Time Machine for OSX Lion 10.7 using Debian 6.0 Squeeze - <AUTHOR> http://www.mikepalmer.net/build-a-netatalk-time-machine-for-osx-lion-using-debian-6-0-squeeze/ Build your own time machine using open-source software. <comment><USER2> While I appreciate the fun of getting this to work, overall, I really wonder whether saving $300 for a Time Capsule is worth it if it means that your backup solution is now relying on you typing a command like

        defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

The "unsupported" would give me pause when setting up a solution I will need to be there when the worst happens. There must be a reason for this preference to be there.

Granted, it could just be Apple wanting to sell their products and thus doing some public key magic for it to work without the switch. Or it could be that TM relies on some very rarely used feature in AFP which is not or at least not perfectly implemented in netatalk.

Are you willing to bet your backup on this flag being needed for the former reason and not the latter?

<comment><USER3> Apple put that in there so that they could sell more TC's. They also seem to make backwards incompatibile changes to the protocol for every OS release.

That said, the netatalk (and other vendors such as Drobo) have been pretty good at staying on top of the changes. You can safely ignore this as an issue.

<comment><USER4> > Apple put that in there so that they could sell more TC's.

Not only is that pure speculation on your part, it's also not true.

<comment><USER3> Ok, cool, you worked on TM. Care to explain why Apple purposely made it difficult to setup TM using any other third party product other than a TimeCapsule?

'Because we didn't want to get support issues'?

<comment><USER4> We needed certain guarantees on the remote end in order to ensure reliable backups, that's all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found the title a bit unclear. The first time I read it, it sounded like Apple was using Debian Squeeze as part of Time Machine somehow, rather than someone interfacing to Time Machine using squeeze. Both stories would have been interesting, I just wanted to know which one to expect.

</comment><comment><USER3> One addition, use my little automator action (Create Backup Volume) [1] to generate the sparsebundle for each machine you are backing up. It sets up the sparsebundle with better arguments, namely a larger sparse-band-size=131072 which greatly improves the speed of the backups since it is fewer files being opened in the sparsebundle.

Don't worry about the size you give the bundle since newer versions of osx will just resize the bundle to the size of the shared volume in netatalk (something which was neglected in the blog authors post).

[1] <http://code.google.com/p/backmyfruitup/downloads/list>

</comment><comment><USER6> I had this running (except with netatalk 2.2.x I don't think all that "unsupported" prefs setting and xml hacking was necessary), anyway after a month or so Mac OS started complaining that the backup couldn't be "verified" or somesuch, and then proceeded to re-do the whole backup. As this started happening every couple of days I gave up and switched to running rdiff-backup manually across ssh instead. Makes browsing the backup repository much easier too, especially if I only need something from the last run.

<comment><USER7> I think you're right about netatalk 2.2 avahi stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It appears to be down. Here's the Google Cache [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:a7H_n-e...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:a7H_n- eKm-4J:www.mikepalmer.net/build-a-netatalk-timemachine-for-osx-lion-using- debian-6-0-squeeze/+mikepalmer+Time+Machine+for+OSX+Lion+10.7+using+Debian+6.0+Squeez&hl=en&client=safari&gl=us&strip=1)

</comment><comment><USER9> An older page on doing this with a lot more detail:

[http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file- serve...](http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and- time-machine-volume/)

Not all of it is necessary anymore with Lion (and maybe with more recent Debian/Ubuntu, I'm not sure), but it is a nice overview of the pieces.

</comment><comment><USER10> Plug a 1T LaCie all terrain HD into the FW 800 port. Works a lot faster than the wireless and it's easy to back up the backup (portably)

</comment><comment><USER11> Another data point. If you already have a regular Airport Extreme, you can plug a drive into the USB port, share it, and set it as your Time Machine target. I didn't see the need to spend the extra money for the Time Capsule.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use Backblaze (<http://goo.gl/LKYIq>) in case my house burns down and I do TM backups to a DroboShare FS in case I need the data immediately. The TM backups are also full backups so that if I need to just restore a whole machine I have that option too. I also have PreyProject installed in case someone steals my laptop.

Having lost data in the past, I can only say that setting up some sort of backup/recovery system is very important. Hard disks and SSD's are like life, they have a 100% guaranteed failure rate. =)

</comment><comment><USER12> Here is another alternative.

Get a second-hand mac mini and attach an external hdd. Then share the hdd on the network and use it from timemachine.Now you also have a normal web server with apache and php, install your favorite db and you're done.

Or you can create a hackintosh from an old laptop. Though this is potentially quite unstable.

<comment><USER13> And that way you could use a RAID configuration of your choice, rather than being limited to what Apple provides in Time Capsules, which I don't think are even RAID.

<comment><USER14> Getting a little off the topic, I find it interesting that so many people RAID their backups but not their primary storage.

<comment><USER15> most people's primary storage is the laptop hard drive. doubt it is useful to have raid on 1 drive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> To be honest, I'd probably just get a refurb 2 GB Time Capsule for $260, considering the bare drive would run you $160.

</comment><comment><USER17> Can't see site, but it all "just works" if you can go to wheezy on your debian machine.

</comment><comment><USER18> is there a mirror?

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:S1ltAY9...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:S1ltAY9SAgsJ:www.mikepalmer.net/archives/208+&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Spacetime locates a contact on a map by texting them a link to click on - <AUTHOR> I find myself often texting people, "where are you?" so I wrote this little iPhone app that lets me text them a special link.  When they click the link, it uses the HTML5 geolocation API to report their location and shows it on a map.
http://whru.at/
It's only as accurate as the HTML5 geolocation API, but I've been finding it pretty useful.  What do you think? <comment><USER2> Very clever! I think this is a great idea. There's a startup here in the Seattle area (<http://www.glympse.com/>) that's doing something similar, but—frankly—I think I feel a lot more comfortable with your model, especially since I think usage is a lot more likely (and abuse far less likely) in a 'pull' scenario like this one.

Good job!

Also, I have some 'constructive' feedback. Please note that I really do think your app is cool, and I'm only trying to help you make it better:

\- whru.at should give me the option of typing in my location, or manually locating myself on the map.

\- whru.at and Space-time are very different names. Which one do you want to use? (personally I like the 'texty' domain name better)

\- It looks like you're using Titanium or something similar to build the UI. Kill this, and move to Objective C. The selection highlights on your table view are weird.

\- Please only use system fonts.

\- Only use pull to refresh or a refresh button, and not both.

\- The color scheme seems to be all over the place: black, white, orange, blue, gray... Check out appdesignvault.com, or other similar resources for pre-built iOS app themes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! The UI is just a webview that refreshes from a server. This is so I can iterate on the UI without going through the app store, but I agree native would be better. I'm thinking of actually using clutch.io in the next version.

I agree with the rest of your feedback as well. Good stuff.

<comment><USER2> > The UI is just a webview that refreshes from a server. This is so I can > iterate on the UI without going through the app store

Smart :) Good luck with this, I dig it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey Aaron,

I built a POC site a long time ago called FindFacetime (before Apple started using the Facetime name) that was focused on geolocation within a person's forage area, then connected the space on that person's forage map to their available time.

The goal was to find facetime, or spacetime, or the portmanteau (sfacetime) or (spfacetime).

Facebook optimizes on screentime. What service exists to match calendars and offer you a menu of possible options for real-world facetime? Noonhat was the last most interesting entry I saw (and part of the inspiration for Find Facetime), if only there were user account management, and I could invite all my friends to sign-up, and optionally invite strangers.

I hope someone out there runs on this idea and builds a free site that outcompetes Facebook on connecting me face-to-face with my friends, helping us match up our respective forage areas or radii and black out all but our mutually available time blocks.

I'd be happy to invest in the business myself.

</comment><comment><USER4> I really like the ping-pong model here and I think it's the only one acceptable by the privacy concerned masses. I hope I'll remember to use the app every time I'll be curious where ppl are. All I'd wished for is auto refresh.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, you actually hit on my #1 question: whether people will remember to use the app. I guess we'll see now that it's out there.

Also it should auto-refresh whenever it gets an Apple Push Notification. If the push notification is delayed, then your clicking refresh could show new data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the purpose of texting "where are you?" is null: This is an excellent way to find out the location of your friend(s) without them giving much effort.

If the purpose of texting "where are you?" is to meet up: Sure, bearing in mind that your friends will eventually need to call/text each other to confirm that they are going to meet in front of some building.

</comment><comment><USER6> In addition to Latitude, the built-in "Find your Friends" seems to already do this, without the user needing to explicitly provide consent every time after the first.

You should clearly state why your app is better.

Also, I know this is hard to do on iOS, but it would really be nice if it could use Google Voice, or email/gmail, or some method other than texting. A lot of people still don't have unlimited SMS plans.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried those and other location-sharing apps but I couldn't find any that didn't suffer from two problems:

1\. They force my contacts to go through many steps, like downloading an app, registering an account, etc. It's hard to get someone to download and setup an app. It's easier to get them to click a link.

2\. They force my contacts to share their location 24/7, which I don't need and they don't want. Having users "explicitly provide consent every time" is a feature.

You're right that I should put this in the app description.

<comment><USER7> At least with Latitude, it doesn't force you to share your location 24/7. You can turn it off at will, so you can effectively only share it when you want your contacts to see where you are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool. FYI, there's a startup in Portland (<https://geoloqi.com/>) that lets you do the same in reverse - you can send a link to your friends and show them your location; the link automatically expires after a set time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, there are many apps that do this in reverse. I was surprised at this, because I find it so much more useful to get someone's location than to share my location.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Marauder's Map! Awesome.

</comment><comment><USER10> Clickable: <http://whru.at/>

</comment><comment><USER11> old trick - Where Are You Now: [http://servletsuite.blogspot.com/2010/10/where-are-you- now.h...](http://servletsuite.blogspot.com/2010/10/where-are-you-now.html) Send link to Geo Mail

</comment><comment><USER12> This is the entire point of Google Latitude existing.

(But I like your idea too! Very useful)

</comment><comment><USER13> Awesome - I've just used it with a few buddies and love the simplicity! My only concern is that I'll have to send an additional msg to new friends to get them to click on the link as the msg sent via the app may seem a bit spammy. I wonder if you can somehow solve that.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why is OPs text greyed out?

<comment><USER15> It is to prevent/reduce the posting of large amounts of text. Big blocks of grey text are hard to read, so it discourages people from posting them.

Apparently it is preferred that if you have that much to say, then you should create a blog post and then submit that.</comment></comment>


Verity Credit Union changes all member passwords to birthday + last four of SSN - <AUTHOR> https://www.veritycu.com/

<comment><USER2> Has anyone else had experience with onlinkbank.com? That's the service which Verity has switched to for their online banking, which uses a single domain for all of their customers it seems (e.g. if You're with financial institution X you access your online banking via <https://command.onlinebank.com/X/>)

It just looks sketchy, you have same-origin issues potentially, and their UI is horrible leading me to believe they probably don't have high overall code quality.

In addition to setting the passwords as described, they also make the user pad their username with leading 0's because their app can't handle <8 char user names. That's ridiculous on so many levels, I don't need to elaborate why here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not only that, but many people's default usernames included the last four of their social, if not the entire thing!</comment></comment>


South Korea's booming 'webtoons' - <AUTHOR> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/05/05/business/tech/south-koreas-booming-webtoons-put-japans-print-manga-notice/ <comment><USER2> One factor not discussed in the article is the differing attitude towards exports, piracy and copy protection. Historically, and even today, it's extremely difficult to legally view lots of Japanese content outside Japan, yet Japanese producers pursue copyright claims with rabid fervor. Japanese publishers for books and music were also extremely resistant to move to e-books, digital downloads or streaming.

For whatever reason, South Korean publishers were not as myopic, meaning their content could be more easily accessed -- at first technically illegally, but soon there was a groundswell of demand that led to large-scale legal rebroadcasting (TV stations showing Korean dramas etc) and that then led to today's juggernaut. Manga is just the latest example of Japan losing a market that really should have been theirs for the taking.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's fair to call it myopic. That implies that one method is correct and the other is wrong. It's more of a cultural difference.

While South Korea has largely embraced the Western style of instant gratification hyper consumerism, Japan is more nuanced. And IMO, that's a good thing.

There is value in scarcity, and in context. It's OK if a publisher doesn't want its work distributed around the world for everyone to see. It's that publisher's property. Having to travel to Japan to see, read, or hear certain things is a good thing. If every thing and every experience was available everywhere, there would be no point in travel.

Having ramen in a hole-in-the-wall ramen shop beneath the train tracks in Japan is a different experience than having ramen in Japantown Los Angeles.

When my wife goes to Japan, she brings an small empty suitcase to ship home just for the books, magazines, and music she can't get here.

It's like artists who destroy their work after a show. Scarcity increases the object's value to some. And it's the artist's choice to do so, not the audience's.

I know this is an unpopular view, especially in tech circles, but you don't have a right to consume every piece of media ever created in every region around the world all the time.

<comment><USER4> > but you don't have a right to consume every piece of media ever created in > every region around the world all the time.

Oh you do. Artists and general creatives often tumble into the trap of thinking they can control the spread of their work following public release. You cannot control the zeitgeist of a generation. If your work is popular than the moment you print it, its spread is out of your hands. IP, copyright and legal action are lossy mechanisms that work against the prevailing system. I'm not saying they don't have value (they very much do!) but when your product is consumer-grade content that don't have infrastructure you own baked into its operation you'll find your stuff being obtained illegally if you don't make it available legally and quickly.

I've seen break-dancers expect to be able to have exclusive rights to movement into perpetuity enforced by community-driven shaming tactics (doesn't work) and I've read enough scanlations to know that the Japanese approach to print manga is negligent of the ramifications of globalisation. When you publish, its gone. You have to be more prepared at publish time in the modern era.

<comment><USER5> Just going to leave it here. Seems relevant

Planet Money: Joke Theft [https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/06/710404524/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/06/710404524/episode-904-joke- theft)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Webtoons have a very interesting business model. Unlike manga, webtoons are usually free and ad supported. I don't even have to sign up to start reading one in most cases. The interesting part is, webtoons are usually released once a week and you can actually pay ~30cents to read the latest episode before it's released next week for free. So if you can't wait another week after a cliff hanger, you can pay to read the next episode and now you're stuck in a vicious cycle of paying every episode to be one episode ahead.

<comment><USER7> Most webcomic artists have been using this model for a while now; no one likes ads and they don't pay much, but $1 a month on Patreon to see pages a week early isn't too much to ask. There are often higher tiers for bonus content (sketches, high-res pages, side comics, etc.) as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Most webtoons trending on domestic manga apps are not only translated but > meticulously localized for a Japanese audience, with names, locations and > various proper nouns all Japanized. Even the original illustrations can be > altered to erase anything distinctly South Korean, such as the design of the > police cars.

Man, how the table has turned. This was exactly how South Korea imported Japanese manga and anime for decades. Up until mid-90s virtually all Japanese manga was "Koreanized" in a similar way, even though by that time everybody knew they were Japanese. In earlier days they wouldn't even tell us: there are a generation or two of Korean boys who grew up thinking Atom, Mazinga and Future Boy Conan were Korean animations.

The wounds of colonization (1910-1945) were still raw, and admitting you liked Japanese culture was frowned upon for a very long time. (Which is ironic, considering most of children's prime time TV shows were made in Japan.)

South Korea briefly had a renaissance of comics ("manhwa") in the 90s, but then widespread piracy together with the advent of the internet killed off the industry in the early 2000s. I remember a comic strip where the protagonist (the artist himself) decides to kill himself after going broke, so he turns on the gas valve and go to sleep. He wakes up the next day because the gas line was shut off for non-payment.

I think a major reason why Korea embraced webtoon so easily is that the traditional comics industry was essentially burned to ground. Webtoons were initially a side dish, offered by web portals (which are still strong in Korea) to lure viewers because servers were cheap and artists were also cheap (where else would they go, anyway?). (It also explains why it's basically free and ad-supported.) But then it started to make money, and then money started to attract talents, and so on.

If someone told me, only five years ago, that Korean webtoons will threaten Japanese manga industry, I would've laughed. "What are you talking about? It's Japan!"

</comment><comment><USER9> At the end of the day great content wins though. The medium's convenience really only makes a difference in the "filler" level content we consume.

For the winners of the power law in manga we'll go wherever the great content happens to be. (That being said japan is so bad at modern global digital licensing / distribution they really have been leaving tons of money on the table for the last decade+)

<comment><USER10> It's honestly quite depressing to imagine just how much money is left on the table regarding manga. The demand for translations has lead to massive amounts of illegal sharing of digital/digitalized copies and there's even somewhat of a living to be made of unofficial translations (though I know many translate out of self interest).

I'm hoping that there'll eventually be a Steam for manga. I know several companies are trying to become that, but they've all failed to catch on with both consumers and producers.

<comment><USER11> US pricing is silly. But, the US market for this stiff is also fairly tiny. Outside of a small number of mega hits it's just not worth the company's time to try and sell to the US market.

Some of this just comes down to cultural differences. Most US novels don't get translated to Japanese.

<comment><USER12> I think part of the weirdness of the market is that they, unconsciously, are straddling the "content" and "souvenir/collectible" market. It's sort of like vinyl records today in that regard.

I'm a moderate enthusiast-- probably have like 200 volumes of English translations. I am not really interested in digital platforms, both because then you get no physical souvenir, and because I don't trust them to not implode suddenly. I suspect most long-term fans have a series or two they loved but had to give up on because the translator went bust or it disappeared from whatever service they subscribed to. Once bitten, twice shy...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Korean here who has been watching webtoons since the very beginning.

Unlike some recent hits made by printed manhwa artists, webtoons were initially an amateur thing. Where as mangas always seemed to have a certain level of professionality in terms of detail and storytelling.

That said, it is interesting how Koreans adapt to these technologies really fast and globalize their culture through a media platform.

It feels really weird when you spot someone reading a webtoon in public in the US because that was just native Koreans who lived in Korea 5 years ago.

<comment><USER14> Since you've been reading webtoons for a long time, I have a question if you have time.

A lot of the most popular webtoons I've read are based on serialized novels (e.g. 귀환자의 마법은 특별해야 합니다) -- I've been wondering if this is an actual link, or just some kind of selection bias. Do you know?

<comment><USER13> I'm not really sure what the "most popular" webtoons among non-Koreans. I know some American friends who showed me some that were supposedly popular, but I couldn't recognize.

That's certainly not a trend in mainstream webtoons, which are usually the Naver Webtoons. Nearly all (can't think of any one based on something) of them on that platform are original content. Sometimes they get published as novels. Like Noblesse.

I think the particular one you mentioned is based on a webnovel (similar to webtoons but novels).

I definitely see this trend in Japanese mangas though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting to see the picture on the top of the article, meant to represent Japanese print manga, features Shingeki no Kyojin (Attack on Titan) most prominently.

I don't think I've read any True Beauty, but then again, the fact that I'm not at all sure whether I have, whereas there is no chance of a snowball in hell that I'd confuse Shingeki No Kyojin for anything else, suggests to me that Japanese print manga still have a future. To say the least.

And can I take this opportunity to point people to Totsukuni no Shoujo (The Girl from the Other Side)?

[https://myanimelist.net/manga/93972/Totsukuni_no_Shoujo](https://myanimelist.net/manga/93972/Totsukuni_no_Shoujo)

Once in a while, I find a little gem like that buried under all the shonen and shoujo in my local bookstore. That's what keeps me coming back for more.

</comment><comment><USER16> Anecdotal, but my wife is obsessed with webtoons and eagerly awaits new updates to the (50? 100?) different stories she's following. It's similar to the way I consume podcasts. She especially likes romance webtoons.

Before finding webtoons she had no interest in graphic novels, comics, anime, etc. and still doesn't. She just likes her webtoons.

<comment><USER17> It's all about content and demographic targeting. Female targeted comics basically do not exist in the west. Shoujo manga is not popularized / suppressed by the western community. Webtoons have a lot of female creators early on represented that continuously pump out women targeted content. Women could easily be 80% of the core video game playing population if the correct content was made. It's an absolute joke that it's been more 10 years and we still haven't gotten a single twilight video game.

<comment><USER18> I think you're wrong on both counts. I know plenty of female targeted comics in Belgium and France.

And half of gamers are women. Women just like to play different games than men. Casual games that are dismissed as 'real games' by many. But even before smartphones casual games were a billion dollar industry.

There's a study [1] that spells out which game genres are dominated by women. They surveyed 270,000 gamers about their favorite game titles. According to this study, women make up about 70% of match 3 and family/farm simulation games' audiences. About half of casual puzzle and atmospheric exploration games are played by women, too. The gender ratio plummets when we get to first-person shooters, tactical shooters and racing games. At the bottom of the chart, a mere 2% of sports game-players are women

[1] [https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by- genre...](https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/)

<comment><USER17> You cannot compare the female targeted comics to something like marvel superheroes. I'd be shocked if it has even 1% of the popularity of male comics.

And of course I'm talking about games that cost 50+ million dollars to develop. I find your comment about different games to smack a bit segregationist. The female market dominate many hardcore games including the most popular game of 2016/2017 Arena of Valor: [https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2018/01/02/57...](https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2018/01/02/574471694/chinas- most-popular-mobile-game-charges-into-american-market) You'll also notice a marked rise in gamers who play more recent games like Overwatch and Fortnite because they pander to men just a little less. Anyway I'm talking about core games and if you target correctly there should be as many girls playing those as in mobile games too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Japan and South Korea are in a battle over popular culture. Japan has the Cool Japan Fund to invest in pop culture projects.[1] The fund, backed by the Government of Japan and some big banks, was well-financed, but the projects have not been very successful.[2]

They need some better VCs.

[1] [https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/](https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/) [2] [https://www.nippon.com/en/news/fnn20180713001/floundering- co...](https://www.nippon.com/en/news/fnn20180713001/floundering-cool-japan- projects-see-loss-after-loss.html)

<comment><USER20> Who will win this battle? What are the ramifications?

<comment><USER21> There's no battle. Both Korea and Japan see the value in exporting cultural products, although I don't think the Korean government is focusing on webtoons as much as kpop.

Manga and webtoons are different and cater to different audiences.

In any case manga is much, much more popular and actually gets translations. I think this is due to the longer publishing schedules and how established manga is compared to webtoons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Warning: May be inappropriate comments ahead.

I stumbled upon the topic many years ago when I was looking at online publishing and making money. And Webtoons in South Korea caught my eyes, It was in its early days but I first thought it was some idea that will be destined to fail. Simply because I don't believe there is a market that are willing to pay for it, the content were; Amateur at best. And it was too easy to private. I was wrong. I knew I was wrong because it is gaining momentum not only in Japan, but also across in SEA.

There are two distinct category that Web Toons, and specially South Korea Webtoons excel in. LGBT and Adult Content.

In LGBT I have no idea the audience were _huge_ , with distribution channel like the web, even a small percentage would be a massive Number. And it was amazing to see lots of female secretly fantasise about Gay Man. And unlike man where many are privating porn, they are very much willing to pay for it.

Then there is Hentai, ( the world actually means something else in Japanese but its English form is mostly used to describe Porn in Cartoons or 2D ). I mean, who enjoys it? And even if they did, who is wiling to paid for it? Again turns out the audience is actually gigantic. Pornhub even confirmed this when they release their data analysis.

One day I chatted with an old friends, he is a real life translator who used to do subtitle for Anime as hobby and ask him what is he up to. Turns out he was doing these Webtoons translation from Korean and was making good money. Good not in terms of amount, but in terms of time spent vs money made. As it was much easier to do compared to Animation.

<comment><USER23> Commercial and independent gay and lesbian manga have existed for 40-50 years, and there's also a significant number of gay/lesbian anime and games.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I live Japan and this is a great example of how the culture holds on to tradition even if it hurts them over time. Manga is interesting because it's actually a quite old art form, but the current print method of publication is not [1]. So, you'd expect the web to be a natural, obvious progression.

I'd liken the ethos here to: "Move slow and never break things."

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

</comment><comment><USER25> There are some programs that colorize manga(e.g. neural networks), if it was more popular it would add a competitive advantage vs webtoons - artists can tune automatic colorization themselves(vs drawing color). Reading monochrome black drawings is very confined expirience, such colors are depressive, dramatic and bleak - colors that evoke negative associations and melancholy. Color expands the emotional gamut significantly.

</comment><comment><USER26> Japan still uses tape to go from agency to broadcaster (this has only started to change over the last couple of years) and a lot of it is to do with not wanting to put people out of work and less about adopting technology. The way business works in japan is just so different to anywhere else in the world.

</comment><comment><USER27> I have paid to webtoons for fast-pass several times but not for manga from Japan. One of the reason is official translations come later than the fan translated versions. After a couple of days, there is no remaining discussion of the chapter at the community.

Also, the community is ready to pay for the new manga chapters. Last month, a fan translation group removed their translation of a webtoon, which was in the fast-pass period, because of backlash by the community.

I wish manga is more accessible. Because they are professionally crafted and have better storytelling.

</comment><comment><USER28> One other element to webtoons' success that isn't mentioned in this article: When I see people talking about comics with LGBT themes that aren't from the US, a significant % of them are Korean webtoons on one of the multiple portals that have dozens of active series with those themes in them. This seems like a savvy way to target audiences that are traditionally underserved (i.e. if they want to find this content, japanese or otherwise, it's quite difficult). Some of the portals seem to specialize in this content - Approximately 1/2 of Lezhin's active series appear to be about homosexual romance, for example. For a Japanese consumer a lot of this content is either in 1-3 focused monthly/bimonthly print series or picked up at comics festivals in-person.

I've seen some attempts to target this audience from Chinese artists as well but with the policy changes made by the Chinese government lately I have no idea if those artists will be able to continue with their work - I've seen a few reports from artists that the government is actively punishing them for releasing that kind of content now (hopefully this is not true).

</comment><comment><USER29> Eh, they'll die off. Tokypop used to try and license Korean manhwa here a while back ago, among other publishers. If you remember the movie the Priest, that was about as famous as it got here. I used to read it, usually it was the same problem a lot of Korean stuff has..it's an okay copy, but there isn't really an original spark to it that makes it come alive like manga does.

</comment><comment><USER30> it's great that this forces more manga to move to the web. where's my Netflix for manga Japan?

anecdotally, on a JAL flight between Tokyo and London (for which Russia taxes every passenger individually, story for another time), I saw a bunch of manga on the in-flight entertainment system, and people were actually using it to read. cooler still, seeing both the parents and their children reading different manga.

<comment><USER21> If someone did a subscription service for manga with quality translations (and coloring) they'd make a killing, probably.

<comment><USER30> the problem is the medium: manga are just not made for digital consumption. they're brilliant for analog thou.

i've tried a couple of these services, but they were quite subpar.

<comment><USER31> I don't see how reading manga on an E-ink ereader, with one page filling the screen and "turning" pages by pressing the right side, is fundamentally different from reading it in "analog" (paper) form.

I wouldn't want to read it on a non E-ink screen, or have to scroll within a single page though.

<comment><USER21> Parent probably was referring to reading it on a laptop or similar, which many people do. (I also read it this way).

I use the SimpleComic reader on OSX, first removing the menu and then fullscreening it. This requires me to download the manga beforehand. It works for me since I don't read that much manga.

Now that I have an ipad I wonder how well it could work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm a pretty huge reader of manga and I have been reading a couple of webtoons lately. Besides South Korean ones, there are couple of Chinese Webtoons that is based off of famous web novels that is really fun to read. South Korean webtoons tend to have "weird" formatting since its one long page rather like a book since its catered towards phones or tablets. I noticed a good amount of webtoons out of South Korea that is sponsored by Line originally but the industry has really taken off this past couple years with independent publishers. Not sure if this is true since I only see the English translated ones rather than the originals but I find that South Korean webtoons has a higher percentage of being explicit material. Not sure if it's because translators chose them on purpose since they have a higher click rate?

</comment><comment><USER33> Japanese people are reading ad-supported free manga on their phones and tablets constantly nowadays.

There are several competing services and they seem to be spending a lot on advertising right now if the amount of TV commercials is anything to go by

</comment><comment><USER34> Can someone please link to a webtoon so I can figure out wtf they're talking about?

I feel old.

<comment><USER21> I mean, "webtoons" aren't really a thing in western culture. You can think of the posts like chapters from a comic. Anyway, here's the latest chapter[0] of 마음의 소리 ( _The Sound of Your Heart_ ) which is popular. Enough to have its own tv show on netflix.

You can see more of them at comic.naver.com [1]

[0]: [https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=20853&no=...](https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=20853&no=1173&weekday=tue)

[1]: [https://comic.naver.com/index.nhn](https://comic.naver.com/index.nhn)

<comment><USER35> I really enjoyed the first season of The Sound of Your Heart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "Internet threatens print industry" would've been a less interesting headline.

</comment><comment><USER4> worth noting One Punch Man started out in a web toonish delivery mechanism before being turned into manga.

</comment><comment><USER37> The ideas in Reinventing Comics are finally becoming mainstream.

</comment><comment><USER38> Web comics were pretty big in the West for a while, too - I guess they never really got large enough to be commercialized and produced on an industrial scale, though.

The article mentions that a lot of these webtoons are vertically-oriented for smartphones; is that what sets them apart? Or is it more of a genre thing? Did they maybe crank up the production values a bit?

[https://xkcd.com/157/](https://xkcd.com/157/)

<comment><USER21> It may be a little bit of A, a little bit of B.

Anecdotally I can tell you I've seen many, many people reading webtoons on their phones on the subway. I've done it. The vertical format in this case is perfect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> On notice like scoring a point when you are down 10-0

</comment><comment><USER40> Another day another story of an old style of business facing obsolescence due to shifting market conditions.

The narrative for stories like this one is usually "businesses stuck in their ways refuse to adapt and die out", painting the business as fools who die due to their incompetence and conservative mindset. I'm curious, though; is there any reason why Japan's manga publishers might want to retain their focus on print media rather than move to a digital focus?

Going digital seems like the clear optimal move here, they might even consider encouraging artists to create their own webtoons and make Japan competitive in that space. Why might they not want to do so?

<comment><USER41> > an old style of business facing obsolescence

Manga is nowhere near obsolete. It's such a huge market that there are entire supporting industries indirectly built around it.

> Why might they not want to do so?

Probably because they're raking in money.

<comment><USER40> > Manga is nowhere near obsolete

I agree. The obsolete label applies to _print_ manga, not the medium itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> They're essentially the same thing. I see ads for webtoons but the tropes are the same you see in manga. Very large breasted women who are all attracted to the socially awkward nerdy guy.

<comment><USER43> That is probably more indicative of the kind of content that pulls in eyeballs when broadly advertised than the genre as a whole. For example [https://www.heartofkeol.com/](https://www.heartofkeol.com/) probably counts as a "webtoon" and follows a different set of tropes.

<comment><USER44> Also a matter of targeting - with fresh accounts browsing certain subsets where I didn't bother to install have clearly gotten work youtube for music loops to think of me as a woman completely accidentally.

I got essentially entirely romance manga banner ads and video ads were for birth control, menstrual products, and oddly schizophrenia medication (not sure if that is broad targetted or not). It makes them look amusingly inept at ad targeting and someone in marketing look kind of sexist - given that guy ads tried to sell me cars and beer constantly.</comment></comment></comment>


Clementine is Joining Dropbox - <AUTHOR> http://www.clementine.io/blog/clementine-is-joining-dropbox <comment><USER2> [http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

 _We're now excited to announce the next stage of our journey — we're joining Dropbox!

[ Dropbox will build on their technology. ]

The Clementine service however, will be shutting down. The free portions of the app will remain active for current users until August 31, 2015 and we'll provide plenty of help to regular and premium subscribers as the service transitions._

Remind us again why we should take a chance on startups like this??? I wish more people would realize the potential for a vicious cycle.

Side note: 5 weeks in the dog days of summer isn't much time to transition; I hope it's longer for paid customers.</comment>


Calling All Socially-Minded Techies; Kiva Launches API Platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/03/calling-all-socially-minded-techies-kiva-launches-api-platform/ <comment><USER2> Kiva is great - I've used it a few times.

This year (xmas) I convinced my family to invest in Kiva instead. Each year we'll add to the pot and roll any investments forward.

This approach seems interesting - Really hope this initiative gets traction.</comment>


Top keyword search on Eat24? Domino's - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eat24hours.com/top-keyword-search-on-eat24-dominos/

<comment><USER2> So much public ownage of a multibillion dollar company, it's just beautiful. Nom nom nom. I'd love to see how dominos responds.</comment>


Google Signs Agreement with NYC to Replace Taxis With Driverless Google Cabs - <AUTHOR> http://inhabitat.com/nyc/google-signs-agreement-with-nyc-mayor-to-replace-nyc-taxis-with-driverless-google-cabs/

<comment><USER2> April Fools, 2012.

<comment><USER3> 5,000 driverless cars by 2014? Yeah. That'll happen. Nice pipe dream though.</comment></comment>


Fukushima contaminants found as far north as Alaska's Bering Strait - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alaska-fukushima-idUSKCN1R90BV <comment><USER3> Read the article, this is essentially non-news with a jarring headline. Wow, an already extremely rare isotope in seawater is now 40% higher in concentration. Do you know what a very small number * 1.4 is? Another very small number. It has no health effects of any kind and no appreciable affect on the earth or humanity in any way.

<comment><USER4> These contaminants stories spread unnecessary paranoia among those with an already irrational fear of things like radiation.

Then they create complacency among those who notice we're talking microscopic amounts and changes.

But the thing is that this release of radioactive elements can still cause substantial problems, not everywhere you detect traces but specific areas where various factors reconcentrate such light or heavy radioactive elements - the top of the food chain and tbe arctic come to mind but I'd guess we'll find others.

<comment><USER3> Cesium is highly soluble in water, which in my layman understanding means it won't bioaccumulate nearly as much as nonsoluble/large substances like mercury and pesticides.

<comment><USER5> The issues with all of these things that are pragmatic is that the additive effect of all the little things we have done in the past 100 years over the course of a very small period of time say 10,000 yeas. So 100 fold is significant. Progress and growth is an addiction and we're blinded to any other facts in the face of that. For most of history we have basically 0% or negative growth... then all the sudden you had massive growth say 3-10% each year which was to say the least impossible a few hundred years before. To maintain this sort of monstrous growth you need to create energy and that means pollution... which adds up over time as many of our technologies are based around things that are not natural and don't break down.

<comment><USER6> Cesium-137 half-life is ~30 years. So in 10000 years any additives will fade to what, something like 10^-100 of what they've been when introduced?

<comment><USER5> Yes I actually did some more research and it seems that even in the case of Chernobyl this is not a concern in the long run. In that Plutonium is not a concern in general which has a half-life of up to 300,000 years. And most other elements decay after a few decades. So in the case of nuclear meltdowns the concerns are limited to the century in which they happen mostly.

[https://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/l-3/3-chernobyl- envi...](https://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/l-3/3-chernobyl- environment.htm#2p0)

[https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact- sheets/r...](https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact- sheets/radwaste.html)

I still think the issue exists with other contaminants but with at least nuclear energy it seems the long term effects of its use in terms of disasters and even spent fuel are very limited.

<comment><USER7> Except Pu is toxic and accumulates in the bone marrow, compared to Cs which is excreted.

Unit 3 at Fukushima was the only one fueled with MOX fuel containing 6% Pu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Everything about this says the scientist they interviewed was trying really hard to stress how safe it is and how non-issue this is.

You need 3kx higher levels to even approach danger levels. All this article says is that heavy particulate takes a long time to travel from Japan to Alaska by means of ocean current.

<comment><USER9> > All this article says is that heavy particulate takes a long time to travel > from Japan to Alaska by means of ocean current.

Also that we are really good at detecting trace levels of radioactive materials.

<comment><USER8> That's a good point. We're REALLY good at detecting radiation. Which is why I usually chime in when an article just says they "detect" levels of radiation. The distance between detect and danger can be huge (it can also be low, but that's less common).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A useful perspective is that we find contaminants from fossil fuel burning everywhere.

<comment><USER11> I've read, though can't find a citation right now, that we dump more radioactive gunk into the atmosphere every year, just from burning coal, than has been released in all the nuclear accidents in history, combined.

<comment><USER12> Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste — Scientific American

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is- more-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more- radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/)

—

Radiological impact of airborne effluents of coal and nuclear plants

DOI: 10.1126/science.202.4372.1045

<comment><USER11> Thanks! By "can't find", I'd meant, "not in a place where I can take the time" because my build was about to finish, sorry.

I think this SA article's title is a bit hyperbolic, frankly. The editor's note even cites the article's text having been changed so as not to say that. But not the headline...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For a comparison, remember every living being still has contaminants from the nuclear bombs detonated over fifty years ago.

</comment><comment><USER14> I did not realize how bad Fukushima was until I went into a youtube marathon yesterday. Building a reactor at the shoreline of an earthquake zone was bad enough but the safety features of the reactor were poor reliability engineering. "We learned that the reactor design should not rely on external power sources to prevent it from blowing up" was one of the lessons learnt.

The reactors are leaking and contaminating ground water. The solution is to store all that water in thousands of tanks and run them through an expensive decontamination process. They are considering freezing the ground under the reactor to control the ground water contamination!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNFvZ6Vr2U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNFvZ6Vr2U) Understanding the accident of Fukushima Daiichi

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtwNyUZJgw8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtwNyUZJgw8) Return to Fukushima - <USER2>

<comment><USER15> "We learned that the reactor design should not rely on external power sources to prevent it from blowing up"

This has been known for decades. Fukushima (like essentially all nuclear power plants) had backup diesel generators. But the electrical switching equipment that connected the generators to several of the reactors were located in areas that was flooded by the tsunami. Oops.

<comment><USER16> Also, it had an emergency cooling system (the isolation condenser) which could work passively without pumped water. Unfortunately the failsafe logic made the valves to the isolation condenser close when electricity was lost, and then without electric power the reactor operators could neither open the valves, nor monitor whether the valves were opened or closed, so it didn't work and the operators were confused about why. [[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253938/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253938/)]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The newly detected Fukushima radiation was minute. The level of cesium-137, > a byproduct of nuclear fission, in seawater was just four-tenths as high as > traces of the isotope naturally found in the Pacific Ocean.

>Those levels are far too low to pose a health concern, an important point for people living on the Bering Sea coast who subsist on food caught in the ocean, Sheffield said.

>Cesium-137 levels some 3,000-times higher than those found in the Bering Sea are considered safe for human consumption under U.S. Environmental Protection Agency drinking water standards, officials said.

<comment><USER7> Of course it's 3k times higher, because it all decayed to Barium 137 aeons ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > It was the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl 25 years earlier

First of all: It _is_ the world's worst nuclear disaster. A long way still far from being a solved problem. The use of "was" here is too optimistic and not justified.

The article focuses in how radioactive stuff can travel miles and miles and cross boundaries. Something that is not unexpected but is always interesting to report and measure. Facing the data is not spreading fear, is improving our knowledge about a problem.

The water masses in the ocean are not homogeneous. Contrary to what most people think, the ocean is not a place covered by water; is a place covered by _waters_. There are many different layers of saltwater that do not mix (or do it very slowly). If a water mass can transport a low level of radioactivity between Alaska and Japan, is not impossible having the next month a storm bringing a different, maybe deeper water mass with more salts and a different radioactivity level. To measure just one layer is not enough to understand the entire system and shouldn't be extrapolated as a value for the entire system. Wouldn't be a wise move.

If we can learn something from the article is that USA will need to remain vigilant and keep measuring things, ready to apply quick corrective actions (and close fisheries if necessary) for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how is that comparable to contaminations due to a natural volcanic eruption. I bet the numbers will be several times bigger for volcano.

<comment><USER8> Only radioactive contaminants. But that's really just my guess, I don't know as much about volcanoes. As far as I'm aware, there usually aren't big radiation deposits around volcanoes. But as far as total contaminants it depends on the size of the volcano.

From quick searching I can get some numbers [0]. Yearly volcanoes produce >200m tons of CO2 (not sure if that is CO2eq, because volcanoes also produce a lot of CH4, SO2, H2O,H2S, and other greenhouse gases). A quick search doesn't yield anything conclusive. But I can tell you I've worked on shielding tech and my intuition is that a volcano is going to produce a lot more. This might be a good place for acidburnNSA[1] to chime in, as they know substantially more than I do.

[0] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks- volcan...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcanoes-or- humans/)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=acidburnNSA](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=acidburnNSA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Remember:

The shorter the half-life of an isotope is, the more radioactive and thus dangerous it is.

The longer the half-life of an isotope is, the less radioactive and thus dangerous it is.

Fukushima happened in 2011, almost 8 years ago.

Almost everything dangerous had since decayed.

What we can detect long-living and thus not-so-dangerous isotopos, or detect minute traces of short-living ones because we have very sensitive equipment means exactly nothing besides the fact that we can.

<comment><USER20> > The shorter the half-life of an isotope is, the more radioactive and thus > dangerous it is.

> The longer the half-life of an isotope is, the less radioactive and thus > dangerous it is.

> Fukushima happened in 2011, almost 8 years ago. Almost everything dangerous > had since decayed.

Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years and is pretty dangerous AFAIK [1]:

> Radioactive contaminants are dangerous for 10 to 20 times the length of > their half-lives, meaning that dangerous plutonium released to the > environment today will stick around for the next half a million years.

[1] [https://www.livescience.com/33127-plutonium-more- dangerous-u...](https://www.livescience.com/33127-plutonium-more-dangerous- uranium.html)

<comment><USER21> Yeah, even longer lived things that decay via alpha particles are dangerous when ingested... high energy atomic nuclei hitting DNA makes for bad juju.

<comment><USER6> Of which Radon-222 and Radon-226 still are way more threat than some reactor blowing up somewhere.

edit: if you've got granite in the basement, be vefy afraid :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Teen left blind and deaf by decade-long diet of sausages, crisps, processed food - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/teenager-blind-deaf-junk-food-diet-processed-food-eating-disorder-bristol-a9089331.html <comment><AUTHOR> _eating disorder known as ARFID (avoidant-restrictive food intake disorder) ... avoid food with a certain texture, smell, taste or appearance, or only eat it at a certain temperature ... damaged his optic nerve ... nutritional optic neuropathy (NON) ... irreversible_

See also: _House_ , S01E06, [https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6yd2ui](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6yd2ui)

<comment><USER2> Also see: excessively permissive bad parenting.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an actual eating disorder. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28532967](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28532967)

<comment><USER2> Yes, and it doesn't come from nothing. In the article the mother is quoted as saying the habit started around the time the kid was 7. They effectively let them eat whatever they wanted. That's on them.

Disorders are developed, not innate.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Movine, a simple database migration management CLI tool - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/byronwasti/movine <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, I've been working on a simple CLI tool for database migration management that I thought I would share with a wider audience. The project began out of frustration with existing migration management tools, which I found either too bulky (difficult to install and manage) or too simple (couldn't deal with complicated development strategies). Movine is extremely simple to setup, and is a simple Rust package (or library).

The main thing Movine does differently is keeps track of variant migrations (migration run on the database differs from what you have locally) and divergent migrations (migration run on the database doesn't appear locally). It also provides some tools to fix these states, making it really easy to develop database migrations.

Happy to hear any feedback and hopefully someone is able to find this useful!</comment>


Ask HN: Refactoring Software Documentation - <AUTHOR> Hello!
Disclaimer: I am the author of Helpinator software documentation and technical writing tool.
As a coder myself I usually apply programming approach to documentation and Helpinator is more than an IDE for documentation than an editor. Recently I was thinking about the ways I usually refactor documentation and the tools needed for it. The result was a blog post [1] on how to perform documentation refactoring using tools already built into Helpinator. But I have a feeling that I am missing some important things and I didn't implement tools for them yet. What I have so far: extract topic, extract subtopic, merge topics, move text selection to topic, massive TOC reorder. What else one might need to quickly refactor documentation? <comment><AUTHOR> [1] The post in question: [https://www.helpinator.com/blog/2019/08/26/refactoring- docum...](https://www.helpinator.com/blog/2019/08/26/refactoring- documentation/)</comment>


A Hacker's Guide to Bending the Universe - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/a-hacker-s-guide-to-bending-the-universe-86a5636b04da#.pqjo9zioo <comment><USER2> For a number of years the only remaining applications for tubes were the CRT and the magnetron. We are now down to only one.</comment>


Tumblr Proves That Even Billion Dollar Companies Can Screw Up Mass Emails - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/24/tumblr-proves-that-even-billion-dollar-companies-can-screw-up-mass-emails/

<comment><USER2> They notified their users of an upcoming change and gave them about a month of warning. It'd be nice if the users could go ahead and make the change as soon as they read the email, but it's not like Tumblr is going to intentionally withhold that key detail indefinitely.

It's just a little flub, and nobody's blog is or was negatively affected, so I don't really see a need to drag out the pitchforks over it.

<comment><AUTHOR> No pitchforks, just belly laughs. Rather than just a cosmetic flub like "Dear [First Name]...", they left out the most critical info of the email with a placeholder.

Mostly meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but pretty funny nonetheless. Makes me feel better about some of my past email fails.

<comment><USER2> Much better story in that light, I should probably stow the cynicism and give it another read =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well off to a great start with Yahoo in charge.

</comment><comment><USER4> Billion dollar companies are still staffed by humans, as far as I know. "Companies" don't do anything. Their employees do.

</comment><comment><USER5> We needed proof that a billion dollar company could make an email mistake?</comment>


Obama Puts New CIO Vivek Kundra On Suspension - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-puts-new-cio-vivek-kundra-on-suspension-2009-3 <comment><USER2> _"placed on leave out of 'an abundance of caution'"_

The headline seems misleading since "suspension" implies a punitive action.

</comment><comment><USER3> When the raid story first broke here I wrote this comment in that thread...

"More to the point, the Obama administration could have the worst vetting team in the world and they'd still be smart enough to ask the FBI if they had any active investigations on the appointee. It's too rudimentary a step to skip."

I'm still sure the vetting team checked specifically into Mr. Kundra but I have to admit this makes them look a tad incompetent. They may not be the worst vetting team but the fact that the President seemingly didn't know this was coming does not reflect well on them or the Administration.

(In my original comment I assumed the vetting team knew this raid was comming but disregarded it because there were no direct ties to Kundra)

<comment><USER4> Can the vetting team ask the FBI for information on an active investigation on one of its job candidates? The FBI should never answer such a question and the mere idea they ever could is a bad sign the Bush administration did some very serious institutional damage.

<comment><USER5> Last I checked, the FBI was part of the Executive Branch and answered completely to the president.

There's no special agency that doesn't answer to anybody. As president, Obama is also responsible for enforcing laws. He has every right as part of the vetting process to give law enforcement agencies veto ability (or not).

There are some special rules for the Office of Public Accountability, but they're for investigating officials already in power. Even then, I don't think you get around the Executive Branch running the FBI. The president, as chief law enforcement officer, can muck around in any ongoing investigation he deems he should.

<comment><USER6> That's not true at all. I'm guessing the last you checked was never, since a simple Wikipedia query would dispel that notion.

Despite being part of the criminal division of the DoJ (and therefore under the Attorney General who is appointed by the President) the FBI's governing body is Congress.

However he does have some pretty broad vetting tools. I believe that is generally coordinated by the Secret Service, who has access to all levels of police report. It's therefore almost inconceivable that they didn't know about this.

<comment><USER5> Okay I checked just now.

The FBI was created by the Justice Department. It is entirely inside the Executive Branch. Its leader, like other cabinet officials, is appointed by the president and confirmed by Congres, although he serves a 10-year term. As Nixon clearly demonstrated, the heads of these agencies serve at the pleasure of the president ([http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/national/longterm/water...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/national/longterm/watergate/articles/102173-2.htm)) More recently, Clinton got rid of Sessions <http://www.slate.com/id/2066861/>

Like all Federal Agencies, the FBI has close relations with Congress, which approves its budget, tells it how to operate, and investigates any wrongdoing. But policy decisions -- how to execute the laws in place -- are made solely by the President.

But none of that looking told me anything I didn't already know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems impossibly hard to find "clean" upper level government employees in Washington. This should really be more of a concern talking point with us citizens.</comment>


Why Apple's Taptic engine in the iPhone 6S is more important than 3D touch - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2015/09/25/haptic-feedback/ <comment><USER2> The iPhone, also the new one, doesn't create any tactile feedback besides just feeling like a vibrating device. It's a much more subtle and precise and pleasant vibration than on my current device (iPhone 6) on the new 6s but it's not really a big change. No quantum leap.

(Can I just say that I really hate people who dislike that metaphor? A quantum leap is a discontinuous and surprising change, not necessarily a massive one. It's more appropriate to describe a qualitative difference, not a quantitative one. As such it doesn't really matter that in reality a quantum leap is a tiny distance, what matters is that it's discontinuous, with no steps in between. That's what the metaphor is playing at. Something that seems familiar weirdly ends up in a suprising place it has no right to be. Not without being somewhere else in between first.)

On the MacBooks that same technology most certainly is a quantum leap: on the trackpads it actually feels like clicking down a physical button. On the phones that same sensation is not created. Not at all, not even a little tiny bit.

My hypothesis is that with the trackpad your only point of contact with a vibrating surface is the tip of your finger. With the phones you feel the whole device vibrating in your hand. That should make it harder to fool your brain into thinking you are holding anything but a vibrating device. I will have to lay the new iPhones flat on a table and test it out when I get the opportunity, maybe they would feel differently. (But even if they could create that feeling while flat on the table iPhones are probably set up differently than MacBook trackpads and more tuned to just create a pleasant vibration, since that's all they normally can do in your hand.)

All that said, yeah, real tactile feedback, if it can be pulled of convincingly, provides some neat perspectives for touch interfaces.

<comment><USER3> Try putting the phone on a surface and press down on one of the system apps (like say, Maps) to get tactile feedback that is distinct from a vibration.

<comment><USER4> I don't know if I'm the only one but I just tried that and it still felt distinctly vibration-y.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand the fuzz about 3d touch.

I haven't seen the new phone in real life but as far as I can see from the press IOS9 has introduced a context menu exclusively for 6S - but could that now have been done using the existing hardware and thus for all models? Ie. by triggering the context menu with double tap, long tap, tap and slide up or something?

<comment><USER6> I don't think the current use of it is much interesting.

But bringing pressure sensitivity back to touch screens could allow things like on-screen keyboards on tablets that allow fingers to rest on the screen without constantly registering input. Meaning that a OSK moves one step closer to a physical keyboard.

Edit:

And i just reminded myself that supposedly there is a company working on how to use static electricity to give variable surface texture. So you could perhaps recognize the location of keys by your fingers brushing over rough patches.

<comment><USER7> One area where it will be interesting is with music-making apps - still a market where iOS rules supreme; iOS is the dominant leader in the synthesizer/music-tool application market. Features like this make a lot of sense for music performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is a demonstration of what i mean with how Apple get attention in media that other tech companies does not. His one article about another phone in the archive is at first glance about the Moto X Pure, yet it quickly ends up talking about phone ergonomics in general.

And other than iPhone he his articles are about biology in various forms, even when supposedly bringing up Pixars (memory).</comment>


Ask HN: Physics/engineering lessons for 14 year olds? - <AUTHOR> My 14yo niece is bored out of her skull under quarantine and I'm looking for resource material for daily lessons I can go through with her remotely in topics like physics, science, engineering, programming, etc...
She's smart and creative, but her local school district was doing very little in the way good science before the COVID19 shutdown.  Now they are literally doing nothing for the next two months.  It's silly.
I believe this is a great time for our community to reach out to these poor skulls full of mush and help them experience the joys of manipulating science
Any online resources for supporting our journey?
Need a mix of fundamentals, practical exploration and 'lab' experiments that scare parents
Especially since I can't actually be there to help! <comment><USER2> It depends on the individual. I spent the majority of my early teens disassembling binaries and writing programs to patch software, reading virus source code and trying to wrap my head around polymorphic viruses, manipulating acid/base/oil to make soap and metals to produce gas and currents and observe surface phenomena, distilling plants and flowers to make oils, trying to understand programs to simulate forces on an airplane, lockpicking, perfecting copper tube-lead-match firecrackers, making darts that fly go relly far. Super, super fun, right? My nephews and nieces wouldn't do that if I _paid_ them. This is mainly due to the fact that I don't know how to teach them and I didn't invest time in learning how to connect with younger people.

I'm watching this thread for ideas. I'm considering "Physics for Everyone" by Landau and Scratch for which I have an apprehension because why learn that when I _know_ they're capable of learning to code directly, but maybe it would help getting them hooked.

</comment><comment><USER3> Although not exactly a structured course or lessons, FEATool has been designed to be a very easy to use toolbox for physics simulations and learning by experimentation and trial and error with built-in tutorials (currently free license for home use during the lockdowns [1]), for fluid flow and heat transfer the simpler CFDTool might be more appropriate with an even simpler interface that "hides" the underlying PDEs [2].

[1] [https://www.featool.com](https://www.featool.com) [2] [https://www.cfdtool.com](https://www.cfdtool.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> Like half of my knowledge of physics comes from Mr. Wizard episodes from the 80s:

[https://www.amazon.com/Mr-Wizards-World- Volume-1/dp/B00NL5PP...](https://www.amazon.com/Mr-Wizards-World- Volume-1/dp/B00NL5PPW4)

They made a huge impression on me -- much more so than the classes I had in high school where everyone was just expected to blindly memorize formulas and no one understood any of the fundamentals.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would recommend looking at Mark Rober's channel[1]. He's a NASA engineer turned YouTuber and does (weekly?) live lessons teaching kids physics through experiments. It's really fun to watch (and his catalog of non-live videos are good for kids too).

(I have no connection to this person, I just love what he's doing)

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY1kMZp36IQSyNx_9h4mpCg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY1kMZp36IQSyNx_9h4mpCg)

</comment><comment><USER6> Feynman's physics lectures: [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/project/tuva-richar...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/project/tuva-richard- feynman/?from=http%3A%2F%2Fresearch.microsoft.com%2Fapps%2Ftools%2Ftuva%2Findex.html#data=3%7Cd71e62e2-0b19-4d82-978b-9c0ea0cbc45f%7C%7C)

</comment><comment><USER7> Get her started with an Arduino kit! And then follow tutorials on Adafruit, SparkFun, Make: Magazine, etc. I always found circuit analysis to be a super dry topic when taught in my high school and college classes, but it's fun when you start out with the goal of building something. Depending on whether she's more interested in physics/EE/programming, you can delve into one of those areas more.

</comment><comment><USER8> I was slightly younger than fourteen when my fifth-grade teacher staged a bridge-building competition in the class. She priced the raw materials (mainly toothpicks, glue, and string; I can't recall what the various exotic items were), and graded us based on ineffables such as teamwork and empirical metrics such as how much we spent on materials and how much weight the completed bridge supported.

</comment><comment><USER9> You could ask her to build a trebuchet and explain why she built it the way she did. There's lots of online resources for that and it doesn't have to be too math heavy if she isn't yet studying F=ma, potential energy, kinetic energy, etc.

And if she is far enough along to know/learn those things then they can be applied to.

Hope this helps</comment>


The current situation of Tox - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/1379

<comment><USER2> Tox was originated by developers who were not versed in crypto yet tried (badly) to build their own design. It's already had too much drama for me. I guess I'll stick with Jitsi.

<comment><USER3> it pains me that the only robust option for encrypted chat is a java application.</comment></comment>


Urbit and the Not-So-Dark Future of the Internet [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://storage.googleapis.com/urbit-extra/etc/the%20not%20so%20dark%20future%20-%20isaac%20simpson.pdf <comment><USER2> As long as urbit sounds so mystical and life-changing, it will never take off. It's so overwhelming. It sounds like some homeless software engineer's fever dream.

<comment><USER3> It won't take off until there are useful apps to run on it, and once there are, people will get it for those apps, not for it itself. Only to CS majors is it interesting in itself - to everyone else, it will (or won't) be interesting purely on the strength of what you can do there that you can't do elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why does this link to a PDF print of the content at [https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/urbit-and-the-not-so- dark-f...](https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/urbit-and-the-not-so-dark-future- of-the-internet-400c9b667e2) rather than to that page?

<comment><USER5> because your link is paywalled</comment></comment>


Web browser standards support - <AUTHOR> http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support

<comment><USER2> _I am currently in the process of testing other browsers and versions, including Safari and Konqueror. I do not yet have estimated dates for when this information will be available._

Bummer. It would be interesting to see Safari 4 (and full IE8 tests) in there as well.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As a Linux user, I've found this site to be incredibly useful for developing sites that must be compatible with IE6. It prevents large changes after testing.</comment>


Ask HN: Have you ever used PL/pgSQL – the PostgreSQL programming language? - vanilla-almond If you have, what was your experience using it? Was it positive or negative? When do you think it is suitable to use it?
Here is an overview of the language:
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/plpgsql-overview.html <comment><AUTHOR> When I didn't know any better I wrote a finite state machine in it.

In my opinion, try and use as much SQL as you can first. Functions are often an optimization barrier for the postgresql query planner. The postgresql implementation of SQL has a bunch of neat functionality in it that replaces things that often happen in apps, like window functions, and the docs are so great.

They are hard to debug. Try to keep their functionality small.

My experience, overall, is positive. Consider using it if the amount of data transferred to the app and evaluated there is getting absurd. But try to creatively solve the problem with pure SQL first before moving to functions.

<comment><USER2> Functions don't have to be optimization barries. If you mark them as stable or immutable I believe postgres will inline them whenever they are used such that they can be optimized.

<comment><USER3> Optimization barrier means something a bit different, it means that the optimizer can't push down filters or change the join order, or flatten subqueries into joins. That is, it splits the query into parts that are separately considered for rewriting and plan selection.

In postgres, CTEs are optimization barriers, that is, the implementation plans and executes the CTE separately and the main query consumes the result of the CTE. Pure SQL functions can sometimes be inlined, that is, made part of the containing query, but functions in the other languages cannot. In particular, if a function runs queries itself those happen in a new execution context (portal) and don't share anything with the function callers plan.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are both great observations.

VOLATILE/STABLE/IMMUTABLE is definitely a choice worth considering and making in an educated way when writing a function.

Also, using WITH to create CTEs makes SQL easy to read, but sometimes will slow down a query considerably. I have a feeling that new releases will make attempts to mitigate this issue in some cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've used it. There is a time when milliseconds count, and nothing else will help you get to that speed. I've taken some things that were running 30 seconds in app logic and reduced it down to 500ms. It's great for solving these little hot-spots. I also think the JSON processing is excellent.

I think it is pretty simple to use, but I've also had to fix a lot of poorly- written PL/pgSQL. There is a LOT of nuances to the language that can blow your feet off, and the language doesn't really scale out to multiple people working on it. You just have to find one person who is good. You also need to have an editor with snippets because the language is very verbose.

Personally, I'd rather use PL/pgSQL than any off-the-shelf ORM, but as I said, it wouldn't scale to more employees very well. The language solves one of the main use-cases of ORMs via the use of entities.

<comment><USER5> PL/pgSQL supports entities? This is kind of amazing. Do you have a resource to pick this skill up?

<comment><USER4> I guess I should be more specific by what I mean by entities. I probably used the wrong word here:

[https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/plpgsql- statements...](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/plpgsql- statements.html#PLPGSQL-STATEMENTS-EXECUTING-DYN)

PL/pgSQL gives you %I and %L, which allows you to specify table and column names. Basically, if you want to `select * from %I`, you have the option to call the specific table.

<comment><USER5> So what's the best way to leverage this feature in crud applications?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A lot of data scientists and analysts favour PostgreSQL for ETL and heavy duty data manipulation. PL/pgSQL lets you perform fairly complex tasks on datasets that may be too large to handle in memory (e.g too big for R and pandas).

And unlike a lot of ETL and reporting tools it doesn't involve a lot of pointing and clicking. You can put PL/pgSQL in version control along with your R and Python code. That's very handy for repeatability.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wrote an entire BPM run-time automation in pl/pgsql. The BPs were stored as PG rows, the deciding data was in the PG DB, and PG triggers automated quite a bit, so the firt seemed perfect. The strong static typing was annoying (I am a Lisper) but did have the usual payoff: if it runs at all it is probably right. Debugging over a socket was rough, but I could take the failed query and drop it straight into a pgAdmin query and get back a very clear error. Guy building the BP front-end picked up what I had done in a few days, and he had never done pg/plsql before.

It took a week to code up, another 2-3 for expressing the initial huge BP and a random BP test driver. Worked great.

My only question is whether I would do it again the same way. I liked that there was not some external system that had to be running for the BP to run, but it is not hard to arrange that and then one gets a much more accessible programming environemnt (such as Lisp). I guess I will not know until I get to do it again.

<comment><USER8> How did you handle deployment and version control?

<comment><USER7> I left before the system got much use, so grain of salt and all that. It was a Rails shop so deployment would have been by a migration. Not sure what you mean by version control. The source was in git. Had we refactored significantly we would have had to write a migration. But the system was in the end quite simple. I refer to it as "BPM" but real BPMN is a bloated monstrosity -- I just captured the essence, and that was dead simple. One fun thing I did not mention was implementing "funcall" in pgsql. That meant that edge cases could be covered by writing a custom pgsql function that would do exactly what was needed. That meant the rest of BPM could stay simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wrote a basic bitcoin exchange using triggers and PL/pgSQL back in 2012. You would insert into an orders table and an after-insert trigger would run the order matching algo written in a PL/pgSQL function. It wouldn't have scaled up too well, I suspect, but it worked really well for the initial product that allowed us to acquire initial customers and raise a Series A.

I would say my experience was pretty positive, I would consider doing something like this again for the right use case. It saved a lot of back-and- forth queries between the app and database and allowed the logic in the app to be much more simple than it otherwise would have been, but at the cost of insert throughput into the triggered tables.

If you are at all considering this route, I would recommend the excellent project, pgtap, for testing: [https://pgtap.org/](https://pgtap.org/)

I used pgtap, along with the cli utility, pgprove, to run tests.

</comment><comment><USER10> We use it extensively for [http://nominatim.org/](http://nominatim.org/) It's superior when writing loops or even recursive queries that usually require follow-up queries (and thus multiple back-and-forths between your app and the database). Debugging and test-driven development on the other hand is hard. So is versioning functions and updating them. I'd only recommend it if all other options of improving the performance of database queries were tried.

[https://github.com/openstreetmap/Nominatim/blob/master/sql/f...](https://github.com/openstreetmap/Nominatim/blob/master/sql/functions.sql)

<comment><USER11> Very cool. Out of curiosity, what would be the best way to get involved in Nominatim?

<comment><USER10> The email list [https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/geocoding](https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/geocoding)

List of small [https://github.com/openstreetmap/Nominatim/issues?q=is%3Aiss...](https://github.com/openstreetmap/Nominatim/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Asimple) and larger projects [https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/20...](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/2018/Project_Ideas#Nominatim)

<comment><USER11> Cool, will take a look. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> To those who have extensive experience with using plpgsql in production, For a REST API application, do you recommend putting business logic in plpgsql?

<comment><USER13> I like to put all intelligence in the database, instead of the middle language (PHP, Python, Node, whatever). People argue about whether to put all your intelligence and business logic in your database, and I think you should google it and read about it for a long time. I say the moment you make a column unique or add a foreign key, you have already begun. What most people do is have part in their database and part in their middle scripts. And it's not by design so much as by how well they knew SQL at the time. People typically learn the middle language first, be it Python or PHP or what have you. They know how to write the business logic in that language, and they only have so much time and energy, and I don't blame them. Learning SQL in general and Postgres in particular takes a long time, but the more I've learned, the more I move.

Now that doesn't mean PL/PGSQL, because I like to use the simplest tool that does the job. From simplest to most complex, you can:

1\. Put it in the table definition, things like: data type, null or not null, unique, foreign key, and check constraints:

        create table orders (
            id serial PRIMARY KEY,
            item int NOT NULL REFERENCES items,
            qty int NOT NULL CHECK (qty > 0),
            ...
        );

2\. Put it in a database view definition. If your SQL is getting long and complex, save it to a view, so your application doesn't have a tower of SQL in its source code. Views can also warn you when you're changing tables in a way that will break something ("You can't drop this column because this view depends on it, you can't change this column's type to that because a view depends on it, etc."). Of course you can drop and recreate the view after changing the table, but at least it warns you. Other times, like if you rename a column, I think the view updates automatically. None of this would happen automatically if the SQL is hardcoded in your Python script.

3\. Put it in an SQL function (SQL, not PL/PGSQL).

4\. Put it in a PL/PGSQL function.

That's the order I take, from smallest hammer to largest.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the detailed reply.

What is your observation on the performance of such a system, when compared to systems where the middle language has all the logic and the database is used just as a dumb datastore?

Also, what are your observations on the scalability of such a system you have mentioned above?

<comment><USER13> > performance

Performance is usually better in the database, because the data is local. However, like any language, there is more than one way to say it in SQL. When the query is complicated, with joins and subselects and aggregates, I have made it literally a thousand times faster by rearranging and rewriting things. I'm not even talking about adding indexes yet.

> scalability

I think 99% of applications could scale just fine with Postgres.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Positive, I would say. Postgres in combination with PostgREST, using database views as resources with a sprinkle of PL/pgSQL in instead-of triggers can build you a performant REST-API real quickly (and still keep your relational data model private).

</comment><comment><USER15> Yeah I've written a ton of plpgsql for the application I've been developing for the past 5 years. In some cases it is much much faster than any other solution I've found due to data locality. Even if the language itself is not fast in many respects, being right next to the data can do wonders in some cases. As others have said, debugging leaves a ton to be desired. As does testing. It's a great tool for the right problems though.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've used Oracle PL/SQL and PL/pgSQL pretty extensively, as well as TSQL (MS equivalent). Mostly for HR, Finance and trading systems. Overall positive, but like many languages, it's easy to misuse and can quickly become unwieldy. DBMSs don't really have much support for arranging objects. In Oracle, you have packages, but overall it's up to you to maintain and document why certain objects exists.

</comment><comment><USER17> My current project uses Postgresql along with pipelineDB. It's great for handling a lot of data, but I don't pretend to fully understand it. I'm focused on front-end, but my job naturally needs me to learn at least the basics of data manipulation and so on.

My company likes using it simply because it's great for that heavy duty data manipulation.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've used Oracle PL/SQL (and sometimes SQL Server TSQL) extensively for the last 20 years. It's way easier to write data manipulation in this specific type of language than to use Java/.net/C etc. Linq for sql has improved things within Microsoft ecosystem but then you have the big overhead of the ORM etc. I know the Postgres version is heavily based on the Oracle language which has been very successful and endures in big business: banks etc. It's a great language to get stuff done, but the ease of use can cause problems if you don't engineer your solution properly.

For data it's great however my current site uses it for many other things such as heavy xml tranformations, web service calls etc and then the gaps in the language start to show through and you've be better off moving into something general purpose, but you can do almost anything with it if you want...

</comment><comment><USER19> (me and my team) wrote an entire private label system on this ( and perl ) by early 2000´s; on pgsql 6, if i recall correctly. It was ( at that time ) a very good option, to avoid the Oracle's pl/sql ( version 8.1.5 ) that would be needed for the reporting tasks. Didn´t write much of pl/pgsql since...

</comment><comment><USER20> Yes and I love it, and it's amazing. I have been using it to write plpgsql functions for postgraphile. Find out more at [https://github.com/graphile/postgraphile](https://github.com/graphile/postgraphile)

</comment><comment><USER21> I played a little with it in the past. It was positive, but needed some work to upgrade. Now I just put a layer of perl before postgres to solve the same problem. I find that is more easy to me.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have. I'd rate it neutral. If I was starting from scratch I'd probably try out PL/Python or PL/V8.

</comment><comment><USER23> Having used Oracle's PL/SQL, I can't really see a use case for this kind of language. Your application logic should be kept within your application, not on your database.

The exception to this of course being unless your application is already on your database.

<comment><USER24> There is. When you need to treat your data without network delays. When performance is essential. When you can't express it efficiently with non- procedural SQL or need to have access with several technologies (can think of it as service on db level). Depending of environments, deploying changes can be much easier than patching app side.

<comment><USER23> That is a very good point :) I definitely did not consider the performance benefits. You learn something new every day!</comment></comment></comment>