Setting the Record Straight - <AUTHOR> http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/52491403007/setting-the-record-straight <comment><USER2> The NSA slides are highly damaging to American service providers, thus they are trying to be as forceful as possible in these statements. There are already European government officials calling for the discontinuation of American services and for the development of European alternatives. Making the matter worse is American official's arrogant short-sighted reassurances that the surveillance is for foreigners only. As the NSA called it "our home-field advantage", that these dominant global Internet companies are located here, could quickly be lost thanks to the hubris of our government.

<comment><USER3> We should give foreigners rights that Americans enjoy. If American enjoys 4th amendment protection, so can foreigners. That mean you can't spy on foreigner without getting a warrant from an open court, rather than secret courts with secret ruling.

Edit:

I am not arguing that foreigners should receive welfare check and benefit from social programs. I am arguing that if they are targeted by the US government, they should be subjected to the same protection. There should be no special exception for anybody, because the special exception was used to justified the NSA spying program.

<comment><USER4> > We should give foreigners rights that Americans enjoy.

Uhhh no. I pay taxes and uphold my civic responsibilities (jury duty, selective service, etc.).

I earn those rights.

Unless those foreigners decide to become US citizens and take on the same responsibilities, no, those rights do not extend to them.

<comment><USER5> Those foreigners usually have those responsibilities in their own countries.

The same works the other way around.

Wouldn't it make sense to have reciprocity so it ends up being a game of citizen collaboration, rather than of competition (as in many other areas of international diplomacy and law)?

<comment><USER4> > Wouldn't it make sense to have reciprocity so it ends up being a game of > citizen collaboration

Yes, I'd be perfectly happy with that. In fact, I'd be thrilled to have the same protections when travelling abroad. Unfortunately, most countries don't provide such protections for even their own citizens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm struggling to make sense of all this. On the one hand, the denials from the companies in question are becoming more and more genuine and convincing - on the other, the NSA PowerPoint did leak which very clearly states the companies' involvement and no one's thus far denied its validity.

Who's lying?

<comment><USER7> > no one's thus far denied its validity.

On Thursday, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, wrote " _The Guardian_ and The Washington Post articles refer to collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They contain numerous inaccuracies."[1]

Today, he released a fact sheet[2] which stated, among other things,

* PRISM is not an undisclosed collection or data mining program. It is an internal government computer system used to facilitate the government's statutorily authorized collection of foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision, as authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (50 U.S.C. § 1881a). This authority was created by the Congress and has been widely known and publicly discussed since its inception in 2008.

* Under Section 702 of FISA, the United States Government does not unilaterally obtain information from the servers of U.S. electronic communication service providers. All such information is obtained with FISA Court approval and with the knowledge of the provider based upon a written directive from the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence. In short, Section 702 facilitates the targeted acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning foreign targets located outside the United States under court oversight. Service providers supply information to the Government when they are lawfully required to do so.

* The Government cannot target anyone under the court-approved procedures for Section 702 collection unless there is an appropriate, and documented, foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition (such as for the prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities, or nuclear proliferation) and the foreign target is reasonably believed to be outside the United States. We cannot target even foreign persons overseas without a valid foreign intelligence purpose.

* In addition, Section 702 cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, or any other U.S. person, or to intentionally target any person known to be in the United States. Likewise, Section 702 cannot be used to target a person outside the United States if the purpose is to acquire information from a person inside the United States.

[1] [http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press- releases/191-pre...](http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press- releases/191-press-releases-2013/869-dni-statement-on-activities-authorized- under-section-702-of-fisa)

[2] [http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Facts%20on%20the%20Collec...](http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Facts%20on%20the%20Collection%20of%20Intelligence%20Pursuant%20to%20Section%20702.pdf)

For other statements from the DNI, see [http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press- releases](http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases)

<comment><USER6> I said no one's challenged the validity of the _PowerPoint_. What you're quoting is challenging the articles written by the Guardian and the Post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These companies are making themselves look really bad to anyone paying attention. Nobody is reporting that they joined a program to volunteer illegal access to user data, so these assurances are canards. What is being reported is that the NSA has been running a secret program to legally collect user data from these companies. If these companies want my respect, they need to admit that these reports are true, declare their opinion against the practice, and state their position on legal reform to make such practices illegal.

<comment><USER9> Sincere question: was it not common knowledge that these companies would hand over user data if compelled to do so by the government? What exactly is new about this revelation?

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure how others feel, but for me the systematic nature and the scope of collection are what get my hackles up. Requesting specific information on a specific individual because of the suspicion that a crime has been committed is perfectly reasonable. Collecting information on everyone in order to search for illegal activity feels like a serious violation of privacy. We can debate about the kind of information they can get through NSLs only being "metadata", etc., but that's the crux of the issue for me.

<comment><USER10> There is no evidence they collect information on "everyone". Everyone has denied the firehose feed hypothesis, even the NSA. Verizon didn't deny it, proving that there's no gag order, nor did the NSA. So we have Verizon admitting a metadata firehose, but everyone else denying it, which seems to suggest the tech companies are telling the truth.

<comment><USER8> I hope so. But we have no insight into how much information was put in the "locked mailboxes." From what we do know, it's reasonable to assume the NSA has been gathering as much information on as many people as is/was legally permissible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I still can't get past 'yahoo.tumblr.com'

Seems like a paradox. Mind blown.

Something about this feels like it carries more weight, probably because it comes from the legal department and not from a CEO.

<comment><USER12> i think the reason this statement feels like it carries more weight is that it doesn't read like a mad libs where the CEO has filled in their company name in the required blanks.

<comment><USER13> Yahoo's is almost exactly the same as what Google posted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't care about whether a given company "volunteers information" (or has it compelled), or whether it's via "lawful means" (which means, we got a secret court order or an NSL for everyone). What I want to know is, of the N users you serve in Country X, how many have had information turned over to a third party?

If you qualify it as "any third party", I really doubt the proscriptions over disclosing specific FISC or NSL orders apply. They do receive orders to turn over information for all sorts of reasons, some of which are totally legitimate.

Unless the number is "100%".

<comment><USER15> The word "infinitesimal" appears in this document.

<comment><USER14> Many words, and no numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow bet Yahoos glad they took a little longer than Facebook and Google to 'set the record straight'.

This statement definitely carries much higher conviction language that related statements, interesting to note the absence of Marissa Mayer from the statements. I would guess that it just gives a little more PR distance in case things blow up further.

</comment><comment><USER17> Lately all these PR statements from the companies involved are so carefully structured that they can be interrpreted 2 clear ways.

1) Face Value. Don't look into the wording and just see that so many companies "accused," are not involved.

2) Semantics. Look at the wording for hidden meanings, possibility of a gag order, and these companies are (in reference to this article) involuntarily involved.

I think they are general so the person reading it will take it as they want. I posted a "what will you do now," post on here [0], because that's really what this comes down to. I agree with most that I've ALWAYS assumed we were all monitored, but as I've said many times....it's not what they know, it's what they can prove in court (that's why I'm thankful CISPA got blocked...it was kinda like legalizing what was already going on to be able to use what they know in court).

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5842556](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5842556)

<comment><USER18> For those interested, there is a dissection of Yahoo!'s statement by Chris Soghoian (privacy and security research, policy expert/technologist @ the ACLU): [http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2013/06/analyzing-yahoos- prism-n...](http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2013/06/analyzing-yahoos-prism-non- denial.html)

Like the other official/legal postings so far, the verbiage in this post is carefully crafted to mean the opposite of what it says.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> All the organizations in question have a permanent smut on their record. The angle I'm missing in this discussion is that this is a business opportunity for something new and better. Acquiring new users for a search engine, social network, etc was damn near impossible because you couldn't compete with the resources, quality and brand. Now they have a flaw; privacy. Maybe the homogeneous landscape of the tech industry can get shaken up. Kim Dotcom is creating an anonymous email service and I'm curious to see what other alternatives for common tech pops into existence in the wake of this.

Changing a government will take a lot of time; but a business outside the reach of US legislation could pop up tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER20> A clear statement. Thank you Yahoo!</comment>


Potential responses to a bigger company's onerous contract demands - <AUTHOR> http://www.ontechnologycontracts.com/2009/07/five-potential-responses-to-a-bigger-companys-onerous-contract-demands/

<comment><USER2> Our experience is that larger companies are often quite flexible and can remove many of the onerous demands. It's definitely worth asking for them to be removed or amended.

When you're small, the person hiring you has often already decided that you're a risk worth fighting for and will push through any roadblocks.

<comment><USER3> Not when you're really tiny, and they're one of the largest employers in the world. I am a one man software shop and my dealings with one of the world's largest beverage producer has been anything but _negotiation_. The lady I have been dealing with has been really hard, I am not exaggerating, but it's very close to them ordering me around. Every few weeks I get 20 pages of crap for me to go thorough, and I usually have a day or so read the fine print, sign and fax it back to them. I am not even sure what I promised anymore, however, the pay, when it comes around in about a year or so is well worth it (not exactly retirement, but enough to live off of for 5+ years.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> True, and I had one very large company back off after the equivalent of a staredown. My lawyer, when first seeing the contract, left me a one-word voicemail: "Egregious".</comment>


Calpers CIO made false disclosure, resigns 2 days later - <AUTHOR> https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/08/calpers-chief-investment-officer-ben-meng-made-false-felonious-financial-disclosure-report-more-proof-of-lack-of-compliance-under-marcie-frost.html <comment><USER2> Finance used to be a boring but scrupulously honest area of work. Unfortunately, many finance people are now corrupt. Private equity for example in the last thirty years has turned into a mechanism to make its operators rich while destroying the businesses it invests in. [https://joelx.com/private-equity-destroys-hospital- chain/159...](https://joelx.com/private-equity-destroys-hospital-chain/15949/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Naked Capitalism has done a great job covering this stuff, and has many articles describing the corruption in CalPers.</comment></comment>


Pirate Bay founder builds the ultimate piracy machine - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-builds-the-ultimate-piracy-machine-151219/ <comment><AUTHOR> For the original page of the project, see also [http://konsthack.se/portfolio/kh000-kopimashin/](http://konsthack.se/portfolio/kh000-kopimashin/)</comment>


Ask HN: Calendar/event manager that doesn't suck? - <AUTHOR> I want to create events with a time and date, assign participants and automatically notify them via e-mail (or SMS) a day before. I don't want them to have to download any app or create an user account. And it should work with any kind of e-mail (Gmail, Outlook, custom domain). I would manually manage the name, e-mail and phone number of each person. It would be acceptable, though, for the user to create an account if he wants to check the full calendar with the e-mail he was invited. Just not for the notification and confirmation stuff.
So far I tried:
- Outlook.com: slow, heavy cache problems, events failing to be created, most e-mail notifications don't get delivered (maybe they need to be in my contact list or have exchanged e-mails with me? some kind of anti-spam?), if Gmail users click on Yes/No/Maybe I get "550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable". Tried both with a custom domain and a new @outlook.com account. I couldn't believe how shitty this thing is.
- Zoho: terrible UI, and I couldn't even get the confirmation e-mail delivered. It doesn't even hit my Gmail spam folder. How can I trust it to deliver notifications?
- Gmail: Like Outlook, user needs a Google Account to be able to reply Yes/No/Maybe, or to view the events.
- Trello: Doesn't work for this use case.
Any suggestions? If I need to self-host this thing in 2016 I might give up on the internet. <comment><USER2> I'm from the Zoho marketing team. Embarrassed at the poor impression we have left you with while trying to use our service. We'd really like to connect with you and learn where we slipped. Will be great if you can reach out to us at email@example.com with subject "Ref: Post on HN on issues with your Calendar app".

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't be. Judging from all the apps I tested, making a good calendar must be a really hard problem (but I never built one myself). At least for my use case. I mean, how much money have MS spent on making the new Outlook web thing, and it doesn't even work? I even tried in another computer with a new account, to see if I was doing something wrong. That's how bad my experience was. And Google stuff isn't that much better either. The lock-in is real. The integration with Google Keep is the best thing I can say about it.

I just didn't got the confirmation e-mail. Tried several times the same day. Maybe it was a temporary problem since I tried again and was able to confirm my account.

Regarding the UI, it's just a matter of opinion. I use a lot of apps with bad UI and don't care but a calendar is something really personal and important for me that I just can't deal with something that doesn't feel natural. But my opinion shouldn't matter since I'm just an overly judgmental dev and not the 99% type of regular, business user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://basecamp.com/help/2/guides/calendar/add-an- event](https://basecamp.com/help/2/guides/calendar/add-an-event)

</comment><comment><USER4> What about something Evite, Eventbrite, or even Meetup.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll take a look.

By the way, the events should be private (and might contain some confidential information).

<comment><USER4> I know Eventbrite has privacy settings for events, including password protecting the event page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My friend and I were just talking about this yesterday. I was surprised when he said he couldn't find a suitable solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> Who needs working calendars when we have Uber.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's a possibility:

[http://www.teamup.com/](http://www.teamup.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> No e-mail notifications for the participants, unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did you try [http://doodle.com](http://doodle.com)?

<comment><AUTHOR> I found it quite a hassle to manage a lot of events. So many e-mail exchanges, links and confusing interactions. It puts too much focus on the "confirmation" part. I couldn't find how to notify users a day before the event date but I'll keep looking. Thanks.</comment></comment>


15 Strat Tips For Crafting the Coolest and Most Impressive Twitter Bio - <AUTHOR> http://bajillionhits.biz/post/3330302489/15-strat-tips-for-crafting-the-coolest-and-most <comment><USER2> That's some very high quality snark!</comment>


Why serverless newbies should use a deployment framework - <AUTHOR> https://winterwindsoftware.com/serverless-newbies-should-use-framework/ <comment><USER2> I prefer the the exact opposite approach. I don't want to learn any new tools however easy they might be when a one time effort (few lines of code) can give you a dependency free development/deployment mechanism. Ref: [https://github.com/hasura/graphql- serverless/tree/master/aws...](https://github.com/hasura/graphql- serverless/tree/master/aws-nodejs/apollo-sequelize)

Basic idea is to use an ENV var to specify local development and expose a simple http server for local development. Deployment can be done by the very easy AWS console itself.</comment>


Houston mom created an app that prevents teens from ignoring calls - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/technology/wp/2014/08/18/houston-mom-created-an-app-that-prevents-teens-from-ignoring-calls/

<comment><AUTHOR> Mods: I think this is the original source, if you want to update the submission...

[http://abc7news.com/family/houston-mom-creates-app-to- contro...](http://abc7news.com/family/houston-mom-creates-app-to-control- childs-phone/258924/)

<comment><USER2> Thanks. I only just saw this, and it's too late to make a difference now. Maybe someone can post this url in its own right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 10 minutes until some kid figures out how to disable the app.</comment>


How the iPhone 6 "ruined" Apple - <AUTHOR> http://leancrew.com/all-this/2016/01/how-the-iphone-6-ruined-apple/ <comment><USER2> It's clear that we've entered into the maturity stage of the product lifecycle. Devices are not innovating like they were 3 years ago and that's OK. It means things have reached a plateau and you'll see a focus on optimising.

Apple's growth is going to be flat, that's expected. If they want to see growth they've got to create a new market.

I hope for their sake they are working on a car and it isn't just an OS for car manufacturers. Apple excel at optimising the whole process, they could wipe Tesla Motors from the map with some of their classical execution.</comment>


RAD's ground breaking lossless compression product benchmarked - <AUTHOR> http://richg42.blogspot.com/2016/08/rads-ground-breaking-lossless.html <comment><USER2> Impressive results for RAD's suite of lossless compression products, which is apparently called "Oodle"[0] and was on HN a few months ago[1].

I can't put my finger on it, but something about the blog post bothers me. The "groundbreaking" compression suite is closed source and commercial, and even the data set used for testing in the post isn't public. Con Kolivas (ck), the author of lrzip, commented and inquired about the corpus but the blog post author says he "can't release it". I dunno, it just seems like a weird exchange to me.

[0] [http://www.radgametools.com/oodlewhatsnew.htm](http://www.radgametools.com/oodlewhatsnew.htm) [1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583898](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583898)

<comment><USER3> > something about the blog post bothers me

Yep, same here. Way too much excitement for something that shows no "groundbreaking" advantage over other codecs based on his own benchmark results.

<comment><USER4> Right. There's a niche where it excels, giving you lz4 decompression speed combined with zlib-esque ratios, but it accomplishes that by having significantly slower compression than either of them. It's not really breaking away from the pack in any way that I can see.

<comment><USER5> I think it's targeted at the game industry, so the slow compression doesn't matter. It just needs to decompress quickly for the user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would love to see Kraken taken for a spin by objective third parties in a fully transparent way that compared it to the available alternatives on equal footing.

Sadly, a compression benchmark that doesn't detail the compiler, hardware, corpus, or even version of the libraries used is not very compelling. If others cannot reproduce your results, the results aren't of much value beyond marketing.

<comment><USER7> Go read cbloom's posts: [http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com](http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com) [http://www.cbloom.com/rants.html](http://www.cbloom.com/rants.html) [http://www.cbloom.com/oodle_arm_report/](http://www.cbloom.com/oodle_arm_report/)

Stuff like the compilers used for Oodle are detailed there, and a bunch more benchmarks are published using (I believe) open corpora.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lots more stats and graphs on Charles Bloom's blog (RAD employee working on compression) - [http://cbloomrants.blogspot.co.uk/](http://cbloomrants.blogspot.co.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER9> For me the most interesting benchmark for most use cases is that from the squash library for it's plugins, because it's interactive and visually well made: [https://quixdb.github.io/squash- benchmark/unstable/](https://quixdb.github.io/squash-benchmark/unstable/)

And these high end benchmarks for bigger data: [http://mattmahoney.net/dc/silesia.html](http://mattmahoney.net/dc/silesia.html) [http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html](http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html) [http://mattmahoney.net/dc/10gb.html](http://mattmahoney.net/dc/10gb.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> RAD's packer is nice for cases when compression time is not the most important aspect.

Seems like LZ4 is still unbeatable if you need as fast compression as possible. Think kernel memory page compression (to avoid swapping pages to disk) and compressing data destined to a high bandwidth sink. I'm just guessing, but probably LZ4 has also less power consumption.

If your output device can do over ~100 megabytes per second, LZ4 seems to win easily.

Optimal compression algorithm selection seems to depend on capacity and bandwidth constraints of output device.

<comment><USER11> I often use a script I hacked together called memo [1] when exploring the commandline. Today I was running a pipeline like this:

      $ memo expensive-with-lots-of-output | memo -s expensive | less

I noticed that lz4 (the default (de)compressor memo uses) was the bottleneck. ("memo -s" absorbs standard input and calculates a checksum over it and the command arguments, if that checksum is in the cache, it knows it can just output the cached value instead of running the command).

So I started looking around if there was nothing better around. From the Squish benchmarks posted elsewhere on this article [2], I noticed that zstd(1) seemed to make the right trade-offs. I required compression speed > 50MB/s, decompression speed at least as fast, and as high a compression ration as possible.

zstd(1) seems to work brilliantly and is very fast, it was easy to compile too, just running make in its directory was sufficient for me. I love those kinds of projects. I've made it the default over lz4. What gave me even more confidence in this change is that zstd is by the author of lz4.

[1]: [https://github.com/aktau/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/memo](https://github.com/aktau/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/memo) (currently a version that doesn't prefer zstd(1) yet, I need to git push).

[2]: [https://quixdb.github.io/squash- benchmark/unstable/](https://quixdb.github.io/squash-benchmark/unstable/)

<comment><USER10> > I noticed that lz4 (the default (de)compressor memo uses) was the > bottleneck.

It probably depend on how much bandwidth you got.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting preface to this, [http://richg42.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/zlib-in- serious-danger...](http://richg42.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/zlib-in-serious- danger-of-becoming.html)

However, the compression is nothing compared to Pied Piper's algorithm.

<comment><USER13> Someone had to say it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Any insight into which tool was used to produce these graphs?

</comment><comment><USER15> Impressive. This reminds me of the series Silicon Valley, though.

</comment><comment><USER16> comparison to lzturbo possible? (Unfortunately also closed source, sich).</comment>


From Defeat, Rejection to Success - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120940892966150319.html?mod=rss_Today's_Most_Popular <comment><USER2> The guys behind "Valley of Broken Dreams: A YC Postmortem" should read this.</comment>


Jarc - An Arc interpreter written in Java - <AUTHOR> http://jarc.sourceforge.net/

<comment><USER2> Interesting. I have only tried Rainbow, which is another Arc implementation for the JVM <http://github.com/conanite/rainbow/blob/master/README>

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks fun. One of the few remaining complaints I have about Clojure is the lack of a Lisp-style debugger, and Jarc has one. No compiler, though.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm looking forward to the Dot-Narc implementation for Windows users.

<comment><USER5> Narcotics?

Jarc could have been Joan (of Arc, of course)

With all due appologies for these silly puns...</comment></comment>


Tools of the Trade: What Tools I Use for iOS Consulting - <AUTHOR> http://brandontreb.com/tools-of-the-trade-what-tools-i-use-for-ios-consulting/

<comment><USER2> As a web app contractor / sometimes consultant, I'll also recommend framework- specific job boards ([1] & [2] for example).

[1] <http://www.djangohire.com/a/jbb/find-jobs> [2] <http://djangogigs.com/>

I'll second Freshbooks. Awesome for invoicing, receiving invoices and now importing expenses from your cards & accounts. It pretty much handles everything you need for collections, receivables and taxes.

I'll second LinkedIn as well. Keeping a network of people you've worked with and paying for the business account allows you to find (your network * 3) of potential sources to introduce yourself to. Ihaven't tried the jobs feature - will do now that you've recommended it.

Recruiters work too. They are expensive to your bottom line but mitigate risk. They typically have 6 month waiting periods after you've finished a contract before you can work with the client directly - and I recommend you wait patiently then let the client know you are now independent.

I'll finish with this: know who you are targeting. LinkedIn has an industry and location search - your acquisition strategy should too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cashboard (<http://cashboardapp.com>) is also a fantastic invoicing tool, and their free plan gives you some different options from what Freshbooks gives you.

</comment><comment><USER4> He doesn't mention one if the most important things, time tracking, I use harvestapp there is also toggl, both are great to keep a log of the time you spend on a project, with reports and invoicing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh, perhaps that wasn't obvious. I do all of my time tracking inside of Freshbooks. That way there is no discrepancy when I bill the clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really useful. Not sure how I've missed CocoaPods or Freshbooks but I'm off to check them out. Thanks

</comment><comment><USER6> Linkedin seems to be very interesting! Other feedbacks about linkedin?

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand why you would make posts like this, OP. I really don't.

Your target market for this post: people who are either iOS consultants or want to become iOS consultants

Your competition in the workplace: people who are either iOS consultants or want to become iOS consultants

Telling people where you find jobs and how you find jobs is just mind-boggling to me. The number one way to lower your ROI for said gigs is to increase your competition.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Scott,

I totally understand your perspective. However, this is Hacker News. It's all about the community and helping other hackers out. To be honest, there is such a huge sea of work out there, I would be happy if others would take some of it on.

I have to reject a few contracts a week due to the volume that seems to be coming in. Also, you might not have guessed it, but posts like this help bring me more work than anything else.

I would definitely worry about what you are saying if mobile development was a race to the bottom and only about getting the cheapest price. Then I would be screwed. However, if you hone your skills and are at the top of your game, you should never have issues competing for contracts.

Cheers!

<comment><USER7> _To be honest, there is such a huge sea of work out there, I would be happy if others would take some of it on... However, if you hone your skills and are at the top of your game, you should never have issues competing for contracts._

Life is long, Brandon. What's "hot" today might not be so hot tomorrow. Teaching an army of followers to do things the same way you do is just a race to the bottom (of the hourly/project rate variety certainly). The more you train, the faster you will find it harder to find work. The faster you train them, the sooner it is that someone else's rates will be played against yours in a bidding war. It's not rocket science we're talking about here; there is no debate about whether this will or won't happen. I think market economics are such that, if you/others cause the bottom end to drop (in price due to more competition), that the top end will drop correspondingly.

I always chuckle a bit about this and think, "Is this the sort of thing Sun Tzu advocated in The Art of War?" I can imagine a five-star general posting his "Here's our strategy in detail" on a public forum haha.

Jacques Matthiej has my favorite post on this topic: [http://jacquesmattheij.com/So+you+are+making+good+money+now+...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/So+you+are+making+good+money+now+STFU)

Here's a tip: if you ever want to get downvoted, post that link. All the copycats at HN hate it when someone posts it. They want everyone telling them what/how to "be successful" rather than them having to actually work at it.</comment></comment></comment>


What Happened When We Unsubscribed 250K Subscribers Without Asking - <AUTHOR> https://readthink.com/what-happened-when-we-unsubscribed-250k-subscribers-without-asking-5a2fbe12fa68#.c8mxol4g0 <comment><USER2> Graymail - just yesterday I finally unsubscribed from a product email that I subscribed to before the product was out. I glanced at, then ignored many emails, sales, holiday specials, etc. What made me do it? An email asking me how I liked the product. I don't have one, they should know I never bought one.

If more companies would take the time to send meaningful emails or even unsubscribe me when they feel I'm not interested, I may sign up for more things. If they valued a quality list over the quantity my inbox would be a different place.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wish my email client would do this for me. I know there's things like unroll.me but AFAIK they can't tell how engaged with particular mailing lists I am.

Or even just a "swipe to unsubscribe" feature in Google Inbox would be nice.</comment>


Darpa Wants Benefits of Psychedelics but Without Hallucinations - <AUTHOR> https://sociable.co/science/darpa-wants-benefits-of-psychedelics-but-without-hallucinations/ <comment><USER2> "A military cannot function if its soldiers realize they are one with the enemy."</comment>


Stick or Twist: The programming language dilemma - <AUTHOR> http://wannabevc.wordpress.com/2013/09/27/stick-or-twist-the-programming-language-dilemma/

<comment><USER2> I can take or leave Java per se, but it will be a cold day in hell before I touch a Tapestry project again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Can you share why?

<comment><USER2> Tapestry isn't standard Java, it does its own class postprocessing. As a result a lot of the advantages of Java go away (e.g. standard Java tools like debuggers and profilers don't work reliably), and code becomes virtually impossible to reason about.

Furthermore the design of components is backwards, making it impossible to properly encapsulate reusable components. I forget exactly how it worked, but I remember that you had to pass parameters down from parents to children, and because of the way variables were passed data ended up alternating through html-like files and java code, making it very hard to see where a given variable had come from.

After a month or so of that we switched to Wicket, which remains the best web framework, and quite possibly the best object-oriented library, I've ever used.</comment></comment></comment>


Stanford CS231n – Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition - <AUTHOR> http://cs231n.github.io/ <comment><USER2> Hi HN, the course is still in progress so the notes are not yet finished (I'm currently struggling to finish the ConvNet notes).

Our syllabus is here: [http://cs231n.stanford.edu/syllabus.html](http://cs231n.stanford.edu/syllabus.html) where you can also find lecture slides, which have some more information.

Lastly, our assignments (that walk you through implementing a Softmax/SVM classifier and Neural Networks and ConvNets in Python+numpy) are all on terminal.com. Terminal.com lets us set up a VM in the browser: You visit the assignment URL, fork the snapshot, and you can work right away on the assignment in your browser on an IPython Notebook: the data is there, all dependencies are already installed, and everything ready to go. We're also working with terminal.com right now to get access to GPU machines soon, which will let us set up assignments that use Caffe and efficient GPU code, etc.

<comment><USER3> I've been reading through the notes and you present the material extremely well. I especially like how you discuss naive approaches before going about a better way to do things (e.g., computing a gradient numerically vs analytic). This is rare in teaching but, from a student's perspective, it really helps fill in the gaps of knowledge as you try to reason and understand the process on your own.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! Unfortunately a lot of teaching is very relative and strongly depends on prior background. A different student gave me feedback on that section as: "Why are you expanding out all the random steps nonsense? Gradient descent takes one line to explain". It's the same for my lectures: No matter what I say or cover, at any point during the lecture some people are bored and some are completely lost. All you can hope for is hitting the median well and then learning to ignore (to some degree) the person who just asked a question that indicates that they are not following at all, and the person next to them who is yawning and on their phone.

<comment><USER4> I'd like to second karpathy here. When you do a practical interpretation of something like machine learning (and even deep learning!) I've had to cater to different tastes. Usually people in these classes fall in to either the more engineering side where breaking down gradient descent can help, or mathy where they've already done convex optimization and know the trade offs of LBFGS vs Conjugate Gradient and all properties of parametric models are obvious. The best thing you can do here is work with the students 1 on 1 to fill in the gaps. There's no silver bullet. Which is why I'd say taking the class in person is always going to be better than notes. I think karpathy is hitting a wider audience with the way he's handling the notes though.

Props to the way you're handling this!

<comment><USER4> Confused as to the downvote..but maybe I can clarify here. People wanting to apply deep learning tend to fall in to one of two camps: heavy CS with some applied ML experience and mathematicians who might not have as much experience building things. In karpathy's case, he's likely going to get a mix of students who have taken different classes. There's a lot of variance either way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been following along, and this course has been great so far. The author also has made the code for one of his publications about image captioning publicly available: [https://github.com/karpathy/neuraltalk](https://github.com/karpathy/neuraltalk)

Along with various other nice work about neural networks:

[http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs/started.htm...](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs/started.html)

[http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/recurrentjs/](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/recurrentjs/)

[http://karpathy.github.io/neuralnets/](http://karpathy.github.io/neuralnets/)

Nice visualization about classifiers from the class (various svm, softmax):

[http://vision.stanford.edu/teaching/cs231n/linear- classify-d...](http://vision.stanford.edu/teaching/cs231n/linear-classify- demo/)

</comment><comment><USER6> OT: It's fantastic that faculty at top universities like Stanford are increasingly making their content freely available on Github. It surely is an awesome time to be alive!

</comment><comment><USER7> I wish I could take this class online (not an alumnus, not even in the US) but thanks for the free material!</comment>


Game reviews on Metacritic: why we avoid inclusion - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/05/game-reviews-on-metacritic-why-we-avoid-inclusion.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss <comment><USER2> Having worked as a game reviewer, they're correct. There's a ton of hidden pressure behind the scenes to positively review some games, for threat of losing the publishers review materials.

Some publishers were great, and some were complete asses putting up embargoes on review release dates to hand them off to the bigger magazines first. Overall it just made the experience of reviewing them rather negative, which has tainted my view of games as a whole.

I used to be an avid gamer, now I'd barely classify myself as a casual gamer. There are some great and truly innovative games in all sorts of terms from gameplay to story, however mostly I just see Arbitrary Action Element 12 followed by Unsurprising Plot Development 8, even in some reputedly great games.

<comment><USER3> The golden days of game development imo were the late 80's, just enough computer power to make things interesting and not enough big money in it to make it hard to get in to for creative small companies.

It's been very much downhill since then, with the exception of a few interesting developments in the console market.

<comment><USER4> Almost all video games from the late 80s were crap by today's standard. I think you're guilty of some pretty severe bias in your estimation. You need to justify the criteria by which you are measuring, IMO, in order to explain why such brilliant games are not currently out-competing today's games.

By crap, I meant that they had so little resources to work with that most could only work on the level of playability, puzzles and reaction times; to get deeper, they had to rely on text, where they didn't enter into a visceral feedback loop with the player. They worked only on very slim slices of the mind's abstraction stack. If they were reaction-based, they would be at most tactical, not strategic, and certainly not epic in a story-telling sense; and if they got into story-telling, they ended up in interactive fiction land, where they lose the immediacy of high-bandwidth visual and aural representations. They need to say, rather than show, so the user gets a narration, rather than an experience.

<comment><USER3> > most could only work on the level of playability, puzzles and reaction times

That's _exactly_ why I liked them. I used to play games a lot because it was great fun, the games out today concentrate on 'the experience' rather than any of the above, and I already have a great world around me to experience.

The pacman game on the google page really brought that home to me, I really had to very strongly resist playing it or I would have been hooked for at least an hour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not surprised. This is the same Ars where they used to rate other things (like iPods) with a numeric scale and ditched it because people were fixating on the rating and ignoring the article.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Our practice of giving games either a "Buy, Rent or Skip" verdict is too vague for Metacritic to arbitrarily take our score and tell its readers what it thinks we meant."

<comment><USER7> Instinct suggests 85/65/30. If you felt inclined you could probably have some fun with parsing the reviews for influential words too.

<comment><USER8> They actually have a policy for scoreless reviews:

 _However, this does pose a problem for our METASCORE computations, which are based on numbers, not qualitative concepts like art and emotions. (If only all of life were like that!) Thus, our staff must assign a numeric score, from 0-100, to each review that is not already scored by the critic. Naturally, there is some discretion involved here, and there will be times when you disagree with the score we assigned. However, our staffers have read a lot of reviews--and we mean a lot--and thus through experience are able to maintain consistency both from film to film and from reviewer to reviewer. When you read over 200 reviews from Manohla Dargis, you begin to develop a decent idea about when she's indicating a 90 and when she's indicating an 80.

_

<http://www.metacritic.com/about/scoring.shtml>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They kind of paint Metacritic in a poor light. It's not Metacritic's fault THQ has the policies they do.

<comment><USER10> I think what surprised me the most is how much Metacritic matters to the gaming industry. You don't get the same issues with music, say, or movie releases.

It's true - Metacritic isn't at fault for THQ's policies, but then that's what you get for coming in and changing the mechanics of the game review world.

<comment><USER11> I think it's because a lot of gamers treat game reviews as some kind of absolute truth, instead of just the opinion of one guy. People seem to have no problem treating movie reviews like someone's personal opinion, and find a reviewer they like and trust, and ignore the rest.

But when a game gets 8/10, it somehow either _is_ an 8/10 game or the game reviewer is _wrong_.

Somewhere along the line people forgot that reviews are subjective, not objective.

<comment><USER12> Yes, but the stakes are higher. A movie takes $10 and 2 hours of your time.

(New) Games cost $60, and occupy a variable amount of time. Since I'm bootstrapping my startup i.e. poor, I only buy games with a high expected value. I typically look for $1 / hour of entertainment, or better. This means I buy games that I can expect to play for 50+ hours before getting bored. Modern Warfare 1, for example, I played for hundreds of hours, making it a great bargain.

The game review scale is also highly compressed. The difference between 8/10 and 9/10 is often the difference between "good game" and "unplayable".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Quickly Loading Things from Disk - PVS-Studio http://probablydance.com/2015/12/19/quickly-loading-things-from-disk/ <comment><AUTHOR> Depending on your platform (os, hardware, compiler) you can even do something silly like write packed structs and then write those to disk (or send them over sockets) and cast back.

Mostly it works if you know the hardware and compiler will stay the same (as in packed struct representation will stay the same). It is basically a poor man's Cap'n'Proto or Flatbuffers.

As for speed, buffering strategy (size and how often fsync is done) will often dominate other stuff. I remember doing a benchmark between C++ and Python for loading and saving data. Python won hands down. The reason was because it had better buffer size defaults. There is also trickery and configuration involved in your page cache params are setup and the schedule of how dirty pages are flushed (if you don't fsync).

> If you're interested in how fast using read(2) is, it's essentially the same > speed: 5437341 ns if I'm reading directly into the std::vector.

Yap, mmap is not always better, it is more complicated and depending on access pattern not always worth it.

<comment><USER2> Also, the quality of the library providing stdio or streams can vary quite a bit. I know a few platforms where you're much better off _never_ calling this stuff (unless it's for quick bringup or other throwaway code) because the folks writing that layer obviously hated their day jobs and wanted to write an OS instead . . . so they did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a confusing article. Does the author know about byte alignments? Or that read/write binary values like floats is just a quick way to run into platform/portability issues if relevant? Or investigating how any RDBMS serializes and reads data as fast as possible? Or really any research related to the field? What about comparing spinning disk via ssd? Or even how libpng works? Or the complexity of ASN.1 notation (used for TLS certificates and many other things)?

Protobuf solves a completely different problem than 'load a file from disk,' which at least FlatBuffers does.

It seems like the only complaint the author has is that it doesn't work particularly at the level of abstraction they prefer. The FlatBuffers timing results also seem dubious because of the lack of profiling to say what is killing the time. Are the comparisions ruining pipelining? Why not write a transpiler to glue the protobuf output to something you actually want?

It's hard to get past the first half with any confidence in methodology of testing, especially when the author leads with 'Loading things from disk is a surprisingly unsolved problem in C++.'</comment>


Basic Type-Level Programming in Haskell - <AUTHOR> http://www.parsonsmatt.org/2017/04/26/basic_type_level_programming_in_haskell.html <comment><USER2> I always thought this kind of thing was abstruse and impractical until I read _Type-Driven Development with Idris_ [0], which made basic dependent type examples--like those demonstrated in the posted article--completely straightforward. Turns out that this kind of thing isn't actually that hard with the right language and tooling.

I highly recommend buying the book and checking out Idris if you found this article interesting. Read the free "overview" chapter[1] at least.

[0] [https://www.manning.com/books/type-driven-development- with-i...](https://www.manning.com/books/type-driven-development-with-idris)

[1] [https://manning- content.s3.amazonaws.com/download/a/580d6ba-...](https://manning- content.s3.amazonaws.com/download/a/580d6ba-451f-43c2-98aa-304705c5dab5/SampleCh01.pdf)

<comment><USER3> This was one of the reasons I felled in love with Turbo Pascal back in the day.

Algol derived languages, while not as powerful as ML ones regarding the type system offer quite a few possibilities to ensure safer code via type definitions, ranges, enumerations and ADTs (Abstract Data Types not to confuse with Algebraic data types).

C++ also allows for this, but requires a bit of boilerplate with templates, classes and operator overloading, which is way more work than a few type declarations in Haskell or Idris.

<comment><USER2> Yes, this was exactly my feeling reading through the Idris book. In the same way that a few lines of elegant Haskell can sometimes describe functionality that takes all kinds of technically-works-but-only-the-author-understands-it C++ template abuse, a few lines of straightforward Idris can sometimes replace all kinds of Haskell "type family abuse".

all kinds of s can be elegantly described in a few lines of Haskell,

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the difference in motivation between doing things this way vs with functional dependencies?

<comment><USER5> Type families are more general than fundeps, and can lead to simpler code with fewer extensions—FunctionalDependencies requires MultiParamTypeClasses, and often FlexibleInstances, FlexibleContexts, and UndecidableInstances.

Fundeps are pretty clear for some simple examples (e.g., a container's element type is uniquely determined by the container type), but in general I find it easier to think in terms of type-level functions than dependencies between types.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not an experienced Haskell programmer, but I've never seen someone use different names for the type and the type constructor, as in:

        data IntAndChar = MkIntAndChar Int Char

They belong to different namespaces, so you can use the same name:

        data IntAndChar = IntAndChar Int Char

Indeed, I believe this is preferred as it reduces the programmer's cognitive load.

<comment><USER7> This seems to be the convention in Idris where

      data IntAndChar = IntAndChar Int Char

would not compile with

      Main.IntAndChar already defined.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This article hit the sweet spot for me on so many levels. It's so easy to find very advanced/specialized Haskell tutorials, as well as beginner tutorials, but this stuff -- bridging the two -- is exactly what I was looking for. Please keep these coming, dearest author.

Favorite quote:

> For some reason, functions that operate on types are called type families.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is there a possibility that length-encoded vectors will be practical someday, or is it just a useful toy example for tutorials?

<comment><USER9> In Haskell? There are packages like [http://hackage.haskell.org/package/vector- sized](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/vector-sized) One might need a typechecker plugin like ghc-typelits-natnormalise [http://hackage.haskell.org/package/ghc-typelits- natnormalise](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/ghc-typelits-natnormalise) to help GHC reason about the lengths.

These two presentations about dependent types in GHC are also good: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buVyfrU6QF4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buVyfrU6QF4) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgD0KUxMaQs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgD0KUxMaQs)

<comment><USER8> Are people using these packages much in practice? Any pitfalls?

<comment><USER9> That I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Damn, this is exactly what I was looking for, thanks mate!!!</comment>


Intro to TDD with Django and Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.realpython.com/blog/python/django-1-6-test-driven-development/

<comment><USER2> Thank you! Will buy your book and support your kickstarter</comment>


Civil / gov communication infrastructures [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1K6D2SlNcA <comment><AUTHOR> I am surprised to see from the comments how many countries have their own app for some purpose</comment>


Firefighters Don't Fight Fires - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/firefighters-dont-fight-fires.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

<comment><USER2> Interesting, but that first graph's y axis is a little misleading.</comment>


Tech companies fear repercussions from a new bill to combat human trafficking - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/8/1/16074808/facebook-google-amazon-sex-human-trafficking-congress-section-230 <comment><USER2> This is a slippery slope. Human trafficking is repulsive and should be stopped but to allow lawsuits and prosecutions of sites because someone placed an ad in say a comments section, or in a review etc is crazy. Even the best scanning will miss some. It is irresponsible to put Google or Airbnb in the same category for responsibility/punishment as Backpage is dangerous.

Where would be the time limit for finding and dispatching such comments/reviews? Does the company only get sued if the comment or review is up for say more than 24 hours? What is someone is trafficked because of a comment that is on say Airbnb for 30 minutes or even 20 hours? It is impossible to draw a line in the sand but the repercussions to the victim are the same if the comment results in harm to someone if that comment is live for 30 minutes or 30 days.

I am not saying these companies should not police comments/reviews etc with great diligence. People's lives are at stake, but with billions of people online there will always be things that slip by.

Before people go on the attack, know that I have daughters and young granddaughters and I do want them safe. I just don't want nor expect Airbnb or any other company to be the gatekeeper of their safety. Now that being said, if they know that comments/reviews are being used to facilitate trafficking then I do believe they have a responsibility to be proactive in stopping this scourge.</comment>


Python's dir function is wrong - <AUTHOR> http://jedidjah.ch/code/2013/9/8/wrong_dir_function/

<comment><USER2> Plase read the docs for the dir function before it's source code, before complaining so loud. Direct quote "Note Because dir() is supplied primarily as a convenience for use at an interactive prompt, it tries to supply an interesting set of names more than it tries to supply a rigorously or consistently defined set of names, and its detailed behavior may change across releases. For example, metaclass attributes are not in the result list when the argument is a class."

<comment><USER3> The ticket was also closed by the author as it what pretty much determined to be a "won't fix".

[http://bugs.python.org/issue19002](http://bugs.python.org/issue19002)

<comment><USER4> It was closed by R. David Murray (a Python core developer), not David Halter (the author)

<comment><USER5> And for all those interested in the blog post, I recommend you read David Murray's reason and suggestion.

<comment><USER6> And the link straight to that is [http://bugs.python.org/issue19002#msg197498](http://bugs.python.org/issue19002#msg197498)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Python objects can override __dir__, which is all dir() calls anyway.

It looks like this is all for an autocompletion library. Why not just write jedi.dir (jedir?)

<comment><USER8> I personally haven't wanted dir() to do this, however I guess I could see the case for an extension to dir such as:

dir(inst, traverseclass=True)

Maybe the author should write a PEP?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> practicality beats purity

<comment><USER10> Yes, but purity generates a lot more blog posts than practicality. Or so it seems.</comment></comment>


Xoshiro256** PRNG - <AUTHOR> http://xoshiro.di.unimi.it/xoshiro256starstar.c <comment><USER2> > For general usage, one has to consider that its lowest bits have low linear > complexity and will fail linearity tests;

<comment><AUTHOR> > passes all tests we are aware of.

I.e. your quote relates to xoshiro256+, not Xoshiro256 __* __*.

<comment><USER2> Where can I read a comparison of the two? Also, it seems like a bad naming scheme to use as it's easy to confuse.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not the author, however there is a full discussion in the paper... [https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.01407](https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.01407)

To summarise...

Xoroshiro256+ is slightly faster but fails some linearity tests in the low order bits, however when generating 64 bit floats only 53 bits are used, thus if you take the most significant 53 bits then Xoroshiro256+ is perfectly fine. It's also probably fine for generating the full 64 bits for the vast majority of cases, unless you have some very specific requirements. But for peace of mind there is the option to take the 15% slower version for a PRNG that is still sub-nanosecond (per 64 bits generated, on contemporary superscalar CPUs) and that passes all tests that the authors were aware of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> xoshiro home page [http://xoshiro.di.unimi.it/](http://xoshiro.di.unimi.it/)</comment>


Being Your Selves: Identity R&D on Alt Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/23/being-your-selves-identity-rd-on-alt-twitter/ <comment><USER2> There's something to this, but it's on a collision course with the trend of spam bots becoming harder and harder to distinguish from real people. Give it another decade and any community not tied to some sort of verifiable identities will be infested with bots that only exist to influence your buying habits and political opinions.

It would be nice to preserve open and pseudonymous communities where you can be sure you're interacting with other humans, but how to do that is an open question.</comment>


Yahoo redesigns 7 of its sites - <AUTHOR> http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/59486431470/introducing-7-redesigned-more-personal-yahoo <comment><USER2> Eek.

I think, and I stress that this is wrought of my own unprofessional feelings, but I think that in the early days of rich consumer UI (pre-2004 lets say), that rounded corners, gradients and shadows did some great things to design, because they created affordances so that people knew, for instance, that a button was a button. It stood out against the other website clutter and cruft.

But we've sort of moved on. I'm reminded of a Doisneau quote (famous photographer, 1912-1994):

> "Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much > more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image > which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will."

Nowaday's peoples visual expectations of what they might find on a website or app are much better, and you don't need to "point out" as much stuff. In other words I think users "got better". At the same time, we seem to see a real slimming of other visual distractions, so buttons don't _need_ to be pointed- out as much.

This is the essence of Flat-UI in my opinion, that if you remove enough cruft, then afterwards you can remove _even more cruft_ since your buttons and menus will no longer need to stand out from other stuff with gradients/shadows/rounded corners, and users are more attending to looking for them and expecting them anyway.

And I think, in light of all that, Yahoo sort of dropped the ball here. They didn't remove the cruft! Distractions distractions distractions.

<comment><USER3> I appreciate the minimalism of flat UI, but I do feel the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction.

Microsoft is the worst culprit here - presenting a text block containing some hyperlinks, but the text is all styled identically so you have to hover the mouse over a word to notice the link. WTF?

Sure, let's keep things clean and minimal, but there needs to be some kind of basic visual language that indicates "this bit is interactive, and this other bit is static content".

Somewhere, Jakob Nielsen is having an aneurysm.

<comment><USER4> _the text is all styled identically so you have to hover the mouse over a word to notice the link. WTF?_

Affordance of hyperlinks is key to the Web.

I apply the following CSS to most/many sites to identify links:

            a {
                color: #427fed;
                text-decoration: none;
            };

            a:active {
                background-color: #427fed;
                color: #fffff6;
            };

            a:hover {
                text-decoration: underline;
            }

Hrm. I should add a :visited selector as well.

<comment><USER4> I'm liking this color:

        a:visited { color: #6f32ad; }

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it's an interesting choice to go dark. Regardless of what prior debates were had on this thread with respect to the "flat design" choice / minimalism there are two things that stand out.

1) It's original. At least, it seems original relative to its competitors. They are borrowing the well-accepted design language of their Weather app (which was critically acclaimed in relevant circles, I believe - like won some kind of award), and assimilated it across their web properties.

Contrary to what other's have said, I don't find the text hard to read. Instead, due to the novelty and aesthetic of the design, I am drawn to stay. It's a nice refresh.

2) It's cohesive. This design language has been consistently ported across its properties without making it constricting. Yahoo Sports is functionally distinct from Yahoo Movies, but blended together by the same aesthetic.

This began with Yahoo silently porting its top bar across its properties (with the search feature ubiquitous across all constituent sites). This final piece was missing and is just another step closer to bringing Yahoo together.

So no, I don't think the designs are cluttered, or that they hide/confuse information, or that Yahoo is copying the fad. I think they are paving their path, boldly, and it should yield some interesting results.

</comment><comment><USER6> I hate to be the guy that just critizes, but I can't find anything that I like about the redesigns. Take Yahoo Sports for example: the dark background makes it hard to read anything, it's crazy cluttered and even after filtering for NFL I get this stream of useless news. I'm guessing that they did some research and discovered that their core audience likes cluttered designs and the whole image-first, clean design paradigm is not a good idea for content sites.

Also, why doesn't the blog announcement link to the actual sites???

</comment><comment><USER7> I give them credit for trying darker background, but the new designs are quite unsightly. I also find the fixed background image that doesn't scroll with the page incredibly distracting.

It's actually causing me great physical discomfort to use these new sites.

</comment><comment><USER8> What Yahoo is doing is maintaining and working hard at a consistent design language, while maintaining individuality amongst their sites. It's a smart move, even if it's not pretty enough for designers or developers to praise it heavily.

</comment><comment><USER9> Just noticed the new logo a few hours ago.

I have hated almost every yahoo redesign.

This one I liked. It's kind of cute.

<comment><USER10> They are showcasing a different potential logo each day this month and will reveal the "winner" in a few days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Unrelated, but to the tune of the new interest in Yahoo that Marissa Mayer sparked: As a working adult, say, with no time for _more_ entertainment, why would I visit a Yahoo site?

<comment><USER12> Yahoo's entire strategy revolves around the idea that peoples' tastes and habits change over time, but that content is perennial and not even _close_ to the point of saturation.

I'm not saying there aren't people for whom this strategy doesn't apply -- some call them the "Oh, I don't own a television" crowd -- but it's certainly not just a generational thing.

<comment><USER11> I'm imagining a crowd somewhat like reddit, yet older, more mature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting. They made it more full of links and images. I was expecting it to feel light (sparse). The dark background makes the whole page look muddled and uninviting.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps the "best pizza ad format" works with web, we may have to leave out our assumptions because only tech savvy individuals speak of white space, spacing, kerning, and all that other stuff. Frankly many people do not even know the difference between IE and the Internet and a browser?

Edit: If you built a browser aimed at the masses you should just title it "The Newest Internet" or "Get a Faster and More Secured Internet," rather than "Faster and More Secured Browser."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I hope to god Yahoo consciously decided to eschew the current trends of flat, minimal, content first design that is perpetuating through the industry. Windows Phone, iOS 7, and plenty of other leading UI designs are shedding the bloat and focusing on content first. If they didn't do it on purpose, it means they are still the old Yahoo. If they did, maybe they know something about their target demographic that I don't...

<comment><USER7> You don't think the new Yahoo designs are following the flat trend?

<comment><USER15> They almost make it, but fail on spectacularly on color and backgrounds. The sports.yahoo.com would do much better with a clean background, I find the striped outfield to completely negate the rest of the improvements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Don't forget they are also creating daily logos

[http://www.yahoo.com/dailylogo](http://www.yahoo.com/dailylogo)

<comment><USER17> Quite a contrast between Google promoting History and Science to hundreds of millions of people via charming artistic doodles and this cornucopia of horrible purple typography glitter devoid of all meaning and character.

<comment><USER16> They are two entirely different things in my opinion. Yahoo! is attempting to undergo a re-brand and Google is not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yahoo's tumblr blog also makes the basic mistake of not linking back to the main website.

</comment><comment><USER19> I actually don't mind the Weather page. Looks pretty, though I'd never use it since I almost never need to go weather sites.

The bigger issue to me is none of these sites are particularly responsive. They all have a huge background but small areas for content and huge waste of space on larger monitors. To be honest, I think should've had a bolder re- design with a greater emphasis on editorialization instead of a standardized layout across sections.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm just clicking around on them, and somehow I've got the sports site in a state where the scroll wheel scrolls the background images but not the content. Then, after the page finally loads, the left, middle, and right panels all sort-of scroll together, but stop scrolling at different times. That's really messed up. The alignment between them shouldn't change.

</comment><comment><USER4> Y'know, it's not the site design that turns me off of Yahoo.com.

It's the placement of entertainment and sports as the top items on the page.

I don't particularly care what your site presentation is (OK, I lied, I do: it should be simple, out of my face, and distraction-free), but if you show contempt and insult me with your content, I'm gone and never coming back.

<comment><USER21> Entertainment and sports insult you?

<comment><USER4> Are they relevant to my interests? No.

Do they have any impact on my life? Other than local events impacting my commute: no.

Do they improve me? With the selections Yahoo chooses? Not at all.

Is this information/content I can't get a a bazillion other viral sites? No.

Differentiate. Lead with your strength.

Even going to Yahoo News rather than Yahoo changes the story only very slightly.

Perhaps this will enlighten you: [http://onion.com/14yzeCq](http://onion.com/14yzeCq)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm really not liking the new feel. The dark background images make reading the content way too hard -- and I can only assume their goal is to replace the background with large ads for site takeovers once in a while.

</comment><comment><USER23> The transparency and non-scrolling BG image reminds me of myspace pages.

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks like AOL.

Yahoo's logo was iconic, this is gimmicky.

</comment><comment><USER25> Ugh everything but Yahoo Finance.

<comment><USER4> It's less insulting than the other pages, but I'm getting massively misalligned elements. Yes, I force font sizes to something legible, so your hipster fucking 22 y.o. pixel-perfect layouts aren't going to work.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you find careful programmers vs. clever programmers? - <AUTHOR>

It seems like there are at least two kinds of software people: the clever and the careful. I'm oversimplifying of course but it seems that some people really enjoy making things in new, clever ways. They like new programming languages, they like doing stuff in far fewer lines of code than it would normally take, they love clever techniques, new algorithms and so on. In contrast, the careful people just really want to make sure it works and don't really care as much about using some neat trick.
I think all good programmers have aspects of both. I think I tend to skew more toward the clever side but I think I have a healthy dose of careful. Another programmer I know is super paranoid about bugs and is much more focused on being careful. Perhaps that is because she spent a lot more time in a real software company which ships code to big customers where as I spend a lot more time on research style projects.
So I think I have a relatively good sense of how to find the clever programmers. But my company is currently searching for someone more on the careful end. How does one find the careful programmers?  How does one find the kind of person how says "My system never goes down. It's tested 10-ways from Sunday and is bulletproof"? <comment><USER2> it's all in the code.

ask to see some large-scale code samples. if they can't provide any (which is understandable, as these are often the property of former employers; and a lot of people who lead real lives don't have a lot of spare time to work on open source projects), just see how they actually do on an actual, real, end-to-end project.

it doesn't even have to be terribly deep or complicated. but the main thing is, it should be VERY non-sexy. the unsexier, the better.

because that's what distinguishes the (supposedly) clever ones from the careful ones: they just don't have the patience or willingness to "sully" themselves for the sake of, you know, that "other 90%". particularly for something that just isn't all that cool, and that they can't get bragging rights for.

so you'll find that their stuff works, umm, "mostly." except for this or that (frequently and naturally occurring) corner case. and for all the extra manual housekeeping it requires. oh and that it also just tends to break. a lot. (to which they'll always be able to say, "oh, I'll just fix that"... for as long as they're around, that is.)

and for the fact that you'll just be able to see that everything's done in a slapdash, one-off way that's hard to read or generalize.

and I DON'T mean in the pragmatic, "worse is better" sense; but in the fricken' careless, "I'm too good for this gruntwork" sense.

ultimately the real distinction isn't clever v. careful; the smarter programmers, in my experience, are always, without exception, also the very careful ones.

it's more a distinction between those who talk -- and like to get credit for projects that are really collective efforts -- and those who simply do (and take pride and satisfaction in simply doing it very, very well.)

</comment><comment><USER3> How about asking for a sample of work that the candidate is "most proud of"?

You may be able to glean their inclination from that alone...</comment>


With USB 4, Thunderbolt and USB will converge - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/04/with-usb-4-thunderbolt-and-usb-will-converge/ <comment><USER2> I hate how when I see a USB port now I have no idea what it's capable of. Used to be if it was on a beige box it was 1.1. If not it was 2.0. If it was blue it was 3.0. Now if I see a type C port I have no idea what I'm getting. Maybe it'll be USB 2 or 3 5gbs or 3 10gbs or 3 20gbs. Maybe it will charge the device. Maybe it won't. Maybe it'll do USB hosting, maybe it won't. Maybe it'll support MHL or Slimport or Display Link or it won't.

I already received a hard lesson in this concept earlier this year when I bought a OnePlus 6 only to find out it only supports Display Link for video out, a standard version hich not only requires an expensive adapter and doesn't support charging, but consumes so much power the phone dies in less than two hours.

Just color code the damn things so I can keep up. Make charging input ports purple and video output ports green and otg ports yellow or something.

<comment><USER2> While you're at it patent the port design and enforce licensing requirements. We're all tired of chargers, cables, and devices that don't obey standards. You have to go to a third party to find a type C cable on Amazon that works correctly. You have to buy specialized chargers for the Nintendo Switch because it violates the USB specification in two dozen different ways that can brick your device if you use the wrong accessory.

This kind of fragmentary bullshit isn't good for anyone.

<comment><USER3> > You have to buy specialized chargers for the Nintendo Switch because it > violates the USB specification in two dozen different ways that can brick > your device if you use the wrong accessory.

Huh? I used my Thinkpad charger with the Switch and it worked as designed. Just me being lucky?

<comment><USER4> I've used an official Apple USB-C charger, an Amazon USB-C charger, and my Anker battery pack combined with an official Apple cable, an Amazon cable, and one of those "keyring" USB-C cables to charge the Switch and none of them caused any problems.

But it does seem that there were issues - [https://bgr.com/2018/04/06/nintendo-switch-charging- cables-w...](https://bgr.com/2018/04/06/nintendo-switch-charging-cables- warning-bricked/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know the etiquette for these things, but would it be appropriate to merge this with the other USB 4 post ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19304857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19304857)) currently on the front page?

<comment><USER6> Typically if there are ~0 comments the repeating post just gets suppressed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Active discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19304857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19304857)</comment>


This Post Took 3 Years to Write - <AUTHOR> http://brawl.in/3-years-to-write

<comment><USER2> "Like who you work with: In life, and in business, surrounding yourself with people you enjoy makes difficult times easy."

A very underrated statement. This really matters. No matter what you do in life, it _always_ comes down to the people you do it with. E.g. People don't leave a company, they leave their boss. People don't leave a marriage, they leave their spouse etc etc.

<comment><USER3> I don't agree. I prefer to work and be alone.

<comment><USER4> If I take your meaning correctly, you do agree! You also would prefer to work with the same set of people you want to hang out with. It's just in your case that set is empty in both instances.

<comment><USER5> Both sets are non-empty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In Tutorial, when being instructed to place the 8th-grader, it's not clear that it should be placed on a specific tile out of 6 (?) highlighted. Took me some clicking around to notice that small _green_ arrow against _greenish_ tile and realize that.

Later on, same hiccup with "Now press forward". Green smallish arrow against cyan background next to green header pointing at green field... you see where I'm going.

      --

All in all, while this is not something that I'd play, it appears to be really well done and it leaves great first impression. Congrats on the launch and here's to hoping it will make you rich, healthy and happy! :)

<comment><USER7> Also, having the modal boxes jump around is kind of annoying.

<comment><USER8> Same here. If you transition one into another - fade out content, resize and move into new place, fade in new content - and do it quickly (200-400ms), you'll get nice continuity and better flow to the tutorial. But as others have said - great job as it is!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Something that is not said often enough: congratulations on launching! Even if it was years behind schedule

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'm more of the "launch early and iterate" philosophy, but unfortunately with games you need to be much more polished than a web/SaaS app.

<comment><USER10> An interesting example of this is Dejobaan "1, 2, 3 Kick It! Drop that beat like an ugly baby" which is effectively a mashup of their earlier game, "AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!" and AudioSurf. They released a prototype to pre purchasers, which then they put on Steam (privately) for ease of distribution.

Leading up to Portal 2's release, with the potato promotion, a still unfinished "Kick It!" was involved as part of the promotion, with users needing to obtain a certain ingame achievement. However, it was not at all made clear to users that this game was still in alpha. Tons of users had a bad experience, and a game that wasn't even really intended to be played yet ended up getting exposed to the games industry at large, of course, with a horrible reception.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good work!

I tried out the tutorial and thought it was pretty good, but wanted more before signing up. I'd recommend putting in another larger battle where the tutorial ends, so I can get a feel for how the game plays.

<comment><USER12> I felt the same way. And then I signed up with a bogus account, and it wanted an e-mail verification.... Why make me e-mail verify?

<comment><USER13> E-mail verify is a GOOD THING. They're going to need your e-mail address anyway, for the inevitable password resets and such. And almost nothing drives me _more nuts_ than sites that take down an e-mail address during registration/account creation and then DON'T verify it. Why? Because I've discovered that there are thousands of idiots out there who either don't know their own e-mail address and accidentally type in mine, have a personal vendetta against me (so they sign me up for crap sites using my e-mail address), or want to sign up but use a disposable e-mail address to do so (and again they use mine). Apparently I have a common-sounding-enough (err, you know what I mean) username on GMail that people are constantly signing up for crap and using [myusername]@gmail.com to do so, and I am _SO_ _TIRED_ of receiving it all.

If more websites would verify, then this wouldn't be a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Gave the tutorial a try and signed up.

We're huge fans of tactical strategy games here in the office, so I've shot the link around to get a few people up and running. Small game studio based out of Toronto here, so if you'd like some feedback from peers, let me know and I'd be happy to collect what feedback we can offer. :)

Congrats on launching!

<comment><USER15> I'm the other 1/2 of the development team. Glad to have some other devs kick the tires. Would love whatever feedback you have! Thanks!

<comment><USER14> Cool! You guys have an email I can reach out to? Might take us a bit to get some more game time under our belts. :)

<comment><USER15> Yup. You can use the in-site Feedback link, or hit us up at firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER14> Consider it done. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's some pretty unpleasant stuff in the "Terms and Conditions". I didn't agree.

* If you link to the site, you can only say nice things

* You can't opt out of their emails

* They say, "please refer to our privacy policy" but there isn't one (this might be an oversight or maybe I just missed it)

[edit for formatting]

<comment><USER15> Valid feedback, not an excuse, but we drafted this with a lawyer ages ago and haven't had the funds to properly revise. That said - it's not an excuse, and I have nothing to say but we're sorry. It was an launch oversight.

We will look to revise this to get rid of the yucky stuff. Lawyers can't be that expensive :/

That said, you can opt out of all emails, and we obviously the link stuff is just dumb and not enforceable.

Apologies.

<comment><USER16> Thank you for the response. Is there any reason why you can't just take those clauses out?

You also say that you might change the terms at any time. Go ahead and change them. :-)

<comment><USER15> Valid point. I guess we don't really need lawyers to remove stuff, likely only to add them. We'll take them out this evening.

[EDIT: Terms have been updated. Thanks again for bringing this to our attention]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _Don't waste hours hours on something someone else can do in minutes. Value your time._

Yep, hence why I hire designers..

</comment><comment><USER18> I played through a dummy game for about 20 minutes.

This seems like it will be a lot of fun. My suggestion: Make basic info (attack,movement, etc) about the brawlers viewable without clicking. There's too much clicking as a new player because I don't know what anything does.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Had 1,867,713 additions, 1,748,514 deletions and 4,923 project commits."

Damn you're persistent!

In hindsight, why did take so much longer than initially expected? Poor estimation of the initial target, or a large change from the initial target?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think to be fair, a bunch of those insertions/deletions were from checking in node_modules early in the dev cycle. But the 5k commits is accurate :)

And for schedule, it was vast underestimation of the scope of a digital CCG combined with having day jobs => bad estimation and inconsistent hours.

<comment><USER19> I suspect that managing a day job and a kid impacted the schedule quite a bit. I recall a quote from another thread, "Once you have kids you are only allowed one hobby."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Tip to others trying the game: Play multiple games at once. Start a game, then open the menu on the left, click Start Game, and begin another. I've found some players are quite unresponsive and having a few on the go keeps it interesting. You get notified when it is your turn in each game. Enjoyed my first foray into this game, nice work guys :)

Feedback:

\- As someone else said the 'End Turn' button should disappear or be more heavily disabled when it's not your turn. A more prominent alert at the top of the screen when the turn hands over would be nice too.

\- Notifying of the turns you need to take is great when you have multiple games on the go and totally saved the experience for me. It would be even better if you could jump between games more quickly. Imagine a quick-jump menu on the right with all your active games in it.

\- Music/Sound please! (I'm sure you're working on this!)

</comment><comment><USER21> My main feedback based on playing one game is that "End turn" shouldn't be visible, even faded, if it's not my turn. I found myself clicking that a lot during my first game because I wasn't sure if I'd passed control to the opponent or not.

</comment><comment><USER22> Well, that felt intuitive. I didn't want to click on a card then click the (i) to view a detailed description. So I held ctrl and clicked it. It worked!

I'm going through the challenges right now. So far I'm really enjoying this. Nice work!

<comment><USER23> Right-clicking to get info was what came to my mind -- which also works!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Isn't it great that stuff like this isn't getting getting built in Flash anymore.

</comment><comment><USER25> Awesome game! Totally with you..Launching as early as possible with a MVP simply doesnt work for games.. There are some exceptions if you target the right audience (Minecraft) but in general gamers are very unforgiving. This being a side project made by 2 people who have jobs and families i can only imagine what kind of work went into that. Great job!

</comment><comment><USER26> Great game! Do you have short overview of what you used for making this game (frameworks, database, hardware, etc.)?

<comment><USER15> Sure - I can speak to that a bit (there's a bit more information in an interview we did over at: [http://blog.nodefly.com/post/49780591448/nodefly- buzz-atomic...](http://blog.nodefly.com/post/49780591448/nodefly-buzz-atomic- brawl))

We're currently running an all javascript (coffeescript) stack. In the backend we have a variety of node.js servers. We have the following "types" of servers:

\- Metagame: handles our web api requests \- Game: handles all the game logic, on the server. no client side game logic. Because we're all JS - client is effectively open-source. \- Notification: routes messages and notifications to the users, utilizes 0mq between servers. \- Matchmaker: takes in requests for game searches, keeps requests in memory, and finds matches. \- Overseer: orchestrates where all the servers live. Want to know the address of a server? talk to the overseerer. Need to spin up a new game server? Overseerer. \- League: Handles league management.

We currently have physical 6 servers (2 metagame, 2 game, 2 for the others). The metagame mixes web-sockets and standard web requests. The game server is web-socket only. These are the only two servers that talk to the clients. All other servers just network between themselves.

The Metagame, and Game server are fronted by nginx which acts as a reverse proxy, does ssl termination, caching policies, etc. All our assets (images, etc) are stored on Amazon Cloudfront, and cached forever. All filenames encode the MD5 signature of the file to ensure that we can cache everything forever, speeding up the clients.

We're currently using MongoDB to store all our game data. We use [http://www.objectrocket.com/](http://www.objectrocket.com/).

We were also accepted into the Rackspace ([http://www.rackspace.com/](http://www.rackspace.com/)) startup program which provides us a lot of free servers for a year. While we don't need all 6 servers right now, we can test out the infrastructure and launch this way, allowing us scale up easier. Free for a year was a good reason to move away from AWS - where we previously resided.

We went with nodejs - largely because of the "fun" factor. When we started we didn't have a ton of familiarity with it, but we wanted something different, and node had a lot of buzz at that time. While writing it in C, Java, or Erlang would of been more in our wheelhouse, we knew this was a hobby project and wanted to learn something new and enjoy ourself. It turned out to be a good choice, node is great. It performs well, and is a joy to work with. I've always felt that server side performance just needs to be good enough, you can optimize and optimize and optimize, but at the end of the day your stack needs to be architected such that it can run on 100s of computers at a time. You can only run with 1 server for so long, so creating something is scalable in hardware is more important then squeezing a single server for all it's worth. Node, combined my 0mq (for us) makes this a snap. My 2 cents anyhow.

Mongo was chosen for a similar reason. It has nice aspects to it, and is a great compliment to an all JS system. For us, we're not query heavy so it was a good choice. That said, as we add features, I can see partitioning our data into mongo data and more traditional RDBMS data. Mongo is good for certain classes of data, but you need to know what you're getting into. If you'd like me to talk to anything else, let me know.

<comment><USER27> Very cool, thanks for the info. I don't play games, but I do develop servers and I find this fascinating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Played the game, it is very good. A couple of points, \- I was also confused by the end turn button. \- Is there time limit on the move? It wasn't very clear to me. -It wasn't clear to me that traps affect friendly units (A warning would be good.

<comment><USER28> Not having a time limit is a big issue. Currently I have 5 games where the opponents are AWOL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Had 1,867,713 additions, 1,748,514 deletions and 4,923 project commits.

93% of the code written was replaced at an average of 734 lines changed per commit. That is some serious coding.

</comment><comment><USER30> Not sure how I feel about the considerable bonuses for supporters. Maybe less cards/gold and more aesthetic things? Gold bonus and 50% more cards per challenge reward is quite high.

</comment><comment><USER31> Not sure if anyone here had the pleasure of playing "Glitch", but the copy done by Chris Shorrock is wonderfully crafted and reminiscent of the game.

<comment><USER32> Copy?

<comment><USER31> Copywriting. All the character descriptions and such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Oh my god someone wrote something awesome

I am going to be the best, like no one ever was

</comment><comment><USER33> Congrats on launching! Not much of a gaming guy but liked the tutorial you have. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER34> I forgot how tedious signup forms are. OpenID or facebook/twitter login?

<comment><USER35> I emailed them to recommend Persona. Would get rid of the separate email verification step, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Keep emotions out of arguments.

Impossible.</comment>


Delta Motorsport Launches Gas Turbine Range Extender - <AUTHOR> https://www.theengineer.co.uk/delta-motorsport-launches-gas-turbine-range-extender/ <comment><USER2> 17 kW and 45 kg. That's worse power to weight than a Briggs & Stratton gasoline engine, though better than diesels. Unexpected from a turbine.</comment>


Backcountry.com Fires Trademark Attorneys - <AUTHOR> https://coloradosun.com/2019/11/08/backcountry-com-fires-attorneys-tries-to-make-amends/ <comment><USER2> > _Nielsen, while saying "everything is on hold," stopped short of promising > to terminate the petitions for cancellation the company's IPLA attorney John > Kim filed with the USPTO. Nielsen said he would be reaching out to every > business targeted in those petitions to discuss how they can work together._

So, they still think they own the generic term "backcountry" and that others need their permission to use it. Nothing has changed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Had a friend who worked there. Worst experience of his life. If you aren't drinking the Jonestown Flavor-Aid, you're not one of them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Too little too late. Been munching on popcorn watching all my camping and hiking forums and communities coming together saying they are done buying from them.

<comment><USER5> I thought this was a pretty solid response. Out of curiosity, is there anything that you think is "enough" to change your mind?

<comment><USER6> Not OP, but dropping all trademark enforcement attempts on the generic term "backcountry" would be the minimum (them using "backcountry.com" should have been as far as they got).

Also, abandon all existing legal action based on that generic term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> lol. Not buying it.

<comment><USER8> Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.</comment></comment>