Signs of cancer can appear long before diagnosis, study shows - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/05/signs-of-cancer-can-appear-long-before-diagnosis-study-shows <comment><USER2> While it is certainly interesting to hear of new developments for cancer screening, it must be taken in with the proper context. I see a lot of people without medical or public health training fall into the trap of thinking that any sort of screening mechanism is a net positive, without taking into consideration the "costs".

For example, a lot of breast cancer screening has been highly controversial, because of either A) false positive diagnosis B) slowly growing cancers that are too aggressively treated. To properly assess the utility of a cancer screening technique, you need to look at specific long term metrics, such as mortality reduction, that can only be quantified using randomized controlled trials. On the other hand, there's many pitfalls for over treatment. Patients may die during surgery. Biopsy isn't a fun procedure to go through on the receiving end. There's a lot of emotional stress involved. Adverse reactions from chemotherapy/biological agents used to treat the disease. And all this is in the face of the fact that you may die from other causes such as a heart attack.

Certainly I share the optimism with many that we can develop breakthrough cancer screening techniques, but it's irresponsible to let it interfere with rational decision making based on proper studies.

<comment><USER3> This is a hugely important comment and given the demographics of HN, I'll bring up prostate cancer as an example. It is important to catch prostate cancer in younger men, as in younger men it tends to be an aggressive cancer and lead to mortality. Paradoxically, in older men, aggressive screening for prostate cancer is _bad_ if you want men to live longer and healthier lives. To oversimplify a bit, old guys with prostate cancer tend to have slow-growing cancers and they will most likely die of something else long before the cancer becomes a problem. Overtreatment of prostate cancer among old guys leads to _increased mortality_ due to the risks of treatment, as well as leading to decreased quality of life due to side effects of surgery. This is why prostate cancer screening guidelines have been revised over the last 3-5 years.

<comment><USER4> It's interesting that one argument against early detection (in certain situations) is that patients + medical community can't be trusted to act rationally with the information.

<comment><USER5> What no one talks about is when you get an indeterminate result. For thyroid tumors that might be as high as 25-30%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lately I've been doing 7 day fasts two times a year mostly to reduce visceral fat and reduce my chance of type 2 diabetes. However a lot of science is pointing to it being a good way to reduce cancer risk. Nothing definitive, but it's nice to think I may be helping my body fight possible cancer too. Maybe I will catch some of these things early during these phases where the genes are present but the cancer hasn't begun to be diagnosable or slow it down.

I've also heard some doctors suggest that fasting during cancer treatment improves the effectiveness of chemotherapy.

<comment><USER7> 7 days fasting (electrolytes-only) gives me a week-long euphoria afterwards, but days 6-7 show some ugly symptoms of previous diseases, so persevering those is a bit tricky. It also leads to 10-12lb weight loss.

<comment><USER6> Lately I've been trying supplementation of potassium, magnesium and calcium which are supposedly lost during a fast. (I'm skeptical of most supplementation...) Pretty much just sea salt, creme de tartar, and lime juice. Seems to help a little with the weirder effects of a long fast. (Cramping, weakness, lightheadedness) In water they taste a little like gatorade without the sugar.

<comment><USER7> The electrolytes I use are some kind of salt combined with the elements you mentioned; without proper electrolytes you might die during longer fasts. I avoid any kind of juice to make sure that part of my digestive tract can rest and do some internal cleanup. Autophagy should start at around day 5 and immunity renewal at around day 3.

If I do sauna (many hot/cold cycles), I feel great for a day, if I do a 7-day fasting, I feel like that for a week. Sauna probably forces some mild cleanup through sweating, fasting through autophagy and burning off fat that stores toxins body didn't want to deal with earlier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> ... can appear in the genome long before ...

> "What's extraordinary is how some of the genetic changes appear to have > occurred many years before diagnosis, long before any other signs that a > cancer may develop, and perhaps even in apparently normal tissue," said > Clemency Jolly, a co-author of the research based at the Francis Crick > Institute in London.

</comment><comment><USER9> >The findings, based on samples from more than 2,500 tumours and 38 cancer types, reveal a longer-than-expected window of opportunity in which patients could potentially be tested and treated at the earliest stages of the disease.

One issue with this might be selection bias towards cancer. What is the baseline rate of finding these type of mutations in people that do not develop cancer? There are cells going bad all the time in the human body, but because of factors such as the immune system, they actually don't cause any problems.

One example of this kind of thing is prostate cancer. Prostate cancer used to be aggressively treated often with a lot of side effects such as not being able to control urine and sexual dysfunction. However, further research showed that a lot of these cancers either don't continue to progress or progress so slowly that the patient will die with the cancer rather than from the cancer, and so not doing anything is the best course of action.

Overall this is an exciting development, but it will take a lot more research to know what should be done with that information, and to avoid over-treating which has its own downsides.

</comment><comment><USER10> According to Craig Venter, early detection is what we need to eliminate cancer: [https://youtu.be/iUqgTYbkHP8?t=15m37s](https://youtu.be/iUqgTYbkHP8?t=15m37s)

<comment><USER11> Early detection is what the industry wants so they can improve their 5-year survival stats. And of course increase the total addressable market for conventional treatment options

<comment><USER12> Scott Alexander has an interesting blog post about this:

 _Official statistics say we are winning the War on Cancer. Cancer incidence rates, mortality rates, and five-year-survival rates have generally been moving in the right direction over the past few decades.

More skeptical people offer an alternate narrative.

[...]

Suppose a certain cancer is untreatable and will kill you in ten years. If it's always discovered after seven years, five-year-survival-rate will be 0%. If it's always discovered after two years, five-year-survival-rate will be 100%. Better screening can shift the percent of cases discovered after seven years vs. two years, and so shift the five-year-survival rate, but the same number of people will be dying of cancer as ever.

This post tries to figure out which narrative is more accurate._

[https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/01/cancer-progress- much-m...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/01/cancer-progress-much-more- than-you-wanted-to-know/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My friend 40 years young died of cancer yesterday. Fuck Cancer. I know this doesn't add much to the conversation. My apologies.

<comment><USER14> Hey, maybe it doesn't contribute much to the conversation. But it's a super rough thing, and dealing with your grief in the ways you are able to is super important. And as long as you're not taking it out on other people, which you clearly are not in this comment, I figure it's a good thing.

It's always amazes me when such an awful thing happens how the world keeps on spinning, when it really feels like it should just not be able to, but maybe there is ultimately some comfort to be found in that.

Anyways, I really have no idea what you're going through, the loss of any relationship is a very individual experience, but you have my deepest sympathies, I really do feel for your loss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Obviously human bodies are not machines, they're much more complex and less understood than computer hardware, but I can't help but think of the analogy to running web servers.

Medicine today seems a lot like running a web app and never knowing if anything is broken unless users complain. It sort of works, but with good monitoring and alerting set up you can catch issues earlier or prevent them altogether. And the stakes with your body are much higher than just a web app going down, the difference between catching something like cancer a few months earlier is literally life or death.

From what I've read in threads like these, almost everyone in the medicine field is very opposed to moving in this direction, even seemingly in principle, and I really can't understand why. I get that doing certain tests can be invasive on its own, so the cost/benefit has to be considered on a case by case basis. This argument also as an analogy to operations - you get false positives on your webservers too, and sometimes people get woken up in the middle of the night for no reason. But we work to fix noisy alerts one by one, and things generally improve over time. Why is this not possible in medicine?

<comment><USER16> It's because of the idea of iatrogenics: harm caused by the doctor.

If things are going wrong in a web server then intervention is almost always necessary.

The human body can take care of itself, and most of the time it's better to let it.

[https://fs.blog/2013/10/iatrogenics/](https://fs.blog/2013/10/iatrogenics/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _The findings, based on samples from more than 2,500 tumours ..._

Findings based on tumors sound like 20/20 hindsight!

If your crystal ball tells you where in a body tumor will develop five years from now, then if you look at the cells there, you might see some subtle signs that you know are not false positives.

Somehow, I don't think I'm holding my breath for new screening tests.

<comment><USER18> The idea is to take blood samples from a patient population every year for a few years and sequencing the cells and cell free DNA population in the sample. You do this for years until the patient is diagnosed with cancer. At that point you can look back to the original samples a look for any potential biomarkers that in retrospect could have predicted the cancer. You do this for a large number of people. Right now we take a tumor and look for known biomarkers.</comment></comment>


The #kidtech movement: a zero-data architecture for children's apps and sites - <AUTHOR> https://blog.superawesome.com/2018/12/13/the-kidtech-movement-a-zero-data-architecture-for-childrens-apps-and-sites/ <comment><USER2> They are selling a platform for putting advertising in front of kids. Targeted or not, they make money from kids asking parents for stuff they saw in adverts in apps.

</comment><comment><USER3> i feel like this article is missing something. i guess the big thing was "you can make a site where you don't track people individually"? but that doesn't seem like a huge revelation.</comment>


E-learning poor countries during Covid-19, Lockdown? - <AUTHOR> Hi Guys, I live in South Africa, where there is a huge inequality, other people have no access to the internet. We are currently under lockdown making situation even worse. Any suggestions on what we can do to help bridge the digital divide during this time and make sure even the poorest have access to education. Thanks, Jongi <comment><USER2> Hey. Also South African here. Currently building a WhatsApp based classroom/learner resource management application ([https://foondamate.com](https://foondamate.com)) in hopes that this will at least help in the future. So far I've only launched the functionality to download past papers look up works, search wikipedia and look up solutions to equations but have been working on other features. I'm hoping since WhatsApp is wildly accessible this will make a difference. Already have quite a few user, over 50 but under 100. Happy to chat and discuss further. You can mail a me at email@example.com.</comment>


The API Randomizer - <AUTHOR> http://apirandomizer.com/ <comment><USER2> Fun!

You should build an aggregator about air for the benefit of the environment Using these APIs: MyMemory - Translation Memory, Gender and ethnic detection for Russian names, oDesk</comment>


Userinterface.js – A small library to build front-end JavaScript applications - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/thoughtsunificator/userinterface.js <comment><USER2> There are too many non constructive negative comments. Not many web engineers understand how the dom really works, or how to make a library. I applaud this tech demo.

Would I use this in production? No. But the author is not asking for that. It takes a lot of guts to create something and show it to this community. I really enjoyed looking at how the code progressed, how the author tackled a difficult subject, and their replies to constructive comments. Keep it up!

<comment><AUTHOR> With those kinds words I feel like could reach for the farthest unknown places of space. A never ending thank you for those kind words. And a big thanks for even looking at it, it means a lot to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Without JSX (or templates), writing HTML as JS is quite painful. Some don't like JSX but it is truly the best way to write HTML in JS.

<comment><USER4> I agree with your first sentence. We can agree to disagree on the second, though, as I thoroughly prefer a template approach.

<comment><USER3> I should have said that it's the best in my opinion. I think people from different backgrounds do prefer different methods, for example Vue seems very popular with PHP.

<comment><USER4> I came from a java background. Company I started at used an old templating approach using freemarker, and you could say it just stuck with me. I'm not 100% opposed to JSX, and I think it has its uses, but I prefer to keep the rendering layer separate from the functional code behind the component. I'll grant that a lot of frameworks like Angular.js and Vue tend to blur those lines a little bit with their approach due to directives, but in the end, it is still html, at least, and I like that kind of simplicity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At first glance, this seems like it would be painful to write for. It doesn't seem like it really makes anything _easier_ than HTML and vanilla JavaScript.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I'm not so sure about the use case myself...

Input:

UserInterface.model({ name: "children", method: UserInterface.appendChild, properties: { tagName: "div", className: "model", children: [ { tagName: "div", className: "child", textContent: "My first child" // and so on.. } ] } });

UserInterface.runModel("children", { parentNode: document.body });

Output:

My first child

<comment><USER7> I think I'd have about three "UserInterface"'s in me before going crazy over why they didn't just name it "UI"

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you have a great point, how about code snippets or renaming the global object in your index.html or application entry point? Thanks for looking at it, I appreciate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fantastic example of everything not to do. People seem to forget languages are meant for humans to actually write in and be productive in. I think there tends to be this idea that if you make a language constrained/annoying enough to write in then it makes bugs impossible, and that's not true -- it just makes productivity impossible.

<comment><AUTHOR> I mostly agree, however if you go too far on the other edge it does not help either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Feels like a modern take on the Marionette+Backbone stack.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words. If I may ask, what made you think they were lookalike?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> At first glance it looks a bit like Vue.js - did you create this to scratch an itch or learn something? Was there an objective when you created this library, to solve a problem that the current set of front library tools currently are not addressing? Sell me on why javascript developers should be using your library over the other tools that dominate the front end landscape.

<comment><AUTHOR> To begin with, by all mean use React, Vue and others. I think they're amazing and got me super excited whenever I deal with them.

userinterface.js was made out of the frustration I went through when I was maintaining multiple Browser Extensions. I wanted it to exploit my existing knowledge of DOM API and JavaScript language. Something that would at least try to befriend CSS, HTML and JS to make them work together in a semantic fashion.

Giving their own world to each of the parts of the UI was for the most part the core aspect of it.

Most of the frameworks you mentionned have their own ecosystem, I find them pretty hard to integrate in contexts such as Browser Extension if you do not wish for a never ending build toolchain.

I think a fair comparison for userinterface.js would be the Web Components API.

I'm glad you're even asking the question, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really like the angle of the project. Today it is very hard to talk with people about such approaches. People are so close minded about how to do stuff. I would really love to see a hands on how you use it because it must be brilliant. I would hope more people have this kind of out of the box thinking. It is the innovative spirit that drives world forward.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your comments means a lot to me. And by a lot I mean a number that even a quantum computer would have a hard time dealing with!

I will keep on doing what I like to do and keep a very close eye on my enthusiast so that it will never leave my side. We are very much a like in the regard, variety make for a great part of the world in its own.

I am not sure if there would be anything for you to gain today but if it's not today I surely will be making something that is at least worth seconds of your time.

<comment><USER10> Is there any way we could stay in touch? I cant see any private way to communicate here

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This API makes little sense to me. If you are going to manually create a vdom, why not just use the native browser APIs to manually create an actual DOM? Most developers tend to prefer not to manually construct DOM elements, but in this case it looks like vanilla DOM would be both easier and less verbose.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no virtual DOM implied, userinterface.js is operating on the DOM itself. Thanks for even looking at it, I appreciate.

<comment><USER11> In the example code from the readme:

      UserInterface.model({
       name: "children",
       method: UserInterface.appendChild,
       properties: {
        tagName: "div",
        className: "model",
        children: [
         {
          tagName: "div",
          className: "child",
          textContent: "My first child"
          // and so on..
         }
        ]
       }
      });

vdom was probably the wrong terminology for me to use. What I'm getting at with that is that your properties are like a virtual dom tree.

The majority of what I see being painful to use here is caused by exposing all of that manual boilerplate. You can do something equivalent with a hyperscript-like syntax:

        h('div.model', [
          h('div.child', 'My first child')
        ])

Or with JSX that compiles down to what you have in your `properties`:

My first child

You could even trivially add a helper function with low runtime costs that makes it easier to write out the properties. Just using `h` here since it's like hyperscript, but you could call it something better:

        function h(tagName, attributes, ...children) {
          return {
            tagName,
            ...attributes,
            children
          }
        }

That alone would make it easer to read and write properties. The example would become:

      UserInterface.model({
       name: "children",
       method: UserInterface.appendChild,
       properties: (
         h('div', { className: 'model' }, [
          h('div', {
            className: 'child',
            textContent: 'My first child'
          })
        ])
       )
      });

There are other things that you can't fix with syntax changes, though. For example, each model defining the `method` used to add it to the parent seems backwards to me. Shouldn't a component only care about its own state? Down the road, if you wanted to add one of these `children` things to another element by prepending it rather than appending it, you'd have to have to change the child.

<comment><AUTHOR> The helper function is one hell of a great idea. I like it.

I get your point, and it's a fair one. Right now if you want to "prepend" you have to add a container as first child and give it a className to identify it and then use the "runModel" on it.

I like the idea of going the opposite way and I also share your thoughts about component only caring for its own state.

Thank you (again) very much for your feedback, much appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> so much code to do such simple things. honestly i don't see the benefit in this at all.

</comment><comment><USER13> Congratulations. You just reinvented subset of Backbone.js

<comment><USER14> Sure, but this is still a good exercise. Not every library has to be 100% unique and solve a completely different problem.

Kudos to the author for sharing and good luck.

edit: what I don't get is how this post ended up at #10 of /news (I'm jealous)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't get it either and probably never will. Thank you for your kind words!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am glad I am not the only one confused as hell. The API of the library is literally anti-pattern.

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting - it seems more verbose but fairly expressive. Two thoughts: (1) a (more) declarative model would interesting vs. all the callbacks, and (2) where's your to-do app, lol -- all the frameworks have one? :P

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, I will surely make one. I am not sure if you found the few demos I listed in the README? Were they not welcoming enough? Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reminds me a lot of ExtJS which is still pretty widely used by legacy apps so I'm not sure why everyone is hating on it so much.

</comment><comment><USER18> reminds me of Jack Slocum's original Ext.JS with Yahoo UI components .. circa 2006/2007.. Appreciate the awesome effort! even though the industry overall moved to templating model (JSX) which makes it easy.

</comment><comment><USER19> Seems overcomplicated to me, but congrats for the effort!

</comment><comment><USER20> Why does this exist? Why should I ever use this over react, preact, or Vue?

<comment><USER21> Honestly don't think the author is even trying to sell it over React/Ang/etc. Just something he built to make his life easier and open sourced it.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's right, I use React when I have to.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is best book or tutorial to learn how secure a website? - <AUTHOR>

What is best book or tutorial to learn how secure a website? <comment><USER2> Here are a few links my host gave me when i ran into the same problem: [http://www.tech-faq.com/source-code-security- vulnerabilities...](http://www.tech-faq.com/source-code-security- vulnerabilities.shtml) [http://www.fortify.com/landing/extra/ppc_source_code.html?so...](http://www.fortify.com/landing/extra/ppc_source_code.html?source=goog&kw=source_code_security&gclid=CP3piJXu- pUCFRg6awodsQaYFA) <http://sectools.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Jackman,

Thanks a lot for the links. Do you know any book to read?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would you use a zero-knowledge personal data vault on the web? - <AUTHOR>

Service would be primarily text storage but you can also assume the possibility of storing small files (<10 MB). Still working on a method to avoid the (forgetting password == data loss) scenario. <comment><USER2> _Still working on a method to avoid the (forgetting password == data loss) scenario._

Why? "forgetting password == data loss" is a feature, not a bug.

<comment><USER3> Well, it's both. It's just that most alternatives for this kind of application would introduce bigger bugs.</comment></comment>


What Scares Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/google <comment><USER2> > _foretelling a day when a perfect search engine would comprehend all of the > world's information and the meaning behind every user query_

There.

That line.

That's why Google will eventually be dethroned.

Google sees the world through the lens of search -- through the lens of querying. With a little adjusting you could massage the above into Microsoft's strategy in a different era.

It's not entirely clear what it will be, but someday we're not going to access all of the world's information starting with short query strings that we type into a search bar. When that happens, Google's worldview won't be able to make the jump, just like Microsoft and IBM did not in the past. They're a search company.

<comment><USER3> _They're a search company._

They're an advertising company, which happens to own a search engine.

(30% of their revenues come from advertising on sites not owned by Google. By way of comparison, that is ten times what Google makes from every revenue source _other_ than advertising. See their 2008 Annual Report if you don't trust my math.)

<comment><USER4> "Google is an Artificial Intelligence company. They just don't advertise the fact."

<comment><USER5> Source?

<comment><USER6> It's like porn! You might not be able to define intelligence but you know it when you see it.

Noam Chomsky points out we know English automatically, not through having been taught rules.

Similarly, I don't know have any references and artificial intelligence nor do I know exactly how does their search system works (well, I know page rank but I know they've done lots of work beyond it). But I can tell they're semi- intelligent by experiencing the semi-intelligence of their searching system. So they are an artificial intelligence company whether they say it or not, whether they know it or not, simply by the fact that what they create operates semi-intelligently to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "Most of the emphasis within the company is on the next couple of years, and > we tend not to think about longer than that," says Peter Norvig, Google's > director of research.

Does anyone else, after having read this article, find that it isn't really about what the title suggests? There's no direct admission or direct quote from anyone at Google about what scares them.

The closest this article comes to telling us what scares Google is extrapolating that Google's slightly different method of developing products (fail fast, fail often) is a sign that they're scared. It's quite a stretch.

The Atlantic may be a venerable publication, but the title on this one sure looks like linkbait to me.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, misleading article title.

I really like Norvig's attitude. When big companies start worrying about how powerful they're going to be in 10 years it's a bad thing. It leads to fear and paranoia, which makes it harder to not be evil.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had a comment on why I think articles like this one are silly, but remembered Fake Steve did a much better job here:

[http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/07/lets-all-take-deep- breath-a...](http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/07/lets-all-take-deep-breath-and- get-some.html)

For example, from this Atlantic article:

 _"Microsoft never got its collective head into competing against the simple and free stuff available on the Web._ "

Fake Steve:

 _"They're starting to look like the new Scott McNealy. Remember him? Ran a company called Sun, which had a great little business going until McNealy became obsessed with Gates and started doing things like paying millions of dollars to buy StarOffice so he could get into that booming free software business."_

</comment><comment><USER10> [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=profit+microsoft+ibm+go...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=profit+microsoft+ibm+google)

Microsoft has started brand new billion dollar businesses (TFS, SharePoint) recently --- Google, so far, hasn't shown they can do anything except sell ads.

<comment><USER11> Yes, you beat me to this. The premise of the article is bogus. Both IBM and Microsoft are doing well. I also checked in WolframAlpha <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=microsoft,+google,+ibm> I like the way it returns a well-designed summary. I'll try to use it more.

<comment><USER12> Yes, but IBM had to completely change its stripes in order to survive. They used to make business computers. Yet they sold off every last bit of computer manufacturing, the last part going to China as Lenovo. Their core competency is no longer computer design and manufacture, it's now basically just business consulting.

So, yes, IBM is doing well, but it's no longer playing the same game in the same market that it once was.

<comment><USER13> > They used to make business computers. Yet they sold off every last bit of > computer manufacturing, the last part going to China as Lenovo.

When did IBM stop making System/Z (the mainframes)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would imagine Twitter scares Google. For the first time ever, there are questions for which Google isn't the best place to type out your query.

"What do people think of X?" "What's happening in _country_" etc.

Google determines quality based on variables which take time to shake out, in part because that's harder to fake.

Twitter can be gamed, but on the whole it seems to give a decent picture, perhaps because in effect you see many results on the page in front of you, rather than links to the results.

<comment><USER15> As with wikipedia, google can just index twitter. If twitter becomes a true threat(which I personally doubt) google can always tweak PageRank to work with fast evolving twitter news. Instead of searching twitter many people will still search google and click on twitter results if they happen to be relevant.

<comment><USER16> For that, Google needs the Twitter fire hose. I am not sure if Twitter would be willing to offer that to Google at this time.

<comment><USER17> Or they can just look at the topology of the connections and the RSS feeds of the tiny fraction of people representative of the entire thing. Not a big deal, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Google Earth was bought, not made (they acquired Keyhole, Inc). And I don't think it makes any money for google, at all.

Many huge companies have diversified revenue streams, within a broad industry - like Nestle, General Electric, Proctor and Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive.

Google has diversified products, but it doesn't have diversified revenues.

That said, information comprehension is like science in that the more you look, the more there is. Google's mission may have a _lot_ of runway left in it.

<comment><USER19> Totally. IBM got blindsided by software as a product. Microsoft got blindsided by the Internet. Google is not going to be blindsided by some kids who magically perfect search in 10 years. It'll be something completely outside their core competency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's hard to imagine where search will be in 10 years without speculating about where the web will be in 10 years. I think when we get better at organizing information when making web pages (or their future equivalent), search will get better and easier, and Google for search will be less relevant.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is really what scares Google.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWe7eUdgx1I&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWe7eUdgx1I&feature=related)</comment>


Facebook's 2016 Election Team Gave Advertisers a Blueprint to a Divided US - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/facebooks-2016-election-team-gave-advertisers-a-blueprint <comment><USER3> All in all, this is why there is no dislike button. The entire Facebook system incentivizes division because division creates revenue. It's a perpetual loop.

Let's walk through how it works:

Step 1) A person posts, or shares, something incredibly divisive. Note: There is no feedback button to let the poster know the content is hateful and that broader society disapproves of it. There is also no consequence to posting it most of the time.

Step 2) The content attracts likes. Since there is no dislike button, or negative feedback, any likes received makes the poster feel good.

Step 3) The poster is emboldened and increases his/her frequency of posting divisive or hateful content. This attracts a following and more engagement for the original poster. The poster has no need to create inclusive content. They are incentivized to find and highlight divisive thoughts from their life because it rewards them with engagement and the Facebook system re-enforces those thoughts.

Step 4) Repeat

Each subsequent post creates more comments, more engagement, more passion. This is great for Facebook because it means more time on site and increased usage frequency. The handout Facebook is giving advertisers is proof of that. They are monetizing the system. Make no mistake, it is designed to work this way and they are profiting from it.

<comment><USER4> I disagree - reddit has a downvote button and it has zero Impact on the outcome.

This isn't Facebook making this happen.

This is human beings being human beings in an alien environment exposing the difference between their stated preferences and unstated preferences.

It happened with forums, it likely happened with geocities.

You don't need a like or dislike button, you just need the internet and text.

Anti Semitic forums were attacking Jewish forums before Facebook even showed up.

Facebook is just absorbing the entire internet in that all the "forums" are now just groups on Facebook. So it owns all the ad revenue everywhere - <USER2> long as people stay on Facebook.

But there's no special incentive for divisiveness - that's just what happens when people interact in a feature deficient, always on, text first, persistent environment.

<comment><USER3> Reddit is a different beast. It is confined to a sub-reddit and the people who judge it are the people who are part of that sub-reddit. Mods included.

Also, reddit doesn't spread the content if there is any uptick. It is all pretty confined. Facebook does the exact reverse. It goes out of its way to spread the content that is driving engagement.

<comment><USER4> The thesis holds that a dislike button's absence emboldens negative behavior.

This is not true, because if so Reddit's and their subreddits would have a very different history.

And as another user pointed out, the research shows that a dislike button actually creates MORE engagement and content, not less.

My point is that this is the human mind on the internet; most human beings have no clue about how they work, what their hidden biases are, and what assumptions and fantasies they carry to deal with the world.

When those heuristics are treated to a system that assumes their best behavior, it will fail to our more regular, normal behavior.

<comment><USER3> Referencing one research article isn't proof. There are several others that argue otherwise.[1] On Reddit, a dislike button isn't meaningless. If your post and comment karma go down endlessly, you start to lose privileges. So it really does encourage behavior that is acceptable in the context of the subreddit. The research paper, for example, talks more about rating scales in context.

As I have mentioned, Facebook's problem is that a) There is endless spread for bad content, like fake news. b) There is no way to have the crowd give definitive negative feedback to the user where not only is a dislike recorded, but the impact of the dislike is weighted based on the standing of the user giving it. c) and even if there was, there is no way to degrade privileges.

[1] [http://www.rangevoting.org/sen- recsys2011.pdf](http://www.rangevoting.org/sen-recsys2011.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember reading about Obama's election and the use of "big data" and "data science" to target voters: [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/509026/how- obamas-team-us...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/509026/how-obamas-team- used-big-data-to-rally-voters/)

The social media companies picked on that and ran with it. So, while Facebook is not exactly the paragon of ethical behavior, this is just fodder for click bait. If the same targeting had worked in someone's favor the article would have been "gave advertisers an edge over traditional advertising" or something.

<comment><USER6> Check Cambridge Analytica:

[https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2017/10/16/15657512/...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2017/10/16/15657512/cambridge-analytica-trump-kushner-flynn-russia)

<comment><USER7> They helped Tory in this summer GE in UK, and they failed miserably.

<comment><USER6> uh? they were behind Brexit

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This idea goes back a long way. See "The 480", from 1964.[1] Karl Rove got his start doing such analysis. There's a famous picture of young Rove with a reel of computer tape. Such data used to be used to target direct mail and phone calls. It didn't help with TV and newspapers, though, and they were more important.

The difference this time is that Facebook now has a big fraction of the news business. Now this stuff has real traction.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_480](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_480)

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's a WaPo summary on the legality of "the Russians" buying Facebook ads: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post- politics/wp/2017/09...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post- politics/wp/2017/09/07/did-facebook-ads-traced-to-a-russian-company-violate-u- s-election-law).

Basically, it all hinges on if the ads mention a candidate (illegal) or were worded in a vague manner (gray zone).

<comment><USER10> Maybe all political advertising needs to have a named publisher like in the UK get caught promoting a candidate without stating the publisher and their election agent will get you in the election court.

<comment> xkcd-sucks "Published by Americans for a Safer Tomorrow, inc."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Techmeme summary: _Alex Kantrowitz / BuzzFeed: Facebook provided political advertisers 14 targeted categories from very liberal "youthful urbanites" to very conservative "great outdoors" during 2016 election_

</comment><comment><USER11> The implication of this is that the real "filter bubble" is not the one people choose by their free association with other people, but the filters applied by the platform for advertising purposes. Your neighbours are reacting to ads, news and clickbait that you've never even seen and may not have the opportunity to see.

</comment><comment><USER12> Neal Stephenson's _Interface_ (1994) has never been more relevant.

 _" The corresponding item on the list was highlighted, a bright purple box drawn over it so that the user could see which category he was dealing with at the moment. The hundred categories and names on the list were as follows:_

      IRRELEVANT MOUTH BREATHER
      400-POUND TAB DRINKER
      STONE-FACED URBAN HOMEBOY
      BURGER-FLIPPING HISTORY MAJOR
      SQUIRRELLY WINNEBAGO JOCKEY
      BIBLE-SLINGING PORCH MONKEY
      ECONOMIC ROADKILL
      PENT-UP CORPORATE LICKSPITTLE
      HIGH-METABOLISM WORLD DOMINATOR
      MIDAMERICAN KNICKKNACK QUEEN

..."

</comment><comment><USER13> Reddit is different, you don't have public profile with you identity. The upvote and down vote are true opinion of people.

</comment><comment><USER14> BAM! You've been _Buzzfed_!

</comment><comment><USER15> Remember: If you're not the customer, then you are the product.</comment>


FreeBSD 8 released - <AUTHOR> http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.0R/relnotes.html

<comment><USER2> FreeBSD 7/8 are really starting to feel like the decisions made in 5.x are starting the pay off. Between the ULE Scheduler, ZFS filesystem, DTrace (even if not as good as on Solaris) and the new Jails, Its a pretty sweet technology packed release.

Hopefully we will be upgrading some of the apache.org server soon :)

<comment><USER3> If you want ZFS and DTrace, is there a good reason to prefer FreeBSD to OpenSolaris?

<comment><USER2> Because the FreeBSD userland enviroment and ports collection are sane, and there is a reasonable way to do upgrades, while with OpenSolaris you have... what?

<comment><USER3> A Synaptic-like package manager? It's really easy to use and self-updates the system every time there is something new without need to make the human attached to the computer go and check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sometime I wish FreeBSD and OpenBSD are more popular than Linux...

<comment><USER5> Technically this is already true, since OS X is a FreeBSD variant and is more popular than Linux (at least in the desktop world).

But I know what you mean. I actually host two development servers for FreeBSD and employ one of the core devs (laszlof). I'm trying to help! :)

<comment><USER6> The kernel is different, and the userland is different. OS X may be FreeBSD- derived, but it has moved a long way from its roots since then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> FreeBSD 4.2 was my first copy. I had so much fun tinkering with it. It's still my favorite unix os.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great! Just in time for me to build my new ZFS-based file server. =)

</comment><comment><USER3> Does FreeBSD have something like Synaptic?

<comment><USER8> FreeBSD setups typically use the BSD Ports collection for package management, which compiles from source + patches (vaguely similar to Gentoo Linux).

There doesn't appear to be a mainstream UI for BSD ports.

 _(Curiously, the Mac OS X equivalent, MacPorts, has at least two current UI projects.)_

<comment><USER9> To append to what your are saying this is because ports is set up for unix people to work it.

To search you use ls, cd, and find. To install you "cd <dir> && make install".

If you are installing freebsd you should already be comfortable enough to not need a pretty gui hiding these very simple details.

<comment><USER10> You could use find, but it is easier to use the built in facilities to search for ports. If you are in the ports directory you can:

make search name=name_of_port

to search for a port by name and:

make search key=key_to_search_for

to search by key. You can also use quicksearch instead of search to reduce the verbosity of the results. If you read the ports man page, you will find a bunch of other nifty things you can do with the ports system.

<comment><USER11> I tend to just search at <http://www.freebsd.org/ports/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'll try to put it on my EEE 900 this weekend (which is running Arch at the moment)

<comment><USER13> Post some recent instructions if you get it working? I had numerous problems with networking (which I solved) and swap/RAM overhead (which I didn't) when I tried installing to my Eee 900.

<comment><USER12> According to this list it should work: [http://wiki.freebsd.org/AsusEee#head-6d00dcb960b731976447f25...](http://wiki.freebsd.org/AsusEee#head-6d00dcb960b731976447f2511654a0419ce7cc0f)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying</comment>


Facebook Video: Now Serving 1 Billion Views A Month - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/22/facebook-video-now-serving-1-billion-views-a-month-including-this-amazing-zuck-impression/ <comment><USER2> Did anyone watch that video? I can't help but get the sense that the web world overestimates its own importance. One of the engineers that built FB video: "With this job [...] you can go home saying, I've changed the world."

Really?

I guess I'd make a terrible FB/Google/Twitter/Whatever employee. I understand that yes it's cool and communication is faster and easier than before, but - seriously - is it really world-changing?

The discovery of agriculture, the advent of organized religion, the dissolution of organized religion, the idea of self-determination, the harnessing of electricity - these things changed the world.

But adding a single feature to a single website - really? Would someone who was cryogenically frozen just before FB video was put online, and then was unfrozen after, be able to comprehend the world they were living in? Do the same thought experiment with organized religion.

"But people were skeptical of other world-changing technology or ideology at the time, too." Yes. You're right. And I'm skeptical now. Doesn't make me wrong.

I understand that they're in California and that it's apparently fashionable to imitate Jobs-like megalomaniacal optimism about one's own importance. I understand that self-motivation requires them to believe that what they do is the highest cause, and that it's important for one's career to appear to be a Jihad on behalf of the employer.

And don't get me wrong, FB is a great website and a really useful one which I use regularly to find people. But can we please agree that it's not world- changing. Here's what's great: it doesn't have to be. You do not _need_ to be a hero. If your code doesn't change the world, that does not diminish you (if you never have a true, deep human friendship - _that_ diminishes you).

<comment><USER3> "I understand that they're in California and that it's apparently fashionable to imitate Jobs-like megalomaniacal optimism about one's own importance. I understand that self-motivation requires them to believe that what they do is the highest cause, and that it's important for one's career to appear to be a Jihad on behalf of the employer."

I get the feeling that so-called social media is often largely _insular_ media. People get their circle of friends and associates, and that becomes their whole world, which in turn becomes _the_ whole world.

There are people who believe that if they put something on Twitter or FB then they've announced something to the world, and now _everybody_ knows. The idea that vast numbers of people are not only not on one or anther social media tool, but simply do not give a rat's ass, is a completely alien concept.

<comment><USER2> _People get their circle of friends and associates, and that becomes their whole world, which in turn becomes the whole world._

You're right - and I'm afraid it might be even worse than that.

A world built of online "contacts" rather than real life relationships is a shallow one at best. So 10,000 people watched my video, and 1000 of them became my friends. How many of those will console me when I lose a parent? And if they won't - then why am I spending time on them?

One justification is that it's the "whole world." In other words, it's _important._ Maybe it doesn't mean anything - but it's "very important".

I just hope a whole generation of people (myself included) don't wake up one day to discover that we have no real social ties, no firm bedrock on which to anchor identities and lives in the real world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe less _is_ sometimes more. Facebook serving 1B/month while Youtube serves 1.2B/day.

But, last I heard, Google is yet to make money off Youtube. Facebook may be finding that video can be an value-adding supplement to its business, not just a bandwidth-sucking enticement to the lowest-common-denominator of the masses. [ "not that there's anything _wrong_ with the latter" - it just doesn't seem to make for a profit center, even for Google.]

<comment><USER5> Of course there's no _evidence/data_ cited that it is yet a _profitable_ profit center for Facebook.</comment></comment>


Facebook halts Oculus Quest sales in Germany amid privacy concerns - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/09/facebook-halts-oculus-quest-sales-in-germany-amid-privacy-concerns/ <comment><USER2> The ban isn't about the sale of oculus quest. It's about all oculus devices.

Facebook said all oculus devices would need a facebook account. I know this statement is overly broad and not (exactly) true but this is the nightmare scenario oculus users are dreading.

Facebook said there were caveats and exceptions. For example, if you bought it before date x then you don't need to create a facebook account, etc... The german privacy commission isn't convinced facebook would/could separate the purely oculus created facebook accounts from their normal accounts.

Now it becomes a coupling issue. Apparently it's illegal in Germany and I know this is illegal in Belgium. And if I took a guess it would be illegal in most countries in the EU.

<comment><USER3> It violates GDPR, so it's illegal in the EU in general (plus UK & Switzerland). The relevant parts are Article 7 Paragraph 4, and Recital 43. In short, consent isn't valid if it's a condition for an unrelated contract.

[https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/)

[https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-43/](https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-43/)

<comment><USER4> EDIT: Maybe this wasn't clear, but I was replying specifically to this part in the parent comment: "violates GDPR, so it's illegal in the EU in general (plus UK & Switzerland)" as GDPR never specifically applied in Switzerland.

I'm not sure it applies to Switzerland. GDPR at least doesn't seem to apply to Swiss companies catering to Swiss residents [1], so I'm not sure it would apply to Facebook/Oculus here. Also, if we're going for completeness EU/EEA is included as far as I know, not just EU.

[1] [https://www.pwc.ch/en/insights/tax/gdpr-swiss-based- companie...](https://www.pwc.ch/en/insights/tax/gdpr-swiss-based- companies.html)

<comment><USER5> switzerland is not in EU

<comment><USER6> It is, however, member of EFTA, the Single Market Agreement, Schengen, and the European Conference for the Protection of Spotted Eels (but not the Customs Union, nor EEA). It also has a host of individual agreements to participate in Bologna and the like.

As a result, any given EU regulation, especially of the economy, is more likely than not to also apply to Switzerland.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was kind of tempted to buy an Oculus headset because a friend of mine had good things to say about it. But the coupling requirement has made buying it impossible, as I don't have, never had, and will never have a Facebook account. One less gadget to worry about.

<comment><USER8> Can you not just make a throw away account?

<comment><USER9> Facebook will typically lock such accounts until you give him pictures of yourself in your house with your driver's license.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted, they actually lock people out asking for an government ID[0] (AFAIK not necessarily yourself in the photo).

I also know someone who wanted to change their last name (their current one is already fake) and the system didn't let them without sending an ID.

[0] [https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=1016165...](https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=101616510396306)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I created an account a few years ago, since a few of my friends relied on Messenger / FB Events to coordinate plans. I used anti-tracking plugins, on mobile I used an unofficial F-Droid client for Messenger, desktop only used the mbasic.facebook.com

It was probably two months before my account was flagged for "suspicious activity" and asked that I submit a photo of a government-issued ID, which I never obliged.

<comment><USER12> You're lucky. I made it 30 minutes after changing all the privacy settings and not providing a phone number then signing in on my phone browser. I accidentally sent in my profile pic for the "suspicious activity" verifier which is totally on me. Instantly got my account disabled and have been unsuccessful at recovering it since June 2019 despite several attempts at sending in my ID as they requested.

However, now the create a new account page says there's an existing disabled account with this email address, but the account support portal says one doesn't exist! Top notch engineering. Luckily I have my IG account for Messenger login, but I can't use it for desktop sign-on's which is pretty dumb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Currently there is a rumor of a new Quest being released at Facebook Connect September 16.

Walmart and Target also might have "leaked" and confirmed the price of the new base 64GB version to be only $299 which makes things interesting.

And they haven't really only stopped "selling" them in Germany. They are out of stock almost everywhere, Walmart, B&H, abt and more.

Renders of the new "Quest" were also leaked by a twitter account with a great track record when it comes to leaks, the user h0x0d who's account has been closed by twitter :-)

<comment><USER14> I wonder how similar it's going to be to the Snapdragon XR2 reference design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The charge against coupling is valid.

I had almost given up ever using FB last year, perhaps logged in briefly once a month.

The pan I bought an Oculus Quest (best toy ever!) and I started uploading videos to FB so I could watch them on my Quest, started buying Quest VR experiences, etc.

After the purchase, I am logging into FB once a week.

</comment><comment><USER16> It should be considered illegal product bundling for Oculus to require a Facebook account. Facebook has an extreme monopoly on social media and should be shattered into a dozen companies.

</comment><comment><USER17> Ah, good, the EU is serious about enforcing antitrust tying rules.

<comment><USER18> This is a GDPR issue not an anti-trust one. Also it should apply not just to Germany. Effectively buying the product cannot be tied to given consent for an unrelated service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I like the way they suspended sales only in Germany just to get good boy points from the German authorities.

<comment><USER20> A more cynical view would be that it is to foster resentment from potential buyers against the regulatory authorities, "see what they made us do"

<comment><USER21> You think we are bootlickers like that, in Germany? You are mistaken.

<comment><USER22> Well, there's any kind of person anywhere, anyway.

I think it's not wrong to be pre-emptively wary of that (and prepare arguments for it), considering the way F.U.D. about "cookie banners" [1] got many people worked up against a supposedly useless and clueless law that (again, supposedly) "forces" sites to show such banners -- because their desire to track, which is the first link in this causal chain, is being ignored or assumed as given and benign.

[1] banners sites put up because they would prefer to track everyone on the first visit, rather than having an opt-in link somewhere in the footer for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've been on the fence about buying one and was leaning against it because of this kind of stuff. In the few weeks since I started following it this kind of stuff has already started coming up. No thanks. FB loses a customer again.

</comment><comment><USER24> I sure wish the US had rules around coupling.

I wish this concept went further, too. Hardware products like this should have to demonstrate a good reason to eschew a no-login option.</comment>


Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/Microsoft to censor hate speech within 24-hours - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/31/technology/hate-speech-facebook-twitter-eu/index.html <comment><USER2> Interesting conflation of "hate speech" with "supporting terror" in the article.

</comment><comment><USER3> What needs to be censored is all of the above incl. cnn. Problem solved.</comment>


Deep Learning in the Stock Market - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@TalPerry/deep-learning-the-stock-market-df853d139e02#.x8nyhfhg2 <comment><USER2> I did something similar( with two other people) for my work hackathon, the difference was that my program analyzed news and matched the subject of that news article to a traded stock, and then predicted from the sentiment of the news article whether the stock is gonna go down or up. Very simple, and it worked most times, but could be improved on a lot

</comment><comment><USER3> I commend this guy for trying to improve improve his skills and writing about it.

I'm not sure why he said he's just assuming the stock market data of 1000 stocks offers the type of structure relevant for NLP and this is plausible.

But even if it did, he might be in for a world of hurt trying to predict the VIX with it. The VIX is based on the prices of near term options, not stocks. The connection to stocks comes via these SPX options using the SPX weighted index of stocks. The VIX isn't trying to be accurate though, its a standard deviation estimation for options expiring 30 days into the future.

Who knows, correlation isn't causation and this doesn't seem possible, but anything can happen and he might find something. But then you're left with a black box.

</comment><comment><USER4> If structure can be inferred in financial data, it's bound to change in unexpected ways, at some point. I'm not familiar with NLP, but I'm guessing for all intents and purposes the structure of language is assumed to be fairly static.

</comment><comment><USER5> buy on the rumor; sell on the news.</comment>


The Vegetarians Who Turned into Butchers - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/dining/butchers-meat-vegetarian-vegan.html <comment><USER2> The only ones 'turning conventional meat industry on its head' are going to be researchers in private R&D turning up synthetic meat products from animal cultures or plant cultures. This article is silly, imo it reminds me of the hipster side of vegetarianism/veganism rather than the philosophical side; Convictions are a convenient aesthetic. Besides in the case of free-range, well that's out the window even faster because of climate change.

<comment><USER3> > researchers in private R&D

this or insect farmers. otherwise i agree, these "ethical butchers" are a joke in regard to the ethical morale behind vegeterians/vegans. i'm not saying you can only be a veggie/vegan if you love animals but please don't use this topic to advertise yourself.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Online curl command builder - <AUTHOR> http://curl.build <comment><AUTHOR> There's something up with the DNS for the curl.build domain right now, here's an alternate URL: [https://curl-builder.herokuapp.com/](https://curl- builder.herokuapp.com/)</comment>


Ask PG: Shall we ban Techcrunch articles? - <AUTHOR>

I think most users here read Techcrunch frequently. Shall we just ban submissions linked to Techcrunch? We can have room for more interesting stuffs. <comment><USER2> I actually don't read TC.

I'd rather have the knowledgeable folk on here upmod a good TC article, then I'll read it.

Crowdsourcing my reading :)

<comment><USER3> I agree, but I'd also like to have the ability to down-vote submissions.

<comment><USER4> considering that TC employees regularly check news.yc it's plausible to assume they automatically upvote all TC stories.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, which is why you should be able to downmod.

<comment><USER6> If you add in the ability to downmod submissions this place will rapidly turn into Digg. i.e. An environment where a handful of people control the majority of the information.

As far as excluding TC content goes, while I could live without it, think about the number of AWESOME discussions that would have killed in the past, then ask yourself if that's what you want for the future.

<comment><USER7> A handful of people already control the majority of the information on this forum.

ValleyWag posted a flurry of articles which were counter to YCombinator interests and now ValleyWag articles are automatically posted with the dead attribute. The same scenario could happen with TechCrunch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> No please. The comments here on TC articles is very interesting. The comments on TC often are trolling and add no value.

</comment><comment><USER9> As much as people bag on Techcrunch, with many times said bagging being justified, I find that it's one of my main sources for startup news. They tend to cover a lot of startups that I wouldn't hear otherwise from other sources, probably runner up being Mashable.

You guys have to remember that they are writers, so it's in their nature to write stuff that's interesting and conspiratorial, granted this can come at the price of accuracy, but that's where the community here can filter and chime in.

But inaccuracies of specifics aside, I still think it's a great source.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like Techcrunch. I can't keep up with it though, they just publish so many articles, and I don't have time for all of them.

I count on Hacker News, Reddit, etc. to tell me which ones are worth the read, so I vote no.

</comment><comment><USER11> Honestly Techcrunch is such a tabloid.

You know when I first started frequenting this board, it was because of links that would challenge my existing understanding of coding and teach me something new, or thought-provoking questions challenging the establishment party-line, such as needing to go to a name-brand college or even going to college in order to be successful.

How is reading about the latest trials and tribulations of Microsoft and Yahoo any different from reading about the latest exploits of Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus? Less gossip more ideas please!

</comment><comment><USER12> Unlikely to happen, since YC companies get so much coverage from TechCrunch....

<comment><USER13> well said they definitely scratch YC's back and are a key media outlet for startups. I get a bit annoyed seeing every TC article on YC but oh well

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Instead of banning any website, pg can enable down-votes just for posts from websites that are brought up for ban.

<comment><USER15> A personalized blacklist would be nice. I.e. a submission with a blacklisted URL won't even be visible on my front page unless its score is over a configurable threshold.

<comment><USER16> This capability is available as a third-party tool:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173581>

<comment><USER15> Great, thanks, but - no.

(a) it doesn't exactly do what I want it to

(b) it's a third party (officially unsupported) extension

(c) GreaseMonkey itself is just too much of a security risk.

PS. I did upmod your post though :)

<comment><USER17> As the 'third party' that wrote this, I have to ask:

(a) What else do you want it to do? I'm bored and willing to add to it.

(b) Is it so mission critical you need official support? I'll gladly sell you a support contract for $100/yr. That will buy you piece of mind that if PG ever changes the html structure of the page, I'll update my GM script accordingly.

(c) Don't install scripts without looking at the source first. I posted mine for all to see.

PS. I'm serious about (a) ... I'll gladly work on it for fun.

<comment><USER14> _> I'm bored and willing to add to it_

Kind of unrelated request:

Can you write a GM script that displays a red envelope like in Reddit, if someone replies to any of my comments?

Thanks for the blacklist btw. Very useful. And your cross site GET via image request is interesting. How about multiple requests when the data doesn't fit (with an end-of-requests marker)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A bit OT, but what I like about this thread: PG didn't even react, the community decided what is best. And the title is wrong - it should be "Ask HN" not "Ask PG".

</comment><comment><USER19> I've been pretty critical of the content of TechCrunch articles in the past, but I'd never suggest an outright ban on them for any reason (either volume or content). If we really believe in crowd-sourcing, then any issue with any content provider, TechCrunch or otherwise, should correct itself if the collective group thinks that it's becoming a problem. Artificial, arbitrary bans shouldn't be necessary.

</comment><comment><USER20> Yes, please. I appreciate that Arrington has solicited feedback here at news.ycombinator.com, but that in itself doesn't make TechCrunch articles any more useful.

If TechCrunch isn't banned, please mod the system so that links to TechCrunch start out with a negative point value and can be modded up.

</comment><comment><USER21> I would say no. I do read Techcrunch, but I very rarely read the comments there. The important articles do find their way on News.YC, and I'd rather read 20 insightful comments here than 100 spammy comments there.

</comment><comment><USER22> No, don't ban them. I only read TC articles when they show up here.

The comments here are also good.

<comment><USER23> I agree. Hacker News acts as a good filter, and the comments here are generally higher quality than what one sometimes finds on TechCrunch. No point in banning it -- some of their stories are worth reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why not just add a small negative weight to all articles that come from an address which isn't unique? For instance if someone discovers XKCD for the first time and submits 20 of them, sure they're great but presumably once you've seen one you could navigate the rest of the site on your own. So add a little automatic downmod to the other 19 submissions because it wasn't a unique site. It would alleviate the techcrunch problem and similar ones without actually banning anything.

</comment><comment><USER25> More room? Is there some submission/day limit I'm not aware of?

It might be that most read TC, and it might also be true that most read it through here.

</comment><comment><USER26> No. Thats a daft suggestion. This site acts as a filter for the more popular techcrunch articles.

<comment><USER27> No it doesn't. The techcrunch shills submit and upmod (multiple times) every techcrunch article. Techcrunch's writing style is terrible, and the articles are usually hearsay and completely unresearched.

In the words of a famous kitten: DO NOT WANT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> No.

Too much noise to read TC directly. I prefer to see the noteworthy posts show up here.

</comment><comment><USER29> Looks like Arrington is taking the active step and banning Hacker News: <http://twitter.com/TechCrunch/statuses/804383391>

Good thing I don't frequent this site =)

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't believe he said that. But I personally had several arguments with Mike Arrington before on his Techcrunch blog comments. (Mostly regarding to Music business model and one of the startup that I worked before) So I am really sorry to PG and other HN members that my submission causing such a big trouble.

I learned from a friend before that most law school students may take an oath in not telling a lie due to their special status in society. I hope Mike is not really taking this one seriously.

My deep apology to PG.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The "more room" argument is silly. The techcrunch articles aren't just "taking up room", they're on the main page because people are _voting them up_. People _like them_ more than the articles that aren't being voted up.

</comment><comment><USER31> Don't bite the hand that feeds you. I know that some people find Mr Arrington very annoying etc, but a lot of people read TC and he does generate a lot of traffic towards the target, even if what he writes isn't nice.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm still more interested in having the number of upvotes required to get somthing in the rss be increased, having 1 other person finding something interesting isn't enough.

3 or 4 should be about right

</comment><comment><USER33> 'Ban' is a very strong word. Maybe there should just be a handicap that rates TC articles 'lower', that way if the article is good it can be rated up, but the ones nobody cares about will trickle down

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I did not know this one post attracts so many replies. I did not mean it to be a troll to promote my own karma. I was a bit annoyed this morning when I saw a lot of top 30 articles are from Techcrunch on Yahoo! Microsoft deals. I felt I am not here to read Techcrunch but some other rare stuffs that other members feeling interesting. And I am sorry that I can't modify the title of the post after I submitted it. Yes, it should be a question to "Ask HN:" instead of "Ask PG".

</comment><comment><USER34> Nope. Dont like the idea for the reasons mentioned by others.

</comment><comment><USER35> No. Techcrunch is a good source of technology and startup news. I agree sometime there is too much of fabricated stories and rumor stuff. Nevertheless, techcrunch does an amazing job of introducing new startups. I guess it acts like an advertisement platform for many of the YC startups. As long as we can control the submission on YC through voting, it's good to submit techcrunch article

</comment><comment><USER36> Why are we banning any sources? You never know where any good news/information is going to come from. It just seems pretty silly to me.

</comment><comment><USER37> I actually like my tech crunch filtered through the great minds that make up the YC community. I also find value in the commentary that gets made here regarding the tech crunch articles that do make it to the front page.

</comment><comment><USER38> I would rather ban TechCrunch inlinks to News.YC. Every mention of News.YC there means an incremental merging of that community into this one, meaning here becomes more like there.

</comment><comment><USER39> No, I don't read techcrunch. But I think PG should cluster new stories to filter out similar stories. (Such that there isn't a new story on Microsoft/Yahoo, Xobni each day on hacker news)

</comment><comment><USER40> Yes. Not becuase I read it, but because I don't want to read it. I'm always disappointed when an interesting-sounding article ends up linking to a pointless Techcrunch rant.

</comment><comment><USER41> I vote to NOT ban it. I stopped following tc because the best tc articles always floated to the top here on HN, and I didn't need to sort through the riffraff myself.

</comment><comment><USER14> [http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/hn-blacklist-now- with-u...](http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/hn-blacklist-now-with-ui.html)

</comment><comment><USER42> No.

I don't read TC that often (or at all, really), so I get use out of having the better articles posted here.

techcrunch != valleywag

<comment><USER43> so you're saying you read valleywag often? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Yes. I like the unique interesting stuff Hacker News aggregates. Techcrunch is like fast food these days.

<comment><USER43> should fast food joints be banned? just because you don't like something isn't adequate argument to ban it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Yes, Arrington runs it like a tabloid.

</comment><comment><USER46> WTF?

<comment><USER47> Wasn't exactly a popular idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> on those wire photo contests, you can count up votes and down votes separately. what if you could filter by:

\-- x up votes -- \-- y down votes -- \-- x/y ratio --

</comment><comment><USER47> Nobody bothered to mention that Michael Arrington gave a lot of us a pretty useful talk, for free, at Startup School '08. (And after getting hosed by Bezos, no less.)

Just sayin'.

</comment><comment><USER43> Let's ban everything!

<comment><USER43> ok guys it's not that amazing. stop upvoting this and write a better comment please.

edit: they keep upvoting it. i feel like gail wynand.

<comment><USER49> Banning is hard... let's go shopping?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> What harm is Techcrunch doing here on HN? None that I can see. (Valleywag may be another matter.)

</comment><comment><USER51> No. What a stupid fucking post.</comment>


Artificial Intelligence as a service - <AUTHOR> https://orbit.ai <comment><USER2> Love the design and the product looks super interesting :) Wish there was some type of playground to actually test its capabilities. Hardcoded results is not as impressive

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh, I see, it's writing automated news from data feeds. Thousands of low level news writers will be jobless.</comment>


Dog and Cat Data - <AUTHOR> https://www.datafix.com.au/BASHing/2019-03-31.html <comment><USER2> "No, no, i'm not calling about the dingo. There's a dead possum over on the other side of the chlorine atom."

</comment><comment><USER3> I would like to see a large set of cat owners mic their homes to record cat meows. Then have each owner tag the meows by what type, i.e. I'm hungry.

Then I'd like to use machine learning on the data to build Dr. Dolot, which would be a real time cat meow interpretation / translation engine.

<comment><USER4> I think I've heard before that cat sounds are mutually learned - the cat makes random noises until the human responds appropriately, remembers the noise for next time, repeat until you recognize that particular yowl as meaning "I'm hungry". But because of that, there's no shared language - cat owners can't understand other people's cats.

<comment><USER3> This would throw a wrench in the works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _uniqc is a handy alias I use to left-justify and tab-separate the tally > numbers from_ uniq -c: alias uniqc="uniq -c | sed 's/^[ ]*//;s/ /\t/'"

I did this exact thing down to the name of the alias few years ago. The choice of space characters as separator in the uniq command is hard to understand. Is this a case of a design flaw turned feature?

<comment><USER6> Most people find right-aligned numbers easier to scan than left-aligned numbers. Most tabular representations of numbers use right-alignment; disk usage listings, spreadsheets, SQL command prompts, etc.

If I want to sort the output of `uniq -c`, I use `sort -n`, which knows about numbers even if they're left aligned. If I want to extract out the number to do something with it, I use `awk`.

I think right alignment is the correct default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Doing data analysis with bash seems interesting. It's perhaps the fastest way to do quick queries. But I am wondering, how much data analysis can you do with "BASHing data"?

<comment><USER8> The main problem you will hit eventually is subtle bugs, like not handling CSV escaping correctly when, for example, the field value happens to contain a comma.

Quick and dirty and probably fine for a quick PoC if that's what you're used to, but otherwise you're probably better off with a real language with libraries designed for what you're doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am an Australian living in the US and one nice thing about being here is having a cat. Although many people have cats in Australia they are terror on wildlife, most of which nests on the ground.

<comment><USER10> Given Australia's indigenous wildlife, I'm actually surprised it's not the other way around.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, me too. I know that cats wandering in the neighborhood can be very bad for the local bird species though. On the other hand, I doubt that your- typical-house-cat would able to survive anywhere close to being wild, especially in Australia.

<comment><USER12> I've heard that as well but our outdoor cat that came with the house killed a grand total of two birds in 12 years.

She did get a number of mice during that time and nicely left their stomachs as presents on my doorstep. I now watch where I'm going barefoot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> tl;dr

The Australian government's open data portal has a surprisingly large amount of data on dogs and cats.

Nearly all of it comes from local councils with open data policies, since it's local government in Australia that registers domestic animals, regulates animal numbers on non-farm properties and answers the call when someone complains about a wandering dog.

Pretty cool data... thank you for sharing. I hope this summarize helps.</comment>


I Am The "Other Developer". - <AUTHOR> http://blog.matt-darby.com/essays/i-am-the-other-developer

<comment><USER2> I had no idea what this was when I started reading it, but is related to this blog post [http://blogjustine.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/because-it- needs...](http://blogjustine.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/because-it-needs-to-be- said/), and the hn comments are here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6537587](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6537587)

I'm not sure Matt really adds anything to the conversation, which is maybe good and bad. Does anything else need to be added? Do we need to hear from Joe?

I don't think the 'facts' of the case matter that much. The important thing is that Justine feels she needs to be heard, that the men in our industry should be more conscious of how they are making women feel.

That isn't a dig at Joe at all. This story should have the same effect if we know the names of the people or not. We keep hearing story after story of how women have been treated badly at geek events, and we should be thanking her (and the other women) for having the strength to stand up and tell us, rather than hide in the shadows in shame.

I guess the important thing is we should also thank Matt. Thank him for showing us how easy it can be to defuse these sorts of situations when they happen.

If you see wrong-doings now, will you take action? I hope I will.</comment>


Aptimize says it's software can increase loading times by 200%-400% - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/web/25275/?a=f <comment><USER2> Perhaps you mean increase loading speeds? And perhaps you mean _its_ rather than _it's_.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes and yes, caught the article on my way out the door and posted it quickly. I wish I could edit..*sigh

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's sad that the article also uses the phrase "increase loading times by 200%-400%" - who in their right mind would want to do that?

I read stuff like that, and hope that the so-called "reporter" gets immediate re-training to become a dishwasher.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think I saw the guy behind this on Mixery awhile back. Curious what the HN crowd thinks of this product...</comment>


The Prius principle: What worked for cars can work for trains - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/17791989

<comment><USER2> Here's an idea I had a bit ago: put solar cells between rail tracks and make the trains electric.

Also, with the advent of robotically-driven cars, a robotically-driven train should be much less of a technical problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is the locomotive engineering industry really this conservative, or is it just a lack of appropriate battery technology? Because diesel electric locomotives have been common place for ages, and according to wikipedia they already use dynamic breaking they just bleed it off in heat instead of store it in battery banks.

It's seems like a pretty small jump that should have been made already to hook batteries up in a DE locomotive.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't get what's so new about this. Trains have been diesel-electric for decades.

<comment><USER5> Adding batteries?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_locomotive#Diesel- electr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_locomotive#Diesel-electric)

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

The article does a poor job of pointing out that diesel-electrics are very common already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> They've already had hybrid shunters built since 2004 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railpower_GG20B> and you can see some more that were scheduled to be in use in 2007 and 2009 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_locomotive></comment>


TensorFlow-DirectML - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/microsoft/tensorflow-directml <comment><USER2> Just tried it.

On integrated graphics (Intel HD 620) (batch size 1000):

\- was able to train a simple dense network, but no speed up over just doing CPU training on the same processor (i3-7100U)

\- ResNet style architecture failed on the same HD 620 with "LLVM ERROR: SPIRV internal error: Invalid magic number"

On a machine with NVidia GPU (batch size 1000):

\- unlike Intel GPU, ResNet trained without any errors (so it might have been Intel driver issue)

\- using DirectML came out about 3 times faster, than CPU of the machine (i7-8700K)

\- using DirectML came out about 12 times slower, than using regular tensorflow-gpu with CUDA

So far mixed feelings, but I am excited to see how it runs on AMD GPUs, and on Windows on ARM64 (e.g. Surface X).

P.S. I run [https://github.com/losttech/Gradient- Samples/tree/master/Fas...](https://github.com/losttech/Gradient- Samples/tree/master/FashionMnistClassification) and [https://github.com/losttech/Gradient- Samples/tree/master/Res...](https://github.com/losttech/Gradient- Samples/tree/master/ResNetBlock)

had to add "batch_size: 1000" to the fit call to see speedups over CPU.</comment>


Ask HN: Our code review checklist. Love it or hate it, but add your comments - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lct10jhe3FotsqkeCsVPkM_UMq4jMC5otslydJu7-8s/view

<comment><AUTHOR> You can comment here on HN or edit in the following link:

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lct10jhe3FotsqkeCsVPkM_U...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lct10jhe3FotsqkeCsVPkM_UMq4jMC5otslydJu7-8s/edit)</comment>


ThingSpeak: an open source "Internet of Things" API  - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/iobridge/thingspeak <comment><USER2> Also see: [http://www.violet.net/_mirror-give-powers-to-your- objects.ht...](http://www.violet.net/_mirror-give-powers-to-your-objects.html) (Violet also frequently uses "The Internet of Things" when marketing their products). I wrote a hacker-friendly app for the mir:ror at <http://mirlite.heroku.com>

<comment><USER3> Looks cool, maybe we need to make an open source adapter for all of these platforms?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just found pachube today and I think I like your implementation better. I've been looking for a standard for sensor api interfacing. Just a tip, I scrolled down by accident and noticed you had a news area. Might want to make that more obvious. The way you page looks now it looks like it "ends" before your news

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the comments, we moved the news section up a bit more. Glad you like our implementation, if you have any feature requests let us know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also worth a mention is <http://droneos.com> With all the craziness coming out of robotics now - and <http://DIYDrones.com> lowering the barriers of the hardware - this could have some neat applications.

<comment><USER3> Wow - just think of a net connected drone - maybe a drone with Google Maps on board or pushing air quality stats to a database. That would be an interesting mash up. Also, it's nice to see a HackPGH'er on here.

<comment><USER6> Yea, exactly. There are a ton of things like that - combined with cheap sensors / cameras + image processing / machine learning you could do tons of stuff:

\- StreetView -> DroneView (w/ on demand updates) \- News / Traffic / accident remote reporting \- Inspection of infrastructure \- Small Package Currier Service

PS: Where my Pittsburgh Hackas At?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> We built the API to be more like Twitter's API - so geolocation and status updates are built right in and gives raw sensor data more context. My house is completely connected and my things send me status updates. Dig in to the open source API and you can see the differences.

<comment><USER7> Ok so it took me a couple minutes to understand what this is. Do you have examples of how this is used, what kind of hardware provides networked sensor data? Is there a compatibility list somewhere?

<comment><USER3> The main hardware that others have used are Arduino, Netduino, and ioBridge. But, you can do more abstract things, like use CURL to send server uptime or embed a web page counter on your website that sends a Growl update or flicker an LED.

Here are some tutorials - <http://community.thingspeak.com/tutorials/>

Here is a project from me using netduino and jQuery to build a front-end showing updates from my house.

[http://iamshadowlord.com/2011/02/thingspeak-building-my- own-...](http://iamshadowlord.com/2011/02/thingspeak-building-my-own-twitter- for-things.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> see also: pachube.com

<comment><USER9> pachube.com is cool, but this is open source.

<comment><USER10> yeah but pachube is really cool. and way more featured and you can use everyone elses data. which makes it a more valuable kinda open.</comment></comment></comment>


Windows 7 Phone Series Doesn't Support Copy and Paste. Irony Ensues. - <AUTHOR> http://codesketch.com/2010/03/windows-7-phone-series-doesnt-support-copy-and-paste-irony-ensues/

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a first gen iPod touch, and the (original) lack of copy and paste didn't bother me nearly as much as I would have thought. Now that it's enabled with a software update, I use the feature maybe once every other week. Nice to have, not a killer feature.</comment>


Howto host 10 WordPress Sites on AWS for under $4/month using EC2 and CloudFront - <AUTHOR> http://www.kozen.de/2018/10/23/migration-wordpress-mariadb-mysql-php-ec2-coudfront/ <comment><USER2> I still see no point. I've been paying $6/month for a VPS with 6GB RAM, 4 cores, 200GB HDD. It absolutely annihilates the nano instance. I also run cloudflare CDN, the free tier is very nice.

It's a powerful enough instance to do 3d rendering on it without killing all the websites that run on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually had a VPS before for several years. The problem was that I never got to enjoy hardware upgrades / lower service costs. The price always stayed the same and I was not able to easily upgrade to a new machine. After I think 8 years, I finally made that switch away. Now I'm more flexible and at a lower cost.

But true that, I won't be able to do 3d rendering on that :)</comment></comment>


Robots and automated cars will require our cities to become machine-readable - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/10/robots_and_automated_cars_will_require_our_cities_to_become_mach.single.html

<comment><USER2> Beware any utopian scheme that involves the large-scale reworking of existing settlements. The cities where most humans live are complex systems and decades (or, in many cases, centuries) old. You can't just completely rework them without enormous expense and disruptions.

<comment><USER3> Stick QR codes to everything? Or QR codes only visible in IR, so as to be less annoying?

<comment><USER4> If it's not necessary to be human visable/readble, you could also embed RFID tags in walls / the street.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How about automating the supermarket in the same manner as the library? I usually get the same stuff. I'd like to place my order over the web then walk/drive over to pick it up.

<comment><USER6> Many supermarkets offer this functionality, but the products are collected by humans. It would be tricky to implement a robotic system that you could maintain and operate for less than minimum wage. There's also the additional problem of what to do if they don't have the specific thing you asked for. Finding a 'reasonable replacement' is actually a nontrivial problem for AI to solve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interestingly, the article never mentions computer vision, which seems to be the main area of focus for autonomous cars such as Google's.

<comment><USER8> Vision is pretty good, but if all cars, roads, lanes, and intersections were lined with nodes emitting wireless signals, vision would be less important (I guess except for avoiding running into jaywalkers, etc.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm really eager to see google cars in an old medieval european city. The "hunt the traffic light behind the tree that's behind the parked truck just after the bend" game might prove a bit funny in the beginning. After a while I'm sure they'll find solution where they don't rely on direct vision for that.

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone thinking of the implication regarding terrorists? Now they don't even have to be in the cars! Set it up somewhere and let them go. It's scary!</comment>


Install Mac OS X on VMWare - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Vmware_how_to Has anyone been successful in running Cocoa via this setup? <comment><AUTHOR> Has anyone been successful in running Cocoa via this setup?

<comment><USER2> Running Cocoa what? Cocoa is a set of APIs, not an operating system.

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant using the cocoa api in this setup. anyone?

<comment><USER2> All Mac OS X applications use Cocoa, with the exception of a few Carbon holdouts.

If you're actually asking about _building_ Cocoa applications, XCode is thataway: <http://developer.apple.com/technology/xcode.html></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I created a platform to share your feelings (Part 2) - <AUTHOR> Hello, we are from team ShoutIt. We recently posted our first version in HackerNews and got some feedback on our system. Over the past few weeks, we have improved our design added some features and more. We would like to get some feedback on our idea.<p>To visit the platform: https://www.apprester.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Link [https://www.apprester.com/#/](https://www.apprester.com/#/)</comment>


Project Python – Free Interactive Book That Introduces Python Programming and CS - <AUTHOR> http://projectpython.net/chapter00/ <comment><USER2> In my humble opinion there really is no need for ANOTHER introductory book on python.

But there is a great, great need for REALLY well done books on intermediate python and advanced python.

<comment><USER3> There's one "Fluent python" by Luciano Ramalho

<comment><USER4> +1 for this excellent book on core Python

It can be complemented by:

        - The Python 3 Standard Library by Example
        - Python Cookbook

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been trying to learn python for a while now, and I have a grasp of it in a similar way that I have a grasp of golf- I know what to do, but I'm still missing a few fundamentals.

All these intro to X things seem to gloss over the high level stuff, but I've hit a few walls in certain concepts that I just can't possibly Google. Maybe HN could help me out:

take a pandas dataframe. There's a .describe() method that I can chain to get the mean of the columns in the data frame grouped by var1:

df.groupby(df.var1).describe().mean

But then, there's also:

df.describe(df.var1).mean()

They largely do the same thing, but one gives me the mean across all variables, and the other one doesn't.

Now, how do I possibly Google this question? One method has parentheses, the other doesn't.... but It's clear I'm missing something fundamental here that I thought an intro online resource should address... but none do.

<comment><USER6> Ok, this was more complex than I thought. I hope I got it right and this gives you some pointers how I investigated. :)

Use type() to see what you are getting:

        >>> type(df.describe().mean())
        <class 'pandas.core.series.Series'>
        >>> type(df.describe().mean)
        <class 'method'>

Something without parenthesis cannot be a method _call_ , at least not from a normal viewpoint. Instead you are trying to access the attribute "mean" of the result of describe() if you run df.groupby(df.var1).describe().mean. This attribute might very well be a method itself (a method object).

Last in that chain was describe(), so let's look at that: [https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas- docs/stable/generated/panda...](https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas- docs/stable/generated/pandas.DataFrame.describe.html)

It returns a "summary: Series/DataFrame of summary statistics", so calling .mean() on that, will call [https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas- docs/stable/generated/panda...](https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas- docs/stable/generated/pandas.DataFrame.mean.html#pandas.DataFrame.mean)

Accessing .mean will instead return that method object itself.

By default pandas will return a string describing the data itself when printing a method:

        >>> df.describe()
               numeric   n2
        count      3.0  3.0
        mean       2.0  3.0
        std        1.0  1.0
        min        1.0  2.0
        25%        1.5  2.5
        50%        2.0  3.0
        75%        2.5  3.5
        max        3.0  4.0
        >>> df.describe().mean
        <bound method DataFrame.mean of        numeric   n2
        count      3.0  3.0
        mean       2.0  3.0
        std        1.0  1.0
        min        1.0  2.0
        25%        1.5  2.5
        50%        2.0  3.0
        75%        2.5  3.5
        max        3.0  4.0>
        >>> df.describe().mean()
        numeric    2.00
        n2         2.75
        dtype: float64

I assume this is what threw you off? You are not using the "results" of .mean in further code but were just looking at them, right?

<comment><USER5> That's right, I was using notebooks for a project and luckily, didn't have to actually extract the mean. Thanks for such an insightful answer

<comment><USER6> Glad to, as I need to learn Pandas in more depth than I currently know.

Also, I noticed something very very dangerous you did:

.describe() will return a DataFrame with all those statistics. One column per numeric column of the input. One row per statistical value (like mean, std, etc). If you call .mean() on THAT DataFrame, you will get the mean of the statistical values per column, so e.g. the mean of columnA's count, mean, std, etc values. Definitely not what you want!

Instead, use either .mean() directly on your "data DataFrame" (not the one returned by .describe()). Or access the specific value from the result via .describe()['columnname']['mean'].

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How different is this from composing programs?

[http://composingprograms.com/](http://composingprograms.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> What's the license though?

<comment><AUTHOR> Since there is no license listed, the default is they retain full copyright/all rights reserved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you try to access this via HTTPS you get a self-signed cert whose CN is set to www.example.com</comment>


Try this. Immerse your face in cold water and watch your heart rate plummet - <AUTHOR> So just tried this. Immersed my face in a sink of cold tap water. Programmed my Apple Watch to read out my live heart rate readings. Resting HR = 89, after immersion immediately plummeted to 61 then carried on dropping as far as 53. Not sure if this is the "master switch of life" as per the TED article author but definitely worth a try. May upload binary to Github. Can anyone think of any cool APP-lications for this? http://ideas.ted.com/science_of_freediving/ <comment><USER2> When I was a kid, I had a heart condition called 'SVT'\- Supra-Ventricular Tachycardia. When you're born, you have a collection of nerve endings which control the heart rate, & normally, the weaker ones die off & leave a single strong connection. In my case I had a tie for the heartbeat-signalling transmitters. They would oftentimes get caught up in a feedback loop which would leave me with a double heart rate until something would interrupt them & set a hiccup to make my heart just listen to the dominant transmitter again. It was eventually rectified vie an Radio Frequency (RF) Ablation procedure which burned & killed the second-strongest transmitter causing the problem. But before I had the operation I was instructed to dunk my head in ice water when I had an attack- to try to initiate a hiccup & disable the second-in- command transmitter. Another technique was to do a handstand & stay upside- down as long as it took for the gravity to cause an interruption in the signals enough to disengage the offending transmitter. Yet another technique was to bear down as if I'm taking a constipated dump, which increases blood pressure in spurts & would issue just enough resistance to stop the feedback loop. The most effective of these methods was the ice water & I remember since it wasn't readily available at school, I'd be upside down alot of times in the hallway outside my classroom- & it took forever to get it under control alot of the time. I got picked on for that- it sucked.

</comment><comment><USER3> This effect is called the mammalian diving reflex: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammalian_diving_reflex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammalian_diving_reflex)

</comment><comment><USER4> Depending the place I looked, a testing heart rate of 89 may be a cause for concern. Some places say anywhere up to 100 is 'normal' but this one says over 85 is 'poor' (you may want to consider improving your fitness levels): [http://www.topendsports.com/testing/heart-rate-resting- chart...](http://www.topendsports.com/testing/heart-rate-resting-chart.htm)

<comment><USER3> By the sounds of it he was standing at the sink in order to do this. That's not "resting" for the sake of a resting heart rate.

Edit: for instance, I just tested mine from sitting (at my desk) to standing beside my desk it increases 25 points, on the linked chart going from "athlete" to "below average."

<comment><USER4> Tru dat. Awyu can relax after all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this may be mammalian response to being submerged in water in an effort to need less oxygen</comment>


Conway's Game of Life, in COBOL - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/luontola/learning-cobol/blob/master/game-of-life.cob <comment><USER2> Very nice, thank you for sharing this!

To try it with GnuCOBOL, compile it with:

        $ cobc -F -x game-of-life.cob

The "-F" switch instructs GnuCOBOL to use so-called _free_ format of the source code, and "-x" builds an executable program, "game-of-life", which you can run with:

        $ ./game-of-life

Use Ctrl-c to interrupt it.

A major attraction of COBOL is the ability to quickly construct user interfaces for efficient entry and processing of records.</comment>