Ask HN: Why were there so few women at Startup School? - <AUTHOR>

I was one of the female attendees at Startup School and I was floored by the gender ratio - being in tech, I'm used to being a minority, but this was possibly the most extreme balance I've seen.<p>I'm genuinely interested in whether people have theories about why this might be, and whether any women considered attending but decided not to?  Or is this simply a real life manifestation of the HN community? <comment><USER2> I was there, and the #1 thing I noticed was that of 11 presenters, exactly one was a woman; and of the CEOs telling stories, zero were women. It was, uh, not exactly an experience full of female role models. The 'fewer than one in ten' ratio may be true of startups in general, but the way to balance out the gender divide is to provide more role models, not to magnify the status quo: I was pretty unhappy to see such an exclusionist panel.

In general, if I were a woman, I would have felt pretty unwelcome at the event, in general: of my small amount of wandering around during the breaks, I saw one attendee wearing a shirt with the text: "SELECT * FROM girls WHERE free_sex=TRUE;". More distressingly, I saw a speaker (Ben Horowitz [1]) wearing a shirt with the text "No bitch-ass-ness" on it; I suspect that this may have been a cultural reference that I missed, but that sure does seem as unwelcoming as a shirt that would say 'man up and do it' might.

The content was, in general, high quality. I wish that the experience, however, had been designed to avoid shutting out half of the population. A good start for making Startup School more inclusive would be to adopt something along the lines of the Conference Anti-Harassment Policy [2]; I hope that Y Combinator will do something along those lines next year.

[1] Yes, I know. This is part of Horowitz's persona: he wants to come off as 'edgy', compared to, for instance, Ron Conway; he wants to show that he's hip and with it. For instance, as I recall, he used the word 'fuck' a few times during his speech. This is fine; now we get it! You're one of us! You can be edgy without being a dickhead.

[2] [http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti- harassmen...](http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti- harassment/Policy)

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't offended by ben's shirt - I thought he had the best presentation of the day, and content outweighs slogans.

The issue with role models is a great point though. But how to fix? If there are no female YC alumni with great stories about working all nighters, how to get someone on stage without risking positive selection?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I saw it too, and I wish I had an answer. It definitely prompts feelings of "what am I even doing here?" that merely participating on the site does not.

The whole ethnicity balance was pretty far out there, too. Considering it was held in Silly Valley, I would have expected to see far more of a mix, but that didn't seem to happen, either.

I wonder, are both observations the same effect in action or something else entirely?

<comment><USER4> What was the ethnicity balance like, if you don't mind me asking?

<comment><USER5> Asians were way, way over-represented. That's common in this sort of event.

<http://startupschool.org/zuck-sus2010.jpg>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree that the exposure to female role models is key. At the Stanford Graduate School of Business, we introduced a short course about 6 years ago called "Entrepreneurship from the Perspective of Women." Each year, over a 2 week period, we bring in 25 women entrepreneurs and investors. The impact has been meaningful; in <5 years, women have gone from representing just 12% of the entrepreneurs in a given class to over 25% (remember, women are only 40% of the entire class). YC can do better than this. Anyone from YC out reading this? I'll even offer to help you!

</comment><comment><USER7> I was not there but as an older male, who doesn't drink, I am constantly reminded of how young and alcohol obsessed "entrepreneurs" seem to be. David Rusenko (Weebly) was still in college when he and his buds started. So to me it seems like college boys dominate. And the kinds of technically oriented women that would be interested in Startup School aren't as interested in hanging around with a bunch of drunk college kids where there are not that many women.

Id be curious if the gap was smaller watching the webcasts?

<comment><USER8> If my college days are anything to go by, the presence of drunk college kids has never deterred women before.

<comment><USER7> That's why I qualified with "technically oriented women that would be interested in Startup School"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Has anyone considered that women just aren't as interested in tech entrepreneurship as men are?

<comment> saiko-chriskun Not by this wide a margin, no.

<comment><USER10> So what are you saying? YC is sexist and isn't accepting women into Startup School?

<comment><USER11> YC is sexist and isn't providing enough kitchen space for more women to attend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Having been to a number of "geeky" conferences, I was surprised at how large the number of women there were at the conference.

We should also keep in mind that this community has always been aligned more with the engineering side of entrepreneurship and less on the all the other equally important functions, which tends to make the community somewhat insular and under-represented.

</comment><comment><USER13> Women in general take less risk than men. Women in programming/hacking are far less compared to men. Women who are married/with children find it hard to get themselves around startup scene. I do not have any source to back all that, just my personal view. I see things are changing and see more women in hackathons, programming meetups etc. But it will take at least a decade to bring balance.

<comment><USER14> >I do not have any source to back all that, just my personal view

Your view is welcome but please take care with comments such as 'women in general take less risk than men'. The second statement you make may be a fact but your first statement comes across as a cause for this fact, and there is no data that suggests this. My personal experience, as a woman, would be quite the opposite: women make more risks than men. Would that because of my gender bias and who I spend time with talking about such things as risk, on a deep enough level to for to consider it substantial? Quite probably, which is why I would never make such a statement to back up a fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> We have a chance to change that! This is a shout-out to all the women out there who are working on startups-- apply to YC!!

</comment><comment><USER16> I think there were only 1% women at the event. Whatever the cause, this gender gap is ripe for disruption!

</comment><comment><USER17> Really enjoyed Startup School but I agree. I've never felt the tech gender ratio as much as I did today.

</comment><comment><USER18> Women tend to be less interested in taking risks than men.</comment>


What lives inside fog water droplets - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-lives-inside-fog <comment><USER2> This seems to be putting the cart before the horse:

> Just how does this hitchhiking benefit you, little Marinomonas? That's not > clear. "Maybe traveling or living in fog droplets makes a microbe more > viable; maybe it's growing, eating some of the other stuff in the droplet, > or able to survive longer than if it's traveling on dust," Evans adds.

It may not benefit the microbes at all; they may simply get caught up in the fog droplets, carried into the desert, then all die when the sun comes up and parches the landscape.

On a deserts-and-fog note: I've always found the Atacama very interesting. Some parts haven't received any rainfall since we've started measuring, and possibly not for up to 3 million years. Some parts of the soil are completely dead because there is 0% moisture. Yet a few specialist plants survive by condensing the fog.

</comment><comment><USER3> Coastal trees also participate in this ecosystem. Oceanic fog condenses on their foliage, it's often raining under a large tree on a foggy day, and they also create fog. When conditions are right you can see the trees exhale and mist rise up and become fog. Apparently, I've been told, the oxygen isotope ratio changes from oceanic fog to tree-produced fog. (Not by transmutation, of course, but by interchange with isotopes the trees have metabolized from other sources.)

<comment><USER4> Fascinating! If you've got a source for the oxygen isotope variation, I'd love to read it.

<comment><USER3> Sadly, I do not, it's something our teacher told us during a Permaculture Certification course. I suppose it could be bunk... :-(

Funny story, I immediately piped up and asked him how the trees did it and he just kind of shrugged it off. I scanned around the room and only one other person was also looking around. Our eyes met and we realized we were the only ones in the room that knew the difference between chemistry and, uh, nuclear stuff. We talked about it after during a break and yeah, we were both pretty perplexed by the scientific ignorance.

So yeah, I have to admit I don't know if it's true. And if it is, I assume there's some sort of difference in the isotope ratios of oxygen in the oceans vs. ground water or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> was hoping for electron scan images or drawings or list of species :(</comment>


The Google App Engine Hoax - <AUTHOR> http://brokenpromisms.blogspot.com/2009/03/appengine-hoax.html

<comment><USER2> The article is wrong. You can get more than 500 requests per second, you just have to contact Google first.

[http://code.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=A...](http://code.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=AppEngineCPURequest)

Also, the limit isn't 500 requests per second, it's 30,000 requests per minute. So this doesn't kick in until you get 30,000 requests. The App Engine help says this should be sufficient for a Digg or Slashdot link... seems reasonable to me.

<comment><USER3> Does anybody know what actual figures are for getting Dugg, Reddited, Slashdotted, NYTimed, etc?

500 requests/second seems pretty high to me. But I'm admittedly new to the big leagues.

<comment><USER4> It varies with the emphasis (front page or not) etc., here is some of the latest information I could find on super surges (some people reported over a million viewers):

[http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/06/12/yahoo...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/06/12/yahoo- buzz-traffic-the-slashdot-effect-squared/)

Here's someone saying that dramatic swings can happen inside 60 seconds:

[http://omniti.com/seeds/dissecting-todays-internet- traffic-s...](http://omniti.com/seeds/dissecting-todays-internet-traffic- spikes)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is overblown. Estimate 10 objects per page (if you don't have good cache headers)... 43 million GETs a day (1.3 trillion requests a month) at 10/page is around 4 million pages a day and 130 billion a month. Adjust your estimate as necessary but it's quite a lot of page views...

Plus, you can request a quota increase here:

[http://code.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=A...](http://code.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=AppEngineCPURequest)

<comment><USER5> It's about fast scale-out. If you are getting that kind of sustained traffic, then you can likely pay for the conventional hosting.

The problem is what happens when you have normal trafic but get spikes? The NY Times links to your startup one morning and suddenly you have hundreds of thousands potential new customers kicking the tires at the same time. You'd like to be able to handle that easily, so you can convert some small % into paying customers and take advantage of the free publicity. But if your site goes down in flames you give a bad first impression to all those potential sales, and they will likely never give you another chance.

<comment><USER4> I agree but still think that's possible with the quota (before you request an increase).

In an eight hour period (the work day), 500 requests per second is enough to serve 1 million people 17 GETs. And the vast majority of people will bounce away after one page view.

So unless you cured cancer or something, I wouldn't worry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree it seems weird the guy has been blogging since 1994 (per his Blogger about page) with a whopping 2 posts, yet somehow ends up here on HN? Kinda fishy... also, isn't Azure the polar opposite of the technology spectrum from AppEngine? I would of expected "EC2 here I come" instead.

<comment><USER7> There are people here who hate Google AppEngine and Google in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Umm, not to be picky, but can't a single server handle 500 requests a second if (as is likely) most of them are for static content?

I just hit my site's homepage with ab (Apache Benchmark) just for giggles. Its on a 256 MB Slicehost VPS ($20 a month), with a bog-standard install of Nginx serving static content.

Nginx has a maximum of two processes.

Result of smashing it with 25 concurrent requests through AB: served 80 requests a second. I'm guessing I could set that number of child processes higher and watch as it dutifully saturated my outbound link. 500 requests a second is only a factor of six and change, that is probably easily doable.

90% of the workload going into an app engine app is going to be the same stuff, right? Hitting small bits of static content, repeatedly.

Remind me why you need to rearchitecture your entire application if the limits to what The Cloooooooooooud can scale to are in any way comparable to what you can get from a single $20 VPS?

<comment><USER4> If you are hosting predominantly static content there, then it doesn't make a lot of sense for this level of traffic because your bandwidth bill is going to be _sky high_ (put your static content elsewhere). Also there are uptime properties with the app and its datastore you are not going to get at slicehost without work and other instances.

And besides, this is not a limit on Google's architecture, this is an initial limit they put in place for you to bump up against... which is why I find the guy's argument inflammatory, there is no "hoax" here. EC2 has an initial speedbump too (20 nodes) and they'll bump it up if you ask, our max is at 200 right now.

(btw I'm using slicehost, EC2 etc. myself, and I don't see appengine as some silver bullet. I just don't think this article's argument holds any water)

<comment><USER9> Even for dynamic content, VPS can push through stuff. I can hit a page that's generated dynamically at about 170 requests per second. On my $30 a month VPS. For a page requiring database access, I can run about 40 per second... with the DB running on the same VPS.

Frankly, this is pretty embarrassing for google.

<comment><USER4> But you can ask for more and you'll get it. Is it embarrassing for EC2 that their initial cap is at 20 nodes?

<comment><USER9> Since their goal is to have as many resources as you need, then yes I think it is.

<comment><USER4> I don't remember seeing "infinite" in any marketing material. I'm not trying to be snarky... I think both Google and Amazon are upfront about this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> jjx here (The original poster). My blog post is accurate. Read the description of scalability that Google provides. It implies that you can scale to any degree. 500 request a second is an absolute joke. I can use any web development environment (like Rails), and get 500 requests per second on a crappy little machine. So App Engine doesn't scale, at all.

The main reason I wrote this post is out of utter frustration with Google. They should get out of the developer tools business. For months I have been coding around their onerous and ridiculous quotas, waiting for the nirvana of paid quotas, only to be horrified by the new quotas. If these quotas are not lifted, then I've completely wasted my time. As it stands now, I'm abandoning App Engine.

<comment><USER4> " _if these quotas are not lifted_ "

Did you ask them to increase your quota?

[http://code.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=A...](http://code.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=AppEngineCPURequest)

<comment><USER4> On your blog, you put this in comments:

" _For all those saying that "all I need to do is ask (beg) Google for more quota, read this:_ "

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/81f1k/the_googl...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/81f1k/the_google_app_engine_hoax)

I read that and it seems like the person is talking about not getting a special _free quota_ he had and that he was in negotiations for (but had not heard back yet)?

That seems like a completely different situation to me than a paying customer who wants to increase their quota.

Note that this translates to "give Google more money" so I don't know why you think this is something like begging.

On Amazon, they also want to make money and they happily increase quotas. They just want to know what's up, if you're a legitimate customer who's really going to pay them and not do a chargeback on the credit card the first month, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> my web apps only need to handle about 5 hits a minute, so I'm good.

</comment><comment><USER11> @jjx, you should have known better than investing your resources into a platform that does not suit your needs. When buying a product buy it for it is today, no what it may or may not become tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER12> Gotta agree that 500 req/s for a _scale on demand_ service. I'm building my service on the Azure platform, though nothing has been officially announced, it doesn't look like they'll have similar limits.

<comment><USER13> But doesn't Azure have a much worse limitation: Microsoft?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Talk about much ado about nothing.

If Google's limits are, somehow, a problem for you.. go get yourself some EC2 servers, or co-locate or.. a hundred other possible things.

<comment><USER15> The promise of the cloud was a goodbye to limits. Deploy to the cloud, and you'll never run out of anything. Ever.

Amazon (, promise of): We add resources faster than you can use them, kthxbye.

Google apps: Hit the once-in-a-lifetime really, really big one, and we'll be serving up 503's to your customers instead of writing invoices to you. Oh, and if it's sustained we might need you to spend critical time re-deploying to a different architecture.

<comment><USER16> The difference between the two is that Amazon isn't free. Its pay-per-use.

Provided that you stay within the "free" quota, an AppEngine app can be developed/deployed for free.

One is more "hobbyist" than the other. S3/EC2 is used all over the place by professionals, whereas AppEngine has yet to to really achieve that same kind of ubiquity (in terms of developer mindshare).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fake blog, disperse posts, incendiary article against google.

Smells like propaganda, follow the money trail to redmond.

<comment><AUTHOR> jjx here. This is not propaganda, nor is it incendiary. It's the truth. I have been promoting App Engine to everyone I talk to, because of the ease of deployment and the promise of scalability. I have been waiting for months for the beta quotas to be lifted. My wait has been in vain. It seems that scalability to Google means it will scale on one little machine in their infrastructure. If 500 requests per second is the best I can get from "10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems", then the hype of Google is a fiction.

<comment><USER18> All you have to do is ask them to raise your quota.

Why are you omitting this fact?

[http://code.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=A...](http://code.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=AppEngineCPURequest)</comment></comment></comment>


Hacker Group 'Lizard Squad' Hits Gaming Consoles with DDoS Attacks - <AUTHOR> http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/top-security-stories/hacker-group-lizard-squad-hits-xbox-live-and-playstation-network-with-ddos-attacks/

<comment><USER2> Launching a DDoS attack requires no imagination and no skill at all. Why do we keep giving these script-kiddies any mention? They live on attention. Stop giving it to them.</comment>


Ask HN: How does a modern BI/Analytics look like? - <AUTHOR> Hello.
I've made a transfer from freelance programming (good tools, but culture is not for me) to corporate analytics (better culture, atrocious tooling).
There's lot of spreadsheet maintenance, some of them are getting slowly ported to ancient OBIEE 10, but process is slow and on top of that we're migrating ETL DB and there's whole lot of 500 cols table filled with logic and complete ignorance of datatypes (90% storage are strings). Have I told you about lack of docs?
I can see lots of issues with that but maybe that's inexperience with intelligence tech. Nonetheless, I expressed my concerns to the superiors and they said they're really happy to look into ideas for improvement.
That's what lead me here, could you tell me what can be though of as THE modern workflow in this area? <comment><USER2> I don't understand if you're asking about ETL and data warehousing or about BI and analytics.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to open general discussion, so both.</comment></comment>


GridCentric (fork() for VMs) + Hudson = Elastic Build System - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/2010/08/elastic-build-system-in-action.html

<comment><USER2> Slightly off-topic, but I've been building my CI server by hand with Rake and various shell/Ruby scripts. It's working OK but I wonder if I would gain anything by moving to Hudson. I've heard a lot about it lately.

<comment><USER3> buildbot is the lisp of CI systems.

That is to say, as a buildbot user/contributor I look at things like this and say, ``Oh, yeah, we added latent slaves with an EC2 sample implementation somewhere around the end of 2008/beginning of 2009.''

buildbot lacks a really awesome web interface, but I don't use that part very much. It runs everywhere and does everything, so we end up having to focus mostly on our actual software.

<comment><USER4> But how do you ensure that your EC2 slaves have exactly the same tools/libraries/environment as your blessed build machine? I'm guessing you just have to carefully curate and update AMIs every single time you make a change to the master. Chasing that stuff down is massively time-consuming.

<comment><USER3> If I did it twice, I'd automate it.

I haven't made very many AMIs, but when I did, I got it down to a little shell script that basically goes from a blank machine to me installing a few things I needed, building some stuff I needed, uninstalling some other stuff and uploading the images with roughly no effort on my part. The most painful part was using the web console to launch instances and then wait for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is an elaboration on Dave's earlier post here: [http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/2010/07/elastic-build- system...](http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/2010/07/elastic-build-systems.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a big deal. As your build process grows more complex, it can become a very significant bottleneck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Tell your friends! We're giving away fully-functional 60-day trial licenses and there are a growing number of interesting use cases for VM clone: <http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/search/label/recipes></comment></comment>


On the Forms and the True Purpose of Castration - <AUTHOR> https://blog.kareldonk.com/on-the-forms-and-the-true-purpose-of-castration/ <comment><USER2> The repression of innate urges certainly causes a lot of individual and social problems.

> All kinds of personality disorders also come into play, and especially women > go on to develop the very irrational, unpredictable, unstable and emotional > behavior that they've become known for.

I think the inclusion of that sentence will dominate any discussion of the article; alas.</comment>


Show HN: Funny/Joke App. Worst Idea Ever. - <AUTHOR> http://www.lootitooti.com/ From the about Tab:
With lootitooti.com, we made one of the goofiest ideas come to life.
My bro and I get real goofy when we play video games. One day I was playing League of Legends with my bro and humming Game of Thrones theme(Tana Nana). My bro started humming the same song with a different lyrics (looti tooti), and we kept going. I decided we can turn this into an app, and troll a bit on humanity. We enjoy this absolutely goofy stuff, maybe someone else will like it too.
If we get good response (highly unlikely), We can turn this into a platform where people would be able to create funny variations of their favorite tunes.
We want to stay anonnymous for now :P, but if you have anything to say, please feel free to email firstname.lastname@example.com
Thanks for checking out Looti Tooti. I'm sure now you can get through with the rest of your day! <comment><USER2> Made me laugh :) It is stupid in funny way :D

<comment><AUTHOR> Hehe. Thank you :D. I did make the disclaimer "worst idea ever" ;)</comment></comment>


Here are a few of the things I've built - <AUTHOR> http://www.nikilster.com/fun.html#buffering

<comment><USER2> It's times like this that I wish I could downvote stories.

<comment><USER3> Some of the comments are gray. How did other people made that happen because I don't see downvoting for comments neither?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Shut up and take my money.

</comment><comment><USER5> lmao awesome...just awesome

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Uhh who edited the title...

Should read: HTML 5 Technology Enhances Buffering Performance by 8x for Workout Apparel

<comment><AUTHOR> well this is awkward...</comment></comment>


Obie Fernandez: My Reasoned Response about Scala at Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.obiefernandez.com/content/2009/04/my-reasoned-response-about-scala-at-twitter.html <comment><USER2> Hmmm, the Twitter guys say Scala helps them write "reliable, high performance code" that is "correct and maintainable," and Obie Fernandez basically blasts them for needing that help. Their problem is that they wrote a large codebase in Ruby and ended up creating so many bugs that they had to add a bunch of run-time checks to guard against them. It seems reasonable that they would want to choose a language that helped them with that, rather than sitting around flagellating themselves because they failed to get the job done in Ruby, which is apparently what this writer wants them to do.

<comment><USER3> I think you're missing the point. You can't bash Ruby because you wrote shitty code in Ruby. What do you want to bet I can write a shitty message queue in Scala? Does that mean Scala is bad? "Reliable, high performance, correct and maintainable" have nothing to do with the language you've chosen.

<comment><USER2> _You can't bash Ruby because you wrote shitty code in Ruby._

If by "bashing" you mean claiming that Ruby was less suitable than Scala, why not? When a language isn't suitable for a particular application, that manifests as shitty code. Needing a bunch of hand-coded runtime type checks to prevent new bugs from creeping into the code suggests that a statically typed language would be more appropriate.

Of course, an infinitely intelligent programmer could have written Twitter in assembly, Brainfuck, or even C. There exists a positive integer N such that Ruby would have worked if all the Twitter developers had IQ >= N. (Please, nobody think too hard about that statement. I'm just making a point.)

So maybe they were just too stupid to use Ruby. But in that case, they were right to switch to another language, and they were right to report that Scala helped them succeed where they failed with Ruby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In my opinion this is a clear ad-hominen attack from Obie against Alex, and one that should not be appreciated.

I am not a fan of scala, but I say lets wait and see what happens, as we all should know by now, in theory Ruby should scale as much as scala, but maybe in practice we come up with different results! As is there is a difference between what you should be able to do, and what you can really do.

Alex is obviously trying what he thinks he can, not what other thinks he should be able to do! which is of course just a theory

</comment><comment><USER5> Obie's appeal to emotion while flying the flag of rationality does us all an intellectual disservice. The article contains many accusations, but few reasoned arguments to support them, and could not be any more antithetical to Alex Payne's appeal for calm, reasoned discussion.

"Alex is indeed scapegoating Ruby for Twitter's shitty legacy codebase"

"... frankly the timing of his essay made me throw up a little in my mouth. The nausea only grew this morning when I checked on how much it's being re- tweeted."

</comment><comment><USER6> Scaling from one end of the performance/team size/code size scale to another using a single language is a very difficult problem no matter what language you choose. Things like static type checks that get in your way at one end of the spectrum become much more useful at the other end, and different languages fit different problem domains; when your problem space essentially changes on you, the tools you chose initially might no longer be the best choice. That doesn't mean the tools themselves are broken, just that they're no longer a fit.

</comment><comment><USER7> Obie took the easy way and simply said 'oh it must be the crappy Twitter code'.

Too bad he is ignoring the very valid points about Ruby's slow runtime, memory usage because you are forced to a per-process mode, lack of proper threading and usage of dynamic languages in large systems.

<comment><USER8> A per-process model for Ruby doesn't have to use a fuckton of memory -- with fork() & COW, the processes could easily share.

Unfortunately Ruby has an awful mark-and-sweep garbage collector that writes to nearly every page on every collection, making COW useless.

<comment><USER9> Forgive me as I'm unfamiliar with lower-level details like this, but isn't this exactly what Ruby Enterprise Edition is meant to solve?

<comment><USER7> 'REE' - that is a joke right?

<comment><USER10> No it's not and it works quite well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Meanwhile, the C# developers go all the way laughing to the bank. ;-)

Here's hoping that Scala will help to fix the Java issues. However, given the similar way such languages work, I fear many developers will prefer to use something else, really, like PHP, C#, Python, JavaScript, ActionScript...

If Scala means more open source developments, there are many ways to go about that.

Celebrities and their audiences, huh? Both the Scala guy and the JRuby guy are celebrities in their own rights.

Here's how worried Ruby is that Scala is gaining traction:

      dewd@senna:~/in_motion/ruby$ ls -l
      total 32
      drwxr-xr-x  5 dewd dewd 4096 2009-03-29 15:44 ironruby
      drwxr-xr-x 18 dewd dewd 4096 2009-04-05 15:23 jruby
      drwxr-xr-x 20 dewd dewd 4096 2009-04-05 03:05 macruby-experimental
      drwxr-xr-x 16 dewd dewd 4096 2009-03-25 12:13 rubinius
      drwxr-xr-x 25 dewd dewd 4096 2009-04-05 16:18 ruby
      drwxr-xr-x 18 dewd dewd 4096 2009-04-05 16:27 ruby-1.8.6
      drwxr-xr-x 18 dewd dewd 4096 2009-04-05 16:27 ruby-1.8.7
      drwxr-xr-x 24 dewd dewd 4096 2009-03-06 02:58 ruby-1.9.1

As the Ruby community has grown throughout the years, there have been some controversies among Ruby users every now and again. For example, now that there are many Specs and Tests to run when testing a Ruby implementation, there has been the implementation of a minimalistic and fast runner for them which was not meant to be fully compatible with RSpec and Test/Unit, which has caused some discontentment at times... :-)

JRuby too is not without its own love/hate feedbacks among potential users. ;-)

That said, Ruby and its ecosystem is not "too big to fail" yet. Other languages and systems like Java and C# are "too big to fail" and it can be hard to compete against them with other less-supported tools. Scala builds on top of Java and to some extent it works great that way, right? Ruby "loves" the Java world in the JRuby form and it works quite OK that way, without the static typing and absolute performance of Scala.

Scala and Ruby belong to different typing systems, static and dynamic, and may well be extremes on each end of that spectrum. Ruby has had a "motto" of encouraging "duck-typing" as in "if it walks like a duck, quacks like duck, then it's a duck", so no need to check the is_a?(Duck) with Ruby. It kind of betrays the way Ruby is "meant to be" to do stuff like that. If big systems weren't to be built in Ruby, Ruby on Rails is that exception, that wonder of a miracle, really. Ruby on Rails with all kinds of plugins and stuff can be quite a featureful framework... And yet, it's constantly under development and the (lack of) typing system hasn't killed it just yet...

In celebrities wars, we are just fans really...

</comment><comment><USER12> There is a rule of thumb in UI design wherein if someone blames operator error, that's shorthand for system failure. Obie's call that Alex's code base is bad is classic blame the operator behaviour.

</comment><comment><USER13> Seriously, is there really a need to be such a dick about these things? Maybe he's right, maybe the other guy's right, maybe they're both talking about totally different things and just not noticing because they're too busy arguing.

There may well be things world for which Ruby is not the best language. Or maybe even there aren't. Why does it matter so much if someone says that there are? Even if you believe that there aren't? Are they stopping you from doing what you think is the right thing?

I kind of feel like some people have this fear that someone preaching The Wrong Way will convert everyone and leave them all alone. This fear seems to rob them of all civility. Even the discussion here seems to have degenerated to a shouting match in some parts.

Guys, discussion is good and fun, but don't get so upset about it. No one's going to take your toys away from you :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Truth in labeling: the headline is sarcastic. It's not really a 'reasoned response' when, by the third paragraph, it reaches for the new gross-out hyperbolic cliche, "made me throw up a little in my mouth".

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow, what a douchebag.

<comment><USER16> Yes. Language warring with extra nerd-rage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> People need to remember that twitter started as a side-project at odeo. Odeo is a Rails app (right?). These guys just used what they knew to get twitter going: ruby.

No big deal and no surprise at all that ruby (for several reasons) is not the first choice for such a high volume messaging back-end. Who cares.

Ruby is a beautiful language. But your pet langugage can't serve all needs, get over it.

Scala is a fantastic language that is capable of handling the requirements of twitter's back-end problem domain. Its my understanding that twitter played with quite a few alternatives before settling on scala (erlang based solutions being one). They went with scala. Cool.

</comment><comment><USER18> I hope MagLev does great things for the Ruby community. I like the language, but keep away from it because of lack of a formal spec and the slow implementation. I suspect most potential users have the same reasons for not giving Ruby a go.

<comment><USER19> "I suspect most potential users have the same reasons for not giving Ruby a go."

Reasons I've heard for not using Ruby:

\- Already know and like <Python|Lisp|Blub>

\- It's like Python, but Python has more robust libs, so I'm learning Python

\- Dynamic typing leads to serious bugs in non-trivial apps

\- It's slow

\- I hate the syntax

\- I'd like to use it, but my boss insists on <Java|PHP|Blub>

Slow isn't usually the first concern I hear. Besides, JRuby and Ruby 1.9 alleviate the speed issue; JRuby alleviates the library concern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Obie is a smart man. He knows when to assert himself into the situation. He has achieved his goal: advertising himself/his business. It doesn't matter what he says regarding this drama as long as it's not "don't do Ruby/Rails".

</comment><comment><USER21> Sorry, but I have to dismiss this as Obie protecting his economic interests as an owner of a Rails consultancy. I can only guess that he sees negative Ruby coverage like this as a threat to new Ruby development, and thus the future of his consultancy.

With few exceptions, Ruby applications running on MRI will be wholly unsuited to high throughput environments. This is true regardless of how good your Ruby code is. Saying that using Object#kind_of? is bad Ruby coding may be true but it's mostly orthogonal to the speed of the code. Even the most aesthetically pleasing, extensible, and clean Ruby code will be slow.

After a certain threshold of requests per second the bottleneck will almost always become Ruby. After all, it might not even matter how aggressive your caching strategy is if it can take upwards of 50ms to even talk to your cache. MRI Ruby's IO subsystem and its threading model absolutely hamstring its suitability for even IO bound applications.

The good news is that Ruby will improve in the future. For better or worse, Engine Yard hitched its wagon to the 1.8.x generation of Ruby. Engine Yard's customers will be using the 1.8.x series of interpreters for quite some time to come. And Engine Yard has the engineering know how and an economic interest on improving that generation of Ruby.

But in the meantime those of us building applications that need to make efficient use of a given set of hardware are left with a choice. Do we fight with our platform tooth and nail to try and wring even an acceptable amount throughput out of it? Or do we change our platform to best suit the problems in front of us?

<comment><USER22> _Sorry, but I have to dismiss this as Obie protecting his economic interests as an owner of a Rails consultancy_

This was my exact thought. After reading his claims to Alex's "agenda", I looked at the sidebar and saw that he's written four (obnoxiously-covered) Ruby books. Who _really_ has the agenda here?

Near as I can tell, Alex's entire argument was "Twitter is really big and ugly; we need a stricter type system; Ruby doesn't have one." That seems perfectly legitimate to me.

<comment><USER23> Also, as Alex himself alluded in his original piece, why would someone who presumably has a stake in a company that shrugs off half-billion dollar acquisition offers be trying anything devious to promote a _technical book_?

<comment><USER10> Fun? Personal brand? I mean, I make more than enough to get by on but I still promote my book every change I get. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> what's the deal with questioning people's "agenda" when you could just stick with a technical argument? unless you don't have one.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't see how you're scapegoating Ruby when you say that you have bugs that could have been prevented entirely by having a type system that lets you check types at compile time.

<comment><USER25> Because blaming a dynamic language for being dynamic because your code sucks is scapegoating.

If you're passing an invoice to a function that expects a customer, you don't fix it by inspecting the type inside the function; you let it blow up and you fix the bug where the hand off is done wrong.

You don't litter up a program in a dynamic language with manually written type checks. If you're reinventing a static type system, you're doing something wrong.

<comment><USER26> "You don't litter up a program in a dynamic language with manually written type checks. If you're reinventing a static type system, you're doing something wrong"

Yes: using a dynamic language</comment></comment></comment>


Newly discovered bacteria can eat plastic bottles - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2016-03-newly-bacteria-plastic-bottles.html <comment><USER2> From another article on the same topic[1]:

>The Kyoto researchers identified the gene in the bacteria's DNA that is responsible for the PET-digesting enzyme. They then were able to manufacture more of the enzyme and then demonstrate that PET could be broken down with the enzyme alone.

Sounds like this is quite a big step forward in our ability to reduce plastics to more base elements.

Has anyone caught what the exact output of this process is? Some waste must be excreted by these microbes, right?

[1] [http://phys.org/news/2016-03-plastic-munching-bacteria- fuel-...](http://phys.org/news/2016-03-plastic-munching-bacteria-fuel- recycling-revolution.html#jCp)

<comment><USER3> Well if these genes exist somewhere, and we commercialize them. Is it not a matter of time until these genes become more common in bacteria in general and then we can no longer use plastics, I guess then we would have to put some antibacterial in plastics too. Like say a long time period.

<comment><USER4> I'm not a biologist, but I don't think genes are contagious

<comment><USER3> Look up horizontal transfer.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of this article.

Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag in Three Months: [http://www.wired.com/2008/05/teen- decomposes/](http://www.wired.com/2008/05/teen-decomposes/)

<comment><USER6> I know that HN is not reddit and these sort of remarks are frowned upon, but the URL is hilarious, in a creepy way.

(Note to self: when using "talking" URLs in a future web app, use the whole article title, not just a snippet)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _Mincer said: "I don't see how microbes degrading plastics is any better > than putting plastic bottles in a recycling bin so they can be melted down > to make new ones."_

How it's better is that recycling is really just downcycling. Recycled plastics are of worse quality and are put to inferior uses. Plastic bottles that are recycled are not only melted but also shredded. Over multiple recyclings, the shredding reduces the molecular length and therefore qualities like tensile strength. The mixing of different plastics also degrades quality.

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

So then this bacterial approach provides a potential exit path for plastic that has been recycled too many times to be of any decent use any more.

It sounds like these particular bacteria do a better job of breaking down plastic than what happens to "biodegradable" plastic when it is left out in the elements namely turning into "plastic dust" that hangs around.

</comment><comment><USER8> Everyone seems to see this as a good thing, but think of terrible it would be if all the plastic items around you decomposed like wood. Sure, it would be beneficial for garbage and litter to "go away," but just think of how much more plastic we would need to use if every plastic item needed to be replaced every 10 years. I think it might have a significant impact on recycling as well - "rotten" plastic might be unrecylable, leading to even more use of virgin (?) plastic.

<comment><USER9> Dry wood lasts a lot longer than 10 years. Presumably, dry plastic would also last a very long time.

A paint can also protect stuff for a long time.

<comment><USER8> Except "not rotting or corroding in wet conditions" is one of the reasons plastic is so useful.

<comment><USER9> People also used to use wooden boats.

<comment><USER8> Ok? They switched because plastic is a far superior material.

I never have to worry about my plastic canoe rotting, weighs half of what a wooden one does, and is more flexible when scraping rock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a bit confused. In the article it has these 2 statements:

> "...enzyme breaks it down even further, providing the bacteria with carbon > and energy to grow."

> "I don't see how microbes degrading plastics is any better than putting > plastic bottles in a recycling bin so they can be melted down to make new > ones."

Is it degrading it to basic elements such as carbon, or is the bacteria just breaking the plastic down into smaller, microscopic pieces? If the bacteria actually breaks the plastic down to base components, then that is undoubtedly different than melting and recycling the plastic. There could be incubation centers that focus on reproducing this bacteria at mass scale and then releasing them into dumps to break down the plastic that is mixed in with the garbage.

<comment><USER9> What's the issue with having plastic in dumps? IMO, they dumps are one of the few carbon sinks humans actually use. Releasing that carbon seems to be a waste.

<comment><USER10> We can't keep creating new garbage dumps, eventually we'll run out of land. If we can decompose plastic, let all the organics and paper based garbage decompose, then you have a lot more space for new garbage to be added.

<comment><USER11> I mean you're technically correct, but how long will that take? The earth is _large_ and we have not covered even a fraction of 1% of it with landfill. It's unlikely that we'd actually run out of space in practice, it'd take thousands of years. Not that I condone the idea.

<comment><USER9> Not really, today's dumps are tomorrows mines. If we really don't want to keep this stuff over a very long time scale we could use a seduction zone and send our junk into earth mantle.

PS: Trash is matter, to generate cubic miles of the stuff we need cubic miles of raw materials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Would it be possible to use a spray rich in these bacteria (and maybe other nutrients?) onto that island of plastic at sea?

<comment><USER13> The article mentions the bacteria works at "a steady 86 degrees Fahrenheit." It may work slower or not at all at Pacific Ocean temperatures.

<comment><USER14> may work in a animals stomache?

<comment><USER15> Exactly. They found it living in plastic eating bugs and it will do good for say - sea turtles, which mistakenly eat plastic and choke. Just force the turtles to ingest a pill with Ideonella Sakaiensis and if they'll be lucky - they'll get new symbiotic pals!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone else concerned that by helping this new bacteria thrive it will set off a series of unforeseen side effects?

<comment><USER17> My username is a reference to Project Wildfire from "The Andromeda Strain". In the novel, Andromeda mutates into something that can consume rubber -- the same materials used throughout the world as seals against contagion.

So, yeah, if life imitates art it could get pretty interesting.

<comment><USER18> Can't forget this classic work of speculative fiction either: [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2368220.Mutant_59](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2368220.Mutant_59)

 _In the Coburg Street control room of the London Underground system, there was a full emergency... In a dozen tunnels, trains ground down to a halt. Hordes of terrified commuters made their way anxiously along dark, musty tunnels to the lights and safety of the next station. There were minor explosions, fires, and the failure of a million wires and cables. As the dissolution of plastic proceeded and accelerated in rate, the elegant order of the system gradually turned into complete chaos..._

<comment><USER19> I'm glad I'm not the only person who remembers that one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Doesn't really say what's left over after the plastic gets broken down.

<comment><USER21> CO2 is a safe bet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sounds like a great discovery until you get to the end of the article

> Mincer said the study was impressive and did a good job showing that these > organisms were eating the plastic pretty well.

> However, he said it was not immediately clear whether or not it would help > keep plastics out of the ocean, for example. "When I think it through, I > don't really know where it gets us," he said. "

>I don't see how microbes degrading plastics is any better than putting plastic bottles in a recycling bin so they can be melted down to make new ones."

<comment><USER23> > I don't see how microbes degrading plastics is any better than putting > plastic bottles in a recycling bin so they can be melted down to make new > ones."

You don't have to waste money and energy sorting bottles out of the trash if you can just dump a bunch of this bacteria in your landfill.

<comment><USER22> The comment you are responding was what the scientists in the article concluded, not something I was saying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My first thought when I read this headline was, "Thank God. We're going to need this in weaponized form when the robots take over." Next up, bacteria that eats carbon fiber...

</comment><comment><USER25> Reminds me a bit of one of the plot points of the Ringworld novels. Our world runs on plastic; I wonder what would happen if a massively successful plastic- eating bacteria took off.

<comment><USER26> I also seem to recall a part of "Andromeda Strain" where bacteria were eating anything made of rubber?

<comment><USER27> A microbe species from a hitherto undiscovered kingdom, and a synthetic compound used for many of the same applications as rubber. But otherwise, yes :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Jeff Goldblum has something to say.

"Life, uh, always finds a way"

The danger of humans is whether we give life enough time.</comment>


Rockmelt Will Shut Down Social Browser - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/rockmelt-browser-web/ <comment> jack-r-abbit Sad. I had used Rockmelt almost exclusively since the very beginning. A few months ago I got a new laptop and was unable to find a download for it. They seemed very focused on their iOS app. I've not used Rockmelt for a few months now. While I miss it, I'm already over the shock of having it gone so this does not make me super sad. Although I'm pretty sure I saw a post from them a few weeks ago about an update for desktop app coming soon. I guess the "update" was really "hey... we're killing it."</comment>


Radio station spent two years advising listeners how to stash child porn - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/05/radio-station-spent-two-years-advising-listeners-how-to-stash-child-porn/ <comment><USER2> He didn't think this through. It won't be hard to search his hard drives and find some images in his browser cache that are both salacious and look underage. Especially if he's ever been to any porm site ever.

They may not be able to convict him, but they can make his life hell for a few years.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, it is one thing to make the statement that penalties for the possession of such material are unjust. There are several compelling arguments to make for that case.

On the other hand, it is deeply disturbing that this guy is publishing directions on how to securely store these materials in a way to evade law- enforcement in such a specific manner. I hope and suspect that there will be a thorough investigation of this guy's activities.

Separately, it is unbelievable that such a controversial and conspicuous PSA could go unnoticed for over two years! Wow.

<comment><USER4> _If_ the penalties are unjust (and particularly if the penalization at all of mere possession of some or all of the materials in the class at issue is unjust), then advising people how to avoid those unjust penalties—which are an unmerited harm by definitoon—is not merely _not_ "deeply disturbing", but actually meritorious.

The issues _cannot_ be separated. You can't say it's okay to argue that the penalties are unjust, but improper to help people avoid the penalties: if the penalties are unjust, it is at least good and perhaps even morally obligatory to take reasonable steps to help people avoid being on the recieving end of that injustice.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure if I agree.

One can rationally argue that the death penalty for murderers is unjust, while at the same time maintaining that coaching people on how to murder without penalty is disturbing and wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Paul Lotsof is right.</comment>


Simple multicast testing with nicnack - <AUTHOR> http://adventuresinfabric.posterous.com/presenting-nicnack-for-quick-and-easy-multica

<comment><USER2> Whilst not a replacement for deep network diagnostic tools - such simple application layer multicast tools like NicNak are IMO invaluable.

Surprised there aren't more of them around!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd be interested to know what other options are around, it's the only one I've come across to be honest and debugging multicast is such a pain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great little tool - saved me a lot of time when trying to debug multicast based software.</comment>


Ask HN: What software engineering rules have you broken to get the job done? - <AUTHOR> Sure you should always write tests, be agile, don't repeat yourself, use patterns.
I often find myself working on different technologies / languages / projects where I'm not always aware of the best tooling or practices and don't have people I can ask for help.
I tend to fall back on a top down approach, build something that fails and iterate, read some documentation or existing code and modify and generally hack it out. I know I'm not engineering stuff in the best way but it usually gets the job done and I'm guessing this is pretty common among people who are jack-of-all-trades rather than a c# web services developer or a JavaScript React UI developer for example...
I still try to make stuff fairly easy to maintain, document stuff and write a few tests, but I'm definitely not doing tdd implementing state machines for every bit of logic, using DI everywhere etc etc
Maybe you have some interesting stories... <comment><USER2> Same, divide and conquer by iterating a lot.

I can't write tests if in a hurry, and if the structure of the code gets to messy, but I catch and handle exceptions I find and the ones I can think about.

Later it proves useful when refactoring

</comment><comment><USER3> All of them, often with management approval and blessing.

Technical debt has always been great job security :^)</comment>


Sexual Harassment Inc: How the #MeToo movement is sparking a wave of startups - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2018/01/05/sexual-harassment-inc-how-the-metoo-movement-is-sparking-a-wave-of-startups/?utm_term=.5f193f3946e7 <comment><USER3> My first thought was that there might be some sort of risk of a conflict of competing interests between justice and the profit-seeking motive. And because having an aggressive sales/marketing team trying to draw in more customers might encourage false accusations.

But then I realized I was reacting emotionally and that many law firms already have to advertise and sell themselves and I'm applying some sort of cognitive bias to startups that I'm not applying to the law profession.

Which actually caused me to have a more interesting realization: the notion of being a tech entrepreneur is new enough that I think it lacks some sort of slowly built cultural trust in the ethics/morals/impartiality of the profession.

People kind of trust doctors, (some) lawyers, judges to be above any sort of greed or profit-seeking immoral actions.

But I don't think there's any trust at all that startups will "do the right thing".

Obviously big business and corporations have proven to have a poor track record with labor rights, environmental protections, etc.

But does the Silicon Valley startup deserve the same distrust? Or should it be given more of the benefit of the doubt?

I'm not sure. But it's interesting that we're so quick to jump to mob mentality distrust of tech.

Maybe the reason we trust law or medicine is their codified ethics - <USER2> lawyers it's the law itself and for medicine it's hundreds of years of cultural tradition and teaching and the Hippocratic oath. And many people and organizations have proposed an equivalent for scientists and engineers.

But I somehow think the pace of change and cultural values we have today make it much more difficult to really foster that sort of occupational "culture", at least in the tech world.</comment>


Fraudsters target "wire payment switch" at banks to steal millions - <AUTHOR> http://www.scmagazine.com/fraudsters-target-wire-payment-switch-at-banks-to-steal-millions/article/307755/ <comment><USER2> > RSA researcher Limor Kessem said she had not seen the wire payment switch > attacks in the wild, but the company had received reports of the attacks > from customers.

Ouch, even worse than expected. They didn't even detect it happening after the fact.

<comment><USER3> she's a consultancy, her customers are banks and other types of financial institutions (I presume)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is why I love security so much. You have to continually challenge the assumptions that underlie most people's thinking. For example almost all consumer locks can be picked within 30 seconds. Home alarm devices can be defeated by a quick team, a sledge hammer, a mask, and a car. The most secure systems have been taken down by attacking the email of the security chief's wife. Attackers are bold, they are creative, and they always keep you on your toes. It only takes one tiny opening for an attack to be put into play, and that opening more often than not is just a small stupid little thing that you failed to consider. Things that people don't seem to consider include the personal security of their employees, a USB stick being passed around air gap SCADA systems, or their ability to deal with multiple attacks simultaneously.

It only takes one flaw to bring an entire complex system to its knees. It takes a whole lot of challenging faulty abstractions, critical thinking, extreme pessimism and a whole dollop of both cynicism and pragmatism to keep them purring along.

Security rocks. Only the paranoid survive.

<comment><USER5> > This is why I love security so much.

This is why I hate humanity so much.

<comment><USER4> We are nothing without the humanity that surrounds us. Use security to mitigate the downsides that humanity brings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can't access this site, pop up demanding I register

</comment><comment><USER7> bitcoin user not affected</comment>


Ask HN: How did you get a Solid understanding of the full web stack? - <AUTHOR>

Im pretty sure a large portion of this community has a strong understanding of the web stack so I figured Id ask: What is a good book to read to get a Solid understanding of the full web technology stack (e.g. HTTP, cookies, headers, asset loading / caching)? or what resources would you use to understand the above concepts? <comment><USER2> In my personal experience the best way to learn how the stack works is to use the stack even if you don't know how it all works yet. You'll pick up pieces here and there and you'll eventually have your "aha!" moment and everything falls into place. If you're a complete beginner it will take you a couple months to understand the basic concepts and practices I'd say, but you learn exponentially from there. Just think of a project you want to do, no matter how complicated it seems, and do it. You'll be googling things every other minute but that's fine, that's how you learn this stuff. Books are good to get an overall perspective, but things change very quickly on the web, so the web is the best way to learn and stay updated.

</comment><comment><USER3> The stack always change, but the concepts remain. Make sure you have a good foundation in CS.</comment>


The Wetsuitman - <AUTHOR> http://www.dagbladet.no/spesial/vatdraktmysteriet/eng/

<comment><USER2> Migrants in Calais trying to get to the UK. It's bonkers. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syyl0gfNDRE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syyl0gfNDRE)

Being from the UK I have mixed feelings about this.

<comment><USER3> Reminded me of Children of Men for some reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's fascinating is the lengths some people will go to investigate a mystery.

What's tragic is the lengths some people have to go for a better life.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't think this was mentioned in the article, why would refugees have a better life in England than France? So much better that it's worth risking their lives over.

<comment><USER6> The migrant environment is dramatically more benign in the UK, driven by the briefly mentioned almost Utopian stories told in migrant communities round the world. I'm not sure reality quite matches the stories told but it is well documented that it is easier to remain in the UK.

There is a show called UK Border Force which shows how almost trivial it is to evade deportation (destroying documentation is key and claiming to be from a country on poor-ish terms with the UK - e.g. Iranian, Chinese etc. which refuse to provide travel documents to undocumented people). I have no idea why the UKBA allowed the show to be made as it makes them look like gullible chumps most of the time. I recall one clearly 30+ man being allowed entry as he claimed to be 13-14 years old and a refugee. The nice voiceover simply stated he disappeared from the hostel within 24 hours and was not heard from again. The border guards had clearly caught him out on his age and story but had to go along with it since he stuck to his ridiculous story and refused to admit it was nonsense. It seemed that easy.

I entered the UK at Gatwick a few months ago and a woman in front of me was registered asylum seeker from France (i.e. she somehow arrived in France and claimed asylum, receiving a letter confirming receipt of her claim from the French authorities). She had flown to Vienna and been refused entry as she had no other forms of documentation (i.e. NO PASSPORT, just that 1 page letter in French). The Austrians let her choose where she wanted returned to and she picked England, so was on the same flight as me. She was well versed in the UN convention on refugees to the point of arguing particular sub-clauses of one article which she was using to travel document-less and which gave her, she claimed, rights to enter the UK. After around 15 minutes of arguing on convention details, she was allowed entry to the UK. Either she had failed to convince the Austrian border guards or she had simply gone there in order to be deported to the UK as a mechanism to get entry. Whichever it was, she got to the UK with just that 15 minute discussion. We schmucks behind her took longer to get in with our passports.

<comment><USER7> It seems vanishingly unlikely that this story is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Argument from authority is daft, so instead take this merely as context: I'm a lifelong UK citizen with friends who have worked as volunteer translators on the UK border for asylum seekers. Their stories do not chime with this whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Netherlands _

<comment><AUTHOR> Had to truncate the title due to the 80 char limit. And the island where the second body was found (Texel) is actually part of the province of Holland (North Holland) so it's perfectly correct.</comment></comment>


Lead Front End Engineer Bugnsag - <AUTHOR> https://hire.withgoogle.com/public/jobs/bugsnagcom/view/P_AAAAAACAAJUNf-E5QX-u3v <comment><AUTHOR> Contact: Alyssa_at_bugsnag_dot_com if you are interested in this role.</comment>


A dockeron project, built on Electron and Vue.js for Docker - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dockeron/dockeron <comment><AUTHOR> Dear Community,

I am thrilled to introduce an open-source project I am working on - [Dockeron]([https://github.com/dockeron/dockeron](https://github.com/dockeron/dockeron)). It is a cross platform desktop client built on Electron and Vue.js for Docker.

When my girlfriend and I originally started this project, we were planning to created a software which is easy to use for docker container and image management on desktop (Mac, Linux and Windows).

Since we are currently all busy with our daily work and cannot spend very much time on it. We would like to have the help from the community in order to improve this product and make it better.

Here is the link of Dockeron's repository: [https://github.com/dockeron/dockeron](https://github.com/dockeron/dockeron). Since this is our first front-end project, there might be some bad practices. This is also one reason that we would like to have the help from the community to refactor it.

I'm looking forward to hearing from you! :)

Many thanks.

Best regards, fluency03</comment>


One Week in SF...what to do, where to go, who to see? - <AUTHOR>

I am a game dev heading to SF for the first time. I will be staying in Palo Alto. Sure would like to know of all of the cool, nerdy and fun things to see and do. I am very interested in the startup scene, and opportunities. Much appreciated. <comment><USER2> Palo Alto is definately not SF, they're fairly different.

If you come into SF, be sure to check out Noisebridge, Union Square, Alamo Square, The Golden Gate Bridge and get a real burrito (I recommend Taqueria El Buen Sabor).

In Palo Alto, be sure to check out the Philz, drive by the Facebook offices, then leave PA.

Check out Hacker Dojo in Mountain View.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe checkout this guide:

Hackers' Guide to Silicon Valley [http://steveblank.com/2011/02/22/a-visitors- guide-to-silicon...](http://steveblank.com/2011/02/22/a-visitors-guide-to- silicon-valley/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks alot guys for the info.

</comment><comment><USER4> Walk up and down University Ave in PA and bang on VC's doors.

They love that.</comment>


Show HN: A faster implementation of Git status - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/romkatv/gitstatus <comment><USER2> Very neat! How can we get this on bash (ubuntu)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Take a look at the example: [https://github.com/romkatv/gitstatus#gitstatusd](https://github.com/romkatv/gitstatus#gitstatusd). Even though this example uses ZSH, it's just for exposition. It launches gitstatusd, writes a request to its stdin, reads the request from stdout and prints it. You can discern from it the format it uses for requests and responses.

There is also a formal description of request/response format in `gitstatusd --help`, or in [https://github.com/romkatv/gitstatus/blob/master/src/options...](https://github.com/romkatv/gitstatus/blob/master/src/options.cc).</comment></comment>


Ungrey bookmarklet for HN - <AUTHOR> Changes all grey comments to black.
Maybe this is obvious, or there's an existing quick tool for this, but I've tried so many times to read super-light grey text, with no instant way at hand of making it readable. I would've loved this had someone else posted it, so.. Enjoy!

  javascript:(function(){var i,x=document.querySelectorAll(".commtext");for (i=0;i<x.length;i++) x[i].className='commtext c00'})();
 How to bookmarklet: Save it as a bookmark URL called 'ungrey', then drag it to the bookmarks bar, or make a key shortcut.
(thanks to bjourne for asking and skylark for answering - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18940063 . I have old browser, so modified skylark's answer.) <comment><AUTHOR> Hmm this is totally disappeared off the Ask list after only 3 hours..(or less, I didnt check until now) No idea why. There are other things 1 day old with 1 point and no comments, still on the list.</comment>


Feedback on our MVP - Social Video Conferencing - <AUTHOR>

Please review our minimum viable product - http://qcst.co/cbhVf3
Invitation code is 'hacker' (ONLY 500 invites available!) each invitee can invite upto 20 people
Please wear headphones, or enable push to talk!! We still haven't finished building echo cancellation so if you don't wear headphones there will be some unbearable noise.
Quecast is a social video conferencing app that allow users to meet and have discussions around very specific topics.
Users can create a channel/community around a specific topic and gather to have a discussion about the topic.
Up to 8 people can broadcast their video and thousands of people can participate in each channel.
We want to host great group discussions online!
Think of it as Foocamp (or Barcamp) done online.
I made a Hacker News Channel so come hang out! http://qcst.co/cbhVf3
Thank you! <comment><USER2> I found I could describe this in 2 ways:

* Chat.StackOverflow without StackOverflow

* IRC-like chatrooms

Would be awesome if you offer to connect to some user feedback service like getsatisfaction or uservoice. I'm sure a lot of people would like to offer this as a kind of support channel for their services.

Some suggestions:

1.) decrease the width of the left sidebar

2.) signup form doesn't submit when i press enter (the one where i signup with invite code). have to submit by clicking the signup button.

3.) you could make a business by charging people for making bots. or charging for chatrooms with more than a specific number of people online at a time (if it's a business).

4.) allow people to choose different nicknames for each channel.

5.) facebook widgets on the group pages for group chat :)

These are just random ideas that occured to me. On the whole, it's a cool service with potential.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for the awesome feedback! Very helpful! Yes we'll make sure that signup will submit on enter.

Definitely Facebook App is on our roadmap!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "The connection attempt failed" is what I get when loading the Adobe Flash thingy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks jtchang! What broswer/os are you using?

<comment><USER3> Ubuntu 10.04 with Firefox 3.6.8.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! yeah Ubuntu / Flash hasn't been working for everyone. We'll look into it

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We're out of invites! Thanks for participating and for the great feedback! We'll send out another batch of invites when we complete our next interation!

</comment><comment><USER4> I like the app so far. Interesting take on video conferencing. Would be fun to see Twitter integration soon...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Will definitely do it soon

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What makes you different from services like Tinychat or Stickam?

<comment><AUTHOR> Tinychat focuses on disposable chatrooms.

Quecast focuses on connecting people with topics and interests.

We want to make quecast a place where people can have constructive group discussions (or at least aiming to).

Stickam is one to many. Quecast is Many to many

<comment><USER6> Not sure where you got some of this info.

S tickam is not just one to many, they also have group chat.

Tinychat is not soley focused on disposable chatrooms. We are very much so focused on topic based chat, as evidence by the fact of us hosting several recent events and even in the process of introducing a system similar to reddits subreddits.

Just wanted to come in here to put that down so nobody gets the wrong idea about tinychat at least.</comment></comment></comment>


Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents - <AUTHOR> https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/doing-windows-part-1-ms-dos-and-its-discontents/ <comment><USER2> Printers. Oh $DEITY.

You boot your 80286 with 1MB RAM and a 20MB (RLL) HDD. This was my second PC and I'd forked out over £100 to get a 287 Maths Co-pro. so I could run a dodgy copy of AutoCAD. I had it all on this box: WordPerfect with the multi colour cardboard Fn key strip. Harvard Graphics and Super Calc and a flirtation with WordStar (I still prefer joe for a terminal editor). GW BASIC and some other games rounded out the collection.

Printing was a right laugh because each app, including your own, had its own printing system. Getting our Epsom RX80 working with all of the above was a major feat and my efforts with C (Borland? Can't remember) nearly drove me mad.

Ahhh, I can still see the faded (partial) Mandelbrot set crossing over the perfs. on the tractor fed paper because I'd screwed up my co-ordinate transformations.

<comment><USER3> Back in those days we had a Clipper application which used a table as printer drivers.

Basically we defined the columns to be printer operations, bold, italic, subscript, ...., then went through the manuals copying the escape codes while creating a row for each printer model being supported.

Adding new printer support was releasing an updated version of the printers.dbf file.

It was really "fun" making it work and testing printouts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > But the most glaringly obvious drawback to MS-DOS stared you in the face > every time you turned on the computer and were greeted with that blinking, > cryptic "C:\>" prompt. Hackers might have loved the command line, but it was > a nightmare for a secretary or an executive who saw the computer only as an > appliance. MS-DOS contrived to make everything more difficult through its > sheer primitive minimalism.

Man, that wasn't minimalism, _the computers really were small._

<comment><USER5> > Man, that wasn't minimalism, _the computers really were small._

Yes, they were. But it was more than that. The machines were very diverse. Several very different video card options were all in wide use and to make them work efficiently meant low level frame buffer work. Pointers were rare and weird, and again, diverse; bus mice, serial mice and other stuff. Writing a GUI compatible with all the permutations of PC hardware while being simultaneously efficient enough to run from floppies was possible with difficulty, but what value would it have provided? These were 16 bit machines with either no or extremely limited (286) MMUs; just how many processes were you going to be multitasking with your 512K of MMU-less RAM?

DOS was just a program loader, and being just a program loader it was perfectly suited to the PC market. You bought a system with the 'adapter' cards you needed, booted DOS and let some program take over the system, be that Word Perfect, Paradox, Lotus 123 or whatever. That was the real, day to day use case for the PC. An advanced user with a 'fast' disk could bounce between programs in a few seconds and that was entirely sufficient for the vast bulk of PC users. It's also not dissimilar to the contemporary phone/tablet use case.

And I don't remember anyone getting too hung up on the C:> prompt. They either acquired the clues needed to run a few commands or had someone make a .BAT file to kick off their program.

There were certainly contemporaries with compelling UIs, but they invariably cost more and had a vastly smaller catalog of software.

<comment><USER6> Cost more? Not really. The Amiga and Atari ST cost much less and were more capable than contemporary late 80's PCs. Less software is definitely true.

<comment><USER7> I grew up on Ataris. When the platform died, I ended up on a Microsoft PC, and definitely felt like I had regressed.

<comment><USER6> Atari and Amiga were about 5 years ahead of the PC. By 1996 or so, it was over. It's sad to think about what these platforms could've become with better financing and management. MacOS was crap back then, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh, DOS.

It's always sad to read histories of computing during the 80s. It was a lost decade in many ways. Much more powerful and competent paradigms were alive and vital at the start, but by the end, they were all collapsing. A few different choices, a little bit better business sense, and we'd have a computer world profoundly alien to the one we have now.

It's still possible, of course. But it'd be wearing the hair shirt and being a lone hacker as you built up your system.

I refer, of course, to _both_ Lisp and Unix machines, along with the various developments in parallel architectures. The Unix machines as sources of power and use lay quiescent for many years, until maybe the early 00s, and IMO the Lisp machines path has never been genuinely walked.

There's an elegy to be written for the loss of the operator of the computer being turned into a consumer rather than a producer (unix) or symbiont (lisp). Maybe rpg will write it one day.

<comment><USER9> Well, DOS (by which I really mean the IBM PC) was arguably more "powerful" than Unix minicomputers of the time, in that there was never any OS sitting between you and the hardware. Compared to say, an iPad, it was a very developer-friendly machine.

Turbo Pascal, in particular, more or less introduced an entire generation to programming, especially since it had no copy protection.

<comment><USER10> I owe my entire career to GWBASIC, QBasic, and Turbo Pascal, all of which was done from an IBM PC. When I first discovered UNIX by way of Red Hat Linux I was utterly confused: all of those absurdly named directories in my root! And where were the executables? I remember pecking out some C in nano, compiling it, and then wondering how the hell you turn a.out into a.exe.

<comment><USER11> Yes. My first line of code was written in that primitive BASIC that came with the Commodore 64. But my first real program which did something useful -- a game, what else -- was written in GWBASIC.

I owe everything to DOS and GWBASIC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The book mentioned at the bottom "The Making of Microsoft: How Bill Gates and His Team Created the World's Most Successful Software Company" is a very interesting one. It was actually the first book i read on computing history many years ago and i got hooked to it since then. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Microsoft's early history - and i'd like to find something similar that covers their 90s history to a similar extent (the book only covers up to 1992, but the majority of it is on 80s stuff).

<comment><USER13> If you haven't read it yet try "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy. He covers a big chunk of computing history from the hardware hackers at MIT to the game development revolution that spawned from micro computers.

<comment><USER12> Yes, i have :-). It was also very interesting to see the "evolution" of Brøderbund from its early stages in Levy's book to a big slow moving company in Jordan Mechner's Karateka and Prince of Persia diaries (and i'd be very interested to read about the development of The Last Express, which was also developed when Brøderbund collapsed).

It is very interesting to piece together these history pieces from the various books :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > The user interfaces for the Lisa and the Macintosh made almost all the right > choices right from the beginning

No, they did not. Off the top of my head:

\- No cursor keys. You had to reach for the mouse every time you wanted to move the cursor. Rectified later, yes, but not the right choice from the beginning.

\- Menus across the top of the screen, inherited from Xerox Alto whose portrait format monitor made vertical space most plentiful, did not make so much sense on the Macintosh landscape monitor, still less so on today's letterbox monitors.

\- One-button mouse leading to a workaround where to perform the most common operation of running a program or opening a file required clicking twice in rapid succession. Windows fixed the first problem immediately, but the second problem only years later.

\- Copy-pasted text bringing attributes from the source document where it should take them from the destination document. This problem still has not been fixed to this day.

Like other artifacts, the Lisa and Macintosh had their good points and their bad points. Let's not let appreciation of one blind us to the other.

<comment><USER15> I don't get the mouse one. Double clicking is like a safety. The number of times I accidentally clicked on stuff with my overly relaxed surfing hand.

And how did windows fix it? Maybe I'm too young to remember. I've always been double clicking.

<comment><USER16> Even to this day, there are certain users who double-click on everything. (e.g. on AJAX forms you always need to disable the button.) My assumption is users are confused when a single click or a double click is appropriate, so they always double-click.

<comment><USER17> Yup, seen this with kids on windows.

If an icon is on the desktop, then it requires a double click. If it is added to the task bar, then it is a single click. I understand the reasoning for the distinction, but it is not intuitive at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Already in February of 1984, PC Magazine could point to at least four other > GUIs of one sort or another in the works from other third-party developers: > Concurrent CP/M with Windows by Digital Research, VisuALL by Trillian > Computer Corporation, DesqView by Quarterdeck Office Systems, and > WindowMaster by Structured Systems

I've at least heard of the latter two, unlike the former ones, or VisiOn. IIRC,they were mentioned in the documentation of some program or game or another I had found and tried to run on my assembled-or-modified-from-scrap computers back in the mid-90s. I assume they had achieved some measure of success and presence in the marketplace (however small or brief that may have been), had they managed to be worth mention in an old DOS or Windows application's documentation.

I'm curious if they'll be covered in subsequent articles in this series.

<comment><USER19> DesqView was big in the 80's for multitasking DOS programs. It wasn't a graphical window system, but ran in text mode.

<comment><USER20> DESQview (as its maker styled it) was a great program for those of us who weren't convinced yet by Windows. While you're right that it started out as text-only (although IIRC later versions supported mice, and you could drag windows around and resize them that way), one of Quarterdeck's last products was DESQview/X, which was basically an X11 server running under DOS. It could run 16-bit Windows applications, DOS applications, and X applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This article is astonishing in its depth, I thoroughly enjoyed as much as I have read so far. It just keeps going.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think RiscOS (which you can run on a RPi) is the modern example of a simple system that can satisfy most needs of a desktop user. I wish DOS/Windows followed the same path.

<comment><USER23> IIRC RiscOS is still cooperative multitasking though, which is pretty sad. Other than that it has a lot going for it. It's fast and light-weight, all menus are context menus, and applications are just folders as God intended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It was CPM/86 not CPM I have actually used a IBM compatible pc to run it which probably make me one of a fairly small group I think it was a DEC rainbow.

I also usued a grey import IBM Pc before it was sold in the UK we had out electronics shop build a custom 240-110 v power supply

</comment><comment><USER25> Blatantly ripping this off from Stratechery, but DOS was why Mac lost in the 80s and the end of the day a GUI OS is just a feature. Apple had a clearly superior UI, but the distribution and adoption of DOS allowed windows to take it by storm.

</comment><comment><USER26> 1) I came from 370 BAL. The sense of freedom from rules was outstanding in DOS. 2) x-windows. 3) print.com true multi-tasking in Ms/pc/Dr DOS. 4) LIM and emm386

<comment><USER27> At the time, print spooling with PRINT.COM was not really regarded as "true multitasking". We knew what true multitasking was, from knowledge of operating systems as diverse as Sinclair QDOS, AmigaDOS, and MP/M, and that was not it. (-:

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This article skips over one of the most interesting stories in modern business: how Gary Kildall lost IBM to Microsoft:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall#IBM_dealings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall#IBM_dealings)

<comment><USER29> He covered that in a previous series of articles about the origins and development of the IBM PC, starting here:

[https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc- part-1/](https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-1/)

<comment><USER28> Yes, there's a detailed account here:

[https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc- part-2/](https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-2/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> >but it was a nightmare for a secretary or an executive who saw the computer only as an appliance. MS-DOS contrived to make everything more difficult through its sheer primitive minimalism

I don't know about that - people have adapted to the GUI because it's the most dominant thing. Microsoft shipped Solitaire to get people used to the mouse and I'm _sure_ I've heard of people who were extremely reluctant to give up TUI or DOS programs that they were extremely efficient in.

<comment> yoz-y People adapted to GUIs because they were simpler to grok. Text commands are useful and more powerful if you already know them, in a GUI you can actually see all of the buttons you can press.

In the end, both are very useful.

<comment><USER27> What the headlined article is talking about is not a TUI-GUI split. It is talking about a command-line interface versus other forms of TUIs. As mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, there were plenty of ways of end users interacting with MS/PC/DR-DOS without having to use the command-line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Yay... another "technology safari" post that loves to point and laugh at how dated old technology (read: old to the _author_ ) was. Why can't people accept things the way they were without constantly disparaging them?

<comment><AUTHOR> The theme of the author's blog is the history of gaming, and he spends a lot of his time explaining and often glorifying old games and systems. Perhaps to some, he isn't paying enough respect to MSDOS in this instance. But he is someone who does thorough research about old tech and software:

[https://www.filfre.net/hall-of-fame/](https://www.filfre.net/hall-of-fame/)</comment></comment>


Stock trading strategies using machine learning - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/firmai/machine-learning-asset-management <comment><USER2> I'm not even good at coding and this all looks like a mess to me. I wouldn't be surprised if all of this resulted in catastrophic loss.

<comment><USER3> This is research for a paper. No one is using it for active trading. If the research is successful then these strategies might be applied in the future. If not they're obviously not going to be used.

Sometimes when people are doing research they need to try new things that might seem silly to find new groundbreaking material.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Best one I've seen so far is based on NLP datasets and Elastic [https://www.elastic.co/blog/generating-and-visualizing- alpha...](https://www.elastic.co/blog/generating-and-visualizing-alpha-with- vectorspace-ai-datasets-and-canvas)

</comment><comment><USER5> Why would you not host the code in the Github repository?

<comment><USER6> In this case, it makes sense to host the code and data in Google Drive where you can easily access it with a Colab instance.</comment></comment>


IndexedDB API polyfill on WebSql - <AUTHOR> http://nparashuram.com/IndexedDBShim/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Really excited about this, I just wrote PouchDB on top of indexeddb and was planning to rewrite the entire thing in webSQL to get support for safari (mobile) and opera, which was depressing since webSQL is deprecated, it looks initially like this does everything PouchDB needs to 'just work' with webSQL browsers, great job

<comment><USER2> Hope this increases the adoption of the API, now that the API is available on devices like iPad and iPhone too !!</comment></comment>


Google reportedly being investigated by the FTC for suspected FRAND abuse - <AUTHOR> http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/06/googlemotorola-reportedly-being.html

<comment><USER2> I've flagged this. Please don't post stuff by Florian Mueller, hes a paid Microsoft shill that attacks FOSS and anyone who is pro-FOSS.

If you find an actually legitimate source for this news, please submit that instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't see how the author's alleged affiliations has any implication on the story. Fact is fact, after all.

In any case, here is the same story on Businessweek: [http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-06-29/google-said- to-f...](http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-06-29/google-said-to-face-u- dot-s-dot-probe-over-motorola-patents)</comment></comment>


Why spend time and money finding new prime numbers? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/02/ask-ars-why-spend-time-and-money-finding-new-prime-numbers/ <comment><USER2> > Why spend time and money finding new prime numbers?

By the same token, why fund pure (as opposed to applied) science? The answer is that applied science is able to produce short-term practical results, which it does very well, while pure science is able to create entirely new fields of knowledge, which it does very well.

The "time and money" spent on pure research is often criticized, usually by people with a limited grasp of history. If you name a modern technology or scientific field, I will show its origins in pure research.

</comment><comment><USER3> For the same reason people spend time and money climbing difficult mountains: because it's there; because doing so engages and inspires and satisfies; because doing so is meaningful to some people, who don't care if it's not meaningful to others.</comment>