Show HN: We built a split testing library for React - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/react-alpha-beta/alphabeta <comment><AUTHOR> yaru22, github.com/bxh-io, and I built this because we wanted it to be easier to split test components inside React apps.

We also wanted there to be an A/B testing framework that works declaratively, the same way React does.

We'll be watching this thread for comments, questions, and feedback.

We plan to keep building this out, especially if there's a decent amount of interest in this approach to A/B testing.

Thanks for the feedback, and thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER2> Quick Q from a rookie on the topic: what's the primary advantage behind React being declarative in how its built?

<comment><AUTHOR> The big advantage of declarative frameworks (not just React - many are moving in this direction) is that reasoning about your application's state becomes much easier. This is because when you take a declarative approach, your application's state is kept separate from the DOM, and the DOM is a function of the application's state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Woah....this looks pretty amazing. Is adding A/B testing to a web framework like React even possible?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man! It's possible, you just have to build an API endpoint to store the results across users. There's a section in the README on that - it shouldn't be too hard :-)</comment></comment>


Generating six-pack abs with Tensorflow - <AUTHOR> https://blog.floydhub.com/generating-six-pack-abs-with-tensorflow/ <comment><USER2> Suppose that data in quantities orders of magnitude greater than that used in this project was scraped from the internet and used to train a model that powers a commercial product.

Is it ethical to sell something that is dependent upon data that people might consider sensitive? Even if they willingly lent their photos to fitness organizations, it's unlikely that they would have predicted that AI would make use of their personal data in the ways it does today.

<comment><USER3> I'll be honest, this sort of thing didn't cross my mind when I was gathering my small dataset. To me, if someone had willingly let an organization publish their photo on the internet, it was free game.

That said, having considered what you've pointed out about people's expectations when having their data taken not accounting for things like deep learning, I would be hesitant adopting the same attitude if I were working on a product or paid service. Right now I can't lay down a bottom line as to whether I think what you described is ethical, but I do think that the general public should be more informed when it comes to how their data, even old data, could be potentially used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey Ray, great article! Really loved your approach, i've never imaged a similar application! I think that this type of service can really be useful to a lot of people to maintain the right motivation for achieving their fitness goals, that usually are in the medium-long term.

I have some questions: Have you planned some possible data pipeline to improve the data generation? What about concept validation? I mean, this is really cool and could really improved the users experience in a gym or fitness center.

<comment><USER3> Hey, so the idea behind the app would be that users would constantly upload photos of themselves, thereby generating a lot of data, that includes their personal information, time of uploads, and hopefully lifestyle information, which would make the images generated by the model more realistic.

For this to work, the generated images would need to be already realistic enough. I think one way to "fake it until you make it" would be to interpolate between someone's picture and a fitness model, in the method introduced by the paper "Generative Visual Manipulation on the Natural Image Manifold"

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I noticed the skin and short color is different in the sample outputs. What techniques can be used to "teach" the network to preserve those features?

<comment><USER3> When it comes to the short color, I think this an instance of the model "overfitting" to the data. I noticed that images generated during training gradually learned to map changes in shorts colors for each of the ~130 people in the set that had shorts in their photo. When I use overfitting in this context, I mean that the model hasn't learned that certain transformations are things that humans consider invariant in the image-to-image translation problem, and since it has enough parameters to map every such noisy transformation in such a small training set, we get the artifacts you pointed out.

Data augmentation by slightly scaling pixel intensity uniformly across all color channels would be my first idea as to how to counteract this. After that, I would consider regularization by adding a penalty to the cost function that punishes larger differences in average pixel intensity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Often times a body transformation from one image to another results in a redefinition of the relative position and length of edges in a photo (as a person gets leaner).

Do you think that the L1 regularization used in pix2pix - which is intended to preserve low-frequency spacial patterns in the image pairs - will ultimately end up limiting how well cGANs can learn the body transformation image translation task?

<comment><USER3> Great question! My intuition tells me that L1 regularization could indeed be impacting the performance of the model, but for me personally, the only way to find out for certain would be to test this empirically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd like to see more about how this deep learning visualization (or any DL project for that matter) was used in context of a user-facing product or app - does the user take a selfie and receive a transformed picture back. I've seen the Prisma style transfer app, and I'm curious to see how others are starting to include DL features inside a customer product.

<comment><USER3> That's exactly how we had the app work in the demo. The "facade" part of things is that our trained model was not used as the backend or exposed on an API in any way. We used it to generate our best transformation on an image I took of myself, and hard coded an Android app to always return that transformation.

You can see that demo in the facebook live video, or check out the code here: [https://github.com/rayheberer/burda_hackday](https://github.com/rayheberer/burda_hackday)</comment></comment>


How Jason Kottke is thinking about kottke.org at 20 - <AUTHOR> http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/last-blog-standing-last-guy-dancing-how-jason-kottke-is-thinking-about-kottke-org-at-20/?utm_source=Benedict%27s+newsletter&utm_campaign=87100fce9d-Benedict%27s+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4999ca107f-87100fce9d-70267629 <comment><USER2> Kottke makes the important point that the demise of GoogleReader and decline of RSS was really the turning point in the popularity of blogs. I often wonder how things might have been (better?), if there had been a more accessible independent group of writers over the last 5 years.

I feel like Twitter, Facebook, and to a lesser extent Instagram etc would have been forced to be better by some competition as well. OTOH I have saved months of my life not reading them...

<comment><USER3> Feedly is an excellent service (with great web and mobile apps) for those looking for a feedreader that is actively supported.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The un-cluttered URL is: [http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/last-blog-standing- last-guy...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/last-blog-standing-last-guy- dancing-how-jason-kottke-is-thinking-about-kottke-org-at-20/) without all that tracking junk on it.

<comment><USER5> Thanks. Unfortunately all queries to niemanlab.org are not returning any results i.e. the site is overloaded.

<comment><USER6> [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:eTUqZX...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:eTUqZXugv_wJ:www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/last- blog-standing-last-guy-dancing-how-jason-kottke-is-thinking-about-kottke-org- at-20/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's an interesting point that he thinks the site would not take off if he launched it today, compared to when it started in 1998.

Similar to the early adopters of Instagram who built huge followings simply because they were there first. Anyone starting today has to face a huge headwind: the content algorithms.

Are there other examples of vestigial platforms that are leftover successes from before?

Email newsletters are the last outpost of unfiltered connection - I shudder to think of what happens when personal email dips below 100% organic reach.

<comment><USER8> It seems analogous to a forest canopy...initially the soil is rich and opportunity seems boundless. But over time old-growth trees grow and spread until they absorb most of the available sunlight, making it difficult or impossible for saplings to get started below.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> this post makes me nostalgi-sad</comment>


A camera that can see around corners - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/how-to-see-around-corners-1.10258 <comment><USER2> Stuff like this just makes me imagine how deadly the Terminators are going to be. Lightning reflexes, flawless aim, senses that include all light and radio spectrums, and now seeing around corners in 3D.

<comment><USER3> They said similar things for the nuclear bomb, humans have the ability now to make the earth inhospitable for advanced life. War robot flying drones will replace advancing human armies as rifles replaced swords and spears.

We will live to see the day where humans fighting each other with humans in planes, humans in tanks, humans in boats and humans with guns will be as ridiculous as 10,000 years ago where tribes fought eachother with sticks and bones.

The humans who choose not to adapt will go extinct, I will elect to change by getting this vision tech merged into my DNA so my offspring get it too.

<comment><USER4> "The humans who choose not to adapt will go extinct"

I think if you were to adapt towards peace then there wouldn't be any problems.

<comment><USER5> Even if you adapt toward peace, the transhumanist with the giant robot dong might have a reproductive advantage over the guy who opts not to be modified (I am making some pretty broad assumptions about the desires of women, but I think that history will bear them out, and anyway, this is just an example).

That said, I don't think maeon3's "genetic transhumanism" view of the future is terribly plausible. Modifying ourselves? Already started. Flexible genetic modifications that can do things like giving us magic laser-scatter-vision? Not plausible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This can also be accomplished with a camera on a stick.

<comment><USER7> Or a mirror.

<comment><USER8> Those might even be better, since this appears to need a wall near the corner for the lasers to bounce off in order to function correctly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's an (unrelated) neat trick to see around corners by looking at diffuse scattered light:

<http://homepage.mac.com/sigfpe/Dual/dual.html>

<comment><USER10> That's interesting too, but differs in that there still needs to be a unobstructed path to the object from the laser, in which case it could as well have been a camera.

Still very clever, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this really much different than current time-of-flight cameras / flash LIDARs? It looks like a slightly modified version of one of those with a lower frequency pulse or something to bounce backwards towards the stick person.

Cool, definitely. But maybe not as novel as it may seem.

<comment><USER12> There's a little bit of discussion in these two papers on the relationship between LIDAR and the "full" solution to transient illumination:

* <http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~amsmith/papers/ucsc-soe-08-26.pdf>

* [http://cameraculture.media.mit.edu/files/TransientImagingICC...](http://cameraculture.media.mit.edu/files/TransientImagingICCV2009LowResolutionMediaLab.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You may also want to watch out for people with telescopes zooming in on the tea pot standing close to your monitor:

<http://gauss.ececs.uc.edu/Courses/c653/extra/reflections.pdf>

<comment><USER14> A friend's been posting his Lytro photos, and we realized that it lets you focus unto reflections, thus sharpening them and letting you do things like reading an out of sight monitor off the reflection on a table that would usually be too blurry. So you don't even need a telescope anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> MIT Media Lab consistently comes up with the most amazing projects. It feels like the modern equivalent to Bell Labs.

</comment><comment><USER16> I like to give the team that produced that video a virtual high five (iFive? oh, previously coined...) as I watched without sound and seem to have been no less informed for it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Great video. I'm not certain, but other time of flight approaches like this have had limitations in range. First, because light intensity decreases by a power of 2 with distance traveled, and second, because the MOS gate (if it has one) sees larger distances aliased as shorter ones. See MS Kinect for similar issues.

</comment><comment><USER18> ENHANCE!

Marvelous achievement. But I hate it when technology confirms the misunderstanding of a Hollywood hack.

</comment><comment><USER19> Possibly related: <https://xkcd.com/538/>

</comment><comment><USER10> This is really interesting. I wonder how the mathematics work of using different directions to find the locations of bounces, and how much the accuracy can increase with more directions.</comment>


Google teases October 4th announcement - <AUTHOR> https://madeby.google.com <comment><USER2> Two images from the source that aren't actually used in the rotation:

[https://madeby.google.com/static/images/tenfour/extras/001.j...](https://madeby.google.com/static/images/tenfour/extras/001.jpg) [https://madeby.google.com/static/images/tenfour/extras/002.j...](https://madeby.google.com/static/images/tenfour/extras/002.jpg) (clearly shows a phone)

<comment><USER3> One that looks like an old iPhone, to boot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How come anytime smartphones come up people start flinging poo at each other? Seriously, why does anyone care that someone prefers an iPhone, or is disappointed at the rumored price increases?

<comment><USER5> us vs them + bikeshedding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pixel phones? [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/09/google-confirms- octob...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/09/google-confirms-october-4th- event-prepare-for-pixel-phones/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Apple and Google should save money and hire the same design firm (similar to how Toyota and Subaru collaborated on the 86/BRZ).Their flagship phones already look very similar. "Premium" != "Aluminium unibody, with edge-to-edge glass" /s

<comment><USER8> I though that Apple and Google already used the same design firm: Apple inc.

<comment><USER9> Please. This fanboyism without any concrete evidence is just a troll comment. I can go an about how Apple ios design brought in inspiration from Windows Metro & from other competitors too but, this thread isn't about that. Please do provide specific examples or notes to validate or create a new thread.

<comment><USER10> Did any Android manufacturer release a phone with a similar form factor as the iPhone prior to the iPhone? Yet suddenly now it's almost impossible to find a phone that doesn't mirror the iPhone...

<comment><USER11> You mean a slab of glass, most of which is screen?

Wow. Design award of the decade... Or actually simply what people thought about before but wasn't possible until then. (The LG Prada around at the same time shows this)

It's pure fanboyism.

<comment><USER10> Strange that if it was so obvious or so easy, there were people saying stuff like this [0]:

"Apparently none of you guys realize how bad of an idea a touch-screen is on a phone. I foresee some pretty obvious and pretty major problems here. I'll be keeping my Samsung A707, thanks... Color me massively disappointed."

"Touch screen buttons? BAD idea. This thing will never work."

"no qwerty keyboard? ojhsdodsagfadhjldgs!!"

"This looks like a disgusting bastard child of iPod/Cellphone/PDA. Yes it's shiny, but I'm sure it won't be so shiny once you touch it."

"lol last i checked many companies tried the tap to type and tap to dial ... IT DOESNT WORK STEVIE, people dont like non-tactile typing, its a simple fact, this isnt a phone its a mac pda wow yippie.... "

"It took apple how long to develop this ONE PHONE, samsung and motorola release new phones every few months lol, and constantly innovates and gets better, im sorry but if im sending text messages i'd rather have my thumb keyboard than some weird finger tapping on a screen crap."

Somebody should ask that last guy what phone he uses today.

And yet it seems literally _no other company_ can figure out a form factor that competes with it. So yes, you're right, design award of the decade.

Do you really think that's HTC/Samsung/LG/Huawei/Motorola's inspiration for all their devices? They're modeled after the LG Prada?

[0] [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/17-of-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/17-of- the-best-internet-reactions-to-the-original-iphone/415095/)

<comment><USER11> No, I think that that was the direction phones were moving in anyway, and it was an obvious step.

I also think that fanboys like yourself give way, way too much credit to Apple for 'inventing' the form factor and the smartphone when they weren't even first to market with that form factor and other smartphones had been around for years.

They did what they do well - designed a good product with mass appeal at the high end of the market, they even lead the market. I'm not trying to claim they're somehow bad or just derivative (because I'm not a fanboy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Could someone fix the headline please? The link suggests that it's October 5th, and not 4th.

<comment><USER13> It says October 4th for me. Maybe it's detecting timezones?

<comment><USER14> Probably. The title says 'Oct. 4 - Google', but the content of the page says 4 Oct.

As I'm in the UK 4 Oct would be correct way around for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Unless they pledge iphone-class software support, I can't think of any announcements that would really move Android forward.

<comment><USER16> I think he means providing software support, like updates. It is unacceptable for a $650 phone to only get 2 years worth of updates. Apple provides 4-5y. Sure, sometimes features are removed on older devices, and they run slower, but surely that's better than no updates at all. My company will not allow phones to connect to the exchange server if you have a phone that doesn't get monthly security updates.

<comment><USER15> This exactly, and I'm referring especially to security patches. Nexus devices are the best among Android but still pale in comparison to iOS. Google Play Services can't patch vulnerabilities in the core system libraries or the kernel. A smartphone without software updates is like a desktop computer without access to Windows updates. If Google wants enterprises to take Android more seriously, it needs a flagship line of devices with enterprise-grade software support.

<comment><USER17> I have a Nexus 5X on Project Fi and my phone gets updates very frequently. I have updates at least every month if not every couple of weeks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Rumours are that the smaller version (Pixel) will cost $649, with the Pixel XL costing $749. Ridiculous. You don't compete with Apple by copying their pricing. Compete by having a better SoC, better camera/screen etc..

<comment><USER18> > Compete by having a better SoC, better camera/screen

Do you think those things are free?

<comment><USER16> Right, but there is no SoC that can compete with Apple's A10 fusion SoC. Google just buys off the shelf Qualcomm parts, and they are far slower, especially when you take into account that the Google phones need even more horsepower because they run at much higher resolution.

<comment><USER19> In single core benchmarks, Apple's A10 is king. In multicore it's pretty much inline with others.

[https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/09/14/geekbench- andro...](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/09/14/geekbench-android-a10)

The Samsung Galaxy S7 is 6 months old, and the iPhone 7 beats it by 5% in multicore benchmarks.

<comment><USER20> The iPhone has half the number of active cores.

<comment><USER21> Those A series cores are also larger than the Qualcomm cores.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Nexus 6P was released in October 2015, so I imagine they will just be announcing a new phone. Taking a page from Apple's playbook with surprise announcements etc.</comment>


Kik battles Facebook with bots in the new messaging wars - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2016/02/10/kik-bots-messaging-facebook-wechat/#cf6ff3a25712 <comment><USER2> No desktop, no thank you! Kik's been promising this for years!</comment>


Banking in Berlin - <AUTHOR> http://blog.holvi.com/2012/11/29/banking-in-berlin/ <comment><USER2> A few things:

\- Opening a bank account isn't pain and its free. If you do it locally at your bank, you can start using you account right away, you may have to wait a week or so for you credit/debit card and your online-banking pin, since they are send via mail. If you open an account with an online bank. You fill out the form, print it out, sign it, go to the post office with your ID, the post- person will check if your ID matches the form and send it to the bank. Few days later you will get your cards and passwords and are ready to go.

\- Yes there are delays between banks. But there are some EU directives on the way, which seek to minimize the delay between banks in all of europe.

\- I have no idea what your app is supposed to do. Is it some kind of fancy online-banking interface? With integrated accounting? For multiple accounts? The main-site (holvi.com) doesn't really help me with that.

<comment><USER3> On Holvi: we completely replace traditional banks. So we do not just interface with your existing bank, we actually offer you a whole new type of current account. It is thus not merely an app, but a new banking service. One with, yes, integrated accounting and other things.

"You fill out the form, print it out, sign it, go to the post office with your ID, the post-person will check if your ID matches the form and send it to the bank.Few days later you will get your cards and passwords and are ready to go." — I'm not exactly sure I'd call that a nice process :-)

<comment><USER2> Well because of anti money laundering laws they still need an ID-check before they can open the account.

The good news is that germany started issuing ID-cards with RFID, that can be loaded with a certificate, that will enable you to digitally sign contracts and identify yourself, so the trip to the post-office will no longer be necessary.

On your Project: With upcoming SEPA payments it will not matter anymore where your bank is registered, since transaction times and fees will be the same for all transactions within europe. So just register yourself as/partner with a bank in a european country that offers the most favorable banking-laws/ banking infrastructure/ whatever. In regard of germans, they really want to know that their money is "safe". Especially now in the euro-crisis, so make sure that the depot insurance of the country of your choice is of a comparable quality to the german system. (And maybe dont settle for a PIIGS state, as germans have a strong distrust in banks and politicians in those countries)

<comment><USER3> Yes, in different countries there are different mechanisms to do this. Some places you can manage completely online. There are things you can do before the ID check, but at some point it needs to be done, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's certainly no need to sign off on your bank statements. However, the bank must ensure that you get them - so if you don't pick them up yourself, you get them sent every couple of month.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you have a company blog, please put two things at the top: a short description of what you are doing and a link to your home page. Coming from HN with no previous knowledge of your company, I have no context at all.

<comment><USER6> Same here. For the benefit of those that don't like to type: <https://holvi.com/> but I'm still not sure what's different.</comment></comment>


Fear of Macros - <AUTHOR> http://www.greghendershott.com/fear-of-macros/ <comment><USER2> Great resource, previously on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7601506](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7601506)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9692499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9692499)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great intro. After reading it, I wrote up an outline to approach the same subject from a different angle: [http://www.gavinmcg.com/2016/02/03/racket- macros.html](http://www.gavinmcg.com/2016/02/03/racket-macros.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Greg Hendersott isn't a typical hacker. He's the creator of Cakewalk, a digital audio workstation that ruled the Windows roost for about 20 years. Hendershott is the John Carmack of music creation software.

</comment><comment><USER5> C macros are to be feared. Not Racket macros.

</comment><comment><USER6> For those looking to get into Racket macros, the Racket School [0] from this year is now also an excellent place to start.

0\. [https://summer-school.racket-lang.org/2018/plan/](https://summer- school.racket-lang.org/2018/plan/)

</comment><comment><USER7> There are continuations mentioned in the preface, right? Are we going to talk about them next? :)

<comment><USER8> A continuation is best understood by trying to implement an evaluator that can pause.

An evaluator is just a function that takes in some JSON and spits out a result. [if [> 2 1] 8 9] would produce 8.

Say you wanted to pause during the evaluation of the [> 2 1] condition. What do you do? How would you resume it later? Well, you have the original JSON. Meaning you have the whole program code. You know where you are in that program code. And you know the current state of the program. So you save those somewhere, return from your evaluator, then restore the values later and tell your evaluator to start from a specific location.

One non intuitive aspect of this, though, is that "the current values of your program" includes "what the evaluator should do at each step". Imagine evaluating [if [> 2 1] 8 9]. In your eval function, you check "if the first thing in the list is "'if'", call the 'eval-if' subroutine." Your two options here are to either (a) have eval-if evaluate the condition and then return the result, or (b) pass the condition and both branches to the function, and have that function evaluate the condition and one of the branches.

The latter form is called continuation passing, and it's much easier to pause and resume. But you're restricted to tail calls only. You can do it the other way by saving a stack.

<comment><USER7> Thank you. I think there is more in it, though. When you only talk about ability to pause, you still don't change the sequence of execution - you only can inspect it at arbitrary moments. The sequence itself remains immutable. It's not so clear when you use continuations themselves within that sequence. Say, you save current continuation as an object in memory and then return to it - not immediately but after some other actions are done. In this case you have more questions about how perfect is your return to the state when that continuation was saved is. Indeed a perfect return would mean the whole memory state of the machine is restored exactly as it was when the continuation was taken, and, barring side effects, the execution will repeat what was done after the continuation was taken but before it was returned to.

I'd like to hear more about control flow state and data flow state here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is the _only_ resource with which I had success getting started with Racket's macros.</comment>


Writing Linux File System for Fun - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLR17lUjTpc <comment><AUTHOR> "Writing Linux File System for Fun" by Maciej Grochowski

Slides: [https://github.com/cppdug/presentations/blob/master/files/20...](https://github.com/cppdug/presentations/blob/master/files/2018-05-14/WritingFS4Fun.pptx)

Abstract: The UNIX Filesystem story goes back to the first implementation of the operating system. Since then there were many different implementations and improvements, that makes FileSystem quite complicated but also rock solid piece of software. Currently, most people treat FS as a black box or indivisible part of OS. In this talk, I want to present some basics about FS by doing a simple implementation of Filesystem.</comment>


Tagged Buys Popular Social/Instant Messaging Client Digsby - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/19/tagged-buys-popular-socialinstant-messaging-client-digsby/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a longtime user and fan of Digsby due to its social network integration, but until today I've never heard of Tagged.</comment>


How Google Maps has moved so far ahead of the competition - <AUTHOR> http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/12/20/fascinating-read-google-maps-moved-far-ahead-competition/ <comment><USER2> This is an area where Apple needs to seriously reconsider all of the third party sources. They just aren't where Google is by themselves. Perhaps using OpenStreetmap as a partner?

TomTom supposedly has a map correction tool but I have never been able to get it to load.

The Apple satellite images are woefully out of date in many places.

Although, Apple does seem to have gotten a lot faster at adding user submitted places to Maps. I wonder if they have some sort of user reputation system in place? I've noticed things I've submitted have been corrected within a couple days. Pins moved, road changes, businesses that have closed/opened, or just adding new places.</comment>


Copycat coders create 'vulnerable' apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49960387 <comment><AUTHOR> To be more specific, the research[0] was conducted using C++ code snippets from Stack Overflow.

[0] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01321](https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01321)</comment>


A Rank of NPM packages updated daily - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/anvaka/8e8fa57c7ee1350e3491 <comment><USER2> i think there's a flaw in your script; you miss counted one of my libs by a few hundred, when compared to npmjs.com</comment>


Browser Websites via Facebook [APP] - <AUTHOR> http://apps.facebook.com/textonly/

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a Facebook app which allows you to browse websites and share links quickly.pls check it out</comment>


Dawn, a WebGPU Implementation in C++ - <AUTHOR> https://dawn.googlesource.com/dawn <comment><USER2> I was curious what shader language would be used for WebGPU and couldn't find an answer. From [1] it seems to be undecided for now.

[1] [https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/#typedefdef- gpushadercode](https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/#typedefdef-gpushadercode) > Note: While the choice of shader language is undecided, GPUShaderModuleDescriptor will temporarily accept both text and binary input.

<comment><USER3> I think not specifying the shader language / byte-code makes at least sense for those native WebGPU implementation libraries (of course not for the WebGPU standard itself).

For instance, currently Dawn comes with a lot of code to translate and validate SPIRV to the underlying shader languages or byte-codes. When using Dawn as a native library to get a friendlier cross-platform API over Metal, Vulkan and D3D12, it might make sense to do the shader translation offline, and feed Dawn directly with Metal and D3D12 shader bytecode. The strict validation isn't really needed in such a use case, the shader translation doesn't need to happen at run time, and the executable can be a lot slimmer.

Ideally I'd like to see both in web backend, SPIRV as base, but also have a quasi-standard textual language (might be WHLSL, I don't care, but just don't offer WHLSL as the _only_ way to get shaders into WebGPU).

Both D3D12 and Metal allow to either feed shader bytecode to the API, or translate from shader source during run time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> WebGPU is the hot thing right now. This could be the start of a cross platform revolution; So exciting.

<comment><USER5> Genuine question from someone looking at toying with graphics programming who had never heard of WebGPU before today: does this mean I should hold off on learning WebGL? How different are the two?

<comment><USER6> If you don't have any kind of experience, you are better off starting with WebGL.

It is more beginner friendly and it is here now.

You can either start from scratch:

[https://webglfundamentals.org/](https://webglfundamentals.org/)

Or use one of the two most developer friendly frameworks.

[https://threejs.org/](https://threejs.org/)

[https://www.babylonjs.com/](https://www.babylonjs.com/)

If you have zero experience in graphics, another approach is to learn about 3D software rendering in first place.

[https://www.davrous.com/2013/06/13/tutorial-series- learning-...](https://www.davrous.com/2013/06/13/tutorial-series-learning-how- to-write-a-3d-soft-engine-from-scratch-in-c-typescript-or-javascript/)

Leave WebGPU for when you feel comfortable with 3D programming.

<comment><USER5> Thanks! I'd actually been looking for that software rendering article for a while as well and couldn't find it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anything that reduces Vulkan boilerplate is welcomed.

</comment><comment><USER7> For those of us who haven't been following C++, what year's language dialect / C++ standard version is this?

<comment><USER8> Most likely Google's internal C++ coding standard.

<comment><USER7> Right, found at [https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html](https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html) \- it doesn't really answer the question though, very "it depends" there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Someone write QuickJS bindings for this and we'll have the new best game development platform!

<comment><USER6> You could just use nvk instead.

[https://github.com/maierfelix/nvk](https://github.com/maierfelix/nvk)

<comment><USER4> Vulkan is too low level for most people and use cases I guess. The idea is to reduce that boilerplate.

<comment><USER10> Based on my interests, I tend to look at this in the opposite direction. Vulkan is the correct level of abstraction for an API targeting high performance utilization of CPU/GPU rendering/compute resources. But I don't do any web based programming (other than pushing results of large data formatting to simple forms for my office). I don't care what uses a front or back end dev finds simple or low-boiler-plate, I want maximum control with as much cross- platform portability as possible. But I do get that other developers want something different. So I'm all for Khronos staying away from WebGPU and focusing on the things I care about.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, there are both use cases. Having a low level, very flexible API and a higher level, more opinionated and probably easier to use API. Having only one doesn't cut it in my opinion. There must be two levels of use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> rough-sea are there rust bindings?

<comment><USER11> Rust has its own stuff going on:

[https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu-rs](https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu-rs)

<comment><USER7> This doesn't mean that wgpu-rs will necessarily be the choice for all rust users of course.

<comment><USER12> wgpu-rs and Dawn have already started to implement a common "webgpu-native" header ([https://github.com/webgpu-native/webgpu- headers/blob/master/...](https://github.com/webgpu-native/webgpu- headers/blob/master/webgpu.h)) which would allow native implementations to be swapped</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sturgeon's Passionate Revelation - <AUTHOR> http://braythwayt.com/2014/02/03/sturgeon%27s-passionate-revelation.html <comment><AUTHOR> Mind you, the observation that "90% of the companies advertising for passionate programmers are crud" is uninformative about the nature of passion does not mean that Avdi's article was uninformative. It's highly useful to be reminded that such companies are nothing special, and that working 80+ hour weeks is nothing special. 90% of all that is crud, and that's ok.

And speaking personally, it's very important to be reminded that being passionate about programming isn't anything special, it's a personal choice. I don't believe that in and of itself it makes me necessarily worse than if I was "moderately enthusiastic," but it doesn't make me any better.

</comment><comment><USER2> So I guess the trick is in identifying the non-crud identifiers, not just for potential employees but for anything really. How do we do that?

<comment><USER3> Not just any non-crud indentifier. You'll need some very reliable ones. The more extreme the (un)likeness of something, the more reliable indicators you need for dealing with it.

For example, say that 90% of your potential emplyees are crud. You have a position with 100 candidates and 10 are fit for it. Now, you apply a (very well correlated) identifier, it reduces the candiadtes to 50, keeping 8. You still have too many candidates, so you apply another filter, reducing them to 25 in total, with 6 good ones... You can see where this is going, with some luck you'll have: 4/12, 3/6, 2/3, 1/1; you can expect quite often to have: 3/12, 2/6, 1/3, 0/1; with some bad luck you'll have: 3/12, 1/6, 0/3, and no good candidate will make it even to the last round of selections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> By extension, 90% of the internet is crud - this article wasn't. Thanks Reg.

<comment><USER5> No. The Internet's six sigma compliant. 99.99966% of everything is crud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wait, I'm confused. Did anything happen here except for restating the law (OK, "revelation") a few times?</comment>


LaTeX was not built for the web - <AUTHOR> https://authorea.com/4675 <comment><USER2> LaTeX was built to typeset documents. You have pages in documents and pagination is of critical importance in LaTeX. In the web you don't have pages, it's evolved to be seamless and scrollable. Natuarally, LaTeX was not designed for such an environment.

That doesn't mean that LaTeX is worthless on the web. The gluing algorithms that Knuth used for creating sentences and paragraphs do (for the most part) work, even in documents without pages. In all honesty, the web could benefit greatly from LaTeX, pagination aside.

I'm glad that the author seems to have a practical perspective on this: >We think LaTeX is still the best programming language to tell a computer how to place text on a page. But the TeX project started pre-web, in 1978, and its scope and function are tightly linked to the printed page, not the webpage.

He goes on to give an example of constructing a table in LaTex which requires (or assumes by default) a suggested location for LaTeX to place the table in the page; something which is currently nonsensical in all but a few web environments. Like the author, I also find CSS appealing for a potential "LaTeX" on the web solution.

However, LaTeX was designed from the very first to be the next standard in type setting and is a turing complete language. CSS is still under debate for being turing complete, and it lacks nearly all of the features that are iconic of LaTeX, except for the ability to format math equations ( and even then...).

I'm not sure what the next standard in typesetting will be, but it will be designed to be device agnostic (with book existing as a supported format), it will target the web and similar digital media, it will be turing complete, and it will be created specifically to fulfill each of those goals, not to have them retroactively attached in a ham-fisted way.

<comment><USER3> "We think LaTeX is still the best programming language to tell a computer how to place text on a page."

No. The output might be beautiful, but the language is most certainly not. Awful to debug.

I consider a more modern language that compiles to LaTeX and leverage its rendering engine for paper docs (while giving you sufficient control over the output) and also gives you a nice web output more pragmatic and a nicer way to approach the problem.

<comment><USER4> "No. The output might be beautiful, but the language is most certainly not. Awful to debug."

Absolutely agree but, as far as I'm aware, this "more modern alternative" does not exist.

<comment><USER5> What about this ? [http://dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML/](http://dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML/)

Having some XML output seems to make it easier to add CSS rules ?

<comment><USER6> Combines the complexity of LaTeX with the hideousness of XML. Great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Give me something that

      * is a simple and logically consistent as Markdown

      * has the ability to embed LaTeX formulas

      * has a functional #include for larger documents

      * can refer back to headings, equations and citations

      * can compile to PDF or webpage

      * compiles FAST

and I will give you a lot of money.

LaTeX is a horrible language, inconsistent and badly designed and unpleasant to look at. TeX is good at what it does but the whole system is horribly slow to compile documents. Documents will compile fine with some frontends but not with others. Markdown is not feature complete enough.

The scientific community is unfortunately stuck with LaTeX for the foreseeable future. Seems like every day someone asks me how to do something that should be very simple, which inevitably involves loading some obscure package.

<comment><USER8> What do you find complicated/logically-inconsistent about LaTeX? The job it is supposed to do is nontrivial, so it seems appropriate that the tool is at least somewhat nontrivial, too, especially if you don't like defaults.

It admittedly doesn't compile to HTML and the compile-time can be on the order of minutes for very large documents, but are these really deal-breakers?

If you really don't like LaTeX, have a look at org-mode, which seems to be able to fulfil most, if not all, of your requirements (not sure about compile times).

<comment><USER9> Org is really good about letting you unobtrusively embed LaTex into a document and can export to a bunch of formats.

I was doing an algorithms course with lots of mathematical formulas last year. Org was a godsend for completing the homework assignments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Perhaps I'm just old and tired, but I loathe reading technical papers on a screen, whether it's my LCD monitor, my iPad, or my Kindle. One thing that irks me about the WWW specifications, for example, is that you cannot get a nicely formatted hard copy. I'm find with technical material being put on the web, but for the love of $DEITY please make a decently formatted PDF available too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. That is one reason why most technical and scientific documents are still perused in PDF. In Authorea you can export each document to a journal format (Export). Soon we will have a printer-friendly style which is basically CSS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> From the article:

 _This table command instructs TeX to put the table in the page, here, where the table is declared (h) AND at the top of the page (t)._

PrinceXML, an XML/HTML + CSS to PDF renderer, can do this using a "float:top" style: [http://www.princexml.com/doc/9.0/properties/float/](http://www.princexml.com/doc/9.0/properties/float/)

Also, before they abandoned their bespoke browser engine, Opera released an experimental build that could render web pages as paged media (see [http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-reader-a-new-way- to...](http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-reader-a-new-way-to-read-the- web/) ). It, too, supports floating to top (as vendor-prefixed "-o-top").

Paged media is as alive as ever (it's just moving from dead trees to tablets), so I wouldn't count this stuff out just yet.

</comment><comment><USER12> The main problem with LaTeX is that it does not have a good hyperlink mechanism. So, I am thinking about how to switch from LaTeX to HTML. I have a markup system based on Racket:

[http://andreimikhailov.com/slides/bystroTeX/slides- manual/in...](http://andreimikhailov.com/slides/bystroTeX/slides- manual/index.html)

The main application was supposed to be slides, to replace the Beamer. But I think it is good for generic math-oriented web publishing. It does not work on Windows, though. Comments/suggestions/testing are welcome!

<comment><USER8> Is there anything specifically wrong with the hyperref package? It seems to work rather decently for me.

<comment><USER12> I want to put a hyperlink to Eq. (4.4) of [http://arxiv.org/abs/hep- th/9907164](http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9907164) What is the right format? How can it even in principle work? If I click on the link:

[http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9907164/Eq_4_4](http://arxiv.org/abs/hep- th/9907164/Eq_4_4)

what is supposed to happen?

<comment><USER13> Is [http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep- th/9907164v2.pdf#page=30](http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/9907164v2.pdf#page=30) a reasonable approximation? It works in Chrome and should work with the Adobe plugin, but doesn't work in Safari. I don't know if PDF has finer scale references than page.

<comment><USER12> Also, if they submit a revised version, it will be a different page. Anyway, I don't think we will ever get a good PDF reader, because there is no demand. People read HTML.

<comment><USER13> After a little more digging, I've found that pdf files can have named destinations, like eqrefs, so you don't have to use page numbers as references. See [http://www.tug.org/pipermail/pdftex/2007-October/007383.html](http://www.tug.org/pipermail/pdftex/2007-October/007383.html) for how to make them in LaTeX.

This does require whoever generates the pdf to include the labels, but then so does html. It shouldn't be too hard to generate a reference to any named equation in a file.

What exactly is your problem with current PDF readers? PDF.js is pretty nice for browsers, Preview.app is standard on OS X, Linux has several that were fine and I know that Windows has many that are considered good alternatives to Acrobat Reader. Even phones and tablets do a good job, though e-readers do not.

<comment><USER12> You are right, and thank you for the link. Actually, let me use this to advertise my own fork of PdfViewer:

[https://github.com/amkhlv/pdfviewer](https://github.com/amkhlv/pdfviewer)

I started that fork because I could not find a viewer which would keep vertical position, and jump back after following an internal link, and have bookmarks with charhints.

There is a conceptual problem, however: as I said, I feel that PDF is getting deprecated because of insufficient demand. If this is true, then it does not make much sense to invest effort into TeX + PDF. Maybe I am wrong. Sometimes I think that I am simply allergic to TeX :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In terms of pure mathematical typesetting, it's great, and, as they mention, Mathjax does a fantastic job of handling equations in webpages. Yes, TeX takes some learning, but it's a let less verbose than MathML for the same equation, and being distinct isn't necessarily an issue: there is precedent within HTML, such as CSS and Javascript code being embedded within pages. A browser with native support for (a subset of) TeX would allow for a lot of technical papers to be presented in a fully searchable, device agnostic manner, and would avoid the additional learning curve or conversion to MathML.

For layout, though, HTML with CSS is the way to go if your prime target is web.

</comment><comment><USER15> > What does the future hold for academic writing? We like to think that a few > years from now we will format our research papers with the web version in > mind, rather than the printed PDF.

I've been thinking about this for almost a year. I believe as well that webview-first is the future of technical publications. The problem is how to either 1) get traditional publishers to adopt newer and better technology (a lot of publishers are still using systems seemingly from 90s that doesn't even support features that have been stablized in TexLive for years); or 2) build new publishers that gain enough reputation fast enough, so that the academia would consider them as good communication channels.

Personally I like the second way better. It's more convenient (and easier to think out of box) to start from scratch than to change an existing system (by system I mean organizations, publishers, rather than a computer system).

Academia is somehow like a trust chain. People tend to follow reputable researchers/professors. If a platform can get most reputable researchers, it can be adopted soon.

<comment><USER16> I really hope we don't optimise for a webview-first future. I personally find reading large pieces of text on a screen uncomfortable at best, and painful at worse. I want to be able to print out any scientific or academic documents, and at the moment LaTeX and PDF do that for me the best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> And HTML was not built for GUIs. Does it stop the ongoing madness? No.

</comment><comment><USER18> These guys are well worth a look [https://www.writelatex.com](https://www.writelatex.com) if you're looking for web-based, collaborative LaTeX tools.

Along with mendeley and peerj there's the makings of little cluster of companies trying to innovate in the academic publishing space here in London.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, yes! We know and are in touch with all these guys (writelatex, mendeley, and peerj). Great stuff coming out of London in this space. Digital Science and Figshare are also there. We are very excited that there's a movement to change/improve academic publishing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> One tricky bit is that I think a good solution medium-term will need to handle both media. Right now, a typical academic paper's print format transfers relatively poorly to the web. But the reading experience you get when you print out a web-formatted document to paper is also typically pretty poor, especially with things like figure layout.

It's possible e-readers will someday obsolete print entirely, but I personally still find it difficult to read longer-form stuff on a screen, so I'd like to see better options for print layout of web documents. Technologically these are possible, e.g. PrinceXML shows quite a bit of print-layout stuff you can do with the web-technology stack (though it's unfortunately proprietary), but the bits and pieces don't quite plug together well yet.

</comment><comment><USER20> Correct, tangle was built for the WEB. Well TeX was built written in WEB.

(sorry for the bad knuth toolchain jokes)

</comment><comment><USER21> There is another problem.

Some time ago, I thought about integrating LaTeX into user-facing software, not to render an entire web page but to generate a few formulas and images containing formulas in real-time or close to real-time. It breaks my heart to say that it seems impossible to do so, because LaTex is soooo slow.

The codebase is written in an obscure language (that Knuth created for the purpose?) and would have to be converted to something optimizable such as C in order to become faster.

Since I won't be re-implementing LaTex soon, I'll stick with MathJax for simple formulas and must look for something else if I want to create a complicated formula-containing image.

<comment><USER22> Web2c is typically used these days. The issue is not as simple as _" It needs to be written in C"_.

<comment><USER21> Well, I gave up when I saw that it wasn't written in anything I could work with, so this is news to me.

Also, having had some bad experiences with to-C translated code (looking at you, Matlab), I'd say that knowing that Web2C exists doesn't cause me great optimism.

<comment><USER23> There is recent work on a TeX engine with a Lua interface:

[http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/36/differences- betwee...](http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/36/differences-between- luatex-context-and-xetex)

But still LaTeX sits on top of that, so it probably doesn't move you along very much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think the guys at [http://substance.io](http://substance.io) are trying to solve this problem. You should take a look !

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! I did come across substance.io a few months ago. Seems like they made a lot of progress. Looks beautiful. It's time to get in touch with them again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> On a related note, has there been any recent word on LaTeX3?

</comment><comment><USER26> Should I learn to finally do my resume in LaTeX?

<comment><USER27> I did, and would recommend it to others. The final product is just so much nicer looking than I feel the reader subconsciously finds one to be a more appealing candidate.

You almost certainly want to use a better font than Computer Modern, but that's easy.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What 'programming' skills should an average person ideally have? - <AUTHOR>

Note that my definition of 'programming' is broad enough to include, say, VBA in Excel, and my definition of an average person is 'someone who is not pursuing a career in programming.'<p>My initial guess is VBA, enough SQL to sufficiently query a mature database, and enough Python/Ruby to be able to automate simple tasks.  What are your thoughts? <comment><USER2> It's a popular fantasy here that 'we' are what everyone should be but it's nothing more than that. The average person should be concerned with their diet, health and financial situations not what we do.

</comment><comment><USER3> Enough to put electrical tape over a blinking VCR/DVD display and pop popcorn in the microwave without burning more than half the kernels... :-)

Honestly, I would say enough to write a simple joined SQL query, do some conditionals on a spreadsheet and/or mailmerge.

Most folk will never use more than that knowledge. There are many many people including kids that rarely touch a computer. Hard to believe but it's true, talked with some teenagers last year bout computers, many said "yeah, I don't like em, I only use them when I have to do schoolwork on em."

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think that an average person should have any programming skills.

Just like I don't think that the average car owner would require engineering skills, or an average eater would require farming skills.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Just like I don 't think that the average car owner would require engineering skills, or an average eater would require farming skills._

I'm talking things on the scale of fixing a carburator or cooking a home- cooked meal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Scripting should be considered a basic form of digital literacy along with learning enough Photoshop to know what can be faked and understanding why Wikipedia can only be trusted so far.

The particular scripting language doesn't matter that much but I'd say JavaScript is the most ubiquitous and accessible. The main concepts people need to learn are: 1) Decomposing a problem into steps and conditions. 2) iterating through and transforming text and numbers and 3) responding to user events.

All of these concepts are useful to "average" people wanting to take control of their data or understand how their applications work.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think everybody should be able to write some small scripts to his/her environment. For example, someone who uses excel often should know enough VBA to automate some tasks. On the other hand, someone who has no exposure to computer at all (which is closer to my definition of a normal person, as tablets and smartphones are overtaking PCs) doesn't need to know anything at all.

</comment><comment><USER7> I still find it surprising that some people - who use a computer often - don't know keyboard shortcuts, e.g. for copy/paste. So forget the average person having programming skills.</comment>


Ask HN: Good OS X data modeling software? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for something to help me visualize my data structure design. I've done the requisite Googling and haven't come up with much besides OmniGraffle, which is a little pricey ($100 US for Standard Edition) and not built specifically for this purpose.
In the old days I'd just fire up M$ Access and use that to show table names, attributes, and relationships. Currently I've resorted to pen & paper.
Anybody solved this problem before? HN community advice is always welcomed and appreciated! <comment><USER2> I usually just use pen and paper (my workflow works best this way), I also like OmniGraffle, but here are some others to check out:

<http://www.aquafold.com/>

<http://www.sqlpower.ca/page/architect>

<http://www.dbvis.com/products/dbvis/>

<http://www.thekompany.com/products/dataarchitect>

ERD Stencil (Rails) for Omnigraffle: <http://graffletopia.com/stencils/318>

</comment><comment><USER3> You could do your modelling in xCode using a core data model. Just create a Core Data application in Xcode and play with the model file.

<http://developer.apple.com/macosx/coredata.html> [http://developer.apple.com/macosx/images/CoreDataSimpleDataM...](http://developer.apple.com/macosx/images/CoreDataSimpleDataModel.jpg)

<comment><AUTHOR> This could work, thanks I'll look into it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I vote for pencil and paper ;-) you can erase! I do this and then directly create the sql in phpmyadmin or something similar -- for most of projects which are small.

<comment><USER5> _you can erase!_

And you're not limited by the preconceived notions of the software you're using. It's also surprising how quickly you learn something when you have to draw and erase it 5 times (vs. entering some data into someone else's app.)

 _for most of projects which are small_

Large projects too. They're just a lot of small projects stuck together.

<comment><USER4> also I would like to point out that I love paper. I love notebooks with my daily notes in them. I love print-outs. I love storing paper. I love seeing my (ugly)handwriting in my notes. It makes me remember things and makes me understand faster than looking at the fonts in my monitor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I recommend Graphviz, which is free:

<http://www.pixelglow.com/graphviz/>

</comment><comment><USER7> DIA: <http://live.gnome.org/Dia/>

I think the darwinports page for it is currently down (actually the entire server may be down), but regardless dia rules! Saves as svg so it's really easy to write reverse engineering tools for your code base/database. When I say really easy I mean possible.

</comment><comment><USER8> SQLEditor works very well, although a single license costs $79. Try out the trial. One awesome thing about it that it can parse a SQL dump of your existing database and create a visual model of the structure.

<http://www.malcolmhardie.com/sqleditor/>

<comment><USER9> You sir, are my new best friend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know this is not as advance as you would like, but I use Open Office Draw for my process flows and DB models and stuff.

</comment><comment><USER11> You may want to glance at 'R' which is an open source alternative to 'S'. <http://www.r-project.org/>

'R' is used to manipulate data and graphically display the results. I've never used it myself, but I know it's used in my University's Computer Science department.

</comment><comment><USER12> as mcormier said, you can use Xcode's data modeling. There is also Umbrello, which either requires X11 or finding a recent native OS X build.

i don't have any experience with it, but also found ArgoUML (<http://argouml.tigris.org/>)

</comment><comment><USER13> Visualization is for sissies. Directly editing SQL scrips in TextMate is the only way to go. :)

<comment><USER14> handing sql scripts over to clients in the first stage of planning development is a _great_ idea :)

so easy to read!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is probably outside of your pricerange, but have you looked at Wolfram's Mathematica? I find it invaluable for all sorts of statistical data modeling.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm not a techy but www.thebrain.com is the coolest visualization tool i've found and its free...but may not apply for what you're looking fore

</comment><comment><USER17> Java UML tool like ArgoUML?</comment>


Ask HN: Tech companies which do not allow telecommuting?  - <AUTHOR>

The only two big companies I'm aware that they don't allow " working remote" are Google and Apple.<p>What about Facebook? <comment><USER2> Yahoo</comment>


Questions on the Bethesda reselling drama - <AUTHOR> https://www.meganwalker.me.uk/2018/08/questions-on-the-bethesda-reselling-drama/ <comment><USER2> I have two questions.

First, if the product is unopened, how will Bethesda know the warranty does not apply? I have bought a number of products that came with a registration card that I was supposed to send in so I could get the warranty. In the case of PC games, I'd assume the warranty kicks in if you tie the game to your steam account. No idea how this works for consoles. But this has clearly not happened yet.

Second question: What warranty? Are you f'ing kidding me? Bethesda has been shipping horrendously buggy games for as long as anyone can remember. You buy them at your own peril. After a few years of patches from Bethesda and the community (google for unofficial skyrim patch) the games become playable. But it's not like you get the patches on warranty after complaining to Bethesda. You get them automatically. Because otherwise nobody would buy those games in the first place. If there is a warranty from Bethesda, I would be very interesting in finding out its terms.

As far as I know, nobody has ever gotten their money back from Bethesda because the game was too buggy. Bug people have gotten their money back from Steam when returning a buggy game. So Steam actually does offer a warranty that is actually worth something.

It is worth noting that Steam had to be guilt-tripped into offering that warranty by too many shitty, buggy or outright fraudulently marketed games. This was not a day one feature.

<comment><USER3> I think the warranty covers factory defects on the physical disc, i.e. if the disc is unreadable they send you a working copy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't this trivially mooted by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_So...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_Sons,_Inc). ?

 _The Court held that the first sale doctrine applies to goods manufactured outside of the United States, and the protections and exceptions offered by the Copyright Act to works "lawfully made under this title" is not limited by geography. Rather, it applies to all copies legally made anywhere, not just in the United States, in accordance with U.S. copyright law. So, wherever a copy of a book is first made and sold, it can be resold in the U.S. without permission from the publisher._

<comment><USER5> There was some decent discussion about that earlier on HN [1].

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17739631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17739631)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Archive link if needed: [https://web.archive.org/web/20180812140408/https://www.megan...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180812140408/https://www.meganwalker.me.uk/2018/08/questions- on-the-bethesda-reselling-drama/)

(My website may not survive the HN hug of death).

—-

I made this because I feel there's some interesting questions and implications this raises specifically because it's going after unauthorised sellers who market their goods as new.

I specifically did not try to answer all the questions I've raised because for most of them I don't have a definitive answer, or possibly even what it should be. I'm interested to see discussion on these points though!

<comment><USER6> It is a good point. There are a few industries where companies tend to be really strict about who you buy from and will refuse to honor warranty from unautorized sellers (headphones, other than the least expensive, are one that I came across recently). Many others require some kind of proof of purchase and I would guess most people realize that if you get something on ebay there is a good chance that the manufacturer will not honor the warranty. Sometimes this is just due to time limiting considerations (if something has a year warranty and you buy it and sell it unopened a year later should the person who buys it get a year warranty?) and sometimes the company wants to limit the warranty to the first person who buys it.

IMO, warranty needs to be considered independent of if an item is new or not and any company who has a problem with how Amazon is representing that should go after Amazon and not random third party sellers. I would also strongly support companies being required to either honor warranty on items that are resold new or specify a warranty period independent of when or where it is bought that is listed on the product. Many companies do everything they can to make sure the warranty sounds great when you buy while making every excuse to not honor it later. "Authorized Sellers" are just one part of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This may be related to Bethesda transitioning to distributing its PC games directly via Bethesda.net and cutting out middlemen such as Steam. They want to capture the full price of a retail copy, and to do that they are cutting out resellers on all platforms to drive people towards their own new platform.

[https://www.pcgamer.com/fallout-76-wont-launch-on- steam/](https://www.pcgamer.com/fallout-76-wont-launch-on-steam/)</comment>


June Intelligent Oven - <AUTHOR> https://juneoven.com/ <comment><USER2> Does it recognise all my food?

 _" Food ID uses the camera and sensors to recognize commonly cooked foods. The camera communicates with the NVIDIA K1 Quad-Core ARM Cortex and the NVIDIA Kepler GPU with 192 CUDA cores."_ ~ [http://support.juneoven.com/article/69-how-does-food-id- work...](http://support.juneoven.com/article/69-how-does-food-id-work-does-it- really-recognize-all-my-food)

How about an oven that:

\- cleans easier?

\- use less energy?

\- stop me getting burnt while extracting trays?

\- have simple ergonomic controls?

\- in-built smoke detection?

\- a loud timer?

\- warms up faster?

These are all real-world problems that don't require software/hardware looking for a problem. I'm disappointed when I see the novelty approach taken to to solving problems of cooking. I thought this was already achieved with the microwave?

Instead what I would really like to see is a way to determine if food is going off, contaminated and where it comes from. This kind of food-tech would rock!

<comment><USER3> _\- warms up faster?_

The website claims a pretty fast pre-heat time of just under 5 minutes, which is probably mostly attributable to the compact size -- a smaller volume can be heated faster. I didn't notice anything about how the heating element works ongoing, though, so it's unclear whether that's just the time to heat the volume of air, or if the walls and ceiling are kicking off enough radiation to sustain cooking at that point. I'd assume the latter, given the price tag.

 _\- use less energy?_

I would expect this oven to use less energy than a traditional home oven, since they advertise consistent heating and good insulation, both of which tend to be lacking in most home kitchens. Again, the small volume will be an energy saver as well.

 _\- have simple ergonomic controls?_

They claim that it'll recognize the food when you put it in, and prepare it to your requested style based on their computer vision and machine learning algorithms.

<comment><USER2> _" They claim that it'll recognize the food when you put it in, and prepare it to your requested style based on their computer vision and machine learning algorithms."_

Speed & energy, maybe. Simple, no. Computer + Oven = Computer. [0] The potential for cognitive friction is high for Homo Sapiens.

[0] A play on the Alan Cooper question: _" Q. What do you get when you cross a computer with a (Foo)? A. Computer"_ \-- Inmates running the Asylum, pp 3-14.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a market developing here within the "temperature controlled smart cooking" world, with the number of different engineering approaches growing rapidly. Y Combinator alone has funded three companies in this space already!

Pantelligent (YC W13) - $199 - [https://www.pantelligent.com/](https://www.pantelligent.com/) \- smart frying pan plus smartphone app. Recipes are smart software & give you instructions to adjust on the fly to provide perfect results every time. Works for any dish you can cook in a frying pan (steak, salmon, eggs, veggies, ...).

Cinder (YC W15) - $499 - [https://cindercooks.com/](https://cindercooks.com/) \- electric grill style countertop appliance with smart recipes on smartphone.

Nomiku (YC W15) - $249 / $199 pre-order - [http://www.nomiku.com/](http://www.nomiku.com/) \- sous-vide water bath immersion circulator

June Oven - $2995 / $1495 pre-order - [https://juneoven.com/](https://juneoven.com/) \- countertop electric oven style

Consumers have a wide range of options and that's pretty amazing, because fundamentally, the technology (temperature controlled cooking) works great and it's something I believe a lot of people are going to want to have in their home. It's like "process control 101" \-- time and temperature -- finally made it to the kitchen.

(Disclosure: I'm an engineer & co-founder of Pantelligent. Words can not convey just how delicious a Pantelligent-cooked salmon or steak is. Paul Graham said, "This pan made the best salmon I've ever cooked. In fact, better than I've had in almost any restaurant." If you're skeptical, check out some of our hands-on reviews; we were recently on NBC TODAY Show, CBS This Morning, and Popular Science's "Top 10 Inventions of 2015". And if you're still skeptical and live in the SF Bay Area, email visit @ pantelligent.com and we'll see if we can schedule a visit to our Sunnyvale warehouse so you can try it out for yourself!)

<comment><USER5> With the exception of the immersion circulator, I don't understand these devices. Can you help me understand?

I'm an experienced cook, so (again, with the exception of the immersion circulator) I'm not in the target market for these devices. I'm having trouble understanding the target market though. I was thinking that it was for inexperienced people who want to cook at home. When I play that scenario through my head, it doesn't completely work.

Take your salmon example: getting the pan to a good temperature and cooking the fish to the ideal temperature is not easy, so I can see how an inexperienced person could easily benefit from real-time temperature feedback. What I'm having trouble figuring out though, is that after gaining experience from cooking fish a few times, what's the benefit of the real-time temperature feedback? I guess the thing I'm wrestling with is that as one becomes more experienced, the value of these smart devices seems to rapidly diminish.

I don't intend this to be negative or harsh, so I hope it doesn't come across that way. I'm genuinely interested in the thinking behind this smart device trend. Hope you can share.

<comment><USER6> I'm exactly the target market for this. I never learned how to cook meat growing up (I got by with sandwiches and salads and the like), but now as an adult I find myself in situations like the following:

Last week my significant other and I decided to cook dinner together (for a change; usually we don't). We were both interested in salmon, but neither of us knew how to cook it, so we ended up doing something else.

My status quo options are: (1) don't cook salmon, (2) cook salmon and most likely screw it up—hardly the best way to start an evening together, or (3) take cooking classes.

An appliance that unlocks option (4) cook salmon and have it most likely turn out delicious on the first try? Yes. I will eagerly pay money for that.

Even assuming over time I no longer need the device, the reality is that I'd much rather pay this one-time upfront cost than expend a bunch of time trying and failing or taking classes in order to develop a skill I'm not passionate about.

<comment><USER7> Why is getting it right on the first try the only acceptable outcome? If you try, fail a few times, and eventually learn it will still be dramatically cheaper than buying any of these machines. And once you learn it will become a transferable skill -- you won't be tied to only being able to prepare your food when you're home with your specialized device.

<comment><USER8> So much this. The fear of failure in cooking is a bit like the fear of failure in maths ("I'm just bad at maths") or fearing technology ("I'd never be good at computers!").

I do get it. It feels extremely wasteful to throw out a ruined meal. Many people are taught from very young that the stove is 'dangerous' and that hot pans are something to be feared. It's potentially really really embarrassing to ruin a meal for guests, etc.

It's a fear of experimentation though, which is a shame.

FWIW I'm a kitchen gadget nut as much as the next person - this could be a really good tool for convenience, not criticizing it at all in that way.

<comment> semi-extrinsic On the other hand, there's nothing cooler than having friends over for dinner and being able to say "yeah, I've never tried making this before, but it turned out great". Fortune favours the bold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think you could make a lot of money branching out into reflow oven land. Provide degrees C and controlled ramp up and ramp down rates. Time lapse video of the solder reflowing. Twitter integration "Hey I just reflowed a SMD PCB"

Clearly you can make more profit off an individual reflow oven than an individual glorified toaster oven. Although you can sell more toaster ovens than reflow ovens. Well, probably. HOWEVER the insightful part is the reflow oven model is the same hardware with a different software load and probably a custom sticker that says something like "never for use with food after interior is contaminated" or similar. There may be some OSHA or FCC/EMI recert issues to sell a reflow oven (semi-)commercially instead of as a home toaster oven, but its probably pretty small potato costs.

There are, of course, competitors in the world of toaster oven sized SMD reflow ovens. But this is a nice looking oven. However "The suggested MSRP for the June Intelligent Oven is $2,995" and even in reflow oven land thats kinda steep.

Also talk to a metal worker who does powder coating. Another "converted toaster oven" job with peculiar temp control and ventilation issues. Again, you're a simple new software load on the same old hardware away from a new product in a new market. I believe powder coating would be pretty rough on the optics and the glass door, but it might work anyway if the user is careful.

I suspect your hardware can't handle it but a desktop kiln for ceramics or enameling artwork is an interesting idea.

Finally how good is your low temp control, could you "air sous vide" or just provide a stable environment for rising bread? low temp stability is harder than you'd think, probably. You may already be able to do this, it just didn't make the cut to the website.

</comment><comment><USER10> Any idea why an oven needs an "NVIDIA Tegra K1 with 2.3 GHz quad-core processor and 192 CUDA GPU cores"? Seems like overkill?

<comment><USER11> To stream video from the full HD camera. Now, any idea why an oven needs a full HD camera?

<comment><USER12> To be able to identify the food you put into it using machine vision. Now, any idea why an oven needs to identify the food you put into it?

<comment><USER13> Image recognition with visible spectrum is pretty limited. I can put a egg- based or sugar-based glaze on something and it will turn brown faster, without making the meat cook any faster.

What might be more interesting is a gas-phase chromatography which analyses the vapors and deduces the various reactions going on. But that's going to be severely over-kill (and incredibly priced).

<comment><USER14> Well in the video it used a temperature probe to detect when the meat was done, then it cranked up the heat to brown. So in that scenario your glaze would be just fine.

But I am not defending this product. It may find a market but it would not be for me. I have been learning to cook through trial and error and find it fun and rewarding. Not only that, it really doesn't take that much time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> adam-a Seems like a fun idea, and it potentially allows really precise cooking with the internal probes too. Hopefully they don't go to overboard with the social media and wireless connection and focus on making something practical in the kitchen.

For example, including over the air updates. I am imagining an XBox like scenario where you just want to cook dinner but you have to wait 20 minutes for it to update.

<comment><USER15> You just saying that has elevated my blood pressure. Firefox does the same thing. GRRR haha

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> At first glance it looks really neat, but I was disappointed to see that this doesn't have combi oven functionality. For the price I would guess this would retail at, I wouldn't be willing to buy this over a combi oven.

edit: I missed that the MSRP is $3000. I was right, I'm not willing to consider this over a (for example) nice built-in Wolf combi oven in the same price bracket. I'll also argue most people would be better served with a combi oven over this device. There are some neat ideas here, but I don't get the appeal.

<comment><USER16> I have been thinking the same thing. For this price, for a so-called "smart" oven, there is no excuse that it's not a combi or cvap oven. I wouldn't consider purchasing any standalone oven appliance for this price unless it was combi or cvap.

Before any other "smart" features I'd want:

* Precise temperature control between ~100 _F-450_ F

* Precise humidity control from 0%-100% relative humidity

* Dry bulb temperature, wet bulb temperature, and an internal temperature probe (preferably up to 2 internal probes).

* High temperature sear/broil

If you want it to be "smart" then forget the camera identification and allow me simply select "roast chicken" and have it cook to an internal temperature of ~155 _F (165_ F if you so choose) at 100% humidity before automatically turning the humidity down to 0% and switching to broil to crisp the skin.

<comment><USER17> That's how we built our app, you tell Cinder it's chicken and it's the time/temperature profile. You can also manually control temperature precisely from 70F to 525F, and the even high heat sear has amazed many chefs. We looked at steam but it's challenging because water reservoirs limit cooking time, or running plumbing is beyond reach for most homes (but something restaurants do). I'd like to build one in the future. Meanwhile, Cinder is $499 (email me for a HackerNews discount: email@example.com).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So it's "smart" and costs $3,000. Are there public APIs or am I at the complete mercy of their software?

<comment><USER19> So many of these consumer products and "IoT" deprioritize public APIs, it's a shame... They are missing out on potentially huge sub-communities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Like cruise control on your car, June continually calculates the power > needed to maintain a constant temperature

So you say it has a thermostat in it, then?

> Food cooks faster while using less energy than traditional ovens

So you say it's a convection oven, then?

> June sends you a push notification when your food is done. And you can > customize your alerts so you aren't disturbed you when you're away from > home.

So you say I can disable the alert... that tells me dinner is ready... because I'm away from... um. Somebody didn't really think this one through, then?

<comment><USER21> > > Like cruise control on your car, June continually calculates the power > needed to maintain a constant temperature

> So you say it has a thermostat in it, then?

Having a thermostat is not the same as continuously maintaining a constant temperature. Typical "dumb" ovens have thermostats, but they maintain a _rough_ temperature by turning on, overshooting the target temperature, cutting the heat entirely, dropping substantially under the target temperature, and repeating that cycle.

> So you say I can disable the alert... that tells me dinner is ready... > because I'm away from... um. Somebody didn't really think this one through, > then?

There's often more than one person who lives in a home and may use an oven. Its quite possible for one of them to be away from home and not want notifications, while another is at home and using the oven.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I want to hear John Syracusa do a review of this oven.

<comment><USER23> I saw people mentioning him in tweets about this thing yesterday. The review of a Hamilton Beach from yesterday's ATP was good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wish they would give us the specs for the actual oven hardware ... as opposed to the specs for the computer in it.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, it was weird to keep hearing about the Nvidia whatever which to me seems totally irrelevant to anything (and super un-Apple/Path-like).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm skeptical how a small form factor oven like this could provide even heating that is required for many kinds of baking, even if it has convection fans. Also, having such a small volume means that most of the heat will escape when the door opens making it difficult to get that crucial "oven spring" for bread baking.

It seems like a perfectly acceptable (albeit pricy) alternative to a toaster over, however.

<comment><USER5> > Also, having such a small volume means that most of the heat will escape > when the door opens...

Supposedly, there's an air curtain to help with that problem.

> It seems like a perfectly acceptable (albeit pricy) alternative to a toaster > over, however.

It may be an alternative to a toaster oven, but is that a good thing? Even the best toaster oven isn't very good, if you go by testing by Cooks Illustrated for example. I don't see how this one can perform any better given, as you point out, the physics limitations of a small oven.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This reminds me of my DIY reflow oven: [http://viennot.com/reflow_oven.pdf](http://viennot.com/reflow_oven.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER28> It's a reasonable idea, but it needs to cost $300 instead of $3000. Expect clones to be available in Shentzen at that price point by next year.

<comment><USER4> Yes and no; pure hardware clones are one thing, but high quality software, content, customer education about a new product category, and marketing are not categories that cloners have (yet) done particularly well. Beyond that, hardware lends itself to hard IP protection -- Pantelligent's technology is patent pending, and it's likely that other smart cooking products are as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Reaches 350°F in 4 minutes and 15 seconds.

Not going to work as a reflow oven, unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER30> Seems superfluous. The instagram upload of the cookies was a̶n̶ ̶e̶y̶e̶ ̶r̶o̶l̶l̶e̶r̶ well placed,

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm holding out for a kitchen system that orders and stocks the food, fetches it from the fridge, (at the touch of a button) prepares and plates it and then (most importantly) washes the dishes and puts them away.

This current oven incarnation seems like more bother and expense than it would be worth. More stuff to get in the way and break. Not KISS at all. But then again I'm a good (and fast) cook and simply can't see how the smart oven would do anything to help.

To be charitable, maybe this technological step is necessary to realize the dream of fully automated food preparation. I fully expect one day to see this dream fulfilled. And from this perspective a hearty round of applause for the inventors.

</comment><comment><USER32> "Over the air updates" via wi-fi? For an oven... I'm feeling a little luddite-y.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've been a huge fan of toaster ovens for as long as I've been heating up food and just can't seem to find one that does what it needs to do well. It toasts too slow or it's the wrong size or heats unevenly. Seems like a simple problem to fix but I've been through 5 different ones over the last decade+ with mostly lame results.

As such, this is _very_ appealing to me. I haven't owned a microwave in several years so the ability to reheat something while I'm somewhere else in the house is fantastic. A little pricey for me (not saying anything about the value, just a lot to spend) but I might just go for it.

<comment><USER5> If you trust Cooks Illustrated, Breville's top end toaster oven ($250 on Amazon Prime) is at the top for toaster oven performance and works well. Have you tried that one?

Personally, I'm more interested in auditioning Cuisinart's mini combi oven ($300 on Amazon Prime) before going all in on a built-in, but I haven't read any reviews I trust yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't know about this, but I would love a secure peripheral for controlling my oven over the internet that also had high quality thermometers.

I particularly enjoy slow cooking meat all day, but need to budget time to come home before it nears my target temperature. If I could measure the temperature of the meat remotely and adjust my oven, that would be awesome (or even set a limit at which the oven will stop cooking and lower the temperature to keep the meat warm only).

What I don't want is to buy an entire oven. I want to be able to buy a high quality oven/range like a Wolf and use such a device with a high quality oven of my choice.

</comment><comment><USER35> While the camera is useful if the image recognition works well, I don't see this things being as good as one of my Miele ovens. They heat up faster, have many automatic programs including with temperature probe, and with the steam oven I can cook vegetables and other things as well.

That said, there is a lot of room on the software side to improve. I have 100 ideas that are 'easy' to implement that could life the Miele range to another level, but in my contacts with them, it seems like they are typical in that they're very hardware focused.

</comment><comment><USER36> Sensing the internal temperature of a roast and cooking until it's done is a nice idea. Convection and aesthetics are good. Efficiency is good.

The HD camera, food detection, phone app, and touchscreen are waaaay overkill, in my opinion.

I don't want to have to put my oven on the WiFi, and it shouldn't _need_ software updates. The useful functions ought to be simple enough to code once and ship.

</comment><comment><USER37> This looks really awesome. I probably won't be an early adopter, but I'm definitely looking forward to more smart kitchen appliances. I just hope they can all work together. It's kind of stupid if my frying pan, oven, and fridge all have their own competing recipe apps and databases.

</comment><comment><USER38> Reminds me of Ronco's products:

[https://www.ronco.com/products/rotisserie- ovens/4000-stainle...](https://www.ronco.com/products/rotisserie- ovens/4000-stainless-rotisserie.html)

Just set it and forget it

</comment><comment><USER39> Are we now going to have ovens with social media accounts?

<comment> jon-wood Why not? You can have it Instagram your dinner without even having to take it out of the oven.

<comment><USER40> Cook double portions to make your friends and family think you met someone!

<comment><USER41> It's got a pretty nice GPU... instead of wasting food, it can just render an image of a double portion of whatever you put in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The warranty is only one year - not ideal for a $3000 counter top appliance.

</comment><comment><USER43> I need something smart enough to beat the microwave.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's very ugly.

</comment><comment><USER45> Another stupid product which exists for the sake of technology.

$3000 for a fucking oven. Seriously. For that you can get a professional kitchen oven with decent warm up time, is easy to clean and serviceable for a couple of decades without too much effort.

Also how does it see through the tinfoil over my chicken? Does it know the difference between a sirloin and a rib eye?

Dear hardware startups: Stop taking random things and adding technology and $2000 to shaft some cash off people with loose credit habits. Build stuff that is fundamentally game changing. Now I know that's hard, and that's the point.

</comment><comment><USER46> Another oversimplification of the culinary art, but this time - a costly one!</comment>


OpenStack Needs A Dominant Vendor, Not Interoperability - <AUTHOR> http://readwrite.com/2013/07/25/openstack-needs-a-dominant-vendor-not-interoperability <comment><USER2> Metacloud seems to be one if the quietest yet best players in this soace</comment>


Does IBM suck for doing this? - <AUTHOR>

I was reading the contents of this page http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/websphere-commerce-enterprise to find out more about IBM's Websphere product. I was interrupted by a pop up chat window offering me help.
Here is how helpful they were, you be the judge!
you: Does WebSphere support business models that have retail, wholesale, independent brands and distributor arms?
Justin O.: Yes websphere would .
you: any case studies or live examples that you could point me to?
Justin O.: Are you looking at purchasing a websphere product ?
Justin O.: Can I have your name and company please ?
you: I am currently looking for what's available in the market
you: any case studies or live examples that you could point me to?
Justin O.: Can I have your name and company please ?
you: can't you just point me to case studies without getting my details? :)
Justin O.: Sorry , I couldn't I need to comply with IBM'S Export and Compliance Regulations .
Justin O.: Please refer to our website .
you: I am not trying to be difficult but IBM's Export and Compliance Regulations doesn't allow you to point a potential customer to a case study or relevant information that would help him/her to find further information about your product without getting their details?
Justin O.: I'm not trying to be difficult either , but we need to know who we are speaking to . Really sorry about this  There is relevant information on our web site re Websphere .
you: I am requesting you to point me to publicly available information about your product that demonstrates your product's capabilities and you can't do that without knowing my details.
you: Thanks for your help.
Justin O.: Again apologies , have a nice day .
you: You too. Bye
Chat InformationChat session has been terminated by the IBM representative. <comment><USER2> Yes, it sucks. This is not a support chat but rather a lead generation one. They are so quick to get you on the phone with sales people it is crazy.

The upside is that if you want to demo their products, the right reseller can make it happen.

I find their site quite frustrating. So many liks are either broken or lead to a sign-in, sign-up, or contact pages.

You might get more traction with a local/regional reseller. Just be prepared for the barrage of email and follow-up calls.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not the way to get customers, in fact it's the quickest way of driving potential customers away.

Why do you need my personal details? Why can't you just tell me about your product and how it could help me!

Selfish.

<comment><USER2> I think IBM has a problem in that, as a company, they do not know how to sell to smaller fish. Chances are that you already have a relationship with IBM or a vendor, and that is how you get information on new products or upgrades.

My guess is that $5k / year for a product does not "move the needle" to reach sales quotas. Therefore, there is no incentive to talk to small shops.</comment></comment></comment>


JQuery documentation with type system applied - <AUTHOR> http://closure.pubref.io/global/jquery/jQuery.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is just a different way to scan over the jQuery api. Generated using the closure compiler jquery externs file, which adds a static type system to javascript. Enjoy your day.</comment>


Jezebel on Snowden's girlfriend  - <AUTHOR> http://jezebel.com/nsa-leakers-romantic-life-reads-like-escapist-fan-fict-512585576 Jezebel reports on Edward Snowden's "dancer" girlfriend, or at least her blog and social media stream(s). <comment><USER2> > It's bullshit to focus on Snowden's personal life instead of the real > bullshit he exposed.

…in an article about Snowden's personal life.

<comment><USER3> The article can't really argue that his girlfriend is interesting or at least entertaining. It ends by saying, it's ok to enjoy this but don't forget what's really going on.</comment></comment>