Upgrade drags Stealth Bomber IT systems into the 90s - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/11/stealth_bomber_upgrades/

<comment><USER3> This kind of technological inertia is not caused by actual risk and reliability issues as much as fear of public failure, scandal and lawsuits. You can see it in the entire aerospace industry. This is the reason the Cessna 172 is still one of the most widely used general-aviation aircraft used today, powered by 1960s-era Lycoming or Continental engines. There is a huge opportunity here, but every major manufacturer is afraid to make the leap. And given the current legal climate in the US, they can hardly be blamed - <USER2> instance, see <http://www.aviation-law-news.com/html/fatal-lawsuit.html> or [http://miami.injuryboard.com/mass-transit- accidents/aviation...](http://miami.injuryboard.com/mass-transit- accidents/aviation-lawsuit-settles-for-11-million-to- date.aspx?googleid=218674). These cases would never get this big if it was simply a matter of a car accident, but imagine how much greater the wolves would howl if the airplane involved used an "unproven airframe design" or "a novel type of engine".

In many ways the quasi-governmental airframe companies such as Boeing and Lockheed/Northrop are actually better, because they allow themselves to be closer to the theoretical bleeding edge. Clumsily though they may do it.

An accident is much easier to defend if everything seems to be in order. Just like with the leadership of technology companies.</comment>


Show HN: Depot - <AUTHOR> https://www.depothq.com

<comment><USER3> Nice site, but I'm always puzzled by this idea that a business can be managed entirely with a cookie-cutter product. Surely if your business _can_ run on something like that, it has zero competitive advantage, right?

In practice, I find that supporting all the edge cases inherent in my business made it very worthwhile to build my own such tool. But then, I guess there are many other entrepreneurs out there who don't have the tech skills to roll their own version of this... this is probably for them rather than for me, and it certainly beats spreadsheets hands down.

<comment><USER4> You are running a business and you have the time to create your own version of this app?

That's excellent. For me however, there is hardly time to comment on Hacker News :), let alone code my own CRM when I can get one for $30/month/user (at least for now).

Cost/Benefit I guess. Its not worth my time to code this up myself, but in your business, It might be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This has nothing to do with the actual product, which may be great, but... I am _so_ ready for the trend of hyper-animated websites to start dying down.

I scrolled through the whole website, and while it looked great, by the time I got to the end I still had no idea what the product actually offered because my eyes were too busy watching all the little animations to pay attention to the content.

<comment><USER6> Also that yellow hurts.

<comment><USER7> that yellow just burned a hole in the back of my eyes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't agree with the comments that the site looks bad. For one, the font is amazing! The layout is extremely clear and functional, a lot of carefully crafted details make this site very polished. Thumbs up!

<comment><USER9> Totally agree. Of course it has the standard trendy animations-as-you-scroll, but they aren't actively annoying, and once you get past the landing page everything is extremely clearly presented. I think this product looks terrific.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love your pricing. Or what I initially thought it was

One plan every feature - (correctly) gives me the impression that if I pay $30/month, I'll get everything your app has to offer.

Extend your reach for less(or Need Less, Pay Less) - I initially thought that this was a feature-limited lower priced tier of your app (for small startups or freelancers for example)

This made it seem as though your "One Plan" was cleverly pushing the plan you want most people to join, whilst still making lesser plans available for those who cant afford the "one plan".

This is a great because it makes me feel comfortable paying for the "one plan" (the most expensive plan) without feeling as if I'm paying too much or missing out on any key features (by choosing the lower plan). I feel you are charging me fairly for what I'll use.

And because you have your needs-based up-sells, you left room to increase revenue from heavy users.

This is excellent and I will definitely split-test this in my business against the traditional pricing grid.

</comment><comment><USER10> slightly off-topic but is there a term for the sort of syncing between the vertical scrolling and the animations? Is there some canonical thing everyone is using to implement this?

Really like the art style, dunno how much bigger companies will want to pay their bills (i.e. invoices you send) via Paypal though, 2.x% of 5 digits is a decent amount of cash

<comment><AUTHOR> We call it parallax scrolling, but I'm not sure thats the correct industry term.

Anyway we used a version of Skrollr for the animations: [https://github.com/Prinzhorn/skrollr](https://github.com/Prinzhorn/skrollr)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The site looks great. Not sure how it performs against your target audience, but it _looks_ great. A couple of nitpicks though -

1\. "Sign up for free 30..." button at the bottom of the home page should really be white/on/blue to match "Try depot for free" button styling in the main section.

2\. "Keep up to date" is too dark and doesn't look like a hint, more like a message. Also "Submit" button is 4-5 px taller than the input field (Firefox), so altogether it looks sloppy. And it should too be white-on-blue.

PS. Tungsten doesn't look all that great on Windows and even on Mac it has this seriously wobbly baseline. Just look at the "Ingeniously simple ..." at the top of the page and focus on the bottom of it. It works against the look and feel that you are after.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does this support an ability to set up project templates or do any kind of business process/workflow management?

I have a specific business proces/structure that I need projects to run through with various roles intersecting at various stages. Each delegate needs to know what their role is and when they need to perform it.

Can this handle something like that?

Also do you have any integrations available for Zapier? (Or Xero?) -- I'd like to send the invoices to Xero, but also, i'd like to integrate with other apps so i can send data back and forth.

If anyone from depothq.com is reading this; I'd love some more info and if possible even a skype call.

Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey - do you want to drop me an email ryan at depothq dot com with your use case and we'll see if the product fits your needs?

<comment><USER12> sent

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> FYI, the styling of the Features page (and possibly others) has some problems in Firefox, at least for me. While the inspector claims the font is Tungsten 4r, what I'm seeing actually looks a lot like Times New Roman. Looks like that difference is causing a bunch of headings to be pushed under the icons and such things.

Edit: Hmm, restarting with add-ons disabled fixed it, so presumably the problem is on my end. Will see if I can track down the culprit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback - what version/platform of Firefox are you using?

<comment><USER13> Firefox 30.0 on Windows 7. I found the culprit though - it's HTTPS Everywhere. Not sure why since your site and font files appear to use SSL either way, but I've confirmed that iff I disable HTTPS Everywhere the fonts work properly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Love the idea of centralizing the workflow of a project from lead to invoice in one tool. Don't like design for this use case, though - way too fancy and distracting.

</comment><comment><USER15> Isn't it strange that for common data structures these companies still need a custom application like Depot? In the past people could survive with a spreadsheet, why isn't a spreadsheet-like tool that support small processing/linkage of data and a small editable manner of presenting that data? Wouldn't that be a universal solution, like the spreadsheet?

</comment><comment><USER16> Is it just me, or is the password field (on the signup form) just a regular text field, rather than type='password'?

<comment><USER17> Conform from my side, it is text field. Not sure how they forgot to use password type...

<comment><AUTHOR> It was intentional - to avoid having to use a confirm...

<comment><USER18> I gotta be honest, if I were the target audience, this would be a turn off for me. A confirmation re-type is no big deal and is kind of expected, as it's the norm. Also it's just not secure. I don't know about you, but I often have to type in my password in front of people. Or during presentations. Maybe you'll say the login field using type=password (I admit I didn't look), but I'd say that it is still concerning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Generally speaking I think you did a great job with the design. My feedback would be that it is difficult to tell the buttons apart from the form fields (specifically in the footer). The gray form field for the email address is basically the same design format as the buttons.

</comment><comment><USER20> The "Learn More" section is ... well not a place where I learned more.

A tour of some sort would be great for a brief explanation of the product.

Fabulous webdesign, though, and bonus points for SSL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback - we'll definitely follow up on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> You should consider self-hosting your webfonts - [http://i.imgur.com/R6TsOW4.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/R6TsOW4.jpg)

<comment><USER11> I don't know why you are in gray, but that's a valid point. I too had to switch to IE to get fonts.net to release the font files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> My question mark is:

Would you outsource all this sensitive data about your business like this? (Personally, I'd be too scared to do it.)

</comment><comment><USER23> The screenshots are low res, need to really stress to understand each, maybe you could just post magnified shots.

</comment><comment><USER24> Beautiful mobile site. The typesetting, colors, the way everything pops - <USER2> gorgeous.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is the most sexy web app I've seen this year; I LOVE that design!

</comment><comment><USER26> fonts are off on firefox/linux (debian) [http://i.imgur.com/rvTUKNE.png](http://i.imgur.com/rvTUKNE.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback - what version of Firefox so we can look into it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Very cool site!</comment>


Compiling a Subset of APL into a Typed Intermediate Language (2014) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://hiperfit.dk/pdf/array14_final.pdf <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the APL interpreter in Julia ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVv1GipR5yU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVv1GipR5yU)). The APL code gets translated to Julia data structures, which is then mapped to Julia code, which is then compiled to machine code via Julia's JIT. I thought it was a pretty neat way to run APL.</comment>


Bartholomew L. Bartholomew - <AUTHOR> https://masqueandspectacle.com/2017/03/01/bartholomew-l-bartholomew-d-a-hosek/ <comment><USER2> I like how you're never certain if Bartholomew is in the right for rebelling against the arbitrariness of Agile practices and an overbearing paranoid boss, or if the narrating manager is right that B.L.B. is a shirk just pretending to do work and disrupting the environment with laxness and insubordination. And both the HR rep and the VP are either responding appropriately or with bureaucratic indifference.

The ambiguity of it all is what really makes the story sound true to life.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hated bartleby the scrivener in high school. I thought it was a boring story about a boring guy who didn't do anything. Once I'd been working for several years I re-read it again and found it to be really funny and interesting. Kinda countercultural

<comment><USER2> Bartleby, like Walden or even modern office sitcoms, only sounds true to life and appealing once you've found yourself in that position. I still don't really understand the ending of the original story, though. Melville reveals a character point that seems out of nowhere. Is handling dead letters for the post office really that soul-crushing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Background: [http://www.bartleby.com/129/](http://www.bartleby.com/129/) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartleby,_the_Scrivener](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartleby,_the_Scrivener)

This rewrite differs considerably from the original. Bartholomew is sinister and parasitic in a way that Bartleby was not. Less absurdist Kafka than Orwellian nightmare. Both versions have virtues.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's an interesting modernization of the classic ... overall I liked it!

But ...

The grey text on the black background is horrible for those of us with "older eyes". It needs more contrast and/or a heavier font. It's especially bad that, when scrolling, the font's contrast dims even more (making it very difficult to see where I am).

<comment><USER6> _The grey text on the black background is horrible for those of us with "older eyes"._

I agree. But I also feel that this battle has been lost a long time ago. So when I read the article in Firefox and hated the background, I just did View -> Page Style -> No Style.

In the same vein, I have min font size 18 and I also have Lucida Grande set as my font, and don't allow pages to choose their own. I also have JavaScript turned off by default.

If I feel I'm missing something on a particular page or site I'll view it in Safari or Chrome. But 99% of the time I don't need to do that.

When these hipster web designers are sixty years old, they will say "WTF was I thinking when I did that???" But until then, it's the arrogance of youth. Absolutely nothing someone older says to them will make any of them care about the accessibility features of their websites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've witnessed this scenario before, almost verbatim.

Clearly the manager was wrong, but so was the employee. The issue here is that the employee is doing everything "right" from their perspective, without understanding the negative impact it has on the rest of the team. I'll spare my theories on how to "resolve" the situation, but suffice it to say, toxic employees can destroy companies; especially startups.

</comment><comment><USER8> The author of the story should have been terminated on the spot. "I pulled the headphones from Bartholomew's head, cracking the plastic in the process" Really, as a coworker I would have stoop up for Bartholomew.

<comment><USER9> _Narrator_ , not author

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The author should be proud of his research for this writing. Plausible enough for HN readers mistaking it for a real story.

</comment><comment><USER11> The narrator fails as a manager. When he took of B.L.B headset he should have been ready to fire him. He should have also immediately offered to replace the headphones. He should also be capable to bring his authority to HR and his own boss. If he can make decision but is unable to execute on them he is an employee not a manager.

</comment><comment><USER12> I can see myself enjoying reading this when I'm older and no longer working in professional software dev. But right now it just left me anxious and questioning why I work in this industry.

</comment><comment><USER13> Maybe if I committed myself and more time to analyzing this story I would understand its significance. But I'd rather not.

<comment><USER14> I feel similar. At best I can conclude that both the narrator and Bartholomew failed at their jobs, but honestly for the most part the story has an 'uncanny valley' vibe. It feels true enough to read the whole thing and identify with some of it, but somehow I've never quite encountered any situation quite like it - and I've experienced quite a variety of corporate/IT environments.

Actually, the story comes across as the kind of 'incomplete, subjective account' I'd hear from both sides in the past, somehow mashed together into one. Maybe that's what makes it interesting?

<comment><USER15> Taking the manager's side for a moment, it echoes a somewhat-uncommon-but- important problem which we have in our industry: when management makes risk decisions for engineers, rather than engineers making those decisions for themselves. This gets into a mess of definition, but we can define that a superior in the organization who is fully informed about the costs and benefits and trade-offs and options, understanding and weighing it all, is still doing "engineering" and the problem is precisely that some way up the organizational hierarchy this capability breaks and we transition from "engineering" to "management". And the problem is precisely that at that level, administration has to transition from top-down authoritarian to bottom- up support, from a general directing their soldiers to the janitor slopping up their messes. Of course there is still some role for long-term vision, but the point is that this role does not encompass specific decisions that bear business risks, because these roles can't, because these roles are by definition not able to be completely informed about those risks.

In this case, we see a supervisor who is still close enough to the code to have the engineer's hat on, but whenever they interact with their own superiors they get the same refrain of "I don't understand this" \-- so those people are managers. The problem is that the risk decision of keeping or firing the troublesome team member (as well as other decisions like whether the team's methodology should be agile or not etc.) has been usurped by management.

Normally this decision-making takes a more-concrete form like the 90s-era "And the code absolutely must be written in Java" ... "do you know what Java is?" ... "Yes, it is the software that enterprise businesses like ours use! We must use it!" ... "But this will be faster and more maintainable in another language" ... "Don't care, we need Java", or whatever. In this case I find it interesting that the issue exists one level up in hierarchy, sort of the same problem at a higher abstraction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _Bartholomew, the Programmer_

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't get it. Is the story real or fiction? Why didn't the manager ask Bart why he did not want to work? Why did he prefer staring at his desktop background over working?

<comment><USER18> It's a modern version of Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener". You should read the original, it's very good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Such an interesting read.

Is there any similar sort of stories(both fiction and non fiction). Esp related to dealing with bad hiring, toxic employees and frustrated managers.

<comment><USER20> One of my favorites is the portrayal of N.I.C.E. director John Wither in "That Hideous Strength" by C. S. Lewis. (especially Chapter 3, "Belbury and St. Anne's-on-the-Hill")

[http://fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20141232](http://fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20141232)

<comment><USER20> (didn't want to give too much away, but when you've read the story and understand N.I.C.E. a bit more, you'll see how incredibly creepy Wither's nonchalance is. Should be a primer for working anywhere known for a culture of fear.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "and I'd like you to view this as a lateral move, not as a demotion, your salary will remain the same"

Run Forrest, Run!</comment>


What wireframe tool do you use? - <AUTHOR>

I would be interested in knowing what wireframe tool do you use to make your UI/s.<p>Please give a link where possible and state if its free or paid? <comment><USER2> Balsamiq fits well to most iterative needs atleast in my experience.

I am talking exercises where you are tweaking, changing an already sketched experience or work flow.

When it comes to wireframing for an experience from scratch, my first choice remains pen & paper, simply because I know that tool for 20+ years now and it gets my creative juices flowing :)

After the basic sketches are done and critiqued by every "design conscious" person (read everyone in your organization), its usually time to migrate that work to Balsamiq for future iterations.

</comment><comment><USER3> The ones I've used - Pencil - Free - [http://pencil.evolus.vn/](http://pencil.evolus.vn/) Balsamiq - Paid - [http://balsamiq.com/](http://balsamiq.com/)

<comment><USER4> Yup. I use Balsamiq too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Balsamiq Mockups - the desktop version not the webapp.

The webapp was pretty nice, but the desktop version is __great __.

</comment><comment><USER6> Axure [[http://axure.com](http://axure.com)]</comment>


Philosophy Is Not a Science - <AUTHOR> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/philosophy-is-not-a-science/?hp <comment><USER2> If it were up to me, I'd require every student to have taken and mastered an Introduction to Logic course.

If only at least so that when I pointed out a particular logical fallacy or faulty reasoning someone committed, they'd know what I was talking about. It's no good to know when someone is full of BS if they don't understand it why. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> For those wishing to find a more direct picture of what philosophy can offer to scientists, I'd suggest looking into the work of individuals such as William of Ockham, David Hume, and Carl Popper.

<comment><USER4> I'd add Kuhn to that list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> pg had some interesting commentary on this a few years ago <http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html></comment>


The $10,000 Creationism Bet - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/creationism-v-the-bible-bet-2013-3

<comment><USER2> Court costs will be paid by the prevailing party??</comment>


Statistical shortcomings in standard math libraries (and how to fix them) - <AUTHOR> http://www.evanmiller.org/statistical-shortcomings-in-standard-math-libraries.html#footnotes <comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, it looks like the Cephes library of mathematical functions linked from this article is released with a poorly specified license, and contains code that is copyrighted by multiple organizations: [http://www.netlib.org/cephes/readme](http://www.netlib.org/cephes/readme)

<comment><USER2> [ _Edit: I overlooked the fact that, being free under GPL, the GSL implementations do not suit the author 's intent. (See /jwmerrill's comment below). Leaving the comment anyway just for reference, but my original point is moot._]

This. The author should have at least mentioned the ubiquituous and reasonably well-maintained GNU Scientific Library (GSL) [1], which already implements all the functions listed in the article [2,3,4,5], among many, many other things [6].

[1] [http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/](http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/)

[2] [http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/html_node/Incomplete-...](http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/html_node/Incomplete- Gamma-Functions.html#Incomplete-Gamma-Functions)

[3] [http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/html_node/Incomplete-...](http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/html_node/Incomplete- Beta-Function.html#Incomplete-Beta-Function)

[4] [http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/html_node/The- Gaussia...](http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/html_node/The-Gaussian- Distribution.html#The-Gaussian-Distribution)

[5] [http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/html_node/Bessel- Func...](http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/html_node/Bessel- Functions.html#Bessel-Functions)

[6] [http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/html_node/](http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/html_node/)

<comment><AUTHOR> The gsl is a great resource, but I don't think it suits the author's purpose. He is talking about adding new functions to the C standard library, for anyone to use in commercial or non-commercial software. It isn't practical to stick GPL code into C standard libraries that are meant to be used broadly in commercial as well as free software.

<comment><USER2> You are absolutely right. Now I see why the author didn't mention it. That was a knee-jerk reaction on my part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The meat isn't in the footnotes, so if a mod could update the link it would be nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We are still using distributions in FORTRAN written decades ago to generate random numbers in a variety of distributions. Having support for the inverse standard normal CDF would be incredibly helpful, especially when I had to go back in and add support for correlated uniformly distributed variates.

</comment><comment><USER5> I see that the author of TFA wants this stuff put in the various standard libraries, and I agree that that would be good. But in the meantime, at least there are a variety of libraries one can use for accessing statistical functions. In Java-land there is Commons Math[1] which provides a number of statistical functions (in addition to other numerical/maths functions).

Things like Quantlib and jQuantlib also provide a lot of mathematical/numerical algorithms. Yeah, it's a drag having to pull in another library, but at least these things exist. :-)

[1]: [http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons- math/index.html](http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-math/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> I wouldn't have guessed these functions were so popular. I think those people who need them, need them often, but they are very few, so standards committees just ignore their needs.

If I have time this summer, I'll implement the Gamma and Beta functions, and their inverses, with a permissive license.

</comment><comment><USER7> The problem with this is that most programmers don't need statistics on a regular enough basis. That's how things get into standard libraries: people need these things so regularly that there's no point in reimplementing them forever.

You really think we need stats functions in libc more than we need, say, properly written accelerated vector and matrix functions? Which do you think comes up more regularly in practice?

You're better off reimplementing these handful of functions in a BSD-licensed copy-lib and forgetting about it. None of these are particularly tricky to implement.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The problem with this is that most programmers don't need statistics on a > regular enough basis.

Empirically, many language environments (think, e.g. scripting languages) don't have really easy access to all of these functions, but do have easy access to most of the rest of libm. The author is saying that if these were part of libm, then language implementers would include them in their respective standard libraries, and then people that care about stats (and many of us should care about stats!) could write good stats software in general purpose languages that we might have chosen for some independent reason.

> You really think we need stats functions in libc more than we need, say, > properly written accelerated vector and matrix functions?

Can't we have both?

<comment><USER8> The (dense) vector and matrix functions have lived in Lapack and BLAS for 40 years, longer than there has been a libc. Every serious language has a standard interface for them, and the issues discussed in the article haven't caused problems for decades.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Web Timer, a Chrome extension to keep track of how you use the Web - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ggnjbdfgigejghknieofeahaknkjafim

<comment><USER2> Thank you very much! I love the fact that the code is on GitHub. Do you plan adding features or should I make a fork for things like:

# hours browsed per day history

Anyway, thanks again!

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem. I'm currently busy with another project, but if you do add additional functionality, submit a pull request! I'd love to see what people come up with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great Idea! So how does it count time? time spent on a tab? What if you have multiple windows open?

In any case, I expect more threads tomorrow with optimal web time management strategies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It counts time by looking at the URL on the active tab every three seconds. Even if you have multiple windows open, it only counts time for the active tab. And if there is no active tab (i.e. Chrome does not have focus), then it doesn't count time at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome work, congratulations! I'll definitely going to test this out. :)

After I try it for a week I'll make a fork on GitHub and try to help improve it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great! Looking forward to seeing your improvements!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Source code: <https://github.com/dskang/webtimer>

</comment><comment><USER5> You should consider adding badges. For example: wasted 4+ hours on 9gag/facebook in one day.

<comment><USER6> You can also add a way to share these badges with your buddies across Facebook, Twitter etc. It would be cool.</comment></comment>


I Was an Expat Freelancer. Lessons Learned the Hard Way - <AUTHOR> http://www.starrhorne.com/2012/03/05/i-was-an-expat-freelancer-lessons-learned-the-hard-way.html

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the write-up! I am a junior in college who is very interested in that sort of lifestyle when I graduate and finish off my student loans. I'd be happy as a clam if I could find a job or a number of freelance projects that'd allow me to have a decent standard of living abroad while seeing different parts of the world. I have a few questions if you would be so kind to consider.

Are you considering trips anywhere else? How is your Spanish after spending a year in Mexico? What was your relative standard of living like when making money from these projects? Did you go into it with a reasonable "war chest" of savings to live off of while acclimating to the environment? Was it ever a deterrent to potential hirers that you were abroad? What was the coolest part of your experience?

I might have a couple more depending on your answers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm glad you found the write-up helpful. Feel free to email me if you have any questions. (my email address is in my blog header).

At the moment I'm not planning any more trips. I took a job with a startup in Seattle, and so I'll be here for a few more years. After that, who knows :)

You don't need much of a war chest if you go to the right places & have a decent amount of work. In guadalajara (a big city), $1k / month will get you full-time spanish lessons plus room and board. Hostels are about $12/night if you want to go that route.

My standard of living was very good. I had a 2 bedroom house in the trendy part of the city. Ate out whenever I wanted. etc. I imagine I was spending 20k a year (not including state-side expenses such as student loans).

My spanish is pretty good. You learn survival spanish pretty quickly. After a year I'm able to hold conversations, understand song lyrics, etc...more or less :)

I don't think I lost any clients from being in mexico. It was win-win. They got a good developer at a slight discount. I got my mobility. Actually, about 1/2 of my existing clients never knew I was in mexico. I didn't hide it from them, but it never came up.

Coolest part: making a lot of friends from around the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I tried something similar this past summer while traveling through Europe/Turkey and found that the hardest part freelancing (beyond the difference in time zones) was finding stable wifi in order to transfer client files. Even in a place like London I found myself in train station Starbucks uploading files.

I imagine if you stayed in a country for a while it'd be easier to get mobile broadband but hopping around a continent makes it pretty difficult since you can't (in my experience) get sim cards with data plans and use them in several countries.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, I don't have much experience with working while traveling through lots of countries. I can imagine that does make it harder. Though, to be honest I did do most of my work from a Starbucks. Even went on a date with one of the baristas. :)</comment></comment>


Debugging a failing test case caused by query running "too fast" - <AUTHOR> https://databricks.com/blog/2017/02/16/processing-trillion-rows-per-second-single-machine-can-nested-loop-joins-fast.html <comment><USER2> Vaguely reminds me of a bug I thought I had in a Python sorting routine (sorting a set of database entries by date/time) - all of the tests passed until I removed some debug print statements, after which it ostensibly stopped sorting and just returned the original order.

I eventually realised that the routine was fine, but my test data was being generated quickly enough that time.time() (IIRC) returned identical values for all of the dummy records (with the print statements, there was just enough of a delay for there to be a few milliseconds between each one).

</comment><comment><USER3> Very nice!

I've been consistently impressed with Databricks' approachable blog. This particular post spawned a nice discussion around database design with my son, who has taken a lot of recent interest in all things technological. Keep up the good work.

</comment><comment> nevi-me Interesting read! I have a service that was in SAS, and we've been translating it to run in Spark, but one of the killer issues that we identified was latency, without understanding what held up the computation, the would be increasing pauses of a few seconds, sometimes reaching nearly a minute, in execution. This is on a single machine, and at that time we wouldn't notice any resource utilisation. No disk writes, CPU nearly at 0.00, etc.

I keep coming back with every new Spark version to see if the problem has gone away, (wrote it at 2.0.0, so I mean every minor and patch). I looked up what I could online about optimisation in Spark, and applied that.

The business people got tired of us wasting time trying to optimise, and forced us down the lines of SAP HANA and other proprietary marketing hoohah because we need a product that's real-time.

I hope the upcoming version of Spark at least helps reduce latency, perhaps through improvements in the whole-stage code-gen.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are some insane performance. I thought memory bandwidth was a limitation, to move 2~4TB data through memory. Then saw it was a cross join of 1M numbers X 1M numbers. 1 million of 4-byte int is just 4MB, which can fit comfortably in the L1/L2/L3 caches. And the output of the 1M x 1M cross join is thrown away; just a counter is incremented. So no 1T results were pushed through the memory.

A cross join is just two nested loops iterating over one array over another. With 40 cores, each handles 25 billions iterations of the 1 trillion. Assuming each iteration takes 10 CPU cycles, a 6GHZ core can handle 600M iterations/second. 25B / 600M = 41 seconds to run the whole thing.

Yes, 1 second is too fast.

Awesome that they figured it out it's the JVM optimized out the no-side effect computation.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. Most of the traditional RDBMS implementations have some kind of delay functionality. SLEEP is in mysql, postgres has pg_sleep, MSSQL has WAITFOR, and so on. I guess Spark doesn't have one.

These are also handy to test for SQL injection issues without screwing anything up.

<comment><USER6> > These are also handy to test for SQL injection issues without screwing > anything up.

They're also handy to _exploit_ SQL injection issues, in cases where you can't see the output of the query, but can measure how long it takes to execute :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Awesome seeing Ala and Bogdan already producing awesome stuff at Databricks.</comment>


Circular Shock Acoustic Waves in Ionosphere Triggered by Launch of Formosat‐5 - <AUTHOR> https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/2017SW001738 <comment><USER2> I'm taking the liberty of reworking their "plain language summary." I aimed for maintaining accuracy with relaxed precision, but please correct me if I've lost too much of either in the process.

I corrected a specific bit of imprecision in language in the source's plaintext summary not clearly distinguishing between vertical/y v. vertical/z, something the technical abstract clarified by stating "vertical altitude."

\---

In _plainest_ language, the rocket was lobbed up, not hurled forward, and this resulted in a shock wave that was followed some interesting reactions in the ionosphere between the rocket exhaust plume and the plasma in the ionosphere, all of which need further study because of potential risks to things like how accurate your GPS might be in the area around the "hole" caused by these reactions.

\---

Plain(er) Language Summary

On 24 August 2017, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, carrying Taiwan's FORMOSAT‐5 Earth observation satellite into orbit. The lightly weighted solo payload lets the rocket fly a path higher than the bare minimum to insert the payload directly where it needs to operate (the mission altitude), at 720 km. This unique nearly vertical path away from the ground is different from the usual satellite launches where rockets fly over horizontal paths more closely to the ground and insert satellites at 200 km above Earth and rely on orbit maneuvers to reach mission altitudes. Because of this lofty (more vertical) launch path, the rocket launch generated a gigantic circular shock wave in the ionosphere covering a wide area four times greater than California. It is followed by an ionospheric hole (plasma depletions) due to rapid chemical reactions of rocket exhaust plumes and ionospheric plasma. Large spatial gradients caused by these reactions and the resulting hole could lead to ~1 m range errors into GPS navigation and positioning system. Understanding how the rocket launches affect our upper atmosphere and space environment is important as these human- caused space weather events are expected to increase at an enormous rate in the near future.

<comment><USER3> Is '~1 m' meters or miles?

<comment><USER4> Where have you ever seen 'm' used for miles? Wherever that is, go there and scribble it out! Also tell off the person who wrote it.

<comment><USER5> It's used that way on highway signs in England, where it's _very_ confusing.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure it's _very_ confusing. Context suggests that you're not going to be told how many metres you are away from London.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Even plainer language:

Rocket exhaust can have impact with atmosphere, we need to study it more on short and long term effects.

<comment><USER8> The ionosphere is not the same thing as the atmosphere. The ionosphere is a shell of super hot gas outside of the atmosphere.

<comment><USER9> The ionosphere is not outside the atmosphere, it's part of the atmosphere.

The atmosphere consists of many layers. From the ground up, these are the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere.

You may be thinking of the thermosphere, which is indeed very hot (thus the name), albeit with such low density that it wouldn't transfer much heat to your spacesuit or spacecraft. But the thermosphere is part of the atmosphere too.

[https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/thermosphere/en/](https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/thermosphere/en/)

The ISS and other low earth orbit satellites are orbiting inside the thermosphere. Yes, the ISS is _in the atmosphere_ and suffers from a small amount of atmospheric drag, so it requires occasional reboosts to maintain altitude.

The ionosphere isn't exactly a separate "layer" from these. It's a very tall region of ionized gas that starts near the top of the stratosphere and overlaps parts of the layers above. Its exact limits vary with solar conditions.

The ionosphere is actually made up of several layers of its own, defined by the solar energy wavelength that causes ionization in each layer. These are the D, E, and F layers, and occasional sub-layers within those. Hams and other shortwave radio operators are familiar with these ionospheric layers because of their different effects on radio propagation.

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

[https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/ionosphere/en/](https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/ionosphere/en/)

[https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/science/atmosphe...](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/science/atmosphere- layers2.html)

And I finally get to say about one of my own comments: "Username checks out."

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

(I'm actually named after the Truetone Stratoscope radio antennas, not the balloon, but sometimes people do say I'm full of hot air.)

<comment><USER10> that nasa site was actually interesting. but i think like i'm 5.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can this cause any other issues other than GPS errors? Lines like

 _It is followed by ionospheric hole (plasma depletions) due to rapid chemical reactions of rocket exhaust plumes and ionospheric plasma._

sound concerning but that's most likely because I only understand half the words, and have even less of an understanding when they're strung together in that manner!

<comment><USER12> _It is followed by ionospheric hole_ (should be _It was... holes_ )

A ~900km wide patch of the ion blanket around the earth became thinner. Probably in the density sense, not the size sense: there was less plasma there than normal. (The abstract measures this in terms of how many electrons they counted in that area.)

 _due to rapid chemical reactions of rocket exhaust plumes and ionospheric plasma._

They think the thin patch was caused because the Falcon's exhaust reacted with the ion blanket. I'm not sure how.

<comment><USER13> I'm curious about this too. The Falcon burns RP-1, essentially a very refined kerosene, with liquid oxygen. Exhaust should be water, carbon dioxide, and a bit of carbon monoxide.

Not typically the most reactive things, but perhaps there are different interactions with plasma?

<comment><USER14> Anything is reactive when interacting with plasma.

There should be little of those gases naturally up there (mostly so for water), and even throwing a large mass of gases up there may be enough to disturb everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The worst such event on record caused errors of ~1 meter. I didn't think civilian GPS was that precise anyway, and that's why various schemes are used in conjunction with GPS for greater accuracy? Presumably, military GPS has similar schemes to deal with this sort of event?

<comment><USER16> I don't have firsthand knowledge, but I'd be surprised if mission critical military gear uses GPS for more than a secondary / corrective role.

I can't imagine the signals play that well in a heavily-jammed environment.

High probability rough GPS fix + radar / optical terrain comparison & dead reckoning for terminal guidance seems more likely.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure if you consider this "mission critical" but US military drones use GPS for navigation. There have been several cases of them being captured via GPS jamming.

<comment><USER16> From what I heard, that extended to GPS spoofing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I thought orbiting was all about horizontal velocity, otherwise what comes up must come down!

Did the rocket just turn sideways to accumulate the necessary horizontal velocity to actually maintain an orbit at a much later phase in its flight?

<comment> Tuna-Fish Yes, absolutely. The total sideways velocity required is fixed, going on a steeper trajectory requires more fuel for the same target orbit.

The reason Falcon 9 still does that sometimes is that a more vertical trajectory makes the return flight back to the launchpad easier. So if the payload is light enough that there is enough free delta-v, they want to do that. If there isn't, they land on the barge or fly expendable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd be curious to know roughly how long the disturbance lasted. Did it dissipate/recover in minutes, or did it stick around for the better part of a day (or two, or three)?

<comment><USER20> According to arstechnica's reporting on the paper (I don't have access to full text):

"In the case of this Falcon 9 launch, it induced a plasma hole that lasted for two to three hours, which a magnitude comparable to a magnetic storm"

[https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/spacex-launch- last-y...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/spacex-launch-last-year- punched-huge-temporary-hole-in-the-ionosphere/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can someone ELI5 how this would cause GPS errors?

<comment><USER22> GPS works by computing your distance from satellites by measuring how long it takes radio signals from those satellite to reach you. As an electromagnetic wave, radio moves at a different speed through plasma (which is full of charged particles) than through holes in that plasma, so this will change how long those radio signals take to reach you, which will change how far away from the satellite you think you are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> SAW also means Surface Acoustic Wave which is a different type of wave like what travels along the ground in an earthquake. That's a terrible double use of an acronym! I think the author of this story might have just made it up and not seen the existing meaning.

</comment><comment><USER23> Did anyone try downloading the actual paper? My browser opened and then closed a tab. Kind of odd.

<comment><USER24> The paper is behind a paywall. It probably went back to the abstract page because the login / buy panel is on the right side of that page.

Maybe see if your local library or university has an institutional subscription you can use to access the paper?

<comment><USER25> The paper is on scihub.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Every time somebody else burns a hole in the ozone layer I wonder if they did it over _their_ home or over _mine_. Somehow I don't expect to be pleased by the answer.

<comment><USER27> As an Australian this is what we've had to deal with for decades. We don't produce much pollution but the hole is largely over us and giving us skin cancer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Could major GPS issues become a nonstarter for the BFR intercontinental transport vision?

<comment><USER16> Maybe that's why the BFR interplanetary version is the focus. Screwing up GPS is less of a deal when you're leaving the planet for good... ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Are there any noted events in history that have exploited such ionosphere disturbances?

</comment><comment><USER30> Related at all to the flight delays earlier today?

</comment><comment><USER31> Plainer news headline style "SpaceX Falcon 9 launch might have interfered GPS signal coverage in area three times larger than California"

</comment><comment><USER32> I wonder why a SpaceX Falcon-9 was singled out. Wouldn't any sufficiently large rocket have the same effect? And if so, wouldn't the Falcon heavy cause an even more dramatic effect?

<comment><USER33> Read the article before asking questions.

"This unique nearly vertical trajectory is different from the usual satellite launches that the rockets fly over horizontal trajectory "

<comment><USER34> To add to that, also from the article: "This is the largest rocket‐induced circular SAWs on record."</comment></comment></comment>


Outing the Inside: On Louise Bourgeois - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/12/07/louise-bourgeois-outing-inside/ <comment><USER2> It always seems to me with modern art that the blurbs about the artwork or the artist are more interesting than the artwork itself, or that the blurbs make the artwork interesting, or even that the blurbs are part of the artwork.

<comment><USER3> Dave Hickey calls the phenomenon you're talking about a piece of art's "social value"[0]. this goes for lots of things though, not just art (modern or otherwise) because all things exist in some historical context and so you can read them (accurately or not) as a cultural reaction or as being part of some larger Scene. my take is that one of the things that makes some art particularly effective is its ability to provoke these reactions when placed in new historical contexts.

modern art is particularly complicated because something like Duchamp's Fountain or Readymades can become easily reduced to trope or gimmick "<groan>, another toilet-as-art piece." but software is like this too!! "great, another algebraically-typed fp language with poor unicode support and no stdlib." the thing that makes us keep paying attention is the culture that develops around these things and advocates for and argues for the thing's "social value" irrespective of the "social virtue" we may observe as outsiders.

[0]: [http://nsfmc.tumblr.com/post/1671107720/since-there-is-no- ab...](http://nsfmc.tumblr.com/post/1671107720/since-there-is-no-absolute- authority-in-the-art)</comment></comment>


How Hypothes.is is going to fix online Identity and Reputation - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hypothesis.php

<comment><USER2> worth reading to the end just for this gem:

 _Disclosure: My really good friend Randall Leeds is building Hypothes.is as the technical co-founder. This happened after RWW started covering founder Dan Whaley's efforts to create an annotation system for the whole Web. It's a complete coincidence. Still, I admit that this may have an impact on my reporting. But hey, at least my fund isn't investing in it._

<comment><USER3> That is interesting. I'm glad you posted it because I'm done reading these breathless blog posts, so obviously desparate for page views. Four years ago, I still read things like Gigaom, TC, and RWW, etc., but I've found they offer nothing of value beyond the HN comment threads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks, zerostar07!

If you're interesting in helping out, watch <https://github.com/hypothesis> or subscribe to our dev list with email@example.com

<comment><USER4> I should add we have a low-volume list for outgoing announcements if you'd rather just hear those: email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like a nice idea, but this post makes it look like it is doomed from the start ... and such a system could even be detrimental to a humane, forgiving society.

</comment><comment><USER6> > _"If we could filter the Web by reputation, we could turn it into a > meritocracy."_

What does that mean?

</comment><comment><USER7> Very excited to see this move forward. Look at this project and compare it to something like diaspora, and you see some significant differences which give hope that this can achieve traction, notably the extensive, deep market research done up front.

<comment><USER3> Have you ever looked at the number of Diaspora-like (AKA distributed/ federated) social networking projects?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network>

<comment><USER4> We're not trying to compete for attention in the social web. Part of that is reflected in our involvement with the W3C Open Annotation Working Group (<http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/>). While Hypothes.is may be one place to publish, the goal is to provide better linking and referencing tools to facilitate aggregators and plugins that can bring the conversation back to the source material. In other words, to bring this conversation on HN into the RWW frame and vice versa and to allow better quoting and transclusion between these content silos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yet another horrific police state nightmare under construction.

<comment><USER4> Quite the opposite, actually. I will be seriously considering the privacy implications of everything we do. One of our core principles is a commitment to pseudonymous accounts. To the extent we allow multiple identities to be linked to one account, it will be in your control to do so (or not) as suits your multi-faceted persona, tin foil hat paranoias, or legitimate privacy concerns. While we understand there is a social cost to cheap pseudonyms (see Friedman, Resnick (2001) [http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/identifiers/081199....](http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/identifiers/081199.pdf)), we believe we can develop a reputation system and a user community that resists gaming attempts without significant barriers to entry or privacy- invading personal information mining.

The goal of Hypothes.is is, on the contrary, to be a forum where you can voice your opposition to policies you find to be ushering in a police state and have the community weigh in on an informed discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _Real people are multi-faceted. We want to be able to express different > aspects of ourselves in different contexts._ [links to Chris Poole's > "identity is prismatic" interview]

So far, sounds OK. But then,

> _A pseudonym could also be privately verified with a government-issued ID or > some other standard, so the user remains pseudonymous to the world, but the > reputation system knows who it is._

Really? Seriously? Government ID is about as far away from multi-faceted identity as you can get. The consequence of a database compromise is also going to be orders of magnitude more catastrophic than the average password leak.

Not even Google knows my driver's license number, and I'm sure a lot of us would like to keep it that way. If you want to know what happens when you tie all online identities to Government IDs, just look at South Korea.

<comment><USER4> I think Jon was just trying to provide some information on the spectrum of possible identity solutions one can choose from. At Hypothes.is, it's extremely unlikely we would try to do anything like this. However, it does represent a form of "verified pseudonymous" identity, in which your uniqueness as an entity is verified by a central authority, but that identity is never exposed. See my comment below for more information about what we might actually implement.

<comment><USER10> This reply still seems to indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of multifaceted identity. The fact that i am one physical person should be irrelevant to a reputation service. If I have one identity that I use to post jokes on reddit and another identity that I use to post serious content, those identities should have different reputations. What I do with one should not affect the other. My uniqueness should not have to be verified, the only thing that should matter towards my reputation is what the persona I am currently acting as has done before.

<comment><USER4> Yes. I totally agree. I would certainly love to support multiple distinct personas. There is an open question of how to do that while mitigating the damage potential. There are also cases where multiple personas might usefully be linked. For example, when commenting on programming issues you might want to link your persona to your stackoverflow identity or your HN account. Honestly, the biggest mistake I could make would be to assume I know what the community wants before we have a community. I think it's probably wise to err on the side of less friction and more prismatic identity and deal with restricting multiple signups if/when we need to. For now I plan to enforce uniqueness for outside identities (only one pseudonym per Twitter account) but also allow a basic reCAPTCHA username/password signup. If someone wants to contribute code to manage multiple personas within one account that would be fabulous, but annotation functionality feels more priority for me. If you think there's still a fundamental misunderstanding please continue, but I totally agree with your comment and don't think there's anything about it that's incompatible with my current vision.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Attract hackers, evangelise YC, and change the world? Vote for "NEW" YC T-Shirts! - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> I want YC T-Shirts because I LOVE news.yc and:

1) I want to evangelise the good news of YC, and of startups by students, around campus.

2) I want to fly a flag so that other hackers/YC faithful know that I'm one of them too, and we can come together.

3) I want the world to know it!

So Jessica, Paul, Robert and Trevor: Make YC T-Shirts, PLEASE!

Sizes: XS (for the ladies;) to XXL, Colours: White/Orange/Black, Slogan: "Make Something People Want"

What do you guys reckon?

<comment><USER2> We have YC T-Shirts, and they say "Make something people want" on them. All the people we fund get them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Paul! Thanks for clearing that up. When will you make them available to the general YC faithful for my aforementioned reasons? I believe it will benefit YC when it eventuates.

<comment><USER2> To get one, just fill out this simple form:

http://news.ycombinator.com/apply</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fan who threw 96 MPH at in-stadium radar booth signs contract with A's - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/rockies/2019/08/02/mlb-nathan-patterson-fan-96-mph-signs-athletics/1898405001/ <comment><USER2> Fan who plays in a local league and who has been training hard to get into the pros.

But still, an amazing story.

</comment><comment><USER3> This makes me remember the movie 'The Rookie' (Disney, 2002) with Dennis Quaid.

[https://m.imdb.com/title/tt00265662/](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt00265662/)

Based on the story of Jim Morris

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Morris](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Morris)</comment>


Ask HN: I want to become a co-founder - <AUTHOR>

I am based in London & want to become a co-founder. I am an experienced developer with the following attributes -
* currently working for a 'big 6' IT consultancy.
* Experienced Agile practitioner.
* Java is my main platform
* .NET is my secondary platform
* I have open sourced software written in Ruby (email me for details)
* Don't class me as an out and out techie, I can explain abstract technical terms to 'non-'techies'.
* I do front-end (originally trained as an industrial designer) as well as backend server development.
* Lots of other tech skills too numerous to list.
* I am passionate about writing quality software.
* I enjoy learning new things.
* The web, Android platform, and Augmented Reality are the areas that interest me the most.
I work pretty damn hard, and rather than work for someone else want to work for myself. Why? - I want to build something worthwhile, be financially independent, channel my energies to solve interesting problems, & have fun doing it. I am an ideas man, and have explored various areas; mainly stuff to scratch my own itch. I like to think I am pragmatic & consider myself to be a Maven.
I am looking to interact with like-minded people who are either a Salesman, Connector or a Maven. I'm not necessarily looking to implement my own ideas, it could be one of yours or a need that we discover, I just need to have belief in it & be passionate about it.
I am NOT looking for another job, I enjoy working for my current employer, & work with some great colleagues, hence why I have asked you to email me for details on what I have open-sourced (email in profile). For something I believe in & am passionate about I will leave my current position.
It doesn't have to be a software startup, I am open to all ideas & have way more to offer than my core software skills.
Is anyone looking for someone like me or can they put me in touch with interested parties? Advice on how best to go about tapping into this space? To get things rolling I am offering my services pro bono to allow both parties to get to know each other - no obligations for either party - get an honest feel on how good a fit it will be. Think of it as a probationary period, at worst you get my services for free!
Please get in touch via email in my profile.
wr1472 <comment><USER2> _Please get in touch via email in my profile._

The email field in profiles is private (pg can see it, but not us normal people). Try putting your contact details in the "about:" section.

<comment><USER3> There's currently a feature request to make this more clear:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1017933>

Voting for it would be greatly appreciated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can I check out anything you've worked on before?

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://wsl.xqoob.com> is what I have open sourced.

Also look at <http://xqoob.com/scrumboard/ScrumBoard.html> for one piece work in progress to scratch my own itch. This is a virtual sprint backlog, that I would ultimately like to get working in conjunction with the wiimote hack (look at the "sprint backlog" tab).

if anyone is going to email please put "HN" in the subject.

cheers</comment></comment>


A blog I started on Neural Networks and Probability - <AUTHOR> https://jontysinai.github.io <comment><USER2> You know what would be great for learning probability? A set of easy problems (graded in difficulty) and their answers. There are many introductions in text, but the best presentation would be one where you also play with the notions, and initially this must be easy enough.

It's like the difference between supervised learning and RL. In one you just get a dataset, in the other you get a playground - a dynamic dataset where you can explore and test hypothesis.

Selecting the problems requires real flair, it's one thing to understand the subject, and quite another to understand the usual pitfalls and stumbling blocks of students learning it.

<comment><USER3> I think somebody should make this for many subjects in math

<comment><USER4> That's what textbooks are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Regarding the biology of neurons, it is important to know:

1) that neurons are a family of cells rather than a uniform, homogeneous thing.

2) initially it was believed that dendrites only propagated spikes. now it is accepted that dentrites generate spikes of their own. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendritic_spike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendritic_spike)

3) the concept of threshold has been challenged. eugene izhikevich for example presents some counterexamples for the idea of the threshold (where a spike a spike was expected and doesn't happen, or when a spike was not expected and happens), and provides an alternative explanation involving dynamical systems.

so, while useful, it is important to understand that most artificial neural models are simplified abstractions. eventually we will figure out why biology is doing what is doing. e.g: how much of the biology has to do with information processing, how much of it has to do with keeping neurons alive, and how much of it has to do with passing information around.

<comment><USER4> What do you mean when you say a neuron is a family of cells?

<comment><USER5> e.g: a pyramidal cell is different from a purkinje cell.

<comment><USER4> Ah - it sounded like you meant that a neuron consists of more than one cell, not that that there are different types of neurons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm enjoying the Probability for Everyone post. I'm also quickly reminded how complex the notion used in Probability Theory is. Lowercase, uppercase, script uppercase, double struck uppercase, and Greek uppercase all have specific meanings (sometimes multiple meaning), and they get held together with the set theory symbols. It's even worse since some people use different characters for inconsequential things, and then there's situations (online forums) where the notation can't be used and substitutes are made, I even recall some books using bold letters which made note taking a real hassle.

<comment><USER7> Well, all of that is really just Hungarian Notation [0] with typesetting rather than extra characters, so it's not 100% necessary to fully understand -- just look at the definition again. The exception is standard sets, like the Reals or Natural Numbers etc. (which use the double strike through). But that's pretty standardized.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Good music with beautiful visualizations, submit yours. Now with WebGL - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/victorqribeiro/radio <comment><USER2> you go ham

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't know what that means.

<comment><USER2> sorry. It means you go hard as a motherf __*er. cool work man.</comment></comment></comment>


How to get push notifications for Rails and Ruby security updates - <AUTHOR> http://thibautbarrere.com/how-to-get-push-notifications-for-rails-ruby-security-updates/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious to know what other people use to stay up-to-date when it comes to Ruby security. Comments welcome.

<comment><USER2> I have a cron-driven script that pulls data from web.nvd.nist.gov and builds a site header for ruby-doc.org when there are any alerts within the last 2 weeks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty cool! I wondered how this was updated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> IFTTT on Android has notifications built-in. You can just skip the Boxcar step.</comment>


Show HN: We made this 'Pandora for Music Videos', let me know what you think. - <AUTHOR> http://viddyjam.com

<comment><USER2> Looks neat.

Couple suggestions:

1\. Add some suggested artists that let me click and immediately start watching/listening. You want to demonstrate the value asap, so anything you can do to reduce thinking will help. I spent awhile thinking, came up with "Arcade Fire", then found that there were no results. If this wasn't a post on HN, I would've bounced there.

2\. Keyboard shortcuts. But this is obvious, and I'm sure you'll get around to it.

3\. The on-hover controls are ok, but there should be some indication that they exist before I mouse-over. You could also use some basic icons to make the controls easier to parse (especially arrows for next and prev).

4\. As it stands now, there's no way to surf videos easily. After clicking "next", I have to move my mouse out of the central area, then move it back over to click "next" again. The goal of a site like this is to facilitate brainless and easy surfing, so you should try to reduce as many friction points as possible.

<comment><USER3> This.

And the fourth video related to Radiohead was a 2 hour and 24 minute video of the 4th meeting of the Bipartisan Fiscal Commission in the USA... a la [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSXhjjsRcCQ&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSXhjjsRcCQ&feature=player_embedded)

<comment><USER4> the selection algorithm is going to be pretty hard here. i had a different problem, somehow getting stuck in a loop of two videos, back and forth forever. new Jam!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> So, I moved to the Bay Area a few months ago and have been looking for work. In my copious free time I worked on this fun little project.

There are such a huge number of great music videos and performances out there that I was completely unaware of until I started working on ViddyJam. I feel like I discover something interesting and cool every time I use it.

</comment><comment><USER5> I liked the idea immediately when I saw the title :)

UI suggestion: Try making the Jam button bigger and slightly more button-ey (even a 1px drop shadow would help), also maybe add a » too. Would make it clearer that it's a call to action.

</comment><comment><USER6> Like it!

However it didn't find me anything for Weezer, surprised.

When typing, it felt really laggy, lots of JavaScript going on?

When I hit Donate, it opened in the current window, killing my music! Needless to say I then hit back again to get back to the music, and didn't end up donating... ;-)

Consider adding Gigs along with Amazon and iTunes? DISCLAIMER: my day job is with GigJunkie.net, we could link your users to gig tickets and share the affiliate. If you're interested, send me an email, email@example.com.

Good work, nice project!

</comment><comment><USER7> The UI is a little finicky. The artist selection when a video is playing tends to appear and disappear a little too easily.

Otherwise, awesome! I'll actually make use of this!

</comment><comment><USER8> It may be too early to complain about the recommendation system, but I think you should invest some more time on a good one.

<comment><USER9> Nope, not too early, but it says they are pulling data from last.fm, Never used last.fm, but it's seems like their system is not as good as pandora or jango.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can you sort for music videos as opposed to static images with audio? I attempted to tackle this problem with youvj.com (a weekend project of mine) a while ago, filtering for music video, official, etc in the description and title (as well as popularity and other factors), but never got results I was truly happy with.

<comment><AUTHOR> YouVJ looks nice.

There are many songs that do not, and never will, have a 'real' music video. Even songs that do have official music videos are often not allowed to be embedded/streamed. [As I'm sure you know.] I chose to offer the largest amount of music, at the expense of having actual music videos for each song.

Perhaps I could implement some type of pref that could toggle between 'all music' and 'real music videos'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great idea! I actually found some nice video's I haven't seen in 25 years.and the recommendations are fantastic! Keyboard shortcuts obviously; arrow keys and space bar so I can remote control it from a couch, bathtub, shower or while dancing with a hmd.

</comment><comment><USER12> Love the "lower the lights" feel when in stream.

I'd like to have a link to the specific channel (possibly the combination of artist/song?) that i'm currently listening to in the URL so I can send to a friend.

Great work!

<comment><AUTHOR> You can use the 'Get Link' button to get a link to the current video, which will then be used to seed a channel if someone follows it.

Perhaps we can make that clearer.

<comment><USER12> Excellent! I assumed it linked to the youtube video url.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I noticed that when trying to change the artist name while watching a video that the UI disappears when the mouse stops moving, so I can't see what I'm typing in the search box.

</comment><comment><USER14> Didn't totally pick up on my like of the artist"White Town" well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure what you mean. Did you attempt to 'Like' a video on Facebook and have something go wrong? What happened?

<comment><USER14> I went to the site directly and told it I like artists like White Town.

Does it not do as well with more obscure artists? It seemed to do ok with the mega-popular stuff I threw at it (metallica, lady gaga, etc), but nothing too profound.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh, gotcha. Yeah, the more obscure the artist, the harder it is to find videos for their songs. So if you are looking for something really obscure, theres a good chance you wont find much.

<comment><USER9> The band Tool sounds nothing like Lovemongers, but Lovemongers is what I got when I typed Tool. could be cool if it worked consistently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I just did a search for Nine Inch Nails and got Rickrolled.

</comment><comment><USER16> Great idea. Didn't work on iPad.

</comment><comment><USER17> im getting a lot of static cover art : (

Very cool app though

</comment><comment><USER18> Autocomplete!</comment>


Open letter to Amino Candidates - <AUTHOR> https://amino.com/blog/a-letter-to-amino-candidates/?q=amino <comment><USER2> It is hard to find startups where the hiring process and encouragement process of existing employees forms a key aspect of the day to day work. It is understandable how this falls into the blind spot. Many companies assume they have highly driven employees, hence this may not be necessary. However the occasional nudge goes a long way.</comment>


Getting a PDF to work well on a Kobo - <AUTHOR> http://talesfromannoyance.blogspot.com/2014/04/getting-pdf-to-work-well-on-kobo.html

<comment><USER2> Whoa. Lots of work just to read a PDF. I like your writing style btw.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

While it is a bit of work, it saved a lot of money. An epub for a certain certification I'm looking at costs $70. The group provides the PDF version for free. A few clicks and I've got an impressive tome and money in my pocket.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Compensating for uneven hours among founders? - <AUTHOR>

Background: we're a small bootstrapped startup, with four founders with equal equity share. We're about half a year into the game, still feeding off of everyone's personal runway and paying no salary, but this is looking to change soon (which is brilliant!)
Due to differences in personal life situations, we are seeing that some of us voluntarily seem to be putting in more hours than others. Everyone is carrying their weight, so this is not a problem, but depending on a situation, individuals are finding themselves working through weekends, mainly due to their own volition and the fact that we're pretty thrilled about what we're doing. For some of us, facts of personal life simply do not allow this.
We've agreed on equal salary among the founders, but there's a growing suspicion that we should compensate for the uneven hours somehow, and we're exploring different options for that.
Does the HN community have positive/negative precedents on how to handle uneven hours among founders? An easy way out would be to start compensating for overtime in salary; however, this brings along issues like time tracking, which we're a little uneasy with.
Personally, I have been wondering if a more results-based approach would be more appropriate; after all, in these times I would encourage us to work smart rather than to work hard. Sales commissions (even among founders) could be one way.
Any thoughts? We're worried that if we somehow do not deal with this, it might lead to friction later. Any input is much appreciated. <comment><USER2> I think the solution to this problem should be more human than metric. I have a human solution to it. It might not click with everyone. tl;dr - be around as much as you can, it shouldn't be that one guy is putting lots of extra hours all alone all the time.

I feel that folks who are not able to spend extra time due to family/life's other commitments should (few times a week) just be around the person who is actually spending extra time. So basically, they may or may not really work on their stuff but being around to share ideas, celebrating small milestones matter a lot. This also shows they care and ultimately thats what matters.

</comment><comment><USER3> _"Everyone is carrying their weight"_

So why invent a reason for drama?

<comment><AUTHOR> According to some founder stories we've heard, uneven workload is one of the major causes of drama. Colour us pre-emptive.</comment></comment>


Writing a functional and yet functional image processing library in Scala - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5323186/writing-a-functional-and-yet-functional-image-processing-library-in-scala

<comment><USER2> Problems like this are why I only try for 'outwardly' functional code.

Without knowing the full details, I'd speculate that they only care about the image before and after modification. So within the function, you have free reign. For example if you just destructively modify and return a copy of the source, to the outside caller it appears functional. And everything is blessedly simple.

<comment><USER3> > if you just destructively modify and return a copy of the source

Then the caller can no longer reference the source without observing the fact you've mutated it -- you'd have to guarantee they've dropped all references to the now-mutated buffer.

How do you ensure the mutation doesn't leak out like this, breaking all the nice properties?

<comment><USER4> I think that he means the copy that gets returned is what gets destructively modified.

In other words, the overall process winds up being functional and nondestructive, but the intermediate internal steps aren't necessarily so.

<comment><USER3> Right. You better copy the original data structure. That's one good way to guarantee internal mutation (of the copy) isn't going to be visible. Or it gets tricky (e.g. linear types)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Ventures Library - <AUTHOR> http://www.gv.com/news/introducing-the-gv-library

<comment><USER2> If I'm not mistaken, access to these videos previously required an account from a GV-funded company. It looks like they've opened up content to everyone. Very cool.

<comment><USER3> Some of them still requires an account. Like: [http://www.gv.com/lib/working- with-the-media](http://www.gv.com/lib/working-with-the-media)

"This video is only for employees of GV portfolio companies. Sign in"

<comment><USER4> I tried the "request access" option on a movie I wanted to see (Effective Story Telling). Hope the author grants me access.

BTW, when I worked at Google as a contractor, I had to request access to many papers I wanted to read that by default were just available to employees. Almost always the author/owner would grant access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My favorites:

"The science of building a scalable sales team" [http://www.gv.com/lib/the- science-of-building-a-scalable-sal...](http://www.gv.com/lib/the-science-of- building-a-scalable-sales-team)

"Lean Product Management" [http://www.gv.com/lib/lean-product- management](http://www.gv.com/lib/lean-product-management)

"Lean Analytics" [http://www.gv.com/lib/lean- analytics](http://www.gv.com/lib/lean-analytics)

</comment><comment><USER6> The unprotected videos are here: [https://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleVentures/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleVentures/videos)

</comment><comment><USER7> Small unrelated comment: I love how that menu works. It does a really great job as an alternative for the hamburger menu.

<comment><USER8> Well, to me, it's still mystery meat navigation. Why do we need this on desktop sites?

<comment><USER9> Completely agree. There is absolutely nothing gained by collapsing that sidebar on a desktop.

<comment><USER10> Agree +1. Icons only and tooltips when hovering make more senses to me. Or at least the main contents shouldn't shift when I hover the sidebars

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love what GV is doing. Future of VC is not about giving value only to their portfolio companies but also to the entire community.

YC has been doing this for a while (Essays, Startup School), which also serves as a lead for applicants.

I wish they opened up all the videos as well.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am disappointed to see that the two security engineering videos are blocked by privileged access control. Improved overall internet security benefits everybody, and it's surprising that GV does not share that ethos.

If anybody from this project is reading here, are you abel to change that, or can you comment as to the motivations for how things are classified as public vs privileged?

<comment><USER13> I'm a member of the GV team, and one of those who helps run the workshop series. In many cases, workshops are available only to employees of the portfolio because it supports more open and candid conversations.

In the case of our security videos, we've restricted them because there were discussions about particular companies' security needs that aren't appropriate to share publicly. It's unlikely the talk would have been as beneficial to our portfolio companies if people felt the need to hold back knowing the details would be made public.

As casca mentioned, we've opened many of our videos to the public and we'll continue to do so when the workshop leader and audience participants agree: [https://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleVentures/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleVentures/videos)

At GV our mission first and foremost is to serve the employees of our portfolio companies. Google as a whole is of course dedicated to improving internet security and the company dedicates tons of people and resources to that.

<comment><USER14> How does it benefit GV to have that list of videos presented but inaccessible to the public?

Why not outright filter those videos and only show them to the people with the right permissions?

<comment><USER15> Funny that within two posts we've gone from "Why isn't GV more transparent" to "Why is GV so transparent".

I agree that from a UX standpoint it isn't great, but I think it achieves two things:

1\. gives a hint at what you receive when you're a GV-funded company. Something for potential companies to think about. 2\. stops any conspiracy theories about the "Secret Training Videos Google Won't Let You See".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rebuilding the line-mode browser (in node.js) - <AUTHOR> http://line-mode.cern.ch/

<comment><USER2> The webfont used in the simulator renders badly in Chrome, Windows: [http://i.imgur.com/jv1ltu5.png](http://i.imgur.com/jv1ltu5.png)

(Firefox is fine).

<comment><USER3> Does anyone know why Chrome font rendering sucks so hard. It isn't just this site. Boss passes me a design to make and more often than not we have to reject the designers font choice because of terrible rendering.

<comment><USER4> As far as I know Chrome still uses GDI for its font rendering on Windows instead of the _much_ better DirectWrite API. Firefox, IE10 and so on are using DirectWrite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Heh [http://line- mode.cern.ch/www/proxy?url=https://news.ycombina...](http://line- mode.cern.ch/www/proxy?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero](https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero)

</comment><comment><USER7> Surprisingly usable, I like the references syntax for links much better than browsing through them like with lynx.

<comment><USER8> Check out the Mouseless Browsing extension if you're using firefox:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/mouseless- bro...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/mouseless-browsing/)

It's overkill to have it show the IDs all the time, so you can disable that and set a shortcut to toggle them on and off so you only get them when you want them.

<comment><USER4> Don't forget Vimium for Chrome: [http://vimium.github.io](http://vimium.github.io)</comment></comment></comment>


OpenZFS on OS X - <AUTHOR> http://openzfsonosx.org/ <comment><USER2> This is the Mac flavor of [http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Main_Page](http://open- zfs.org/wiki/Main_Page) which is aiming to share development among the various OS specific ZFS implementations. So it's an early successor to MacZFS - [https://code.google.com/p/maczfs/wiki/DevelopmentOverview](https://code.google.com/p/maczfs/wiki/DevelopmentOverview)

</comment><comment><USER3> This appears to be a rebrand of MacZFS, which was never as performant as ZEVO[1] in my usage

1: [http://getgreenbytes.com/solutions/zevo/](http://getgreenbytes.com/solutions/zevo/)

<comment><USER4> "Please note that if you are running MacZFS, you should use their site instead: maczfs.org"

Sounds like a different project. That's just from giving it a quick glance. No idea what's going on under the hood.

Edit: As the next comment points out, I'm wrong on that one.

<comment><USER3> Take a gander at their github: [https://github.com/zfs- osx](https://github.com/zfs-osx)

         OpenZFS for Apple OS X

        http://MacZFS.org/
        firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER5> More to the point,

> This is a very early alpha of ZFS on OSX, to be the next generation of > MacZFS.

from the project's readme.

<comment><USER3> That's nice, its still a rebrand of MacZFS and is still missing some key features (like TRIM).

<comment><USER6> I thought with newer SSDs TRIM is no longer as important and in some FSs even has drawbacks?

<comment><USER3> Some SSDs implement TRIM at the firmware level, but Trim support in the fs is pretty much required if you want to use ZFS on an SSD

<comment><USER7> WTF are you talking about? TRIM refers to only one thing: the ATA TRIM command that gets sent to the drive by the OS. TRIM isn't the same as garbage collection or wear levelling, though it makes it easier for the SSD to do both. It is however completely unnecessary for the drive and filesystem to work together to correctly store data. It's just a performance hint, and one that isn't even that important for many drives and workloads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The project's GitHub Repository is [https://github.com/openzfsonosx](https://github.com/openzfsonosx). Technically, OpenZFS on OS X is a port of ZFS on Linux, which at the moment we use as the direct upstream git repository. In turn, ZFS on Linux uses illumos as its upstream. However, significant elements of OpenZFS on OS X are ported directly from illumos and from FreeBSD, which, like ZFS on Linux, uses illumos as upstream. OpenZFS on OS X is in no way a "rebrand" of MacZFS, which has a completely different, and rather old, codebase and had a completely different set of contributors.

</comment><comment><USER9> Congratulations on the site launch! I've been using trunk builds in production for the last three months. Very few issues for pre-alpha software.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks interesting, but from what I understand it's a really really bad idea to run ZFS without ECC RAM. So is this geared purely toward Mac Pro/Hackintosh users, since no other Mac models use ECC RAM? Or does this somehow do things differently?

Oh, and it looks like it still doesn't play nice with Spotlight. That's a dealbreaker for me until they fix that.

<comment><USER7> I've seen a lot of people repeat that assertion about using ECC RAM with ZFS, but I've never seen it explained in detail. Is ZFS actually more susceptible to data loss if RAM gets corrupted as compared with other file systems, or is it just an overblown piece of advice about not forgetting your RAM when trying to make a backup system reliable?

<comment><USER11> This is overblown at all, ZFS needs ECC as it doesnt detect memory corruption on its own, and here's some explenation: [http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/ecc-vs-non- ecc-r...](http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram-and- zfs.15449/)

<comment><USER12> I think the question is, all else equal, is ZFS _less_ reliable than alternative filesystems/software-RAID on non-ECC?

<comment><USER13> Read the linked FreeNAS forum thread. The answer is yes.

On a non-ZFS file system, a bit getting flipped in memory will result in the file being written incorrectly. That sucks. You can read the file ten times and nothing more will happen. Your file is corrupted, maybe even unreadable. If you were really unlucky, maybe some file system metadata was corrupted.

On ZFS, the same single bit being flipped can result in ZFS writing _more_ bad data when the file is read, because ZFS will try to fix the file but can never do it successfully since the memory is bad (and the original checksum was wrong). Hypothetically that could keep happening forever, trashing more and more bits, all because of ZFS.

Now, the real question is how often that scenario can arise and does that justify the cost of ECC RAM in your mind.

<comment><USER6> So you're saying if you aren't using RAID on your ZFS vdevs than ZFS with non- ECC is no worse than anything else... and there is a valid scenario for doing so. I use ZFS on offline backup drives so that I can periodically mount them and scrub them too see if they need to be replaced updated. In my mind this is faster and more reliable than any custom verification scheme I might have come up with.

Also, if I understand correctly, your disaster scenario requires the RAM to keep repeatedly fing up in a way that allows ZFS to screw up repeatedly during corrections but coincidentally won't cause the system to outright crash? It's possible, but in my experience most of the ECC errors I've seen are pretty transient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> MacZFS != OpenZFS on OSX project. It's successor of MacZFS. MacZFS was abandoned a while ago.

</comment><comment><USER15> This post seems to have destroyed the site. Excited to try it out though.</comment>


Can Napster Be Stopped? No (2000) - <AUTHOR> https://abovethecrowd.com/2000/04/17/can-napster-be-stopped-no/ <comment><AUTHOR> In a way he was right. In a way he wasn't.

But it makes you wonder how many of today's unicorns will still be around in 20 years.

<comment><USER2> Well, the fear he was talking about is just using Napster as an example. This piracy still exists, and as he said, the tech improved so much that you can easily illegally share an album.

What actually stopped wide-spread music piracy, was easy to use legal solutions like Spotify.

It's as Gabe Newel said, to fight piracy, just provide a better service.</comment></comment>


'BioSolar Leaf' to Tackle Air Pollution in White City - <AUTHOR> https://news.algaeworld.org/2019/04/worlds-first-biosolar-leaf-to-tackle-air-pollution-in-white-city/ <comment><USER3> Its cheaper, prettier and more effective to plant trees, climbers and hardy shrubs.

I get that algae is all fun and that, but it needs a boat water, glass, filtering and pumping. The other part is its a massive monoculture. which means that its very prone to fungal and other algae types.

The hard part through all of this is not getting the plant to grow, thats simple. Its keeping it watered and maintained.

To keep pollution down in london, growing a wide variety of trees is _an_ answer. But they require maintenance.

If you could create self contained boxes for something like dwarf cheery trees, which can be connected to the grey water system by capillary, it would have a far bigger impact on pm2.5, temperature and no2.

having vast vats of water on roofs, with pumping filtering and airating systems isn't co2 efficient. I suspect the amount of c02 sequestered is significantly less than the glass/running energy requirements.

<comment><USER4> I'm with you. We need to make planting trees and growing local gardens cool again.

One thing that is kind of popular here in Vienna are window gardens .. there's a high jankiness factor, but it always feels very rewarding to visit someone who has put the effort into tending their window gardens a little ..

[https://www.pinterest.com/pin/206673070369456616/](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/206673070369456616/)

It cools down the apartment and in many cases provides fresh herbs, which - <USER2> a concrete jungle like Vienna - is a welcome reward. Plus, at least in the ones I've visited, it smells so good. I wonder what can be done to push window gardens a little higher up the mainstream acceptance scale?

<comment><USER5> I was looking for the source of that image and came across what appears to be the source video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkCuPrsPn_I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkCuPrsPn_I)

Edit: I previously linked to their website (it's linked in the video) but it seems to have been hacked, or somehow containing some unrelated/unexpected content.

<comment><USER6> That website looked very interesting, and then I kept reading...

> Window farms are a great item to show off to casual dates you meet from > websites such as Meet N Fuck.

What the meet?

<comment><USER7> There are other links to porn sprinkled in there. It this an elaborate art hoax site or something?

<comment><USER6> Looks like blogspam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This project is very interesting and I think it's great that this is being studied, but we already have a technology for reducing greenhouse gasses in trees and other plants. They do not have expensive and pollution-causing manufacturing processes, contribute to biodiversity and natural ecosystems and don't produce lasting waste. Perhaps I'm being cynical, but it seems like the ultimate driver of this technology is still profit. There's a lot of trademarks and business speak in this article.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks very cool, but I was disappointed not to see any numbers. Has anyone heard what this kind of thing costs, and how much CO2 it removes?

<comment><USER10> For CO2 removal the article says they "can remove carbon dioxide and produce breathable oxygen at a rate equivalent to a hundred trees from the surface area of just a single tree".

Trees sequester ~48 lbs of CO2 per year.[1][2] So 48*100 = ~4800lbs CO2 removed per year for this project. As others have said I'm interested to see if they can do it cost effectively.

[1] [https://projects.ncsu.edu/project/treesofstrength/treefact.h...](https://projects.ncsu.edu/project/treesofstrength/treefact.htm) [2] [http://urbanforestrynetwork.org/benefits/air%20quality.htm](http://urbanforestrynetwork.org/benefits/air%20quality.htm)

<comment><USER11> Humans exhale something around 2.3 pounds of CO2 per day [0], 2.3 * 365 = 839.5 pounds per year, 4800 / 839.5 = 5.7 people per "surface area of a tree". That might be small enough that this can keep the CO2 level constant in a office...

The average american carbon footprint is 19.8 tonnes per year [1], 19.8 tonnes / 4800 (pounds / "sa tree") = 9.082 surfaces areas of a tree per person to eliminate their carbon footprint. That's a lot better than I expected really... somewhat doubt my numbers.

(All number here have _huge_ standard deviations, decimal points on the approximation should not be read as indicators of variance).

[0] [https://www.reference.com/science/much-co2-human- exhale-3f8c...](https://www.reference.com/science/much-co2-human- exhale-3f8cfdd9076c129)

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02/carbon- emissions-per-person-capita)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's all PR fluff, so it's hard to know what they want to do. Perhaps just get investment $ for the CEO.

But, cleaning air (CO2, pm 2.5, volatile particles) indoors at home is probably very important and should be done more.

Well chosen indoor plants will do it, but this could compete. If it's edible it might make people more likely to do it.

Not sure how the masses will react to removing particles that kill, then eating them though.</comment>


Show HN: Hyper.sh – Effortless Docker Hosting - <AUTHOR> https://hyper.sh <comment><USER2> Looks very interesting..like the per-second pricing model. Wonder how it compares with Docker cloud?

<comment><USER3> Hi,

Founder is here.

I'd that they are both trying to solve the container hosting issues, but with very different approaches.

Docker Cloud = VM cluster + Swarm, meaning that it is essentially a managed VM service. For developers, Docker Cloud creates the cluster on other cloud providers, and manage the cluster to deploy containers for you. In other words, you can focus on containers, the infrastructure is managed by Docker Cloud for you (of course you need to pay for that).

On the other hand, Hyper.sh is container native. You simply run containers, with worrying the cluster, not because it is managed, but that there is no cluster at all. How? Hyper.sh is built on secure Docker runtime, which is as fast as linux container, but as secure as VM. Therefore, the secure container becomes the new build block, rather than being nested in VM for isolation.

Given this, the whole cluster, capacity planning, scheduling and management thing is gone in Hyper.sh. And yes, you no longer need to pay for the cluster management.</comment></comment>


One year using Kubernetes in production - <AUTHOR> https://techbeacon.com/one-year-using-kubernetes-production-lessons-learned <comment><USER2> Nice article!

Load balancing with native kubernetes services is pretty easy with nodeport. Simply don't specify a nodeport and a free one will be provisioned that dosen't conflict. Then just put an elb or whatever in front of the nodes and update it with the api.

Also kubernetes supports blue-green with the deployment object. I think it's a mistake to try and roll your own and you lose a bunch of powerful native features.</comment>


I want to fork everything - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/2cb10e446b93

<comment><USER2> It's an interesting idea. I definitely like it -- excited to see if it works.</comment>