Ask HN: When Is YC19 Summer Deadline? - <AUTHOR> Does anyone have any info on YC Summer 2019? The website still has the info for Winter 2019 (ongoing right now).
"If you want to apply, please submit your application online by 8 pm PT on October 2."
This is October 2, 2018 right?
https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ <comment><USER2> It's faster to get an answer by email firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


Yahoo Selects Google as its Default Search Engine Provider (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/06/yahoo-selects-google-as-its-default.html

<comment><USER2> It is from 13 years ago...

<comment><USER3> Indeed, I believe Bing is now the bread & butter behind Yahoo search</comment></comment>


Google Launches SERP Menus - <AUTHOR> http://blog.intigi.com/google-launches-serp-menus/ <comment><USER2> The field of Search Engine Optimization may someday encompass countermeasures to prevent search engines from scraping too effectively. It's likely to continue to be an arms race as the search engines become better and the web masters adapt, but that adaptation may someday be geared at hindering, not helping, the search engine to increase non-robot traffic to the site.

<comment><USER3> In general, this is tactic is called Cloaking: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking>

I believe that Google Search frowns upon this practice. Though, one can argue that there are different shades of gray, especially when supporting different display types and sizes, or when presenting different pages depending on the referrer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Google A/B tests SERP Menus"

They are kind of an interesting solution, but it seems like it might be better suited to only showing up when you click on "more from this domain" (but at that point the whole results page is for that domain, so it could probably be organized differently).</comment>


Ask HN: What are the most important skills to develop in 2018? - <AUTHOR> In your opinion what are the most important and demanding skills to develop?<p>How would you go about teaching these? <comment><USER2> Ability to gather requirements, and then prioritize: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/12/20/the-best- technology/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/12/20/the-best-technology/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Self discipline, inner peace and compartmentalize work and home. Still looking for a way to get them all I guess it's a long road ahead of me.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd vote for (tech) writing. It can be helpful in almost any area. Some basic writing is taught in schools. In order to learn it deeper, one may try rewriting some website content to make it original but not losing any quality or important information.

</comment><comment><USER5> Empathy, self-awareness, and self control.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am learning Python. It is widely used general purpose programming language. As cited on the most websites, it is great for data analysis, visualization, scientific research, web development, automation.

I have no prior experience of any coding language, but I am grasping it very easily.

It is very easy for non-programmers.

</comment><comment><USER7> ?self-[http://samuel-beckett.net/lessness.html](http://samuel- beckett.net/lessness.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> The most important skills are the ones in demand in your area, or area that interests you - have a look at the job listings, see what they want and learn that stuff

</comment><comment><USER9> I've recently interviewed for 10+ tech companies. I haven't seen any real extraordinary commonality except security. (DevOps/SRE)</comment>


YC blog - <AUTHOR>

This little text field can contain a lot of text.  Enough for blog entries.  So it might be an interesting idea to publish a blog directly on this page.
It might not be a good idea for the community though.  If the blog is any good - you will get some regular readers.  They may vote up your entries - which will pollute the front page.
If I had anything to say I would probably do it myself - just because it's possible.  But I guess I am just to lazy and elliptical. <comment><USER2> The threads page (<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=eru>) is a kind of de facto microblog.

I wouldn't recommend using toplevel submissions as blog entries, because it would amount to self-submitting every post to news.yc. But if people wanted to use news.yc as a blog platform, I'd be open to it. It would only take about 10 lines of code. Does anyone?

<comment><USER3> Can you please allow us to see more entries in the 'threads' page? (perhaps with a 'more' link)

Yup HN Blog Platform would be cool.

<comment><USER4> This is the feature I want most of anything. Why can't the threads page go on forever, paginated?

<comment><USER5> My guess is that this was done to prevent trolls from going through someone's entire comment history and downmodding everything. (Not that this is impossible to do currently, but it's tougher than it would be if a user's comments were paginated out to infinity).

Or it could just be a feature that was left out for lack of time/motivation.

<comment><USER4> I assume the latter. After a week or so (I think), the downmod button disappears from all comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ++ for YC Blog platform

</comment><comment><USER7> <http://wordpress.com> ?</comment>


Rotor.js - A 3D DOM Nodes Manipulation JavaScript Library - <AUTHOR> http://louisremi.github.com/rotor.js/demo/

<comment><AUTHOR> via Functionn - Open Source Resources For Web Developers & Designers: [http://functionn.blogspot.com/2012/12/otojs-3d-dom-nodes- man...](http://functionn.blogspot.com/2012/12/otojs-3d-dom-nodes-manipulation- library.html)

P.S. Functionn contains a whole lot more of awesome resources like Rotor.js. There only a fraction of them I can post here at a time. Take a look if you're interested, and subscribe:

<http://functionn.blogspot.com></comment>


Is Facebook Losing Its Cool? Some Teens Think So - <AUTHOR> http://business.time.com/2013/03/08/is-facebook-losing-its-cool-some-teens-think-so/

<comment><USER2> I expect Facebook to see new competition enter via the college market, fittingly.

It's a time when teens are attempting to break away from their parents, family and old rules. Facebook now represents part of that old structure.

Some company is going to capture that market, but this time if they're smart they'll hold onto the market segment and not open up to try to include everyone. For example, you join as a freshman, and you're cut off two to four years after graduation or past a certain age (back to Facebook you go).

There are about 18 million college students in the US, and probably 15 million young college students. Plenty to build a business around.

<comment><USER3> I suspect that you're right. I registered with Facebook very soon after it launched at Harvard and I remember it being a cool thing my classmates and I could use to make plans for the weekend and then share the events of that weekend. When Facebook started allowing high school students and then anyone use the site it changed how we used it. We were disappointed because we were supposed to be away at college and now it was like our entire family was right there with us. Surely some people would still like to have that privacy.

Yes, you can not friend your family members or add restrictions to what they can see. But if other families are like mine (large and nosy) this can cause quite a bit of consternation.

<comment><USER4> I have friends with kids who painfully accepted that they refused to friend them. Now they've friended them, but restricted what they see - severely. :-) Some of their other young relatives friended them, but they seem to actually live their lives on twitter, assuming - correctly - that their older relatives will not follow them on twitter..</comment></comment></comment>


A third of cash is owned by 5 U.S. companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/05/20/third-cash-owned-5-us-companies/84640704/ <comment><USER2> Combine this with the unprecedented excess reserves held by US Banks on deposit with the US Fed and you have an economic atrocity.

Money's movement through the US economy, in the form of investments that create jobs and opportunity, is a necessity. That those same funds sit idle in US Treasuries, corporate bank accounts (see excess reserves), and offshore is a tragically inefficient and possibly even unjust allocation of capital.

I'm no fan of corporate taxes and/or tax holidays, but this is the strongest case I've seen for urgent tax policy intervention to free up sequestered cash.

</comment><comment><USER3> good thing they aren't dumping it back into the economy it would cause massive inflation.</comment>


Email's About to Die, Argues Facebook Co-Founder - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/business/2014/01/next-big-thing-missed-facebook-co-founder-says-email <comment><USER2> "he took it upon himself to create a new kind of communications system for Facebook that could relieve some of the pain, bringing project management and communication into a single application"

There are tons of these things floating around, e.g. Basecamp from 37Signals

The thing about email though is that it's (a) free, (b) distributed not centralized (unless you choose to use a centralized service like gmail), and (c) the mental model is totally accessible to all including my grandma.

I don't see email going away.

On the other hand I do see Facebook going away.

zing!

<comment><USER3> Hahaha; if you read the comments in the article, they were vicious. The subject line was just shock value - granted Asana is a good application that many use.

I just don't think they should go up against Email. Historically Email have won many times (there are few exceptions like company impose Yammer)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > TL;DR - Ex-Facebook exec creates a startup to replace email, insists email > is dead and we should all pay him to drag away the corpse. Email refuses to > die.

<comment><USER5> This startup will fail. While I hate how antiquated email is, at least it's fairly decentralised.

<comment><USER4> Its simplicity accounts for its robustness. In a hundred years I can still see something very much like like email working precisely because it is simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think e-mail is here to stay for awhile longer.

</comment><comment><USER3> "[There is no problem with Email itself.] The real problems we face are ones of organization, discovery, workflow, meaningful semantics, and overwhelmingly managing information overload." \- someone's comment on Hackernews about Email's Problem

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==

Deep analysis of Email:

\- Email is our medium of communication. Yes, for personal, we have social apps. For professional, we have LinkedIn messages - which is actually directed back to email. For internal small companies, there are Asana, and Basecamp. For larger groups, there is Yammer.

However Emails still cuts through all of those and everything in between because its just agnostic. Also it enables external communication as oppose to those internal structures.

\- Email is also associated with behavior. Implanted to us since the internet. (Actually before the internet.) It is built into our mobiles, our laptops. Tough to tell someone to not use it.

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==

Possible Solutions:

\- Behavioral: Slow transition is required. Little by little.

Examples:

1) Require where the group is going. I tell you to give up email, and use Asana tomorrow. Sounds great but you probably wouldn't (or not yet). If I give you 3 months, tell you that all people you know will slowly be using Yammer and you will get less and less emails. Then you would say yes. Big change but require time and group use.

2) Think about Boomerang, a small plugin, a small behavior change that helps - people started to incorporate it into their email use. Little behavioral change, big gain.

3) Think about Rapportive, highlight recipient info, small change, now many people use it. Little to no behavioral change.

4) However, Ping or Hop, making email into Instant Messages. Possible in the future, but not right now because it is a big jump in the way we view Email. Almost 'eliminating' how we write email. Big behavioral change.

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==

\- Interface change (small incremental UI and UX) on the recipient's side.

Examples:

1) Mailbox, is literally email but with added features to enhance use. Snooze, and swipe.

2) Gmail vs. Outlook. Both emails, better ease-of-use features.

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==

\- Reduction of Unnecessary Emails (FYI Emails)

Examples:

1) Gmail's filter tabs.

2) Apps like PeeqPeeq takes out your shopping newsletter, and puts it into their app.

3) Startups like Square, Stripe, Buffer, and Khan Academy are now using blackhole-mailing-list. CC everything FYI in. Access it when you have time.

4) Sharemoto.io [www.sharemoto.io] (shameless plug) is Sharepoint / Dropbox for Emails. Personal use, hashtags for archiving email and email threads regardless of subject line. Team use, hashtags become semantic topics and users can be invited or follow these FYI topics. Ultimately, reduce CC emails and view no action-required content at their own time.</comment>


Show HN: Let's Crate has shut down, but we're auctioning off our source code - <AUTHOR> https://forms.gle/SqSd5nvSf1vipVDT6 <comment><USER2> I'm genuinely curious as to who would bid for the source code and what their motivations behind it would be. There isn't exclusive rights to the source code and the original owners of the source code even say that they are going to continue to work on it. So you start off with 9 other competitors at the exact same place as you as well as all the other competition in the market. Then add to it the competition that may come in from buying the code on gumroad.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea isn't really to push anyone to start a file-sharing website—it's not really a profitable endeavor. :)

The idea behind selling the source code is educational. There aren't many resources out there for folks who who've never built a web app before and want to see a complete one for reference.

As for Gumroad, it will go up for sale there soon, but the publicly available price will be 4x the winning bid amount, so if you want it, you're best off bidding. :)

<comment><USER3> I once heard of a site called github that is a repository of sort... or code... lots of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> And your point is?

<comment><USER2> The point is probably in reference to your comment:

"There aren't many resources out there for folks who who've never built a web app before and want to see a complete one for reference"

As there are completed web applications that people can look through.

<comment><AUTHOR> Again, there aren't _many_ resources.

Not many previously closed source, fully-commercial SaaS web apps have been completely open-sourced. If you'd like to debate what "not many" means, I suppose we could, but I think that's missing the point. I, for one, can't think of any.

When most startups shut down, they take all of their code with them. I'm kind of surprised that anyone's response to doing _something_ to changing that status quo would be negative. I mean, I'm sure you'd like to have us just give it away for free, but why? Why would we do that?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A tour in ooc land - <AUTHOR> http://ooc-lang.org/about

<comment><USER2> For the record: I only read the front page, and didn't look much further. The had trouble reading through it because of all the cutesy references to internet-memes. Very distracting, and honestly, I just don't think the jokes are funny enough to warrant the distraction.

I like the approach of dropping the reader immediately into the language, and introducing new concepts as as you scroll down. This works well, I think. I think they should go a little more in depth. People who don't know what a class or inheritance is aren't going to experiment with new programming languages, but we do want to know whether the language has value or reference semantics, what the type system is like, and so on. 90% of the text was explaining what the syntax does... and that's frustrating when you just want them to get to the point.

Examples.

1) Don't explain that `for x in [1, 2, 3]` is a for loop, I can guess that. Explain whether it's lazy or not, whether you use iterators / generators behind the scenes or whether it's just syntactic sugar. Explain whether the "x" is a copy of the variable in the container, or a reference to it. Does `for x in [1, 2, 3] x *= 2`, work? If not, does the type checker warn me? Or does it work like most scripting languages nowadays, where it doesn't work for primitives, but does work when iterating over something more complex like [[], [], []].

2) Objects on the stack or the heap? Both? Objects on the heap, rest on the stack? What about structs?

3) I see you can almost have a 1-1 mapping between C structs and OOC objects, but OOC just has "integer". How can you map that faithfully to "unsigned char", "signed short", "long long int", etc? Are they arbitrary precision integers? And if so, do they magically become heap objects when they exceed 2^31 or 2^30 (see: ruby)?

4) And objects... Multiple inheritance? Mixins? Single or multiple dispatch? Messages based system? I think the answer is: all method calls are virtual, single inheritance only, but that's just a guess.

5) Their claim that "garbage collection is fast and if you disagree you're an idiot" (liberal quote) is silly. What kind of garbage collection do they have anyway?

6) They mention templates/generics, but not whether their type system works w.r.t. covariance/contra variance. I suspect their type system / inference system simply isn't sound.

Anyway, most of these questions are rhetorical. The language has a number of nice characteristics, but the cutesy approach and focus on syntax over semantics doesn't give me confidence.

<comment><USER3> Reading your post was an experience in humility that usually only happens on reddit. Nevertheless, let me try to respond in a constructive manner.

First off: I understand your cuteness overload at reading the frontpage. As a matter of fact, you're not the first <http://github.com/nddrylliog/rock/issues#issue/1>

Also, I wasn't aware XL and Io were internet memes now. They'll be happy to learn about it though =) Moving on to the interesting stuff

1) Generics (not templates, ie. not a subset of macros) support primitive types. This is one of ooc's points of interests (compared to, say, Java). How else would 'for(i in [1, 2, 3])' work, knowing that [1, 2, 3] is an ArrayList<Int> and that Int is a cover from 'int' ?

No it's not lazy, list comprehensions are planned: [http://github.com/nddrylliog/bootcamp/blob/master/source/upc...](http://github.com/nddrylliog/bootcamp/blob/master/source/upcoming/list- comprehensions.ooc) We're still throwing ideas around, AFAIK there's no definitive best solution.

for(x in [1, 2, 3]) x _= 2 compiles and runs very well, but doesn't modify the list. Which makes sense, given that it's equivalent to: { list := [1, 2, 3] x : Int iter := list iterator() while(iter hasNext()) { x = iter next() x_ = 2 } }

Iterating over [[],[],[]] will make 'x' a list too, not iterate over the sub- lists recursively. That would be a nightmare imho. You can have a CompoundList or something with a custom iterator if you want.

2) Objects are allocated on the heap, covers/primitives/structs on the stack. This is just a start. Escape analysis will allow the compiler to allocate objects on the stack where it's possible. It is my belief that in a modern language, it shouldn't be up to the programmer to decide if he doesn't want to (but still be possible)

3) No, ooc doesn't have just 'integer', it has covers of all numeric C types. [http://docs.ooc-lang.org/sdk/lang/types.html#module- lang/typ...](http://docs.ooc-lang.org/sdk/lang/types.html#module-lang/types) This is not a definitive state of things, but it worked well enough so far. Also, no, there's a 1-1 mapping between ooc covers and structs, but object clearly have reference semantics on ooc.

No bignums in the core language at the moment (for your 2^30 question), but we're looking for a good (and fast) BSD lib for that. Any suggestions?

4) Hint: we wouldn't announce we got interfaces if we had multiple inheritance. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1288250> Mixins are on the way. Single dispatch. All methods are virtual by default (what horrible C++ term), you can make them non-virtual with the 'final' keyword.

5) No, it says "stop listening to your mom about your father's GC and go do some actual performance research to see what fits best for you". Also, -gc=off exists for a purpose. And from the very same paragraph which you 'quoted', we have a link to <http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/> Which says quite clearly 'The Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative garbage collector can be used as a garbage collecting replacement for C malloc'. This is not necessarily a final state of things. It just makes it very easy to use C libs in a garbage-collected manner (think GTK+, etc.), and it performs a lot less worse than one would expect of a conservative GC. That's why the page says "and no, it's not necessarily slower"

6) This is one of the areas where we could definitely get more type safety. You can cast a List<File> to a List<Object> alright, and you can also do the reverse. The compiler is precisely too lax in that area, and that is a real issue to work on for the next releases.

While you make some interesting points and ask some uneasy questions (not hard, just uneasy), I'm surprised that you didn't just try it out and look at the generated C code (-noclean compiler option), which would've answered most of your questions in an eye-blink.

Also, yeah, we do care that our syntax doesn't suck. Most people agree with that. There are interesting semantics all over the place (recent C#, _ahem_ Java7 _ahem_ , all the JVM-ish languages, all the FP languages), the world doesn't need one more Lisp, seriously. I hear Clojure covers pretty well the "FP language that doesn't suck at getting shit done" thing. Kudos to them.

Also, is it possible that you are taking yourself too seriously? When did programming last sounded fun for you? What is your last free time project you enjoyed working on? Those are mostly rethorical questions, but I'd still love to know.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the in-depth response. Let me first state that it was not my intention to attack your language.

I didn't download or try the language to answer my questions (or read the rest of documentation) because I was just giving my opinion on the introductory guide, not on the language itself! In other words: I'm not saying your language sucks. I haven't formed an opinion on it yet.

Regarding bignums, for my programming languages I've settled on imath ( <http://spinning-yarns.org/michael/sw/imath/> ). It has a BSD compatible license, it's ANSI C, it's very fast and it has both bignum and bigdecimal support. It's also memory efficient for small numbers.

I'm happy to report that I'm working on hobby projects and my own startup all the time. Having a blast. Next time, please don't assume I'm a sarcastic jerk.

<comment><USER3> Of course, it's just the pile of adjectives that eventually started to sound a little aggressive, but no offense taken.

Also, I understand very well what you want to know as a language designer yourself, the difficulty resides in making the homepage friendly for beginners too! Let me know when we can do expertise-detection of the audience in the browser =)

Thanks for the feedback anyway, we're always looking for ways to improve the docs, it's just that one has only 24h a day, as I'm sure you're well aware (especially with a startup on your hands.)

IMath sounds awesome, someone suggested it earlier I think but we were worried about performance. I'll definitely give it a shot.

I'd love to hear more about your programming language and the design choices you made, where can I get more information?

EDIT: I'm sorry that you felt like I considered you a sarcastic jerk. It really wasn't my intention :/ it's just hard to tell the good people apart, you know? Again, apologies if I sounded harsh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Having the class/function name come first on the declaration line is different, but surprisingly consistent with variable declarations where names do traditionally come first.

I expected Go to have a syntax more like this--different, but in a good way, not a weird way.

</comment><comment><USER5> Well I am getting a bit nostalgic about the use of ":=" for assignment (reminds of Pascal of course), but otherwise, I am not sure what the point is.

Maybe you can start by telling us what this language has that others don't?

<comment><USER3> So <em> is not enough?

I'm seriously considering the use of <blink> at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> One problem is that when I saw "ooc" I thought it was the esoteric programming language Ook!: <http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/ook.html>

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not looking for another C syntax language, but I do rather like this bit of style:

" _All our code are belong to BSD._ "

"BSD" is a link to the license.

<comment><USER3> C syntax? We clearly haven't read the same homepage.

<comment><USER7> Err, vs. Lisp/s-expression syntax.

Most of the post-70s children of Algol have adopted "C syntax" as I refer to it, although I'll agree this language is some distance from that, e.g. it doesn't suffer from "cancer of the semicolon". But it is strongly C/C++ influenced at the very least.

<comment><USER3> Oh, I see what you mean now. Calling everything that is not S-expression a C syntax is pretty far-fetched though =)

<comment><USER7> Well, there are also:

Algol syntaxes, e.g. wordy ones with begin end instead of { and }. It introduced cancer of the semi-colon and := and quite a few languages followed it, most notably Ada and Pascal and its derivatives. C is obviously an optimization of it, but it also adds its distinct features.

There's the postfix Forth family including Postscript and Factor.

Python's use of significant white space deserves mention.

I could go back further to BASIC and its line numbers, FORTRAN IV with its column significant spacing (e.g. the statement continuation column), but you get the idea....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I dare not make the attempt, but I think you could use regular expressions to turn their examples into valid C++ code.

</comment><comment><USER9> "ooc is a modern, self-hosting, object-oriented, functional-ish, high-level, low-level sexy programming language, starring closures, interfaces, enums, garbage collection.."

Um, why put the word "modern" together with all the other ideas from the 50's, 60's and 70's?

It's like to claim something is modern because it's made of plastic, isn't it?

<comment><USER3> What do you consider modern then? A reincarnation of Algol-68? Yet another Lisp? Another python-killer-killer (ie. a ruby-killer) ?

<comment><USER7> Lisp lucked out in the temporary hack of s-expressions plus its basis in the lambda calculus such that it has managed to modernize itself without too many changes in its essential nature. E.g. there are I would say (from my '80s and on background) three major changes, each more "modern" than the next:

Mainline Lisp, which is for the most part stuck in amber with Common Lisp.

Scheme, which is semi-stuck in its MIT design style "do it right or not at all".

Clojure, the new hot Lisp that many think is the future of Lisp.

Scheme made some major departures from mainline Lisp, only one of which was adopted by the later (static scoping and all that implies (I now forget how good its support for closures is)).

Clojure is a further departure: not very multi-paradigm (and much more functional than Scheme) and its unification of data types (lists, maps, etc.). It's also like Scheme in getting rid of a lot of legacy cruft (starting with cons!) but is not an essence of purity language like Scheme, e.g. while a Lisp-1 it has mainline Lisp style macros.

So I'd say it's "more modern", e.g. its embrace of STM, which is an idea of the mid-80s to mid-90s. Most other new Lisp dialects strike me a "yet another Lisp"; I'm not sure about Arc, though.

I agree at least in part with the comment you are replying to, a modern language needs concepts newer than the '60 and 70s (closures are I think the only '70s concept in what Flow enumerated).

While its mathematical roots are fairly old, aggressive Hindley–Milner style type inference is I think a "modern" language concept. '70s at least???

<comment><USER10> Aggressive Hindley-Milner inference is old but getting it to mesh well with the OO concepts that developed independently of it (subtyping/inheritance, run-time polymorphism, virtual functions, etc.) is seriously tricky and is an area of cutting-edge research. I'm not a type theory expert but my impression of the current state of things is that you can have aggressive HM inference (infers the type of everything and does so correctly) or OO language features but not both.* If you want both you have to settle for "best effort" inference where the compiler infers things when it can but sometimes needs the programmer's help. This flavor of inference is just now (within the last decade) making it into mainstream languages, cf. C#'s var, C++0x's auto/decltype, Scala, etc. And ooc's inference appears to work this way too (or at least it's going to.) So how is this not modern? What are the "modern" features that ooc language is missing?

* My limited understanding of Ocaml is that it supports both, but nobody uses the OO features of the language so I assume there's a reason for that.

<comment><USER7> " _What are the "modern" features that ooc language is missing?_ "

Good question; I'm not up enough on this direction of languages to answer.

It has closures, as noted.

One might say that functional programming is new again, or at least strong functional programming where you have guarantees that certain varieties (almost said "classes" there, which in this context would be confusing at best :-) of data will not change out from under you. Haskell has this, of course, as does Clojure in a weaker form.

What about first class continuations? Continuations per se are too basic to be entirely modern, e.g. Steve Russell, inventor of obscure things like Spacewar and the Lisp REPL invented them for the second implementation of LISP (on the vacuum tube 704), but they weren't first class until Scheme in the 1975 (all this according to Wikipedia, and Scheme's aren't quite first class enough for my tastes).

Modern concurrency stuff? For that matter, what's its concurrency story? A search for various keywords like that, thread and SMP didn't find anything.

I'm sorry to say that I personally am only interested in new languages that have a good concurrency story, that and languages per se are the only areas of pure CS that I find interesting. (And of course I have Clojure for concurrency.) If it's "functional-ish" but not functional enough, it might be hard to graft that onto the language.

<comment><USER3> Don't be sorry by what you're interested in =)

Concurrency is obviously one of the last points (with exceptions) to tackle before we throw together a 1.0 spec.

We haven't settled on a final solution there, but there are definitely discussions and hacktivity in that area.

We're not so foolish as to pretend to be a modern language without even caring about concurrency =) It just takes some time to get it right.

<comment><USER7> " _We're not so foolish as to pretend to be a modern language without even caring about concurrency =)_ "

I _was_ wondering.... You might want to make a note of that on the home page, as well about exceptions.

" _It just takes some time to get it right._ "

Indeed, as do exceptions. Go doesn't have them yet, many languages have problems with them, especially if grafted on later, and I know they were a work in progress (well, the work had about finished, I think) when I left the Lisp Machine community in mid-1983.

If I wasn't in love with Lisp, i.e. if I hadn't started programming in 1978 and therefore had long ago established a variety of preferences, I might well be interested in your language, it does have variety of tasteful features. I wish you luck.

<comment><USER3> while I don't want to fall too much into vaporware, the homepage mention might indeed make sense.

Thanks for the luck-wishing, we'll definitely need it.

However it ends up, it will still have been a wonderful journey. Every programming experience should be so.

<comment><USER7> You're very welcome.

I understand the vaporware concern, but if you e.g. are saying to yourselves "this won't be successful without concurrency" then you might as well mention it as an in progress feature. If you are at least playing around with it, serious discussions, designs or even have cut a little code for it, that's not dishonest in any way.

For a lot of people, including myself, it's now a "checklist" feature. So are exceptions, but those are a bit obscure, or perhaps more appreciated by the more experienced or something like that. Those who know about these things also know they're hard to do (right).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using deep learning to analyze the ultrasonic vocalizations of rats - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.mathworks.com/headlines/2019/04/24/deep-learning-deciphers-what-rats-are-saying/ <comment><USER3> It'd be cool to have a watch or smartphone app that translated some animal sounds into estimations of what they might mean. Shazam for animal sounds.

<comment><USER4> There's certainly interest on this topic from the neuroscience community. At least for mice vocalizations, the first (unsolved) problem is to find a dictionary of possible vocalizations. This is a highly non-trivial problem, mainly because it depends on having a good similarity between (noisy) vocalizations, but also because we don't have a ground truth or gold standard.

The vocalizations vary between strains, and some of them are more less clean than others in their spectrogram representations. Different strains vocalize in different frequency ranges.

Assuming that you've found a dictionary, then you'd have to learn how to map dictionary elements to behavior. Behavior labeling is done by human annotators that spend hundreds (or more) hours looking at mice behavior and learning how to identify different these. This, by nature, is a noisy process as well (and possibly biased).

Given the difficulties, the problem itself is very useful for people in neuroscience because mice only vocalize in social situations, so they see it as a window into studying social behavior of, for example, mice with autistic behavior.

Edit: grammar

<comment><USER5> Do you know if anything similar is being done with any sort of birdsong?

<comment><USER6> Yes, with zebra finches, bengalese finches, and starlings, among others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In case anyone is interested, I'm developing a Python/Tensorflow-based open source project, vak, that annotates birdsong, similar to what Deepsqueak does: [https://github.com/NickleDave/vak](https://github.com/NickleDave/vak)

(DeepSqueak runs in Matlab.)

We've also developed a neural net architecture which we find gives low error across individuals and is much more lightweight than Faster-RCNN, the net that Deepsqueak uses under the hood: [https://github.com/yardencsGitHub/tweetynet/](https://github.com/yardencsGitHub/tweetynet/)

I've tried to make it so that any net (even Faster-RCNN) can be used with vak and I've built tools so it works with multiple audio and annotation formats ([https://github.com/NickleDave/crowsetta](https://github.com/NickleDave/crowsetta)).

We're finally about to submit a paper on this, thought I'd share here now case anyone is interested in contributing to the library in the future.

(edit for clarity)

</comment><comment><USER8> I could be wrong but it seems that most animals do a better job of understanding our intent than the other way around. If that is actually the case I couldn't hazard a guess as to why, but it only takes me a short time to teach my dog to sit, but I'm pretty dumb to what she's trying to tell me. Hopefully this will help us catch up.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why 2D convolutions over a spectrogram instead of 1D convolutions over the waveform? It seems strange to do that small amount of feature extraction if deep learning is being used anyway.

</comment><comment><USER10> I tried some deep learning to figure out what my cat was saying. Turned out it was:

"feed me" "feed me" "feed me" "Feed me" "Feed Me" "FEEED MEEEE you stupid human"

<comment><USER11> Your learning model may be imcomplete. I observe far more complex and interestingly nuanced layers of meaning in my daily interactions with a number of cats. That number is seven, and for starters I can always single out - <USER2> sound alone - exactly who is doing the talking and what the gist of it may be. Might be food, yes, but might equally well be about my desired presence for company, about changing of litter, opening of doors, a bat in the woodstove, a stranger in the driveway, a settling of scores, an attempt at bullshitting me into some action, a call of general distress, what have you. Certainly, I'm only scratching the surface of understanding. I notice that my dog - of whom some of them seem extremely fond - gets targeted with some interspecies communication that I either don't or am too thick to grasp.</comment></comment>


Sherbert.io Bite sized learning - <AUTHOR>

Bite sized learning. Get short bursts of knowledge from smart people all around the world.http://sherbert.io <comment><AUTHOR> A micro-Learning platform, we allow people to post videos up to 4 minutes long to teach something from one of our categories. Users can follow people they think post helpful videos, they can comment on videos, bookmark them and upvote them also. We have a heavy twitter API integration that makes our app easy to use, and has a built in audience to enhance early growth. Users can also sell videos in the app by using our Google drive and Drop box sync for easy uploads. We focus on mico sales, meaning the max price for a video you will see in our app for sale is $20. but we are encouraging a much lower price to spike volume.</comment>


Raspberry Pi Launches Starter Kit - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/09/raspberry-pi-finally-offers-an-official-starter-kit-after-passing-10m-sales/ <comment><USER2> Posted 10 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463942)

and

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463942)

<comment><USER3> Reposts are ok if a story hasn't had significant attention yet ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)). It's best only to link to previous submissions if there's an interesting thread there.</comment></comment>


Please stop saying it's hard to find female founders - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mitacarriman/please-stop-saying-its-hard-to-find-female-founders-please-just-stop-7b3b5a0c62ae#.bxmb5v7fp <comment><USER2> An pitch event organizer recognizes the gender imbalance of the application submissions and makes an announcement to the attendees urging the female founders they know to apply. He is publicly chastised for his troubles.

Honestly, does the author here not see any possible benefit to what the organizer has done here? Maybe they only go strictly by incoming applications and don't have time for a steady founder outreach efforts beyond basic marketing. Is there a theme that keeps these events running with a certain culture? If so, prompting attendees for people they know to apply is almost certainly a better way to maintain that culture moving forward.

No good deed goes unpunished.

<comment><USER3> I think the (implied) accusation is that organizer basically lied, or is at least misrepresenting how much he cares. Maybe he was asked about the lack of female speakers or maybe he noticed how lopsided it was once he saw them on stage.

The event was certainly publicized somehow, and if you actually care about diversity it should be possible to post the announcement in a few focused groups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a bit like all these female-only groups that exist and special programs for women. If I were a women I would be a bit offended by those things as I would if I would work in another field and the spotlight was constantly on my gender rather than my competence.

It's just so... ironic.

<comment><USER5> I'm a female founder. I go to a handful of woman-only events.

I don't go because I need or want any special accommodation for gender, nor do most other women I know.

We prefer woman-only events because attending mixed events is made uncomfortable and annoying by a small minority of unpoliced men. I mean, what are we going to do about that, make a scene because some poor guys are unusually awkward and persistent (as pop culture instructs them to be)? Easier to just skip them and find our community elsewhere

<comment><USER6> Very well, but since you clearly like the female only events, what is the problem with having male only events then?

<comment><USER7> The status-quo is already effectively a "male only" event.

<comment><USER8> No, that isn't accurate. Predominance does not necessarily equate to exclusivity, as you seem to be hinting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It sounds like you want the venture capitalist/investor to go to the female founders. This isn't how it works.

VC have so many people pitching ideas and companies to them every day. they don't need to go looking for more.

It's extremely competitive for everyone and I think what they are saying is that they don't have many female founders coming to them and pitching.

This actually makes sense because the number of Female founders is much lower than male founders and only a small percentage of each will take the time and effort to pitch their idea to the VC.

You may think you were being funny with your eye-rolling pictures randomly selected from TV/movies, but it does nothing to actually help your cause and your

<comment><USER10> But if you read the article, in this specific case, the event organizer was going looking for female founders... but seemed to totally ignore the ones that were standing right in front of him and ignored the easily accessible resources at his disposal.

<comment><USER9> They ignored the one from the article, which I think is the main point of contention.

Now, the other part of this is the companies the female founders were pitching. Venture capitalists will only want to go that extra step if they think the idea is worth the investment and can make a quick ROI.

Since there aren't as many women there in the first place (we don't have exact numbers, but the article), and the ones that are there have to have an idea worthy of a pitch, my point still stands. Getting a pitch is mostly about having a good business idea and not about race or gender.

I keep reading that women are paid 70 cents to the dollar to men. If this were actually true, why wouldn't the venture capitalists be fighting each other to get cheap labor?

After reading the article again, I'm also a little shocked that the author is trying to make a point about being excluded while at the same time pointing to an entire list of groups that are exclusive to a specific gender or sexual preference.

Shouldn't we be fighting for equality instead of creating more exclusive groups? Why do you expect this behavior of others if you can't behave that way yourself?

<comment><USER3> Oh wow, this reads like the index of a book on sexism in the 90ies...

> I keep reading that women are paid 70 cents to the dollar to men. If this > were actually true, why wouldn't the venture capitalists be fighting each > other to get cheap labor?

This doesn't even make sense, since founders are not employed by VCs. But regarding the talking point you're repackaging, the idea is that people actually value women less then men so they wouldn't recognize the bargain they're getting. But the topic is much broader including, for example, jobs traditionally reserved for women to have lower wages across the board, even when the requirements are the same. An example I seem to remember is nurses vs. <some technical job I forgot>: both require comparable education, but nurses are paid 30% less per hour.

> After reading the article again, I'm also a little shocked that the author > is trying to make a point about being excluded while at the same time > pointing to an entire list of groups that are exclusive to a specific gender > or sexual preference.

That's answered elsewhere in the thread, but basically the thinking is it's ok because (a) women may need these events so as to avoid being "grabbed by the pussy" and (b) it's a false equivalence because these groups don't create injustice but try to make up for existing injustice. See also every argument about affirmative action ever.

> Since there aren't as many women there in the first place [..] getting a > pitch is mostly about having a good business idea and not about race or > gender.

This seems to be making the point that it's not statistically significant if of four chosen founders, none are women because the number of women in the population of founders is equally low. Let's say only a quarter of founders are women that gives about a 30% of an all-men panel of four (0.75^4). That's not significant based on the standard p-value cutoff, but I'm almost sure this isn't the author's first event and she may have gone into it with a certain `prior`.

<comment><USER9> "Oh wow, this reads like the index of a book on sexism in the 90ies..."

I want equality for all and you try to tell me it's Sexism. We live in a truly twisted world.

"the idea is that people actually value women less then men so they wouldn't recognize the bargain they're getting."

What proof do you have of this? This isn't the 1950s anymore. Times have changed. In every company I have ever worked, both small and large, there were women at every level..and paid accordingly.

Women have their equality and it's not good enough. They need to now dominate. In my experience in the workplace, women were way more sexist than men. Towards hiring both men and women.

Men can't really do anything about it, because they aren't taken seriously.

"This doesn't even make sense, since founders are not employed by VCs. But regarding the talking point you're repackaging, the idea is that people actually value women less then men so they wouldn't recognize the bargain they're getting."

The wage-gap has been debunked multiple times. When you account for experience, education, position, and factor in that many women leave the workforce for different periods of time to have children, the pay is actually about 1-5% different.

"An example I seem to remember is nurses vs. <some technical job I forgot>: both require comparable education, but nurses are paid 30% less per hour."

It has nothing to do with sexism and more to do with the free market. Nurses are not really in that much demand and the supply is much greater, so you will get lower pay. Male nurses get paid 30% less as well, so I don't think you really have a point.

If women want the same pay, they need to get the same experience and education as men and compete for the same positions.

There are many high-paying fields dominated by women like veterinarians, biologists, and pharmacists. Nobody seems to care about diversity here.

It's also interesting that women only fight for the cushy, office jobs. What about the extremely dangerous or messy jobs that men dominate? Garbage workers get paid over $100K in many big cities and I don't see any women fighting to get these jobs.

"women may need these events so as to avoid being "grabbed by the pussy""

I suppose when people get 'grabbed by the pussies', they better hope the assaulter's wife won't use their political clout to humiliate them in public and deny them their day in court.

"t's a false equivalence because these groups don't create injustice but try to make up for existing injustice. See also every argument about affirmative action ever."

How doesn't it create injustice? You are excluding men from these organizations and painting all men with the same brush. This doesn't even meet the textbook definition of 'diversity'.

The civil rights leaders of the 60s fought for inclusion. The leaders of today? They fight for more segregation through small, authoritarian groups.

Affirmative action is a funny one because it actually makes me second-guess anyone that got their education as a result of it because it means they weren't good enough to get it on their own.

This is a form of racism and is exactly why minority groups will continue to struggle in the US. You automatically assume that minorities are so stupid, they need to be given extra points to get into a university.

"Let's say only a quarter of founders are women that gives about a 30% of an all-men panel of four (0.75^4). That's not significant based on the standard p-value cutoff, but I'm almost sure "

Founders and VC aren't based on pure statistics and percentages of the population. It's very difficult to be successful enough to have VC money and there are many other factors at play here. It's also difficult for a founder to have an idea/company good enough to get VC money.

I still never heard the business ideas from the woman in the article nor the other founders she claims were rejected. They could be terrible ideas. We shouldn't be so quick to assume it's sexism.

People that are rejected in business or in life always want to blame other people for their own shortcomings.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: jTools – a collection of JavaScript web components with MIT license - <AUTHOR> https://bossanova.uk/jtools/ <comment><USER2> Mentioning here because I found this confusing: these self-titled "web components" don't seem to actually use the body of browser features usually referred to as Web Components (e.g., Custom Elements, Shadow DOM).

<comment><USER3> Indeed, I couldn't find any evidence that there are web components involved either by inspecting the demos or searching the source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://github.com/paulhodel/jtools/blob/master/src/editor.j...](https://github.com/paulhodel/jtools/blob/master/src/editor.js#L64)

You can do this safer with:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/DOMParser](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/DOMParser)

an then just removing what you don't want to have via querySelectorAll() and remove().

<comment><AUTHOR> I will double check that. Thank you ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The accessibility concerns are right on. Another thing to think about is not distributing them as a monolith, so that devs can pull only the features they want to use. One of the biggest benefits of an all-vanilla library should be a minimal download.

<comment><USER6> +1

The Date/Datetime picker looks very good. Would love to be able to only pull that to my JS bundle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I didn't check all the examples but most of the ones I did seemed to lack basic support for keyboard operation or other capabilities to make them accessible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I am working to improve that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Been looking for a good spread sheet component for the past couple of weeks, but not found one that fit my needs. On the surface, jExcel supports all of my UI requirements. I will drop it into my project and see how well it works with my code.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am happy to help, let me know if you need anything. I am trying to bring more features to the Open Source version. It should be integrated with jTools soon. [https://bossanova.uk/jexcel](https://bossanova.uk/jexcel)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The title should be: _jTools - The definitive common javascript web components_.

<comment><USER10> For a project created 22 days ago? I doubt it. (There are many other things called "jTools", though, so it's hard to tell if this is where it originally started.)

paulhodel: I think it should have a "Show HN:" at the start, since you posted your own work, and maybe not the self-promoting "Great".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I do like the datepicker, but wish they had a panel between the calender month view, and the year navigation that displayed the months of a given year. Date of Birth is a very common use case, and navigation between months would be faster for more than 1-2 forward/backward as an intersticial.

Didn't test for small displays, or the other components.

Aside: I would prefer they used the term Browser Components or HTML Components instead of "web components" as it makes people think of the Web Components standard.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am working to improve keyboard / touch interactions, such as swipe left/right to move months, etc.

Thank you for the suggestions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I looked at a few, and there are some fairly serious issues with them, particularly with accessibility. Unfortunately my comment here is mostly negative, and I can't recommend using these components as it stands—but I put this list of various concerns with it in the hope that you can learn more about how to do these things, and make these, and more, components good. Pray accept my bluntness in this spirit.

Dropdown: comparatively inaccessible to screen readers; the dropdown basically won't be noticed while you're typing, because the accessibility tech sees a text box that is incidentally followed by a bunch of words of no significance that change every so often while you type. Needs various ARIA attributes. That's going to be true of a lot of things here, actually—though be careful, because as they say in [https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria- practices-1.1/#no_aria_better...](https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria- practices-1.1/#no_aria_better_bad_aria), _no_ ARIA is better than _bad_ ARIA.

Input masking: broken in three notable ways: (a) select everything in the field and start typing a new value, and it refuses to accept it, leaving the old value in place; (b) it seems to be doing keyboard handling itself to at least some extent (which I may add scares me enormously, and my fear seems justified by a brief skim of the related code: the shiftUps business is just wrong; try it out with a variety of different keyboard layouts and see) and doesn't check for modifiers, so e.g. `Ctrl+1` adds a 1 to the field rather than switching to my first Firefox tab; (c) due to inserting extra characters (such as leading zeroes and all kinds of separators), things like Backspace don't behave as you'd expect. (I may also add that input masking in general is for the most part simply a bad idea; validating the value the user has entered with no additional fanciness is normally the best idea, or for something in between the two, normalising the value on blur. I basically never encounter them these days, but I think that I could count the number of ones that have been implemented completely satisfactorily on the fingers of one hand, and I don't think any of them were on the web.)

Context menu: doesn't take care to avoid falling outside the viewport.

Image slider: poor accessibility, most notably because nothing is focusable (you should basically _never_ put a click handler on a <div>, unless you want to count the case where you use bubbling so you can have multiple links or buttons or such with only one event handler registered) and click modifiers aren't checked. Escape works to close it, but arrow keys don't cycle through the images. Normally also image sliders use different DOM elements for the thumbnails and for the large view (commonly called "lightbox"), but you've gone for these being the same elements. There is a reason why people normally use separate elements for the lightbox: so that the thumbnails can be small images, while the lightbox loads the full-sized images. Lets things load slimmer and faster.

Modal: again accessibility problems from missing ARIA attributes and lack of focus management. You click that button, a screen reader will do zip: it hasn't been notified that a popup is now open or been told to announce any change; as far as it's concerned, you clicked the button, and the button is still focused and nothing happened. (I also observed a JS error in Firefox at this point; `e.path[0]` is not a thing. If I recall correctly, that's a Shadow DOM v0 thing, and composedPath() is the proper thing now—though without thinking at all deeply about it, I suspect that .target is actually what you want.)

<comment><USER13> I'll add that touch handling is severely lacking. The modal can't be closed, scrolling inside the dropdown is hit and miss.

<comment><AUTHOR> It has been fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> for being "cross platform" there sure are a lot of issues in Firefox. modal doesn't close, HTML editor doesn't work, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> All the issues mentioned here have been fixed. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Might want to cut back on the words "simple" and "vanilla".

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there a reason why things like the dropdown can't be done by upgrading select/option instead of building them from scratch using divs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, autocomplete, render the data in different ways just a few different initialization codes.

There are a lot of applications: [https://bossanova.uk/jtools/dropdown-and- autocomplete](https://bossanova.uk/jtools/dropdown-and-autocomplete)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> You have a bug on this page: [https://bossanova.uk/jexcel/examples/table- styling](https://bossanova.uk/jexcel/examples/table-styling) under "HOW TO SET GLOBAL CSS RULES FOR YOUR JQUERY TABLES". Double click on Price twice and the top row displays an error.

</comment><comment><USER18> This reminds me of throwback jquery libs.

</comment><comment><USER19> [https://bossanova.uk/jtools/](https://bossanova.uk/jtools/) seems to be the main page for this project.

<comment><USER20> Ok, we'll switch to that from [https://github.com/paulhodel/jtools](https://github.com/paulhodel/jtools), which is linked there.</comment></comment>


Creating video platforms. What's annoying as hell? - <AUTHOR> As a dev when you're creating a Video platform what's annoying. Creating the backend and the whole upload transcode thing? Is it that you have to create the management side. What would you love to see? <comment><USER2> Working with DRM was particularly annoying and hard to debug on web browsers. Last time I checked, there were 3 different DRMs for major browsers and different browser versions all have some anomalies on how they deal with them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah DRM is tough especially with all the different specs. Did you use use a DRM server? Or was it just the Video Player implementation that was the pain? Cheers.</comment></comment>


Teardown and exploration of Apple's Magsafe connector (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2013/06/teardown-and-exploration-of-magsafe.html <comment><USER2> Why bother tearing it down? They just fall apart naturally after a few months (or weeks) or use.</comment>


Ask HN: Thoughts on the 4 tech bills making the rounds on the US senate? - <AUTHOR> On July 2018, US Senator Mark Warren released a whitepaper[0] discussing 20 topics for potential tech regulation. In 2019, Warren and others introduced four technology regulation bills along the lines discussed in the whitepaper. I highly recommend reading the original bill texts, they are short and easy to read.
[1] S.2658 - ACCESS Act of 2019
It require communications platforms with 100M monthly active users in the US to make their services interoperable with other platforms. The bill presumes that platforms using open protocols already (like email) are fine. Facebook and it's messenger platform is likely to be the only one meeting the threshold.
[2] S.1951 - DASHBOARD Act
It applies to online platforms or data brokers with over 100M monthly users in the United States for most months over the last year, and says they should disclose a lot of information about the user data they hold.
[4] S.1578 - Do Not Track Act
It says that the FTC must implement a DNT system that defines a standard for devices, websites and services to send and receive DNT requests, and develop an app for users to send DNT requests.
[5] S.1084 - DETOUR Act
It says that large online operators (defined as services with more than 100M monthly active users anywhere, not just in the US) may not use misleading interfaces or unclear wording to mislead the user. It also says that they can only conduct behavioral experiments.
Links:
[0] Whitepaper: https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/d/3/d32c2f17-cc76-4e11-8aa9-897eb3c90d16/65A7C5D983F899DAAE5AA21F57BAD944.social-media-regulation-proposals.pdf
[1]ACCESS Act of 2019: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/2658/text
[2]DASHBOARD: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/1951/text
[3]Do Not Track: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/1578/text
[4]DETOUR: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/1084/text <comment><USER2> S.1084 is worded like they are going to use it to pull a peasent off the street for threats of violence. That is it's worded so vague that it applies to anything pretty much giving the prosecutor complete discretion over who to prosecute.

</comment><comment><USER3> The ACCESS act 3(c) says:

> Exemption for certain services: The obligations under this section shall not > apply to a product or service by which a large communications platform > provider does not generate any income or other compensation, directly or > indirectly, from collecting, using, or sharing user data.

Are there any >100M user networks today that don't monetize user data?

It might encourage some growing networks to not monetize user data at all, if that's not their primary business model.</comment>


Twitter is building own data center to beach the fail whale - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2010/07/21/twitter-to-build-data-center-to-beach-the-fail-whale/

<comment><USER2> That is a lot of physical infrastructure for a company with little revenue and a single business offering.</comment>


Mental illness: is 'chemical imbalance' theory a myth? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2013/10/18/mental_illness_is_chemical_imbalance_theory_a_myth.html

<comment><USER2> I think it is a myth, but there is an underlying reality to it that is unspoken.

When scientists study animals, it is clear that "underdog" animals have low serotonin levels whereas "dominant" animals have high serotonin levels.

Last year I was working at a company where I was the final assembly programmer who threw releases over the wall to the testers, and this usually involved several iterations over a 25 minute build process.

On top of all that, I was using an off-brand issue tracker where I had to wait 30 seconds to put a trouble ticket in or to assign time to a ticket. The wiki we were using also added a 30 second delay to the process of updating documentation.

Never mind the fact that the team had one guy who was good at maven (who, if asked how to do something the right way, would tell my boss that I "wasn't a team player") and several other people who built POM files by cut-and-paste.

When performance review came around, my boss told me I was "too slow" and that I wasn't a team player because I was complaining about how slow the tools were. (Funny, github works at interactive speed over my crappy DSL connection)

I thought about quitting the day I got that review, but instead I went to see my doc and I got a prescription for Paxil. About three days after I started taking the prescription, I stepped in dog shit in my woodshed and instead of getting furious, I released pressure from my foot at the first minute, and found that none of the shit had stuck to my shoes.

I can say that Paxil helped me deal with the stress of staying with the job until the project was ready for customers.

Since then it has helped me deal with the stress of doing a lot of sales work to make my next venture work. It's helped me have enough confidence that I can refuse to work with dull tools, even if it means I run up my home equity loan a little bit.</comment>


Financial Times Hits 1M Users On HTML5 Site That Dodges Apple's Tax - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/18/financial-times-mobile/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure if this story is even news worthy but here is my take. Personally, I never really understood why most people flocked to the app store rather than using the already existing www mobile sites? Gmail is a good example -- why would I download the app when I can just go to the mobile site? This is especially true if you're running a pay wall and have to fork over 30% ;) The app needs to be updated constantly but the mobile site doesn't. Am I missing something? I guess you miss out on people searching for your app on the app store.

<comment><USER3> Native Apps are faster. Frankly, there isn't even a debate to be had. Native low level code will execute faster and be more efficient than web apps rendered in the browser using high level languages like JS. This is of course assuming the app is more than just a UIWebView, though.

Obviously it depends on the site and the quality of each app, but as a rule of thumb a half decent native app will beat out even the best web apps or mobile sites, which I might add are far and few between. Most web apps and mobile sites offer an awful experience.

A great example is Google Music. Why do I prefer the native 3rd party gMusic for iOS over Google's web app? Where do I even begin. How about, every single thing about the native app is better, faster, more responsive and less buggy without one exception, period. That covers it pretty well.

Even if we are talking about something simple like news, there are still huge advantages to native apps. For example, lets say I'm on the subway. I have two iOS devices. I launch the NYT app on one and go to newyorktimes.com in MobileSafari on the other. Which will actually have news on it?

Likewise, the subway goes above ground temporarily and I get a quick 3G spot. I do the same thing. Which will end up with more content, the mobile-fied homepage of NYT, or the much more efficient data pulled down by the app? Native apps still offer advantages that the web can't begin to duplicate. If they didn't, we would all be using Chrome OS right now.

<comment><USER4> Yes: something like Google Music is currently much better implemented as a native application; the browser support for audio interfaces, particularly in mobile browsers, is very poor. Meanwhile, the UI you want is often very custom for a music player: small, dense, and omnipresent.

However, the NYT example is really poor: the quality difference between an HTML5 offline application and a native application, for that specific use case, is going to be very small, if not downright negligible. The specific issues you brought up involving network connectivity aren't even true.

With the HTML5 offline application cache, all of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, will be cached locally, atomically stored and updated in MobileSafari's WebApp cache; you can therefore go to the website, even without any Internet access, and still get the site. If it is implemented well, you will also be able to browse previously downloaded news, which could be stored in HTML5 localStorage or Web SQL.

Finally, due to proxy server limitations, it isn't like the native alternative will be doing anything different than the web application with respect to "pull[ing] down" "more efficient data": both are going to be using HTTP requests, which will have identical overhead, and both could download the same data format.

So, no: I think you are drastically over-generalizing, and should spend some time looking into the more advanced mechanisms that are now available for developing HTML5-based applications on these devices. You may think you have had bad experiences with web applications, but frankly you probably have only ever used one or two (maybe even zero) HTML5 offline applications (they are fairly rare).

<comment><USER3> > With the HTML5 offline application cache, all of the HTML, CSS, and > JavaScript, will be cached locally, atomically stored and updated in > MobileSafari's WebApp cache; you can therefore go to the website, even > without any Internet access, and still get the site. If it is implemented > well, you will also be able to browse previously downloaded news, which > could be stored in HTML5 localStorage or Web SQL.

Something nobody has yet to actually do. Sure, it CAN be done. But it's significantly easier to deliver those features with a native app over a web app. Web app developers refuse to ever admit or acknowledge this, but it's 100% true. Web apps just aren't there yet, and won't be any time soon.

> So, no: I think you are drastically over-generalizing

I don't think I am at all. I'm certainly generalizing, but not over or drastically so. You couldn't even provide a single example of a quality web app that fits your previous description. That pretty much says it all.

> You may think you have had bad experiences with web applications, but > frankly you probably have only ever used one or two (maybe even zero) HTML5 > offline applications (they are fairly rare.

Of course. I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm wrong, and my experiences are invalid for x reason. Responses like this drive me crazy. It's borderline "no true scotsman" IMO. Oh sure, those high profile web apps suck, but those aren't REAL web apps.

The bottom line is even the best web apps still have to utilize the newest technology and options to deliver basic, basic stuff that even crappy native apps have had forever, and they still can't reach the quality of a native app. I'm also completely unconvinced that your browser's rendering engine speed will be able to provide as good an experience as a native app.

The ONLY real advantages to web apps frankly are for the developer. It makes cross platform development & deployment much easier, and they don't have to pay Apple the 30%. It's worse for the user/consumer in almost every way.

<comment><USER4> I took each of your points, and either ceded them (audio applications) or provided a specific technology that could cover them nicely (HTML5 offline storage, Web SQL, and cache manifests), all of which are easily found in the specifications using Google, if you don't believe they exist.

Your response, which actively ignores all of that (and in fact snips it out of the reply text), is pretty much "I haven't seen it used, so it isn't true"; the only (unrelated) argument you added was "rendering speed" (as if a news reader was limited by that? citation?).

In juxtaposition, I must say you have a convincing argument: it had not even occurred to me that these technologies I and my coworkers use everyday might not actually do these things that they seem to do; certainly not the things the code for them (which is open source) seems to look like it does.

So yeah: I'm sorry. In the future, I will avoid making arguments that respond to points, and instead I'll just say "worked for me: you're not a true scotsman", as apparently that's all that you are capable of seeing in my text anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone who subscribes to the FT can attest to just how great their ipad site is. I honestly can't think of a native app that does what they do better, the entire interface is lovely.

<comment><USER6> Has anyone used it on any other tablets? Curious to know how well it works.

<comment><USER5> They've only been marketing it "for iPad and iPhone", and they use strict user-agent checking against PCs and my blackberry. I could of course be wrong, maybe their marketing doesn't line up with the devices they actually support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And if they were in newsstand, maybe they'd have 40% more people, and making even more money.

That said, I'm glad to see people can go at it without Apple as well.

<comment><USER8> Eh, I doubt it. 1M is pretty impressive for FT's "niche." Unlike the WSJ, it's not dumbed-down for the general public, so it's audience is going to be significantly smaller than a mainstream newspaper.

<comment><USER9> Shit, now that you've made that good point about their niche I'm starting to rink my first reaction to this. Maybe a million is pretty impressive after all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> News sites are really starting to get their act together and present content in mobile-friendly manners. The Toronto Star just launched an iPad optimized site at read.thestar.com - and it's awesome. They're using Pressly (no affiliation). Highly recommend taking a peek if you're into mobile news design.

</comment><comment><USER9> A whole million huh? Sorry, I'm really not impressed. Why is this becoming about native versus html5. The article has kind of an anti-Apple subtext to it too. I don't know. There was just something off about the whole post.

Native and web both have pros and cons. Some site used html5 despite the app store trend. Big whoop. I hope people use both in the future and I hope web apps get faster and the app store reduces fees. It's kind of a non story like filler to keep a page on TC filled for a bit.

<comment><USER11> I thought the whole "Web-apps makers are outsmarting Apple" angle was done by now. One of the reasons these kinds of sites work well is because Apple does a pretty nice job of allowing you to "appify" them. That kind of support makes it really nice, and shows that Apple is not trying to force people into the App Store. You might argue they overcharge you for using the App Store, but mobile web apps, when done well, are serious contenders for certain use cases. So there's really no reason to focus on this kind of drama.</comment></comment>


I'll give away one of my startups to someone on HN - <AUTHOR>

A little over a year ago I built ronin.tehcrowd.com as a way of learning python/django.
Tehcrowd aggregates status updates for groups.  Read more at tehcrowd.com/secret/.  Here's an example crowd: http://ronin.tehcrowd.com/crowd/top-rubyists/.  I never really launched this site because: a) Similar sites have recently launched and b) It's yet another twitter app.
I'm sure there's something cool that could be done with this project.  I'd love to see tehcrowd go live.  So here's the deal: Post why you should get the project and I'll give the domain and code (no strings attached) to the highest rated submission.
No trolls please.
<comment>=
EDIT:  The neatest part of this site was my algorithm for filtering tweets.  Each tweet was ranked based on several variables: user follower/following ratio, number of tweets by that user, number of "relevant" terms in the tweet, whether that user is tweeting at another member in the crowd.
I.e: A user with a high follower/following ratio and a low number of total tweets is less spammy and their tweets were ranked higher.  Or if a user tweeted at another twitter user that's also in the crowd the tweet was deemded to be relevant and also ranked higher.
As more feeds were added to a crowd this filter became more strict thereby increasing the quality of the crowd. </comment><comment><USER2> You have solved an important issue with Twitter - grouping different kinds of people so readers can separate them and read only the kind of tweets they are interested in at that time.

There is a higher level problem - reading only certain kinds of tweets from certain groups of people. For e.g. I am interested only in tweets about Ruby from the Ruby people. Put this way, the solution is to simply filter on words related to ruby. But this is not powerful enough for the user to be able to say I am interested in any tweets about technology from the Ruby people. Now your dictionary will run into hundreds/thousands of words per group.

We are building a solution to this problem. In fact we don't have any twitter api code yet since we are focusing on the core logic first. This would be really useful to us.

Edit: plus we use django as well!

Re-edit: Your ranking algorithm for tweets is pretty cool. You asked why we should get the project. Here are the specific reasons:

1) We are building something useful that adds to your solution, something that (we believe) people want.

2) I have a strong background in text analysis and classification - it has been my bread and butter for almost 4 years now. (I'd be happy to go into specifics over email) My partner is a talented programmer, also from GaTech with a background in AI (among other things).

3) We use the same framework (python/django) so integration should be easy

4) Our weak point is a UI - our current UI is pure HTML, only functional not pretty, although we have a very good idea of how we want it to look. You have a better UI for twitter (which we will improve upon)

<comment><AUTHOR> If you want the backend twitter/rss code I'll give that away right now: <http://dpaste.com/hold/60154/>

Be forewarned: this was my first python/django project.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! I'll continue to vie for the full prize too :)

I like that you're using python-twitter. I have played with it a bit and contributed to a very minor fix (<http://code.google.com/p/python- twitter/issues/detail?id=58>)

This is our 2nd Django project so we are still learning the ropes as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I want this.

I founded and sold Groupvine, a group platform for colleges that was swallowed up by the Daily Jolt and shut down.

What I learned was that getting specific groups of people to shift habits and adopt new collaboration tools is tough. It's massive buy-in at every level.

We also wanted to aggregate activity from across campuses to filter a real- time stream of "what's happening now" in case you wanted to join in and check something out you didn't know was happening.

When I see this, I see a low barrier to entry and I see overlap with everything from what I was trying to accomplish to Yammer...

But then it applies to marketers, too. I want to know who everyone is who tweeted about Klean Kanteen bottles, but don't want to follow of them quite yet.

It's a "getting to know you" engine, a knowledge-cultivating engine, and simultaneously an activity-tracking engine.

I love it. It could be leveraged into marketers' tools, or simply as a way of giving people an easier way to be a voyeur. So many applications here!

</comment><comment><USER4> Why not just open source your code (MIT-licensed perhaps), then give away the domain in one month to the person who takes it in the best direction? That would be easier than trying to evaluate people based on a HN comment and would almost guarantee a more fit selection.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll let the highest ranked submission decide what to do with this. At that moment it looks like that's you. :)

Let's give it another 30 minutes and make a decision at 3PM PDT.

<comment><USER2> Since there seems to be a tie, between this idea and another contestant below, I'd like to transfer all my points to this idea :) (as much for selfish reasons as the public good).

Also other comments suggesting the same things have points which they should get! :D

<comment><AUTHOR> Done: <http://github.com/srosro/tehcrowd/tree/master>

In a month if anyone has built something cool with this code and wants the domain send me an email: firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER5> Thank you! I was going to ask if I could look at the source code to learn from, and now I can!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was working on something similar a while ago.

I bought the domain twitchboard.com (Like a switchboard for twitter, harhar ^.^ ). I cobbled together a proof-of-concept on it. Since I'm not a hacker I can say with certainty that the backend is janky at best, and I am much more comfortable doing design work and marketing, but all that is to say, if anyone is interested in putting 2-and-2 together we could use the Twitchboard domain name and I'd be more than willing to help with graphics and marketing. I also have a lot of feature ideas that I have outlined which could really make something like this a worthy tool.

So maybe between the work Sam has done, and the domain name/design I could add we could get something going. If anyone is interested let me know.

<comment><USER2> Trevor, did you design twitchboard.com alone? Do you have a portfolio of any UI design work you have done which you can point me to? We are looking for someone to help us with design. Thanks.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I did do the design. I emailed you a few other details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> lets fix the reasons why you aren't still engaged. Because no one is using it.

I bet with some marketing you'd be 100% all over it.

Here's how you do it - man, its so easy to market your app. Do this:

a) get a better catchier name. One that can be tweet'd as "Cool, just got listed on x"

b) go thru the most influential twitter names and group them in cool ego- massaging groups. Not celebrities, you can't reach them. Smaller than that. Go for the @ryancarson style people. Create flattering groups, then tweet all the people in said groups and make it sound awesome that they're included in such an elite list, beg them for a retweet of your link.

c) allow users to submit users to groups on your service. So I can tweet your service "@tweettop @plc #founders" and it'll add @plc to the #founders group on your site. Awesome. People can RT that tweet to support it.

Then you're pretty much made - the crowds will decide if your app is useful. If it isn't its kind of pointless in general...

<comment><AUTHOR> No one's using it because I haven't told anyone one about it.

The reason I'm giving this away is because I simply don't have time to maintain multiple projects. I'm focusing 100% of my energy on Divvyshot.

<comment><USER3> Divvyshot looks cool. You could probably use a tehcrowd-like mechanism to promote it or increase engagement within the app

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am a working UI Designer / Developer who also just built an application to learn Python/Django.

I feel that I could properly give this site a visual upgrade with my design and front-end skills, while also learning and maintaining the Django project.

Adding a viral loop to the mix would skyrocket groups and userbase. I'm definitely up for the challenge :)

</comment><comment><USER9> ... Because I've injured myself. I cannot practice kung fu for 6 weeks. I need something to do in that time.

Taking over your project sounds a lot more productive for both myself and future customers than just sitting around playing MMORPGs.

That, and I'm the only person so far who answered your direct question of, "Why you should get the project."

:)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm an undergraduate college student currently working as a code monkey (pity me) for a New York City startup. I tell myself every day I am going to quit and work on my own project -- but I can't think of a project idea. Though the idea needs some refinement, I'd love to talk to you about it and take over.

<comment><USER11> we're _all_ code monkeys somewhere.

_all_ = undergrads w/ summer jobs

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Open source the project. Then you won't just have to give it to one person.

</comment><comment><USER13> I just got out of an unsuccessful attempt to start a hedge fund with several other quants. I am looking for a new project to adopt and this fits my interest.

I recently started playing with a ranked Twitter search engine in Django and would be happy to combine both projects in order to create a more useful thematic Twitter-powered knowledge base type of project by combining the ranks and group belongings of each twitterer.

</comment><comment><USER14> why not open source it?

</comment><comment><USER15> How do you get users' tweets? If you're using the normal API, you're going to run into rate limits soon and even if you're using the streaming API, there could be some troubles.

</comment><comment><USER16> So it's like Alltop for tweets?

Why not talk with Guy Kawasaki about this.

</comment><comment><USER17> I will bring Michael Jackson back from the dead if you give it to me.</comment>


English prof's tweetstorm about 'King Lear' is literary community's hottest beef - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/8/11889404/king-lear-shakespeare-500-tweetstorm-syme-vickers <comment><USER2> Seemingly a more informed account of the unseemliness wherein a benighted Brit cites peer review and accuses Elizabethan bookbinders of editorial vagaries sending Toronto Twitter Trolls apoplectic:

[https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/shakespeare- schola...](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/shakespeare-scholar- vents-500-tweet-bitterly-sarcastic-attack-book)</comment>


Ask HN: Why is the Khanacademy website so power-hungry? - <AUTHOR>

I like to brush up on some topics using Khanacademy, because it is well structured and gives quizzes with feedback. One thing I've noticed, however, is that my laptop gets very hot, the fan spins up, scrolling gets laggy, and Javascript elements (quizzes, etc) have enormous latency.<p>What are they doing in there that causes it to consume so much computing power? I feel bad for anyone who uses the site and isn't fortunate enough to have a powerful computer like I do, because if it's annoying to me it must ruin the experience for them. <comment><USER2> I think you might be using flash to play the videos. I've used the site on a 5yr old macbook with Chrome and haven't noticed issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have Flash installed so it can't be that. Hm, maybe a browser issue.

<comment><USER3> If you have chrome can you open up its task manager and print screen it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recognize this effect with a lot of websites, namely google maps, most fancy/designed web 2.0 startup websites (those that like to display a lot layers using CSS that change their position when scrolling... don't know how this is called)

My guess would be inappropriate or too much JavaScript or other stuff that blocks execution of JavaScript, maybe some kind of plugin that is beeing initialized.</comment>