YC application – video views - <AUTHOR> Ok. We have 45 views on our video about founders. Yeah, 45. What in the world should I think about this? And, yes, it's unlisted and it has been growing since day one. <comment> 100-xyz Did you guys get invited for the interview?

</comment><comment> 100-xyz Is your video unusually funny, weird...?

Is your company unusual in some way?

We are showing 10views, most of which I'm sure is us.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's nor funny nor weird, but it is unusual in a way it tackles a cultural stigma (probably not something many companies come to YC with) and is not tech based, it's hardware.</comment></comment>


Kindle, schmindle...I've got your $350 e-book reader right here - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/8301-18603_1-10188221-73.html <comment><USER2> The article seems to stray away from a side by side comparison, netbooks have their place but reading books is most certainly not one of them.

Screen resolution of a netbook makes it hard enough to read webpages and other things but reading a book on one is out of the question to me, if I were to invest in an electronic way to read a book it would be with something that looked like ink, which the kindle has shown to be a very good selling point, not to mention Amazon and their book collection backing it.</comment>


The Origen Semiconductor Developer's Kit - <AUTHOR> http://origen-sdk.org <comment><USER2> There's a lot on the website and none of it clearly explains what Origen is and why it might be used.</comment>


Ask HN: MVP vs. Landing page - <AUTHOR>

I have lately noticed that a lot of people confuse or claim their landing page as MVP. There are websites like quickMVP that just make a landing page but call it MVP.
 I am curious if that is the case. Doesn't MVP refer to a hacked prototype which might not look good but does everything that the real product would do? While landing page is just single page webapp to market your idea? Please share your thoughts on this. <comment><USER2> Landing pages are not MVP's, end of story. Landing pages built pre-MVP are to validate ideas. Getting a user to sign up for a service and use a service are significantly different levels of validation.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are three different things, 1. MLP, 2. MVP, 3. MSP which kind of come in order.

1 MLP is Minimum Learnable Product i.e. anything which helps you learn something about what product you should be building. It can be an email that you send out pitching your product or a landing page.

2\. MVP is Minimum Viable Product i.e. by viability we imply usability. If it is not usable then it is not viable. So landing pages, wireframes are ruled out. Mailers might work if you start to provide a service (which will get eventually productized, automated, etc) via the mailer. So an ugly looking product would also do as long as users find it usable.

3\. MSP is Minimum Saleable Product i.e. the product based on which you can start making revenue (if you so wanted)

</comment><comment><USER4> An MVP by definition is the very base point that you can convince people to buy your wares. Whatever form that takes will depend on you and your market. The point is to get whatever you have up there in your head and put it out into the world; who cares what that looks like. Landing pages are so popular because it's the path of least resistance in getting your idea in front of a sizable audience. Going straight to a working prototype for your MVP without hitting the landing page or comparable stage first sort of misses the mark on what an MVP is all about.

Instead of thinking of an MVP as a single _thing_, we just made things easy and called everything we did our "MVP" until we started doing recurring sales.

</comment><comment><USER5> A Landing Page with good results can be seen as a validation for a MVP, but can never be one itself. Unless your business is to harvest e-mail addresses in which case you're 10 years late to the party ;)

I try to think of LP's as a catalyst instead of a validation. LP results make sure you have a potential userbase to reach out to when you suddenly have your MVP in your hands. It's like getting the cohorts ready for battle. Better line them up upfront then scrambling for them when the heat is on. In that light it's more a parallel path than a part of the MVP.</comment>


Show HN: I spent the past 8 months mapping Chicago's History with Drupal & GMaps - <AUTHOR> http://www.domu.com/chicago/history-map

<comment><USER2> Very cool history map. I've never seen anything like this before. Love it!

</comment><comment><USER3> Love the 'oddities' blurbs! Very cool.

</comment><comment><USER4> Amazing and fantastic!!</comment>


Republicans pull healthcare legislation plan in blow to Trump - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-obamacare-idUSKBN16V149 <comment><USER2> This seems like a good time to ask about the actual impact of the vague executive order Trump issued in January, basically telling the executive branch to "waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay" whenever legally possible:

> To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Secretary of Health and Human > Services (Secretary) and the heads of all other executive departments and > agencies (agencies) with authorities and responsibilities under the Act > shall exercise all authority and discretion available to them to waive, > defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation of any provision > or requirement of the Act that would impose a fiscal burden on any State or > a cost, fee, tax, penalty, or regulatory burden on individuals, families, > healthcare providers, health insurers, patients, recipients of healthcare > services, purchasers of health insurance, or makers of medical devices, > products, or medications.

[https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press- office/2017/01/2/execut...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press- office/2017/01/2/executive-order-minimizing-economic-burden-patient- protection-and)

Does anyone know what to expect when renewing insurance in 2017?

<comment><USER3> > _This seems like a good time to ask about the actual impact of the vague > executive order Trump issued in January_

Trump Issues Executive Order Scaling Back Parts of Obamacare | Jan 20, 2017 [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/us/politics/trump- executi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/us/politics/trump-executive- order-obamacare.html)

What Does Trump's Executive Order Against Obamacare Actually Do? | Jan 21, 2017 [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/upshot/what-does-the- orde...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/upshot/what-does-the-order- against-the-health-law-actually-do.html)

Get a digital subscription to the _Washington Post_ or the _New York Times_. There's a lot happening that affects the little guy.

<comment><USER2> That's really not helpful.

I've read both of those and neither contains much information. But I haven't seen the news mention anything more recently. Surely we've learned something about the actual impact in two months, but the news has moved on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This legislation was a complete mess. Republicans have been warning about the Obamacare "death spiral" for years. For the life of me I can't figure out why no one is talking about the much worse, much faster death spiral embedded in this legislation: no one would be forced to buy insurance, but insurers _still_ have to take your preexisting condition, and can only charge 30% more for one year for the extra risk. Hello adverse selection!

I'm a pretty free-market guy and can get behind healthcare reform in general, but this bill had holes big enough to drive trucks through from the right and left simultaneously with plenty of room to spare. I could believe it coming from Trump, but I have no idea what Paul Ryan was thinking... the guy is supposed to be a policy wonk.

<comment><USER5> This. As someone who's worked on the insurance side of the equation for a while, it always amazes me when people don't realize the majority of health insurance policy is a zero sum game.

If insurance companies aren't solvent and profitable, products won't be offered. And that's exactly what happens when you force unfunded / unbalanced mandates on them. Congress can easily legislate the country into a market where no one wants to offer insurance because there's no way to do so sustainably.

 _That said_ , one of the _best_ things that ACA did was finally target some of the inefficiency in as conservative of a business as insurance. The provision capping administrative costs did a lot to jolt companies into streamlining their operations and investing in modern, more efficient technologies.

<comment><USER6> > the majority of health insurance policy is a zero sum game

That's what "insurance" _is_. I also don't get why people don't seem to understand that.

IMO, a big part of a solution has to be to stop conflating "health insurance" with "healthcare".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The republicans had 7 years to prepare for this. What a joke.

<comment><USER8> What a difference a year makes! In January 2016, Congress passed legislation to repeal Obamacare, confident that Obama would veto it:

[http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/06/politics/house- obamacare-r...](http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/06/politics/house-obamacare- repeal-planned-parenthood/)

Now that Republicans have the power, they can't agree on anything anymore. What a miserable bunch of phonies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem for the Republican leadership is that the House of Representatives is effectively a hung parliament. There's the far right House Freedom Caucus (~30 members), the moderate-right Tuesday group (~40 members), and the party doesn't have a majority without both groups. When John Boehner was speaker he kept the government mostly functioning by combining the moderates in the Republican party with the Democrats to pass bills to keep the lights on (continuing resolutions, debt ceiling increases, etc). But that doesn't work for major policy initiatives like health care.

<comment><USER5> The leadership drove the bill the wrong way. They should have hung the Freedom Caucus out to dry, moderated the bill, and tried to peel the necessary votes from Democrats in red states.

Torpedoing essential benefits without a more fundamentally comprehensive replacement was like strapping engines to a car and expecting it to turn into a plane.

<comment><USER10> > The leadership drove the bill the wrong way.

There was no right way; the only way to win was not to play the game. Anything that destroyed the basic model of the ACA—except to move to a stronger public guarantee which basically no Republican members are interested in—was never going to attract significant Democrstic support; the initial version of the AHCA had substantial opposition from both hard-line conservatives and moderates in the Republican Party, and anything that did more to appeal to either of those groups expanded opposition on the other side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if the leadership suffered from the same confusion that this article shows. It's hard to call the Republicans Trump's party. Perhaps even calling Republicans a single party is going too far.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've been a frequent critic of Obamacare. I've personally experienced some of its shortcomings: lesser coverage, more out of pocket, higher deductibles, can't see the family doctor my other family members see, and that I saw for years, etc.

But I saw nothing from the Republicans that indicated they were fixing or improving anything.

I think a number of dissenting House Republicans know that premiums are going to go up no matter what and decided they'd rather see Obamacare go down the drain with his name on it than step up and fix what needs fixing.

<comment><USER13> What coverage did you lose under the ACA?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is how I see a lot of the Trump presidency going. The USA isn't a dictatorship, Obama ran into similar roadblocks and I credit him for actually getting something passed rather than what was passed.

</comment><comment><USER15> non-Americans: can you describe what dealing with your health care system is like? I want to understand: is it a supply constrained, health-care rationing, expensive bureaucracy; or is it an affordable, convenient, healthy paradise; or something in between? I see reports from people who create a portrayal of European and Asian health care systems that match their narrative of these systems either being excellent, or horrible. Can I hear from actual people who live in this systems if they are good or bad?

</comment><comment><USER16> Can anyone explain to me why it would have been a _bad_ idea for the Republicans to have introduced a single-player plan and then claimed to have fixed healthcare? Feels like they missed a big opportunity there. Is it purely ideology?

<comment><USER17> Because this wasn't really a "healthcare bill" it was a tax cut bill to transfer 600 billion dollars from the poor to the wealthy. It was never even about healthcare, it's about wealthy/monied interested who own the Republican party, which has somehow become the standard bearer for poor people who apparently just don't understand that their own party has it out for them.

<comment><USER18> Technically speaking, I think the nominal notion was to _prevent_ the transfer of $600 billion from the wealthy to the poor.

In actuality, because of twisted Republican orthodoxy combined with the reality of politics, at the end of the day the approach would have resulted in $600 billion in deficit spending.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It seems like most people's response to this news is either extremely happy or very upset.

I'd be interested to hear why anyone on here feels either of those emotions.

For me, it looks like I'll have to continue paying the Obamacare penalty for the foreseeable future, and it will be impossible to find an insurance plan that makes sense for my family.

<comment><USER19> I have insurance through the Washington State Health Benefit Exchange (i.e. Obamacare), and a pre-existing condition. My insurance is kind of 'meh,' but it means that I will not be bankrupted if something serious happens to me.

Had this morning's version of Trumpcare been made law, the odds of me being able to afford useful insurance would've been slim to none. So, I am _ecstatic_ about this news.

<comment><USER20> Isn't that the whole point of insurance? Life, auto, home, fire, farmer's?

To not go bankrupt and share the risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Another brilliant Trump move.

<comment><USER22> Did Trump really think it would pass though? I figured he pushed the vote knowing it'd likely fail so he could move on to tax breaks. He then "tried", and Ryan / Freedom Caucus takes the fall in the midterms.

<comment><USER23> It doesn't really make sense to invest so much time into promoting the bill if this was the plan, though. He claimed to be personally calling hundreds of representatives, threatened those planning to vote against it, had Spicer guarantee its passage, etc. I don't know if Trump thought it would pass, but he certainly gave lots of signals that he wanted it to and was taking responsibility for it.

<comment><USER6> He appeared to be pushing hard on it, but even as someone who voted for him I don't trust the perception of what he's doing.

He _may_ have been actively trying to get this bill passed, but it seems at least as likely to me that he merely intended to be seen as doing so.

<comment><USER22> He absolutely had to be seen as pushing for it, even if he realized that many millions losing coverage would hurt him deeply in 2020.

Right now healthcare is shelved and the far right reps lose steam, having failed to work with their own party and a President far more popular with their constituents than they are.

Honestly I don't think he care whether it passed or not. He's not playing the game we see.

<comment><USER10> > Right now healthcare is shelved and the far right reps lose steam, having > failed to work with their own party and a President far more popular with > their constituents than they are.

Current polling data to support the claim that any far right Republicans are far less popular with their own constituents than Trump is would be welcome. Given his cratering approval numbers, including with Republicans, I kind of doubt that is true in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> On one end of the spectrum, you have the 25 year old single dude who works for a big company. He pays $60 every two weeks for his PPO and doesn't understand what the big deal is. Can people really not afford $60 every two weeks? He votes Republican because he's a maker, not a taker, and he wants a tax cut. He fundamentally misunderstands the nature of his coverage: his employer pays 80% (or 100%!) of his premium.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have a family of five that makes too much money to qualify for a subsidy. They live in a red state that didn't expand Medicaid, uses the federally-managed exchange, and suffers from a lack of competition because there's only one insurer on that exchange. An HDHP for the family would cost $1,300/mo, which they can't afford, so they pay the penalty and go without insurance. They vote Republican because as they see it the government is forcing them to buy something they can't afford, and they want it to be better... or at least go back to the way it was.

A lot of people and families had plans and doctors they liked before the ACA was passed, and one of two things happened:

1\. because year-over-year premium increases are regulated by the government per the ACA, insurers were forced to make their plans more efficient by reducing the size of their networks in one way or another. This meant that a lot of people lost access to their doctors and had to find another, often having to travel further and/or wait longer to see their new doctor.

2\. they had _terrible_ insurance before the ACA was passed, but didn't realize it. Perhaps they had unreasonably high deductibles, or access to few essential services, or ridiculously low lifetime limits, or punitive coinsurance rates, or... Perhaps they'd refuse to cover something because it was a "preexisting condition." Perhaps they'd drop you mid-treatment, making it impossible to get further treatment without going into severe debt. This insurance wouldn't have been much use to anyone in the event of cancer, or a heart attack, or a broken leg, but they were paying the premiums anyway, and it sure helped them _feel_ insured. ACA made all of these practices illegal, or at least put some controls on them to ensure a baseline quality of insurance. These plans went away or became as expensive as other plans.

These people vote Republican because from their point of view ACA took away their plans and their doctors, and Obama had stupidly promised them that wouldn't happen. They had it good, or so they thought, and it was taken away from them.

Everyone else is experiencing rising deductibles and premiums with no end in sight. What most people fail to realize is that deductibles and premiums would be rising with or without ACA—as they were before the passage of ACA—at a greater rate! ACA bent the curve, so they're still increasing, but less so. Yes, your insurance cost $300/mo last year, and it costs $400/mo this year, but how much would it cost if ACA hadn't been passed seven years ago? Would you even be able to get insurance? Do you or a family member have a preexisting condition? Our minds aren't wired to think like this, though... all we see is a higher bill and want someone to blame, so we vote Republican.

I could go on. ACA did a lot, but it didn't do enough to encourage competition and control costs. Clearly. A public option and "death panels" would have helped a lot, but of course these were dropped to encourage bipartisan support for the bill... which it didn't get. Oh well.</comment>


Ask HN: Startup development infrastructure - ec2, cloud services or own servers? - <AUTHOR>

I'm just starting a job with a startup and we'll now have a team of developers instead of just one—which means setting up source control, continuous integration and backups.
Anyone have any advice on best practices or good solutions to this? We're considering either an ec2 instance, a physical server in our office, or a reasonable set of cloud services.
Details: a few developers and a designer, Java web apps and an Android app, probably Jenkins for continuous integration, git for source control. <comment><USER2> We used heroku until the free tier wasn't enough. Then AWS, though it does have a initial learning curve. AWS is really flexible, but you do have to become a bit of a sys admin.

<comment><USER3> That seems to make no sense at all to me. $50 a month for a db and 2 dynos has to be cheaper than AWS+your time sys-admining everything.

Now I'm not saying there aren't other reasons to not use heroku, but yours doesn't seem reasonable to me. Care to elaborate a little for us?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am running off a managed dedicated server because server adminstration just isn't something I want to deal with and my concerns about scaling/growth aren't there yet. I guess it probably depends on your situation, if there is someone in your office who has a really strong opinion and the knowledge to implement it, perhaps that would work best for your group?

<comment><USER5> Good point, considering the capabilities. If you do everything with EC2, you should stick with it. Otherwise, if your developer box is Linux, you are probably able to admin a dedicated Linux server (for the build environment) as well, no?

On the other hand, it makes sense to develop Cloud skills at some stage as well, and you might want to screw it up with the test&build server first, before setting up the production server ;) Probably depends as well then on how much time you have?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The sooner you get set up on the cloud or any VPS host the better. Hosting your site from a desktop in your office is pretty ghetto in this day in age.</comment>


Der Spiegel reporter Claas Relotius sacked over 'invented' stories - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46624297 <comment><USER2> Just scratching the surface really.</comment>


Perspective API – An API that makes it easier to host better conversations - <AUTHOR> http://www.perspectiveapi.com <comment><USER2> I took the slider to the left end, and it was a lot of climate change denial. I thought "ugh, is this going to opine on left vs right ideology? That seems Orwellian", and dragged the slider to the right end, where, to my surprise, all the comments were insulting/useless.

It's pleasing to know that it doesn't care about your opinion, just about how eloquently it's expressed. Sounds very useful.

<comment><USER3> "The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged today is of the same sort as the battle waged, during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus! ... We shall regain our health only be eliminating the Jew." – Hitler

17% toxic.

<comment><USER3> If I use my full comment above (not just the part in quotation marks) it says 25% toxic.

I think it is mostly a profanity filter.

<comment><USER4> For anyone who's used Google Translate, it should be entirely unsurprising that the best "AI" we can cook up appears to be doing little more than rating individual words.

I admire the effort, but the tools seem to be so fundamentally lacking.

<comment><USER5> Give it some time. ML improves with usage and training data.

<comment><USER6> While this is true, ML isn't a panacea that will solve all problems given time and training data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems to really hate profanity. `I love it` is 1% toxic. `I bloody love it.` 38%; `I f __king love it` 95%. In many circles, the more profane are more congratulatory.

<comment><USER8> Even when used positively, hyperbolic words like profanity indicate a level of close-minded passion about one side or another of a discussion. The purpose of Perspective seems to be to foster rational discussion between open-minded individuals in a comment string. I'd be hard-pressed to find someone who moved a conversation in a non-toxic direction by typing "I bloody respect your opinion, but here's why assumption X is wrong."

<comment><USER9> The implicit assumption you are making is that a comment can contain only one thing. Something like the following would be both perfectly acceptable and moving the conversation in a good direction, IMO:

 _So fucking awesome.

By the way, how do you do X? Whenever I've tried I always run into problem Y. Also, I'm interested in your thoughts on Z._

The initial congratulatory statement used profanity for effect and to convey emotion, but in a positive way. The following statement(s) are specifically contributing to and flushing out the conversation. 85% toxic according to them (but helpfully it did allow me to correct them, so maybe they'll get better).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "The author of the previous comment has a simian countenance which displays a lineage rich in species diversity" \- 2% toxic. So insults are OK as long as they are from Watterson. I approve!

</comment><comment><USER11> Great tool, by the way. I think it might actually work!

I started off with a highly toxic comment (in the window on the tool, not in "real life") and I tried to be just as insulting while lowering the toxicity level.

It was informative that when I did this, the sentence sounded more educated, more polished, but was just as rude.

If this spreads wide, I suspect it will usher in a new era of veiled insults and implied disfavor, but that will be a vast improvement over what we have today.

<comment><USER12> I think HN is basically already like this. It has its own set of problems, but I agree that it's an improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> To me that creates the question why I would read the comments in the first place. Because "filter to the left" contains not one post that would interest me. It also doesn't give me a feeling on relevant discrepancies in opinion.

If I could filter I would love to filter out everybody in the "filter completely to the left" as well as the "completely to the right" spectrum and just have the ones in the middle. The ones on the left are insanely boring and conformist, and the ones on the complete right are really just idiots.

</comment><comment><USER12> Very interesting, though I'd love more details about the signals they're using.

I hold out a slim hope that this discussion doesn't once again devolve into "but how can we even define 'truth'??" This seems more analogous to spam detectors - perfection is absolutely theoretically impossible, but low-error implementations are incredibly useful in practice.

<comment><USER14> This seems to be a tone detector, not a truth detector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I remember (from building a sentiment analysis irc bot[1] back in the day that used the afinn wordlist) that sentiment analysis is effective because robots can do mid-70%-accurate classification, but humans only agree around 80% of the time on 'positive/negative' classification.

So I always wonder, if simple models like the afinn wordlist work at close-to- human levels, how much total value is added by the more robust model. Still very cool!

\---

[1] [https://github.com/mrluc/cku-irc- bots/blob/master/feelio.cof...](https://github.com/mrluc/cku-irc- bots/blob/master/feelio.coffee) \- included the following line of code, which is a coffeescript crime but also a cute sentence:

        if i_feel_you then @maybe @occasionally, => say i_feel_you

</comment><comment><USER13> "Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."

Oscar Wilde, being 14% "toxic".

\--

"Politeness , n. The most acceptable hypocrisy."

Ambrose Bierce, being 48% "toxic"

<comment><USER16> Also 14% toxic:

> "If parental love is so distorted that it demands submission and dependence > for its self-confirmation, social adjustment turns into a test of obedience > and the child's efforts to comply bring with them the loss of genuine > feelings. The human being then becomes the true source of evil."

\-- Arno Gruen (though putting it in quotes knocks off a full 3% toxicity)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I tried two phrases:

        59% You're a potato.

and:

        60% You're a potato

Just losing the period makes it more toxic! Wow.

Now what can I do with this?

<comment><USER13> Putting your comment in quotes seems to makes it considerably less "toxic" than the same sentence without quotes, apparently (unless very high rate in the 90s).

"You're a potato."

35% toxic

<comment><USER18> just <potato> is 19% toxic

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> You can have all the technology in the world but eventually what censorship really means is someone else stopping you from speaking your mind, and that person can be benign or malignant.

"host better conversations" is a nice little marketing jingle but what it really means is "host conversations closer to what you consider 'better'". And 'better' is in the eye of the beholder.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm getting <10% toxicity ratings with sarcastic, mocking comments. Those ones will be a bit hard to fight off, it seems.

<comment><USER21> This is how the team built its toxicity model:

 _What 's toxic?

This model was trained by asking people to rate internet comments on a scale from "Very toxic" to "Very healthy" contribution. Toxic is defined as... "a rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to make you leave a discussion._

I'm not sure if it will ever be possible for algorithms/sentiment analysis to identify sarcasm as it is extremely situational and is often misread or misunderstood even by humans.

Seems to me that sarcasm will keep human moderators employed for some time to come.

<comment><USER22> it's seems easy to me, all they have to do is look for the /s! (/s)

<comment><USER9> Lazy youngsters, can't even finish your pseudo-tags! In my day, it was </sarcasm>.

</sarcasm>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > We are also open sourcing experiments, models, and research data to explore > the strengths and weaknesses (e.g. potential unintended biases) of using > machine learning as a tool for online discussion.

Does that mean that practically everything to be able to run it on a server without any google API is possible (once those things release)?

</comment><comment><USER3> Context: NYT will use it [http://www.nytco.com/the-times-is-partnering-with- jigsaw-to-...](http://www.nytco.com/the-times-is-partnering-with-jigsaw-to- expand-comment-capabilities/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I just tried some different terms in the test bed on perspectiveapi.com and so far I noticed that 'Podesta' is a very toxic term, the same as 'Pizzagate' and 'Skippy' for some reason.

Kind of strange. Seems like this is more a tool for shaping the narrative than it is a tool for keeping a discussion sober.

<comment><USER25> Of the total number of discussions you've had or witnessed regarding pizzagate, what percentage have been sober?

<comment><USER24> Most of them have been sober, as sober as can be considering most threads I have partaken in contained content from his instagram...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This reminds me of the work Crystal is doing to coach you to write in the style most appropriate for your audience.

[https://www.crystalknows.com/](https://www.crystalknows.com/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Seems like lemmatizing the text before it's rated by humans (during the training of the model, that is) would get around a healthy portion of the grammatically-induced scoring differences.

</comment><comment><USER28> Detecting (and warning commenters) about toxicity seems like a really useful idea. I would certainly like to browse many Brexit discussions with the top 40% of toxic comments cut out.

<comment><USER21> I think people often forget how much toxicity is filtered out of a conversation by talking face-to-face with a real person. I like to reserve conversations on political topics for emails, texts, calls, or real life chats.

Internet anonymity enables a ton of toxicity.

<comment><USER29> I agree that anonymity increases the potential for toxicity. But you're basically saying that because of that you're only willing to discuss politics in private, which to my mind doesn't really count as engaging in politics in a meaningful way. Given the proportion of public discourse that takes place on the internet these days, it makes perfect sense to develop tools like these to improve its quality.

Opting out to only engage in political discussion in private is in a way a privilege, that many feel they can no longer afford.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> In addition to being a basic term match, it also would mark any conversation about controversial subjects as toxic. Try saying something innocuous about suicide or rape.

</comment><comment><USER31> This thing does not like exclamation points. I'm all for being less toxic and more positive in my language, but sometimes I get really excited about it!!!

</comment><comment><USER32> Sentiment analysis, basically?

</comment><comment><USER33> I wonder what the results are on HN comments.

</comment><comment><USER34> 'You have a nice behind' scores a lot differently than 'you have a nice ass'. Hmmmm.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I get Ajax working with a Bookmarklet? - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone!
I am trying to write a Bookmarklet and the goal is to be able to submit information from any site X (the origin page they are on when clicking the bookmarklet) to my site's servers while staying on site X.
Ideally, I would be able to send a response back and have it pop up somewhere but this is not necessary.
I keep running into the issue of the same origin policy -- that from site X, XMLHttpRequests can only be initiated with site X's domain.
Does anyone know of a way around this (or a tutorial they can point me to)? some Ajax with a Bookmarklet?
Thanks so much!
-Wesley <comment><USER2> You might want to ask such tech-related questions at stackoverflow.com.</comment>


The Senate is trying to ram CISA through within the next 48 hours - <AUTHOR> https://www.faxbigbrother.com/

<comment><USER2> I actually was in the Senate gallery yesterday and watched Diane Feinstein and a male senator co-author discuss to a largely empty chamber. In came former presidential candidate McCain whose 'questions' were more in the nature of 'how can any senator -not- vote to protect American's information-. It was certainly not a debate. To the male senator's credit he seemed mostly pushing for debate and amendment on the floor.

<comment><USER3> What you were witnessing was not debate. Speaking to a largely empty chamber is the norm, and serves a different purpose.

Debate and discussion of legislation happens in the discourse Senate members have with each other, with their staff, between their staffs, with committee staffs, and with private industry and other lobbyists. These discussions are happening all the time, just not usually on the Senate floor. So while it does seem weird that Senators orate to an empty chamber, that doesn't mean that the other Senators aren't hearing the arguments.

Whether they are hearing the right arguments, however, is a different issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They discussed it a bunch yesterday, but the vote for "cloture" (which is basically a vote on whether to proceed with debate) will be this afternoon around 2pm.</comment>


HipHop VM: now at 98.5% PHP framework parity, 16% faster - <AUTHOR> http://www.hhvm.com/blog/2813/we-are-the-98-5-and-the-16

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure I understand. Is this the framework that "compiles" PHP?

Is the 15% performance increase relative to vanilla PHP or to a previous version of HHVM?

<comment><USER4> HipHop was the PHP -> C++ compiler. HHVM is a JIT-compiled implementation of PHP.

The 15% increase is relative to HHVM at the beginning of the 3-week sprint they just completed. HHVM was already far faster than vanilla PHP when it was first publicly announced over a year ago.

<comment><USER5> That's more interesting. How much faster is hhvm overall?

<comment><USER6> The Wikipedia article ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP)) says "up to 6x", however, about 2x speedup versus plain PHP was a more typical experience for me when I used it before.

<comment><USER7> So basically it's as fast as using PHP with an opcode cache?

<comment><USER8> No, 2x speedup relative to PHP with an opcode cache.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Other than Facebook, does anybody have HipHop running in production? Any big caveats?

<comment><USER10> Other than Facebook, does anybody _need_ HipHop?

<comment><USER11> You're confusing HipHop with HHVM.

HipHop took PHP code and basically turned it into a statically compiled C++ application. The resulting binary acted directly as a web server. It was pretty fast, but very limited.

HHVM is an actual JITing virtual machine for PHP. It's still huge (one of the project pages say that the binaries are nearly a hundred megs), but it's now a real-world reimplementation of PHP, capable of doing anything PHP can, including eventually being run by mere mortals with normal code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice! CodeIgniter is at 100% now. I've been contemplating the switch to hhvm for my startup, now it seems likely.

<comment><USER13> Don't take this the wrong way, but you're actually developing _new_ applications with CodeIgniter? Ugh...

<comment><USER14> Yeah, Laravel is pretty much the modern framework for people who can't divorce themselves from CodeIgniter.

<comment><USER15> What does Laravel do that other frameworks like FuelPHP and Yii don't do? I hear a lot about it but don't hear a lot about why it's so much better than others.

<comment><USER14> On the surface most of the popular PHP frameworks are not much different from each other. Basic MVC separation, some sort of dependency injection container (actually a service locator), Composer and standardized autoloading, etc. Once you dig into the coding aesthetics then the differences start to become clear. Yii isn't PSR compliant, both FuelPHP and Laravel make liberal use of Facades and/or __callStatic to preserve the style of static function calls that are prevalent in CodeIgniter. I guess what makes Laravel stand out is the sheer amount of documentation and examples that are available, both on the website and in the code itself. This makes it really easy to get started.

Me, I'm not really keen on the Component::function() syntax. Feels like a crutch to me. Especially when people go out of their way to avoid specifying namespaces by abusing class_alias. Plus you're not really saving that many keystrokes compared to, say, $this->app['component']->function(). (Yes, I like Silex).

<comment><USER16> $this->app['component']->function() gives me an instant headache. Which is why I always wind up giving up on Symfony/Silex after trying it out every now and then.

OTOH, I had a much easier time with Laravel, though it uses some of the same Symfony components under the hood.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hmmm Laravel at 100%. This is now getting interesting!

<comment><USER18> Drupal is also 100%, that's actually really nice. Want a quick performance boost on your Drupal site, replace PHP with HHVM

<comment><USER19> This is core though, from what I hear contrib still breaks (haven't tried myself)

<comment><USER20> I tried it two days ago after they made the fastcgi announcement. My day job sites are fairly big with what I consider a pretty large number of contrib modules. I managed to get it up and running, but the HHVM logs were full of notices and it finally bombed out after several requests (not enough to really warm up the VM) on something related to apachesolr, and another one related to GD, which is strange because we use imagemagick, but whatever. Sad Trombone.

The really cool part though, it truly was "drop in". Every bit of my existing nginx/fpm configs worked as is, so once it's a bit further along, it's just a matter of shutting down fpm and firing up HHVM.

There were also a couple of gotchas in the setup related to the fact that their apt installer installed HHVM configs that don't assume Fastcgi, so it took a little bit to figure out the correct edits to the init script and HHVM config so it'd listen on :9000 instead of :80, but all in all that it worked at all was really fun for a minute. Very excited about this project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there a good tutorial on installing HHVM on server and then running your PHP app?

<comment><USER22> Yes, on the official wiki: [https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/wiki/_pages](https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/wiki/_pages)

First read the page related to your Linux/BSD e.g. "Prebuilt Packages on Ubuntu 12.04"

Then read the page "Using nginx as Front Server to HipHop"

As last step read this blog article how to write/edit the config file (/etc/hhvm.hdf): [http://www.hhvm.com/blog/113/getting-wordpress-running-on- hh...](http://www.hhvm.com/blog/113/getting-wordpress-running-on-hhvm)

Read this and copy things you need from the _documentation_ : [https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/blob/master/hphp/doc/option...](https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/blob/master/hphp/doc/options.compiled)

This is how I got HHVM working.

To sum up:

      * you need a little bit of basic Linux knowledge
      * install Linux or BSD (e.g. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) (64-bit)
      * install Nginx (or since last week HHVM also supports Apache with FastCGI)
      * install HHVM
      * install MySQL or MariaDB, etc.
      * create a web directory where you place your php files
      * edit the hhvm.hdf (config file)
      * start hhvm

Btw. a lot of blog posts you find with Google search are still about the old HpHp (the former and now outdated PHP to C++ translator also called HipHop from FB)... so better skip third party blog posts older than January 2013 ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder how hard it would be (for me) to take php and change all function names to be consistent. All PascalCase and spelled out (no awful abbreviations). Then download the documentation and change it there as well.

<comment><USER24> Ahh yes, take the most criticized aspect of Java -- the obscene verbosity -- and cram it into PHP. Sounds wonderful.

<comment><USER23> I'll take a long function name over an incomprehensible one any day.

<comment><USER25> While you're at it why don't you fix: (needle, haystack), (haystack, needle)? :P

<comment><USER26> With array functions, the needle is first. With string functions, the haystack is first.

[https://gist.github.com/salathe/1672543](https://gist.github.com/salathe/1672543)

<comment><USER25> This still doesn't convince me it was ever a beneficial design.

<comment><USER26> I didn't claim it was beneficial, just consistent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The performance increase in relative to the previous release of HHVM.

</comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone have an easy method of testing HHVM on your website?

I was thinking of recording the production requests for x amount of time and replaying them on HHVM so you could see if responses are identical, there are no crashes, state of the database is same afterwards, etc.?

<comment><USER29> A good test suite? ;)

Seriously though, I decided that if I had a project that was difficult to test, that I knew had hairy code that used some funky features it was best to just stick to APC. All my new projects are being built on HHVM directly with test suites as I go.

Edit; that was a while back now, though. What frameworks and libraries are you using? Run their test suites through HHVM and if they all pass, you'll be fine. Facebook use it themselves now apparently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What does a Lockdown implies?

<comment><USER31> I'm not sure about the particulars of this one, but a lockdown is generally a period where you are encouraged to prune away unnecessary and/or lower- priority requests for your time.

There generally aren't a lot of status meetings, team meetings, project meetings, and so forth at Facebook, but you might want to turn down a request to present at another team's meeting, or turn down those requests to interview - they can wait, or another person can be found.

People tend to make progress on lower-priority work items in between higher- priority work items - things like migrating onto a new library or version of a service, or maybe migrating from one set of machines to another if you aren't using one of the high-level service management systems. This is necessary to prevent these things from becoming interrupt items down the line, but during a lockdown period, it's okay to let these slide for a bit.

If the whole team does this, then suddenly you're spending a lot more time together. Instead of potentially working on different parts of the software like you usually do, you can all focus on a particular class of problem - <USER2> this case, performance and parity. That means everyone has that context loaded up, and you can have better discussions and quicker code reviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I see a lot of familiar frameworks and CMSs except one. Wordpress. Any idea why Drupal and Joomla would be listed without WordPress?

<comment><USER33> Wordpress' unit test suite was just too gnarly to get running with our test harness. Send us a pull request if you can get it working.

[https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/blob/master/hphp/test/frame...](https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/blob/master/hphp/test/frameworks/run.php)

<comment><USER34> It seems at the moment there's no way to have a DB server available when running tests. Is that correct? Until that happens, I don't imagine WP tests will be able to run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Hey guys, congrats on the release. Any news about Hack coming out any time soon?

</comment><comment><USER36> With the recent discussion on the origins of PHP function names, and about what, if anything, can be done to fix PHP without ruining it...I'm curious about what happens at Facebook. Besides HipHop, do they maintain a strict PHP style among their developers? Even if HipHop can handle all of PHPs variations, I imagine there's time saved by writing optimally-designed (for the human) code, too?

<comment><USER37> For core language features like that, there really is no way to "fix" it. Just pick a better language.

<comment><USER38> Poor choice of function names are the easiest of problems to fix. Write an internal base framework that you use and _strongly_ discourage the use of functions outside of it. Even if the new set of APIs are as simple as just forwarding the call to the standard PHP one with reversed arguments, using one example people complain about all the time. This isn't hard to do, doesn't require a lot of upfront work (add APIs as you go) on a new project, and won't give you too much (if any) of a performance hit. You don't need to burn the house down because you don't like how the furniture is arranged.

<comment><USER37> PHP has so many more problems than that, though. I don't think it's worth the effort. It'd be like replacing the rotting floorboards of a house that has mold spores in every corner and a caved-in roof.

<comment><USER18> wow, you really hate PHP. That that mold infested roof caved in house runs a great deal of the web.

<comment><USER39> In what universe? Maybe to maintain wordpress applications, but thats just one product. I don't know that codes in php anymore.

<comment><USER38> We are literally in a thread about one of the biggest names in tech and something they invent to help with their massive PHP codebase.

<comment><USER40> Yeah, but Facebook is just a collection of Wordpress plugins.

See: [http://wordpress.org/plugins/facebook/](http://wordpress.org/plugins/facebook/)

;)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chronicler of Islamic State 'killing machine' goes public - <AUTHOR> https://apnews.com/cdc0567f7bf34958b914b15869392a84?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=AP <comment><USER2> Oh wow. I know it was a news article but the pace read more like spy novel.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't imagine the courage and luck that it took to do this.</comment>


Scale by the Bay 2018: Bryan Cantrill, Rust and Other Interesting Things - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wZ1pCpJUIM <comment><USER2> Slides: [https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/platform-values-rust- an...](https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/platform-values-rust-and-the- implications-for-system-software)</comment>


Open source neural network chess engine Leela defeats Stockfish in TCEC 17 - <AUTHOR> https://chess24.com/en/watch/live-tournaments/tcec-season-17-superfinal-2020/1/1/96 <comment><USER2> Some really incredible games from Leela. Beat Stockfish with white AND black pieces in the French defense. She usually won by strategic material sacrifices making the games a real treat to watch.</comment>


Ask HN: "Why shouldn't I hire you?" - <AUTHOR> The CEO at my company asks this question in every interview he is in on. What is your best answer to this question? <comment><USER2> "Because my salary requirements just went up fivefold. I call it the jackass fee"</comment>


Ask HN: Homeschooling Resources? - <AUTHOR> My son is 3 years old and I'm interested in homeschooling him.
Googling 'homeschool curriculum' and the like turns up a lot of noise and not a lot of signal. (I'm guessing there is a lot of money to be made for affiliates in homeschooling.)
I'd like to ask the HN community: What are your favorite resources are for homeschooling?
- How did you get started from "ground zero"?
- What blogs/websites do you read?
- What curriculum, if any, would you recommend?
- What books should I read?
For some background, both myself and my wife were homeschooled up until high-school. So we know what's involved from a student's side, but not from the parent's side. <comment><USER2> Read "The Well-Trained Mind" by Susan Wise Bauer. It is written with only a hint of religion, so a secular homeschooler will still get a lot out of it. There are vast lists of resources in the book from kindergarten through high school. The book emphasizes a "classically based" curriculum. This means different things to different people.

My oldest is in Kindergarten and we are homeschooling her. You didn't mention your opinions on religion, but you will find that most of the complete curriculum are made by religious organizations. Although we are moderately religious, we use a completely secular curriculum, The Calvert School. See homeschool.calvertschool.org. We used them largely because they are an "umbrella" program approved by the stte of Maryland(where they are located and where I live.) We are happy with them so far. They are one of the more expensive programs out there but there is a lot of value in the materials they send.

If you are located in a state or school district that makes homeschooling difficult also consider joining the Home School Legal Defense Association. We have not had any problems(our county seems to be okay with homeschooling) but others in our state are not so lucky.

<comment><USER3> This. We use this extensively for our nine year old and it's been fantastic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My wife and I have four kids all of them homeschooled. We made the decision when my oldest was in 3rd grade. Up until they are 5 don't worry too much about adopting a rigid formal homeschooling plan. Just use everyday situations to cover the basics, ABC's, 123, basic addition, subtraction etc. Use every "why" question from them as an opportunity to turn it into a simple science lesson. If you don't know the answer tell them lets go look it up. Just get them used to the process of how to seek answers.

After they are 5 you need to formalize it more, start to think about what it is you want you child to learn and start to form a schedule of subjects that they need to know. Understand that as they grow and become more independent that they need to be able to take over this schedule and do more and more things that they are interested in. For example if they like Chemistry let them opt to do more science in Chemistry over Astronomy.

As for curriculum, up until about 3rd grade it does not matter all that much, because you are dealing with reading writing and basic arithmetic. The last one being one one that curriculum is the most important for. We personally used Math-U-See and like it pretty well, but more and more for our older child we have been using <http://www.khanacademy.org/> as a resource for her. One thing to beware of is that there are a lot of religious organizations in homeschooling, I have nothing wrong with religion per-say (I attend church and read the Bible) but I tend to not teach my children Science from text with religious affiliation, just as I don't teach them from text with an environment or activist affiliation. I share common beliefs with some of those groups, but for science I want just the facts with no agendas. Religion or environmental concerns are a separate study in my household. I say this because we have had to filter some of the science books provided to us from other homeschooling families.

<comment><USER2> What are the advantages of Math-U-See? I have been looking for a new math curriculum. I think that the current one we use(Calvert School) is a little too basic.

<comment><USER4> Math-U-See is a visual and object based math system, it's actually pretty revolutionary they use color coded blocks to represent math problems and the instructor video uses the same blocks, the student then has a set of blocks that they use to re-visualize the problem. They also start teaching Algebraic concepts early on. We are really happy with it for the K-8th education, as we start to enter high school level math we have been relying on Kahn's more and more. If you want more detail of why we did not choose other programs I can get that info from my wife. She narrowed them down and then I helped choose out of her narrowed selection. I don't know what her filters where for getting down to the smaller selection, I just know that Math-U-See stood out from the 3 we narrowed down to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not exactly curriculum, but I really, really, really recommend the (fictional) book "The Last Samurai" by Helen DeWitt.

It's about a young mother homeschooling her prodigy son, and is set in London. Easily one of the most inspiring books I've ever read.

[http://www.amazon.com/LAST-SAMURAI-Helen- Witt/dp/B0014JOL1A/...](http://www.amazon.com/LAST-SAMURAI-Helen- Witt/dp/B0014JOL1A/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325784886&sr=8-1)

</comment><comment><USER6> Where are you located? Your best bet might be to find local groups and ask them.

This group tends to be NC-centric, but it's worth asking them for recommendations: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/spice-line/>

Fellow hacker, @ntalbott might give you some pointers. My son is 2 and we haven't started figuring things out yet, but we fully intend to HS.

</comment><comment><USER3> We participate in a homeschool group (secular) which has a small number of families, as well as a co-operative (which folks teach various classes). We found both through Yahoo groups for our area (hamptonroads, va). I'll admit I was skeptical at first but now can't imagine not homeschooling.

</comment><comment><USER3> My wife and I homeschool, and I've had her detail resources and whatnot here: <http://homeschooly.com/blog/>

Disclaimer: The links there are Amazon affiliate "enhanced" and I've experimented with other advertising on the site.

</comment><comment><USER7> Startup idea: AirBnB for home schooling tutors.

You got experience, so you should do it :)</comment>


Contractors Defend Work at Troubled Salesforce Transit Center - <AUTHOR> https://www.enr.com/articles/46576-contractors-defend-work-at-troubled-salesforce-transit-center <comment><AUTHOR> Fascinating to see professional/ industry groups (all broadly in engineering and construction) disagree with each other over definitions, standards, and culpability.</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg accused of abusing power after row over 'napalm girl' photo - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/08/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-napalm-girl-photo-vietnam-war <comment><USER2> See also: "Dear Mark. I am writing this to inform you that I shall not comply"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12457004](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12457004) (10 hours ago, 165 comments)

</comment><comment><USER3> He is right. Applying "terms of agreement" blindly is stupid. For the same principle, one couldn't post a pic of David Michelangelo or Birth of Venus, because of nudity?

Norms and laws have to be applied thinking about their Ratio, not just "because here it says so"

<comment><USER4> Actually Facebook's terms, at least for their Instagram property, allow for photographs of murals, paintings and ironically other photographs depicting nudity.

So I see the point you were going for but its almost like they made that policy out of precognition for your exact rebuttal years in the future

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So basically he's saying "I broke the terms of agreement and you removed my content. Now I'm sad." I don't know why some journalists seem to believe that terms and/or laws don't apply to them. I know there are a lot of gray areas, but you still don't have the right to do anything you please and yell at the world for not being handled differently from whatever law/agreement you know you are breaking.

<comment><USER6> Even though businesses are privately owned, when they provide public spaces, they do not absolutely get to make up their own rules on grounds of private proprietorship.

Suppose Facebook's agreement said "blacks are not allowed in this site and will be removed". Would that even be legal in the US?

<comment><USER7> > Suppose Facebook's agreement said "blacks are not allowed in this site and > will be removed". Would that even be legal in the US?

I would imagine it would be. I don't really frequent any racially-charged Web sites, but if KKK or Aryan Nations or you-name-it run a forum of some sort, those are likely the rules they go by.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Large Norwegian Newspaper (Aftenposten) changed its logo for today, and has this open letter, strong message. [http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kommentar/Dear-Mark-I- am-...](http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kommentar/Dear-Mark-I-am-writing- this-to-inform-you-that-I-shall-not-comply-with-your-requirement-to-remove- this-picture-604156b.html)

<comment><USER8> sorry for bad formatting, new to this one

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nudity == bad. Jihadists == Freedom of speech.

</comment><comment><USER10> FB "the world's most important medium." Ha! If this is true then I'm really out of touch.

<comment><USER11> At first I agreed, but then, can you think of a better (more important?) medium?

<comment><USER10> Important is subjective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In other news, Newspaper requests different rights for "editors and other Facebook users" as a way to stop 'limiting of freedoms'.

tl;dr Editor breaks TOS, uses open letter to misuse own editorial responsibility.

<comment><USER13> This photo shows the atrocity of using napalm. The suffering of this girl (any idea in how much pain she is?) is much more important than the hurt feelings of some people about 'showing too much skin'.

The OP makes the point that the TOS must be changed. This photo was chosen Press Photo of the Year and earned a Pulitzer Price. It also influenced public opinion worldwide.

Some things are bigger than hurt feelings.

<comment><USER14> Her name is Phan Thị Kim Phúc, and her Wikipedia article has a bit of information about her current health: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc)

I doubt Facebook removed the picture because of hurt feelings though. I'd wager it's more that they have a "nudity is not allowed" policy, and they apply that policy without thinking for even one second. In other words: Zero tolerance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't get it. Why does a Norwegian paper complain about an American company? Facebook isn't Altenposten's website, you post something on Facebook, you play by Facebook's rules. You don't agree, then don't post on Facebook and go run your own website / printed paper.

And if you feel that Facebook is too large and censoring things, go talk to your government. If you are a large enough paper in your country, you should have a say.

I think the biggest issue here is that there is no way to get into a reasonable discussion with Facebook that a picture should not be removed or pixelated. It's automated, and no Facebook representative will look at it.

It should be very easy for Facebook to include a picture like this in their whitelist (eg. all award winning photos or something).

<comment><USER16> This American company evades taxes from Norway (and all other countries they operate), so maybe they have even more reasons to complain than their American counter-part. Same problem is happening here in Brazil.</comment></comment>


Turning time into energy:free energy device to be shipped this quarter - <AUTHOR> http://www.irishtimes.com/business/fact-or-fiction-irish-firm-invents-everlasting-battery-1.2506832 <comment><AUTHOR> Can anyone explain to me the mindset that allows you to go so far as to burn through a ton of investors money and actually ship a "Free" energy device to the public? It is baffling to me that someone could continue to bluff all the way until the inevitable public humiliation. Still I'm going to enjoy watching it play out, provided they actually do ship these boxes and dont magically have a last minute hitch (even that would be interesting to hear what excuse could be made up).</comment>


This Video Is Our Scary Normal - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/3017108/you-need-to-see-this-17-minute-film-set-entirely-on-a-teens-computer-screen <comment><USER2> this is great!</comment>


Show HN: Hydra OMS – First open-source order management system - <AUTHOR> http://www.hydra-oms.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everybody!

Hydra OMS is an open source application for managing service/job orders and business processes. It is intended for use in companies and automates their complex and/or frequently changing business processes.

Nowadays companies often face hundreds or even thousands of service orders every month. These orders are usually executed by complex, ever changing business processes with a lot of people and applications involved. This may result in quality issues.

Hydra OMS allows companies to automate their order execution, build powerful business process models with ISO standardized BPMN 2.0 and provide employees with a user-friendly order execution wizard. And last but not least – customization: Hydra OMS can be easily integrated with third-party software.</comment>


A Twitter parody leads to expensive lessons in Peoria - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-peoria-aclu-twitter-edit-0908-20150904-story.html <comment><USER2> Unavailable due to paywall.

<comment><USER3> Google it to read it.</comment></comment>


Scrapping Contracts: a critique of the Go generics proposal - <AUTHOR> https://blog.merovius.de/2018/09/05/scrapping_contracts.html <comment><USER2> I think this proposal looks pretty good, but it does expose something odd about the core language. Given this example from the article:

        func Max(type T ordered) (a, b T) T {
          if a < b {
            return b
          }
          return a
        }

It would make me assume that if I were to write a function that looks like this, it would at least accept the same type of arguments:

        func AnotherFunction(a, b ordered) {
            ...
        }

As in, substituting 'T' with 'ordered'. Unfortunately, it would not. In this case, the arguments are interface objects, which are pointers under the hood. Calls to the function have to be adjusted to pass in pointers. I think Go would have been more consistent if instances of interface objects always had to be prefixed by * . Concretely, this would throw a compiler error:

        func ReadStuff(r io.Reader) {
            ...
        }

Instead, it should be written as follows:

        func ReadStuff(r *io.Reader) {
            ...
        }

As in, r is a pointer to an object that implements the io.Reader interface.

<comment><USER3> > It would make me assume that if I were to write a function that looks like > this, it would at least accept the same type of arguments:

        func AnotherFunction(a, b ordered) {
            ...
        }

Not really. If we consider `ordered` an interface, then `func(a, b ordered)` does not enforce typeof(a) == typeof(b), only that both types implement `ordered`.

<comment><USER2> Exactly, which is why I said: "it would at least accept"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is, in my opinion, the best critique of the Go generics proposal so far. There's more discussion on Reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/9d1zsz/scrapping_co...](https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/9d1zsz/scrapping_contracts/).

<comment><USER5> The Go community is against the proposed implementation and has provided a well thought out alternative. If the past is any indication, the community proposal will be rejected and we'll have the original proposal that no one is really happy with.

It's fun to dream though.

<comment><USER6> What? Several people expressed constructive critique. You extrapolate this _way_ too much in this comment. I, for one, am part of "Go community" and am certainly not against the proposal. More than that, I _love_ that people smarter than me are currently publicly discussing and exploring alternatives and disadvantages in a civil manner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I also felt uneasiness with the definition of contracts but couldn't put my finger on the reason. Merovious made now clear to me that the language to define contracts is the problem.

Nevertheless, I do think we need to keep contracts because they are a superset of interfaces. Interfaces specify only a collection of methods, and contracts specify a collection of methods and operations (e.g. ==). Remember that base types can also have methods. We may also want to restrict types to referenced, or unreferenced, because it determines if an assignment make a copy or not.

Contracts are types of generic parameters. I would find more natural to define these generic parameter types like this

        type foo generic { ... }

As suggested by Merovius, the content would be a list of method signatures, operations, interface names or predefined operation set names.

<comment><USER8> > methods _and operations_

Isn't a major part of the idea in the article that we can replace the "and operations" part with a system of pseudo-interfaces that encompass those basic operations?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To me, the most interesting part of this whole Go2 discussion is the amount of brainpower being expended on keeping the language on its current path of pragmatic minimalism and not careen off into type system land akin to contemporaries like Rust, C#, Scala and Swift, while at the same evolving and modernizing it. It's not easy.

Not that complex and rich type systems are a bad thing, but there's something to be said for Go's austerity. Having been a Delphi/ObjectPascal programmer for many years back in the 1990s, Go feels very familiar to me, with good approaches to many challenges. I do think Go's designers made some crucial errors that should have been obvious at the time, and that we are paying for them now. In attempting its special flavour of minimalism, they arguably didn't bother to learn enough from past language experiments. Of particular note, Modula-3 has a very pragmatic approach to generics [1], which later inspired similar approaches in Delphi/ObjectPascal/FreePascal. (I'm not saying Modula-3's design is right for Go, though.) If you want to look at extreme engineering pragmatism (as opposed to type-theoretical elegance you find on Idris, Agfa etc.), look at Ada, or even plain Pascal. Both have range types and enums and other things which grant the language first-class mechanisms for tightening a program's semantics, but they do so in the syntax and compiler, not through advanced type system shenanigans. (Oberon, which influenced Go in many ways, actually did away with enums in the name of simplification. Minimalism can go too far, too.) Ada, arguably the most engineering-oriented language ever conceived, also has tagged unions, although I don't think they were ever used for error returns, since Ada has exceptions.

I'm not at all worried that Go adopting generics will lead to type system madness, especially given how conservative the designs have been so far. I think the amount of discussion and lively idea brainstorming in the community right now is a very healthy sign. More than some other language communities, there have been times when it's seemed -- right or wrong, it's hard not to get this impression from the vantage point of an ordinary developer -- that the Go team has historically been somewhat distant, preferring to unleash finished implementations on the world instead of evolving their designs in collaboration with the community ( _cough_ vgo vs. Dep), and I think this is an opportunity to open up the process a bit. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm certainly very much enjoying all these articles being put out.

[1] [https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/hosking/m3/reference/generic...](https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/hosking/m3/reference/generics.html)

<comment><USER9> > _More than some other language communities, there have been times when it 's > seemed -- right or wrong, it's hard not to get this impression from the > vantage point of an ordinary developer -- that the Go team has historically > been somewhat distant, preferring to unleash finished implementations on the > world instead of evolving their designs in collaboration with the community > (cough vgo vs. Dep)_

I think one reason may be that "constrained minimalism" and "internet community" are two things that don't really play nice together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't mean this as a criticism, but it's amusing how the Go community is slowly inventing Swift.

\- "Protocols" that can be used as both constraints on generic parameters, and existential types

\- Operator requirements in protocols

\- Associated types

All of the above introduces a huge amount of complexity too, and I imagine trying to retrofit it onto an existing language that does not have generics is going to be an interesting challenge.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, Swift is on another level, and doesn't strive for Go's rather relentless minimalism. Go, even with these additions, would be a lot smaller than Swift, which was intentionally designed around rich, complex abstractions, including generics and compile-time type constraints, from the start.

Of course, Swift didn't exactly pioneer these concepts. Scala, C# and Haskell also provide compile-time type constraints that are heavily based on generics, and these languages also influenced Swift.

<comment><USER11> It's always been "curious" that Swift never credited Scala, I thought.

<comment><USER12> My impression when I first saw swift code was "wow, that looks a lot like scala".

<comment><USER13> Anecdotally as a mostly full time scala dev, swift has been the easiest "I'm bored this weekend I'll pick up a new language for side projects" I can remember.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> All these proposals are far too explicit and cause too much boilerplate code, someting that the Go team so far tried to avoid (or so it seems).

I'd prefer a macro-like approach to generics where generic parameters are unconstrained like interface{} until they are used inside the function with constrained operators/function calls, which define the limitations for the parameters. Just like a macro that expands to code that only works with particular types, it will simply generate an error when the compiler detects an incompatibility between the types used by the caller and the operations inside the function. This would be powerful enough and simple to understand.

<comment><USER15> > I'd prefer a macro-like approach to generics where generic parameters are > unconstrained like interface{} until they are used inside the function with > constrained operators/function calls, which define the limitations for the > parameters.

That sounds awfully like how C++ templates work, and I think that it's pretty much universally agreed that that approach is not ideal due to the potential for supremely terrible error messages (among other drawbacks, probably). Contracts allow for type checking at the call site, which is significantly more user-friendly.

<comment><USER14> Compiler errors and their quality are fundamentally an implementation issue. I'm talking about the design of the language and what the user has to deal with all the time, not just in the error case. Designing primarily for beautiful error messages is a flawed concept IMO.

<comment><USER15> > Compiler errors and their quality are fundamentally an implementation issue.

I don't really agree here; language design can place constraints on the quality of errors emitted by implementations. There's a reason Concepts are such a widely desired feature in C++, even though template errors now are vastly better than they were in the past --- there's only so much you can do with the language in its current state.

> I'm talking about the design of the language and what the user has to deal > with all the time, not just in the error case.

I'm inclined to say that fixing/avoiding type errors is likely to be far closer to what programmers have to deal with all the time than having to write contracts, especially for library types.

In addition, it's not just the error case that's involved here. If you're writing generic code with constraints on the involved type(s), those constraints are probably going to have to be documented somewhere anyways. Why not write them in your source code where the compiler can help?

> Designing primarily for beautiful error messages is a flawed concept IMO.

I'm not saying that the design has to be primarily for beautiful error messages; it's just that useful error messages are important and whatever design emerges should try to enable helpful error messages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'll admit that I don't have much experience with generics, but can't we get done what we're trying to get done just by letting builtin operators get overloaded, then making an interface for those functions and using the interface? From what I've seen, it appears the main point is to let various types that can all get "+" applied to them get handled with one function. But defining the interface is the contract and the interface is any type that fulfills it, so...? What am I missing?

<comment><USER17> I think the graph example of the article, instantiated using an adjacency matrix, shows nicely a need for generics that has nothing to do with operators.</comment></comment>


Facebook planned my birthday party, and I can't decide how to feel about it - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/19/11970818/facebook-birthday-party-suggestions <comment><USER2> scary and really awkward experience. Especially as it really creates the impression the birthday person would be behind this, because "why would facebook do that on its own".</comment>


3 Reasons Why Replacing Microsoft Excel Is Worth Money to a Boss - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/metabrown/2017/12/31/3-reasons-why-replacing-microsoft-excel-is-worth-money-to-a-boss/#66b5020a37a9 <comment><USER2> >Your boss can avoid that, by replacing Microsoft Excel addiction with more appropriate analytics tools and processes.

The problem is that excel is supremely flexible. You can do accounting, budgeting, inventory, reporting, forecasting, graphing, etc for a small to medium business from the same piece of software using basic formulas. I work at a small business and sometimes our specialized tools limit us in some of those areas, when you just want the ability to dump the raw data into excel (easily) and do a simple formula calculation.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most of the problems listed in the article are just side-effects of spreadsheets in general (e.g. have to make formulas, build the sheet, add notes, etc) and aren't just specific to Excel. The same also applies to Numbers, LibreOffice, and Google Sheets. In this regard, the author's point doesn't really stand.

Excel may be the most widely used spreadsheet software (going by estimation, don't quote me on this), but it is far from perfect. There are plenty of annoyances I've found while using Excel, and have actually enjoyed using Google Sheets a lot to remedy some of them. The problem I see is that people in business are ingrained with using Excel since it's what they have always used. Excel is to corporations what the Ford F-150 is to America. Part of this is thanks to .xls and .xlsx files. Unless there is fully-compatibility support to seamlessly open these files in other software, it's a huge pain in the ass to deal with inconsistencies and formatting from conversions (ex. transferring from Excel to Google Sheets or vica versa). There is no widely used open spreadsheet file standard (Yea, there's CSV/TSV, but how many business people or non-analysts save their spreadsheets as those filetypes when emailing them around), which really sucks when the potential for something better than Excel is apparent if it could actually reach critical mass.

</comment><comment><USER4> At my current workplace we have a few workbooks that need to be updated any time that our customer provides us with an update to them. Unfortunately they never tell us what changed so we have to go through and redo all the changes that we did previously and apply them to the new workbook. Then we have to test if we didn't mess something up in the migration and whatnot; all in all it takes upwards of a month between managerial overhead and the time it takes to actually figure out where something got messed up. And there's no good diff tool for excel documents which makes it incredibly frustrating to try and find what one cell might be wrong between a working document and an incorrect document. And then VBA for macros is basically impossible to understand because any googling for it returns results for every other version of VB with slight differences that don't work in Excel.

<comment><USER5> Here are some links that may help solve your problems.

Comparing spreadsheets is standard since Excel 2013.

[https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compare-two- version...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compare-two-versions-of- a-workbook-by-using-spreadsheet-compare-0e1627fd-ce14-4c33-9ab1-8ea82c6a5a7e)

Power Query may be of use to automate ETL type processes, which is standard since Excel 2016 and is a free add-on prior:

[https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to- mic...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-microsoft- power-query-for-excel-6e92e2f4-2079-4e1f-bad5-89f6269cd605)

<comment><USER4> Those would be great solutions but we're stuck on Excel 2007 and can't install any newer versions or basically any software because of IT reasons.

<comment><USER6> Office 2007 hasn't even been Extended Supported for two years now. That seems an egregious information security problem and your IT may need at least some modest sanity checks.

[https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/help/3198497/office-2007...](https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/help/3198497/office-2007-approaching-end-of-extended-support)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't normally use Excel, or any of the other Office tools, and I constantly argue my boss about the drawbacks I see with using them. The result is always the same: "It's what everybody knows how to use".

Then, what I hate the most, I have to sit while they struggle to position some object pixel perfectly in PowerPoint, or make the index numbers correct in any Word list, or have to explain why Excel show rounding errors, etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> Author should provide some alternatives..

<comment><USER9> And that is really what I was hoping for - maybe something that I'd not heard of or contemplated. Not even a suggestion.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What tools do you use to make programming/editing code on VMs easier? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Typically when I need to develop inside a VM I do my editing inside that VM as well. So my tools would be:

1\. Ample memory and power 2\. OpenBox (or equivalent lightweight DE) 3\. Emacs (or equivalent "light weight" editor/terminal

Also I've found that VMware fusion works much smoother for me than virtual box.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use Vagrant (with parallels provider) to run headless environments but the actual code I write in IDEA ultimate on the macOS host.

I'm not sure I'd want to rely on a vm for my editor.

</comment><comment><USER4> My Linux VMs are VMWare Fusion. I keep and edit code on my Mac (the host). The Linux VMs mount my code folder using NFS.

</comment><comment><USER5> emacs + tramp</comment>


Shared – 100G storage for free - <AUTHOR> https://shared.com/?ref=47818 What is Shared.com?
Shared is a new cloud storage service that helps people upload all their files quickly and efficiently from anywhere. The Best Things in Life are Shared
With Shared, you can upload any file and send a link to anyone -- there's no requirement for them to sign up and there's nothing to install. Want to send a PDF or need to backup all your digital music? No problem, with Shared, you can upload and keep your files private and share what matters. High Security
Shared is a cloud storage platform that connects you with your files, built on a robust system and high security data center. Our highest priority is keeping your privacy and files secure. More File Storage
Get started with 5GB of free storage. Need more? Upgrade at anytime. We've got you covered. Shared offers you multiple options so you won't run out of storage. On the Go
Access your files from any Internet connected smartphone or tablet. (Coming soon) Sign Up or Take a Tour to get started. About Shared Media
Based in San Francisco, Shared Media is a network of media hosting sites providing utility based services for data and content storage. <comment><USER2> So double the storage of Mega but hosted in the US and they don't publish anything about the so-called security.

The whois record points to Ivan Wong: [http://crunchbase.com/person/ivan- wong](http://crunchbase.com/person/ivan-wong). The address is the same as the one for his other companies.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Share what you want with whom you want. Your files are private and we > maintain the highest level of security for all your data.

Where can I learn more about this security?

</comment><comment><USER4> Works well, good deal, nice UI. As far as I can tell your files are -- by default -- exposed to the world if someone can guess the URL.

One annoyance is the url windoid that appears after each upload. If nothing else, it should just disappear when I drag more files into the window (the file drags are received, but the upload dialog won't appear until the dialog is dismissed and a new file dragged in).

</comment><comment><USER5> This is 2013, not 2003 anymore. Today throwing 100 GB of online storage at people won't cause "yay, I need to claim that and upload everything I have" but "who are these people who want to store 100 GB of my data" and then a dozen questions more about privacy and security. If I don't see any answers easily available, I don't care about your offer.

</comment><comment> UVB-76 Is this a file locker or cloud storage service?

The entirely web-based interface suggests the former, in which case the storage limit is curious. Other file locker services have allowed users to upload and share effectively unlimited amounts of files for years.

<comment><USER6> How does it enforce the 100G limit if it lets me start uploading without signing up? By IP address? Leaving a cookie?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of the things I like about Dropbox is that it manages resuming/restarting uploads for me without me having to think about whether I've restarted my computer / my web browser crashed.

In that case, downloading a client is an _advantage_.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it in America?

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately yeah, San Francisco

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Free plan has no direct download which is an old trick in the business.

</comment><comment><USER10> I bet that limit doesn't last for long</comment>


Erlang will replace Java in the next 2 years as the standard for Enterprise Applications - <AUTHOR> http://voodootikigod.wordpress.com/2008/09/10/pompous-statement/ <comment><USER3> No, it won't. OO has ruled the roost in the so-called Enterprise space for nigh-on 20 years now. Java hasn't (yet?) fully displaced C++ in 10 years despite, for this specific class of application, have several clear advantages. This is as much cultural as technological. Large corporations have a morbid (and self-fulfilling) paranoia about staff turnover and have adopted technologies such as OO because it is far easier to manage a hundred average coders each of whom has a clear boundary (the object) than it is to manage 10 rocket scientists. The power of the functional paradigm comes with a steep learning curve, there's no way around that.

<comment><USER4> The irony is that Erlang is so much easier than Java.

<comment><USER3> Shhh, don't tell anyone :-D

On a more serious note yes, but again that's a cultural thing. Languages like Erlang (and OCaml, and Haskell, and...), you spend more time thinking than typing. You don't (need to) write much code, and if you think of a better way you might completely overwrite yesterday's work. You might deliver a huge chunk of functionality in a couple of pages of code that took weeks of thought, but that looks like it was typed in a day (I have been in that situation). Functional languages don't fit big-company management comfortably. They don't look like "work" in the sense that most IT organizations are used to. Java will be with us for a long time.

<comment><USER5> That's nice, but how easy is it to understand those 2 pages of brilliance later and how brittle are they?

Remember - the author is the smartest person who will ever see a given piece of code. The reader, even if it's the same person, will be dumber.

Programming isn't literature or poetry. No one ever had to add a mail reader to"Ode to a Grecian Urn".

<comment><USER6> If cutting out boilerplate to sharpen focus on the actual code doesn't _help_ make it easier to understand, then something is seriously wrong.

Part of writing good code, whether two pages of brilliance or twenty of gradual brilliance, is conveying intent in the human-readable parts. The parser doesn't care if all the functions have names like doTheNextThing() or french_onion_soup, but it would be a slap in the face to any future maintainers.

Choosing informative names and separating a program along clear conceptual boundaries can be a greater aid to understanding than any syntactic redundancies. Well-placed comments help smooth things over, particularly notes on why a particular approach was chosen. The names themselves should be able to convey what is going on in most cases.

(For distilled wisdom along those lines, see _Thinking Forth_ by Leo Brodie, also online at <http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/>.)

<comment><USER3> I have that book, and I am a big fan of Forth.

It's not unusual now for some of my source files to be more comments than code, the comments explain my intent and the assumptions I have made.

I'm gonna call a function french_onion_soup tomorrow just for larks :-)

<comment><USER6> For leeks, you mean. :)

The biggest thing I learned from Forth is that if I'm about to add a comment inside a function because something needs clarification, I should probably try breaking it out and thinking up a descriptive name instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No it won't (this coming from someone who loves Erlang and has worked full- time with it for a year).

There has been way too much invested in both Java _and_ conventional OOP for them to be displaced that fast. 2 years may be a long time in startup world, but in the enterprise world it's nothing.

Ruby has been growing rapidly for the last 3 years, and it's still nowhere as popular as Java. And Ruby's marketing has been way better than Erlang's.

<comment><USER8> _2 years may be a long time in startup world_

It's actually not a long time in the startup world, either. The average life cycle in the valley for VC-backed startups from founding to exit is 7 years. There are always exceptions, of course. But two years isn't enough time, in general, for anything interesting to shake out--either in languages or in startup companies.

<comment><USER7> What I meant is that it's possible that Erlang will become a popular choice for startups in the next two years.

<comment><USER8> I doubt that, as well. Ruby _still_ isn't all that popular a choice for startups, and it's had some astoundingly good marketing. I'd say maybe 20% of the startups I know personally are using Ruby, with the rest divided amongst PHP, Python, Java, and Perl (not necessarily in that order, though PHP is definitely at the top of the list by a large margin). Since RoR started gaining traction about three years ago, and RoR is still not the leading platform, the notion that Erlang could even become a contender (much less the leader) in two years is more than a little ridiculous.

Not to mention the fact that there's only one language at this point that is _inevitably_ going to grow really rapidly in popularity (JavaScript). (Others will grow, but none so fast as JavaScript.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What a classic linkbait submission title.

<comment><USER10> Next week, I'll tell the world why "Lua will replace Erlang in the next 2 years as the standard for Enterprise Applications"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Java is still the standard language in the vast majority of CS programs. Lots of programmers entering the enterprise only know Java, and if they know more languages they definitely don't know Erlang.

Certainly demand for Erlang programmers will increase over time...

<comment><USER3> History shows that the languages taught in CS and the languages used in industry don't need to be related at all. That the same language is popular in both at the same time is unusual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> No.

Where are the plethora of libraries for Erlang that Java enjoy?

Java is great because you can stand of shoulders of people releasing brilliant libraries.

Who cares about Availability, Performance, Scalability ... if you can't ship?

<comment><USER13> This says so much about why the world of enterprise java is a complete pile of shit that I just don't know where to start...

<comment><USER12> You have to know how to navigate away from the many rocky shores littered with shit. I was embarassed to call myself a Java developer after going to J1 this year, so sad.

That being said, there are some amazing libraries out there.

Google Guice, Google Collections Framework, struts2, BDB JE to name a few. They help me ship.

Lots of great software if you poke around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I will replace Jesus in the next 2 years as the standard for Western deities.

</comment><comment><USER15> Enterprises move slowly. 2 years is no time in the enterprise world. How many Erlang programmers are there? I love learning new languages, but there are a lot of crusty programmers out there who refuse to update their skill set - <USER2> they're often entrenched in enterprise settings.

This next part will probably some change over time. Erlang is slower than Java - even with the HiPE JIT compiler. Erlang's performance is more akin to Python. Plus, as much as I protest, "enterprisey" people seem to have a love affair with static typing. They also have a love affair for nicely UML- diagrammed objects and Erlang is functional.

But the most important reason why this won't happen is that the majority of "enterprisey" systems I know of are a ton less reliable than consumer systems. "Enterprisey" has become the term I associate with needing to have a programmer on call for. This might sound stupid, but so many programmers I know worry about job security - mostly because they won't upgrade their skill set. Something that obsoletes the need for them to babysit applications eats at that security.

Erlang will get (more) popular. Lots love the functional paradigm. It's really well implemented, reliable, etc. It just won't displace Java quickly, if ever.

</comment><comment><USER16> The 2 year aspect of the argument is a bit absurd. These changes just do not happen that fast, especially with sqillions of entrenched java developers in the enterprise.

He also argues that Erlang has "already penetrated the enterprise." Might seem that way if you work at Ericsson, but otherwise I can't imagine making this statement.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is not going to happen in 2 years, inertia is too high. Imagine all those projects that have just started now that aren't even out of analysis yet?

</comment><comment><USER18> If there were a public market for predictions, I'd short-sell this one.

Not saying it couldn't happen, but the odds are highly against it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Scala is more likely perhaps? Since it builds on the JAVA platform but is a much more flexible language(functional/OO hybrid) and offers several ways of doing concurrency(including Erlang-ish message-passing/Acor model).

Not sure how limited the concurrency model of Scala is by the underlying architecture though.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wow do I wish betting markets had that title as a wager.

</comment><comment><USER21> COBOL. That is all.

</comment><comment><USER22> "Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt."</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best free email services, what do you use? - <AUTHOR>

I have a gmail account, but need to get a new address. I have literally $0.00 dollars, so unfortunately, paying is not an option right now. What free email services do you use. <comment><USER2> What kind of email account do you need ?

> For disposable addresses you have mailinator.com

> For normal ids, there are quite a lot from mail.com .. or you could go to > yahoo or outlook ...

> Your ISP must have provided you an id to you too.

All of them work.

<comment><AUTHOR> I need a general purpose email. I am about to sign up an IRC nick. Not sure if I actually have to retain the address so I am hesitant to use guerilla mail etc?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> cock.li

I'm immature and it's fun to give out the email over the phone sometimes.</comment>


Ask HN: Affordable dev server solution - <AUTHOR> I need to hire a linux dev server so that I have a consistent setup although I might need to use multiple machines for my personal project - I know there is plenty cloud solution like Digital Ocean but I am concern about whether their spec is being too low - it should really faster than my Macbook. is there any affordable but efficient solution out there? thanks <comment><USER2> I assume you've looked at Amazon EC2? They offer VMs at a wide variety of price/performance points.

There are cheaper options, but they all involve a lot more work, IMO (especially if you may need to deploy and remove servers regularly, as it sounds like you might).

Edit: they have a free tier, which may be enough to get you started.

<comment><AUTHOR> ideally I want to keep it running forever - so it need to be cheap enough

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The "cloud" ones are very expensive, some cheaper alternatives are like hetzner.de ovh.com online.net soyoustart.com but they may not come with the same level of support/uptime.

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't overlook DigitalOcean too soon. They charge by the hour, so you can snapshot and destroy your server when you're not using it.

<comment><AUTHOR> this is a good point, although does not provide large hard drive with cheaper price - I might need to mix it with other solution.</comment></comment>