Crossplane – Open Source Multicloud Control Plane - <AUTHOR> https://blog.upbound.io/introducing-crossplane-open-source-multicloud-control-plane/ <comment><AUTHOR> At GitLab we're really excited about the vision of Crossplane. Multi-cloud seems to be the future [0]. This is the missing technology to make that convenient. Our first step is to work with Bassam to become the first complex application deployed in this way. We already have a popular helm chart. But that doesn't set you up with things like object storage and a cloud managed databases (PostgreSQL and Redis).

After we make that work we will integrate Crossplane in Auto DevOps [1] so you achieve application portability for the apps you make in GitLab.

The most interesting thing to me is that Crossplane works outside Kubernetes since k8s is another service it will provision. Bassam his plan is to make crossplane + Kube-api more tightly integrated, maybe even a crossplaned at somepoint.

0\. [https://medium.com/gitlab-magazine/multi-cloud-maturity- mode...](https://medium.com/gitlab-magazine/multi-cloud-maturity- model-2de185c01dd7)

1\. [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/)

<comment><USER2> What is the business model of upbound/Crossplane? Product seems to be free.

<comment><USER3> hi bassam here (CEO @ Upbound). Our business model is still firming up, but we're thinking we would be hosting crossplanes among other things. We want the crossplane project to be community driven (and not vendor driven) and welcome other contributors (see our governance model).

<comment><USER2> Thanks but aren't you worried about someone else hosting your product and competing with you.

<comment><USER4> Crossplane could be one package that customers would not want to use directly from a major cloud provider. You'd never trust AWS/Google/etc to really give equal footing to a competitor. Separately, I'd prefer to trust the company behind the open source software as opposed to some other upstart. So this model may really work.

One observation: Crossplane and Upbound seem a little too unrelated of names. Github has benefitted from being almost synonymous with git (admittedly, Github also created the opening for Gitlab at the same time).

<comment><USER3> Great response! Regarding naming we did not want to tie the company to a single project, not did we want the project to _feel_ like a vendor driven project. So we went with different names completely :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks really exciting and congratulations on launching! We will definitely be taking a look at this as it looks like a great fit to recommend to our customers.

My startup Meshcloud [0] is helping companies manage the "organizational" side of multi-cloud like integrating account provisioning, SSO, policies, chargeback, quotas etc. using a declarative orchestration approach we call "org as code" (basically infrastructure as code but for org stuff). Our product is e.g. used by a large german car manufacturer to orchestrate hundreds of tenants across AWS, Azure and a mix of private Clouds based on OpenStack, Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. Workload orchestration is obviously the next challenge down the road for these customers, so we're currently looking at providing good integration to tools like Open Service Broker API, Terraform, Bosh, Spinnaker etc. Each of those solves a slightly different set of problems but at the scale our customers are operating at they all have their place.

0\. [https://www.meshcloud.io/en/meshcloud/](https://www.meshcloud.io/en/meshcloud/)

<comment><USER6> Your comment here did a better job explaining your product than the website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks fairly similar to the new Kuberentes KEP for portable service definitions.... [https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/blob/master/keps/...](https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/blob/master/keps/sig- apps/0032-portable-service-definitions.md)

<comment><USER8> Very similar. Can someone more familiar with Crossplane/KEP comment?

<comment><USER9> Hi, this is ichekrygin (crossplane maintainer). Yes, indeed. There appears to be an overlap in general principles (even in use-case example). From what it appears, KEP sig was "published/released" (not sure what is the right term here) on the GitHub 3 days ago, we did not see this. However, now since it out there, we will definitely reach out to discuss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I thought it was going to be a cross-cloud Terraform, but it looks like it's a bunch of presets operating on k8s? So when he asks for the DB, is he getting an RDS/CloudSQL/whatever or is it spinning up a DB on an EKS/GKE/whatever?

I really don't like the latter in comparison to the former, tbh.

<comment><USER3> scarejunba, this bassam (one of the maintainers on crossplane).

when you ask for a DB you get an instance of RDS/CloudSQL/etc., in other words you are using the managed services of your cloud provider.

we're just getting started with cross-cloud scenarios. would love your feedback on [https://github.com/crossplaneio/crossplane](https://github.com/crossplaneio/crossplane)

<comment><USER10> Oh, I get it. Reading the design document[0] helped greatly. Should've done more than skim the blogpost. The definition of what you want is specified as a custom resource that is cloud-agnostic. Then a set of cloud-specific custom controllers are installed on a K8s instance and they control which cloud is affected by your `kubectl apply`.

You have to set up your own k8s manually (there's no way to bootstrap), but then it's all fun and games.

Nice. Very clever.

0: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1whncqdUeU2cATGEJhHvzXWC9...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1whncqdUeU2cATGEJhHvzXWC9xdK29Er45NJeoemxebo/edit#heading=h.annq8ww6da48)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's a missed opportunity to link your blog back to blog.upboundio instead of to www.upbound.io

Blog posts often lead me to wonder what the product is, so it should be convenient to find out.

</comment><comment><USER12> What are the benefits of using Crossplane as opposed to Terraform?

<comment><USER13> It seems like you would still use both. Terraform to provision your Kubernetes cluster and other non-application specific infrastructure.

It seems like, and I have only briefly read the article, Crossplane is meant to bring all that application specific cloud infrastructure into the same configuration files you would use for defining you Kubernetes application.

So along with defining your ingress you define your mysql database and it gets provisioned. This keeps all your application specific provisioning together instead of having to use Terraform to provision your database ahead of time and keep it in sync with the application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really like idea of separating a service's infra requirements from it's infra implementation details.

> Crossplane supports a clean separation of concerns between developers and > administrators.

If I've understood correctly im not sure this is the best way to sell the idea though.

How does this work in a world where developers administer their own services?

<comment><USER3> > How does this work in a world where developer administer their own services?

in that world the developer plays admin too, and can configure crossplane as an admin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why do i need to configure a mysql database for a wordpress if that wordpress always needs a mysql database?

While i really like the idea, i'm looking forward to see if we moved our problems down to the operator code or if those configuration problems are gone.

<comment><USER16> Wordpress supports MySQL or MariahDB.

Other software supports multiple database systems.

There are opinionated packages of the sort you are looking for, I think, perhaps you would be interested in sandstorm.io?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So I could use this to setup a local dev env? Instead of using something like [https://github.com/localstack/localstack](https://github.com/localstack/localstack)

</comment><comment><USER18> Anyone care to comment on whether this complements or competes with Rancher 2.0?

<comment><USER19> Seems to me you would run this on a Rancher 2.0 cluster, and then get automagically provisioned databases. It extends the default kube system, and Rancher just provides an interface to that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So how is this different from AWS Operator?

<comment><USER7> The AWS operator targets AWS resources. You can't take them, in a general sense, to minikube, Azure, or elsewhere. It's declarative to AWS services.

Some would call the AWS operator as a form of vendor lock-in.

I think the idea here is about using services with portable apps across cloud provider.</comment></comment>


IPhone 4 Available in China on September 25 - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/09/19iphone.html

<comment><USER2> damn that's expensive</comment>


FanSnap Is The New Kayak For Event Ticket Searches - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/13/fansnap-is-the-new-kayak-for-event-ticket-searches/ <comment><USER2> Although FanSnap has a lot more result filtering functionalities, and a more in depth visual ticket system, which are all wonderful, their crappy interface makes me uncomfortable. I think a big area most ticket aggregators are missing out on, and that TicketStumbler is assumedly working on, is user notification when a band/team/etc. of interest is playing locally. I hate having to hear about these things from friends or by stumbling upon a band's Myspace only to find out they're playing in town tonight.

<comment><USER3> LuckyCal will tell you when bands you care about are coming to town. And, even better, when they're playing wherever you're travelling.

Full disclosure: I _am_ LuckyCal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> More vendors and reach than TicketStumbler?! IMPOSSIBLE!

EDIT: That was tongue in cheek, since when did 'more features' and 'more interactive images' make something a better product? I thought 'less' was in these days.

<comment><USER5> Haha I think we have a similar number of events (we just added theater tickets this week), but they do have more vendors. However, many of the long tail sites they include also list tickets on Ticketsnow, Stubhub and Ticketnetwork so they're already included on TicketStumbler anyway.

I'll give credit where it's due though; they've done a great job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very cool.</comment>


Bing Napkin Maps - <AUTHOR> http://infosthetics.com/archives/2010/06/bing_destination_map_automatic_napkin_sketching_of_maps.html <comment><USER2> I'm pretty stoked that Microsoft is no longer evil/complacent and is innovating (again?). This is of course not the beginning of this turnaround, nor even the first time Microsoft-as-Good has reached me for unabstract personal benefit[1], but this is probably the first thing I've seen from Bing that could make the rounds being touted as cool without my first and overriding suspicion being "total astroturf".

Back in the days I read Slashdot, I very viscerally hated Microsoft like only a teenage Windows-user reading Slashdot could. I switched to Macs after the Intel changeover and I've been increasingly locked into Google since Gmail. Completely removed from their ecosystem, when (rarely) some news of Microsoft bubbled up to my attention, I watched with bemused indifference. Lately though, with Apple's behaviour especially, I've borne actively good will towards Microsoft. I'll probably never use Windows again, but I want them to succeed. Competition is good, and it's also very gratifying to see this affirmed.

\-----

[1] "Windows 7-style Window Resizing" is my most indispensable feature in BetterTouchTool[1] - <http://blog.boastr.net/>

<comment><USER3> I had much the same train of thought when I saw this article. I've been very harsh on Microsoft since roughly the Active-X era of the late '90s for doing things that benefit their own dominance at the expense of the ecosystem. I WANT them to be good citizens and good competitors. When I see something Microsoft does that really is innovative, I'm happy. And at first glance, that's what I thought of this napkin-map thing. And then I tried to look at a Bing napkin map on this computer - running Ubuntu. They've done it with Silverlight. Back to disappointment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is really worth a look. My experience was very positive; it took only a few seconds to compute, and the decisions about what detail to suppress were made very insightfully. (This was for an address in San Francisco--streets were selected for all the approaches into the city, but very economically.) The result would be MUCH better to give someone than a standard Big or Google map. No bugs, no problems with silverlight. (From Bing Maps, I discovered, you find this feature by clicking on the "Map Apps" button at the bottom of the left column, and then choosing the app "Destination Maps".)

<comment><USER5> I'm not a fan.

Why? Because I once walked into a pretty dangerous ghetto in Memphis thanks to having a map leave out information (even though it was relatively to scale).

Here's the map for the Stax Museum: <http://www.soulsvilleusa.com/plan- visit/maps-directions.asp>

And here's the Google map of the same area: [http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&#...
OK, so the Google map is way busier and contains a lot of noise. But because of the Stax map we chose to walk from the National Civil Rights Museum to the Stax Museum because "the map shows it's only a few blocks over".
That few blocks turned out to be a 10 block walk that involved police (who turned back once we walked beyond a certain point), watching a gang trying to cut us off (they were armed), being rescued by a kindly lawyer who then drove us out of there and back to the police. Apparently walking through that neighbourhood is a death- wish.
The Stax map isn't of poor scale, it's just that it's aimed at drivers following main roads... a bit like the napkin map. The problem is, you cannot be sure of every use of a map and it's safer to leave more info in than risk decisions that will be made because of a lack of information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thats cool, but I wasn't able to figure out how to turn on the feature within bing maps.

Also, its frustratingly buggy, and asks for silverlight to get many of the cool features natively available in google maps.

</comment><comment><USER7> Reposting a comment from srikanth:

"FYI, this is based on RouteMaps <http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/routemaps/>

I remember that MSN maps had already implemented this feature into their application a couple of years ago."

</comment><comment><USER8> As visually appealing and nigh-brilliant as that is, there's a _fatal_ flaw in it that means I'll never touch the stuff:

It distorts the map to enhance meaningful areas. All those images are of the same area, compare them to the normal map on the left at the top of the article.

Brilliant and deadly. I use maps _because_ they're physically accurate, so I can estimate times / distances between things, and find alternate paths if needed, and know if I went too far. The distortion there is _way_ too significant to do that sort of analysis, though.

I know I may very well be in the minority in that, but there you have it. I'd love to see a large comparative study between "real" people. Gut-feeling is that most would like it, though, because it seems few outside the geek world are efficient at information filtering.

<comment><USER9> If you want objective accuracy, do you then use aerial photographs, rather than maps? The point of a map is exactly that it simplifies information, and exaggerating or downplaying certain features is a way of doing this.

<comment><USER8> Aerial photograph maps are _barely_ more informative than line-maps, and they're filled with much more misinformation. Colors are not correct, I'm on ground-level so I don't see buildings from the top, trees, cars, construction, etc are all incorrect as well by usually over a year, buildings aren't skewed like that (especially tall ones)...

Besides, I'd only stated I use it for distances and paths, not _color_. Where the exaggerating / downplaying of features destroys the ability for comparative analysis of locations with other maps, I find I have little use.

<comment><USER9> But you're picking one aspect (distance) and attributing a lot of importance to it. Depending on who you are and what you want to do, that may not be the most important thing. For example, if you want to drive somewhere, the exact distance may not be overly important, but the intersections with larger roads probably is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks cool. But not so cool I'd want to install Silverlight!

</comment><comment><USER11> Semi-related, I want a feature for driving directions where I can specify that I'm familiar with either the origin or destination. If I print out directions, half the page is taken up with turn-by-turn instructions on how to get from my house to the nearest interstate highway. These should go away and be replaced with a simple "goal" instruction ("Get on I-71 North").

<comment><USER12> Bing already has a solution for that already, which they call one-click directions. If you search for a place, there's usually a set of options such as "from I-5 South," "from I-5 North," "from 450 West" which give directions starting from those respective highways. I'm a big fan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Largely forgotten is an earlier offering in reduced-detail maps, MapBlast's drafting-diagram-like 'LineDrive' directions. It's still available if you get to MSN maps via mapblast.com:

<http://www.mapblast.com>

</comment><comment><USER13> The realistic-looking highway shields are a welcome addition. (They're much better than the cartoony-looking ones seen on most online maps.)

I wonder if they were influenced by this: [http://www.41latitude.com/post/598792787/realistic- looking-h...](http://www.41latitude.com/post/598792787/realistic-looking- highway-shields)

</comment><comment><USER14> Hmmm... I posted the exact same link 12 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1412740>

Weird that it allowed it to be created again.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's very very slow.

</comment><comment><USER16> No coffee ring?</comment>


File extensions are ridiculous - <AUTHOR> http://dansdata.com/gz125.htm

<comment><USER2> Why can't you have both file extensions and file types? File extensions aren't ridiculous, they're a helpful hint for developers. Also, "my copy of Windows" hides file extensions by default (which I loathe, but understand).</comment>


Show HN: Multi-Cluster and Multi-Cloud Service Meshes with CNCF's Kuma and Envoy - <AUTHOR> https://konghq.com/blog/multi-cluster-multi-cloud-service-meshes-with-cncfs-kuma-and-envoy/ <comment><USER2> When Kuma is being deployed in multi-zone mode and a service from one zone wants to consume a service from another zone, does that mean that the outbound request will automatically be routed to the correct address of the service (potentially in a different zone) while still honoring any custom "TrafficRoute" policies that the mesh administrators may have created in the meanwhile?

<comment><USER3> Yes. In Kuma the ".mesh" DNS zone will route to either an IP address of a replica of the service in the same zone, or to the IP address of a Kuma ingress in another zone for automatic cross-zone connectivity (only if mTLS is enabled so we can leverage SNI). Any TrafficRoute will be honored, and we can also apply zone-shifting rules by using the "kuma.io/zone" tag in a "TrafficRoute" [1] policy.

[1] - [https://kuma.io/policies](https://kuma.io/policies)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does Kuma also support VMs in addition to Kubernetes on both DP and CP?

<comment><USER5> Yep, Kuma supports both Kubernetes with native CRDs and auto-injection, as well as VMs with sidecar data plane proxies. You can configure it via a REST API or the CLI. In multi-zone it's also possible to mix and match them in a hybrid service mesh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How much RAM is needed for Kuma? Interesting project, I have been working with a Swarm + Traefik scenario maybe I will switch to this :).

<comment><USER3> Not much, the project is very efficient but if you have questions you can always reach out to the official Slack channel: [https://kuma.io/community](https://kuma.io/community)</comment></comment>


YouTube suspends Google accounts of Markiplier's viewers for minor emote spam - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/dtr6gi/youtube_suspends_google_accounts_of_markipliers/ <comment><USER3> The real issue here is that (reportedly) the people who spammed got their GMail accounts shut down.

That's outrageous.

That's your real-life, not just your online-life. Your GMail account isn't even related at all to your YouTube identity.

Remember: if you aren't _at least_ paying for your e-mail service you don't own your own mailbox. When was the last time you made a backup of your GMail account? What contingency plan do you have in-place if Google ever accidentally, unintentionally, or in this case, intentionally, shuts it down?

(Disclaimer: I pay $20/mo for an Office 365 E3 account for my personal mailbox)

<comment> m-p-3 Google should be able to disable access to a specific service, not shutting down the whole account.

They want to be _the_ identity of the online world, they need the responsibilities that comes with it.

<comment><USER4> When I was a kid I had a Yahoo site with some images hotlinked to another domain. The domain owner changed the images to porn, reported my Yahoo account, and it got my account entirely deleted. Emails and groups and chat and all. Really dumb

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish lawmakers instead of spending time on misguided cookie banner laws, spent more time on things like this.

Behavior like this is completely unacceptable, it is equivalent to store owner throwing you out because he thought your hair are red.

People whose accounts are being suspended without warning, without explanation, and without a way to appeal, like in this case, should be able to sue the company for a large sum of money, so that company knows that breaching contracts is not a good thing.

The job of government is to help people establish contracts between themselves, and to help keeping the explicit and implicit terms of the contract. The random suspension of account is likely a more serious breach of contract than selling private data to third parties.

<comment><USER6> > Behavior like this is completely unacceptable

This comment gives a lot more context:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/dtr6gi/youtube_susp...](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/dtr6gi/youtube_suspends_google_accounts_of_markipliers/f70lbtq/)

IMHO, it seems a lot more reasonable.

<comment><USER7> No, it's not reasonable.

>The emote spam in question was not "minor", the accounts affected averaged well over 100 messages each, within a short timeframe.

This is a crazy bad take. 100 messages in a few minutes is totally normal for live-streams. Just hold the ctrl-V button and... oops, your G-Mail is locked.

That. Is. Crazy. I worked at Twitch and the idea of disabling someones Amazon account for spamming emotes (even temporarily) is completely insane.

<comment><USER8> Nuts. Why not just have a cooldown for emote spam? It's ridiculous it's that easy to have your shit banned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just absurd, the damage of having my entire google account being banned is seriously non-trivial and would easily cost thousands of Dollars worth of time and energy to deal with. I remember having the fear of what's happening here when Google originally purchased YouTube but after years of non-issue I forgot about the possibility. For me, this is the last straw with Google, the risk of being banned for such an arbitrary reason is simply too high for me and I'm going to start moving documents and accounts from their services.

It baffles me, they hire some of the worlds more intelligent people but the products/systems they produce are constantly idiotic and daft.

</comment><comment><USER10> There are too many people here advocating to host your own email in your own domain. Please be warned that it has its own risks:

By hosting your main email on a custom domain(not a provider) you open a new attack vector for identity theft. There was an article on HN just a couple weeks ago about someone getting hacked by exactly this attack form. IIRC it was godaddy having stupid verification process.

Someone can hijack your godaddy/namecheap/gandi account and point the MX DNS records of the domain to their own server and receive all your "Forgot your password? here is the link to reset!" emails

This a very bad advice unless you actually know what are the risks.

Maybe suggesting a paid email provider would be better, does anyone know of any reliable email providers that you pay for what you are getting and they are not selling your account data or block you for some reason?

<comment><USER11> Also, you randomly won't be able to send mails, as google will randomly mark them as spam (for no reason, with no explanation and with no chance to appeal)

So you'll never know if any mail you send to a gmail user (which is pretty much everybody) will ever actually reach an inbox

[https://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg08806.html](https://www.mail- email@example.com/msg08806.html)

[https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-October/10381...](https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-October/103817.html)

<comment><USER12> This. I recently found that even though several emails from my custom domain accounts had gotten through to gmail users - some of them did not get to the main box instead ended up in promotions.. and some of them did not get delivered at all.

These cases were to the same person, from the same computer and account - <USER2> would go through and some would not, some could be found in spam box, others just vanished -

then I started calculating the time I spent writing some emails that I never got a reply to - like hours of writing - and I though I was just ghosted for a competitor - turns out it's likely they never saw the work I sent.

I have witnessed this with 3 different receivers the past year.

The last back and forth I just resorted to using my personal gmail account to communicate with new business associate as the receiving was so erratic. At first they wondered why google was putting stuff in spam folder that did not belong there - then it just turned to non-stop frustration and delayed thumbs up on work orders.

the algo should know if you sent one email and they opened and read and replied - and you sent another, it should not matter if you put in the second email, 'your desire to do Z with your web site is understood, and can be done, but you may run into a bad SEO issue that could affect where your site displays in search results, so instead we reccomend not doing X and instead doing Y.."

something like that - so many times is seems that the anti-spam seo hating google teams trump and destroy all the things, regardless of false positives - and no transparency which hurts people - but saves the secret sauce of the anti-spam team I guess.

This is a tough place to be in when so many use gmail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Constant news about Google banning accounts for various mistakes, small or large, reminds me of a certain country's social credit system. When will they start banning people that have any kind of contact with accounts in bad standing? Will they start denying purchases on Google Pay depending on how well behaved the account is?

<comment><USER14> Companies are authoritarian dictatorships

<comment><USER15> Which is why its baffling to me that lots of people who are deadly afraid of government tyranny are completely ok with privately owned tyranny (even monopolistic kinds)

<comment><USER5> Government tyranny is a far greater danger because government can use force in the form of army and police, and when established it effectively owns everything else in the country.

The privately owned tyranny has much less power, and when it becomes bad, government can intervene.

So while no tyranny is ok, government deserves much more attention, because it is the more powerful tool, that needs to be protected much more vigilantly.

<comment><USER16> Some of these private multinational corporations are _easily_ more powerful than some smaller governments.

Let's just agree that both can grow bad. It's just that clearly, governments+people can grow a LOT bigger (in absolute number of people) than a corporation, before it generally goes bad.

None of the largest corporations are really trustworthy, and neither are the largest countries stellar examples of good governing. The difference, however, is an order of magnitude more people being "managed". Apparently Google (Alphabet) employs about 100,000 people, most of them subjects not rulers. That's just a very small city or large town.

If we compare this to a small-medium sized country with a reasonably well- working economy, the difference becomes laughable: The corporation is a much, much, smaller group of people, with a disproportionally unwieldy huge amount of power, completely unable to control themselves and behave in an ethical manner. It's _pathetic_. YES they absolutely need a government to regulate them just like a baby needs someone to change their diapers.

<comment><USER17> > It's just that clearly, governments+people can grow a LOT bigger (in > absolute number of people) than a corporation, before it generally goes bad.

I don't think it's so easy to separate the two. A corporation is not a real thing, it's a legal fiction _created by a government_. If a corporation acts badly, it's really the government that allowed it to act badly.

The complications occur when a corporation obtains enough power to be able to influence the government, and thus the ability to influence the rules by which it abides, like a recursive program which is able to alter the mechanics which created it.

At this point, the difference between government and corporations start to blur. It's entirely possible for a corporation to be initially created by a democracy at the will of the people, but over time, as its size and power grows, is able hold the government captive, and control its own rules.

Sadly, this is not just a hypothetical thought experiment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What blows me away is that the supposedly manual reviews believe that these Google-wide permanent bans are appropriate for "spamming emotes" in a stream.

Google employees, you hold too much power to be so arbitrary with your bans. You hold people's digital lives (and, with Android, a portion of their physical lives) in your hands. Please be a bit more responsible with that power.

</comment><comment><USER19> And he'll make a fuss, a video, and it'll get fixed. They'll all get their stuff back. It'll add to the\ sour taste in his mouth but it'll get fixed.

While smaller creators in similar situations are completely out of luck. Throw a support ticket into the ether. And just have to hope more and pray a bigger Youtuber picks up their plea and their video gets popular so that it gets fixed.

</comment><comment><USER20> This boils down to trust. We need to trust that our email provider won't turn off. We need to trust that our ISP won't shut off our internet. We need to trust that our cell provider won't shut off our service. We need to trust that our power company won't shut off our power.

There is simply far too much on the line here to not have protections. The use contract of email providers needs to regulated.

<comment><USER21> I've been working on a theory for a few years now that advances in communications technologies fall somewhere on the spectrum of either tending to, or absolutely, reducing trust between individuals and social groups.

Note that trust != reliability. Trust is an extension of faith beyond available information. Reliability is a statistical measure. You can achieve higher reliability with low trust through surveillance, enforcement, punishment, and/or a limited-options environment. But that's _not_ engendering trust (and may actually be a reasonably good summary of why tech tends to break down trust -- I'm still thinking this through).

Keep in mind that trust is a two- or multi-way street. In our mediated relationships, there's trust between user and provider, provider and user, and third parties. Any or all may be or contain untrustworthy elements. And the channels of information are limited making decisions on who or what to trust challenging.

It's complicated. Though I think Google can and should do better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wish platforms like Facebook and YouTube would stop pretending they can build "communities" with one billion people.

<comment><USER23> Yes communities is the wrong word. They are just YouTube viewers, the people watching are not united in a common purpose and may be watching for many different reasons. Youtubers are just mass market celebrity like it's always been. Some of them are barely 'creators'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> [https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en-US#toc- modification](https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en-US#toc-modification)

"Google may also stop providing Services to you, or add or create new limits to our Services at any time."

<comment><USER15> Wow I'm sure that they are compliant with the EULA is a relief to everyone involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Google's approach to coping with bad actors, i.e. immediately cutting off people from their entire Google presence for anything that trips their automated systems on any individual platform, is incredibly abusive. People can have years and years worth of data locked away permanently simply because they post a line of emojis on a YouTube video? Simply astonishing.

Why would anyone trust Google with any important part of their lives based on this kind of behaviour?

</comment><comment><USER26> Things like this are a good argument for breaking up the tech giants. It's an example of how monopolies hurt consumers.

</comment><comment><USER27> Wonder if the ban related to this rule

Repetitive comments: Leaving large amounts of identical, untargeted or repetitive comments.

</comment><comment><USER28> Looks like they are trying to use AI for automation and it's screwed up. Again. And it will and must happen again and again to get better.

Actually they call this stressful work and actively explicitly are working towards not getting workers to do this work for their own benefit if you believe HR and the mental health supporters of this policy.

I forget the actual term it's something like "Mental Health Ops'.

Why should Google make their contactors suffer digging through video chat when they can get an AI to do it for them? This is literally their policy, it's not satire.

<comment><USER24> Yes, but just block further commenting, lol. If your algorithm has bad false positive rate, don't hook it to "delete this person from Google" action, but something less intursive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> "The accounts have already been reinstated. We handled that last night. 2. The whole-account "ban" was a common anti-spam measure we use. The account is disabled until the user verifies a phone number by getting a code in an SMS."

Is g00gle harvesting mobile numbers?

<comment><USER16> 1\. Yes obviously

2\. They are lying through their teeth about the accounts being reinstated (many have not been), as well about the SMS thing, given that the video shows actual screenshots of people being denied having their accounts reinstated, so obviously that SMS thing doesn't work at all as they claim it should.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Google seems to be constantly playing with any of their algorithms... I totally understand that it's their business, but especially YouTube gets worse and worse.

</comment><comment><USER31> oh wow! there must be more backstory to this. finding it hard to believe that whole google accounts got suspended for spamming a youtube video chat!

<comment><USER32> This is why I avoid as many google properties as possible. Who even knows what actions might get my Gmail account disabled. And when they do, there's no chance of their support system fixing it. The ban bot decided a rule was violated, and when reviewing its decision the ban bot unsurprisingly decides the same thing on appeal.

So no, I'm not going to start shopping with Google Wallet no matter how many coupon offers they send me.

<comment><USER33> I would not rely on a third party (especially a platform with so inconsistent behavior and unclear rules) when talking about an irreplaceable asset.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, switching to a better email provider is on my to do list, but it's a big project that I'll get around to "someday". Easier to fly under Google's radar.

<comment><USER18> I'm sure some of those commenters in the video stream believed the same thing.

<comment><USER32> They made the critical mistake of touching a second Google product

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Would it be a reasonable and temporary solution to ban accounts at a service level? So spamming on YouTube bans access to YouTube, etc.

</comment><comment><USER35> How does this even get coded? Bug in some rules engine for detecting spam?

<comment><USER21> Much of Google's behaviour seems to be AI/ML based.

Which effectively means Google's own engineers don't understand what is happening or why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> You'd think that Google would get better at dealing with this situation after, oh, say, _six years_ of having the problems of forced multi-service integration (and abuse countermeasures) pointed out to them:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6746731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6746731) [1]

But no.

Just from my own experience, I've been locked out of my Google account[2], my _real_ Google account[3], and of course, when the company, as it on very rare an infrequent occasions does, cancels services, found myself (and a few million others) scrambling to salvage content and communities.[4]

Others have had slightly worse authentication/access situations.[5]

To be fair: the problem is a complicated one, and Google sees a lot of abuse. Or, as in Mariplier's community's experience: activity which looks a lot like spam, at a multi-billion-user scale, which can make assessment difficult.

(Though as has been pointed out: if scale of operations makes reasonable levels of service provisioning prohibitive, perhaps you shouldn't be operating at that scale?)

Google _do_ manage to cull a lot of spam, abuse, and other crud. In my some- time career of trying to get hard numbers regarding aspects of Google+ membership and activity, I found:

\- G+ communities were being created _and deleted_ at a prodigious clip of thousands per day. Even in the final months of the site, several hundred thousand new communities were added.

\- A strong predictor for whether or not a G+ profile would be deleted was _if it had ever posted public content_. By a factor of about 10 over profiles with no visible content. Presumably, many of these were spam or other abusive profiles.

\- The very most active profiles across a small sampling of recent Communities posts were spammers, and by the time I'd gone back to verify the top few, most or all their content was removed.

When you're operating at large scale, it's difficult to make discerning, accurate, fair, or consistent decisions. That's understandable.

But _you should be aware of this_ and design systems to recover gracefully from errors. Which includes not discomfitting, annoying, or distressing users excessively. Someting Google have repeatedly failed at.

________________________________

Notes:

1\. The day that item ran, the top three items on HN were either directly or indirectly about my experience or frustrations with the then-new Google+ - YouTube accounts merger. [https://i.imgur.com/YgEjUuI_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&f...](https://i.imgur.com/YgEjUuI_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium)

2\. [https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2w618r/how_to_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2w618r/how_to_kill_your_google_account_access_it_via_tor/)

3\. [https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3mo7l6/that_go...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3mo7l6/that_google_identity_thing_again_who_are_you_is/)

4\. [https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Goals](https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Goals)

5\. [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia- hack-e...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack- election-dnc.html)

</comment><comment><USER36> I wish we could ban them too.

</comment><comment><USER37> You mean YouTube comments are now moderated? That's very welcome and long overdue.

<comment><USER38> This is about livestream comments.</comment></comment>


A Genocide in Colonial Africa Finally Gets Recognition - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/brutal-genocide-colonial-africa-finally-gets-its-deserved-recognition-180957073/ <comment><USER2> The Herero genocide is a plot point in Gravity's Rainbow. I didn't realize it was a real until years later.

<comment><USER3> It also makes an appearance in _V._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why are most of the recognized genocides these days committed by Germans? (at least according to my perception)

Do they commit more (relatively) or "recognize" (~ admit) (relatively) more? Why?

<comment><USER5> Probably because "recognition" of genocides is mostly a political instrument rather than a correction of historical record based on new proofs. The recognition depends mostly on the political relationship between the "recognizer" and the perpetrator. For example: The Armenian genocide: As long as Turkey is an ally of US, US fails to recognize any wrong doings and takes no action. The holocaust: Germany was not an ally of US at the time; US recognizes the genocide and takes action. The various french "activities" in algeria and africa in general: US fails to recognize anything. France is an sovereign (=they have nukes) ally. Al-Anfal "campaign" in Iraq: US fails to recognize the actions of Iraq (unofficial US ally against Iran at the time) but remembers a decade later when Saddam falls into disgrace and action is taken in 2003. Second Chechen war: Russia is not ally of US but it is too "sovereign" for any action to be taken.

<comment><USER6> Prof Justin McCarthy, Melbourne Symposium: "What Happened During 1915-1919?" [https://youtu.be/TPcNuu3jJWk](https://youtu.be/TPcNuu3jJWk)

<comment><USER5> Thanks but I'm fine with wikipedia. wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's great. How many decades before we start paying attention to what's going on there now?

<comment><USER8> The colors are not the right combination for current political optics ... so probably a long, long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ultimately it is about money. Germany has rebuked demands for reparations. Good for them. I can see reparations when you are within a generation or two and there is a chance of finding those directly affected by such actions, but when you four or more out all we should be after is acknowledgment if that.

The take away is, past governments have done things current governments find abhorrent. Times change, what is acceptable changes. However the biggest factor is the ability of people to prove events and get acknowledgment of that proof.</comment>


Sun aquires VirtualBox  - <AUTHOR> http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-02/sunflash.20080212.1.xml <comment><USER2> I discovered VirtualBox a few months ago and am now migrating to it away from VMWare Workstation. It's stable and performs well.

It also offers the Parallels-like feature which allows you to run application windows from your VM in your host desktop environment. This is very handy for doing cross-browser web app testing, where you can (for example) put a Win IE7 browser window right next to your Linux Firefox one to compare things side by side.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just set this up over the weekend. I hadn't heard of it before and was a little skeptical but it's a lot like the VMWare I've used at work.

It's performing very well and offered some pretty flexible install options (I had an iso file I was going to burn until I noticed VirtualBox could just use it directly).

</comment><comment><USER4> The thing I really enjoy about VirtualBox is that it just works. I have been using it to run XP under a linux host for things like Skype, and it's really nice not to have to fight with configs and such. Hopefully Sun lets them keep the same ethos after the acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://marc.info/?l=openbsd- misc&m=120492689515501&w...](http://marc.info/?l=openbsd- misc&m=120492689515501&w=2)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is from 2/12/2008...</comment>


The Startup Pivot: How Moo Got It Right & Became Profitable - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2009/12/13/moo-pivots-becomes-profitabl/

<comment><USER2> "... it appears that there was actually very little progress made last week on the key issues needed to deliver an agreement. That means the heads of state, who will arrive and begin to speak as early as Wednesday, are left with the bulk of the decisions and a lot of hard work on fundamental issues like emissions targets, long term financing, a shared vision of the agreement and even the legal framework of the final document.

Marcelo Furtado, Executive Director, Greenpeace Brazil, said on Monday morning that negotiators had done so poorly last week that they left a crime scene for the arriving heads of states, and that developed countries had clearly failed to do their homework. Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the current drafts from the developed world on the table would deliver an increase in emissions."

You don't send leaders to a conference to sign agreements until the agreements have already been debated, written and agreed to in advance.

Sheesh.

<comment><USER2> Apologies for this misdirected comment.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Lito - A virtual office for your remote team - <AUTHOR> https://getlito.co <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everybody!

Two friends and I launched our side project recently and we are looking for your feedback.

The web app is called Lito and it's a virtual office that connects your distributed team through voice.

Waiting for replies, feeling left out, not knowing who is working at the moment, and struggling to find a time to meet. If you are working remotely or work with remote co-workers, these problems might resonate with you.

That's why we build Lito (You can read our full story on Medium) [https://medium.com/getlito/an-easy-hack-for-more-efficent- re...](https://medium.com/getlito/an-easy-hack-for-more-efficent-remote- collaboration-f037d98bbcb6)

Try it! We're really looking forward to your feedback!</comment>


Why I Love Startup School - <AUTHOR> http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/why-i-love-startup-school

<comment><USER3> I was lucky enough to attend Saturday's Startup School Silicon Valley event (my first time), and I'm happy to say I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I've previously blogged about what I think makes a "great" startup event[1], and Startup School does seem to fulfill most of the criteria - Great speakers, a focused theme, a focused audience, and best of all it's free and highly accessible.

Despite all that, in the spirit of iteration and helping the event improve in the future, here are my 2 nitpicks/suggestions:

#1 - More transparency around how attendees are selected

YC already does a great job of explaining what they look for and how they choose teams that apply to their accelerator program[2], and it would be great if they could explain, even briefly, what selection criteria they use for Startup School. It's already free and open to anyone (to apply to), and I think being transparent with the selection criteria would be the cherry on top.

#2 - Expand the Office Hours segment

The speakers and their talks were excellent, but I think Startup School could be even better with more of an interactive, hands-on element as well.

The Office Hours segment, in which two YC partners simulated YC office hours with 3 teams selected from the audience (10 minutes each), is arguably the most interesting part of the event, and something that truly differentiates Startup School from other "fireside chat with [successful founder]" events. It gives the audience a good idea of how YC partners help founders ask the tough questions about their own startups that can hopefully point them in the right direction.

However, the Office Hours segment left me wanting more, and I started imagining how cool it would be if this was turned into a 1-hour breakout session, where 10~20 YC founders in different verticals would hold open office hours for anyone who wants to have their own startup or project critiqued.

Again, I think Startup School is a great resource for the community, and I'm excited to think about how it could be made even better.

[1] [https://medium.com/@petershin45/what-makes-a-good-startup- ev...](https://medium.com/@petershin45/what-makes-a-good-startup- event-9a0b29e711bb)

[2] [https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply/](https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply/)

<comment><USER4> This was my first time, too, and it was a fantastic event. Visiting the YC offices for the BBQ on Friday evening (really their extension offices/meeting building, I think the HQ is down the street) is a religious experience. And, yes, I admit that walking into that orange glory I was as giddy as a high- school groupie (wasn't the only one!). The food was FANTASTIC (both days) and everything was well-planned. And it was all free. Amazing.

No event (esp. one this big) is perfect enough to not warrant and suggestions for making it better, though, so to extend this thread, here are a few of my own:

1\. _+1 for more Office Hours_. I would suggest to pepper these in between talks, after a few back to back talks the audience got a bit of an information fatigue, I think. I saw a lot of people on their phones after 4pm. The informational value of the session on Saturdays were huge. IDEABOLT: How about having a web cast of these, I would pay to watch it and I heard other people saying so, too.

2\. _More interaction with YC 'ers and speakers_. Maybe this was an absurd expectation with 1,700 people in attendance but I was looking forward to saying hi to pg, Jessica, sama, and the gang during the breaks at SC and at the BBQ but couldn't see them mingling with the crowd (could be that I was too preoccupied with the great food and drinks). Having the speakers available outside to ask questions would be great, too.

3\. _Better nametags_. I think there should be a customizable area on the printed nametags, e.g. I would like to see people's HN nicks (for those who want to put it there, of course). I know/follow quite a few people here but don't know their names, this would have been helpful in saying hi to these folks. Also I saw a lot of people adding information by pen to their nametags about their startup, it would be nice to be able to do this at the signup web page, too. Now that I think about why not even include a NFC tag with more personal information, company website, etc. This would solve the problem of not remembering the names of the many people you chat with during the event.

4\. _Startup story booths_. Picture booths are now popular at parties. Why not set up one which, when you enter your registration code, will tape you for 30secs. You can use this time to pitch your idea/company. These can then be posted online, voted on, etc.

All in all it was a great event to attend!

<comment> grey-area _Startup story booths._

Great idea, +1 to that...

I went to the last event in London and the thing I felt was missing most was social interaction between attendees who wouldn't otherwise meet and hearing stories of other startups not (yet) in YC. This was mostly down to the attendees, which if you didn't know anyone else could be a bit intimidating.

It'd be nice to see a few more social elements to encourage mingling - <USER2> example an open mic area to talk about your startup and solicit advice, discussion groups (or office hours) for different startup categories (travel etc) in smaller rooms so that people with similar interests could gather, or perhaps some kind of mini hackathons lasting 15 minutes on different subjects. Anything that lets people interact in a non-forced way.

People mingled at the drinks at the end to some extent, however that was pretty random I felt more group interaction earlier on would have helped break the ice a little more rather than simply leaving that to drinks etc. and my only regret about the event was that I didn't speak to more people.

 _I would suggest to pepper these in between talks, after a few back to back talks the audience got a bit of an information fatigue, I think_

Definitely - the talks were all in contiguous blocks, which meant by the end it was difficult to take it all in, though in London I loved Paul Buchheit near the end - he started to guffaws from some kids in front of me because of his gnomic delivery and by the end had them rapt. They do at least have the ones from the event online. More office hours between talks would be great - perhaps each speaker could give an office hours open to the floor?

Smaller talks to smaller groups (perhaps in parallel) would also work wonderfully, as having such a large audience makes the dynamic very different when it comes to questions and even for the speakers themselves. There are of course issues with that in terms of money and it's already a free event.

 _More interaction with YC 'ers and speakers._

I don't think this is really possible, given the number of people in attendance. At the event in London speakers were mingling but were mobbed by hopefuls standing in rings around them and it all became a little odd and celebrity-focused, which I don't think was the intention. Perhaps some people find this useful, but I wasn't sure it added much given the ratio of speakers to attendees.

Great events though and cheers to YC for putting them on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love how this year's event illustrated that you don't have to be an asshole or a sociopath to be successful. All the speakers sounded like genuinely nice and wonderful people.

Some of entrepreneurship's biggest successful outliers seem to have exhibited those traits and thus they became part of silicon valley lore. I think it's important for people getting into startups to understand that you don't have to turn yourself into a stone cold shark. Some business decisions will be tough, but that doesn't mean you have to be an ass about them. Your ambition can be to be successful, but that doesn't mean you have to "crush your competitors" or disregard other people entirely.

An article I once read cited a study showing that on average, people are more financially successful AND happy, if they are considered by their friends to be good people. I tried to find it just now but couldn't. Has anybody heard of similar results?

Edit: What are some examples of extremely successful entrepreneurs that were known to be extremely kind?

<comment><USER6> >examples of extremely successful entrepreneurs that were known to be extremely kind?

It's kind of hard to say how kind people are without knowing them but the good Arthur of Market Basket seems an interesting recent example

( [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/25/market- basket-f...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/25/market-basket- family-feud-grocery-massachusetts) ).

Also Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines perhaps. I don't know if you'd consider Warren Buffett an entrepreneur but he's done well and has a good reputation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "cheap, no-frills, and amazing content and people. And, of course, little to no introductory remarks."

Love that. Seeing EU events headed in the opposite direction... increasing fees, more showmanship, speakers all trying to literally sell you something, not very genuine or down to earth.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, whereas Startup School Europe was really excellent and I came away completely enthused about the startup scene. Talking to Kirsty and Qasar definitely convinced me to apply for YC at least!

Hope they carry on with EU events, even if they aren't in London. We certainly do need more of that attitude around here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I got the chance to attend this year and what struck me as most interesting about the weekend was not the day of speakers but the people I met. I meet lots of people who _talk_ about startups but almost everyone I met was deeply serious and wicked smart. Every person I met, every conversation I had I came away thinking that they would be successful...and I am usually quite pessimistic in that scenario. Ground zero is a great term, I feel I met so many great people and heard so many great ideas that there was almost certainly a unicorn company in that room.

<comment><USER10> Caveat: I was not there at all.

To clarify, was this time exceptional amongst other events like this that you have gone to? I am skeptical, as many people at events like these that I have attended are there to sell you themselves and idea, hence it would be by design that you walk away thinking they all are 'going to make it.'

<comment><USER9> I have been to other startup focused events, though normally on a smaller scale and not in SV.

I never felt like any of the people I met were trying to sell me their idea - it was far more collaborative among the people I spoke with. We shared, offered advice etc. I mostly spent time with people from out of town as we all were in town Friday night and used facebook to coordinate getting together for drinks since we were all there early.

<comment><USER10> Wow, nice to hear! Is there a mailing list anywhere that you are apart of that advertises such events?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My then girlfriend (now wife) and I flew to New York from Atlanta and took the overnight bus to Boston to save on flight fare to attend the first startup school.

That chain of events ultimately led to YC W12.

I missed my first startup school in all these years last Friday, but it was to talk to customers so I don't feel that bad. I hope to be back next year!

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd just like to thank YC for putting the event on. I went last year. I came to SF for it and never left. I'm here a year later with a relatively successful business doing what I had been meaning to do for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER13> Startup school is the reason I have an awesome cofounder (now working together 4-yrs) – thanks Jessica!

</comment><comment><USER14> We had the chance to go to Startup School in NYC a few months back. It certainly spurred some thinking for us, namely:

i) Embed persistence and resilience into your startup's culture because you are probably going to face a lot of rejection and resistance throughout your journey

ii) Should applying to Y Combinator be a first resort instead of a last resort?

We wrote more about this here: [http://blog.planitwide.com/2-hugely-important- thought-starte...](http://blog.planitwide.com/2-hugely-important-thought- starters-for-first-time-entrepreneurs-from-startup-school-nyc/)

</comment><comment><USER15> One of the things I like about Startup School is the quality of people attending. I tried to organize a quick "Speed Networking" session during lunch hour - bunch of people joined in and it was fun. I remember PG saying a lot of founders apply as single founders - I think if the organizers setup a "networking area" with a simple "speed networking" type rules it may even help people find their next co-founder. And the team behind the next big thing could say - hey "we met at startup school"

</comment><comment><USER16> Thanks for the great Work Jessica. An amazing experience, great people and speakers. I fly from NY and found a bunch of people from around the world also traveling to California for the experience.

</comment><comment><USER17> Jessica thanks for your Italian language skill! :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Thanks for organizing! Event was extremely well organized and lucky to be part of it:-)

</comment><comment><USER19> Can you upload videos to youtube, please?

<comment><AUTHOR> They'll be going up later today. We'll make sure the link to the videos gets posted to HN.

<comment><USER20> Thanks. I'm eagerly waiting for them. I'd missed a few talks in the morning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Seen the videos, talks are amazing.</comment>


WebGL – working with GLSL source files - <AUTHOR> http://www.pheelicks.com/2013/12/webgl-working-with-glsl-source-files/

<comment><USER2> You should have RequireJS compile them on-the-fly in the browser like the CoffeeScript plugin ([https://github.com/requirejs/require- cs](https://github.com/requirejs/require-cs)) and the Handlebars plugin ([https://github.com/SlexAxton/require-handlebars- plugin](https://github.com/SlexAxton/require-handlebars-plugin)).

That way a separate Python script isn't required.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice suggestion - I agree it would be more elegant if I didn't need to invoke Python. I haven't been using Require.js for that long, so wasn't aware of the plugin functionality.

However, in the future I think it'd be nice if I could also have the GLSL code linted/compiled or minified, and this is probably out of the scope of what a Require.js plugin could do. Or am I wrong?

<comment><USER3> To make things easy during the development of [http://Clara.io](http://Clara.io) we wrote our own creation scripts that do all the processing of dependencies automatically.

Basically track which files are dirty and what other files are dependent upon their results (like a MAKE file) and then execute the various rules you have setup. This can work both in the context of a database where the files are all provided by the user, or it can work like MAKE does on a local file system.

GruntJS does this as does Jake with local file systems.</comment></comment></comment>


White House meeting on video game violence was unproductive and bizarre - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/8/17098230/trumps-video-game-violence-meeting-esa <comment><USER2> Reminder: Peter Thiel, a former YC Fellow, supported Trump for President.</comment>


Show HN: MeloCraft – Pitch detection in real-time - <AUTHOR> http://melocraft.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello, I made this tool when I started learning the violin and wanted to correct my pitch despite not having a musical ear. I figured it might be useful to other people (:

<comment> adam-a Hi, nice tool. I just gave it a go and it seems reasonably accurate. I've recently been developing something similar - I'm detecting singing pitch for use in a game. I wonder did you use any particular method for detecting the pitch?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's FFT-based. Then I do some basic computation to try and guess the « best » peak, taking the harmonics into account. Still need lots of work and I suck at math.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Asking me to subscribe to get a download link, with the only way to avoid it being a link that doesn't look like a link seems evil to me. Please reconsider.

<comment><USER3> There is a link to display the download links in small text under the subscribe.

Calling a signup 'evil' is a bit over the top. People who don't spend their days on the web are less familiar with the less obvious ways of gleaning user data...e.g. current Google or Facebook logins, third party trackers, etc.

<comment><USER4> > Calling a signup 'evil' is a bit over the top.

On HackerNews, the word "evil" might as well mean "kind of annoying." Use Mailinator or a similar throwaway email service if you don't want to sign up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Crashes instantly on start (on Windows):

      Fault Module Name:	Qt5Gui.dll
      Exception Code:	c0000005
      Exception Offset:	00044856

<comment><AUTHOR> That's odd, can I ask what version of Windows you're running? How much RAM you got?

I only tested it on Win7 and had a friend test it on Win8 and Win10.

<comment><USER5> Windows 8.1, 16GB RAM

</comment></comment></comment><comment> josh-wrale Looks like it would be good for setting intonation on a guitar or similarly stringed instrument. Cool!

</comment><comment><USER6> so its like [http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/fosphor](http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/fosphor) but limited to audio?

<comment><USER7> While it hasn't been updated in a while (get ready for OSS and JACK support _only_ (use jack)) and the website has a few missing images, it's hard to beat baudline for frequency analysis.

[http://www.baudline.com/what_is_baudline.html](http://www.baudline.com/what_is_baudline.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm on Windows so I can't test this one, but seeing from the screenshots, it does not seem to be aimed at musical notes and musicians.

I don't aim to be the best at frequency analysis. My goal is to help beginner musicians to get more confidence about their pitch accuracy.</comment></comment></comment>


Xmake Getting Started Tutorial 4: C/C++ project description settings - <AUTHOR> https://tboox.org/2019/11/10/quickstart-4-basic-project-settings/ <comment><AUTHOR> Xmake is very easy to use, welcome everyone to try it. Thanks!</comment>


If programmers are leaving VB and aren't going to C#, where are they going? - <AUTHOR> http://visualstudiomagazine.com/columns/article.aspx?editorialsid=2979 <comment><USER2> I think this is an example of someone trying to extrapolate data from a source that's incapable of providing the conclusions he wants. He's using Google Trends to try to determine the popularity of programming languages which doesn't logically track.

I'll give you one example of what I mean. He states that over the last 5 years searches for C# have remained flat and that VB.NET searches are going down. But in the last 5 years several very helpful .Net aggregation sites have gone up (dotnetkicks, asp.net weblogs, stackoverflow, etc...). That aggregation trend might cause people to search less

That's just one of many reasons why search results aren't an accurate measure of language popularity.

</comment><comment><USER3> OK none of this is scientific - just observations:

A lot of old school (shall we call them) programmers are still operating but in their "comfort zone" in VB5 and VB6 - which is why they are not searching for new information and tools on the Net.

Lot's of occasional programmers have just given up - there is a good deal more "bodging" of mini apps using spreadsheets within businesses that I get a chance to observe. This is probably good for the overall quality of corporate code but worrying - while some of those old VB apps were pretty clunky home grown spreadsheets are just about guaranteed to be buggy and likely to lead to management errors/

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting line about "every other traditional language is trending downward". I don't really consider c# a traditional language, and other non- traditional languages such as ruby, python are also flat (as compared to not dropping).

</comment><comment><USER5> _Perhaps developers are using Live.com instead of Google? I'd accept that if it were just the Microsoft languages, but LAMP programmers leaving Google for Live.com? I don't think so. Something real is happening._

insight :)</comment>


Tough questions we get asked: 2018 Annual Letter - <AUTHOR> https://www.gatesnotes.com/2018-Annual-Letter?WT.mc_id=02_13_2018_02_AnnualLetter2018_DO-COM_&WT.tsrc=DOCOM <comment><USER2> I love the self-awareness in their response to question #8 - we are fortunate that "the king is just" in the case of the foundation, but it is very undemocratic for the wealthy to solely pick causes they care about at such a large scale.

Just last week, Gates himself was arguing that he and other billionaires need to be paying significantly more taxes.

[https://phys.org/news/2018-02-gates-billionaires- significant...](https://phys.org/news/2018-02-gates-billionaires- significantly-taxes.amp)

<comment><USER3> ? It's his money that he actually decided to give away why should you or I have a say in it?

<comment><USER4> The argument is, why do we as a society allow people to amass wealth on the scale of nations. Instead, perhaps that wealth should be democratically owned, and then put towards what the society needs, rather than what one person decides.

<comment><USER5> Two things can happen. We can be a society that ensures social needs are met while allowing vast concentrations of wealth.

<comment><USER6> That is, historically, false. Concentration of wealth always ends up implying power, whether soft or hard. Having such amount of power outside of democratic institutions is a threat .

<comment><USER7> This is, historically, true: in communist countries with "equal sharing of misery", power and wealth was 100% concentrated into the hands of a few elites or outright tyrants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It always amazes me how pessimistic people can be in terms of where the world is heading, especially people who tend towards populism (on the left and the right). In debates, I eventually point out actual data about living conditions[1]. Looking at data instead of news stories, it becomes clear that extreme poverty, vaccination, child mortality and education are vastly improving for a majority of humans on this planet. This leaves aforementioned populists with nothing to argue about but the validity of the data they are seeing, unable to reconcile reality with their world view.

[1] [https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living- condit...](https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions- in-5-charts)

<comment><USER9> If you include all sentient beings in your analysis there's no question that the world has gotten _much_ worse over the past 50+ years. The number of animals living lives of unending torture has gone up and up during that time period. Any gains made by humans are a blip in the statistics.

I'm somewhat hopeful that we are in the middle of the time when that start changing, but until it does, I think it's quite clear that things have gotten worse, not better.

<comment><USER10> To add to your point, the affect of the amount of animals bred into existence coupled with how they are treated is devastating the environment.

<comment> wu-ikkyu Indeed. None of these apparent positive gains will matter for very long if we destroy our own ecosystem in the process

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I sometimes wonder what would happen if Bill Gates and say Warren Buffet spent a ridiculous amound of money on lobbying, in order to drastically change the political landscape.

</comment><comment><USER5> Unrelated but the first thing this site did was ask me to fill out a user survey. That's the exact wrong time to ask a user to fill out a survey.

<comment><USER12> Exactly why I default to no JS. But in cases like this, I load a 20k line webpage and see zero content until it's enabled. Welcome to the modern web.

<comment><USER13> There are people working on a decentralized web that doesn't require clunky (impossible-to-fully-audit) web browsers and it is JavaScript free.

<comment><USER14> Please elaborate.

On a side note, please don't make people ask for essential information, just state it right away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The first 2 questions remind me of the (fantastic) book I'm reading Doing Good Better. This is basically effective altruism.

This book argues that a dollar goes a lot farther in the third world. (Obviously.)

It also has a great story about how money spent on educational resources can have almost no effect while money spent on deworming (yes, worms) can greatly increase educational results. (Not so obvious.) This is a third world example but its fairly obvious the problems with US education aren't' resource or efficiency based.

<comment><USER16> Another good book on effective altruism is The Most Good You Can Do by Peter Singer.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168483-the-most- good-y...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168483-the-most-good-you-can- do)

It's clear that Bill and Melinda Gates are practicing effective altruism in an effort to do the most good with their money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "I think he broke the law, so I certainly wouldn't characterize him as a hero" \- Bill Gates on Snowden. A question I'd love to hear any rich person answer explicitly: is it impossible for a criminal to be a hero?

[http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/bill-gates-the- roll...](http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/bill-gates-the-rolling- stone-interview-20140313?page=2)

<comment><USER18> I'm pretty sure Bill Gates has a very different view on this than anyone reading this site. He would have doubtless been exposed to the realities of the US government for decades.

<comment><USER19> In press interviews, he's also expressed criticism toward Apple about the San Bernadino iPhone case and about the goal of deploying end-to-end encryption that nobody can break.

(I work on these issues on what's apparently the other side from him.)

<comment><USER19> A subsequent example on cryptocurrency anonymity (which is a topic that's often controversial here, but with relatively few people taking it as far as Gates did):

[http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-on- cryptocurrency-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-on- cryptocurrency-2018-2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16366263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16366263)

</comment><comment><USER21> Maybe one of the most controversial statements they make is: "In our U.S. work, one premise we start with is that a college degree or career certificate is critical to a successful future. In short, a college education should be a pathway to prosperity for all Americans."

I wouldn't dispute that having enough skill/education to offer value to the global/US marketplace is critical, but I have some doubt about whether what we call "college education" is the way really large numbers of people (not just the elite) can obtain that skill/education.

Maybe we're over investing in an outdated, inefficient process and it will never be good enough.

<comment><USER5> You don't even need to be near a campus to go to college these days. It can all be done online provided the infrastructure are there. I see two critical problems to address and a third more radical option.

1-Invest in bridging the last mile gap for broadband.

2-Clear headed planning to address the fundamental employment issues undermining labor/per capital wealth.

—-there aren't enough jobs to employ everyone given current market conditions. Ie lower the full time/OT line to 20-30 hours or so and make better support systems (healthcare for all, housing projects for all that aren't crimes dens)

—-make programs to help college students prepare, correctly for the labor force.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can't be the only one who wishes they spent nothing in the US on Education and direct it all to homelessness, so they can stop screwing up Education. Common Core is horrendous.

</comment><comment><USER23> _> We are outspoken about our optimism. These days, though, optimism seems to be in short supply. The headlines are filled with awful news. Every day brings a different story of political division, violence, or natural disaster. Despite the headlines, we see a world that's getting better._

It should take a lot of nerve to open this way. Sympathy, or I guess we call it _empathy_ , who knows, cannot be achieved through optimism alone. The unfettered optimism in this intro seems tone-deaf. I think it undermines the effort they make to the contrary.

<comment><USER24> I'd argue the exact opposite. It is all too easy to just throw up your hands and say "The world is fucked; there isn't anything to do about it". Empathy is impossible without the belief that something can be done, which is optimism.

<comment><USER23> HN readers are quick to be enthusiastic in celebrating urgent acknowledgement and critical response in the case of server outages and security breaches. Why limit this regard to that?

Sure, saying there isn't anything we can do about it is irresponsible, and so is the lack of nuance of "the world is fucked".

Is this the only alternative you can imagine?

 _> Empathy is impossible without the belief that something can be done, which is optimism._

That is not what optimism is.

If you can not identify problems, you are multitudes more unlikely to solve them. My critique is as basic as that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > _Submit a question below and we will answer the best ones in the near > future._

No you won't. You will select some questions you like, and answer them. They will not necessarily be the "best" (whatever that means... according to what criteria??) or the ones most people would like to see answered. Just the ones you feel like answering.

A more democratic system would be to let people vote for questions, and promise to answer the ones with the most upvotes. Or maybe (why not) offer to answer ALL questions.

<comment><USER26> "Are you imposing your values on other cultures?" and "Is it fair that you have so much influence?" are close to the touch question I expected them to not have. The big complaint I see from the left is that billionaires get to determine the direction of philanthropy--two unelected people get to impose their ideas about public education, for example.

That said, while those questions are close to the big tough question, I don't think their answers really addressed them in an adequately thoughtful way.

(I think the Gates Foundation is mostly making good choices with their philanthropy, but maybe we just got lucky. How about [Soros|Koch] (pick whichever you like least)?)

<comment><USER25> None of the 10 questions listed is "tough", and at least one (out of ten, so 10%) is of tabloid level: _" What happens when the two of you disagree"_ \-- the answer includes the nugget that there's a sculpture in front of their house, of two birds looking ahead in the same direction. Isn't that something.

If one doesn't like the idea of Internet voting or answering all questions, then let them hold a press conference with real journalists. But this is not it; this is nothing; this is a show with pictures of the couple laughing and showing a serious face in front of poor people; this is just marketing.

An interesting question would be, how do you justify speciesism[1].

When they describe how they're "optimists" and how the world is getting "better", they're obviously only talking about humans. The world is getting much much worse for every species of living things, except (some) humans, so the only way to consider that the world is indeed getting better _in general_ is to consider that humans are so superior to any other living thing that any amount of suffering / extinction of other species is more than offset by the marginal utility we get out of it.

If you're religious, maybe your religion offers a way to accept that (depending on the religion).

But if, like the Gates (or me), you're atheists, how does this work exactly?

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Duh. Why not clean water instead of vaccines? [http://www.organiclifestylemagazine.com/how-plumbing-not- vac...](http://www.organiclifestylemagazine.com/how-plumbing-not-vaccines- eradicated-disease)

<comment><USER28> Providing clean water, infrastructure ('outhouses') and good-enough nutrition are much harder problems than organizing vaccination campaigns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder how Bill Gates can use a huge yacht for its own enjoyment, while at the same time spending money to fight climate change. I'd be curious to know his point of view.

<comment><USER5> I'm never going to ask someone to renounce luxuries when they are clearly donating much or a majority of their wealth. That's a recipe for no giving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am irked to no end how off the mark their entire foundation is. It's like the person with the least imagination on earth, got handed billions of dollars.

What is the lowest hanging fruit of all time? Right, the night-time ads on TV with poor children in a foreign country.

What is the least imaginative way of helping a developed nation? 'Better education'. Sigh.

Really? We just need to stop children from dying, educate the parents, and everything will be fine?

It's not that people are pessimistic - they are just REALISTIC, about what a crock of shit they're being handed, and Bill and Melinda's answer is to meet Steven Pinker and go 'hey, statistics show that everything's better than it ever was!' My god... We're talking billionaires, having no ideas, no imagination, and no idea that they have neither, and wondering why things kind of suck?

Because people with no ideas, no imagination, are the ones who get to make billions of dollars in our society? Maybe, just maybe, that has something to do with it Bill...

<comment><USER6> This is completely uninsightful.

<comment><USER30> If you had cancer and didn't know it, and someone named Melinda came and gave you a nice bed, some pain-pills and told you she cared, you'd feel a bit better.

Except you'd still have cancer.

When someone got you to a doctor, who operated on you quickly and saved your life, you'd not only consider the person who got you to the doctor insightful, but far more helpful than Melinda, and be rightfully outraged at Melinda's well-meaning but clueless efforts to help you.

I am the person getting you to the doctor, Melinda is Melinda Gates, and the insightful bit is figuring out what cancer is, and what a doctor would be, in this metaphor.

Melinda and Gates think it's lack of education in the USA. You tell me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder if they could quantify the human suffering and death that has happened as their proprietary surveillance operating system has betrayed it's users to totalitarian governments worldwide and just how vital it has been in eroding the constitutional protections of the fourth amendment by essentially backdooring everyone that uses it.

Bill Gates was never a good guy, and I don't really give a Fuck if most of you reading this don't like me saying this because you forgot what the word hacker really means because there are too many businesspeople here pretending to be hackers here instead of the other way around.

<comment><USER13> Well, you can use their OS, which has for years tried to undermine the free and open source communities, but you have to pay for it. And you have to agree for them to spy on you. And you're poor?? That is okay, just give up more of your privacy rights and we already sold all your data, so you will be a good consumer now.

You run Windows. Your mind belongs to us. Your ability to think beyond .NET and C# will soon diminish, and we will give you some mediocre job now based on your mediocre proprietary skills, and your role as a tech worker now be to spread your love for MS to everyone, because if you don't we will stop paying you, and you will have no food and no home. And you will not know how to use anything but Windows.

<comment><USER32> _And you have to agree for them to spy on you. And you 're poor?? That is okay, just give up more of your privacy rights and we already sold all your data, so you will be a good consumer now_

This is hilarious. What OS do you think Google, Facebook and the NSA run?

<comment><USER13> Google provided an open source operating system, web browser and built a container solution used by every major cloud provider.

<comment><USER32> You think that was altruism?

At the end of the day Gates wanted to sell products for money, straight up cash transaction, take it or leave it. Google et al are sly and underhanded, you don't know the price upfront, they try to turn you into the product...

<comment><USER13> You mean, like if I were to go buy a laptop pretty much anywhere, and they just include Windows in the laptop price??? I don't see how that is any different. I can go buy an unlocked Android phone at Costco for $199 that has Android 7.1.1. I know that I am paying for the hardware, and the OS is free.

So, you are basically trying to say that proprietary is better because we don't know what the open source version costs? Well, you have the source code... so I guess you may not be willing to look inside, but the other one you don't have the option to even look.

<comment><USER32> _am paying for the hardware, and the OS is free._

It is not free, unless you think Google is made of unpaid volunteers and all its shareholders are charities?

You are Gates' customer, but you are Google's inventory

<comment><USER13> So, if you go here:

[https://source.android.com/](https://source.android.com/)

Or here:

[https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/](https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/)

Compile it and run it, you are inventory of Google for compiling free source code that you can modify however you want? Where do you get the source code like that to compile for Windows?

<comment><USER13> @gaius: Now I'm blocked from responding to you. The only source code I could find for Microsoft, is for debugging, and doesn't give you access to all the source. You have to use a smart card that they send as well.

Here is the license for Android:

[https://source.android.com/setup/licenses](https://source.android.com/setup/licenses)

Where is the license for Winblows?

<comment><USER32> You're not blocked, HN just rate-limits comments :-)

<comment><USER13> Good to know that my anti-Microsoft messages aren't being entirely censored.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to find a viable business idea? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Start with the problem you are going to solve:

What is the problem?

Who experiences this problem and how often do they experience it?

Is the problem painful enough that people will pay for it?

How many of those people are able to pay, and how much are they willing to pay?

How are they currently solving this problem?

How much will it cost you to solve this problem? What is the potential revenue opportunity?

Example of a viable, stable business - locksmithing:

What is the problem? People get locked out of their homes, businesses, and cars.

Who experiences this problem and how often do they experience it? Most adults that own a home, business, or car will experience this once every six months or year.

Is this problem painful enough that people will pay for it? Yes.

How many of those people are able to pay, and how much are they willing to pay? Most working adults are able and willing to pay $100 to get into their home or car, especially if they are in a rush.

How are they currently solving this problem? Spare keys, friends and family with keys, AAA / tow companies, etc.

How much will it cost you to solve this problem? What is the potential revenue opportunity? Basic home locksmithing tools, certification, uniforms, insurance, business license, local advertising may cost a few thousand dollars, so breakeven might be 3-6 months.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a bunch of ambiguity encoded in to the term "viable" here. The number of viable businesses is almost infinite. Maybe think about restructuring the question with some contexts around that viability in terms of size, area of focus, type, etc, since this will inform the answer to the question heavily.

</comment><comment><USER4> Focus all your energy on thinking sales: what can you sell, what're people looking to buy, distribution, sale cycle, are people actively buying, what will it take to sell, talk to the potential buyers. Then think who are you going to displace and how you will differentiate yourself.</comment>


Optimizations (Part I): Operation Screaming Pixels - <AUTHOR> http://glitch.com/blog/2011/04/06/road-to-beta-operation-screaming-pixels/ <comment><USER2> A very nice article, but also a stark warning that they don't have a clue about graphics!

Doubtless the serverside sounds really interesting - Java + presumably rhino or a parallel node.js world. Definitely nice to see its all about content!

On the client-side, they are using Flash - presumably they've got RTMP going (writing RTMP servers is fun and quite doable without using any Adobe $tack), which is neat. Although they might be messing around with "websockets". That might fit better with their plays to move beyond Flash later.

From looking at their videos and dovetailing that with that post, they are doing this as a massive Flash game as 2D sprites. Flash has supported decent 3D graphics for a long time and you could get that same look from a noddy 3D engine and it'd be hardware accelerated and much much faster and smaller, directly addressing the issues of the post. The artwork really ought to measure in megabytes not the hundreds of MB they mention in the post. Are we given to believe that to play the game they will have a few GB of unpacked textures? Madness.

<comment><USER3> I don't find it odd that it's 2D. The game only needs paperdolling and scrolling, which are easily built with native Flash APIs. It makes sense that they'd start with the naive case and end up with a performance problem as the total character load builds and each one grows more complex.

What is odd is that they somehow decided that the server is burdened with sending a finished spritesheet over the wire, instead of having the client composite and cache them. That would reduce their load down to sending the paperdoll parts, which will be about as tiny as any textured 3D model. With some work to space out the compositing process over multiple frames, the CPU burden during caching would be negligible.

Edit: Read it again, looks like they actually were caching on the client before. Too bad; just switching to Molehill and compositing in real-time with textured quads might have been enough.</comment></comment>


Nim partners with Status.im - <AUTHOR> https://nim-lang.org/blog/2018/08/07/nim-partners-with-status.html?ref=hn <comment><USER2> Nim is still the best language I know of in terms of clean code, speed, metaprogramming, FFI, etc.

And I think a sharded and/or light client/browser for Ethereum could actually replace banking and potentially a ton of other applications if it becomes popular. The trick will be all of the competition in terms of clients.

Rather than Dapp browsers I would like to see a lightweight mobile client library and server combo that would allow me to just build a freestanding app. Maybe just a lightweight client rather than an actual node. Or maybe have a way to install the ethereum node server only if it's not already there.

But with when sharding actually comes online I am very hopeful that Ethereum will blow up. So I may buy some more Ether tonight.

<comment><USER3> I'd wish there was a Rust with Nim syntax, haha.

<comment><USER4> I suppose something close might be OCAML or Haskell, since they have similar type safety to Rust (whose syntax is loosely based on OCAML from what I understand) but have some nice features that Python and Nim use like list comprehensions and generators, lazy evaluating, etc. But also with Rust macros you can sort of make your own sub-DSL's which add some of those features.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I know about the ML syntax languages, they are pretty cool, but Rusts unique selling point is the borrow-checker. Getting GC style code without runtime overhead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great news. Nim (and the team working on it) deserves much support and praise.

It is a language that enables C/C++ programmers to be more productive and makes performant programming approachable for beginners as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is great news Dominik. I remember speaking to you guys in your IRC channel a few years ago about Nim, and you all answered my questions and criticisms very professionally, and I really liked the direction you have all taken with Nim. This post is a good reminder to write something fun in it tonight. :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Way to go team Nim!

I was dabbling in this community almost a year ago before being distracted by work/life, very fun and supportive.

Still enjoy wearing my Nim t-shirt and look forward to returning to some dabbling in the (hopefully near) future.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've played with Nim, I think it's great and deserves more attention. Especially in the scientific computing and gamedev communities.

It has Python-like terseness, static typing, and simple C interop.

</comment><comment><USER9> Amazing. Interesting to see programming language teams getting together with web3.0 teams.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nim is new to me and I'm missing the "why" of it. From the website, I'm getting "we like Python but wanted to compile to native code and JavaScript". Is that fair?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's why I started using it.

But Nim is much more than just this, it's more like "We like Python, but we also like static typing, efficient and dependency-free programs, super easy C/C++ FFI and metaprogramming. We also like to write all our software in the same programming language so we compile to JavaScript" :)

<comment><USER11> This is literally Go, save the fact that it compiles to WA instead of JS.

<comment><USER12> > This is literally Go, save the fact that it compiles to WA instead of JS.

Except Nim compiles to C and JS, no official WASM yet (though you can Emscriptenize the C output). Nim has macros, generics, inheritance, exceptions, deterministic GC, and more. Otherwise, yeah, exactly the same.

<comment><USER11> I was responding to the comment... the things they mentioned are available in Go. You're taking my comment out of context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> very cool. hopefully you guys take off. i love python for being productive but static typing and easier distribution (compiling down to binary) are killer features for a language with similar semantics/expressiveness.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is there a transpiling / migration story for a python code base into Nim? I briefly looked at Nuitka to get to a dependency free binary from python but this could be another approach.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is some experimental stuff, py2nim for example: [https://github.com/metacraft-labs/py2nim](https://github.com/metacraft- labs/py2nim)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's awesome, congratulations Nim team!

</comment><comment><USER16> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER17> So nobody is going to comment on why Status.im even exists? 100m dollars for an "open source mobile dApp browser" and messaging system, when dApp browsers are dime a dozen, open source, and pretty good!

Trust Wallet any one? Toshi?

Hopefully all those bucks can be used to propel development of other things, like with Nim and a real sharding ecosystem.

<comment><USER18> The two wallets you mention are not running an ethereum like client on the phone and are therefore depending on third parties to get access to the ethereum network.

<comment><USER19> Running a node on a phone sounds like a horrible idea. Why would this be desirable?

This is a solved problem and I never understand why people keep going back to it. Host a node or use a public node. Use a local wallet to do signing and depend on the public node for RPC calls. The vast majority of users and clients do not need to be dealing with Ethereum nodes on their own devices, they just need good key management systems.

<comment> noman-land It's desirable for a couple reasons. Firstly, the node enables whisper, which is a p2p messaging protocol. You can't do p2p messaging with a public node, and nearly zero users will host their own nodes.

Also, public nodes can be DOSed or otherwise taken down. They can invisibly filter the requests they receive. Some jurisdictions could have the nodes completely blocked.

The point here is to build a fully p2p system, so running an on-device node is an attempt to do that. That doesn't mean that public nodes can't also still exist.

<comment><USER17> Care to elaborate on how they intend to accomplish this?

This seems to have predictable limitations, and the last people I talked to a month ago said it killed their batteries. Surpriseeeeeeeee or not really?

<comment><USER20> That's part of the motivation for developing a new Ethereum client, in Nim. The theory is that the executables produced can be more readily tuned according to various device profiles, e.g. desktop clients, mobile clients, beefy server clients, and so on.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Transport for London Unified API – Location of Things - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tfl.gov.uk/2015/10/08/unified-api-part-2-lot-location-of-things/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is part two of the series. Covered this week:

Searching for stops, Retrieving stops and stations with facilities, Finding stops near a co-ordinate or in a bounding box, Finding StopPoint information for all stops on a line or bus route, Finding the locations of other things, Santander Cycle docking stations</comment>