Ask YC: Would you take a short break before the final push? - <AUTHOR>

Say you had one final push required to complete the beta phase of your startup, maybe 7 days of work total. If you'd been working on the startup for months and felt exhausted, would you a) take a short break now, aiming to complete the project in ~14 days or b) keep marching through clenched teeth and have it done in a week?<p>Option b) could be considered DIFN, I guess, which appeals to me. But a short break is also an attractive prospect right now. I've read elsewhere on Hacker News that the hard work doesn't really start until you launch, so is this all the more reason to go with a)? <comment><USER2> I'm in favor of a short break prior to the final push. But, to me, a short break is a pre-sprint evening of dinner and drinks to boost morale and get the team feeling good together.

I personally wouldn't break for two weeks when you can see light at the end of the tunnel.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would push on, get it done in a week and then take a break.

Then you're done, and a break will be good for you to get your thoughts clear for launch.

</comment><comment><USER4> Each one of us works differently, but I would say this probably depends more on your momentum at the present time. If you find that your productivity remains high, then you probably should push through the final week. However, if you've seen a precipitous drop in your ability to get work done, then you should take a break. Why not start with taking 2-3 days off? If you still don't feel like that was enough, then extend it up to 7 or more days as required. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> I felt the same way as you right before we launched our site. I tried to take a week off, but it ended up being a week of me coding for 4 hours a day instead of 8 hours a day. (I still have a full-time co-op required for graduation, so this doesn't count my 40 hours a week for that)

Nonetheless, it was very relaxing and I'm glad I did it. At the same time, when you're this close and really into your company, it's hard to NOT work on it.

</comment><comment><USER6> do you what you think your body needs. If you launch and your burnt then what is the point?</comment>


MetricsGraphics.js – a library based on D3 for time-series data - <AUTHOR> http://metricsgraphicsjs.org/ <comment><USER2> Is there a single graph library that targets both web and mobile? I want to keep visual consistency across both my web and mobile app, or can the presented library here generate images?</comment>


A Burnt-Out Case (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenation.com/article/burnt-out-case/ <comment><USER2> > One tab of acid at a late-era Grateful Dead show at Soldier Field, where I > hallucinated a giant eagle and got mocked by a nurse for wearing a necklace > made of Fimo beads that I'd bought in Oregon; another tab two nights later, > followed by eight hours of seeing vampires crawl across a leaky apartment > ceiling in Evanston, Illinois

Funny, I've took LSD a bunch of times when I was younger and I know quite a few people that have and pretty much everyone agrees this whole hallucinating lively animals and characters stuff only happens in movies, not real life. So I'm suspicious of anyone who claims this.

The visual stuff is mostly limited to light trails or textures, surfaces start look shimmering, full of colour, or organic/wet, sometimes melting even (it's a hard thing to explain). That reflects the stuff I've read online from the US government studies too. Never 80s-horror movie 'vampires crawling on ceilings' stuff or Fear & Loathing dinosaurs. Maybe someone else could chime in?

I wonder how many people make up these LSD stories to sound cool. Or maybe he really did and simply took way too much for a first timer.

<comment><USER3> None of my acquaintainces reported anything like that either. Vampires crawling across the ceiling... i mean, with closed eyes and on an conceptual level, sure, one can hallucinate things like that, but full-blown visuals with no relation to reality sounds like Salvinorin A, not LSD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That was surprisingly spiteful. Maybe Leary deserves a takedown, maybe not. Seems like bad form for a Nation book review though.</comment>


10 Graphs That Sum Up the Medical Student Debt Problem - <AUTHOR> http://blog.clipboard-plus.com/10-graphs-that-sum-up-the-medical-student-debt-problem/

<comment><USER2> All of them are OK except for this one: [http://blog.clipboard-plus.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/11/8....](http://blog.clipboard-plus.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/11/8.jpg)</comment>


SXSW - Has Blogging Passed Its Peak? The Creator of WordPress Doesn't Think So - <AUTHOR> http://foundercode.com/has-blogging-passed-its-peak-the-creator-of-wordpress-doesnt-think-so/

<comment><USER2> Seems to be blogspam. The original article is here: [http://marketingland.com/wordpress-mullenweg-at-sxsw- bloggin...](http://marketingland.com/wordpress-mullenweg-at-sxsw-blogging- still-booming-35808)

<comment><AUTHOR> There are no ads on the site, just a summary and a link to the original. How is this blogspam?

<comment><USER2> I thought blogspam included rewrapping an existing article in a blog post without adding any additional commentary / value.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, I can see where you're coming from. I'll make sure to add more commentary and value in future posts.

<comment><USER2> You can take a look at how Daniel Tenner (swombat) does it for some inspiration.

His MO is just at the edge of what's an OK way of doing this sort of thing (IMHO ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


HubbyDoc for OS X: Offline access to GitHub repositories documentation - <AUTHOR> https://hubbydoc.com <comment><USER2> This looks really nice & useful! Just signed up for a trial.</comment>


Discussion style and respect - <AUTHOR> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf-announce/current/msg14217.html

<comment><USER2> Standards groups tend to attract people who are Right Right Right. Typical make-up of a standards group:

\- Two to three professional IT standards people. Haven't written code in years, limited actual influence back in the companies they work for. Usually report in to the "office of the CTO".

\- One or two people ruthlessly out to promote their companies point of view because their products depend on it. Often don't even pretend to be diplomatic. Politicians.

\- One or two academics representing their personal research whims and interests. They have little to no actual skin in the game. Often derail onto irrelevant topics.

\- One to two people who know the area deeply, are actual practitioners with hands on skills in the area, and are reasonably neutral.

<comment><USER3> I think your forgetting national interests and NIH - The Joke that the 8th layer OSI is Politics has some basis in reality.

Non tariff barriers also come into play eg why you can't buy a land rover in the USA

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think some people get so combative because their identity is wrapped up in being right. It's unfortunate, given our capacity to collaborate and build, that we still struggle with these scuffs.

I think if you want respectful discourse, it has to be part of the culture of the community; where behavior is enforced at a group level, more than an administrative or rule based.

There will always be a range of people involved, and even the best of people have bad days; coupled with the fact that most people usually mean well, I've found it's best to cut people some slack if you have the chance.

<comment><USER5> Can you clarify "I think some people get so combative because their identity is wrapped up in being right."? If people are discussing a topic, I want people to say "what is true" where it adds value to the discussion. I feel that "right" misses the basis of what and why and is largely irrelevant to Respect in conflict.

Conflict is good when managed and it adds value. You usually end up with more rounded or more complete ideas. This can fail when there is a lack of respect between adversaries, a lack of understanding or a lack of truth from at least one side.

On your point of community vigilance, Administrators/site owners should set the rules of engagement and a culture (eg. No ad hominem attacks). If the community determines the rules of engagement, you can have the community derail itself far too easily. I'm seeing quite a few communities lose the plot recently through political correctness or through a hostile community that self-regulates. One of the best sites I visit is very rule based. The moderators do a great job of setting the rules and when the community loses focus, the site owner/moderators recalibrate. I keep thinking of leaders vs committees as a good parallel.

I don't have simple rules about what rules should be applied to respect in conflict. There are several examples of exceptions that come to mind: Karl Popper talks about not tolerating the intolerant; Political Correctness can introduce prejudice (and has spoilt some good communities).

<comment><USER6> In most of these discussions, there is no one "true" answer. There are engineering tradeoffs. There are design decisions, about what will be most easy for people to work with, least likely for someone to screw up and break the whole system. There is inertia of existing systems, that would cost a lot of money to rewrite, and tradeoffs of what will be the lowest cost solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> TIL that the IETF has a RFC about "Guidelines for Conduct"

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7154](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7154)

\--

plus that DDG has a !rfc bang which redirects directly to them

<comment><USER8> There are also several Debian RFC packages in the event you care to have local access to a copy. The full set's surprisingly large.

With the dwww package, you can browse them locally at [http://localhost/dwww/](http://localhost/dwww/)

[https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=jessie&section=all&...](https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=jessie&section=all&arch=any&searchon=names&keywords=doc- rfc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The phenomena addressed in that mail are very common. There isn't an organisation in the world that couldn't use those remonstrances from time to time. We're all just human.

</comment><comment><USER10> What's the context? Which discussion was particularly heated?

<comment><USER11> Probably multiple, but this one certainly seems to qualify.

[http://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/ietf/current/msg93416.h...](http://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/ietf/current/msg93416.html)

"TLS everywhere is great for large companies with a financial stake in Internet centralization. It is even better for those providing identity services and TLS-outsourcing via CDNs. It's a shame that the IETF has been abused in this way"

Looks like a very unprofessional and offensive attribution of motive, which completely fails to keep the conversation on a constructive course.

P.S. Nice to see someone's trying to bury this. It's exactly the kind of thing the OP talks about, provided in direct response to a question. How could that possibly be worth a non-partisan downvote?

<comment><USER12> > [http://www.ietf.org/mail- > archive/web/ietf/current/msg93416.h...](http://www.ietf.org/mail- > archive/web/ietf/current/msg93416.html)

This post seems like reasonable criticism to me. It doesn't attack any individual.

It's fair to attribute motive for a particular agenda. The discussion would not be complete without considering conflict-of-interest motivations of the participants.

It also seems fair to say that Google and other companies with the goal of Internet centralization have been pushing this, and that this is one of the likely motivations for them.

It also seems fair to point out, in a technical way, that HTTPS-everywhere is not capable of achieving the goals that its proponents claim it will, and that it is more likely to be harmful to those goals.

The last sentence that you quote is perhaps unhelpful but the "rough consensus" decision-making model of the IETF creates a perfect situation for lobbyists from large companies to control the agenda. This can be seen as an abuse.

 _Edited to add:_ I would be very concerned if the chair of the IETF was seeking to quash discussion of this type. That would only prove there is a serious problem.

<comment><USER11> No. Attribution of motive is never helpful or appropriate as part of a supposedly-technical discussion. If it were, then maybe someone should also mention Fielding's own interest in enabling insertion of ads by proxies. But no, that's exactly the kind of thing the IETF chair's message was trying to address, for all parties involved. If there's a problem with lobbying and conflicts of interest, that needs to be taken up at an organizational level, not as part of the technical debate.

In any case, whether you think that kind of behavior is appropriate or not is kind of irrelevant. That wasn't the question. The question was what motivated the IETF chair's message. Can anyone deny that the hostility and accusatory tone of a message that has been splattered all over the internet today might be part of that motivation?

<comment><USER13> Many engineers often seem to forget that their work has impact on the lives of people. I think that, in the part of the email that you are not quoting, Roy Fielding makes a very good point that TLS everywhere is not just a technical issue, but has significant social implication.

Thus, incentives and motives are very valid concerns. If the IETF's idea of professionalism precludes the discussion of ethical concerns, it needs to change.

<comment><USER11> Discussion of ethical concerns is important, but vague accusations that fail to identify any specific party or the nature of their interest are not a discussion, nor are they conducive to such a discussion being productive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How far away is censorship? The IETF has always been a rough and tumble group, with consensus over voting or process. I encourage respect and politeness, but the tone of Jari's email seems a little condescending and schoolmarm to me.</comment>


Web Scraping with Node.js and Chimera - <AUTHOR> http://www.deanmao.com/2012/08/13/enter-chimera/ <comment><USER2> Great project. The biggest question for me when I'm using phantomjs is why phantomjs is trying to replicate nodejs infrastructure. For example, phantomjs has an HTTP server feature for processing incoming requests. This doesn't make sense to me because a browser shouldn't be a server. If you need to get information out of the worker, you should POST it somewhere. The proclivity of phantomjs users to prefer stdout is astounding. It's definitely the #1 question or issue that I get fielded in #phantomjs on freenode.

For example, for POSTing and reading from redis/resque I wrote this (proof of concept, not what's in production):

<https://gist.github.com/000037f472b72d9490a6>

A few thoughts..

        > There are similar "glues" like phantomjs-node that integrate phantomjs by
        > spawning a process, and processing the stdout stream, but it is limited by
        > what can be done via the command line of phantomjs. If you really want direct
        > api access to the browser, the best way is via direct integration.

This seems like a lot of overhead on top of a phantomjs (or even just a generic webkit) worker. Substack's approach was to just put a proxy in front of a browser that injects a <script> tag into the page to boss the browser around:

<https://github.com/substack/schoolbus>

Supposedly the actual browser client shouldn't matter, as long as your fleet of workers are up and running. I bet chimera's approach will end up with more access to npm modules in the long run compared to phantomjs.

Also, the link wasn't in the article: <https://github.com/deanmao/node- chimera>

For the python equivalent of this project, there's <https://github.com/kanzure/pyphantomjs>

</comment><comment><USER3> Did we really reach the point where demonstration code can be presented in coffeescript without an equivalent javascript demo?

<comment><USER4> People have been doing that for a surprisingly long time. I think it was encouraged by the fact that CoffeeScript is immediately intelligible to a lot of JavaScript coders, and authors reckon that anyone who has trouble can just compile it and get fairly idiomatic JavaScript.

I actually wrote a bookmarklet a while back that would look for CoffeeScript snippets on a page and translate them for people who find it troublesome, but didn't end up doing much with it because I didn't feel like there was much interest.

<comment><USER3> criticisms of coffeescript aside (e.g. interstitial whitespace sensitivity), the code can't directly be applied in node (as far as i can tell, you can't tell node to run a coffeescript file directly using the `node <script>` syntax -- you have to use a framework or compile to js).

<comment><USER5> How is that really different toolchain-wise from having to compile source code in a language such as Java?

<comment><USER3> remember: java is to javascript as pain is to painting.

it's not an apt comparison. You can directly write javascript and run it in your browser or in node (or test it out interactively in the node REPL).

I like to play with modules in node interactively (when relevant) because its easier to see what's going on and much easier to iterate (esp. in conjunction with the .load REPL command)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great work! This might even have potential for browser-based testing, since mocha-phantomjs runs from an executable; I'd prefer a code-based solution like Chimera integrate with Mocha.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a great idea! phantomjs-node works okay, but it is suck a hack. A nifty hack, but still. <https://github.com/sgentle/phantomjs-node#how-does-it- work>

If you want to parse the DOM for the internet at large, you need a real browser. There are simply too many sites with really bad HTML to be parsed reliably with anything else.

<comment><USER8> If you need a great html parser, I also wrote a library for one of those: <https://github.com/deanmao/node-hubbub>

It's merely an integration library for the netsurf browser. It's the html parser for a real browser. I considered using the parser from other browsers like firefox or webkit, but netsurf had the fewest external dependencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks really great. I would love to see a bit more of an in-depth example in a follow-up post!

Is more documentation to come?

<comment><USER8> Sure, I can make more. This post caught me by surprise. It's odd to see your own blog post from months ago on HN.

I sorta gave up on the project seeing as nobody other than myself used it. (I have zero watchers on github)

<comment><USER10> A README is the absolute bare minimum for a GitHub project. Even a lack of code can get some interest in an idea. Someone landing on the GitHub page will reflexively look for the back button if they haven't seen the blog post.

Great work!

<comment><USER8> I've added a readme now. Will add more soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Has anyone actually gotten this working? I've tried installing on Mac OS X and Ubuntu, both with various problems. The precompiled binaries don't work, the qt build scripts fail, etc. etc.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is there more documentation(or source) available somewhere?

<comment><USER13> It's on github, but at 6 months since last commit and no documentation...

<comment><USER8> I can make more. After about 3 months with no github watchers, I figured the only person reading the docs would be myself.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for adding docs, this should be a better alternative than phantom or jsdom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Similar project: <https://github.com/LearnBoost/tobi>

<comment><USER15> Sorta. The joy of PhantomJS (and of Chimera) is that they use a real browser to run the JS/CSS/HTML/whatever. No simulated DOM; no simulated cookies; etc. Just a real [headless] WebKit browser with all of its quirks and tricks. You can even take screenshots of a real, rendered webpage (which is great for debugging).

<comment><USER14> >You can even take screenshots of a real, rendered webpage (which is great for debugging).

That is pretty cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Testing (<http://bartaz.github.com/impress.js/#/bored>)

</comment><comment><USER17> How does it differ from ZombieJS?

<comment><USER18> Zombie doesn't use a "real" browser, but a simulated DOM Window using jsdom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> wow this is exactly what I need, thanks!</comment>


The radioactive boy scout: the teenager who attempted to build a breeder reactor - <AUTHOR> http://www.harpers.org/archive/1998/11/0059750 <comment><USER2> To me, this illustrates a breakdown of our education system.

Why was this kid not noticed, and nurtured? Not to play the nerd card here, but I can almost guarantee that if he had had an exceptionally good throwing arm (instead of an affinity for chemistry), his school would have noticed and would have helped him develop.

Maybe I'm just bitter because I grew up in a small town and saw this happening all around me. This story reminds me a lot of a very close friend of mine that used to manufacture all kinds of different chemicals in his garage, used some of the same social-engineering skills to obtain the necessary equipment to do so (accurate scales was always a problem because people though he was making meth), and was completely and totally ignored by his school.

It's depressing; excelling physically seems to be more important than excelling mentally. Where does that leave us?

<comment><USER3> > Where does that leave us?

It leaves us here:

[http://memepunks.blogspot.com/2006/06/americas-war-on- scienc...](http://memepunks.blogspot.com/2006/06/americas-war-on-science.html)

and ultimately, here:

<http://yarchive.net/physics/effete.html>

Linus Pauling developed an interest in chemistry by experimenting incessantly throughout his childhood. Today, he would have been imprisoned. The new generation will have no Linus Pauling, unless the Third World - where one might still purchase a beaker without a license - supplies us with one.

<comment><USER4> On the other hand, it's hard to argue that David Hahn's reactor should have been legal.

<comment><USER3> "May as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb."

The _legal_ thing to do was to sit and vegetate in front of a TV set. Or beat smaller kids senseless. Or any of the other socially approved, mindless activities open to children today. He chose to be a free spirit, and paid the price.

<comment><USER4> The point is, he endangered his neighbors. I'm sort of ambivalent about the story. Should society let people build reactors? Sure. Should it let them build reactors in an unshielded toolshed in a residential area? Hell no, but it's still sort of awesome when it happens. And I'm not sure if it's really more dangerous (from a societal perspective) than owning a car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's really a shame that this kid couldn't get competent adult supervision. With some structure in his life, things might have turned out differently for him.

His social engineering skills were quite impressive... although his habitual lying does make him seem like a psychopath.

All in all, very cool, and very sad. At least he didn't get sent to prison.

</comment><comment><USER6> Apparently he was at it again in '07: <http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=0a6_1186335230>

What a shame. In the right environment, he could have done great things with his talent.

<comment><USER7> Trying to make uranium out of lithium batteries....?

<comment><USER8> More likely he was trying to harvest the americium-241 from the detectors:

<http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=340>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a classic story, here is what he looked like from the exposure to radiation: <http://beto.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/david_hahn.jpg>

<comment><USER10> I've seen that picture before, but it reminds me more of a meth-addict than anything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a good read for anyone who's ever wondered how hard it would be to gather a complete collection of the elements that make up the periodic table.

</comment><comment><USER12> DIY home radiochemistry from some who actually seems to know what they are doing (a nuclear engineering grad student):

[http://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/uranium- chemistry...](http://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/uranium-chemistry/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I recall reading his book of it a while back. It was interesting, but I can't recall whether it added much to the article.

</comment><comment><USER14> I remember reading this a long time ago (~10 years) in the Reader's Digest.</comment>


Ask HN: What just happened to HN that I couldn't access it? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I didn't notice it and I can't be sure, but short-term outages on HN are usually because pg reboots the server.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1274058></comment>


Mixkit 2.0 – Free assets for your next video project - <AUTHOR> https://mixkit.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> We've just re-launched Mixkit. As well as Video we've now added Music and Premiere Pro Templates. All free to download and use, free!

Check out our launch. [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/mixkit-music- video](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/mixkit-music-video)

<comment><USER2> Good work on launching. I don't have confidence in the licensing because it is non-standard.</comment></comment>


Pay no attention to the code behind the curtain: the tech behind tldr.it - <AUTHOR> http://omgbloglol.com/post/1381385171/pay-no-attention-to-the-code-behind-the-curtain-the

<comment><USER2> Nice post. Nice of you to explain the tech behind your app.</comment>


Beanstalk: Bootstrapped, Run Virtually, Generating $1+ Mil Annually - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/beanstalk-bootstrapped-run-virtually-generating-1-mil-annually-with-chris-nagele/ <comment><USER2> I love Beanstalk!

I just cancelled my account, but only because I'm shutting down the associated business. I definitely plan on moving back when I have something that requires secure, awesome external SVN hosting again.

<comment><USER3> I'm thinking of using it for a new project. What's your opinion of it? Any gotchas?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was a Beanstalk customer for over a year. Never had a problem with their product or their service. But over time, I started wondering why I maintained a github and a Beanstalk account and there was only one which I could cancel.

Beanstalk - love the product and the service, but what's the plan to compete with github?

</comment><comment><USER5> I've seen Chris N around Miami the past few years for FOWA.

Beanstalk is amazing, I've always wondered if it was profitable & who built it.</comment>


Ask HN: How to value your company when departing as co-founder? - <AUTHOR>

Hello, for obvious reasons, i'm using an anonymous account to post this. but i've been a longtime member of HN so i was hoping you could assist me with this.
I was one of the 3 co-founders of a startup which has been running for 3 years. I'm the only technical co-founder and basically created the site and maintain the servers. The business has been profitable and we make around $100,000-$120,000 a year.
I've since started a side project for myself which i want to focus on and want to leave the current company. We all signed a contract to own 33% of it. Now if i want to leave, how much money should i ask for? should i sell my 33% for $100,000? is that too much?
what would you guys suggest?
thanks <comment><USER2> Have you seen those posts where someone asks "I want to make an LLC/corporation, I don't have any $ so I'm not using an attorney, what's the best way to do this myself?"

This is one of the reasons why that is a mistake.

You don't get to decide unilaterally how much your part of the company will sell for - the buyers have to agree on your price, too.

There's a lot of information missing here to even start to talk about valuation - e.g., what sort of "startup" is this? How replicable is it? How replaceable are you? Would outside investors want to own a piece instead? How much of the "profit" is left after paying reasonable wages to the principals for their participation?

Maybe instead of selling your share, you should just be a passive owner.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think that's way, way too much, though I can see why it would seem like a good idea. Sure, when you run the numbers that seems fair. In reality, I want to be helpful (and not critical) and point out that $120,000 a year for three co-founders is not a business worth pursuing??

I suspect you agree?? (which is why your leaving)

Your two partners will need to hire a technical founder. How much of the profit will that take???? (maybe $60-$100k). You have maybe $20-$60k profit.

You should ask for $20-$40k max! Or increase the profit before you make the transition.

Again, trying to helpful!!

<comment><USER3> Those poor other co-founders...hope they can keep it together!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> wow, if you're the only technical co-founder, those other guys are going to be pretty screwed when you leave.</comment>


A followup on Concurrency within Python - <AUTHOR> http://jessenoller.com/2008/03/17/a-followup-on-concurrency-within-python/ <comment><USER2> > I believe Python programmers want to write Python - not Java, nor .Net. What > attracts us to Python is a clean syntax. If I want concurrency in Python, I > don't want to have to call into java.util.concurrent.

A-freakin-men. Remove the GIL! (I know, I know, easier said than done).

<comment><USER3> I felt very lonely-- being the only one during Guido's keynote to get up and tell him how much we didn't like the GIL (in the form of a Py3k question). I'm quite glad to hear this sentiment getting some renewed backing.

I mentioned it many times during my talk there, since embedded apps have no real recourse to avoiding the GIL with CPython (i.e. can't be expected to fork/relaunch a 300MB process for just a tad of Python).

(sigh)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Concurrency doesn't have to mean threading. I've used greenlet-based coroutines (<http://pypi.python.org/pypi/greenlet>) for concurrency in large projects. They work with the GIL, and I find it easier to write correct coroutine-based programs.</comment>


SourceForge Infrastructure and Service Restoration - <AUTHOR> http://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-infrastructure-and-service-restoration/ <comment><USER2> So the post in /r/sysadmin[1] has nothing to do with reality? I guess we'll have to wait for a post-mortem. I don't want to be in the shoes of the ops personnel there, I hope everythings turns out fine!

1: [https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3do9k0/sourceforg...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3do9k0/sourceforge_is_down_due_to_storage_problems_no_eta/ct77o49)

<comment><USER3> >"We consulted with our storage vendor when forming our next steps."

They didn't mention Extremely Massive Corporation in this blog post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone who visited Sourforge to download GIMP 7 years ago, why does this site still exist?

<comment><USER5> 1\. What is the alternative for user facing open source projects? The icentives for GitHub are even more misaligned as they want to attract developers and not users. I am wondering how long it takes till they shut down their binary release feature again, once everyone puts their binary releases there.

2\. It gave you all the stuff you needed for your project at one place. The SCM of your choice, mailing lists, hosted forums, wiki, bugtracker, and a website with PHP/MySQL. They have retired hosted forums, wiki and bugtracker now.

3\. It increases the discoverability of your project. The project summary page actually gives a nice overview of the main points of your project such as licence, category and features; They have things like project of the month, etc.. Without sourceforge (and freecode) we are at SEO, social media and word of mouth for open source PR. This is much more effort.

4\. They allow huge binary downloads which can be uploaded with e.g. rsync and scp.

Loosing all this might be fine for a large project such as GIMP, as they have the manpower and donation money to do it themselves. For smaller projects this distracts from developing the project.

<comment><USER6> >1\. What is the alternative for user facing open source projects? The icentives for GitHub are even more misaligned as they want to attract developers and not users. I am wondering how long it takes till they shut down their binary release feature again, once everyone puts their binary releases there.

At this point I have to wonder - why not have a paid download service for OSS builds - like 1-2$ or whatever symbolic price minimum - this will probably cover the download costs and maybe leave your project some tiny bit of cash.

At the same time provide a free build link on torrents so that your users can access it trough torrents if they don't want to pay - it doesn't cost you anything (even the bandwidth if your project is hosted on something like GH pages).

So you pay 1-2$ for convenience or go download trough torrents or if you can't use torrents and you're brave search google for mirrors.

<comment><USER7> The simple answer is that 98% of users won't pay it.

Source: I manage an open source project used by a few million people.

<comment><USER8> 98% seems like a very generous user-base. Getting 20k$ from the 2% in your million users would maintain the download server for at least twenty years.

I assume it's much lower than 2%, which would fit my experience. From about a thousand users (a conservative estimate), I get around 10m$/user on average, and 0.3% of paying users.

<comment><USER9> And the SFLC will help you to create the onerous organization you need in order to collect, possess, and spend that money by committee.

And that is why everyone turns to the ASF for help in this situation, since they already exist, but that's probably not sustainable.

The answer is not clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I thought this update was some kind of reawakening, where sense had prevailed and all malware was removed and Sourceforge was returned to its former glory.

I searched for 'malware', 'spam' in the post and found none.

Son, I am disappoint.</comment>


Can Windows 10 unite Microsoft's two worlds? - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3036924/app-economy/can-windows-10-unite-microsofts-two-worlds

<comment><USER2> Hard not to invoke Betteridge's law of headlines over this one...</comment>


When is a BIG Rewrite the answer? - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6268/when-is-a-big-rewrite-the-answer <comment><USER2> Over the years my opinion on this sways between never, and whenever you feel like it.

Never: its far too risky, usually ends up not fixing half of the issues in the first place. Better off taking scorched earth refactor approach at the class / file level than system level.

Whenever: the more often you do something, the better at it you should get, the faster you will get, and the better your designs will get.

I think there really is likely some middle ground in there.

The one thing I caution against is not to refactor while doing bug fixes unless it is part of fixing the bug. Overcomplicates the situation dramatically, make a note to refactor next time you're replacing a feature / have some downtime (lol downtime)

</comment><comment><USER3> When you can't do a component-wise rewrite and the cost of not fixing the currently-inadequate components justifies the cost and risk of a big rewrite.

But make sure when you do it you build with a loosely coupled architecture so that this is _never_ an issue again -- any system that will force you into deciding when a big rewrite is necessary is badly designed.</comment>


1957 German Grand Prix - DC-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957_German_Grand_Prix <comment><AUTHOR> Notably this was on the Nordschleife, an ~ 23 km track (most modern F1 tracks are around 5 km). F1 stopped using the Nordschleife portion of the Nurburgring in 1976 because it's considered too dangerous and it's extreme length makes it difficult to adequately staff all portions of the track and be able to respond to emergencies quickly.

The Wikipedia mentions that they had F2 cars also racing at the same time. Again, this is likely due to the Nordschleife's length (longer track means you need more cars for viewers to watch. Otherwise they are stating at an empty track for most of the time).

</comment><comment><USER2> It is unfortunate that we will probably never see a modern Formula 1 car racing hard at the Nordschleife again.

<comment> DC-3 Did you see the 919 Evo lap? True, it's not an F1 car (although similarly fast), and it had the circuit to itself, but still...</comment></comment>


Show HN: Minimalist App Layout Using CSS Display Flex - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brucewangsg/flexapplayout <comment><AUTHOR> Crystal clear markup structure to ease the crafting of complex web app layout. The underlying layout is mainly driven by CSS display: flex.</comment>


Feldman: Bin Laden Fulfilled His One True Ambition - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-06/osama-bin-laden-fulfilled-his-one-true-ambition-noah-feldman.html

<comment><USER2> > Our response to 9/11 was needless, silly, and wasteful. Any other response > would have been unimaginable.

A bit schizophrenic, but at least he covers all the bases.</comment>


Go package to make ASCII line graphs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/guptarohit/asciigraph <comment><USER2> I hate to be "that guy," but that's not ASCII.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for pointing this, I understand this now:). Thinking about renaming the repository, 'utfgraph' sounds good? or please suggest any other more appropriate(good) name, thanks:)

<comment><USER3> 'chargraph'?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice work. I personally have great appreciation for tools that do one task and integrate well. This is the kind of a tool you don't know you need until you're querying vague search terms on your search engine of choice.

</comment><comment><USER5> nice. there are similar packages for other eco systems like node.js. it makes sense that go gets its own.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, that's what I thought :) Actually I need the same for one of my ongoing project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good work. Sad that terminals still don't support even basic graphics though. It's 2018!

<comment><USER7> Lots of terminals support both inline and loaded graphics. A surprising number of terminals support things like OSC 1337: [https://chromium.googlesource.com/apps/libapps/+/master/hter...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/apps/libapps/+/master/hterm/doc/ControlSequences.md#OSC-1337)

It's worth noting that iTerm2 and ChromeOS's HTerm ([https://chromium.googlesource.com/apps/libapps/+/master/hter...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/apps/libapps/+/master/hterm)) are a popular but hardly singular example. The (unfortunately name conflicted) HTerm/Hackterm is a pretty cool example of an older standard: [http://41j.com/hterm/](http://41j.com/hterm/)

<comment><USER6> Interesting. Can it be used for graphical interfaces and animation though? Or is it just "show this image"?

<comment><USER7> I haven't tried, but I think 1337 doesn't do anything destructive to the normal terminal extensions for mouse interaction.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Red Herring awards (scam) started major campaign today soliciting startups - <AUTHOR>

Warning: Red Herring awards (total scam) are trolling SF/Valley startups to submit to their bogus awards. I know of at least 4 top startups who got the pitch today. (see this thread for context http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4538950 )<p>The only way to stop these guys is for no one to submit for their pay-for-play BS awards. <comment><USER2> This is a really annoying scam, and sadly I have had several companies coming to me asking if we'd ever done their event at Twilio (we never did) and if it was a good idea. Stuff like this can be a huge time suck for founders, and if they don't find out it isn't legit then it can be a big money drain as well. Does anyone know what people behind Red Herring? I have wanted to know for some time, so I can avoid anything else they are doing.

<comment><USER3> As far as I can tell, the brand of the old Red Herring magazine was bought by a company called DASAR, which appears to be owned/run by this guy: [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1972998,00....](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1972998,00.html)</comment></comment>


Physics Engines for Dummies - <AUTHOR> http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2011/04/06/physics-engines-for-dummies/

<comment><USER2> Here's an A+ reference/tutorial for anyone looking for a "not for dummies" version of rigid body dynamics:

[http://www.digitalrune.com/Portals/0/Documents/A%20Unified%2...](http://www.digitalrune.com/Portals/0/Documents/A%20Unified%20Framework%20for%20Rigid%20Body%20Dynamics.pdf)

(Had to google for a fresh link; unfortunately this doesn't seem to be nearly as widely mirrored as I believe it deserves.)

Things I liked about it:

\- The author continually explains, compares, & contrasts alternative approaches throughout.

\- It builds up a full actual system, including a lot of discussion of what other references may dismiss as mere software engineering.

\- The author starts with the fundamentals and goes from there, usually fairly thoroughly.

<comment><USER3> That's a great resource; Thanks! I wonder why it hasn't been shared as much as it should have been? How does one fix that problem in general?

<comment><USER2> Part of the reason this one isn't more widely known is certainly because there's already a lot of good tutorials. (And even more bad ones).

For every article like this one, there's quite a few people posting "here's another awesome tutorial!" -- and yes, guilty as charged.

Also, this is much closer to a textbook in scope & depth, which (a) turns a lot of people away, despite being a fantastic resource and (b) makes it less blog-able.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is excellent.

Also check out the speculative contacts post: [http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2011/03/25/speculative- conta...](http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2011/03/25/speculative-contacts-an- continuous-collision-engine-approach-part-1/)

Even if your physics algorithms are wholly fake, you need quality contact resolution, or strange behavior will appear in collision responses, since any collision response is predicated on having correct contact information. (The consequence of bad contact quality, seen in lesser physics engines, is major errors where shapes can "squeeze through" other shapes or jitter against each other, gaining energy and eventually exploding.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's another great game physics reference by Glenn Fiedler. It's a must-read for beginner (and not-so-beginner) game programmers and has helped me immensely.

<http://www.gafferongames.com/game-physics/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Excellent. This is the kind of stuff that I'd love to see return to HN more often. Take a look at the rest of his blog, it's excellent too: <http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/>

</comment><comment><USER7> If I remember correctly from when I read about this 10 years ago, enforcing constraints by adding restoring forces/impulses is a bad way of doing it, because it gives very stiff equations. It works decently for soft constraints, like springs, but if you want to rigidly enforce a constraint, you need very large forces which are applied very suddenly, and to integrate such a system you need a very small time step. My impression was that it was much better to design your constraints into the equations of motion such that you reduce the number of degrees of freedom of the system and solve directly for the "constrained" motion. But that was research papers. Do real game engines use the method described here? Maybe the difference is the degree of "realism" required.

<comment><USER8> Games engines have these problems too. But instead of solving it mathematically which is hard (and still result in a pretty inefficient algorithm, as game worlds usually consist of complex geometry, not simple shapes), it is usually hacked around in some pragmatic way that still looks good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another excellent resource is the archive of Erin Catto's GDC presentations (Erin is the author of Box2D). Box2D was first presented in 2006; the 2005 presentation is about an iterative method for constraint solving in 3D.

Zips are here: <http://code.google.com/p/box2d/downloads/list>

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anybody know how to calculate torque? Like if two billard balls collide, I suppose part of the impact translates into new velocities, and part into spin. How much spin, that is the question.

Another example: in the C64 game Thrust, a rocket drags a ball which is attached with a stick. The ball is like a pendulum, hanging from the rocket. Now if the rocket accelerates, how will the pendulum swing, and where will it pull the rocket? Another way to view this is a big ball with a rocket on it's skin, that can accelerate in any direction. How much of the acceleration will turn into velocity and how much into spin?

Maybe I should be able to figure out the latter case by simply drawing vectors, but last time I tried my knowledge of physics was insufficient.

</comment><comment><USER11> And here's the book for the "pragmatics" [http://www.amazon.com/Foundation- Actionscript-3-0-Animation-...](http://www.amazon.com/Foundation- Actionscript-3-0-Animation-Making/dp/1590597915). i found this one cool</comment>


Paypal fee hike. Removing 1.9% rate for business over $100k. - <AUTHOR> https://cms.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=merchant/merchant_fees

<comment><AUTHOR> This is months after their UK hike. [http://tamebay.com/2011/07/paypal-fee- changes-for-september-...](http://tamebay.com/2011/07/paypal-fee-changes-for- september-2011.html)

Not sure what else has gone up this time around.</comment>


SearchQA: A New Q&A Dataset Augmented with Context from a Search Engine - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05179 <comment><AUTHOR> The dataset [[https://github.com/nyu-dl/SearchQA](https://github.com/nyu- dl/SearchQA)]</comment>


Vx32: portable, efficient, safe execution of untrusted x86 code - <AUTHOR> https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~baford/vm/ <comment><USER2> Fairly similar to Native Client [1], whose originally paper was released the next year (2009): they both rely on x86 segment registers, for example. A core difference is in how they guarantee that the guest instruction stream contains no dangerous instructions such as system calls - which is hard, because x86 instructions are variable-length and unaligned, so you have to avoid the situation where the guest code jumps to an address which is in the middle of some legitimate-looking instruction, and the processor interprets the bytes starting there as a different instruction. Direct jumps can be validated ahead of time, but indirect jumps can't - including all function returns. Native Client prevents this by requiring the sandboxed code to be compiled with compiler passes that align all valid targets of indirect branches to a given alignment, and insert mask instructions before indirect branches themselves; then it validates that no instruction streams starting at any aligned offset do anything dangerous. Vx32, on the other hand, wants to be able to run semi- arbitrary existing x86 code, so it has to address this with a layer of indirection. Rather than just validating instructions, it translates each basic block to a modified set of instructions - essentially an x86-to-x86 emulator. Indirect jumps are translated to a hash table lookup (mapping original code addresses to their corresponding translated versions), which achieves safety at the cost of significant slowdown in some cases.

[1] [http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/34913.pdf)

<comment><USER3> _such as system calls_

This sounds like something the CPU hardware should be handling, as x86 has 4 privilege levels ("ring 0 through "ring 3") while most OSes today only use 0 and 3. 3 could become "really untrusted" while what used to be in 3 moves to 2.

<comment><USER4> There are some problems with that that have arisen due to the long disuse of the other privilege levels:

1\. The fast methods for system calls (syscall/sysret/sysenter/sysleave) completely ignore these privilege levels and can only perform transitions between 0 and 3. That means you have to use interrupts which are slow, and may be even slower than 0/3 interrupt transitions because the processors aren't used to dealing with them.

2\. You can't make much use of them for x86_64 programs, since these disable segment based protection and the x86_64 page tables (you guessed it) only have a single bit to select privilege level of a page. Somebody that remembers the Intel manuals better can hopefully inform us if you can use them in x86 compatibility mode under a 64-bit kernel, but I'm going to guess you'll have some wrinkles here.

I would be very surprised if these two issues don't kill any performance gains you would get from avoiding the recompilation step.

<comment><USER5> All x86 page tables have a single bit for page tables, not just 64-bit ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People don't understand that vx32 allows you to implement scheduler in userspace. It's not 1-to-1 mapping between host process and guest process (like NaCL for example).

With vx32 you can have many-guest "processes" in one host process.

This is totally unique.

<comment><USER7> In fact Russ Cox (the author of vx32) has ported the Plan 9 kernel to vx32, so you can run a whole Plan 9 instance under Linux or what have you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My friend and I have a crazy idea that in the future, all songs will be binary executable code running in a sandbox similar to Vx32 or NaCl. This would allow you to edit parameters and change the song to fit the rest of your playlist.

The next step is to keep the binary locked away on a server and stream only the resulting audio to the client, and suddenly you have a major piracy disincentive.

<comment><USER9> Maybe I don't understand. Is this a joke? Is it not already perfectly possible to edit a song and make it fit your playlist? And how would streaming the audio from a binary be a disincentive for piracy, except inasmuch as on-demand streaming is more convenient than piracy?

<comment><USER8> Sure you can edit a finished, mixed song, but it takes a lot of skill, and realistically no one's going to do it without stems. If a song is an executable, it can expose user-friendly adjustable parameters. So one song could have infinite variations. A pirate could record one of those variations and share it, but that's much less valuable than the executable / stems.

<comment><USER10> What kind of adjustable parameters? I'll admit I'm intrigued by the prospect of songs that vary _slightly_ on each play-through (e.g. slightly different drum fills, different solos, etc), but I suspect this is distinct from what you're suggesting.

I'm also of the belief that piracy of digital arts is largely a cultural thing & that attempts to prevent it by force will never be more than marginally successful at best. That said, I have zero evidence to back it up. It's something I'd like to investigate, but I don't know how.

<comment><USER11> An example would be dynamic soundtracks in games, which can change during gameplay. (New Doom, FTL, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is the difference between this and, say, qemu's user mode emulation? IIRC qemu (for both system and user emulation) uses Tiny Code Generator in a similar manner when not using hardware virtualization.

Is it just a different API geared towards a different purpose, or are there significant differences in the implementation (e.g. a greater focus on security)?

<comment><USER12> QEmu's user mode emulation is not sandboxed AFAIK and can't run in-process (of the controlling process).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How does this compare to Google's Nacl/Pnacl

<comment><USER14> I made a wrapper for a NPAPI plugin for it back in the day.

Back then I was trying to make a decent performing system out of the XO-1. Flash performance on the XO-1 was terrible so sandboxed in-browser native seemed quite appealing.

This video shows some of the things I was working on at the time. [https://youtu.be/58UmxHryq8E?t=157](https://youtu.be/58UmxHryq8E?t=157) The time offset jumps to the VX32 part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> if you didn't notice, plan9 was ported to run under this : 9vx [1]

which you might find in your Linux package manager, e.g. AUR on Arch [2]

[1] [https://swtch.com/9vx/](https://swtch.com/9vx/)

[2] [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/9vx](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/9vx)

<comment><USER16> That port of Plan9 is quite old and will not work with the newest sources. It has received may updates since them. I added a good bunch of features as part of a GSoC project.

Nowadays, it is being maintained by David du Colombier at github: [https://github.com/0intro/vx32](https://github.com/0intro/vx32)

<comment><USER15> I still use "the blacksmith eats with a wooden spoon"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've had this for over two decades.

It's called a laptop I don't mind reformatting.

<comment><USER18> How do you tell whether you need to reformat it?

<comment><USER17> You give it an internal VLAN and watch for the malware trying to use it (assuming you disabled your physical network card on-system first before executing the code.)

It's a system set up to act like it's got internet connections, but it does not. You use sneakernet to transfer files.

<comment><USER18> What if the malware generates files that infect other machines?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nvidia Extends PhysX for High Fidelity Simulations, Goes Open Source - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/12/03/physx-high-fidelity-open-source/ <comment><USER2> Can anyone who has used both give an impression of how PhysX compares to Bullet?

</comment><comment><USER3> Has anyone used this platform extensively? How does it compare to other options? In particular Gazebo for ROS?

<comment><USER4> It is my understanding that PhysX is more comparable to a physics engine, like Bullet Physics or Open Dynamics Engine, both of which Gazebo integrates. Perhaps they could now integrate PhysX as well...

EDIT: When I say "integrates", I actually mean "interfaces with"; you can run Gazebo simulations using either physics engine (although switching between the two is not quite as simple as that).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a BSD license.

<comment><USER6> >It will be available as open source starting Monday, Dec. 3, under the simple BSD-3 license.

Doesn't the repo saying it is copyrighted contradict the BSD-3 license?

[https://developer.nvidia.com/physx-sdk- home](https://developer.nvidia.com/physx-sdk-home)

<comment><USER7> (Note that I am not a lawyer...)

In a nutshell, copyright ownership gives the owner(s) the choice to license their work as they see fit. The word "copyright" is often misunderstood as meaning "copying of the work in question is prohibited by law" \-- people often throw around the phrase "oh, you can't copy that - it's copyrighted!" \-- but that's not what copyright means.

Because the misunderstanding generally comes from people's experience with books, I'll use that as an example.

Say I write a book. As the author, I'm now the copyright owner of that book. I could then sell (or give away) that book under whatever terms I choose. In the real world, those terms usually are something like "you may _not_ make and/or distribute copies", and the rationale should be obvious: if an author's income depends on people buying their books, they're going to have a hard time paying bills if people make (or distribute) copies.

But back to me and my book. My income is independent of any copies sold, and if someone can't afford the book (or is even on the fence), I'd prefer they have access to the information contained therein rather than require they pay me. In my case, what I might do is ask that people pay me if they're willing and able, but allow for people to copy and redistribute the book if necessary. I might also allow people to make derivative works. That would be done by providing a license; that could be, say, one of the BSD licenses, or GPL, or one of the Creative Commons, or whatever.

Now, what prevents someone from saying "Hey, cstrahan has written a cool book; I think I'll just copy it and release it under incompatible terms in which everyone is required to pay me and redistribution is prohibited!"

That's where copyright comes in. I'm the owner of the work, and so I'm the only individual legally entitled to distribute that work under my choice of license. If someone tries to distribute my work under an alternate license, they're in violation of copyright law.

In short, copyright ownership and the terms of (re)distribution are two separate concepts that shouldn't be conflated.</comment></comment></comment>


Deformed babies born near N. Korea's 'wasteland' - <AUTHOR> https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/11/07/report-deformed-babies-born-near-north-koreas-nuclear-wasteland/23269939/ <comment><USER2> This sort of murder and radioactive pollution that will effect the whole world is moral reason enough to declare war and take control.. or is that what i am being manipulatied to believe.. i don't know anymore</comment>


Ask HN: how was your experience with hiring developers on Odesk or Elance? - <AUTHOR>

Any tips/advice? I am a technical person but need some help with finishing up some projects. TIA! <comment><USER2> I've had decent luck on Odesk with Wordpress stuff. (Tangent: I enjoy using Wordpress less every day. It's time for something better.) I only outsource easy/boring work. I found a couple developers for the first job that were good enough for me to continue hiring them for subsequent jobs without looking elsewhere.

The way I did it (I was taught this by a friend who does it more regularly) takes a bit of extra micromanagement for the first job, but it will pay off for subsequent jobs because you should be able to re-hire the same people. Post a job, wait until you have about 15 offers and then pick the top 5 (filter them on their English and whether or not they specifically respond to your post). To those 5, assign different pieces of your total job as a test job (less than 3 hours of work each, and limited by the hours/week setting). The _most important_ part of Odesk hiring is communication - use middle school English and make it clear that they are to ask questions immediately if anything is unclear. Be friendly and be sure they know that you are happy to help.

Of the five people you hire for a test job, at least one of them will probably not even start it. Another couple might start but not finish. You will almost certainly have a few that do decent work, though, and even if they represent different skill levels you can leverage them across different projects. (I have a contractor from India who inserts content really nicely, but she can't edit themes very well. I hire her regularly for page content, but I pay her less than my contractor in Kenya who takes care of editing themes for me.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I tried using oDesk because I thought it would speed up my development. It didn't.

I'm sure that the people I engaged had the skills, but unless I had a daily conference call the project just got way off-track. It started off as bi- weekly, conf calls - I'm not an obsessive micro manager, besides I don't have the time for that, but it was quickly apparent that they were doing the absolute bare minimum, and actually not strictly following spec.

I gave them a bit of leeway to fix the stuff, until I realised I was being taken for a ride, nothing was really being delivered.

I think I spent about 250 euros, nothing really, and I ended up taking the project back and finishing it myself, in a week.

I'm not saying my experience is everyone's, but my advice is only give very small tasks, specify _exactly_ what you want them to do, don't expect them to do any thinking, and they only seem to work if you have the time to micro manage them. Check the screenshots _very_ carefully. That will tell you if they are working or not, and finally make sure they actually deliver something to you at the end of each week.

Lastly, make sure they are in a similar time frame as you. I'm in Europe, and had Indians. Half their day was over by the time I got up, which meant I lost a day when they'd gone off track. India works for the states because they are beginning their day during the US day.

<comment><USER3> and one other thing... that's why I think a co-founder is so valuable. They share some of the load, meaning that at early stages you can move quickly on development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've had experiences all over the map with Elance. I had an amazing experience outsourcing a cost-benefits analysis to a freelancer from Pakistan. For $48 he did the most amazing job, with spreadsheets, Powerpoints, graphs, etc. On the other end of the spectrum, I hired a lady from Texas to write simple blog posts, and she started out great, and then she started missing milestones, and then giving outlandish excuses. I mean, if you can't do the job, just say so, but a power outage, a hurricane, a death in the family, and a computer theft all in one week? (ok, so the hurricane I was able to verify). In the middle, I hired a designer to do 6 variations on a standard portfolio website design and html coding. His portfolio looked great, so I went with him. The results I got back were beautiful, but horribly coded. I had to have my team in the Philippines recode them. It was as if the portfolio was done by a designer/coder duo, but the coder quit and the designer tried to code it himself.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like Elance. I've posted projects & delivered them & I feel the system works well from both sides.

However now when getting anything technical produced basically you're swapping dev hours to product management. That's fine if you don't have certain skills but you have to keep track of it all and write such specific instructions this can take longer than you'd have ever have thought.

I ALWAYS pick someone with a similar project in their profile & point to that as their starting point.

You've got to be sure you like their style before you pick them.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sorry to be spammy, but if you're interested the startup I'm a part of is working on something (not yet launched - will launch in approx 1 month) to help product managers know exactly how each member of their development team is progressing, as well as building reputation profiles of freelance developers.

We'll be looking for feedback and beta testers, so if you're interested you can sign up for our early beta at www.mindcrimp.com or email me at derek [at] mindcrimp [dot] com</comment>


What differentiates night terrors from nightmares - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/buzzfeed-collections-medical-mysteries/can-you-die-from-a-nightmare-a1d86b648853#.prs9d1wch <comment><USER2> I could have written this. I can't always say what the night-terror has been, I often don't remember what it was when I finally snap out of it. I do know that I feel overwhelmed with shame and embarrassment.

Mine started about 13 years ago, at age 29. They were mostly the same back then: I would think my condo was on fire and I HAD TO GET OUT NOW AS FAST AS POSSIBLE OR I'M GOING TO DIE.

I learned to keep a clear path between my bed and the door. I learned that locking the door was a bad idea; I would struggle so hard to open it that I'd injure myself. I learned that I would generally snap out of it within a minute or so, but there have been occasions where it must have been longer based on where I woke vs where I went to sleep.

The night terrors I have now involve imminent danger to me or my wife. Sometimes it's sort of normalish. Like I would think the ceiling fan was about to fall on my wife and so I would try to push her out of the way. I would usually wake up in the middle of trying to shove her.

Sometimes it's more bizarre. My God, the ceiling! It's a bunch of junkyard cars smashed together!? How can it stay up!? I freak out at the creaking sound of one of the cars breaking loose, its going to crush us. I wake up trying to push my wife out of the way. I'm very embarrassed and ashamed it has happened again.

Sometimes it's "the house is on fire." And probably a million other things I can't remember.

I've seen a sleep doctor, he's a neurologist. Graduated with honors from stanford. He's a really cool guy, my favorite doctor. We decided that stress was probably creating a favorable environment for a night-terror event, and something disturbing my sleep (noise in the room, etc.) would set it off. Something like ambien would only make it worse as when the terror started, I'd have that much more difficulty snapping out of it.

I tried clonazepam (klonopin). It seemed to help, but we had to titrate to get things under control. It took 2mg a night to essentially stop the terrors. It was a huge relief...I regained confidence and trust that I would be able to sleep through the night. That by itself reduced my stress level.

Night terrors can be worsened by stress, and they are in fact a stressor themselves. Downward spiral into the abyss.

After a couple years at that dose I started noticing memory problems. I'm sure my wife noticed them long before me. It wasn't just forgetting, I believe the memories didn't form in the first place. The worst episode, I was writing some code for work, and went to implement something only to find I had already done it. That's strange, I thought. I looked at the git history, and i had done it about 45 minutes earlier. That was bad.

I take a number of medications, and hadn't really had any issues with the clonazepam, so I didn't associate the two. I told my GP about the memory issues, and she said it was a classic side effect of clonazepam. So over a long period of time, we titrated back down to 1 mg.

Memory issues seem to be resolved, although if I take the clonazepam too late, and it's still in effect when I wake up, I can have memory problems until it's metabolized.

Clonazepam is a relatively benign drug in the short term. Not much studying has been done for long term, so that's iffy. I'm dependent on it now. If I go without, I have incredible difficulty sleeping. I won't necessarily have a night-terror, those are still rare now, but I feel like my brain just won't shut off and go to sleep.

<comment><USER3> Clonazepam belongs to a class of drugs called benzodiazepines. It is not benign. It can cause a range of side effects and withdrawal symptoms that are often mistaken for other problems. You may want to check out [http://www.benzo.org.uk/votsymp.htm](http://www.benzo.org.uk/votsymp.htm)

<comment><USER2> Yes, I agree, it's not benign. But among benzodiazepines, clonazepam is _relatively_ benign. I'm not a doctor, don't take anything I say as medical advice, etc., it's just my personal anecdotal experience.

<comment><USER4> Although you mean well, "benign" and "benzodiazepine" don't belong together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mild "night terrors" are occasionally a side effect of taking melatonin for me. I will wake up and see a swarm of aggressive insects flying towards me, or a large rat in my bed, or a person in my room who is trying to kill me.

The first few times this happened I reacted strongly, jumping out of bed and running out of the room. It would take me about 30 seconds to convince myself that what I saw was not real, making for interesting conversations with my roommates who sometimes saw me exhibit this behavior.

Now I typically realize quickly that what I am seeing is likely not there, and try to wait to see if it will go away before acting.

<comment><USER6> One thing that helped me during a stretch of events like that was sleeping with an eye mask on.

If I was wearing the eye mask when I woke up, then it was impossible for me to have seen something like the 'swarm of aggressive insects' in the first place. low-tech, but effective.

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately for me, this would just make things worse. I'm in some in- between state of dreaming and waking and if I can't see physically then my mind will fill in the blanks.

For me it's crucial that I be able to see when the night terror happens. So I have a nightlight.

<comment><USER6> For me, not being able to see was what made it possible to tell the difference between what was real and what was not.

If I have a dream about a 'swarm of aggressive insects' and I wake up and can't see anything, then I know that it wasn't real.

Are you sure your nightlight isn't making things worse by blurring the dream world and the real world? If the real world is pitch black then anything you thought you saw couldn't have been real.

<comment><USER2> The high level thinking parts of my brain aren't active in my night terrors. It seems perfectly rational to think the ceiling is made of compressed junkyard cars. Much like it would in a dream. You aren't really awake when you are running around in the panic state of a night terror.

Not being able to see would simply allow my semi-dream state to continue while I fumbled around in the real world wearing a sleep mask.

But you are right, some things seen do filter into the dream state. When I would think my condo was on fire in florida it was often when I'd take an afternoon nap on a Sunday and the sunset would color the whole place yellow- orange, and I often thought that might have been why the idea of fire popped into mind.

However, I think the more reality I can get into my system, the faster I'll realize the nonsense of the night-terror-fugue. I could be wrong, it's just my personal theory about me.

<comment><USER6> Ah, yes, I think our dreams were quite different.. Mine never involved 'nonsense' as you put it. I used to have dreams like a giant spider crawling across the ceiling directly above my face. When I would wake up I would jump out of bed and try to find the spider that was there a second ago.

The mask helped remind me that there was no way I could have seen anything in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I used to have night terrors as a child and pre teen. It is the scariest thing one could imagine for those who have never experienced it. For myself I would be partially awake but unable to move hypersensitive to noise light and dark. The whole room would stretch away from me. The hum of the fan or the window unit would ramp up to a deafening squeal. The darkness would turn to a plague of spotted bugs and the light would flicker like a fire. All taunting and terrible, worse then any nightmare.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, and as someone who also had it as a kid, I can't even imagine how absolutely terrifying it would be to start having it as an adult. You're physically (and probably mentally) capable of much worse things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had something like this as a kid.

One episode I remember vividly was where I woke up, looked around, and the room was filled with metallic flying saucers each about the size of a large potato, whizzing past my head, clanging as they bumped into each other, and I "knew" they would kill me if they noticed me. It was fascinating but terrifying. It didn't feel at all like how "waking up in a dream" does—I was definitely conscious—I checked, introspectively observing that I could control my thoughts. I hid under the blanket for what must have been at least a few minutes until the whizzing and clanging suddenly stopped, then anxiously checked that the saucers were gone, and fell asleep again.

Probably unrelatedly, I would also occasionally unexplainedly faint, so I was tested for epilepsy and sleep issues because of that. Both came up clean.

The sleep terrors thankfully stopped partway through primary school. I still have the unexplained fainting, but that's a story for another comment.

</comment><comment><USER10> I sometimes wake with night terrors where I feel like it's the part of the matrix where the helicopter lowers down outside the window and the minigun fires off. I've lept out of bed with the comforter (for some reason) in hand and slammed the door behind me. 40 seconds later I realized that there would prolly be bullet holes in the panel door from the chain gun that I thought was after me. Same for snake in the bed, xxx.

those don't bother me much and are kinda fun.

The ones that used to get me were the nameless horror coming for me or sucking me down into the depths of a basement or whatever. I learned to yell myself awake. not scream, yell... and I put my right hand up to wake me. You feel paralized for a second or so then your hand moves and you wake up.

Then I learned the real trick. As I told my wife, I learned from the matrix... "Tank... I need guns... lots of guns" ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mbkWMEMB9s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mbkWMEMB9s))...

I've gotten good at it so I literally/mentally reach behind me with my hand and then pull forward and dive into sleep... It's really funny actually because I start chasing the dream... or it swaps...

Anyway I told my wife this a while ago... she swears I'm a dream genie or something. She does it sometimes but last week she was being chased by a bear "I don't know why"... I said "why didn't you a) rocket launcher or b) porridge... or you know you love harry potter... levioso!"

But yeah now I will purposfully go back into the worst dreams I have and confront them. It feels super ninja esp when you're not actually awake enough to realize it's just a dream you're fighting.

It also feels very ninja when you are cackling chasing down the nameless horror with a infinite round rocket launcher or a proton pack.

</comment><comment><USER11> We changed the baity title, bound to raise the usual objections, to a phrase from the article. If anyone can suggest a better phrase (i.e. accurate, netural, and representative of the article), we'd be happy to change it again.

<comment><USER12> I found it interesting that the article linked here is from Medium, but it originated on Buzzfeed, where the author is employed.

Does HN restrict submissions from usually click-baity sites like Buzzfeed?

<comment><USER11> buzzfeed.com and medium.com are in the same category of sites, IIRC. These get mildly penalized, but there are a bunch of things that can override the penalty. This is how we try to deal with sites that produce a lot of dreck but also valuable, substantive pieces. A lot of big media websites fall in this category.

In this case it was just a coincidence that the post showed up with a medium.com URL.

We'll probably segment medium.com URLs one level down instead of at the site level, since it's really a bunch of different mini-sites. But we haven't gotten around to that yet. (github.com is another one of those, and there are a few more.)

<comment><USER12> Thank you for breaking that down. I generally stay away from sites like Buzzfeed, but I've also seen some great in-depth pieces from them.

<comment><USER13> Buzzfeed is having a kind of half revolution in what they do. While the main of what they produce is still clickbait listicles, they seem to have hired a bunch of heavyweight investigative journalists who are producing really interesting pieces.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Raise money for charity without lifting a finger - <AUTHOR> http://www.computeforhumanity.org/

<comment><USER2> Looks like a great app but why only target one OS that has less than a 5% market share? I would install it if there was a Windows/Linux version.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, creator here. Happy to answer any questions anyone has, and I'm curious to hear what you all think!</comment>


EBay's Svpply Brings A Daily Catalog Of Personalized Product Recommendations - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/20/ebays-svpply-brings-a-daily-catalog-of-personalized-product-recommendations-to-your-iphone-via-new-app-want/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> Great job guys</comment>


'Unlimited Vacation' Is Code for 'No Vacation' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-09-30/-unlimited-vacation-is-code-for-no-vacation- <comment><USER3> I don't know how many vacation days I've taken this year, because I haven't been keeping track.

</comment><comment><USER4> BS - I worked at Netflix for over 2 years and took lots of vacations - <USER2> ones too.</comment>


Show HN: HackerFAQ - <AUTHOR> http://www.hackerfaq.com

<comment><USER2> It would be much more useful if you could browse the list of questions by category or keyword rather than having to guess what information was available.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, you were able to ask anything programming related but stackoverflow bans the program when used too much.

Help of a Python developer would come in handy [https://github.com/demircancelebi/hackerfaq/issues/1](https://github.com/demircancelebi/hackerfaq/issues/1)</comment></comment>


Newly released eBook on Entrepreneurship (first 100 downloads free) - <AUTHOR> http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2011/06/sunday-buzz-survival-guide-for-slow-start-entrepreneur-by-denny-k-miu.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I did it. I finally published my second book (my first eBook). There are a total of ten chapters which are basically re-edit of my previous LoveMyTool posts. In this short book (50+ papes), I summarize my twenty years experience in high-tech startups, based on my two companies, one VC-funded and one self- funded.

There are no overnight successes. Building a startup is a journey not a race and it is about value-creation not valuation. I write about my survival techniques in creating values for potential customers which is a much slower, much longer, much more demanding but yet ultimately much more financially rewarding journey than creating valuation for potential investors.

The first 100 downloads are free. I am hoping to get enough exposure so that as many first-time entrepreneurs as possible could benefit from this book. If you like the book, as a personal favor to me, please rate and comment on Lulu.com. The more positive feedback I get, the better chance it will be for the book to appear on their recommended list.

Thanks and good luck with your venture.</comment>


US Navy Laser Weapon System (LaWS) Live Firing Onboard USS Ponce AFSB(I) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REHt44BuASk#t=72 <comment><USER2> It is only 30 kilowatt for the moment... let see the next upgrade to 15 kw!</comment>


Ask HN: What are some ways to watch people's behavioral patterns? - <AUTHOR> Weird question I realize.
I'm not around people enough "a good sample size" to see what they're using/doing in terms of things related to technology. My question pertains to observing people and "foreseeing the next step" so to speak.
I guess Facebook could be one source. I'm "on the other side of the fence" in the sense that I am a developer so while I can make things, I don't know what to make. What do people need? What can I solve? That sort of thing.
Where is the data... I remember there was a Google service for "most searched words" maybe it's still around.
It just seems that many successful business ventures were based around solving something or predicting the next step/evolution in something whether it's tv shows or design of mobile devices.
One place I saw some "data" was on outsourcing sites in particular Amazon Mechanical Turk where you're paid pennies to do random tasks but one in particular you were a "human OCR" equivalent, you had to run through pictures and pick out which ones matched a specific category. That was awkward job.
Anyway if you have any thoughts let me know. Gotta sign me up for a rewards card hahaha. I had to look up what those were for. THEY'RE WATCHING ME!!! <comment><USER2> This may not answer your initial question, but I hope it helps with your overall objective.

I would argue that there is a commonality in successful business venture solutions. The software often serves to replace an archaic(frequently so) and inefficient solution, by focusing on solving a specific problem more efficiently. To test this theory, try to find all of the oldest industries that are still active. See if the companies have been innovative in terms of technology. You could find that those that haven't been "upgraded" are a next inline for a needed solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any help/direction to look helps. It also would help if I was actually passionate about whatever field I decided to pursue.

I'm starting to realize more and more that time counts, when you allocate so much of it to a person/company/job and you have less and less, what you do matters.

Anyway as I said I don't really have like a "social life" so to speak, I have a couple of good friends, but I don't know "what's current".

I'm still unclear, "oldest industries" what are you talking about? Glass ware? Factories? Textiles... I don't know, but it's something so thanks for your input.</comment></comment>


Sequoia, Greylock Take Stake In OpenDNS - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/07/sequoia-opendns-greylock/ <comment><USER2> OpenDNS is not 'open' in any meaningful way, and it's not DNS (poisoned on an opt-out basis).

It's not fast either: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=497959>

I don't know how the hell they managed to market themselves so successfully as the answer to "my ISP's DNS sucks", especially when their entire business model is so straightforwardly evil: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_Finder>

<comment><USER3> Wait, let me get this straight:

They're evil for providing global DNS you can use from anywhere because of something verisign did? And their service is terrible because its not quite as fast as your ISPs DNS which is much closer to you? Bitter much?

People like OpenDNS because you can set and forget it, as you move around networks. Its nice. If you don't like it, don't use it. But spare us your outrage, mm-kay? ;)

<comment><USER2> Their service is a much more invasive version of what Verisign was rightly excoriated for -- they don't stop at squatting on wildcard DNS + malware domains, _they proxy Google search!_

My shitty ISP's DNS is only slower than OpenDNS on my ISP's awful internal network that routes my DNS packets over it's internal network cross-country for no reason -- on the internet backbone OpenDNS is marginally slower. Both are completely blown out of the water by Level3's free public DNS (126.96.36.199 - 126.96.36.199).

OpenDNS's claims to speed are bullshit, and they don't even seem to try -- I've only ever seen packets routed to them via NTT/Verio, which is the least- connected and highest-latency Tier 1 Network.

<comment><USER4> I hate that when using OpenDNS on my computer if I ping a site that is down the ping is returned from another IP address. I am less bothered by if the site doesn't exist, they load the search page from OpenDNS I would expect that as they have no other way to make money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This was a competitive VC deal? Halsey Minor has been trying to get someone to take OpenDNS off his hands for quite some time now; he needs the money. Don't believe everything you read, kids.

<comment><USER3> OpenDNS claims openly to be profitable. You're saying this is false?

Your claims of desperation do not jibe with one of the VCs being... Sequoia.

<comment><USER5> Umm, why do you feel a need to downvote and reply to every criticism of this company?

Just because something is making money doesn't mean it is making enough money to be worth keeping around. Also, doesn't mean it's making as much money as someone thought it would. The VCs involved may have invested sensing a turnaround opportunity, or to combine OpenDNS with a portfolio company. I'm sure they received favorable terms for their cash.

<comment><USER3> You don't seem to have any inside knowledge whatsoever, you're just making assumptions and stating them as fact. Which is why you got down-modded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Had the pleasure of interviewing David when I was in Silicon valley last month, and was impressed at how down to earth a guy he was. I'm sure they'll put this money to good use.

<comment><USER6> David was pud's sysadmin, about as low on the totem pole as one can get. "Down to earth" is the only favorable adjective one could use for this fellow.

<comment><USER3> Jealous much?

<comment><USER6> I know David from various different settings and even he will agree that he's a smarmy fellow.

<comment><USER3> I know you from one setting, and so far my impression is that you registered an account just to talk shit about someone anonymously. I think you will agree that makes you a despicable coward.

<comment><USER6> That's funny, 'cause I don't know you and it's my first time posting on this site, though I've visited precisely once beforehand. I did read the site guidelines and I suggest you do the same. There is a bit in there about civility that you have clearly missed.

As for David: his line of work is identical to Verisign's roundly reviled typo-squatting model.

<comment><USER7> I typed them two IP addresses in myself because Embarq's DNS was so shitty. Daily outages shitty.

Verisign abused their power and jacked the internet.

How are these things the same?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>