Programming is not a craft - <AUTHOR> https://dannorth.net/2011/01/11/programming-is-not-a-craft/ <comment><USER2> There are other aspects to programming quality that matter to outsiders more than idiomatic purity and The Latest Framework.

These are the kinds of things which in other fields, real engineering, are covered by codes. The security of the system, whether it is engineered to deliver the uptime needed for its intended use, technical aspects of disaster recovery.

These our equivalent of the kind of thing real engineers get sued for. Krebbs security blog reported cases where developers served medical records on the web without even enforcing basic authentication, and it will be the company not the developers who pay the fine (if any).

Very often, we come to a program which encodes complex business logic which is not understandable and implements systems not written down. I once worked with a financial services company who had no understanding of their pricing algorithm due to staff turnover and total lack of documentation or readable code. Should it be legal to deliver work of that quality?

Framing code craftsmanship as equivalent to these kinds of duties is strange, because lawyers might be taught writing or speaking skill but it doesn't enter into their professional registration. That does not mean it isn't important, or an important thing to consider at hiring time, it's just apples and oranges.

I think that, especially where we work on systems that can deeply impact peoples lives, the viability of business, or safety, we need something better than 'has worked on ISO x compliant systems' on a job spec. We need professional registration and the ability to strike engineers off if they are found not to be following an enforced code.</comment>


Ask HN: Why does Chrome use IE's proxy settings? - <AUTHOR>

Trying to understand why doesn't Chrome have its own proxy settings. <comment><USER2> Chrome was designed to be as simple and easy-to-use as possible; part of this initiative involved being immediately compatible with most corporate set-ups (eg, IE users on a company intranet) so a decision was made to use Windows' proxy configuration settings out of the box.

You can actually override the proxy settings yourself via command line switches, however-- look through this page and search for "proxy": <http://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/>

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a useful link, this should come up on the top of search results, this never came up for some reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pretty sure that's a best practice for Windows software.

IE's proxy settings are synonymous with Windows system-wide proxy settings.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, they could have provided a setting that you can enable/disable/override within their options page instead of using a switch. May be there is design decision behind this.</comment></comment>


Numenta: HTM computing - <AUTHOR> http://numenta.com/

<comment><USER2> Has anyone used HTMs? How do they compare to other learning algorithms?

More importantly, have they solved any problems that were unsolvable before HTM's?

I personally don't see any real reason to use them from the website. I would expect some new algorithm that is _proven_ to have on their front page:

"Welcome to numenta. The worlds best artificial intelligence for problems in the X,Y,Z domains. Here are papers comparing htm to other competing technologies by independent researchers".</comment>


Emil Du Bois-Reymond: Greatest Unknown Intellectual of the 19th Century? - <AUTHOR> https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-greatest-unknown-intellectual-of-the-19th-century/ <comment><USER2> The 19th Century was a fascinating time. One of the most colorful characters from that era, who's little remembered now (though he still has some ardent fans), was Richard Francis Burton[1] -- adventurer, explorer, spy, translator, ethnologist, linguist who spoke 29 languages, geologist and botanist, sword master (an art he wrote a treatise on), sexologist, physician and poet.

He was the first European to see the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and live to tell the tale, something he accomplished by disguising himself as and adopting the language and customs of a wandering Dervish -- a daring feat which risked certain death if he was discovered. He managed to repeat the feat with various other forbidden cities around the world, though not without injury.

He produced, to my mind, by far the most entertaining (though apparently far from accurate) translation of the _Thousand and One Nights_ , and the erotic classic, the _Kama Sutra_ , along with various other works.

 _" Throughout his life, Burton continually sought passionately for "Gnosis," which he pursued around the world in myriad forms. He was a student of the Kaballah and of Hermeticism. He was an initiated Nagar Brahmin and Kadiri Dervish; he became a member of the Ismaili sect, which claimed decent from the Assassins; and he was at various times a formal convert to Hinduism, Tantrism, Roman Catholicism, Sikhism and Islam."_[2]

He was a founder of _The Cannibal Club_ [3], where men (of course they were all men) could openly discuss _" subjects deemed deviant by society"_.

He was also a through and unapologetic racist and colonialist, almost to the point of caricature, which makes his works (which typically contain many personal notes and digressions) hard to swallow for most modern readers.

After his death, his wife burned much of his unpublished work and diaries (presumably because of their frank sexual content), so we may never see his most scandalous work.

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

[2] - [https://hermetic.com/sabazius/burton](https://hermetic.com/sabazius/burton)

[3] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cannibal_Club](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cannibal_Club)

<comment><USER3> His tomb is quite spectacular, it's based on a Bedouin tent and is in a small Churchyard in Mortlake, not far from Richmond in West London.

[https://www.london-walking-tours.co.uk/secret-london/sir- ric...](https://www.london-walking-tours.co.uk/secret-london/sir-richard- burtons-tomb.htm)

[http://burtoniana.org/tomb/index.html](http://burtoniana.org/tomb/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Greatest Unknown Intellectuals will remain unknown by definition.

Read Stanislaw Lem..

<comment><USER5> I have. Stanislaw Lem read Emil du Bois-Reymond. He's the source of several of the ideas in "Solaris."

<comment><USER5> Hence the allusion to du Bois-Reymond's "Die sieben Welträthsel" in the title of my article....</comment></comment></comment>


Mancy – Cross Platform JavaScript REPL Based on Electron and React - <AUTHOR> http://www.mancy-re.pl/ <comment><USER2> it'd be good if export to file exported it to a javascript source file rather than an array</comment>


The Mastodon Spring Creator's Release - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/tootsuite/the-mastodon-spring-creators-release-65f60d0edb8c <comment><USER2> Focal points are one of those things I didn't even know I was missing.

<comment><USER3> I saw a post here a while ago, if I remember it right, about Twitter's use of machine learning for this and I think this is quite an elegant solution</comment></comment>


Apple will no longer unlock most devices for police, even with search warrants - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/apple-will-no-longer-unlock-most-iphones-ipads-for-police-even-with-search-warrants/2014/09/17/2612af58-3ed2-11e4-b03f-de718edeb92f_story.html

<comment><USER2> Is this an actual change as confirmed by Apple or just something that this journalist (mis)read from the updated privacy guidelines?

<comment><USER3> It is an actual change confirmed by Apple. The discussion on the post by declan is quite informative [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8333595](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8333595)</comment></comment>


Why Scala is a must-learn language even if you don't plan to use it. - <AUTHOR>

Learning Scala teaches you the state of the art in programming language design.  So even if you don't plan to use it, at least you will be familiar with advanced programming language concepts that you may not have learned at university. <comment><USER2> I think Scala is a must-learn language IF you plan to use it. If you're on the JVM, and for some reason CAL doesn't work for you then Scala might well be the best thing available.

However, for learning interesting and useful stuff, I'd probably point people more towards Haskell.

</comment><comment><USER3> I tried using liftweb for a project once, but was discouraged by the heavy dependency on maven. Also, liftweb is undergoing huge churn, especially in the database modeling.

<comment><USER4> (Disclaimer: I'm a liftweb committer.)

I'm sorry you were discouraged by maven. I've found maven to be a huge productivity boost, especially when compared to the alternatives. Though I'll admit it's mostly "black magic" to me. Half the time I don't know what exactly it's doing. But since it "just works", I find it really doesn't matter that much that I don't understand it.

Also, most of the "churn" is in new features. There are 6-12 production apps running off of lift's trunk, so check-in's very, very rarely break backwards compatibility. There is an effort to re-work the ORM layer and make it much, much more powerful (it'll be much more than just ORM). This work is proceeding cautiously though. There will be ample warning before the old ORM is deprecated and thrown out.

If you want to give lift a second chance, I'd encourage you to use the mailing list as a resource (email@example.com). People are very friendly and generally very willing to answer questions.

<comment><USER3> That's cool that you're a committer, I think scala/lift are very promising, and look forward to using them in the future.

If everything is working well, maven can be a huge productivity boost. I'm sure the decision to use maven was to make the learning curve smaller. But I get an uneasy feeling when maven is being used for every aspect of the project, including creating it, compiling it, running it, updating the libraries, deploying it, importing to eclipse, etc...

The best way to use maven is to set up a stable local repository, and be _careful_ when you update them. Archtypes can be upgraded server-side on the fly, and this can cause problems if you're not careful about versioning.

By default, however, people won't set up local copies of maven repositories. And despite the best intentions of liftweb.org, and ibiblio.org, neither organization has a vested interest in your project, and they suffer from downtime frequently. liftweb was down for over a day at one point. You couldn't create a blank project template, or update the dependencies. It's a risky dependency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Scala looks cool and all, but how is it better than ocaml, haskell, etc.?

That isn't rhetorical.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's more familiar to Java programmers and uses the Java platform. You can learn its advanced concepts incrementally starting from a familiar base. Also, it doesn't force you to program in a functional manner as with Haskell.

<comment><USER6> But I LIKE functional programming.

<comment><USER5> Me too, but I _don't_ like being forced to program functionally if I feel imperative programming would be more readable, efficient, or fast. Certain tasks are more suited for functional programming than others.

That said, I don't mind languages like Haskell where imperative programming doesn't fit in well conceptually. It's just that I wouldn't use languages like that for everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How so?

<comment><AUTHOR> Some things that you could learn:

* important concepts such as f-bounded polymorphism, covariance, contravariance, implicit parameters and methods, etc.

* traits that solve the diamond problem with multiple inheritance

* functional programming concepts including monads

* advanced concurrency concepts via the actors library

* pattern matching via case classes and extractors

* that type inference can make you highly productive in a statically typed language

<comment><USER8> > * important concepts such as f-bounded polymorphism, covariance, > contravariance, implicit parameters and methods, etc.

The fact that those are important concepts in Scala doesn't make them important concepts.

> traits that solve the diamond problem with multiple inheritance

There are lots of solutions to the diamond problem. The fact that scala uses traits doesn't make traits important.

> * pattern matching via case classes and extractors

Again, so what?

Scala is full of elegant mechanisms to solve problems that resulted from design choices. The elegance of those mechanisms or their importance to scala doesn't make them important. After all, one might reasonably have made different design decisions, making them irrelevant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many people are not aware of the issues. This would be a learning experience for them that starts from a familiar base.

<comment><USER8> Not so fast.

The claim was that scala is special. However, the argument doesn't support that claim. It's a list of "me-toos" and hyperbole.

For example, every language with multiple inheritance has some mechanism to deal with diamonds. Type inference is useful/interesting, but it doesn't result in "highly productive".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using Twilio to make a call forwarding and voice messaging system - <AUTHOR> https://thedarkside.frantzmiccoli.com/how%20to/2020/04/01/twilio-how-tocall-forwarding-and-voice-messaging.html <comment><USER2> If there's interest in this kind of stuff, I'm working on open-sourcing the core of a SaaS side project[0] I have. It's visual voicemail on steroids (cliché, sorry) and, like the linked article describes, accepts your forwarded call and handles the voicemail. Afterwards (and this was my original use- case), it can trigger a bunch of hooks to your favorite things — Dropbox, email, Slack, SMS, Zapier, what have you (and all right out of the box).

I built it because I was on Android and wanted to keep my moms voicemails. :)

[0] [https://tinyvoicemail.com](https://tinyvoicemail.com)

<comment><USER3> This is interesting. Let me give you some potentially helpful context:

Some services require companies to have a public phone number. This doesn't need to be a real support phone number, but it shouldn't be completely unattended.

Your service would fit right into that, and if you (optionally) handled the purchase of the number itself (Twilio will do that), it would make it quite literally a 5 minute setup.

The only other thing I haven't found is a forwarding service, that would allow such companies to purchase a number in a particular country, to forward calls/sms to another arbitrary phone number (or an email/voicemail box). I'd certainly use that for myself as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hate voicemail so much.

I wanted my phone number to "ring forever" if I didn't pick up, and here is the Twilio twiml bin that does that:

        <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
        <Response>
            <Pause length="600"/>
            <Hangup />
        </Response>

OK, actually ring for 10 minutes, but that might as well be forever ...

<comment><USER5> And you get billed for up to 10 minutes.

<Response><Reject /></Response> is free

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is super simple, and I like that using Twilio Studio makes it easy to expand and customise.

But for just the end goal, depending on use case specifics, another option is to use Twimlets which has the added bonus of the missing voicemail to email. [https://www.twilio.com/labs/twimlets](https://www.twilio.com/labs/twimlets)

I've been thinking of building something a little bit more in depth, using Twilio Studio and Google Firebase, with proper dial-in voicemail retrieval, SMS notification, and maybe Sendgrid voicemail to email.

Does anyone has a ready-rolled Twilio Studio direct to Firebase example?

</comment><comment><USER7> The only issue I have with Twilio is their charging. For voicemails, calls typically last less than 10 seconds, and often only a second (because they hang up and don't leave a message) - but as they charge per minute you are billed the full 60 seconds each call.

I built something similar as a side project but switched to Nexmo, purely because they charge per second. It was a fun thing to build and test.

<comment><USER8> Fun fact, if you're an enterprise customer you can demand full second rounding, or if you're mid market you can bring that down to 6 second rounding in many telco oriented places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would also recommend having a look at Anveo. They have a visual call flow handler that is less flexible than Twilio, but generally easier to understand and faster to make changes in. [https://www.anveo.com/consumer/features.asp?code=ivrcallflow](https://www.anveo.com/consumer/features.asp?code=ivrcallflow)

</comment><comment><USER10> Twilio has a great API and documentation etc. But I don't understand why we don't kill the old telephone system as soon as possible. And for anyone who has looked at how SMS actually works, it's a dumpster fire similar to XMPP but probably worse.

</comment><comment><USER11> Twilio is pretty great but for this use case using Google Voice is a lot simpler (assuming its available in your country)

I recently did this for a firm that is fully remote now during pandemic. They had non voip line for main number. Set the office phone to FW to a GV number and put GV in DND so it goes straight to voicemail which was what they wanted. Then setup GV to send voicemail to email and gmail to forward to slack channel using the basic slack email integration app.

All in all very easy to setup in 20 min or less and get transcribed VM in slack channel with link to play the message as well.

<comment><USER12> Google voice doesn't work for some 2FA services (Bank of America, for example). Messages simply do not deliver. Very annoying.

<comment><USER13> And they also dont work for Google's own 2FA. No using google voice number as the sms target for gmail signup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The one feature that everyone seems to be missing with these tutorials is a simple tool to have people confirm that they would like to accept the forwarded call... I'm helping a mutual aid group and we have a list of people whose phones all ring simultaneously (meaning that inevitably someones voicemail answers first) and I have yet to find an easy way to implement a simple "Press any key to accept this call" where the first person to answer AND press any key gets the call...

<comment><USER15> >I have yet to find an easy way to implement a simple "Press any key to accept this call" where the first person to answer AND press any key gets the call

Would you be interested in a functions script that does this? I've got one kicking around I can share.

<comment><USER14> YES!

<comment><USER15> [https://github.com/randomthingsandstuff/twilio_oncall](https://github.com/randomthingsandstuff/twilio_oncall)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I did this a while back, and got rid of the home phone. We had made the transition to VoIP in the early 2000s, and then migrated the number to Google, Anveo, and finally Twilio. I was tired of getting calls all day for various things and decided to make a Twilio Studio IVR. Now, I have text messages and certain calls (if someone vocalizes a choice or pushes a key) forwarded to mine or my wife's mobile.

</comment><comment><USER17> Twilio really is a great provider. Sure they're expensive, and sure you have to pay to lease your number every month, but I've had so much fun with them.

For example I hooked I setup a simple "on-call" system by monitoring a specific Slack channel, and when emergency-messages were present, would dial and play a message to an engineer. Wonderfully reliable and worked really well.

</comment><comment><USER18> Doesn't Twilio charge both incoming and outgoing minutes for call forwarding?

<comment><USER19> Yes, but this is standard of any telecom provider, and Twilio is charging you for it because their underlying providers are charging them. Also inbound legs are generally an order of magnitude cheaper per minute for standard phone numbers.

Standard call:

\- A places an outbound leg to C. _A pays for this leg_

\- C receives an inbound leg from A. _C pays for this leg_

Forwarded call with B (your Twilio/some other telephony API provider number) in the middle:

\- A places an outbound leg to B. _A pays for this leg_

\- B receives an inbound leg from A. _B pays for this leg_.

\- B places outbound leg to C. _B pays for this leg_

\- C receives an inbound leg from B. _C pays for this leg_

In this scenario the two "sides" of the call could be going through completely different underlying telcos so there's no "Oh it's just forwarding!" The two different telcos don't really care about that. To them they're still each setting up 1 outbound & 1 inbound leg.

Although the billing structure is standard, Twilio is _not_ considered a low cost provider for what they offer. They kind of rely on their customers being software people that need an API but don't know enough about telecom billing to demand better.

The value-add is real though, you would never want to go about this on your own. Companies like Twilio (and their competitors) gloss over the millions of rough edges that exist when working with a telco directly. It's just that the markup is very high for Twilio.

<comment><USER20> Are there alternatives that have as simple and well documented an interface for development... considering how much some of the SIP providers I've seen charge for SMBs, I think it kind of evens out depending on usage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been wondering, how hard would it be to set up a system like Apple's "hide my email" but for phone numbers, generating a new random phone number whenever I need to give it out?

<comment><USER8> Super easy and a bunch of apps do it, the problem here is that the numbers actually have a leasing cost if you want to hang on to them vs something like an email alias/front.

<comment><USER22> One possible way around this is to use phone number extensions, although I haven't researched how well supported this might be across apps and the web.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can one port their cell phone number into Twilio and build their own google voice equivalent using it? Not that I really plan on doing this :)

<comment><USER24> Note that Twilio numbers (in the US, anyway) cannot receive SMS messages from short codes [1]. This means that you may not be able to receive SMS 2FA messages from your bank.

[1] [https://support.twilio.com/hc/en- us/articles/223181668-Can-T...](https://support.twilio.com/hc/en- us/articles/223181668-Can-Twilio-numbers-receive-SMS-from-a-short-code-)

<comment><USER23> Is there any reason why twilio can't start supporting them?

<comment><USER25> Probably for the same reason twilio don't allow you to set your CNAM entries. Banks and PayPal use it for KYC and such...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> you can go a bit forward and transfer the call to WhatsApp or any other messenger using flow.ai , very useful nowadays.</comment>


Tour of a real toy Haskell program - <AUTHOR> http://mainisusuallyafunction.blogspot.com/2010/10/tour-of-real-toy-haskell-program-part-1.html

<comment><USER2> My transition to "real" Haskell programming happened with some parallel signal processing stuff, but my best example toy is my two-player tetris clone, triHs: <http://web.jfet.org/~kwantam/TriHs.tar.gz>

Note the "bastard" key, where you can swap your opponent's next piece. >:)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting article, some of it went a little over my head but I'm pleased to see articles like this as I've always wondered how people make that transition in Haskell from writing fibonacci sequence generators and one-line FizzBuzz functions.

Would be interested to see if this thread becomes popular and has the incentive for people to post their Haskell projects and how they did them

</comment><comment><USER4> This is great. One of the barriers to entry for me into haskell hacking was finding a useful app to look at. Yi the editor was what finally got me over the hump. It's great that more people are recognizing this need and meeting it.

<comment><USER5> Is Yi still being developed? I've also encountered the fibonacci gap with Haskell, so looking at Yi would be pretty fun, but I was unable to install it via cabal the last time I tried.

<comment><USER4> The development had slowed but I've started submitting patches now so at least one new developer has joined the ranks there :-) There are at least three other developers who are are responsive on the development list so you can probably get your questions answered.</comment></comment></comment>


Once, I was the fake Steve Jobs. Fixing it now - <AUTHOR> https://blog.reprime.io/what-is-reflect-372ac46218ba#.6l0rtc4ob <comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt: \--- It took us several months and a bank balance of three-digits to realize the problem — the fake Steve Jobs — me. You think I didn't know about Lean Startup and all that on Seth Godin's blog? I did. But wasn't I supposed to be the one to whom the rules of the world doesn't apply? The one beyond the rules? The one who was supposed to break the rules to make the world a better place?</comment>


Apollo Lands - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/18/adobe-apollo-launches-so-go-build-something/ <comment><USER2> From the FAQ: _"Apollo 1.0 will not be available on Linux. We plan to release Linux support shortly after the 1.0. release. While we had originally planned to support Linux in the 1.0 timeframe, we have had to wait on the core Flash Player's support for Linux to be finalized."_

Well maybe if they had more than a _single_ Linux Flash developer it would have been finished quicker. Watch them use this same excuse to push it back even further.

</comment><comment><USER3> A thorough set of free videos by the product manager which introduce the platform, how to install and get started:

<http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?id=378>

</comment><comment><USER4> adobe's site: <http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Apollo seems neat.

Now, once they tie in Flash Lite and create a mobile client...</comment>


How The Boring Company tunnels will move cars faster [video] - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/28/watch-how-elon-musks-boring-company-tunnels-will-move-cars-faster/ <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14223020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14223020). Although this one has a few minutes' seniority, that one is (a) the original source and (b) currently at #1. So it seems like it should win.</comment>


The Science of Craving - <AUTHOR> http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/features/wanting-versus-liking?page=full#_

<comment><USER2> Finally a popular press article wanting that digs deeper than the old fables about dopamine. For more in-depth information Berridge has a big list of review articles:

[http://www.lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/public...](http://www.lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/publications/review%20publications.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a great article but also long so here is a tl;dr

paraphrased:

        Berridge stumbled upon evidence in 1986 that dopamine did not produce
        pleasure, but in fact desire. In early 1990s, after rigorous research,
        that he felt bold enough to go public with his new thesis. The reward
        system, he then asserted, has two distinct elements: wanting and
        liking (or desire and pleasure). While dopamine makes us want, the
        liking part comes from opioids and also endocannabinoids (a version of
        marijuana produced in the brain), which paint a "gloss of pleasure",
        as Berridge puts it, on good experiences. His most telling discovery
        was that, whereas the dopamine/wanting system is vast and powerful,
        the pleasure circuit is anatomically tiny, has a far more fragile
        structure and is harder to trigger."

        Potential clinical applications are always on his mind. His revelation
        that desire and dread share the same brain operations, like two sides
        of the same coin, could help ease schizophrenia symptoms. Iggy Pop
        1998 album "Live on the King Biscuit Flower Hour" was used in
        conjunction with bright lights to generate dread in the rats for these
        experiments. (It worked.) A trial drug has had some success in
        reducing delusions by restricting a certain dopamine neuron that
        produces fear.

It goes on with an interview with and text about Berridge and his research. Including details of how his 1986 study started with "failed" lab tests. Further there are discussions with Kringelbach and his collaborations with Berridge and own research.

        In spring 2014, Kringelbach and colleagues from Oxford and Aarhus
        released a research paper on groove –music that makes people want to
        get up and dance and is, as the study puts it, "frequently observed
        in…funk, hip-hop and electronic dance music".

They discuss Kringelbach Baby likeness test which splits on gender under one condition but equalizes under a less subjective condition. It briefly mentions the Stanford Lust and Loathing study (quote from study[1]):

        We show how being "jilted"—that is, being thwarted from obtaining a
        desired outcome—can concurrently increase desire to obtain the
        outcome, but reduce its actual attractiveness. Thus, people can come
        to both want something more, yet like it less

1\. [https://faculty- gsb.stanford.edu/khan/documents/jilting.pdf](https://faculty- gsb.stanford.edu/khan/documents/jilting.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> "A trial drug has had some success in reducing delusions by restricting a certain dopamine neuron that produces fear."

Wow, that is fascinating. So, could this help explain why smart people can still believe crazy things ("dysrationalia" as Keith Stanovich calls it)? [1]

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysrationalia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysrationalia)

<comment><USER5> Depends if ideas equate to emotions. Or in other words, if a concept can be turned into a want or a like reaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The science of anti-craving: [http://focusr.co](http://focusr.co)</comment>


How to beat Google, part I - <AUTHOR> http://www.skrenta.com/2007/03/how_to_beat_google_part_1.html <comment><USER2> I have always wondered why it's necessary to _beat_ Big Company X. I recall reading some writings by Eric Raymond when he remarked that competition is good for the consumer, and thus anyone who is trying to quell competition (Mic _cough_ sof _cough_ ) is intrinsically hurting the general populace.

That said, the article, in my mind, is actually presenting ways to compete with Google, which is definitely A Good Thing. The title, however, could use a little work. I think it's important for us to avoid the mindset of, "This company is highly profitable, so I want to figure how to beat them and steal their revenue," and instead shift to, "This company is doing a great job, but I can provide a valuable service by improving upon such and such feature." In a market where there are hundreds of options and new ones appearing every day, the most important thing is to provide a new, valuable service. If you can do that, the users will come.

</comment><comment><USER3> As I read this I kept thinking of Paul Buchheit's presentation from startup school.

How are any of the authors propositions either A) Fundamentally different or B) an order of magnitude better?

</comment><comment><USER4> yawn.</comment>


Reactive Extensions for Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://Rxrb.codeplex.com/

<comment><USER2> This is very much the definition of a code dump: a single file, not following any standard ruby code conventions - not even naming conventions (it would be called "rx" otherwise), tests within that file, misformatted code. snake_cased and camedBacked variables mixed. It monkey-patches Enumerable and uses class variables. `gets` at the end of the file, to keep the Windows console open, rendering the whole thing unusable as a library. Also, the author clearly doesn't know that you don't need ".rb" when requiring files. Last commit on December 22, 2012.

Could people please have a look at the source before posting stuff here? This is not a project to be taken seriously and a waste of time. "Someone at Microsoft was playing with Ruby" is the only valuable thing you can get out of it.

<comment><USER3> I tweeted about this release, and they specifically asked me for contributions, saying they would love help with making the project more Ruby like, actually following conventions. I told them that I don't work on anything Microsoft related, for personal ethical reasons, and they actually handled that response quite gracefully.

<comment><USER4> That's interesting.. Where do you draw the line as far as Microsoft relatedness goes? Is your motivation more to make sure you never contribute to Microsoft goals, or is it actually never to be exposed to Microsoft technology yourself?

Is there something Microsoft affected you personally with or is it their business practices in general?

<comment><USER3> Microsoft attempted to destroy humanity's crowning achievement (so far): the World Wide Web. Totally unforgivable.

Now: people sometimes use Microsoft products, and they're often beginners. I will write software that runs on Windows, as that's often the people who need help the most.

But contributing directly to a Microsoft product is too much for me.

<comment><USER5> Germany attempted once to take over Europe and lots of people died. Totally unforgivable.

Now: people sometimes visit Germany, and they're often just tourists. I will build things for Germans, as that makes me money.

But contributing directly to Germany is too much for me.

<comment><USER3> I too enjoy absurd comparisons.

<comment><USER5> Well, stop judging the Microsoft of today with the one of yesterday. Many of us worker bees never went through that time period, and we really are just trying to build better things.

<comment><USER3> Comparing "embrace, extend, extinguish" to the Holocaust isn't exactly helping me not judge you.

<comment><USER5> I was just invoking Goodwin's law earlier rather than later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bookmarked for later use, I'm sure it will come in handy, thanks for posting.I wish it was hosted on GitHub though, but given that it's backed by Microsoft, I can see why not.

<comment><USER7> See: [https://github.com/Reactive-Extensions](https://github.com/Reactive- Extensions)

<comment><USER6> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there any practical example? I've browsed through the source and it seems like a framework to provide asynchronous queries over arbitrary datasets. Am I right?

<comment><USER9> [http://rxrb.codeplex.com/documentation](http://rxrb.codeplex.com/documentation) has a more detailed description. It also has code examples, though they are misformatted.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: You're broke and need rent+food money. What side hustle do you start? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> write code, it pays.

</comment><comment><USER3> Find someone that has the life you want, and ask them if they can teach you.</comment>


How to build an Anti Aircraft Missile: Bayes' Theorem and the Kalman Filter - <AUTHOR> http://georgemdallas.wordpress.com/2013/07/13/how-to-build-an-anti-aircraft-missile-probability-bayes-theorem-and-the-kalman-filter/ <comment><USER2> Interestingly, terminal guidance has been the simple part for decades. Back when people thought "hitting a bullet with a bullet" type of kinetic intercept was hard, what they did not realize is that the software is relatively straightforward and even primitive computers are fast enough to do hypersonic intercept. Newtonian physics is slow compared to a computer.

The hard part, outside of having an adequate sensor to begin with (a problem of many early designs), is designing a high-performance steerable rocket motor that can consistently deliver the precision that the software is capable of demanding under the performance envelopes required. This turns out to be an exotic materials science and precision fabrication problem so comfortably in the domain of conventional hardware engineering. As cool as it is to design a terminal guidance system, that is the easy part of building a practical anti- aircraft system.

Also, most vaguely modern systems do not track objects per se, they extract the features of the designated target with broad spectrum imaging and only chase that. In other words, the missile does not chase _a_ plane, it chases _the_ plane. This means that the Hollywood trope of being hit by your own missile generally won't work in reality.

<comment><USER3> The sensor in the original Sidewinder is fascinating - a spinning disk with a reflective strip on it. When the reflector is pointing towards the target, the reflection off the strip into one of a ring of sensors tells you in which direction to steer. This meant that the missile couldn't see straight ahead, only at an angle that would bounce from the disk into the sensors, hence it would sort of edge sideways into the target, and that's why it's called the sidewinder.

<comment><USER4> Interesting, I always thought the name alluding to the typical wingtip mount of these missiles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If anyone is interested in learning these types of probabilistic perception algorithms, especially pertaining to robotics, Prof. Edwin Olson's Mobile Robotics video lectures at the University of Michigan are excellent. They are located here: [http://april.eecs.umich.edu/courses/eecs568_f12/wiki/index.p...](http://april.eecs.umich.edu/courses/eecs568_f12/wiki/index.php/Calendar) . He even jokes near the end of the course that you could build a cruise missile with the math he teaches in the course, and kindly asks the students not to do so (I believe it was the Sensor Zoo video).

</comment><comment><USER6> The variance of the combined Gaussian will not always shrink with more data. Consider the case that you have one sensor that predicts 100m at a high accuracy and then you get another sensor predicting 10,000m with the same accuracy. At first you thought you had a very good idea of the location then with more information you realize that you actually have no idea and you get a Gaussian with mean of 5,050m and a very high variance.

<comment><USER7> The post left out the some important parts of the Kalman Filter, where you adjust your certainty in how well you're able to predict where the target will go and how accurate your sensors are in response to how they perform over time. So even if you're Gaussians are 10 klicks apart the variance for this prediction still shrinks, but your future Gaussians would be much wider. I think what was described in the post was more an alpha-beta filter.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_beta_filter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_beta_filter)

<comment><USER8> Adjusting the measurement covariance to fit the residuals is not part of the Kalman filter algorithm. One could make the argument that any real-world implementation needs to address this problem, but as far as the algorithm is concerned, the measurement covariance is externally computed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > It's easy to write a program that will do this automatically without any > human input. What if the plane is changing altitude? The problem becomes > slightly harder, but not too hard. It's just a matter of figuring out how > far to plan in advance.

This reminds me to some extent of Basic Mechanisms in Fire Control Computers [1]. The whole thing is worth watching, but the link will take you to the point that I was reminded of.

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4#t=612](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4#t=612)

</comment><comment><USER10> It is far easier to buy a FN-6 from China or seize a Soviet/Russian variant from a failing state's coffers, yielding a better chance to take down an airplane than a DIY model. I've been following events in Syria since protests started to get shot up, to the security void created under aerial attacks allowing foreign fighters to swarm in.

For the aspiring MANPAD or Anti-Air battalion a better ROI would probably be what I mentioned above. Evidenced by this is a group having four MANPAD variants in hand enabling me to make a lovely group panorama of the set[1]. For some analysis on the weapons shown in the image you can read a write-up by N.R. Jenzen-Jones including the group shot here[2] or here[3].

This is a lovely exercise for the mind but obviously like most weaponized missile/rocket systems it is best to leave it for the pros. :)

[1] [http://imgur.com/gallery/KFH6b04](http://imgur.com/gallery/KFH6b04)

[2] [http://rogueadventurer.com/2013/05/31/9k338-igla-s-and- other...](http://rogueadventurer.com/2013/05/31/9k338-igla-s-and-other- manpads-in-syria/)

[3] [http://www.armsresearch.org/post/51809092891/9k338-igla-s- sa...](http://www.armsresearch.org/post/51809092891/9k338-igla-s-sa-24-and- other-manpads-in-syria)

<comment><USER11> Pictures remind me of 2nd rate action movies. Probably because those movies are closer to real life than the 1st rate Hollywood action movies.

<comment><USER12> or may be because both - the pictures and the 2nd rates movies - try to imitate the 1st rate movies.

Whenever i find Youtube videos from real recent conflicts - it looks nothing like movies, 1st or 2nd rate.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: freemium services - are multiple subscription options better? - <AUTHOR>

I'm creating a freemium subscription service and am wondering if I should have one "pro" account or break the "pro" service into smaller focused subscription services.
It's a site for musicians. The three "pro" services would be: extra space (photos and music), very detailed play stats, extra exposure/promo (featured spots etc). These could easily be individual services or all lumped into one pro service.
Other examples: wordpress - breaks down their site into several different services. evernote - just has one premium service
Thoughts? Experiences? I haven't seen any good write-ups on this.
Thanks!! <comment><USER4> Ideally you could create both, do some split testing and see which one converts better.

From my experience (I work at a freemium startup) I recommend going with one bundle plan. Fewer choices is usually easier otherwise they're worrying about what they need. You can always add another plan, but it's more difficult to take them away (Don't take candy from a baby!). Always try to minimize the amount a user has to think and how much pain it is to upgrade. Also, less important than how easy it is for your users, but important nonetheless: as a developer it's also more difficult to support and maintain different services/tiers

The key thing is less about what type of plan you're selling, but how well you're converting your users. Make sure you're notifying them when they're getting low on space, etc...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, good advice. I always try to simplify things, so this makes sense. One thought was that It may be easier to convert users if there are focused cheaper plans that meet a specific need. Wonder if anyone has data on this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Have you launched yet? If not, I'd suggest just launching with a single paid plan. Something low cost. Then you can add more plans as you grow. Without analytics you won't know the best way to segment multiple paid plans.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hard to say without more details but:

If your service has a real professional end user (i.e. someone who will make a living off your service), a multiple tier one seems a better fit. For example look at smugmug - they have their free account, a couple of paid accounts aimed at "serious" users, and a professional account aimed at people selling photography.

Evernote has only one paid service but that matches their usage base - <USER2> free/casual users, or people who have bought into the whole "second brain" idea. But note that the evernote paid account is still reasonably priced.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks. good point on the pro end user. I'm not looking so much for advice on "tiers", but if I should split out the premium services into multiple premium services.

eg: evernote could split their premium service into two services: \- supersized uploads ($2.50/mo) \- advanced collaboration ($2.50/mo)

<comment><USER6> Oh I see - you are talking about a la carte pricing. Interesting question - <USER3> a user my gut reaction is I would be happy to pay $5 for 5 features, of which I only use 3, so that way you get an extra couple of bucks out of me. But, again the key thing is that $5 has to seem reasonable to me. If you were charging $100 for 5 features and I only use 3, I would definitely want the choice to only spend $60, or else I might decide not to spend any money at all.</comment></comment></comment>


Netflix Denominator – Portably control DNS clouds using Java or bash - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Netflix/denominator <comment><USER2> Adopting this tool seems risky while this issue remains:

[https://github.com/Netflix/denominator/issues/374](https://github.com/Netflix/denominator/issues/374)

> As much as I hate to admit it, I'm no longer a good choice to champion this > project. It isn't about denominator itself, just I'm stretched too thin to > continue. That's been evident in the changelog, where I've not done much in > the last year. Netflix softly archived the project in early Dec 2015, but I > think we should less softly do so in order to not lead people on.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do companies with such large amount of machines all over the world not run their own DNS service?

<comment><USER4> DNS resilience is best served by diversity at every level of implementation. That includes diversity beyond your own resources. Somewhat topically, DNS services for high profile entities are DDoS targets; there are very few entities that can absorb incoming hundreds of Gbps without the service collapsing.

The emergent downside of sharing the eggbasket is that of collateral damage i.e. a successful DDoS intended for one target also cripples many others.

In Netflix's case, their CDN infrastructure is all about video delivery and is almost certainly optimised for outbound bandwidth and video QoS. Engineering to absorb an inbound DDoS is expensive, and involves compromises. By having DNS elsewhere, they've avoided the basket sharing and created new opportunities for mitigation. That's an example of how diversity systematically enables resilience.

In the worst case ops scenario, having to cold-boot an entire platform from down, then it's pretty much essential to have directory services as independent infrastructure. The larger you get, the more weird interdependencies arise if you don't take architectural steps to avoid them. This can apply to migrations of infrastructure also. Not 100% necessary, but sooo much easier if so.

<comment><USER5> In addition to these good points, assuming you also host whatever application your MegaCorp makes, you have now put all your eggs in one basket. If they can break DNS, they can (or have) probably also broken your app. Likewise, if they manage to DDoS your app, you can't change DNS records to point them elsewhere since that's also down probably. For the same reason you may use multiple hosting providers (like a nice Digital Ocean droplet for when Linode is under attack), spreading out your DNS options is also very smart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not sure if Netflix confirmed officially, but they were down during this week's Ddos attack on DynDNS. Would be interesting to know why

<comment><USER7> Are you sure it wasn't just connectivity problems related to it? Netflix uses Route53 for DNS, not Dyn.

<comment><USER8> Yes but Amazon used Dyn for us-east-1, IIRC, so it might be related.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are Netflix (and others) using multiple DNS providers simultaneously? If so, why?

<comment><USER10> The DDOS attack against a single DNS service provider that took down a large number of services this week is probably a pretty good example for the necessity.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: List of Past and Future Black Swans - <AUTHOR> Just looking to compile a list of past black swans and potential future black swans.<p>Definition: an unpredictable or unforeseen event, typically one with extreme consequences. <comment><USER2> Might be a fun exercise...

Past: 1906 San Francisco earthquake, WW1, stock market crash of 1929, Pearl Harbor, German invasion of the Soviet Union in WW2, successful Trinity atom bomb test, Sino-Soviet split, legalization of abortion & the birth control pill, assassination of JFK, Rosa Parks, invention of the microprocessor, breakup of the Soviet Union, invention of the WWW, September 11.

Future: nuclear winter, breakup of the United States, Russian invasion of Eastern Europe, a paradigm-changing physics or cosmology discovery, hyperinflation in the developed world, discovery of an advanced civilization beneath the surface of Mars, the ability to reverse aging, development of strong AI and resulting rise of an AI consciousness, political instability in the Middle East that leads to the detonation of a nuke in Jerusalem.</comment>


Classifying Japanese characters from the Edo period - <AUTHOR> http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/1221098 <comment><USER2> If I understand correctly, the guy downloaded a data set, train it and get happy because it performs over 95% on the training set from the data set.

This is not interesting at all because the hard part is to actually segment and classify characters in a real text, and in real life they don't conveniently come as 28x28 images. As someone with a few hours of training in reading that kind of texts the difficulties are:

\- taking appart characters (hentaigana) that looks very close

\- segmenting characters because size and length vary a lot

\- differentiating between kana and kanji because the former are deritaves of the latter and they sometime look quite alike

So the experimenter should have started his post telling he didn't know any Japanese instead of closing it as such (even if one can notice when he just use modern kana as classes).

<comment><USER3> > This is not interesting at all because...

Comments like this make me reluctant to post things I work on

<comment><USER4> The OP's comment is very good because the discussion in the article is quite misleading about what they accomplished. It's also apparently self-serving; apparently marketing material for Wolfram. As your sibling's post makes extremely clear, classifying handwritten text from the Edo period is a much, much, much more difficult problem. In fact the samples they have taken for training are so unstylized that they might just as well have done an article about recognising modern hiragana hand writing. That would be very cool too, but would have gathered no interest because it is a well solved problem.

I have no problem with people doing fun projects and explaining how they did them. I have a bit of a problem with people apparently making exaggerated claims about their product's capabilities.

<comment><USER5> > I have no problem with people doing fun projects and explaining how they did > them. I have a bit of a problem with people apparently making exaggerated > claims about their product's capabilities.

This isn't written by a Wolfram employee. It seems to be just someone's fun and educational project, posted on a Wolfram message board.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The training set contains errors. The に row is especially messy: it's full of 小, ふ, and み.

<comment><USER7> Aren't these hentaigana?

[http://www.book-seishindo.jp/kana/onjun_2.html#ni](http://www.book- seishindo.jp/kana/onjun_2.html#ni)

<comment><USER6> Ahh, I see. These aren't supposed to be visual variants of に specifically, but are just any old forms/arbitrary other characters that were used in place of に (sort of like "V" being classified as "u" because of Roman texts).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I want to do the same for Chinese.

I have a collection of 1500 fonts, and finally exported all the PNGs for 75,000 characters. Now I need to pad, crop, and scale to make 28x28 (or 32x32, or 64x64, or another resolution).

Then I want to do the Machine Learning (Classify) step.

The article doesn't go into any detail about how to install Classify, how to import the training and testing data, and how to then actually run it. I watched the videos from CS231n because of my boss, but again, I'm still not really sure what to do practically.

If I have lots of folders of images, what should I do to build an OCR program?

<comment><USER9> \- load images, convert into array, call it X

\- put the labels (character codes one hot encoded) in an array called y

\- use a convolutional neural network to learn the mapping X->y (training)

\- send new images to the network to make predictions

That's how you train all neural nets in supervised learning.

<comment><USER8> Just like the article, your comment is pseudo-code. Isn't there a tutorial for this?

<comment><USER10> OCR for handwritten number and Latin characters: [http://opencv-python- tutroals.readthedocs.io/en/latest/py_tu...](http://opencv-python- tutroals.readthedocs.io/en/latest/py_tutorials/py_ml/py_knn/py_knn_opencv/py_knn_opencv.html)

As my sibling poster mentioned, these are generally research level tasks. Most people working on this are either writing papers on very particular issues related to OCR or they are working in industry and the companies are not open sourcing their code because it is expensive to produce and/or they have custom data sets they don't want to give away. There might be some tutorials somewhere though.

Source: previously worked on OCR systems for European and East Asian languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone know the work he refers to as the inspiration for this article?</comment>


China's Detention Camps for Muslims Turn to Forced Labor - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/world/asia/xinjiang-china-forced-labor-camps-uighurs.html <comment><USER2> I am not politically ignorant but ... I did not know about this.

Is there a global list of, well, shit going on. A heat map or an ordered backlog of things that need fixing in the world? Because if I missed this, what else don't I know

<comment><USER3> Russian invasion of Ukraine?

<comment><USER4> What invasion?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great, now China appears to have descended to effectively using slave labor. I wonder what it would take for other countries to refuse to trade with them if not this. China has already shown it is willing to kill political prisoners for their organs, and I have no doubt that this is already happening to the Uighurs.

<comment><USER4> What would take for the US to refuse to trade with Saudi Arabia?

Executing and imprisoning opposition, illegal war in Yemen, the recent murder of a journalist are clearly not enough.

<comment><USER3> That is another country that I believe nobody should have anything to do with. Unfortunately it's not up to me. For governments economic considerations carry more weight

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The comments section here is borderline criminal. Focus on radicalization and "Europe should take note". Shameful and inhuman. To think these are our neighbors in Silicon Valley :/

<comment><USER6> Nah, it's the 50 cent party. They get alerted on anything China related on Social Media and swarm in to push a pro-Chinese agenda.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party)

<comment><USER4> This is offensive.

A comment about radicalization is made by an account more than 6 years old and having karma over 17000.

Labeling everyone who you disagree with as a paid propagandist is bad for public discourse.

<comment><USER7> Offensive? Someone who is older than twelve is suggesting that UK, France and Germany stop "playing nice" with Muslims. And they _weren 't_ called a shill, read it again, read what is actually written. As far as I'm concerned, it would have been more charitable than to assume they're older than 12 and really mean what they wrote. I mean, where do you from _there_ , right? A shill can quit their job at least.

As a German, the idea that we should put a whole religion in camps so beyond the pale, I think it's mainly bad for public discourse that this discussion was flagged. People should have their comments dissected until the cows come home, instead of not really having to own up to their words. This coy short flashing of this unwashed, ugly underbelly, that's the problem, that people who say A don't have to say B is the problem. They should have to sleep in the beds they declare fit for others.

It's pretty rich to bring up being offended, or radicalization for that matter, while people happily normalize putting a whole religion in concentration camps.

<comment><USER4> "they weren't called a shill"

Really? What else can "It's the 50 cent party" mean?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party)

<comment><USER7> Yes, really. There was a specifc reference to that comment _but also the thread in general_ , which didn't mention shills, and a reply which didn't reference that comment, but the thread in general.

The way stories critical of some, uhm, vaguely important developments in China regularly get flagged off the front page, while utter fluff about China winning some "race" or other being on the front page every second day is quite something. I don't know what the karma threshold is for flagging stories, but it sure isn't 17000. Of course, as that article notes:

> David Wertime of Foreign Policy argued that the narrative where a large army > of paid Internet commentators are behind China's poor public dialogue with > its critics is "Orwellian, yet strangely comforting". Rather, many of the > Chinese netizens spreading nationalist sentiment online are not paid, but > often mean what they say.

Either way, shill or useful idiot [1] or just independent nonthinker; it's still poor dialogue, as a result of poor reasoning and/or underdeveloped empathy, in defense of abominable practices -- and if someone can shrug off people being put into camps, they can shrug off being called names. Again, this didn't even happen here, but _even if it had happened_.. not that I find that constructive, of course it's also destructive and poor, talking about how "the shills are out" is totally useless and more toxic than shitty arguments I can at least disagree with -- but I still reject your claim that that'd be "offensive". Maybe for you, my priorities are vastly different.

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

<comment><USER4> "Yes, really. There was a specifc reference to that comment but also the thread in general, which didn't mention shills, and a reply which didn't reference that comment, but the thread in general."

I have no idea what you are talking about - the comment I was replying to made a statement that many other comments including the one about radicalization are the product of the 50 Cents Party. It's the only way it was talking about other comments.

Perhaps, your statement about 'poor reasoning' and 'poor dialog' applies to you as well and your sense of superiority is unwarranted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm wondering why this was flagged?

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand why important articles such as these, especially written by NYTimes, get flagged?

</comment><comment><USER10> President Xi is the reincarnation of Stalin?

</comment><comment><USER11> labor camp, community service, maybe better than bombing somehow? It is kinda force women to get educated. I don't really know where I stand. Maybe for some religion education is bad. I hugely doubt people will disappear for no reason. Of course, my English friend always know more about how I live in China. Every time I try to have a discussion I always end on the losing end.

<comment><USER3> Also, I doubt that many of the allegedly million people in the camps are involved in bombing anything.</comment></comment>


Paid Vacations for Freelance Designers and Developers - <AUTHOR>

Our team is proposing something a bit different at http://plainmade.com/paid-vacation -- A way for freelancers to go on vacation and earn 25% or more of the estimate and we do the work. I'd like to know what the HN community thinks of this idea. <comment><USER2> So you are offering to be a subcontractor but don't providing any information on the technologies you specialize in? I'm a little confused about the value proposition here.

Its a cute marketing angle but your pitch is incredibly light on information considering you are asking me to put my reputation and business in your hands...

<comment><AUTHOR> We agree that our page is very light on what we actually can provide. We just started picking up client work recently, after having built two products (Barley and Unmark) that haven't yet made it to profitability (close!!). Our backgrounds are such that we have a very wide range of skills.

We're going to update our site over the coming months to include a portfolio and also try to be very specific on the type of work we excel at.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> You can see the page here: [http://plainmade.com/paid- vacation](http://plainmade.com/paid-vacation)

</comment><comment><USER3> Are going to direct bill the client? Not sure that would be my first choice. if not then just cut the estimate. I would think this whole thing could go bad quick. what if the client isn't happy with your work and doesn't pay me. What happens if the client isn't happy and they don't pay you would I still get my commission?

<comment><AUTHOR> So far we've asked our customer to manage the relationship, bill the customer, etc. We get a cut of the estimate -- we do not do the estimating.

Also, if our client isn't happy we don't get paid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> IMO, there is no user need for this. As a freelancer, putting my client's work in someone else's hands would be more stressful than me doing the work on holiday myself.

If you're problem is that you're weak at finding work, would it not be easier to hire someone that would specialise in that & put them on a commission basis?

</comment><comment><USER5> So you're a (sub)contractor? Do you then sub it out to in-house dev/designers or have companies you work with?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have in-house designers and developers. If we get more work than we can handle we have a few trusted designers and developers that we've worked with to help us keep up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Doesn't seem a great idea. Both the freelancer and the customer have to trust you with the job. And after a couple of weeks/days you will never see them again. As a customer I wouldn't accept that.

Besides, wouldn't it be easier for you to score your own assignments?

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean "after a couple of days you will never see them again"?

To be completely honest, we're not-so-great at finding new work. Word of mouth is about all we've had any luck with. So we thought this a new and interesting idea on how to drum up contacts and work. Maybe it will be good, maybe not. But we're giving it a try.

<comment><USER7> It's cool that you're honest with your marketing/sales problem and try it with this idea! I wish you luck, I/We have the same problems with marketing/sales. If you figured out some learnings, would be great to read on your blog!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Rather than give you design and development work, I'd rather give you emailing, phone calling, bill paying, and server fixing work. I'm happy enough to not take on new projects for vacation, but it's letting the ball drop on anything in motion I worry about.</comment>


ACF Hide Layout – WordPress Plugin - <AUTHOR> https://flyntwp.com/acf-hide-layout/ <comment><AUTHOR> A WordPress plugin for ACF Pro allowing to hide the layout of the flexible content on the frontend.</comment>


An airless, puncture-proof car tyre takes to the road - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/06/15/an-airless-puncture-proof-car-tyre-takes-to-the-road <comment><USER2> Different article about same topic, discussed 10 days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20113174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20113174)

Also, another brand promoting this concept 4 years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9908665](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9908665)

</comment><comment><USER3> They could have made this a long time ago but the industry backed by giants like Goodyear, Dunlop, pirelli etc would lose out on their business model of replacement tyres so wouldn't push it. Similar thing happened to the electric car in the 90s California had quite a few, but the oil industry killed them off, watch the programme "who killed the electric car"

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks like airless tyre is not an entirely new concept [0]. What makes this tyre special?

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

<comment><USER5> They've been around for ages but not in mass produced cars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It will work, but the extra force will stretch out the tyre over time. "Not being air cushions, they could not be punctured, their main trouble being usually their liability to get detached from the rim and the tendency to stretch."

[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/58444/58444-h/58444-h.htm#Pag...](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/58444/58444-h/58444-h.htm#Page_74)

The Modern Bicycle and Its Accessories [1898]

Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20145663](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20145663)

<comment><USER5> You're quoting a 130 year old book, it might not be relevant to modern tyre designs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's the rolling resistance? It won't be so eco-friendly after all if it rolls worse than standard tires.

<comment><USER8> Presumably it offers increased unsprung and rotational mass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://outline.com/YuejXh](https://outline.com/YuejXh)

</comment><comment><USER10> This looks like it would not handle getting rocks or mud in the sidewall gaps well at all.

<comment><USER5> The picture is just showing the internal structure. The actual product does have sidewalls and look like normal tyres.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much activity did you get on Developer Auction? - <AUTHOR>

For those of you that have used Developer Auction before, how much activity did you see on your profile once it was approved/public? How long did your auction run for? Approximately how many profile views did you get? How many offers did you receive? What was your time-to-first-offer? How many years of developer experience did you have at the time (if you don't mind sharing)? <comment><USER2> I set up an account and got one "offer". They're not really offers, they're requests for interviews. I don't think they're under any obligation to follow through with their offer amount. One of my coworkers got two "offers" and then interviewed with both. For various reasons, neither of us got any of the jobs.

Took a week or so for everything to happen.

It's anecdotal, but my advice would be to take DA's promises with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER3> That's pretty much what I expected to hear. It's a good idea, but I don't think the execution is quite right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I got my current job through Developer Auction, and think I ended up with better compensation than I would have negotiated by myself. I got six offers, but I'm in Boston, so that's probably lower than average. I've been programming (post-college) for ten years. I would recommend the site to other developers; I don't see that there's anything to lose.

(In case it needs saying, I have no ties to the company other than getting this job using their site.)</comment>


What is the HN category of "from"? Just saw it - <AUTHOR> Snapshot below taken at 2/14 9:10 Mountain. The From category is available via this URl https://news.ycombinator.com/from  but appears/disappears.<p>Imgur screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/UTvPpNC <comment><AUTHOR> Ah. Just noticed if you add the site tag, it shows all the articles posted from a particular domain. Eg:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=google.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=google.com)</comment>


Ask HN: Which are the best platforms to access public policy data? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Pew Research Center[1] has some interesting datasets on a wide range of categories.

[1]:[http://www.pewresearch.org/data/download- datasets/](http://www.pewresearch.org/data/download-datasets/)

</comment><comment><USER3> What kind of public policy data? What country? The Sunlight Foundation[1] is pretty good for US data.

[1]: [http://sunlightfoundation.com/api/](http://sunlightfoundation.com/api/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I intend to create a personal blog that analyses social and economical phonomena with the least influence of political ideologies of any kind.

My focus will be Brazil, but this does not mean I'll neglect data of other countries. On the contrary, data of other countries will be crucial to support my blog posts.

Some exemples of the phenomena I'll try to analyze are: i) the importance of interest rates in different countries; ii) models of metropolization across the globe; iii) models of public and private university level programs.

TKS for the information.</comment></comment>


The xkcd survey - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1e8htNa3bn5OZIgv83dodjZAHcQ424pgQPcFqWz2xSG4/viewform?c=0&w=1 <comment><USER2> If you like this sort of thing, you may also enjoy:

1) My website Correlated.org ([http://www.correlated.org](http://www.correlated.org)), which has been generating weird correlations based on users' survey responses for more than four years.

2) Spurious Correlations ([http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious- correlations](http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations)) by Tyler Vigen, which also offers wacky correlations, but based on publicly available datasets rather than survey responses.

3) Google Correlate ([http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/draw](http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/draw)), which allows you to draw a curve, then find search terms whose popularity over time matches the shape you drew.

<comment><USER3> Can anyone explain how Google Correlate works? I understand how a brute-forced approach might work, but is there any way of optimizing this?

<comment><USER4> Locality-sensitive hashing should work:

[http://www.slaney.org/malcolm/yahoo/Slaney2008-LSHTutorial.p...](http://www.slaney.org/malcolm/yahoo/Slaney2008-LSHTutorial.pdf) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality- sensitive_hashing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality-sensitive_hashing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Found out that gnome 3 has some keybinding for dynamically changing screen resolution. I don't know which keybinding that is, but I found it during the mash the keyboard test.

<comment><USER6> Sigh. I hit "Enter" and it submitted the form without letting me finish. Now they will never know if I'm a dog or a cat person...

<comment><USER7> I suspect the real problem isn't so much hitting "enter" but hitting it directly after the other hand hit "tab". A text field should be able to deal with an enter.

<comment><USER8> The text fields do handle the enter key correctly. Sometimes you just accidentally press enter and the form lacks required fields and validation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can't shake the feeling that this will just measure of how willing people are to follow instructions for no reason whatsoever.

<comment><USER10> Or as an alternative theory, Randall Munroe wants to know if it's OK to tell everyone when he throws away all his socks and buys a bunch of identical ones.

<comment><USER11> This seems strangely plausible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how many responses of :

Cantaloupe');DROP TABLE Food;--

ol' Randal is going to get (or some permutation thereof). Figuring that Randal is pretty smart, I bet he has a piece of code to parse out that. Still, anyone here have a good hack that can just nuke days of his time whilst completing this form? Only other one I can think of him using is (for Matlab):

Cantaloupe'); clear all; clc; close all;

<comment><USER13> The data gets collated in a Google sheet, so I think he'll be fine. Or at least if he finds a bug, it'll get fixed.

<comment><USER14> Yeah I suspect google sheets is not obviously vulnerable to sql injection at this point in the game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> === SPOILER ALERT! ===

The most interesting question, to me, is the one about which words you know the meaning of.

About half of them aren't real words. I assume this question is used partly as a gauge of vocabulary (how many of the real words do you recognize) and partly of honesty (how many of the fake words do you claim to recognize).

<comment><USER16> I thought all of the words were perfectly cromulent.

<comment><USER17> cromulent

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cromulent](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cromulent)

<comment><USER16> D'oh!

<comment><USER18> I thought you had intentionally misspelled it as a play on intentionally including non-words

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > On a scale of 1 to 5, which number is your favorite?

> 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Chuckle...

<comment><USER20> If you liked that question, check out the Self Referential Aptitude Test: [http://faculty.uml.edu/jpropp/srat-Q.txt](http://faculty.uml.edu/jpropp/srat-Q.txt)

<comment><USER21> Arg! Help!

I must of miss-stepped somewhere because I think I proved the answer to Q8 was C, so Q3 and Q4 had to add up to 6, but Q1 says Q3 or Q4 has to be B, and they can't BOTH be B, because of Q2. So I'm stuck! I've done something wrong.

Maybe I'm reading one of these questions wrong? Rats.

edit: oooooops, C is 2 away from E.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So is the last question not a common thing? Because I do it every year or so, but my wife thinks I am crazy.

<comment><USER23> I think that is very wasteful.

[http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_freshwater/freshw...](http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_freshwater/freshwater_problems/thirsty_crops/cotton/)

<comment><USER22> I mean, I run 6 days a week so my running socks get beat up pretty bad. When they are dead, I need to throw them out. So my options are:

1) Buy 1 new pack of socks, throw out 6 old socks - repeat every month. Doing it this way I have to match socks between several different styles.

or

2) Put 4 packs of socks, throw out all of my socks, repeat 4x less often. Also I have no matching to do, as all of my socks are the same - just grab 2.

(And technically I have 2 styles of socks, summer socks and winter socks. Summer socks is a buttload of cotton socks that get bought in bulk. Winter socks are 3-4 pairs of identical wool socks that last much longer).

<comment><USER24> My son just picks two in the dark and wears them. He wanted an outward sign of his nerd cred. If they matched, he used to pick again. But he stopped doing that, because if he really didn't care, he would wear matching socks too. Has he reached some higher level of Nerdvana?

<comment><USER25> I think technically caring about having socks that doesn't match rules him out. He's testing strongly for hipster though.

<comment><USER26> I'm going to second the "definitely a nerd", since not only did he make up an arbitrary rule, he even altered his behavior to be logically consistent ("well, matches can happen in random choice, so I can't disallow those ..."). That's pretty cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Hope the results will be as entertaining as the Color Survey: [http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey- results/](http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Thermostat: Warmer or Colder?

How about less intense? At the office I bring a sweater in the summer and so sometimes strip to my undershirt in the winter....

<comment><USER29> Yeah, I don't ever adjust a thermostat set by someone else. If there's a thermostat to set, I'm always happy with whatever anyone has set it to. if there isn't, there's nothing to set. There should be a choice "I never adjuust a thermostat."

<comment><USER7> I didn't answer that one. None of the answers clearly applied to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "Pick a number from 1 to 100"

I wonder how many of that will not be 42 :D

<comment><USER31> I bet 37 is pretty popular.

<comment><USER32> How come?

<comment><USER33> It's always the number everyone thinks no one else will choose.

<comment><USER34> Hypothesis:

People think even numbers aren't as "random" and odd numbers are more "random". That leaves us with 1,3,5,7,9. 1 and 5 both divide 10 and don't seem so "random" to us, I guess. That leaves us with 3, 7, and 9. 33, 77, 99, i.e. numbers with repeated digits don't seem so "random". That leaves us with 37, 39, 79. And 9 maybe (not sure if all people subconsciously think this way) isn't that "random" because it's one less than 10 and divisible by 3.

Infact, the jargon file says that 37 is the most common random number people will choose[0].

[0] [http://catb.org/jargon/html/R/random- numbers.html](http://catb.org/jargon/html/R/random-numbers.html)

<comment><USER35> I chose 37 purely because it was the first number that came to mind, but then I have also knew that jargon file entry...

Second was 51. Clearly the primest looking of the non-primes under 100?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I am incredibly excited by this survey specifically because of the question regarding sandwiches.

I finally will have some meaningful data for my extensive definition of sandwiches as a structural form!

<comment><USER37> I actually would like to comment here.

My personal definition for (an unqualified) sandwich is that there must be two /isolated/ 'bread' sides surrounding a payload (the 'meat' of the sandwich).

As a quesadilla is often made folded I at first disqualified it; however not /all/ quesadillas are folded. Some are actually made with two individual tortillas. Thus it is close enough to a sandwich to be expressible as a member of that class, while the others that are similarly close are always made with single pieces of bread (cut in the middle) and thus, they are not in fact sandwiches as it is not optional to select different types of bread for the two sides (even though I've /never/ seen anyone do this; it's still /possible/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Is the submit not supposed to work on iOS? Kind of a let down to spend 10 minutes filling it out, then the submit button doesn't do anything.

<comment><USER39> Try again? I had to try twice - google forms seems to be a bit overloaded.

<comment><USER40> Yeah I got asked to resubmit, then redirected to a blank survey after the third time. Wonder if that means it was submitted, oh well...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I've never had so much fun taking a survey.

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder how much the dynamic URLs to the forms are playing a part in this. Each refresh of the comic [1] and homepage [2] gets a different form URL. Are these being associated with other data from the xkcd.com domain..? And how much has it messed up Randall to have such shenanigans defeated by a direct form URL being submitted to Hacker News.

In fact, how do we know that the form URL submitted to Hacker News is one of Randalls?

Dang should probably change the URL to the comic permalink: [1]

Though I am late to the party and this might not get noticed.

[1] [http://xkcd.com/1572/](http://xkcd.com/1572/)

[2] [http://xkcd.com/](http://xkcd.com/)

Edit: Actually refreshing the comic URL [1] is getting only a range of URLs to forms. More often than not the forms answers are in a different order, I suppose to either prevent bias, or encourage it and monitor it.

<comment><USER43> Google forms has an option to randomize the order of the answers and the questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I spent 15 minutes filling it out only for Google to tell me "Wow, this file is really popular! It might be unavailable until the crowd clears."

<comment><USER45> I just hit the back button and resubmitted and it took it. YMMV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> My answer to 'Write any 5 random words' :

        'Moon landing was a hoax'

<comment><USER47> I wonder how many entered 'any 5 random words'

<comment><USER48> I went for "arbitrary, stochastic, erratic, haphazard, aleatory".

<comment><USER7> I went for the first 5 words that came to mind, which randomly happened to all be drinks from the previous question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I like that it was allowed to put negative numbers of siblings/twins .. which I did :)

</comment><comment><USER50> "There was an error submitting your form response. Please wait a bit and try again."

 _sigh_

<comment><USER51> Took me a few attempts. You will know when your success was accepted because you'll see a message stating so.

<comment><USER52> I've been waiting almost sixty years, have yet to see that message. Still trying.

<comment><USER53> 3dark5me.

<comment><USER54> We must imagine Sisyphus happy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there any reason the results or at least the summary page are not already visible?

<comment><USER55> I imagine it's so they doesn't impact future entries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I have a google form like this for Couchsurfers who wish to stay a few nights in my apartment. I believe my questions might be little bit more on the insane side though.

<comment><USER57> This I would like to see, for the laughs.

<comment><USER56> I am tempted to go public with the form but right now, I enjoy the novelty. I also barely have the time to keep up with the requests.

Sample portion:

      MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS

      In life, there are no right answers. But this is a test so you better choose wisely.

      Question 1. Right now, do you want to ask the apartment tenant something along the lines of: "Are you serious?" ?

      A. Yes.

      B. Are you serious?

75% of applicants choose B. And it all goes downhill from there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Was it proper thing to stop myself from writing "five random words are here" as a response to "Write five random words"?

<comment><USER59> Fun anecdote. I took a cryptography exam, where the question was "Progress as far as possible towards decrypting or decoding the following message:", followed by a sequence of letters in alphabetical order- several As, a different number of Bs, and so on. It seemed obvious to me that a message that has been sorted into alphabetical order cannot be reversed without luck and a computer, so I assumed the unencoded version was something we could guess. On a hunch, I checked the question itself, and sure enough, the answer was "Progress as far as possible towards decrypting or decoding the following message". Apparently I was the only one to figure it out.

<comment><USER60> For anyone curious, it looks like this would be what he was shown, assuming spaces omitted and all lower case: "aaaaabccddddeeeeeeeffggggghiiiilllmnnnoooooooppprrrrrrssssssssstttwwy"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> After wasting time on this i get "Wow, this file is really popular! It might be unavailable until the crowd clears. Try again."

</comment><comment><USER62> That was a fun survey... would be great to see the visualizations that come out of this data set

</comment><comment><USER16> Who else?

> Type five random words

five random words

<comment><USER63> Not quite, but close [http://i.imgur.com/dt3hEYc.png](http://i.imgur.com/dt3hEYc.png)

<comment><USER64> You missed the colon

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> "Which of these can you do reasonably well?"

Should really have a "none" option.

<comment><USER15> That would be equivalent to not ticking any of the boxes.

<comment><USER65> It didn't let me submit without checking one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> "five random words"

</comment><comment><USER66> Was strangely fun answering these. Can't wait to chart some of this data on [http://chartblocks.com](http://chartblocks.com)

<comment><USER14> Yeah I was starting to design some visualization for it in my head!

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I laughed at the last one I've done that and I certainly say go for it, there's nothing like uniformity in regards to underdress!

</comment><comment><USER68> discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158352](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158352)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158498](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158498)

<comment><USER31> Interesting, the dupe detector allows both https and http versions of a site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> no idea why i just took that

</comment><comment><USER70> The link here is different than the link from the comic, is this OK?

</comment><comment><USER71> Well, it's totally random alright.

</comment><comment><USER72> Anything for xkcd.

Much respect. salute! o7

</comment><comment><USER73> Kinda pointless, the whole thing - though I bet some statistician is going to publish some deep-insight paper from this data :D

<comment><USER73> right - thanks for the link, I haven't been on the xkcd site in a while (really need to catch up ;-) )

I do think the downvoting is uncalled for though, after all, it's not like the questions _weren 't_ pointless, and you could reasonably call Randall Munroe a statistician of sorts..</comment></comment>


Anyone going to BarCamp this weekend? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Palo Alto, Ought to be good

</comment><comment><USER3> Where's it located?</comment>


Peeling Califoria's SB 50 Onion with UrbanFootprint - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/urbanfootprint/peeling-the-sb-50-onion-with-urbanfootprint-921680d988b4 <comment><USER2> Hi HN! I'm the Director of Engineering at UrbanFootprint[1]. Let me know if you have any questions about the blog post, analysis, or the platform we're building which makes this possible.

Also, here's the subtitle for some context:

 _SB 50 seeks to address California's severe housing shortage. We examine the data to unpack the potential impacts._

And...

 _California State Senator Scott Weiner's Senate Bill 50 aims to address California's housing crisis by stimulating more housing development in existing residential areas. SB 50 made it one step closer to law last month as it made it past the Senate's Governance and Finance Committee. Like so many bills, as SB 50 winds through the legislature and grows in complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand and measure the potential impacts of the proposed legislation._

1\. [https://urbanfootprint.com/](https://urbanfootprint.com/)

(edited for formatting)</comment>