How to Fire Non-Performers - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/2009/07/how-to-fire-non-performers.php <comment> onreact-com What about motivating your team? Caring for the people who work for you? Assigning he right tasks? those that fit? When you're a misanthrope, people won't "perform" for you.</comment>


The Unofficial YC Guidebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.guidetoyc.com

<comment><USER2> I get a warning in Chrome (SSL Error)

<comment><USER3> You can drop the https to just http.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, that should work</comment></comment></comment>


An Overview of Quantum Computing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.caffeinatedanalytics.com/an-overview-of-quantum-computing <comment><USER2> This is really interesting. Do you have a recommendation for a good quantum computing intro book?</comment>


Ask HN: How to properly authenticate REST API? - <AUTHOR> I've been researching this for about 4 days now and can't seem to find an industry consensus. What I'm almost sure not to do is: use JWTs, and implement stateless authentication— it's probably not worth it. I've read about using 16+ random bytes as a token, but am not sure of it's implementation. My understanding is: 1. generate the tokens in the server when a user logs in and store them in a tokens table in data store 2. respond to request with token 3. store token in cookie client side 4. include token in header of request as auth bearer for every protected URI<p>What am I missing here? I don't see that much of a difference from this to using a stateful JWT? Since the token would also be stored client side, wouldn't this have all the insecurities of JWTs? <comment><USER2> Don't over complicatr. Use HTTP basic authentication and be done with it.</comment>


Google Native Client - Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.leafsr.com/2012/08/google-native-client-part-1.html <comment><USER2> Google should be pushing Portable Native Client, not plain Native Client, which is by implication Non-Portable. NaCl solves Google's problems, but is a damaging standard for the rest of us.

Nobody should be pushing CPU architecture specific executables as a web standard. Yes, you can compile is for x86 and ARM, but that's incredibly short-sighted. What about PPC? MIPS? Some future architecture that hasn't been invented yet? Do we have to make a virtual machine then? Yes, you can also compile as LLVM bitcode, but then why give prejudicial preference to x86-32 and ARMv5? (Note the specific versions there) You might as well just ship as PNaCl and skip NaCl altogether.

PNaCl is an amusing evolution of web scripting: we've come full circle from a JVM thru Javascript back to a solution which is almost a JVM. To be cynical, it seems like an awfully huge project just to avoid writing Java.

<comment><USER3> Heck — we're already having enough pain as Typed Arrays expose system endianness to the web platform. Most scripts using Typed Arrays are already broken on big endian systems, and it's practically inevitable that Typed Arrays are going to have to convert endianness dynamically to appear little endian.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Native Client Adoption by all browsers would be awesome for the gaming market and would also provide alternatives to Javascript, which many people would like i guess.

<comment><USER5> In the short term, sure. But since NaCl doesn't run on all CPUs and is not standardized, it would lead to problems in the long run.

Regarding alternatives to JavaScript, you can compile pretty much any language into a form that can run on the web, right now: C++, C#, Java, etc. (That form happens to be JavaScript.)

<comment><USER6> PNaCl targets LLVM bitcode, so can be supported on any modern CPU: [http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/building-and- test...](http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/building-and-testing- portable-native-client)

Compiling other languages to JavaScript imposes an unacceptable speed penalty. C++-to-JavaScript is not a viable platform for real applications, especially anything performance-critical.

<comment><USER3> Except, of course, LLVM bitcode isn't meant to be distributed: it's designed as a compiler IR, and merely an intermediary form. It's also not portable: the existence of types like x86_fp80 and ppc_fp128 make this quite clear.

<comment><USER6> I suggest reading the PNaCl paper, which addresses how they make LLVM bitcode distributable and portable. Because believe it or not, they have thought about these problems, and solutions to them have been designed and implemented.

It's not a force-fit either. LLVM is designed to be a form from which machine- specific code is generated. The problem is only that different platforms have different conventions. But any modern 32-bit platform can use a given set of conventions if you want it to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is impressive, it would be nice when people adopt that, I wonder if we could make a python for browser out of it.

<comment><USER8> I know that the Mono C# is now supported. I think it's due to its LLVM support. So basically, any language that supports LLVM JIT can be used with NaCl.

I could be wrong, but I remember reading about it somewhere. Either way, it is pretty cool technology of which nobody else seems to want to support. Which is too bad, really.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but Google contributed a huge patch to Mono to make it work, making changes in the runtime all over the place. So LLVM is not the reason, at least not in this case.

Maybe there is also a NaCl backend for LLVM, I don't know ...

<comment><USER8> Yes, I believe it is called PNaCl. It uses LLVM as its back end.

edit: I suppose a link should be presented.

[http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/building-and- test...](http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/building-and-testing- portable-native-client)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Last time I did a web search for how to write something for Google Chrome in a language other than Javascript I found nothing.

Where is the "hello world" for writing a plugin/chrome-app in some other language?</comment>


Anna: A KVS for any scale - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/03/27/anna-a-kvs-for-any-scale/ <comment><USER2> Earlier discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551072](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551072)

</comment><comment><USER3> I could not find any information about plans to release or distribute it. Did i miss something?

<comment><USER4> "Anna is a prototype and we learned a ton doing it. ... We're now actively working on an extended system, codename Bedrock, based on Anna. Bedrock will provide a hands-off, cost-effective version of this design in the cloud, which we'll be open-sourcing and supporting more aggressively."

Not to be confused with another existing database by the same by a company called Expensify, I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is Bedrock going to be fully in memory or will also provide disk persistence ?</comment>


Drop.io's Sam Lessin on Social Media Hostages - <AUTHOR> http://drop.io/swl/asset/taking-i-hostages

<comment><USER2> Quantcast totally undercounts, by about 3X or more, sites that don't have their widget installed. I noticed this when they first got going, and immediately added it to all my sites.</comment>


Connect for iPhone – A contact manager to manage pro and private contacts - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/app/dexem-connect/id659434552

<comment><USER2> Great app, easy to use. Many thanks for to the works done.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wonderful app!! Very useful

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot! Glad you like it!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which open source projects would benefit from their docs being edited? - <AUTHOR>

Hi!
I'm a freelance editor, and I'm looking to help open source projects by editing/proofreading their documentation.
Ideally I'm looking to work with something reasonably well-known so that I can provide maximum value and so I can use it for my CV, but I'm also open to helping smaller projects.
Do you know of any projects that might benefit from this, and would be happy to work with a reasonably non-technical person? (I'm okay with Git, but that's about my level.)
Thank you for your time, and thanks for any ideas you can give me!
Becca <comment><USER2> I'd look at suggestions made by _mamaar_ about projects with a lot of non- technical users.

I'd also look at projects where it is growing/big but the dev team is small enough that great documentation can sometimes be difficult for them to churn out.

> and would be happy to work with a reasonably non-technical person?

As long as you know how the system works and can explain things to users, that would already be a value-add to any project. If an OSS project can't appreciate your documentation, you simply walk away and contribute elsewhere.

Even on the internet, assholes and their projects eventually whither away if they can't appreciate any great contribution (granted, you must respect their processes and not become the asshole to their project).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your thoughts! Projects with non-technical users sound like a good idea.

Do you have any specific ideas on which projects might fit the bill for growing/big but with a small dev team finding it hard to provide quality documentation?

Walking away if the project / devs don't appreciate my work seems like particularly good advice. I'll keep it in mind; it should save me a lot of headaches.

<comment><USER2> > Do you have any specific ideas on which projects might fit the bill for...

Probably a good idea to track the "Show HN:..." for any open source projects. If the project "sticks", it will get a lot of stars, but contribution may not be massive.

The only issue with that is, you may not feel passionate about the project at hand.

What is normally assumed is that a lot of OSS contribution is done by people who have a strong passion for the software they are contributing too.

It will be up to you at the end of the day.

Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Libre Office is a well known and big project with a large non-technical user base who can make use of some great documentation. As an editor the project might be relevant to yourself too. [https://www.libreoffice.org/community/docs- team/](https://www.libreoffice.org/community/docs-team/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Great idea, looking into their process for joining the team.</comment></comment>


Startups are Risk Bundles - <AUTHOR> http://codingvc.com/startups-are-risk-bundles/ <comment><USER2> For a more formal treatment of using probabilities to estimate valuations read Douglas Hubbard's How to Measure Anything. It's an eye-opening approach to thinking about things that are hard to measure (like startup valuations).

Hubbard uses elements of information theory to help structure measurement problems. His key insight is that it's worth paying to reduce uncertainty. Most people know this intuitively but resist actually putting numbers to the idea.

Staged funding rounds are a way to reduce uncertainty.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Valuations are based on what the company might accomplish (potential energy), not what it's actually accomplishing (kinetic energy)"...

I'm not exactly sure why but for some reason this metaphor irks me. Just seems like a stretch, I'd probably be happier leaving the actual physics terms out of a statistics/financial discussion.

<comment><USER4> we're used to a lot, a few more is ok.

Burn rate, churn, runway, incubator, cottage, organic, stale, etc

<comment><USER5> momentum. Fuel in the tank. viral. exponential. phase shift. trajectory. lasing. More heat than light.

<comment><USER4> viral is the real good one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Obviously, the number of existing startups matching all those restrictions tend to 0 (zero), mainly when you apply the "hundreds of millions rule".

Everybody will obviously fund any company that matches those restrictions. It can be seen as a tautology.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Will the team be able to find product-market fit? (What if the CEO is > fixated on a specific product idea and wants to build it without getting > feedback from potential users?)

If finding product-market fit were only as simple as just getting feedback from potential users. In any case this should probably be the first item in the list. If you have a good product market fit then it will likely solve all these other problems.

</comment><comment><USER8> after watching "The Big Short", and understanding that a CDO is essentially a risk bundle, this made things way more terrifying to me.

</comment><comment><USER9> All of this is very well known and written much about in books, blogs, talks, etc. already...

<comment><USER10> I hadn't seen this put this way. What book would you recommend to get this kind of insight?

<comment><USER11> A similar approach

[http://blog.gust.com/valuation-part-i-peeling-the-onion- or-h...](http://blog.gust.com/valuation-part-i-peeling-the-onion-or-how-top- investors-value-the-startups-they-invest-in/)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Waze for Coronavirus. A crowdsourced infection map - <AUTHOR> https://sneezemap.com <comment><USER2> Being able to view the map without sharing location would be nice. Maybe a third option, view without making a report.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. The concern is that the contribution ratio will reduce. Every data point helps paint the bigger picture. Is the concern about privacy? If so, how can I better demonstrate that the data is 100% anonymous?

<comment><USER2> The concern is about privacy. How to demonstrate anonymity is a good question. "Privacy: No personally identifiable data is collected. Location data is slightly altered before storage." is a great start. My thought when I saw this, was how long is this information stored, even in an altered form? Also the question of who this information is shared with. Obviously, it is used to create the map, which is what makes the map great. I think stating whether you share it with other parties, such as google analytics, or other tracking services. I can see from inspecting the page loads, that you aren't doing anything like that, which is great. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! very helpful feedback

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> would be sweet if it aggregates tested positives

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> all feedback welcome</comment>


Ask HN: Layoffs in the Bay Area? - <AUTHOR>

Are you seeing a rise in layoffs in the Bay Area as of lately? I'm aware of at least Cisco, eBay, Microsoft and NetApp. Any thoughts on how this might affect the extremely high house prices? <comment><USER2> Economy affects home prices in the far away prices first: tracy, stockton, brentwood, etc. It does not impact home prices in, say, Palo Alto, that much, because homeowners in Palo Alto can hang on to their homes during the downtime.

I have not heard much about layoffs. Yes, Microsoft Mountain View has moved employees to Redmond. Netapp been laying off since 2011. Cisco is the same thing.

Unless the stock market crashes, the economy can absorb all developers, etc. Middle management, I donno.

<comment><USER3> The 2 big companies to watch for layoffs this year are Paypal and Yahoo. Could be thousands each.

Paypal is just grossly overstaffed.

Yahoo is under pressure from investors to return the Alibaba proceeds to investors and cut their staff in half. (Some investors would like Yahoo to shut down and sell their campus off. Yahoo has no value as a going concern.)</comment></comment>


The Surprisingly Innovative Future of Wood - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/these-gorgeous-buildings-showcase-the-surprisingly-inno-1757398349 <comment><USER2> I've been looking for an hour for an image to post here, it is a end-on view of the long bell sawmill log drying facility. The logs are so large that it takes a while to realize the scale of the image, the people are tiny compared with the logs. Just a few hundred years ago large parts of the US and Canada were covered with forests of giant white pine and other trees that are now a rarity. With 'giant' I really mean giant, logs 5 meters or more in diameter were not exceptional. Unfortunately I haven't been able to locate the image, the closest that I've found is this one, which gives you a tiny little taste of what was lost:

[https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/236x/a6/8c/1f/a68c1f38c...](https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/236x/a6/8c/1f/a68c1f38c9af15985248f63ae895a516.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Not sure if this is what you had in mind:

[http://www.ralonghistoricalsociety.org/images/mill2.jpg](http://www.ralonghistoricalsociety.org/images/mill2.jpg)

[http://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/media/uploads/O-A_Lumber_C...](http://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/media/uploads/O-A_Lumber_Co_long_side_carriage.jpeg)

[http://freightsheds.largescalecentral.com/users/rick_marty/_...](http://freightsheds.largescalecentral.com/users/rick_marty/_forumfiles/miscpicts/IMG_0002.jpg)

[https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/236x/0c/4d/0f/0c4d0f8c2...](https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/236x/0c/4d/0f/0c4d0f8c24785eb4ce5725eb2ab6f540.jpg)

[https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/236x/01/2d/23/012d232fb...](https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/236x/01/2d/23/012d232fb83981a4fdb697de80cf6ae6.jpg)

[http://www.american-rails.com/images/Log_Car.jpg](http://www.american- rails.com/images/Log_Car.jpg)

<comment><USER2> I'm going to have to find that image now, just to show you the scale of it. Thanks for finding these!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The wood technology mentioned in the article isn't particularly new, but has certainly been getting more attention recently in the push towards more sustainable construction practices. In the bay area, most new mid-rise (3-8 story) residential construction goes up as a concrete pedestal parking garage with a wood structure on top - wood has a great strength/weight ratio and so reduces the earthquake forces you have to design for.

The biggest issue in going taller and to other occupancy types is fire. Buildings over a certain height (related to the height of fire truck ladders) are designed to burn out entire floors completely[1] without collapsing[2]. This is easier with steel and concrete, which lose strength at temperature but don't actually add fuel to the fire. What's been found more recently is that if you put the right additives in engineered wood products and make it a stocky enough shape then the wood will burn itself out even in a very large fire. But that information is new, and building codes are necessarily conservative. These things can also get awfully political, considering that there are separate trade organizations for the wood, concrete, and steel industry who all have a vote and want the code to say that their material is the safest.

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

[2] [http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/03/11/san-francisco-mission- ba...](http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/03/11/san-francisco-mission-bay-fire- lessons-learned)

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if this is a good or a bad thing. When it becomes mainstream and the process becomes common and cheap, will every building use this process? If so, how do we sustain it and be competitive. We could do everything to grow new stock, but poor countries can use slash/burn techniques to win contracts on wood stock. It would continue the deforestation's we are already seeing. I would like to see local wood farmers who are doing it right, lobby for laws that make this movement a green path as well, then I am all in.

<comment><USER6> World forest coverage has almost stablized, and is increasing in wealthier countries. Presumably, it will finish turning around in the next decade or so as developing countries become less poor.

Wood that is grown, cut, and then used in a way that resists decomposition contributes as a non-negligible carbon sink.

<comment><USER7> Have you got a source for this? My understand is that it may have slowed, but we are yet to reverse hectares lost per year.

<comment><USER6> That's what I mean by "almost stabilized". Global forest coverage is still decreasing, but at a rate that is clearly slowing. And since we see that coverage increases in rich countries, we tentatively conclude that the rate of global decrease will not equilibriate at some negative value, but rather will continue flattening and then turn upward as poor countries become rich. Furthermore, the low point of this process is not particularly bad; it forms a trough that bottoms out at ~4% decrease compared to current levels.

This is the best I could find:

[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS/countries...](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS/countries?display=graph)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wood is such a great material and seems to be making a comeback of sorts all over the place. Recent big bestseller nook in Norway/Sweden was about chopping, drying and stacking firewood: [http://www.amazon.com/Norwegian-Wood- Chopping-Stacking-Scand...](http://www.amazon.com/Norwegian-Wood-Chopping- Stacking-Scandinavian/dp/1419717987)

</comment><comment><USER9> I was curious about the fire-resistance and found these videos:

Cross laminated timber barbecue (loud music!):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbvxQDTfhzk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbvxQDTfhzk)

CLT fire performance testing:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRIPQ_q2iyY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRIPQ_q2iyY)

</comment><comment><USER10> Mind was blown first time I learned that gluing wood together along the grain is often as strong a bond as the wood itself.

<comment><USER11> Yes, but it's heavier.

Also it's a moisture barrier. This could cause problems for buildings in the long run (100 years).

<comment><USER12> Why is that? I don't know anything about wood in construction.

<comment><USER11> If wood gets wet, it's not necessarily a disaster, as it can be dried. But if there's a moisture barrier surrounding it, it might never dry. Think about a log is wrapped in plastic. Moist wood will be eaten by mold.

During a house's long lifetime, it's likely that there are problems and some structure gets to experience some moisture at some point. It should be able to recover.

A friend told that a house expert had a quote.

"There's two kinds of houses: 'if' houses and 'despite' houses."

The 'if' houses stay in shape if everything works correctly. The 'despite' houses stay in shape despite there being occasional maintenance lapses. The key takeaway is robustness to real life events.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Those photos of wooden architecture are absolutely beautiful. I'd love to live in a house that looked like that. It's even environmentally friendly so long as you're only using farmed wood, and there's no reason you wouldn't when you're using engineered wood products.

</comment><comment><USER14> A friend just turned me on to acetylated wood:

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

A supposedly more eco-friendly way to make (e.g, ground-contact) wood rot- resistant. Sure beats cyanide, methinks.

<comment><USER15> Do you want to live in a building soaked in acetic anhydride?

<comment><USER16> Compared to some of the alternatives? And it doesn't really matter. You don't really use treated lumber indoors, and you don't really have direct contact with it to begin with.

<comment><USER15> People _do_ use treated timber indoors, all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anyone have any idea about the safety of the chemicals and adhesives they use to make these things? I'm curious if the glue will last indefinitely and more importantly if we aren't going to find out in 50 years that the stuff they treat all this wood with is killing us like seems to happen with so many things.

</comment><comment><USER18> American forestry and wood products is a national treasure. It really does embody what sustainable use of natural resources should be.

Shout out to any one working for/with the forest service. keep it up!

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how much "thinner" the building can look. If other kinds of support need to be covered, that adds thickness to walls, supports, and pillars. If the wood doesn't need to be covered, would the buildings look noticeably leaner?

</comment><comment><USER20> Haven't people (e.g. Japanese) been doing this for thousands of years?

<comment><USER21> Its a peculiarly composite article in that the first half is about the cool advantages of several new technologies that conceptually boil down to extremely high quality and strength bulk plywood, so you can have a 12 inch structural beam that's 40 feet long, etc. This is new technology and it usually takes building codes awhile to accept new technology. Every line of a building code was written on a stack of dead bodies, changing codes is a very serious business.

The second half of the article is completely unrelated, just interior decorating fashion is going thru its periodic fascination with finished wood a-la knotty pine wall paneling mancaves in the 1970s. There's nothing wrong with it although all those interior finishes could be done with veneer on metal or various faux processes having nothing to do with the first half of the article.

<comment><USER22> > This is new technology and it usually takes building codes awhile to accept > new technology

You just need a UL rating (or UL assembly rating) to integrate new technology into your building... you can look it up in the IBC. Usually manufacturers are required to UL rate their building products. The only time I've had a client willing to pay for it was one who wanted to do a building made of shipping containers they had for free and that was at least 10 years ago. The containers were never tested, but UL was able to supply enough docs to satisfy the reviewers prior to permitting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder what some of the outdoor applications of wood look like after, say, 5-10 years.

<comment><USER24> There are wooden churches in Norway that date from the 12th century:

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

That's as harsh a climate as any. A 500-year-old wooden building can look better than the average 50-year-old concrete building.

<comment><USER25> It's important to keep in mind with very old wooden structures such as these that they are often rebuilt over the centuries, plank by plank, as it were.

From the Wikipedia entry you cited:

> A very important problem in dating the churches is that the solid ground > sills are the construction elements most likely to have the outer parts of > the log still preserved. Yet they are the most susceptible to humidity, and > as people back then reused building parts, the church may have been rebuilt > several times. If so, a dendrochronological dating may be based upon a log > from a later reconstruction.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to publish small projects without GitHub and the like - <AUTHOR> A Github monoculture is emerging.  And I guess there are people (I for one) who do not want to use Github and the like, for they are private and closed-source services, but are not experienced enough to set up their own solution.  So, how can such people publish their projects, in a way that they're visible to the outer world and collaboration is possible and in the open?  Are there any good tutorials on how to set up such environment? <comment><USER2> Just hosting a git repository is pretty trivial. If you want to also have a web-based interface, there's GitLab Community Edition: [https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/](https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/)

EDIT: to just have SSH access to git on a server, see this: [https://git- scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-The-Protoco...](https://git- scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-The-Protocols)

</comment><comment><USER3> Bitbucket or just host it on your remote and ssh in</comment>


Redrawing the Map: How the World's Climate Zones Are Shifting - <AUTHOR> https://e360.yale.edu/features/redrawing-the-map-how-the-worlds-climate-zones-are-shifting <comment><USER2> Some things (the barrier reef) may not be able to shift fast enough to compensate for the climactic shift. Reef structures do exist south of the barrier, and I have read that migratory fish stocks down in Tasmania now include species now normally found further north, so I could imagine there are compensations, but still: 2000+ km of coastal organism, wiped out in my lifetime.</comment>


Phone thwarts thieves by learning its owner's habits - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429943.000-phone-thwarts-thieves-by-learning-its-owners-habits.html#.VFkhivnF-So

<comment><AUTHOR> Link to the paper for those interested (PDF) [http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1410/1410.7743.pdf](http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1410/1410.7743.pdf)</comment>


Open Application for YC Growth Program - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/open-application-for-yc-growth-program/ <comment><USER2> How does total number of employees is a good proxy for success of the company?

In my opinion, total number of employees is a bad proxy as it fundamentally masquerades the unit economics and profit margins once they have revenue in several multiples of millions (which is what founders should have on their mind all the time if growth is healthy). Also, naturally logistics related startups will have more full time employees vs. pure SaaS company. Venture business is run by outliers. And 2 of the outliers of last 5-6 years were Instagram and WhatsApp - both of which had less than 50 employees at the time of sale.

Would love to hear thoughts of YC on this.

<comment><USER3> When I went through YC, one of the things the partners beat into our heads was "more employees ≠ success." I don't think that's changed.

I see the headcount guidelines for YC Growth not as a belief that "headcount = success," but instead an attempt to create a batch of companies facing similar challenges - the people challenges that come as a company grows from 50->150.

If you can avoid the 50->150 problems by scaling your company's impact without having to scale headcount, that's incredible! You might not need YC Growth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder at the design of this program and what incentive the is to join:

 _...The Growth Program is designed for companies with between 50 – 150 employees that are scaling rapidly. Ideal candidates are companies that expect to double employees, revenue, customers, etc in the next year of operation...._

Why would I spend 3 months of my time (time I could apply to running my company), if I already had this level of success ? Plus, no promise of a funding round.

What am I missing ?

<comment><USER5> One doesn't just coast after entering that phase of growth, there is a completely new and very real set of problems and challenges to face. If I were running a company with 100 employees and I expected that to double in the next year, I'd want all of the help I could get. I'd have no reason to believe that this would be any less difficult than the earlier stage of that company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Are you guys open to companies that may conflict with current portfolio or would that be an auto disqualify? Especially, since this is not directly tied to funding.

<comment><USER7> For some years now the average YC batch size has been 100+ companies. With so many companies, it's inevitable to select and support competitors. My experience is that conflict of interest is not a thing at that stage.

If you feel like you're competing with other companies at seed/A stage, maybe your market is too small?

In short: Yes, they'll select you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Have you considered how this will impact people who are running a business with 50+ employees 10000km and 9hours time zones away from the Bay Area?

As it is, it's definitely optimized for US companies who can afford to fly in for the weekly dinners without allowing their companies suffer from their 3 month absence.

<comment><USER9> YC is US centric, and more specifically SV centric. If you are not in a position to benefit from this that will no doubt skew the situation even further away from a level playing field but that is how the rest of the world feels anyway. All attempts to duplicate Silicon Valley to date have failed.

<comment><USER10> Taiwan has plenty of talented people [1] [2], but there aren't as many accelerators like YC over here.

If any investors are disillusioned with living in the US, you're welcome to visit Taiwan!

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16271384](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16271384) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16272114](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16272114)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there a demo day or expectation of a Series A round of funding at the conclusion of the program?

<comment><USER12> No Demo Day or fundraising event currently planned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just wondering: Why Elon Musk did not go to YC when he starts SpaceX?

<comment><USER14> I think he already had a (successful) startup experience by that time and also some money.

<comment><USER13> So it means founders who have a (successful) startup experience and money don't need YC?</comment></comment></comment>


Teenage Email Account Is a Lost Time Capsule - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/your-teenage-email-account-is-a-lost-time-capsule-a7627d53c466 <comment><USER2> [https://outline.com/M6eLqS](https://outline.com/M6eLqS)</comment>


Twitter's Response To PeopleBrowsr Lawsuit: 'This Is Contracts 101′ - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/28/twitter-responds-to-peoplebrowsr/

<comment><USER2> If Twitter hadn't been acting like a jerk to their developer community for the last 2 years, I would completely side with Twitter on this.

However, given Twitter's recent behavior of backpedalling on expectations they set for developing on their platform, and their disrespect for developers who've been cheerleading and building apps for them the last 6 years, I'm glad to see someone fight back the best they can. If for no other reason than to illustrate that they're acting like jerks. Unfortunately, given Twitter's response and hand waving dismissal, I don't think they received the message. They could have at least paid a little lip-service. Ya' know, act like they give a damn.

Humbug!

<comment><USER3> This lawsuit seems like crap, and it makes me feel really uncomfortable -- what if I don't have millions in VC funding? It basically means that a random person with enough resources can tie me down with a bogus lawsuit even if I have a legally-sound contract that is _supposed_ to protect me.

I agree that Twitter backtracked on their API and platform, but a bogus lawsuit is the exact opposite of the right way to fight back. Even though App.net and others have their flaws, that is the "right" way: developers have to steal people's attention away from Twitter instead of going for a lawsuit that doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER4> > It basically means that a random person with enough resources can tie me > down with a bogus lawsuit even if I have a legally-sound contract that is > supposed to protect me.

yes, that's pretty much the state of things in the US. Anyone can file a lawsuit for any reason; granted if someone files for something stupid it will almost certainly be laughed out of court immediately, but you will still have to spend time and money defending yourself from it.

And this is in no way limited to companies. You can be sued for asking the guy behind you in line to talk into his cellphone quieter. That'll almost certainly be dismissed with prejudice, but you'll still need to either research the law yourself or contact a lawyer to deal with that idiot.

<comment><USER3> Somewhat. The person filing the lawsuit has to be able to convince a lawyer to pursue the case. In other words, that person needs to have money.

In a situation like this, people should be publicly shaming PeopleBrowser (people publicly shamed Twitter for going back on their API!), and I'm happy that the tone of the TechCrunch article at least portrayed PeopleBrowser in a negative light.

Where the legal system fails, social pressure is the next best option.

<comment><USER4> agreed. Honestly, I'd be more worried about a laywer than anyone else because the lawyer only needs to convince himself and is always willing to work this case pro bono.

"What we didn't know about <him> was that he was a retired lawyer, and which is one of the dangerous breeds of lawyer because they have nothing but time to crawl right up your ass" -Stephen Colbert [1]

[1]: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=0fnHcbQJiYM#t=130s)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It strikes me a little odd that twitter doesn't want to have a larger hand in their data distribution. Having some one else handle it seems like something a non-tech company would do. Scaling and automating the distribution to subscribers doesn't strike me as a problem twitter would have a hard time solving and I hardly doubt they need any one else to sell it for them from a marketing standpoint. What, from a business perspective, do you suppose is driving their decision to only work with three companies?

<comment><USER6> Are you sure that Twitter is a tech company?

<comment><USER5> For what Twitter is today, I'm sure they are. They are essentially the world's largest chat room except every participant gets to curate their own experience (plus it's all indexed). Maybe their revenue stream won't be directly a tech product but will certainly be the result of one.

<comment><USER7> What do you mean by "won't be directly"? It seems like you're implying they're not making money today, which they most certainly are. They do have a revenue stream. Several, really, between promoted tweets, promoted accounts, and the firehose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Its an interesting twist, if you reason that part of Twitter's enterprise value is its Firehose data then unwinding these contracts is in Twitter's best interest. However I have experienced first hand problems with contracts written "pre-success" that didn't anticipate what success would look like. Depending on the players those have generally been amended amicably. On the other hand it does seem like it will damage Peoplebrowsr's product to lose access. Perhaps its just a money question?

</comment><comment><USER9> This happens especially a lot with companies that don't actually have and programmers on staff. Changing means of access means they basically have to buy their outsourced app all over again...</comment>


SunSpider – Spartan vs. Chrome 41.0.2272.101 – Number's Don't Lie - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/1WmnOYm

<comment><USER2> SunSpider is about one thing and one thing only — cold code performance. The benchmarks are all so short (the _longest_ in Spartan is 19.7ms, albeit with a large uncertainty) that it's all about how quickly you can JIT code and get rid of the dispatch overhead of any interpreter you have, and how many optimizations you can do in that very quick first compilation. If you're interested in longer running code, where implementation quality makes a far bigger difference, look at Octane and Kraken.

Chakra, Spartan's JS engine, has long been good on SunSpider.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure we can draw conclusions from a screenshot of the numbers, especially in this early phase and for one benchmark, but it's extremely encouraging to see Microsoft's willingness to go head-to-head with its competitors, both in terms of feature range and raw performance. This is one of the many bricks that will help foster a vibrant and lively web programming ecosystem. Good on them and good on us.

</comment><comment><USER4> Tangent

Of course numbers can lie. Numbers have to be compiled and interpreted by humans, who can make them say anything they want the numbers to say.

Best recent example: Gerrymandering. The majority of voters want one candidate, but the other candidate is able to draw up regions in such a way where they win, to make the numbers support their lie.

</comment><comment><USER5> Chrome 41 is a real stable release browser in production use. Spartan is still a WIP. I'm not sure it's fair to compare them. How about giving Canary a spin instead?

</comment><comment><USER6> In the broader benchmarks it still looks like Firefox or Chrome is the winner:

[http://www.winbuzzer.com/benchmark-deep-dive-microsoft- windo...](http://www.winbuzzer.com/benchmark-deep-dive-microsoft- windows-10-spartan-browser-vs-ie11-vs-google-chrome-41-vs-mozilla-firefox-36/)

<comment><USER7> Nearly two months passed since that post, I'm sure they're outdated already.

It would be interesting to see them refresh it soon and compare the progress in two months.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Search up to 50k Domain Names - <AUTHOR> https://namegrep.com/

<comment><USER2> Nice idea.

Bug: I noticed that it lists a lot of 3 letter .com as available when none of them are.

Also offer a choice of domain name registrars as I am not a GoDaddy fan.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool app, quick question - how are you finding domain name availability so fast?</comment>


Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist   - <AUTHOR> http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html

<comment><USER2> This looks like a fairly basic Python book. I'll volunteer to answer any questions people have while reading it.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an introduction to programming using Python. The author did another version using C++:

<http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkcpp/>

but, for programming newbies, I strongly recommend the Python version (and so does the author).

For programmers who want to learn Python, I'd recommend:

1) Dive into Python 3: <http://diveintopython3.org/>

2) Google's Python Class: <http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python- class/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Any similarities with these?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=638026>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=440180>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=351903>

<comment><AUTHOR> The link is exactly the same as the link submitted in the second posted link.

I'm not sure how HN let's me post it.

I apologize for the link I posted.

You are somehow always able to find links that have been posted earlier. How do you do it? If you tell me how, I'll do it before I post a link so I don't duplicate.

<comment><USER5> The newest submission (before this one) was from over a year ago. I think you're okay–HN lets links be resubmitted after _n_ days, I do believe.

I think it's fine to have resubmissions from time to time, though I can't say I _personally_ like seeing the same links, there are new users to HN, and good articles resurfacing are an okay thing.

That being said, I'm not sure this is something that necessarily appeals to the kind of people who frequent this site, but I don't particularly care.

That being said, to answer your questions: <http://searchyc.com/submissions/like+a+computer+scientist>

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I recently tried submitting this article, and HN rejected my submission: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html>

It had been previously submitted over 1200 days ago(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12964>).

Anyway, thank you for telling me how I should search for articles. That's a great tip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can not recommend this book, or Python, highly enough.

Programming is hard. This book + Python make it easy.

<comment><USER7> Not only that, but this plus Learn Python the Hard Way ([http://learnpythonthehardway.org/static/LearnPythonTheHardWa...](http://learnpythonthehardway.org/static/LearnPythonTheHardWay.pdf)) makes it a lot of fun as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is the book I learned how to program with 5-6 years ago.

Great book, "translated" into different languages (Java for instance)</comment>


Data Mining with R - <AUTHOR> http://www.liaad.up.pt/~ltorgo/DataMiningWithR/ <comment><USER2> A good tool built on R is rattle[1]. It's open source and is used at the Australian Taxation Office (Australian equivalent of the IRS?), so it must have something going for it. The version I used in a data-mining course last year was a bit buggy though...

[1] <http://rattle.togaware.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> He says it's for R and MySQL, but R is just reading CSV in his code. It looks like you can use Postgres, or SQLite, or even code in a general programming language.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, that book is really old (2003). I had no idea R had been around that long. Is the stuff in it still relevant? I have no idea how quickly R has evolved.

</comment><comment><USER5> What about Weka?

<http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/></comment>


BsTools - command line client for working with beanstalkd job queues - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jimbojsb/bstools

<comment><AUTHOR> I created this tool because while beanstalkd is great, there isn't a huge tooling community around it. The main alternative is just grabbing a ruby gem and working with it in irb. bsTools is available as one standalone file that you can drop in your bin folder, and has nice console UI thanks to Symfony2</comment>


Philosophers should not be sanctioned for their positions on sex and gender - <AUTHOR> https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/07/22/philosophers-should-not-be-sanctioned-their-positions-sex-and-gender-opinion <comment><USER2> I came late to realize the existence of this problem, and discovered it when someone on Twitter blocked me _simply for asking about_ Jordan Peterson. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

I fail to see how sanctioning/blocking/banning/censuring/deplatforming is compatible with open honest debate (these are all basically the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_baculum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_baculum) fallacy, "punishment-as-argument"), in any event, and since I strongly believe in the latter, I fall on the "strong free speech" side. (My Twitter account has all of 9 blocked accounts, and those are mostly things like low-signal-to- noise-ratio businesses with lots of promoted tweets)

There are people who believe that ideas exist that are both bad and that cannot be defeated rationally, but I think they are wrong. Take racism, for example (I've argued against racists): They will come at you with supporting (correlational) data, so you come at them with this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence) and then you ask them whether they're shorter than average and still want to act on these correlations they put so much stock in, because in that case they need to now act against their own interests (favor preferential hiring of tall people, etc.), and you just wait and let that sink in because most of them will go quiet. ;)

<comment><USER3> Amen: the best way to defeat any bad argument is to subject it to public, open, and fair scrutiny. If anything is true, it will stand. If it is false, there is no greater boon to an intellectual community than having publicly dissected and exposed for what it is.

<comment><USER4> That's probably true in isolation, but I have doubts about whether it scales.

It's generally easier and less time consuming to produce a bad argument than it is to produce a good argument to refute the bad argument. For the targets of the arguments, it often is harder and more time consuming to follow the good argument, too.

Get too many independent sources of bad arguments in your society, and there simply won't be time and resources to counter them.

<comment><USER3> You raise a good point. Sure, it can't match the scale. However, I think that if you can sway the intelligent and conscientious, you've won most of the battle. You don't need to (and really can't) counter every bad or false argument or idea. Maybe I'm too optimistic, though.

Trying to scale effective debate is a hard problem. I've run across a few entities that are trying to make civil, open discourse more commonplace. Unfortunately I forget the name… Anyone got examples?

<comment><USER2> There are sites like procon.org that pit arguments 1-vs-1, but don't really make allowances for rebuttals, see this one on e-cigs for example: [https://www.procon.org/headline.php?headlineID=005430](https://www.procon.org/headline.php?headlineID=005430)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> By the amount of attention this issue gets, one might actually think it were a real problem and not something that a specific segment of the population really wants to focus on. Even the open letter itself only mentions "conversations" and "proposals." No professor at a major university seems to have actually be sanctioned or punished for what they say on this issue, despite all the conversation around it.

We can compare that to the 10 trans people murdered (according to Wiki) just this year alone. And that's just the ones Wiki editors decided merited inclusion. There are probably more, some unknown, and countless other trans individuals who face violence and harassment on a near daily basis.

Meanwhile, the hollowness of these arguments and the crocodile tears of the people who focus on them is laid bare when considers the amount of anti-BDS legislation that have been passed, with many universities requiring speakers to sign statements saying they will not and have never engaged in BDS.

These people, these "philosophers", simply want to be allowed to be transphobic in public without consequences. But that's the real heart of freedom and free speech. You can say what you what, it's true, but you're not free from people talking back or deciding they don't want to hear from you.

<comment><USER6> >We can compare that to the 10 trans people murdered (according to Wiki) just this year alone.

70x more people will be crushed by soda machines this year.

<comment><USER5> If only there were a difference between murders and freak accidents.

<comment><USER6> I think we should put things in perspective before going into a moral panic

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Peter Singer was one of the signers of this letter, a name people outside of philosophy may recognize.

</comment><comment><USER8> Unlike many HN commenters, I generally fall in favor of the current trend in social media censorship and stratification. I don't think there's a problem with individuals choosing to engulf themselves in a "bubble" of reinforcing opinions. I certainly see no reason why any individual should be forced into internet debates about their opinions if they are not personally a fan of internet debates.

That said, academic institutions are not Facebook or Twitter, and academics rightfully should hold the power to ask questions and make statements that make others feel uncomfortable. There is no doubt that there should be room at universities for people who want to muse on the nature of gender, even in a way that may challenge others' strongly held beliefs.

However, it is immediate and utmost importance to recognize that questions of gender identity are not just abstract questions. There are members of universities and of society at large struggling to gain acceptance as queer and transsexual, and whether or not academics want to deliberate on what it even means to be of a gender, universities and the people involved with universities seem to be overwhelmingly in favor of protecting the current progressive status quo of gender identity.

I think there needs to be an important distinction made. Academic inquiry into the nature of gender is fine. But oppressing those already struggling to gain acceptance in society is not okay.

To that end, I'm not sure I understand the bullets listed at the bottom of the post:

>We affirm the right of transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals to live free of harassment and abuse, and we welcome them enthusiastically as fellow participants in the profession of philosophy.

>We reject calls for censuring or deplatforming any of our colleagues on the basis of their philosophical arguments about sex and gender identity, __or their social and political advocacy for sex-based rights. __

Is this not a contradiction? If we are looking to protect philosophers ' "social and political advocacy for sex-based rights", it seems implied that this includes advocacy _in opposition_ to the previously stated "right of transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals to live free of harassment and abuse".

Even within academic discourse, there is an Overton window. The window may be wider for academics but it still exists. I don't know who gets to decide the Overton window for academics, but there are topics which are certainly out. We can all agree that sympathizing with genocide or advocating racism, things of that nature, are outside the Overton window for academics. If a philosopher muses "maybe killing all Jews is okay", he or she would be removed from the institution, and rightfully so.

The question here is where the Overton window's edge lies in the realm of gender identity. My opinion is that the window ends where people's rights begin. If you want to ask "does gender even exist? Is gender identity a meaningful form of expression?", fine. If you want to say "gender doesn't exist, so don't protect transgender folk from discrimination in legislation", you have gone too far.

Who defines the Overton window in reality? There is no "Board of Acceptable Philosophy". The process we have now of internet rage mobs and "deplatforming" is arguably the most democratic way society has ever had of enforcing an Overton window, but that's not a good thing in the context of academia, which should rightfully be separate from society at large. I think in the old days, the outdated ideas would simply die off with the thinkers who hold them, reflecting the changes in the world in slow motion.

</comment><comment><USER9> Philosophers search for truth and objectivity. A person's identity (according to today's school of thought) is not objective, it's completely subject to _their_ needs.

And since you, the academic, don't fully know their needs, you cannot understand their identity, and thus you cannot come to some objective truth about it.

I think this is why philosophers are being called x-phobic; they're using their power as academics to enforce some kind of truth.

<comment><USER10> I'm not so sure I agree. I don't see anything particularly special about why people believe Alex Jones or polarize to creationism, racism, nationalism, etc. These are all well within the ability of science in all it's forms (biology, history, psychology, sociology) to explain. Their needs are well- quantified and analyzed in any number of papers that have been published. There's nothing new there, except the internet reinforcing existing behaviors in a novel way that wasn't possible before. But the underlying pathologies? They've always been there.

<comment><USER11> Weren't philosophers a decade a go lamenting of how reductionist science has become? Like I remember going to college and the professors held a forum where they insisted that science isn't the end-all be-all for human existence. Weird how I disagreed with their analogies but I find myself agreeing with their point that human experience is not meant to be reduced to what is already known.

<comment><USER10> And they (as much as one can generalize across an entire discipline) still do (rightfully so) lament about science and how it pretends to be the answer to everything. But that doesn't mean we're supposed to throw out everything we do know about humans through science, such as how they establish their beliefs or how they manage to persist or how these beliefs get tied up in identity, and what we continuously find out by applying scientific methods (such as how presenting facts can lead to reinforcing contradictory pre-existing beliefs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What does the continued distractionary tactic by those in power in government and the media, (especially in the UK relating to trans issues) of wringing hands over gender and sex have to do with a site ostensibly about hacker news, especially on a site where it seems wholly heterodox to suggest any sort of alternative societal structure might be needed to combat climate change, as that is quickly denoted as off topic, and something that market forces will eventually solve. I honestly could care less for the hand-wringing of academia in a field completely non-relevant to "hackers", and this simply feels like the sort of thing used to distract from broader issues at hand, and a way of us v them-ing society in order to manufacture consent for an impending climate catastrophe where those with massive pecuniary hoards will further divide society on identarian (sex/gender/race/location) lines in order to distract from the broader issues at hand.

<comment><USER13> Philosophy is absolutely a form of hacking. It's about pulling apart concepts and the unreal while building and applying systems.</comment></comment>


Ex-CA. State Sen. gun control champion heads to prison for weapons trafficking - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/02/25/ex-calif-state-sen-leeland-yee-gun-control-champion-heading-to-prison-for-weapons-trafficking/ <comment><USER2> It's important to note that these are the sort of people who directly profit from gun control: gangsters and politicians. To say nothing of law enforcement, the legal system, or prison systems. The Philippines (apparently where the weapons were to be trafficked from) is rife with arms manufacturing, both legitimate and black-market. [0] Enact further gun control in California and these are precisely the sort of arms that will be in the hands of cartel soldiers, gangsters, and criminals, with no commensurate bulwark in the civilian population.

Also I just have to laugh at the levels of hypocrisy here from the left. Quite an interesting change of pace from the typical marital infidelities of "family-values" Republicans.

[0]: [http://www.bbc.com/news/business-21840183](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-21840183)

</comment><comment><USER3> Some context for that year in CA politics: State Senator Ron Calderon was indicted by the feds in a pay-to-play sting on a film tax credit, State Senator Rod Wright was sentenced to 90 days in prison for breaking the law about living in your district (he served only a few hours, CA prisons are too overcrowded), and then State Senator Leland Yee was indicted by the feds in a sting that was actually meant to get Raymond Shrimp Boy Chow but ensnared a State Senator by chance. The State Senate actually suspended all three members.

CA remains a popular target for federal stings, Shrimpscam was a famous example of a federal sting that ensnared many members way back, but now there are much more recent examples. It was a crazy year, and the indictment for Leland Yee was nuts, it read like a crime novel.

<comment><USER4> Interesting thing about the Wright case:

 _Many_ CA legislators were infamous about running for districts in which they did not live. One of these was David Roberti, a member of the Democrat leadership who built his career on firearms ban (CA's first "assault-weapon ban" was officially the Roberti-Roos act).

The CA media generally refused to report on this until he was term-limited out.

I always wondered if one of the reasons that Wright was left to twist in the wind was that he dared oppose the Democrat leadership on some issues... like gun bans.

<The State Senate actually suspended all three members.>

I don't know if any was suspended _before_ suffering felony indictments. Calderon was not only _not_ suspended, he officially remained in office (drawing full salary and benefits) for the rest of his term. Wright was not suspended until _after_ his felony _convictions_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >As a legislator, Yee supported strict gun control laws and was named to the Brady Campaign's Gun Violence Prevention Honor Roll.

Well that's ironic.

<comment><USER6> I look at it as gun control laws would get rid of the legal competition to his gun running and drive up the value of his product.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it seems like he was simply a very successful sociopath.

<comment><USER7> So..... He's a politician?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well making guns illegal was always going to be about as effective as making meth illegal. And with the same side effects, like making black market sociopaths, like Lee, rich and powerful.

<comment><USER9> I'm not trying to be obstinate, but does that argument apply to anything, or just to attractive things, like drugs and guns? Or are there just certain arbitrary things, that we find out by experience, that are subject to that "making X illegal only causes a black market" logic?

I'm asking because I'd like to have an easy-to-use argument to trot out for things like making copyright stricter, or other things that hinder my ease of use.

<comment><USER8> Is there a market that isn't being met with current copyright law? Because it seems to follow something like "People want X. If you make X illegal, people will still want X, only now it will be supplied by criminals."

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash Bismarck said something to the effect of "the less people know about how law and sausages are made, the better they sleep at night."

Cases like this can sometimes make it look like there are rare bad apples in a given political system, but I'm sure we would be nothing short of outraged if we knew the full truth of every politician's back-room dealings in this country.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yee was also one of the most vocal critics of video games, and wanted a ban on video games that portray gun violence.

EDIT: Why I was downvoted for pointing out a fact?

<comment><USER11> Probably because the fact in question has negligible relevance to The Fine Article, and comes across more as sniping at Yee's character. "Yeah, and he's _this_ kind of doody-head, too!"

EDIT: That's not to say there isn't plenty to snipe at about the man, because obviously there is. It just doesn't contribute a lot to the discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> ot: He skipped a court appearance and the (minor) case was _dismissed_!

Shouldn't skipping a court appearance be a crime of itself??

</comment><comment><USER13> Gun control is a joke</comment>


'Austerity, That's What I Know': The Making of a U.K. Millennial Socialist - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/world/europe/britain-austerity-socialism.html <comment><USER2> UK millennial are not socialists and they have no clue what socialism means.

That's what is really scary.

<comment><USER3> Then you have nothing to worry about.

<comment><USER2> Quite the opposite.

They are clueless and used by the current Labour leadership who _are_ actual Marxists.

That's why it's scary.

<comment><USER3> Wow, that is scary.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for proving my point...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Anti-censorship Chrome extension removed for custom minification - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/anticensority/runet-censorship-bypass/issues/10#issuecomment-524615051 <comment><USER2> The 1 MB limit bug report gets on a certain nerve of mine, "I don't think it'd be fast so no need to change the limit just do these things that'll make it slower anyways".

There might be an easy way around all of this though, the problem is that the URLs used START encoded. If you just sourced the raw list and in the extension live ran it through [https://github.com/pieroxy/lz-string/blob/master/libs/lz- str...](https://github.com/pieroxy/lz-string/blob/master/libs/lz- string.min.js) to output the lz compressed pac file to disk (you'll need the filesystem write permission on the extension) and attach that lz-string library at the end and call it to decompress (similar to how you do now just not manual) it's probably a win-win.

I say win-win because on your side the lz compression will probably net a file ~10x smaller than what you have now at the same decode speed and on Google's side the URLs used are stored a form they can validate against.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've actually found a workaround in the extensions API -- bypassing the script via `data` field instead of an url doesn't have 1MB restriction. The reason we compress the script is that it is used not only inside this extension but also in settings of other browsers/OSes (e.g. Internet Explorer, Windows system settings, chromium CLI flag `--proxy-pac-url`).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wish Google would take a note from Mozilla's add-on submission process and allow the source to be uploaded as a separate package. It's simple to test that the source package builds to match the compiled code and gives a more easily readable method for audting. It would also avoid this sort of nonsense.

<comment><AUTHOR> The PAC-script being minified in our case is generated outside of the extension to make the extension less resource-consuming. PAC-script is regenerated and updated several times per day. However we may release sources for the generator, actually the old version of it was published in 2018 at [1].

[1]: [https://bitbucket.org/ValdikSS/antizapret/src/master/](https://bitbucket.org/ValdikSS/antizapret/src/master/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess one could set up a local proxy server and load the PAC file into that, this seems to be a project that accomplishes it for the Chinese firewall: [https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks- windows](https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks-windows)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> UPDATE: our extension was restored in the WebStore after some letters, publications and discussions.

</comment><comment><USER5> Minification of scripts in an extension can only have nefarious purposes. It isn't worth it in terms of bandwidth.

<comment><USER2> You must not have read past the title:

\- The linked page covers why they needed to do it

\- A chromium bug report on that issue was linked (i.e. they tried to get the limit removed properly)

\- "* Encode the rules as data rather than generated code" was the idea of a chromium developer in that bug report</comment></comment>


Singapore Army trials titanium exoskeleton designed to reduce load on soldiers - <AUTHOR> https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/saf-army-exoskeleton-mawashi-reduce-load-12960250 <comment><USER2> OT, I know, but what I would really want to have available would be an exoskeleton "loader" like the "Caterpillar P-5000" in Alien.

There was a sort of it as a "civil" experimental one by Panasonic (with a projected affordable price):

[https://www.cnet.com/news/panasonic-working-on-actual- alien-...](https://www.cnet.com/news/panasonic-working-on-actual-alien-power- loader/)

which was never finalized (let alone sold at that kind of price).

</comment><comment><USER3> Mitsubishi had a similar prototype at DSEI Tokyo last year. Good to see lots of effort put into these concepts.

These are frequently argued as useful for special operations forces. I think they are more applicable for logistics personnel, aviation maintenance, etc.....people who are lifting heavy objects regularly, and yet are close enough to power sources/repair facilities that power-efficiency and ruggedness don't need to be perfect.

</comment><comment><USER4> Can civilians buy this tech? It would be so nice for carrying all my kid's stuff

<comment><USER5> They have a civilian exoskeleton also: [https://www.mawashi.net/en/fraco- exoskeleton-by-mawashi](https://www.mawashi.net/en/fraco-exoskeleton-by- mawashi)

<comment><USER6> Argh, the videos in that page are useless, you hit play and it's a girl doing a vlog. Just show me the product in use! I skipped around the 3 videos and I couldn't find a clear show of the exoskeleton in action.

It's strange to see this social media style marketing for an industrial product... props to them if it works, although in this case it didn't work for me.

<comment><USER7> It's exactly what you'd expect: social-media style marketing is for products that people don't want/need based on what they actually do. Since your product doesn't solve a problem, you create a problem: "as a user I want to look cool and fit in with my peers". To do that, you create social proof around the product, so people thinks it will fill their social needs.

There's a reason Apple, for example, has ads that just show a disembodied hand using their product. They know they have a good product that does something people want, so they don't need social proof.

The exoskeleton is probably being advertised with social media style marketing because it doesn't work (yet).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I recorded vlogs to show how I built side projects - <AUTHOR> https://indielog.com/user/damon <comment><USER2> I sometimes find myself hacking together a quick console-based or vanilla JS prototype for an idea and then just stop there because messing with different cloud providers, containers, react, webpack and etc is just soul draining. I remember when I was 14 I'd throw up a quick PHP script for my project, upload it to my host and get it up and running in just a few minutes. A month ago I spent week trying to get Cognito working with a Serverless API and by the time I figured it out I was mentally done with the project. I cannot ever seem to get over this hump. I love working on side projects but getting things up and running properly is just a huge drag these days.

<comment><USER3> Confession: it took me like two damn hours the other day just to figure out how to get TS code that included Node modules packaged for the browser. There was a lot of advice that was wrong or outdated or otherwise didn't work. I've written JS since before jQuery was a thing and have done some damn good work in React and React Native, but hadn't dealt with bundlers and such manually. Phew boy, it is a _mess_.

<comment><USER4> Yes my frustration is the entire frontend in x framework now requires nodejs by default. I develop with Javascript (nodejs), Erlang(Elixir) and Ruby(Ror and Jekyll). The one pain point is managing the nodejs dependencies in these projects.

<comment><USER5> It is very hard to control your dependencies when you use a framework or a transpiler in JS. They bring in tons of other packages which have their own dependencies and so on.

This has also opened a new dangerous attack vector where hackers take over a small forgotten component used by many nodejs packages and inject malicious code into projects without anyone noticing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bug report on the site itself: with the way you've styled _both_ body and html, body is a separate scrolling pane from the document scroll area, which causes the header and the "give feedback" buttons to sit on top of the scroll bar, and breaks keyboard navigation (arrow keys, Space, Page Down, _& c._) until you focus the body (by clicking on the page or with Tab). A simple additive way of fixing this is to set `overflow-x: unset` on at least one of html and body (if you just do one, it actually doesn't matter which, because html and body are a bit special), but removing the offending overflow declarations altogether would be better. A top-level `overflow-x: hidden` is generally a bad idea anyway—if it changes anything, it suggests that you've got some other styles somewhere wrong (though there _are_ one or two genuine cases where there's no good alternative), and doing things that way invariably ends up going wrong and truncating important content sooner or later.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, you made my day Chris! This issue bothers for quite a long time, and I just didn't know how to fix it. In fact, I thought this is just some css issue, and didn't affect the functionality, so didn't invest too much time on it, also because of my procrastination :)

Thanks for suggesting the fix!!!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I started to build IndieLog (formerly Lonely Dev) since the lockdown to fix my own problem. The other project Backlogs is like a by-product while building IndieLog.

I never did something like this, putting myself in the public. It sounds scary. Indeed it was in the beginning, but it's an incredible journey so far!

<comment><USER7> Nice looking site and product! I watched your drag and drop demo for the kanban board. You may consider having a "best of" at the top, I wouldn't watch a vlog because of the time involved, but I would definitely watch a couple of top rated videos from your journey where you talk about pivots, big feature demos, etc. you could manually curate the top ones for now and influence them with thumbs up and view as there are more user metrics. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> This is such a great idea lukevp!!! I will consider to have those featured ones.

<comment><USER8> You might also take a look at how popular influencers use Instagram Stories to collect throughout-the-day updates into cohesive stories across days and weeks.

IE: "My trip to Cabo" might include 1-2 stories out of 10 posted that day, but they are the user's favorite and tell a cohesive story.

Another analogy is Youtube's "Playlist" feature.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we kinda have that feature, but in a different way. As most of our members are bootstrapping their own product. Any video if it is related to a particular product, it can be attached to the product. Like our member David creates a product called Remake, all related videos can be linked to Remake in this page [https://indielog.com/product/remake](https://indielog.com/product/remake)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I quite like the concept of keeping each video under 2 minutes.

Congrats on getting to the 100-mark! What do you think was the best thing to come out of vlogging simultaneously?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, 2 minutes is like a standup update. Our members also think the limit is very helpful to keep them concise. A good way to practice speak in some sense.

The best thing so far is definitely making lots of friends around the world. We can see each other, hear each other. It's the feeling that none of those text-based forums can give.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Multiple people here seem to be thinking this is recordings of the actual building of side projects. Rather, it's videos not more than two minutes long, mostly just a person talking to the camera about the work they're doing.

<comment><USER10> Yeah even I thought it would be concise demos or screen recordings of everyday progress but it's just person talking. Is there a blog or Youtube channel which slowly builds a project which you can follow too?

<comment><USER11> There is an in site IDE at gif.com.ai and I was thinking about recording a few demos of how to build gifs using it. But I thought it would be better to contact existing computer graphics bloggers who post videos. It's hard to both build an app and vlog about it full time. It's not like you can just stream your screen.

<comment><USER12> (TimeSnapper developer here) — you can use TimeSnapper to continually screenshot your work. Run it together it creates a super fast movie.

For the purpose of indie log it might be sufficient to handroll a custom script that takes the snapshots and then use ffmpeg to convert them to a video.

<comment><USER11> It looks like the ability to focus in on an app could prove useful. If I get into it again. I will take a look.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great job! Would like to see you on indiehackers podcast talking about your journey, maybe a bit early for this but hopefully soon. I have a suggestion to add some kind of pagination to the video so after one video you go to the next one without going back to the pain profile page, or maybe some kind of playlist, I think would be wise to focus on making the video experience very good before adding the audio feature. good luck

<comment><AUTHOR> This is such an invaluable idea! I am adding it to my roadmap: [https://indielog.backlogs.co/post/pagination-to-the- video-19...](https://indielog.backlogs.co/post/pagination-to-the- video-1921a7c0)

Thanks a lot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hey I was just thinking about doing something like this, but just on Youtube.

I was recently on Indie Hacker's podcast and got a lot of followup emails from other engineers asking questions and it was cool talking with random developers.

Is there a way to post a link to a youtube video on IndieLog so I can double dip?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, I think that would be cool to have. Indeed some of our members are Youtubers as well. It would be a duplicate effort for them to upload the same thing on IndieLog. Thanks for sharing this idea. I will definitely see how I can make it work!

I added it to our backlogs: [https://indielog.backlogs.co/post/allow- indietubers-to-share...](https://indielog.backlogs.co/post/allow-indietubers- to-share-yt-link-on-indielog-ca3f08eb)

<comment><USER15> Backlogs is a cool idea! But I feel like it really wants to be a Trello Powerup. Show a popup asking for CC info after install, using Stripe Checkout. Then give people a CNAME record that displays a public board in an iFrame, available at backlog.yourservice.com. This would be like a 3-5 day project, instead of weeks, to duplicate most of Trello's functionality. And you'd benefit from the visibility in Trello's marketplace. You could really simplify your implementation and still validate the idea. Just a thought!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's so true! If I heard Trello Power-ups, I will definitely give it a go.

Actually for Backlogs, some features are already taken from IndieLog, like the upvote and commenting. I just implemented the roadmap boards and the changelog page.

Haha, I built the Backlogs on the side, so it is a slow process :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great concept and nice implementation! Feels a bit like Justin.tv meets Github. Very cool.

<comment><USER17> years ago, I'd proposed (to the 5 people who used to listen to me!) that we put together a protocol to be able to tie audio files (for comments) to specific commits in a subversion system (2006 maybe?).

perhaps if GitHub gave us a way to do media attachments with particular commits, we could let people embed instructional/teaching moments in their code bases...

not suggesting GitHub is the only player out there, but may be big enough to give this a try as a side project for some of the internal folks.

<comment><AUTHOR> This idea is mind blowing!!! We can make Github more fun, like giving users options to attach audio, or video along with the commit. World nowadays is no longer text-based, it needs more context!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love the idea and the implementation! Great job!

If I had time for side projects I probably would use it. Bookmarked for when that time comes.

How many active users (uploading videos) are already? How you feel about speakers in other languages?

<comment><AUTHOR> The visitor are like hundreds every day. But today is totally different :)

For speaking in another language, so far we don't have people do that. I am not an English speaker as well.

But if you think our platform is useful for you to simply document your own journey, feel free to say it in your own language :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Awesome! It's not easy to put yourself out there like this, but it will make a difference for somebody who will either take value from your videos or be inspired by them (or both!). Kudos!

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed! We are like virtual colleagues, help each other out, cheer for any achievement, and grow ourselves and our products together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hey, look! It's my hero Damon! Made my day seeing this on HN just now, you definitely deserve the exposure. Keep it up mate, you're doing great work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Charlie, thanks for support as always!!!

I really didn't expect this much attention. I will do an update on IndieLog in a bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice. I did a test project and just let screenflow record for hours - I think I have around 26 hours of stuff, but ... it's definitely not fit for consumption or learning from. I look back and think I could edit it down some and make it useful, but then think I may just start the next project with a more focused eye on the recording in the first place.

<comment><AUTHOR> 26 hours nonstop? You didn't take any sleep?

<comment><USER17> oh no, it was a few hours a day for a few days, then... picked up a couple weeks later, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been tempted more than once to vlog programming, but what do you do about the (frequent, for me) times where you're just searching stackoverflow or reading docs or barking up the wrong tree? I'm more tempted to write the thing, then vlog starting over from scratch as if I know what I'm doing.

<comment><USER22> That's all a normal part of my process, and true for many people. Seeing that is as valuable as anything else.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hi, I just tried to login in the site via Github, but a popup flashes and nothing happens. I've tried the Feedback tool ([https://feedback.indielog.com/post/](https://feedback.indielog.com/post/)), but this page gives me a 404. Thank you

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I am really sorry, it sounds terrible!

I just fixed the 404 issue for the feedback tool. For the Github popup, I can see new users signed up via Github with no issue.

May I know what browser are you using? Is the popup blocked by the browser somehow? Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Very cool, and great presentation! Have you considered getting on a service like Twitch or YouTube? Not so much as a way to produce the step-by-step snippets you're already doing, but to document yourself working in livestream, with all the upsides and downsides it entails?

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to try livestream, but my 19mo daughter would not allow me to do that.

Actually as you can see, most of my videos do not have good lighting because I recorded them in the evening time after my little daughter went to bed. In the day time, I only got fragmented time slot so I can add things, whatever bug fixes or new features, little by little.

So blocking hours to do livestream would be hard for me as for now :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wish there were more live-coding and / or code snippets!

This guy is a UX pro!

<comment><AUTHOR> Would like to see if we can bring the live streaming and code sharing to our platform! Wow, you just opened up some hidden potential to IndieLog. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If anyone has issues logging in or signing up in Chrome, spam Damon so he'll fix it lol, otherwise, use Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER27> Waaay better name! Good choice. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This just gave me the idea to use YouTube for the same thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, do it, it's going to be fun!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Love the idea. Is there a plan to support Email only sign up?

I dislike using social account because I might get suspended and lose the data and access to the website.

<comment><AUTHOR> hey jsnk, email sign up is supported now! [https://indielog.backlogs.co/changelog/support-email-sign- up...](https://indielog.backlogs.co/changelog/support-email-sign-up-279e18dc)</comment></comment>


Uber hires two security researchers to improve car technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/28/us-uber-tech-security-idUSKCN0QX2BQ20150828 <comment><USER2> Those researchers won't tell uber things uber wants to hear.

If they're serious about security they're basically looking at fundamental changes in the way automotive electronics systems are implemented or various ugly workarounds. You can't just plug anything in to the internet and expect it to be ok...

<comment><USER3> The flip side is that these researchers also won't tell the public things uber doesn't want them to hear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The job postings they have in Pittsburgh are particularly illuminating: [https://www.uber.com/jobs/list?keywords=&location=Pittsburgh...](https://www.uber.com/jobs/list?keywords=&location=Pittsburgh,%20PA%20\[Advanced%20Technologies%20Center\])

<comment><USER5> There was a good article recently about Uber commandeering pretty much the entire robotics department at CMU;

[http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/ube...](http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/uber- self-driving-cars-carnegie-mellon-poached)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not sure if this has been well known before (I don't follow uber much) but I find it very interesting that Uber is doubling down on self driving cars. It makes fantastic sense for what they are doing, but as an "employee"/"contractor" driving for them, I'd be looking at options long term.

<comment><USER7> Surprisingly, I've found that a number of uber drivers seem to be aware of the fact that they will ultimately become obsolete yet are fine just riding the wave in the meantime.

<comment><USER8> That is what I would expect to hear. I would be surprised to hear that the drivers were unhappy in the interim to have a job. Keep in mind this is a job with significant autonomy, i.e. variable/flexible schedule and little to no managerial supervision, and yet it does not require any rigorous training, previous work experience or advanced certification.

What percentage of current uber drivers do you think will stop being uber drivers because cars will drive themselves? How far out in the future do you think that is?

<comment><USER9> 6 years for widespread autonomous vehicles on our roads. 2030 for the majority of vehicles sold being fully autonomous capable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Uber seems to be the Mirror Universe's Google (think Star Trek's Mirror Universe, where humans formed a brutal empire instead of utopian society of explorers). Both companies found a way to make truckloads of money, and are now using it on (among other things) robotics research.

</comment><comment><USER11> Two ... made me spontanously smile. Uber and even more so the automotive industrie needs quite some more. All the IoT industrie. Kids in the candy shop.

<comment><USER12> These two happen to be accomplished experts known by most people in the security community. That's why it's news. Uber almost certainly has many, many more engineers working on security.

<comment><USER13> We sure do. Feel free to apply here at [https://www.uber.com/jobs/28017](https://www.uber.com/jobs/28017) :)</comment></comment></comment>


Updated Research: The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime (Donohue and Levitt) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nber.org/papers/w25863 <comment><AUTHOR> Recent Freakonomics Podcast where the authors discuss their findings, the controversy surrounding their initial claims, and the impacts of lead (or rather, the removing of lead from many environments)

[http://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion/](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion/)</comment>


RDPCheck checks your PC/Network for exposure to RDP vulnerabilies - <AUTHOR> http://rdpcheck.com

<comment><USER2> While this is an awesome idea, I can't help but think about the humongous potential for abuse. Were the logs to be leaked, stolen or otherwise compromised, you now have a goldmine of potentially vulnerable systems. Even if the results weren't logged, you'd now have a list of systems where the sysadmin wasn't 100% sure.

"For your security we do NOT store your IP address/result combination"

So the IP/result combination is not stored, but technically the IP address and result could be stored without there being a relation between them?

<comment><AUTHOR> "While this is an awesome idea"

Thanks :)

"but technically the IP address and result could be stored without there being a relation between them?"

Technically the answer is yes. We've deliberately made it very difficult (along with not out and out storing the data). All of this is a little academic though - If you wanted to compile a list of targets you'd just do the scans yourself... It'd be million times faster and easier than trying to hack it out of us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Where is the ToS link that I'm supposed to be agreeing to?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's being put together... It'll be up in 20mins or so.</comment></comment>


LG Nexus 5 makes probable appearance in FCC with plenty of specs - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/05/lg-nexus-5-fcc/

<comment><USER2> Rewording of [http://s4gru.com/index.php?/blog/1/entry-351-teaser-is- the-l...](http://s4gru.com/index.php?/blog/1/entry-351-teaser-is-the- lg-d820-the-nexus-5/)</comment>


Ask HN: Have you ever been fired for making a version control "mistake?" - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> No. But you should.

Part of successful development teams is to build within the newest and least experienced members an insane FEAR of failing so that it drives them to build better things rather than be casual about what they do and release garbage. Too many young developers today are growing up with the mentality that they can be casual about their work. That mistakes don't matter. That getting it right isn't the most important thing. That's because they have massive support systems built around them with people who actually answer for when things go wrong, when these young naive developers release crap, break things, and these same people also FIX the crap and garbage that gets released, all because of naive programming.

So, please tell EVERY developer that a version control mistake is grounds for termination and you'll make sure that they REALLY dedicate time and attention to their work.

<comment><USER3> _Part of successful development teams is to build within the newest and least experienced members an insane FEAR of failing_

Not sure if serious, but I completely disagree.

An environment of "insane fear of failing" is also an environment filled with fear of trying new things. Of course you should carefully select and then mentor your junior devs appropriately so that they will produce quality results, but you should also have a reasonable amount of safety nets in place such that mistakes can be rectified relatively easily. I find the attitude that version control mistakes are intolerable to be ironic, considering that one of the very benefits of version control is that, when properly used, it eliminates or reduces the impact of many development "mistakes".

I have many times witnessed junior engineers (some under my supervision) come up with inventive solutions that in some way improved existing development practices. Many of these solutions would likely never had been discovered, had these engineers been instilled with an _INSANE FEAR_ of failing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> no</comment>


Code for Flexibility: A Manifesto - <AUTHOR> http://coderoom.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/code-for-flexibility-a-manifesto/

<comment><USER2> This reads more like a novel than a manifesto, but the gist is good. I think the name is misleading too, which doesn't help when you're trumpeting a manifesto.

When I read 'Code for Flexibility' I hear the antithesis of 'YAGNI', and think of large Java projects where every class implements interface and every interface has one and only one implementation. Yech.

The article makes some good points though, that could benefit from a restating. "This too, shall change" might be a good mantra for those writing software in almost all environments. "Don't get too attached" speaks more to me than "Code for Flexibility".

Change happens, we're evolving as a community to embrace that. Coding (up front) to anticipate change later, is a bad move, which while not the point of the article, is how I read the title and many of the headlines therein.

</comment><comment><USER3> A very interesting read for the most part. I worry this kind of call to action will send a noob off in the wrong direction, even before they've actually learned the meaning and lessons behind what the author is hoping to prevent.

Personally, I think the biggest problem I find in other people's code smacks right up against the author's main point--it encapsulates one person's timestamped reasoning on a problem, and didn't keep in mind that that might either be wrong, or drastically change in the future.

I'd love to come across more 'flexible' code, but I'd be far happier to come across more code that is well-reasoned and thought out in a manner that makes inheriting said code to be more than a royal PITA.</comment>


A brief history of the numeric keypad - <AUTHOR> https://uxdesign.cc/a-brief-history-of-the-numeric-keypad-59112cbf4c49 <comment><USER2> The 123 on the bottom makes some sense for calculators because calculator keypads, unlike telephone keypads, are often used to enter data, physical constants, and mathematical constants.

Those quite often follow Benford's Law [1]. That means if you are using scientific notation, where numbers consist of one digit to the left of the decimal point, the decimal point, and then a fractional part, then an exponent for the power of 10 the number is to be multiplied by, then you are much more likely to be entering a small digit before the decimal point than a large digit.

123, therefore, arguably belongs near the decimal point on the keypad on calculators.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law)

<comment><USER3> I don't even think it's that technical, though I agree Benford's law does help.

The numeric keypad is largely based off of ribbon tape desk calculators [0], which is why the + is double size, the enter (=) is double size, and the 0 is double size. The + and Enter are designed to be used by the right hand pinky, while the 0 is designed for use with the thumb. The numeric keypad is designed for _five finger entry_. Leaving it in that configuration means that people in an office who are used to using a ribbon calculator can more easily adapt to the PC keyboard. That's what office workers expect to find on a machine that sometimes is just a calculator.

If you go into a business or accounting office today, you'll _still_ see people using these stupid calculators (stupid because they waste paper and ink). And if you've ever seen someone use one that's good with them, they can be extremely fast. Faster than you'd ever need to be entering a phone number (unless you need to enter the IT Crowd's emergency number).

When you use a telephone, however, you only use one finger. You're only entering 7 to 11 digits, typically.

[0]: [https://www.google.com/search?q=ribbon+tape+calculators&tbm=...](https://www.google.com/search?q=ribbon+tape+calculators&tbm=isch)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article mentions the 1960 Bell System user study of different keypad layouts. I can't speak to the other layouts, but I think in hindsight it's clear why the "touch tone" layout (with 123 at the top) won over the the "calculator" layout (with 789 at the top).

Everyone or nearly everyone in the user study was surely a _telephone user_. At the time, that meant being accustomed to the rotary dial layout, where the order of the digits is 1234567890. 0 is the last digit, after 9.

Both the calculator and touch tone layouts had 0 at the bottom. So the calculator layout has 0 next to 123. The touch tone layout has 0 next to 789 (and following the 9), just like a rotary dial.

This must have accounted for some of the preference between these two layouts.

</comment><comment><USER5> The numeric keypad on computers has stayed remarkably consistent given how adept manufacturers are at moving the other keys around the keyboard. It is not a given that Page Up/Down, cursor keys, the delete key and others will be where you expect them to be by convention, these keys can be moved around for 'designer reasons' even on keyboards from the same manufacturer (yes, you, Logitech).

I have yet to see the numeric keypad on the left for left handed users that type in lots of numbers, e.g accountants, data entry clerks etc. We also never had desktop computers integrated into landline phones with a 'phone lock' button to switch over to 'dial someone' mode. At all times the numeric keypad has opted to follow convention as defined by the original IBM PC circa 1981.

<comment><USER6> It's a considerable inconvenience for me now to encounter a phone-style input. I so rarely dial numbers that aren't already in my contacts that it is unusual to encounter, and many phone number inputs just use numeric layouts. I have to stop and think or my 1s are all 7s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of the two opposing conventions for drawing memory maps --- do you put "lower" (numerically lesser) addresses at the bottom and increase to "higher" addresses at the top, or start with 0 at the top and "increase" downwards? Just like with the Endianness Wars, it seems that multiple conventions often prevail when there isn't a clear and obvious advantage of one.

<comment><USER8> Lower on the left, higher on the right! And if you don't have space for that, lay the addresses out on a Ulam spiral ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the articles cited is available for free: <[https://archive.org/details/bstj39-4-995>](https://archive.org/details/bstj39-4-995>). I find it interesting to note that the engineers also made variable force profile pushbuttons to test different springinesses as well.

</comment><comment><USER10> > In 1902, the Dalton went on to become one of the most popular 10-key adding > machines of the time, rendering multi-column calculators obsolete.

Multi-column calculators survived much longer, being king of the hill for high-accuracy multiplication and division. I had a job using one until the end of 1969.

</comment><comment><USER11> On rotary phones, zero was usually at the bottom of the rotar, just after the after nine. When touch tone phones came out, I suspect many people preferred the zero at the bottom of the keypad since it was near the nine and better aligned with their existing muscle memory</comment>