Show HN: Material Kit – Free Bootstrap UI Kit Based on Material Design - <AUTHOR> http://demos.creative-tim.com/material-kit/index.html <comment><USER2> Honest question from a non-web dev. Are these things actually used for real working websites? Are there any examples other than landing pages and blog posts?

One of the things that keeps me from using a web platform on my projects is that I don't want to have to worry about aesthetics. With good ole Windows, I drop some controls and buttons into a designer and I know it is going to look pretty good and be obviously functional to all users. I don't have time to place individual lines and worry about the alignment of shading and curves. Projects like Bootstrap interest me because they offer a way for me to focus on function rather than looks, however I never seem them in action for something substantial. Say, a financial accounts manager.

Are there projects out there using these templates for such purposes?

<comment><USER3> These tools: bootstrap, material, etc. seem to be exactly what you need. They make sure your style is consistent and looks good without too much work. You can then configure the framework to make it look unique to your application. My impression is these frameworks are used all over the place in production, they are just customized so you might not recognize them. The last three companies I've worked at, one used angular material, one used bootstrap, and one had a custom css framework. The later had a tendency to build internal frameworks instead of new product and is suffering the consequences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks good.

I've been very happy with [http://materializecss.com/](http://materializecss.com/). Really simple to use with some very slick touches.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Free?" what the heck is a Creative Tim license?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is the license that we give to our users. As an overview, you can use this product for your personal projects, startups or for a client. What you cannot do is to get this product and resell it/post it anywhere as your own created product. This is what we want to protect. That's it. Please let me know if I can help with other information.

<comment><USER6> Lack of exact licensing terms may make any legal dept (or just copyright- conscious individual) wary. The table at /license doesn't count - there are no definitions and without those some rows are really odd, like "multiple developers" restriction (who counts as a "developer"? does the "personal" license forbid two computer-savvy persons making a website? or, say, what if I code the page myself but then call someone for assistance?)

Legalese sucks hard (and layman-readable licenses are hard to write), but ambiguity is even worse.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you're right, the legal stuff sucks. We wanted to make it as simple as possible and not have 100 pages terms and conditions. We will try to make that more clear so people can understand that if they get this product for Free can be used by how many devs they have, in how many products they want.

Our business is to create good looking products that speed-up the development for web developers and not to go after people who use our products without a license. Probably there are 1000 people every day who just "View Source" of the page and get the product. We cannot and don't want to focus on those people :D

<comment><USER7> Please stop wasting potential customer's time by offering a great looking, professional-grade product with a horrible, non-professional license. I'd love to use your templates in my business. The pricing is on the high end of what I'd pay but not so high that I'd walk away. But I have to walk away,I can't allow myself to waste any more time looking at your site because the license is an absolute deal breaker.

Licenses aren't just "ugh, we do software but we have to put up some stuff about licensing." Licenses are essential to any form of commercial software. If I base my front end on your bundle, which I paid for, I'm basing my _business_ on your bundle. If I don't know what I've bought and what I can and can't do with your bundle, I don't know what I can do with my business. That's an absolute deal breaker. There's a reason why licenses look the way they do. This kind of stuff is incredibly hard to specify and the evaluation criteria isn't "I'm a programmer and I think I know what it means" it's "I'm a court of law reviewing how licenses have been interpreted historically for the past thousand years."

Did you pay a lawyer who specializes in software licenses to write that license? If you did, find a different lawyer. If you didn't, take down the license _and your offer to let people use software you don 't know how to license_ until you have found an actual lawyer and had them draft an actual license that is as professional as your product.

If you want a plain-vanilla license out of their law firm's files, expect it to cost a few thousand dollars to have your license prepared (mostly for the time it takes them to understand what you want). If you want an unusual or highly customized license, expect it to cost more like five to ten thousand dollars to have it prepared (because they will need to bill you for time spent writing that custom document). Licenses are hard. They are literally the contract between your business and your customers' businesses. They matter.

If you had a real license, I would have bought a pro license this morning. You don't, so all I can do is complain about it on hacker news and hope in some future life I find your site again and find a decent license on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the detailed explanation. We have over 1 million users who checked our resources, 97.000+ web developers are using them in 150.000+ projects and this is the first time when somebody is not happy with our licensing options. We will see what we can do in this area.

<comment><USER7> Given the number of questions on this HN page about licensing I think it's a mistake to conclude my comment is the first time someone wasn't happy with your licensing (And people who pay for software tend to be the same people who care about licensing, so the fraction who care about licensing is likely to be a much higher fraction of potential _paying_ customers than simply x/1.000.000)

How about just offering it for sale on envato under their licensing. Yes, you give up a bit of revenue because they take a cut but you don't have to pay a lawyer to draft a license for you, and you can still offer it on your own page under your own non-professionally-drafted license at the same time if you really want to do that too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it possible to upgrade a personal license to developer? IE when bootstrapping a product, getting customer feedback, and then upgrading when you actually start charging people?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you can do that whenever you want

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Personal preference but does anyone else not like material design concepts?

<comment><USER10> I initially really liked material because it seemed nice and clean but the animations have gotten out of hand, IMO, particularly when used on desktop. Is there a non/less-animated version?

<comment><USER11> If they do it in CSS, I bet you can remove the animations by setting the animationduration property to 0 seconds.

Or if you want to aggravate users, override it so that each animation takes 10seconds. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would like to use it for one of the saas application. I am not sure by when it will start generating revenue.

Can I use personal licence till the the time my app is not earning any revenue ?

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks amazing - great work!

This might be something I can use for a new SaaS I'm doing. Is there a "dashboard" type page?

And something with Tables/graphs etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> At this moment we are working on Material Dashboard. It will come in the next weeks and it will be for Free having all the basic elements that you need to create a Dashboard (tables, charts, maps, forms etc). Then there will also be a Premium version for that with more components and customization. But the Free version will be enough for most of the cases.

It will be something like another dashboard that we created: [http://demos.creative-tim.com/light-bootstrap- dashboard](http://demos.creative-tim.com/light-bootstrap-dashboard)

<comment><USER13> So can I clarify - will this be like an "add on" to the Material Kit that is posted here? i.e. can I use the Material Dashboard + Material Kit together?

Or will it be it's own standalone product?

i.e. can I start developing the Material Kit now, and add the dashboard on later?

<comment><AUTHOR> It will be a standalone product, but It will have all the components that are in the Material Kit. So you will use Material Kit when you create the Presentation page or landing page of your product and then on the admin part you will use Material Dashboard. They will have the same design line so there will be consistency in the overall design of your web app.

You can start developing with Material Kit, then when we release the Dashboard you just change the CSS with the new one and also get the new Structure of the page (Sidebar + Main Area).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is nice and your other products are really nice. Was thinking of doing semantic ui for my next project but this will do. Pre-sale question if I want to resell a final product on envato will the developer license do (that is if i dont attach the source materials for the themes).

Also what License is suitable for an open source project?

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks great! Someone should make these into react components :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys,

If you want to give use feedback, want to contribute or have any issue, here is the Github Repo: [https://github.com/timcreative/material- kit](https://github.com/timcreative/material-kit)

<comment><USER16> Saw the live preview. Can people customize the color of entire UI kit before downloading?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, you cannot change the colors before downloading. You can do that, very easy, after you download using the SASS variables and a SASS compiler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why didn't you contribute to [https://github.com/FezVrasta/bootstrap-material- design/](https://github.com/FezVrasta/bootstrap-material-design/) instead?

<comment><USER18> To make money I'd assume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just looked at it and looked at pro version. Very compelling in my view, congrats. I know people might have different uses and approaches, but I think if it can save me a lot of time, it is worth it.

<comment><AUTHOR> @desireco42 we are glad that you like! It will definitely save you a lot o time :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Am I the only one who thinks material design looks really bad? :-/

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm thinking of using Material Design Lite for my next project [https://github.com/google/material-design- lite](https://github.com/google/material-design-lite)

</comment><comment><USER22> Hm, using Gigi Hadid as the profile pic is pretty lame. :/

</comment><comment><USER23> Change that woman's picture at the bottom, not classy in my opinion.

Also, in SeaMonkey, the part with the sliders is like the sluggiest I've ever seen a website...

<comment><USER24> Why is it not classy? The picture looks like a fashion photo shoot, probably for the earrings

<comment><USER23> Not everyone's culture would find that picture okay. It's not hard to find something else like a tree that would work just as well. Also, why not a guy?

<comment><USER25> Why is a guy ok? I expected a girl in a bikini or something but it's just a headshot of a girl. That's totally fine in most places in the world.

<comment><USER26> > That's totally fine in most places in the world.

...and the places that isn't can suck it frankly.

<comment><USER27> YeeeHaw...! Don't forget in some cultures women cannot have their faces shown in public spaces (burka?). I respect that, but in general we should mine such culture sensibilities before posting something.

<comment><USER26> I've observed that often the people screaming "respect my right to do <thing x>" are the ones who are intolerant to my right to think <thing x> is wrong/stupid and say so.

You see this particularly with religions who think that belief in something unprovable should give them special rights.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


As the digital revolution kills jobs, social unrest will rise - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9243038/As_the_digital_revolution_kills_jobs_social_unrest_will_rise

<comment><USER2> Well, good thing that within a couple of years from now, we'll have that AI- powered Drone Army on hand to keep them in their place.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> > "Ultimately, every society lives from the backbone from a strong middle > class," said Seitzberg. "If you get just a top level, a small amount of very > rich people and a very large piece of very poor people, it leads to social > unrest."

The " _a small amount of very rich people_ " is basically Congress, backed up by the various lobbyists who are paid by huge industries, such as the military-industrial complex. They create the laws and, as an example, push the NSA to push mass surveillance, which in turn will help them kill any "Occupy" movements before they even become serious threats to their out-of-proportion wealth. Whenever you communicate, encrypt it.</comment>


The Website That Got Me Expelled - <AUTHOR> http://www.codeword.xyz/2015/09/05/the-website-that-got-me-expelled/ <comment><USER3> As someone who is both a former student with authority issues and a former high school teacher, this story leaves me with a whole bunch of feelings. You would think that teachers have the maturity to be more or less immune to the impressions of teenagers, but it's actually quite a challenge to maintain face [1] as the instructional leader of dozens of humans. In my experience in Teach For America, it was a fashionable meme that it's the adults that make education hard, not the children. But I think that's not quite honest. While adults are ultimately responsible for everything that's wrong with education, on a day to day basis, you're put in very delicate and stressful situations with children, who are impulsive, emotional, and myopic. It's really, really hard to deal with adolescents at scale.

Yet, in this case, like so many others, it's very clear that at some point, some of the adults decided that it was appropriate to wage total war on the child who offended them. They allowed their hurt feelings to suspend their sense of empathy and proportionality. Even worse, as the role models for the school, they set a standard of absolutism and intolerance. I can identify with them, while also seeing how badly they failed to take the high road.

It's interesting how this same dynamic has played out in criminal justice as well. We struggle with the ability to treat the incarcerated in a humane manner, to hold police accountable for their excesses, to provide security without domestic militarization, and to fully rehabilitate and reintegrate ex- cons into society.

I guess it's probably an inherent tension in human society, when there is a boundary of authority. I just hope we can learn and progress.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_%28sociological_concept%2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_%28sociological_concept%29)

<comment><USER4> It's interesting, I graduated from that school in '92, and I was surprised when I read it. The faculty I knew, most would have encouraged such a project. My drafting teacher let me do a 3point of a x-wing for my final project. The school let me take 3 years of art in one year. I got caught smoking in the stairwell, and was just told to go outside. I did nudes, a controversial art projects that my college would have raised an eye to. This wasn't a bad school, or at least it wasn't the 5 years before this story occurs. So while I'm sure this happened, my own experience makes me believe that were not getting the whole picture.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was really surprised by how it all went down as well. Up to that point, I had felt that the school, teachers, and administration were all very progressive and tolerant, which was a huge factor in my decision to go forward with the whole project and keep it going as long as I did.

As far as not getting the whole picture, I shared everything I could to the best of my recollection. I also had one of the friends who was involved go over it and it was his opinion that I have left nothing salient out as well. It did all happen close to 20 years ago, however, so it's entirely possible that we've forgotten something significant.

<comment><USER5> It's amazing to read that first-person account. I recall reading about it at the time. Or maybe it was the other case that you refer to. Thanks! I'm curious about your perspective on a few things, though.

What free-speech rights did Canadian students have then?

Do they have more rights now, or less?

Teachers are "public figures", right? Or is Canadian libel law more like English than American?

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure that a high school teacher would _not_ be considered a "public figure" in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The most famous incident like this is "neverseconds".[1] This is the blog of a primary school girl in Scotland who, each day, took a picture of her school lunch and reviewed it. The school authorities threatened her and insisted she stop. That backfired on them, badly. Coverage on TechDirt. Coverage on the BBC. Worldwide press coverage. 10 million page views of blog. Complaints in Parliament. School authorities disciplined by national education minister. Public apology by town council. Girl wins several awards for fighting censorship.

Her blog is still active, three years later. She encourages other kids to send in pictures of their school lunches, and it's a great site for seeing what kids have for lunch around the world.

[1] [http://neverseconds.blogspot.com/2012/06/goodbye.html](http://neverseconds.blogspot.com/2012/06/goodbye.html)

<comment><USER8> That's crazy. She's just documenting her reality. I'm glad she "won" in the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ah, the good old days. I remember in middle school when I'd set up my first webpage. I got my first and only in-school-suspension for going to that site during class. Just going to the website. I just wanted to see if it was up, since I had never accessed it from anywhere but home. My teacher's explanation was "It could have been anything! You can't go to websites I don't approve of!"

Now, this would normally have been something trivial I would have just shrugged off. But my computer partner also got in trouble for "not stopping me". What was he going to do, knock me out of my chair before I pressed enter? This kid was the stereotypical teacher's pet who always did his homework and was quiet in class, so I felt particularly bad for getting him in trouble. I even offered to serve two days of ISS instead of him getting in trouble - <USER2> course that request was denied.

To this day, I still cannot understand that woman's reasoning. How is "you could have done something bad," grounds for punishment? What kind of person feels the need to punish a child who's showing enthusiasm for a subject they're teaching?

<comment><USER10> >How is "you could have done something bad," grounds for punishment?

Unfortunately, this kind of thing pops up in the real world a lot as well too. "You're riding a bicycle after drinking a few beers? You could have crashed into someone! DUI felony charge for you!"

<comment><USER11> Driving under the influence is categorically different. You are a real danger to others and can maim or kill them. How is that even remotely comparable to navigating to a personal website in class?

<comment><USER12> No matter how drunk you are, it's hard to maim someone else with a bicycle. You might knock someone over, but you're really only a danger to yourself.

<comment><USER13> As a pedestrian I disagree. I've actually seen cyclists knock someone down (it was a pure accident, no drinking involved as far as I know) and they were pretty badly injured (ambulance, etc). Last thing we need is cyclists drunk, they're dangerous enough when sober.

<comment><USER14> I only have anecdotal evidence, but offer the heuristic that most "drunk enough to be dangerous" bicyclists can't ride fast enough to maim anyone -- and if they're riding down a hill, _they 're_ much more likely to be maimed.

There's an inherent barrier to entry that makes drunk biking difficult enough to limit those who can actually do it. Like how often do you see someone drunk on a road bike with clips? How many drunk people bike on busy roads where _they 're_ more likely to get killed than the guy in an air conditioned hunk of metal on wheels?

A reasonable person's analysis might conclude that it's better to say, "hey, let's bike to the bar" that's 4 miles away rather than "let's drive," because statistically you're as/more likely to fall down and injure yourself as if you'd walked, and will harm society much less than if you'd decided to pilot a machine that requires a fraction of the bodily coordination to get from A to B.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Loved reading this, I have a very similar story. Same year, 1997, I made a Geocities site and had teacher report cards just like in this story. I put the site up on the library computers home page and then it spread around the school immediately, kids were talking about in the hallways, teachers mentioned in class that they would find who did did it.

I also critiqued the school itself, some of the hypocrisies I saw and notably since it was a Catholic school they had a school rule against pornography even when you were at home. So of course I put up a very soft core nude photo as a sort of fuck you.

However, unlike this story I actually was expelled, but it's not very difficult to get expelled from a Catholic school, it was a regular occurrence at our school. Knowing this I kept it very anonymous and didn't tell anyone.

I got an email from the school saying they would sue me for libel unless I came and turned myself in. That made me pretty nervous and pretty soon after that a student who I knew emailed me saying he loved the site and wanted to help. I then told him who I was and it turns out it was actually a teacher impersonating a student.

My brother and I were both expelled, my brother didn't do anything but contribute a few of the teacher reviews, so it sucked pretty bad for him. For me too of course but I was kicked out halfway through my senior year so I was mostly done with high school anyway. Plus I had already applied to colleges so it the expulsion didn't show up on any transcript the colleges received.

My brother wasn't so lucky since he was only a sophomore when this happened, when it came time to apply for college he got accepted to none of the colleges he applied for. He appealed hard and finally got into one.

<comment><USER16> Did you ever find out how they targeted you at the first place?

<comment><USER15> Oh, I had an anonymous email account listed on the website so people could leave feedback or submit additional teacher reviews. So, they didn't know who I was but they could contact me.

I fucked up by outing myself to the teacher impersonating a student, but with a legal threat I guess it could have turned out even worse if I didn't out myself.

Huge drama at the time, my parents were pretty religious so they actually took the values of the school seriously and were so upset that they told me they wouldn't let me go to college.

That was a pretty easy fight to win though as there is no way they could have stopped me.

<comment><USER16> It's interesting. I don't suppose there is a way to protect your anonymity at the time. They would have got you either way. Using an email list might be a better solution... haha, use a free email for every weekly update. Never reply.

<comment><USER5> In the late 90s, there was no Tor, or VPN services. There were still pseudonymous remailers (penet.fi having gone down in 1996). I remember using Potato Idaho to craft Mixmaster remailer messages with reply blocks. That's how I posted to filtered cypherpunks :) But it was tedious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was almost suspended at school eight years ago for using `net send` from .bat files and because I had Everest portable on my network drive (a tool that lists system specs, I was curious what hardware the PC's had).

The guy that managed the network at the time was almost personally offended and accused me of 'hacking' the network with dangerous tools. He got the school board involved, my parents had to go talk to the headmaster. My parents and I had to sign a contract which said that any other 'unauthorised' use of the school network would get me suspended for 3 days.

If you have one bitter person working somewhere and nobody knows enough about something to stop them, you can get these power-mad types. Probably happens a lot at schools with just one network administrator.

<comment><USER18> I must have gone to a great high school. I _actually_ hacked our systems a few times.

We used a piece of software to lock down the PCs, IIRC, called Fool Proof. I'm not sure if it was supposed to be ironic, because it didn't take long to figure out that it kept the clear text admin password in swap. The machines didn't have BIOS passwords, so it was pretty easy to boot into a hex editor and dig it out.

When my teacher found out I did this, he praised my ingenuity and even got me involved in vetting alternative options, despite the fact that I had been handing the password around to friends like candy.

<comment><USER19> Did you have a clue as to where in swap the data was stored? Looking through a swap partition in a hex editor sounds mind-numbing.

<comment><USER20> Plaintext actually stands out pretty easily in a hex editor, just because everything else is basically gibberish.

<comment><USER21> And never underestimate the amount of time that a teenager, with all the time in the world, would dedicate to this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Some sites require JS because they do weird things like rendering stuff clientside.

This site "requires" JS because... The opacity of the article is set to 0? Everything's there, everything's rendered, but they have a CSS rule (".use- motion .post { opacity: 0; }"). Only thing I can think of is that they do a JS fade-in or something and missed the unintended consequences.

(Speaking of which... Doesn't Google penalize sites that have an excessive number of hidden keywords? I wonder if the entire article being hidden qualifies...)

<comment><USER23> oh come on.

It's 2015, not 1999. If you don't have javascript enabled, do you honestly expect to be able to read half of the internet?

<comment><USER24> For privacy and security I do the same. Requiring javascript to just view a blog article is insane.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Reminds my of the first program I ever wrote, in 10th grade, painstakingly assembled one IBM card at a time, output onto green bar paper.

I changed the school motto from "Gateway High School, Hats Off to Thee" to "Gateway High School, Pants Down to Thee" surrounded by an ascii generated toilet.

The principal took away half my card deck (which would have taken weeks to reproduce), promising to return them only when my father signed my output.

My father reproduced my output by hand with his signature and a label: "Functional Specifications".

The principal returned my cards and never said another word.

<comment><USER26> Dude you must have gone to an elite high school

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wish the post had gone into more detail about how the author was caught. Did another student rat him out? Was there some forensic evidence he didn't consider? I did _much_ worse at my high school, but I was never caught. Chalk it up to trustworthy friends, knowledge of computer forensics, and a little luck. Even if I had been caught, I doubt there would have been any real consequences. A suspension? It's going on my Permanent Record? Pfft, who cares?

If there's one piece of advice I can impart to students, it's this: Don't worry about getting into trouble. Unless you're committing an actual crime, the consequences are entirely forgettable. Even in the author's case, a clear and disproportionate overreaction, he's _glad_ to have had the experience. So don't be cowed. Have fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> I never really found out how they caught me. I suspect the guy in the states who started hosting the site after the initial shut-down told them my name when they contacted him, but who knows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Haha, this brings back memories. Starting in Jr. High some friends and I ran a website which started out as just some crudely drawn absurd comics, but later added a section called "Anarchist Times" where we would vent mostly about school in a news-article-esq manner, but also often politics which looking back we knew nothing about. We would let anyone who wanted to write and At its height we had something like 14 kids regularly providing content. A reoccurring theme was to mock the principals son, who was in our grade and acted like a prince. To my knowledge no one ever got in trouble, we did however get blocked by the schools IT department whom I went to and protested until it was resolved.

There was also some hijynx when we tried to enter the website for class president and were told a website wasn't eligible, so we ran a write in campaign and plastered the school in posters, which the school promptly took down.

This was how I learned PHP and MySQL, which has made me my living the last 10 years!

After high school it fell largely into disuse, but I have paid for the domain every year since then. I've ported it from host to host, and it still lives on my Nginx digital ocean server. Even done a few small upgrades like making the audio of our band "The Medium" playable through the site (html5). Lol, it's at the poorly chosen [http://oasisband.net](http://oasisband.net) if anyone was curious.

A few people have asked me to change their names which I have obliged. People say some stupid things in highschool, I know I did.

<comment><USER29> >A reoccurring theme was to mock the principals son, who was in our grade and acted like a prince.

Err, cyber bullying?

<comment><USER26> It's not just regular bullying... _cue ignorant middle aged schoolteacher gasp chorus_ IT'S CYBER BULLYING!!! _cyborg bursts through the wall and grabs nerd by the collar_

<comment><USER30> Please don't do this here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Public schools are often filled with petty tyrants. I'm lucky I was not more harmed by the sadist VP that ran my middle school.

<comment><USER32> > Public schools are often filled with petty tyrants.

If you think that's only public school you're deluding yourself. My secondary education was in private schools (in the US sense of the word) and I have no issue whatsoever seeing this scenario unroll there (I can even cast the parts).

Petty tyrants is what you get when petty people get access to any sort of power to lord over others, the exact nature of that power has little relevance. The concentration of petty tyrants is only a function of how easy it is to be granted power by the environment.

<comment><USER31> If I thought it was only public schools I would have said only public schools.

<comment><USER33> When you add artificial specificity, people assume you did so for a reason. Like if you say "women are [X descriptive property]" people will assume, rightfully, an implied "women, as opposed to men, are ..."

And of course when I say "when you add artificial specitivity," there is an implied "when you, or anyone else, adds artificial specitivity," totally contradicting the rule. This is English, not Aristotelian logic.

<comment><USER31> picky, picky

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I must be about the same age as the author. This certainly brings back memories!

Oh for the days when we could just uncomplicatedly assume that anyone who knew anything about technology was also an instinctive anti-authoritarian, too.

</comment><comment><USER35> I had a really similar experience when I was in high school, though I didn't get expelled. I made a website with photos of students (and their first names) giving the finger to the camera. People of course set this as the home page on library computers.

Unhappily, this was right after Columbine, so the administration was super paranoid and I was a little X-Files-obsessed black-trenchcoat-wearing weirdo... so I got a week's suspension.

</comment><comment><USER36> What the hell is this guy doing as a coder - he should be running a media empire by now!

Everything he reported doing in high school is fantastic grassroots marketing and PR, and the content he created was great even back then. The teacher review is one of the best ideas, ever. He got everything down - content, distribution - even on slips of paper - the works.

This is exactly what you read in a media billionaire's bio: expelled from a prestigious high school for running an underground school newspaper, which printed students' uncensored teacher reviews. Oh yes.

More recently - even our HN title is clickbait! Yet his write-up is fantastic, 100% true and a great read! This guy knows how to press people's buttons.

And remember, he got free hosting because some guy thought his writing was so hilarious.

OP, get into media, stat.

Oh, and OP? You _are_ hilarious. No rose-tinted glasses about it.

<comment><USER37> The author clearly writes:

"I was a pretty stereotypical "nerd" in high school. A debilitatingly shy and socially awkward computer club member who spent the vast majority of his time on the internet and listened exclusively to music by "Weird Al" Yankovic.".

<comment><USER36> could you elaborate on what you meant by that?

<comment><USER37> I can imagine several scenarios:

* Being very introverted he hates doing the "people stuff" that is necessary to run a media empire

* While he is good at PR, he loves computer programming more

* He did PR in a way that worked quite well at a high school, but doing it professionally requires different/additional skills (say, people skills)

* While he has all the necessary competencies to run a media empire in principle, our society has some strong expectations how such people have to be (say, more extroverted, less nerdy).

* He has a very anarchistic way to run PR, which succeeded in its own way at the high school (see article), but does not work in a professional environment, where a different style is excepted, where he's not good at.

<comment><USER36> well, I disagree. you have some good points, but my impression still leans toward my former post. zuck isn't the most social person either :)

anyway, until OP tries it we'll never know :) thanks for elaborating on your reasoning for me though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I also had a similar story. It was also early 2000s and our high school had a calendar system for each student so they could look up in which room they would have what class. So a friend of mine and I have setup a proxy server which would modify rooms randomly, or randomly cancel classes. In order to "test out" our code, we ARP+DNS spoofed the the whole school network, so anyone visiting the site internally would end up on our site. Most students thought it was super fun that their classes were "cancelled" but obviously teachers didn't approve :-)

It was also a couple of months away from our graduation, and we did get into pretty big trouble, where we got suspended, and had to write a letter of apology to the principal so they would allow us to graduate.

</comment><comment><USER39> I got expelled from several schools for the crime of knowing more about computers than the teachers, having an interest in computer security, and having a website. I was also used as a scapegoat by a network admin who couldn't fix his networking issues. After the first school, every other school assumed i was some kind of dangerous delinquent. It's part of what prompted me to drop out.

</comment><comment><USER40> I remember when I was on the school newspaper my junior year (long time ago, before the internet) we all decided to put a fake ad on the back cover of the newspaper just for fun. It was a picture of a girl in a bikini with a headline about her boyfriend loves her because she knows Calculus (or something I forget exactly). Students of course thought it was hilarious, the school did not, and actually fired the journalism teacher (who was female). The next year we were basically locked down and could do nothing without prescreening. Thankfully my family moved a few weeks into the year and I didn't have to deal with it much.

</comment><comment> loup-vaillant Be sure to read the comment below about how another student got into similar trouble for messing up with the school's unsecured network, but was able to blackmail his way out. (The school had committed insurance fraud.)

Funny how people change their attitude the second they realise they do not have the upper hand after all.

</comment><comment><USER41> my self and 4 of my friends got banned from using the computers at our school for ~5 weeks. We were the geeks in the computer class.

Showing my age, but the class had 12 Apple IIs and a networked Corvus hard drive connecting them all for storage. The system had accounts. Each student got some space on the shared hard drive to save their work and could not access each other's storage areas. The teacher of course could access everything and used it to read students' programs for grading.

One time the teacher had logged in and then stepped away to deal with something or a student. One of my friends took that opportunity to do a binary save of a large chunk of memory on that machine, the part where OS/state extra was. Turned out if you loaded that save back into memory you'd become the teacher. He gave us all copies of the file.

We never used it for any kind of mischief but a few days later the teacher noticed one of us doing something we shouldn't have been able to do. The teacher wrote our parents letters and said we were banned from using the computers till the end of the quarter.

IIRC only one set of parents were actually upset. I think the rest were actually kind of proud. It didn't affect our grades. We also liked the teacher. I just thought it was his way of appropriately punishing us to make it clear even though you can do something doesn't necessarily mean you should.

</comment><comment><USER42> Like many commenters, this post brings back memories of similar experiences...

My experience with being silly on school computers was mainly in middle school (age 14) where friends and I would find more inventive ways to wreak havoc on the network. One of the favourite tricks was to hack open the command line (using accessibility options in XP) and remote shutdown other student's machines towards the end of a lesson before they'd saved their work... rather cruel to think back to it now. Another more daring guy sent a string of offensive messages to the principal on a LAN-chat type application that caused pop-ups on the receiver's screen. Come to think of it, there were so many 3rd- party administrative 'tools' that could be run trivially without root access on XP, such as drive-encryptors (rendering machines essentially useless) that it was easy to perform a whole manner of tricks.

Personally, I was only called into the deputy's office once, regarding a server-wide DOOM game installation. They confiscated my memory stick due to it holding the DOOM installation files. However, I somehow managed to get it back the next day without them checking it; thankfully they didn't, because there were so many 3rd-party executables and 'network guides' on there it would've been far worse. I can relate to the stress the author felt in that sense, because going home that night knowing they had my memory stick was one of the most gut-wrenching feelings of my teenage years.

Thankfully, all that was required of me was a meeting with a sysadmin trying to explain why I had filled an obscure part of the server's shared area with DOOM and COD sprites...

</comment><comment><USER43> My highschool brought me in to a meeting with the principal and police officer when I wrote the name of my boyfriend on my ticket to senior prom. They "convinced" me that I could not go to prom with a guy. End of story.

<comment><USER26> I love how the police officer was deemed necessary

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> > Our plan was to surreptitiously allow our fellow students to grade and leave > anonymous comments about their teachers, which we would collect and publish.

So... ratemyprofessors.com ?

</comment><comment><USER45> IANAL, but near as I can tell, it's still up in the air if (in the US) students have a constitutional right to be free of official retribution for off-campus speech.

There is some evidence that if the speech is truly off-campus and if it doesn't cause a substantial disruption to school functions (see Tinker v. Des Moines), students are protected. Even the famous Supreme Court "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" case was partially decided based on the speech being at a school- related event.

On the other hand, "disruption" is defined rather loosely sometimes, perhaps even lowering the bar to content that is viral, as long as it is also insulting. See, for instance, SJW v. Lee's Summit.

</comment><comment><USER46> The initial reaction of the head of English was what surprised me the most in this article.

Shouldn't the English department be happy that their students have understood satire and 1984, without taking a personal grudge? Glad it worked out well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was surprised, too. I thought my reference to animal farm (some animals are more equal than others) was particularly clever.

It's possible that the head English teacher was the one who wrote the original Winston's Way, however, and may have taken it more personally as a result. I'm not sure though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I have read several stories like this from the US. It baffles me how many Americans seems to think their country is the bastion of freedom of speech. Having it in your constitution apparently doesn't mean shit.

<comment><USER48> You don't get these freedoms as a student. Or at least, the school is free to discipline you (or kick you out) however they see fit for basically whatever reason. You'll notice that there was no mention of police in the article. Our freedoms exist only in respect to the law.

I actually do think that the American civil liberties are quite strong. I can go protest in front of a government building with an ISIS flag with no (legal) repercussions if I want to.

<comment><USER49> The USA identifies ISIS/ISIL as a terrorist group [0]. There is a good chance that you will at-least be detained for questioning if you carry out said activity.

[0] - [https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press- office/2015/07/06/remar...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press- office/2015/07/06/remarks-president-progress-fight-against-isil)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> In high school, I made a WScript that prompted user "Network timed out on line #6. Please re-enter password:" and would surreptitiously record it. I put this on a floppy, popped it in when someone in the library went to the printer, waited, came back and said, "sorry forgot my floppy; can i get it, excuse me". Didn't use it maliciously; usually would just modify the folder settings on their home drive on the network to have repeating images of Pokemon as a background image. I suppose this all sounds quite devious in writing.

</comment><comment><USER51> That sucks that your creative high-school gag was met with such hostility by the administration. I'm three years older than you and did something similar in high-school. A friend and I made a MS Word clone from scratch of the formatted template the school used for report cards. Then we filled it up with teachers' comments and grades for us, but in total sarcasm. It was hilarious. The teachers found out about it, and... they had a good laugh also. No harm done. I guess it just depends on your environment.

</comment><comment><USER52> In highschool I made a website (in like 50 lines of web.py, easily the best framework for small sites) with the twitter API that allowed students to post anonymously to an account I ran. It was before YikYak came out, and I'm not mature enough yet to not admit that it was a LOT of fun. ~400 followers (from a school of ~1100).

There was admittedly a lot of cyberbullying, but I got the feeling it was mostly friends making fun of friends and nothing was too nasty. It was more along the lines of teasing each other with embarrassing inside jokes than anything, and I made a strict rule that anyone would be banned if they used anyone's real name so none of this would ever come back and prevent someone from getting into school or getting a job.

It was like 4 months before graduation and my favorite teacher asked me to take it down, so obviously I did. Friends were upset with me, but ultimately we had our fun and I was happy to put it behind.

To relate this to the HN crowd, I have to say that I think YikYak sucks for an anonymous platform. YikYak is so dumb because it's college kids posting either unoriginal jokes or things about buildings on their campus.

The YikYak killer is the YikYak that is only somewhat anonymous. The YikYak where you interact with your friends anonymously, not anonymously with strangers nearby you and your city of 40k people.

</comment><comment><USER53> I was taken to the principles office after they found out I had access to the camera systems of the schools.

I used it all the time to look for friends and check the lines for some bathrooms.

</comment><comment><USER54> Ah, school. I was suspended three times for various failure to comply with authority, got straight As anyway. College, high-paying tech job, no problems :).

</comment><comment><USER55> Awesome story!

In college we ran a website called "The No More Bzzz Bzzz Hun Hun" about the professors at the University of Geneva, in Switzerland. It was hosted in Sweden with X-Force (mrsaint.net), a pirate group. Similar idea, but you could vote for the most boring teachers (bzzz bzzz is the noise that a fly makes in a boring classroom and hun hun is something to do with "fly f---ing", a term in French that means saying things that are boring and useless). You can see its remnants in [http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz](http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz). They never found us, but I was definitely scared about getting expelled from college at some point. Unfortunately I no longer have the poll data :(

[http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz/faqs.html](http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz/faqs.html) is priceless.

</comment><comment><USER56> My messing around in high school was comparably minor. Our network ran Novell NetWare and I managed to discover that there was an unsecured Website that had a number of interest. Most of them were read-only with pretty boring info. However, there was also a messaging function that allowed you to send messages to any machine on the network that would appear as a popup. A couple friends and I messed around a little and I promptly forgot about it.

Turns out someone else had found out about this and decided to make use of the much more dangerous broadcast functionality. I can't remember the message that was sent, but I believe it involved some profanities against our principal. Of course they didn't think such a message could be tracked but it was. I think this person was only suspended for a few days, but the admin learned his lesson and secured things after that.

</comment><comment><USER57> Your website now doesn't render text unless javascript is enabled. This is bad design. Stop it.

</comment><comment><USER58> Really interesting how lack of anonymous hosting prevented the student's public critique of their teachers.

Related: [http://voidnull.sdf.org/](http://voidnull.sdf.org/) (unafilliated)

<comment><USER59> I would hardly call it 'critique', it was just straight up gossip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> This reminds me of when i installed key-loggers on all the library computers at school :) Got a lot of interesting info during those weeks. Then my idiot- friend logs into a teachers email account using credentials we found and sends a recommendation to some university for himself... He got expelled, i explained exactly how the key loggers worked etc, and was tasked with 40hours of computer support as a "penance". I just skipped all my classes and completed the "penance" it in less then a week lol. Sometimes i miss those days :)

<comment><USER60> Forgot to mention that i was the unofficial network and system admin for the school since i was about 14. I had access to everything except an old 286 with green/black screen that they used for grades. I still wonder if they kept it on that system because of me. I know they upgraded it 1.5 years after i graduated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Ah, young people. You can't equate students rating teachers to teachers grading students. Unless teachers are allowed to say things about students like: "She was a total bitch".

<comment><USER62> I am sure they do say such things in the teacher's lounge. The difference, of course, is that they are not doing it in public.

<comment><USER61> Exactly!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Could've been me if my HS administrators had a lick of savvy.

</comment><comment><USER64> I have to say that it was perfetly written. I was hooked.

</comment><comment><USER65> I really liked your article and it made me remember that no matter what someone (an authority figure in your case) says, there is always a way.

</comment><comment><USER66> This is another good example of the complete and pervasive misunderstanding of what free speech is. Unfortunately law, ethics and morality cannot be reduced to a bumper sticker.

Churchill high school kids come from one of the richest school districts in the country practically defining the term 'privileged'. He undoubtedly could have found a more productive and healthier hobby.

</comment><comment><USER67> This reminds me of the time I attempted to use an article from The Onion as part of current events assignment back in high school. Of course it just resulted in a fail and was nowhere near taken out of proportion as OPs stunt but taught me that certain people just can't appreciate humor.

</comment><comment><USER68> You have to say these sort of anonymous reviews should be formalised and teachers questioned if their class think they are bad at their jobs. Or hungover in class.

Of course, I also think teachers should be the highest paid people in society (when I'm king), so take what I say with a pinch of salt.

<comment><USER69> Highest paid is fine, but accountability is equally important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Wow schools stray so far from actual education. To punish kids with the threat of lack of education for airing their opinion on their own education experience is so strange to me. It seems more like some sort of totalitarian experiment than education.

</comment><comment><USER71> I find it immensely entertaining that Rudis created his own federal reserve inside his school and immediately abused the monetary system to "buy all kinds of sweet stuff." You should have gone into politics @Rudism. You would fit right in.

</comment><comment><USER72> Free speech is important but for some reason this story does not make me feel much sympathy for the author. I'm not sure why. Maybe because it seemed like the newsletter was posting borderline defamatory comments anonymously.

<comment><USER61> Yes. It's sad how so many here romanticize being a dick in high school. No, not all teachers are saints but I have some sympathy for them too. If this guy created a revenge porn site or a gossip site where other students were being harassed, he wouldn't have had quite as nice a reception here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> It's funny to think that there is a website devoted to the report card feature of your newsletter. Rate My Professor, while kind of despised, its existence is tolerated.

<comment><USER46> When Rate My Teachers first came out, teachers were annoyed by bad reviews and sometimes frightened of the consequences.

Now - it's tolerated, in my opinion, because students on there are a lot nicer than you might expect them to be.

I'd be curious to know what, if anything, has changed over that time.

<comment><USER8> I had a college professor specifically mention he would love if everyone went on and gave him honest reviews because he was able to get them immediately after the class ended (the feedback cards via the university were 2-3 months behind the semester).

<comment><USER74> In my high school classes, I used to always give a handout (I have killed so many trees... :-P) I often included a short survey that the students could fill out in a minute or two at the end of class. It was a checkbox affair to keep things as anonymous as possible (although some students occasionally wrote comments which I appreciated). I found it unbelievably useful in improving the classes.

Of course, it's hard to get information on how the students are personally relating to you. I also would have welcomed a way to get feedback without invoking a confrontation. Elsewhere in this thread I describe how it is inevitable that some students will come to hate you (either by mistakes on your part, or because of problems that the student is having personally). You have to accept that it is part of the job, but I would have welcomed some way to see if there are any common threads that I could work on.

Of course, just like any profession, some teachers can't deal with criticism. Just look at programmers. Tell Joe Blow that his design could use improvement and instantly they turn off. Some will take it as a cue that they need to submarine you politically so that you aren't a threat to their job. :-P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I almost got suspended in high school for making a "virus" (just an .html page with some js to open itself recursively in a new window).

</comment><comment><USER75> one of the only times i got in trouble at school was talking openly about potassium nitrate in my math class, and how to make explosives out of it. I completely understand why i was sent to the VP's office. Oh and that other time i was burning leaves with a mag. glass.

</comment><comment><USER76> I nearly got expelled for learning how to use their copy of Macromedia Flash 8 for making games.

</comment><comment><USER77> Kudos to that Dad for not over reacting during all of the drama and supporting his kid

</comment><comment><USER78> I can see the same exact story playing out on Glassdoor. It's going to happen.

</comment><comment><USER79> I'm sure the underlying story is true, and the author's core point of freedoms of speech and the poor handling of the situation are true... but this sounds like it was written at the time of the incidents, by the same teenager, and not by an adult reflecting back on it.

</comment><comment><USER26> I can relate to this story. One of my funniest memories was when my 7th grade teacher reprimanded me for "putting a password" on my website. She was referring to the username and password fields in the sidebar. I told her everything on the site was visible without a user account, but I guess she didn't believe me, because she made one that night. Of course she didn't find anything. The best part was she filled out her whole profile, including a picture of herself, her interests "knitting, helping children", etc, just so she could have a chance at discovering an imaginary section of the site where everyone at my school was lambasting her.

</comment><comment><USER80> _In junior high I invented my own currency–I printed an initial run of "Daddio-Dollars" on my computer which I handed out to kids at school, then sold candy and some of my brothers toys to them. Once I had fostered enough confidence in the purchasing power of my homemade money, I printed up a ton of it and used it to buy all kinds of sweet stuff from the other kids._

Wow, the man invented central banking independently.

</comment><comment><USER81> It's sad that the same organization is the judge, the jury, and the executioner. Even for the appeal process.

A shitty system.

</comment><comment><USER26> I am jelly of some of my friends who got really good at programming in high school. One dude managed to replace the keyboard drivers for every keyboard on the entire network with garbage, so that if they plugged in another keyboard, it still wouldn't work. He also gave his English teacher a "wacky mouse", where she would be presenting something and at some random time her cursor switched and behaved as if attached on the end of a spring. She would often inspect the underside of the mouse in response to this problem.

</comment><comment><USER82> I don't know if it was the dialogue coming from the teachers or glazing over the content of the newsletter, but I am highly skeptical of this article.

I've never heard teachers talk to students or each other how this is written. 1997 also seems very very early for this kind of activity, turns out Geocities has been around since 1994 but I can't recall a single instance of sites being shutdown for this sort of thing in or around 1997. In 1997 many people were still asking "What is the internet exactly?" Also is it being implied the American friend gave up his identity? Why did he even has this information? It is technically feasible for this to have happened, I'm just saying I have my doubts.

<comment><USER83> Also... What 16 year olds weren't allowed to watch The Simpsons in 1997? I mean, yeah when it came out and I was 9 in like 1989 maybe it was edgy... But 1997 it was prime time. South Park was a little edgy in 1997, but not The Simpsons.

<comment><USER84> I had friends who could not watch the Simpsons because they said "Damn"

<comment><USER85> Did this friend happen to be called Leopold Stotch?

<comment><USER84> hah this was pre-SouthPark</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Serializing Data - JSON vs. Protocol Buffers - <AUTHOR> http://4feets.com/2009/08/serializing-data-json-vs-protocol-buffers

<comment><USER2> Google's documentation claims that protocol buffers are designed to be fast so I tested them out and I also found that their Python implementation was too slow to use. I posted a question to the Discussion Forum and found out that it's a known (but undocumented!!!) problem:

[http://groups.google.com/group/protobuf/browse_thread/thread...](http://groups.google.com/group/protobuf/browse_thread/thread/2f57569563a6a476/53ed0cf5cf5ee1ff?lnk=gst&q=andres#53ed0cf5cf5ee1ff)

Recently I tried out keyczar, Google's crypto toolkit and found that their Python implementation was too slow by a factor of 100X because they are using a slow random string generator:

[http://groups.google.com/group/keyczar- discuss/browse_thread...](http://groups.google.com/group/keyczar- discuss/browse_thread/thread/8ed3a503dad4b6b7)

It's hard to see how both of these problems could have passed internal benchmarking and made it into live code. Maybe Google isn't using its own Python implementations internally.

<comment><USER3> Large systems tend to push you towards tradeoffs other people wouldn't make. Scalability over efficiency. Bisection bandwidth is the most scarce resource in a large cluster so I imagine protocol buffers have had much more attention paid to saving bytes than to encoding/decoding speed. Latency critical stuff probably doesn't use python anyhow.

<comment><USER4> Protobufs are actually pretty fast to encode and decode (in the neighborhood of 200-300MB/s on my core2 desktop, when using the C++ bindings).

It's just the Python implementation that is slow. I'm working on a Python implementation that will be much faster. It's really unfortunately that Protocol Buffers are getting a bad rap due to the current Python implementation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My friend Josh (a Google engineer) is working on a Protocol Buffer implementation that's explicitly designed for (a) efficiency and (b) clean integration with dynamic languages like Python: <http://wiki.github.com/haberman/upb>

It's still a work in progress, but the code is there (including tests and some documentation) and you can start working on bindings for your favorite language...

</comment><comment><USER6> Conclusion, if you're developing for the Android platform you may want to use protocol buffers, otherwise use JSON.

I'm quite surprised at how large that library is and how badly it performs, especially since it does _less_ translation than a comparable JSON serializer would.

For a complete comparison it would have been nice to include XML as well.

<comment><USER7> I wonder whether the author used the 'optimize_for=SPEED' parameter in Protocol Buffers. Seems relevant, and since the author didn't mention it, I suppose he probably didn't.

I personally have a hard time accepting that PB is actually orders of magnitude slower than JSON, especially given the fact that PB prides itself in its efficiency.

<comment><AUTHOR> i didn't use the optimize_for=SPEED option but will do that right now and update it in half an hour.

EDIT: I just added the option *optimize_for=SPEED to the .proto file, and it increases the speed of the Protocol Buffers by around 5% (still 10 x more than JSON with Python).

> I personally have a hard time accepting that PB is actually orders of > magnitude slower than JSON

it's not always slower, but in certain situations yes. it seems that the Python implementation is especially slow -- would be nice to see the results with C++. anyone cares to give it a shot?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting. I am writing an Android app that uses JSON. Using Protocol Buffers never even occurred to me. (JSON works fine, and I am not going to change for this app, but I will definitely consider it in the future.)</comment>


Mapping human genome to cost $1000 and take 24hrs by end of 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://ces.cnet.com/8301-33373_1-57356065/proton-promises-us-$1000-genome-mapping-by-year-end/?tag=mncol%3bcnetRiver

<comment><USER2> Here's the "experts" talking about the announcement ...

seqnanswers thread : <http://seqanswers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16709>

Just how good this piece of equipment is unknown. Regardless, the race to the $1K genome may be in the final lap.

Illumina is their main competitor. Looks like ILMN stock took a hit but recovered quickly : [http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=ILMN+Basic+Chart&t=5d](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=ILMN+Basic+Chart&t=5d) , so I guess the market is unconvinced.</comment>


VRChat and Rec Room see Steam user growth since 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2020/01/vrchat-rec-room-social-vr-steam.html <comment><USER2> Many people get turned off by the public worlds in VRChat, as the application has not been hardened very well against client attacks and even server attacks, DDoS, particle overflows, etc... Endless use of client crasher guns. (Crash the OS, lock up video cards, lock up VR headsets) and hostile feedback from a few of the devs. I believe they have some maturing to do. VRChat has a LOT of potential for growth if they improve the user experience. I could see them expanding in to corporate use cases for online remote-office training, as world creation is very easy.</comment>


Ultimate++: a C++ cross-platform RAD framework - <AUTHOR> http://www.ultimatepp.org/index.html <comment><USER2> This looks amazing - it looks like wx with better documentation, and Qt without the MOC garbage.

<comment><USER3> A crucial downside compared to wx is that U++ doesn't use native widgets, at least on Windows. And unlike Qt, it doesn't implement platform accessibility APIs. This is a show-stopper for blind users, because their screen readers can't identify the types of the widgets, tell which one has keyboard focus, etc.

<comment><USER4> I haven't dug seriously into it, but I think Qt has decent accessibility support: [http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/accessible.html](http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/accessible.html)

<comment><USER3> My mistake. You're right, Qt does implement accessibility. Fixed in the comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It says "cross-platform" but every screenshot is Windows, the only installation instructions are for Windows, and there's no mention of any other platform except Android, which is not yet supported.

Update: Linux seems to be pretty well supported.

[http://www.ultimatepp.org/www$uppweb$download$en- us.html](http://www.ultimatepp.org/www$uppweb$download$en-us.html)

via Google I found some evidence of early support for Mac OS X:

[http://www.ultimatepp.org/forums/index.php?t=thread&frm_id=9...](http://www.ultimatepp.org/forums/index.php?t=thread&frm_id=90&)

I also note that it doesn't support Clang.

<comment><USER6> _the only installation instructions are for Windows, and there 's no mention of any other platform except Android_

You could also edit your comment to remove these two completely false statements... The Linux instructions are very easy to find any I don't even know how you managed to miss them!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone have any experience with this fellow? Looks interesting.

<comment><USER2> I have begun to get started with it just now. The forums seem very active, and it looks very promising.</comment></comment>


A Friend of Beethoven, Now Rediscovered in His Own Right - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/arts/music/anton-reicha-ivan-ilic-beethoven.html <comment><USER2> Glad that he's finally getting some of recognition that he has been unfairly denied for centuries. There is extraordinary intelligence and personality behind his music. It's almost inexplicable that he doesn't get more attention. By far the most "underrated" composer that I am aware of.

Reicha's work proves that the style pioneered by Haydn was not only fundamentally sound, but capable of change and development far beyond what music scholars would typically have thought to have been possible. Music history, and perhaps world history would be very different if subsequent composers had continued along the path broken by Reicha rather than that taken by "The Romantic Generation".

<comment><USER3> My experience with Reicha is mostly through his wind quintets, which are all competent, but not especially memorable IMHO. Which is very close to how I feel about Haydn. Reicha is actually more famous among woodwind players for popularizing (maybe originating?) the ensemble than for any of his individual works. Even a lesser work of Beethoven like his wind octet seems like a much higher standard to me. (To be fair, I've made the same criticism in the past of the following 50 years of Romantic-era music.)

There are sadly many composers who might've been more obscure if they hadn't had someone like Bernstein to popularize their works. Nielsen, Martinu, and William Grant Still are three of my favorites whose symphonies deserve to be much more widely played.

<comment><USER4> > Which is very close to how I feel about Haydn.

Well, the melody from one of his string quartets was used as a national anthem.

In terms of inventiveness, he did things like writing a menuet where the first half is a mirror of the second half. Also, his "The Joke" string quartet screws around with the audience with multiple false endings, then a final ending that makes it sounds like the music will continue.

Also, listen to the last movement of the "Lark" quartet. It's a extremely fast rondo that chugs along, unexpectedly turns into a 4-part fugue for about 45 seconds then switches back into the rondo themes as quickly as it began.

<comment><USER2> > Which is very close to how I feel about Haydn.

Glossed over that part when I first read the comment! It was Haydn who essentially created "The Classical Style", which is perhaps the most perfect mode of musical discourse that humanity has yet encountered. His importance is under-stated in the statement that he is "the Shakespeare of Music". That is all quite apart from the innumerable volumes of individual masterpieces that he created!

<comment><USER4> Don't forget that an AI codenamed "Mozart" output some string quartets trained on Haydn's Opus 33, and Haydn then wrote his Op. 76 string quartets which equaled/exceeded the quality of the AI's output.

A real John Henry, that one. :)

<comment><USER5> "I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition." (said to Leopold Mozart, Mozart's father) ― Joseph Haydn

Also: ". . . scarcely any man can brook comparison with the great Mozart. . . If I could only impress on the soul of every friend of music, and on high personages in particular, how inimitable are Mozart's works, how profound, how musically intelligent, how extraordinarily sensitive! (for this is how I understand them, how I feel them) - why then the nations would vie with each other to possess such a jewel within their frontiers." ― Joseph Haydn

Also, a letter from Mozart to Haydn: "A father, having resolved to send his sons into the great world, finds it advisable to entrust them to the protection and guidance of a highly celebrated man, the more so since this man, by a stroke of luck, is his best friend. - Here, then, celebrated man and my dearest friend, are my six sons. - Truly, they are the fruit of a long and laborious effort, but the hope, strengthened by several of my friends, that this effort would, at least in some small measure, be rewarded, encourages and comforts me that one day, these children may be a source of consolation to me. - You yourself, dearest friend, during your last sojourn in this capital, expressed to me your satisfaction with these works. - This, your approval, encourages me more than anything else, and thus I entrust them to your care, and hope that they are not wholly unworthy of your favor. - Do but receive them kindly, and be their father, guide, and friend! From this moment on I cede to you all my rights over them: I pray you to be indulgent to their mistakes, which a father's partial eye may have overlooked, and despite this, to cloak them in the mantle of your generosity which they value so highly. From the bottom of my heart I am, dearest friend, Your most sincere friend, W. A. Mozart

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's neat that Hacklily is right next to an article about Reicha. Very musical day on HN.

Anyway, here's a piece by Reicha in Hacklily: [https://www.hacklily.org/#?edit=jnetterf/sheet- music/Fantais...](https://www.hacklily.org/#?edit=jnetterf/sheet- music/Fantaise_AntoineReicha.ly)

<comment><USER5> Your tempo is a little slow. It's in cut time (2/2) not 4/4\. OK, I'm being churlish. I recorded this piece for Chandos Records last year, so I have an opinion. Excerpt here: [https://www.chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%2010950](https://www.chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%2010950)

It is indeed cool that Hackily is near Reicha; he would have loved it (and Hacker News, for that matter). Music notation software has been ripe for disruption for a while. The problem is that for what most people want to do the interfaces are too complex and slow to learn.

The problem seems to be getting worse because of the desire to make possible the notation of as many far-fetched extreme cases, rather than making the core use as simple as possible.

Imagine if you were to use Finale or Sibelius (two of the best known) as a novice. Imagine you were JS Bach trying to write his first Prelude from Book one of the WTC with the software. The patterns should be faster to notate.

A tough problem, admittedly, but an important one to solve for future generations of young musicians learning the craft. Writing music by hand is still easier for simple pieces, for solo instruments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some of Beethoven's later piano sonatas get in pretty deep, too. I wonder who influenced whom. Also the article reminds us that when younger, Beethoven was a proficient violist. Bach, too, tripled on piano and multiple string instruments as long as he was alive.

<comment><USER2> Definitely the influence worked in both directions. Some comments by Ilić on that topic can be found in this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2xC3UDeTYo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2xC3UDeTYo)

<comment><USER8> There goes my afternoon :)

<comment><USER2> Didn't mention explicitly Beethoven's influence on Reicha, but I'd say the sonata movement he played at the end of the video (Grande Sonata in C Major) is inhabiting the same sonic world created in the third movement of the Waldstein sonata. IMO, influence was stronger in the Reicha --> Beethoven direction, since he simply adopted many of the same lifelong concerns of Reicha's into his own work around the same time Reicha left Vienna, and becoming even more pronounced in his "3rd period", while Reicha continued steadfastly on his own path.

Could it be that the Hammerklavier fugue, marked "con alcune licenze" is a kind of rejoinder to Reicha's Op. 36, about which he is said to have remarked, "daß die Fuge keine Fuge mehr ist"? What about the fugue in the D Major cello sonata, with its displaced accents and unusual structure? Could it be a riff on the compound and irregular metres seen the same Op. 36? What about the overall structure of the Diabelli Variations (a long series of different perspectives on one idea, which could potentially go on forever--not counting the penultimate section and coda)? Essentially the same fundamental structure as L'art de varier (which deserves a similar stature in the piano repertoire). Possibly the final variation, no. 33, a minuet is a reference to no. 39 in Reicha's set: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks1jAMN7XTw&index=40&list=OL...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks1jAMN7XTw&index=40&list=OLAK5uy_lNYy1W1jNVS-s43RYkm9NWwoN0xGtBZkI)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for posting this, made a quick Reicha playlist on Apple Music and am beginning to work through it. Sounds interesting.

</comment><comment><USER10> Reicha's musical ideas and experimentations were simply genius. He delved into advanced music theory like no other classic composer I know. While his music may sound a bit odd to people, it is theoretically sound and shows how vast and exciting music can really be.

<comment><USER5> I agree that there are pieces which sound pretty quirky, which can put people off a bit. But I have yet to find someone who doesn't like this one (which I can assure you has _nothing_ to do with the playing):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSHm3ZphFlk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSHm3ZphFlk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pareto also operates in the context of posthumous fame.

</comment><comment><USER12> Funny to see this on HN, Ivan is a member here.

<comment><USER13> Ivan Ilic? I thought he was dead. (SCNR)

<comment><USER12> I received an email from him last Saturday so I _highly_ doubt that. If that's your idea of having a sense of humor I suggest you get it checked.

<comment><USER14> probably just a joke referring to: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Ivan_Ilyich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Ivan_Ilyich)

<comment><USER12> Ah, that explains it. Thank you for digging that up.

I've worn my best a couple of times in the last few months, it's been enough with the Grim Reaper for a while for me, so I'm not too easily amused by the subject.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pijul: A Rust based distributed version control system - <AUTHOR> https://pijul.org/posts/2018-04-21-pijul-0.10/ <comment><USER2> I think the more interesting thing is that the data model of pijul is a successor / refinement to the types of ideas found in Darcs. (They even cohosted some hack events a few years back?)

Either way, the model of patches they have is pretty neat last I looked. Definitely a good read.

<comment><USER3> My company used Darcs for several years roughly around 2006-2009. It was great.

One of the magic aspects of Darcs was that picking a commit from another branch would include all the other commits that it depended on, which meant it was much easier to migrate logical changes between branches. With Git, if you're not merging/rebasing _all_ of a branch, you have to manually untangle everything.

Darcs also pioneered the interactive "hunk record" interface, which Git eventually added as "git add -p".

Darcs' main problem was performance. Back when we were using it, it had an edge case where the merge algorithm sometimes went into exponential time, and it could take hours for it to resolve a conflict. It tended to happen at the worst possible time, and of course nobody could hack Darcs to fix it -- even the main author of Darcs seemed to struggle to find a solution. To my recollection, when Darcs 2 came out with (apparently) a fix, Github was already happening, and switching over to Git was a no-brainer. Git was considerably worse than Darcs, and it _still_ isn't nearly as user-friendly, but on the other hand, I've never lost any productivity time to Git bugs.

Pijul is inspired by Darcs and uses a similar "theory of patches", but it doesn't suffer from Darcs' issues, last I checked. Rust also has more mindshare than Haskell, so it's got a higher chance of being adopted.

<comment><USER4> It's worth noting that Darcs is seriously considering just porting Pijul's algorithm into their next version to fix some performance issues.

[http://blog.darcs.net/](http://blog.darcs.net/) and search for "Pijul" to find multiple mentions of this.

> Rust also has more mindshare than Haskell, so it's got a higher chance of > being adopted.

I'm... uh... not so sure about this. The Haskell community is quietly pretty big these days. It's not that Rust isn't growing rapidly (and is growing fast due to consistent direct capital infusion from Mozilla), but as of the first half of 2018 it certainly felt like a smaller and more specialized community than the rather large surface area Haskell covers.

<comment><USER3> I don't mean the size of the community, but that Rust has an edge as far as being "mainstream-adoptable" and more mainstream-friendly overall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title needs to be fixed to just "Pijul". The word "Rust" does not appear on the linked page, nor is Pijul "Rust-based" in any meaningful sense. It is software that happens to be implemented in Rust but could be implemented in any other language. If Pijul is "X-based" for any value of X, that X would be "category theory" (though that term doesn't appear on the page either).

<comment><USER6> Guys I found the grammer nazi. Geez chill out man.

<comment><USER7> What did the parent comment say that you disagree with?

<comment><USER8> One can be accurate while still being unnecessarily pedantic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The reference manual seems to need some love:

[https://pijul.org/manual/reference/log.html](https://pijul.org/manual/reference/log.html) Is it pijul log or pijul changes? Also I see a huge block of ~30 nested blockquotes below the "Usage" title that probably shouldn't be there.

[https://pijul.org/manual/reference/patch.html](https://pijul.org/manual/reference/patch.html) The subtitle "Output the compressed encoding of a patch (in binary)" seems misleading, since that only describes "pijul patch --bin"?

Why is "pijul record" not called "commit" instead? That's the equivalent, right? It seems all other commands have very familiar names, but this one is just different to be different?

[https://pijul.org/manual/getting_started.html#definitions](https://pijul.org/manual/getting_started.html#definitions) Same for "a pristine, which is a representation of the current recorded version of the repository". What's the "normal" word for that? The definition doesn't really make sense to me.

[https://pijul.org/community/](https://pijul.org/community/) The "Getting started" section contains no information about how to get started. Why no link to [https://pijul.org/manual/getting_started.html](https://pijul.org/manual/getting_started.html)?

</comment><comment><USER10> Previous threads:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13643025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13643025)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10470281](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10470281)

</comment><comment><USER11> I mean this with love, but the project would possibly get more attention if there were regular, automated releases. The 0.10.x release is not really rebuiladble without patching cargo files which has made it hard for me to package it for nixpkgs/nixos.

</comment><comment><USER12> The database used by Pijul: [https://docs.rs/sanakirja/0.8.16/sanakirja/](https://docs.rs/sanakirja/0.8.16/sanakirja/)

Cool project on it's own. A "nosqlite" :)

<comment><USER13> Has the code quality improved? I remember looking at it a couple years ago and finding it unreadable. Types had impl blocks all over the place, and it was hard to untangle. It made me lose interest in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > nothing is really reversible

Will Pijul ever support something like git's interactive rebase? I find myself using that constantly. One common flow for me: make some commits, make a final commit bumping my package version, realize I forgot something, make another commit, git rebase -i to move it before the version bump, git push.

<comment><USER15> As I understand it this isn't really a meaningful operation to Pijul (or Darcs, or patch-theory-based version control in general). The version bump commit and the final commit don't depend on each other so they're not inherently ordered.

<comment><USER16> What if they do depend on each other though? E.g. you added a changelog but spelt its filename wrong or something.

<comment><USER17> The backing algorithms figure that out and include all the necessary patches, applying them in an order that works.

Without understanding the theory behind it, it sounds a lot like magic, but apparently it works.

<comment><USER18> That does sound like magic. If I made the following three commits in order, how would it figure out that the last commit depends on the first commit but not on the second one?

\+ import foo

\+ import bar

\+ foo.hello()

<comment><USER15> That's not the sense of "depends on" that applies here. It's a textual relationship- in this case, I believe the last commit would depend on the second, which would depend on the first.

If you're familiar with CRDTs, they're closely related. Patches store enough information to commute, so a given state (e.g. a branch) can be described purely by a set of patches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's what I wrote on reddit 5 months ago, when 0.10 was released (the edit is from then too ; TL;DR, it's not delivering what it promises wrt speed just yet):

I'd report the following on the nest... if it didn't alternate between not responding, HTTP 500 and HTTP 404.

I wanted to give pijul a try, and see how it scales. So I took the mozilla- central mercurial repository, and started applying the initial changesets from there.

The first mercurial changeset only added a .hgignore file, so that went smoothly. The second imported the entire source of Firefox at the time the repository was created. Which, by then, was only 245MB of data. `pijul add` was fast, but `pijul record -a` took a while, and crashed with an IO error... which turned out to be because I created the repository under `/tmp` and pijul filled all the 7.1GB that were free there. After moving the repo to some other place, it turned out to take more than 1 minute to record that change, and 10GB of temporary space, which went down to 1.8GB once done. That's a lot of disk space for 245MB of raw data.

Then I went with the third mercurial changeset, and `pijul add` went quickly. Before doing a `pijul record`, I wanted to see how `pijul status` looked like, and it ran for 12 minutes without a single line of output yet before I decided I had waited enough and ctrl-c'ed... Then I went with `pijul record -a` directly, and as of writing, it's been running for 10 minutes and hasn't finished yet.

The home page says: > Pijul started as an attempt to fix the performance of darcs, and ended up among the fastest distributed version control systems.

Maybe that's true for small repositories, but apparently, it scales really badly.

Edit: I did another attempt with a different method, importing each of the 24373 files from the second mozilla-central mercurial changeset with a separate `pijul record`. After 160 files, each `pijul record` was taking > 0.5s ; after 260 files, each was taking > 1s ; after 340 files, each was taking > 2s ; after 440 files, each was taking > 3s ; after 510 files, each was taking > 4s. It took more than 10 minutes to get there, and I stopped.

<comment><USER20> The patented "Shlemiel the painter's algorithm" [1].

1: [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to- basics/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > nothing is really reversible

This is a dealbreaker for me if it means what I think it does, which is that you can never change history to pretend the order of commits was different from what it was in reality.

I understand that certain people's preferred source control workflow involves keeping around every little intermediate commit. That's fine. But a tool should not impose workflows on me, or prevent me from modifying my data in the way I personally choose.

Imagine if vim didn't let you save files with words spelled wrong, because its authors didn't agree that that was a valid way to write prose.

<comment><USER22> I don't think you can ever really reverse anything in git either. Reflog has saved my ass a few times.

<comment><USER23> Reflog entries expire (after 30 days by default) and they're local only.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm unable to build from cargo install pijul

the first error is error[E0277]: the trait bound `T: rand_core::RngCore` is not satisfied .. this could be related but doesn't help [https://nest.pijul.com/pijul_org/pijul/discussions/291](https://nest.pijul.com/pijul_org/pijul/discussions/291)

</comment><comment><USER25> _new cool VT100 feature of Windows 10._

The trouble with git is the terrible user interface. That's what needs attention.

</comment><comment><USER26> I can't find the info anywhere. Where is the code of the Nest? Will I be able to run my own instance?

<comment><USER27> looks like the source code for Nest is not public:

[https://nest.pijul.com/pijul_org/nest](https://nest.pijul.com/pijul_org/nest)</comment></comment>


Dataset for rejected license plate applications - <AUTHOR> https://flowingdata.com/2020/01/28/dataset-for-rejected-license-plate-applications/ <comment><USER2> This arrived at literally the exact moment I was looking for lists/services for profanity/vulgarity (to disallow as game app nicknames). Thanks!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some interesting stuff i there. A lot reject I would let slide. Some approved I would never...</comment>


Fatal Tesla crash in China may have involved Autopilot - the-dude http://www.autoblog.com/2016/09/14/fatal-tesla-crash-china-autopilot-lawsuit/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is the kind of accident that should not happen in a car with all those sensors. Even without engaging autopilot the car should slow down and stop instead of ramming full speed into a stationery object on the road.

</comment><comment> josh-wrale I just skimmed the video, but seems like there should have been a lot of photos/videos in such a segment showing the aftermath. Hmm..Maybe I just missed them in my quick skimming. Edit: okay.. See around 3 minutes.

<comment><USER2> @ 4m it shows the actual crash footage.

</comment></comment><comment> the-dude Video includes dash-cam recording of the actual crash.</comment>


18 Smokin' Hot Business Card Designs - <AUTHOR> http://freelanceswitch.com/general/18-smokin-hot-business-card-designs/

<comment><USER2> Meh. Now this is a hot business card: [http://www.singulier.com/boutique_us/fiche_produit.cfm?type=...](http://www.singulier.com/boutique_us/fiche_produit.cfm?type=52&ref=04040012C2&code_lg=lg_us&pag=1&num=9)

</comment><comment><USER3> if you guys are curious about BCard printers, i've had great luck with overnightprints.com

i got 1k glossy cards for $66 shipped. <http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1209/570761163_37e0cf1493.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER4> I like cards that serve multiple roles.

I want something that will convey essential contact info, express core traits of my business, and have enough white space such that I can use it to jot notes down to give to people (or allow people to add their own notes).

</comment><comment><USER5> No tech business card discussion is complete without mentioning Steve Wozniak's: <http://www.tuaw.com/2006/10/03/the-wozs-business-card/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow!

The third one down, Antonio Diaz (Artifice Studios), is my best friend and God Father of my baby-to-be (found out today I'm having a girl -- Whoo!).

Glad to see his work getting some recognition. :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Shouldn't Clayton Bellmor's say <div class="Website-Designer"> ? (class instead of id, hyphen instead of underscore). I guess maybe he's saying he's unique.

</comment><comment><USER8> Kevin Mitnick's is also pretty cool: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/ranh/106709219/></comment>