Have we really measured gravitational waves? - <AUTHOR> https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/11/have-we-really-measured-gravitational.html <comment><USER2> From a year ago: "Danish physicists claim to cast doubt on detection of gravitational waves":

[https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/danish-physicists- cl...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/danish-physicists-claim-to- cast-doubt-on-detection-of-gravitational-waves/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I am a bit shocked that the work by LIGO is so... unprofessional. How can one give away a Novel prize so easily.

<comment><USER4> I don't really think that's what happened here (that LIGO's work is unprofessional) and I think the vast majority of scientists believe that LIGO's data (and the analysis) are reliable enough to conclude that they did, indeed, demonstrate the existence of gravity waves to a reasonable level of evidence.

<comment><USER3> Maybe I misunderstood Sabine Hossenfelder but she wrote:

> They just throw away data that don't look like they want it to look.

If I take white noise and an assumption about how my data should look like I can basically prove anything.

If I take two white noise generators I am pretty sure I will still be able to find a signal which more less appears at the same time at both generators.

I hope they did more than just select the data which fits their assumption.

<comment><USER4> A lot of very interesting information has been published by LIGO and in the popular press (no insult intended, but based on what you're saying I'm assuming you don't have any deep understanding of modern physics experiments).

I wouldn't put too much weight on Hossenfelder's blog posts. She is very angry when things don't go exactly her way (in this case, IIUC, she's basically trying to hold LIGO to an unreasonable standard before accepting proof, and casting some aspersions which only experts in the field would be capable of evaluating).

<comment><USER3> None taken. I indeed don't have much insight into modern physics experiments. Can you recommend other physicist which give different insights into LIGO or other experiments?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most of the points made here have been explained for a long time at this point and there doesn't seem to be a good reason to doubt we've discovered gravitational waves.

To go over the points made in the article:

* Sabine complains that the plot in the original LIGO PRL paper was "not found using analysis algorithms". In reality, the claim of gravitational wave detection was not made using that plot, but with rigorous data analysis which has now been replicated by two independent groups [1]. The only reference I can find for her claim is some New Scientist article and in the LIGO paper it only looks like they applied some filtering to the data to clean it up. That is, they presented real data. While the collaboration should have made it more clear what processing they applied I think this is nitpicking. PRL is a general interest publication and tuning plots for pedagogy is a good thing in this case.

* The blog post also tries to throw doubt at the 2017 multi-messenger signal. First off, the fact that the gravitational wave analysis finished after the gamma ray detection doesn't invalidate the result. They measured gravitational waves with an EM counterpart. Not only that, but followup with a network of optical telescopes was able to locate the galaxy from which the event occurred [2]. These observations and the kilonova aftermath line up closely with the expected optical signal for a binary neutron star merger. The reason why the automatic alert didn't go off is because that alert is triggered by an approximation of the analysis software which does not give the most accurate results. The full analysis takes much longer than the single second scale time delay between the gravitational wave and the gamma ray signals.

* It's also brought up that the collaboration has retracted many of their alerts and that often EM telescopes don't turn up anything. This shouldn't concern anyone because the alerts are based on significant approximations to the analysis to make it fast enough for multi-messenger astronomy. In addition, Sabine doesn't give a fair representation of just how difficult EM detection is. When the alert goes out it isn't telling people to look at just one galaxy, there is a huge error bar on the location with the approximate algorithm. This often means hundreds of galaxies. In addition, up until recently there were very few telescopes actually involved with multi-messenger astronomy. Now that the alert system is open to the public it is expected that more EM discoveries will follow. The reason why the 2017 signal was detected by EM in the first place involved a lot of luck and was due to the fact that the neutron star merger happened to take place in a region of sky with only about 30 galaxies within the error bars. The lack of EM detection is just a testament to how difficult this problem is.

* Again, Sabine tries to throw doubt on the measurement by making scary sounding claims about "glitches" in the data. There is an entire field of experimental physics devoted to detector characterization, not just for LIGO, but for every major experiment out there. "Glitches" as Sabine calls them are nothing new and a normal part of science. She also tries to make the collaboration sound unprofessional by calling out the names they give the glitches which doesn't have anything to do with the science here. The collaboration has good methods of dealing with noise in their detector and these types of problems have already been argued about extensively in literature [3]. The results of those arguments is that gravitational waves are real.

* It' claimed that the collaboration just throws away data they don't like which is simply unsupported.

I have to say that in the past I have appreciated Sabine's posts, especially about the prospects of new high energy colliders. There are real scientific concerns about spending that kind of money on a project that isn't likely to turn up new physics. However, after this article I have lost a lot of respect for her opinions.

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/two-independent- anal...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/two-independent-analyses- confirm-ligos-discovery-of-gravitational-waves/)

[2] [https://qz.com/1102926/how-ligo-virgo-scientists-tracked- dow...](https://qz.com/1102926/how-ligo-virgo-scientists-tracked-down-a- kilonova-2017s-biggest-discovery/)

[3] [https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/danish-physicists- cl...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/danish-physicists-claim-to- cast-doubt-on-detection-of-gravitational-waves/)

Edit because I'm bad at formatting</comment>


At 92, Movie Bootlegger Is Soldiers' Hero - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/nyregion/at-92-movie-bootlegger-is-soldiers-hero.html?hp&pagewanted=all <comment><USER3> This enrages me. Unequal application of law is an injustice to everyone. How can teenagers be bankrupted and have their future damaged by sharing a few MP3s via P2P yet this guy can bootleg 300,000 current release movies and the industry hardly flinches? This guy gets a free pass because he's old? Because he's supporting US troops? Bullshit.

When kids can have their future ruined because their situation doesn't "warm your heart" and this guy can bootleg for 5 years you know the system is broken.

 _Note: I'm not defending USA's IP laws. They are very, very broken._

<comment><USER4> It's civil law; they only sue if they want to. Which is good, since a lot of times a lawsuit isn't the best way to solve an issue (for example, in GPL violation cases the FSF often gets the infringer to comply without suing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hollywood can't even provide a convenient solution for overseas American troops to enjoy a favorite American past time. The same American troops that are helping protect the lives of the Americans that watch all of Hollywood's entertainment offerings.

At least they've (so far) decided to let this guy do some good without going after him.

<comment><USER6> _At least they've (so far) decided to let this guy do some good without going after him._

This actually presents a really big challenge to the MPAA. By not actively protecting their copyright (which they aren't if they let this guy off the hook or turn a blind eye) they risk losing other cases because of it. At the same time, if they go after this guy they look awful.

<comment><USER7> The obvious thing for the MPAA to do is to start doing it themselves -- voluntarily send free discs to overseas units.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, you'd think they get positive PR if they sent free DVDs with pre- recorded messages from the stars before the movie.

"Hi i'm Tom Cruise and I, and everyone else at Sony Pictures, want to thank you for your service. Enjoy the show!"

<comment><USER9> I wonder how many people would find it odd if Sony a Japanese company did that. I know their a multinational and all MGM seems like a more natural fit.

<comment><USER10> Japan is pretty clearly part of the imperial US having ceded all military protection to the US.

Have you ever heard anyone in government use the acronym CONUS? It is supposed to stand for Contiguous United States: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiguous_United_States#CONUS....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiguous_United_States#CONUS.2FOCONUS)

But it is more commonly used opposed to "United States Interests at home and abroad" - i.e. the imperial United States

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Something about this story just warms my heart. Particularly image # 7: A 92 y.o. veteran leaning over his flat-screen monitor, performing a labour of love for his comrades thousands of miles away.

With an old-fashioned alarm clock on his desk.

<comment><USER12> Actually, the images are really nice. Pity they don't provide hi res (I'd pay). You don't see photo stories like this too often now.

This chap reminds me of the volunteer hospital visitors we have in the UK. People go into their local hospital (known to staff) and just sit with the ones who have no visitors that day and engage them a little.

<comment><USER11> I'd hardly be described as sentimental, but it's the small things like this that give me hope for humanity.

It's amazing, the things we can do to-or for-one another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> ""It's not the right thing to do, but I did it," Mr. Strachman said, acknowledging that his actions violated copyright law."

What an odd quote. It seems like he thinks it was the right thing to do (as do some of the recipients), or he wouldn't continue to spend so much time and effort doing so.

<comment><USER5> I think he's more acknowledging it's not the "right" thing to do as in the legal thing to do, but he understands that beyond the law, it's the moral right thing to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I generally don't have time to read enough of the news to find gems like this so I love the fact that I can come to Hacker News and catch a little bit of everything. I know this has been said before and contributes little to the conversation but it's nice to see stories like this along with everything else.

</comment><comment><USER15> Seems like such a simple thing for the movie studios to do - legally - <USER2> generate some positive PR for a change... but no.

<comment><USER16> The military actually does run it's own movie theater chain. I'm not sure who pays for it, but the showings are free. Although I think the movies are released a month or two after the normal release date. And I doubt that the military actually has a theater somewhere in Iraq or Afghanistan

<http://www.mwrguam.com/company_detail.php?keyword=movies>

<comment><USER17> Actually a lot of the bases had movie theaters in Iraq and Afghanistan (not the little 10-1000 person bases, but the big ones like Balad, Bagram, etc. which have >10k people).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ironically, this story would itself make a great movie. One can only imagine how much this old man, who our society would write-off as "no longer productive", raised the morale of our troops who were otherwise lonely from their families.

For the amount of money spent on the war, the DOD could have purchased the rights to the films and made their own copies to distribute to the troops.

<comment><USER19> If the DoD had tried to purchase DVD distributions rights, Hollywood would have insisted on some sort of DRM so the DVDs could only be played on military-owned computers located outside of the United States. That would have been, er, doubleplusunconvenient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wasn't alive then, so this probably me romanticizing, but the Hollywood of the WWII era I grew up learning about would have been sending these films over to the troops on their own.

<comment><USER21> Even if they were doing so, the situation was very different. You couldn't easily copy movies, and either way, people in general weren't as dependent on Hollywood entertainment as they are now.

<comment><USER20> My broader point is that there's a lot of talk surrounding the legal/piracy implications of what this man is doing, and yes, the world is far different now that it was some 70 years ago, but _in his era_ a comparative act to this - if there is one - wouldn't have been met with nearly as much (potential) "controversy" I think. Hollywood used to do quite a lot to show it's support to the armed services/government. (Disney sidelined projects to work on what was essentially free propaganda films among many others)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm surprised that after 75 comments nobody remarked this quote:

"You're shocked because your initial image is of some back-alley Eastern European bootlegger — not an old Jewish guy on Long Island," Captain Curran said.

I may not be so familiar with the north american culture, can anybody clarify this for me: Is it a generally accepted fact that bootleggers are east europeans and old jews would never do such a thing?

<comment><USER23> Big-time _organized_ bootlegging/piracy is often associated with communist and former communist areas (Russia, China, the Ukraine, etc.) in popular consciousness. Not just in terms of movies, but in terms of knockoff Rolex watches, Coach bags, and so on. It's some combination of low respect for capitalism, high corruption, pockets of general lawlessness, cheap labor, and powerful criminal organizations.

I certainly have a hard time picturing my 90 year old, very religious, WWII American Veteran grandpa being interested in piracy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The best part.. he sends to the _chaplain_ to then distribute to the troops! He starts with purchasing boot leg from vendors on the street. That made me say "NO!...". Is it wrong of me to want to step in and show him how to do it right?

This was great story.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm curious as to what's going to happen now, being that he's admitting to copyright infringement on page A1 of the New York Times....

<comment><USER26> The editors at the Times know what they're doing. This pretty much makes him untouchable.

<comment><USER11> "Movie industry sues WWII vet for boosting troop morale."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What a lovely man.

</comment><comment> excuse-me Ironically this would be perfectly legal if the army was doing it.

Recently a musician attempted to sue the Army for its use of his music played at very high volumes to 'interrogate' prisoners at Guantanamo. The case was rejected because the US government has a blanket right to use any US copyright material for national security.

So the Army is presumably free to pirate all the copies of 'Two and a Half Men' it needs to keep it's troops in a fighting mood.

<comment><USER28> I searched Lexis and think you're probably mistaken. There's no such law but also no such case.

<comment><USER29> "Any State, any instrumentality of a State, and any officer or employee of a State or instrumentality of a State acting in his or her official capacity, ___shall not be immune_ __[...] for a violation of any of the exclusive rights of a copyright owner" 17 U.S.C. § 511<http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#511>

No such law, in fact explicitly no sovereign immunity.

<comment> excuse-me I think it's a more general principle of "if we say it's a matter of national security we can do whatever we want"

If you don't agree you are perfectly at liberty to be held indefinitely without trial and be tortured.

I don't remember the latin term but it's approximately "look what a big stick we have"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Well this guy makes a much better hero than the fucking ridiculous Kim Dotcom.

<comment><USER31> You don't think that soldiers watched MegaVideo too?

Or downloaded new music from MegaUpload?

Just because the New York Times didn't write a story about it, doesn't mean it didn't happen.

<comment><USER32> I don't think Kim's mansion in NZ and ridiculous antics were his way of helping out soldiers overseas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm sorry but war should never be comfortable or have entertainment.

Don't feel good for him doing this while we can shop at the mall.

The solution is those people should be watching it at home in the comfort of their own homes.

When we have a draft for every military action declared by a single person in charge, then I'll change my mind.

<comment><USER34> In a volunteer army, these people serve by choice (albeit perhaps not always for altruistic reasons). It is also the choice of this fellow to make their horrible experiences less so. While certainly I don't support endless war, I think this story is an uplifting one - a singular act of selfless kindness to add humanity to what is otherwise an inhumane situation. Certainly no one is coercing or paying him to do that. In fact, quite the opposite.

<comment><USER33> He's making it more comfortable to go to war - both for the recipient and for us on our comfy chairs knowing someone did this for them.

Enact the draft for EVERY military action. It's only fair.

I know these are not popular opinions but they are true.

Where are the people sending DVDs to people in the peace corp? They make far less than people in the military.

Obama promised to promote the peace corp and I've never seen one ad, but plenty for the military.

<comment><USER35> > Obama promised to promote the peace corp and I've never seen one ad, but > plenty for the military.

Perhaps because the Peace Corps isn't such a tough sell (you aren't going to war!), so they don't need to advertise to expand. Just more funding. Obama has increased the Peace Corps budget and as such there are more participants. I'm sure they receive plenty of DVDs from their loved ones.

<comment><USER36> Also most of my friends who did Peace Corps didn't even have electricity for two years. I don't know how they did it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Path ways to become a Future Physicist - <AUTHOR> http://www.physicslog.com/be-a-future-physicist/ <comment><USER2> > why apple always fall towards the earth but not earth towards an apple?

But it does.</comment>


Take Me Off Your List - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/part_forbes/2008/0602/056.html

<comment><USER2> I wish forbes.com would take YC off it's list.</comment>


Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 RC Available - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2015/10/29/visual-studio-2015-update-1-rc-available.aspx <comment><AUTHOR> I am very excited to see the return of an IDE-less release, just the compiler, libraries, etc. Very cool!

 _Visual C++ Build Tools 2015 (Pre-release). If you want to build your C++ projects targeting Windows desktop without having Visual Studio installed on your computer, Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools 2015 provides the required tools: C++ compilers, libraries, build scripts, Windows SDKs. This Community Technology Preview ships with the same C++ compilers and libraries packaged with Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 RC (2015.1)._

</comment><comment><USER2> I wonder what the android experience is like in VS? I had to do android studio stuff at uni about 7 months ago and it was awful.

<comment><AUTHOR> The last time I did any Android work it was painful. That was back with Eclipse though, I have heard Android Studio improves things and now with things like Intel HAXM apparently the emulator isn't painfully slow.

The best experience, by a long shot, is Windows Phone. Shame nobody uses it. iOS isn't too bad with Xcode if you live fully in the Apple world (Obj-C, Swift) but Xcode is funky with C++ which can be frustrating at times.

Microsoft have _seriously_ upped their C++ game in recent years. Now with VS Community being free for the majority of people there has never been a better time to give things another shot if you were put off MS in the past.</comment></comment>


Code rot and why I picked OpenBSD - ezequiel-garzon http://homing-on-code.blogspot.com/2015/01/code-rot-openbsd.html <comment><AUTHOR> OpenBSD is really great, and it qualitatively _feels_ really solid and cohesive. Especially compared to Linux which by comparison feels like a bit of a clusterfuck at times.

But I just can't switch to OpenBSD as a daily driver yet. The big ones for me are battery life and responsiveness. Unfortunately compared to Debian I get almost 2 fewer hours on a single charge, and using OpenBSD's power management functions makes my i7 thinkpad sluggish and laggy. Noticeably longer delays when starting applications and whatnot.

I'm sure OpenBSD is a great desktop/server OS but IMHO it's just not there yet for laptops, which is surprising/disappointing to me because I'd always heard the OpenBSD guys dogfood their stuff heavily.

<comment><USER2> The solution I have used for this for well over a decade is Windows on the hardware, then a VM, then my OS of choice running full screen ontop. The overhead of even semi-modern virtualisation is pretty low, and you benefit from power management that has thoroughly matured.

<comment><USER3> I tried that out and noticed minification and bundling of my js code taking several seconds rather than a couple of milliseconds. Am I doing it wrong or is that to be expected? I was using Ubuntu in virtual box on win8.

<comment><USER4> Are available hardware virtualization features enabled in the BIOS?

A little digging brings a 9/2014 comparison of virtualization software that notes VirtualBox as a distant third on performance benchmarks ([http://www.tekrevue.com/parallels-10-fusion-7-virtualbox- ben...](http://www.tekrevue.com/parallels-10-fusion-7-virtualbox- benchmark/13/)) and an Ubuntu thread noting that its performance under VirtualBox leaves much to be desired ([http://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/virtualbox-or-vmware-for- linux...](http://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/virtualbox-or-vmware-for-linux-on- windows/1810)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My second development laptop runs FreeBSD - switched away from Debian in 2012. I wanted to try OpenBSD, however the amount of labor required to simply upgrade the system (Google "openbsd upgrading") outweighed all benefits for me at the current point. Also, FreeBSD has pkg, which is a neat binary package manager - which is important on a desktop/laptop - and it looks like OpenBSD still uses the old, manual pkg_add way. Maybe I'll try it on the third laptop, curiosity grows bigger every day for sure.

<comment><USER6> > I wanted to try OpenBSD, however the amount of labor required to simply > upgrade the system (Google "openbsd upgrading") outweighed all benefits for > me at the current point.

Are you sure you understood the documentation? Most upgrades are done in ten minutes, and it's mostly an automated process (the package updates are limited by your bandwidth of course). Every once in a while something on the system is changed or removed, and the upgrade guide tells you how to deal with that -- unlike on many other systems, where you upgrade and then find out things have changed and broken and you have no idea what needs to be fixed.

<comment><USER5> Hmm.. Let's take this FAQ, for example: [http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade56.html](http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade56.html)

To me this looks more "manual" than FreeBSD's freebsd-update. Additionally, if there's no tool like pkg then upgrading all the user land packages will be quite an undertaking. A typical desktop/development environment may have about a thousand of them installed. On FreeBSD, I can do pkg upgrade, and it will take care of all dependencies pretty much automatically. Is there something similar available on OpenBSD?

<comment><USER6> Look very carefully. 99% of what happens in the upgrade happens under the title "Upgrading by install kernel". Literally, you just boot bsd.rd, smash return a few times, reboot, and you're done.

After that you're into the "final steps" territory. Which means running sysmerge to merge changes in config files. It's not called openbsd-update, but freebsd-update requires you to do the same thing.

Typically the only "manual" part is removing some files and users no longer needed by the new release. Now 5.6 has lots of these files, but it's not really representative -- most releases have a _much_ shorter list of file removals. In any case, there are very good reasons for the system _not_ to do this automatically for you. And, in any case, if you know you haven't done anything unusual so as to depend on these files, you can get away with copy pasting these instructions.

At this point you update your packages with pkg_add -u. Just as you would have to on freebsd...

<comment><USER7> > Literally, you just boot bsd.rd, smash return a few times, reboot, and > you're done.

No, you're not done. You've merely dropped a new OS onto an old OS. It's now an exercise to the user to figure out how to remove all the files leftover from the old OpenBSD release. Leaving older libraries around is dangerous as programs could link against them long after they've been retired potentially exposing you to vulnerabilities that you didn't think you were exposed to anymore.

The correct way to upgrade OpenBSD is to do a clean install. Hopefully someday they'll support a tool like "freebsd-update" which handles all of this for the user.

<comment><USER8> Removing files is included for completeness (because people kept asking for it), but it's hardly necessary. Just glancing at the list reveals half the files are old man pages; there's little harm in retaining them. Even libraries aren't a problem; the linker won't use old versions.

<comment><USER7> If you're custom building any software you could end up making a mistake though. Not everything a user may want to use is in packages/ports. I end up building several things manually because they're not in ports.

But you're right, removing files documented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Code rot: LOL and amen. I had to (help) make a nuclear reactor simulator work on Win32. 30+ megalines of Fortran developed by mostly nuclear engrs over three decades. Thankfully it worked in reasonable time by disabling swapping.

</comment><comment><USER10> _"... At my previous job I worked with a 2 mln LoC code base for a core banking system. ... Imagine working with a code-base, that's layer upon layer of quick fixes. Imagine being woken up at 3 am to diagnose & resolve an issue with it. ... The company wasn't really affected by heartbleed. ..."

AND

"... OpenSSL code base, counting how much resources are needed to plumb it into shape, how the original maintainers - let's not go there. Let's say 'didn't do a great job'. ..."_

Does anyone see the disconnect here?

<comment><USER11> I'm the author of the article. Can you elaborate more clearly on what you are pointing out?

<comment><USER10> Hi @mulander, this is a good read (quickly went thru your other posts as well).

The point I wanted to make was the bank code base described in the article reads like it's insecure (no mention of it being exploited). The article then describes using Unix variants at home, [0] though not which one. I assume Linux. Usable, permissive and open, Linux has always been inherently insecure. Then the article goes on to describe finding of OpenBSD, post Heartbleed.

The question I asked myself: _" How does a smart capable person as yourself, miss security being the heart of the operating system and programming while working on core bank systems?"_ Is this atypical? That's the crux I've what struck me. The dis-joint between the description of what represents a secure, large code base and the personal move to OpenBSD.

From what I understand OpenBSD, a bastard child of 386BSD [1] was a deliberate move to build a secure and audited and most importantly free operating system. This is such a contrast to the cruft described in the article. Maybe that's the point of the article, a growing awareness that fast a moving code-base left unchecked, comes at a cost. It has to change and it can be done.

[0] I fully endorse this btw. A linux user since '95, I love how I could use lots of different hardware with it. Linux is also fast. Fast to use, fast to install software. Fast. Secure it is not. I got sick of trying to secure my boxes and started using OpenBSD. Read about my pathetic attempts to install it on old hardware <[http://monkey.org/openbsd/archive/misc/0310/msg01026.html>](http://monkey.org/openbsd/archive/misc/0310/msg01026.html>)

[1] P57, Tovalds & Diamond, 'Just for Fun', "One BSD derivation in particular is worth mentioning. I was the 386BSD project by Bill Jolitz based on the BSD code-base, distributed over the Internet. It was later to fragment and become the freely available BSD favors-NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD".

<comment><USER11> Hi @bootload, I deeply appreciate your response. It's sometimes hard to read between the lines as English is not my native language.

I'll try to put some more light and perspective into how my previous work place 'ticked' and how I intended to outline my passage to OpenBSD in the article.

My previous workplace was a large corporation. I were literally on the clock accounting for every 0.25h of work I did. You were not allowed to touch a single line of code unless you had billed hours against that task (contract with a client, bug report from a client). This literally meant that doing comprehensive code reviews or reworking a particularly nasty part of the code was not possible. There was a 'process' for doing code reviews but it was so bureaucratic that going through the paper work you had to submit after one took 0.5h-2h but the time you had for a code review was counted as a percentage of the time it took someone to produce or alter the code. So if you reviewed a change that took 1h - you had 10 minutes to do the code review and all the alloted paperwork.

I don't want to speak about the quality of the code base in detail due to obvious reasons but I can assure you that people working on it are really experienced and know what they are doing. Most of the problems and the humongous technical debt is years of corporate culture. Did I mention that the banking system I worked on was born around 15 years ago?

During my 7 years at that job. I had the chance to refactor code once. In my first 3 months of working there since I was not yet on the 'clock'. When I was at my leaving period I was given a free hand and was took off the clock again. This allowed me to really look at the code, analyze potential problems and actually react on them. People that are still working on it don't have that privilege on a daily basis.

The stab at Linux was actually accidental :) I use Linux personally since late 90s. What I mostly pointed out was some of my bad hardware choices in the passage and how OpenBSD drives me more into actually diving into the code contrasted to all the years I solely used Linux.

You are correct that my 'evolution' towards tighter, smaller and correct implementations drew me towards OpenBSD. I think I had that feeling for a long time but hopefully you understand that it's not always in the hands of the programmer himself to call the shots and do things right. What I really loved though was auditing and removing a ton of cruft in one code base while OpenBSD did the same with LibreSSL :)

Hope this answers your question.

<comment><USER10> @mulander

 _"... I were literally on the clock accounting for every 0.25h of work I did. ..."_

That is a revelation. Please follow with more articles like this.

I like to think the development of software as something akin to making music. If startups are Punk, big business is Pop. Manufactured Pop. It makes a lot of money and does the job, but at it's core the product sounds crap and devoid of time for creativity.

There was one guy who was a natural at playing guitar, a born player. He started in school and went on to be a top session player for a commercial company in the UK. It got to the point where he would turn up and be handed a folder of music and would have to play it on the spot, no practice, just play.

At that point he realised he was just a highly skilled session player, churning out _muzac_. He quit. That man was Jimmy Page who went on to play in Led Zeppelin.

Understanding how these musicians/programmers make the choices and tradeoffs to create, be it commercial _muzac_ or punk rock, hearing about this trade- craft is good value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is the performance of the JVM/PostgreSQL/NGINX on OpenBSD the same as on Linux? Are there any reliable OpenBSD VPS providers?

<comment><USER13> I'm using Vultr.com but I installed as "Custom ISO" since they didn't have a 5.6 option at the time.

<comment><USER14> The main reason why it's not an official image is OpenBSD doesn't seem to support any sort of online disk resizing.

Operating systems get deployed from an image, and typically expand the own partitions to fill up the disk... OpenBSD can't do this, which makes things pretty tricky.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article advises paying attention to the mailing lists.

Is there a LWN style product covering OpenBSD (possibly with free/net as well?)

<comment><USER6> Not exactly LWN, but you can find a good sum-up of interesting news/changes/discussions concerning all the BSDs here: [http://www.dragonflydigest.com/](http://www.dragonflydigest.com/)

I also watch tedu's blog ([http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/](http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/)) and the OpenBSD tag on lobsters.

<comment><USER16> For [http://www.dragonflydigest.com](http://www.dragonflydigest.com) I find the "Lazy Reading" articles to be some really great pointers to all types of cool articles. The "In Other BSDs" is a great survey of the BSD news highlights.

For general news, undeadly is in my rss feeds. I also like the BSD Now and bsdtalk podcasts. BSD Now is from two folks from PC-BSD and FreeBSD, but covers the other BSDs as well.

<comment><USER17> BSD Now is from three people, the third of which seems to be more of an OpenBSD person. That balances the news out a little more I suspect.

<comment><USER16> They do a pretty good job, although the interview with the FreeBSD security person who didn't want to get contaminated by the OpenBSD code was painful. I really wish they had challenged that statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> avoid nvidia if switching to OpenBSD, you miss out on dropping all X privs [http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140223112426&mo...](http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140223112426&mode=expanded)

<comment><USER19> Not to mention that Nvidia cards don't play nicely with non-Linux (or OSX) Unixen in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Everybody is piling garbage on top of garbage, then taking the money and running. Don't be the schmuck who chooses to die on some godforsaken hill to make a point about software quality. When it starts to smell, move on. Is this world suboptimal? Yes, it is.

<comment><USER21> I worked at a place like that once. The application was the definition of lava layers. It was my second gig so I hustled, got uo to speed fast, and really impressed my boss. Found the exact same situation, crap on crap, features that never worked, features that were sold but never implemented, hand rolled transaction framework, a real pile of sh*t. At a year went out and lined up another job then gave notice.

Long story short, and against my better judgement i stayed, for a 50% raise and a promotion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I love OpenBSD and I use it as my desktop OS at work and at home. But there are a couple of inaccuracies in this piece.

 _In OpenBSD you are encouraged to run current._

What they actually say[1] is:

      The name -stable refers ONLY to the API and
      operations of OpenBSD not changing, not the
      overall reliability of the system. In fact,
      if things go as desired, the -current flavor
      of OpenBSD, on its way to becoming the next
      -release, will be an improvement in reliability,
      security and overall quality over the previous
      -release and -stable.

What is implied is that sometimes things don't go as desired; -current sometimes has issues. They are almost always quickly fixed, but if you depend on as near as possible certainty that an update won't break anything, you should run -stable.

 _If OpenBSD states that something is configured then it works and will remain working flawlessly or will only get better over time._

Not guaranteed. I remember somewhere in the 4.x series my NIC driver was removed from the release build. I updated, and suddenly had no network access. My fault for not reading the release notes, but they don't always support old/obscure hardware forever. More recently, support for some older Microsoft VPN protocols was removed. It was because they were insecure, but this changed the way I had to interoperate with one of my client's internal networks.

[1]: [http://www.openbsd.org/stable.html](http://www.openbsd.org/stable.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> I've been using OpenBSD for about a year now. It's still not _quite_ my daily driver (it's running on one of my three main workstations - a PowerBook G4 - but not on my desktop or my other laptop, both of which are still running GNU/Linux - Slackware and openSUSE, specifically and respectively), but it's certainly the OS of choice for my servers.

OpenBSD appealed to me as a Linux user for the same reasons why Linux appealed to me as a Windows user. I was tired of bugginess, and just wanted things to work. Unfortunately, I still have the same obstacles migrating to it from Linux as I had migrating to Linux from Windows - namely, hardware support and gaming - that keep it from being my dream OS; however, it's still the OS I like to use when I need to get real work done (just as GNU/Linux was the OS I liked to use when I needed to get work done, back when I was still a Linux/Windows dual-booter so many years ago).

Even with those shortcomings, my PowerBook G4 is currently my favorite machine. There are some kinks, to be sure (power management is non-op, so I can't put the laptop to sleep), but with OpenBSD and WindowMaker, it's pretty rock-solid despite its age.

The nice thing about OpenBSD is that the devs aren't afraid of breaking backwards-compatibility if needed. They've already solved the 2038 problem as of 5.5, for example; with Linux's policies on backwards-compatibility, that'll be a nightmare to fix on 32-bit Linux systems (and even other BSDs, if I understand correctly). To me, that's awesome; I'll take a minor flag day to clean-reinstall my servers _now_ over a major flag day to hack together some kind of band-aid "fix" _later_ any day, and it's nice to know that, should I setup a server right now, it won't spontaneously vomit all over itself in 20 years or so due to it suddenly thinking it's 1970 again.

</comment><comment><USER23>
        Lesson 1 sources on the hdd
        This might sound simple but in a long time I didn't feel     so connected to my OS. Having the sources for every piece of software I use around made things really different. How? I'm  actually looking at them

I've taken to keeping a ~/code on my machines after experiencing the same thing with a BSD. It has been life-altering to be able to search implementation details with a simple :grep in my editor. I typically keep a copy of OpenBSD sources, along with major libraries for my current target OS and my dev toolchain (clojure/python(pypy)/clang) around to reference due to this. OpenBSD sources are kept around because it's cleaner to reference when I'm simply studying how something might be accomplished (as opposed to loading up glibc or the linux kernel if I need an implementation detail).

</comment><comment><USER24> I've used OpenBSD for years in my router. Something that has given me a bit of pause recently, is that with all the various espionage revelations coming out in the past 14-16 months, I had expected the OpenBSD crowd to be out in force talking up the operating system but they've been surprisingly subdued. Just makes me wonder...

<comment> glass- > I had expected the OpenBSD crowd to be out in force talking up the operating > system but they've been surprisingly subdued

The OpenBSD motto is "shut up and hack". Look at the work that is being done recently with libressl, openssh, the new httpd, signify, static PIE, xorg privilege separation etc. etc.

They're letting the code do the talking.

<comment><USER24> I don't think that the OpenBSD crowd's response to the OpenSSH vulnerabilities are an example of some motto of "shut up and hack" at all. In fact, I find their response to demonstrate the difference in reactions that got my attention.

Heartbleed provoked substantial discussion as well as the LibreSSL project.

<comment><USER19> If by "OpenSSH" you actually meant "OpenSSL" (I'm a seasoned sysadmin and I still get those mixed up in conversation, so don't worry), then yes, the crowd's response was _certainly_ an example of "shut up and hack": the OpenBSD devs wrote libressl to replace it, cutting out as much of the insecure cruft as they physically could.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm curious about the mention of shopping with a bootable usb stick. Has anyone else tried this? Where can you do such a thing? I'd be afraid of salesmen thinking I was "hacking" or something.

<comment><USER26> Explain what you are doing and why; if they don't want to let you try it, then you aren't interested in buying it. It's understandable that, out of ignorance, they aren't comfortable letting you do that... it's equally understandable that you wouldn't pay thousands of dollars for something you can't even play with for a few minutes in the store first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > I gave my 3 month leave notice to my employer at the end of March 2014.

3 months? That sounds excessive. How much would your employer have been required to give you if they decided to let you go?

<comment><USER28> I left a job after 8 years. It took 3 months to do a thorough knowledge transfer (documentation and training).

It's a business-critical system so as a professional, I wanted to ensure my replacement's (and my former team's) success.

I left on very good terms.</comment></comment>


Who's new to news.yc? Say hello here - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I am new. I'm from Manchester, England, and I write a network simulator in Java. I'm mainly interested in Lisp at the moment, and its potential for children and for embedding into existing applications, such as media players.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just noticed we've got a lot of new folk on news.yc. Welcome! Introduce yourself and say hello to the community.

I'm Sumon, check out my profile if you want to know more.

</comment><comment><USER3> Howdy. My name is Jeremy, and I'm a software developer for a startup in Charlotte, NC. My company uses the .NET platform, but, personally, I'm a python guy.

</comment><comment><USER4> Or better yet, join #news.yc on EFNet and say 'hello'!

</comment><comment><USER5> Hi. I'm Noel from San Diego. I'm beginning a new startup and yc news has been very interesting. Maybe I'll apply for the next round?</comment>


Show HN: Optimized trading algorithms using IPython parallel and ec2 - <AUTHOR> http://twiecki.github.com/zipline_in_the_cloud_talk/

<comment><USER2> Cool technical presentation, but trying to optimize moving average trading strategies is a fool's game - you might find a set of parameters that work in all out-sample/cross-validation tests, but there's still a good chance it'll lose money in actual trading going forward - market paradigms can shift, unforeseen world events, t-cost/slippage higher than what the model accounted for (especially with more frequent rebalancing), etc.

If you actually want to trade moving average strategies, your best best is just to diversify and run several different strategies across a variety of parameter sets and across various sectors/asset classes, without trying to overly optimize a single strategy

<comment><AUTHOR> Certainly that's always a risk. Zipline does however support simulating transaction-costs and slippage so those will be accounted for (as best as possible).

As for market-paradigm shifts, I totally agree. One way to deal with that is to constantly re-optimize the parameters based on recent data. This is also known as walk-forward optimization on which there is a slide at the very end (see <http://blog.quantopian.com/parameter-optimization/> for a more information).

Finally, as to running multiple strategies with different parameter settings. The OLMAR paper that describes the algorithm (<http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.4626>) has a variation of this where they use a range of different-length moving averages, rather than just one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I noticed you got close prices from Yahoo that you are using for your backtest. If you get the close prices in real life and optimize, when are you going to trade?

You have to deal with intraday prices now. Got those? Well they are not split or dividend adjusted. Good luck.

<comment><USER4> Don't forget mergers. I spoke about this problem recently at Matt Turck's Big Data Meetup (<http://vimeo.com/60598560>). Quantopian provides zipline powered backtesting over fully adjusted intra-day data (minute bars) for free.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately I wasn't able to attend February's Big Data Meetup, so I missed your talk. EDIT: (I did just view it online, my comment takes what you said into account.)

My point about intraday data with corporate actions wasn't really about the difficulty with corporate actions, but rather the leaky abstraction of trading present in the slides. To give you credit, I don't know what issues Quantopian addresses. On the other hand, has any one tried running Zipline-backtested strategies in real life? Does any one know what issues aren't addressed by Quantopian? Corp actions was one part, T-cost model was hinted at in the slides, but was any though given to borrow costs and availability? There leaks everywhere. It is not that you don't seem like smart guys who made this cool thing freely generously available to everyone, but that you seem like you spent too little time downtown NYC.

PS. Fully adjusted bars are nice, but they have an epoch to be adjusted to. Unfortunately having an epoch that is not today() means you can't add today's data to it. If you can't add today's data to it, you can use this system to generate real trades to trade. Now you need two sets of data and two sets of code to work with. Good luck.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for taking a look, and for the feedback. Zipline does model transaction costs, both commissions and price impact of your own trading (slippage). The commissions and slippage models are pluggable, so you can use what is there or roll your own.

Quantopian does not have data for stock borrowing costs or availability, and Zipline's slippage/cost model does not account for them either. We'll find a way to get that data and plug the hole. The challenge has been finding a clean way to get it from the brokers, or finding an aggregator with a reasonable price (any advice?). In the meantime, we've been open about this limitation, and the zipline code is opensource, so I think/hope anyone who cares to know does probably know.

Quantopian is building our live trading environment now, so we don't yet have comparisons between the backtest results and real trading.

Regarding your point about the epoch, I'm not sure I entirely follow you. Part of the point of zipline's design is to allow easy swapping of datasources, mainly to allow the transition from backtesting to paper trading and then to real trading to be seamless. One algo code can run either historically or live. Adjustments from splits and mergers are back-projected, so that current day prices need no adjustment. Dividends are dealt with as announce, ex, and pay events, meaning we do not smooth out the over-night drops, instead we increment/decrement cash.

I'm in NYC regularly to host the NYC Algorithmic Trading meetup - it would be awesome to talk to you about these issues in person, please consider coming: <http://www.meetup.com/NYC-Algorithmic-Trading/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An interesting course on using software algorithms for stock analysis and trading can be found at Coursera: <https://www.coursera.org/course/compinvesting1>

That course also uses Python as programming language in the examples. Short description from that URL: "Find out how modern electronic markets work, why stock prices change in the ways they do, and how computation can help our understanding of them. Build algorithms and visualizations to inform investing practice."

</comment><comment><USER6> Fascinating from a technical perspective, but how does it add value to the world beyond the search for increasingly complex ways to make money?

<comment><USER4> Investing is one way people plan for the future. Helping people plan for the future is a good thing. Algorithmic trading has mostly focused on (ultra) short timescales, without much regard for future planning. I think the world would benefit tremendously if more of that effort went toward investing on longer timescales. Investing is still almost fully manual today, and packed with inefficiencies and costs that could be automated away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool! My question is, how do you use something like Zipline to actually _execute_ trades.

<comment><USER8> For those with an account, E*TRADE offers a REST based API @ <https://developer.etrade.com> . Onboarding is manual but once you get your key you can execute trades for your account via the API. Equities / ETFs only right now, they were working on support for other asset types but not sure when they are going to launch it.

Full disclosure - I used to run their developer platform.

<comment><USER4> How do commissions work? per trade? Does the api provide any data, or just execution?

<comment><USER8> Commissions are the same as your E*TRADE account; list price is $9.99 for equities although if you are doing higher volumes you can negotiate discounts ($7.99 if you do 150 trades / quarter, and call them up if you are doing a lot of trades for lower pricing).

Data: [https://developer.etrade.com/ctnt/dev- portal/getDetail?conte...](https://developer.etrade.com/ctnt/dev- portal/getDetail?contentUri=V0_Documentation-MarketAPI-GetQuotes)

There's also a call for data on option chains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can't scroll down the code on slide 8.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the code is cut-off unfortunately. It's the new IPython nbconverter that still has some kinks. The idea of the algo is expressed on the next slide.

You can, however, view the full IPython NB here: [http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/twiecki/zipl...](http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/twiecki/zipline_in_the_cloud_talk/gh- pages/Zipline%2520in%2520the%2520Cloud%2520--%2520PyData%252013.ipynb)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Beautiful presentation; really loving all the stuff built on top nbviewer.

As an aside, I think an enterprise-quality zipline solution could be a worth a pretty fat chunk of $$ especially considering that the budget for KX and its support is generally > 1M per year per firm. (Yes, there's complex logistics and legal issues)

I believe seeing on github some requests for h5 support -- this + support could potentially be a big inroad...

</comment><comment><USER11> Finally got it to load. Don't know what the problem was. I kept getting a blank page (wouldn't even let me right-click). Cracked open the dev tools, and the DOM was there, and all of the resources were loading. No clue what the problem was.

[ Running: Chromium Version 26.0.1386.0 Ubuntu 12.10 (177362) ]

<comment><USER12> The third or forth slide causes my IPad's instance of Safari to crash. (IOS 6.1.3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This was a great talk, find it on pyvideo.org in a few days</comment>


Ubuntu Off to a Promising Start on Smartphones - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511756/ubuntu-off-to-a-promising-start-on-smartphones/

<comment><USER2> I've been watching this with some interest. It was particularly interesting to see how much better Canonical did creating a credible 'desktop->laptop->tablet->phone' design for an OS than Microsoft did. Microsoft could do a lot worse than just copy it.

That said, Glass and what not threaten to upset the applecart. There is a lot of potential in the 'smart brick in your pocket' linking to a variety of UI devices around your body, that has yet to be played out.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it will be really interesting to see if this will also do something like Ubuntu for Android, where you will be able to dock the phone and have a full version of Ubuntu Desktop.

I could see being able to use this as a development machine (Django/Flask/RoR) that you can take with you. I would have one setup docking station at work, and one in my home office. I would no longer need to keep two or more machines in sync via vcs/database dumps. Things are looking up.

<comment><USER4> Maybe, if you are using your desktop PC mainly as an SSH terminal. OTOH there are always going to be tradeoffs between things like weight/battery life and power.

I assume my smartphone would choke if I threw all the stuff I use on my desktop (eclipse,photoshop,VMs,emulators etc) at it. You might be able to make a smartphone that can do this but then it's unlikely to last as long on batteries or be as lightweight as one that couldn't.

Regardless of what computer I'm using , my work is never more than a dropbox sync or git pull away.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, as far as batter life, I was assuming that any heavy lifting would be done when it was in a docking station and charging. Used like a normal phone when not, as I would never try and program with a touch keyboard.

Yeah, dropbox and VCS' work. My main problem is that if I just want to quickly do a few things, it becomes a time burden to spend 5 minutes or so doing the sync (and other things like db updates, what have you). This little extra time sometimes destroys my motivation to work on something real.

<comment><USER4> Once you start putting extra hardware into the docking station to do heavy lifting you essentially end up back where you are now with a mobile device that can do some but not all tasks but also acts as a mobile filestore.

I would imagine that as broadband speeds become faster we will see a diversification of devices rather than the other way around. Things like kindle , roku and xbox seem to be selling a lot better than things like MS Surface for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ubuntu is already takin huge market in the desktop and server space. I have made the full switch. It will be very interesting to see how it tackles smartphone . Just thinking 'Sudo Apt-get install Apache' gives me the shivers

<comment><USER6> pacman -S apache!

That presents an interesting prospect - once Ubuntu hits phones, and there is a proven infrastructure for "mobile" distros, will we see the mass proliferation of such OSes? There is nothing inherent to the phone that makes it harder to have distro like behavior on, just that since it is mainly a media consumption device it would probably be less fun to tinker with.

Hell, Plasma Active even presents a viable interface that isn't the mobile Unity that Canonical probably won't be all sunshine handholding open contribution with already.

<comment><USER7> I don't think my N9 is less fun to tinker with just because it is mostly a 'media consumption device' and given appropriate support (i.e. SDK and all such things), it's not even harder to tinker with it than with the OS on my laptop. I would still prefer a truly open system where I don't have to circumvent silly kernel modules (aegis, I am looking at you) every other day, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hardware - Canonical should get into making their own hardware. Open hardware with unlocked bootloaders on which you could install ubuntu, ff os, android and if ms releases images then winrt as well. Plus, they could make money this way. The boom that windows/pc's saw in the 1990s was in part due to easily available hardware. Why can't we have something similar but based on open source values for mobile phones.

</comment><comment><USER9> A promising start is when they sell them and lots of them and people start dropping good reviews.

With Firefox OS around and with a brand name more people recognise, I doubt they will get anywhere.

I mean even Microsoft have had to work hard to get their stuff on the market.

</comment><comment><USER10> I hope they will win a few carriers to support Ubunto Phone. Otherwise the will fail badly.</comment>


Show HN: Beep Boop – a simple platform for your Slackbots - <AUTHOR> https://www.beepboophq.com/ <comment><USER2> "Beep Boop" :-D I love that name and design! I always balk at adding more bots to slack, it's always yelling at me as it is now. I know what bots are and I've written some integrations, but I'd love to see an example on there. "For example here's a bot on Beep Boop that does this super useful thing"

<comment><USER3> Thanks, it's been really fun to create too :)

The most useful bot that we use internally is a deployment automation bot that orchestrates deployments and scaling in Amazon ECS. We are working to generalize and open source that bot.

In general, I think that bots on Slack will be boom or bust, but it's clear that Slack as a platform and Slack integrations are one of the key things that make the product special and successful. We'd like to give developers the best shot at making bots successful and useful in Slack.

Here is a super simple weather bot example that you can try if you want to see what the Beep Boop user experience is from the consumer side:

[http://bit.ly/wittyweather](http://bit.ly/wittyweather)

And here's the source: [https://github.com/mbrevoort/witty-weather- bot/blob/master/s...](https://github.com/mbrevoort/witty-weather- bot/blob/master/server3.js)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I cannot log in with slack, I confirm slack team, and authorize access, redirects to home and nothing. Try it again, exactly the same thing. Disabled adblocker, same thing.

Also, I was expecting to receive an email invite to your Slack team. That hasn't happened.

<comment><USER5> Dang, sorry that isn't smooth. We're working on fixing a few things around that, but if you sign up by using the form here...

[https://beepboophq.com/maker/signup/](https://beepboophq.com/maker/signup/)

...you should get an invite, and then will be able to login with the BeepBoopHQ team. As you launch bots into different teams, you can then login with any of those teams.

<comment><USER3> Sorry about the confusion! There are some constraints we're working around with the way Slack supports authentication and "adding" integrations. They have been great partners, and we're working with them to improve this.

So like Brad mentioned, signup and then you should see the Slack invite to the BeepBoopHQ team and then you can log in with your BeepBoopHQ team user. After than you can associate other user/teams under settings and then log in from accounts in those teams as well. If you get stuck, please reach out in Slack or to email@example.com. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just so you know there is an extra .com on the github link making it github.com.com which has so pretty nasty redirects.

<comment><USER3> Wow . We're fixing that right away. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can change team but not retry a different password? I am stuck in the registration process ...

Well that sucks :/

<comment><USER3> Sorry you had a bad experience :(

We completely rely on Slack's authentication. Once you sign-up you should receive an invite to the BeepBoopHQ Slack team and you need to log in with the Slack account. After you're able to login you can add additional slack user/team combinations under settings and then log in through that team via the Slack auth flow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Saw this at a Slack Dev meetup. Really promising stuff especially with the Wit.ai integration.

</comment><comment><USER9> Site not mobile friendly, "log in" pop out blocks whole screen.

Will check this out later though.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, we've tried very hard to make Beep Boop a 1st class experience on mobile. The login is through Slack which has worked well in all of our testing on mobile. I'd love to see what you're seeing. Email email@example.com if you could. Thanks for checking it out!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Guten Haiku – mine haiku from text with 80s CLI - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sloev/gutenhaiku <comment><AUTHOR> Author here:

Guten Haiku was created as I had a severe need to extract as many legit Haiku poems from the whole corpus for Gutenberg.

It didn't mean a lot to me if it was the "fastest kid in town" but it sure needed to be pretty ;-)

The journey:

0\. I write in python3

1\. I went for space as nlp lib of choice (they are so niiiiiice peoples)

2\. I needed to be able to extract syllables but space didn't know how to do that

3\. I therefore created another lib called [https://github.com/sloev/spacy- syllables](https://github.com/sloev/spacy-syllables) to annotate tokens with their syllable counts

4\. I now had a syllable counting pipeline built with space

5\. Now I needed to make an 80's aesthetics inspired cli app for my pipeline

6\. I started with creating the whole colourful look with colorama and click

7\. I created the default command for extracting haiku from text

8\. I created another command for downloading fancy AI models ... uuuuh fancy!

9\. Boring test implementation... yawn... zzz zz z

10\. Even more boring packaging with poetry

11\. Even even more boring time with travis, I don't love you right now travis

12\. Release to the internets on GitHub and pypi

13\. Battle with asciinema and asciicast2gif to get a pretty README up and going

14\. Write hacker news about by personal triumph :-)

I wanna shout out to everybody and say that you all should make something silly and pretty today. I value those things highly and if you haven't visited [https://theuselessweb.com/](https://theuselessweb.com/) yet, please do so cause TIM HOLMAN is a really nice guy with a great imagination.

Peace out and take care during the virus thingy!

<comment><USER2> huge fan of anything silly and pretty especially if it contains a kernel of novelty and progress.

very interesting I've been toying with the idea of doing a project with haikus, (something along the lines of the markov chain project you mentioned in this very thread). I'm not much of an poet though and am quite lost as to the best way to approach it programmatically. Would you be interested in being contacted regarding this and in that case what would the best way be?

<comment><USER3> Yeah please contact me. I have been around in mount silly for years and might be able to help out other sillyheads

My contact info is at

sloev.github.io (about)

<comment><USER3> Byw supernihil, sloev and johannes valbjorn are one and the same (occationally nihil as well)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great little project! I enjoyed looking through it.

Just wondering why this needs AI or "fancy AI" (as described in the program)

Isn't this just searching for a string of haiku sentences (5-7-5) in the text file, or am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> it uses tensorflow through the lib "deepcorrect" to re-establish punctuation on the haiku. I did this for fun, i dont know if it makes sense (that applies to the project as a whole as well ;-) see: [https://github.com/sloev/gutenhaiku/blob/master/gutenhaiku/p...](https://github.com/sloev/gutenhaiku/blob/master/gutenhaiku/pipeline.py#L91)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice project! Very pretty CLI and cool project name :)

1\. How much time did you spend on it?

2\. Do you like working with "poetry", or did you choose it because of its name? :)

3\. Which book produced the best results?

(PS: The lib is written "spacy", not "space", I think)

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. saturday morning to sunday morning (with some sleep)

2\. yes very much, i am not much of a writer though so i try to use computers to mess around with it, i have previously used markov-chains to generate poems from the corpus of my friends poems which we collaborated with live: [https://vimeo.com/72808984](https://vimeo.com/72808984)

3\. i think the "A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe" gives some horrifying results :-) ([http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/376](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/376))

spacy not space: THX :-)

have a great day!</comment></comment>


Optimal placement of log printing statements under specified overhead threshold - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/11/03/log20-fully-automated-optimal-placement-of-log-printing-statements-under-specified-overhead-threshold/ <comment><USER2> From an operations standpoint while I'd certainly like to see more logging in code branches that aren't seen often or expected by the developers (I am all too familiar with patching code that a developer wrote without knowing how many ways a function can fail outside the confines of their test environment) many of the logging statements I'd like to see are pretty routine and let me know that something is actually running as expected. This methodology errs on the side of removing statements I'd want. In the absence of instrumentation and infrastructure that can definitively tell me that a program has not deadlocked, I'd far rather have a crying baby than a silent baby.

With that said, I've seen developers write some woefully negligent logging statements that cost millions of dollars in production monthly due to the sheer amount of output that's generated and the extra management and storage costs necessary. When your write amplification from a 1 KB input blows up into 100MB minimum and 50% of that is whitespace or semantically useless statements like "ok" you have to start questioning the value of a log statement in that environment at all.

This is a topic that doesn't get much discussion so I'm glad to see people actually studying it.

<comment><USER3> > From an operations standpoint [...] many of the logging statements I'd like > to see are pretty routine and let me know that something is actually running > as expected.

Not to mention that these "everything OK" logs allow to track where exactly some data landed or where to look for more context. Logs are not just for reporting errors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very impressive stuff. We should see more and more of this sort of assistive technology, to alleviate and improve on the manual labour of programming. This isn't a language issue, although perhaps this sort of branch annotation in production systems is the sort of thing a futuristic language runtime might offer.</comment>


Ask HN:  What logical fallacies irritate you the most on Hacker News? - <AUTHOR>

One I find annoying is when someone gives a counterexample as if that would be enough to shoot down an (implicitly) statistical claim/argument. <comment><USER2> I'm not a fan of people trying to shoehorn arguments (especially: arguments they are losing) into strict logical exercises. It's like a "work to rules" strike, message board style. The point of a message board argument is to influence and communicate and, sometimes, to arrive at a shared understanding of the truth (some topics, subjective ones, don't readily admit to a convergence on "truth" and yet make perfectly fine fodder for an HN discussion). They don't all need to be scored from the Nizkor list.

I'm not saying logical fallacies are all benign, but if you ask me what fallacy annoys me most on HN, it's the fallacy that logical fallicies are themselves _invariably germane_. They aren't.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if there is a conflict here because for some people careless statements are reliably at too low a precision to be helpful because one has already considered the topic at higher precision.

When you are an expert at something, to improve further you need to hunt down every last mistake you can find. You don't just dismiss logical fallacies as not being germane. Sometimes they don't look germane but actually are for a subtle reason.

By contrast, for newbies, even if a fallacy is germane in some subtle way it doesn't matter b/c they aren't learning subtleties.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure if this is a logical fallacy per se, but I have observed some very strong groupthink effects with respect to voting dog piling, both for positive and negative votes. Strongly postive comments and stories tend to have accelerating up voting rather than the expected fixed frequency of votes, implying that number of votes is itself a factor for some in deciding whether to vote for something. It shouldn't be.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it's increasingly easy to find out which side of an argument has the more popular viewpoint, even if both sides are making good points and intelligent comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> None. I don't care what people say or how they say it because we're all different.

However, since it just came to mind, on StackOverflow.com, I despise when someone pops in and says "read the documentation" then provides a link. As if I hadn't already read it a thousand times and ended up at Stack because I was stuck.

Whoa. Way off topic.

<comment><USER7> This may be a little off topic, but downvoting w/o a comment seems rude. Let me help you balance that a little.

In response to your SO complaint: I will sometimes reply with a request to read the documentation (including a link to the relevant section), but only when it's very clear that the OP has not read the docs. It's especially prevalent for me, b/c I tend to stick to the PHP/lowest common denominator languages.

<comment><USER8> My policy is to down vote or comment, but not both. If it's worth a reply, why would I down vote it? If it doesn't contribute to the discussion, why would I reply?

<comment><USER7> Because by replying, you can point out flaws or disagreements in the parent post. That helps the person who wrote it get a little better.

Additionally, downvoting w/o a comment feel punitive, as opposed to corrective. It also seems a little lazy -- "I'll click the downvote arrow, but won't take any time to help them improve."

<comment><USER8> If I believe there's a good reason to help them improve, then I can do so and there's no need to also down vote, as my feelings will be on display for everyone to read.

Also, most posts with flaws do contribute to the discussion, I just disagree with the reasoning. That's not the right place for a down vote. IMO.

A down vote might be used for a situation where someone else has already explained why the comment is not helpful, or perhaps something beyond redemption like "Pwned, LOL" :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Windbaggery, a.k.a. the fallacy of thinking that wrapping your ideas in intellectual-sounding verbiage will make them invulnerable.

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems like philosophy students see this far more than other people (based on my informal survey of my philosopher friends) but confusion of descriptive and normative statements, also known as David Hume's "is-ought" problem, is one of the most common fallacies I see anywhere.

This is most easily seen on the more populist articles on Hacker News (which I simply found by going to /best).

Here's an example: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2037139>

These people are having an argument about whether it _is_ or _is not_ slavery i.e., a descriptive judgment. However, the question of whether or not it is slavery has little bearing on whether or not it _should_ be done. The commenters are confusing a _descriptive_ statement as relevant to a _normative_ question.

<comment><USER11> Although what you say does happen, I don't see how that comment thread an example of it. Somebody claimed it was slavery, and other people argued that it was not. To say that particular line of conversation was about whether it _should_ be done is a better example of the fallacy — you link to a descriptive debate, and because you think it _should_ be a normative debate, you say that they were arguing the wrong thing.

<comment><USER10> It's true that I'm counting relevance to the topic in the conversation. Given that these are replies to a thread with a normative statement, the responses are either a fallacy or completely off-topic. I chose the more charitable interpretation.

<comment><USER11> As far as I can tell, it was neither fallacious nor completely off-topic. It was a response to the logical argument, "We should not do this because this is slavery, and we know slavery is wrong." This is a valid argument, so they were replying that the argument is factually unsound, which is a descriptive sub- issue within the larger normative question. If we are not allowed to debate the facts and can only debate the normative conclusions, arguments almost invariably devolve into emotional shouting matches.

<comment><USER10> Actually, I think that whether or not something can be called "slavery" is irrelevant to whether or not it is wrong. If it shares the same moral violations that our conventional idea of slavery does then it is wrong, but not because it is called slavery but because it violates the same moral or ethical precepts. If it could be called slavery but doesn't violate these precepts then it is not a moral wrong. This is actually slightly related to Socrates' question in Plato's _Euthyphro_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wishful thinking. For instance, a recurring theme is to predict a given platform will die (Flash, desktop apps, Apple's App Store, relational databases, etc.). Although I often find myself agreeing with those predictions, the arguments presented often take the form of a wish rather than an evidence based observation.

</comment><comment><USER13> Appeal to auth- Wikipedia.

I hate the use of buzz words and namedropping "theories", and this is a close relative.

Just because there's a friggin' article about something vaguely tangential to the discussion does not mean that you've refuted someone's argument by linking to it. Five bucks says you haven't even read the article, but just used it based on the title.

Sometimes people don't even understand the science behind it, and sometimes they've misconstrued the actual concept of the theory.

Some people just toss in a link like a large, dead trout on the kitchen table as their entire comment without explaining their - supposed - train of thought. But hey, you want people to know that you've learnt a fancy word.</comment>


Airbnb is sunsetting React Native and reinvesting all efforts into native - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-native-1868ba28e30a <comment><USER2> This is marked as dupe but I cannot find the dupe.

<comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17348215](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17348215)</comment></comment>


Why Steve Jobs can't stand Adobe - <AUTHOR> http://www.hardmac.com/news/2010/02/05/apple-and-adobe-the-roots-and-reasons-behind-today-s-situation <comment><USER2> I would love Apple to create a Photoshop competitor. As powerful as Photoshop is, there is a ton of room for simplification. You know there is a problem when software provides five different ways to perform a task, yet users have to have 5 years experience, or Google, to remember how to implement it.

<comment><USER3> You don't need Apple to implement this, there is already a software product for the Mac that is slowly evolving into a full-featured photo editor: <http://www.pixelmator.com/>

<comment><USER4> A closed source product built upon exploited open source code.

Can Pixelmator to do unto others?

<comment><USER4> If you're inclined to downvote this sentiment, at least have the testicles to comment why.

<comment><USER5> 1 - You are being inflammatory and immature. You are welcome to raise your own opinions without questioning the testicular fortitude of everyone on this site.

2 - Pixelmator is reliant on ImageMagick, which is governed by the ImageMagick license. This license in no way prohibits commercial use of the library, and requires only attribution. By all accounts Pixelmator has respected this license.

3 - Not only has Pixelmator respected the letter of the license agreement, but it even widely advertises its use of open source components. How this is a bad thing for open source in general, only you seem to know.

4 - To pre-empt any Stallman-esque tirades about the evils of commercial exploitation of open source software... remember that no developers are in any way forced to allow others to commercial exploit their open source work. ImageMagick has done this out of their own accord, and it would be presumptuous to assume that people _following their license_ are exploiting them in a way they did not intend. Furthermore, from what I can tell Pixelmator has added _extremely_ substantial functionality to ImageMagick (a top-end GUI app instead of a command-line app, really?), and is deserving of whatever commercial success they may derive from this work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How about the fact that Flash (besides having performance issues) would more or less end the reason of having an app store and apple's one large source of revenue?

Do you think if iphone had flash, developers would go through the trouble of app betting process by apple? Every streaming music service, video service and flash games and applications would make Appstore irrelevant.

That, in my opinion, is the single biggest reason why we will _never_ see flash support in iphone of ipad no matter how fast and secure flash becomes in the near future.

Not that I care about flash in mobile device. But, using performance as the main reason for not supporting flash is silly. It can be one of the several reasons, but definitely not the main reason.

<comment><USER7> Apple's three large sources of revenue are selling Macs, selling iPods, and selling iPhones. Everything else--from music to TV shows to movies to iPhone apps--is a complementary product rather than a major revenue driver for Apple.

<comment><USER8> "iTunes and App Store are still running a bit over break-even." — Peter Oppenheimer (Apple CFO)

(via <http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/25/apple-q1-2010-results/> )

<comment><USER9> For a company whose main product lines throw off massive amounts of cash "a bit over break-even" is SEC-speak for "loss leader." If they ran for too long as money-losers then Apple would be more vulnerable to predatory pricing attacks based on the closed nature of both products, as long as they barely make money then Apple has better protection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Flash is doomed. I'm more interested in what would happen if Apple _did_ write a Photoshop competitor.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hmmm, another detailed and specific list of Apple's discontents with Adobe which pretty much doesn't intersect with this on submitted yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1102512>

<comment><USER12> First sentence:

 _For some absolutely shocking reason some people wonder why the Apple iPad comes without Java and Flash support._

Fair to say it's basically a biased rant.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, definitely a rant (there's nothing to be happy about in this situation, unless you think Flash is evil per se (e.g. its not well known cookie system)), but it seems to be backed up with hard facts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Still, for the longest time the main target demography of Mac users were designers who were primarily using Photoshop. Maybe Apple should present their Photoshop replacement asap.

<comment><USER14> Or perhaps the relationship is more complex than that. Despite his antics, Steve Ballmer was right about developers. Apple might be irritated by Adobe over some issues, but I don't think they would want to cut Photoshop's lunch like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> looks like MSFT would benefit from conflicts between apple/adobe, apple/google etc.

</comment><comment><USER16> Once again, every single issue listed in this article would disappear if Adobe freed Flash. I don't know how they can't see the necessity of this. They should do it soon, before serious HTML5 adoption gets underway, if they want Flash to last.

<comment><USER17> Supposedly, the swf specification is already available to anyone who wants to implement it, without restriction:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Open_standard_alter...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Open_standard_alternatives)

<comment><USER17> Wil Shipley (the Delicious Monster guy, formerly of the Omni Group) tweeted that they wrote their own Flash player for Rhapsody, and it wasn't hard:

<http://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/8404153085>

<comment><USER18> I doubt it was full featured, given how huge is the spec and how many technologies it embeds especially nowadays (video streaming, p2p etc).

<comment><USER11> And doesn't the video streaming include payments to e.g. the H.264 rights holders? Freeing the whole thing still wouldn't give others the right to distribute it with those codecs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The part about Adobe being slow to fix bugs had me laughing, I've seen apple take years to fix obvious annoying bugs that had developers banging their heads against their desks.

Apple is so annoying to work with with their insane secrecy and arrogance, if I was Adobe I'd pull Photoshop for OSX and talk Microsoft into pulling their Windows licenses for Parallels.

<comment><USER20> _if I was Adobe I'd pull Photoshop for OSX_

This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why you're not Adobe.

<comment><USER21> It's not a completely outrageous point. There is a not-insignificant group of Apple customers who are using their Macs for design purposes with Photoshop being their primary tool.

If Photoshop ceased to be available on the Mac (or performed below standard) then which is more likely?

They find some other tool? Or switch to an Operating System which lets them run their tool of choice?

For casual photo editing, you would probably try a different tool. For professionals who live in Photoshop, they'll probably just switch to Windows.

<comment><USER22> If Photoshop ceased to exist for the Mac, that's a huge opportunity for a 3rd party developer or Apple themselves to fill the gap. While most Mac OS users can now simply boot into Windows, I'm sure they wouldn't all be happy about it.

<comment><USER23> You buy your hardware because it runs your software, not the other way around.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chicago technologist Harper Reed joins President Barack Obama's 2012 campaign - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-0602-confidential-reed-20110602,0,7924072.column

<comment><USER2> And even better headline would have been something like, "Obama 2012 Hires Startup Hacker as CTO." One of us!</comment>


The great digital certificate ripoff? - <AUTHOR> http://successfulsoftware.net/2008/02/27/the-great-digital-certificate-ripoff/

<comment><USER2> Thanks to the author for taking the time to write this up.

We recently had to buy a digital certificate ($99), and it felt very much like a digital mugging. In a year it reverts to $499. You can get a nearly identical SSL certificate for less than $10.

The situation is an example of everything that can go wrong when ethics evaporates from business. Not to mention, the approval process is hostile to startups (corporate letterhead? fax machine?).

"Opening an unapproved browser on Windows Vista now results in multiple warning dialogs and a bright red security notice---unless the unsupported browser pays us millions to audit their program."

<comment><USER3> >We recently had to buy a digital certificate ($99)

I assume you are referring to one of the MS certificate program 'discounts'. If so note that, although this is a valid class 3 authenticode certicode, you are _not_ allowed to use it to sign your code. Whether you do or not is up to you. What a rip-off!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was going to print a TShirt which said "I gave VeriSign $199 and all I got was this lousy certificate: [cipherblock]". It looks like I'll have to increase the price.</comment>


Y Combinator head who pushes basic income is reportedly running for office - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/05/y-combinator-head-who-pushes-basic-income-is-reportedly-running-for-office/ <comment><USER2> Earlier discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14337507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14337507)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Among other projects, the 32-year-old has recently been pushing Y > Combinator's experiment with a basic income program in Oakland—although > nearly a year after it was announced, YC hasn't touted any data or results.

What do we know about the results of this project, one year on, if not the data? Curious to hear anything about this after all the buzz about it last year.

</comment><comment><USER4> A prelude to Zuckerberg Altman 2020

</comment><comment><USER5> Well, he's not Gavin Newsom, so good luck if this is true!</comment>


Eu.org and Altern.org Are Leaving France (Fr) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nextinpact.com/news/93871-loi-renseignement-eu-org-et-altern-org-plient-bagage-gandi-explique.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> Some organization are already leaving France because of the new mass- surveillance law.</comment>


Ask HN: How to win trust from your colleagues again - <AUTHOR> You missed startup for several times, you keep make ing careless mistakes in Pull Request,... <comment><USER2> Unless they're literally about to fire you it should be okay if you 1) stop missing startup and 2) spend a little more time reviewing your work before submitting a pull request.</comment>