Ask HN: Can anyone recommend a lightweight project management tool? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for a lightweight project management tool and wondering what folks are using. I've used Trello before but would like to learn about some alternatives. Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> Full disclosure - I work for Teamwork.com, but I use the Teamwork Projects[1] free plan for a few of my side projects and haven't found an easier alternative, you can adjust the "lightweightness" per project and just turn off stuff you don't use, then again I am more familiar with it than other tools so of course it will be more straightforward to me.

[1] [https://www.teamwork.com/project-management- software](https://www.teamwork.com/project-management-software)

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://orgmode.org/](http://orgmode.org/)

[https://sourceforge.net/projects/jttslite/?SetFreedomCookie](https://sourceforge.net/projects/jttslite/?SetFreedomCookie)

[http://www.ganttproject.biz/](http://www.ganttproject.biz/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Depends what you are looking for (project management tools doesn't narrow it down much) but Trello is often seen as the competition to JIRA which seems to be used extensively in more 'old school' businesses.

</comment><comment><USER5> Notepad. No, I'm not trolling. Plain text with some utf8 icons gets a lot done. Saves getting locked in to one platform or another

</comment><comment><USER6> Basecamp.

</comment><comment><USER7> Trac? TaskJuggler?</comment>


Could humans ever understand minds that are radically unlike our own? - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/beyond-humans-what-other-kinds-of-minds-might-be-out-there <comment><USER2> Can we just start with "Could humans ever understand minds?</comment>


Will there be a Distributed HTTP? - <AUTHOR> https://www.mnot.net/blog/2015/08/18/distributed_http

<comment><USER2> This isn't distributed, but it might be considered (arguably) vaguely relevant: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_TCP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_TCP)

MPTCP splits a TCP virtual circuit (connection) up into multiple paths so that the underlying packets can travel via more than one route to their final destination.

It's a very, very new protocol; Linux contains the official reference implementation (which Android gets too), and independent implementations can be found in FreeBSD, F5 Networks' BIG-IP, and Citrix Netscaler.

However, Apple's introduction of MPTCP in iOS 7 is the most interesting: the OS actively uses the technology to talk to various Apple-controlled services. [http://perso.uclouvain.be/olivier.bonaventure/blog/html/2013...](http://perso.uclouvain.be/olivier.bonaventure/blog/html/2013/09/18/mptcp.html)

As such, it's currently the biggest commercial implementation of MPTCP out there at the moment.</comment>


Jack Dorsey's Reputation Is Crushed In Book On The Early Days Of Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorseys-reputation-is-crushed-in-nick-biltons-book-on-the-early-days-of-twitter-2013-10

<comment><USER2> That was very scathing but it doesn't surprise me since a similar guise is used to describe Mark Zuckerberg. I'm wondering how much is fact and how much is fiction.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ehhhh you dont give someone who was fired 500 million in stock just because you dont want the bad publicity... thats for DAMN sure.

<comment><USER4> No, you give somebody 500 million because you have no other choice. He owns those shares.</comment></comment>


Dialectics of Darkness: On "The Myth of Disenchantment" - <AUTHOR> https://inference-review.com/article/dialectics-of-darkness <comment><USER2> I think this sort of thing happens on a personal level as well as a societal level. There's always a point in your life when you realize that Santa Claus isn't real or that there's no such thing as 'true love' and a little bit of magic just disappears from the world.

What I find interesting is how one continues to enjoy something which has been disenchanted — like adults who still follow pro wrestling, or people who watch magicians even if they know how the tricks are performed.

I think one way to continue to entrance people who know how the sausage gets made is breaking the fourth wall and going meta — Penn and Teller's cup and balls routine, for example.

<comment><USER3> To speak to your two examples I will say that with pro wrestling, it's still physically demanding and impressive. More so impressive when you realize that they're doing everything to not seriously injure each other. If you see it less as an athletic competition and more like a stuntman exhibition, it becomes "enchanted" again. I mean, it takes skill, timing, and work to be able to jump off a turnbuckle, wrap your legs around someone'e head, spin around with them, and hit the ground without killing one or both of you.

Similar thing with magic. Knowing there are false shuffles, pockets, forces, double-lifts, etc makes it more impressive when you still can't see it happening. It's the execution that becomes impressive rather than the result.

<comment><USER4> Which gets us to this very good article in the Journal of performance magic (an academic journal published by the university of Huddersfield that offers some really good reflections on the subject) : [http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/34495/](http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/34495/)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any open source fleet/gps tracking system for SMB? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I know lots from around the world from bag tracking, asset tracking, trucks or local routing because those are a typical use case for geocoding we offer[1], but haven't seen an open source system yet.

I assume you mean software like this [http://gps- server.net/features](http://gps-server.net/features) who offer a whitelabel solution for resale.

[1] [http://geocoder.opencagedata.com/](http://geocoder.opencagedata.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for [http://gps-server.net](http://gps-server.net), very clean design for fleet tracking software. Are there any open source alternatives?</comment></comment>


How a half-educated tech elite delivered us into chaos - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/19/how-tech-leaders-delivered-us-into-evil-john-naughton <comment><USER2> From the article:

' _One of the biggest puzzles about our current predicament with fake news and the weaponisation of social media is why the folks who built this technology are so taken aback by what has happened. Exhibit A is the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, whose political education I recently chronicled. But he's not alone. In fact I'd say he is quite representative of many of the biggest movers and shakers in the tech world. We have a burgeoning genre of "OMG, what have we done?" angst coming from former Facebook and Google employees who have begun to realise that the cool stuff they worked on might have had, well, antisocial consequences._ '

Perhaps that is true for some of the employees, but for the founders, I'm calling BS. Zuckerberg, Thiel, Parker, Moskovitz, etc. are sharp, well-read guys who knew _exactly_ what they were doing from square-one. They did it anyway. Probably thanks to the fact that in 2017, if you have enough money and you flush one country down the toilet, there's always another one that will welcome you with open arms for the right price. India's elite have been making the same migration to the US for two generations, and Thiel just built a house for himself in NZ.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish the elites would stop constantly blaming magical powers that somehow manipulate the poor, deluded masses and instead possibly consider that people don't trust the elites because they are divorced from the masses and populate ideas that will harm them.

Arguments like this really are arguments that we need much more control of the discourse to choke out ideas that challenge the elite mode of thinking. The writer is more along the lines of educating the tech barbarians, but it isn't much of a step to direct control when the barbarians don't particularly want to be educated.

The idea that maybe the elite should reflect a bit never really occurs.

</comment><comment><USER4> I expect this will level itself out, it's just a new engine for propaganda the population aren't used to yet.

In time people will begin to realise what Facebook puts in front of them isn't necessarily the whole picture the same way posters from WWI and II seem crude and obvious to us now.

</comment><comment><USER5> The "chaos" in this case being the electorate receiving political messages from unapproved sources.

<comment><USER6> And uncritically accepting lies as the truth on a daily basis.

<comment><USER7> This is, frankly, something that completely did not change since times immemorial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article seems to forget about PRISM.

I highly doubt the tech elite weren't contacted at one point or another by an alphabet agency, or they weren't being monitored by the government.

I personally think tech has shown us how deeply divided we have always been. We just didn't realize it because we didn't start sharing so much of our personal lives on social media until around 2007.

</comment><comment><USER9> The elites have controlled the narrative basically forever and now their control slipped a bit because new tools have come about that allow less mainstream ideas to be pushed through to people. Now they're in panic mode so we get articles like this I guess.

<comment><USER10> " _The elites have controlled the narrative..._ "

Which elites are these? The leftist elites, the liberal elites, the conservative elites, the right-wing elites, the military-industrial elites, the corporate elites, or the religious elites?

<comment><USER11> Outside of the religious elites and the "leftist elites" who are virtually nonexistent, these are all the same group of people. They basically believe in the primacy of education and intelligence which not everyone agrees with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Lousy, snobbish article. Blames innovators for changing the world. So? What does the author suggest could have been done differently? Perhaps the author could draw on his elite liberal arts education to reflect on the history of _planned_ (as opposed to unplanned) social change? (The record there is not so hot.)

<comment><USER2> John Naughton, from Wikipedia:

 _" Starting as an electrical engineer who worked in systems modelling and analysis, Naughton subsequently developed an interest in the public understanding of technology and—later—in the social, political and cultural impact of internet technology."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love how a journalist thinks that anyone without an humanities education is only half-educated. In that case the reverse must also be true, all journalists without a science education are also only half-educated. You cannot have it both ways.

<comment><USER11> As someone with a solid but not exceptional education in both, I would agree with both statements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> " _Now mathematics, engineering and computer science are wonderful disciplines – intellectually demanding and fulfilling. And they are economically vital for any advanced society. But mastering them teaches students very little about society or history – or indeed about human nature._ "

...which is why most university STEM programs have requirements and electives outside the STEM fields. Of course, it's possible to avoid the harmful influences of the liberal arts, but then,...

" _The cynical answer is they knew about the potential dark side all along and didn't care, because to acknowledge it might have undermined the aforementioned licences to print money._ "

<comment><USER14> I don't know about in the US but for my engineering degree at an Australian university there were mandatory Ethics classes. One of the courses we were required to take talked about precisely this sort of thing the long term consequences of technology. I remember debating case studies in tutorial groups about things like Asbestos, CFC's, GM crops, cloning and the like. Being considerate of the unintended consequences of technology was very much something we were encouraged to think about.

Another class we took covered the ethical responsibilities of an engineer, regulatory compliance, liability, disclosure, whistle-blowing and the like I still recall vividly hearing during a lecture the story of American Engineer William LeMessurier who was made aware of critical structural defect in a building he had designed and then risked his career and professional reputation to resolve the problem.

I'm a bit saddened to hear other people have these negative opinions about engineering. A lot of us do take the moral and ethical implications of our work quite seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A lot of why these tech leaders go wrong is due to a techno-utopianist ideology which assumes that if bad is happening in the world it is always only because people don't have the technology needed to do good. This in turn rests on some very mistaken ideas about why humans behave in good or bad ways.

That is in turn due in part to the great influence Ayn Rand's crackpot ideas have had on technologists.

The books Naughton recommends are much more realistic.

</comment><comment><USER16> There is a fundamental disconnect here in the analysis and attribution of malice and disregard for social duty. Building a product and company is a messy affair. You have to earn your way into having a perspective and responsibility to society. Engagement and virality and advertising revenue built off digital addiction may have a dark side but you have to build the business before the self reflection. This is the reality of capitalism: make enough money that you can afford the luxury of guilt.

</comment><comment><USER17> > It never seems to have occurred to them that their advertising engines could > also be used to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political > messages to voters.

I still don't understand where the problem is, to be honest.

It's not that political parties didn't advertise their messages in a targeted way before and, as long as both sides are able to target their potential electors, it's normal political propaganda.

(or maybe the problem is "Trump won and we can't just accept that"?)</comment>


Relating natural language aptitude to differences in learning programming - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60661-8 <comment><USER3> > one participant was excluded because he was an extreme outlier in learning > rate (>3 sd away from the mean).

Can anyone explain why did they do this? Was it just to prove their hypothesis? I bet this guy had really high numeracy scores as well.

Edit: They also botched some of the numbers:

> (Fig. 1A: mean learning rate = 1.25, range = 0.81–2.0, sd = 0.24)

The 2.0 point is not included in Fig. 1A, the highest learning rate is 15 lessons over 10 sessions or 1.5, so they included the outlier in that range but removed it in the plots.

Also I don't find it unreasonable that a person completed 20 lessons compared to the others 15, so I don't see why this was so extreme that he had to be removed. You could argue that the later lessons are harder so it was unreasonable, but then you just confessed that the learning rate metric is not linear so your regression models doesn't work since it assumes that going from .5 to .6 is equal to going from 1.5 to 1.6! Even though as we can see from the plot many of the best learners got stuck at lesson 16 for an entire session without making progress, while the slowest learners took 10 sessions to reach roughly the level these fast learners reached after the first. That is almost a 10x difference, but this plot shows it as just 2.5x.

<comment><USER4> Removing outliers is a common practice in data science. A quick search on "why removing outliers" returns a lot of discussion on the topic of when it should be done and when it should not. I encourage you to read some to get familiar with the arguments.

In this specific case, I suppose they could have added some motivation for their decision, but I don't think they did it in bad faith. They only had 36 samples, and a 3sd event occurs once in ~300 cases: this hints to the fact that that data point might have been erroneous, or that there could have been some other factor (e.g. earlier exposure to programming concepts - <USER2> disguised as something else).

If you are interested in the study, you can find the data and the script in the linked repository: [https://github.com/UWCCDL/ComputerWhisperers](https://github.com/UWCCDL/ComputerWhisperers) The range for the learning rate seems wrong. If you check the data, there is no data point with 2.0: [https://github.com/UWCCDL/ComputerWhisperers/blob/master/Com...](https://github.com/UWCCDL/ComputerWhisperers/blob/master/Computer_Whisperers_Stepwise_Regression_Data_for_pub.csv)

<comment><USER5> > They only had 36 samples, and a 3sd event occurs once in ~300 cases: this > hints to the fact that that data point might have been erroneous

Or it hints that the distribution of learning rates is not gaussian. When there's an "n-sigma" event, it's usually much more likely that the model is wrong than that the event is that rare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if this predicts any better than a generic IQ test?

The idea behind IQ is that lots of different cognitive tasks are correlated.

<comment><USER7> That would throw under the bus a lot of race-and-IQ suppositions seeing how Africans commonly speak 3 or 4 languages, sometimes more, and a large majority of white people and Asians are monolingual.

<comment><USER3> A majority of Europeans speak 2 languages, a quarter speaks 3 or more. So it isn't a white thing, it is an American thing. And it isn't because Americans are dumber than Europeans, it is just because learning new languages makes more sense for Europeans than for Americans due to those languages being smaller and foreign languages being physically closer.

Also mastering a single language is harder than learning to get by in multiple languages, as even though a majority of Europeans can speak multiple languages a majority of them are not really all that good even in their mother tongue as we can see from standardized testing. They aren't worse than Americans, but they aren't better either, they get roughly the same results.

<comment><USER7> >A majority of Europeans speak 2 languages, a quarter speaks 3 or more.

You haven't met many Europeans have you. Not all of them are Dutch, Scandinavian, urban youth or immigrants.

>a majority of them are not really all that good even in their mother tongue as we can see from standardized testing

This makes no sense. You can't be _not good_ in your mother tongue - it's your _mother tongue_. Standardized testing has no say about how a language is structured, that's an absurdly prescriptivist point of view. As for foreign language ability, in real life it's not assessed by making them sit down and pass test questions, it's assessed by having them speak and write close to a native. Someone who casually uses slang, "bad forms" and occasionally makes native-sounding mistakes is more proficient at a language than someone who speaks an academic version of it and got good grades at a test.

<comment><USER8> I had a great-grandmother from rural Moldova. She spoke Vlach, Bulgarian and Russian.

Speaking three languages is not a big deal when you live in a village where everyone else speaks them.

<comment><USER7> Apologies, I'll amend my previous comment.

>You haven't met many Europeans have you. Not all of them are Dutch, Scandinavian, urban youth, immigrants or throwawaybbb's great-grand-mother.

<comment><USER8> My grandmother knew 6 languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had always hypothesized that numeracy is, besides being generally useful of itself, mostly useful to programmers as application domain knowledge rather than as an indicator of learning programming concepts or programming languages. That said, an awful lot of certain problem domains are heavy in mathematics.

<comment><USER10> (This is armchair psychologist speculation...)

I wonder if numeracy is actually a correlated factor to the propensity for modeling systems, which is very much relevant to learning to program in any programming language. In my anecdotal experience, being fluid with numbers often comes from having a bias towards thinking about the world in terms of numerical relationships.

<comment><USER9> Honestly the biggest benefit I can see with knowing some math beyond basic arithmetic for some types of programming is understanding code complexity and big-O notation.

If you're doing 3D graphics projections you're going to want linear algebra. If you're doing financial forecasts you'll probably want to know calculus. If you're modeling throughput of large menssage-passing systems with multiple cooperating processes you need to know ratios and proportions. If you're the one maintaining the query planner for a database or maintaining a large, high- performance data store you're going to want to understand relational algebra.

For a CRUD application or some light server automation understanding data flows, boolean logic, and some really light set theory helps but is not necessary to get started. There's an awful lot of code out there that is not actuarial, simulation, or engineering code.

People understand things numerically, sure, but also spatially, linguistically, mechanically, or logically. Mathematicians and physicists can give you more precise descriptions of many things that people don't do much math about in their daily lives. Just like people don't need to be linguists to communicate, people don't need to do a lot of heavy math just because the underlying tools are based in math and mathematical logic.

Math can definitely help one understand the system better and excel at optimizing code and solving certain programming issues. And as I said, a lot of the problem domains people write code for are themselves very heavy with math. There's a reason CS grew largely out of mathematics and physics departments at universities, but this study was about understanding the concepts of programming in a high-level language.

<comment><USER10> I don't disagree with you, but as far as I'm aware the study was talking about "numeracy", not math.

From the Wikipedia article on "numeracy":

 _Fundamental (or rudimentary) numeracy skills include understanding of the real number line, time, measurement, and estimation.[3] Fundamental skills include basic skills (the ability to identify and understand numbers) and computational skills (the ability to perform simple arithmetical operations and compare numerical magnitudes).

More sophisticated numeracy skills include understanding of ratio concepts (notably fractions, proportions, percentages, and probabilities), and knowing when and how to perform multistep operations.[3] Two categories of skills are included at the higher levels: the analytical skills (the ability to understand numerical information, such as required to interpret graphs and charts) and the statistical skills (the ability to apply higher probabilistic and statistical computation, such as conditional probabilities).

A variety of tests have been developed for assessing numeracy and health numeracy._

That's just basic arithmetic, not any of the heavy math that you described. I'd argue that for a lot of CRUD apps, numeracy as a skill is quite important - though that's not relevant to the topic of picking up programming languages/concepts.

<comment><USER9> Well, numeracy and "fundamental numeracy" / "rudimentary numeracy" leaves a bit of wiggle room. Conditional probabilities and the ability to interpret charts already are quite a bit more advanced than percentages. None of this is really as helpful as Boolean logic for basic programming skills in a high- level language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They asked the subjects to write a Rock Paper Scissors game in python. Then asked programmers to mark what people did. They unfortunately didn't provide the source code the subjects wrote.

From what I've seen online this is done with an if/else tree which is very far from a good solution.

The way I would model this is with a group [0]. Something you can't possibly see without a very substantial background in mathematics.

Programming has as much to do with learning a programming language as novel writing has to do with learning punctuation.

[0] in Python3.6+:

        import random

        class hand:
            wins = {'r': {'r': 'r', 'p': 'p', 's': 'r'},
                    'p': {'r': 'p', 'p': 'p', 's': 's'},
                    's': {'r': 'r', 'p': 's', 's': 's'}}
            def __init__(self):
                self.value = random.choice(list(hand.wins.keys()))
            def assign(self):
                value = input("enter r, p or s: ")
                assert value in hand.wins.keys()
                self.value = value
            def __mul__(self, other):
                return hand.wins[self.value][other.value]

        if __name__ == "__main__":
            for i in range(10):
                h1 = hand()
                h2 = hand()
                print(f"{h1.value} * {h2.value} = {h1 * h2}")

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't have time to read this whole study, but am a little skeptical of the hypothesis.

Much of natural language aptitude is about fuzzy logic with lots of exceptions (in English at least) and contextual intuition (especially in Chinese). Whereas programming computers requires more mathematical oriented thinking and raw working memory for abstract symbolic logic.

I recall Joel Spolsky (I think) wrote in one of his essays a long time ago, that one of the obstacles to learning programming for some people is that they kept trying to find some kind of meaning in the symbols. Eg they remember things by associating meaning with them. Whereas people who pick up programming more easily have no need to find meaning, they just remember things directly without any kind of association aids.

Natural language is _all_ about meaning on multiple levels - literal, contextual and implicit. Someone naturally good at that may not necessarily be naturally good at programming.

For anyone who read the study, was this addressed in any way?

<comment><USER13> > Much of natural language aptitude is about fuzzy logic with lots of > exceptions (in English at least) and contextual intuition (especially in > Chinese).

Not saying you're wrong, but do you have a source to back up this claim?

<comment><USER14> Linguistics, literature, epistemology, philosophy, cognitive behavior studies,... for starters.

Language is a social construct. What you see on paper or a screen, the vocal sounds you hear as someone speaks, those are just physical representations. They don't carry any inherent meaning.

All human interaction is based on a shared understanding of the world. When I state that "one plus one equals two", I assume that my audience and me agree on what each of those terms in that sentence means. That we share the same frame of reference to assert that statement as true or false.

I could easily invent an entirely new language where the only difference is that the words "two" and "three" swapped meaning. At that point, the sentence "one plus one equals three" carries just as much truth, as long as we share a common understanding of what "three" means.

The difficulty then is that a common understanding of shared meaning isn't always clear cut. Culture, education level, aptitude, personality,... all impact how we perceive and interpret the world, and how we'll use language to build an abstract mental model from which we can can assert our own individual identity.

What many programmers tend to forget is that a "high-level programming language" is exactly that: a vocabulary and a syntax that mimics a natural language which allows you to describe the world. It's NOT merely an abstraction of low level internals of a computer as is often assumed.

Implementing a feature request then consists of interpreting whatever you've read in a spec, user story, brief,... transform that into your own mental model and then express that using the limited formal set of symbols provided by the language. Functional testing is basically verifying if your own unaware assumptions and biases didn't break a shared framework of understanding or created a disconnect between you and the client or the user.

Developers have a penchant for creating new frameworks and languages based on a fallacy: that theirs will be able to somehow "fix" the "fuzzy logic of language", whereas that's inherently impossible. Unless, you're the last person alive with no-one to challenge you on how to interpret of things, that is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The scatter plots seem quite spread out. If you removed one outlier person from the numeracy plot it would be much more correlated. Maybe that person is a special case somehow.

I wonder if there is any formalized way in statistical hypothesis testing to quantify how much the conclusions could be changed by removing at most k (e.g. k=1) number of datapoints.

<comment><USER3> It is suspicious that they had so many with 0 correct answers out of 8. Here are the 4 easier ones of the questions:

> If the chance of getting a disease is 10%, how many people would be expected > to get the disease? Out of 1000?

> If the chance of getting a disease is 20 out of 100, this would be the same > as having a _____% chance of getting the disease.

> Imagine that we roll a fair, six‐sided die 1000 times. Out of 1000 rolls, > how many times do you think the die would come up as an even number?

> In the BIG BUCKS LOTTERY, the chances of winning a $10.00 prize are 1%. What > is your best guess about how many people would win a $10.00 prize if 1000 > people each buy a single ticket from BIG BUCKS?

[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bdm.1751](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bdm.1751)

I guess a lot of people never learn what % mean, and since basically all questions are related to % they would fail just from that. So I'm not sure if this is a good test of numeracy, feels like it relies too much on a few key items.

Edit: Also that test was designed so it gave a normal distribution for a typical population, in this study we see a lot of 0's and then no 1's and 2's. So it feels like the population tested wasn't representative, or some of the students asked just didn't bother with the math questions. Since students are forced to participate I wouldn't be surprised if a few of them just skipped trying at all on the math parts.

<comment><USER16> >> Imagine that we roll a fair, six‐sided die 1000 times. Out of 1000 rolls, how many times do you think the die would come up as an even number?

A classic example of a question you can only answer if you _don 't_ know what you're talking about. I bet they think the answer is 500.

500 is the most likely result, but the odds of actually getting 500 heads on 1000 flips of a fair coin are 2.5%, 1 in 40. A little ways out, at 505 (or 495) heads, the odds have fallen all the way to... 2.4%.

This is kind of like asking "Imagine that we roll a fair, six-sided die one time. Out of that one roll, which number do you think would come up?"

Except, assuming you make the best possible guess both times, you're more than six times as likely to be right for my revised question.

<comment><USER17> Isn't the correct answer _about_ 500? Sure, getting exactly 500 would not be highly probable. But getting approximately 500 would be.

<comment><USER16> Is "approximately 3.5" the answer to "which number will come up when I roll this 6-sided die once?"?

<comment><USER17> The Expected value would be _exactly_ 3.5 ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value#Finite_case](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value#Finite_case) ). But isn't the question malformed since for a single role only one of the discrete values can come up?

<comment><USER16> How is "which number will come up when I roll this die?" better or worse posed than "how many even numbers will come up when I roll this die several times?"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am missing something. This is a study with 36 triallists fitting responses to a relatively high-dimensional model with several input and explanatory variables.

I think one could reasonably expect to see a wide range of outcomes in this circumstance, but it does not seem newsworthy.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have been wondering about this for a while, because I have some anecdata of a few kids with very strong language aptitude but somewhat weak numeracy. And they are pretty advanced for their ages in learning programming.

</comment><comment><USER19> Interesting, although of course these things are very hard to study rigorously. When I did the UnderC interactive interpreter, my hypothesis was that people learn programming better in a 'conversational' setting, just as with human language. It remains an hypothesis - it is probably more true for some people, who just like REPLS :). A stronger case can be made for "interactive rich environment", e.g. the classic LOGO experiments.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't understand how an n=36 study got into Nature in this day and age.

<comment><USER21> This is "Scientific Reports", an open access journal also published by the Nature publishing group. It's not the actual journal "Nature".

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The title should read

"Relating natural language aptitude to differences in learning basic PYTHON programming"

as it doesn't represent other programming discipline (e.g. low-level- programming, concurrency)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm curious as to whether the correlation between natural language aptitude and programming aptitude runs both ways.

</comment><comment><USER24> How many programmers scored higher on verbal SATs than math?</comment>


How to View Latest HN Story Comments? - <AUTHOR> When I check the comments on a post, I'm quite curious to see the latest comments but have to traverse through each branch structure. Is there an easier way to do this? <comment><USER2> Python 2. It works in FF on linuxmint at least. Save to hnlatest.py and run it from the command line, giving the url of a comment thread. It opens a new tab in your browser, latest comments at the bottom. "Tested" by inspection. :)

It would have been cooler to make a bookmarklet in javascript, but I didn't want to learn javascript for this.

      import re
      import sys
      import tempfile
      import urllib2
      import webbrowser

      try:
          url = sys.argv[1]
          page = urllib2.urlopen(url)
      except Exception as e:
          print 'How to run: python hnlatest.py url'
          sys.exit(2)

      items = re.findall(']+>', page.read())
      items = sorted(set([x.split('=')[2].split('"')[0] for x in items]))

      items = ['https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=' + x for x in items]

      with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(delete=False, suffix='.html') as tfile:
          for i in items:
              tfile.write('' + i + '' + '
\n')

          webbrowser.open_new_tab('file://' + tfile.name)

</comment><comment><USER3> CMD or CTRL+F "minutes ago"</comment>


Ask HN: What are some interesting applications of Bitcoin aside from currency? - <AUTHOR>

For example, there is a "proof of existence" being built using the Bitcoin protocol [0] and a distributed prediction market [1]. And this great post by Albert Wenger of USV hints at a universe of possibilities [2].<p>I'm very interested in what else is possible, and what else is currently being built. My guess is that others are as well. Thanks!<p>[0] http://www.proofofexistence.com/about [1] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/bitcoin-research-in-princeton-cs/ [2] http://www.usv.com/posts/bitcoin-as-protocol <comment><USER2> So many:

\- Distributed stock market. By using colored coins, for example Bitshares, Protoshares, Zerocoin and Mastercoin.

\- Distributed Document registry and notarization.

\- Market prediction applications (distributed consensus)

\- Foreign Currency transmission (you can move dollars, euros and yens using bit coins). Look into the Ripple project.

\- Scientific data mining. Using currency mining to solve scientific problems. For example, the Primecoin project.

\- Stateless companies: [http://firstblockchain.com](http://firstblockchain.com)

\- Online lotteries

\- Online giveaways

\- Micro-crowdfunding

\- Content monetization

\- Machine to machine payment

\- Distributed digital signatures

\- Stateless IDs, passports, etc

\- Corporate memoranda automation

\- Government transparency projects

\- New Internets (Public and private). See the Namecoin project

I could go on forever, but I hope you get the picture. Bitcoin is truly disruptive.

@jordhy

<comment><AUTHOR> This is awesome! Thanks. I love the what's possible with the technology but think that a currency actually under-utilizes its potential.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Bitcoin code was used for Namecoin, which provides decentralized DNS as well as decentralized CA (credentials free of any certificate authority.)

Bitcoin can be used for proving notice. (Replacing say, newspaper classified ads for the same purpose.) Bitcoin will become the ultimate notary.

Bitcoin makes it possible to wire gold. For example, you walk into a gold shop and hand him some physical gold in return for BTC, which you send to your grandma in Asia. She then walks into a gold shop in Africa and leaves with physical gold.

...Thus, Bitcoin can be used for wiring anything.

Bitcoin, via colored coins, makes it possible to issue real-world assets without having to trust a central entity to control the ledger.

Bitcoin makes it possible to run exchanges anonymously, at a profit.

Similarly, Bitcoin makes it possible to operate bazaars anonymously at a profit. (Silk Road being one infamous example.)

Similarly, Bitcoin makes it possible to operate prediction markets anonymously at a profit. These have the potential to drive scientific progress as well as political change.

...Basically, Bitcoin makes it possible to operate many many things anonymously at a profit.

Bitcoin makes it possible to eliminate capital controls. There's the basic concept of using Bitcoin to move funds across controlled borders, but it goes much deeper.

...For example, let's say that there are capital controls in Argentina, which drive up the Bitcoin price to 130% of its price in the USA. This means that a beef exporter in Argentina, who prices his beef in Bitcoins, will be able to undercut all the other Argentinean beef exporters by 15%, while simultaneously earning 15% more money for his sales. Therefore Bitcoin is destined to eliminate all capital controls.

</comment><comment><USER4> Would it be possible to use bitcoin for digital voting? Once a vote is in the blockchain it can't be altered anymore, greatly reducing the change of election fraud. Or am I missing something?</comment>


Show HN: Ninox – Human friendly database to create your own business application - <AUTHOR> https://ninoxdb.de/en <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys. This is Ninox team.

We are happy to answer your questions.

Looking forward to your feedback and comments.</comment>


Slice and Carve: The Next Wave in Computer-Aided Creativity - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/slice-and-carve-the-next-wave-in-computer-aided-creativity/?_r=0 <comment><USER2> I think "technology" has become synonymous with mobile technology and their screens. Too much attention is being drawn to phones, while changing our ability to communicate with each other, our ability to physically manipulate the world has not moved forward.

On top of that, 3D printers and laser cutting machines are still pretty expensive. It will take about a decade before they are within reach to everybody.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cost is one thing I'm not worried about. Makerbot lead the way by making an additive 3D ready-to-use printer available at <$3k. Now Dremel's got a consumer 3D printer at $1k. There are credible projects to get small-build- volume 3D printers down at $250 and Peachy's taking a reasonable swing to get it under $100 (disclaimer: kickstarter backer).

Glowforge is now tackling this for lasers. We're still a ways away from shipping, but we're already confident we can get the price under that of a Makerbot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Laser cutters are probably where it is at. They are lower maintenance, faster and can make sturdier objects. But not like this: "A camera inside the laser cutting chamber and image processing in the cloud will take the place of a part called a motion planner." Great, now we have a printer that needs a high speed internet connection to proprietary servers just to operate, after uploading everything you print to the cloud. As if the shenanigans that the inkjet people pull are not bad enough, think of how anti-consumer and anti- maker this is going to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hear you. As we set out to design the Glowforge, we did not make the decision lightly to engineer it as a network-native device. It makes the experience better in many ways - lower cost, more powerful, and easier to use - but the flip side is that if you're not connected, you can't use it. That's a real drawback.

That said, we prefer our Dropcams to our closed circuit TVs and our Fitbits to our pedometers. We realize that some people may not like the tradeoffs we made, but we hope some folks are as excited about it as we are.

<comment><USER3> Ethically if it is truly nothing more than a cost saving measure, you'll do the $0 option and release a completely unsupported server disk image for people to self-host on their LAN. Think of how much money you can save on CPU and network ingress.

On a purely technical side, I have a strong suspicion that "cost saving" is a smokescreen. A camera would be useful for quality assurance, A/B testing new routing equations and at most calibrating the origin point of the bed. But maybe I am a little jaded from SimCity 5.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For everybody who was into legos as a child there is the ultimate open source laser cutter: [http://www.lasersaur.com](http://www.lasersaur.com)

Build it like this: [http://www.lasersaur.com/manual/build/](http://www.lasersaur.com/manual/build/)

Control it with your browser: [http://www.lasersaur.com/manual/software](http://www.lasersaur.com/manual/software)

Disclaimer: I have a Lasersaur an I am a dev person for it.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would love to be able to pair their 3d printer with this ipad laser cutter design app: [http://www.zotebookapp.com/](http://www.zotebookapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> What exactly makes it a "3D" laser cutter?

Also I have to call out Mr. Wingfield for calling a milling machine a "reverse 3D printer". Really!?

</comment><comment><USER7> I love my othermill. I ended up investing in the company.</comment>


Ask HN: Is jQuery really awful for Single Page Apps? - <AUTHOR>

This is what I see when I read the introduction to backbone.js

    When working on a web application that involves a
    lot of JavaScript, one of the first things
    you learn is to stop tying your data to the DOM. It's
    all too easy to create JavaScript
    applications that end up as tangled piles of jQuery
    selectors and callbacks, all trying frantically to keep
    data in sync between the HTML UI, your JavaScript logic,
    and the database on your server. For rich client-side
    applications, a more structured approach is often
    helpful.
 Is this really justified? Meaning is learning and writing more javascript code a solution to the potential problem highlighted in that paragraph? I am not convinced because I can do so much more in my head using jQuery nor have I experienced a great deal of difficulty for building Single Page Applications with a LAMP backend. <comment><USER2> It depends on the project's complexity, and also on how many generations of developers have dogpiled horrible kludges onto the original code base.

For simple apps, it doesn't matter much. Do what gets you in front of users soonest.

For more complex apps with a lot of client-side state, you may quickly find yourself outside of jQuery's intended use case. Note that simple apps often become much more complex under ongoing development.

What creates problems is trying to pile on a lot of questionable commits without enough structure or organization, and trying to shoehorn it into use cases which it's really not appropriate for. In practice, these situations occur much more often than people anticipate.

<comment><AUTHOR> do you think that it's better to rewrite the jQuery app with a framework like Backbone.js once it reaches an increased level of complexity and developers or should it be built from scratch with Backbone.js or a framework like Ember.js or JavascriptMVC in the beginning? It seems awfully slower than just cranking something out in jQuery but I will admit that something like JavascriptMVC looks rather nice.

Ideally I would like to avoid having to hunt down jQuery libraries by using one of these frameworks. For example, I am already relying on the following libraries:

LAB.js (because I discovered some edge case where things don't load in order)

Cookie.js

Mustache.js

JSON3.js

These are rather great for displaying JSON data in a template with jQuery but I had to actively look for these things.

<comment><USER2> If you're going to be building or maintaining apps in JavaScript, it's absolutely worth your time to learn tools like Backbone, Angular, Ember, or something else in that vein.

If you're more concerned with building a business, the optimization criteria are different. Your priority should be building the business - or at least building enough of the business that you can start acquiring customers and pitching to investors. That gets you runway, market leverage, knowledge of _what_ you should be building to acquire and keep customers.

You can worry about implementation details like tech stack after the business exists. Worrying about it before you know the business is even valid is premature optimization. You are orders of magnitude more likely to fail because you _don 't_ _start_ than because you chose the "wrong" tools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm a huge fan of both Backbone (I'd recommend using Marionette though) and jQuery, and I've spent the last 3 years building single page apps with both. The number one thing that Backbone makes easier is testing - by abstracting your code away from the UI and in to encapsulated blocks of models and views you can write unit tests much, much more easily. When you start doing things with promises (and you will) you'll find it's so, so much better. Debugging a race condition between two jQuery events because something bubbled up further than it was supposed to is a full-on nightmare.

<comment><USER4> You may have a look into angular testing. Karma/Testacular is just awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I expect backbone forces you to follow good principles such as separation of concerns (data-model from UI code etc.)

However, it's still possible to follow good principles using your own design and JQuery, which means you're tied into one less framework and have more flexibility.

If you're developing with a small team, or on your own, then maybe you're disciplined enough to go down the more flexible JQuery route.

If you've got a larger team, then maybe you need the more rigorous constraints of a framework like backbone to make sure everyone is coding to a sensible structure, and you don't end up with 5 design ideas merged together in one big mess.

That's my thoughts anyway. Frameworks can offer essential constraints to help avoid a mess but they might be an unnecessary burden of constraints aren't required.

If I was doing a project on my own. I'd use JQuery and unshackle myself from a higher level framework. If I was working in a team, I'd favour the safety of a framework to prevent too many people doing things their own way.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the best approach to single-page apps is _simplicity_ and _elegance_ (and often they coincide). You will need some abstraction to achieve simplicity and elegance, and in the end you will be more productive. That's it.

<rant>I have a personal aversion for jQuery... It's awful because you probably don't need 99% of it.</rant></comment>


New "university" from Marginal Revolution bloggers - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/09/introducing-mruniversity-spread-the-word.html

<comment><USER2> Marginal Revolution is a kindred spirit to Hacker News. I view MRUniversity as the economics equivalent to Udacity. I have very high hopes for this site!</comment>


Dystopian dreams: on feminist science fiction - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/25/dystopian-dreams-how-feminist-science-fiction-predicted-the-future <comment><USER2> _And Atwood had a horrifyingly prescient eye for how a state like Gilead could come to exist: "… after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time … Newspapers were censored and some were closed down, for security reasons they said. The road-blocks began to appear, and Identipasses. Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn't be too careful." Eventually, women's bank accounts are frozen, taken away from them, women are fired from their jobs. It happens step by step. How do you boil a frog? You turn the heat up slowly._

Stories are good at illustrating points in an argument, but not at helping to predict the future. Books need to be fun to read, so realism will give in to the needs of the plot eventually.

<comment><USER3> Have you read The Handmaid's Tale, or are you judging its realism based on the columnist synopsis you quoted?

<comment><USER2> I've read the plot summary on Wikipedia and am judging its realism based on the quote, yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 3 more days: [https://www.humblebundle.com/books/women-of-scifi-and- fantas...](https://www.humblebundle.com/books/women-of-scifi-and-fantasy-book- bundle)

Includes Octavia Butler's _Parable of the Sower_ for $1.

</comment><comment><USER5> You know, I don't have much use for modern day third-wave feminism, but I kinda would like to read more hard Sci-Fi written by women. I've noticed that Sci-Fi written by men tends to envision societies where there's lots of casual sex in ways that I suspect women would not appreciate. I wonder what kind of societies women dream up and what the male-female relationships are like in them. At least, when they're not stuck on making some ham-fisted point on current-day gender relations.

<comment><USER6> The escape pod and their sibling podcasts have a periodic "Artemis rising" series where they concentrate on non-male authors. There's no agenda as far as the content goes, so there's a good mixture of ideas. [http://escape- artists.wikia.com/wiki/Artemis_Rising](http://escape- artists.wikia.com/wiki/Artemis_Rising)

If you're after some interesting views on relationships, I remember the "Boris's Bar" and "Chimeras" were fun, but there's much more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _The Handmaid 's Tale_ was made into a movie in 1990. It's an OK movie. The upcoming TV show is apparently a spinoff.

</comment><comment><USER8> > with the sudden accession to power of a theocracy in the United States

 _really_?

<comment><USER9> That sentence is quite clearly describing the setting of the book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > How do you boil a frog? You turn the heat up slowly.

Obligatory reminder that you won't be able to boil a frog by slowly turning the heat up, it would jump out. It would be nice if people stopped using this common misconception as a metaphor.

<comment><USER11> Man, I agree, I've trying to kill two birds with one stone for the last couple of years to no avail. It just doesn't happen.

<comment><USER12> Have you tried using a bigger stone?

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, I really didn't know about all that and I feel I've been lied to for so much time! Nobody ever told me who wrote Frankenstein, and what the theme was. It's deeply interesting and deeply disturbing, considering what we missed.</comment>


Is My Credit Card Stolen? (A ruse to educate people about phishing) - <AUTHOR> http://ismycreditcardstolen.com/ <comment><USER2> Interesting concept!

I'd remove the negativity from the start. Putting "This is a test, you have failed it" right in front of folks is an _instant_ turn-off, and might lead people away from your page instead of to the helpful content below.

More bullet points. There's not a whole lot of text there now, but anything you can do to get the message across with fewer words is a win, especially when dealing with non-technical folks.

Under "look at the address bar", you have: _A common phishing trick is to have a domain like amazon.com.not.ru, which steals your credentials when you try to log in. The actual domain in this example is "not.ru," but people often only check to see if the string "amazon.com" is anywhere in the address bar._

I'd change that to not use the word "string" since non-tech-folks don't parse that very well, and maybe include screenshots of an address bar containing the real Amazon.com and a phishing site disguised as Amazon.

Still though, good idea!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions. If you want to make changes, you can fork <http://github.com/pquerna/darwintest> .

Edit: I used the "you fail" message because I think it makes people more likely to remember it. I wanted to say something like "your credit card has been stolen. kthxbye." but that would have caused some false alarms.

It's hard to have a memorable message without it causing offense or panic.

Also on my TODO: add a counter for those who put 16 digits in the credit card field.

Extra edit: nfriendly: Thanks for the styling suggestion.

<comment><USER3> On the same vein as the post above, a little vertical spacing between the bullet points would go a long way toward improving readability:

      li { margin:12px 0; }

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "If asked for your password, do not give it out. Real websites will never ask you for your password. (Login forms excepted, of course.)"

This is confusing, in my opinion. It's hard to explain the difference between a login form and a page asking for your password, so it's probably worth just leaving this out. Any phisher worth his salt makes the page asking for a password look like a login form anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. It will be fixed whenever pquerna gets back from the Cassandra get-together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1) Create an online form that doesn't take input, and call it "educational".

2) Get a bunch of educated people to review it for 3-5 days and approve of it.

3) Wait until the educated people send links of this to their non-internet literate friends, for education, shits and harmless giggles.

4) Switch to a live form that _captures_ data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Clever idea, but it's not hard to find out the identities of those behind this site. They'd get busted for fraud pretty quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Could you perhaps write some Javascript to check the check digit and submit just whether it was correct or not? Then you could have some stats on how many people are gullible vs. just curious.

</comment><comment><USER7> You know what, this is a phisher's dream. Even if we could trust this website for not saving the data, the connection is a regular non-secure connection, so all somebody would have to do is catch some open wireless connections or similar.

<comment><AUTHOR> View the HTML source. The credit card inputs aren't part of the form. They're never sent across the wire.

<comment><USER6> This doesn't matter. If the connection is intercepted, the credit card inputs suddenly can be part of the form.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true for any non-https site. They could inject stuff into wellsfargo.com or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The site's started to hit Firefox's "Reported Web Forgery!" page...

"This web page at ismycreditcardstolen.com has been reported as a web forgery and has been blocked based on your security preferences."

</comment><comment><USER9> How responsible is this if you allow the domain to expire someday - or your email gets hacked and a foreign party takes control over your domain name?

</comment><comment><USER10> I havent particularly been following it, but is there any real solution to phishing? with punycode domains and arbitrary tld's, along with characters that look the same in a lot of fonts, l and I, people need a cs degree to figure out if they are being phished.

I guess paypal and a small number of verified payment processors, (or real online banking) are about the only option.

<comment><USER11> Yes, Use bookmarks on a trusted computer or better yet type any sensitive domains. Typing www.paypal.com is easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Last week, I posted something similar to proggit using the youtube redirect exploit.

During its three-hour run, nearly 6000 people (20%) tried to give me their google account credentials.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bpy7h/think_you...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bpy7h/think_youre_immune_to_phishing_attacks_see_if_you/)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is remarkably similar to the site my friend Leon set up, which he artfully called "Creditcardology" - see <http://secretgeek.net/cco/CCO.HTM>

</comment><comment><USER14> They are banned now...

So anti-phishing folks got accused for phishing. Looks it was technically nice idea but terrible user experience.

Unless of course there WAS a hidden agenda here.

<comment><USER15> Okay, that explains why I couldn't understand what you guys were talking about and all I got was a "Warning: Suspected phishing site!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I submitted no data and it still said I failed the test?

<comment><USER17> I guess you're not supposed to submit these kind of forms, even if empty.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nah, I'm just lazy and didn't write any JavaScript to validate the inputs.

Edit: yeah I would normally never use JS for validation.

<comment><USER6> You rely on JavaScript to validate your inputs?

Edit: although I suppose you can have an exception in this case :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I tried to find a way to pass the test and couldn't. Could someone explain to me how to pass?

<comment><USER19> A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Aha! Online credit-card-information catcher?

</comment><comment><USER21> I'll mail this link to my mom right away.

</comment><comment><USER22> The meat of the site is this page: <http://ismycreditcardstolen.com/check.html></comment>


Music exposure differentially alters BDNF and NGF levels in mouse hypothalamus - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304394007010981?via%3Dihub <comment><AUTHOR> Just use sci-hub to get around the paywall</comment>


Zimbabwe offers new exchange rate: $1 for 35,000,000,000,000,000 old dollars - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/12/zimbabwe-offers-new-exchange-rate-1-for-35000000000000000-old-dollars <comment><USER3> Brazil did this in the 90's but with a twist: they created a transition currency, the URV (Real unit of value), and the people believed when they introduced (1:1 to URV) new currency (R$ or Real).

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-f...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how- fake-money-saved-brazil)

<comment><USER4> I think Greece should introduce a currency like that and pay pensions and government employees in it. It should have a floating exchange rate to the Euro. They should call it the 'faux'

<comment><USER5> Please don't bring this kind of comment here. It's pretty much impossible for a flippant joke about shredding a large group of people's pensions to result in productive discussion.

<comment><USER6> It's a serious idea, presented in a sarcastic way.

Defaulting on all Euro debts, exiting Europe, bankrupting the banks, issuing a new currency is a viable solution. Yes it's a horrible hang over to live through but it means removing the horrendous debt burden for the next 50 years. See how Greece is having trouble with every IMF payment in the past few months? If the EU has its way Greece will continue paying chunks of cash like those for decades to come. Better to burn everything down and start over. They might even pick up some Russian and Chinese financial support along the way.

<comment><USER4> Well I was thinking mostly of what options does Greece has if it is not allowed to print money to get out of debt. The Brazilian virtual currency, named the opposite of virtual, was an interesting idea. Another alternative could be for them to have an aggressive sales tax domestically while giving tax relief for exports, basically making them competitive internationally while their money doesn't go as far locally, but I think EU rules forbid this sort of subsidy.

<comment><USER7> Another idea would be to multiply pension plans with whatever the drachma to euro ratio ends up being - that way only the world bank suffers and the pensioners can keep their standard of living. They would likely have to do something similar for employees and business owners, but that would still be manageable.

<comment><USER8> Ultimately everyone is going to take a haircut. Creditors and pensioners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is not new thing, it happened in Germany, Turkey, Yugoslavia... but yes, in Zimbabwe is exaggerated. I bought some bills of hyperinflated currencies through Ebay:

One hundred trillion dollars of Zimbabwe.

50 million marks of between wars Germany.

Some millions of Turkish lira.

<comment><USER10> The ironic thing is a million Zimbabwean dollars is worth far more as a novelty note sold on ebay, than it is as currency in it's own country.

<comment><USER11> "The hyperinflated, worthless Marks became widely collected abroad. The Los Angeles Times estimated in 1924 that more of the decommissioned notes were spread about the United States than existed in Germany."

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Zimbabwe: proof that even when shit goes completely off the rails, people can be cowed into putting up with it. At least they didn't go on an international ethnic cleansing binge like the Nazis did.

<comment><USER13> [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1099467/Mugabes- geno...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1099467/Mugabes-genocide-The- images-despair-reveal-horror-Zimbabwe.html)

You are right, this cleansing is only within their borders...

<comment><USER14> I know people there.

Brilliant country with a lot of potential. Psychotic leadership - it's far worse and more violent than a lot of people realise. (As in - <USER2> dissenters down mine shafts violent.)

The West is partly to blame. Mugabe and Zanu-PF aren't going anywhere while Zim remains a cheap under-the-counter source of diamonds and minerals.

<comment><USER15> The book "The scramble for Africa", a history of colonialism in Africa written in 1991, has this upbeat assessment of Mugabe as representative of a new breed of progressive African leaders: "his creed was pragmatic African nationalism .. he told the new nation that the 'wrongs of the past must be forgiven and forgotten'. Mugabe was a statesman in the making." How depressing that this turned out to be so wide of the mark.

<comment><USER16> A friend reminded me of [http://www.petertatchell.net/direct_action/mugabe.htm](http://www.petertatchell.net/direct_action/mugabe.htm) . How much could've been avoided if we'd been willing to enforce our laws?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how quickly the US dollar would inflate if it was no longer the "global reserve".

We print and waste an enormous amount of money compared to other countries that don't have that luxury.

<comment><USER18> This is false. Japan has been doing QE long before we have, and is fine (actually they weren't even able to get inflation for a very long time).

Printing money doesn't necessarily mean inflation is going to happen. There are so many factors involved, and the fact of the matter is the market cares about other things more than supply.

<comment><USER19> Printing money, and putting it into circulation, in values that exceed economic growth always results in inflation.

Inflation is trivial to cause. Deflation takes a bit more work and discipline, and is subject to the requirement that economic growth exceed increase in money supply - but the method behind it is well understood.

The challenge is to keep your inflation at a low, reasonable level - say 3-5%. I don't think anybody has figured out a repeatable method to do that.

<comment><USER20> It is trivial to cause inflation, but central banks are either not allowed or ideologically opposed to effective means of putting money in circulation. Many central banks have printed enormous amounts of money and inflated the currency less than they would like to because they're buying second-hand bonds with the printed money. They've been really frustrated with the inefficiency of this, which I find amusing and slightly suspicious. Just printing money and giving it away doesn't necessarily cause short-term inflation. The way in which it is done is the key.

<comment><USER19> I absolutely guarantee you that if the US government just started cranking out a tax return to its citizens, inflation would return with great efficiency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> At what point is the paper/materials worth more than the money printed on it?

<comment><USER22> I'm pretty sure that happened a long time ago. But the latent value of the materials is hard to recover--you could recycle the paper, but that requires a lot of expensive equipment, and there are many accessible sources of pulp which are easier to collect. Such an endeavor would inevitably fail because it lacks the efficiencies of scale.

As an interesting aside, US pennies minted before 1982 contain $0.018 worth of copper. It's not nearly the problem that Zimbabwe has, because pennies makes up so little of the US currency in circulation. But one might think an enterprising entrepreneur could profit from this. But again the problem falls to inefficiencies of scale: you simply can't harvest and sort enough pennies quickly enough to make the effort worthwhile (machinery even exists for this purpose).

<comment><USER16> I remember someone observing that physical currency from 100 years ago was worth more than you'd've made by investing it in stocks, property, or any financial instrument you care to think of for those 100 years.

<comment><USER23> Maybe if you have a rare and beautifully printed treasury bond, it's worth more than the (now antique) cash it cost!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It is strange using an ATM in Zimbabwe in that it dispenses US dollars. Unlike most US ATMs, it will dispense fifties and hundreds. Larger notes are mostly clean, but dollar bills are absolutely filthy. They are used until they fall apart.

Notes are US, but coins are South African rands.

<comment><USER25> Ecuador also uses the US dollar as currency, cash machines dispense $20s and $50s.

Tourists from the USA should bring $1 coins and leave $1 notes at home, people don't like the notes as they get dirty.

Ecuador mints coins (1, 5, 10, 25, 50¢) which are the same shape as US ones, and interchangeable in Ecuador.

<comment><USER26> That would be nice, but with weight restrictions being what they are particularly on international flights, toting along an extra two pounds of $100 in coins is unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Romania changed their currency way back, but they kept the name of the currency equal, and they even kept using the old currency for some time.

So, there I was, getting money from the ATM, thinking I had hit the jackpot :)

<comment><USER28> It's super confusing, even today.

In France something similar happened, one day a poor man came up to me and asked me 'Tu n'as pas cent balles?' or something to that effect, I thought it a bit curious that he'd ask for 100 euros but in fact he was asking for 100 'old' francs, which would translate into roughly 25 eurocents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You have to do the Dr Evil voice when reading those denominations aloud

</comment><comment><USER29> I still really want to get a few bags full of Zimbabwean notes and use it to wallpaper a room one day. You'd think that would be easy living in a country right next to them..

</comment><comment><USER30> Guinea is working is way up there slowly but steadily. We are at $1 = 7249.95 franc. And you basically spend it at the same value. It's time to reset a large part of Africa.

<comment><USER31> Doesn't the franc have a fixed conversion rate with the euro ?

Oh ok I see, that's the real Guinea you're talking about, not one of the other Guineas. Do you know the reason why Guinea doesn't just use CFA francs ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Anyone got a spare 1Trillion note they could send me?

<comment><USER33> You can just buy some on eBay.

I once made a wager (which I lost) with a friend for "a million dollars" as a joke, but then found that you can just buy trillions (at the time) of zimbabwean dollars easily, so I bought some and delivered :) Funnily, they sell it on eBay at a price higher than their exchange rate (and that's excluding shipping).

<comment><USER34> >Funnily, they sell it on eBay at a price higher than their exchange rate

Doing the opposite of that would mean a man delivering letters with money in them with nothing in return. Sounds too philanthropic, especially when we're talking about money here.

<comment><USER33> I haven't thought about it this way, this actually makes sense. Insane margins threw me off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> They need to use exponential notations! 10^20.

</comment><comment><USER36> Yugoslavia also had huge hyperinflation in the 90s - [http://www.rogershermansociety.org/yugoslavia.htm](http://www.rogershermansociety.org/yugoslavia.htm)

 _Between October 1, 1993 and January 24, 1995 prices increased by 5 quadrillion percent. That's a 5 with 15 zeroes after it._

</comment><comment><USER37> Zimbabwe. A prime use case for Bitcoin?

"At the height of the country's economic crisis, Zimbabweans had to carry plastic bags bulging with banknotes to buy basic goods. Prices were rising at least twice a day."

Bitcoin is often cited as being volatile. Its never been anywhere near as volatile as that ^ (at least not in the last 2 years)

<comment><USER38> Yeah, all the poor people without access to electricity would love Bitcoin.

<comment><USER39> Most people in Zimbabwe have electricity. Zimbabwe has 97% mobile penetration: [http://afkinsider.com/20015/report-zimbabwe-has-97-mobile- pe...](http://afkinsider.com/20015/report-zimbabwe-has-97-mobile-penetration/) Last time I checked their phones didn't run on magic, but on electricity :) And all you need to use Bitcoin is a cellphone (a $20 smartphone).

(No I am not seriously suggesting Zimbabwe uses Bitcoin. I am just pointing out you seem to incorrectly think all people in African countries live in huts or something.)

<comment><USER40> > Most people in Zimbabwe have electricity. ... you seem to incorrectly think > all people in African countries live in huts

I know people who live in good houses in affluent parts of one of the largest cities in South Africa, and they don't have electricity 24/7 [http://loadshedding.eskom.co.za/loadshedding/description](http://loadshedding.eskom.co.za/loadshedding/description).

<comment><USER41> It's quite likely your friend uses a generator or inverter. It is quite likely 24/7.

Load shedding's occurrences have also only been something more recent (past few months).

<comment><USER40> Generators are still fairly rare in the suburbs. Load shedding has been in SA for several years now.

<comment><USER41> It's been there for several years conceptually as a plan to deal with limited capacity. Meaning it comes and goes.

For the good part of the last 3 years it's hardly been there (so unnoticeable one would probably say power is hardly/never cut). Its just been more impactful in the past few months & the last few months of last year.

Generators/Inverters aren't rare in the suburbs or in the further outlying areas. At least not anymore. Not everyone, but one could hear someone else's close by/a neighbors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> They say quadrillion; shouldn't this be quintillion?

<comment> white-flame No, quadrillion in the common short scale:

      35,000 = thousand
      35,000,000 = million
      35,000,000,000 = billion
      35,000,000,000,000 = trillion
      35,000,000,000,000,000 = quadrillion

In the long scale, this would be a "thousand billion" (or apparently also a "billiard" according to wikipedia), so not a quintillion there either.

It boils down to denoting thousands of thousands, not just the raw number of triplet zeros in the number.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> It probably doesn't help that education systems in countries like Zimbabwe is barely able to teach basic numerical skills to a large part of their population.

(I don't want to imply this is necessarily the case in Zimbabwe, or everywhere in Africa, but I've heard in some MOOC that people in developing countries tend to have numerical problems with prices)

<comment> nevi-me Unless the standard's changed in the years, we (South Africans) view Zimbabweans as having a very good education system, extending to math literacy. Perhaps that view might be biased as most of the Zimbabweans we would be exposed to (or any other country really) would be the 'cream of the crop' due to the best and able affording to get scholarships to study in other countries.

BTW, I'm 25, so I'm talking about things that I've seen in varsity from 7 years back to this day where I interact with varsity students.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you believe that you can write secure code and applications? - <AUTHOR> What the title says basically.
I'm doing some research for a thesis and I'm looking for some feedback on this question. When I say secure, I mean : - Do you think that the code you write is exempt of basic/common vulnerabilities ?
 - If you think so, where/how did you learn to ? - Is there a process in your company to check for those vulnerabilities ? <comment><USER2> >Do you believe that you can write secure code and applications?

Code? Sure, applications? Nope, they run on systems outside our control

>Do you think that the code you write is exempt of basic/common vulnerabilities?

Not the same question as above, yes.

>Where/how did you learn to?

We do cybersecurity training at work.

>Is there a process in your company to check for those vulnerabilities?

Penetration Testing.</comment>


Show HN: GoldenLayout – JavaScript Layout Manager - <AUTHOR> https://golden-layout.com/ <comment><USER3> Commercial javascript libraries have a tough stance. "Free for non-commercial" is essentially meaningless, since there is no clear definition of commercial use. For me, I wouldn't even consider including such a library into any software (OS or commercial) which runs on multiple domains/servers/computers, because it makes licensing and scaling less flexible.

To justify a licensing price, a javascript library needs to offer huge, peerless, hard to imitate functionality, stable code base, rapid bug-fixing and preferably a paid team working on it.

Which isn't to say that nobody will buy it. At $99 per site even one or two dozens of customers would cover the development costs.

<comment><USER4> I disagree. 99 is a very reasonable price. I pay much more for IDEs, tools, libraries, services, support, and infrastructure. 99 is a reasonable one-time cost, all things considered (assuming it works on all modern browsers and mobile).

<comment><USER5> It is hard to justify unless you know you need it. IDEs get used on multiple projects. This license is per site. IDEs often have some kind of trial or at least you got to play with it on your friend's computer first. But "commercial use" could include testing it in your commercial application.

I prefer licenses that are based on how much something gets used. So, free if your site has small traffic or maybe free if the number of developers using it is small. That lets me use it in experimental projects or personal side projects (which may or may not make money and hence may be commercial) but not have to pay until the project grows large enough to be worth buying something like this.

I think the only library I've ever bought for a web project was $30 for a site license. It was when I worked at a company and multiple projects were going to use it and run from the same domain.

<comment><USER6> As someone who has worked at a job where spending $40 on an IDE was a big a deal, I can see where you're coming from. My current job doesn't bat an eye unless it's over $1000, so I know it's all relative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've not looked in detail, but I'm not so sure about the security of generating windows via URL parameters. I feel like there's an XSS in that for sure.

Edit: there is [https://golden-layout.com/?gl- window=%7B%22g%22%3A%5B%7B%22o...](https://golden-layout.com/?gl- window=%7B%22g%22%3A%5B%7B%22o%22%3A%22Layout%22%2C%22l%22%3A%225%22%2C%22h%22%3A%22demo%22%2C%22i%22%3A%7B%22bg%22%3A%22%5C%22%3E%3Csvg%20onload%3Dalert\(1\)%3E%22%7D%2C%22n%22%3A%220%22%7D%5D%7D)

Please don't chastise me for disclosure ethics, this one was low-hanging fruit.

<comment><AUTHOR> good point. What it passes via URL parameter is URL encoded JSON - which is parsed using JSON.parse()... so shouldn't expose an attack vector. The alternative - creating about:blank windows and moving DOM elements into them comes with a wealth of glitches and restrictions

<comment><USER7> I edited my original post to include a working XSS exploit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow...impressive. Even though this is not so much a weakness o f Goldenlayout as rather the particular image component I use on the startpage. Still though, thanks. Remind me to hire you if I want to get back at someone.

<comment><USER7> Usually I work to prevent problems rather than create them but hey I could be the antagonist in someone's novel. I doubt that's not the only exploit in the library either. I could go through it with a finer toothed comb if you wanted.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd be forever grateful. I imagine this one to be quite tough since it's ultimately up to the user to create and read serializable state objects for their components.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am always interested to see ways that people apply different layout ideas to code.

The Golden Section is a number considered to produce the most aesthetically pleasing ratios of things. A playing card's dimensions are usually roughly the same ratio: 1:1.618

For the past few hundred years print designers have been aware of the Golden Section and have been working it into their page sizes and margins - so wether it's beautiful and that's why we use it, or we use it and that's why it's beautiful - there's no question that we are familiar with seeing this design tool be used in print.

This looks like a library to help integrate some of those layout ideals into your code in ways that would be tricky or cost a lot of time to implement otherwise.

<comment><USER9> The 'Golden Section' is mystical bullshit.

A 1:1.618 ratio has some geometric properties that are useful in rare situations, but the idea that it is "aesthetically pleasing" is completely unfounded.

Explanation here: [http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/pseudo/fibonacc.htm](http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/pseudo/fibonacc.htm)

<comment><USER10> That guy's wound a little too tightly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We built something like this for our online 3D modeling/publishing/rendering tool: [https://Clara.io](https://Clara.io)

I was just looking if it makes sense to adopt, but our needs are pretty customized compared to what is offered here. But a lot of it is similar. Maybe if we were starting over, this would make sense and we could have adopted it.

Screenshot of our tab/multiple window UI: [http://exocortex.com/img/blog/OneYear_ModelingTab.png](http://exocortex.com/img/blog/OneYear_ModelingTab.png)

I think this is a real contribution though, especially if others build upon it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Creative Commons licensed?

Q: Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software?

A: We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering licenses made available by the Free Software Foundation or listed as "open source" by the Open Source Initiative.

[https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#...](https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_apply_a_Creative_Commons_license_to_software.3F)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, but its a legal construct that allows to offer something "free for non- commercial use"

<comment><USER13> I suppose that is true, but most devs that want to do that just offer a dual license. GPL license, but you can purchase commercial license to remove GPL restrictions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Would you happen to know if there any downsides or upsides to either? To be completely honest, I looked at under which model HighCharts operates and did a similar thing.

<comment><USER14> It's probable that HighCharts chose CC BY-NC because there has not been a clear legal consensus (much less any sort of case law) on whether proprietary/minified Javascript linking to a GPL'd Javascript library is in violation of the GPL. If you want to prevent that type of use of your library without people paying for a license, then CC BY-NC might be a viable choice.

For a sampling of how complex the legal issues around the GPL are: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Lin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works)

However, note that, say, an MIT licensed or BSD licensed or Apache licensed project, developed for noncommercial use, would be _prevented_ from using your library for their layout, because then the non-commercialness of the CC BY-NC could "infect" their project and prevent them from using those licenses. For instance, the Highcharts license caused this project to switch to a competing library altogether: [https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/php-code- coverage/issue...](https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/php-code- coverage/issues/192)

In general, there's no good solution, but I personally shy away from CC- licensed code.

(I am not a lawyer, and this should not be construed as legal advice.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Statements like the "ultimate JS layout manager" just sound hyperbolic. This wouldn't be appropriate for the vast majority of web sites in the world, so I'm not sure how it's the ultimate anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hehe, not at all like "AngularJS — Superheroic JavaScript MVW Framework"

<comment><USER16> There can be many superheroes, but only one ultimate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been looking into libraries that do exactly this in the last couple weeks, thank you for sharing this one. The competitors in this space (that I have found) are wcDocker[1] and DockSpawn[2]. One "feature" lacking from GoldenLayout: you aren't hosting your code on Github, or in a way that can be utilized by Bower[3]. GoldenLayout looks like an otherwise better library than the others, could you talk about why or why not for Github hosting?

1\. [http://docker.webcabin.org](http://docker.webcabin.org)

2\. [http://www.dockspawn.com](http://www.dockspawn.com)

3\. [http://bower.io](http://bower.io)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for providing those links. The latest version is on github and bower though, please have a look at the links in the footer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know if there is a manager like this one but based on the concept used in Blender (blender.org)?

I realy like the concept in Blender where you can divide the screen the way you like and select a view(controller) per division.

<comment><USER11> Well, [https://Clara.io](https://Clara.io) (our online version of a Blender- like tool) has something similar. It isn't open source... yet. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> In the "getting started", you should put the .js and .css files somewhere so the examples work. I copypasted all your codelines just to be dissappointed that it doesnt not work. I understand you probably don't want to be a cdn. But for testing purposes, I cannot be assed to copy stuff over to my server. I prefixed them with [https://golden-layout.com/assets/](https://golden- layout.com/assets/) and it nicely worked. Nice. Bookmarked.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea. Noted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seems cool but breaks if you rearrage things... windows disappear.

<comment><USER21> yeah, that is what I noticed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Absolutely awesome concept, could not be better timing - need pretty much exactly a dock manager like this for upcoming work!

What are the plans for graceful degradation on mobile?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks . It's easy to turn pretty much every feature off individually. Just setting 'hasHeaders' and 'reorderEnabled' to false for example is effectively enough to switch off any user interaction whilst keeping the component lifecycle and resize behaviour when the phone is tilted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looks nice, but one recommendation: when you are moving a window, make the drop box cover the window bar as well. Also, the resize bars can cover the window bar to the point that if there is no content you cant click on the name because all you get is the resize action. Lastly, I somehow dropped a window to vertically split another one and it lost all of its content. I tried to resize the bottom border down but it wont move.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm simply wondering - how in general html/js applications would work with multiple monitors.

A typical set-up at work (game studio) is 2-3 monitors for artists/level builders. We had to write a new docking system for Qt5, since the existing did not allow to dock outside windows to others (or tab in them) - e.g. bit like Visual Studio docking (but not there yet)

<comment><USER25> I'm working on a project that's big into this. I extended dockspawn to support popout windows and give a breakout editor feel.

The window you popout can still communicate with its opener until you refresh or navigate away from that page. It's not ideal, but it's the best you can do without using something like signalr or sockets.io to join everything together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is not layout manager, but docker. "Ultimate Layout Manager" is something like Mig Layout for Swing.

</comment><comment> V-2 The "open in new window" icon looks misleadingly like "restore original size" on Windows. Also, once you do, closing the popup removes the component altogether. You actually need to click the icon in the right bottom corner (why there??) so that it returns back to the original layout.

</comment><comment><USER27> One reason that I love extjs is indeed its layout manager. This golden-layout seems promising...

</comment><comment><USER28> I got into a not necessarily unrecoverable but certainly not very nice state just moving things around a little.

Chrome Version 39.0.2166.2 dev (64-bit)

[http://i.imgur.com/OB67q2i.png](http://i.imgur.com/OB67q2i.png)

</comment><comment><USER29> This would be easy to do with IE8+. They should have went for IE6+, support older browsers, they might have got those juice enterprise customers that throw $10,000 of dollars away on software. Also why is it so slow?

<comment><USER30> Nobody should waste time and money supporting IE6. It's completely unsupported by Microsoft. Those big enterprise customers should have upgraded in April at the absolute latest when XP hit EOL. Even IE8 only has a year left.

<comment><USER31> > Those big enterprise customers should have upgraded in April at the absolute > latest when XP hit EOL.

The ones that didn't still have money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> When I maximized and then restored, it put the section in a popup window and removed it from the original layout. I would have expected restore to dock the section back in the original layout as before.

</comment><comment><USER33> Really nice, might use it for an upcoming project. It's a little buggy in the current state though and no mobile editing support kinda hurts.

</comment><comment><USER34> Was literally looking for EXACTLY this for the past two weeks. Will definitely buy in the next week or two :)

</comment><comment><USER35> Looks great. Does it have integration with Meteor js? I'm thinking of adopting this to mine at vida.io

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. Vida.io looks really promising. I can't promise a schedule, but I'll try to add a MeteorJs tutorial as soon as possible. Generally though it's just DOM elements that you put stuff into, so it should be compatible with pretty much anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Looks very neat. But what is the reason for the initial load time?

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers. Good question about the load time. The library itself is 50k - <USER2> gZipping. But the demo on the startpage also includes Highcharts and SlickGrid and all their dependencies...and the examples are in Codepens - which take a while to load

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Who the hell licenses SOFTWARE as creative commons these days? :S

</comment><comment><USER38> The windows in demo should resize immediately as I drag them.

</comment><comment><USER39> I love it. Looks stunning, and is straight forward to use.

</comment><comment><USER40> How do you expect people to do this from a keyboard?

</comment><comment><USER41> Should be free use with commercial grade support.

</comment><comment><USER42> Interesting! Might have to look into replacing our use of jQuery UI with this...</comment>


How the Other Half Works: an Adventure in the Low Status of Software Engineers - <AUTHOR> https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/07/13/how-the-other-half-works-an-adventure-in-the-low-status-of-software-engineers/ <comment><USER2> This is bloody depressing to read, and rings true in my experience.

One of my pet peeves is relocation costs. Companies in nyc try to hire me at least every six months, particularly since I used to live there. You can tell who is an asshole by asking about relo packages. If they start at $5k my wanker detector goes off. Assholes offer maybe up to $10k, often as a hiring bonus, so it's taxed; maybe $6k might land in my checking account. That's a joke for a mid-30s data scientist. A trip to nyc for me plus partner to shop for apartments alone is $2.5k (2 airline tickets, taxis, meals, boarding a dog, 3 nights in manhattan hotels). Then the costs of apartment rental, job search for partner, winding down an apartment lease here, selling a car, and moving a grown up apartment -- ie I own a real bed and dressers and a couch and a table -- across the country. A relocation would cost me on the order of $15-$20k after taxes.

Yet ceos whine endlessly about the lack of good employees. You never see them in a bwm dealership bitching they won't sell a 5-series for $30k though.

<comment><USER3> Michaelochurch has another blog post about exactly this.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's called "Never relocate unpaid", and I posted it on HN a few days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8003073](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8003073)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As I move further and further beyond 30 I encounter the assumption or at least question as to whether I am or am aiming to be a manager more and more often.

I've actually been thinking about whether I should try and remake myself in the same way for the same sort of reasons related.

For instance, bits like this...

 _> '...praise for doing things that would just have been doing his job if he were a managed person.'_

...and...

 _> 'It's far better, unless you're applying for a junior position, to start at 70 and get credit for everything you do know, than to start at 90 (or even 100) and get debited for the things you don't know.'_

Read as pure truth in my experience.

Coming off a period where my final title was 'Program Manager' my technical credentials seemed to be treated as gospel and an incredible bonus. Later, with a purely technical 'Engineer' title and no less responsibility those same credentials are heavily scrutinized and interviewers seem puzzled by an inability to fully categorize my experience.

I've come to think there's a lot to be said for and gained by properly managing titles / signals of status and managing the sort of interactions that are easy to dismiss or deride as 'playing the game'.

</comment><comment><USER5> > Instead of being a programmer auditioning to sling code, he was already > "part of the club" (management) and just engaging in a two-way discussion, > as equals, on whether he was going to join that particular section of the > club.

Hmm! The latter is typically how I approach interviews (I'm a developer). I feel that if that's not the case then why am I here? Sometimes you get people that are smart in a dumb way, like the last interview in the story here. Just looking to be intellectually dominant, the "winner". But you just have to recognize those situations for what they are and not get discouraged. Developers are in demand, we get to act like it. And sometimes people get treated like shit because they allow it to happen.

</comment><comment><USER6> Most programmers seem to avoid conflict at all costs, which is a bad trait in a corporate environment. But you can minimise the discomfort by standing your ground at the right times.

The best time is when accepting the employment offer and not signing anything that will put you in a position of having to stand your ground against shitty conditions later. Things like non-compete clauses (and relinquishing all IP rights), no side projects (because you have to be 110% for the job) or mandatory overtime with inadequate or no compensation shouldn't be accepted as-is.

Otherwise you will have zero status because you signed it away at the start.

<comment><USER7> Conflict avoidance is pretty much always a losing strategy and a very bad habit. It makes you less efficient in a company (as flawed decisions aren't challenged until to late), but more importantly, it makes you vulnerable and ensures that you often get unreasonably bad deals.

It can be fixed, as almost everything else, it's a trainable skill/habit.

<comment><USER6> It's a better skill to be teaching our children than simple conformity to authority that seems to be core to school curriculum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A fascinating analysis. Anecdotal, of course, as a controlled double-blind test is hard to do for in-person interviews on behalf of a single person, but this presents some interesting possibilities for further research, along the lines of these:

[http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html](http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html) [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109#aff-...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109#aff-1) [http://mpra.ub.uni- muenchen.de/49392/2/MPRA_paper_49392.pdf](http://mpra.ub.uni- muenchen.de/49392/2/MPRA_paper_49392.pdf)</comment>