NodeJs and Bouncy as Web Front End - <AUTHOR> http://donpark.org/blog/2013/01/28/nodejs-and-bouncy-as-web-front-end

<comment><USER2> Nice example of a route/vhost setup in pure node. +1 for socket.io support. I look forward to seeing the solution for malformed request handling.</comment>


How to know if you are good enough at coding to get hired? - <AUTHOR> https://joshuakemp.blogspot.com/b/post-preview?token=4PT7DE8BAAA.Opzo7Fc-AO5ZjvDLJhw3xw.We61_R9nLuKbTOQ5wXp4Lg&postId=4456322494157147233&type=POST

<comment><USER2> Interviews and the many challenges you have no idea about until you get there are what keeps you alive and interested in new opportunities out there. That nervous filling you have, the multiple Google map checks to insure your going to the right place, the multiple looks in the mirror to insure you look your best is always a good thing. The best part is with any new job or interview there is normally something that your not used to that pops up that gets you thinking outside the box, even if you have been a Senior developer for a long time there is always something new and fun to learn that brings back the junior developer fun when learning new things from time to time.

This leads you to hitting the books and documentation again to improve your craft or brush up on the basics you may have forgotten about that you used to be able to code with a breeze. It's like going to school for a degree but mainly free, and at the end you have a wonderful feeling of fulfillment when you master that new skill or build a project integrating your newly acquired skills.

</comment><comment><USER3> run the experiment. apply for a job. not everything only works if predicted ahead of time. you are a sample of one, anyway, so it works to try to get hired to find the answer.</comment>


C# Byte Iteration Teaser - <AUTHOR> http://kossovsky.net/index.php/2009/07/csharp-byte-iteration-question/ This one is a great c# interview question – short and simple, but tricky. <comment><USER2> spam</comment>


Pud launches Fandalism.com - <AUTHOR> http://fandalism.com

<comment><AUTHOR> It's invite only, so if you're a musician and want it, friend me on fb (<http://www.facebook.com/ronhornbaker>) and I'll hook you up. It's pretty sweet.</comment>


ELI5: What does a CEO of a large company do in a "typical" week - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/210to8/eli5_what_does_a_ceo_of_a_large_company_do_in_a/ <comment><USER2> Great description and first hand experiencing it myself currently.</comment>


The Automobile Storage Battery – Its Care and Repair (1922) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29718/29718-h/29718-h.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought this was interesting in light of the article about Tesla expanding into home batteries. Large energy storage is going to become ubiquitous in the near future, and it will be interesting to see if the batteries will be as maintainable and hackable as they were in 1922. Already we hear of Prius owners rebuilding their battery packs instead of paying Toyota to replace them. In this case, all that was needed was to clean some corroded bus bars: [http://imgur.com/gallery/j8Bcp](http://imgur.com/gallery/j8Bcp)

<comment><USER2> Batteries are the new ink cartridge ?

<comment><USER3> To some extent, they already are. IMO, one of the most unfortunate side effects of today's tech is the proliferation of incompatible battery packs as a vendor lock-in tactic. Even when the cells inside are a standard design like the ubiquitous 18650, they're almost always in a proprietary pack. Forget about using a Canon battery pack in a Nikon camera, or a Makita pack in a Black & Decker drill.

Don't get me started on the whole "design a non-replaceable battery into that expensive device so we can make it 0.5 mm thinner" nonsense.

Unfortunately, I think the problem is only going to get worse as time goes on.

<comment><USER2> Erf, sad fact indeed. The cynical me is not even hoping that the Ara project will catch on, somehow the 0.5mm has more public appeal than component reuse (either for planet or their own wallet ecology).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A lesson from two cases of fabricated data detected by statistics alone (.PDF) - <AUTHOR> http://fa.its.tudelft.nl/~hart/37/temp/SSRN-id2114571.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a shorter, popular article about how the "data detective" got started in using statistics to spot faked data in psychology journal articles:

<http://www.nature.com/news/the-data-detective-1.10937>

A subsequent popular article about him

[http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/07/data-detective-makes- hi...](http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/07/data-detective-makes-his-fraud- busting-algorithm-public.html)

led me to the submission here, his formal (pre-publication) paper on his method of detecting fraud.</comment>


Civilizations: 9-Hour Documentary Series on the History of Art - <AUTHOR> https://www.pbs.org/show/civilizations/ <comment><USER2> American narrator: "Were artists really artistic or did they have help? Is it possible their talent was ... otherworldly?"

American talking head: "I'm not saying it was aliens, but the leaps these artists made in artistry is spooky. If they didn't have help making art then I can't explain it."</comment>


More evidence for a 'fifth force' found in radioactive decay measurements - <AUTHOR> https://physicsworld.com/a/more-evidence-for-a-fifth-force-found-in-radioactive-decay-measurements/ <comment><USER2> Note that there is no new experimental evidence measure by an independent research group. It is just a new analysis of the data by the same group.</comment>


NgPlant: Open Source plant modeling suite - <AUTHOR> http://ngplant.sourceforge.net/

<comment><USER2> Just wrap this in an Angular directive, and a plant modeling suite is just an HTML element away.

<comment><USER3> That's also the first thing that the ng prefix made me think of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Heh - I was playing around with this a few weeks ago to generate tree meshes for forest scenes:

[https://vimeo.com/91155115](https://vimeo.com/91155115)

It's no SpeedTree (fiddly interface, random luck based on the random seed what shape branches and leave orientation you get), but it's pretty cool, and the meshes are quads as well, which is nice.

</comment><comment><USER5> Made me remember of arbaro [http://arbaro.sourceforge.net/](http://arbaro.sourceforge.net/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I had no idea something like this existed, but it looks pretty cool...

</comment><comment><USER7> reminds me of outrun :)</comment>


Show HN: Solon – Collaborative Jukebox Using YouTube, Vimeo and SoundCloud - <AUTHOR> https://solon.rocks

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there,

just this month we hit a point, at which we were confident enough to release this and now we're even more confident, so we put it on HackerNews.

If you care about our techstack: the backend is built using rails, em- websocket and postgres, while the Frontend relies on angular with some Backbone leftovers. Messaging is done via vanilla websockets and protobuf.

Every kind of feedback is welcome, however harsh. Thanks!

<comment><USER2> I just hunted this on Product Hunt. What's your twitter id?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :) Atm we're only on FB & G+, but as soon as we figure out how to create a twitter page for non-people, we will do that. Here are our handles: [https://www.facebook.com/solon.rocks](https://www.facebook.com/solon.rocks)

[https://plus.google.com/+SolonRocksYourParty](https://plus.google.com/+SolonRocksYourParty)

[https://twitter.com/YSchuchmann](https://twitter.com/YSchuchmann)

[https://twitter.com/grexception](https://twitter.com/grexception)

<comment><USER2> I invited Yannick. Couldn't invite the other id because of the "egg" on the id pic.

<comment><AUTHOR> I deserved that :D

And now I have one!

<comment><USER2> Invite sent</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


On the Design of Editors for Small Computers (1972) - <AUTHOR> http://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/archive/apps/Whitfield-Thesis/thesis.html

<comment><USER2> "if they make large numbers of errors or have difficulties with the command language when these could be reduced by changes to the program, then this must be regarded as a failing of the program and not of its users"

This is an excellent point, ahead of its time, and a controversial position as late as the mid 90s. ("No, it's a training problem.")

<comment><USER3> > "if they make large numbers of errors or have difficulties with the command > language when these could be reduced by changes to the program, then this > must be regarded as a failing of the program and not of its users"

By this standard, automobiles have an absolutely terrible design.

<comment><USER4> I think it's possible that the controls used for automobiles suffer from grognard capture: experienced drivers don't want anything to change.

<comment><USER5> I had never read "grognard capture" before. Isn't this a special case of the economist's "path dependence" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence))?

<comment><USER4> Yes and no, I think. There is also a "memoryless" effect at work that causes new users to favour more complex and presumably powerful products, which they then invest in and are reluctant to switch away from. I'm not sure the resulting network effects in the market are an example of path dependence. There is an article by Don Norman on the complexity phenomenon here: [http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly.html](http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you like this you should also read Craig Finseth's thesis ([http://www.finseth.com/craft/](http://www.finseth.com/craft/)) in which he describes an emacs like editor.</comment>


Facebook whistleblower documents evidence of moderation algorithm and team bias - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7o4A16QCxE <comment><USER2> Well, it is interesting to see a FB employee, who has a nice salary I would imagine, coming out with his view of how internal FB staff behave.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish there was a completely technical solution to moderation sadly it's a human problem and humans come with their biases. It's election season if someone could document systemic political bias would that be treated as an in- kind donation under the FEC regulations?

<comment><USER4> Remember just a couple years ago when it looked like we were going to have sentient robots around the corner...

Now if we could just get a content moderation system that isn't a human kludge mess, then maybe we can worry about general AI

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> According to Wikipedia, "Project Veritas is an American right-wing activist group. The group uses "disguises and hidden cameras to uncover supposed liberal bias and corruption". The group is known for producing deceptively edited videos about media organizations and left-leaning groups"

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

<comment><USER6> Are you accusing their source of lying? Or the hidden camera footage of their moderators as admitting bias - were they lying? What do you allege was deceptively edited here? Because what is reported by detractors as "deceptive editing" looks typical of just plain "editing" for clarity and brevity, not unlike what CNN or MSNBC may do. Else the recordings would literally be hours long.

Regarding Wikipedia's pronouncements, Wikipedia sources are largely news articles. Surveys of journalists show that those willing to identify themselves politically overwhelmingly identify as left leaning, the groups that Veritas tends to target. As such, the sources Wikipedia uses are more likely to be from organizations and writers with a bias against Veritas or towards their targets.

Not only that, Wikipedia itself, via Wikimedia, provides grants to left leaning organizations to host "edit-thons" to both generate content (which naturally coincides with the biases of the authors) and edit existing content (again, which naturally reinforces said biases). Not to mention the edit-thons not specifically funded or requested by Wikipedia themselves.

In any case, if this were the first, second, third, or even fourth time Facebook had been secretly caught with such biased ideological considerations, it may be a valid point. Sadly, it isn't. It keeps happening, and it keeps happening in favor of one side of the US political spectrum.

<comment><USER5>
        > Are you accusing their source of lying?

I never said that. I just selectively quoted Wikipedia to make Project Veritas look bad.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: neo.mjs main thread addons - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/neomjs/neo/tree/dev/src/main/addon <comment><AUTHOR> In case you are not familiar with neo.mjs yet, it is a new UI framework which runs inside a web worker to use multi threading to the fullest.

[https://github.com/neomjs/neo](https://github.com/neomjs/neo)

I just finished the main thread addons, so this is my highlight for the week.

In case you want to work with other libraries or tools which need to include their own scripts, you can now do this with adding addons to the main thread. Examples are highlight js, showdown, Google Analytics.

Each addon got an optional entry point: onDomContentLoaded, where you can import new scripts or stylesheets as needed. You can expose methods to other workers (in most cases to the app worker) to directly use them as promises.

Choosing which addons you want to use is convenient: Just drop each one into the Neo.config (e.g. [https://github.com/neomjs/neo/blob/dev/apps/realworld/index....](https://github.com/neomjs/neo/blob/dev/apps/realworld/index.html))

This way we can ensure, that the main-thread is as small as possible since each app only needs to include the addons it needs.

Under the hood this is working with dynamic imports. This does work in the dev env with no JS builds at all (Chrome 80), as well as the webpack build versions (dist).

Using webpack this was tricky at first, since the __webpack_public_path__ config is not sufficient: we only want to build one main thread for all possible apps, but app entry points can be on different folder tree levels. So, using publicPath for the main thread was not an option. A small override of __webpack_require__.p for the dist versions did already fix it though.

Feedback appreciated!</comment>


Ask HN: How to find Remote Unix Admin jobs to develop skills - <AUTHOR>

I am currently working in Marketing /Sales. I do have a bachelors in CS and how I got here is a whole different story. However, I do feel left out of the IT race, for the lack of better words.
So to sum up I had an IT background wherein I had a month or so of UNIX admin mentoring/training. It was Solaris mostly and I loved it. But I moved on to seek a challenging opportunity. That being said I still want to do some Unix Admin on the side. What would be a good resource or who will be willing to hire me for remote work or something of that sort ? Please advise. <comment><AUTHOR> any tips?</comment>


Autobit, new kind of puzzle game. Suggestions are needed for improvement - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3xQRriqzl0

<comment><AUTHOR> test</comment>


Is a product ever complete? - <AUTHOR> http://avisweblog.tumblr.com/post/12647714821/is-a-product-ever-complete

<comment><USER2> Is anything ever complete? What does "complete" even mean?

On the one hand, you can always tweak. Add new things or take them away or reorganize them. On the other hand, there are always entirely different things you could be doing, and the time you spend tweaking could be used to make new things.

Walt Whitman spend his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, editing and re- editing. Had he not died I'm sure he'd have continued to write it. Is the complete poem the last draft he wrote? Is it one of the earlier drafts when he first thought he was finished? Or is it the poem he would have continued to write had he not died?

One of the truly tremendous things about interactive technology is that things are easier to deconstruct and edit than they ever have been before. Authors don't get the final say exactly the way they used to. Everything is a living, breathing document, more than ever before.

The question, I think, isn't whether a product is complete, it's whether it's currently moving anyplace interesting, or whether it ought to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nicely said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> i would say no, most website always have to keep evolving and improving, even if its just adding like buttons and google+ bits as they come out. ross @ moodpanda.com</comment>


Bill Gates's Prescient Internet Prediction - <AUTHOR> https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/03/20/bill-gatess-prescient-internet-prediction/ <comment><USER2> He didn't predict the Internet as we know it today. His book "The Road Ahead" didn't mention it as being important. He thought that 'The Information Superhighway' made of proprietary communication entities like 'AOL' would be the norm and he believed that MSFT's 'MSN' would be the one that would succeed.

When Windows 95 was released in August 1995, there was no internet browser or TCP/IP stack included. That was a later 'add-on' which came on a CDROM that was mainly advertised for its other 'goodies'.

To give Microsoft its due, it came to the Internet party late, but caught up in less than six months.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you call the box with the CPU in when talking to non techs - <AUTHOR>

I was chatting with some low-tech friends, people who use their computers for day to day desktop tasks, about terminology for the parts of a home computer and we realised that for a non-laptop, non-all-in-one there doesn't seem to be a consensus term for 'the box with all the bits in'. Think classic beige box desktop tower, that bit.<p>We decided that 'hard drive' would be the best bet for general understanding amongst ourselves, but this niggles my pedantic geekery. What term do you use when you're trying to point someone to 'the bit that actually has the computer in'? <comment><USER2> I just call it "the computer" since that's what it is.

<comment><USER3> Same here, and I've always tried to educate family/friends on the difference between the 'computer' and the parts inside it (when they ask).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, the word "computer" leaps to mind. Maybe "processor enclosure" if you prefer more wordy descriptions.

</comment><comment><USER5> Best bet is to go with "tower" or just "computer" when it comes up in a normal conversation.

If a non-techy is asking you about what's inside I'd suggest sticking to the basic components (CPU, hard drive, graphics card, RAM/memory, and maybe motherboard) and a short explanation to what task the component does. Beyond just the basics you'll probably do more harm then good unless they have a genuine interest in learning.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'll call it the 'tower' usually. If it's an oldschool non-tower case, you'd probably be stuck using multiple words.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've not found a good answer to this. Non-techies have definitely called it a 'hard drive' to me before, but this is wrong and can be genuinely confusing (especially if they have an actual external hard drive on the desk too).

Happily, my family all have iMacs or laptops these days, so the issue has gone away. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> I use their word for it. I will point at it and say What do you call it? Unless it's grossly wrong, or confusing to them or future helpers I let them have their word.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've heard many non-techs call it "CPU". "Cabinet" or "CPU Cabinet" is also very popular here in India.

</comment><comment><USER10> In Spain and Argentina we say: "the tower".

</comment><comment><USER11> the case</comment>


One Tech Guru's Crusade to Ban Handshaking - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2014/04/02/one-tech-gurus-crusade-to-ban-handshaking/

<comment><USER2> When interviewing startups, shaking hands with hundreds of people who've flown in from all over, we found a lot of us got sick. Until we started using Purel after each group. That seemed to fix it. Small bottles can be inconspicuously carried in your pocket.</comment>


A cure for Hacker News overload - <AUTHOR> http://jmillerinc.com/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overload/ <comment><USER2> Privacy issues aside, I'd love a co-occurring votes / collaborative filtering based approach to HN. The problem here is that a fixed threshold of votes is a coarse estimation of quality and relevance.

Imagine a system where each HN vote is weighted according to your similarity to that voter. That way a vote by people with whom I have very little in common would also be worth very little to me.

I'd love to view a HN where I don't see the highly-voted Gruber/Apple/Facebook posts but I still see the stuff about Clojure, Steve Blank, and patio11.

<comment><USER3> You can implement what you want with simple keyword & url filtering.

<comment><USER4> Speaking of this, does anyone know of a good RSS filter? By that I mean a service to which you give a link to an RSS feed and provide certain filters, and they will provide a link to a modified version of the feed that they host themselves.

<comment><USER5> Check out <http://feedrinse.com/>

<comment><USER4> Awesome, this is exactly what I wanted! By filtering out all the Apple/iPhone/iPad-related crap, I'll probably be able to cut the number of new items from tech blogs in half.

<comment><USER5> And if it's a Gawker Media site, they allow you to filter their by changing the URI. For example, [http://gizmodo.com/tag/not:apple/not:iphone/not:ipad/index.x...](http://gizmodo.com/tag/not:apple/not:iphone/not:ipad/index.xml)

I wish more sites had that kind of filtering.

<comment><USER4> Oh, that's even better. I don't subscribe to Gizmodo, but I do subscribe to Lifehacker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd like a Best of Hacker News that, like Best of Reddit, links to exceptionally interesting comments. The comments on HN are usually far more interesting than the stories, and often interesting comments are attached to uninteresting stories.

<comment><USER7> Well, there is a Best of Hacker News page, but it shows the best submissions of the past few days rather than the best comments.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/best>

<comment> s-phi-nl There is also a best comments page at <http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments>.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great solution and glad to see how you expanded it to other thresholds. I think this might be the best automated way to track the best of Hacker News (of course I think my <http://www.hackernewsletter.com> is another great way with more of an non-automated feel + other content.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Very good project. I would love to see, in the rss feed, the real article (the HN text or the link the story points to). This would be great so that we don't have to get out of google reader to actually read the article.

Example : [http://toadjaw.com/article?url=http://steveblank.com/2010/07...](http://toadjaw.com/article?url=http://steveblank.com/2010/07/26/you- cant-take-it-with-you/)

Hacker News reader for mobiles, created by toadjaw, is using a scrapping script which will extract nicely the article from the linked webpage.

</comment><comment><USER10> I prefer <http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/>: that's the top 10 articles of the previous day. Reading them one day late is not too bad for me, and it helps procrastinate less: it has put an end on my "let's see if there's something new".

Still this is a very good alternative, which I'll probably end up trying :)

<comment><USER11> If you're not time bound to the absolute latest, also check out the new <http://hackerbra.in> \- it will shade down the snapshots you've already seen in its history

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A noprocrast of 3 days works great for me!

</comment><comment><USER13> This may actually prompt me to keep a Twitter client open again (for the first time in a year). Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER14> Dapper + Yahoo Pipes = Same result, allowing customizable score filter, customizable sorting, customizable date thresholds, etc. In about 30 minutes.

If a single person replies to this comment, I'll implement it.

EDIT: T+46: As promised, but without the sorting or date threshold. Sorry.

Change the parameters to meet your needs. Supports min/max comments/points. Sorts by points DESC. Go play with the pipe if you want :)

Apologies that it doesn't tweet you.

[http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=ceb3c855a339606d3c...](http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=ceb3c855a339606d3c57489f4b0a4206&_render=rss&max_comments=10000&max_points=10000&min_comments=20&min_points=20)

<comment><USER15> sure, why not. Not sure what dapper is required for, couldn't you doo this all in pipes?

I use pipes for a number of my applications, great stuff yahoo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is awesome, I love it.

However, is anyone else concerned that the driver seat of HN is essentially being handed over to new users as more advanced users switch to services like this or "HN daily" or even the "/best" page? It seems like the people that don't know anything exists beyond the front page will become the only ones left to do the work of curating content.

(just speculating, nothing against new users I haven't been here that long myself...)

</comment><comment><USER17> Part of why I like HN is that I _don't_ have a big queue of things to read, unlike my RSS feeds. I can skim without feeling that I'm missing something.

</comment><comment><USER18> Neat, see also:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1514037>

</comment><comment><USER19> As long as only a minority of users use this, great. Otherwise, if everyone's reading through things like this, WTF is voting the stories up in the first place?

Part of what makes HN good is that most people hit the site and help with the voting. The more people who move away to reading HN remotely or through feeds.. the worse the voting situation gets.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, but I don't think there's much to worry about as it stands. PG said newsyc currently gets 60,000 unique visitors per day, and the # of ppl following these twitter feeds is barely 1% of that.

<comment><USER19> _PG said newsyc currently gets 60,000 unique visitors per day, and the # of ppl following these twitter feeds is barely 1% of that._

Though that doesn't say much to what percentage of the 60,000 are even users or logged in.. I suspect it's not a high percentage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Thanks a lot, this was bugging me the other day and I was starting to brainstorm how I could filter things. This is perfect!

</comment><comment><USER21> Diff it!

Say we snap a cache frequently either centrally or locally. It would be so much easier to just diff the HN cache throughout each session with the last central cache or local cache to see what has changed significantly by highlighting or something.

<comment><USER11> I was thinking of adding that as a feature to <http://hackerbra.in>. Currently, news is every 2hrs, ask 5hrs, best 11hrs. The site tells you if you've already viewed the current snapshot, but actually highlighting the new items since the last snapshot would be an interesting feature. Also, when stored, having a tweet go out with the number of new items for that snapshot could be useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Thanks, I added the 50 score filter feed to Google reader and it works well for me so far.

</comment><comment><USER23> Many thanks! I've added the feeds to Pulse on my iPad and its working like a charm!

</comment><comment><USER24> _@newsyc20 includes links to the story itself and the Hacker News comment page for that story._

Sold! Not having links to the comments when following @newsycombinator always perturbed me.

</comment><comment><USER25> Kudos for adding the user's Twitter username. Really impressive!

</comment><comment><USER4> Still holding out for a version that uses Readability to include the full linked article directly in the feed :)</comment>


ZFS on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu-xenial-zfs&num=1 <comment><USER2> So ext4 seems not to be so bad in comparison despite the hype of zfs/btrfs...

<comment><USER3> ZFS's killer features are keeping your data safe and actually having incredibly configurable pool setups as well as a plethora of filesystem features. Benchmarks aren't the only factor. tmpfs does great as a filesystem under benchmarks, that doesn't mean you should use it to store your data.</comment></comment>


Review our app: IntentBox (London Startup Weekend) - <AUTHOR>

We just built this app this weekend, we didn't manage to get full facebook integration. But the site works as a self-contained app.<p>Our site: http://intentbox.com <comment><USER2> One thing I noticed right away is:

I entered in what I wanted to do, and I'm instantly prompted to register. Fair enough, this is a common pattern. But after I've registered, the thing I entered in already isn't listed, and I have to re-enter it. I was very much expecting that information to carry over.

I can't speak for everyone, but this doesn't solve a problem I've ever had, and it doesn't seem any more useful than an email or Facebook status update.

<comment><AUTHOR> Regarding versus Facebook status. Facebook status will move very fast. If you post "I want to go and see Batman" in a couple of days time everyone will have forgotten about it. This keeps track over time.

Initially we planned it to have tight facebook integration but the facebook api proved to be an enormous pain, so we cut our losses to built what we could build in a weekend.

Also we wanted an android/iphone front end which would be good for realtime activities (i.e I want to go to the pub this evening) but again it was a time thing.

<comment><USER3> A nice value add over what you can already do by just posting a Facebook status update / shooting out a message on Twitter would be to do a time- delayed push of the message. If I know I want to go shoot pool tomorrow night, put that on your site, shoot it out over Facebook/Twitter/whatever with a link back to your site, then if I haven't created plans, push out a 'last chance' status update that is closer to the time when I want to go do whatever it is I wanted to do.

More generically, I can see value in choosing a strategy to publish information at some future time and not having to do it manually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Clickable link: <http://intentbox.com>

<comment><USER5> Project start - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=954556>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really like the idea behind this. Best of luck.

I'd prefer an OAuth twitter integration.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's a neat idea.

Any chance of OpenID support rather than requiring signup?

Oh, and the ability to link to an intention from elsewhere. I'd love to be able to link to it from my LJ.

<comment><USER5> As a quick hack you can link directly to an intention by clicking on it and then copying the URL.

(This is fixable and should be no problem however).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please don't look too closely at the code, there are some things in there that need a bit of refactoring :-)

</comment><comment><USER8> "I built this app in a weekend" + need to register to see anything = bounce. Make it easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't have to sign-up with an email address, you can just pick an arbitrary username which isn't taken and hit signup.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, my brain is hardwired by everyone else's signups to bounce on screens like that. Maybe it can be made clearer that there's no big signup required? Even picking a password is friction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would be really useful if it automatically added my facebook friends list

</comment><comment><USER10> Isn't it similar to 43things.com?</comment>


Mojolicious 4.0 released: Perl real-time web framework - <AUTHOR> http://mojolicio.us/

<comment><AUTHOR> I am using it for HN tl;dr extension on a server side.</comment>


Ask HN: Am I too dumb for life, CS and STEM? - <AUTHOR> I'm a 19 years old uni drop out, who is from and lives in a small town in Spain, but I am Ukrainian Citizen because of my parents and nationality acquisition issues. I'm very concerned with my intelligence and with my complete inability to form and maintain relationships with other people.
I've spent most of my life on the IT ever since '11. When I was a teenager, I told everyone in my town I was smart and made good money online, which were lies, so my self-ego is inflated, but I've come to accept ever since that I am simply dumb.
My grades were average during HS (I especially struggled with math) until the last 2 years before Uni, when they tanked. I didn't pass Chem & Bio during the last year, but the teachers chose to pass my anyway in order so that I didn't have to repeat a grade.
I then got the worst SAT score in class. I got a 3.5/10 in math that made me go to a 2nd tier Uni to study CS. I studied "irregularly" for the SAT. In Uni, I failed all of the mid-term finals I had, even one that was non-CS related. I didn't study "well" for them either.
The subject with which I struggled the most in Uni was programming. During the 2nd semester I got a seemingly unfixable segfault C++ error that lead me to loose all motivation in prog, even though the professor told me the code was sound. I've not programmed ever since, and I find opening a prog book scary.
The only thing that's stopping me from killing myself are my parents, who currently sustain me and let me live in their house while I am "struggling".
I think I struggle to study because of how dumb I am, both in regard to math specifically and in general. Am I simply too dumb for CS, STEM or modern work?
I have no will to progress anymore. What is it good for, if I am destined to be a sore looser genetically and because of my choices. It seems like all careers other than CS suck salary wise and will be automated in some way or another, and I can't stop thinking about this and sleep. <comment><USER2> First,HN isn't a good place to seek help regarding you suicidal thoughts,which you should definetly see someone about.

You're over estimating too many things and using too much emotion in your analysis. Objectively speaking,you should define your life goals first and evaluate your abilities.

In my opinion,for "modern" or any other life,your career is primarily important to take care of yourself and your dependents. Even homeless people lead a life worth living. Life can always get worse or better.

Yes,natural abilities are imoortant but perseverance and wit are more decisive in succeeding(even in programming). Therein lies your weakness based on what I gather from your question. The fact that you gave up to easily and didn't attempt to at least "fake it till you make it" is a big problem.

I don't consider myself talented in STEM either but I am confident I can debug myself out of a segfault most days,primarily because of the ridiculous amount of time I spent with C and gdb debugging simple code mistakes. I don't know if I'd make a good programmer but since they want uni education in compsci,I focused in IT fields which is working out great for me.

In the end,I think you'll do fine in general. I don't know if STEM or compsci is for you based on what you mentioned but my advice is to at least persistently pursue your dreams. I would also highly recommend investing in relationships with people(personal,academic and professional) life is too hard on your own.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've recently been to a psychologist, so yeah, about the suicidal part.

I understand what you mean, but it's just so hard for me to keep up with other people. I am just awkward and I do not know how to interact with them. I literally have a relationship maintenance problem, in a way :D

>In the end,I think you'll do fine in general. I don't know if STEM or compsci is for you based on what you mentioned but my advice is to at least persistently pursue your dreams. I would also highly recommend investing in relationships with people(personal,academic and professional) life is too hard on your own.

Indeed. Thanks a lot for replying and for the encouraging message:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well, selfhating thoughts are TRICKY... Trust me, I'm pro on the subject. :) The tricky part is: you can never be sure that you are objective about yourself. 90% of the time this bad thinking is linked to hormons.

The thing with hormos is this: WHen chemistry kicks in, you start to paint EVERYTHING in black colors, your mind just switches circuits and you can not reason with it (some of the pathways are just off). So immediate advice to you: well... no metter what I say, your brain will process it depending on what type of hormon reaction is dominant in your body :) So, most of the time logical advice will not help.

I envy your 19years old... I got to know logarithms in my 30... and started to code at the same time... Danm I wish I started earlier... I would have be Einstein or he would have been second Me. :))

Remember one thing: you can NEVER be sure that your ranking of yourself is objective. It might be genetically programmed into you to struggle in that particula age...

Remember Darwin: no metter what keep existing that's how you win in the long run.

Practical advice: Start from the beginning. Find a math book for school and start again. Page after page. If stuck, find another book of the same category... and so on.. I used to read about 40 (no joke) books on linear algebra before my first undersanding kicked in. (mind you 90% of those were abandoned in their first 1/5 text, cause I just stopped understanding the material (it got too complex). Of those 40 books only once I was able to finish a book with complete understanding. (it was the last of the bunch :)

<comment><AUTHOR> >. I would have be Einstein or he would have been second Me. :))

This made me laugh :D

>Practical advice: Start from the beginning. Find a math book for school and start again. Page after page. If stuck, find another book of the same category... and so on.. I used to read about 40 (no joke) books on linear algebra before my first undersanding kicked in. (mind you 90% of those were abandoned in their first 1/5 text, cause I just stopped understanding the material (it got too complex). Of those 40 books only once I was able to finish a book with complete understanding. (it was the last of the bunch :)

Oh, wow, that's a hell of a lot of books. I'll look into it for sure. After reading or quasi-reading all of those books, did they change the way you thought?

Thanks for replying :)

<comment><USER3> Of course they have changed me. In what ways? 1\. I know that I can learn anything. BUTTTT I never rush. If you have a deadline, it will ruin everything. No rush, no deadline. I learn because I LOVE it. I'm high when I start to undestand complex subject, I wasn't able even to be able to think about. Like entropy, "pull backs", probabilities ect.

No time limits, no deadlines for learning.

2) If you have a goal to reach some point of undestanding... that's not good either. Goals MUST NOT define you. What must define you - activities you like to do. If you set goals you'll never reach them (that's life) and you'll feel miserable. But if you just like doing things, how can it ruin you? No metter what goals you would achieve you still had a great time doing the thing (achieving)... thus you'll die of old age having spend your life doing fun things. No goals reached? Who cares? Fuck'em!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't lose hope! Just because you do poorly in school does NOT mean you are not smart.

I joined the US Navy and went to Navy Nuclear power school, I did so poorly that the instructors started writing "recruitment error" on my wrong math test answers.

Now? I work for the #1 cyber security company and have an amazing life, with no college degree.

What changed? I was diagnosed with ADD, prescribed aderral and that made all the difference.

Find out what is keeping you down, solve it, and get the career of your dreams!

<comment><USER5> Seconding this, have you ever been evaluated for ADD/ADHD? If you feel like you are constantly failing to achieve your potential, can't focus on one thing long enough to be successful, intimidated by hard work/the grind, find simple but boring things like remembering to do chores difficult, you may be dealing with this issue. Speak to a doctor about it (even though it's scary - do it! You'll be glad you did if this describes you). Here is a link where people talk about what it's like: [https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-know-if-I-really- have-ADHD-AD...](https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-know-if-I-really-have-ADHD- ADD)

<comment><AUTHOR> I visited a psychologist recently, she told me that because I didn't exhibit many symptoms when I was younger I probably do not.

The loosing things around and lack of situational awarness is something that doesn't resonate with me at all. I'm more of a massive procrastinator, though.

So I do not know.

Thanks for the link, it was really interesting to read other people's experiences!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> First off, don't kill yourself. If you feel you need to ask for help on that issue please, before you head in that direction call the suicide prevention hotline for Spain. 717 003 717

Second, it doesn't matter if you're dumb or not, there is a place for you. Even if most of the jobs you're think of are automated there are jobs that you haven't thought of that won't be automated.

Third, which follows closely to the second, you don't have to do CS. You can force it and struggle which many times seems to be what programming is - finding the bug, figuring out the solution. People have succeeded simply because they didn't give up, or because they went for in depth help to get over the hump. BUT if you want to go in a different direction you should keep in mind that there will always, _always_ be a human doing something.

I seriously hope someone else comes by with better advice but you should understand that there is a path just for you and as long as you don't completely give up you'll get to a good place.

</comment><comment><USER7> You are not dumb, you simply have depression. And you didn't get depressed because you failed, you failed because you got depressed.

No amount of thinking will get you out of this. You need professional help and medication. Life will get better quickly after that and you will be able to fulfill your potential, whatever it is.

</comment><comment><USER8> I too went through a similar phase in life during college where I felt worthless, completely socially inept, and suicidal.

The major thing you need to realize is that your self-worth is not tied to what you do. Even some of the most successful people in the world feel like a failure at times - this is because they are basing their worth on what they do, not on who they are. And that is a trap. As a famous book says, you are "fearfully and wonderfully made", and this is something you need to internalize - that you are a unique human being with experiences that no one else will ever have. You have two loving parents who recognize this fact. I can hear you at this point raising an objection, "But that's just becaus-". Stop that. Tune out of the negative self-talk and replace it with positive self-talk.

At this stage of life, a lot of things are happening that are adding to your stress. Don't give up. You'll find that this seemingly hopeless situation is a case of "this too, shall pass".

Now for something practical. You say that you feel that dumb. I did too, and sometimes still do. Why not put some of those feelings of inadequacy to work? If you're of lesser intelligence, it means you will need to work much harder to reach a average level of performance. With this mindset, I soon surpassed my classmates in college, despite being a very slow learner and a person of below-average intelligence.

I'm now working at a famous company as a robotics software engineer, and loving every moment of it. Hard work pays off, even if you're of lower than average intelligence. Take small steps towards your goals. As one author put it, "Little by little, one travels far."

</comment><comment><USER9> General suggestion that I heard from multiple people is to do something that you enjoy and the money will typically come to you. Someone recommended "what color is your parachute" book to figure out what you might want to do for career. Also, even thought it's a US website, Occupational Outlook Handbook site is a good reference too.

I went to school for CS and didn't like it. I'm in security now and the pay is pretty good at least in US. I know I could make more if I was a developer but I know I'm happier where I am so who cares. It's better to be in a happy mental state than constantly miserable. At 19 you have a long life ahead of you. And even if you want to get a job as a developer, study on your own at you own pace. Know your limitations and set goals that are realistic, like working for any company instead of the ones everyone wants to work for.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm happy you found a good career in security. I understand what you mean, having said so, it's really hard to find a different life path different from the one I use to want to have because I feel really lost (and I become completely insecure) whenever I think about it.

This is something I must research and "decide" by myself, but needless to say, it's hard.

Thanks for replying and for sharing your personally story :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You're placing an awful lot of pressure on being in CS - there are many other careers that have good salaries and will not be automated in the near future. I also think you're placing too much emphasis on math proficiency in terms of general CS success. Obviously some CS subfields are math heavy, but many are not.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Is better to give than to get".

Aside your job, consider an activity that requiere help others. Most people like when you help them, even in small ways.

Also, other activities that help to be "solo", but in the good way. Like walking in a forest. Play music or paint. Exercise. Anything that allow to be in your own thinking, but in the path to a positive objetive and not remembering how much you sucks. (also, this can become groupal easily, and still let you to stay alone sometimes!)

You absolutely not need to be good at any of that. People sign in the shower, and suck at it!

So learn and do anything that you enjoy. Not work after a while? At 19 you still have the luxury to change tracks fast.

However, also PAY attention to why, how you do things, what work or not, and what effects and possible source of that are.

\---

In relation to programming, in the case your wanna continue:

You hit a problem, google it, fix the problem?

Congratulations, you are above average!

</comment><comment><USER12> "It seems like all careers other than CS suck salary wise and will be automated in some way or another, and I can't stop thinking about this and sleep."

that's bullcrap dude. Nurse, firefighter, cop, trades, yes even accountants... by the time any of those are automated a lot of programming jobs will be too.

<comment><USER13> If I had it to do over I go into a trade. Get skilled(while everyone else if in college). then after a couple years work for myself. And yes even in today's automated environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> First, you CAN do a lot of things and you ARE intelligent. You're also brave for asking here and I hope you're getting some helpful answers!

I think one thing you'll have to come to terms with is your lies about the past. It may be the kind of thing you don't mention again and just move on from, or if it comes up in the future it might benefit from you being a little more honest with people. Impostor Syndrome is a very real thing for people in our industry just because the world is changing so fast, so you'll likely deal with Impostor Syndrome yourself at a number of times in your life/career. This post might be an example of that kind of thing - you feel like a fake when you think other people know what they're doing, and you're an imposter, and if people find out, you'll be out of there. That's not true, and a lot of people struggle with these feelings over many years. The good news is that the solution to impostor syndrome is being honest with people. Don't be afraid to reveal what you _dont_ know or _cant_ do to people. That will help.

Now for the question of "are you smart enough to CS or STEM work" I'm going to say: YES. The fact that you're here, asking in what might be a second language to you, and the intellect you're showing just in what you said all show me that you have a good brain. The field of CS, and STEM is very vast, there are TONS of options, and tons of roles.

You mentioned you ran up against a wall with C++. Me too right when I started, you got farther than me :D You should try something a little more forgiving like JavaScript. It's got tons of practical applications, you could build websites, apps for your phones, desktop apps, server-side apps. I'd suggest taking a more casual approach to programming and try to play with it, and be creative with it, rather than just studying it seriously.

And in the meantime while you're 'struggling', thank your parents for sheltering you and having patience, and trusting you. They've been invested in you for two decades already, and I'm sure they want to see you spread your wings and soar as an adult. You'll get there! They can help :D

</comment><comment><USER15> At 19, you have no way of knowing whether you're too dumb for anything. All people are dumb at something, vast majority of 19 year olds are dumb at all things. It's possible to have aptitude for something you haven't tried yet, it's possible that getting good takes just a lot more time and effort than you put in so far.

The only way to find out how good you can get is to try a lot of stuff for a few years, and spend 10-20 more years doing the thing you like the most(or have the most aptitude at). Maybe you'll push through and find a way to get success with CS, maybe you'll find out you're good at writing or art or public speaking or something else.

One of my favorite quotes (from Atomic Habits):

> Focus on fulfilling your own potential not comparing yourself to someone > else. People get so caught up in fact that they have limits that they rarely > exert the effort required to get close to them.

Keep trying and learning and reading, this definitely beats killing yourself.

Also, as other people have said, your post reads like you're depressed. If you have suicidal thoughts - share them with your friends, parents, a doctor, or someone else you trust. The odds are it's just your brain chemistry making you feel these things, which is fixable for many people with lifestyle changes and medication.

Speaking of which, make sure to eat healthy, have enough high quality sleep, and regular exercise. You'll be really surprised how much difference this stuff makes, especially over time, both in intelligence and mood.

I felt suicidal when I was 19, and I'm VERY happy I didn't do this, I ended up discovering things I love doing and feel very passionate about, and I want to live SO MUCH, more and more every year. If you don't feel like living for your career, live to watch the next season of Rick and Morty, to see Elon Musk land a spaceship on Mars, to have your intelligence improved with whatever crazy tech we'll have in 20 years, to avoid upsetting your parents - find any excuse to keep going, it doesn't matter, what matters is that it's VERY likely that a few years from now your life will change in all sorts of surprising unexpected ways and you'll feel about this stuff very differently.

</comment><comment><USER16> Don't kill yourself, life has too much fun even for you.

You're probably not that smart, but not dumb either. For smart people math usually comes easy, as it doesn't require much memorisation.

Dumb people are not able to do deep self reflection.

C++ is probably not your language, so if you want to stay with computers, I suggest you take a look at web programming, as it has the least math. You can always switch inside programming if you change your mind.

Go for HTML, JavaScript, Vue as a start for example. Try to have fun with it. Build things. Then come back and ask more questions.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you interested in moving forward with programming:

You might try making a game for fun. To give yourself a goal that's more intrinsic. with less stress.

Also, stay away from c++ until your a lot more comfortable with programming. or ever.

You might check out python or vb.net to learn with. little bit easier to follow what's going on.

I would look for tutorials with a cool library or api like an opencv + language tutorial.

The best part of programming is when you can use some else's hard work to slap together something cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh... I was thinking about trying out some web development stuff, but because of other issue I haven't tried doing so yet.

Also, gotta investigate what vb.net is. Never heard of it before!

Thanks for your response ;)

<comment><USER13> there are a lot of libraries out there that help you make cool things with a little programming. But, in the beginning that's how you get into programming and get passed the procrastination hump. VB.net is part of visual studio. it's the .net version of basic. which to me is much easier to read and program. Also, if your just learning to code windows forms is a good place to start because you can drag and drop widgets on a screen and build pretty good local programs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Don't kill yourself! You're 19 things will be fine! Check out Lambda School ([https://lambdaschool.com](https://lambdaschool.com)). It's an immersive all remote coding school that won't let you fall behind. They will support you the whole way and you only pay them back if you get a job that pays 50k or more a year. They're opening in Europe too!

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh you are still 19, you have a long way to go. Take it slow. Try new things and find what you like to do.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm going to invoke Betteridge here and say no :)

You can do anything you want. There will be struggle (such as what you experienced with the segfault) but that's the stuff that keeps other people out, it doesn't have to keep you out.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :)</comment></comment>


Readability: bookmarklet that strips away irrelevant content - <AUTHOR> http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been trying it with various news sites: nytimes, cnn, arstechnica, etc.. and it's worked flawlessly so far.</comment>


Starting to Evolve Our Organization and Culture - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2014/jul14/07-17announcement1.aspx

<comment><USER2> _The first step to building the right organization for our ambitions is to realign our workforce. With this in mind, we will begin to reduce the size of our overall workforce by up to 18,000 jobs in the next year. Of that total, our work toward synergies and strategic alignment on Nokia Devices and Services is expected to account for about 12,500 jobs, comprising both professional and factory workers._

This is why people don't trust executive-types. Satya, why can't you just say: "We're laying off 18,000 people total, and 12,500 people from Nokia."

<comment><USER3> Because while that's the top-line for the 18,000 people affected (12,500 today), he'd desperately like that _not_ to be the only thing the other 100,000 people who are staying hear. He wants the rest of the people to first hear: "We're changing for the better, and while these layoffs are a bad thing, it's necessary pain we have to go through to be better in the long run." That means wrapping the bad news with as much context and transparency as you can, every time you talk about it.

<comment><USER4> I agree with your overall sentiment that you can't just lay bald facts out there, devoid of context and expect great things to happen.

However,if I were famous enough to propose a Sokoloff's Law, it might say "If your goal is to increase transparency, you've failed once the phrase 'realign our workforce' or 'work toward synergies and strategic alignment' creeps into the draft."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone else feel like Microsoft hasn't actually _done_ anything in over a decade? OK well .. except with the Xbox lineage. It seems like in every other part of the business they've made a bunch of dumb purchases, epic-failed in all areas - including their previous core competency of the consumer OS space - and brought in this Steve Jobs-esque clone CEO guy who is gagging to be seen as doing something while offering precisely zero believable direction.

It must be hard for them seeing all the areas die for them at once: Bing, Exchange, Hotmail, Office, Windows, XBox, mobile, embedded...

<comment><USER6> Satya Nadella's only been CEO for 6 months. You can't effect major changes in a major multinational corporation overnight, especially not until you've had sufficient opportunity to come up with a good direction for that change. If anything, I would consider that a promising and reasoned approach, as opposed to announcing a layoff of 18,000 people within the first month of his appointment.

Steve Jobs did not invent innovation or style and he certainly didn't patent them, so there's no need to claim anyone else with a hint of competence or ambition is just some cheap knock-off. If you raise his pedestal any higher you'll only spend your own life living in the shadow.

<comment><USER5> My point was it's a sinking ship, this guy is too little too late and yet to prove any efficacy. I think you misinterpreted the Jobs mention... I'm not a fan of the original, and frankly find the similarities with other tech presentations highly amusing. Skivvies. Round glasses. Slightly wasted, career-corporate bearing. Ease with which non-words of utter boardroom befuddlement spill out of their mouths. And so on...

<comment><USER6> I think I get your point on the Jobs mention, that you weren't dismissing him as a wannabe-Jobs so much as the culture and manner Jobs most prominently embodies. That's pretty fair, I think.

Though a Jobs-related counterpoint, Apple was in a pretty rough place at one time, too: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Amelio#Apple_Computer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Amelio#Apple_Computer)

I think it's still much too early to count Microsoft out, they've still got a whole lot of runway ahead of them before they run out, and cutting such a huge part of their work force could just buy them even more runway, enough to get their bearings and recover. I think it would be pretty interesting to see a post-Microsoft tech world, but I can't imagine that happening until a worthy successor dethrones them, rather than simply fading away.

<comment><USER5> _I think it 's still much too early to count Microsoft out, they've still got a whole lot of runway ahead of them_

The name will surely live on in some offering or other, but the dynasty has already faded.

 _it would be pretty interesting to see a post-Microsoft tech world, but I can 't imagine that happening until a worthy successor dethrones them, rather than simply fading away._

With regards to the primary three product lines: the OS and the office suite, plus the corollary server solutions, Ubuntu + Redhat seem to be pretty effective at stealing former Microsoft clients, particularly governments. Hell, even Amazon's getting in on the act with EC2 sales to the CIA.

That's fairly strong evidence on its own, but in addition the world has shifted away from desktop and Microsoft's strongest position against this is essentially office work requiring a keyboard and XBox/gaming rigs. SteamOS is going to add further challenge to the console space, and encourage development in a cross-platform direction, and we've already seen open and largely interoperable source office solutions proven at scale.

If you had to point at a successor, I believe it's the Linux world in general, but from the consumer's perspective Ubuntu.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: BestBooks100.com - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
Just thought I want to put this beta site out for public review. It's a prototype of a cms/bookstore engine I am working on using google app engine.
The total work so far is clocked at about 7.5 hours -- using Gaelyk is really productive if you know Grails.
Comments and insights will be appreciated. http://www.bestbooks100.com <comment><AUTHOR> Direct link: <http://www.bestbooks100.com>

</comment><comment> dorian-graph I'd love it if there was more space below the title image. :P Otherwise, it looks okay. 2 small things that came to mind is the hover effect on the book images and the possibility of having a small blurb in the hover box for each book?

<comment><AUTHOR> hmm, you should see a popup with description when you hover.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> One thing with top x lists is they can suffer from not showing good older titles in favour of recent more hyped titles. Wonder if there is a way to account for this? So it is a more of an all time top x list?

</comment><comment><USER3> nice ! is there a way for visitors to vote on their favorite books & you order books based on that ?

maybe even add a few if you missed out something ??

</comment><comment><USER4> That's a really nice and simple idea. You could turn it into a game, where people vote by bumping their favourite books against others.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sorry, I feel like I'm missing something. It's pretty, but is this only Amazon.com's business category sorted by "Bestselling"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the time, ya time being, just a prototype to display amazon best selling books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I see a blank wooden background in FF6 and Chrome 13.

<comment><AUTHOR> Adblock -- I love learning new shits everyday. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> the pop-up that shows up when you hover on image is not updating..it keeps showing info of the first book i hovered over.

</comment><comment><USER8> Who has the time to read all that stuff?

</comment><comment><USER9> The images are set to

        width="1" height="1"

So they are not showing up.

Also I don't see a point to that project. I can just go to amazon and sort the business books by user reviews:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_n_0?rh=n%3A283155%...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_n_0?rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Abusiness%2Cn%3A%211000%2Cn%3A3&bbn=1000&keywords=business&ie=UTF8&qid=1316336584&rnid=1000#/ref=sr_st?qid=1316336605&rh=n%3A283155%2Cn%3A!1000%2Cn%3A3&sort=reviewrank_authority)

<comment><AUTHOR> I got the same problem too, it's caused by your AdBlock. It's just a prototype for a cms for bookstore, so ya, it'd be useless for amazon power users. :-)</comment></comment>


Jack Parsons and the Occult Roots of JPL - <AUTHOR> http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/aerospace-engineering/rocketry/jack-parsons-occult-roots-jpl/ <comment><USER2> If anyone hasn't seen Strange Angel I highly recommend it. It's definitely the "Hollywood version" to some extent but it's _relatively_ close to his biographies and is a decent watch regardless.

The title and thesis here is a bit wacky. JPL itself doesn't have "occult roots." Parsons was into occultism and Thelema/Crowley, which is far less sensational than it sounds if you've ever actually read any of that stuff. It's not any more shocking than someone being into Daoism, esoteric Hinduism, Sufism, or any other minority (in this country) religious or philosophical sect. The beliefs involved are no more or less bizarre than the beliefs championed by much more popular religions.

I have noticed a tendency for creative outside thinkers like Parsons to be into "weird" belief systems. I've met a good number of really bright hacker types who are into all kinds of non-mainstream beliefs including conspiracy theories, Neo-Paganism, esoteric types of religion, strong interests in topics like UFOs and the paranormal, etc.

<comment><USER3> Well, the article directly contradicts your perspective of Crowley and Parsons beliefs with: beastiality, incest, and more.

<comment><USER2> I'm agnostic about those allegations personally. Anything fringe back then was going to attract tabloid claims, and Crowley himself was a troll who was fond of promoting outrageous BS about himself for attention. They were a bunch of nutballs certainly but there's quite a bit of very sensational stuff out there about that scene that's just as questionable.

Today they'd just be a bunch of goth swingers into Neo-Pagan LARPing and totally unremarkable.

<comment><USER4> From the OTO members I've run into this sounds about right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > changed the name to "Jet Propulsion Laboratory." Despite the fact that they > were not researching jet engines

A rocket engine is a "jet" engine as the jet of gasses provides the thrust. What we think of as a "jet" engine today was originally called a "turbojet" engine.

<comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_propulsion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_propulsion)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you want to know more about this, the Unexplained podcast has a 3-parts episode on the story of Jack Parsons. Really recommended!

[http://www.unexplainedpodcast.com/episodes/2018/3/20/s03-epi...](http://www.unexplainedpodcast.com/episodes/2018/3/20/s03-episode-1-we- are-the-witchcraft-pt1-of-3)

<comment><USER8> Additionally the "biography" of Parsons, "Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons", is a great read.

[https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Rockets-Occult-World- Parsons/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Rockets-Occult-World- Parsons/dp/0922915970)

<comment><USER9> And because Parsons' life intersected in the late '40s with that of L. Ron Hubbard, he features prominently in Lawrence Wright's excellent history of Scientology _Going Clear_ ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_Clear_(book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_Clear_\(book\))) as well.

Wikipedia summarizes Parsons' and Hubbard's sex-magic collaboration here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer)...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_\(rocket_engineer\)#L._Ron_Hubbard_and_the_Babalon_Working:_1945%E2%80%9346)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Parsons is a very interesting character. I think the same character traits that cause scientists to produce new theories also causes them to go into "weird" directions. You have to have a high level of stubbornness and fearlessness to go against the shared wisdom of the time.

In general I love to read about famous persons who had a lot of on the surface contradictory facets to their personality. There is a tendency in the media to view people as one-dimensional. People don't seem to be able to compute that people are not all-good or all-bad. A famous people would be Newton who was kind of an ass and also spent a lot of time on alchemy and other stuff.

A while ago I saw a British TV show about Hitler and there they had a scene where Hitler shot his dog out of anger. From whatever I know he loved dogs but somehow the show creators thought Hitler has to be portrayed as a totally bad guy.

<comment><USER11> "A while ago I saw a British TV show about Hitler and there they had a scene where Hitler shot his dog out of anger. From whatever I know he loved dogs but somehow the show creators thought Hitler has to be portrayed as a totally bad guy."

One of the greatest self-inflicted wounds in the modern world is the propensity to portray Nazi Germany and its major figures in a completely cartoonish fashion. Godwin's law be what it may but the long term ramifications of pointing to Nazis as inhumanely evil to a point that breaks all logic has blinded people from being able to accurately understand exactly what led to their rise to power, what drove their decision making process, and how they managed to direct an entire country toward supporting the very goals currently portrayed as the actions of a handful of mad hatters divorced from all laws of human behavior.

Everyone knows the colloquialsim that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, well here's a perfecf example of that in action. Disingenuous representations and false accounts of history eliminate the possibility of developing a true understanding of how things actually progressed in reality. If you can't understand how things progressed, you have no hope of countering that progression until things have developed too far to be reversed through peaceful means.

<comment><USER12> The book Ordinary Men covers this. It is quite fascinating. Regular people became the Nazis. People on HN could become Nazis. This is an uncomfortable truth not many people are willing to confront. I'll give HNers some credit, but still, the way it progresses is subtle and nefarious. (It being Authoritarianism into Totlitsrianism with a dictator$

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The story of Jack Parsons is one of my favorites. He really contributed scientifically, was certainly in part responsible for L. Ron Hubbards rise to fame and also a protege` of Aleister Crowley.

<comment><USER2> According to most of what I've read Parsons was kind of conned by Hubbard. They did have an association for a while but I don't get the sense that Parsons had any direct role in Scientology per se. Hubbard invented that later.

<comment><USER14> The postwar Pasadena areospace scene was wild.

Scientology is basically Crowley's Thelema but in 1950's space opera clothing. Parsons didn't have any role in developing beyond introducing Hubbard to Crowely, and most notably Sara Northrup. Sara Northrup, later L Ron's wife, helped develop Dianetics, and Scientology.

I read J.W. Carter's "Sex and Rockets", and Lawerence Wright's "Going Clear" back to back, and together they paint a fascinating portrait of the time.

If you want to round out the Pasadena OTO scene, Spencer Kansa's "Wormwood Star" about Marjorie Cameron is supposed to be good, but I haven't read it yet.

<comment><USER4> Hubbard and Sara absconded with a bunch of money Crowley has entrusted Parsons with for OTO purposes and bought a yacht and partied in Florida. Crowley pretty much wrote off Parsons after that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Unfortunately this article doesn't load for me, I wanted to see it because I really enjoyed reading Strange Angel by George Pendle. There is a series on CBS All Access that is very, very loosely based on the book which is fun to watch if not at all accurate.

<comment><USER16> Try this: [http://web.archive.org/web/20181220194510/http://www.spacesa...](http://web.archive.org/web/20181220194510/http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/aerospace- engineering/rocketry/jack-parsons-occult-roots-jpl/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow, lots of great material in here. Certainly enough for screenplay research ;)

As a companion to the this I love this piece about George Sterling's art colony in Carmel at the turn of the century. Utopian bohemianism, whether based upon magic, spirit, or tech. Is a perpetuating driver of human mythos ;)

[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/146051/bohemian- tr...](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/146051/bohemian-tragedy)

</comment><comment><USER18> The founder of an old cult that would eventually become the Jehovah's Witness predicted that the apocalypse would begin on October 2, 1914, the day Jack Parsons was born.

</comment><comment><USER19> The video in the article shows up as unavailable, but there is a version available here (blocked unless you subscribe to cable TV Science channel):

[https://www.sciencechannel.com/tv-shows/dark-matters/full- ep...](https://www.sciencechannel.com/tv-shows/dark-matters/full- episodes/magical-jet-propulsion-missing-link-mystery-typhoid-mary)

</comment><comment><USER20> I tried explaining this interesting connection to a group of friends in college, but they looked at me like I was crazy.

</comment><comment><USER5> I didn't see any support in the article for occult roots of JPL. Occult was simply another interest of Parsons.

<comment><USER21> Exactly, sounds like he was a bright guy and a free-thinker with interesting hobbies. Somehow this gets twisted into nonsense about a Satanic NASA, moon hoaxes, and secret space fleets. Paranoia in action.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There is one hell of a filmed entertainment series here. You've got every element necessary, including the "truth stranger than fiction" angle. I wonder what, if any, studios are developing this history into a show, film or something.

<comment><USER23> Check out Strange Angel! It's a television series. They even came to Caltech to film on location.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Relevant: [http://www.cc.com/video-clips/h71t46/drunk-history-jack- pars...](http://www.cc.com/video-clips/h71t46/drunk-history-jack-parsons- loved-his-sex-magick)

</comment><comment><USER25> The ulter ego he says he encountered in his occult rituals he calls "Dajjal". Interestingly, it is the same name for the Anti Christ that exists in early Islamic literature. What is even more striking is that this same literature describes the Dajaal as one-eyed. We all know that the one eye is the symbol of the illuminaty cult. Another thing that really reminded me about this guy is the movie "Ready Player One", it had the same insinuations, regarding the moon landing mixed with the illuminaty one eye and the movie The Shinning.

<comment><USER26> Whatever religion posses you will have overlapping symbols that are in conflict with the occult. This is intentional. Occultists create subversive symbols to filter out trojan horse intellectuals (EG: The Church of Satan). People who seem smart and capable of deep thought but are actually being coached by a religion and only wield rational thought to serve their religion are pretty common and undesirable to have around when mindhacking. It also creates an "us-vs-them" paradigm that improves community at the cost of wider social ostracism. Anyone who has argued with a christian trained in apologetics on hot button topics knows what I'm talking about in regards to trojan horse intellectuals. So by adopting "bullshit" (like antichrist worship) that directly conflicts with "other bullshit" they can dereference the pointer to the religious back door. Then occultists build their own back doors and reprogram themselves to do what they want.

Obviously major religions want to be the only answer. As any hacker knows as long as more than one person has admin privledges on a network, there is no guarantee control over that network can be maintained. All major religions say that the apocalypse will start when people turn away from them. The result is increasing radicalization as a religion dies out which helps it hold on a little longer.

As for the Eye. Yeah good luck finding constancy in an interpretation. It's the symbol the visual center of the brain is most tuned to. It's going to be everywhere regardless of whatever meaning people ascribe to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > So why isn't he as celebrated as the other founding fathers of spaceflight?

Scientology?

</comment><comment><USER28> half a century ago.. connecting esoterism and cosmology~... fascinating</comment>


Google introduces Labs for Google Maps - <AUTHOR> http://maps.google.com/maps?ftr=0&ie=UTF8&ll=37.0625,-95.677068&spn=39.916234,70.048828&z=4&mid=1265956098&showlabs=1

<comment><USER2> I'd like to have a default zoom depending on viewport center - it should be larger in cities than in the field. Should be relatively easy to interpolate if they log (lat, lon, zoom) tuples of how humans use the map.

</comment><comment><USER3> No all that ground breaking in itself, but really hammering home the feeling that Google is pulling out the stops this year. What next, I wonder.

</comment><comment><USER4> Let me copy their lifejacket here ;-)

 _If such a [Labs] feature breaks, and you're having trouble loading Maps, use this escape hatch:<http://maps.google.com/maps?ftr=0>. _

The latitude/longitude (LatLng, shades of "creat" ;-) tooltip and marker features are neat, but:

\- the tooltip is annoying - possibly only show after a >1s delay, or turn on with context, like putting the marker

\- checking marker vs. tooltip, the tooltip seems to present the LatLng at the wrist of the hand cursor, not a finger ?

\- cannot copy LatLng text/value from marker ...

(HN, now doing feedback form duty ...)

P.S. while I'm at it: general Google search, and Maps search itself, doesn't seem too savvy about LatLng strings taken from random web sources. A little bit of elbow grease there could go a long way ...</comment>


Show HN: Cross-Platform Apple IIe Emulator Written in Go - <AUTHOR> http://octalyzer.com/downloads/ <comment><USER2> I've been working on and off on a Nintendo DS emulator 100% written in Go. You can have a look here: [https://github.com/rasky/ndsemu/](https://github.com/rasky/ndsemu/)

It features both the 2D and the 3D engine (with a full software rasterizer with poly-fillers generated through go generate). It's highly concurrent (each graphic layer is drawn in a different goroutine and then mixed together). The ARM interpreter is also generated via go generate.

I'll add some screenshots at some point.

<comment><USER3> I think Go has great potential in this area. Some emulators (? PCSX2/Dolphin/...) are famously stuck with very few threads owing to the design of the underlying hardware, so anything that encourages extracting parallelism from within each subsystem could potentially be a major performance win.

<comment><USER4> Cycle-perfect emulators at least for typical 8- and 16-bit systems need to run each emulator subsystem (CPU, video, audio, ...) in lock-step for each clock cycle. Spreading those emulator systems over multiple threads would mean that the threads need to synchronize with each other after each step (which is just a few host CPU instructions long). It might be easier for more modern hardware where subsystems are much more decoupled from each other (and I guess with Moore's Law dead this is our only hope to emulate more modern hardware in the future).

<comment><USER2> That's true. In the case of Nintendo DS, I'm aligning doing line-based emulation; so I first serially emulate the two CPUs (I could in theory parallelize then, but I haven't properly design the emulator around this, so all memory-mapped callbacks are not concurrent safe), and then emulate the graphic subsystem for a single line, spreading the different layers across different goroutines.

This means that goroutines synchronize 263*60 times per second, which is something. I measure a high contention, so I'm not even sure it was worth in the end, but I thought it was a good experiment to attempt :)

Another Go-related thing I did was using struct tags to configure memory- mapped registers in a declarative way. See for instance: [https://github.com/rasky/ndsemu/blob/master/irq.go#L13](https://github.com/rasky/ndsemu/blob/master/irq.go#L13)

where I configure the memory-mapped registers of the interrupt controller; "wcb" / "rcb" tags stand for write/read callbacks, which means that specific callbacks (with names matching the register names) will be called for each read/write operation; this is all achieved through reflection. The same applies to mapping the whole register bank, which is done here: [https://github.com/rasky/ndsemu/blob/master/nds9.go#L69](https://github.com/rasky/ndsemu/blob/master/nds9.go#L69)

The memory subsystem handling these and more features is in emu/hwio, and I'm actually pretty proud of it. For the memory mapping itself, a radix tree is built which is quite quick to lookup and doesn't require much barcoding.

In fact, the whole "emu" package is a generic framework for emulators in Go, and I plan to reuse it in the future :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Currently the Octalyzer features full-screen Apple IIe emulation with decent compatibility, USB and mouse-controlled joystick support, cloud disk library (when logged-in to Octa-Link), 3D camera support, 3D LOGO, enhanced BASIC interpreters, custom file browser and editor, and remote screen sharing.

<comment><USER5> Does it have a CRT filter?

A lot of these retro games don't look so authentic on LCD screens because things like blur and shadow masking were actually used by the designers of the original games.

[http://filthypants.blogspot.com/2015/04/more-crt- shaders.htm...](http://filthypants.blogspot.com/2015/04/more-crt-shaders.html)

<comment><USER6> I could care less about games looking like they're "authentic" WRT to curvature or phosphor grid pattern, but things like aspect-ratio correction (non-square pixels), colour switching[0], or cheap transparency tricks through composite[1] are another matter entirely.

[0]: [http://www.aaronbell.com/secret-colours-of-the- commodore-64/](http://www.aaronbell.com/secret-colours-of-the-commodore-64/)

[1]: [http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.fr/2015/03/the-case-for- comp...](http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.fr/2015/03/the-case-for- composite.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of the AppleII+ simulation from XScreensavers:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3QZqhp67l8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3QZqhp67l8) [http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man6/apple2.6x.ht...](http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man6/apple2.6x.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> So cool. I'd love to read the source if it's available?

</comment><comment><USER9> An emulator has been my "bucket-list" ever since I became a software engineer. I still haven't done it...Do you have any good pointers for someone to get started with making an emulator (particularly for someone who works almost exclusively with with server-ey stuff)?

<comment><USER10> Definitely look into CHIP-8, it's more of a virtual machine than an emulator, but then what's the difference at the edges!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the screen-shots looks like Flappy bird:

[http://octalyzer.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/02/oct16.png](http://octalyzer.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/02/oct16.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's flapple bird:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm afraid this does not appear to work on my system (Ubuntu 16.04, 64bit). None of the key combos work (Shift-ctrl-` etc.), and dropping an image just crashes it. And I was all geared up for karateka...

<comment><AUTHOR> We will check it out thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Auto updating? You must be joking.

Also, a single binary file download without even a checksum (let alone the source)??? No thank you.

<comment><USER14> You don't have an application firewall and restricted user rights? Or a VM to run this in?

<comment><USER15> Implying that both of these have been exploit free?

\- posted from my totally secure Firefox

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That is awesome

</comment><comment><USER17> Go is the new C

<comment><USER18> C is the new C. Go is only going to replace C like Java was going to replace C.

<comment><USER19> C is hardly used in the enterprise space as it used to be in the 90's.

Even when C like performance is required, C++ is actually used instead.

The three major C compilers (gcc, clang and VC) are all written in C++ nowadays.</comment></comment></comment>


Hunter S Thompson's son is really normal and has a nice quiet job in I.T - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/hunter-s-thompsons-son-is-really-normal-and-has-a-nice-quiet-job-in-it-a6800446.html <comment><USER2> Related Interview in _Salon_ : [http://www.salon.com/2016/01/04/hunter_s_thompsons_son_shock...](http://www.salon.com/2016/01/04/hunter_s_thompsons_son_shocker_hunter_was_surprised_and_pleased_that_i_actually_grew_up_apparently_sane/)

Comment: Odds are your kids will turn out ok.</comment>


Followup: Zuckerberg didn't cash out - <AUTHOR> http://valleywag.com/tech/mark-zuckerberg/facebook-founder-faces-shareholder-revolt-331633.php

<comment><USER2> Breaking news: there is no breaking news!

<comment><USER3> It tells you something about how much faith Facebook employees have in their company.

<comment><USER4> Facebook is quite like the emperors new clothes IMHO

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's not exactly news when Valleywag gets a story wrong. Whenever there's some big new story on Valleywag, we should always wait a few days before linking to it to see if it turns out to be false.

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe we should be a little more careful about what we use as our news sources around here. But then again, gossip is probably too 'interesting' for humans to pass up.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone know what kind of salary Zuckerburg pulls from Facebook to live on right now?

</comment><comment><USER8> Followup: Zuckerberg doesn't exist</comment>


Women's brains work better in warmer offices, study finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/23/womens-brains-work-better-in-warmer-offices-study-finds <comment><USER2> ... or with warmer clothes, I suppose?

I don't mind if they crank up the heat, if they don't mind if I work without a shirt.</comment>


Wearable Device Scrubs Cancer Cells from Blood - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/diagnostics/wearable-device-captures-cancer-cells-from-blood <comment><AUTHOR> See [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09439-9](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09439-9) for the original paper

</comment><comment><USER2> Didn't we see something like this on an episode of the Expanse?</comment>


Python Pandas: Merging Dataframes Using Inner, Outer, Left and Right Joins - <AUTHOR> https://thispointer.com/pandas-how-to-merge-dataframes-using-dataframe-merge-in-python-part-1/ <comment><USER2> Maybe it's just me, but I find the Pandas method of joining on row indexes rather than column names unintuitive and frustratingly complex. You have to set indexes, join, and reset indexes after the join. Seems like that could be done under the hood and avoid the potential for causing related bugs.

</comment><comment><USER3> This was very informative. Pandas takes practice.</comment>