'Fair and square' pricing? That'll never work, JC Penney. We like being shafted - <AUTHOR> http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/25/11864178-fair-and-square-pricing-thatll-never-work-jc-penney-we-like-being-shafted

<comment><USER2> Isn't their plan to transition to a different customer base in an effort to not be a bargain based store anymore?

There are bound to be loses during the transition.

<comment><USER3> Same thinking here. Good overall article, but instead of losing all "price discriminators", and nothing in return, Ron is hoping to transform JCP into a retailer that caters to a different class of consumers I believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've always wondered about the $.99 thing in pricing. Personally, I hate being manipulated by companies that believe I don't know the difference between $199.99 and $200.00. In fact, one of the reasons I went out on my own was to offer my products at a "simple" price; it costs $3,000. Period. There are no discounts, no extra fees, no price haggling, no weird $.99. Now I wonder if I'm doing myself a disservice.

Do these rules apply to software purchases? It really irks me to have to "call to get a quote" when I want to know how much a enterprise software package costs. I don't want a sales guy to call me back, I want to know how much your product costs and what the fine print says.

Am I wrong? Would you rather purchase something that you knew the price of or haggle for the best deal?

<comment><USER5> It depends on whom is making the purchasing decision. If a manager or CTO is making the purchase, and all their previous purchases require elaborate proposals as well as discounting, bundling etc, than an outlier where it's a no haggle price might make them question either the application or the company supporting it. I've personally had difficulty throughout my career in getting opensource applications approved unless there's a company behind the application willing to offer enterprise class support.

No haggle sounds great, but it hasn't been all that successful. Look at the Saturn brand, before it went under. It attracted those who dislike the traditional auto sales model, but it didn't produce a dramatic change in revenue for Saturn.

What happens when you have a non-negotiable price is that your profit margin is fixed. And for some buyers, they simply hate the idea that you're getting X% no matter what. They want to get the best deal, or more importantly, what they think is the best deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm convinced that this is a byproduct of Americans' inability to do maths. People seem to look at monthly prices and go based on that. They are okay with sales taxes not being displayed in stores. Cell phones and service are notorious.

Probably the best explanation is the historic optimism. If you strongly believe your personal future is going to be better then the price this month is all that matters because next month it will be a smaller part of the bigger pie you will have.

I especially like this quote:

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires"

<comment><USER7> I think that Americans can do math as well as anybody, but they like being deceived, as strange as that sounds. They like the fantasy of $30/month even though they're paying $80. Furthermore, I think the people who most appreciate what JCPenney did are the people with the tightest wallets in this economy.

All of this is pure speculation, BTW.</comment></comment>


Android as we know it will die in the next two years and what it means for you - <AUTHOR> http://an.ton.io/blog/articles/2012/01/09/android-as-we-know-it-will-die-in-the-next-two-years-and-what-it-means-for-you

<comment><USER2> That was a really confusing article. The title doesn't seem to reflect the content. I read it twice and I'm still not sure what the author is trying to say. Android is going to become increasingly difficult to develop for because of fragmentation and some bad decisions by Google?

</comment><comment><USER3> This was posted before, got a bunch of votes and had a robust discussion.

For some reason it was deleted. Any way to know why this is?

<http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3443005>

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems like a lot of speculation and conjecture to me.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I include live help on my site? - <AUTHOR>

I'm nearing completion of a usable version of my site. It is not SaaS or even selling anything.. for the most part it is a consumer site like stumble upon. I've been wondering whether I should include live chat to get feedback or answer any questions any potential visitors may have. <comment><USER2> Qtn: Is your live help available 24/7, there's always someone manning the live chat?

What is the purposes of your live help? To get feedback or answer questions? To get feedback, a simple contact form will suffice. User expectation of live help is Instant Resolution, if you can't provide that level of service, there is really not point having it. Sites like tender, satisfaction will meet your needs.

Consider the cost factor of using live help for the long run too.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've heard great things about <http://olark.com> Everyone raves about them and they're YC alumni.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sure, but there had better be someone there to respond promptly when it says, "Live Help Online". It is very frustrating to click, wait, timeout and be told to fill in a subject so that the question can be emailed.

</comment><comment><USER5> Definitely, I do huge sales through it.</comment>


Sony implementation of WebGL for Android 4.0+ goes open source - <AUTHOR> http://developer.sonyericsson.com/wp/2012/01/25/webgl-implementation-for-xperia-phones-released-as-open-source/

<comment><USER2> I'm hearted by what seems to be a lasting corporate shift towards open source licensing as part of larger corporate strategies. I might be being overly optimistic, but it seems that a lot of companies are starting to realise that open source models aren't at odds with business or capitalism in general. The idea that a overall market health is important for the success of a key player, is logical and pragmatic; but at odds with the previous commercial philosophies of divide and conquer (through proprietary code). I'm very glad the change is here.

<comment><USER2> .. "heartened" even - mobile phone auto-complete hell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> <https://github.com/sonyericssondev/WebGL></comment>


Effects of coffee on gut microbiota and smooth muscle contractility in rats - <AUTHOR> https://www.gastrojournal.org/article/S0016-5085(19)38364-7/abstract <comment><AUTHOR> "Conclusions: Our in vitro and in vivo studies show that coffee stimulates intestinal smooth muscle and inhibits gut microbiota in a caffeine-independent manner." That's astonishing — and unexpected, at least to this anesthesiologist.</comment>


Why "open always wins" isn't the point - <AUTHOR> http://www.webdirections.org/blog/why-open-always-wins-isnt-the-point/

<comment><USER2> The first assumption the author makes, that "1\. Everything Google does is open (either because Gruber believes this a priori, or because Google says so or someone somewhere believes this or something)" is missing the point. The point, to me, is that Google is not entirely open and no one should expect them to be as they are a for profit company. The problem is that Google tries to create the perception in the public eye that they are open and create products that are open and free when the reality is that they are an advertising company, not a non-profit aid society.</comment>


TRAQ: The well-hidden score that controls your advertising revenue - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/3f559a96e166# <comment><USER2> Thanks for re-posting this, there's a good amount of technical information in there and I think people here will find it interesting, but my original submission was fail.

Can I steal your title for future submissions elsewhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Can I steal your title for future submissions elsewhere?

By all means. Thanks for the article.</comment></comment>


Lenovo: researchers find 'massive security risk' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-32607618 <comment><USER3> It seems from the article that the best way to handle this is to uninstall all the trash that comes with a new computer (or hell, reinstall windows from scratch). Do I need Lenovo's power management tools? No. Do I need its Wifi connection manager? No. Windows has all this stuff already and it works really, really well.

<comment><USER4> Where do you get the installation media? I haven't seen more than a "system recovery disk" shipped with a consumer machine in at least a decade.

And I don't know about Lenovo, but I know that on the Dell laptops I last dealt with could never get a stock Windows 7 install to be stable without downloading Dell's drivers for the video card at minimum.

<comment><USER5> My Lenovo came with a recovery partition from which I could reinstall Windows. However, I suppose it would also automatically reinstall crapware, which is beside the point.

The solution was to download an official Windows 8 copy from Microsoft's website - the Windows installer will get the license key from the EFI.

Not as good as a recovery disk, as you will need to download and install manually all drivers, but vetting everything is part of the point.

EDIT: for those looking, this is the link from where I downloaded the Windows 8 binary from Microsoft website: [http://windows.microsoft.com/en- us/windows-8/create-reset-re...](http://windows.microsoft.com/en- us/windows-8/create-reset-refresh-media)

<comment><USER6> I wasn't aware you could get vanilla windows install media for OEM license keys. Does this work with older windows versions as well? I have a Windows 7 Laptop that I would _love_ to do this with,

<comment><USER7> It's a new feature with windows 8[1]. Unofficially you can install windows 7 using the OEM key (note this is not the key printed on the sticker on your laptop) and then activate it.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/save-yourself-from- yo...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/save-yourself-from-your-oems- bad-decisions-with-a-clean-install-of-windows-8-1/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lenovo has, for years, been banned from US government use. They even have a patent on recovering TPM keys ([http://www.google.com/patents/US8908867](http://www.google.com/patents/US8908867)).

It is well known (via Snowden) that the US installs backdoors into US hardware and software for export to China, and it has for at least 15 years warned about the same from imports.

So none of this is particularly new. What is new is that the US is now moving against China on all fronts to prevent it from acquiring superpower status - to isolate it economically and politically, to block its trade and international investment programs, and to increase the risk of its using its military (with the second largest funding of any nation) to project power lawfully in the Asia Pacific.

So these articles come at a good time for the US.

You should not trust pretty much any hardware - recent revelations have shown that products come with backdoors; that is the article does not establish the absence of 'security flaws' by other manufacturers.

<comment><USER9> There's a big difference in intercepting packages and installing backdoors in a targeted and legal way, at least acording to SCOTUS who have zero problems with our status quo SIGINT operations thus making them lawful - and massive cyberwar attacks from China and cooked in state mandated malware.

I know HN hates the US and thinks China and Russia are bastions of liberty and human rights, but the US's method are a million times more ethical than autocratic states in regards to SIGINT. Heck, Putin had Kaspersky give him information on journalists he didn't like. Meanwhile, my Russian friends on VK are always bugging me about citizenship and H1bs. Yeah, they WANT to come here, pal. They hate it there, they aren't blinded by anti-US, anti-UN, anti- NATO propaganda so popular here. They're gentle geeks in fear of a dictator who could eliminate them at any moment.

If I had the power and wealth I would hire them all and bring them to the states. Every. Single. One.

>China on all fronts to prevent it from acquiring superpower status - <USER2> isolate it economically and politically,

We power their economy via our manufacturing and via the sales of our products. If anything they are close economic partners. Are we moving all of our manufacturing to Mexico or something? Seems to me the US is very much tied to the success of China. I can't interpret your statement as anything but incredibly dishonest. Does our national firewall block alibaba now? Oh right, we don't have a national firewall. They do. hell, my own company is tortured by their VPN and censorship limitations. This is a daily headache for me and I'm TRYING TO DO BUSINESS WITH THEM. If anyone is business hostile its them - to us. Hell, they outright block Google services on Android.

> and to increase the risk of its using its military

This is asinine. China is unilaterally taking over disputed islands with zero attempts to use diplomacy, the UN, etc. The Japanese, Korea, and others have claims on those islands. Why are you dismissing their rights? Because they are "evil US" partners as well?

Meanwhile the Chinese prop up the worst state in modernity which has become a mass murder state we have not seen since Stalinist times. I was just in South Korea and its complete madness that a modern democratic state needs to be terrorized by a client Chinese state 24/7 via a madman with nuclear weapons because the CCP likes to "stick it to America." The Koreans we met, drank with, laughed with, etc were no different than me. They bought us gifts and were so gentle, humorous, and loving (especially of children and the elderly) it breaks my heart to think they are one madman's decision away to shell Seoul which would destroy it, and them, in minutes. But I get to fly home to a secure nation because of our strong military and they get to sit there waiting the CCP to tell their pet attack dog to invade or have their pet attack dog go off chain and shell a few things and blow up some nukes to terrorize them. Its depressing. The one man who had a son in the military was so proud of his son's service and showed us many photos, knowing full well, that kid is mincemeat when the North decides it times to roll tanks with Beijing's blessing. The kid looked 16.

> to project power lawfully in the Asia Pacific.

This is pro-China bullshit right here. Lawfully by whose standards? The CCP? Oh okay. Only on a kiddie politics site like HN or reddit would a dishonest and extremely biased anti-US comment like yours be voted to the top. Grow up.

<comment><USER10> > I know HN thinks China and Russia are bastions of liberty and human rights

Citation needed.

<comment><USER11> Confusion over "HN" being surprised, and finding it noteworthy, when China and Russia are "Playing Against Type"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've had a bunch of Lenovo Thinkpads. Each time, the first thing I do is wipe it and install Linux.

<comment><USER13> Thinkpads have long had good driver support for Linux. Pity they don't sell a Linux notebook like Dell Sputnik.

<comment><USER14> would you trust your Linux installation if Lenovo had installed it?

<comment><USER15> No but I would at least have more confidence in the driver support for the hardware included.

<comment><USER16> You can check the [http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki](http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki) for compatibility issues before you buy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The other two flaws would allow attackers to gain a greater level of control > over a system than they should have.

What level of control should an attacker have ?

<comment><USER18> Some of these attacks are remote, some are local privilege escalation flaws.

The local attacker should have user-level access, but instead has admin/system-level access.

<comment><USER19> Researchers seem to encounter a handful of privilege escalation vulnerabilities for Windows every year. I wonder if this will ever be "fixed" (dramatically reduced in number).

A well organized cyber-crime group or a whole number of spy agencies could have access to at least one such vulnerability throughout the year.

<comment><USER20> This specific case is not Windows. It's Lenovo's unbelievable hostility toward their customers in combination with their amazingly aptitude for being completely incompetent.

I would venture to guess that the adware service is running as SYSTEM. Any vulnerability in the service would escalate to system. You can do _exactly_ the same thing in Linux (daemon running as root) and it would have a very similar surface area.

The only difference in this specific case is that Windows has idiots for hardware manufacturers. The only way to "fix" it would be for Microsoft to encourage users to wipe the default installation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Kind of crappy title, and mostly old news.

Should be : Researchers: Lenovo computers contain 'massive security risk'

</comment><comment><USER22> So I feel like I missed a memo. Is there a list / primer on what we do and do not know about hardware backdoors, firmware backdoors and software backdoors?

This bothers me - a16z podcast also threw up a reference to "200 security hygiene" functions - keeping patches up to date and encryption at rest. But Incan only get to about ten.

Is there an appendix in SysAdmin / oReilly I should read or do I have to watch all the CEF notifications and work backwards to what preventative action Inshould stick in my sh file.

It's a serious question - I just don't feel I know what is dangerous out there anymore let alone have it automated.

</comment><comment><USER23> I have a Lenovo ThinkPad, if I blow away the stock version of Windows 8 I'm currently running with an incoming Windows 10, will that blow away all the Lenovo bloatware?

<comment><USER24> > if I blow away the stock version of Windows 8 I'm currently running with an > incoming Windows 10, will that blow away all the Lenovo bloatware?

It will remove the Lenovo applications, but the 'bloatware' and security risks could exist elsewhere, or example in BIOS or in a separate partition on the hard drive.

<comment><USER25> If you repartition the hard drive, at least that latter point should be resolved, though at the cost of blowing away recovery data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> [https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/lsu_privil...](https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/lsu_privilege)

If this is considered "Medium" Severity, how bad would it have to be to become High?

<comment><USER27> Something like the LSASS vulnerability used by the Sasser worm? [http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi- bin/cvename.cgi?name=CAN-2003-0...](http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi- bin/cvename.cgi?name=CAN-2003-0533)

Or even worse - it's not inconceivable that some a bit too clever firmware for a ethernet or wifi device could be exploited by a specially crafted IP package that could be sent over the public internet. As such a device usually has DMA access that would be _really_ bad. I don't think even "High" would be sufficient in that case though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Yet another reason to wipe the drive on a new computer and just install Linux...

<comment><USER29> Don't most people on HN already do this? I do use Windows but my Lenovo machines always run some variant of Linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I really don't think a privesc vulnerability on Windows can be considered a "massive security risk" at this point.</comment>


Code reviews are overrated - <AUTHOR> http://lbrandy.com/blog/2009/06/code-reviews-are-overrated/ <comment><USER2> So, bad methods of code review are bad.

To be fair, it helps junior developers much more than senior developers, but I remember one team of good mid-level developers that did peer review for every change, and QA had to work hard to find bugs because developers caught more corner cases because multiple developers were looking at the code. Further, at least two people knew all portions of code, which was a lifesaver when someone left. Finally, it helped developers get better because we learned what others were looking for in their own code.

As the most experience with shell scripting on my team, I'm asked to review most changes right now. I do them on down time, and I've noticed that their scripts are getting better because they know what to look for. Further, mine are getting better because they're using different methods than I learned.

</comment><comment><USER3> Meetings are overrated, but code reviews are quite useful. If you use a tool like Code Collaborator to asynchronously do code review (rather than pulling everyone into a synchronous meeting) you get something close to an optimal solution.

</comment><comment><USER4> They're pretty nice using Guido van Rossum's rietveld: <http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/></comment>


Android Dev is 30% more expensive than iOS. And we have the numbers to prove it - <AUTHOR> https://infinum.co/the-capsized-eight/articles/android-development-is-30-percent-more-expensive-than-ios <comment><USER2> Wait for Go to be stable enough for Android...</comment>


Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera Review: Interchangeable Lenses, Powerful Sensor - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/raspberry-pi-high-quality-camera <comment><AUTHOR> > A 12.3 megapixel Sony IMX477R sensor on the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera > offers significantly more pixels than the 8-MP Pi Camera V2, the previous > first-party module which will remain on sale. The camera is also much larger > than previous models, measuring 38mm square, versus 24mm by 23mm for the V2.

> The reason for the size increase is due to an interchangeable C mount where > compatible lenses (sold seperately) can be screwed into place. The included > adapter will also enable CS lenses to be used with the camera.</comment>


Twitter is blocked in Pakistan, on orders of IT Ministry. - <AUTHOR>

Here comes yet another black day for internet users in Pakistan. Back in May, 2011 they blocked Facebook & few other sites as well. <comment><USER2> Apparently someone was posting drawings of Muhammad. [http://tribune.com.pk/story/381639/twitter-blocked-across- pa...](http://tribune.com.pk/story/381639/twitter-blocked-across-pakistan- over-blasphemous-drawings/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I am a Pakistani and I fully endorse this ban. It is actually a black day for Twitter for allowing cartoons in the name of freedom.

I am sure Jack will not allow holocaust and ant-Semite stuff on Twitter.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for downvoting. Seems by those who believe in biased freedom of speech</comment></comment>


Behind the Strange New Science of Floating - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/floating/ <comment><USER2> For a spin on the darker side of sensory deprivation, "Simon" was a great comedy film that got little lasting pop-culture traction. Starring Alan Arkin.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_(1980_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_\(1980_film\))</comment>


Apple dials back 'flat' obsession in iOS 7.1 - <AUTHOR> http://usblog.isobar.com/2014/01/06/apple-dials-back-flat-obsession-in-ios-7-1/

<comment><USER2> As I said 2 months ago ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6684466](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6684466)) with respect to adding AppleScript support back into iWork:

"Apple increasingly proves that intransigence in response to customer feedback is not a defining feature of Apple's aesthetic. Another example is the reduced motion setting in iOS7. There's no need to piss people off just for the sake of purity; Steve gave that to Apple, but it is fundamentally distinct from Steve's primary gift - his vision of consumer products. Steve would have berated you for using Applescript, until Apple released the update a year later that supported Applescript."</comment>


ScummVM 2.0 released - <AUTHOR> http://www.scummvm.org/news/20171217/ <comment><USER2> I think it's interesting how ScummVM originally just supported the old LucasArts games and now it looks like it supports several versions of Sierra's engines, the Zork engines, plus tons of obscure game engines here and there. It's truly a great project that lets you play all those old classic CDs you have laying around without needing Doxbox.

<comment><USER3> While I know the parent comment is a positive one, it's really underselling the breadth of games ScummVM supports these days.

There are many games (or versions of games) supported by ScummVM that you can't run in DosBox for the simple reason that they're not DOS games (or even x86).

The number of "obscure game engine" games actually outnumbers the LucasArts and Sierra games combined, and include some of the most popular and famous games of the era, like Myst and Riven (as well as the mentioned Zork games).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Finally Scumm officially supports Riven, one of the best puzzle adventure games produced. It's a shame it's never been natively updated or re-released in a modern HD version (like Myst).

<comment><USER5> That's great news!

Now I'll have find something with a DVD drive to actually read my Riven DVDs...

<comment><USER6> There's two versions of Riven, the multi-CD version and the single-DVD version. The DVD version has (slightly) improved visuals and a couple of extra (cosmetic only) locations, and is quite rare.

<comment><USER5> Aha. You are correct, LeoPanthera. Just dug out my copy of Riven and it is indeed on CD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What are good ways to acquire these game ROMs legally?

A google search brings up a lot of not-completely-legit-looking sites, and I'd hate to give money to some pirate. These games are amazing and I'd love to support the authors if possible.

<comment><USER2> As others have said,GoG et. al. have republished a lot of them (a lot of them just repackage the game using Dosbox or ScummVM; you'll see the license in the download).

I kinda wish they wouldn't though. A lot of these should just fall into the real of abandonware. A lot of these licenses just get sold off to big companies who try to do some long-tail nostolgia sales.

Some /really/ old titles are actually out of copyright (or the publisher has gone under and the license has been lost), but they're still sold through some services cause that's how public domain works.

<comment><USER8> > Some /really/ old titles are actually out of copyright (or the publisher has > gone under and the license has been lost), but they're still sold through > some services cause that's how public domain works.

Nobody has been dead long enough for any computer game to enter public domain by the lawful way of inaction.

There are some games that have been made available by the license holder. Like "Beneath a Steel Sky" which was released as freeware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hmm, Starship Titanic. I recall reading about it back in the day, but never got the chance to play it.

<comment><USER10> Nice catch that it's supported.

I encourage you to get a hold of the game. It's a nice puzzle gem that incorporates the humor of Douglas Adams. One of the main parts is language, talking to the staff, actually typing, and communicating with them.

<comment><USER11> > One of the main parts is language, talking to the staff, actually typing, > and communicating with them.

How well does this work? I can't think of any other game that has even attempted this since. It would be interesting to see what the state of the art could do with this. I think combining this kind of gameplay with voice to text for input and using either text to voice or voice actors for the character talking back could be super immersive.

<comment><USER10> It's fun and doesn't get in your way. It works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ah Christmas, the time of year to snuggle with a cup of cocoa and play games of Phantasmagoria and Leisure Suit Larry.

In all honesty thanks so much to all the people that work on this project.

<comment><USER13> Decisions decisions... do I wait for the people at GoG to pack Phantasmagoria with ScummVM for Mac or do I do it myself?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Surprised to see Plumbers don't wear ties on the list. For those unaware of this masterpiece, I recommend watching this AVGN video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyaF_gCKWsI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyaF_gCKWsI)

<comment><USER15> I'm currently re-watching the 90s UK TV series Gamesmaster - they did a feature on this game in their usual sardonic style.

I didn't realise there was so much more to enjoy, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Where's the zip version for Windows? I can only see installer download.

<comment><USER17> Builds (zip) here: [http://buildbot.scummvm.org/builds.html](http://buildbot.scummvm.org/builds.html)

Source here: [https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm](https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm)</comment></comment>


Everything Explained: On the Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition - <AUTHOR> http://www.signature-reads.com/2016/06/everything-explained-on-the-encyclopedia-britannica-eleventh-edition <comment><USER2> Several years ago, I bought myself a copy of the original 11th edition. It is a marvelous work, and it's a fascinating read especially to see how the world looked to the leading British minds in pre-World War I England.

It was definitely written for rich English readers. At times, this takes on an almost comic aspect. For example, here is some text from early on in the entry on static electricity (aka here as "electrostatics"):

"The reader possessed of no previous knowledge of electrical phenomena will best appreciate the meaning of the terms employed by the aid of a few simple experiments. For this purpose, the following apparatus should be provided: 1) two small metal tea trays and some clean dry tumblers, the latter preferably varnished with shellac varnish made with alcohol free from water; 2) a rod of sealing wax or ebonite and a glass tube, also some pieces of silk and flannel; 3) a gold-leaf electroscope, etc."

The instructions for the experiments go on for pages and pages. There then follows the theoretical explanations, including detailed analysis using tables, calculus, complex diagrams.

Amazing WRT to its comprehensiveness, its formality of tone, as much as its failure to consider the needs of readers who might not be well-heeled, but still desirous of the information.

</comment><comment><USER3> That dates from a time when it seemed that you could fit all important knowledge into a modest set of books. Also from that era are the Harvard Five Foot Shelf of Books, and the full set of Audels Manuals. The Harvard Five Foot Shelf covered everything important in the liberal arts. The Audels Manuals, circa 1920, covered, in one encyclopedia sized set, everything a mechanic needed to know, from plumbing to auto repair to machine tools.</comment>


Monod, our secure and offline-first Markdown editor, is open source - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/TailorDev/monod <comment><USER2> I never understood the purpose of markdown editors. Isn't the main selling point that markdown is a human readable plain text format (i.e., vim will do/you don't need preview)?

<comment><USER3> Theoretically. Unfortunately, Markdown has many potential ambiguities in interpretation, and unintuitive aspects.

<comment><USER4> Especially for GitHub, I don't want to iteratively push commit after commit to README.md just to get the correct syntax for their GitHub-Flavored-Markdown. When editing on GitHub directly, I appreciate the preview to spot mistakes.

However, there are many downsides of using the website for editing (like you can't combine changes to multiple files in a single commit). I prefer using a real editor locally, but using any other Markdown processor might give slightly different results. Therefore I use flavor [1] to filter the Markdown document through the GitHub API for reviewing it locally before pushing.

[1] [http://brettterpstra.com/2012/09/16/easy-command-line- github...](http://brettterpstra.com/2012/09/16/easy-command-line-github- flavored-markdown/)

<comment><USER5> Why not just use Pandoc with GFM syntax options?

<comment><USER4> flavor also includes CSS rules that closely resemble the design of GitHub, so I can view the result in my local browser as it would look on the GitHub website. With pandoc, I only get plain HTML output.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> At first I was a bit puzzled why anyone would need to describe an editor as "secure"... but oh well, it is actually a web application. I can see the need now.

<comment><USER6> Did you read the article? It's an interesting way of making a rich shareable document that is readable by those you share the link with and not by anyone else, _including those who operate the server_ , or those on the network route to you.

Well, that's the principle, I didn't look closely enough to see if their implementation can be trusted, but it's a fun idea.

<comment><USER7> Since the encryption key is in the URL I don't think it's fair for them to claim they can't decrypt.

<comment><USER8> It is in the hash/fragment of the URL, that part is client side only and is never sent to the server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This obsession with react/electron/etc for the desktop is ridiculous. The OP acknowledges as much in the title ("secure" \- what do you mean, it's a text editor, isn't it? Oh, because they decided to go "all web" for this!).

Use MacDown on OS X [http://macdown.uranusjr.com](http://macdown.uranusjr.com) and MarkdownPad on Windows [http://markdownpad.com](http://markdownpad.com)

I don't have any recommendations for Linux, unfortunately.

Then again, the whole point of Markdown is that it's basic plain-text syntax that can be prettified as HTML. Its _entire_ raison d'être is that you _don't_ have to learn (or test) another markup language, but whatever.

<comment><USER10> It's pretty horrible, but it's the future unfortunately.

The web is ubiquitous. Everyone knows it, and so it's much easier to scratch whatever itch you have in a tech you know than a scary one (C!) that you don't; building for situations you understand (your fast piece of expensive apple tech connected to your fast internet) than ones you don't.

<comment><USER11> When developing in a higher level language like JavaScript you are less prone to buffer overflow code execution vulnerabilities, witch seems to be the most common security hole.

<comment><USER12> That's a non-point. There's nothing intrinsic about higher level language that prevents security holes. There are plenty of low-level languages that are immune to buffer overflows—Ada, Rust, D† (to an extent), Oberon†, Cyclone....

D and Ada have real and important software written in them, Rust has hype, Oberon is still actively developed, Cyclone influenced new languages (particularly Rust).

† Garbage collected by default

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bug report for devs:

        1) Edit a doc in tab A
        2) Open same doc in tab B
        3) Edit in tab B
        4) Edit in tab A
        Result: changes in tab A are not saved and there's no notice/indication/error message.

... now bugs aside, why would I want to use a text editor that isn't local?

Even assuming it works fine, what does this get me that $FAVORITE_EDITOR combined with the plethora of other sync methods (dropbox, google drive, onedrive, etc) get me?

<comment><USER14> It would probably be more productive to report this issue on their issue tracker. [https://github.com/TailorDev/monod/issues](https://github.com/TailorDev/monod/issues)

<comment><USER13> Sure but that means I also have to create a github account and sign in there too. I have no interest in that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> An offline editor for generating HTML (from Markdown) written in a framework running on top of a browser?

The irony was lost on someone somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER16> You guys should sanitize for xss...

test

EDIT: removed example page since it wasn't clear to me that access to link means you can edit

</comment><comment><USER17> I'll probably just stick with Sublime or VIM, and not be deploying my own markdown text editor to Heroku. But neat, I guess?

</comment><comment><USER18> What Markdown standard does this editor use? Commonmark ([http://commonmark.org/](http://commonmark.org/)), Github Flavored Markdown, or something else? Is it possible to specify which standard to use?

<comment><AUTHOR> it is CommonMark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice work. I've added "monod" to the "Editors" list at js.libhunt.com. Cheers!

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> For folks looking for a simple Github Flavored Markdown previewer I've been very happy with grip:

[https://github.com/joeyespo/grip](https://github.com/joeyespo/grip)

</comment><comment><USER21> The recent "Show HN": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11518921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11518921)

</comment><comment> extropic-engine > offline first

> site doesn't work if javascript is disabled

</comment><comment><USER22> Using codemirror - I would have thought prosemirror would have been a better fit. Wonder why.

<comment><USER23> I am currently developing my own Markdown editor and looked into CodeMirror, Draft.js and ProseMirror and I also plan to base it on CodeMirror. I think if all you need is "syntax highlighting" (maybe including font sizes for headlines) you are better off using CodeMirror. Of course, if you want some WYSIWYG functionality Draft.js, ProseMirror and the like may be more suitable (or even mandatory).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It would be cool if you could also edit the right side.

</comment><comment><USER24> why oh why do we need another markdown editor? _sigh_ I personally just use VS Code and it's been working fine.

<comment><USER25> Please don't post generic dismissals to HN. The fact that people like to make things is answer enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> it dos use the files as the database right? I like it. The text is a little too big for my taste. I might actually use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, because we had to come up with something quickly (this project was part of an experiment to learn React.js), it is simple and it seems to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Please someone build an RST editor

</comment><comment><USER28> how do I pronounce Monod?

<comment><AUTHOR> Like Jacques Monod, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Monod](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Monod). We don't pronounce the "d" I'd say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If you are interested in a Markdown Editor App for OS X, Linux, and Windows (not browser based), which also support custom themes, and also supports emojis, and also supports GitHub Flavored Markdown and proper GitHub styles, then go star this repository of mine <[https://github.com/niftylettuce/seuss.md>](https://github.com/niftylettuce/seuss.md>). While I appreciate that this was built with React.js, it still does not solve the problem of the need for a better Markdown editor. I'm almost positive Mou still doesn't have GFM support, and MacDown still has 100% CPU issues.

<comment><USER30> If you're going to self-promote, maybe have a README.md with useful info? Or have the repo link to a website that isn't down?</comment></comment>


Apple's Motion to Vacate Brief and Supporting Declarations - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/doc/300524573/Motion-to-Vacate-Brief-and-Supporting-Declarations <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about Scribd. I know a lot of HN folks dislike that.</comment>


Show HN: Track, Analyze, and Graph Your Bash History - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/karagenit/history <comment><USER2> I'm not sure that just blurring the text input is sufficient for obfuscation, There are known methods for reversing blur like:

[https://lifehacker.com/how-to-uncover-blurred-information- in...](https://lifehacker.com/how-to-uncover-blurred-information-in- photographs-1648562658) [http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~ihradis/CNN- Deblur/](http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~ihradis/CNN-Deblur/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Another feature I would suggest is to monkey patch the browser `console` functions (e.g. log, warn, error, etc...)

This way in addition to capture all the DOM related events, someone can also look and see what messages are appearing in the console. This is useful for debugging.

</comment><comment><USER2> awesome idea. I work at a financial institution, and the idea of a browser recording tool, would be ruled out due to regulations and concerns regarding the sharing of user data. However if the data was always encrypted, and redacted, this might be a more workable solution. This kind of tool is invaluable for UX research and bug reporting.

I'd like to get in touch with you. Do you have a twitter handle or email I can DM?

</comment><comment><USER2> I keep getting this error:

"Dang! There was an unexpected error, please try again. If the error persists please come back in a bit or get in touch with us!"</comment>


Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-cloudwatch-logs-insights-fast-interactive-log-analytics/ <comment><USER2> CloudWatch has the worst UX of any log management tool I've used. We are using Logentries currently, and it is so easy and intuitive.

I just don't get how AWS developers are able to accept the eyesore that is their UX. It's easy to miss things in any AWS service's UI. I keep discovering functionality even after years of use. Google Cloud UX is light years ahead. Also, Google's Stackdriver seems great, haven't used it yet though. Would be great if any Stackdriver users here share how it is better than CloudWatch or other log management tools.

<comment><USER3> Have you tried Insights?

<comment><USER4> I just tried it. It's just as bad as AWS UI ever has been. It shows lots of fields that it extracted from the log messages. Can you click them to add them to the search box? Nope. Right click for more options? Nope. These are things Splunk has had for years.

<comment><USER5> >It's just as bad as AWS UI ever has been.

Why is this though? Is Amazon not employing UX/designers? Is there a culture there that trivializes UX benefits?

<comment><USER6> Teams are under control of their backlog in a way that let's them prioritise how they approach the UX/UI aspects. For instance, this is why you'll see 2-3 different UIs across AWS journeys, due to teams implementing at different paces and priorities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting -- they're going after the various log management companies (Scalyr, DataDog, Splunk, Sumo Logic, etc.).

Figured this was bound to come eventually since it's a very very big market and their basic CloudWatch product was lacking in many ways. It's not like Amazon to let an ecosystem eat their lunch.

Few things stand out:

(1) Per-query pricing seems...odd? Likely a good deal for small folks with a low volume of logs (i.e. just need to check actual AWS infrastructure logs vs. application logs), but if you have any actual volume this gets absurdly expensive ($0.005/GB scanned = $5 per query if you need to scan a terabyte. Large enterprises ingest multiple terabytes per day.)

(2) The quote "I pick the first one, click Run query, the logs are scanned and the results are visible within seconds" doesn't sound terribly promising performance-wise. "Seconds" is an eternity in the log management world.

Still, super interesting!

<comment><USER8> It'll be interesting to see what the pricing numbers actually mean.

Say my app generates 1GB of logs per day. If I create a dashboard showing hits/errors for the last 24 hours and have the dashboard refreshing every 5 minutes it might cost me $1.44 per day (0.005 * 12 * 24).

By comparison list price for Sumo Logic is $90/month for 1GB/day of data (stored for 30 days) with queries being "free" (although there are limits to the number you can do).

<comment><USER7> Definitely will be interesting. I'd say this -- for sure, $1.44 per day is better than $90/month, but is it that much better? (Also, $90 is on the high end -- Scalyr charges more like $50/month for 1GB/day ___disclosure: I 'm a co-founder, though no longer there_ __).

For $50-$100/month, you get basically unlimited querying, unlimited dashboards, etc., vs. $43.20 from Amazon for a single dashboard that refreshes every 5 minutes in your example.

Looking at the actual numbers now, there's no way this is targeting the same types of users at this pricing level. It's gotta be aimed more at folks looking at meta-logs for AWS services, the volume of which is going to be much less than actual application logs. Otherwise I can't see this being competitive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's version 1.0 but this starts to make Splunk and similar utilities look less and less important or differentiating in the future of cloud.

AWS understands most people using tools like Splunk probably only need a few simple features so AWS just goes and builds that and gives a lot of people excuses to dump expensive licenses for the AWS version of it. It's a sneaky but highly successful business model.

</comment><comment><USER10> We've had a poor experience with Cloudwatch for logs. The UX is poor and queries over large data sets take forever. So much so that I'm sure we're 'using it wrong'. What have others' experiences been like?

<comment><USER11> Well for what it's worth this service solves the "queries take forever" part. But Cloudwatch logs is just one potential piece of the puzzle. It's easy to hook into for AWS services and easy to pipe into Lambdas, S3, Kinesis, etc etc. If none of that integration appeals to you then there are probably better products, but for certain workflows it's far superior to other solutions despite the rough edges. Same story as most of AWS's services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This looks great, and the query syntax is fairly easy to pick up (just from the "tips" in the UI - I haven't been able to find the documentation yet). The idea of connecting the parts of the query with pipe characters reminds me of [https://stedolan.github.io/jq/](https://stedolan.github.io/jq/)

The feature where you can add the queries to a Cloudwatch dashboard seems to be a bit broken at the moment. First, the version of the query that I copied to a dashboard didn't seem to respect the time limit I'd set so instead of looking at the last hour, it was looking at all time - could get accidentally very expensive! Also, I couldn't see a way to show the visualisation (ie the stats graph) on the dashboard - just the raw table of query results, which is not ideal. Hopefully I've missed something, or those niggles will be sorted out soon.

Overall, very impressive!

</comment><comment><USER13> Any idea what the query engine/translation layer they are using is? I'm assuming there is something like Presto underneath it, but quite curious.

<comment><USER14> I'm with the team that built this. It's actually a new purpose-built engine, optimized for near real-time availability of large scale volumes of log data. It supports an unbounded number of fields across log records, and doesn't require the definition of a schema or dealing with data types at setup/ingestion time. Compute and storage are separate, which is what allows queries to address data from any time window. There is no limit on the data retention period.

<comment><USER15> We would all be exceptionally interested in more technical details about this.

Particularly if you compare to other approaches, talk about technical tradeoffs made, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's the user guide for Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights: [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/logs/Ana...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/logs/AnalyzingLogData.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> Have they got an ML tool yet to allow me to configure alerts for things that aren't "normal"? Logs are all well and good but I generally just care about things that are abnormal for my stack.

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks like Humio. I wonder if they can match speed and flexibility of Humio.

</comment><comment><USER19> Reminds me of log analytics in Azure!</comment>


Starting An Airline - <AUTHOR> http://www.boeing.com/boeing/commercial/startup/index.page <comment><USER2> If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline (Richard Branson).

<comment><USER3> That's a variation on an old aviation proverb: "How do you make a small fortune in aviation? Start with a large one."

<comment><USER4> And countless other industries, eg architecture, casinos, farming: [http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/small_fortune/](http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/small_fortune/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of a vendor of networking products that we could call L. They ended up with a portfolio of machines that were almost perfect for handling all the dial-up traffic an ISP could want, with good management and reference designs and consultants ready to show you how to start or grow your ISP with many many points-of-presence.

And they sold their expensive equipment and made lots of money, only it turned out that many ISPs couldn't really afford all this upfront, and it made sense for L to operate a financing company itself and finance the purchases of the expensive hardware. There was a huge and growing demand, and if an ISP defaulted, well, L could take back the equipment and refurb it and sell it to the next company that came along.

Only when the market actually saturated, there was L holding all these valuable financing agreements backed mostly by the hardware that nobody new wanted to buy.

<comment><USER4> I am curious why you used the mysterious _L_ in your comment instead of referring to Lucent by name? None of what you wrote was libelous. For people not around at the time it will not be obvious who you are referring to. As a result only the "cool older kids" know who _L_ is and it makes it hard for newcomers to learn about the history of the industry. Personally I do not think hacker news comments should be written in such a way as to reinforce boundaries and segregate "people in the know" from the unwashed masses.

For anyone interested in learning more: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent#History)

<comment><USER5> Because it doesn't really matter which company L was: the point applies across markets. When you finance all of your sales with only the products you make as collateral, market failures come easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone else want to kickstart an airline that operates with as few humans as possible? You aren't allowed to check luggage at all...(all the underbelly goes to companies like fedex and ups) just attacking it as an engineering problem?

<comment><USER7> I'd go for the opposite.

An exclusive airline that is basically 1st class through out the entire cabin.

* No carry-on suit cases

* Free alcohol

* Free meals on all flights

Membership required, and can be revoked by:

* Talking on your cell phone

* Not following crew member instructions

* Trying to prevent the person infront of you from reclining

* Trying to jump the line and board when your row isn't called

* Not being able to actually lift 40lbs but requesting an exit row seat anyway

* Trying to smash your carry on into an already full overhead bin

* Listening to music loudly etc.

<comment><USER8> You said:

        * No carry-on suit cases

And then you said:

        * Trying to smash your carry on into an already full overhead bin

Are you sure this isn't just a list of your air travel pet peeves? :)

<comment><USER9> I assume you'd be allowed a small bag of carry on (with a laptop/book/whatever in it), just not a 'maximum allowable size suitcase with everything you need', specifically to avoid paying the checked baggage fee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Boeing should know: not only do they sell to a lot of airlines, they founded United Airlines [0] until they were forced to divest.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_Airlines#Begi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_Airlines#Beginnings)

</comment><comment><USER11> With all this wealth of information available at my fingertips, it is now 10,000% more likely that I will start an airline.

Yet, the probability this will ever happen still is very close to zero.

</comment><comment><USER12> Prices for current boeing jets: [http://www.boeing.com/assets/pdf/commercial/startup/pdf/busi...](http://www.boeing.com/assets/pdf/commercial/startup/pdf/business/prices.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER13> Warren Buffett: "If a capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk back in the early 1900s, he should have shot Orville Wright. He would have saved his progeny money. But seriously, the airline business has been extraordinary. It has eaten up capital over the past century like almost no other business because people seem to keep coming back to it and putting fresh money in. You've got huge fixed costs, you've got strong labor unions and you've got commodity pricing. That is not a great recipe for success."

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2774088/Buffett-My- elepha...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2774088/Buffett-My-elephant-gun- is-loaded.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6437831](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6437831)

<comment><USER15> Thanks; burying as dupe.

<comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this story. Honestly I submitted to hn because after stumbling on the site I thought I had seen it on hn before, so I figured submitting was the fastest way to find discussion. Is there a reason that the submission didn't get flagged from the get go?

<comment><USER15> The duplicate detector is deliberately left weak so that good stories get more than one crack at the bat. But if a story has had a significant discussion within the last year, then we bury it as a dupe. The best thing to do is check HN Search to see if this is the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One of the situations when the V in MVP has to be taken very seriously.

</comment><comment><USER17> Before anyone goes out and does this research supply of planes. Locked up for many years to come from Boeing and Airbus. CEO of American Airlines outlines this in details and suggests fairs will go up and stay up as a result. Not sure if he's right but he seems pretty sure of it.

<comment><USER18> There's a healthy market for used planes.

Allegiant is a great example. They fly slightly less fuel efficient MD-80s which can be bought at bargain prices from the legacy carriers (MD-80's are those narrow body jets with the engines in the back and the 3-2 seating arrangement). They make it work by flying nonstop flights from smaller airports (without competing carriers on those routes), with low frequency. The low frequency also gives them longer until they have to do a heavy maintenance check -- which, for an older MD-80, usually costs more than the plane is worth. [http://www.fastcompany.com/1325762/heard-allegiant-air- why-i...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1325762/heard-allegiant-air-why-its- nations-most-profitable-airline) .

<comment><USER18> > The low frequency also gives them longer until they have to do a heavy > maintenance check -- which, for an older MD-80, usually costs more than the > plane is worth.

By the way, that's why we have this phenomenon: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_boneyard](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_boneyard)

<comment><USER19> What do you mean? The only way to not have a boneyard is:

a) Never take any planes out of service

b) fly every plane until it crashes

No manmade machines have infinite service life, so a is out. No airline passengers will accept b.

<comment><USER18> The point I was making is that many of the planes in the boneyards are in working condition (assuming you gas them up and do some other trivial un- mothballing work).

It's not like a car, where it can be driven until the wheels fall off. Planes are flown until they need an expensive scheduled maintenance check, even if they seem to work just fine.

(To be absolutely clear: I don't think this is a bad thing. Maintenance checks are good. Falling out of the sky is bad.)

<comment><USER17> I know absolutely zero about this industry but I'm not sure this fits the CC model. What's the plan to move up market? I just think there isn't any easy money, especially not in airlines. You gotta just be awesome at everything...

<comment><USER20> That article was written in 2009.

Go look at their route schedule. Looks like penetration to me to more established areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Air travel is a commodity which means razer thin margins and fight for shaving off every last cent. In this type of markets, usually way to succeed is provide upscale product but with only slightly higher margins. In other words, instead of fighting for margins at the bottom, you fight bit above. In airlines case this strategy would translate in to providing all business class plane but with only 15% extra prices, for example. Lot of customers who are extremely unhappy about nickling and diming would flock to this model.

<comment><USER22> The problem is that first class takes up much more than 15% more space per person than coach. You'll notice there are three chairs per side per row in a standard 787 coach, but only 2 first class. That's 50% more right there, plus there's more leg room so it's worse.

Their margins are already thin even packing it as they do, so at only the equivalent of 2/3 current capacity that would be a recipe for failure. They'd have to charge probably twice as much.

<comment><USER23> I agree with this, whenever I think about the airline industry (and I do often as I travel 100% of my time for work) - I believe the only way we can really re-invent it, is to change the plane, not the airlines.</comment></comment></comment>


Developers Are the Problem, Not Monoliths - <AUTHOR> https://codeboje.de/developers-problem-not-monoliths/ <comment><USER2> > Is it a problem of the pattern? Will another pattern fix the problem?

Man, I agree so much with this. I've been on too many teams now which cargo cult _hard_ around microservices. In the best case, they think it'll solve the problems that plague the team ("we don't have to be responsible, because it'll enforce good boundaries!!!" (literally a quote)), in the worst case, people genuinely advocate for them as a "best practice" \-- the latter group is far more terrifying.

Developers, myself included(!), tend to focus only on the upsides of a tech / pattern until they've lived through the downsides and earned their scars.

The most painful thing is that a lot of the time 'microservice oriented architecture' ends up not being made up of microservices at all, but is instead still a monolith that's been awkwardly distributed across a network, which has the nice property of being the worst of all available solutions.

<comment><USER3> Doesn't google essentially have a monolith that's distributed across a network?

<comment><USER4> Monorepo, but not really a monolith. Search, for example, has basically zero dependencies on GMail, while much of the common code (BigTable/MapReduce/Flume/Colossus/Closure/etc.) has clean published RPC interfaces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you find yourself saying "my methodology works great until you mix people into it," consider that you're just saying "my methodology does not work" in different words.

<comment><USER6> "my methodology works until management breathes down my neck but so be it!

"My methodology works until junior devs show up and don't know how to code"

"My methodology just works... except all the times it doesn't and when it doesn't, it's your fault because you did it."

That's what I got from this article.

It's development itself that's the problem. Software is really complex and things take a long time to build. The relationship between the time it takes for management to say "build it" and to actually build it is asymmetrical. It requires many people to build things of significance. Coordinating understanding of things between people is a hard problem. Gaining the experience to know why you should or shouldn't do something takes years. During that time you have to be working on things and contributing to code bases.

<comment><USER3> And this author's been a "dev" for decades on top of that! Junior developers are a fact of life for any growing company with a career path (unless you're netflix), and so is management and coders of all levels. To fix that you need other processes, code reviewers, mentorship, maybe even a google "readability" policy.

<comment><USER6> Yup. The author does have some OK points in places, but some of them are either (a) facts of Life or (b) organizational/management issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If monoliths almost always end up spaghetti code, and the problem is that people always tend towards writing spaghetti code, then the problem is monoliths.

Programming is for people. I can count on zero hands how many times I've seen monoliths not end up... globbed together. It's fundamental to humans to like things broken up into little pieces with boundaries.

If monoliths don't work for people, then monoliths _are_ the problem.

<comment><USER8> So somehow you can't end up with the micro services version of spaghetti code? If an engineering organization can't handle managing a single codebase, why would you assume they would be good stewards of multiple codebases?

<comment><USER9> Not only that, but who takes on the configuration and orchestration complexity of micro services? I'm not saying they cannot work, but often a restructured monolith is still a better idea... I prefer to break off bottlenecks into services where practical. Such as doing image resizing in a separate service.

Breaking data structures apart often leads to it's own form of spaghetti.

<comment><USER10> Microservices allow you to scale your organization, not your application. For that particular use, microservices are absolutely better than monoliths.

I can say this based on four years working on a large multi-tenant service platform composed of several hundred microservices, held against a background of 24 years building software systems, including multi-million-line monoliths (good and bad).

If you're a small company, should you start with a microservices architecture? No. It is much harder to operate. Should you factor your monolith so it is easy to transition to microservices later? Yes. Your monolith will be of higher quality for doing so.

<comment><USER11> Change "micro-service" to "library" and you have a technology that scales equally well _without_ introducing the additional failure modes and complexities of micro-services. That's how pretty much _all_ open source software works. Open source software consists of thousands of libraries that people reuse for all kinds of purposes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Want to know what the true sign of wisdom is for programmers? Realizing that no matter what you're bitching about: marketing, sales, tools, the furniture police, what have you? It's us. At the end of the day we are our own worst enemies.

Folks talk a lot about managing complexity, but it feels a bit too tech-weenie and direct enough for the problem we have. The phrase I've been using is _managing cognitive load_ , because it covers more than making decisions around microservices or null pointers. Our failure -- and hatred -- around managing cognitive load is what keeps taking great organizations and destroying them.

What happens if you have 1-5 really smart devs and give them freedom and a problem? You get a solved problem What happens if you keep adding really smart, capable people? You get a mess. Continue this process, you'll have burdensome process, a couple of new frameworks, an architecture team, and more. You'll get a huge amount of really super smart people -- all making a mess and pointing the finger at somebody else for being responsible.

After some consideration, I have come to a sad conclusion: most of us in tech do not want to do our jobs. Our jobs are to solve problems for people. After that, it's brutally keeping the cognitive load down for everybody that touches what we do. To put others first in this way and realize we're prone to making things far, far too complicated is humbling. It involves creating simple things that a first-year programmer might make. In short, it's _boring_. And who wants to be bored?

We have met the enemy and it is us.

<comment><USER13> I think you touched on the problem here, but didn't quite hit the nail on the head. Many problems could be solved by a smart but small team in a pretty simple way, but that doesn't keep lots of people employed. Look at a lot of open-source tools: they're created by one person, or a small team, and when they're done, they're mostly done and that's it; occasionally they'll do a little maintenance work on it, or some small bugfixes or security updates, but overall there's very little work done after the initial release. By contrast, most commercial stuff is hugely complex, and is constantly being rewritten to use new frameworks and other technologies, but this keeps dev teams motivated and employed, and keeps a nearly constant revenue stream coming from customers.

Basically, just solving a problem once isn't going to keep large teams of people employed long-term, so people don't work that way.

<comment><USER12> Maybe your formulation is better. This is something I've been hitting on for some time.

Here's another way of looking at it: how do you know _not_ to do your job?

It's a simple question. All true professions like lawyers or doctors, have clear guidelines for when their services are not appropriate. You go ask a doctor to use his medical skills to hurt somebody and they'll turn you down (hopefully!)

But not tech. You can throw 100 technology developers at anything. Doesn't matter if the problem is already solved, whether it needs solving or not, whether it's ethical to solve, or whatnot. Doesn't even matter (and this is more to my point) whether you can do it in one line of code or a million. In fact, a million lines would be better! Keeps everybody looking busy.

We desperately need better ethics in our profession. Code budgets can help some here, but there's a lot more room for growth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A lot of people say that microservices are often a way to deal with lack of communication between teams. It's probably better to improve communication than creating microservices which later on create another set of communication problems.

<comment><USER15> Communication is expensive and improving it generally leads to increased engineer unhappiness. Engineers don't want to be in endless meetings, have to follow endless email threads, have endless planning meetings for any change, etc. If they wanted those thing they'd have moved into management of some kind.

<comment><USER14> Refactoring a microservices architecture seems to lead to even more frustrating meetings.

<comment><USER15> Wide scale refactoring is a rare occurrence and a somewhat constrained problem. The whole point of micro services is most changes are limited and constrained. In monoliths you have none of that so everything require mass communication and not just wide scale refactoring.

<comment><USER16> Indeed, instead projects just fall rather than get refactored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Managers are the problem, they push developers to finish a feature and don't give enough time to look back and revise.

As you see it's easy to shift the responsibility. You have to question and justify every foundational or core decision, weight all cons and pros, and revise. But, well, if nobody is motivated or cares..

<comment><USER18> Sure, but I'm not convinced Joe Schmoe developer is really all that good at creating systems which can be easily extended for any requirement that may come up either. Then you have to weigh the cost of rewrites against what value they will actually have. And then you have to contend with mediocre devs who take the easy route and just declare a global.

<comment><USER19> Well I'm not convinced you ask yourself about the L in SOLID when you are doing all that extending.

<comment><USER18> Yes, because all design issues are solved by gating everything behind an interface.

<comment><USER16> Exactly, the interface being general procedure call. Oh wait... ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It comes down to cuture and how people you work with think and perform when building software.

Experienced developers will know that spending time not writing code is where you really solve the challenges at hand.

It's not about patterns or arc' style, that is merely a tool to reach the goal.

It's about experience and knowing when step back and iterate, and take the time needed to solve something.

I often spent months breaking a problem down, and in that period of time I often realize that I was on the wrong foot from the beginning. So I iterate once again, slowly building confidence in a better solution. And in those months of tinkering I don't write production code that problem.

Quality work takes time to do, it's a oneway street that thing.

</comment><comment><USER21> Conway's Law:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law)

</comment><comment><USER22> You just stated reasons to move to micro services. Keep the code small and non complex. Smaller code bases lead to smaller changes. You abstract complexity through interaction. You hand off complexity to a higher level of orchestration.

I think people don't understand what a true enterprise monolith actually looks like.

</comment><comment><USER11> Here is an idea: Implement the _same_ system using two different approaches: 1. Micro-services 2. Libraries. Using the same number of micro-services and libraries (to make the comparison accurate). Now, if you are smart, you will probably realize that the best way to do this is to implement a library for each micro-services and _then_ add the additional code needed by a micro- service on top (communication, configuration, routing, fail over etc.) But hold on ... if you are smart enough to realize this, then you should also be smart enough to realize that micro-services require all the code the libraries need PLUS additional code to do what only micro-services require (communication, configuration, routing, fail over etc.) Which should tell you _before_ you even start the experiment that micro-service architectures are inherently more complex than building applications using independent libraries.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure that I disagree with anything said in the article... I'm not sure how it relates to the referenced article. My own approach has become, make everything as simple and discoverable as possible. If you create or use an abstraction, it should make the rest of the codebase simpler, not add more layers of indirection unnecessarily.

In my own experience, the longest lasting codebases I've worked on or implemented are those meant to be thrown away that didn't have a lot of extra cruft for "pattern" sake. Add it when you need it, and push back on every feature you can push back on.

Also, organize by practical feature, not by type of file. If a feature only has a view and not a distinct controller or models, that's okay... making it easy to discover where the hell crap is makes it easier to maintain. That doesn't mean shove all of your models/controllers/views/components etc into 4 mostly mirrored trees, it means merge them into a structure where like needed/used things are together.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'd say managers and crappy team leads are the problem. They're often asking the developer to deliver code that is not quite ready or adequately tested. I admit though that the absence of senior engineers who perform an unforgiving code review is also a problem.

</comment><comment><USER24> I am really confused by this website.

1\. The tagline on this website is "Guiding Developers since 1869". Is that a joke?

2\. If he is so against micro services, why does he promote three of his own pocket guides on how to do them?

Is there something I am missing?

<comment><USER25> 1) No, it's not a joke. This blog has really been around that long.

2) He's not against micro-services. He's just saying that your problems won't go away bc you're building micro-services instead of monoliths.

PS: i would say #1 is a joke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is the case with (almost) all best practices and better choices, though. Machines don't care about code organization or type systems reminding them about what's what; these are developer tools and aides.

</comment><comment><USER27> Yeah I always think this way with just about every code/system problem. "If the fucking developers were not so stupid this would never be a problem"

The issue is I've never worked at a company without at least a few dumb and/or lazy developers. I've done freelance and trying to do it all myself, but its just too time consuming. So, I dunno, I've learned to accept rules like this just to curb the stupidity some.

</comment><comment><USER11> Agree. If you don't have the software engineering skills to implement a monolith, then you have even less skills implementing micro-services. Micro- services are destined to be the future of nightmare legacy software. But hey it will keep software engineers busy so maybe we shouldn't complain too much :)

</comment><comment><USER28> It's not the tech, it's not the devs, it's not the project managers, it's not sales, it's not the customers, it's not the pattern/model.

It's all of them. They all contribute to a system, and the system is what produces the output. You cannot lay the blame on any single part of the system without understanding the interrelationship between each part.

A developer produces some quick and dirty prototype and it ships but is a bitch to maintain. Blame the dev? Maybe. Blame the PM? Maybe. Blame sales? Maybe. There was a deadline and the dev hit it, you can't blame them for shipping when the deadline wasn't relaxed (by the PM or sales). But maybe you can blame them for giving bad estimates.

Why are the estimates bad? Do they _know_ how to estimate? Have they collected metrics on how long problems of various size take to be completed? Has the PM? Has the head of the software division set that as a goal to understand? If not, then some teams will estimate better than others because they took the initiative. But they probably weren't given the money or time to do it, they stole that time from their customers (which isn't wrong, but it's hardly scaleable).

Is the team junior? Have you trained them? Do you have a training program in your company? Mentorship? Do you send them to conferences? Don't blame the junior devs for the failure of the business to understand and convey the importance of training to PMs and devs.

A dev who feels they have no authority to say no will always say yes, even if it's outrageous. They saw a peer get fired or demoted for saying no too many times and don't want to risk it themselves. It's the system that creates this. So create an environment where the devs can say no to requirements. Help them to understand how to present their case when saying no. Or, better, teach them to say, "Yes, but...". "Yes we can deliver that feature, but you will have to delay delivery by a month." "Yes we can deliver that feature, but you will have to pay for database training or a DBA because we don't have that competency in our group." "Yes we can deliver that feature, and hit that deadline, but only if you descope these other features." Don't make it optional, make it clear what the tradeoffs are. Sure, devs can do this now. But many feel disempowered to do so. Create the culture within the business that empowers them to make these meaningful contributions.

A company that lets sales to scope all features and decide deadlines is setting itself up for failure (failure to deliver stable, reliable products on time and in budget). A company with a too conservative dev group that says no to everything will fail in the market place (failure to deliver what customers want). It continues from there. Don't look to one group and play the blame game unless that group is overly strong/weak within the organization. At which point you need to distribute authority/responsibility better and empower people to make meaningful contributions and decisions.

Examine the system and culture, then shift it towards one that can achieve the desired goal, or change the goal if you're unwilling to change the system, or fail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, it is a system and devs are a part of it. However, a problem with a system is that a single individual can almost never change it alone. You can not change people; you can not change your team members.

You can change yourself though and inspire people to move with you. So, any change starts with oneself and not with others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> this article seems rather emotionally driven, still will consider a micro- service for my next projects architecture as it still seems less mental overhead

</comment><comment><USER30> Rephrasing the title: Developers are the problem, microservices is a counter- measure.

</comment><comment><USER31> The post really rubs me the wrong way.

> If the biz says, "Jump," many devs ask "how high?" or just do it. It is the > same with requirements or workloads.

There is only so much push back senior, let alone junior, developers can give. Having "soft skills" helps a lot with this, especially when alternative solutions can be proposed or your force the people with real power to assign _actual_ priorities to work. (i.e. "I'm sorry I've not done anything for your project, the VP told me to work on this other project. Please consult with them if you believe yours is more urgent.")

> A recent example makes that more clearly. Take a dev team, who build a new > app from scratch - greenfield. They chose a document store but modeled their > domain objects in a relational way. Now X features and iterations later, the > performance went downhill… Yet, no one admits the wrong architectural > decision. But anybody complains about it - even the devs. Bad monolith.

There are also real consequences to making large changes to something like a datastore. The amount of time and risk is hard to calculate, and for a non- tech business hard to justify when there are other issues requiring developer attention.

I think what I dislike most about this post is that it continues to perpetuate the feeling that the developers and the business are on separate "sides" or otherwise the post ignores concerns from the rest of the business. It's really about trust. If you, as the developer go "this is going to take 3 weeks" and the asker goes "but I really, really want it in 1", the two sides need to trust each other enough to honestly discuss the discrepancy. Could some MVP be rushed out, but the follow up 2 (or 3) weeks _be scheduled now_ to clean up the rough edges, ensure formatting and full coverage test suites are finished, &c. If the developer doesn't trust the asker to be reasonable, and the asker doesn't trust that the developer honestly needs some additional time, negotiations cease and someone winds up unhappy and the business as a whole suffers from either a later product or additional tech debt.

I think most people, not just developers, have a hard time understanding that if you can or simply how to frame "non-productive" time in terms of the business' bottom-line or risk, you'll have much more luck (but no guarantees, some people just don't care about your opinions as their underling unfortunately, but I would say most do).

For instance, maintenance of a mechanical system leads to downtime and increased operational costs. However, that maintenance increases the reliably and operating life of the mechanical system.

For code, just building in a little time for each issues' estimate for cleaning, testing, review. Why is this important? Reviews help familarize other team members with the implementation of new features, minimizing the single point of failure. Tests help to spot coding errors or conflicting business priorities at a later date when the details of this specific product may not be fresh in everyone's mind. Cleaning up/formatting code enables more of the team to jump in and fix issues, again reducing the single point of failure. All of these together help ensure that the code is less likely to randomly "break"/not handle certain cases correctly as well as enable anyone on the team to take up a bug with a reasonable expectation that it won't balloon because no-one knows how the feature works.

Anyway, the issue has nothing to do with monoliths vs microservices and everything to do with the trust and communications between different parts of the business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Trust is essential and I wrote about it before but left it out in this post. If the involved parties trust each other, they can accomplish great goals together.

However, if you want to change a system or even build up trust, one can only start working at oneself. And that was my intention for the post, raising awareness that devs must change themselves and stop blaming other humans or even patterns for shit they (partly) created themselves. We can not change another person, we can only change us and maybe inspire others to join.

Same is with trust. People do only trust you if there is a good reason for it. And you have to build that reason up over time. For example, if I can't hold my ground with given estimates, how can I expect that the other person trusts me (in that point)? Those sum up. In the end, often biz does not trust devs and vice versa. But I can't change biz nor the other devs, only myself.</comment></comment>


Using Artificial Intelligence to Write Self-Modifying/Improving Programs - <AUTHOR> http://www.primaryobjects.com/CMS/Article149

<comment><AUTHOR> How about using Deep Learning on Topcoder data?</comment>


How do you install macports? - daniel-cussen

I'm stumped right were I'm supposed to mess around with the .profile thing.<p>I've looked at http://www.nabble.com/%22port:-command-not-found%22-after-installing-MacPorts-1.6.0-10.5-Leopard.dmg-td15348745.html, but can't figure it out.  I created a .profile ($ touch ~/.profile) but have no idea were to go from there.  What terminal commands should I do? <comment><AUTHOR> Just like that nabble page says, add the following to your .profile using a text editor:

        export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH

<comment> daniel-cussen And how do I do that? Where is this .profile?

<comment><USER2> umm.. you'll have quite a learning curve ahead of you, but preserver.

open up terminal.app and type -

      >ls .profile

You should see a response like -

      eric@quark:~>ls .profile
      .profile
      eric@quark:~>

this means that the file ".profile" exists. If instead you get something like -

      eric@quark:~>ls .profile
      ls: .profile: No such file or directory
      eric@quark:~>

Then you should type -

      >touch .profile

this will create the file with no contents.

Next type -

      >open .profile

(I assume you don't know about vi, so TextEdit.app will have to do for now).

Paste in the macports environment settings, save, and open a new terminal window. macports should now work.

<comment> daniel-cussen I got it to work.

Macports on Tiger walkthrough: 1) Install Macports from macports.org, and open the box icon that ends in .pkg. 2) Open the terminal. 3) Paste [touch .profile]. Don't paste the brackets, just what is inside. press return. 4) Paste [open -a TextEdit ~/.profile], press return. A text file will open. 5) Paste [ export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH export MANPATH=/opt/local/share/man:$MANPATH export DISPLAY=:0.0 ] in the file. Save it and close it. 6) Paste [. .profile]. Press return. 7) Paste [sudo port -d selfupdate]. Press return. The computer will ask you for your password; give it and press return. 8) Wait for about three minutes. The terminal will act weird and will be busy updating macports. When it's done, you can use macports by pasting [port search sbcl] to search Steel Bank Common Lisp. You can install by pasting [sudo port install sbcl]. Then you can get on with your startup and take on the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> well... your shell is probably ignoring .profile. I think the default shell under osx is now bash, so look for a file called .bashrc, and if it exists add the settings from .profile in there (or you can just source .profile from your bashrc).

<comment><AUTHOR> No, bash will also use .profile</comment></comment>


Now It Is Official: The 'Internet' Is Over - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/insider/now-it-is-official-the-internet-is-over.html <comment><USER2> As long as Avenue Q continues to run, the Internet will always be really, really great.</comment>


Aggie.io – A Shared Canvas - <AUTHOR> https://aggie.io/ <comment><USER2> [https://aggie.io/bzprk_43yb](https://aggie.io/bzprk_43yb)

</comment><comment><USER3> My macbook pro has shut down once I clicked Start drawing button on the site.

anyone else faced this?</comment>


The Essential Tools of Scientific Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> http://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/the-essential-tools-of-scientific-machine-learning-scientific-ml/ <comment><USER2> This is an aside to the main point of the article, but I have to take issue with a couple of quotes:

> For a long time scientific computing has kept machine learning at an arm's > length because its lack of interpretability and structure mean that, despite > it's tremendous predicitve success, it is almost useless for answering these > kinds of central scientific questions.

> However, the recent trend has been to merge the two disciplines, allowing > explainable models that are data-driven, require less data than traditional > machine learning, and utilize the knowledge encapsulated in centuries of > scientific literature.

Recent trend?? This is the norm in every scientific field I've even slightly worked in... This quote just described what we call "inverse theory" in the geosciences. It's the root of pretty much everything we do and has been for many decades. Those of in the scientific computing world have hardly been keeping machine learning at arm's length... A lot of machine learning methods come from scientific fields (e.g. gaussian processes).

There's more to machine learning than CNNs, and many fields have been using machine learning much longer terms like "data science" and "AI" have been around. We just trend towards parametric approaches or approaches that can be reasoned about more clearly. (E.g. lots of convex optimization problems and interpolation/"super-resolution" problems.) Those are machine learning methods as well.

All that said, most of what they're talking about in this article is about approximating solutions to differential equations with purely non-parametric approaches. That is somewhat new and is a much narrower topic, which this article does a nice job of describing. (I don't really take objection to the article as a whole, but a few sentences in it strike me as presumptuous.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Solving inverse problems has been around forever, agreed. Not just in geosciences but also aerospace, biology, etc. But, some of the ways that people are beginning to use universal function approximators inside of scientific simulators is new. The techniques are very similar to traditional inverse problems though: use adjoint equations for gradients and update parameters with some optimizer. It's just now they models include more non- mechanistic terms to fit. There were hints of it before with latent force models, but I am not sure of anyone using this idea to successfully solve 100 dimensional PDEs until 2 years ago.

>There's more to machine learning than CNNs.

Most definitely agreed. I think there's a lot to do with utilizing all of the methods of machine learning neural networks and beyond, automatically within scientific simulation codes.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, using non-parametric methods to approximate PDEs is really what this article is about, and it is a recent and very fruitful trend. I got a bit unnecessarily up-in-arms about phrasing.

(edit: And I just realized you're the author -- excellent work by the way!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very much Julia oriented. Nice that Julia is catching up with other. This one however is missing comparison with R tools. I guess R would also be quite green on the "Quick Summary Table".

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have an example of an R automatic differentiation package which has an ecosystem of compatible tools like PDE solvers, automatic sparsity detection, convolutional neural networks, and global sensitivity analysis? If you have one I'll add it to the list. But the ones that I know are things like madness [1], radx [2], and TMB [3], all of which are good AD systems in their own right (the latter most having some good parallelism), but are missing most of the relevant features for a discussion of scientific ML (but would be great for standard ML). I could also point to autodiffr [4], but that's using Julia to autodiff R.

But if there's one I missed I'd love to hear about it and start tracking the project!

[1] [https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/madness/vignettes/in...](https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/madness/vignettes/introducing_madness.pdf)

[2] [https://rdrr.io/github/quantumelixir/radx/man/radx- package.h...](https://rdrr.io/github/quantumelixir/radx/man/radx-package.html)

[3] [https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v070i05/v70i05.pdf](https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v070i05/v70i05.pdf)

[4] [https://non-contradiction.github.io/autodiffr/index.html](https://non- contradiction.github.io/autodiffr/index.html)

<comment><USER3> I don't, but maybe a disclaimer on R in this article could bring those who could share their experience with R?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good thing I did not ever "Give Up On Julia"™! So happy to see numerical programming breaking new grounds like this

<comment><USER5> You and me both ^_^

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How do I, with a very nice AMD GPU, and running on Windows, play around with any sort of GPU accelerated learning for anything? Last I knew, pretty much nothing worked with either of those caveats.

<comment><USER7> Running Windows is perfectly fine; the major libraries for GPU-accelerated autodiff and networks (CUDNN with Pytorch or Tensorflow) have great support nowadays. It's the AMD GPU that remains essentially useless, as of 2019. If you want to get into the game, I'd recommend buying a middle-of-the-road NVIDIA GPU like the RTX2060.

For toying with autodiff and basic CNNs, CPU works just fine by the way...

<comment><USER6> >It's the AMD GPU that remains essentially useless, as of 2019

I guess more important question... _Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy_

<comment><USER8> Probably support for CUDA over OpenCL.

<comment><AUTHOR> CuBLAS and CuDNN are just better libraries than what exist on OpenCL right now. Until that changes it'll be hard to switch for numerical work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was hoping 'scientific' meant publishing the training data and resulting AI model in order that others could either use it or reproduce it. A lot of neural net A.I. isnt really scientific in this sense.</comment>


Five SpaceX Starlink satellites are about to burn up – SlashGear - <AUTHOR> https://www.slashgear.com/five-spacex-starlink-satellites-are-about-to-burn-up-01582381/ <comment><USER2> For those who only read the headline and the comments: Five of SpaceX's Starlink constellation satellites are set to come burning back through Earth's atmosphere, _an unexpectedly low attrition rate_ following the company's launch in late May.

Seems like it's doing well.

<comment><USER3> Furthermore, only 3 are failures. 2 more are being deorbited as a test.

<comment><USER4> I bet those 2 are also failures, but probably in other satellite subsystems. For example, if the solar panel only partially unfolded, there would be enough power to do a controlled descent, but not enough for useful service work.</comment></comment></comment>


Tech and Business Sources you should be Paying Attention to in 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@m1try/top-100-tech-and-business-sources-you-should-be-paying-attention-to-in-2017-eddaf96bafbb#.ycz6cksha <comment><USER2> Wow. Seems like a ton of work

<comment><AUTHOR> Just a bit. Though I sent out individual reports to each and every curator and shared raw data here:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xiQJBo10qG2U8cnEGNI0...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xiQJBo10qG2U8cnEGNI03vY3TbIR0P90WM3Mx6FzTQA)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the followup!</comment></comment></comment>


Xkcd font - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font <comment><USER2> Ä and Ö look ugly: [https://goo.gl/photos/EWbrvSjPvWMdrUqa8](https://goo.gl/photos/EWbrvSjPvWMdrUqa8)

<comment><USER2> Checked out the font in Fontforge. Realized this is US-ASCII-font. Managed to copy xkcd-A to Ä and also to add dots on it. But totally did not understand how to save this new shit in OTF-format. I think I have used Fontforge successfully before.

<comment><USER2> Made it: [https://goo.gl/photos/eCKocPNuH3fqRxMz7](https://goo.gl/photos/eCKocPNuH3fqRxMz7)

<comment><USER2> [http://timonoko.github.io/jemma/xkcd- Regular.ttf](http://timonoko.github.io/jemma/xkcd-Regular.ttf)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


British divers rescued four Thai adults from cave before saving trapped children - <AUTHOR> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/09/26/british-divers-rescued-four-thai-adults-flooded-cave-complex/ <comment><USER2> The headline unfortunately makes it sound like there was a conscious decision to rescue the adults before the children, whereas the article states:

"However, in a previously unknown twist, the two caving experts thought they had found the boys three days earlier when they surfaced from the zig-zagging submerged passageways into one of the cave's chambers to find four people.

In fact, they had come across a group of inexperienced Thai water company workers who had got into difficulty during the chaotic early days of the rescue mission."

</comment><comment><USER3> [2018-09-26]</comment>


Untethered Soft Robotics - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-018-0024-1 <comment><USER2> Thank you for posting. More please!

This is an interesting overview paper of a subfield that I haven't heard much about. 139 references, so it looks like a good springboard to specific topics.</comment>