Black Homeownership Drops to All-Time Low - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/black-homeownership-drops-to-all-time-low-11563183015?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> I've seen a lot of Hispanic home ownership in the bay area (one of the most expensive places to buy a home), from what I've seen, the people who work more blue collar type jobs pool their money together with extended family and buy a house, pretty smart.

</comment><comment><USER3> \---- Rate of Home Ownership Q1 2019 -----

All races: 64.2%

White (non-hispanic): 73.2% (+-0.4%)

Hispanic: 47.4% (+-0.9%)

Black: 41.1% (+-0.9%)

Other races: 53.9% (+-1.1%)

[https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf](https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf)

This Excel document contains historic data going back through Q1 1994 up to Q1 2019 (although it lacks the MoE per above):

[https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/histtab16.xlsx](https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/histtab16.xlsx)

The article seems to be factually accurate. Although it would have been useful to convert the rate into absolute terms, but I cannot find that information on the Census's pages by race.

</comment><comment><USER4> Marriage rates seem to have been ignored. That's a factor directly correlated to home ownership.

<comment><USER5> Ditto for Rural/Suburban/Urban distribution. Closer you get to the city, the more expensive the houses, and the lower the rate of home ownership.

In all fairness, while these to factors likely explain a portion of the difference in ownership, neither explains the recent drop for Blacks.

I looked for articles approaching this like a question seeking an answer, but all I found were articles declaring, with dogmatic certitude, that the sole cause was racism and historical redlining. That's a possible explanation, of course, but I'm still waiting to see some data and preferably a little bit of that rare objectivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> certainly it musn't be an all-time low, considering that near 0 african americans owned homes prior to 1863 and near 0 african peoples were in america in the 1600s

<comment><USER7> Heck, humanity as a whole didn't exist only a few million years ago. And the concept of ownership probably only a bit before that. Jeez, journalism these days, thinking they can ignore billions of years of cosmic history for the sake of an article about modern issues.

<comment><USER5> To be fair 'all time' is an odd choice of words, given that its literal meaning is not the intended meaning, and the intended meaning is unknown. Does the timeframe go back to 1900? Or 1980? Does it go back to friggin Jamestown? The timeframe matters, because the further back it goes, the worse this news is for the Black community.

The editor whiffed with this title...and then proceeded to not mention the timeframe in the article, either.</comment></comment></comment>


Appogram : A new tool for creating mobile applications - <AUTHOR> Https://appogram.io <comment><USER2> Do I need to install anything?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just visit the site, it has an online studio. Very simple and powerful. Not a CMS, a real development tool.</comment></comment>


A new model for online learning - <AUTHOR> http://www.startribune.com/business/119489794.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The site of the firm described in this press report:

<http://www.sophia.org/>

It's interesting that that is a .org website rather than a .com website.</comment>


Installing Linux on a slightly dated chromebook advice - <AUTHOR> Has anyone recently installed a current distro on a dated chromebook? Looking for a reliable tutorial after a few mishaps <comment><USER2> I've installed GalliumOS ([https://galliumos.org/](https://galliumos.org/)) on my Acer C720. Previously I'd added Ubuntu via chrouton but disliked the context switching between ChromeOS and Linux.

Eventually I was going to ebay the Chromebook after not finding much benefit in ChromeOS but I read about GalliumOS and decided to try it as last effort. It's been pretty good so far - the battery life is decent (~5 hours) and all the Chromebook bits work (hibernate, camera, sound, mic, usb etc.)

Gallium installs over the ChromeOS, so you'd need to restore your Chromebook if you want to go back.

I've also put a 128MB SSD in, replacing the titchy supplied one.</comment>


Flickr's API Signature Forgery Vulnerability - <AUTHOR> http://vnhacker.blogspot.com/2009/09/flickrs-api-signature-forgery.html

<comment><USER2> Does anyone know what Flickr did to address this vulnerability?

They didn't move to using HMAC.

Are they just filtering 0x80 and 0x00?

</comment><comment><USER3> Can we please stop using MD5?

<comment><USER4> MD5 is not the problem here, SHA1 is also vulnerable to the extension attack. They should use HMAC.</comment></comment>


Leaked Investor Email From Tapulous Say Breakeven December, More Funding, New Products - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/09/leaked-investor-email-from-tapulous-say-breakeven-december-more-funding-new-products/ <comment><AUTHOR> great apps = great revenue, whodathunk it :)

they started off wobbly but they're going from strength to strength now.</comment>


How hip-hop is saving a dying Colombian language - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20191024-how-hip-hop-is-saving-a-dying-colombian-language <comment><AUTHOR> The music mentioned in the article: [https://youtu.be/JgnYJWKyecE](https://youtu.be/JgnYJWKyecE)</comment>


Tim Ferriss and the Rise of the Email Miser - <AUTHOR> http://calnewport.com/blog/2017/04/13/tim-ferriss-and-the-rise-of-the-email-miser/ <comment><USER2> It's perfectly okay to minimise the time spent checking you email. Moreover, it's quite a waste of time to do it more often than once, maybe twice per day. However, going into 1-2 times per week sounds already somewhat harder. It's doable once you've built yourself up, but not while you're still growing. \+ Email kinda has become the place at least I'm getting most of my news nowadays - via various newsletters...</comment>


YTMND the future of our world - <AUTHOR> http://thefutureofourworld.ytmnd.com/#

<comment><USER2> This is what YTMND was made for.</comment>


NASA Mars Space Science Update (Live at 2pm EST) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html#201511051400 <comment><AUTHOR> From NASA ([http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-announce-new- findi...](http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-announce-new-findings-on- fate-of-mars-atmosphere)):

(Science and Geophysical Research Letters embargoed details until 2 p.m. EST Nov. 5)

NASA will provide details of key science findings from the agency's ongoing exploration of Mars during a news briefing at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Nov. 5 in the James Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The event will be broadcast live on NASA Television and the agency's website.

The news conference participants will be:

Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters

Bruce Jakosky, Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) principal investigator at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado, Boulder

Jasper Halekas, MAVEN Solar Wind Ion Analyzer instrument lead at the University of Iowa, Iowa City

Yaxue Dong, MAVEN science team member at LASP

Dave Brain, MAVEN co-investigator at LASP

A brief question-and-answer session will take place during the event with media on site and by phone. Members of the public also can ask questions during the briefing on social media using #AskNASA.</comment>


If You think You are Kind and think of Humanity then Please - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrump.com/if-you-think-you-are-kind-and-think-of-humanity-then-please/ <comment><AUTHOR> If you think the world really needs help then why people like me should be doing what i can do if not as big but a small little deed that would change the life of some human beings. Don'd forget drop by drops forms a ocean so come together to save humanity save mankind a humble request

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> plz help</comment>


Hackers Broke into Real News Sites to Plant Fake Stories - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/hackers-broke-into-real-news-sites-to-plant-fake-stories-anti-nato/ <comment><USER2> I know people hate PGP, but why don't at least some reporters link signed articles? Writing is such a low-volume activity that the inconvenience isn't a meaningful gate, as it is for say email.</comment>


Debug Adapter Protocol - <AUTHOR> https://microsoft.github.io/debug-adapter-protocol/ <comment><USER2> How does this relate to and interact with the chrome devtools protocol? The chrome devtools protocol is really quite amazing to me as it provides an extremely thorough and powerful way to "get visibility into and external control over" a "process" — or what I think could very well become the most meaningful abstraction of a process for most application development in near future.

Obviously cdp only applies to the communication mechanisms relevant to control a browser — i guess what I'm musing about is wanting to Suss out - is there anything that will be lost (dx feature support, performance) if one attempts to implement ide features but using debug adapter protocol to adapt CDP? Is CDP one of the target integrations that debug adapter protocol will aim to support?

I think CDP is ridiculously important and likely to become more so ...

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm aware that MS has been implementing all kinds of layers of abstraction when building features for VSCode, but I'm not aware (through my own ignorance) of anything else using these abstracted layers - which makes it hard to work out whether this is fluff or cool.

Has anyone used some of their abstractions elsewhere? How good are these protocols they are pumping out?

<comment><USER4> LSP at least is implemented by lots of languages as well as lots of editors. There are long tables on the website: [https://langserver.org/](https://langserver.org/)

Adoption wise, I'd say it's a success. As for how good the protocol is, I'd personally have preferred something binary instead of json.

<comment><USER5> Been using it in Emacs with both Rust (rls) and C/C++ (clangd). It is glorious. I hope more people rally behind both DAP and LSP.

<comment><USER6> Recently switched away from Anaconda to Pyls for Python editing on Spacemacs.

Documentation can be found:

[http://develop.spacemacs.org/layers/+lang/python/README.html](http://develop.spacemacs.org/layers/+lang/python/README.html)

Seems to work fine. Functionally it seems the same, maybe a bit faster. Haven't used it a whole lot.

Really tempted to try out the Microsoft PLS just so that I can say that I am using Microsoft in Emacs. Which is pretty close to being technically correct.

Brave new world.

Nowadays if I was forced to give up my Linux desktop and choose between Windows and OS X for work... Windows 100% of the time. Because I can then use WSL and get Linux nicely integrated into the base OS. Especially since Macbook Pros are not that nice anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good idea, but why JSON? And why HTTP content headers? I much prefer binary protocols, but I'm probably within a minority on that one.

<comment><USER8> I doubt you are in the minority, if only experienced developers are considered.

JavaScript developers really do hold skewed ideas about what kinds of things are useful and worth the overhead that they incur.

Binary protocols are easier than JSON, to me, and to most people I would say, who have actually implemented a binary protocol or wrote code to read or write binary files.

<comment><USER9> I don't get it. First every language brings a JSON parser. It's easy to debug. You also don't have any overhead for parsing in JavaScript based editors like VSCode and Atom. And second, When the protocol is robust and needs to be faster, you can still switch to protocol buffers or something similar.

<comment><USER8> I can't believe that people have communally forgotten how easy binary protocols are.

You don't need protobuf, you don't need json, you don't need any of these things that just add bloat and cost you performance.

Writing and reading binary is easy, and is FAR easier than JSON if you are using something like C.

Most languages have convenience methods for strings, yes, and those can be stacked on top of each other so that JSON libraries can be written, of course. Those libraries are FAR slower than just reading and writing bytes, and deserializing those bytes into structs or serializing those structs into a byte array, and the binary data is much smaller than a JSON document containing the same data would be.

People these days are acting like binary protocols are hard, or that they are suboptimal for one reason or another. I guarantee you that someone who was trying to find a bug in a JSON library will spend as much time or more than someone trying to find a similar bug in a method that reads or writes binary data, and at the end of it, the person who looked at the methods that handle binary data will FULLY understand what is happening in that code. The person debugging the JSON library will almost certainly not have a full understanding of the JSON library after finding and fixing a bug unless they wrote it to begin with.

It comes down to this - all computer programs do is process data. All UX problems, all usability problems, all computer problems boil down to problems transforming data. Transforming data is literally the only thing a computer can do. Any work spent writing code that does not directly solve the data transformation problem at hand is wasted time and work on the part of the developer. Any performance lost using code that does not directly solve the data transformation problem at hand is time away from the CPU for other tasks, time away from a consumer of that data, and so on. It adds up, and it adds up quickly.

<comment><USER10> I've worked on many projects and nothing is more annoying or tiring than dealing with people that have zero vested interest in the project outcome and have no understanding of a projects requirements, history, schedule and constraints chiming in with their worthless opinions.

I call them the peanut gallery and the best way to deal when them is to pat them on their head for being so smart, thank them for their opinion and ignore everything they said. Failure to mute them will derail any project lead by a junior dev who doesn't get know how to deal with pot shots from the peanut gallery. The poor junior dev will actually listen to the worthless feedback and stall the project.

I'm sure the folks who worked on this protocol are rolling their eyes at this comment thread...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hopefully, not UTF-16 this time, like LSP. Everywhere[1] but in Windows UTF-8 is being used. And it should be. So many LSP implentations recode UTF-16 to UTF-8 and vice versa.

[1] [http://utf8everywhere.org/](http://utf8everywhere.org/)

<comment><USER12> > Everywhere[1] but in Windows UTF-8 is being used.

Further popular counterexamples besides the NT kernel (cf. [2]):

\- Java

\- JavaScript

\- .NET

\- Qt

\- Joilet file system (for CD-ROMs)

[1] [http://utf8everywhere.org/](http://utf8everywhere.org/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=UTF-16&oldid=9094...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=UTF-16&oldid=909417171#Usage)

<comment><USER13> All decisions made 20 years ago. The future is UTF-8.

<comment><USER8> honestly the future is probably UTF-32. just make all code points 32-bits and use the 11 bits that Unicode says it will never use for flags so things like formatting can be encoded per character.

<comment><USER14> That's... a very bad idea.

First of all, there's graphemes are inherently not one-to-one with code points, e.g. Á = A + `. There's simply no Unicode encoding that will let you safely index into an array without paying attention to the meaning of the underlying codepoints. (and no, using NFC won't solve this either, because there are combinations for which there's no composed equivalent)

Secondly, general formatting info won't fit into 11 bits (italic, bold, underline, strikethrough - that's already 4 bits, and we haven't talked about color, font weights other than bold, etc.), so why bother baking in a limited, intentionally gimped version into your character encoding?

<comment><USER8> It doesn't have to be formatting...

It is not a "very bad idea" it is "an idea you do not like." Those are different things.

The way you're describing UTF-32, it can't work at all, and it definitely does.

Trying to save space by using UTF-8 over UTF-32 seems like a very small gain to me, is all. UTF-32 is simpler, for text created in that encoding.

<comment><USER14> There are tons of resources online about why UTF-32 doesn't make sense. I'm not gonna repeat them. Do your own research.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8195827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8195827)

[https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2361...](https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/236194/does- it-make-sense-to-choose-utf-32-based-on-concern-that-some-basic-rule-will)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-32#Analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-32#Analysis)

[http://utf8everywhere.org/#myths](http://utf8everywhere.org/#myths)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How does this compare to The Other Leading Brand: the GDB Server protocol?

</comment><comment><USER16> And VSCode moves a step closer to being 'Emacs, now written in Javascript'

<comment><USER17> I use VS Code as my main IDE for both business and pleasure, but I have to mistrust just how developer-friendly Microsoft has been. VS Code is a great, extendable, developer-friendly tool. WSL has made it so that it's less of a shame that I'm stuck using Windows for now. Even CMD has been getting updates that makes it behave more like a POSIX shell.

<comment><USER18> Microsoft had always been developer-friendly.

They just haven't been friendly much towards developers outside their ecosystem, as soon as they have monopolised the given ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> DAP is already improving the debugging experience in other editors. Check out DAP-mode for Emacs

[https://github.com/emacs-lsp/dap-mode](https://github.com/emacs-lsp/dap-mode)

</comment><comment><USER20> For many years now the acronym "DAP" has been used as the name of the debug interface for ARM based SoCs. Embedded software development with Visual Studio Code is already a thing and will likely become more popular. This can be a little confusing.</comment>


On Bin Laden Killing Tech Blogging - <AUTHOR> http://parislemon.com/post/5206913531/on-bin-laden-killing-tech-blogging <comment><USER2> How can MG Siegler write a blog post about "quick-posted nonsense" with a straight face?

</comment><comment><USER3> By employing the words "Bin Laden Killing," is the post author guilty of the same SEO play that he espouses to hate? Or is it intentional irony?

<comment><USER4> I'd tend to say yes, the post is a little hypocritical. Especially since the content of the post is almost entirely guessable from the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For better or worse this is just plain old fashioned journalism man. If it bleeds, it ledes.

</comment><comment><USER6> i feel your pain MG, @techcrunch has much better content and writers than @mashable, but they get more traffic and probably are making more revenue, its all about getting pageview, and they are good at linkbaiting and gaming SEO. At the end of the day if mashable has a conference I dont think people will pay as much as people would say pay for TCdisrupt, thats were the credibility is.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this really new(s)? Old News did the exact same thing in the past when big things happened. It just takes a bit of a different face with blogs.</comment>


Conway's Game of Life in SQL - <AUTHOR> http://iablog.sybase.com/efarrar/2011/06/building-a-glider-gun-with-sql-anywhere/

<comment><USER2> So this version of SQL is turing complete?

<comment><USER3> That's what I'm wondering. Not like I want to use it now.</comment></comment>


Improving Transparency in Scientific Research - <AUTHOR> http://blog.scienceexchange.com/2012/08/improving-transparency-in-scientific-research/

<comment><USER2> I've written before that I believe academics should share their code (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3845070>).

This greatly improves repeatability of results, and saves other researchers a huge amount of time.

My idea---which unfortunately I came up with towards the end of my academic career---was to create a public github from day 1. Because it made me more conscious that other people would be able to see my code, this is a vast improvement in usability over deciding only halfway through that the code would be public.

Unfortunately, many academics are scared of this approach. Sharing their earliest thoughts and meanderings makes them feel exposed, and strips away the veneer of unassailability that only showing finished work gives. And I will admit that I deleted repos that of work that was failure to find.

One potential solution is conferences that give priority to researchers who share their code. (I've seen this occasionally, but can't remember where right now.)

</comment><comment><USER3> This mostly has to do with Life sciences. Most other fields have embraced open publishing and data collaboration, with remarkable results. Life scientists stubbornly insist on defending their tiny castles and not changing the rules with which funding is given.

<comment><USER4> If only _changing the rules_ was as easy as creating a git repo. Not being snarky, just cynical of people who appear to have no experience regarding the realities of a career in _hardcore_ life sciences.

<comment><USER3> Exactly what you say. Nobody wants to volunteer to change any rules. It's sad that researchers have to be _forced_ by their universities to even allow open access. When career is above all, science lags.</comment></comment></comment>


Helicopter parents in the workplace - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2012/02/06/146464665/helicopter-parents-hover-in-the-workplace

<comment><USER2> The last thing the average american parent needs is to be told that they're over-parenting. Parental motivation and consultation is usually a recipe for success. But when it's combined with a lack of independence and drive on the kid's part that this kind of embarrassing stuff happens.

It would be interesting to see how the trend in "My son/daughter is always right" mentality affects the country's economics.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish this article was a joke. Anybody that has their parent's negotiate job benefits on their behalf probably lacks the self awareness to be ashamed.</comment>


Pinterest open-sources Terrapin, a tool for serving data from Hadoop - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/14/pinterest-open-sources-terrapin-a-tool-for-serving-data-from-hadoop/ <comment><USER3> This is Varun from Pinterest.

We did look at a few options before building this. ElephantDB seemed a bit heavy handed, such as having to modify ring configuration every time we added/removed servers and also, modifying domain spec yaml files for newly added data sets. It did not allow us to easily change # of shards across different versions of the data - something that our developers do often to make their jobs run faster etc. Also, it does not GC out older versions and since our workflows write new versions every day, this was a problem.

We did look at Cassandra but we also did not want to operate another data store. However, we definitely wanted to get the data loaded fast i.e. through simple file copy operations. We found that for this option Cassandra had similar issues as HBase i.e. having to do major compactions to get rid of older data versions. Tweaking the number of reduce shards was also harder.

With Terrapin, we essentially tried to build serving system on top of HDFS given the recent improvements in HDFS performance when there is data locality. We felt that HDFS was rock solid and the best storage system (in terms of scalability & ease of operation) for immutable data sets. On top of that, we built versioning, cheap garbage collection, extensible serving formats etc. as mentioned in the blog

As for Apache Drill, it is more suited to running analyst queries with latencies ranging upto seconds or 100s of milliseconds. This is not acceptable for webscale work loads where the latencies must be < 10ms for lower level serving systems like terrapin.

<comment><USER4> Hi Varun,

Can you also elaborate, how you read HFiles and serve it out from Terrapin servers? Are you using similar functionality as HBase? (With block cache like design if yes how do you keep both in sync).

Your blog is missing this interesting detail.

<comment><USER3> That is correct, we are using the functionality similar to HBase. We pull in the HBase BlockCache library with some tweaks to make it work for our scenario. Note that data is never overwritten and HFiles are immutable. So the cache automatically, gets evicted/populated as HFiles are opened and closed. That said, there is a possibility to use more performant formats like rocksdb etc. in the future (the format is pluggable). Or even still use HFiles and have them loaded into some kind of specialized in memory data structure etc.

<comment><USER4> Cool. So in a way its Immutable read only HBase (with guaranteed data locality no memstore overhead and compactions overhead). Cool. Nice solution. I wonder this can be patched back to HBase - as a "read only mode" ?

<comment><USER3> Suspect it would be difficult. There are differences like new data is completely independent of previous data and the source of truth for region distribution is HDFS for the block locations. There are multiple replicas per shard while HBase has one region for each shard etc. Across bulk loads, the number of shards (regions) can be changed for the same fileset or table - <USER2> possible with HBase. The data sharding is not range based like in HBase but mod based, as output by Hadoop HashPartitioner. There are so many differences that its hard to accommodate it into the HBase code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Either more tools like this are going to pop up, or the existing ones will mature, as more people adopt Lambda style architectures, I'd imagine.

While building one out, we looked at VoldemortDB, SploutSQL, and ElephantDB to serve bulk data coming out of Hadoop in batches. Voldemort turned out to be much rougher around the edges than expected, ElephantDB looked very bleeding edge, and SploutSQL wasn't as general purpose. In the end we turned to Cassandra and this tool - [https://github.com/spotify/hdfs2cass](https://github.com/spotify/hdfs2cass).

Good to see Pinterest open sourcing this.

</comment><comment><USER6> The URL [https://engineering.pinterest.com/blog/open-sourcing- terrapi...](https://engineering.pinterest.com/blog/open-sourcing-terrapin- serving-system-batch-generated-data-0) gives more info, which this article links through to.

</comment><comment><USER4> Bulk Uploads into KV stores are slow - so Terrapin allows KV access over immutable HDFS files.

Very typical use case for recommendation systems etc. We face similar problems with latencies on HBase (At Groupon).

So this solution seems interesting. Would be good to have comparison of other solutions Pinterest tried before building this. eg. loading data into Cassandra instead of HBase etc.

In nutshell - very specific use case - but the one which comes across very often

<comment><USER7> What do you think of Apache Drill onto of say HDFS served files?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if the authors are Maryland alumni!</comment>


Super DataBase (Nicki Minaj Super Bass Parody) – TerminusDB - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/yNbc44TGBTc <comment><AUTHOR> Earlier this year before the COVID19 crisis began, the TerminusDB core team got together in Dublin. It got a little late and a little messy and one of the team (Sreya) displayed a particular talent for Nicki Minaj's Super Bass (think 2am outside a pub). This got the creative juices flowing and we thought that there must be a good way to combine those two great loves, TerminusDB and Nicki Minaj!

When we saw that the folks over at MongoDB had a parody cover of Sia's Cheap Thrills, our path was set. Lyrics are by Sreya and video is made in Vyond (which is a great tool).

Willing to bet this is the only Hip-Hop track that mentions prolog and expresses love for data scientists.

We beg forgiveness for any database shade.

</comment><comment><USER2> The site is down right now. Perhaps HN gave it a hug of death!

<comment><AUTHOR> Which site? TerminusDB.com looks ok to me!

<comment><AUTHOR> Aha! Didn't have the redirect for www.terminusdb.com - fixed.</comment></comment></comment>


Yahoo? Can Somebody Explain The Bear In The Next Cubical? - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/uPC6O.png For some context, folks on twitter are trying to figure it out.
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=flipzagging
What the hell is a bear doing in Yahoo's Offices? <comment><AUTHOR> For some context, folks on twitter are trying to figure it out.

<http://search.twitter.com/search?q=flipzagging>

What the hell is a bear doing in Yahoo's Offices?</comment>


Nearly All of Silicon Valley's Political Dollars Are Going to Hillary Clinton - <AUTHOR> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/nearly-all-of-silicon-valleys-political-dollars-are-going-to-hillary-clinton/ <comment><USER2> >fivethirtyeight.com

Seriously, can we keep politics out of HN? Especially _biased_ politics like fivethirtyeight?</comment>


Explaining iOS 8's extensions: Opening the platform while keeping it secure - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/06/explaining-ios-8s-extensions-opening-the-platform-while-keeping-it-secure/

<comment><USER2> If I'm understanding the article correctly, the only extensions iOS allows are keyboards, document pickers, photo editors, sharing services, widget things, and "action extensions." Assuming the action extensions aren't as catch-all as their name, this seems significantly more limiting than Android's model, where any app can arbitrarily define an intent (e.g. "com.example.calculatething") and send it with arbitrary data to any app that defines itself as catching that intent. These built-in extension types seem fairly encompassing now, but they don't leave much room to expand to future ideas, unlike Android's system.

Can any iOS developers clarify the situation? I've long been an Android fan (I've even written a few apps), but iOS 8 (and its integrations with Yosemite) are very tempting.

<comment><USER3> Action extensions are essentially share extensions with a return value. They may or may not present UI, and then manipulate content before returning it to the running application. For example, a Bing translate action can be run on a webpage.

Extensions cannot be enumerated or run programmatically using public APIs. They can only be presented after user interaction in a presented UIActivityViewController.

<comment><USER2> Hm, that doesn't sound too bad. Do you say a certain extension "implements" a certain type of action or something? E.g. the Bing translate implements "com.apple.action.translate.web" and thus when Safari asks for actions that implement "com.apple.action.translate.web" Bing translate appears to the user, or Zxing implements "org.moreactions.scan.barcode" so then when the user taps "find by barcode" in a shopping app the Zxing app is presented to them as a choice?

<comment><USER4> They're not quite as specific as "com.apple.action.translate.web". I believe it's more like "com.apple.web" \- any action that can transform a website will include that in it's extension predicate.

<comment><USER2> I guess my primary question was whether apps can define their own actions -- can they, or is there an Apple-controlled set?

<comment><USER5> Action extensions can declare their support for any UTI (uniform type identifier), so yes - apps can effectively define their own actions. There is an 'Apple-controlled set' in the sense that the item being provided must have a UTI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it doesn't solve a security problem as much as an UX problem. In Android, you can activate a context (a file, a photo, a document) after you've chosen an action from a, sometimes endless, list of possible actions. In iOS it's inverted. You'll get a context within an app and can then choose a possible action. Also, there is no option for a default action, which is a huge plus, because in Android that confuses the user more than it helps him. See also this link that was posted a while ago on HN [http://jacksonfish.com/2014/05/22/a-user-experience- designer...](http://jacksonfish.com/2014/05/22/a-user-experience-designer- switches-from-ios-to-android/).

As for security: iOS warns you that a keyboard extension may send your input to a remote server, but it doesn't prevent it. I assume it's the same for the other extension points.

While I welcome the new keyboard extensions, they could've done better. A keyboard extension can send your input to a remote server but isn't allowed to set the text cursor or mark/copy/paste text. That's a huge drawback to me. The most effective mobile keyboard I've ever used was on my jailbroken iPhone, where you could move the cursor or mark text by swiping over the keyboard. But YMMV.

<comment><USER7> > I think it doesn't solve a security problem as much as an UX problem. In > Android, you can activate a context (a file, a photo, a document) after > you've chosen an action from a, sometimes endless, list of possible actions.

Note that Apple extensions do a different range of things than Android intents; they cover a lot of the same stuff as intents, but also some other things. In particular, they have plugin-like behaviour; you could, for instance, be writing an email, decide that you want to edit one of the images in the mail, and pop up an editor, which from the users point of view appears to be embedded in the app. The easy way would have been to implement this as a plugin; however, in that case it would live in the same sandbox, which would be dangerous. Android intents don't provide this functionality in the first place, so don't have to worry about it.

> As for security: iOS warns you that a keyboard extension may send your input > to a remote server, but it doesn't prevent it.

See the documentation. ([https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/General/Conceptual/ExtensibilityPG/Keyboard.html) Table 11.1). There are two security models for keyboards. One type is allowed to talk to remote servers, and to communicate with its 'containing' app (that is the app it's installed with, not the app it's providing keyboard functionality to). Some keyboards need to be able to talk to servers for a full range of functionality. On installing this type, the user will be warned and asked if they wish to proceed. It hasn't been explicitly said, but in practice, this type will be subject to far stricter review.

The other type has no access to the network, or access to the containing app. This type is thus guaranteed not to leak data (barring bugs in the security model). This type is the default, but it restrains functionality enough that some people may opt for the other type.

<comment><USER8> I don't know if it's called intents (activities maybe?), but are Android's popup activities (I think) similar? An example is [http://i.imgur.com/usXmLzn.png](http://i.imgur.com/usXmLzn.png), which is Dropbox providing a file select to another app. Other than being full screen (I'm not sure if Android apps can do these activities full screen) is the concept about the same as that?

<comment><USER7> Similar enough, I think. Apple seem to have gone with the rather confusing approach of calling a whole lot of things extensions because they (presumably) work similarly, but aren't necessarily all that related in function.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So... does this mean that I can finally click an address to open Google Maps?

<comment><USER10> no

<comment><USER9> Well that's unfortunate. It's one of the main reasons I'm switching back to android (that, and emulators).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Could any one who knows more about this more than I do answer me this. Would this extension framework allow an app to stream a file and have it played in another app. For instance, on my Android TV stick I can open my network share in ES File Browser and click on a file and have it play via MX Player. The ES Browser streams the files via samba from the server and then passes it to MX Player to play. Would the Apple extension system allow for this type of model.

I am just using video as an example. I guess in general I am wondering if the new Apple framework would allow the host app to continuously stream content to an extension. So, I guess another example would be like a website. If it's a dynamic website in spanish, for instance, and I would like to use Bing to convert it to english. Would it be possible to design an extension that would dynamically translate the site, or would it be more of a static deal, where once translated, you have to execute the extension again to translate additional dynamic content that may have appeared on the same page.

Also, apple claimed that they are going to expose GPU to apps, so you can now write apps that can offload calculations to the GPU. Does that mean that we might finally see GPU decoding and encoding for none apple video formats, or is that still a no-no?

<comment><USER12> It seems like that would be possible. The only restrictions that I can think of are the fact that each (iOS) extension needs its own app with significant functionality (so this extension would have to be provided by a file browser or something), and a extension will only run for as long as it takes to do whatever its supposed to do (so no background extensions). I think as long as you're watching the video the extension will be active, so that shouldn't be a problem. You might need to add support to the video player, but besides that I don't see why this wouldn't work

As for the GPU thing, I have no idea, but it seems like they're trying to be more open; I'd be kind of surprised if they said no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Am I wrong or is this stuff that is still under NDA?

<comment><USER14> As was already said, Apple has limited the scope of the NDA considerably.

The NDA only applies to registered developers anyway, though. Additionally, this year anyone can watch all WWDC videos (discussing much if not all of what is mentioned in the linked article). The general public that can just access the page with the WWDC videos (without any login or any requirements to identify oneself or accept anything) is obviously not at all bound by any NDA at all.

Here are the videos, check them out: [https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/](https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/) (sadly still requires the right software to watch)

I like this new more realistic and pragmatic approach to how they handle their NDA. In the past it was always a pain to listen to actual devs talk about the WWDC because they always felt like they had to be careful about what they said (though, to my knowledge, Apple never enforced that, but better safe than sorry, especially if you make your money on that platform). Meanwhile, everyone else was just talking about it freely, but exactly those people who most likely would have the most interesting things to say were silenced.</comment></comment>


Is Bitcoin KILLING the planet? - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/08/28/bitcoin-drives-energy-innovation/ <comment><USER2> From the guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> _In Submissions_

> _Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or > linkbait. Don 't editorialize._

> _Please don 't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or > exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an > article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's > important._

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What would the world look like if Bitcoin did not exist?

Personally I think that energy would be better used growing food, transporting kids to school or heating poor people's homes.

<comment><USER3> they wouldn't. it's a problem of humans , not of bitcoin.. they would find other useless junk to spend their energy on :-).</comment></comment>


Amazon's Hypocrisy on Net Neutrality - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/amazon-said-to-play-hardball-in-book-contract-talks-with-publishing-house-hachette/2014/05/16/cdd40854-dc62-11e3-8009-71de85b9c527_story.html

<comment><AUTHOR> "Amazon said to play hardball in book contract talks with publishing house Hachette"

AMZN reportedly adding 3-5 weeks of (arbitrary) "delivery delay" for online orders.

Exactly the type of opportunism they seek protection from.</comment>


Village Green Project (public air quality display) - <AUTHOR> http://villagegreen.airnowtech.org/welcome

<comment><AUTHOR> The Houston public radio station aired a segment on how the City of Houston was all for installing one of these air quality monitors, at an elementary school no less, but it needed some funding from the state Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which declined. My only question is: Where do I send my check to help get this thing installed in Houston?

[http://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/news/texas-passes-on- new-p...](http://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/news/texas-passes-on-new-park- benches-equipped-with-air-analyzers/)</comment>


Why Don't More People Work as Programmers? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/10/31/why-dont-more-people-work-as-programmers/

<comment><USER2> While I think that most of the points the author makes are valid, I'd disagree with this:

 _" On top of all this, the language that you thought was the next big thing was a passing fad and nobody is using it 5 years later. Now you're on to the next cool language, which might not be used 5 years from now. You constantly have to stay on top of things."_

In most areas of programming, there's no need to chase the next hot language. Many of the languages being used today, such as Python, Ruby, Java, JavaScript, C++ and C have been around for a very long time. Outside of web and mobile development, the frameworks and libraries don't change that quickly.

 _" There's a ton of stuff you need to know, and it keeps changing! It's not something you can be truly great at unless it's your main focus. You can't be a 'weekend programmer.'_"

There are many fields in which you can. For example, if your weekend project is writing a program to do electronic music composition on a PC or a Mac, you'll be pretty much unaffected by the trends in languages and frameworks. The code you write this year will still run just fine five years from now, and user interfaces on desktop machines won't change all that much in the next five years.

</comment><comment><USER3> It has been a while since I was at school and I am sure things have changed since then, however, most of the reasons cited here are not evident at that formative, career deciding stage. At school/university you don't know about 'death marches', the obligation to work in a focused manner for more hours in the week than the stereotypical 'junior doctor' (allegedly they put in all the hours) or that projects are likely to be managed by people that cannot be bothered to learn the slightest thing about how things work 'under the hood'.

The same could be said for almost any other profession - teachers go into it with idealism then get jaded once they find out the reality of what is asked for them. Same with anything else to varying extents.

IMHO there are lots of different types of programmers with different motivations. Some are product/client/customer focused, plenty are not. Some fail to see programming as a creative endeavour - it might as well be car mechanics to them. For some people programming is all they are cut out for, only a miracle will move them on to something else or some late spurt of personal development might enable that.

At the end of the day programming is hard work. But this is not the same sort of hard work that most people consider to be hard work. In some ways this difference is a bit like the difference between 'hot courage' and 'cold courage'. ('Hot courage' is what soldiers have when they do something courageous under fire, 'cold courage' is what Edward Snowden has.)</comment>


Just Say "No" To Mailing List Spam by Recruiters - <AUTHOR> http://code.dblock.org/just-say-no-to-mailing-list-spam-by-recruiters

<comment><USER2> I was getting ready to launch into a tirade about how we aren't all that bad but I won't. Most of us are terrible and those that take advantage of a niche usergroup for the purpose of acting as a middleman are literally throwing shit at a wall and hoping some of it sticks.

London Ruby User Group has the same issue with recruiters posting vague job descriptions but the issue is that despite this unwanted approach, they do get results.

I have no idea how many people are on the MongoDB mailing list but if there are more than 100 people I would be willing to bet my extortionate fee's that they get at least five decent candidates emailing them asking for more information and ultimately ending up being represented by the agency.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there _really_ any need for the naughty-secretary "She uses MongoDB" image at the top of this blog post?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, there's no need. But there was a reason why I put it there, point (2) on how people who know nothing about MongoDB shouldn't be posting to the lists.

<comment><USER4> I've been trying to parse this and just kind of failing. Is the implication that _of course_ a naughty secretary wouldn't know anything about MongoDB?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am used to people not connecting with Russian humor. She's actually well known porn star.

UPDATE: I removed the pornographic infographic, I don't want to have a debate about it.

<comment><USER3> _I am used to people no connecting with Russian humor. She's actually well known porn star._

A bit of advice going forwards: this isn't a national-or-otherwise sense of humour issue. I have no doubt there are many people from many different countries that have a knowledge of famous porn stars. There'll also be lots who don't... and that's without getting in to the whole objectifying women debate ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't hate recruiters. There are a few really great ones and a whole lot of really bad ones. I don't fault them for trying to make a living, but I do recognize that the entire practice of placement fees is what drives these bad behaviors.

The recruiting/placement industry would vanish overnight if companies would stop paying placement fees to any recruiter who manages to locate and then recruit good talent.

<comment><USER2> _The recruiting/placement industry would vanish overnight if companies would stop paying placement fees to any recruiter who manages to locate and then recruit good talent._

Correct. The problem is that this isn't likely to happen as so many companies need extra resource to help them recruit and will suffer the costs willingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The three approaches I've seen mailing lists use to solve the job posting problem:

1) Have a specified criteria which jobs have to meet in order to be posted (i.e. by a regular mailing list member, direct from company, etc.)

2) Have a separate but affiliated mailing list for jobs

3) Charge for job postings (with the money typically going to the bar tab for the next mailing list meetup)

</comment><comment><USER7> Urgh the whole recruiter-hate thing is so boring. Get off your high horse and realise that some people are just trying to make a living - posting a relevant ad to a mailing list occasionally is hardly the crime of the century.

Re his 3 points:

\- A recruiter is never going to reveal the employer name as this risks them getting cut out of the loop

\- So what if a recruiter is trying to make money? Believe it or not line managers are trying to make money too. They wouldn't employ you if they weren't getting a postive ROI.

\- This _was_ a MongoDB ad, not Erlang or whatever.

Provided a post like this is occasional and relevant, I really don't see the issue. It could really help someone land a great job too.

<comment><USER2> _Get off your high horse and realise that some people are just trying to make a living_

The HN High Horse is pretty justified to be fair. Most recruiters haven't the first clue about the technology they recruit for and the amount of underhanded and often illegal tactics recruiters engage in warrants most of the hate they receive.

Yes there are decent recruiters but they are a very rare breed and the decent ones generally know they are decent and consider themselves to be miles apart from the general stereotype and don't get offended by the hate.

Shameless Plug: Have a look at my blog linked in my profile for more info on why recruiters are universally hated.

<comment><USER7> I was making no reference, good or bad, to recruiters in general. I was referring to this particular example in isolation. To me that mailing list post seemed inoffensive and relevant. Assuming it's occasional, what's the problem?

What the author is doing is worse. He's using this minor indiscretion (if it's even that) to jump on the recruiter-bashing band wagon and churn out a blog post and get himself a bit of traffic.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're reading too much between the lines.

Quote from the post:

"Please note that I don't think recruiters are evil. They provide valuable services to both companies and candidates. But good recruiting takes hard work, time and social skills building relationships over a long period of time – something that justifies a 25% ticket from your year's salary upon hire. In contrast, what's the definition of sending an e-mail to 800 people because you have their e-mail address and think they are in your target demographic? Spam."

<comment><USER8> In fairness this is an unusually well targeted email - assuming there's a real job they've effectively alerted 800 people in a relatively small niche to its existence in a relatively inoffensive way (you'd rather they did it the hard work way by bothering you at meetups and calling you to see if you're ready to ditch your startup yet? Really?). The ratio of people that might actually be interested in the job to people who wasted approximately 2 seconds parsing the email is quite high.

Now I start laughing when recruiters match me with CS graduate jobs which match up with me on their database because they're in the same part of the country as the university I went to, four years ago, in a completely different subject area...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>