The incredibly frustrating reason there's no Lyme disease vaccine - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/7/17314716/lyme-disease-vaccine-history-effectiveness <comment><USER2> The incredibly frustrating reason is that the US does not have have the English Rule, which requires those who sue in court to cover the expenses of those they're suing unless they win.

The lack of this rule turns our courts into a lottery.</comment>


The Zero Bug Policy - <AUTHOR> https://sookocheff.com/post/process/zero-bug-policy/ <comment><USER2> "Zero" rules are vulnerable to abuse and leads should not be naive about this. You're not fixing bugs, you're sweeping them into a hole.

For example, how might a team reduce its backlog easily? It could close year- old bugs (that obviously look bad), giving vague or no explanation, and assume that any _real_ issue will be opened as a new bug again. The project clearly doesn't have any fewer problems, it just has problems that are now much harder to track.

Also, "zero" is a number, saying nothing at all about realistic strategies for getting there. Some bugs are fundamental flaws requiring gargantuan rework. Some take weeks to understand but _literally one line fixes_ (like setting a 0 to 1). Shouldn't we at least have a handle on categories of problems and how to "zero" certain subsets of issues, and how to make progress? How do we keep people from getting promoted for closing 50 trivial bugs and firing the guy who spent a month on nothing but one huge and more-crucial problem?

And pity the new manager who comes along and sees "few" bugs; they'd better start looking under rocks. The entire state of the project that they're taking over may be misrepresented.</comment>


Completion audio alerts for long running, remote jobs - <AUTHOR> http://derwiki.tumblr.com/post/347777803/completion-audio-alerts-for-long-running-remote-jobs

<comment><USER2> I like this idea a lot; however, I don't like beeps. Ubuntu (and possibly other linux distros) now supports desktop notifications via Notify OSD. So instead of having the other machine ssh to me and beep, instead I use a utility called "notify-send" to create a desktop notification pop-up. You can install notify-send on ubuntu using:

 _sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin_

Then call notify-send like so:

 _notify-send "Back to work."_

The text can be anything you want, and you can also supply a summary, an icon, etc.

<comment><USER3> I've been doing something like this for a LONG time when I have long running jobs and want to run down to the pub for a beer:

# dosomething;mail -s "Job is done" firstname.lastname@example.com

That way I can be anywhere and just wait for a text message on my iPhone to let me know the job is complete!

Isn't *nix great?

<comment><USER2> This is basically what I used to do as well, except just to my normal e-mail account.

Love *nix :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I want a neural interface to "feel" that my important processes are up and running. In every given moment I want to feel the functions getting called, smell the call frames, and the rounded corners of the system calls returning values different than -1.

<comment><USER5> You really need to read Jupiter by Ben Bova.

<comment><USER4> note taken :) Thanks</comment></comment></comment>


Hands-on AngularJS with Backlift part 2: Wiring up a back-end API - <AUTHOR> https://blog.backlift.com/entry/angular-tut2

<comment><USER2> I love the idea of this for prototyping, but what happens after you're done prototyping? Do they expect you to just use their backend forever?

I feel like most folks outgrow a service like this at some point... is that ok with you, Cole? Or do you aim to grow with folks? And is there a pricing model in mind?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Randall. Thanks for the question. I get asked this a lot. For others that have been waiting to learn more about our future plans before committing to Backlift, thanks for your patience.

We do want developers to stay with us beyond the prototyping phase. I started off building Backlift Data to handle real world application needs like auth, access controls, validation and security. Now that it's in the wild I regularly get requests for features, and we're working quickly to implement those features and expand the circle of applications that Backlift supports. We're lucky that other services like Parse and Kinvey have paved the way, demonstrating that you can ship real products, and build a business, using a BAAS.

But our goal is not to be another Parse. Backlift Data is just one part of Backlift. We see Backlift as a deployment platform primarily, and our goal is to make building client-side apps easier and faster for the majority of developers. And by majority I mean consultants, designers, marketers and students that know HTML, CSS and some Javascript.

Here are some things we're doing to achieve that goal:

1) Limiting the scope of the platform. We don't want your front-end code to be backlift code. You should be able to move off backlift, and onto your own backend by changing a few API URLs. This is hard to do in practice, and many of our performance and workflow features (like our {{$variant}} tag and {{$prefetch}} tag, which we'll announce soon) are backlift specific. But Backlift should not be required for the core functionality of your app.

2) Making migration easier. We currently allow data export and we do want to provide app export functionality so that developers can move onto a different host. Right now we're still working out the best way to accomplish this.

3) Making integration easier. We're working on APIs that will let you tie in other data services easily, such as a proxy API that eliminates much of the pain of CORS and connects your front-end logic to external APIs.

4) Making sharing easier. Right now you can embed a button that will let others launch a new backlift app, based on your template, with a click. We intend to expand on this feature to make it easier to upload and share code, and even make your templates available for a fee.

As for pricing, I hear you. Here's our current plan, but please bear with us because pricing is likely to change. First off, anyone can currently create unlimited free apps on Backlift with temporary randomized URLs. Those URLs are renewable every 14 days. We think this is a good way to offer a sandbox for developers that want to try out different libraries and learn. We also think this provides sufficient obscurity so that backlift apps can be developed in private. When a developer is ready to launch an app publicly, we think there should be an affordable plan, priced to compete with shared hosting options currently on the market. On the other hand if a developer is building several apps, or needs to scale up, we believe they should move to a business plan. So just to put some numbers in here, we're thinking less than $30 per month for the personal tier and closer to $200 per month for the business tier, but again, the specifics will change.

I hope this answers some of your questions. Happy to answer more here or at cole at backlift.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was about to signup, but I saw that you don't support custom domains yet. Any idea when that is coming?

<comment><AUTHOR> We do currently support custom domains. What did you see that makes you think otherwise?

<comment><USER3> Sweet.

"In the future backlift will support custom URLs using your own domain." <http://backlift.github.io/docs/all.html>

also: <https://github.com/backlift/docs/issues/6></comment></comment></comment>


Most Used SDKs in Top 200 Free iOS Apps - <AUTHOR> http://mightysignal.com/top-ios-sdks <comment><USER2> The Top SDKs for Android apps are listed here: [http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev](http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev)

<comment><USER3> How does that site knows which libraries are used on the apps?

<comment><USER4> Probably by looking at the java package names.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pretty surprising to see Alamofire above AFNetworking given that AFNetworking is the Objective-C variant and Alamofire is for Swift. That almost seems to indicate that there are more Swift apps in the top 200 then Objective-C apps. Of course one can use Alamofire in Objective-C, but that just seems like making your life harder than it needs to be

<comment><USER6> We found that interesting too. You can see the apps that upgrade from Objective-C to Swift as well when they uninstall AFNetworking for Alamofire. It's usually accompanied by a huge overhaul of a bunch of SDKs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very interesting - does anyone know exactly what techniques they use to gather this data?

I'm guessing to some extent it must rely on a jailbroken iOS to get past the .ipa code encryption, as with this similar analysis: [https://medium.com/ios- os-x-development/libraries-used-in-th...](https://medium.com/ios-os-x- development/libraries-used-in-the-top-100-ios-apps-5b845ad927b7)

<comment><USER8> I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think ObjectiveC metadata is covered by the Fairplay code encryption.

If that is the case, then you can just download the .ipas using iTunes, and then run classdump ( [http://stevenygard.com/projects/class- dump/](http://stevenygard.com/projects/class-dump/) ) on them to get a list of ObjC classes. From the class names, you can then figure out which frameworks are linked in the app binary.

No jailbreak required :)

</comment></comment><comment> obj-g I didn't do it at first, most probably did, but if you click through to the Top 200 themselves and select an app, you can see all the SDKs the app uses. Pretty cool.

<comment><USER9> Yep. We've actually collected SDK data on around 350K iOS apps and over 1M Android apps, and can scan new ones on the spot (Live Scan).

<comment><USER10> this is cool stuff, we are doing similar things at beta.verify.ly (although more of a security focus rather than BI)

how much fun did you have figuring out generation of kbsync and the crazy iTunes otp / auth tokens? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> obj-g Much love to AFNetworking and SDWebImage. Thanks for all the spare time you've given me.

<comment><USER11> Saved me so much time when I was developing my apps

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I totally read that headline wrong at first glance, "TOP 200 most used SDKs used in iOS apps" ;)

</comment><comment><USER13> What surprised me:

* Spark-SDK – This is for controlling IoT devices, why does Snapchat, Netflix and Spotify ship this?

* Squareup – Do people use this over Stripe? Or what is the use case?

<comment><USER14> Yes, that's really surprising.

Maybe a name clash ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I never heard about Fabric. Can't seem to understand what they do from their website. There is no mention of what it does on the home page. Is this some sort of an analytics library?

<comment><USER13> The branding is very confusing and ends up adding a bunch of buzzwords instead of explaining what it is.

On a side note, why do people use closed source Crashlytics, when there are open source solutions available (still run by for profit companies, but source of their SDKs are open)?

<comment><USER16> It's really quite a nice crash reporting product. I think that outweighs the closed-source point for a lot of folks.

<comment> obj-g Totally agree. Once you get used to it, it's very well done and great UI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Alamofire (an all-Swift library) is linked in 31% more of the top 200 free apps than AFNetworking (an all-Objective C library). I guess Swift is still making headway into Big Apps...

Also, 6 apps are still using ASIHTTPRequest, despite the last release being 5 years ago.

Worse still, 3 apps use a combination of ASIHTTPRequest, AFNetworking, and Alamofire - that's a library that was abandoned 5 years ago, an Objective-C library, and a Swift library. Oh man.

<comment><USER18> Keep in mind that some SDKs have internal dependencies. Those apps could just be linking a set of SDKs that happen to include those 3 networking libraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very cool, I love seeing something like this as opposed to just asking people what they recommend or looking at git activity alone.

</comment><comment><USER20> MBProgressHUD? Really? It's not that hard to write your own progress indicator.

<comment><USER11> Why even bother to write your own though if theres a good solution available

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not viewable on mobile Safari. Is that some kind of joke?

<comment><USER8> I was able to view it on mobile Safari just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is amazing!</comment>


Watch Live: At 1pm GMT, a British man will try to land a wingsuit. - <AUTHOR> http://news.sky.com/sky-news/app/liveTV/liveTv.html Friends who are with him at the moment who are assembling the cardboard boxes which he will try to land in. It will be very interesting to see if he can pull it off!<p>Edit 1: Non-silverlight link - http://news.sky.com/home/sky-live-tv <comment><AUTHOR> Friends of mine are currently assembling the boxes that he will land in: <http://imgur.com/iKwmX>

Interview with Gary Connery and his wife: <http://news.sky.com/home/strange- news/article/16233460>

Unfortunately it's live from the house of commons at the moment, but a lot of skydivers will be watching with eager eyes to see if he can arrive at the landing area safely and uninjured!

Edit 1: Flash only link - <http://news.sky.com/home/sky-live-tv>

Edit 2: The jump has been rescheduled to 3pm GMT.

</comment><comment><USER2> Watch Live: At 1pm...

"Install Microsoft Silverlight"

Guess I won't be watching live then.

<comment><USER3> Use Chrome...

<comment><USER2> I'm not going to yum install chrome just to watch a video. If they want me to watch they should support a format that the rest of the world already uses.

<comment><USER4> The world has been using Silverlight for a long time.

<comment><USER2> The world has not.

What percentage of big name sites use Silverlight exclusively? Even Microsoft doesn't, and they wrote it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good luck to Sky on making me install Silverlight</comment>


Slate's experiment on implanting false memories - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2254054

<comment><USER2> The far more insidious manifestation of 'false memories':

"But what about the Obama-Ahmadinejad handshake? There's no question of a true incident being misremembered: The two men have never been physically close enough to be photographed together. (We searched for them in Google Images and gave up after scanning 500 results.)"

That presence or absence on Google Images is sufficient to constitute proof. Which isn't to say Obama's secretly shaking hands in underground bunkers. I am, however, interacting more and more with people who seem to think that if they can't find it on Google, it doesn't exist.

<comment><USER3> In this case, I'd say the photograph would be newsworthy enough to be run all over the mainstream media, and indexed extensively by Google.

<comment><USER2> 1) Hence the broader point that such 'verification' extends far beyond this picture, which I agree would be noteworthy;

2) The lack of a picture doesn't mean the two were never physically close enough to be photographed together. It just means they were never so when a camera was around.

3) It ignores the broader social context in which Google is the funnel through which information exists. If the ministry of truth wants to rewrite history, they'll do so by manipulating what Google results are available. The entire point of the article is how history can be manipulated, and then succumbs to verification via a source that can, in fact, be manipulated. That is, imagine a picture was taken, and you're sitting here thinking, "I really thought those two met." If verification constitutes, "Is it on Google?" then the task of changing history is pretty easy.

<comment><USER4> "The lack of a picture doesn't mean the two were never physically close enough to be photographed together. It just means they were never so when a camera was around."

I see what you're trying to say here, but you've picked a terrible example. The probability that these men would meet and there would _not_ be cameras around is negligible. Non-zero, I concede, but in a Bayesian world absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence, under the right circumstances. (The conventional phrasing is wrong, it ought to read "Absence of evidence is not _100% proof_ of absence", which scans much less well but is actually correct; the phrase is intrinsically Aristotelian.)

<comment><USER2> You're still missing the point. Google has censored results before, and future censoring would lead to the types of dystopic scenarios outlined in the beginning of the article. I'm not about to get into a debate about the relative probabilities of a picture existing or not. In part, because just-so stories abound on either side. But more fundamentally: it's not the point of the selection in my first post.

<comment><USER5> I think you're getting carried away with the part of the article where it says that they verified they'd never met by checking google.

The historical fact is that these two have never publicly met. They already were pretty certain they knew this, but checked google just to be absolutely sure. Doing an image search is a lot easier than doing a text search since there's an awful lot of articles which mention them both and it would be too hard to sort through the guff.

That doesn't mean you can fool people into thinking that something never happened just by removing all pictures of it from google image search. (Removing pictures would of course be a necessary but not sufficient step for anyone wanting to remove something from history.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. On a somewhat related note, the technique of film editing has been heavily influenced by early Russian artists; Lev Kuleshov discovered that audiences' perception of what occurred in identical segments of footage was heavily influenced by the context in which it was viewed.

Stalin later suppressed the output of these early filmmakers, objecting to the idea of formalism (but was happy to have his propaganda people indirectly employ the technique to political ends).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_Experiment>

<comment><USER7> The book "The Commissar Vanishes" presents bunch of before-and-after photographs in which various of Stalin's associates and henchmen are removed from photos after they become persona non grata. Some examples:

[http://tfustudios.blogspot.com/2009/11/commissar- vanishes.ht...](http://tfustudios.blogspot.com/2009/11/commissar- vanishes.html)

The first photo above shows an eerie example: So many of the commissars have been removed from the official history, that Stalin is alone in the photo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Four of the fake incidents were tainted by essential truths. Lieberman did rebuke President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal. Cheney did rebuke Sen. John Kerry for mentioning Cheney's lesbian daughter, though not until well after the vice presidential debate. Bush was in Crawford during Hurricane Katrina. And Republicans did distribute a Jeremiah Wright ad. These truths may have confused some of our subjects. But what about the Obama-Ahmadinejad handshake? There's no question of a true incident being misremembered: The two men have never been physically close enough to be photographed together._

Actually this one has a genuine incident with which it might have been confused as well. There was a several-day controversy during the Presidential campaign about whether Obama _would_ be willing to meet with Ahmadinejad if he became President. It occupied a large slice of one of the Obama/McCain debates. Obama's position that he would be willing to meet with Ahmadinejad "without preconditions" was controversial and widely debated. So one might easily misremember that controversy as a controversy about a real, rather than hypothetical, meeting.

(In fact the meeting that Obama promised he'd be willing to attend never occurred, but I'm not sure whether this was because Obama changed his mind or whether Ahmadinejad turned out not to have any desire to meet anyway.)

</comment><comment><USER8> Old news. We've known for decades about how easy it is to implant false memories, and bad therapy has caused millions needless suffering by implanting really horrible false memories. Between the memories, and the fallout from false accusations, this ranks as one of the biggest disasters in psychology in the last hundred years.

See <http://www.fmsfonline.org/> for more.

</comment><comment><USER9> The experiment write-up would have benefited from graphic representation of the results.

</comment><comment><USER10> Breaking News: If you lie, people will sometimes believe you. Details at 11.

<comment><USER11> No, if you lie, people will sometimes believe you because they think you are telling them something they already knew.

Big difference.</comment></comment>


RudyMQ – A message queue in .NET - <AUTHOR> http://aashishkoirala.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/rudymq/#rudy <comment><USER2> nice, but this line

var receiveOperation = queue.StartReceiving<MyMessage>(100, /* poll every 100 ms */

shows that you are polling the queue for new messages. Why such inefficient technique? And BTW it looks like there's no support for transactional operations. This is indeed a rudimentary queue ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, there is somewhat of a support for transactional operations - you can declare a queue as transactional - which will return the message to the queue if the client fails.

However, there is no concept of poison queue - or integration with TransactionScope.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious, have you ever got distributed transactions - particularly ones over WCF and the like - working? I've found that wile TransactionScope works like a dream in the trivial case, it becomes disproportionately hairy and frustrating as you start trying to use such elaborate features.

<comment><AUTHOR> It generally works with anything that supports MSDTC; multiple SQL Server nodes being the most usual scenario. The one case where it starts to get hairy is when you bring MSMQ into the mix, not surprisingly. That has been my experience, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting. I have to be honest I did not know about the whole reader/writer lock support. I was accustomed to just using the "lock" keyword.

<comment><USER5> Watch out for ReaderWriterLockSlim. It's dangerous under certain circumstances particularly if:

1\. You have one core or two cores.

2\. Your CPU load is high.

3\. Your thread pool is pretty heavily utilised so there is a queue building up (think IIS).

It relies on spinlock so it enters a tight loop for a number of cycles to avoid lock contention. At this point it increases the CPU load so every thread ends up getting blocked on spinlocks. This means you end up with N runnable threads (one per core) which are utilising 100% CPU in a tight loop and your site goes down.

I wouldn't rely on it for a concurrency mechanism in production!

We've had this in production and it took us out for a few hours.

Note: the root cause was a for loop that never terminated but all the other threads went batshit at 100% inside ReaderWriterLockSlim so it's impossible to identify what is going on. You can't even log into a box under that load so it's a case of waiting for it to blow and dropping a minidump out with process explorer and getting that off-site and firing it up in VS. Total nightmare.

<comment><USER6> Here is a gem on SO about ReaderWriterLockSlim: [http://stackoverflow.com/a/17296055/19020](http://stackoverflow.com/a/17296055/19020)

HC SVNT DRACONES

<comment><USER5> That's marvellous - thanks for posting :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why is enterprise software so bad? - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2009/02/why-is-enterprise-software-so-bad.html

<comment><USER3> 1\. Development process is led by managers, not developers. 2\. Developers frequently work under time / budget pressure. 3\. Money is the only stimulus, so the developers try to make software good enough to get paid. 4\. Big companies try to make something big.

<comment><USER4> I can't buy any of these explanations.

1\. In my experience, most managers in the software development world started out as developers themselves. In our organizations, most of us managers still do a fair amount of development as well.

2\. This is true. But how can it be otherwise? Anywhere in this world we must make decisions based on how to allocate limited resources. This is true even for open source development. A project must finish at some point, else it's a failure to begin with. Thus, we cannot invest infinite resource, and must decide how much we can invest in each part of a system.

3\. I have not found this to be true. Virtually everyone I have ever worked with takes pride in doing a good job. Can you cite evidence to the contrary?

4\. I'm not sure what this means.

I think that much of the problem has to do with #2 and maybe #4 (depending what you meant). That is, many important enterprise projects are just as big as large "shrinkwrap" software. But the number of customers is smaller, so the cost of development must be amortized over a smaller set of buyers. This means that there must be some balance of higher prices and cost-cutting. I suspect that the economics works out so that cost-cutting pressures are stronger in the enterprise arena than for shrinkwrap products.

<comment><USER5> Enterprise applications also have a smaller number of users, so the feedback pool is smaller: you don't get the same number of bug reports feeding back into your development cycle as you would with a widely-used web or shrink-wrap application.

End-users who happen to be employees don't get to choose the software - <USER2> like developers who are forced to use Java at work but code at home in Haskell or Python, they are forced to use a system decreed by management and therefore will often have a negative bias to start with - "the new system" being both a focus of complaints in the coffee room and a catch all excuse to tell customers.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Getting a CS "degree" via MIT OpenCourseWare? - <AUTHOR> Long story short I went to a local small college and had a very miserable 2/4 years. $20k gone and I didn't learn a thing.
I want a proper CS education, but I messed up my high school and theres no way I'm getting into any good schools locally.
I was discussing with my parents and thinking of dedicating a few years to signing up and passing a full CS degree curriculum via MIT OpenCourseWare. I'm currently a mobile consultant and have been in the field for awhile, I'm mainly doing this to get some sort of accreditation in my field beyond just high school and university is out of the picture and to get a more in depth proper understanding of computer science.
I want to be able to take a complex problem and design an elegant solution to it. Right now I'm just a code monkey with no real world application beyond "code this according to spec".
How would potential employers view this?
Has anyone done this before and been hired? <comment><USER3> They are excellent courses if your primary interest is elec engineering. 6.004 is prob the best course I took, all the lectures are online and course material from 2012. Of course you are missing recitation for many courses and TA access though. The assignments for 6.857 and lecture notes are really good for self learning too. As for a job you would have to prove your skills with a portfolio which is a repository of code you've done and develop for some open source project you are interested in. You might find job offers come to you by being helpful on their dev mailing list and somebody notices.

</comment><comment><USER4> Scott Young, a blogger, did this ([http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/mit- challenge/](http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/mit-challenge/)), but not to make himself more attractive to potential employers. He covered the equivalent of a CS degree at MIT in one year, where "covered" means passing. Highly recommend reading about it and watching a few progress videos to get his method down.

</comment><comment><USER5> Please notice you won't get a degree from MIT OpenCourseWare.

"No registration, no enrollment, and no grades or credits are offered" from [http://ocw.mit.edu/help/get-started-with-ocw/](http://ocw.mit.edu/help/get- started-with-ocw/)

But It is worthing to spend time on online courses now. I have finished some courses on [https://www.coursera.org/](https://www.coursera.org/) and [https://www.udemy.com](https://www.udemy.com). I can always learn from the best. I finished my Bachelor's degree and Master's degree more than a decade ago. If I were able to access those course at that time, I wouldn't go to schools to waste my time and my parents' and my money. But that's a personal choice.

And I don't think my degrees matter much for job seeking nowadays. You can easily demonstrate your abilities by developing apps or contributing to Open Source projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nobody in the real world cares about open source projects from my personal experience. I realize I won't get a degree, just wondering if people have ever been hired after spending time on something like this.

<comment><USER6> Define "real-world." Open-source projects are highly relevant in terms of getting exposure and connections. If you contribute to a project used by a company, that can be a big plus, for example. Or if you contribute to a project, you can then probably get internal referrals from other contributors at the companies they work at.

<comment><USER7> I think that depends on the type of company -- a number of old-school companies would be scared off by open-source contributors. For example, back when I was at Motorola (way before the split, and before Google bought out the cell phone section), part of the employment contract was that anything creative you think of at work or at home) belongs to the company, so technically you couldn't work on any side projects without them owning it. Not that it was legally enforceable or that they ever tried to enforce it...

Also, even today there are a number of companies (esp. in the midwest) that won't let any open source software inside, unless it comes from a paid vendor (like Red Hat).

<comment><USER6> Read my first sentence.

<comment><AUTHOR> I work in the corporate world. The reason it's frowned upon is because employers rather see complete projects that you did rather than a bit of random code here and there in an open source project.

<comment><USER8> "the corporate world" is a pretty large place spanning companies that will hire people based solely upon open source contributions as well as companies that will disqualify people based solely upon open source contributions.

It's a pretty meaningless statement to say "in the real world, no one cares about open source" when your definition of "real world" is one fraction of one fraction of the real world (specific companies within the corporate world).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How sure are you that university is out of the picture? I failed most of high school and then dropped out. Eventually I decided to go to university, where I got a CS degree. I had to take a remedial Math course my first semester that didn't count towards graduation, but overall college was fairly easy and rewarding. I did graduate with student loan debt, which I'm still repaying. I got a job doing programming right after graduation and I've been thriving.

The only thing university admissions required was some kind of high school equivalency and ACT or SAT scores. I took the GED and ACT, and my scores exceeded placement requirements by a huge margin. Your mileage may vary outside of the US.

Are you certain you don't meet admissions requirements for any nearby universities? Have you checked, or are you just assuming?

</comment><comment><USER10> To the degree it is about a credential, Western Governor's University is a reasonably priced option - http:\\\www.wgu.edu

While MIT might offer good courses, they're designed to be tough for a very select group of the best prepared students even with the support resources such as Teaching Assistants and labs and peer students and professors with office hours that are accessible only on campus. Without those, it can only be tougher. In my opinion, tougher to the level that a multi-year project has a low chance of success even for a person of above average motivation and intelligence.

Personally, I think a CS education from an average school will probably better prepare anyone motivated enough to have a chance of completing a full slate of MIT courses as self study. You can always get a graduate degree someplace more selective.

<comment><USER11> > To the degree it is about a credential, Western Governor's University is a > reasonably priced option - http:\\\www.wgu.edu

Not if you want a CS degree, which WGU doesn't offer (WGU does offer a variety of _IT_ degrees, which may be an acceptable substiture, or even the preferred option for some people, but its certainly not even remotely the same thing as a CS degree.)

<comment><USER10> I agree that the difference is important to the degree that the concern is over education rather than about credentials. That's why I also mentioned the value of a CS degree from a less prestigious institution when the student is highly motivated.

But if we're just talking about credentials, then a relevant degree plus experience gives anyone who wants to hire the OP a green light.

<comment><USER11> > I agree that the difference is important to the degree that the concern is > over education rather than about credentials.

The difference is important if the concern is about credentials, too; when the concern is about credentials, then exactly _what_ the degree is in can be _very_ important.

CS and IT mean different things, _including_ (perhaps _especially_ ) to people who are evaluating credentials. (In some cases, IT may be preferred, in other cases, CS may be.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Related to the question here, MITx is offering a MOOC-based certificate (one of edX's inaugual XSeries certificates) in Foundations of Computer Science -- but the first class that is required for the series has already finished.

[https://www.edx.org/xseries](https://www.edx.org/xseries)

</comment><comment><USER12> Someone correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the cheapest path to a degree in the United States is to:

1\. make sure your local state university offers cheap tuition to residents

2\. make sure they accept credit transfers from community colleges, get it in writing

3\. do 1-2 years in community college

4\. transfer those to the state university and do the final years there at the cheaper tuition rate

You'd then exit with a solid computer science degree on the cheap. Speaking as someone from outside the USA most of the state universities are highly regarded.

Another option might be a BSc in Computing and Information Systems (does this count as CS to purists? does that matter if you aren't going on to higher studies?) from the University of London, Goldsmiths in this case, for just under 5000 pounds.[1]

However if your experience in the local small college was miserable you have to be brutally honest with yourself about what the real reasons were for not completing there as they will likely apply to anything you do elsewhere. The lowest risk option in that case is to perhaps take some uncredited core CS curriculum from OpenCourseWare, Coursera, Udacity and edX over 2014 and just see how you go. Then, if it works out, you will then be in a position to blitz a credited distance, community/state or online option that might arise in 2015+. The risk, at least in terms of "money on the line", of the community college moving to state university option is fairly low as well.

Finally, as someone with graduate degrees and who is working on a PhD in a different discipline to CompSci, I'd say you shouldn't get too caught up in worrying about degrees if it doesn't match up with you personally. There are reasonable, although often smaller than claimed or imagined, financial and personal benefits from doing a degree though and you should take another shot, or two, at it to make sure it's not for you (so long as the risk is low regarding debt, there is virtually no risk in watching lectures and reading textbooks as the time spent won't be wasted).

[1][http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk/courses/undergraduate/g...](http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk/courses/undergraduate/goldsmiths/bsc- computing-information-systems-bsc-diploma-work-entry-route) The courses seem perhaps a tad dry but it seems to cover the core mathematics, statistics, databases, algorithms and has some nice looking electives.

<comment><USER13> There is an even cheaper way to do it, that I'm _AMAZED_ doesn't get more attention. Credit by exam.

The two options I used, that covered one year of school for me, in about 4 months... CLEP and DANTES.

CLEP - [http://clep.collegeboard.org](http://clep.collegeboard.org) DANTES - [http://getcollegecredit.com](http://getcollegecredit.com)

the tl;dr version: take exam on $SUBJECT, pass exam, get credit.

The fine print:

a. the exams cost money, typically $100 - <USER2>

b. there is typically a limit on how many credit-by-exam credits a receiving institution will accept (for me, it was 30 semester hours, or 1 year's worth) - for _how many_ and _which_ credits you can get - you need to research with the receiving institution!!!

c. Usually, these are NOT easy exams, but the margin for passing exams varies, but typically it's a ridiculously low margin, like 50-60%. I guess the rationale is that the average college student retains only 50-60% of the material they were taught, at best. (my conjecture, not fact!)

TOTALLY doable!!!

<comment><USER14> This is great, and something I looked into when I was pursuing my bachelors, but it's important to note this is something ONLY worth considering after finishing a relevant udacity/mit course, and then making sure the syllabus matches up with that of the local university's teacher's that will be administering the exam.

Also, at my school, which was a mediocre local university, I believe you still needed 70% to pass an examination for accreditation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Speaking as a hiring manager, I would hire a person with such a "degree." Even better if some open source experience, contract experience, sysadmin experience, etc.

Depends on location. Markets in SF and NY particularly are very strong. Maybe don't try this in Tennessee.

</comment><comment><USER16> I am pretty sure (depending on what company you want to work for), "degrees" and "education" doesn't matter anymore.

If you can do several passion projects of your own, no GOOD employer would discredit you.

But I recommend, double down. Create something you love (no business intention behind it) while taking the MIT course.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have a friend who got Red Heat accreditation and got a string of jobs based on it. Now he is in SF doing very well for him self. He had nothing but HS degree.

But I am very interested what others think on this topic as well, so please up vote.</comment>


Design analysis of BERG's Little Printer - <AUTHOR> http://vitor.io/little-printer-design-analysis <comment><USER2> Reminds me of this successful Kickstarter I just saw[1]; I didn't realize portable thermal printers had so much potential.

[1]: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1953425088/mprinter- an-a...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1953425088/mprinter-an-analog- printer-for-a-digital-world)

</comment><comment><USER3> My first reaction to this is why.. why would anyone want something like this. If you are smart enough to use one of these things it seems likely that you have a smart phone. Maybe it's hipster appeal? _shrug_ I don't get it but if this product found a niche and it's selling (or will sell) good for them!

<comment><USER4> Moreover, it seems that this printer uses thermal paper, which contains Bisphenol A (carcinogen). <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A>

<comment><USER2> Wow, I didn't know that! From ye olde Wikipedia:

"Bisphenol A is a preferred color developer in carbonless copy paper and thermal paper, with the most common public exposure coming from some thermal point of sale receipt paper."

The next question would be: what is the uptake of handling thermal paper like, as compared to the usual examples of eating food from cans that have BPA in their liners, or drinking from bottles that have BPA in the plastic?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How should one correctly iterate a tech product? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I run a tech company and I'm feeling a little lost.
We recently launched our product out into the open and began doing qualitative user testing. This was a wonderful revelation as is started to quickly flare up UX issues with the product which we had not seen.
It changed our process from one with lots of tinkering behind closed doors to one where we were throwing up quick versions of the site and immediately testing our thinking against reality. A good change I think!
The question that I'd love some guidance on is the following:
Internally we / I feel a conflict between user acquisition and product development.
I don't know if we should pursue the qualitative testing road more heavily, not just to fix UX issues but to be the main driver for product development, and that that should be our focus right now.
Or if we should also spend our time trying to acquire users to our effectively unfinished product.
What does the YC experience advise? Is it some sort of balance of the two?
Some help would be really useful! Thanks HN. <comment><USER3> I can't speak for the YC experience, but in my opinion acquiring users for a product they won't stick with is like pouring water into a leaky bucket - <USER2> need to patch up the bucket first.

I don't know the details of your situation, but based on what you've written, I'd first get your product to the point where your users love it and are going to keep using it. (Note that it doesn't have to be 'finished' at this point - just loved. It's possible for users to love a product you consider unfinished!) Then and only then would I ramp up user acquisition efforts.</comment>


Finnish Carrier Sets New World Record for 4G Download Speeds - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/wireless/finnish-carrier-sets-new-world-record-for-4g-download-speeds <comment><USER2> > The standard mobile phone plan in Finland comes with unlimited data, and > carriers differentiate their services based on speed.

Meanwhile in Germany, providers ask ~8 euros per month for a 14.4-50 Mbit/s "flatrate" with 1Gb traffic limit... they do provide "unlimited" traffic as advertised but once you consume more than that you are restricted to ISDN speeds (about 64kbit/s). The marketing guys came up with the word "high-speed volume" so they don't need to refer to this as a "limit".

Really scummy practices if you ask me. :( Although the average person may be content with 1Gb of data per month, what use could 64kbit/s have in 2016 (other than texts and narrowband voip ("Call your friends like its 1999™")?

<comment><USER3> Same in the US. It amazes me that it's legal, it doesn't match any reasonable interpretation of the word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > And the rest of the world could soon behave a lot more like the Finns do.

The core issue here is the lack of fiber-connected base stations. The vast majority of them globally are connected with microwave connections that will not be able to handle 1gbps speeds for multiple users at once.

This is a rather significant issue, as laying fiber from the backhaul (sometimes even backbone) network requires a lot of earthwork, the fiber needs to be laid underground and active infrastructure also needs to be deployed. I don't see this happening anytime soon.

<comment><USER5> Also the population density of Finland isn't exactly staggering and it's not like this service is available everywhere across Finland.

Having a small population and only a few highly populated metropolitan areas make it easy.

Providing 1gbps cellular connection in NYC isn't really possible, Helsinki on the other hand is doable. As for the rural areas they aren't covered in Finland and even if a few are the size of the country also plays a role because good luck getting 1gig cell towers across Nebraska.

<comment><USER6> > Also the population density of Finland isn't exactly staggering

Except the excuse you hear from Americans in every single thread about mobile tech is "Oh but the US has such a low population density! Obviously our service must be crap and cost a shitload!"

<comment><USER5> Population density is misleading because it's usually calculated based on total land area, total private land area, total resdential build up etc.

Overall the US is in an odd position where tha large cities are too populated and the suburban metropolitan areas tend to be considerably less dense due to primarily single family housing over fairly large land plots. Combine that with NIMBY mentality and the overall geographic scale and you don't get the best environment for rapidly deploying infrastructure.

<comment><USER6> The problem is all regulatory. You have other countries with really insane population distributions like Australia, but they have some vague semblance of competition (I'm definitely not claiming the Australian market is sane by any stretch) so people who need rural coverage get the expensive but very high quality Telstra network, but people who never leave the cities can get unlimited data on more focused carriers. The US get the worst of all worlds.

<comment><USER7> Most reports I've seen put Australia's broadband speeds way behind the US. Australia's primary broadband technology is DSL.

<comment><USER8> Yeah our wired network is lousy, we had commenced a rollout of nationwide 100MBit FTTP but that was crippled for political reasons, however we have some very high performing cellular networks.

[http://www.smh.com.au/digital- life/mobiles/australias-4g-net...](http://www.smh.com.au/digital- life/mobiles/australias-4g-networks-the-fastest-in-the- world-20140220-3350n.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A few minutes ago I just ran a Speediest on my iPhone 6s+ in Manhattan near a busy intersection on the Upper West Side.

 _47.6 Mbps download / 23 Mbps upload_

I use Verizon, which has deployed LTE-Advanced which allows for the carrier aggregation of different data streams on different spectrums.

My phone uses the Qualcomm MDM 9635 modem: [https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/modems/x7](https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/modems/x7)

The Samsung Galaxy S7 uses the more advanced 9645 modem: [https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/modems/x12](https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/modems/x12)

Honestly, I don't know why I need > 45 Mbits/ sec download and 23 Mbits/sec upload. I don't seem to have problems at all with Verizon, even with the tall buildings.

What I do have problems with is the high cost of the service which does much to explain why people don't use more bandwidth on Verizon and use more on WiFi.

I would much prefer lower costs for Verizon data usage than higher download speeds.

<comment><USER10> I get 50/20 on Tmo in the Seattle/Bellevue area which is to be expected, given their corporate structure is largely based here (for US operations). But I agree; the speeds are largely irrelevant considering I am only getting 5 GB/month at those speeds and EDGE/2G speeds otherwise.

Would vastly prefer 10/5 or 10/2 or something with near-unlimited data.

<comment><USER9> Just curious. What is your handset? Wondering which modem you have.

<comment><USER10> The new Huawei Nexus 6P. Switched from an iPhone 6+ but I had similar speeds on both devices.

<comment><USER9> I think that uses the Snapdragon 810 which has a better modem than the iPhone 6s/6s+ which has a Category 6 modem. Your phone, the 6P has a Category 9: [https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/processors/810](https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/processors/810)

<comment><USER10> Ah. I've not noticed better signal, I don't think. But I do enjoy the phone regardless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have worked in the field, so I may be able to answer some questions. As always, real-world speed will no be this high any time soon. This is a lab demo which is very different from reality.

They do specify the techniques they used:

* Five-carrier aggregation: Each LTE carrier uses up to 20 MHz, so this uses 100 MHz of bandwidth dedicated to a single user. Bandwidth in the air is scarce and many carriers do not have that much in total. LTE is expanding into higher frequencies (towards 5GHz) where there is more BW available, but the range is shorter.

* 256 QAM: This requires very good receivers and extremely low background noise and interference.

* 4x4 MIMO: MIMO is quite magic and unpredictable, even more so than radio signal propagation in general. For 4x4 to work the phone needs to have four separate antennas, and they need to be separated enough to receive different combinations of signals from the four transmitter antennas. 2x2 MIMO is common and works if you are close enough to the base station and get lucky with the angles and signal reflections.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great, now I can burn through my data cap in 8.42 seconds

<comment><USER13> Not really an issue in Finland since the standard mobile phone plan comes with unlimited data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This same carrier just some days ago issued a statement on average their mobile data customer used 13GB of traffic in August.

[http://corporate.elisa.com/press- releases/bulletin/?id=41240...](http://corporate.elisa.com/press- releases/bulletin/?id=41240826956117&tag=corporate.elisa.com%3Apress)

</comment><comment><USER15> Here (in one of the EU countries) we have a strange situation when 4G is 20+ Mbps, but out home DSL maxes out at 2.5 Mbps. We're thinking of switching over to 4G, but it's only unlimited at night.

</comment><comment><USER16> Rule of thumb: carriers actually deliver, once users are up and running on the service (not the first day after deployment), around 1/10 of whatever speed they mention in press releases.

<comment><USER17> You are sorely mistaken with regards to Finland.

Regulation in Finland defines what broadband speeds are acceptable. This includes mobile broadband. Acceptable speeds are a minimum of 50% of top speeds using a 4 hour average or a minimum of 40% of top speeds at any time.

And this regulation is enforced.

<comment><USER18>
      Acceptable speeds are a minimum of 50% of top speeds [...]

I assume that's _advertised_ top speeds?

<comment><USER17> Yes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>