Facebook's photo storage rewrite - <AUTHOR> http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2009/04/facebook-haystack.html

<comment><USER2> Removed the reliance on expensive proprietary solutions, but how many non- standard custom tools needed to be written (and thus maintained) to verify, backup and access stuff? All that "extra" POSIX stuff could be avoided with a DOS formatted file system, or one of the many filesystems designed for small embedded storage systems (read and append only). Sites with the scalability and size of Facebook or Flickr ("...Facebook's effort to design a more cost- effective and high-performance storage system for their _unique_ needs") may have a use for this, but the majority of smaller sites would most likely be best served by a direct filesystem store which has known semantics, easy access, and proven history.

I'd really like to see some performance numbers that shows which parts of their old storage system started breaking down at which levels of scale.

<comment><USER3> If you go though the older presentation. It breaks down at the disk I/O level. Not only that, it seems like one of the main reason was cost. CDNs can get expensive, especially when are the biggest Photo service on the internet.

<comment><USER2> I wasn't really including CDN in "storage system", even though it is listed in those graphics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can understand disk I/O limits, but I'm not buying the metadata argument on a read-mostly workload.

More detail about WAFL (netapp's filesystem) features and design in this preso: <http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~ohadrode/slides/WAFL.pdf>

Great for corporate documents. Overkill for photo storage.

<comment><USER5> But if it is overkill for photo storage why did facebook use that in the first place ?

<comment><USER6> Because early in a high-growth company's life, speed and ease to market is vastly more important than IOPS, $/TB, TB/KVA, or many other measures that matter a lot when you're facebook's current size, and not much at all when you're facebook's size 5 years ago.

Back in 2004, buying an appliance that plugs right in and works the way you understand (presenting a Posix filesystem over NFS) means they can get on with the Facebook-ness of Facebook. 20 hours of research and quoting, 2 hours to rack, network and power it up and you're in business.

Once you're at 1/2 TB/day (I actually can't believe it's that low unless they're counting the final storage requirement, not what the users are initially sending them), the linear factor dominates the constant factor, and they can now "afford" the luxury of doing a design that's better in $/TB terms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hope a new image compression algorithm is installed with it, their current one is horrible.

<comment><USER8> I don't use Facebook, but I think their goal is to minimize storage costs, even if it means over-compressing images. If you want lossless copies of your photos, use Flickr (or a similar service).</comment></comment>


Why Scientists Can't Be Atheist - <AUTHOR> http://melvinmt.com/93/why-scientists-cant-be-atheist

<comment><USER2> "The better word is that they believe in atheism"

This is a classic misdirection. The word "belief" means many things. Do you believe that Australia exists? (That's the classic response.) Do you believe that the North Pole exists? You've probably not been to both. Is this belief the same as the belief in a god?

When I say "classic", I mean that Russell wrote about it in the 1950s, saying:

> I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an > atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable > than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another > illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars > a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this > sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the > Christian God just as unlikely.

The "any more probable" part is key. You wrote "specifically deny that a higher life form exists." That is a strawman view because that's not scientific claim. What atheists will often say is that the evidence is lacking which suggests that a higher life form exists. Some might ask you what 'higher life' means - how do you know one when you see one? Could you tell the difference between a higher life form and a visiting alien from Tau Ceti?

The burden is not on science to disprove, it is on you to provide evidence.

"A scientist is constantly in search of the Truth"

That's not true. We have no way to recognize the Truth if we were staring it in the face. The goal of science is to reduce doubt, and the first law of science is, you are the easiest person to fool.

The second law might be to know what people have done before. Your essay follows well-worn ruts, based on a misunderstanding of what "belief" means, and of the objections of atheism to a religious interpretation of the universe.

Read, for example, more about the spectrum of theistic probability. Many atheists, including Richard Dawkins, regard themselves as a "De facto atheist. Very low probability, but short of zero. "I don't know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there." Fewer are a "Strong atheist. "I know there is no God, with the same conviction as Jung knows there is one.""

Your objections only hold for a "strong atheist", and your thesis means that you really need to learn more about the tenants of deism, theism, atheism, agnosticism, and even anti-theism.

</comment><comment><USER3> Linkbait. I am an atheist and have done more than my fair share of experiments. Also scientists that I know are generally agnostic/atheist bunch. They just don't think that god is important or relevant. Whenever we were pretty drunk to not have more valuable things to do than discuss theology the general consensus was that 1. God probably does not exist. 2 if it exist it has left the universe or left it to its own devices. 3. In the case of deistic power that is influencing and interfering with humanity on regular basis - with all that wide spread misery in the world - we will just beat the crap out of it when we find it.

Science does not search for the grand truth - just knowledge and understanding of the world. The truth is flexible and always obeys reality.

</comment><comment><USER4> Bad article. The giveaway is "The better word is that they believe in atheism." Massive strawman. The strawman also presupposes that some body of doctrine called "atheism" exists, in the same sense that "Roman Catholicism" or "Greek Orthodox" or "Southern Baptist" bodies of doctrine exist.

Also, the article proposes a "God of the cracks" argument. We haven't found The Truth yet, so God might exist somewhere in what we just don't know so far.</comment>


An MIT lab flushing out a city's secrets - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/mar/27/lab-that-flushes-out-city-secrets-massachusetts-mit-senseable-lab-sewage <comment><USER2> Really interesting! Tho it's not hard to envision a not-so-far future where these "stool-tests" are so cheap and automated that they are done in every street, then every block, then every apartment/house/hotel-room! Which can make sense from an urban disease-control perspective, i.e.find out who was the patient 0 of some disease.

But of course then we will have stool-privacy defenders that will combat authorities so we can keep our intestinal activity private and un-spied at.

Imagine the owner/worker of a hotel where {insert famous person name} stays, (s)he could potentially sell that person's sewage-test (directly from the bathroom pipes), to journalists or someone else. Haha.</comment>


Unlock Your Inner Rain Man by Electrically Zapping Your Brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/07/unlock-inner-savant/

<comment><USER2> _> Finally, as Young put it, "If everyone could play music brilliantly or be brilliant artists, it would minimize diversity."_

I don't get that. Just what specific contribution do non-musical/non-artistic people bring society? If someone's gifts are in area X, I have a hard time seeing how such gifts aren't enhanced or left unaffected by musical or artistic ability.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Everyone being brilliant would of course foster diversity, as well as overall cultural capital. I might be wrong, but it seems obvious to me.

To me the original quote seems to spring from an elitist mindset and akin to saying there's no diversity in painting anymore because everyone uses rectangular canvases. It's not the brilliance that makes you diverse, but rather what springs from it.

<comment><USER4> No matter how brilliant someone is, they still only have limited time. Increased capabilities increases the options someone has within their available time. There is incredible diversity in the goals and the specific capabilities people bring to whatever they are doing, increasing the capabilities could only increase the diversity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just solved that 9 dot problem in a minute with paper and pen. Maybe it was the chocolate I ate?

Just knowing that it's a hard problem can make you "think outside the box" (literally in this case). No electrocution needed. Could the results be a reflex of the participants' state of mind, not a direct effect of brain stimulation?

<comment><USER6> I nearly punched out my monitor when I saw the "solution".

By that metric I count my first solution of "Cut the image up into a straight line and connect the dots." as valid.

EDIT: I agree about state of mind, the reason I would say nobody could "solve" that problem was their mental model of the parameters of the problem wildly diverged from the authors.

<comment><USER7> I've seen worse. Here it is in 3 lines :) <http://www.jimloy.com/puzz/9dots1.gif>

<comment><USER3> There's a variant of this riddle where the solution is using a big brush and painting over the dots in one stroke.

I think all of these solutions are interesting and creative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Thinking outside the box" has become such a trite phrase, I was surprised to see it as a puzzle here. Has the phrase become disconnected from its origin?

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

</comment><comment><USER9> This fits with the thunderbolt theory of the brain: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4265665>

</comment><comment><USER10> The thing is: the side effects of such efforts are unknown.

From one of the mailing lists that talks about tDCS, here's a snippet of a recent email that caused me to take pause:

\-----

 _I have never been able to directly correlate anything i've done, or taken, to the severe decline in my sleep quality (both falling, staying asleep). Being diagnosted with sleep apnea has helped, as the machine has been a bit of a help, but not as much as I would have hoped. I'm wondering if any of the tDCS I had done on myself (and i did do a pretty significant amount I guess about 12-18 months ago) might have caused persistent sleep disturbance?_

\-----

If indeed this person is correct, then it is possible that long term heavy use of tDCS can cause sleep issues. I'd much rather sleep well than play the piano. :-)

<comment><USER11> Really? I find no fascination with going comatose and hallucinating vividly for hours over more time living.

<comment><USER12> It's not so much the lack of time as much as the side effects of that lack of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> juicing your brain was all the rage a few months ago

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3557074>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3525744>

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>---

I'm partial to eating blueberries and playing clarinet and piano,

[http://www.sott.net/articles/show/216086-Mental-muscle- six-w...](http://www.sott.net/articles/show/216086-Mental-muscle-six-ways-to- boost-your-brain)

</comment><comment><USER14> I saw the same article with the same professor 6 years ago, claiming that the helmet would be ready in 3 years.

I so hope that this doesn't become a kickstarter

<comment><USER15> Snyder was one of the co-founders of Emotive [1], so he already has a corporate vehicle for any "thinking cap".

[1] <http://www.emotiv.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Imagine a creativity cap.

For the first time I feel I need to say this minor rant...

I had to stop right here and double take on this choice of words. I had to read twice because I was worried that there was a suggestion of artificially limiting creativity with a device.

It's so sad because I can imagine such a limitation being brought upon a populace in my life. At the same time I always imagined that such things as Gibson's or Bank's neural interfaces might provide more than just a collar.

The optimist in me has a hard time looking forward with this.

</comment><comment><USER17> LSD does wonders in helping you to unlock your inner creative mind. Unfortunately, the flashbacks are a bitch!

<comment><USER3> As someone who has never taken LSD and is curious about the experience I have a question:

Have you personally ever taken LSD and actually suffered flashbacks? If yes, how bad were they?

This is a very personal question, so of course feel free to ignore it.

<comment><USER17> _> Have you personally ever taken LSD and actually suffered flashbacks? If yes, how bad were they?_

No, of course not. I am a law-abiding citizen who believes in the rule of law, and I would never consider breaking it. I did, however, have some ruffian, rebellious, criminal friends--albeit, the type of criminal who goes to MIT or who goes on to get a PhD in Math--in college, and they told me what it was like.

Re flashbacks, they told me that no that didn't happen. They did, however, perceive textures on real objects (e.g., the kind in carpets or detailed wallpaper) continue to "breathe" and undulate a bit for the next year or two. (My guess is that such textures are always undulating a bit, perceptually, only you train yourself not to notice it.)

It was the actual experience, I am told, that could be very grueling. I.e., imagine watching "The Exorcist" alone in a big haunted house, only you can't turn it off, and you can't stop watching it, because if you close your eyes, it's now being projected in 3D onto the insides of your eyelids. Only multiply this by 1,000X. I imagine that this kind of stress could have lingering effects for those who already have difficulty dealing with it.

Despite the scariness of the experience, the friends who experienced it this way said the experience was still very worthwhile, and they wouldn't change anything. They just wouldn't necessarily do it again anytime soon.

Some friends didn't find it scary; they just found it fun.

One acquaintance went crazy shortly thereafter, but he was probably teetering on the edge to begin with. Friends who did it dozens of times, were invariably a bit strange ever thereafter, so I wouldn't recommend becoming too much of a rebel.</comment></comment></comment>


Best JavaScript Static Sites Generators to Look Out for in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://areknawo.com/best-javascript-static-sites-generators-to-look-out-for-in-2020/ <comment><USER2> Probably one of the most easiest, feature-rich, and unknown SSGs is called, Publii. (getpublii.com)

It's a desktop cms based on electron and has replaced wordpress has my dev platform for content sites.</comment>


What are TOP 5 hackers attacking countries? - <AUTHOR>

I assume: 1) China 2) Russia 3) USA 4) Irak 5) Iran
True or false? Asking for past and present.
THanks for info. <comment><USER2> since you weren't specific about what kind of attacks you mean, i'll assume "any". you can see for yourself:

[http://map.ipviking.com/](http://map.ipviking.com/)

[http://atlas.arbor.net/](http://atlas.arbor.net/)

iraq and iran rarely enter the top 5.

</comment><comment><USER3> You should check your definition of hacking. US intercepting basically all communications passing through its country, forcing companies to give up customer data, weakening encryption protocols should count light years above and beyond the rest.

About individuals, not countries, it still may be the first.</comment>


Liquid Expulsion from an Orifice – Apple Inc. – Patent Application 20150326959 - <AUTHOR> http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=(381%2F334.CCLS.+AND+20151112.PD.) <comment><AUTHOR> Patent explained: [http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/11/12/apple-invention- us...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/11/12/apple-invention-uses- electrodes-to-dry-out-wet-iphone-innards)</comment>


Calcium Copper Titanate - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_copper_titanate <comment><AUTHOR> >"Calcium copper titanate (also abbreviated CCTO, for calcium copper titanium oxide) is an inorganic compound with the formula CaCu3Ti4O12. It is noteworthy for its extremely large dielectric constant (effective relative permittivity) of in excess of 10,000 at room temperature.[1]"

Also: [https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-last-barrier-to- ul...](https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-last-barrier-to-ultra- miniaturized-electronics-is-broken-thanks-to-a-new-type-of-inductor- eb5c1a2c7460)

>"The photograph shows the large grains of a practical energy-storage material, calcium-copper-titanate (CCTO), which is one of the world's most efficient and practical 'supercapacitors.' The density of the CCTO ceramic is 94 percent of the maximum theoretical density."

Here's a wierd idea:

When we think about capacitors -- we think about the ability (of a material) to hold an electrical charge.

But, what if it's not an electrical charge that the material is actually holding?

What if what the material is really holding -- is the _deformation of space_ (compression, expansion, twisting, rarefaction, pressure, ?)

Or, what if the material was really holding -- was some kind of vibration or vibrations, just we can't detect them with our instruments just yet?

Or maybe both of the above, just that what it is, depends on how we look at it, what we measure, how we measure it...

Then, that in turn brings up the electrical field.

In theory, all capacitors should have some kind of electric field surrounding them.

In other words, let's suppose you had a goal to be able to measure if a capacitor was charged -- but you weren't permitted to do this by connecting a voltmeter to its leads.

How else could you detect (without physically touching that circuit) if that capacitor was charged?

Intuitively then, there has to be some sort of field around a capacitor, and intuitively then, this field would tell you (if you could measure it via some beam-like measuring device, rf beam, other electromagnetic beam, ?) if the capacitor was charged by measuring that field, rather than by connecting a voltmeter to the circuit.

Perhaps the answer has to do with impedance (all the most tough problems in electronics/physics have to do with impedance)...

Yes, all of these ideas are totally crackpot at this point! <g>

Just theorizing aloud, for my future notes! <g></comment>


Will GM or Ford buy Elon Musk's Tesla in 2014? - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/12/26/gm-ford-tesla/4208273/ <comment><USER2> Buy it with what? GM and Ford have market caps of $60B. Tesla has a market cap of $20B. It couldn't be an acquisition, it would have to be a merger. A merger would:

\- put Elon Musk de facto in control of Ford/GM, as by far the largest shareholder;

\- give people who are now holding big chunks of Tesla stock big chunks of Ford/GM stock.

I can't imagine Ford/GM being happy about #1, and I can't imagine Tesla shareholders (including Elon) being happy about #2.

<comment><USER3> Tesla's P/E ratio is literally 1000-1[A]. Most of that market cap of $20B is based on expectations that Tesla is going to have hockey-stick growth rates over the next 5-10 years. So in order to keep that stock price, they need to go gangbusters - "we sold more cars than last year" is bad news for them because investors are counting on them to like double or triple sales. A sustained anti-Tesla campaign (which you'll notice is already underway) combined with a few minor setbacks could cause some big stock price losses and make Tesla a more attractive buy.

Personally though, I don't think it's that likely that Tesla will be acquired in the near term. The only reason the article gives is "GM sucks at making electric cars for consumers" and buying Tesla would help GM solve that problem. But the fact is that Tesla hasn't yet solved the real problem either - they can build kickass electric sports cars and luxury sedans, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a viable consumer car. Ford and GM have tried selling consumer-model electrics and they've failed because of budget - when you try to build an electric car with today's tech for $30K (the average US new car price) you wind up having to make a lot of compromises, even accounting for the generous tax credit. Ford and GM are building inadequate electric cars at roughly the $30K pricepoint, while Tesla's building a great electric car at twice the price. Tesla's doing a lot of clever engineering and making good cars, but it's not really clear to me that "cut the Model S's price in half" is so much easier than "make the Volt/Leaf/etc. not suck" to justify a buyout/merger.

[A] - Stock price divided by this quarter's project earnings per share.

<comment><USER4> As usual, you can't take new technology and expect to instantly engineer it into a mass-market solution, and it certainly won't work if you then do a half-assed job. That, frankly, has been GM and others approach to electric cars.

Tesla is eating up a large part of the global lithium production and is contracting with Panasonic and others to source massive numbers of custom batteries. Panasonic then goes and builds factories, a supply chain, etc. The massive scale here is what will drive cost reductions across the board. Some estimates are that Tesla is already only paying 100$/kWh of raw battery capacity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I doubt that very much. I don't think Musk is interested in a pile of cash anymore - he's already got more than he'll ever need. Changing the world seems to be his current game plan.

The only way I see him selling is if he feels the cash might help him get the hyperloop off the ground - the hyperloop and tesla seem to be linked though so I still think its unlikely.

</comment><comment><USER6> I do not see this happening. One of the main reasons Musk created Tesla was to remove the middleman, that being dealerships, and to be able to sell directly to the customer. If that buyout were to happen, that would completely contradict that main principle of Tesla.

EDIT: At the time of my comment, I forgot about the legalities of buying publicly traded companies. It's something I don't particularly follow.

<comment><USER7> Wait, principle? How does that have anything to do with whether this happens? Tesla is a public company.

edit: per [http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk- borrows-150-million...](http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk- borrows-150-million-to-buy-tesla-2013-5) it looks like Musk, holding 65%, would be able to block any hostile acquisition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tesla has the potential to be GM. I think Musk knows that.

In 10 years the 30k USD electric sedan will be affordable and everyone will want one because it will be safer, faster 0-60, cheaper to maintain, and cheaper to charge than a comparable gasoline sedan.

</comment><comment><USER9> Form and GM would need Tesla(technology, talent). But does Tesla need Ford or GM(diffused operations, liabilities,redundancies, old generation talent)? Nope- Therefore unlikely

</comment><comment><USER10> Don't see it happening, just based on Musk's personality and his strong control of the company/board.

</comment><comment><USER11> Google will buy it and build a self-driving, electric car... I do hope that Elon Musk keeps Tesla though.</comment>


Bodyfuck - <AUTHOR> http://nik.works/project/bodyfuck/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if the same people that prefer kinect and wii games over regular controllers would have an easier time learning to program using something like this....maybe not something based on the cryptic, ridiculous, register based brainfuck but some kind of 'interactive' programming language like this.</comment>


JavaScript ParseInt Tutorial - <AUTHOR> https://superjavascript.com/t/javascript-parseint/ <comment><USER2> Nice tutorial but it would be cool to also have "WTF" stuff explained. For example:

> parseInt('1') 1

> parseInt('2') 2

> parseInt('3') 3

> ['1', '2', '3'].map(parseInt) [1, NaN, NaN]

> ['3', '2', '1'].map(parseInt) [3, NaN, 1]

> ['1', '2', '3'].map(v => parseInt(v)) [1, 2, 3]

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

I'm guessing that those are because of the index argument of map. That's probably worth mentioning. I'll update the article when I can.

I mentioned a big wtf that "010" parses as 8 because of octal.</comment></comment>


Working on Financial Statements for SAAS StartUp - Any recommended examples or resources? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> would be particularly interested in hardware/infrastructure costs as the business scales. What are some ball park figures for hosting and hardware for a business with 100k users and 1 million page views per month?

Amazon S3 cost estimates would also be very helpful.</comment>


Watch Four Years of Oil Drilling Collapse in Seconds - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-oil-rigs/

<comment><USER2> I don't see how that visualization is in any way useful at all. In fact, it's full of a bunch of visual noise that has nothing to do with any salient point: counties where drilling is no longer active. That number grows even as the total number of rigs grows, and it continues to grow as the number of rigs declines. It's not correlated with anything. It's just a bunch of jittery, jumpy, distracting noise.

<comment><USER3> while it's nice to look at, I had the same impression - maybe there's a critically missing additional note or something that would help clarify this.

<comment><USER2> I'd say there is definitely something missing here: a link bait disclaimer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is exceedingly meaningless. Horizontal fracturing rigs can be reanimated relatively easily. And new wells are still being dug at a feverish pace -- they just are not being finished and activated. There really has been a sea change in the petroleum world; and the productive pace can now, with fracking, be feathered ever more delicately with respect to global market prices. It'll get even better if a GOP majority ends the ban on U.S. oil exports.

Here's a better article this weekend: [http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s- producers-ready-new-oil-wave...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-producers- ready-new-oil-wave-1426288890?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories)

<comment><USER5> The best line from the original article was "The fracklog has become America's de facto backup storage."

That's the key take-away: There's a huge inventory of readily available oil. Supply isn't coming down any time soon, which is great news for everyone who isn't in the oil industry.

<comment><USER6> I don't think it is good news for anyone. Burning all this oil is not going to do the environment much good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is something very weird with the collapse of the oil prices. It doesn't make sense. I know mainstream media have talked about offer/demand being the reason for this crash but it doesn't make sense.

It says China didn't grow as much as expected, etc. Well if that'd be a simple offer/demand, the price would have not collapsed so rapidly. Oil is not like housing where bubbles comes and go. It's usually pretty steady unless something happens (9/11, 1982, etc).

Also, price seems to be recovering now which indicate, to me, that it's not an offer/demand issue. The oil collapsing and recovering in a ~6 months period is just plain weird.

If I had to bet, I'd say it's due to ISIS and their access to oil and selling it at a quarter of the ongoing prices. I read a story about that a few months back how they had access to major oil field and were selling it insanely cheap on the black market to finance their operations.

Those are all wild ideas. But things are just weird, I'm telling you.

<comment><USER8> When oil is expensive, lots of techniques are available to extract it, shale oil becomes worthwhile, for example. Saudi Arabia is driving the price down by selling a lot of oil for very low prices.

If you're the United States or Russia, oil production is a relatively small part of the GDP. We use a lot of oil, but don't really care much where it comes from. Iran on the other hand, that's like 1/4th of their GDP. (I don't know if Iran or ISIS or even Iraq is the target. I don't think Saudi Arabia would have a problem with hurting any of them) Price changes there hit very very hard. Directly it lowers oil employment, it lowers tax revenue, and it affects all sorts of businesses in the area. Unemployed people don't go out to restaurants for lunch, which hurts employment and tax revenue even more.

So then, the problems become political. Countries and organizations need to start rethinking policies about how nice they're going to be to their neighbors.

I don't know what Saudi Arabia's goal is, but with a trillion dollars in the bank, they can sell at a loss for a long long time. Prices that low cut off the air supply for several of their neighbors. I think we'll see big changes in middle eastern governments policies before prices go back up.

<comment><USER9> Most likely Saudi Arabia's goal is to drive the new oil-producing techniques (shale), and especially alternatives to oil (solar, nuclear etc), out of business. At least for as long as they can.

<comment><USER8> I dunno. That seems very short sighted. Maybe that is indeed the case, and they are burying their heads in the sand (heh).

I think they're very aware that once oil hits $50 a barrel (or whatever) oil companies in the U.S. flip the switch and turn shale production back on. It's not "lost technology". If anything new technologies will ramp up even faster thanks to the recent boom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I got laid off after twelve years with a major energy services company back in January, and I'm really glad to be out of that industry now.

Lower gas prices at the pump usually meant that layoffs were probably coming, 2-3 times a year.

</comment><comment><USER11> I had a theory (completely unsupported by evidence or even a vague understanding of the industry) that OPEC's recent decision to not fix prices was targeted at hitting the weaker new American producers that were contributing to the recent production boom by America.

</comment><comment><USER12> Whoa, look at this chart, it's almost like there's no active oil rigs at all!!! Whoops, looks like it's just a "data scientist" who conveniently picked the origin of the vertical axis to mislead readers. My bad.

<comment><USER13> If you were not fooled by the scale of the y axis what makes you think anyone else would be? It belies an underlying arrogance to think that others would be misled where you were not.

<comment><USER12> What makes you think I wasn't fooled? What makes you think that's not precisely why I wrote the comment after originally feeling misled? What makes you think that's not exactly what my comment attempted to convey?

I fail to see where there's any arrogance in my comment, very much unlike in your ridiculous white knight posturing. "Others" have not reported feeling slighted until now, thank you very much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It would be nice if they had thought to include natural gas drilling. The fact that they didn't leads me to believe that natural gas production hasn't also declined, and would have made their little timeline rather boring.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does this mean looking for work in the oil rigs is meaningless?

<comment><USER10> Right now, yes. TONS of people in the industry just got laid off.

<comment><USER15> wow that's horrible. Will things go back to normal? What if you have a CDL.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Never search for email attachments again - <AUTHOR> http://filefern.com/# <comment><USER2> A solution to a real problem.

It turns me off that there is nothing said about pricing up front, it makes me hesitant to sign up for the service.

I have been daydreaming about a system that scans a POP or IMAP web server, maybe even a Maildir, and detaches the attachments and stores them in an object store and makes them searchable. One problem with FileFern is that it is active instead of passive, that is, you have to remember to send files to FileFern and the people who send you emails have to do so too. If you just scanned your own mail spool you would just be able to find your emails and that is that.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting point regarding inbox scanning. Problem is it would require access to your email account which is arguably the most sensitive thing about your business. Of these two options which would you prefer/trust more:

1\. Entering your email credentials for a bot to login and scan 2\. OAuth SSO (limited to Gmail)

It's free for now (which I'll indicate more clearly) as I build a "beta user base".

<comment><USER2> I don't use GMail.

My email provider (Fastmail) lets me make credentials that are specific to an application so I can make a set for a bot and be able to revoke them later.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: land that gig by making a great first impression. Feedback appreciated. - <AUTHOR>

http://impressar.io
Another 'scratch your own itch' MVP, bear with me.
I'm a long-time telecommuter, and my gig-hunting success depends on two critical elements: an email cover letter that is visually appealing, and a corresponding portfolio landing page with content tailored to that specific email. Last year I decided to automate this process, and after months of lost weekends and late nights fine-tuning it for public consumption, I'm launching my MVP, Impressario. Briefly, it solves these pain points:
* Collect and keep track of job listings in one place
* Maintain a set of email templates for specific job titles/requirements
* Be able to create and send out HTML emails (with images)
* Host and manage different versions of a portfolio (with custom domains)
* Track sent emails to gauge response
Thoughts / comments / feedback appreciated. <comment><USER3> This looks pretty cool. Tracking all of that stuff is a little messy, I definitely could've used this back when I was on the market.

However, I see this as a cool open source application rather than a for pay service. The problem is that if your service works really well... You're going to eliminate your customers as they get gainfully employed thanks to your site.

<comment><USER4> I (partially) agree about having a high churn rate on customers. I imagine most freelancers will use the service less once they build up a nice portfolio of clients, although I can still see a use for the occasional new client even with a full roster.

I disagree about open source. Sure, it'd be a cool open source project - <USER2> don't give it away for free yet. I'd change the pricing plan.

During your beta, find out what the average life time value of a customer is. Do they use it actively for two months? Six months? After figuring out the lifetime value, adjust your pricing accordingly.

If you find people using it hardcore for a month and then stopping, it makes more sense to sell this as a "one-off" price instead of a low monthly. If people use it chronically, you can keep the low monthly.

All that said, very cool service and I think I'll be one of your customers =)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. The churn rate is a concern, I'm hoping to discover useful features to add that can make the app more enticing to keep around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You did a great job of making the How It Works section clear and appealing.

The one addition I would suggest for the Features page is what email address will your customers be able to use? Will it be their own or an @impressar.io address?

<comment><AUTHOR> They can use their own email address, although a temporary @impressar.io address is built-in - just to add a layer of protection (against spam). If you reply to the @impressar.io address, it gets shown in the Messages section.

<comment><USER5> Excellent. I would just add a line to the Features page like:

Custom email address - Promote your personal brand by using an @yourdomain.com email address.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Look awesome, I was just looking for something like this a couple weeks ago. I'll definitely check it out. If email me at jpollak92 [at] gmail, I'd happily send some thoughts your way (your email is not in your profile).

<comment><AUTHOR> Send them over to bobby [at] impressar.io. Response has been good so far, I'm hoping people can make good use of it when the monthly "Who's hiring" thread comes out next week.</comment></comment>


Linux Runs All of the World's Fastest Supercomputers - <AUTHOR> https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/linux-runs-all-of-the-worlds-fastest-supercomputers/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15707800](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15707800)

</comment><comment><USER3> There are a lot of people gloating about this on Twitter and elsewhere, but to me it just seems sad; the ultimate morass of monoculture and an endgame with no competition. An ode to "the OS layer no longer matters, don't bother putting any effort into it someone else will". Bystander paradox.

I know Linux fans don't see it that way.. young me thought Linux was indomitable and it was foolish for any company and group of people to not invest all their time and efforts into it. Older me knows better, that's not how corporations and groups of people work best. It leads to stagnation and apathy. It kills the fertile ground for ideas needed to make non-linear progression.

I don't know the solution to all this, but systems software is really going the way electronics engineering and circuit design have gone. I am sure executive types without engineering background would love to "outsource" it all to the perceived interchangeable cogs in "low cost regions".. but the rate of technological progress is about to drop of a cliff if my generation doesn't pick up the torch real soon now.

That said, it is somewhat premature as another commentator points out IBM's CNK. CNK is inventor's thinking.. the gall to ask "do we even need a general purpose OS?" regardless of what the market or eventual answer may be.

<comment><USER4> >> There are a lot of people gloating about this on Twitter and elsewhere, but to me it just seems sad; the ultimate morass of monoculture and an endgame with no competition. An ode to "the OS layer no longer matters, don't bother putting any effort into it someone else will". Bystander paradox.

>>I know Linux fans don't see it that way..

I am not a Linux fan per se (as I type this from my Win10 desktop), but I legitimately don't understand what your comment is about. I've read it a few times and I'm still not exactly sure what you are complaining about.

How is Linux a monoculture, or this the endgame... or this stagnation?

I can't figure out what you are saying, sorry.

<comment><USER5> For big metal rigs like supercomputers, there is almost no choice but Linux. Combined with Linux' dominance of the server market in general, there's a risk emerging to get stuck in a monoculture on the OS layer.

Most companies, including very big ones with a long history of OS development are abandoning their efforts in favor of just using Linux. The perception is often that there is no innovation that can be done on the OS layer that will earn back its investment.

This leads to a lack of experimentation, tunnel vision, and in the long run stagnation.

<comment><USER6> Companies experiment on Linux everyday. Unless they want to use a different programming language, they can implement all sorts of innovation in the Linux Kernel without incurring in massive overhead costs of rolling their own.

I don't think the situation is nearly as bad as portrait here.

They can always use *BSD as a second choice too.

Additionally, where's the stagnation we are so worried about here? Any real world examples?

<comment><USER7> > _Additionally, where 's the stagnation we are so worried about here? Any > real world examples?_

BeOS? Singularity? Plan 9? Hell, just read the last 20 years of OS research and realize that large swathes of it will never get used because anything that gets implemented has to be compatible with the way the Linux kernel does things. (By way of analogy, consider the x86 architecture, also a '70s era technology, and the massive contortions Intel had to go through to maintain compatibility over the years while adding new features and how all the newer alternative architectures died in the marketplace because x86 was too entrenched.)

Fuschia and, ironically, Windows are the last hopes for advancing OS architecture and that's really only possible because the semi-monopolists that created them have enough cash and engineering talent to push them until they take off.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear.

We are talking about HPC computing and how Linux being the only viable choice leads to stagnation.

You are proposing those OSes advance the status quo (and I agree) but how is it that HPC computing is stagnated because Linux is the only viable option? If anything, HPC would be an awesome testbed for those experimental OSes and they still choose Linux.

Where's HPC stagnated because awesome ideas from other OSes can't be used?

Finally, are these other ideas so extremely awesome that they require a new OS from scratch (with all the uphill battle that it's to create it)? Can they be implemented on top of the Linux kernel? In which case, is Linux's success really such a bad thing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Whilst it seems it is possible for the compute nodes of a Blue Gene to run Linux [1], I doubt all of them are doing so in the Top 500 and that most still run IBM's CNK.

[1] [http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4453.pdf](http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4453.pdf)

<comment><USER9> You are correct, the compute nodes run CNK. BG/Q has a few Power7 servers running Red Hat that run the cluster control, job scheduler etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I sometimes wonder: what will happen to Linux when there is no Linus Torvalds as a lead architect anymore?

I just have an outsider perspective, but it seems that he still has to intervene every now and then to maintain a coherent architecture. Could anyone else fill this role, ie. be willing, able and empowered?

<comment><USER11> I believe the general philosophy (never break user space) is deeply ingrained into all long term kernel devs.

There is a possibility that Linux splits into multiple variants (server, supercomputer, desktop, embedded, ...), but as long as the licences are compatible I see no problem.

<comment><USER12> Hardly.

Just the other day there was a spat between a security guy and Torvalds, where the security guy wanted to push a patch set that would crash even the kernel if something in userspace made it do something "funny".

And said security guy have a whole bunch of cheerleaders in userspace (quite a few stepped onto social media to defend the patch set and berate Torvalds for being a potty mouthed bully), and perhaps even a few in kernel space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Since its release 26 years ago, Linux has not only persisted–it has come to > dominate every market it enters.

Except the mainstream desktop. Linux has not dominated the desktop, nor do I expect it ever will, at least not the desktop in its current form.

(I remember back in 1999 I would tell people that Linux would eventually rule the desktop, we just had to take a long view of at least 10 years. I can now say empirically that 10 years is not a long enough view.)

<comment><USER14> While desktop market is dead and Linux will not be mainstream in that market, it is an excellent choice as a developer desktop. Fast, super easy to install everywhere and has the best possible packaging systems to get all the software you need. If choosing the right distro, you don't need yearly updates that break your tools or a credit card to use the proprietary app store for certain libraries needed for your open source pipeline.

I'm not saying it's perfect, but in 2017 and being a developer, I'd take a serious look how nice of an OS it actually is.

<comment><USER13> No argument here. I've been using Linux as a developer system since about 1996.

<comment><USER14> Around 1997 for me. Redhat 5.0 was my first distro, if I remember correctly...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article is misleading in more ways than ignoring what the BG/Qs run and the contentious claim that Linux is "the right match", whatever "supercomputing" means. The term is devalued in this context. Nearly the list is not HPC systems in the sense that they could usefully run quantum chemistry at scale; dismiss the Ethernet ones.

The HPL number is acknowledged as bad, even by the standard of single performance numbers. It basically reflects the number and width of the vector units and use of a good BLAS. [https://hpgmg.org/](https://hpgmg.org/) seems a better choice if you must have a single HPC benchmark number. (HPCG, touted to replace HPL, depends on how you re-write it, which you must to avoid essentially STREAM results.)

It's also worth pointing out that much of the capacity there isn't even on an OS kernel, but is off-loaded, and I wonder what multiple entries for "service provider x" actually are as "systems".

</comment><comment><USER16> Now if we Linux users could just get some first-class gaming support!

</comment><comment><USER17> What'd a supercomputer ever want Windows or OSX layers on for? Linux is too obvious.

<comment><USER18> You're forgetting Unix / BSD variants which can be quite competitive in their own respect as well.

<comment><USER19> I still miss the days where Yahoo! was a FreeBSD shop. I think the conversion to Linux was a bad idea on several levels and was motivated by the wrong reasons. And I have been a heavy Linux user since 1995 (used it from 1993, but didn't use it heavily till 1995), yet still feel that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Well, with the Intel ME recent findings, actually Minix is on all of those computers as well as any other modern Intel based computer...

</comment><comment><USER21> Does that mean they're in for a nice upgrade by applying this patch? [https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/04/26/the-linux-scheduler-a- de...](https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/04/26/the-linux-scheduler-a-decade-of- wasted-cores/)

<comment><USER22> This article is from ~april 2016, the last commit was on may 2016 [1]

[1] [https://github.com/jplozi/wastedcores](https://github.com/jplozi/wastedcores)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if the linux foundation lobbied in Munich for Limux. I'm well aware that the issue wasn't the windows kernel vs the linux kernel, but does that matter for the public perception? For Max Mustermann, Linux lost in Munich.

Edit: Just for clarification, I didn't mean to suggest that the linux foundation did lobby. I just wonder if they were thinking about it, and what their decision was.

<comment><USER24> Why not BSD? Could BSD be utilized for a supercomputer?

<comment><USER25> This was addressed in previous hn discussion and it boils down to specialized support for certain HPC hardware. I think that also not having a focus on scientific software probably also hurts.</comment></comment></comment>


HN Idea: Hover over vote arrows - <AUTHOR>

Sometimes I accidentally click the wrong arrow, voting up when I meant down or down when I meant up.
If there was a hover over the arrows it would be clearer which I was currently pointing at. They are so little any bit of help will go a long way.
Additionally, you could add a title="vote up" or title="vote down" so that when the mouse rests above it, a tooltip will appear and let you know what you are about to do. <comment><USER2> Or put them further apart.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best Cordova-compatible hot code push system besides Meteor? - <AUTHOR>

I want ONLY hot code pushes (to Android and iOS), not full-blown client-server database integration, widgets, and all that "magic". Something where I can, say, have it just push production HTML5 components (html, css, js, images) from a standard HTTPS server or Github account, even. As in, I want literally the "Dropbox" of hot code pushes, that does nothing more than sync files to a Phonegap/Cordova app. <comment><USER2> Have you tried modifying Meteor? Cloning the whole repo is really not that scary - I just did that yesterday.

Also, you'd be surprised by just how much you can configure if you try!

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like what you want is PhoneGap Build's hydration feature, if you want to explore that further.</comment>


Systemd: An upstart/sysvinit Replacement - <AUTHOR> http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps more newsworthy is its inclusion in Fedora 14.

<https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/systemd></comment>


More on NX Insanity - <AUTHOR> http://www.os2museum.com/wp/more-on-nx-insanity/ <comment><USER2> I'm gonna take the contrary view - you don't have the source code for Windows kernel functions, so you can't see the comments, and even if you did, you wouldn't be able to click links to internal tickets. These smell exactly like specific workarounds for specific real-world issues where, for whatever reason, the documentation doesn't match reality. I've written lots of code where I write a two-paragraph comment in front of a one-line hack explaining why I'm doing something weird for now and why we hope to be able to clean up the code in five years - and that's just for legacy internal services, not weird CPU bugs. If you don't have the backstory and you just have the disassembled code, of course it will be "not at all obvious what problem Microsoft was trying to solve."

A VMM on an NX-capable CPU that doesn't support NX doesn't seem like something that's worth MS supporting. I'm going to guess they talked about it internally, and decided that whatever they needed to fix was worth the tradeoff. Maybe there's one CPU where NX is in fact supported but for whatever reason it's missing in CPUID, and you've never seen that CPU. Also, honestly, a VMM that doesn't support NX sounds remarkably like _malware_ , if you run into it in production and not on the system of a hobbyist writing their own VMM, and failing hard when you know the CPU you're on supports NX and you know that CPUID is lying to you is an entirely reasonable decision.

Similarly, re skipping force-enable on 32-bit SSE2 CPUs - there's probably one CPU where the force-enable codepath causes some subtle problems, and this is the fastest/easiest way to identify that CPU, and they're not terribly concerned about accidentally missing some other cases. And again, you neither have the comments nor the `git blame` (or whatever MS uses) of that code nor the internal trouble ticket where someone spent weeks chasing down an elusive CPU bug. Of course it makes no sense to you.

And if there is some real problem behind these two cases, it's hardly true that "the original issue is long gone" \- Windows has very long support cycles. This isn't a "problem in the IT industry," it's the reality of the game. If you want your code to work on real-world machines and you want real- world customers to pay your real-world salary, you have to write code for the world as it actually is, not as you wish it would be.

<comment><USER3> And the counterpoint: sometimes you do get to look at the secret sauce and find out that decision you thought was carefully considered is actually just a poorly engineered workaround annotated with the equivalent of a shoulder shrug and "we needed to ship and nobody has complained loudly enough for us to revisit it".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> NX=NoeXecute bit on memory page tables (according to the link in the article)

(I didn't know that, maybe it helps someone else)

<comment><USER5> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's a related story on why Microsoft might not want to believe the result of a query of hardware capabilities:

[https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040211-00/?p=40...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040211-00/?p=40663)

>In other words, whenever DirectX asked, "Can you do this?" they answered, "Sure, we do that," without even checking what the question was.

<comment><USER7> That's a good quote; but I think that the crucial sentence is this one:

> The driver must have been written by the sales department.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > That's right. If SSE2 is reported, KiTryForceEnableNx does nothing. How does > that make sense? I don't know. It is true that all AMD processors which have > SSE2 also have NX (and it can't be disabled). But all Intel Pentium 4 CPUs > made before late 2004 (and some made after) have SSE2 yet no NX.

This is an odd choice, and from the sound of it -- they're only checking SSE2, assuming its presence means that NX can be enabled, enabling it and ... _nasal demons_ of some kind.

I'm guessing someone didn't read the specs carefully enough on the Intel processor side, but at the end of the day it ended up being a "Won't Fix" simply because they explicitly list both SSE2 and NX as required[0].

It's not great to fail with what I assume is some error message that doesn't simply say "Your processor is not supported, see our 6-page requirements document online on another computer". It'd be ideal if the OS could accurately check its minimums.

I think of the application's I've built (nothing deployed widely), it's rare that I've had to do operating environment validation (the need for it in the applications I write is minimal beyond "can I allocate a little memory"), and from some brief reading, it sounds like there's a more than a few edge cases involved.

If my experience as a user (who buys AMD products, usually) is any indication ... No Man's Sky and a 3D program who's name escapes me both required SSSE3[1]. Both blew nasal demons.

[0] Section 3.1 [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous- versions/windows/i...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous- versions/windows/it- pro/windows-8.1-and-8/dn482072\(v=win.10\)?redirectedfrom=MSDN)

[1] I seem to recall it was something like SSSE4.2 or some oddness, but I couldn't find a reference to it ... only SSSE3, which had the same problem of having an extra "S", confounding Google.

edit: and grammar and speling.

</comment><comment><USER9> > _But it's causing trouble because if NX cannot be enabled on an Intel CPU > for whatever reason (such as running in a VM on a host with disabled NX, > thanks Intel!), Windows 10 doesn't believe the CPUID information and tries > to enable NX anyway, which blows up._

This seems like a "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." kind of thing. Just don't do that.

Is there any good reason to disable NX systemwide on a VM host? Seems kinda risky.

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems like it shouldn't be too difficult to just test if it works, if the processor says it does.</comment>


Swipe 2 is now live - <AUTHOR> http://swipejs.com

<comment><USER2> I've found Swipe.js to be helpful in the past, looking forward to checking the new version out.

@bradbirdsall - Chrome canary calls out the mime type of swipe.js on the demo site. I don't think the HTML5 spec requires text/javascript though, so that's probably on Chrome.

<comment><USER3> Chrome is working as intended: <http://crbug.com/180007>

Github serves pages from 'raw.github.com' with an "X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff" header, which specifically disallows browsers from trying to second- guess MIME types. FWIW, IE has supported this header for years, and Firefox is probably going to be adding it soon as well. So if you're serving your .js files with the wrong content type, they're going to break for more and more users as time goes on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From this website, I can't figure out what this is supposed to be doing at all.

</comment><comment><USER5> wtf, the demo doesn't work like it should. When i click in the circles, the slider doesn't change.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can get it to do anything you want. Try downloading it and playing around.

<comment><USER6> > You can get it to do anything you want.

But in addition it should generally do what users _expect_. If the dots aren't clickable, why are they there?

<comment><AUTHOR> The dots are much more a visual cue than a means of navigation.

<comment><USER6> I understand what you're describing to be their purpose. But the first thing I tried to do was click on them, and got confused/frustrated when they didn't do anything. This tells me their purpose is not in line with what I (and possibly others) expected.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's just a demo lol

<comment><USER7> And what we're saying is that it's a bad demo. Demos are supposed to impress you enough to want to use the real thing. Your demo confused me and (apparently) a handful of other folks.

Instead of literally laughing off feedback and pretending there aren't any problems with your site, you may want to think a bit more critically about the presentation of your javascript plugin.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stud No More. Enter Hitch from Varnish Software - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jamwt.com/2016/03/21/stud-no-more/ <comment><AUTHOR> "I recently learned about hitch, from the fine folks at Varnish Software. To the extent my opinion matters anymore on these things, I recommend people use that instead of stud. I'll be pushing a changeset up to the "official" stud repository redirecting people to this project."

You can get it here: [https://github.com/varnish/hitch](https://github.com/varnish/hitch) Read more about it here: [https://hitch-tls.org/](https://hitch-tls.org/)</comment>


OnlineSchemaChange rebuilt in Python, with more features to update MySQL schemas - <AUTHOR> https://code.facebook.com/posts/1290069194423954 <comment><USER2> Hi all, I'm the major contributor of this project. If you have any questions or thoughts about the project, I'm here to listen and answer.

</comment><comment><USER3> What does this do that Percona's pt-online-schema-change tool doesn't do?</comment>


AWS DeepRacer – the fastest way to get rolling with machine learning - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/deepracer/ <comment><USER2> "It's a DeepLens that can follow you into the bathroom."</comment>


Obama orders sanctions on Russia after campaign hacking during US election - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/29/barack-obama-sanctions-russia-election-hack <comment><USER2> So its okay that Obama's administration messes with other countrys' elections but anyone else tries to mess with ours? It would be nice to have more details _how_ Russia messed with our elections.

<comment><USER3> Any country is free to be mad that another country messed with their elections.

Has anyone stated otherwise?

<comment><USER4> Imagine if there would be overwhelming evidence that it wasn't Russia after all, it was an American named Bob. If that would be the case would you say that Bob has messed with the American election? or would you say that Bob has exposed corruption on one side? How about the trump locker room talk leak? Was that not messing with the election?

If this is all true though, than I personally would prefer Russia to come to my country and mess with my elections as well, the more corruption gets exposed the better.

<comment><USER5> What corruption? I think you were niave to think anything that happened wasn't just the regular Washington politics.

<comment><USER4> If you imply that the democrats had no dirty laundry, then the Russians couldn't have messed with the elections if they exposed it.

> you were niave

If calling me some adjective is your best argument then I guess there is no point in this discussion.

<comment><USER5> You could argue that they meddled with the U.S. electoral process but did their meddling affect the outcome of the election is a completely different argument(which I dont think is being discussed).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Daily Stormer: A Hurricane Alerting Service - <AUTHOR> http://www.michaelburge.us/2017/08/16/the-daily-stormer-in-haskell.html <comment><USER2> I too thought there was a strange coincidence, but the Author addressed this: "We'll name it The Daily Stormer, since a good domain name has recently opened up."

</comment><comment><USER3> You _might_ want to fill out the README [0] a bit so casual visitors to your GitHub page don't get the wrong idea.

[0] [https://github.com/MichaelBurge/daily- stormer/blob/master/RE...](https://github.com/MichaelBurge/daily- stormer/blob/master/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER4> On reddit, several defunct formerly NSFW "pussy" subreddits (e.g. /r/wetpussy) have been repurposed to contain pictures of cats instead.

Apparently some reddit user has made it a mission to grab them whenever they crop up.

<comment><USER5> /r/marijuanaenthusiasts/ is my personal favorite (its a tree related subreddit, since /r/trees was already taken)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Love this takeover of a despicable "brand" \-- diminish them at every turn!

</comment><comment><USER7> What is the title of an alert when a blizzard is expected to knock out electricity in the area?

<comment><USER8> Achtung: Blitzkrieg!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> But at the end he says "funding ran dry partway through this project, so I've put the code on GitHub."

I do think someone should follow through, actually acquire the domain name, and repurpose it. Although godaddy lists the domain as taken. God knows what limbo it hangs in now.

</comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of reddit.com/r/stormfront which is a subreddit for storm photos.

</comment><comment><USER11> Did they lose their domain OWNERSHIP? I thought just the hosting part.

<comment><USER12> The domain is in limbo, not the hosting. They already bought a new .ru domain and created a tor hidden service apparently.

Whenever I see yet another article about that site, I think of the free advertising they are getting. It used to be a fringe site nobody had heard of but now that they are the media's public enemy #1 they've been elevated to mainstream status. Reminds me of something James Randi once said about debunking fraud psychics on TV, it didn't matter what he proved about them, people just saw the psychic on TV and immediately signed up for whatever they were selling in droves so he stopped doing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Excellent :D

</comment><comment><USER14> >>We'll name it The Daily Stormer, since a good domain name has recently opened up.

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

The Daily Stormer is an American neo-Nazi and white supremacist news and commentary website.[1][2] It considers itself a part of the alt-right movement.[3] Its editor is Andrew Anglin, who founded it on July 4, 2013, as a faster-paced replacement for his previous website Total Fascism.

<comment><USER15> That's the point—to purposely repurpose the name due to recent events.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the reasons not to go into computer science? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a high school senior considering majoring in computer science. We obviously hear about the positives, but what are the negatives? <comment><USER4> I assume you're actually thinking of going into software engineering as a profession, and not just getting a CS degree and doing something else. The latter can actually be pretty useful in a variety of scientific, technical, and management fields, except you have to pair it with something. Anyway, here's my list (for reference, I'm 32, have roughly 9 years of professional experience all of it in software, and currently work on search for Google. I have a CS degree but went to a liberal arts college and switched around between physics, philosophy, and sociology before settling on it):

1\. Programming is a very cognitively demanding and highly rational skill. To do it well, you to some extent need to "shut down" your emotional circuitry and your intuitions about how things _should_ work, pay very careful attention to how things _do_ work, and then retrain your instincts to take this into account. All on a very rigorous, formal, mathematical level. Unfortunately, if you do this without simultaneously maintaining an active social life, you risk finding yourself unable to relate to "normal" people. It's not just that programming attracts geeks, it's that programming enough can _turn you into_ a geek. This is avoidable (some of the top minds in our field have a life outside work and are quite approachable as human beings), but it requires that you set strict limits on the time you spend hacking - which can often be hard to keep to when you hear about a 19-year-old kid who invented a peer-to-peer protocol or a 23-year-old who invented a programming language.

2\. There's an expiration date on your knowledge. It's not as drastic as some people make it out to be - it is still possible to get hired as an engineer past 40. But pretty much everything you learned when you first started out will be obsolete. I've only been doing this since 2000 and I've had to reinvent myself at least three times - I started as a desktop UI dev working with Java Swing; then I learned JS and web technologies pretty deeply; then I got into unstructured data mining, clustering, and ranking algorithms; now I'm back doing UI, but for mobile web devices (which have completely different performance characteristics as desktop) in a lead role. In fields like law or accounting you gradually learn more of a huge body of relatively static knowledge, and so your intellectual capital increases monotonically over your career. In computing, large bodies of knowledge become completely obsolete overnight, and so you can easily have huge discontinuities in your career where you have to adapt or fade into irrelevance.

3\. Programming is not amenable to just putting in your time and packing it away when you go home at 5. It's a creative profession, and creativity is subject to the whims of your brain and requires engagement and grappling with the subject. Many programmers find it really hard to work on a set schedule - Paul Graham has a good essay called "Maker's schedule vs. Manager's schedule" on this.

4\. The egos. A large segment of the software world seems to be composed of people who keep trying to one-up each others in their knowledge of esoteric trivia, and then once they've found something they know that nobody else does, suddenly everyone else is an idiot. This is exhausting and not all that pleasant. It is much more prevalent in some communities than others - <USER2> are places you can go that are quite supportive, where _everybody_ is interested in learning new things and new knowledge is gently pointed out and explained - but if you read many of the places where programmers gather, there are many a pissing contest that are just complete wastes of time.

<comment><USER5> The egos. A large segment of the software world seems to be composed of people who keep trying to one-up each others in their knowledge of esoteric trivia, and then once they've found something they know that nobody else does, suddenly everyone else is an idiot. /////

I have tried a lot but the being arrgant when you meet somene with similar skills is so tough to avoid. Plus the sheer chauvinism against non-techie people, makes me feel guilty too. What do you suggest to avoid the ego factor?

<comment><USER4> It comes from insecurity. A lot (not all, this is a gross generalization) of tech people are really insecure, because a profession where you don't have to deal with people tends to attract a lot of people who don't _like_ to deal with people, and one of the most common reasons for not liking people is being insecure about our own worth.

The best way to avoid this is to not tie your self-worth to your technological prowess. Discover what you like to do (beyond programming), and go do it, and be willing to put yourself out there and enjoy things even if you don't get any outside approval for it. Oftentimes this makes people really anxious; therapists or talking things over with a solid circle of friends can be helpful for discharging the anxiety, but really you pretty much have to lean into it and accept that being good with computers is not going to make you better than anyone else or solve any other problems you might have.

<comment><USER6> Do you feel that people in Google are more or less egotistical than other engineers you've encountered? Or is it a culture where people are willing to teach others without making them feel stupid that they don't know X?

<comment><USER4> There's really no way to answer that question without making a gross generalization. There are _some_ programmers at Google with outsize egos (although to be fair, they often have outsize accomplishments as well). For the most part, though, the culture rejects the chest-thumping brogrammer type. Your performance reviews are done by your peers, and so if you continually make your peers feel stupid, it will be hard to get promoted. Also, virtually everything is done in teams, and you're judged by what your team accomplishes, and so it's to your advantage to raise the level of the people around you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A girl I dated in high-school wound up with a degree in agriculture - <USER3> wasn't from a rural area, and none of her grandparents had even lived on a farm - at my age that's going back to the early part of the 20th century.

She had started out as a math major.

The biggest negative for a young person is pursuing something they have no passion for. The dilemma of college for most young people is that they have little idea what a field entails until they arrive on campus and start taking courses - and even those who do have applicable knowledge of the reality still don't know about many of their other options.

So why do you want to major in CS?

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to be an entrepreneur and CS seems the clearest path to that.

<comment><USER8> That seems like a terrible approach. Why not major in business or economics?

<comment><USER4> CS is a better major for an entrepreneur than either business or economics. Marc Andreesen recommends engineering or other hard sciences:

[http://sloentrepreneur.wordpress.com/2008/02/10/the- pmarca-g...](http://sloentrepreneur.wordpress.com/2008/02/10/the-pmarca-guide- to-career-planning-part-1-2-and-3/)

(My former cofounder was a psych undergrad + MBA, my girlfriend is a business undergrad + MBA, and I've got many more startup offers from people wanting to found companies with me than either of them.)

<comment><USER9> If and ONLY if you want to start a tech startup. CS is relatively useless if you want to start a restaurant, fashion label, or virtually any business not related to technology.

<comment><USER4> That's true, but I doubt that the OP would be posting on "Hacker News" if he wanted to start a restaurant, fashion label, or virtually any business not related to technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a sausage fest in college (especially upper divisions) and your social skills can take a nose dive.

The lack of social skills, assuming that you don't have one and didn't gain much of it during college, will carry over to your negotiation skills when you look for jobs.

Depending on which area of software engineer you are going in, your tech skills have a half life of supposely 2.5 years. Meaning there will always be something to learn, dev black berry for a long time now? Ha! Iphone and Android is the shizzle now. Cold fusion? Well, now, it's PHP & Ruby.

There is a decent chance you will work under an idiot that lied his/her way to where he/she is now and will back stab you (very high chance if you work in the public sector ie gov,fed,state). Ah! Politics, it's a bitch and it can be in any profession really, but I feel it's more pronounce in this profession. Especially, well the dev team is a few developers and you're like how the fuck is this guy paying more than me and I'm doing most of the work? Eventually, if you catch on, you'll quit and learn how to embellish and get better at interviews.

Ah this lead to ego! It fucking hurts that someone is getting paid more than you but you know more than them. Yeah sure you can say you're just whiny. But really, you can constantly feel like you're being underpaid and under appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER11> I always tell folk that programming is a great job, if you love it. If it's just a job, it must be a terrible job. All day, behind a desk, fixing bugs, or getting ui pixel perfect, or doing the write-build-test-debug cycle over and over again.

So if you're considering it because you already love programming then (for me) there were no down sides. (I even met my wife there.) if you are considering it because "all the money is in computers" then rather pick something else.

Yes, many, ( most?) will make a reasonable amount of money, and there's always the carrot of the big payday for the very very few, but when it takes 2 days to find and fix an obscure bug, which turns out to be a , instead of a . then suddenly something like duck farming sounds like a more fulfilling way to make a living.

If you love it, go for it.

</comment><comment><USER12> For better or for worse, we live in a society where higher education does not teach you a trade. That is, when you leave college and start your first job it really won't matter too much whether you studied CS, Philosophy, or the Harlem Renaissance because you'll spend the first six months of your working life learning how to do the job anyway.

To state the obvious, I would say don't major in Computer Science if you aren't genuinely interested in it. There are many different kinds of businesses to start and simply knowing how to program doesn't really make you any more likely to found a successful one. Even if it did, you don't need to study it in college. While I believe that learning the fundamentals in college is the best way, a person of above-average intelligence with a desire to learn could become a serviceable programmer in a matter of months with nothing more than a computer and a few books.

When you start college you do crazy things like envision a path to success that relies on specific factors that you will soon realize really didn't make any difference. In short, your major will have a predictive rate of about 0% of an impact on your success after college and that's especially true if you are going to start a business.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sitting. Seriously! It's a pretty unhealthy lifestyle unless you make significant effort to request a standing desk, work in hands-on manual role (server integration, physical networking) or are actively fixing issues at different locations or mixing with different teams.

Shoulder, neck, back issues. RSI, eye strain are all common complaints. You have to be prepared to integrate decent amounts of exercise into your free time to stay healthy.

I know engineers that are so used to having everything accessible at their finger tips that it becomes a major effort to get off their ass and go and put a disk into a server.

Always remember, when you go to interview for a job - look at the team. Are they healthy & active or will you be joining a culture that expects you to be sedentary all day.

</comment><comment><USER14> You lose your life in the consumption of programming knowledge and development

</comment><comment><USER15> It's true that, if you learn to enjoy CS-related work, it's thrilling and rewarding. You'll find dazzling solutions to interesting problems, and have a blast doing it. But as respectable a craft as CS work is, does your output really improve anyone's life? Probably not, and it likely even contributes to some mild social ill. And once the dopamine wears off, have the lonely hours spent solving fun puzzles in front of a screen been a good use of your time on Earth?

I'd still recommend a CS major, but I urge perspective.

</comment><comment><USER16> To thy own self me true: Only do it if computers are your passion. The negatives in life are doing something for a living that you don't really love — and i see that every day.

</comment><comment><USER17> What do you want to do? Program?

Many people learn to program on their own, or in their spare time.

How many people learn algebraic topology on their spare time? Or delve deep into combinatorial optimization?

Consider doing something else, and figure out the programming stuff on your own.

</comment><comment><USER18> > We obviously hear about the positives, but what are the negatives?

There's lots of fluff in your average CS degree. You might want to take a mathematics degree instead, which is `harder' (as in `not as soft' and fluffy).</comment>


Ask HN: Remote work for my pregnant wife? - <AUTHOR> My wife quit her job to have a baby, but she'd like to do some part-time work 2-3 days a week. She used to run an online B2B store for a large tech company, and is familiar with databases and some scripting. She'd like to do something that isn't as mind-numbing as mechanical turk, but that she doesn't have to obsess over when she's done working. Also, she doesn't want to work for me :)<p>I know this is a long shot, but I figured HN might have some interesting ideas. Thanks! <comment><USER2> Your wife already has experience working in tech and has scripting and database knowledge. There are plenty of remote opportunities for her with that kind of experience. I see at least a handful pop up every week (DB-related development work)

The only problem is finding the good freelance leads. A lot of low-ball clients tend to be attracted to UpWork, Fiverr, and Freelancer so I'd stay away from those places. You can find a lot of good leads by checking forums, Twitter, Facebook groups, Reddit, and independent job boards where clients post their job.

Shameless Plug - I started [https://remoteleads.io/w](https://remoteleads.io/w) to solve this problem for myself. I aggregate remote leads everywhere clients can post, I manually vet the best ones, and then send them out to remote developers twice a week for free. Maybe it can help you and your wife on your search for a remote job.

</comment><comment><USER3> Automattic is a good remote company to work with [https://automattic.com/work- with-us/](https://automattic.com/work-with-us/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Check out [https://www.skipthedrive.com](https://www.skipthedrive.com)</comment>