Ask HN: Tips for Working From Home? - <AUTHOR>

I am starting a new job soon in which I will be working from home, what are some tips to make the best of this (already good) situation. Specifically, remain productive, not become a shut-in, and continue to grow professionally. <comment><USER2> Lots of good advice here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635236)

If you have a spouse of any description, it's definitely worth looking in to a separate office. Nearly all the issues I've run into over the years of working remotely have stemmed from being physically present in the house/apartment during daylight hours and thus physically capable of answering "quick questions", having things "just put away" in my office, or "letting the electrician in" (and spending 45 minutes explaining to him the various things we needed him let in to do.)

If you're in a separate office across town, or even a shed at the end of the garden, that sort of thing stops happening and you get back to potentially being able to work a full day uninterupted.

<comment><USER3> This. 10x this if you have kids, especially young kids. If they cried I wanted to comfort them, if they laughed I wanted to join them, if they were quiet I wondered what the hell had happened?!

Rent an office - mine is a cramped pigsty, and I have reverted to the orderliness of a 19 year old student bit I actually get work done.

Get an office and walk or cycle in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been working from home for 2 years now. My wife also works from home. We each have separate physical spaces in our home dedicated as offices for us.

As a developer, here are my tips:

* Go to meet ups in your area more often to connect with others and stay in touch with whats going on outside your company. This is a good idea even if you're not working from home, but it's a good excuse to get out of the house when you are.

* If you have access to a local coworking space, make use of it. These are another good opportunity to network with others in your area.

* Work from a coffee shop once in a while for a change of scene. I get some of my best work done outside of the house in a coffee shop. Meet a fellow WFH friend so you have someone to chat with throughout the day.

<comment><USER5> I've found a library can also be a nice change of scene for those who enjoy a quieter environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For one, if you live with others, make sure they know that during the hours of 9-5 (or whatever your hours may be), you are actually working and cannot be disturbed.

My major struggle during my first full time work from home job was family would see I'd be home during the day, and ask me to run errands or do other personal matters during working hours. It was an uphill battle trying to explain to them that I, too, worked during the day - just not in a traditional office building.

Also, if you have the space, try to set up a dedicated "work" office, and them a "home" office in a separate room. Once your work day ends, you can leave your "work" office just as you would a traditional office. I've found this helps with keeping a regular schedule and not working 10+ hours a day. An alternative to having a separate office is utilizing a local coworking space.

</comment><comment><USER7> Have a designated office space.

Ideally, you want to have a completely separate room for working in. I find that light and energetic colors inspire hard work and creativity. Put some art up on the walls, throw in a few complementary plants along the sides, and have great lighting.

If you do not have a separate room available, find a few coffee shops (or similar) that you can frequently rotate between. Also, open yourself up to people. They will come talk to you, and you should talk to them. You will make friends (and/or potential business partners/deals) that way. As a freelancer, this has been my best form of client searching.

Overall, try the different methods out and find what works for you. Remember to take breaks to go on short walks (or similar activities).

</comment><comment><USER8> I worked from home for a year.

Having a designated office space helped a lot. Also I did some exercise every morning before start working. That was very useful to start the day with more energy. The days I didn't do any exercise I felt more lazy. I think it's because when you actually take some time to go to the office you prepare your mind to work, but working from home you don't have this time to prepare yourself.

Also, try to meet your friends more often.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've worked from home about 80% of the past 10 years. Here's what has worked for me:

1) Shower, then put socks on. Every. Day.

Socks on = power.

2) Hit people up for free office space from time to time. I usually did it during the summer (no AC in my home office) and made it clear I'd be gone in 3 months. Nice way to mix it up a bit, meet new folks, and keep from becoming a home-office hermit.</comment>


The Hoard Memory Allocator - <AUTHOR> http://www.hoard.org/ <comment><USER2> Hoard is fine, but if we're going to start talking about various scalable memory allocators designed for concurrent, multi-core/cpu systems then...

libumem is the user space slab memory allocator first available in Solaris 9 (SunOS 5.4) now the default allocator on Solaris (and Illumos, SmartOS, OpenIndiana, etc.). There is a fork of libumem that has been ported to other popular operating systems, such as Linux, Windows and *BSD systems (including Darwin/OSX) by OmniTI (<https://labs.omniti.com/labs/portableumem>). I maintain a fork of portable libumem (<https://github.com/gburd/libumem>) that includes changes made by Joyent as part of their ongoing work to improve SmartOS.

I have deployed this allocator to dozens of production systems to improve the performance of highly concurrent memory-intensive applications (such as Riak) and found it to be an excellent, stable and fast allocator.

In addition to fast allocations it includes excellent statistics and memory leak detection ([https://blogs.oracle.com/pnayak/entry/finding_memory_leaks_w...](https://blogs.oracle.com/pnayak/entry/finding_memory_leaks_within_solaris)) as well as a few different allocator heap-fit algorithm choices.

It is licensed under the CDDL.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a very interesting comparison between libumem (mtmalloc) and Hoard at [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers- storage-d...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage- dev/mem-alloc-1557798.html) (HN link: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3755621>). How do you view this class of allocators to tcmalloc, jemalloc, ptmalloc3, etc., specially in the concurrent multi-cpu scenario?

Here's what I'll be reading on allocators tonight, any further suggestions (following all the links in comments is part of the deal)?

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

[http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook- engineering/scalable-...](http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook- engineering/scalable-memory-allocation-using-jemalloc/480222803919)

<http://locklessinc.com/benchmarks_allocator.shtml>

[http://blog.reverberate.org/2009/02/20/one-malloc-to-rule- th...](http://blog.reverberate.org/2009/02/20/one-malloc-to-rule-them-all/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We've looked into Hoard. It's fast only if you have a large number of threads that are -constantly- allocating memory, and even then it wastes more memory than a regular heap. The large majority of real-world applications don't do this, but some server applications might. I think Hoard could be useful for that. On the other hand, if performance was critical to you then you'd change your code to not allocate memory so much.

A practical problem we have with Hoard is that it lacks diagnostics. By diagnostics I mean extensive heap reports, fragmentation information, free space, what's the largest block I can safely allocate, give me a callback for every malloc so I can do stats tracking, etc.

<comment><USER4> _On the other hand, if performance was critical to you then you'd change your code to not allocate memory so much._

This was a problem we ran into with the Streamflow project (<http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/streamflow/>). There was no benchmark suite for multithreaded allocators, so we had to pull from HPC benchmark suites, but what's the first optimization many people do when improving an application's performance? Remove dynamic memory allocation.

We were motivated to do our work because of runtimes for multithreaded programming that need to dynamically allocate memory to represent parallel tasks. And I think that motivation remains, but that pain wasn't felt until recently.

<comment><USER5> I don't think the parent post was suggesting you completely avoid dynamic allocation just minimize it. Because it's not a question of dynamic vs static memory but # of allocations / second / thread. And often it's a question of delayed optimization where you suspect what your doing needs to change, but you avoid optimizing until you have some performance data.

<comment><USER4> I was more talking about the difficulty of testing the performance of a multithreaded dynamic memory allocator. Because moving dynamic memory allocation off the critical path of an application is a common first optimization, it was difficult to find interesting applications to use as benchmarks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I published a paper about a lock-free allocator back in 2006 that performed very well against Hoard and TCMalloc (<http://goog- perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/tcmalloc.html>), you can find the paper and source code here: <http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/streamflow/>

I think that our techniques worked very well, but TCMalloc is a better _engineered_ allocator. That is, it's production quality code. People have used our allocator in their research projects when they wanted a low-latency, highly scalable allocator, but I'm not aware of anyone using it for production - and I no longer maintain it, so that's probably for the best.

There was recently a paper in PACT last year that extended on our design. Myself and my advisor would like to release a tech report with a more full description of our algorithms and designs, but both of us are busy with our current work.

</comment><comment><USER6> Unfortunately their performance comparison does not include modern memory allocators like tcmalloc or jemalloc.

<comment><USER7> It appears to have made a splash around 2000-2003 or so, which is when most of the publications and testimonials/comparisons are from. Looks like it's been mostly in maintenance mode since then, with relatively minor performance and compatibility releases around once per year, which may be why they haven't done a re-assessment against more recent competitors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hoard is very nice and this kind of programming really interests me.

An alternative is tcmalloc by Google:

<http://goog-perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/tcmalloc.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> I see the license is both GPLv2 _and_ proprietary for commercial use. I was unaware that licensing could be done that way. Is that a valid use of GPL?

<comment><USER10> If all copyright holders agree, then yes (see mysql).

The main issue with that is that you have some problems with accepting external contributions - you need a copyright assignment process, which is difficult to do internationally and a hurdle for contributors to overcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Jason Evans's benchmarks ([http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook- engineering/scalable-...](http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook- engineering/scalable-memory-allocation-using-jemalloc/480222803919), 3/4 of the way down the page) don't look good for Hoard, but they may be a little biased.

<comment><USER4> That's similar to what I found. (See my paper referenced elsewhere in the thread.)</comment></comment>


Chinese Cops Now Spying on American Soil - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedailybeast.com/chinese-police-are-spying-on-uighurson-american-soil <comment><USER2> While this is alarming in the context of ethnic cleansing in Western China, it's not really remarkable that foreign intelligence is operating in the US; what country on Earth does not have foreign intelligence agents operating in it?

<comment><USER3> I don't imagine many foreign regimes have an intelligence operation in the U.S. dedicated to monitoring their own citizens.

<comment><USER2> I think you might be surprised.

<comment><USER3> Russia, I would expect. Cuba, maybe, although that'd be incredibly expensive given the number of ex-pats here relative to the government's budget. Iran conceivably. Mayyyybe North Korea, although are there enough to matter?

Who else would bother?

<comment><USER2> The United States collects information on every phone call its citizens make domestically but you find it implausible that they keep tabs on US citizens abroad? If anything, what's striking here is how hamfistedly the Chinese government is conducting this program, but I suppose that is because intimidation is the point.

<comment><USER3> I was specifically and explicitly discussing foreign operations on U.S. soil. Why are you beating me up for not talking about what the U.S. government is doing abroad?

<comment><USER2> I thought it was reasonable to extrapolate from what the US does. And in some cases, for instance, the Five Eyes countries often cooperate as a way of bypassing their own laws, so it's directly related.

Anyway, for a specific US example, Russia alerted the US about the Tsarnaev brothers. Anecdotally I heard from a South Korean about a visit in Japan from some official with photos warning him to stop associating with some North Koreans he'd met. Call me pessimistic but I think this is going on all the time everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those who just read the headline and are thinking about (or even commenting on) cops being "physically" in the U.S. to spy on people, no, it is not what's happening. The headline is grossly misleading.

The only news here is relatives calling overseas Chinese (who are Uighurs) to collect information on their overseas employment, ID and financial information (presumably instructed by the police).

It is invasion of privacy, of course. But I don't think it is that bad of a measure to counter religious extremism and radicalism. Similar measures are in place or planned in U.S. (Muslim registry, surrendering your social media accounts upon immigration check-in).

The bulk of the article then goes on and on talking about China's influence and old news about reports within China on human rights and surveillance (which you have seen a millions times in every news about China).

Honestly I am amused by the fact that Western media need to recount back all the past events whenever some new information about China emerges. I don't know, it feels like they are just doing this to please their readers by reinforcing the negative image of China.

Full disclosure: I am an overseas Chinese who hasn't been contacted by the police, but then again I am not a Uighur.

<comment><USER5> > it feels like they are just doing this to please their readers by > reinforcing the negative image of China.

It's not like China has been doing a good job on removing this negative image of themselves, aren't they? Granted, not that they should care, they just pay attention at their own game.

Either yanks or russians pulling strings in MENA to satisfy their geopolitical ambitions, or the CPC doing the same in Subsaharan Africa, or major cities of the western world.

It shouldn't really surprise you to see headlines like this.

<comment><USER6> China doesn't really care what the rest of the world thinks about it, so they aren't thinking of their international image when they do things like this.

Reading the Chinese press makes this even more obvious, and leads to an even poorer image of China than CNN could ever accomplish. The western media actually makes China look better in that way.

<comment><USER2> I think that's a mistake to say; I'd say rather that their goals of national unity without domestic challenge override their international image in this case. It's really no different than Trump's obsession with purging immigrants overriding the hit to the US' reputation that his policies have caused

<comment><USER6> With Trump, however, most Americans _know_ he is hurting our image abroad. In China, they are almost completely oblivious to global PR.

<comment><USER2> What do you base that claim on?

<comment><USER6> US western media talks a lot about how trump is damaging our image. Chinese media never even mentions how Xi or decisions made in China are giving it a bad reputation.

<comment><USER2> Perhaps, but you are assuming, I think unjustifiably, that Chinese people are unable to use their imaginations or what information they can find online (the censorship is largely reactive). Also, Chinese papers often will highlight foreign criticism to rebut it and foreign criticism can sometimes be a galvanizing force. On a more basic level I have to imagine that when Chinese people heard Xi Jingping talking about his principle of non-interference in internal affairs they have some idea that he's rejecting foreign criticism.

Additionally, China is a global power and has to care about its reputation to the extent it affects its international projects.

<comment><USER6> It isn't a bad assumption. Many Chinese have no idea where France is let alone about what France thinks of them. Even in the cities where people are more educated, they are dumbfounded when Vietnam riots against them, completely unaware of the reasons why they might do that. At any rate, China has always been self centered throughout their 5000 years of history, it's even in the name 中国 that literally means center of the world.

Chinese papers are very weird. They attempt to rebut foreign criticism without even repeating what that criticism is. GlobalTimes does this all the time in their editorials, it is totally surreal. I've had cases where I'm reading chinadaily and I have to go to a foreign news source to understand what they are actually railing against; eg the article would be like "the Dalai Lama did something, it was wrong!" without ever elaborating about what "it" was.

<comment><USER2> Many Americans have no idea Puerto Rico is part of the United States or that we bombed the island when an independence movement broke out; I'm not really sure you can attribute that to their iron grip on the media. Or educated people are baffled as to why North Korea would distrust them. Honestly, you could make a lot of these criticisms of any place.

<comment><USER6> Sure, but they are mostly aware of the hurricane that happened in Puerto Rico and the USA was somehow negligent even if they didn't know PR was actually a territory.

China has third-world media problems; e.g. how do we get these people not to show there reverence for Xi so strongly. The USA has first world media problems (Trump says CNN is fake news). The same with education and an awareness of world affairs. They aren't equivalent at all, they are on totally different scales.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If these people are so terrible then why are they going out of their way to annoy the ones who have left the country and may possible help their relatives leave the country?

Do they think that if they prosecute them enough the West will accept them as refugees? (I don't see that happening post-Syria or being good for China if it did.)

<comment><USER8> In Machiavellian power politics (which is how the Communist party operates), you want to keep all potential usurpers under your control. If any can escape, they will, and they will come after you. This is China reminding them that even though they are not in China, they are not free from China's influence.

And make no mistake, the folks they're doing this to are essentially the "nobility" or "landed gentry" of Chinese society. These people have connections and skills such that they will be fine if China does not want them, and they would likely be among the political leaders / influencers in the event of a collapse of single-party rule.

<comment><USER5> I wonder how many of these people are somehow related to ROC, that would be a powerful fuel to fire the CPC paranoia.

Even so, I guess that most chinese in exclaves like Vancouver, Montreal, Eastern Australia, and NZ don't suffer this harassment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9>
        "Now..."

This has been going on (at least elsewhere) for a while [0] now.

[0]: [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8556736.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8556736.stm)

</comment><comment><USER10> Serves as a sobering reminder why ubiquitous surveillance is bad.

</comment><comment><USER11> Spying is always bad, when its the other guy doing it. Isn't the rule pretty much, its ok as long as you don't get caught?

<comment><USER6> These aren't really spies though, just some police offers trying to track down and apprehend people wanted in the PRC, like what happened with the booksellers in HK and Thailand.

It would be like US cops or FBI going to Beijing to try and abduct someone.

<comment><USER11> Hey that's every other Jackie Chan movie!

<comment><USER6> Which way? I think the first US one with chris rock was Chinese police coming to the USA, and the second one was USA police going to China. Unless you mean super cop, which was...mainland police in HK?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The term Orwellian almost seems an understatement for what China is doing. Astonishing.

</comment><comment><USER12> Who is not spying?</comment>


EU Parliament adopts resolution to set standards for cloud interoperability - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mist.io/post/70473372408/eu-parliament-adopts-resolution-to-set-standards-for

<comment> DanI-S I've been hoping for years that the EU will eventually mandate that a service must be obliged to delete on request - irretrievably, not by merely flagging it as "deleted" \- any data held about a given individual.

To me, this is a natural part of the concept of privacy. I can have momentary privacy: the assurance that nobody is _currently_ watching through my window, listening to my phone calls, or reading my emails as I send them. But there's no assurance of future privacy if we don't have the right to destroy our old data, wherever it may be held.

When people provide an entity with information, they're doing so under the framework provided by current legislation regarding privacy and freedom of information. If these rules are subject to change - through new anti-terror legislation, for example - their information may become accessible in ways that they did not expect when it was originally provided.

I don't think it's possible to maintain any real sense of privacy while this remains the case. How can your data be considered private when it can be opened up for inspection at a later date, under a different regime? There's currently no way to participate in a connected economy without giving away your future right to privacy.

Edit: and the reason I've been hoping the EU will do this is that, realistically, nobody else will.

<comment><USER2> There's been talk for a while now about a "right to be forgotten" which is along these lines, but it has a terrible name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is the EU parliament really the body we want setting standards for interoperability? Things like this typically result in unintentional externalities that cost providers money and impose compliance burdens that are quickly out of date.

I appreciate the sentiment regarding security and interoperability, and they might be able to declare their intention to procure only systems that meet X standards, but I hope they refrain from broader impositions on commercial users and cloud providers.

NSA articles aside, I see businesses fleeing regulatory burdens faster than the possibility of surveillance.

<comment><USER4> You probably misread, it will be the ETSI setting the standard, not the European parliament.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh goodie goo, another mandatory standard by the people who brought us the EBICS bank standard, which is a freakishly complex reinvention of SFTP.

With EBICS, you transmit a bank command file by encrypting, encoding and wrapping it as CDATA into an XML file and then _repeating the process_. You have to use different kinds of wrapper files with different kinds of intricacies for each type of file you might upload to your bank.

The whole specification is 200 pages, and all it does is transfer files.

<comment><USER6> I dont reallt care if facebook tracks me through iframes or if google tracks me through analytics.

I volunteered to go to a website, that volunteered to use that service. I can choose not to visit the source sites or the associate ones.

The problem I see with all of this "the governments - or - some government - or - the UN - needs to protect our privacy!!!"

Against whom? Facebook? Google?

How about GOVERNMENTS. If you ask me, any sort of nefarious behaviour commited by web companies are most likely the product of a larger, coercive form of behaviour starting from the government.

<comment><USER7> _I volunteered to go to a website, that volunteered to use that service. I can choose not to visit the source sites or the associate ones._

How do you know those sites have those trackers before visiting them? The only way to "opt-out" of the sites with such trackers is to stop using the web entirely.

 _Against whom? Facebook? Google?

How about GOVERNMENTS._

Actually, yes. In the (European) country I live in, public organizations have been prevented from invading privacy (e.g. setting CCTV cameras) by our national data protection commission.

 _If you ask me, any sort of nefarious behaviour commited by web companies are most likely the product of a larger, coercive form of behaviour starting from the government._

How is web analytics and personal data mining a product of State spying? And even if it is, how is it justifiable on that basis?

<comment><USER6> > How do you know those sites have those trackers before visiting them? The > only way to "opt-out" of the sites with such trackers is to stop using the > web entirely.

iframes going to facebook, scripts going to google-analytics.com/ga.js, etc mixed with knowledge about what these elements do (facebook iframe article, obvious in regards to analytics, etc).

> In the (European) country I live in, public organizations have been > prevented from invading privacy (e.g. setting CCTV cameras) by our national > data protection commission.

So public organizations are prevented from data gathering from themselves? Well that solves that problem. I'm sure if the NSA comes out and says they'll start enforcing protection against spying that some would even believe them!

> How is web analytics and personal data mining a product of State spying?

I'm not saying it is! I have no problem with facebook or google. I don't use facebook, and use google only to the extent I am comfortable with. Never have these companies used this information, some exploitable, to exploit me. They want me to use their services.

On the inverse, could you explain to me in your own words why this legislation is necessary?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Giving cloud hosts the status of Data Controllers_

This is a bold move, and much more significant than some attempt at standardisation that probably won't work.

It will make it more expensive to hire a VM, probably, and I wonder if there will indeed be any benefit (given that cloud providers will have to start vetting and inspecting the source code on the VMs people are running - potentially taking away all the benefits of programmatic instance deployment.)

</comment><comment><USER9> "... the standards should enable easy and complete data and service portability, and a high degree of interoperability between cloud services, in order to increase rather than limit competitiveness."

Come on HN, let's help the EU. Anyone got any great ideas? Because I don't even understand the question, much less what the answer would be.

Edit: notice how everyone is just "assuming" what they mean. The problem is not well defined.

<comment><USER10> That's kind of how I feel.

How would you ensure service portability between Google App Engine (runs software, no access to the OS), AWS (Linux VMs) and Azure (Windows VMs)?

<comment><USER11> They are not seeking to ensure portability between different kinds of services (and Azure has Linux VMs by the way)

But portability between, AWS, Google Compute, Azure, Rackspace, Softlayer, Nephoscale, Linode, Digital Ocean, etc would be quite beneficial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh great, the useless bunch who brought you the cookie law will now take on cloud interoperability. And UN, another highly effective institution, will take on spying. I feel safer already.

Does anyone here really believes that any of this is going to make a measurable, positive difference in a regular Internet user's life? That somehow more government meddling is a cure for government meddling? Weren't European spy agencies cooperating with the Americans?

It's yet another power grab of the "no crisis should go to waste" kind.

<comment><USER13> They are also the same group that brought us usb charging for all phones (or at least throw around enough threats like this one for manufactures to start using usb cords for charging for the more pedant among you).

<comment><USER14> I thought the phone manufacturers were behind that push? Also, how did Apple get out of that?

<comment><USER13> Hah, phone manufacturers, agreeing on a standard instead of gouging people by selling expensive chargers!

I think that there was a draft EU directive to standardize on mini-usb, but it was scrapped after manufacturers voluntarily complied. Apple argued that their usb cable to lightning/doc connecter (which can charge from any usb charger/port/etc.) was required for analog speaker docs and the like, and the EU let it pass.

<comment><USER14> Wait, are you saying they voluntarily complied or not?

Anyway I found some info: [http://www.engadget.com/topics/mobile/2009/02/15/eu- commissi...](http://www.engadget.com/topics/mobile/2009/02/15/eu-commissioner- pushing-for-standard-connector-for-all-cellphone/) Looks like the European Commissioner scared them, then [http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/29/european- standardization-...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/29/european- standardization-bodies-formalize-micro-usb-cellphone-ch/) the phone manufacturers agreed to the standard, followed by the CEN-CENELEC and ETSI officially mandating the standard, followed by (most) phones actually coming out with micro-USB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How about just starting with standards for downloading one's own data from cloud operators?

Maybe legislate an easy way to download all my emails from gmail and upload them to outlook.com. Wouldn't that be very useful?

<comment><USER15> Not to be reductive but isn't IMAP the protocol to use for that? Although I don't fancy the idea of legislating that e-mail providers must use IMAP (and if I picked a mail provider without it I'm assuming they'd have a compelling security feature or something...)

<comment><USER16> Some webmail services, notable hotmail, do not offer an IMAP interface. That service is exclusively a premium option, which is required if you ever want to transfer your emails away from their service. I actually done such transfer once, which felt eerily like paying a ransom.

Thankfully, gmail do not keep your emails hostages like that, and users can transfer their property away into a private servers if they ever get tired of the constant spying-for-profit.

<comment><USER15> My understanding is that Outlook.com (which I think is their rebranding of hotmail?) supports IMAP at no additional cost starting this year (although take that with a grain of salt, I'm pretty sure I remember hearing about that but I don't use the service myself)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We've got your cloud interoperability right here:

       ssh firstname.lastname@example.com s3cmd get s3://rsynctest/mscdex.exe

       ssh firstname.lastname@example.com s3cmd ls s3://rsynctest

Done and done.

Ask about discounts for HN readers.

</comment><comment><USER18> The good stuff could be interop. The bad stuff would be silly extra regulations providers have to undergo.

</comment><comment><USER19> Any idea how long it would take before the first draft is out?</comment>


Ask HN: When is your side project 'production-ready'? - <AUTHOR>

I had a call with someone who wants to use a tool I built in their profession (medical). They asked me if the application was production-ready. I was confident in saying yes (the app has been running in production for months, and has tests at unit, functional, and integration levels), but I pondered if I could call it production-ready based on that.
How would you deem your side project as production-ready, especially when used in a mission-critical environment?
PS - The project in question is Dashku: https://github.com/Anephenix/dashku (also hosted at https://dashku.com) <comment><USER2> You should make it very clear to the person asking that while you've been using it in non-mission-critical production scenarios for some time, it is still an incomplete and actively developed project with changes and fix bugs on a regular basis and that you provide no warranty or guarantee of fitness for any particular purpose (this is in the MIT license that you're using, but you don't want to promise anything beyond what's in the license which is "we promise nothing.").

Basically, Dashku is "incorporate at your own risk" software, with the additional note that the hosted version is absolutely not for mission-critical use, that it may become unavailable at any time for any reason and for any duration.

Basically, you want to be sure you're shielded from someone in a "sue everyone!" mindset coming after you just because you wrote a piece of software that was later incorporated into someone else's package where you have no control over how they use it, whether they apply bug fixes, whether they make changes, etc.

There's a reason that an awful lot of commercial software EULAs out there include language specifically referring to the software not being suitable for mission-critical, failure-critical, medical, etc. purposes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your advice. I didn't realise that commercial software EULA's had clauses for things like that. I guess it means that there is a market for, or should be commercial support for the app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have you had a lot of people that aren't you try to break the living hell out of it? Especially those not familiar with the usual workflow? Especially those that take pride in destroying things?

If it can pass that, and you're confident going forward from there, then I would think it's ready.

<comment><AUTHOR> In terms of traffic, lots of individuals have tried it, but in terms of trying to make it break, no. That is a great idea, thanks for the suggestion.

<comment><USER3> No problem. A couple buddies and I take turns trying to wreak havoc on each other's software when it comes time to ship. It's quite fun and very good for ensuring interface and codebase stability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You might want to fix the readme link to the MIT license, as it's broken. Why not paste in the full text? They have that warning about no liability and no warranty which might be really important for you.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just fyi that the screenshot on the github page has the word 'nigga' on there from someones comment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, Thanks for pointing that out. I'll scrub the word out from the screenshot.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: finding hackers to help with charity work - <AUTHOR>

I've been running http://cleftworld.com/main for a year now but the site looks unimpressive. I have rebuilt it (in Drupal) and have redesigned from the ground up but am unable to do the themeing work myself (no experience in this area whatsoever). Does anyone on this site have any suggestions as to where I might find a hacker that would be prepared to do such work on a pro bono basis. <comment><USER2> Post on cragislist? Your project seems like a nice way for a young, up and coming, designer/hacker, to get his or her hands dirty.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea, however, after looking into posting on Craigslist... "all job ads must offer monetary compensation -- no unpaid internships, barters, deferred pay, etc."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Crack open a CSS book, and start imitating some designs out there. Either that or just tweak the hell out of an open source CSS design.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's how I ended up with the current site - unfortunately I've got very little aptitude in that direction.</comment></comment>


Map interfaces from enhanced disorientation to playful geo-imagination - <AUTHOR> http://www.jammersplit.de/displayce/index.html

<comment><USER2> nice tech demo, I would say, but it hurts my brain.

</comment><comment><USER3> the fourth one is really impressive.</comment>


Darpa Funds Hack Machine You'd Never Notice - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/pwnplug/

<comment><USER2> I suppose it's a neat concept, though I still don't get why you'd use this over another means if you already have building physical access.

Assuming you're pentesting, either you're trying to get someone to willingly plug it in (to ethernet and all power stuff too?), have physical access yourself (in which case why not use something cheaper), or are already allowed in (why add another device?)

<comment><USER3> One example I can see is something like testing branches of a financial institution. Send out 100 of these things to branches all over the country and just have the manager plug them in. You don't even have to tell them what it is.

It's much easier and cost effective than to roll a truck and when your finished you can mail them to another branch. Or just leave them in place for future spot checks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone else think that device is a disaster waiting to happen? The example shows sending a "whoami" command to the device via SMS, and then the device responds "root" via SMS. Uh, what's to keep someone else from hijacking it via SMS for their own purposes? A "bad guy" would have to figure out that there's one on the network, but it would still concern me to have a remote-controlled device on the network that's open to arbitrary SMS-sent commands.

</comment><comment><USER5> "If you saw this bad boy under your desk, would you say anything?"

Well, at this point, wouldn't anyone who has read this article be suspicious of a power strip under their desk that wasn't there yesterday and maybe even had nothing plugged into it?

</comment><comment><USER6> Why would you trust hardware you are not really sure you control (do you know all the backdoors and bugs in that thing?) and knowingly give it access to your networks? It's already a hacking power tool, it only needs the hacker.

<comment><USER7> For the same reason you would trust a security consultant to attempt to penetrate your network's defenses and find deficiencies. Any of your employees could bring in a similar device, what are you going to do about it?

With a real one in place, you can come up with a strategy. Maybe your IT team comes up with regular sweeps for cell signals, then the security consultant decides that the cell signal is only active during short periods of time in the day. Perhaps you secure your power sockets, and then the consultant uses the fact that your janitor needs a plug to vacuum and doesn't find a power strip suspicious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, Darpa is providing remotely accessible hacking devices to companies as test equipment and encouraging them to install them in sensitive locations of their buildings. Is this some advanced form of comedy security trolling on the part of Darpa? Like an "If you install this, then you have failed the test already", kind of thing.</comment>


Gmail's Smart Compose Is Ready to Write Your Emails for You - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykarcz/2018/05/08/smart-compose-in-the-new-gmail-is-ready-to-write-your-emails-for-you/#3eb66f774c2e <comment><USER2> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022695](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022695)

Does this kill EasyMail (YC W18) ??

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16577650](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16577650)</comment>


160 Blockchain Companies in Financial Services - <AUTHOR> http://startupmanagement.org/2015/10/22/the-global-landscape-of-blockchain-companies-in-financial-services/ <comment><USER2> Nice chart!</comment>


You have a set amount of "weirdness points" – spend them wisely (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wkuDgmpxwbu2M2k3w/you-have-a-set-amount-of-weirdness-points-spend-them-wisely <comment><USER2> It's true that the average person has a set amount of weirdness points and needs to use them somewhat sparingly.

But there are certain cases where a person might have more weirdness points available to them than the average person and can spend them more freely:

* If you are physically attractive, you often get an extra helping of weirdness points to spend.

* If you are a celebrity or a person with lots of power, you get an extra-large extra helping.

* If you are obscenely rich, you can buy just about as many weirdness points as you want.

<comment><USER3> Weird and poor: you're labeled crazy.

Weird and rich: you're labeled eccentric.

<comment><USER4> It is a side effect of the "fitness function" evaluation of humans. If a person is "successful" it is taken for granted that they are doing something right even if it is irrelevant. It isn't just wealth that benefits from this - social standing or a respected talent alone can do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A few of my points:

> Recognize you only have a few "weirdness points" to spend. > Spend your > weirdness points effectively.

True, but it seems to neglect the possibility that your "weirdness" is actually a coherent worldview that can be advocated for as a whole, not as a series of disparate ideas. You could therefore be very effective in advocating for more ideas than your "weirdness" budget might suggest.

> Clean up and look good.

I also tend to agree with this one. Not because I think it's good to push for conformism in manners or appearance, but because you should be non-conformist where it matters.

> Advocate for more "normal" policies that are almost as good.

It might be better to set up a roadmap that points to where you would like to get in the end, while at the same time coming up with tractable shorter-term solutions. If you simply tone down your proposals completely you might end up just compromising and not making a significant difference.

> Use the foot-in-door technique and the door-in-face technique.

These techniques do seem a bit manipulative. It might be better to just be honest and open about what you believe in.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Many people think donating 3% of their income is a lot, let alone the 10%

Except of course for many mainstream religions [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithe) "weirdness" is very relative to your local view.

<comment><USER7> Speaking in terms of donating percentages is at odds with reality.

1% of 300 USD is 3 USD, and probably a lot for that person. They're probably needing every penny they can get to maintain or increase their standard of living.

1% of 3000 USD is 30 USD, and probably not much for that person. They'd spend it on a friday night.

Never mind the very rich. For them, the difference between 1% and 10% is effectively nothing; it doesn't decrease their standards of living.

<comment><USER8> That's why it's better to define the 'tithe' as a percentage of income over and above strictly required expenditures, i.e. money you otherwise theoretically could have saved.

<comment><USER7> Right, I came to the very same conclusion when I was thinking about this in the past, but I forgot about it. Thanks for the addendum and reminder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> And yet, some people are able to live remarkably "weird" lives, influence and change their communities, and not feel like they have to relegate their appearance to "bland tech office drone" because they choose to be passionate about some number of topics and they used up all their "weirdness points" and have none to delegate to appearance.

Life isn't the Skyrim avatar creator--passion isn't measured in points, and passion is what begets structural change.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think "weirdness points" is a subset of a larger idea.

For example Martin Luther King Jr. had great success when he was pushing for one idea, racial equality. Then a year before he was assassinated, he publicly turned to a wider range of causes. He came out against the Vietnam War at a time when most were supporting it. He announced his support for economic equality. History judged him right, but his timing might have been wrong.

Because of his early stance against the war, he lost many of his mainstream supporters. His fight for racial equality started to sputter.

Maybe this is an exact application of weirdness points? But it seems like something bigger is at work here, and weirdness points are a subset of this bigger idea.

<comment><USER11> A more general (and more mainstream) idea is that of political capital.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really like this article. I don't know much about the science behind it, but anecdotally, it makes a lot of sense.

Here's the psychological concept, an interesting read: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiosyncrasy_credit](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiosyncrasy_credit)

<comment><USER13> I remember reading about something related to perception (however unrelated to group dynamics) called "Wundt curve", an attempt to describe the relationship between the intensity/novelty of a stimulus and its perceived "hedonic value" (roughly its pleasantness) [1]. I read (in the references here [2]) that the original source for this result dates back to 1874: "Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie" (Main Features of Physiological Psychology) by Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt [3]. However, I could not find it in there from a quick look at the archive.org scans [4], so this might be wrong.

BTW, the first paragraph of Wundt's wikipedia entry was pretty surprising to me: 'Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt {...} was a physician, physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founders of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person ever to call himself a psychologist. He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology". In 1879, at University of Leipzig, Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research. This marked psychology as an independent field of study. By creating this laboratory he was able to establish psychology as a separate science from other disciplines. He also formed the first academic journal for psychological research, Philosophische Studien (from 1881 to 1902), set up to publish the Institute's research.'

[1] [https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Wundt- Curve-1874-lef...](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Wundt- Curve-1874-left-shows-the-hedonic-function-used-to-calculate-interest- the_fig6_220851248)

[2] [https://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/6575/volumes/v13/NA-13](https://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/6575/volumes/v13/NA-13)

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

[3] [https://archive.org/details/grundzgederphys15wundgoog/page/n...](https://archive.org/details/grundzgederphys15wundgoog/page/n11/mode/thumb)

also somewhat related: [https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03212593.pdf](https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03212593.pdf)

<comment><USER14> Wundt's name pops up constantly in William James' extremely readable _Principles of Psychology_ (1890). Most of it's what we'd think of as physiology - how our minds and bodies work together; reflexes, the senses etc. Stuff that can be measured and tested. A couple of quotes from it:

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as "chain" or "train" do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A "river" or a "stream" are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. (Vol. 1, p.239, coining of _stream of consciousness_ )

Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that _the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion_. Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we should not actually feel afraid or angry. (Vol2 p449, this is now called the James-Lange theory of emotion)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article applies and probably makes some very good points if your goals include "persuade others to join my cause".

There is a counterpoint to be made for being the person you want to be regardless how seriously people take you.

<comment><USER16> I think you underestimate the effects of observed weirdness on the psyche. I believe most people react to weirdness with caution and suspicion, and sometimes they get intimidated. I believe that being weird makes it harder to connect with people in general, and that is a problem unless you're totally uninterested in socializing with other people.

<comment><USER15> You're not wrong but that's an incomplete model.

Weirdness can open doors to connections people might not have been comfortable with otherwise. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Henson](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Henson)

I guess my own weirdness is reacting strongly to the conformist message in this thread.

Know who you are and be comfortable as that person. Using camouflage, or just keeping your opinions to yourself, are useful skills for getting along with others. But there is also great value in being true to yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> this article just is giving me the hives. Unfortunately it's night time, my son has pneumonia and I have things to accomplish in the next couple hours so a couple of points:

1\. "Clean up and look good." There is a well known stereotype of programmers that the ones who are the most scruffy, unhygienic, weird etc. are the better ones, a popular enough stereotype that Scott Adams made a Dilbert cartoon of it (which I cannot find right now), there is also a stereotype of artists and visionaries that they dress weird and look like freaks, thus drawing an inclination from people to think people who look weird might be real geniuses worth listening to. I'm not saying look weird in every situation because it will help you, I'm saying there are lots of situations in which looking weird enhances your credibility. Personally I hate looking weird (because I think it smacks of being a poser), although I do have a certain level of scruffy programmer looks.

At any rate I think we can all name famous programmers who do not seem to have given a damn about their appearance.

2\. Recognize you only have a few "weirdness points" to spend: so there is apparently no way to get more weirdness points to spend elsewhere by, for example, advocating for something weird, pushing it through, having it be a great success. This is why people who make weird movies that earn lots of money are never called up by Hollywood again. In conclusion of this point - David Lynch does not exist and has never had an effect on cinema whatsoever.

3\. Advocate for more "normal" policies that are almost as good: As a general rule weird things that get accepted and mainstreamed have all sorts of proponents some of which are weird extremists some of whom are less weird. In pushing against racism, the more moderate policies were accepted not because everyone had switched from pushing more extremist views but because the extremist views existed to make the moderate look good (I believe this is part of the generally accepted narrative). If everyone pushing for something currently considered weird moderated their views then the moderated view would become the new weird. Maybe being the extremist is the best use of your weirdness points.

This article is just driving me up the wall.

<comment><USER18> I can't find it, but when David Bowie died, there was a quote that went around. The gist was that in the late 60s, Bowie was a weird red headed kid in a dress. 5 years later, he was a weird red headed kid in a dress and the whole world was amazed by him.

I think the article is probably directionally accurate about average human behavior. I'm less convinced it's good advice, or describes an inescapable trap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The most reliable way I get traction for my ideas is by presenting personally as over the top fusty and conservative, whereas people come to me when they need iconoclastic ideas.

I would also say that "looking weird," used to signal you were so good at something you didn't have to conform, and it imposed the cost on rivals where they couldn't succeed if they imitated you (the actual definition of a counter-signal). Weirdness has changed into a survival strategy to avoid personal accountability. Either because they are so conscientious as to want to make other people feel comfortable by seeming harmless and incapable of coercion - or it means what bright colours and displays mean elsewhere in nature: poison, avoid. Great article, but also surprised how quickly something from 2014 could date.

Today I would say, the smart money doesn't spend weirdness points, it leverages them.

<comment><USER20> Something something "blue hair"...

It's not about being weird, it's about being weird relative to the group. If I'm hanging out with folks at Burning Man, I'm going to look weird if I'm too "default". If I'm interviewing in Silicon Valley, I'm going to need a shower and a change of clothes from my Burning Man attire, at minimum -- but a carefully chosen hint of my Burner affiliation can still work as a conversation piece.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> _The only normal people are the ones you don 't know very well._ \- Joe Ancis

... via [https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

</comment><comment><USER22> There is no scale of weirdness, and the idea alone is toxic. If you contribute in a positive way, people accept you, because you have made yourself useful. Beyond providing value, and not destroying it, 'weirdness' only incurs the occasional wrath of red tape.

Be weird, or don't. There is no fucking quota.

</comment><comment><USER23> Interesting concept but I am sceptical when it comes towards operationalizing social interactions. From my perspective these operationalizations come from positions of weakness of charisma and self-criticism.

If someone has very little self-reflection and does not care about others perception, all those interaction mechanics fall apart. In the end the reality of weirdness is not about getting 50%+ votes in an hypothetical election from a randomized crowd but finding those people that are the most attracted to that weirdness.

</comment><comment><USER24> This article makes me think of the engineer at one of my past jobs that not only subsided on the free office poptarts, but also would butter them. I like to think I am a very open minded person but I had a hard time taking that guy seriously with anything.

<comment><USER25> Have you ever put butter on a Pop Tart?

It's so frickin' good

Have you ever put butter on a Pop Tart?

If you haven't then I think you should

<comment><USER26> Have to try this now!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Weirdness is relative, so its a not-simple problem of figuring out what you're spending them on

<comment><USER28> I use the weirdness relativity principle to my advantage:

Almost everything that comes out of my mouth/fingers is weird. Usually radically weird.

When I say something that is _less_ weird than my usual utterances, people sit up and listen, because I've moved their weirdness window so far off into the wilds that my merely abnormal ideas sound positively sane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Some people, who's very existence apparently fits into "radical" for some reason, do not get to pick their weirdness points.

<comment><USER30> Grammar aside, I don't know why this was downvoted so quickly. A lot of hackers were "weird" not that long ago. And we still are.

<comment><USER31> I overheard a conversation at my local barbershop last week, a technical recruiter lamenting about how "strange" software developers are.... I completely understand it, his target demographic being kids fresh out of University and probably need to exercise their social skills a bit, but the lack of empathy is what irked me the most.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they're not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do."

— Steve Jobs, 1997

<comment><USER33> Particularly in a thread about generating creativity, I think it's important to attribute sources of creativity correctly. This was not written by Steve Jobs, it was written by the 'Chief Creative Officer' of Siltanen & Partners, Rob Siltanen.

At one point Jobs even rejected something very similar to the final ad, saying "It sucks! I hate it! It's advertising agency shit! I thought you were going to write something like 'Dead Poets Society!' This is crap!".

While Jobs shares responsibility for greenlighting this and allowing his brand to stand on it, he certainly didn't write it and I think it's wrong to attribute it to him solely. At the very least he should get a group attribution with many asterisks.

Siltanen article: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2011/12/14/the- real...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2011/12/14/the-real-story- behind-apples-think-different-campaign/#da0939b62abc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Counterpoint: [http://www.hartford- hwp.com/archives/45a/060.html](http://www.hartford- hwp.com/archives/45a/060.html)

</comment><comment><USER35> There are some cases where more weird is better. I have a relative who dresses very oddly. She is praised as a fashionista and trend setter, and has a sizable following on IG. But for me, it's like the Emperor's New Clothes.

I cannot discern any particular design ethos aside from: the brighter/louder/more garish, the better. For whatever reason, being super weird works for her, and I assume if she were less weird in this regard she would be less interesting to her followers.

<comment><USER36> Sounds like she's spending her "points" on her style brand.

> I cannot discern any particular design ethos

Sometimes fashion is simply being confident in the outfit you put on. I like seeing folks in striking outfits choices. I wouldn't wear the same things, but the boldness I love

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Interesting theory. I'd like to add that the higher success rate that occurs when you focus on one point may not be connected to weirdness.

People have limited headspace and attention spans. Whether your ideas are "weird" or not, if you try to push too many, you lower the success rate of all of them.

That's why many brands / marketers choose one or two key characteristics or selling points. More, and the brand is diluted / the audience gets confused.

</comment><comment><USER38> Weird compared to what? Christianity is radically "weird" as is Mormonism or Judaism. None of what you are proposing to me seems weird at all. It seems like run-of-the-mill technocratic political policies by people who believe everything would work fine if they were put in power.

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if the Libertarian party would be more successful if they chose just one issue to push?

<comment><USER40> this is a good question. I've always wondered why libertarianism wasn't more popular. Democrats wants freedom in personal lives. and Rebuplicans favor free business. Libertarianism combines both of those nicely.

<comment><USER41> When I debate libertarians I've always felt that it has never been really realistic and I think a lot of people feel that way.

I'm not American but as far as I understand Democrats type of freedom is very different from libertarians.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Be yourself, man.

</comment><comment><USER43> too strange to die, too weird to live

</comment><comment><USER44> (2014)

</comment><comment><USER45> > But if you're a guy wearing a dress in public, ... recognize that you're > spending your weirdness points fighting lookism, which means less weirdness > points to spend promoting veganism or something else.

Being trans is antithetical to improving the world? Yikes, that's a bad take.

<comment><USER46> I think the article's claim is that bigotry against appearances is so strong that it uses up people's ability to keep an open mind on any other topic of discussion. Which is to say, we live in a world at the moment where when someone meets a transgender person, much of the time the only challenging topics they can think about are transgender related: for example they will have trouble concentrating on arguments concerning cryogenics.

Not to say this is a good or fair thing. But if true, it is a data point to keep in mind and maybe even fix.

So the suggested remedy concerning appearances, has to be re-thought in some cases.

<comment><USER47> Hm, I think that's a good observation. Likely rooted in how a lot of our opinions are consensus based rather than reason based. If a weird person says something you'll write it off as them being them. If a normal (or god forbid a popular person) says it, you'll probably assimilate it into your beliefs. No particular bigotry required.

I kind of hate this about human behavior. It's not easy to suppress. We're very eager to parrot opinions on whether things are good or bad based on who gave the opinion.</comment></comment></comment>


Extracting images from Apps in the AppStore - <AUTHOR> http://idevrecipes.com/2010/12/06/extracting-images-from-apps-in-the-appstore/ <comment><USER2> Does he mean optimize or obfuscate?

<comment><USER3> He really does mean 'optimize'.

There is a command-line utility that is run during Xcode app builds called 'pngcrush'. It was originally written by somebody else, then modified a bit for Apple's use. It tries to further compress png files and, I think, reorganizes them so that they can be more efficiently rendered by the iPhone's GPU. Like, maybe so they can be drawn bottom-to-top, rather than the usual top-to-bottom? I read about this once, but it was years ago, and I can't remember all the details.

<comment><USER4> It reorders the bytes of the image from RGBA to BGRA, which is the natural byte order used by the GPU (other byte orders are supported, but have to get swapped when loaded). Also, it premultiplies each color channel by the alpha channel. So if you have a blue pixel with a 50% alpha (RGBA 00 00 FF 80) it gets converted to (BGRA 80 00 00 80). After that, it uses the usual pngcrush method of trying all different compression settings until it finds the smallest size. So it's optimized both in terms of size and speed of rendering.</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter Prepares to IPO - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/08/11/twitter-prepares-to-fly-ipo/2636335/

<comment><USER2> 1) Curious first about how much they'll try to raise, and 2) what will they buy first? :)</comment>


CIA following Twitter, Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/ap-exclusive-cia-following-twitter-facebook-081055316.html <comment><USER2> _The most successful analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of the crime novel "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," a quirky, irreverent computer hacker who "knows how to find stuff other people don't know exists."_

Who writes this stuff? Sure, Lisbeth Salander is a hacker, but 'quirky'? 'irreverent'? FFS If you'd read the books you'd know that she was a poor woman who'd been hideously abused. Or is that what the AP means by 'quirky'?

Also, give that this is an article about 'open source' intelligence (open source as in public), how is Salander and her ability to find things people don't know exist even relevant? This is the modern equivalent of analysts getting copies of Pravda and reading them, only with a citizen-reporting element added in.

 _Those with a masters' degree in library science and multiple languages, especially those who grew up speaking another language, "make a powerful open source officer," Naquin said._

Yeah, just like Salander. (And, BTW, AP it's master's degree not masters' degree---you can check in the AP Manual if you like).

<comment><USER3> Naquin is just circle jerking. I very highly doubt they knew exactly what was going to happen in Egypt, and their ability to see the future is more of a hindsight bias than anything. I believe this will become more evident as more serious events go by in the US, and will be proven when the US doesn't act with a sort of sixth sense to these serious events.

<comment><USER4> Anyone can see that freedom fighters and protest organizers will use distributed technologies, because frankly they can't afford or manage a centralized technology. This has its trade offs, but it's easy, cheap, and fast.

The only thing it is lacking is verifiability, and in many cases this is an asset not a detriment. When things are easy, cheap and fast you can crowd source verification so that if someone tweets out, "The rioters at $local_location have turned violent and are burning down the $city", everyone there can verify this and drown out the propaganda and rumors relatively quickly.

So the first part of his statement isn't so much of a surprise. It's like saying, "The next political revolution will take advantage of electricity." It's very obvious.

So really, what we are evaluating is can they predict unrest in Egypt reliably using Twitter and tweet content. I believe it's possible. Take for example, that calmness can predict the stock market[1]. Or pronouns can be used to predict any number of things[2]. Is it possible that the CIA can watch for shifts in calmness to anxiety or shifts in the number of pronouns used in reference to a particular leader and measure the likely hood of political uprising? That seams plausible to me.

[1][http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/twitter-crystal- ba...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/twitter-crystal-ball/) [2]<http://secretlifeofpronouns.com/>

<comment><USER3> I agree that social media such as Twitter can be used to evaluate the general mood of locations, but it still won't allow an all seeing eye effect. Probabilities aren't absolutes.

I felt like Naquin was circle jerking with what he was doing, the article gave the distinct feeling that Naquin thinks he can predict the events of the future, just not the when.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would be upset if they were _not_ following Twitter and Facebook.

When the story comes out that CIA has been given ongoing access to the page view data that ad networks collect, I'll be concerned.

But the Twitter and Facebook firehoses are public. These are "open sources" (in the intelligence sense), and if anything, the real concern I have with intelligence agencies is that they waste tremendous amounts of time and money trying to duplicate those sources.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have some problems about these numbers:

         In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an
         unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets
         — up to 5 million a day.

These sound large until you realize that a relatively small project such as Truthy ( <http://truthy.indiana.edu> ) who deals only with ~10% of the full stream is already north of 20M tweets per day.

If they got such a basic fact wrong, where else could they have messed up?

Of course that doesn't mean that the government isn't interested in social media, or what they more broadly call OSI "Open Source Information/Indicators". Take a look at: <http://www.iarpa.gov/solicitations_osi.html>

<comment><USER2> They are likely filtering on specific countries/languages that they are interested in, thus reducing the number of tweets they are working with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If the CIA weren't doing something intelligent with the public stream of Twitter data and Facebook data, I'd be worried about their competence.

</comment><comment><USER8> The issue for intelligence agencies has seemed less about being able to access and collect information, and more about how to filter the firehose.

</comment><comment><USER9> CIA following Twitter and FB to provide Obama with analysis is like asking an average person in China what love is..answer is never dependable..my apologies to our Chineese readers</comment>


Cupcake - <AUTHOR> https://cupcake.io/

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I have to agree: whether or not you can explain it to me here, that page does not explain to me what I'm buying, why I'd want to buy it, or what I can use it for exactly.

Seems cool, but better marketing is required.

*edit: See: [https://tent.io/docs](https://tent.io/docs) \-- that breakdown is actually one of the better explanations of any protocol I've ever seen. Clear, succinct, concise. Really a thing of beauty. Cupcake needs to be explained in the same way. Shoot, I wish everything was explained that well.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for checking it out. As you discovered Cupcake is a hosting service for Tent. We'll also be launching a few apps in the coming months (Dropbox and Droplr type apps powered by Tent). Until then most of the marketing copy is a bit out of place and for most users the service isn't that useful (the Tent app ecosystem isn't that mature yet).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Others have mentioned that you should be more descriptive about your product. I have another suggestion:

The name and design of the site are at odds. Either change the design (show an increasingly full plate of cupcakes?) or the name. A green tree is _not_ what I was anticipating when I clicked on "cupcake.io".

</comment><comment><USER5> After reading the landing page, I still don't know what this is. Is it a backup service?

<comment><USER6> It's a tent.io ([https://tent.io/](https://tent.io/)) hosting service. Basically, if I understand it correctly, tents are personal servers where different applications run that can communicate with other tents. So for example if there were a social networking application running on your tent, if someone else viewed your profile, the data would come from your tent, not from some third party server that you don't have access to. And this service provides hosting of said tents. That's my understanding, someone correct me if I'm wrong.

EDIT: Seems like I was not that far off. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tent_(protocol)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tent_\(protocol\))

<comment><USER7> So the idea is it's app.net but storage instead of messaging?

<comment><USER8> I'd say it is app.net but not in the hands of one company but instead there is a protocol and everyone can implement their own server and apps and run it on their own.

In the end it would be like with email that you would have 5-10 big hosters like gmail, hotmail, yahoo, some regional hosters like web.de, gmx and people who host their own servers like me.

The thing is, the whole Tent thing is not really ready for other people then curious developers. The protocol spec is in the making, most of the apps are broken after the upgrade of the protocol from version 0.2 to 0.3 a couple of days ago and need to be fixed, etc. It will at least take a couple of month until it is usable.

It is not a good thing that cupcake (one of the hosters) are getting new users because of this post because those users will be disappointed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> One of the founders here-- We recently rebranded the service (used to be [https://tent.is](https://tent.is)), which is still in alpha, to make the distinction between the hosting service and the Tent protocol clearer. This landing page was designed with some products that haven't launched yet in mind, so most of the copy is vague outside of that context. Honestly we weren't expecting any serious traffic until those apps launch later this year, so we've been focused on product, not marketing. (Most of the team is currently experiencing a power outage at home so we missed this being posted to HN as well.)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a terrible, terrible website. Not because of the design (which is pretty), but because I have __absolutely no clue __what you 're offering. I know that you want $5/month (for what? Who knows?), that you're expanding the amount of storage that you have, and that "Cupcake is part of the growing Tent ecosystem." Oh....okay....WHAT THE F@#K IS THAT?!

You know those annoying TV commercials where you're left with no idea what product the commercial was trying to advertise? This is the web equivalent. Just horrible.

<comment><USER10> Apply directly to the forehead. Head-on Apply directly to the forehead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I so badly wanted this to be an api for ordering cupcakes.

From the description I couldn't tell what service is being sold but I'm fairly sure it isn't an api for cupcakes. Damn.

<comment><USER12> Now I'm hungry for cupcakes. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Design is aesthetically great but from skimming the copywriting (twice) I have no idea what the product does.

</comment><comment><USER14> True story here: it occurred to me that it would be awesome if there was a customer-brings-their-own-storage protocol for cloud app backends. It would allow arbitrary apps to stay synchronized across devices, but the user would still control the data. And then I remembered that I was pretty sure I had heard about something like this.

And then it hit me, it was the Cupcake/Tent thing I had read about a couple weeks ago but had shrugged off because I didn't really understand the point from either webpage.

I just took a second look, and it seems that Tent actually does everything I had thought in my mind, but also goes well beyond, because it has a first- class notion of sharing. Then I revisited Cupcake and saw that I had actually overlooked the free tier when I first read this story.

Re-examining it all, I think this is absolutely revolutionary! Once people understand that they can actually own all their own data for a couple bucks a month and app writers realize they can achieve cloud synchronization with the customer bringing their own infrastructure, it could be a major shift in the whole multi-device app/social sharing economy. We can start seeing meta-apps that aggregate app content.

But first, both Tent and Cupcake need to find a much better way to portray what they provide, because neither site is capturing the promise...

<comment><USER3> We're currently redesigning and drafting copy for both sites. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have no idea what these guys are selling, but their website is beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER16> Uhm. Ok?

Looked at page. No idea what I'm looking at.

Checked out Tent.io. Sorta understand.

Back to cupcake. Nope, thought I understood.

Sign up for free account. Still no idea. Oh well. Later.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Everyday everyone creates more data by editing files, taking pictures, and sending messages."

'Everyday' should be 'Every day'. 'Everyday' is an adjective.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but it's everyday data. _rimshot_

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So, they promise 50gb cloud storage for $5/mo (not initially, but after you sign up and wait 4 years). That's about $5 at current S3 storage prices - [http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/](http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/)

Why not "invest": unproven reliability and performance, uncertain future.

<comment><USER19> That's not a very fair price comparison. You haven't added in the cost of data transfers that you'll be charged with S3. And it seems transferring data from your store to each of your application providers as needed, is the essential point of the protocol & service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "© 2013 Tent.is, LLC. Tent is a trademark of Tent.is, LLC." Protocol name is trademarked.

Good for the protocol or bad?

</comment><comment><USER21> cupcake.is.ambiguous</comment>