Ask HN: Is remote work here forever? - <AUTHOR> My company has done what appears to be the standard for the non-faang company WFH until the end of the year.
My city has decided to build a road through my backyard, making me want to move. I have the gamble a bit, so looking for everyone's opinions.
Has WFH hit the tipping point where it's just the new normal, or should I expect to still need to remain in the Bay Area? <comment><USER2> Yep. Companies are realizing the amount of money they can save , even the service companies which i thought would be the last one to do so [https://www.businesstoday.in/current/corporate/post- coronavi...](https://www.businesstoday.in/current/corporate/post- coronavirus-75-percent-of-3-5-lakh-tcs-employees-permanently-work-from-home- up-from-20-percent/story/401981.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope so for the planet at least. Millions of people driving to and from work every day in cases where it's not needed is such a waste of resources and time.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't know, but I sure hope so!

I've worked remote for most of my career, and I've had a few bait-and-switches from companies where they'd promise "100% remote" until we get to the offer stage of the interview, then they'd say "actually we need you to move to $bigTechCity". (I don't want to move to an expensive city. I want to live in the home I'm paying a mortgage on.)

</comment><comment><USER5> I think there's a chance companies will slowly go back to office as normal instead of WFH. Just a suspicion though.

Off topic: Do you get paid for giving up some of your land/backyard?

</comment><comment><USER6> For the most part yes.

Some companies realize remote working is good for their needs while others do not. Also, it obviously depends on whether a company is built looking at remote working as an option early on (Gitlab) or it has to experiment/transition its way there much later.

The pandemic has undoubtedly accelerated the consideration for companies in general, and I believe the number of companies favorable to remote work has risen.

</comment><comment><USER7> Things have slowed down enough in my company that we're back in the office. WFH is sub optimal for a lot of people, especially senior programmers who also tend to have several kids, or those who can't afford a house that fits a computer desk.

However, in places like the US, it looks like the pandemic isn't going anywhere soon.

</comment><comment><USER8> A number of companies have plans to return to the office between now and the beginning of next year. Best to check with your employer before making any lifechanging decisions but my impression is that remote work will simply be more accepted and common in the future, it won't be for everyone and forever.

</comment><comment><USER9> As someone who works remote, I bet a lot of companies will see the benefits of it moreso this year then any other, they will also see all of the drawbacks. I think it will become more common in some areas that are fine with drawbacks though (generally companies that pay well anyway).

</comment><comment><USER10> Yes. My uncle recently started working from home and it looks as though it is going to be a long term thing. It a a win win for both the employer and the employee in many cases.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm one that believes that there will not be a long term vaccine for Covid-19. We will need to get a shot every so often, at best, similar to the flu shot every year. Given the potential deadliness of the disease working from home will be here until we come up with a cure or a way to control it.

Will WFH be here forever? Probably not but it will be here for most of the working life of most people living today.

I also think that it will evolve into something different than the way it works now. Most people can't work from home and deal with the distractions. Something different will evolve but I don't really know what. Maybe something like WeWork but offices that can be disinfected on a per user basis.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yes but it's not binary as you or most people think today and it's not because lack of intelligence or anything like that. it's just that work has existed in a binary form largely since industrialized work was invented. The best way to think of the answer to your questions is that parts of "work" will become remote. Depending on the work for some it might be overnight. For some it will be over time. For some (people and companies)it will some part of their work (And their dependent supply chains and that too recursively). This is not going to be driven by people's wants btw the way. Yes some part of it will be but large part of it will be due to efficiencies forced by a capitalist/for profit world we operatin. If you can provide a product or service x% cheaper while maintaining everything else equal you will, and it's increases your margins(at best) and at worse it keeps you from going extinct as your competitors already do it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Gradually, and then all of a sudden

</comment><comment><USER14> Be patient. All will be revealed soon, grasshopper. :)</comment>


Show HN: Gmail Add-On: Collect Emails from Slack for Use in to Field - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/im-10-minutes-away-from-changing-the-way-we-manage-emails-at-work-but-i-need-your-help-or-3aea40057bd <comment><USER2> Cool! InboxSDK has a method you can use for setting the to recipients: `setToRecipients(emails)` [https://www.inboxsdk.com/docs/#ComposeView](https://www.inboxsdk.com/docs/#ComposeView)

</comment><comment><USER3> That seems like a good idea for certain use cases. That sounds like a good feature that should be native to slack. Ie email address per slack channel that emails everyone in the channel.</comment>


I think DuckDuckGo would do better changing that Quack of a name - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I completely agree.

I've said this every time the issue has come up: I think the name is hurting, a _lot_. More than once, I've wanted to just try a quick search on DDG to see it's comparison to Google, and at least some of those times, I've given up because writing duckduckgo is annoying. Is this logical/rational? NO. Is this how I, at least, behave? YES.

And for anyone saying that you can set up your browser to search DDG automatically, that's great if you've already bought into DDG, but it's not something I would do right off the bat.

<comment><USER3> You can set up a keyword search for DDG (for example ddg or just d) and use that when you want to compare. In Chrome, Firefox or Opera just right click in search form and select something along the lines of creating new search, and fill out the keyword.

I have a search keyword even for Google (g), my default search engine is "Feeling Lucky". Other keywords I use are (y)outube, wolfram(a)lpha, google (i)mages, t(orrentz), (m)aps (not google), (r)eddit (not a search per-se, just for opening subreddits), and a few others. For wikipedia, imdb, documentations, .. the feeling lucky is enough.

<comment><USER4> Yes, you can. But you have to think about it, and put a little bit of effort into it, at a moment you really want to do a quick search.

It makes switching a step with some friction, instead of making it possible to 'ease into it' by simply starting to do some search with ddg quickly.

(Heh, notice that many people in this forum write ddg for duckduckgo? I just made two typos typing that in. It's rather unlikely this is not costing them badly).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most people don't seem to know that search engines exist. The impression I get from non-technical people that I know is that they think of search engines as being somehow "part of the browser" or "part of the Internet". They often don't even know which one they use. They'll refer to searching as "Googling", but they're using Bing because it was the default with IE or they're using SuperGreatSearch 3.0 because Norton installed it and they haven't noticed the difference.

And you're suggesting that in a market like this, a silly name is a _bad_ thing?

<comment><USER6> This is definitely a good point; by far most people have no clue what search is and they just type their queries in whatever is given by default. Unless Duck gets installed on computers by default, no one will use it relatively, whatever name it has. The problem is that we are not begin 2000 (or before); everyone has devices with internet and most of these people don't have any technical knowledge; not even enough to know the concept of an URL. A thing like Google, if there would be a new 'revolution' now, would not work as it did then; you need hardware companies to deliver at least the choice. And given the choice maybe 'the people' like Duckduckgo better than 'Bing' (I think they heard Google too much in the news to not pick that)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well in fact, I think the name has a ring to it. The logo too complements it well.

I guess what's not working for DDG is that it's a me-too product. It boils down to this: What does DDG have that Google doesn't?.

Me-too products can perform _reasonably_ well if they are launched by corps with deep pockets for obvious reasons(like G+). Otherwise, a company like DDG has to have something different and unique to offer.

Oh, btw, that privacy hullabaloo works only for a very small percentage of the users. Most don't care or ignore.

<comment><USER8> DDG doesn't track you[0] or put you in a filter bubble[1]. They also have the bang syntax[2] for searching other sites/engines.

0: <http://donttrack.us/>

1: <http://dontbubble.us/>

2: <http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html>

<comment><USER9> I don't think these reasons are so strong. If you're not signed into Google, you don't need to worry about tracking. And you can turn off personalized results: <https://www.google.com/preferences>. The Bang sytax is usually worse than doing a Google site search, since Google usually does a better job ranking a site's content than the website itself.

<comment><USER8> Turning off personalized results doesn't stop Google from tracking you, it just stops leveraging that tracking for your benefit.

And I misspoke about the bang syntax: it actually runs a search on the target website. If you search for "foobar !g" on DDG, it redirects you to this page: [https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=foobar](https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=foobar). Same as "kitten video !yt" redirs to <https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kitten%20video>.

 _edit_ : I misread your comment about goog's site search indexing vs a site's native search. That is entirely site dependent. And it's still only a "kitten videos site:youtube.com !g" away in DDG.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Silly or not, it's the only search engine name other than google or bing that sticks in my head as being memorable. Probably because it is silly and different.

I guess my only complaint would be that it feels long to type because it is three words. (Even though the are short words.)

</comment><comment><USER11> I have spend some time researching good names for products and startups (see here <http://www.quora.com/What-are-good-company-and-startup-names>).

Good names are effective and accomplish a goal:

1: describe the offer: who you are - does the user get a sense what you offer? 2: or explain your mission: what you want to be, or how you want to achieve that 3: inspire to action 4: celebrate the benefit, the relevance, why you matter to consumers 5: describe the user 6: easy to spell and pronounce 7: trigger an emotion related to your mission 8: simple and sticky

DuckDuckGo is at least sticky and it triggers an emotion in my case. DuckDuckGo is not a perfect name, such as: "ChatRoulette", "YouTube", "BurgerKing", "PatientsLikeMe", "TripAdvisor", "OpenTable", "YourMechanic", "RackSpace", "Codecademy", "SoundCloud".

But I had never the problem to remember the name, DuckDuckGo. It is whacky, but is cool. Their logo is stylish. I like DuckDuckGo.

Blekko is a much shorter name. If you don't know, yes Blekko is a search engine. Go check them out. But I have the feeling more people start to use DuckDuckGo therefore either the quality is that good, or they like the brand, despite the very long domain.

They could buy the domain MegaSearch.com before Dotcom does it :) But that would be a lame name.

No, they should just stick with the name DuckDuckGo and try to become the default search engine for Firefox and other browsers, so people don't even have to type in their long domain name to search with them.

<comment><USER7> I cannot agree more!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> _The name of the search engine has been called "silly" by Frederic Lardinois of Read Write Web. Weinberg said of the origin of the name, "Really it just popped in my head one day and I just liked it. It is certainly influenced/derived from [the game] duck duck goose, but other than that there is no relation, e.g., a metaphor."_

Looks like no research was done regarding the name. Naming services very well (or very unique) can really help your company stand out. I like DDG but perhaps a study with regards to the name and the brand might be in order.

<comment><AUTHOR> You still called it DDG. Even DDG kinda adds authenticity and some authority.

<comment><USER13> It could be D^2G or D*2G or D2G

<comment><USER14> Seems unnecessary if it can simply be DDG, a true acronym for the same or less characters than your suggestion.

<comment><USER12> Yes, I find it's too long. I type all day and take shortcuts wherever I can. We all do; TL;DR, HN, if DDG it taken let them claim DDGO!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yahoo, and Google are also silly names. While we are at it, there is a company calling itself 'Apple'... and no, it is not a fruit company! They'd all do much better changing names to something more boring.

</comment><comment><USER16> I was actually thinking about this just the other day. I think that they have a pretty interesting product, but I just can't take them seriously. Hell, even Quack would be a better name...

<comment><USER17> Quack.io is available (duckduck.io is too)

<comment><USER18> .io is not a serious TLD - it is for tech products, not the general public

You have to have a .com if you want to compete with Google.

<comment><USER19>
        it is for tech products, not the general public

It is for the British Indian Ocean Territory. Any other use is a domain hack. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io>

<comment><USER18> You are, of course, correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One very underrated quality of names is how easy they are to say.

<comment><USER21> What some would call the 'radio test'.

1\. Must be a dot com.

2\. Must clearly state & define the product or service being sold.

3\. Must be easy to pronounce & therefore pass the radio test.

4\. Must not be longer than necessary, the shorter the better.

5\. Must be about a product or service that is in demand & being searched for.

6\. Must be easy to remember, in fact it must be a no brainer to remember.

7\. Must be a domain a business could be built on.

source: [http://www.ricksblog.com/my_weblog/2012/11/ringscom- roofscom...](http://www.ricksblog.com/my_weblog/2012/11/ringscom-roofscom- sloganscom-among-dozens-of-others.html)

<comment><USER22> That excludes all available .com domains.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's funny, Google stuck and when I first heard it in college I thought it sounded silly. However, I agree. Google is easier to type on the keyboard while duckduckgo is not quite seamless. Maybe change it? Or find some sort of abbreviation?

<comment><USER24> does it really matter? nearly every browser allows you to add custom search engines, and change the default one. if you set duckduckgo as the default search engine, you don't ever have to type in duckduckgo - you can just use your address field.

<comment><USER23> Why don't you name your startup "asdjflasjflaksdjfa" and see if it survives. Bet you it doesn't.

<comment><USER25> That's a false comparison. It's not just that asdjflas... takes a long time to type, but it's also really hard to remember.

DuckDuckGo is probably easier to remember than most names. It just happens to take a little longer to type than Google or Apple. The Awesome Bar and Omni Bar make it less of an issue, though.

<comment><USER26> Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is pretty easy to remember.

<comment><USER25> Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is only easy to remember because you already have a _reason_ to remember it (ie a strong brand, Disney, has already pushed it into your memory).

If it didn't have a movie behind it, you'd say, "Super-what?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't use it because it's Bing under the hood.

Otherwise I would, name and all.

<comment><USER28> I thought the guy wrote his own crawler?

<comment><USER29> It's both:

[http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...](http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-sources)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> At least its not called searchfy or searchly. Sure, its freakishly long, but I love that damn duck. Same with Blekko. Ugly name, highly useful. Will they ever replace Google? I don't know. Hopefully Nuuton will... :)

</comment><comment><USER21> I agree they should re-brand. Duck.com would have been good. The day I saw duck.com redirected to Google I thought DuckDuckGo missed a great opportunity. That's where you see how savvy Google are.

<comment><USER31> They claim they tried to and were unable to. On2 had the domain and google acquired it when they bought the company.

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/22/net-us-google- duck...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/22/net-us-google-duckduckgo- idUSBRE8AL00I20121122)

<comment><USER21> Yes, but how much did they offer for Duck.com? Duck.com being now with Google, they should just rebrand to something else. Forget the duck. Go with something else. PunchBowl.com or whatever brandable name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My non-tech savvy friends think it is some sort of a joke.

<comment><USER32> When someone comes to you with a problem, it's way funnier to tell them to "duckduckgo-it" and then look at their startled face. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The biggest help for me to switch would be for DDG to produce a fork of Chrome that plugged DDG into the Chrome Omnibox as much as possible.

I use the Omnibox for almost 100% of my interaction with the browser, mostly typing in URLs to visit and accessing search history, all integrated with searching as I type.

If I could use the Omnibox like that with search as I type on DDG instead, that'd be excellent.

<comment><USER34> You don't even need to use a fork, regular 'ol Chrome'll do the job for you.

Go into the settings page, find the `Search` section, and hit manage search engines. Than choose DDG (provided DDG has been used by you before).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> My biggest problem with DDG is that it is so English-centric. I know they have those "regions", but the results from them are much worse than from US region and a need to switch them via settings page every time I change the search language is an unacceptable hassle.

<comment><USER36> You can type "r:xx" in your query to set the region, in any case. (e.g. <https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bonjour+r%3Afr> )

<comment><USER35> I do, like, 40% of searches in my language, so it is still a lot of work. Anyway, language recognition is actually pretty easy nowadays, especially with the amount of data DDG has from crawling -- if they care about foreigners of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Not just the name, they need to improve the search too. Example, searching for xxx gives london2012.com as the first result. I cannot understand why.

<http://duckduckgo.com/?q=xxx>

<comment><USER38> It is Roman Numerals for 30 as the 2012 Olympics was the 30th Olympiad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Google chose a name which can be used like a verb, which I think was a very clever move.

<comment><USER40> Just duck it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I dont want my boss see me using duckduckgo. He would ask me what the fuck i'm doing.

<comment><USER42> Then get a better boss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Silly names stand out and grab attention. In the crowded marketplace they operate in that's just what they need rather than a cool name like Cuil, or an unforgettable generic name like ... oh shit, I can't think of one.

<comment><USER44> NextSearch

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's a great name. Unforgettable. Imaginative. Search provides excellent results.

</comment><comment><USER46> Keep in mind, it's possible that Gabriel Weinberg is making enough money off of DuckDuckGo already and isn't looking to swing for the fences with this particular project.

</comment><comment><USER47> DuckDuckGo -> ddgo ->gdgo ->golgo ->goglo ->googl -> googl(e)

Isn't it more than a name?

<comment><USER48> Golgo 13?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'm surprised to see so much complaining about the length of the name. Do you guys not have auto-complete?

</comment><comment><USER50> duck.com redirects to google.com

<comment><USER51> So apparently DDG tried to buy duck.com but got outbid -- Google ended up buying the company that owned the domain. Apparently just to get it away from Gabe...

That's one of the reasons Google's getting investigated for anti-trust stuff.

[http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-google- duck...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-google- duckduckgobre8al00i-20121121,0,6650221.story)

<comment><USER52> Oh for heaven's sake. Duck corporation became On2 following a merger in 1999, and had ass-kicking video codec technology. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On2_Technologies>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Yes. It's ugly, faux-cutesy and it doesn't tell me anything about the service.

</comment><comment><USER54> agree. too long to type.

<comment><USER55> I'm actually a fan of the name, it's unique. Might sound like a joke until you know that it's not. And it only takes too long to type the first time, auto complete takes care of it for the rest of your life. Here's how it looks for me: <ctrl-t>, d, u, <enter>. Takes no longer than a second

<comment><USER56> Well, it could be much easier, if its your default search engine. All I do is, <ctrl-t>, <my query>, <enter>. They have pretty cool search syntax too.

Hashbangs are definitely awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> You think they ducked up when they chose it?</comment>


Hammock-driven Development - <AUTHOR> http://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586 <comment><USER2> Previous discussion <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962051>

</comment><comment><USER3> Strange to see people being so hard on the presentation. I can't tell if I have low standards or I'm blinded by really liking Rich Hickey and his work, but I thought it was fine, and I love the concept.

<comment><USER4> It's possible they missed the wisdom in it -- this is one of the great talks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The cheat sheet: <http://data-sorcery.org/2010/12/29/hammock-driven-dev/>

</comment><comment><USER6> (video)

Was expecting a (written) post from the blip.tv folks on how to do hammock- driven development. Oh well.

</comment><comment><USER7> Funny, I just ran into Hammock-driven development for the first time on Friday. I like the principle even if this wasn't presented the best.

</comment><comment><USER8> Don't mean to be rude, but frankly his presentational skills were so poor I couldn't uhhhhhhhhh maintain focus.

<comment><USER9> If you don't mean to be rude, just say that his presentation skills were poor and you couldn't maintain focus. If you do mean to be rude, mock him as you did.</comment></comment>


Making Fast-Paced Multiplayer Networked Games Is Hard - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MarkMennell/20140929/226628/Making_FastPaced_Multiplayer_Networked_Games_is_Hard.php <comment><USER2> The hardest part is that most game engines are not designed to be networked in this way. Find an open source physics engine that natively supports teleportation, easing and prediction, they're not there. UE4 is the first engine I've used that seems to have a very nice multiplayer API, and it's only been out for indie developers for a couple of months.

So the hard part is not devising the networked scheme, it's building a whole game engine (or thoroughly modding one) afterwards, at least in my experience.

I was working on a multiplayer racing game project (like GTA2), and my approach was to run 2 physics engines in parallel. One physics engine would always be authoritive, and be in sync with the server, but because of the lag would always be a frame or two (or more) behind. The other would be working on predicting what is going to happen. Every frame snapping back to the authority, and then applying the (predicted and user) inputs over that.

The actual position the user would see would be an averaged position between the current predicted position, and its previous predicted position (to prevent too much jitter/snapback).

If you've got a better scheme to do networked physics I'm all ears :)

<comment><USER3> _> UE4 is the first engine I've used that seems to have a very nice multiplayer API_

I'm working on a triple a ue4 title and i don't like ue4s replication system at all. It's a step towards making the networking concerns invisible, and that always seems like a mistake to me. If the protocol for keeping clients in sync were more explicit, it would be easier to tightly control what and when things get sent over the network.

<comment><USER4> Are you able to contrast it with Tribes' / Garage Games' model? What about RakNet? I'd love to hear more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another series of articles I wrote ~4 years ago about the same topic, but perhaps more detailed and with a live demo: [http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/fpm1.html](http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/fpm1.html)

The title of this article sounds vaguely familiar ;)

<comment><USER6> Your articles were SUPER helpful when I added multiplayer to my game, you may be the reason I succeeded in it, alongside Valve documentation. Thank you so much for writing them!

<comment><USER5> Happy to hear my articles helped! But the reason you succeeded is you, not me :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> See also:

 _Distributed Virtual Reality – An Overview_ , Bernie Roehl, 1995: [https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~broehl/distrib.html](https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~broehl/distrib.html)

 _Characteristics of UDP Packet Loss: Effect of TCP Traffic_ , Hidenari Sawashima, Yoshiaki Hori, Hideki Sunahara, Yuji Oie, 1997: [http://www.isoc.org/inet97/proceedings/F3/F3_1.HTM](http://www.isoc.org/inet97/proceedings/F3/F3_1.HTM)

 _I Shot You First: Networking the Gameplay of HALO: REACH_ David Aldridge, 2011: [http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014345/I-Shot-You-First- Networ...](http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014345/I-Shot-You-First-Networking)

<comment><USER8> This last link is a gem. They refer to the TRIBES Networking Model in the talk, explained here also: [http://gamedevs.org/uploads/tribes-networking- model.pdf](http://gamedevs.org/uploads/tribes-networking-model.pdf)

There is a beautiful implementation of this in the old OpenTNL that seems to be still alive in the newer Torque engine: [https://github.com/GarageGames/Torque2D/tree/master/engine/s...](https://github.com/GarageGames/Torque2D/tree/master/engine/source/network)

The original article does not discuss the aspect of scaling fast-paced games to handle large numbers of replicated objects and players under constrained network conditions but I found the approach proposed in the original TRIBES model to be the most (only?) credible so far. I don't see support for this in any of the popular, modern network libraries (RakNet, enet, lidgren, ...). They all seem to have taken the 'multiple reliable channels' direction but that just doesn't seem to scale to many connected players the way the TRIBES model does.

I would love to hear from anyone who has had experience with that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In specific contexts like a 1v1 fighting game, you can get clever. GGPO*. Every move in the game has a specified "startup" time which is generally a) too fast to react to & b) consistent.

When you jump & throw a punch you send the frame along with your attack. My client speeds up your character's game state to match what your client experiences.

[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/177508/The_lagfighting_te...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/177508/The_lagfighting_techniques_behind_GGPOs_netcode.php)

</comment><comment><USER10> Another reason [TagPro]([http://tagpro.koalabeast.com](http://tagpro.koalabeast.com)) is an excellent game. It's implementation of this stuff is great - with a reasonable connection my ping is usually under 10ms, and the game is often won and lost with the smallest of margins making this kind of thing very important.

Not to mention the excellent gameplay and mechanics - it's very simple to understand and learn, but very very difficult to play well!

<comment><USER11> Not saying this is the case, but 10 ms is a very low ping that could hide a lot of issues with the implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Fascinating, I've been interested in what kinds of serverside software real time online games(WoW, Call of Duty, etc) run for a while now, but haven't been able to find much info on it.

Seems that they would need to be optimized for many very high stress concurrent connections with as little latency as possible, so I'd guess that they run C/C++ and/or Java? Do they use something like Websockets, or do UDP/TCP or some other persistent two way connection method? There don't seem to be any publicly available libraries focused on this kind of thing, so I assume that they develop their networking stuff mostly in-house.

Anyone that knows about this stuff willing to share?

<comment><USER13> > There don't seem to be any publicly available libraries focused on this kind > of thing, so I assume that they develop their networking stuff mostly in- > house.

Have a look at RakNet ([http://www.jenkinssoftware.com/](http://www.jenkinssoftware.com/)) or enet ([http://enet.bespin.org/](http://enet.bespin.org/)).

<comment><USER12> Interesting. Enet seems pretty barebones, but I guess that would be beneficial for games where there can be a lot of variance in gameplay, what with the parent post's explanation of the level of precision required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just a few months ago, I did an overhaul of the network code for DXX-Retro[1] -- a source port of Descent. Descent worked much better over the (laggy, lossy, bursty) net than DOOM, and -- if you're looking to mimic old school games -- is really worth studying.

Some quick technical commentary:

The bandwidth calculation in the article is predicated on sending updates at 60 hz -- or what we'd in the Descent community call 60 PPS. Probably because the screen is refreshing at that rate? It's unnecessary. You want a high framerate for control of your own game, but you don't need it to see enemies smoothly. Remember, movies only run at 24 FPS. ;)

The highest I allow in Descent is 30 PPS, and really . . . it's seen as a luxury. 20 is generally fine. Sometimes I play games at 10, and there you can definitely tell -- even with the smoothing (it sends velocity and acceleration, too, and interpolates) -- but it's perfectly playable.

Which is something worth remembering. With old school games, "crappy but perfectly playable" is actually all they were able to achieve.

No, the physics engines aren't perfectly locked, and how tolerable this is will depend on your game. In a simple FPS, this really isn't a big deal. You just lag lead (compensate in aim, both for the motion of your enemy, and the fact that the data is old). :)

Some of how he's proposing to send the data is wasteful. He initially proposes sending "is weapon equipped" and "is firing" as 1 byte a piece -- and later concludes he can get those in 1 bit a piece. True. That's a savings by a factor of 8 right there. But I can do you one better -- don't send it every update. How often do those states really change?

In Descent, we have two classes of data: position and orientation data that's sent at a steady rate (10-30 PPS), and event data that's sent . . . whenever it happens. Equipping weapons is definitely the second type; it happens extremely rarely -- like, seconds pass between weapon switches. :)

One thing that may surprise you. We don't send "is firing" as a flag with every packet -- we send one packet per shot taken! Two reasons for this: one, it's actually lower bandwidth. Shots fire rarely -- our fastest gun fires 20 bullets per second, but the next fastest fires six. Then five, then four, then . . . one shot every two seconds. And you're not _always_ firing, either. Sending one packet per shot saves bandwidth. But it also increases accuracy! We attach those shot packets to a position and orientation update, so -- even if the receiver has incorrectly interpolated your position -- the shot goes exactly where you intended it to. This is very important. :)

As a player (and a programmer -- but mostly a player), I'm concerned about the article's conclusions about the value of prediction, and the recommendation to avoid position popping by applying smoothing -- to quote the article, "it ruins the virtual reality of the game".

Ok, yes, it does. But the thing is, you have a choice here. You can present your players with something pretty and smooth that is fundamentally a _lie_ , or with something jittery that is the best knowledge you have about _where the enemy is_. This is a fundamental tradeoff: versimiltude or accuracy. You can't have both.

My players overwhelmingly prefer accuracy. To them, the avatars on the screen are targeting aids, and they understand that the data is old and a bit lossy and bursty sometimes, and they want the best data possible so they can take the best shot possible. :)

I suppose your mileage may vary by audience. Mine's been playing this game 20 years and "crappy but playable" is both normal and good to them. :)

But -- I can't imagine this would be different in another FPS -- taking a shot that you _know_ is good on your screen, and have it not hit the other guy . . . that's rage-inducing right there!

Yeah, networked games are hard. For sure. And there are fundamental hard tradeoffs involved in engineering them. For sure. But it's an interesting problem, and also worth it. :)

[1] [https://github.com/CDarrow/DXX-Retro](https://github.com/CDarrow/DXX- Retro)

<comment><USER15> I wrote the multiplayer code for Descent 2 and Descent 3 (as well as the graphics engine for D3). Although I can't remember all the details because D2 was back in 1995(!), D2 had a significantly overhauled network layer from D1. Some examples: Short packets, where position and orientation data was quantized down into single bytes instead of floats, lower packets per second (you could go down to 5 PPS if I recall correctly). We were also the first game where if the 'master' dropped out the game another player would become the master in a hand-off scheme that was a bit complex. The master controlled things like notifying other players of new players, end of level stuff, etc. We had to sweat every byte because we were trying to have 8 players with low lag over a typical 28.8 baud modem.

D3 changed the overall feel of the Descent series, mostly because we introduced a terrain engine and that had a cascading effect on the rest of the game. The speed of the ship, for example, had to be significantly increased because if we used the ship speed from D1/D2 then going out into the terrain felt like you were stuck in molasses.

Working on those games was incredibly fun. Ah, to be 25 again.

<comment><USER16> > _" We had to sweat every byte ... 28.8 baud modem."_

Yeah, that stuff _really_ mattered in that era. Nowadays we've eliminated a lot of the compression and upped the packet rate -- a modern "bad" connection can handle 8 players at 10 pps without compression, and the accuracy is necessary with pilots who dodge as well as some of the modern masters.

> _" if the 'master' dropped out the game another player would become the > master"_

We'd love to reimplement that. It was such a great feature! It was removed when one of the previous coders overhauled the networking code.

> _" D3 changed the overall feel of the Descent series"_

Yeah. It was a fun game in its own right, but it really shifts the emphasis from dodging to aiming. It didn't play as well in a 1v1 setting, but had some really compelling team modes. I played CTF every night from about 2004 to when my son was born in 2009.

EDIT: P.S. there's a Descent LAN coming up this month. If you still keep up with Gwar, he has all the info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This problem was first described in Farmer and Morningstar's "The Lessons of Lucasfilms' Habitat" (1990), which was a MMORPG running on Commodore 64 machines over 300 baud dial-up modems. They referred to this problem as "surreal time".

Back then, they had latencies of 100ms to 5000ms. The original article here says they can get latencies of 200ms from 99% of XBox connections. Not much progress in latency in 25 years. I can understand the LAN party nostalgia.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've been using Bolt [1] for Unity3D for a fast-paced game and surprised me how far I got with almost no knowledge of the library. It's UDP all the way and super explicit about everything.

[1]: www.boltengine.com

</comment><comment><USER19> As apparently, is being on the right side of the GamerGate fiasco. (They're down at the moment.)

</comment><comment><USER20> I always found this article about how the Source Engine handles networking fascinating: [https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_...](https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_Networking)

Really shows how hard just a few of the challenges of making a multiplayer game are.

<comment> squeaky-clean I also love the Source Engine networking. Another one I like is The Torque Game Engine. It has a very similar networking model, I think it may even be a little better (it's the engine that powered the original Tribes game).

I remember buying a license to the original TGE years ago and digging through the networking code, it was great. They've open-sourced the latest version of Torque under the MIT license, and I believe the networking code is nearly identical to the original code used for Tribes.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, there was a really interesting paper on the Tribes networking model in the '97 or '00 GDC conference proceedings.</comment></comment></comment>


Japan Tests Silicon for Exascale Computing in 2021 - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/japan-tests-silicon-for-exascale-computing-in-2021 <comment><USER2> For now, the future belongs to the integration of many smaller dies.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3kGSbWFig4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3kGSbWFig4)

</comment><comment><USER3> What are they using it for? Or other ~100 petaflops supercomputers?

<comment><USER4> Hi, I work at a supercomputer company.

A short list of things I know our customers use them for:

        - secret spy/tla stuff (no i have no idea what they're used for either)
        - simulating nuclear blasts to know if the bombs we have will work or have issues
        - simulating decay of those bombs (safety first!)
        - simulating weather
        - geological work to find say oil
        - biology simulation for protein folding and understanding things like cancer

Thats all I can think of off the top of my head, but generally, they get used for whenever you have a lot of computation that generates a ton of data and then works on that data.

<comment><USER5> Lots of good material science also performed.

And don't forget fundamental science, such as cosmology.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, that list is all I could brain up on the spot is all. >.<

<comment><USER6> \- simulating brains</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The single biggest reason startups succeed - <AUTHOR> https://fpgasite.wordpress.com/2016/07/26/the-single-biggest-reason-why-startups-succeed/ <comment><USER2> Central slide in the 6 minute video

"Top 5 factors in success across more than 200 companies"

       * Timing: 42%
       * Team/Execution: 32%
       * Idea "Truth" Outlier: 28%
       * Business Model: 24%
       * Funding: 14%</comment>


Ask HN: Splitting a company between 2 co-founders. - <AUTHOR>

While the company has became somewhat feasible, the relationship isn't working out. Currently, we are making about 3k/month and the profit is growing by $500/month. The co-founder wants to walk out and start a competition. He wants to do it by taking the code with him and white labeling it.
I'm looking for any advice or suggestion on how much I should be paying him.
Thanks everyone! <comment><USER2> The short answer is that because you didn't resolve this in advance, the split is whatever you two agree is reasonable.

The longer answer is that this is why it's good to have equity splits, vesting, and IP assignments in writing, typically done at the time of incorporation. Founders who stay deserve more control and a greater chance at an liquidity event. Right now, it's in your best interests to come up with a mutually agreeable solution because you probably have overlapping IP claims to the codebase and either of you could sink the company (and competitors using the same codebase) by asserting an IP claim. In that case neither of you get anything. This is why the best practice is to assign IP to the corporation.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most importantly get in writing who owns the IP as that matters most down the road.</comment>


How I Almost Failed a Facebook Turing Test - <AUTHOR> http://georgesaines.com/2011/02/15/how-i-almost-failed-a-facebook-turing-test/

<comment><USER2> I understand the reasons why people accept friend requests from people they might not know but personally, I will never friend someone I don't know. I might only have 30 friends but I actually know each one of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a far more admirable method of Facebooking. I think I gave up being strict about accepting friend request shortly after registering and just tried to avoid social confrontation over declined friend requests. And this is apparently what it leads to. :)

<comment><USER3> Facebook has lists and fine-grained privacy controls, use them. I've got a list for 'friends' and 'acquaintances'. The acquaintances list only gets to see the wall posts and photos that I approve as acquaintance-friendly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Facebook is just a social networking tool. If you decide to treat it careless and accept requests for people you don't know, expect its usefulness to dramatically decline. Use it what it's for... socialising with friends and perhaps you'll find you don't hate it so much.

As someone who has moved around a lot, I find facebook absolutely invaluable to keep in contact with old friends. I'm considerably closer to my old friends because of facebook, whereas usually I would have spoke to them a few times but eventually faded in contact with them.

</comment><comment><USER5> A part of me feels like logging into Facebook to see what my friends are up to (ignoring the ones I'm not true friends with), feels more like a social obligation to not be a reclusive jerk than it is to keep up.

I talk to my friends in person, and do things with them on the weekend. I really feel like Facebook is more for teenagers and college students who need a constant stream of distraction. I can't count how many times I've been angered at parents who tolerate their kids playing DS or wearing headphones at the table when out to dinner. THAT is the Facebook generation.

<comment><AUTHOR> My girlfriend has been trying out some new year's resolutions the past month and has actually "scheduled" facebook time so that she can better connect with her friends who use it all the time. She also writes letters to friends, calls friends on the phone, reads about linguistics (a passion of hers) and volunteers at the animal shelter once a week. After a month of strict adherence to the routine, she still finds her weekly 15 minutes of Facebook the most difficult obligation to uphold!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I quit Facebook back in May when their Turing test wasn't all that well thought out. My friends often posted pictures of cartoons and other drawings and tagged them with names. Facebook asked me to identify those. Something like this (<http://www.michellehenry.fr/Emotions3.jpg>) for instance. Pissed me off so much I deleted my account after taking 4 tries to unlock it.

</comment><comment><USER7> One of my less technically inclined friends received a similar treatment one day. Unfortunately for him, all the pictures that showed up were New Year, Christmas, Diwali (a Hindu Festival) greeting cards with his friends tagged. It's been two months and he still hasn't been able to sign in.

<comment><USER8> Facebook should really use face recognition to make sure that there is actually a face on the photo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think that Facebook is doing some interesting things on the security front, but it doesn't seem to be working very well. Every week another friend of mine gets his or her account hacked and I often get free iPad spam or whatever. As far as I can see, Facebook hasn't made any progress on this issue.

Even worse, they don't seem to provide good resources that describe how to fix a hack after it happens. Also, I've heard that there's no simple way to mass delete the spam that spews from your account. You can't even find it unless you look at every one of your friends' walls to see if you spammed them.

Shouldn't these hacks be pretty easy to stop?

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I was a little nonplussed when I tried to do something about an acquaintance falling victim to the iPad worm that just struck recently. I didn't really know how to get ahold of her, and the only things Facebook offered were 'report' and 'mark as spam.' So I marked it as spam, assuming that Facebook would sort it out.

But it would be nice if Facebook offered an explicit "I think this account has been compromised." button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are there alternate ways of passing this test for people with disabilities? For example, I have some form of face blindness and wouldn't be able to pass this test, unless I could remember the pictured event itself.

<comment><USER12> Interesting you mention that - a friend of mine has that too, and I never knew it. Only a couple of years ago there was an article about it and I recognized his symptoms (and he himself, too). Apparently it is actually very common, is it something like 10% of people being affected?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It seems that Facebook aren't being very smart about which images they select. It shouldn't be too hard for them to choose only pictures which contain something recognisable as a face...

</comment><comment><USER14> Maybe this would be more appropriate if the user was forced to set his own examples, though it'd be difficult to enforce a high level of 'challenge' to this test, if such a thing can be measured. The other problem with is that if you friends set their profiles to public, they help defeat your security.

</comment><comment><USER15> That post is hilarious! And so very true....

First time I had to do that was overseas. I failed twice.... I then realized all my "friends" take pictures only at night and in groups of 10 or more!

</comment><comment><USER3> Couldn't I just run the images through a service like tineye and get the peoples names that way? Seems like a weak test.

</comment><comment><USER16> The Facebook "turing test" is also a scary way of bayesian improving facial recognition software so that they can track you and your activities better.

(here come the downvotes)

</comment><comment><USER17> Maybe I haven't kept up, but if an account holder has their friends list publicly visible, can't you just open up another browser and refresh their profile until the relevant friend appears in the friends list?

Limiting factors:

A large number of friends would make this take a while.

Friends using non-self pictures as their profile pictures would prevent identification, unless the prompt contained their profile picture rather than a picture they are tagged in (or does the verification process only use profile pictures?).

Some third point I'm not thinking of.

Anyway, identifying pictures, when the target's friends list is publicly visible, seems kind of weak, on the surface.

EDIT: Probably to my eventual demise, but I've become exhausted and stopped keeping up with all the changing FB details. So, maybe I'm clueless on this point.</comment>


Man sues AT&T after fraudulent SIM swap led to $1.8M cryptocurrency theft - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/att-employees-helped-sim-swap-hackers-rob-man-of-1-8-million-lawsuit-says/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21340754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21340754)

230+ points</comment>


After the Shutdown: Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station - <AUTHOR> https://njmonthly.com/articles/politics-public-affairs/after-the-shutdown-oyster-creek-nuclear-generating-station-forked-river/ <comment><USER2> The decay heat from dry casks must be transferred to the atmosphere.</comment>


Ask HN: would you use a shared memcached hosted on popular VPS sites? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HNers.
I wondered what are is your opinion on something that might be useful for VPS users. Take Linode as an example: the traffic between linode VPS is free inside the same datacenter.
Regarding memcache, when you need another memcached node, you would need to pay another VPS, only for the RAM. On Linode the ram cost is exactly 25.6 MB/$ no matter the plan you choose.
Imagine a service that would let you rent a shared memcached server for, say, 5 dollar to access a (max) 400MB memcached. Each memcached server would be limited to, say, 10 users. You would then have access to potentialy tens of MB from a fast memcached near your existing VPS at Linode.
This memcached would be shared: you would need to have unique keys, prefixed, for example, by a unique string. You could not store sensitive data on it, as anyone could read/destroy your cache, but depending on your application, that could not be a problem for you. I hear you, you are thinking : but that's not useable!  What if everyong is deleting my cache the whole time ? Well, I answer you : there must be a way to avoid that ! SASL is one answer. That's not the question right now as I'm just thinking about the interest of people in such a thing.
Would you use such a service ? How much are you willing to pay to have access to such a memcached shared instance?
Thanks for taking the time to reply ! Contact me on #startups (nick henri) if you want to chat :)
ps: the goals would be to have many memcached servers in the different linode datacenters, as well as EC2, slicehost, etc.. <comment><USER2> Sorry, makes no sense to me.

If your app _needs_ a memcached instance then those $20 bucks are likely a rounding error on the hosting bill either way.

And If you just want one for testing then a tiny <50M memcached on the local instance will carry you a long way.

Even ignoring the glaring security and technical concerns, I just don't see a use-case for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> on heroku they offer highly priced memcache.They offer 5mb for free,thats enough for me to think there is a usecase (at the time of my thoughts..)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd have grave concerns about the security/integrity of data I stored in such a thing. People tend to store low-value data in memcache without realizing that corrupting it allows attackers to hijack user sessions.

What is the value of sharing a memcached instance? If all you're selling is memory, why not just run multiple memcacheds?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the thing is that today if you want a memcache on Linode, you need to rent another node. A linode 512MB is 20$/month.

But what If i only need 100MB of memcached, and I don't want to pay 20$/month for that ?

Sure, one could sell memcached memory, with many instances per linode node. But my question is more about getting super-lower memcached for not critical data (if people put sessions in it, they misuse the service, they take their risks..). By sharing the bucket with people, can you afford to pay 5$/month for a part of a 400MB bucket ?

<comment><USER4> Can you not run multiple memcached instances on the same node? Wouldn't this lower the cost just as much?

<comment><AUTHOR> you can, but then it's like partitionned. I'm not sure people would pay for 50 or 100MB memcached near their VPS. That's another question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's an interesting idea to consider. Assuming that it is reliable and secure I would be interested. If Lonode offered it, for example - because I trust them enough.

Instead of having to worry about adding a new memcache host I'd also love if you could handle it on your end. If all of a sudden I need a crapton of memory my mcahe would "expand". I'd get charged for that crapton.

Just some ideas brainstorming.

<comment><USER5> Another idea would be to have really good reports so I can see cache misses, num of reads, num of writes etc. Having that in a nice we GUI would be great.

Basically, make it easy for me to optimize my cache store:).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd try it out, yes. Preferably simply priced, low enough for me not to have to consider running it myself (which is easy enough as well). I think Amazon let's you price something like this through them and the bill is just part of your aws bill? That would work for me.

</comment><comment><USER7> You can limit each memcached instance to only accept connections from a single IP address or a range of IPs. That would clear up a lot of the security concerns. Maybe instead of having everyone share the 400mb, you could rent 50/100mb chunks.

</comment><comment><USER8> IMHO technically memcached is best when used locally on LAN, not somewhere on the 'net where latency is high and security is less strict - and memcached has neither encryption nor secure authentication support.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well thats why i am saying that.About having these memcache running in the internal linode network

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> People with scalability problems that need to use memcached don't usually worry about RAM costs, or for that matter host on a VPS.</comment>


Digital Babysitter App - <AUTHOR> Jezter is the world's first digital babysitter coming to iOS. its a digital platform to which parents and children can both log into, that includes a catalog of pre-curated content aggregated from the web. Unlike Netflix and other entertainment platforms Jezter is not limited to television shows and movies. Our catalog features games, web comics, educational lessons, children's news and much more. <comment><AUTHOR> WWW.JEZTERAPP.COM

<comment><USER2> A page saying the app will launch in 72 days?

> The World's First Digital Babysitter Has Arrived.

No, it hasn't.

"If your work isn't ready for people to try out yet, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then." "Blog posts, sign-up pages, and fundraisers can't be tried out" [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there,

Thanks for your response. There have been countless articles on HN about Beta products. A recent example was Robinhood: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6906146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6906146)

You are not in control of HN. Regards.</comment></comment></comment>


Analysis of Soviet smoke detector plutonium - <AUTHOR> https://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/analysis-of-soviet-smoke-detector-plutonium/ <comment><USER3> "... the guest bedroom of the home (the least radioactive room, as it should be)..."

I think that's my new favorite quote from a scientist.

<comment><USER4> What was your previous one?

<comment><USER3> 42

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey kids, if you plan to play with Pu, what the author fails to mention is that it is not only radioactive but actually poisonous (chemically) as well.

On the other hand, another little known fact is that you can weld it, which isn't true of all metals.

<comment><USER6> That's interesting with respect to welding. I just assumed all metals could be welded, do you know the reason why some can't out of interest.

Also is plutonium welded for any application, out of curiosity?

<comment><USER7> One reason certain metals can't be welded is how their crystalline structure is altered by the process, creating a weak or brittle weld/HAZ (heat affected zone: weaker metal surrounding the weld/filler metal altered by heat)

Some metals also have difficult or impossible cooling rates - <USER2> stainless to carbon steel will make a weak weld that is almost guaranteed to crack while cooling because one metal cools and contracts much faster than the other.

The topic is fairly complex, but there is a good textbook/reference for welders put out by the Lincoln Arc Welding Foundation called "Metals and How To Weld Them" that goes deep on structure and metallurgy, in a readable way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> gene-h Doc Brown was probably right: "that in 1985, plutonium is available in every corner drugstore," in the Soviet Union at least.

</comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of David Hahn, a kid who tried to make a breeder reactor in a garden shed. He massed Americium from smoke detectors in an attempt to make Plutonium.

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

<comment><USER9> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn#Death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn#Death)

<comment><USER7> Probably important to highlight that he was 39 when he died...

I always admired his passion, but puzzled at his stubborn lack of safety precautions.

<comment><USER10> If I recall, the cause of death was "unatural" and years of mental health problems hint that he didn't die of radiation related diseases.

<comment><USER7> Thats what I had recalled, until I found his mugshot when he was arrested stealing smoke detectors - his face was covered in lesions attributed to radiation. Pretty sad. If it wasn't the immediate cause, it likely wasn't unrelated either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> noir-york Great science writeup!

The Tsar Bomba described as a "the noble purpose of containing capitalist imperialism" \- great quote :)

</comment><comment><USER11> This has to be the best amateur science write-up I have seen in years, maybe ever.

<comment><USER12> Although the author is a professional nuclear engineer, I do agree with you on the quality of the writing.

<comment><USER11> I didn't look at his bio, but I assumed that he must do something in the field in his day job -- it would be really hard to stockpile this much knowledge from scratch, even with the help of the Internet ...

Nonetheless, he did this with the gamma spectrometer in his spare room ...

<comment><USER13> Note that a high purity Germanium detector requires LN cooling to operate, and judging by the size of the dewar on his detector, would need filling maybe once a week to keep it cool all the time.

That is a bit onerous if you only play with it every now and then and don't have a 20000 L LN tank in your backyard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Modern smoke detectors seem to have done away with ionization in favour of optical technology, and so no longer contain radioactive materials.

Bad news for mad scientists!

<comment><USER6> Are you sure about that, I thought ones with Americium were more sensitive? I'm pretty sure you can still get both.

Edit: Seems I'm not right regarding sensitivity, wiki says:

"Ionization detectors are more sensitive to the flaming stage of fires than optical detectors, while optical detectors are more sensitive to fires in the early smouldering stage"

Wow it also says:

"Where an ionizing smoke detector has been the only detector, fires in the early stages have not always been effectively detected."

That's worrying.

<comment><USER14> Less sensitivity (or rather, being able to have a higher threshold for sounding the alarm) is actually a good feature for general domestic applications.

You don't really want the thing going off every time someone burns a bit of toast or it just becomes an annoyance, and therefore at risk or being removed or disabled.

<comment><USER6> Yeah that's true, I guess personally though I'd rather put up with some false positive alarms from toast etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stanford Biologist and Computer Scientist Discover the 'Anternet' (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.stanford.edu/news/stanford-biologist-computer-scientist-discover-anternet <comment><USER2> Significant discussion from three years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4433142](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4433142)

It might be worth reading that. It's also interesting to see other submissions of the same story:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=anternet&sort=byDate&prefix&pa...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=anternet&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)</comment>


JavaScript: The Great Part - <AUTHOR> http://voodootikigod.com/2009/04/28/javascript-the-great-part/

<comment><USER2> I found this blog way too excited.

<comment><USER3> Font is unreadable to me as well. Not enough kerning perhaps.</comment></comment>


'Facebook is everything to us': How Little Things grew to 50M users in 3 years - <AUTHOR> http://digiday.com/publishers/digiday-podcast-little-things/ <comment><USER2> The website itself looks like the magazines you see at the supermarket when you're in line at the checkout counter. They're very attention catching but in a different way from "What happened next will surprise you" things: "15-Minute Meditation Practice To Guarantee A Great Day", "Your Favorite Bathing Suit Style Reveals Everything About Your Personality", "100-Year-Old Sears House Gets A Modern Makeover".

I can see why they're successful, but have to say I was surprised by the $50 million revenue. Fascinating.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention the subtle social engineering I caught on my visit - a little mail icon on the navbar, made to look like I have (1) new message.

<comment><USER4> That's Digiday (which published the article), not Little Things, just an FYI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Article fails to mention that the founders started Azoogle, which became Epic - one of the biggest companies in the CPA ad space back in the day.

In other words, they know what they're doing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Facebook is the backbone social network. While other platforms will come and go, unless they screw it up, Facebook will, for a long time, be the Alamo of social networks; the fallback, the final rallying point, the basis from which the branches of knowing 'who's who' extend.

As long as they understand this and don't jeopardize the position Facebook should be around in this minimum capacity for a long time to come. In the short term I think they are doing the best they can do to position themselves for newer and longer technologies.

I wish them all the best and hope to see some real, concrete innovation from them in the next few years.

<comment><USER7> I'm curious as to why you think this is the case. For one, users are fickle and attention greatly shifts every time some new social network comes out from complete left field. Facebook got Instagram, but they lost big on Snapchat.

Additionally, Facebook isn't doing so well in emerging markets, which have by far more volume in terms of number of users and purchasing power.

<comment><USER6> The event that was Facebook in it's hot phase; that massive net that captured everyone, EVERYONE, young, young-old, old; that excitement and newness is damn near impossible to replicate in this day and age at FB scale.

It could be done, but at what cost, at what point in time, and from how do people buy in.

Facebook spanned generations, spanned social classes, spanned continents, and mingled everyone in the process. People have deviated from that main network in the subsequent years, but every now and then, those that 'left' for other pastures always come back to facebook to see 'whatsup' see 'how's the old crowd doing' and see 'how is so and so doing'.

No one else can do that, no one else has that power. The social tree always recurses back to facebook. What that means for markets, new prospects etc, i don't know. But behaviorally speaking facebook is far, far from out of the public mind, and as the years grow longer, while it may exist at a lower level in our day-to-day lives than some hip platforms, it persists as strong as ever.

<comment><USER7> Facebook didn't capture "everyone" until many years after it launched. It was limited to college campuses, and popular amongst college students.

Whatsapp replicated this growth and captured an even wider net. Especially outside of the US.

Agree that Facebook is far from irrelevant, but I'd keep an open eye on the hip new platforms. In the attention marketplace, the past is irrelevant. All that matters is the present, and the now. The network that captures the highest level of engagement wins, and amongst certain demographics, Facebook is certainly losing its relevance.

<comment><USER8> Facebook isn't exciting, like telephones aren't exciting. They're both something you use when you need to. It's kind of boring reading about how Facebook has peaked, or it's over, etc. What's to say? Just because the trendy/new/shiny phase is over, doesn't mean it's "losing it's relevance". People still massively use it to arrange events, or talk about them afterwards, share photos, chat etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder how long it will take until young people view FB membership as the epitome of stuffiness and boredom -- one of those things "our parents found cool when they were young and didn't know any better".

<comment><USER10> It's already happening.

Recently, I've asked my high school aged sister and colleged aged brother about how many of their friends and peers use FB nowadays.

Brother -- He and his friends uses it sometimes. But most of their social activities are shared on Instagram or Snapchat and occasionally twitter.

Sister -- Barely at all. FB is seen as uncool and old school by her and her friends. She and most of her friends share their social activities on instagram and snapchat.

Ironically, my mom (in her 50's) uses FB fairly regularly, both for sharing updates and checking up on her friends/acquaintance.

<comment><USER11> My daughter is a high school senior. She says her class is the last one that still uses Facebook at all, and even that is mostly to interact with family not friends. On the other hand, they are all active on Instagram so it isn't like they have gone far.

<comment><USER12> So all 4 people mentioned (your daughter and the 3 in the parent) all use Facebook by way of Instagram.

This is why acquisitions happen and why buying Instagram when FB did may go down as one of the best buys. Missing Snapchat may be one of the biggest misses.

<comment><USER13> My guess is that Snapchat will fade, like MySpace, LiveJournal or AIM.

It's great for teens and early adults, with tight knit social circles and the undivided attention to look at fast-disappearing posts, but that's not much of the population. Lots of people don't even understand how it works, while Facebook and Instagram are pretty intuitive.

My bet is the current audience will age out of Snapchat, gradually seeing it as something for kids, and the next group of kids will use something else entirely.

Of course, I could be wrong--I wouldn't have predicted Snapchat would get as big as it has, so more power to them if they can keep it going.

<comment><USER14> I've stopped naysaying snapchat the third time they made me feel stupid.

The first time was when I first heard of it, "that'll never take off what a dumb fad app."

The second time was when they turned down the $40MM offer from facebook.

The third time was when they turned down the $3B offer from facebook.

They're now valued at $16B. I don't bash snapchat anymore.

Turns out snapchat isn't just for messaging anymore, a lot of people watch the channels on it as if it was any other form of TV, and advertisers absolutely love it.

I'm sure it will be disrupted at some point, but I've stopped trying to "call it."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am almost never see news articles in my Facebook feed. I mostly see ads and pictures of my aunt's breakfast and rants about how Wen shampoo doesn't work as advertised. Am I doing something wrong?

<comment><USER16> Me too. If they have to pay (sponsored content) to get things in front of eyeballs... that can't be profitable.</comment></comment>


The new Muxtape is live - <AUTHOR> http://muxtape.tumblr.com/post/73530628

<comment><USER2> While I appreciate that muxtape is still alive, the new identity of it definitely does not reflect the free spirited discovery tool that it once was.

<comment><USER3> Well... no, because that was violating copyright like mad. On the bright side, that led to Opentape (<http://opentape.fm/>), which is much _more_ open for use.

<comment><USER2> > Well... no, because that was violating copyright like mad.

That's the point. By doing so, it allowed users to discover music in a new way, like a traditional "mixtape." It's no accident that "muxtape" is extremely similar to "mixtape."

I'm familiar with opentape, and while it's a great project, the appeal for me with muxtape was simply the fact that I could go click on some random tape on the front page and hear new music... analogous to finding a random mix tape on the floor of a concert, with a track listing.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but the "point" was illegal. Gawker wrote an article about this that made a pretty good point: "Make something somebody wants" is only a valid tactic if you can legally provide that thing.

I'll miss it. But the new one's gorgeous.

<comment><USER2> Well, the question of legality is just that, a question. The terms of services specifically stated that you must not upload music that you don't have permission to let Muxtape use.

This is what I remember it to be, but archive.org doesn't have muxtape.com yet (from [http://wiredformusic.blogspot.com/2008/03/muxtape-barely- leg...](http://wiredformusic.blogspot.com/2008/03/muxtape-barely-legal.html)):

        Muxtape is a service for creating mixtapes.
        Users may not upload multiple songs from the
        same album or artist, or songs they do not have
        permission to let Muxtape use. Individual users
        may not create multiple muxtapes. Accounts not
        meeting these restrictions are subject to
        termination without notice. Muxtape will never
        reveal your email address to a third party.
        Muxtape is alive.

Wasn't there some ruling that said that websites that host user contributed content aren't liable for copyright infringement, iff they comply with take down requests in a timely manor? I would think that would apply here.

Also, if I remember correctly, by the end of the original muxtape, they were linking out to Amazon for purchases. I wonder how much money was actually paid out to record companies from this?

Another tought: would muxtape have been able to get a license similar to the one Pandora uses for it's service?

<comment><USER3> _Wasn't there some ruling that said that websites that host user contributed content aren't liable for copyright infringement, iff they comply with take down requests in a timely manor? I would think that would apply here._

That exists for sites that purportedly have a purpose other than copyright violation. Muxtape was made specifically to play other people's music. It wasn't billed as a site for musicians. That means most of its content was geared towards illegality.

 _Another tought: would muxtape have been able to get a license similar to the one Pandora uses for it's service?_

Probably not. Pandora's deal exists because it helps people find new music, and because people can't directly play whatever they want. The other big deal, Last.FM's, allows only three plays of a song before that song is locked off. A completely open model like Muxtape's couldn't have worked like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Elegantly designed, but they still don't appear to have any business plan in mind. Are bands/record labels expected to pay to promote their own music?

<comment><USER5> Looks like there might be some planned synergy here between muxtape and Normative, Jakob Lodwick's music label. Reggie Watts--one of the featured artists--is signed to the label, and Lodwick is an (the?) investor in muxtape.

<comment><USER6> Reggie Watts is Jakob Lodwick's roommate.

It's always more incestual than you would even think!

<comment><USER7> Normative and Muxtape also share an office.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention Lodwick payed Justin O, the developer of Muxtape, $95,000 to work on Muxtape, and Lodwick and Francis of Francis and the Lights used to be roommates.

The NY startup scene is fascinating.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's an Example of a Successful Rebranding? - <AUTHOR> There have been many rebranding in the past of big companies that have largely received a negative response from its userbase and the community at large. Examples include Slack's recent logo/color/design overhaul, DropBox and its new radical color combinations, Windows 8 and its Metro design language, etc.
Is this "backlash" over new designs just a user's reflex action to change? Or have they actually been detrimental to the company (due to mass unappeal)?
In continuation, what are examples of "good" or successful redesigns that were positively accepted by, if not all, a majority of the users?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> The art collective Pox Party did a rebrand right around the time of Google's & Airbnb's (both successful in my mind). If the Pox rebrand is successful is up to you... They modeled their video after similar self-aggrandizing announcements. Their "identity program" PDF was modeled after the infamous 1M Pepsi rebrand: [http://getpox.com/](http://getpox.com/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Brand New is a good resource: [https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/](https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great website, thanks!</comment></comment>


South Korea Probe Says North Behind Cyber Attack: Report - <AUTHOR> http://www.securityweek.com/south-korea-probe-says-north-behind-cyber-attack-report <comment><USER2> Is there an article anywhere that clearly explains the actual attack vector?

 _The bash script ultimately used by the malware is a wiper designed to work with any Linux distribution, with specific commands for SunOS, AIX, HP-UX distributions, Symantec said. As such, it wipes out the /kernel, /usr, /etc, and /home directories._

That wouldn't take a particularly sophisticated bash script.

But as far as how the payload was actually delivered to the infected machines, there doesn't seem to be a consensus.

This article portrays it as a RAT/botnet style attack via "a central computer providing antivirus protection," which suggests that they may have gained privileged access to an antivirus company's update server and pushed the code out to clients via the antivirus software itself.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/mar/22/south- korea...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/mar/22/south-korea-cyber- attack)

Meanwhile, this article attributes it to an executable e-mail attachment with a misleading filename, basically a phishing attack:

[http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/31475/south- korea-...](http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/31475/south-korea-cyber- attacks-likely-sparked-by-phishing-emails/)

Some articles described the South Korean government as concluding that the attack came from China, and then later articles say that they backtracked on this and decided it actually came from North Korea. I think this part is heavily politicized, and it's entirely possible that it did come from China but the South Korean government found it more politically expedient to blame it on North Korea instead.

<comment><USER3> My current understanding is that the malware was delivered as part of an update to some commonly used ActiveX controls. The initial infiltration took place 8 months ago, but the malware was designed to go live at a specific time [1]. Over 70 different pieces of malware were used to infiltrate a wide range of targets. The bash script was apparently used on non-Windows targets, of which there were only a few.

EDIT: The single most effective attack vector seems to have been the update server for an ActiveX control called XecureWeb, which is used by several banks and their 20 million customers [4]. Just checked and I have XecureWeb too, in a VM that I only use for online banking. Good thing I have that VM turned off 99% of the time.

According to SK news media, the primary reason the SK government suspects NK of the latest attack is because the attackers used some of the same malware, same proxy servers, and same techniques that were used in previous attacks, which the SK government also attributes to NK [2]. But AFAIK there is no indisputable evidence that links those previous attacks to NK, either. So there's a bit of circular reasoning involved in the accusation.

The initial accusation of a Chinese attack was based on a Chinese IP address (188.8.131.52) that was used by the attackers. This accusation was rescinded when it was found that one of the banks that were hacked have been using the same IP range in its internal network </facepalm> [3]. But even if this wasn't the case, the case for a Chinese attack would be weak because anyone can use a Chinese open proxy.

There was also mention of an North Korean IP address (175.45.178.x) being used for command & control [2], but I don't know how that works because SK ISPs are extremely unlikely to permit any traffic to or from NK IP addresses. Remember, this is a country that censors virtually every NK-operated website.

All in all, little direct evidence that links the attacks to NK has been released. Maybe such evidence exists but is classified. Maybe it doesn't exist in the first place. However, since the series of attacks over the last few years targeted SK's major financial, governmental, and media infrastructure, it is not too unreasonable to suspect that the attackers (or whoever hired them) have an axe to grind with SK as a whole, not with any particular corporation. Given the extremely polarized political landscape, it is also not unreasonable to suspect that someone who has a problem with SK might sympathize with NK.

What doesn't get mentioned amid all the finger-pointing and political rhetoric is that SK's internet infrastructure desperately needs a major overhaul. The so-called "security" companies, who sell ActiveX controls with various alleged benefits, have been in charge of IT policy for over a decade. This has led to an online landscape where it is considered normal for any random website to ask the user to restart IE as administrator and install 5 ActiveX controls just to be able to log in.

This is a completely separate problem from antiviruses. I'm not joking when I tell you that every bank requires you to install an ActiveX control that claims to detect and disable keyloggers. That's 1000x more evil than Norton Antivirus.

[1] [http://news.khan.co.kr/kh_news/khan_art_view.html?artid=2013...](http://news.khan.co.kr/kh_news/khan_art_view.html?artid=201304102221475&code=940202) [Korean]

[2] <http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/economy/it/582269.html> [Korean]

[3] <http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/economy/it/579266.html> [Korean]

[4] [http://news.mt.co.kr/mtview.php?no=2013040922225524474&V...](http://news.mt.co.kr/mtview.php?no=2013040922225524474&VRF) [Korean]

UPDATE: More links.

ADDENDUM: In a previous comment [5], I argued that Ahnlab is an upstanding company that is unlikely to be involved in malicious activities. Turns out one of their products actually was exploited during the latest attack, though it was not their flagship antivirus suite.

[5] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407719>

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the summary. From this, it does appear that they used an antivirus update server as the attack vector.

And about SK's internet infrastructure--believe me, I know. I had an account at Woori Bank when I lived in Korea. For internet banking authentication, they gave me two different PIN numbers (one 4-digit and one 6-digit) and a scratch- off card with a password matrix on it (at each login it would require me to enter digits found in different positions on the card), in addition to username/password and requiring me to install an AhnLab antivirus program, an "anti-keylogger" program, and 2-3 ActiveX encryption programs.

I believe it was actually written in South Korean law until very recently that browser security/encryption MUST be implemented in ActiveX, and HTTPS/SSL was completely unheard of in Korea. I think these other authentication measures were devised to make up for the weaknesses of the ActiveX encryption.

When I asked the bank rep why they had so many different authentication measures, the response was, and I quote, "Because Chinese people do the fake things."

<comment><USER3> The scratch-off card is a poor man's one-time password generator. In fact, it's remarkably effective at preventing scammers from draining people's accounts, as long as you're not stupid enough to take a photo of your card and post it online (yeah, people do that). That little card is what prevents the whole ActiveX fiasco from crumbling down like a house of cards, precisely because it's so low-tech (i.e. requires physical access).

A lot of the other crap is understandable when you take into account the fact that online banking was first introduced to Korea in the mid-1990s. HTTPS was useless at the time because of U.S. export restrictions limiting it to 40 bits. Home-brewed ActiveX controls were used to implement 128-bit encryption. Korea also decided to use public keys and X.509 client certificates to identify people, way ahead of the rest of the world, but of course no browser supported them so someone had to write custom software. After that, inertia and regulatory capture allowed what was supposed to be a stopgap measure to continue for another 15+ years, long after proper HTTPS became available in every browser.

The only benefit I can think of is that Koreans don't have to worry about those stupid password restrictions that a lot of American banks impose on their customers :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is no way in the world that North Korea developed the expertise to affect this kind of attack in-house, even if it is a relatively simple piece of malware.

My guess is that the Chinese have been supporting them in a limited way. China doesn't really have a motivation to encourage North Korea's ridiculous antics and belligerent behavior of late, but it does have a great deal of interest in testing out its own cyber-attack vectors on real-world targets. If they were to directly attack the computers of another nation themselves the world will go into an uproar and their trade will suffer. On the other hand, if North Korea does it we've gotten to the point, collectively, where we don't do much more than roll our eyes and shrug it off. It's a bit like when the Gemans decided to test tank warfare by getting involved in the Spanish Civil War.

<comment><USER5> Unless they, you know, have internet access, some hardware to play around with and the ability to read.

<comment><USER6> It is more likely that an elite group in Pyongyang has internet and computer access, with a subset of that group given more privileges to engineer & deploy malware/etc.

Given that though, I find it rather hard to believe the North Korean government could pull off a cyber-attack like this all by themselves, especially when you take into account the effect of international sanctions and the North's very outdated technology (I remember reading they still use a 1960's crank-phone for communication through the DMZ).

My best bet is that the Chinese government gave them significant assistance in launching this attack.

<comment><USER5> Outdated technology like this? [http://timenewsfeed.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/computers.jp...](http://timenewsfeed.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/computers.jpg)

DPRK has modern computers. DPRK has internet connections. It has smart people who did well in maths class and know how to program. It has very tight control on all of this, but it has it. Hell, if they needed some more off the shelf PCs, they could just wander across the border into China and buy some; the train crossing into Dandong was full of DPRK citizens going into China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was going to make a snide comment about South Koreans using Internet Explorer 6, but apparently usage is way down.

<http://www.ie6countdown.com/>

<comment><USER3> Doesn't really matter, because all the important stuff (like online banking and virtually all government business) still relies on ActiveX controls that were developed in the IE5 days. You can upgrade everyone to IE10 but it won't help because the ActiveX controls are still there.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Good Ruby codebase to read? - <AUTHOR> Inspired from these two previous posts:
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9896369 (Python)
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14462125 (Go)
I want to know what Ruby codebase you recommend to read since I have been building a Ruby Gems. Thank you. <comment><USER2> My suggestions

Rails projects

1\. Gitlab 2\. Code triage 3\. Redmine (Especially plugin architecture)

Gems

1\. Rails (How to arrange big libraries)

2\. Pundit (Get the things done in simple object oriented way)

3\. Spina ( mountable rails engines)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks</comment></comment>


Visual Studio is down. Can't push my commits dammit. - <AUTHOR> http://visualstudio.com/

<comment><USER2> related:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6778042](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6778042) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6778012](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6778012)

</comment><comment><USER3> Who cares? Enough already of site outage notices on HN.

</comment><comment><USER4> the site is up for me.....</comment>


I'm 17 years old and I created a website to help you find necessities in stock - <AUTHOR> http://coronafinds.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm wondering who cares what age are you?

<comment><USER3> I second that. Yeah having it in the title probably helps attract clicks, but it's really just there for an implicit brag about yourself. This strategy is not a super appreciated thing (by myself as a reader at least).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious if it'd be beneficial to randomize the order of items under each category, per client. That way, a traffic spike on your site would less likely result in traffic spikes on the first items on the lists from non-picky buyers.

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks like it works.</comment>


Virtualenv 20.0.0 Released - <AUTHOR> https://virtualenv.pypa.io/changelog.html <comment><USER2> Post's link seems to 404. This may be the correct URL: [https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/stable/changelog.html](https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/stable/changelog.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Link is broken. Looks like it should be: [https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/latest/changelog.html](https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/latest/changelog.html)

instead of:

[https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/latest/changelog/](https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/latest/changelog/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Any benefits of using this project, virtualenv is now built in in Python 3, and it never was missing anything when I was using it.

<comment><USER5> venv is shipped with Python 3, not virtualenv, unless I am mistaken.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I guess it's called different, but has the same functionality and is a drop-in replacement. I'm surprised there's still development on virtualenv after 2.7 is EOL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This explains why chef started yelling at work 4am PST. Upgrading virtualenv via _pip install --upgrade virtualenv_ would fail. This sort of broken upgrade also happened with pip itself recently and required a manual fix, package maintainers refused to revert the release.

</comment><comment><USER7> This isn't the most readable changelog, the main takeaway is at the bottom: The package has been completely rewritten.

<comment><USER8> This announcement of the 20.0.0 beta is useful for understanding why it was rewritten: [https://discuss.python.org/t/virtualenv-20-0-0-beta1-is- avai...](https://discuss.python.org/t/virtualenv-20-0-0-beta1-is- available/3077)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This release is exciting, but taking a step back, it's still really disappointing how minimal and rough around the edges venv is considering how important the library ecosystem has been to Python's continued success. I really wish we had a packaging/environment tool the same quality as Rust's cargo.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've just been using conda environments lately. How much am I missing by not using virtualenv instead?

<comment><USER11> Why did you take up conda in the first place ? venv and pip are part of the python project and conda seems to be yet another package manager in the already crowded and shady space of npm, brew, ports apt yum etc. I've always been puzzled at how they managed to shoehorn themselves into the python ecosystem while offering no distinct value as far as I can see.

<comment><USER10> This is an HPC environment, so besides a nice, working version of TensorFlow, there are large numbers of pre-built scientific/bioinformatics packages. This is a huge win when you're running with a skeleton crew.

Also, note this is for system-wide, not per-user usage. I'm kind of vague on how virtualenv would handle this, plus it feels like it's changed a lot over time. (?)</comment></comment></comment>


DataSift Architecture: Realtime Datamining at 120,000 Tweets Per Second - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/11/29/datasift-architecture-realtime-datamining-at-120000-tweets-p.html <comment><USER2> I find the architecture to be really interesting and useful to learn from. However, they are _way_ too expensive. 1000 tweets is not very much data. I'm building a realtime app now and easily am processing tens of thousands of relevant tweets a day. While a service like Datasift could alleviate a lot of heavy lifting on my part, the cost just doesn't make up for it. It feels like their business model is currently focused on use-cases requiring highly specific targeting, but not intended for use where services need high volumes of certain types of data. Shame, that.

<comment><USER3> Where are you getting your tweet feed? My initial interest in data sift was because they let you get a feed from the firehose. Twitter doesn't seem to let you do this.

All I want is tweets relevant to a particular subject, and in the early days I don't want to be paying hundreds of dollars for it... I've got keywords and phrases I can use to find them, if I just had access to an API that would let me. (Maybe twitter offers this, I couldn't find it in the past.)

<comment><USER2> I'm using the stream, but using track filtering. So far it's working very well for my purposes. You are right in that different use cases might need the firehouse and that's where services like gnip and datasift really come in handy. It's too bad that there's not a middle ground.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We have recently seen a number of startups (including YC founded AFAIK) that look for ways to make twitter data useful. But I don't remember catching any notice of such successes.

While DataSift realtime capabilities look really impressive, I'm afraid there isn't that much of use-cases to pay for the data mined that way. Even DataSift's own list of possible use cases looks bleak.

In any way though DataSift should be fine with applying their expertise to other sources of data, which doesn't bear the same cost as the twitter's firehose.

</comment><comment><USER5> Excellent article.

I worked on a project that I integrated with DataSift.

Lorenzo and every one else I emailed with were very quick to respond and the product performed as expected (besides some hiccups that I can easily understand due to growing pains).

Compared to Gnip, (which we also integrated with) DataSift won hands down on both quality of product and customer relations.

However, I'm still suspect of the usefulness of Twitter analytics/ data mining.

<comment><USER6> There is a lot of value in mining data off social media, but only if you can convert that into simple and easy use cases. We are doing something like that, and we are very happy about the way it is shaping up.</comment></comment>


Om Malik – Has pandemic pushed us into a post-human future? - <AUTHOR> https://om.co/2020/06/14/has-pandemic-pushed-us-into-a-post-human-future/ <comment><USER2> There are two appearances of the word "post-human". First is in the title and the second is in a paragraph that does not define it. I don't know what "post- human" means after reading the article. Seems like a word that could mean anything to justify whatever claim the author is making. This makes me suspicious of this author in general.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it getting common in American usage to drop articles? I've seen that with "blockchain" a lot, but it seems to be a broader change.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think the whole eugenics movement is wrapped up in this pandemic and fits neatly into the transhuman movement</comment>


Bolivia rejects 'offensive' chicken donation from Bill Gates - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/16/11952200/bill-gates-bolivia-chickens-refused <comment><USER2> I think you are better off with chickens even if you don't live in extreme poverty...

[http://articulo.mercadolibre.com.mx/MLM-551038633-gallinas-p...](http://articulo.mercadolibre.com.mx/MLM-551038633-gallinas- ponedoras-todo-el-ano-_JM)</comment>