Saudi Arabia to raise production to maximum levels, escalating oil market battle - <AUTHOR> http://calgaryherald.com/business/energy/saudi-arabia-to-raise-production-to-maximum-levels-escalating-oil-market-share-battle

<comment><USER2> hopefully we will see prices drop a bit... and corporations won't keep all the profits...

<comment><USER3> Ha ha ha.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't Saudi Arabia understands US shale producers, and I don't think the Saudis will succeed in the near term. I don't think they fully appreciate just how long it will take them to meaningfully affect US oil production.

Saudi Arabia is an autocratic top down government with a bunch of lucky-sperm drones of the royal family welding absolute power. Saudi Aramco has a monopoly on Saudi oil production. That's their mindset in this "oil market battle".

But there isn't a US shale oil monopoly or oligopoly that can respond rationally to this "escalation". Instead, there are dozens of medium size oil companies in North America, and hundreds of smaller ones. It's a highly fragmented industry. They're all in competition with each other to acquire and develop the best oil and gas properties.

All those companies have CEOs that are well compensated, both in cash and in stock. The CEOs have all reached the pinnacles of their long careers. They like getting paid for drilling holes in the ground. The companies all have directors that are well paid to show up to a few board meetings a year.

Are these shale oil producers all going to decide to fold their hands against Saudi Arabia? Are they going to dissolve their companies, shut them down, walk away? Hell no!

With current low interest rates, many of even the most indebted shale producers have been able to roll over their obligations to 2020 and beyond. And even if a company fails, there will always be another that will quickly pick up the assets at a bargain price.

In the long run, US shale oil production will slowly decline as depletion exceeds investment. And various expensive "conventional" oil developments run by the US majors and the multinational oil companies will be delayed or cancelled. But that will take many years.

Things could stay "interesting" in the oil patch for quite some time.</comment>


Government shuts down and stocks continue to increase. Is that weird? - <AUTHOR>

I'm having a hard time figuring out how this happens and stocks are not affected much <comment><USER2> Investors know it's just posturing. It'll get fixed in the next few days and life will go on.</comment>


Dude, She's (Exactly 25 Percent) Out of Your League - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/online-dating-out-of-your-league/567083/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem)

Though, in this case, "marriage" is more of a mathematical construct, but the math matches the result here.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would love to see the stats of San Francisco, or at least the Bay Area in general.

<comment><USER4> It's a sausage fest here lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> TFA doesn't mention the race, but if I remember correctly from the okcupid article, race affects the dating way more compared to everything else.

<comment><USER6> Yes it does:

White men and Asian women are consistently more desired than other users, while black women rank anomalously lower.

Bruch said that race and gender stereotypes often get mixed up, with a race acquiring gendered connotations. "Asian is coded as female, so that's why Asian women get so much market power and Asian men get so little," she told me. "For black men and women, it's the opposite."

But "what we are seeing is overwhelmingly the effect of white preferences," she cautioned. "This is site is predominantly white, 70 percent white. If this was a site that was 20 percent white, we may see a totally different desirability hierarchy."

<comment><USER7> That last bit is just wrong. OKCupid did the full analysis, showing how each race preferred each of the other races, for both males and females. Nothing much changes.

The comment that "race and gender stereotypes often get mixed up, with a race acquiring gendered connotations" is interesting. Unfortunately, it implies that this is merely cultural viewpoint, but consider an actual trait: ability to grow a thick beard. Consider another: height. Height is particularly easy to demonstrate. One can simply look up average height by sex and by race.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Most suitable FP language to write a simple game using android device - <AUTHOR> Disclaimer: my health condition doesn't allow me to use notebook or pc, but I can use my tablet to some extent (without physical keyboard though).
I've been looking forward to try functional paradigm for quite some time. Decided to give it a go by trying to make some simple console games.
What language and tooling would you suggest, considering that I'll have to compile, and execute code under termux?
It's worth mentioning that amount of RAM might be quite a restriction. There is only 2gb RAM total on my tablet, and only ~600mb are usually free. I've read that Haskell, for example, requires much more. <comment><USER2> Scheme, Standard ML.</comment>


Ask HN: Who are currently the top programmers in the world? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Programming is not a competitive sport. There are many skills involved. No one person has them all. It seems doubtful you can point to any person, or group of people, and say "they are the best."

<comment><USER3> Programming is a competitive sport see [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_programming](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_programming)

Assuming you're talking about programming as a profession, then this would mean that the idea of a 10x or 100x is myth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Programming inherently has no value. It's the application of programming which is powerful and valuable. I'm assuming by "top", you're talking about the people who are consistently able to create outsized value rather than people who can crank out TopCoder contests.

The application of programming is a multi-disciplinary skill and very very context dependent. The skills needed for a product focused engineer at a 10 person company is far far different than a platform engineer at say - AWS.

Also, programming is so vast a field now that your question is simply too broad and has no concrete answer. Perhaps a better question is something specific like "Who are the top iOS UI engineers in the world?". We're far past the point in our field where there is a "top" person who is good at the entire field broadly.

</comment><comment><USER5> programming is now so vast field that you really cant mention some XYZ that he/she is a excellent programmer.from embedded systems to total client-side languages,there is an ocean of programming languages today

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there a programmer who has had more impact over a career than Linus Torvalds?

<comment><USER7> Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing arguably?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could you please define "Top Programmer(s)" ?

</comment><comment><USER9> MJ</comment>


Bootstrapping your way to $30M/year - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/grasshopper?utm_source=Indie+Hackers+Newsletter&utm_campaign=f471ff8322-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_01_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_43062afaa5-f471ff8322-137888425 <comment><USER2> "The purchase was announced in April, but the price tag wasn't disclosed by Citrix until a later quarterly report. Citrix shelled out $165 million in cash for Grasshopper, plus about $8.6 million in stock that would vest over time."

[http://www.betaboston.com/news/2015/11/12/unicorns-may- get-a...](http://www.betaboston.com/news/2015/11/12/unicorns-may-get-all-the- attention-but-grasshopper-shows-the-benefits-of-growing-slowly/)

</comment><comment><USER3> These are all the same boring thing, if only CSS could hide everything with 'indiehackers' next to it...</comment>


Doom on a Pregnancy Tester - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/Foone/status/1302287398949142533 <comment><USER2> "This is a replacement display AND a replacement microcontroller. I'm not using any of the original tester other than the shell."</comment>


Show HN: Desktopr for macOS - <AUTHOR> http://www.desktopr.link/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop)

I actually used it for a couple of weeks back then.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually it. Except it does not consume that much system resources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> can i just have iterm as my background?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, any website.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd be glad for any comments or notes.</comment>


A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996) - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence <comment><USER2> It's ironic that cyberspace seems to be far _more_ politicized than meatspace these days. Cyberspace has pretty much created its own petty landlords, its bureaucracies and its "claim[s] to own speech itself throughout the world". The next civilization of the Mind will have to look for yet another venue.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was recently listening to the short story "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" by cory doctorow. This came up and I started crying. I have no nostalgia for this time period (I was less than 5 yo when this was written) but I do have nostalgia for this sentiment. Due to the technology delay I got experience a part of this when networks were being rolled out in India. Nobody really knew how to operate it or how it worked entirely. Discovering networks and connecting with people from around the world was a revelation. I miss that feeling. But I can't figure out if that feeling is lost because I grew up or because that sentiment just doesn't exist these days.

</comment><comment><USER3> Needs (1996) in the title.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just edited it</comment></comment>


Why does NPR have it in for Toyota? - <AUTHOR>

Lots of cars have recalls. Even a reporter from NPR said this morning "Statistically speaking, it does not happen to much of anyone, but you do not want it to happen to you"
NPR said this morning "You are 30 times more likely to be stuck by lightning than to be affected by a stuck gas pedal".
I'm not taking Toyota off the hook here (after all I own a Prius that is going in for recall repairs), but the Toyota coverage on NPR has become hysterical and over the top. <comment><USER2> My impression is that NPR's coverage of Toyota's recalls has received much greater air time in proportion to the number of recalled vehicles than their coverage of previous recalls by other companies. I have not verified the numbers to be sure, but 1 or 2 extra stories about how this is unusual because of Toyota's reputation for quality might be appropriate; the current deluge (1-2 stories on every broadcast of every news program!) seems unreasonable to me.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think NPR as a whole does - are you suggesting a company wide conspiracy against Toyota within NPR?

Going by the two quotes you highlight that doesn't indicate they have it in for them. If anything they highlight how rare the problem is (to me at least).

Coverage else where hasn't been much different either IMHO.</comment>


White House: Russia has 'clear legal basis' to expel Snowden & should w/o delay - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-says-russia-has-clear-legal-basis-to-expel-snowden-and-should-without-delay/2013/06/25/eb468358-ddc1-11e2-bc84-8049224b33e1_story.html

<comment><USER2> I think the general topic of spying is important enough to dominate the front page until this issue is settled, but linking to an article with literally 1 sentence of content seems pointless and rewards mediocre content producers.</comment>


Ask HN: How do those eMMC Windows laptops work? - <AUTHOR> I was just shopping around for a low-end Windows laptop and discovered a new trend: machines that have 64gb or 128gb internal storage on "eMMC", which research suggests is similar to what's used in phones, and then they have a micro SD card slot for expansion (also like phones).
I take it the OS lives on the eMMC and not something even weirder like a ROM chip? Do user programs and files go there too or can they only go on the SD? How does it all affect things like partitioning?
Presumably this is a response to the Chromebook-pocalypse but it still feels very strange and mysterious to me for now <comment><USER3> I bought one and used it for a year in college and ran a custom Linux ramdisk OS with a few different chroots on the EMMC. A lot of these things can't really run Windows (I never tried but I'm told they can boot into the copy they ship with a few times but probably don't last and certainly can't update.) setting up Linux on them requires a lot of care (I had to build a custom kernel to get graphics on mine to work at all.) It's better to think of them like a weird embedded device that happens to be mostly compatible with desktop computers.

Yes it's EMMC (think SDcard but without a socket, it's not super fast) and most OSes let you use that as a block device (and most of the firmware will let you boot from it.) Mine had an SDcard socket that I used for really big stuff (anything closed source, any builds so I didn't burn the EMMC out, and anything I needed to run in wine.)

<comment><AUTHOR> > A lot of these things can't really run Windows (I never tried but I'm told > they can boot into the copy they ship with a few times but probably don't > last and certainly can't update.)

You mean just because there isn't enough space? Some of them go up to 64gb or even 128gb, but a lack of OS updates would be a non-starter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> eMMC is just another name for soldered on flash storage. Its no different than a SSD.

<comment><USER5> The interface is slower.

[https://www.howtogeek.com/196541/emmc-vs.-ssd-not-all- solid-...](https://www.howtogeek.com/196541/emmc-vs.-ssd-not-all-solid-state- storage-is-equal/)

<comment><USER6> The school system I work for has thousands of devices with these. They're basically like an SD card for a camera soldered to the board. They do not have the wear leveling and other shit a real SSD has.

They're slow, (comparatively) unreliable and small. Because they're on the board a bad one means a new mobo which is generally not cost effective so it's done. I hate them and the cheap shitty hardware that they come with.

I'd like to point out that these came before Chromebooks but Chromebooks are also using them because they use the same shitty hardware as the cheapest Windows devices.

<comment><USER7> Even high-end, well-regarded Chromebooks use eMMC storage - e.g. the "base" $1k+ Pixelbook models.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It shows up to the PC just like any hard drive.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's not bad. It's slower than SSD, but much faster than a HDD.

The main issue is limited storage space. Some low-end laptops sell with 32GB space, and it's so low, you can't even update Windows properly on that one. Having at least 64GB gives you some breathing room.

</comment><comment><USER10> I bought a very cheap one with 32 gigs a few years ago. I love it. It's fast , light and runs windows 10. It's good for email and browser stuff. My problem now is that i can't update the OS. It doesn't have enough memory. It still functions but i run the risk of not getting the security updates. It gave me about 3 years of great use. I would definitely buy another one.

<comment><AUTHOR> 32GB definitely seems cramped for Windows. 64GB would probably be safe going forward for at least OS updates

<comment><USER11> It does not cease to amaze me how bloated Windows is (compared to any Linux out there, anyway), and how it gets more bloated with each update.

<comment><USER12> The bloat in Windows is an interesting issue. I put together Windows OS images and a freshly-installed, before-updates Windows 10 image might be around 2 gigs (maybe a bit more or less, I'm going from memory here). Granted, a Linux distro may hit that size with a lot more preinstalled software, but I haven't paid much attention.

Windows starts bloating when you apply updates. It keeps a lot around to facilitate rolling back updates if needed; this gets cleaned up over time but it can be an issue on a small disk. There's ways to get the size back down (while sacrificing the ability to roll back updates that you've applied), but you don't regain all the space.

I get the feeling the Windows Update mechanism is a large legacy mess that is stuck having to account for corner-cases that have built up over time. Microsoft are improving it; I think it's just a really big engineering task that they're having to slowly work through. I vaguely remember something about the way Windows handles overwriting open files in-place which makes this worse, but I can't remember the specifics off the top of my head.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I get the feeling the Windows Update mechanism is a large legacy mess that > is stuck having to account for corner-cases that have built up over time.

I get the feeling that Windows itself is a large legacy mess that is stuck having to account for corner-cases that have built up over time. Of course this facilitates its impressive degree of backwards-compatibility (one of its most desirable features), but still.

<comment><USER12> Every time I try to play a game that I paid for on iOS that no longer works because Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility, I'm reminded of how thankful I am for Microsoft's efforts here.

I really think the amount they've improved Windows under-the-hood over time is impressive, especially taking into account the constraints they've had to work within.

On a related (though somewhat tangential) note I must say that I think MS tying WinRT (which as I understand it is the clean rewrite of the Windows API) to the Microsoft Store initially was a massive mistake. I still don't have a clear, confident impression of where I can or should use WinRT, even after all these years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You are super overthinking this. It's a lower tech ssd. It's nand storage just like a sata ssd would be. It's rw just the same.

</comment><comment><USER14> In the mid-2000s I once tried installing Windows XP to a 16GB eMMC drive that was in a PCI slot adapter on my main PC. It did install successfully, just as it would on a normal hard drive. It did boot. The only problem (besides it being only 16GB) is it took forever. The PCI slot transfer speeds were slow. The eMMC card itself was slow. I can't recommend doing it, but it does work.

</comment><comment><USER15> Picked up an Asus E203MA last month. I treat the eMMC just like I would any SSD/HDD and slap Arch on it all the same.

Any specifics you care to know?

I wouldn't expect the heavier windows managers (and Windows) to perform at an acceptable level. Gnome sure didn't. Tiling windows managers and mate/xfce have been great. It handles light web dev pretty fair as well.

</comment><comment><USER16> I bought a HP stream with 128GB internal storage for 199 € and it's serving me well because of weight (1 kg) and purpose (writing, connect to remote servers via ssh). Being a Celeron you can't do fancy things but it's ok. You can extend the storage capacity with microSD cards.

</comment><comment><USER17> funny, I could rescue an small laptop with 32GB eMMC and 2GB RAM from been thrown away just a day ago

i did a fresh win 10 install and it works amazing fast but I have just around 5 gigs left after updating and i want to work with linux as well

does somebody has some tips for slim it down and get the most out of it?

<comment><USER18> Can it boot from the microSD card or USB? If it can, you can install Linux on a card or USB Drive just like you do on a HDD or SSD.

<comment><USER17> yeah, it can! thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you are careful/lucky, some of them have an unused SATA port and then you can add a separate SSD to it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Windows has bad filesystem support, let alone trying to efficiently run eMMC. f2fs has many advantages.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's very slow. Think of SD RaM access speed. Avoid.

<comment><USER22> Slower than a typical SSD maybe, but 400MB/s isn't "slow" by any means - <USER2> compared to a spinning hard disk which is probably maxing out at 100-125MB/s if you're lucky.</comment></comment>


Cringely suggests job losses at Microsoft should be ten times greater - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/ <comment><USER2> I am failing to see a point in this post. Would it have killed him to write:

Microsoft should lay off 50,000 employees because...[his point].

The closest he comes is this:

 _Instead of 5000 positions, the company should drop 50,000. It should decide what businesses it is in and close or sell the rest. It should be a lot better than it is at running its true core – the muscle that's been hiding beneath all that fat._

But that omits a _why_.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure you read the whole article; it's mostly about how Microsoft is overstaffed, and that if you conservatively assume a 10 year average tenure for FTEs at Microsoft, they're losing a multiple of their layoff size every year just in turnover.

<comment><USER4> That answers the question of "How can Microsoft get by with so many more layoffs" but not the question of why it would be a good idea. Specifically, the author identifies Microsoft's real long-term problem as the growing irrelevance of the PC and MS' inability to control the various markets that are supplanting it. How getting rid of half of the employees in the company would fix that problem; I'm not sure.

<comment><USER3> One inference I made easily from the article: if most of what Microsoft is doing is increasingly irrelevant, then they may be heavily staffing projects that are not strategically valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Don't have a lot of time for Cringely any more.

However there is a strong argument for breaking Microsoft up in to smaller units - gaming, office, OS and hardware.

If broken up I think the individual units would have a lot more drive, focus and identity.

It must be quite depressing being a creative developer in a company that does so much you can never feel you'll make a difference.

</comment><comment> old-gregg It's funny how consistently, for such a long time, year after year I see this as-a-matter-of-facty drops of _"... when desktop disappears ..."_ into sentences. Seems like everybody else but me surely knows that it will, and understands why. I can hear Eric Cartman whispering into my year _"You're so stuuuuupeeed."_

<comment><USER6> For several people, it already has. What you use certainly doesn't matter as much as it used to, as long as it has a browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cringely is a stooge for The Man.</comment>


The web is (mostly) blue - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1279&bih=982&q=web&oq=web&gs_l=img.3..0l10.1979.2075.0.2422.214.171.124.0.0.0.58.126.96.36.199...0.0...1ac.1.2.img.Hk5Q-evIYdY

<comment><USER2> The world is (mostly) blue. <http://goo.gl/maps/k6BnA>

<comment><USER3> You guys are blowing my mind!

But what does it MEAN?!?!?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like most of the designers and tech guys likes blue.

<comment><USER5> And tan. If there ever was a geek colorscheme, blue and tan would dominate.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best resources to learn SEO? - <AUTHOR> I have stumbled across SEOMoz and SEOBook but the price point seems fairly steep for me (student/founder). Are these worth it or are there other better resources for learning the ropes of seo? <comment><USER2> I'm the founder of SEOmoz, but I'd say if you're just learning, you can do it for free. Both SEOBook and SEOmoz (as well as other software/tools/community offerings like WebMasterWorld or Raven) are great for when you've settled into SEO as a marketing practice and need the shortcuts those services can help provide in automation, data and expertise.

To start, though, I'd check out [http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to- search-engine-op...](http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search- engine-optimization) and <http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-ways-to-learn-seo>.

Best of luck!

<comment><USER3> Rank was invited to speak at a dinner at YC on SEO and blew the doors off. The links above are great. You should also check out SEOmoz's Search Engine Ranking Factors list ( <http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors> ). Description of the methodology for building the list:

"Every two years, SEOmoz surveys top SEO experts in the field worldwide on their opinions of the algorithmic elements that comprise search engine rankings. This year features contributors from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, the Ukraine, the Dominican Republic and many more.

Each participant was asked to rate more than 100 search ranking factors along with specific questions about hot issues in the SEO field. This document, representing the collective wisdom of expert practitioners, is, in opinion, one of the most useful resources for SEO practitioners of all varieties, helping to provide transparency into what matters (and doesn't) for best practices in search engine optimization."

<comment><USER4> He _should_ change his name to "Rank." ;)

<comment><USER3> Hehe, funny slip, eh? I wish HN would let edits happen after 15m. I caught that too late!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Both of them have blogs available for free. Skip back to early 2006, start reading. (I recommend 2006 as both routinely published on beginner-friendly topics back then, but their focus has become more refined since then. There are only so many ways you can say "Your title tag is really freaking important, and you should get links." By the way, your title tag is freaking important, and you should get links.)

SEOMoz has a quite decent beginner's guide as I recall.

I've got a couple dozen articles on my blog on the subject, but they're not arranged in any sort of coherent fashion, and most are not filed under the SEO category. I'll trade: if you want to grab all the relevant URLs and organize them by theme, I'll let you ask me anything you want to for an hour. (That may or may not be a good deal.)

<comment><USER6> <http://gist.github.com/572548>

<comment><USER5> Please send me an email at your convenience. (The offer is still open to the OP if you can expand on this list.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are a fundamental rules and building blocks of SEO. From simple things such as definitions to page rank and beyond, it's important to find a way to grasp the basics. SEOmoz and other online tutorials are a great way to start.

Personally, I learn with a "hands on and explain it to me" approach. Combining a seminar series like this <http://www.seomoz.org/seminar/series> with lessons about what works, what doesn't and why can teach you the basics.

Beyond the basics, it's about experience. The folks who are the best at SEO have a wide base of experience gearing content toward diverse audiences. A combination of knowing what people want and being able to deliver the right message to those people at the right time is as much a part of traditional marketing as it is SEO. After you learn the technical building blocks of optimization, increasing rank, exposure is more about user interaction and traffic.

Experiment with your own content using the help of excellent tutorials like those found on SEOmoz and you'll be well on your way to successfully optimizing pages. You don't necessarily need to pay for subscriptions, but sometimes it will save you time to have everything assembled in one place and presented in one style.

Just remember... it's not about tricking search engines... it's about helping users find the best of whatever they're looking for and for search engines identify and categorize your content properly.

<comment><USER8>
      >> Just remember... it's not about tricking search engines... it's about helping users find the best of whatever they're looking for and search engines identify and categorize your content properly.

I really like that line, thanks. I normally dislike the term SEO because it can be associated with so many unethical or spammy tactics, but that's a really good way of putting legitimate SEO practices.

I see Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz commented on here which is neat. I've thought about becoming a member of his site, question is, is it worth it? I'd love some feedback from people that use SEOMoz's tools.

<comment><USER9> I just wish that particular line was actually true.

It's not about content. It's about finding the right word combination to convince Google (and friends) that your site is the most relevant one for a keyword and then finding lots of folks to link to it.

I hope that one day it'll be as simple as "the best content wins" but anybody who searches for nearly anything on the internet knows that's not true today.

The About.com's of the world don't have the best content, but my god do they have link-farming and keyword targeting down to a science.

<comment><USER7> I guess it comes down to how you think about it...

For example: I use a variety of synonyms and phrase combinations when writing copy not to trick SE's but to help people who are searching realize that my content will answer their question or solve their problem.

At the end of the day, I truly believe that it is about content. If I create, distribute, optimize (etc), the best content, that has a huge positive effect. People recommend my content, trust that I'm a valuable source, etc. All things that are important in our new social internet.

About.com, Mahalo, etc rely on the lowest common denominator of content and spreading as much as quickly as they can. It's working right now, but I'm quite confidant that won't work for long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Know that SEO in general is the act of second-guessing several algorithmic black boxes. I'd argue that, besides some fairly simple guidelines, SEO is a bunch of blind guys in a dark room walking around with short sticks, excitedly blogging when they think they've hit something.

I'd second the suggestions of reading through Matt Cutts' blog as well as SEOmoz, but here are some consistently referenced tips that I think are defensible.

1) Robots can't parse your images. Render your text with @font-face, not as a JPG.

2) Make sure your URL, your <title>, and your <h1> and <h2> have keywords that are relevant to the material on the page.

3) Register with Google and Bing's webmaster tools, and make sure the keywords they think your sites are relevant for are reasonable. Use Google Analytics to see what organic keywords are sending you traffic. Measure what you want to improve.

4) Generate original content.

5) Get backlinks. Good linkage from HN/reddit/delicious/twitter/whatever can generate multiple orders of magnitude more traffic than long-tail search traffic.

<comment><USER11> So, can somebody tell me why this isn't true? Or what about this misses the point?

<comment><USER12> I'd say apart from (1) he has it down for the basics; see <http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors> for some confirmations.

Why not (1). Well yes (1) too really but: Google use a "game" to get people to describe images and if there's text it can be OCR'ed. Google are quite good at OCR. I doubt they pass all headline images through OCR but I can imagine they might do subject comparison between text and replacement images (eg in pages using Fahrner Image Replacement) to sample whether the text Google is reading matches the images the user sees.

With (2) avoid stuffing.

(4) & (5) <\- this is _all_ it takes!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone have a link to statistical documentation of the efficacy of these "SEO" guys? And further, distinguishing the results of their black magic from simply improving the inherent meaningfulness of the site in question and letting the search engines do the work of finding relevant pages? Every "SEO" guy I've ever met felt to me like a used car salesman whose methodology has all the rigor of reading chicken bones and goat entrails.

<comment><USER14> > methodology has all the rigor of reading chicken bones and goat entrails

SEO is supposed to be about the natural movement of the website by throwing things into the soup to make it taste better and as such move up in an organic fashion. The proof is in tracking the keywords or phrases you are hoping that will move up... I have been using AuthorityLabs.com for about a month now to track rankings and it has been working pretty well. It is a service worth paying for.

<comment><USER15> SEOcockpit: <http://seocockpit.com> is also good. They start at $10 /mnth. I've no affiliation with them whatsoever, but I've used the service.

Now I monitor my rankings, analytics, affiliate sales etc via iphone: <http://www.seoiphoneapps.com>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> SEOMoz's free guide isn't bad to help you get started with on-site SEO. The best tutorials for tactics in my opinion is from Blue Hat SEO (Eli).

If this doesn't blow your SEO mind, I don't know what will <http://www.bluehatseo.com/seo-empire-part-1/>

<comment><USER17> Maybe I was tired when I read it, or lack of technical background to understand it entirely, but I did not quite understand how any of those sites got inbound links from other sites outside the control of the person who is building the empire so that any of them can get pagerank to pass it onto the higher level sites to start with.

<comment><USER16> wordpress, blogger, digg, pligg, and other social sites push links to the mid- level sites

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My company has built a tool that aims to give you the basic page analysis from an SEO perspective fairly quickly. We had some decent reviews from people a few months back.

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

I'd recommend you run the tool against some sites, and tweak things around.

</comment><comment><USER19> Whatever your skill level, there's no more effective way to learn SEO than doing SEO.

Best way to start: your personal brand. Launch a website with the intention to win the #1 rank for your full name. It will teach you most of what you need to know.

</comment><comment><USER20> I was in a similar situation (I don't know about you, but I'm at a fairly beginner level).

This presentation was a good introduction: [http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-comprehensive-intro-to-seo- powe...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-comprehensive-intro-to-seo-powerpoint- slide-deck-)?

Also, a great article from patio11: <http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/>

</comment><comment><USER21> Learning SEO: -Whitehat- Create a website, focus in on a few keywords, create original content, create a community (shift from website), advertise moderately, find users who love what you have done for them and will share the love with their 90,000 friends on Twitter for a tshirt. -Grayhat- Hire someone on fiverr to do all of the dirty work for you. You're ethical, your employees -- not so much. -Blackhat- dump in a lot of money, barely any ROI, would have been better off buying 50 domains + a year on a linode 512, everything that's new is old, all that is old will be seen again, you're probably the innocent bugger who will get removed from the index on his first try.

I know this is SEO, because I read it on the internets. Right?

Forgot to mention, I opt'd into the 50 domains and a Linode option. Somedays, I just sit at the computer writing articles for hours. Its always fun to watch articles getting linked only hours later by some random Googler and wondering what that Google machine's next move is.

</comment><comment><USER22> We've got a series of free PDF guides to different aspects of SEO at <http://www.pluginseo.com/paint-by-numbers-seo>.

They're aimed at people with little or no SEO experience, and intended to be useful to everyone whatever tools they choose to use. Feedback is very welcome.

</comment><comment><USER23> I have found the absolute best way to learn SEO is via experience. There's just nothing better, period.

<comment><USER24> Totally agreed. I started a niche site (a directory for notary publics that funnels visitors into a paid app that helps notaries manage their businesses) as a lightweight SEO experiment.

It's only been ~6 weeks but, even if I can't get many of the visitors to convert to paying customers, I've learned far more in the past few weeks than I could have learned through meetings/reading/dreaming.

First hand experience FTW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have a book on SEO titled, "Google Secrets". I strongly recommend it as something "worth a read". It has all the related info that one needs to know on the subject and tips on improving the ranking on Google as well. The name itself is suggestive.

</comment><comment><USER26> Try this - <http://blog.kissmetrics.com/seo-guide/>

</comment><comment><USER27> Sweet! Thanks HN! I was just having to do some quick SEO learning today.

</comment><comment><USER28> wolf-howl.com is another SEO blog that's a must read for me.

</comment><comment><USER29> SEOBook has an awesome resource section for beginners

</comment><comment><USER30> The Art of SEO is a great resource if you're just getting started and are interested in White-Hat stuff.

If you're more interested in aggressive marketing and link building, stay away from the majority of forums (because they're full of guru crap) and read as much as you can from bluehatseo.com and anything in Eli's blog roll.</comment>


Complementary React Libraries in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.robinwieruch.de/react-libraries <comment><USER2> Very good post, covering pretty much everything regarding best practices / libraries to use. I would add to the list MobX State Tree for state management, and parcel bundler for getting started instead of create-react- app.</comment>


Show HN: Appenguin – Create an Android app in minutes, for free - <AUTHOR> http://webapptoapp.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's still a manual process, but it takes about 20 seconds to generate an Android Gradle project, build an apk, build a release apk, and push it with adb.

The next step would be connecting a form to it so everything is done automatically. Maybe push the app to Google Play through their API.

Edit: sorry if the site is a little buggy, threw this all up in a day or so.

Feedback appretiated, thanks, Yuri

</comment><comment><USER2> It might be helpful to specify in the title that this is for converting website apps to Android apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, thanks! missed that...</comment></comment>


Social network Hi5 dumps Linux/Postgres for Windows Server - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/20/hi5-confirms-28-job-cuts-as-it-dumps-open-source-for-windows-servers/

<comment><USER2> So many wtf's in this. "The company made the move in order to lower costs and improve flexibility for the social network" "Untangling the site from dependence on specific OS and database versions" "The tough part is that the competent employees essentially engineered themselves out of a job. St. John said he appreciated their efforts."

</comment><comment><USER3> I sure hope Hi5's engineers saw this coming when they brought on Alex St. John, "a former Microsoft evangelist," as CEO in late 2009.</comment>


Trademark lawyer to 3-man startup: hand over your domain–or else - <AUTHOR>

Erik @ CaseRails https://caserails.com here.
Our legal document automation startup is being threatened by a trademark attorney who claims that he owns any legal software name with "Case" in it:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/trademark-lawyer-to-3-man-startup-hand-over-your-domain-or-else/ <comment><USER2> Hi Erik!

I imagine you're going to be flooded with advice to grab a lawyer right quick, and that it's just smarter to change your domain name immediately. I'll offer a dissenting opinion, after having dealt with one too many wannabe copyright troll lawyers myself. Here's my response to the last barrister who tried something similar with a domain I own:

> Robert, > > We believe the statement on our page specifically disclaiming > any > authorization by or affiliation with > [http://your.site](http://your.site) is more than enough > to prevent any > possible confusion between [http://your.site](http://your.site) and our > product. > > From Graham Webb Intl v Emporium Drug Mart, 916 F.Supp. 909 > (E.D. Ark > 1995): > > "The Court likewise rejects Graham Webb's argument > that the warnings Drug > Emporium has posted disclaiming any affiliation > with or authorization by > Graham Webb are ineffective and not a question > properly resolved by > summary judgment. While it is true that the > effectiveness of a > disclaimer in a Lanham Act case may generally be a > question of fact, see > Home Box Office, Inc. v. Showtime/Movie Channel, > Inc., 832 F.2d 1311, > 1315 (2nd Cir.1987), a disclaimer expressly declaring > that the seller is > "not affiliated" with the owner of the trademark or is > "not an > authorized distributor" of the trademark owner's products has been > held > to be an effective means of preventing confusion in the minds of > > consumers as to affiliation with the owner of the trademark. Matrix > > Essentials, 756 F.Supp. at 282. As in Matrix Essentials, the only > > reasonable conclusion in this case is that Drug Emporium's warnings to > > consumers disclaiming any affiliation with or authorization by Graham > Webb > effectively prevents likelihood of confusion in the minds of > consumers as > to sponsorship or affiliation." > ". > > Please view the amended site and > let us know if you disagree.

Long story short: read up on the Lanham Act and _all_ it's particulars, talk to a lawyer if you have one on retainer (a trial attorney is expensive, but legal aid and advice is relatively speaking much cheaper), and most importantly, don't freak out - this guy's claim is so vague that he doesn't have a chance of shutting you down (note: IANAL and also not your lawyer, this is just my opinion - but I've had two separate side projects shaken down by wannabe copyright trolls, and I can at least confirm that my approach has worked for me in the past and stopped any potential legal action in it's tracks.)

Somewhere on your main page, perhaps in the footer, specify that you have absolutely no affiliation with his product. Notify him that you've updated your site to clear up any potential confusion between your product and his, and ask him if he can provide any proof of customers for Caseweb confusing Caserails for his product, so that you and your counsel can further evaluate his claims in hopes of reaching an amicable resolution. His response will be illuminating, I'm sure.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks @namecast , we appreciate the support!</comment></comment>


Ask PG: Whom do you admire, look up to, think of as an idol, a mentor? - no-go-mojo

Hi again PG,
I apologize if you feel I bug you too much here. However, I couldn't help but wonder whom you looked up to when you were in college, when you were starting your company, when you were started investing, and now?
Majority of the hackers that I know, who know of you, think very, very highly of you. Which led me to wonder "Does PG have his PGs?"
Thanks. <comment><AUTHOR> <http://paulgraham.com/heroes.html>

<comment><USER2> Another recurring theme seems to be that these people were not shooting for their time's podium, they all seem to be going in a direction that none of their peers were even considering, maybe because they were trying to please themselves only and working for their own self defined standard. Or maybe this could all be filed under honesty, because when you are desperately true to your work you ignore what the rules are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've never met Sam, so I can't say anything about his personality or attitude, but I am not impressed. PG is in a whole other league compared to Sam A, I'm sorry.

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> Since you brought it up, indirectly, what exactly IS the idea behind registering for HN and repeatedly just asking Paul Graham stuff?

There's a whole lot more to this site, but every submission I see on your (relatively new) profile is either asking HN or PG something.

<comment> no-go-mojo Reading and commenting on what's posted, asking the community questions, and asking PG questions is exactly why I signed up here.

What's a little annoying is: who the heck are you? ;)

<comment><USER5> No one of consequence.

I'm a member of the community. I don't see how you'd be annoyed by a member of the community asking you a question in response to the plethora of questions you've already asked of the community.

No need to be haughty.

<comment> no-go-mojo You didn't just ask me a question, you expressed distaste to me asking questions, not cool. I'm just trying to learn and improve.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Meta Crush Saga: a C++17 compile-time game - <AUTHOR> https://jguegant.github.io//jguegant.github.io/blogs/tech/meta-crush-saga.html <comment><USER2> > the famous snake game we could play on our Nokia 3310

I typed in the snake code from Home Computer Magazine (v.4 no. 5). If anyone cares to reminisce with me, see page 69 (or 123 for the actual code) at this link: [https://archive.org/details/HomeComputerMagazine_Vol4_05](https://archive.org/details/HomeComputerMagazine_Vol4_05) That version was called "Slither", but there were no ".io" domain names just yet.

But wikipedia says it goes back even further to 1976:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(video_game_genre)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_\(video_game_genre\))

Maybe the author knows Nokia didn't invent the game.

<comment><USER3> Everyone who learnt to code in the 80s made a version of the snake game. I did one in ZX Basic on my old Spectrum as a bored 9yo using ASCII number 8s as my snake's body

<comment><USER4> Snake and Wall (bouncing ball hitting bricks) were games I made for every programmable system I owned up until around the mid 90's.

<comment><USER3> I wasn't smart enough for Wall (we still called it Breakout in my day and played it with paddle controllers). But I was so excited when I got my snake to move with joystick control

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 15 years from now we'll be reading a HN article on meta-compiler 64k demos written exclusively using obfuscated code that outputs itself.

</comment><comment><USER6> I apologize. Great work though

(For anyone interested, there was also compile time Tetris [https://blog.mattbierner.com/stupid-template-tricks-super- te...](https://blog.mattbierner.com/stupid-template-tricks-super-template- tetris/) and although my mind never fully recovered from the descent into template metaprogramming, I have been able to find some measure of peace in the world of JS :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if anyone would bother in a language that makes this easy, such as Lisp or D.

</comment><comment><USER8> Regarding the last items: Just use clang. Its constexpr support is much better, and you can print user-defined compile-time warnings or errors with diagnose_if. gcc only has _Static_assert which is not enough. The linux kernel uses a few tricks, but all are worse than with clang.

</comment><comment><USER9> If my compile times were greater that 3 seconds I would be livid.

</comment><comment><USER10> Disclaimer : I'm working on a C++ project and as you will understand I do NOT enjoy it.

Every new C++ article about the latest "improvements" to the language tends to confirm my belief that C++ developers are masochists. They don't seem to be interested in actually improving the language and making in better and easier at creating useful software. They even seem to laugh at the word "easy". The entire ecosystem feels like a infinite pile of new features fixing old ones, bringing new flaws in the process. Sometimes I feel like this is the case for every language, but C++ is the worst.

       template <class T>
       std::string serialize(const T& obj)
           if constexpr (has_serialize(obj)) { // Now we can place constexpr on the 'if' directly.
               return obj.serialize(); // This branch will be discarded and therefore not compiled if obj is an int.
           } else {
               return std::to_string(obj);branch
           }
       }

I don't want a language with magic. Magic is hell for software. Show me simplicity and elegance. Show me boring but powerful. Show me how I don't have to choose between value, reference, raw pointer, unique_ptr, shared_ptr, etc, to pass a damn parameter to your function. Show me boring but powerful stuff.

<comment><USER11> I disagree with almost everything you said in that post; what's more, you're objectively wrong. Let's look at your claims.

>Every new C++ article about the latest "improvements" to the language tends to confirm my belief that C++ developers are masochists. They don't seem to be interested in actually improving the language and making in better and easier at creating useful software. [...] The entire ecosystem feels like a infinite pile of new features fixing old ones, bringing new flaws in the process.

Can you give a concrete example? C++ evolution can be divided in roughly two eras: C++98, and Modern C++ (C++11 and above). This latter introduces a new philosophy, an expansion of features that make it look like a completely new language indeed. From ubiquitous type deduction, to lambdas, to compile-time computation without TMP, the language has introduced powerful new abstractions, always with the trademark "zero cost" that gives C++ its power.

>[Code snippet]

>I don't want a language with magic.

What about that snippet is magic that leaves you so appalled? You got a great (new) feature: guaranteed compile-time conditionals with the same syntax as regular if statements. Depending on whether the object has serialize or not, the code will instantiate to each of the branches, guaranteeing elision of a potentially expensive runtime check and branch.

>Show me simplicity and elegance. [...] Show me how I don't have to choose between value, reference, raw pointer, unique_ptr, shared_ptr, etc, to pass a damn parameter to your function.

Show me a language that simpler and more elegant than C++, where you don't have to worry about choosing how to pass parameters, or manage memory, and that still is as fast as C++. You simply can't, because there's no such thing. C++ delivers ZERO-COST ABSTRACTIONS, that's its power, that's its raison d'être. No other language I'm aware of that delivers this, apart from maybe Rust or D.

\--

I realize it's hip to hate on C++, but please keep it rational.

<comment><USER12> > Show me a language that simpler and more elegant than C++, where you don't > have to worry about choosing how to pass parameters, or manage memory, and > that still is as fast as C++.

As someone who built their career on memory constrained, fast code in C++ I'm gonna have to say that Rust _is_ simpler and more elegant.

You've got your zero cost abstractions, heck I can decided static vs dynamic dispatch at compile time. Lots of things are _more_ explicit leading to less foot-guns that you see with implicit type conversion and the like. Borrow- checker catches all those nasty dataraces and ownership problems up front. I've yet to run across anything I could do in C++ that I can't do in Rust.

Listen, I love C++ but I think you may want to expand your horizons a bit before declaring it the best language ever in this space.

<comment><USER13> Rust does come with a different bag of complexity. I'm _thrilled_ to see competition with C++ in this space finally and super excited about Rust, but let's not pretend Rust is easy, either. It has a notoriously monsterous learning curve (which is why there's a major focus to fix that curve: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-roadmap/issues/17](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust-roadmap/issues/17) )

And in this particular context Rust also still forces you to figure out how to pass parameters and manage memory. It "just" helps you with when to call free, which std::unique_ptr also helps you with. Rust makes it a compile error to have a bug, which is awesome, but the "you have to figure out memory allocation & layout" complexity is still mostly there.

<comment><USER12> > It has a notoriously monsterous learning curve

That learning curve exists in C++ too, it's just hidden under the iceberg of 'interesting' runtime behavior. There's nothing like trying to printf a data race only to have the print call insert a fence and make your data race disappear.

> And in this particular context Rust also still forces you to figure out how > to pass parameters and manage memory.

This is a lot simpler in Rust. Everything is value type by default, Box<T> for heap allocations, which even then are managed mostly for you via RAII(yeah I know there's std::unique_ptr but you still also have new, delete, new[], delete[], etc). Parameter types are value, mut ref or const ref. Move semantics are implicit if you have a value type. You don't have const/volatile/etc function qualifiers.

implicit type conversion(esp constructors) can be a total bastard and trip you up in nasty ways. Even more annoying if you're trying to bit-pack or do clever math.

Rust got to learn from a lot of C++'s mistakes and is to me a better language for it.

<comment><USER13> > This is a lot simpler in Rust. Everything is value type by default, Box<T> > for heap allocations, which even then are managed mostly for you via > RAII(yeah I know there's std::unique_ptr but you still also have new, > delete, new[], delete[], etc). Parameter types are value, mut ref or const > ref. Move semantics are implicit if you have a value type. You don't have > const/volatile/etc function qualifiers.

That's not simpler at all - it's basically the same. C++ is also value type by default and you have to ask for heap allocations. And just like in C++ you have types in Rust that look like stack allocations but aren't, like Vec.

So no, it's just value type otherwise Box<T>. That's not true in the slightest. And you need to specify in your function if it's taking ownership or not in addition to whether or not it's pass-by-value or pass-by-reference.

Other than new/delete it's the same shit, just a different syntax.

Rust got to break backwards compatibility which allowed it to remove a lot of C/C++'s old mistakes, yes, but the raw complexity is still entirely there, and very nearly identical.

<comment><USER12> > That's not simpler at all - it's basically the same

Oh, you mean like how you have rvalues, lvalues, xvalues, glvalues and prvalues[1]. In Rust you have value, ref and mut ref.

You also don't specify ownership of passed pointers. So you need to encode that into your function documentation, as opposed to Rust where only value types can change ownership.

> And just like in C++ you have types in Rust that look like stack allocations > but aren't, like Vec.

Never said anything about that, we're just talking about parameter types here, of course you can have value types take ownership of stack allocations(Box<T>, std::unique_ptr and their variants).

> And you need to specify in your function if it's taking ownership or not in > addition to whether or not it's pass-by-value or pass-by-reference.

Not in the case of Rust, value types are the only thing that can take ownership(even Arc/Rc return value types when you clone()). Refs just allow temporary access in a mutable/const way for the lifecycle of the function.

> Rust got to break backwards compatibility which allowed it to remove a lot > of C/C++'s old mistakes

Thanks for proving my point. I've never seen a C++ codebase that didn't use some of C++'s mistakes.

[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3601602/what-are- rvalues...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3601602/what-are-rvalues- lvalues-xvalues-glvalues-and-prvalues)

<comment><USER13> > Oh, you mean like how you have rvalues, lvalues, xvalues, glvalues and > prvalues[1]. In Rust you have value, ref and mut ref.

That is not a reasonable comparison and you know it. rvalues & lvalues are the only things in C++ that you ever care about in the slightest unless you're writing a compiler, and if you're writing a compiler then Rust has things like xvalues, too (how do you think the Drop trait works?)

<comment><USER12> Answer me a simple question, why does std::move exist then?

(here's a hint, Rust doesn't need xvlaues because every value already has an associated lifetime)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Trigger warning: Rust programmers should be careful about clicking the link. The article contains a controversial joke that might shock some readers.

<comment><USER15> I really like Rust; But I see an annoying cult forming around it, and they try really hard to proselytize (Not to say that I was not a part of it in the past, but I am woke now)

<comment><USER4> It is necessary to "proselytize" a young language in order to gain any traction with wider audiences. This is especially true when you're going up against decades old, entrenched languages like C++.

If you don't want your language to die from indifference the only other option is to find a poorly served niche and claim it as your own.

<comment><USER16> Just do something really technically awesome in Rust that becomes hugely popular and the language will speak for itself. I've not seen that yet. But I do hear a lot of fanaticism. That's normally a bad sign.

Docker is written in Go. It works great and is changing how corporations compute. Where is Rust's Docker? It needs that sort of thing to stand on its own.

C++ has nothing left to prove. Yes, it has warts, but those have been and are being fixed (C++11, 14 and 17). Go is 75% there, as far as proving itself technically, and is approaching C++ in the, "what more is there to prove" department. Rust is more like D. Lots of hype and talk but only a few very notable, wildly popular things have been built with it. It has a long way to go.

<comment><USER17> It has some Firefox, GNOME and Visual Studio Code components, today. And some parts of Fuchsia tomorrow.

Sure it still cannot match C++ in many areas, I have stated multiple times I rather use C++ alongside Java/.NET workflows than trying to fit Rust in its current state.

But it will get there, given that it already got the attention of Oracle, Dropbox, Microsoft, Google and a few others.

Sadly I cannot say the same for D, the language is nice, the community has great people, but trying to be a better C++ without a strong domain focus has made it behind all alternatives, including Rust.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain Likely by 2030 - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/08/reverse-engineering-brain-kurzweil/

<comment><USER2> This is the same stuff Kurzweil has been spouting for a number of a years. If he's still around in 2030, we will likely see a new "more accurate" prediction then.</comment>


Show HN: omen.tv – Low-latency P2P streaming with Chromecast support - <AUTHOR> https://omen.tv/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm in Stage 4 lock-downs here in Melbourne, Australia. Over the weekend I threw together a hacky little project that lets you stream your screen in a way that anyone joining can cast that stream to their Chromecast without the latency of Twitch, Youtube Live etc.

It was built with Jackbox Games in mind i.e. I can stream Jackbox Games and my friends can cast that to their TVs whilst answering questions on their phones.

It's P2P, so your computer directly sends the stream to each participant individually, which obviously won't work with a large number of people watching the stream. So it's by no means trying to be a replacement for real streaming services. It's just a handy way for a small number of participants in your game to get Jackbox up on their TV, so they don't need multiple devices in order to participate.

It's implementation is far from optimal e.g. the WebRTC signalling server uses polling instead of Web Sockets. However, it gets the job done.</comment>


Stop the Border Surveillance Bills - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/stop-border-surveillance-bill <comment><USER3> It's better than the plan for towers along the border with remote controlled guns. Israel already has those.[1]

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2008/12/israeli-auto- ki/](https://www.wired.com/2008/12/israeli-auto-ki/)

<comment><USER4> South Korea has something similar.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SGR-A1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SGR-A1)

<comment><USER5> Incredible. I thought this was the stuff of dystopian science fiction...

How can anybody work on this sort of technology and still feel OK about themselves?

<comment><USER6> Looks like an amazing piece of tech, I'd totally work on that if they would let me anywhere near it. Why should I be ashamed of working on something designed to protect a country's border? Yet, I'm probably supposed to feel proud, had I worked for, say, Facebook, whose sole purpose of existing is to waste billions of man-hours a day?

<comment><USER7> You don't understand. Thanks to Facebook, we live in an era after history, in which humans don't have conflicting interests that must sometimes be resolved through violent confrontation.

<comment><USER8> tell that to a Trump supporter in Berkeley. While Facebook (IMO) does not _force_ people to waste their time, but much like booze, it doesn't _discourage_ it either. The result of overuse of either is much the same - <USER2> wasted life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The only part of these provisions I object to, is the social media scanning. That looks a lot like thought police to me.

<comment><USER10> Especially of U.S. citizens. Never understood why the 4th amendment of the U.S. constitution ("unreasonable search and seizure") doesn't protect citizens from being searched at the border.

<comment><USER7> Because "unreasonable" is the qualifier, and searches at the border have (since the 4th Amendment was written) been considered _per se_ reasonable as an exercise of a sovereign nation's powers to create and maintain a border.

<comment><USER10> Yes, I understand the qualifier is what gives the government legal wiggle room, but I don't understand why it's reasonable that you lose constitutional rights the second you cross a border and come back. Constitutional rights should travel with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Eff is doing awesome work! If you donate they will send you a sweet hoodie

<comment><USER10> I donate every year. I've run out of schwag to collect! They need a good coffee table book or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I support the EFF. I really appreciate their efforts. But I think at some point I just got too tired of perpetually being in a state of having just barely fended off the latest attack, and getting ready for the next wave. Something shifted in my mind, and I refuse to be worried about it any more. At the border, I'm just going to do whatever I want, whatever I think is appropriate, and I'll just deal with the consequences. I just don't care. They're just hostile people between me and my destination and I won't spend my life in fear of being illegal. I'm resigned they'll do whatever they want, so I will too.

<comment><USER10> I do love the EFF, but I wish I could give enough so that they would be able to stop taking money from Google and other silicon valley companies. It would make them more independent. I suspect EFF would advocate more on issues such as internet platform monopolies if they were more independent.</comment></comment>


Introduction to getting started with Linux kernel development - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/0xAX/linux-insides/blob/master/Misc/contribute.md <comment><USER2> Alternatively, start here: [http://eudyptula-challenge.org/](http://eudyptula- challenge.org/) .

<comment><USER3> The article will get you through challenge 1-3. Myself, I got stuck on 5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Advice is only singular. [http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/63799/plural- of-a...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/63799/plural-of-advice)</comment>


Systemd Home Directories - <AUTHOR> https://systemd.io/HOME_DIRECTORY/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand why they are using JSON, especially systemd already use an INI-like config format extensively.

Maybe because they are not web devs so that they haven't had an annoying moment when they realize there is no proper way to add comments in package.json?

<comment><USER3>
        {
            ...
            "comment": "this is a comment",
            ...
        }

<comment><USER4> Or you know, you can just do your language equivalent of:

      grep -Pv '^\s*#'

to remove comments, passing the output of that to the JSON parser. The extension could be modified to .cjson, .json.commented, or something.

Good thing JSON doesn't permit literal newlines in strings. Any valid JSON should be able to go through that comment filter without getting modified.

<comment><USER5> That's nice and all, but you'll still have trouble reinserting those comments when writing JSON. And if you don't have that, you have a config file which can only be read, not written. And if you accept that, then what was the point of using JSON in the first place?

<comment><USER4> > you'll still have trouble reinserting those comments when writing JSON.

Sure. I wouldn't even try.

> And if you don't have that, you have a config file which can only be read, > not written.

Just like most config files.

> And if you accept that, then what was the point of using JSON in the first > place?

To not define your own format and be able to use ready-made parsers.

It's not like I'm advocating for the use of JSON over other choices like YAML. I'm just replying to a comment about how to add comments to a JSON with a better alternative. If someone wants to use JSON over other choices for whatever reason and the only thing holding them back is the lack of comments, then this is a valid way to add comments, I believe.

If you use a string property, you can't split your comment among multiple lines. You could perhaps do an array of strings or something, but I think adding a simple commenting syntax like this is neater.

EDIT: Fixed double negative in penultimate paragraph.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The merge request for this feature is here: [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/4119d1e60a111bacca...](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/4119d1e60a111bacca359b61b5bc3dae29932b67) \-- more than 21K new lines of code.

I'm not too worried about this being a "predictable interface names" type of solution to a problem I'm not having. What I'm really worried about is that of those 21K lines of code, only about 100 lines deal with testing, in the form of two bash scripts performing end-to-end tests against the main executable `homectl`.

At $DAYJOB, we find that to achieve any sort of acceptable coverage (which we've arbitrarily defined as 80% or better) -- you'd expect the ratio of production code to unit test code to be close to 1:1, and not anywhere near the 200:1 like this code here.

I mean, either those are some _very_ efficient E2E tests, or we have a small number of happy paths being covered here, and we the users will have to weed out all the corner cases that weren't tested.

Moreover, since these are E2E tests and not unit tests, that makes me immediately worry about the quality of the code. I know that unit testing is not very common on C-land, but is it really that unheard of in C-land in 2020?

<comment><USER7> In the kernel with have selftests, which are basically just regular binaries run by make. I didn't do a lot of C unit testing before I started writing selftests, but now I don't see a reason not to, I just made my own little version of the selftest makefile and use that. C code can be tested like any other code it's just made more difficult by the fact that most C code is very concrete and doing systemy things that are harder to isolate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article is describing a solution, but can anyone describe the problem or an article discussing it? I'm having trouble coming up with use cases where this is the best solution.

<comment><USER9> This article seems pretty snarky but OK.

[https://hackaday.com/2019/10/16/pack-your-bags-systemd-is- ta...](https://hackaday.com/2019/10/16/pack-your-bags-systemd-is-taking-you- to-a-new-home/)

<comment><USER10> I still don't get it. The goal is to have your $HOME-directory on an usb-stick and use it on different computers?

That would require having the same software versions installed on every system. But even then it wouldn't work because the user-settings stored in $HOME might depend on the hardware, e.g. monitor setup etc.

<comment><USER11> I think this is not for private users but for companies where the same or similar software and hardware configuration is used across systems.

<comment><USER5> Usually in configurations like that, the org likes having the ability to scan user home directories at will, for a variety of reasons. In my experience in those kind of networks, home directories are often on a centralized NFS/CIFS server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I already have a Swiss army knife program that manages my life, makes sandwiches, and takes my dog to the groomer. It's called Emacs. I don't need another.

<comment><USER13> And Emacs uses a nice, simple, sane, universal configuration file format (S-expressions) while systemd uses .ini files (on Unix!), JSON, binary and no doubt something else somewhere else.

Hmmm, maybe it'd be worthwhile to just make emacs PID 1.

<comment><USER14> I think the use of .ini files is exceptionally appropriate for systemd. The developers are at there most transparent here, it is essentially them saying "we want to be Windows, we want to be the ones who control your system, we make the decisions and you should be thankful that insightful, expert, never ever ever wrong developers like us grace you with this software." (Obvious fake quote, is obvious) I know the sarcasm is heavy there, but the attitude of the developers of systemd seems to be honestly geared in this direction. So, Of course they use .ini files on Unix, because they want the same sort of mono monster, one true path OS that Windows has.

<comment><USER15> Fwiw systemd definitely does not use ini files. It uses some weird scripting language that looks sort of like ini but has logical operators, clear statements, and the ability to assign multiple values to one key.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One of the things I am hoping for with this change is an easy way for me to log on to any computer I have 'synchronised' (such as my home laptop, desktop, or perhaps the wife's laptop if it has network access to home) and have the same home operating environment.

Will it work? Will the small tradeoffs be worth it? (Like remotely logging in via ssh to a locked desktop machine somewhere...) ...

I guess I'm thinking the Chromebook style experience, but without the google involvement.

Separately - I've often wondered if iPhones couldn't be a bit more user agnostic in this way, perhaps among a family. Couldn't a son pick up his mother's iphone, log on with is Apple ID from the lock screen (assuming she has enabled 'family share') and have access to his messages, accounts, contacts, etc, but not large media? I can't see Android getting there sooner, but this would be a very useful feature I think.

<comment><USER17> > I can't see Android getting there sooner

Why? iPhones still don't support multiple users natively as far as I can tell. Android has this by default since... 7? 8?

Once you have everything set to sync to google services, it's really close to having this behaviour.

<comment><USER18> Multi user support came with Android Lollipop in 2014.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is new to me, and I watched through the video, and in usual fashion, any use case that he and his group thinks are not common, are just hand-waved away "that's not common" "You shouldn't do it that way" "If you want to use this, don't do that".

Yet, all the things he mentioned, like, remotely accessing a locked laptop via ssh, or maintaining a external user database for a cluster of machines in LDAP, are things I do on a regular basis.

He also mentioned something about requiring a privileged daemon to change your ssh keys? Is there any more information about that?

Given the gravity of systemd, and all it's ancillary services, how long till this is the one true way? How does this work in the case of true remotely accessible multi-user systems?

<comment><USER20> my (possibly dumb) personal "conspiracy theory": some time in the relatively recent future there is going to be The Grand Linux Userspace Fork. There's going to be "SystemD with the Linux Kernel" (the SystemD system with Gnu utilities and the Linux kernel if you're into that sort of thing) and then "classic Linux", which is just "not using SystemD".

We already sorta have this now. What I'm (half-jokingly) suggesting is a big ugly fork a la Emacs/XEmacs, where the world visibly and somewhat incompatibly separates.

And like that fork we'll end up with everything more-or-less reconciling eventually, but it's going a weird ride until then.

<comment><USER21> there is devuan already

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If I could just switch to OpenBSD for all my work I would be really happy, Linux and all the junk on it is a dumpster fire. Now that we're in the late stage of Linux being built out of a huge pile of seperately developed components the usability of the system has plummeted to an absurd level. I thought the config file story was bad, and now systemd wants to add auto generated json to the mix (in a top level file of my home directory, no less).

Now Linux feels like all the other "enterprise" systems I deal with on a daily basis: baroque, complex, confusing, and over-engineered.

<comment><USER23> I moved to void for similar reasons. Eventually I'll move to openbsd, but void is a nice stepping stone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The homectl command has some nice utilities too:

with USER COMMAND: This command is useful for running privileged backup scripts and such, but requires authentication with the user's credentials in order to be able to unlock the user's home directory.

resize USER BYTES: Change the disk space assigned to the specified home directory.

[https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/homectl.htm...](https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/homectl.html#)

Also, if this makes setting up an encrypted home directory even slightly easier I am all for it. I setup ecryptfs on Rasbian a few weeks ago and there are a few steps that feel hacky if using a headless host and ssh.

<comment><USER15> I'm pretty sure homed does not support (purely) headless use cases.

See minute 20:00: [https://media.ccc.de/v/ASG2019-164-reinventing-home- director...](https://media.ccc.de/v/ASG2019-164-reinventing-home- directories#t=1184)

<comment><USER24> that is a bummer

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Inside of the home directory a file ~/.identity contains the JSON formatted > user record of the user. It follows the format defined in JSON User Records.

Why couldn't this have gone into ~/.config/? There's enough garbage cluttering my home directory.

<comment><USER26> Also this:

 _Since the user record is cryptographically signed the user cannot make modifications to the file on their own (at least not without corrupting it, or knowing the private key used for signing the record)._

That sounds like something that shouldn't even be in the user's own home directory.

...and JSON, of all things. Every aspect of systemd which I've worked with seems to be full of sprawling complexity and overengineering, and this is no exception. I know "it's not the UNIX philosophy" is a common dismissive complait about it, but looking at the design gives a very different feeling than the "original UNIX" designs, which felt humble and simple.

<comment><USER27> >...and JSON, of all things.

Right? Reasoning was "the web people are using it too". Why not just use key value based config files like every other system tool?

<comment><USER8> Likely because, despite looking similar, those key/value and .ini style config files like every other system tool are actually hundreds of subtly incompatible or poorly specified formats. Unicode handling, whitespace handling, quoting, indentation, multi-line, line continuation, comments, non- string datatypes, lists, maps... you use YAML for human maintained and YAML or JSON for machine so people can use an off the shelf parser instead of implementing your particular key/value specification. Even TOML is better than rolling your own, since at least it has a common specification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm not sold on having plaintext-files which cannot be edited by hand. I'm only slightly doubtful that this will do us great in the future, but I think I'll be a late adopter. I imagine there is a lot of unforeseen consequences.

There's also the deal with recovery from bad situations (tm) or reviving long- dead home accounts.

</comment><comment><USER29> I wonder if there's any other decent way to implement these features. Is systemd the inevitable solution to complex issues like this, or is there a more unixy way to achieve all this?

Edit: isn't JSON technically not free-as-in-freedom?

<comment><USER15> >Edit: isn't JSON technically not free-as-in-freedom?

One implementation was nonfree due to that whole don't be evil clause. Systemd uses json-c, which is permissively licensed from what I remember.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I thought one of the big selling points for this was the ability to move the homedirectory from one device to another via usb or hdd?

Then how will they verifiy the signature of the user json file?

So I can't simply remount the user profile on another system?

Seems like a step back.

<comment><USER31> > I thought one of the big selling points for this was the ability to move the > homedirectory from one device to another via usb or hdd?

I've been able to do this for decades, just copy the files. Why would I want systemd for that?

systemd has already made my textual log files binary and only accessible with their own viewer. Now it's going to apply its philosophy to my home directory too?

<comment><USER32> You have a pendrive containing your encrypted home directory and you can plug this drive in to a machine that _doesn 't a priori have your user account info_ and log in to your account without administrative privilege.

This could genuinely be a viable lightweight alternative to LDAP/IPA in offices that hotdesk. Just sign the user's drive once and they can plug-in to any workstation.

<comment> qu4z-2 I don't really understand why they bother to encrypt it if you're going to be typing your password into presenter laptops, etc...

<comment><USER32> Because someone who steals your drive can't decrypt it? How could you possibly design a system where you can plug a drive into an openly hostile machine, decrypt and use it, and have that machine not be able to access your password or files?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What happens if you have a user called "lennart.homedir"?

<comment><USER34> Either it's lennart.homedir.homedir or you've found a bug.

<comment><USER33> So, you've got two users, "lennart" and "lennart.homedir"...

I guess it would only be a problem when migrating, systemd is presumably happy to have lennart's home dir in lennart.homedir, and lennart.homedir's homedir in lennart.homedir.homedir...

Ed: actually km more concerned with how this (doesn't) work with Pam, getent etc. If ldap, yellow pages or /etc/paaswd specify a home-dir that's not at /home/<username>... Should the system still look at <whatever path>.homedir? But only for interactive logins? Will a daemon running as the user have a different home dir? Will cron? At? The system processing dot.foward/sieve filters?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Maybe this is useful to some people, but I think that it is not useful to me and that what I currently have is good. (I don't need the XDG stuff either though, and I don't use it.)

</comment><comment><USER36> But what if somebody already has data on some other volume-managing filesystem (like, say, ZFS) ?

</comment><comment><USER37> This seems pretty cool. A lot of the eCryptFS based home directory encryption stuff felt difficult to manage and not very sturdy whereas the fscrpyt and LUKS options here seem like they will be solid.

Q: am I understanding correctly that you cannot use btrfs subvolumes while also using fscrypt? does it not make sense to use both?

CIFS home directories is another feature I'm excited for. I'm sure it would have plenty of downsides to using a local filesystem but as of right now I find it cumbersome to have non-local home directories at all.

</comment><comment><USER8> How is the key handling being done? If the .identity file is signed, then workstations will need to look up the key on some keyserver to see if the key has been revoked. This also limits use to online-only.

Without key revokation and online-only, ex-employees plugging in their home directories and regaining their employee privileges, because the trusted .identity file says they are in the staff group.

</comment><comment><USER38> What about ZFS?

</comment><comment><USER39> Some celebrity software developers just seem to love making arbitrary, costly churn changes to existing standards, APIs and conventions to either feed their egos or hype themselves while imposing pointless costs, changes and risks on untold millions or billions of systems and users. Consumerist fashionabilism and obsolescence breaking changes rarely, if ever, serve a legitimate purpose. SMH.

<comment><USER40> Jesus dude. Maybe once in the your life consider that not everybody likes the same thing as you. People like you are the reason this is a toxic community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I think this may be where I step off the train. I grumbled, but can live with it as init, and it is easy enough to disable the ntp and name resolution nonsense to use decent tools.

Buy systemd has no business sticking its nose in authentication or storage, or more generally telling me how to manage users. This is a no.

<comment><USER42> If you want to rage at systemd, you can do that equally well with or without this optional feature: nothing changes unless you specifically tell systemd- homed to manage your home directory.

<comment><USER41> Why does any criticism of systemd have to be due to "rage"? There is this ongoing behavior whereby anything other than fawning praise is treated as irrational and emotion-driven.

You may as well ask why Lennart rages so hard against ZFS.

<comment><USER42> I'm not saying that all systemd criticism is irrational. I'm saying that this systemd criticism is irrational.

<comment><USER43> So this will be disabled by default? It will not become a default and as such nothing will start to depend on it as a default?

Also remarks and doubts on the use of json for this purpose is completely irrational?

<comment><USER44> Systemd is just an upstream project. It's up to your distro to ship it to you and then it's up to you if you want to use some feature or you want to do it a different way. This feature doesn't even do anything unless you create the user with "homectl".

If another open source program depends on it by default, then you can patch it to remove the dependency. If you disagree with the concept of JSON, feel free to write your own data format.

I have zero interest in using this feature, but still I find it really embarrassing that I have to regularly explain this basic concept of open source here. And I don't mean that as a dig at you, I mean it in the sense that there is a lot more work we have to do.

<comment><USER43> I decided to not act on it, take it easy and roll with defaults. After all alternatives remained, it is an upstream project indeed, etc But I took quite a bit of interest in the discussion as it raged on over the years those arguments you've used I've seen time and time again.

Especially this: "If another open source program depends on it by default, then you can patch it to remove the dependency." and "then it's up to you if you want to use some feature or you want to do it a different way."

Now recently also Debian has decided to drop support for other init systems. It just wasn't practical anymore. Now you get to be on the lookout when you "want to use some feature or you want to do it a different way." because if you don't you end up with shit like this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19291067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19291067) Now we get to see hilarious stuff like a systemd developer asking tmux to add systemd specific code to work around systemd's own default behaviour. Now we get BSD's putting in work to deal with the prevalence of Systemd. Now we get those working with embedded linux putting in work to deal with the prevalence and dependency on SystemD. Because at the end of the day the systemd devs don't care about ulibc, non linux and what have you whilst at the same time seeming to really want to set the standard for as much as possible.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you read the author's name or article first? - <AUTHOR> I have long been conflicted about whether I should read the article or the author's name first. On one hand, it's important to accept ideas without further biasing oneself for or against the ideas by knowing who is pushing the ideas. On the other, it can lend important credibility/incredulity and help me set my expectations for the perspective of the author.<p>My solution has been to generally not check beforehand, unless it is a source that I have found to have low standards and quality that varies widely, such as HBR, Forbes, any opinion page, etc. As a well read and mostly rational community, I would love to hear how others on HN approach this. <comment><USER2> 1 - There are so many articles and such posted here and every other website I read, I honestly would not remember an article by a specific person vs another.

2 - I personally, like to read as much as I can and come to my own opinion / conclusion. Who specifically wrote it, is of little concern to me. I may put more weight behind an article from a big newspaper or such vs some random article on medium, but that doesn't mean both articles / opinions aren't valid (or not valid)

There is so much news lately, so many blog authors or writers - news is pretty dime a dozen IMO. Which goes back to newspapers are dieing and ads are increasing on publications so they can pay writers and blah blah blah. VS music or movies, which while there is a lot of music and a lot of movies / tv shows - I think those leave a bigger impact on people because they effect them emotionally. Most news is not to say it's garbage, but everyone has an opinion and a lot of it is hey let's repost this article about the latest apple product or political dilemma and put some ads on it so we can make some money vs original content, which is what music / movies are (usually).</comment>


How fast do you expect CPUs to be in five years? - <AUTHOR>

How fast do you expect CPUs to be in five years, compared to an average CPU from today, say an i5 2500 for example? In which areas of CPU design do you expect the most progress? <comment><USER2> Heres my armchair handwaving = 48-64 cores with a lot of dynamic speed management. -> Have one thread going it might blaze through at 4+ GHz hopping cores while most of the chip is gated off. If youre running many threads then the 48-64 threads chug along at 2.5-3.5 GHz.

</comment><comment><USER3> Define "fast". No joke, no sarcasm, no snark intended; you really ought to be more specific if you want useful answers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't define it on purpose. Part of my question is defining what fast will mean in five years. Will it be many more cores? A better architecture? More MHz?</comment></comment>


Sorcery or science – the world of cherry picked data and sloppy statistics - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@anotheronebitesthedust/sorcery-or-science-the-world-of-cherry-picked-data-and-sloppy-statistics-ce864cb2dde6#.lw5koyipj <comment><AUTHOR> I'm really wondering if the academic environment, from a supposedly free- thinking and failure embracing context has started to share more similarities with a high-competition silicon valley startup scene (excuse the labelling) rather than its own established principles.

Applying for grants is a similar process as raising capital, only with different currencies involved in the evaluation: impact, experimental results, etc. The resulting pressure seems to encourage bad science, as described in the posted link - and the many others shared here on HN.</comment>


Pitch Cards - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/283123643/pitch-cards <comment><USER2> 40 Euros for a deck of cards is a bit steep. I've backed card kick starters before, usually around the ~12 Euro mark.

<comment><USER3> Hello, I'm the creator of this game. I understand your feedback about the pricing. There was some early bird pricing for one deck but it's all gone. The best thing to do is to grab a friend that could like the project and order a double pack with the early bird pricing. FYI, it's a double deck of cards and more a serious game than just a nicely designed card game so the usual pricing is around $30 (check the brand deck or Pitch deck on kickstarter).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How to prevent the fear of public speaking</comment>


File First, Invent Later? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/82096 <comment><USER2> Perhaps a slightly misleading headline. You can't file a patent without inventing something; to be enforceable, a patent must document a "best known mode" of operation sufficient to enable someone reasonably skilled in the disciplines relevant to the patent to actually build the thing.

So this article does not in fact suggest that you can file "hover jellybeans" just because the thought occurred to you to do so. Rather, it adjusts a somewhat arcane dispute resolution system that many of you didn't even realize existed so that the patent system in fact works the same way you thought it did, which is that the first person to file a document describing and enabling an invention unencumbered by prior art wins the patent.

Presaging the "OMG WTF PATENT LOL" stuff, let me say: _I don't care_. This story doesn't have anything to do with whether software patents are reasonable. Tell me they're evil and I'll agree with you.

</comment><comment><USER3> If two people independently invent something at about the same time, does that mean it's obvious to someone skilled in the art?

In those scenarios, I'd like to see both patents thrown out.

<comment><USER4> > If two people independently invent something at about the same time, does > that mean it's obvious to someone skilled in the art?

No. If it was you would have dozens or hundreds of simultaneous inventors, not just two.

<comment><USER5> If it was actually obvious, most people wouldn't pay the fees to file. Just the rip-off artists hoping for a big score.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Invent!? Who said anything about inventing? It says _file_. Inventing is what the suckers who have to pay me do.</comment>


Canadian scientist sent deadly viruses to Wuhan lab – CBC News - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/canadian-scientist-sent-deadly-viruses-to-wuhan-lab-months-before-rcmp-asked-to-investigate-1.5609582 <comment><USER2> > The only reason the correct packaging was used is because the Chinese wrote > to them and said, 'Aren't you making a mistake here?' If that had not > happened, the scientists would have placed on an Air Canada flight, several > of them actually, a deadly virus incorrectly packaged. That nearly > happened," Attaran said.

That sounds extremely reckless for a scientist who knows what they are shipping.</comment>


Paidly.io - Simplest subscription billing for SaaS businesses - <AUTHOR> http://www.paidly.io <comment><USER2> I like the intention of what you guys are doing (mimicking what Joel did with Buffer). I think you need to explain a bit more. Buffer was targeted at marketers and bloggers. You're creating a service for engineers who have built a SaaS business already.

It also wouldn't hurt to be a bit original and at least change some of the copy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Too empty, don't you think? A few more details about how you are going to charge SaaS wouldn't harm.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why won't businesses bill themselves, and cut down the price on their end user?</comment>


Planning a Trip? When It's Cheaper to Take Uber and Lyft Than Rent a Car - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/04/30/planning-a-trip-when-its-cheaper-to-take-uber-and-lyft-than-rent-a-car/ <comment><USER2> From personal anecdotes and the news, it seems like apps like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb are getting very popular, and the quality is starting to go down, and getting pretty hit-or-miss..

I'll probably be sticking with renting cars just for the convenience factor alone</comment>


Jet.com Runs into Turbulence with Retailers - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/jet-com-runs-into-turbulence-with-retailers-1438899476

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't associate with them either when they can't mitigate basic SQL injection:

[https://jet.com/search?term=%27%20OR%201*1=1*1%27](https://jet.com/search?term=%27%20OR%201*1=1*1%27)

<comment><USER3> Having logical URLs for your search results isn't SQL injection:

[https://jet.com/search?term=Sony%20OR%20Samsung](https://jet.com/search?term=Sony%20OR%20Samsung)

Look, it even guessed the product category based on my search term.

Back in the day search engines used to have these things called logical operators, then basically Google deprecated them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Jet is trying to save its customers money by not making a profit on the items they sell and offering all kinds of discounts from the commission they would have made all the way to the supply chain cost and passing all of that to the customer.

It's not surprising that this model clashes with retailers they are not in the business of saving people money and they certainly see the disruption this will cause and the efficiencies it will force on them. They will have to get efficient to compete if this takes off.

<comment><USER5> As a retailer myself, I wouldn't be thrilled with the model where the customer pays with their credit card on jet.com, then jet.com pays me with their own credit card and contact info. Not because I don't want the customer saving money, but because I am now not clear on who the customer actually is.

What happens if there are customer service issues, an out of stock situation, returns, refunds, chargebacks, etc? Is Jet.com prepared to deal with all of that in this middle-man setup?

<comment><USER6> they don't pay you with their credit card, they use ACH like every other marketplace.

<comment><USER5> "When a Jet customer buys items that aren't in its inventory or available from partner merchants, a Jet employee buys the items from another website and has them shipped directly to the customer."

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/frenzy-around-shopping-site- jet-...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/frenzy-around-shopping-site-jet-com- harks-back-to-dot-com-boom-1437359430)

Edit: The context is that the article at the top of this thread is showing one way they are sort of "faking" partners. The concierge model I'm referencing is another. Hopefully, it's a temporary thing, because it's messy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Jet's major value proposition was that it was supposed to be an attractive alternative option to Amazon for the Retailers and CPG companies. In the short run, that customer is probably more important than the end customer (similar to Airbnb initially with hosts vs. end users) because if they don't have the faith of the Retailers/CPGers, than this model fails very quickly

</comment><comment><USER8> That particular link has a paywall.

<comment><USER9> Go here: [https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0...](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0&q=Jet.com+Runs+Into+Turbulence+With+Retailers&oq=Jet.com+Runs+Into+Turbulence+With+Retailers)

Then click the (probably) first link.

<comment><USER10> It failed for me because I'd already clicked the link and they set a cookie.

Solution: open the search in an ncognito window or privacy window, and then click through to WSJ.

Chrome: COMMAND-SHIFT-N Firefox: COMMAND-SHIFT-P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> On one hand, it seems odd to complain about people driving sales of your stuff. On the other, is this really Jet's grand strategy?

</comment><comment><USER12> So they are giving out cashback rewards for purchases on unaffiliated online shops?

Sounds like selling at a loss but making it up on volume is back.</comment>