Tech workers in China's Silicon Valley face burnout before they reach 30 - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/tech/apps-social/article/3002533/no-sleep-no-sex-no-life-tech-workers-chinas-silicon-valley-face <comment><USER2> > "One thing Chinese founders or unicorns haven't figured out is how to become > a sustainable business. If you continue those [long hours] for 10 years, > people will have no personal life any more, they will have no kids, they > will go crazy," Wingender said.

I wonder if this is simply symptomatic of a labor market imbalance. China has a lot of people, and proportionally they have a lot of people who can do software. Employers can demand what they want. This model is only sustainable so long as the stream of labor is constant, which I suspect it is.

<comment><USER3> there are 2 inputs to the classical production function (e.g. the 2 things businesses need to purchase/obtain in order to stay in business) - labor and capital

if labor is continuing to improve its value (through education, training business skills, learning new technology, etc.) then it continues to have bargaining power in wage/contract negotiations

if a company can produce the same or more output with more capital (generally cheaper/scales better) and less and/or cheaper (younger/less experienced) labor, then it generally will

this is why we're seeing so many "ageist" layoffs at the large tech and industrial companies in the west

old employees are very expensive (especially with pension programs) and they're often not necessary to keep the output constant, or can be replaced/outsourced, for the sake of pumping up equity/shareholder value because cost cutting is currently a lot easier in tech than the R&D/acquisitions needed for increased revenue gen

there are a few things that could happen to increase the bargaining power of labor and increase wages/time off work (benefits): 1. the supply of labor drops (a war/natural disaster) 2. the supply of capital drops (luddites/natural disaster) 3. the quality of education increases 4. labor unionizes 5. TFP (total factor productivity) increases

i don't know chinese labor market specifics but my general impression is that it's much more cut throat because there are just so many more people, the tech companies are playing catch-up in some sense to their western counterparts, the jobs are more blue-collar oriented (rather than white-collar services jobs which have more wiggle room), and because of cultural/government/societal factors that prioritize hard work and family/society dynamics over individual liberty and health

<comment><USER4> Isn't "the labor unionizes" just a special case of "the supply drops" since labor unions enforce their power by controlling the supply of labor? (Eg strikes)

<comment><USER3> yea there are other ways to increase labor bargaining power too i just listed the most common off the top of my head

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, from 10 months ago: The Fate of Most Silicon Valley Drones: 'Live Work Work Work Die' [0]

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17201057](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17201057)

</comment><comment><USER6> I honestly wonder whether anyone else has had my philosophical crisis this past few years. I started to think all of my attempts to be part of an elite group that's "changing the world" through technology are actually fucking it up more.

Whether this is fueled by burnout or a feeling of uneasiness with world events I can't be sure. I'm getting scared though because if I don't get my motivation back in a few years being broke is going to suck.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I think anybody with some kind of moral compass in tech has that thought at the back of their mind. When I was 18, the thought of working somewhere like Google was the dream, but now I'm not so sure.

<comment><USER8> Google itself changed a lot. 13 years ago it was amazing to work there. In 2008 there was a feeling of slowing down luxury expenses, but the real change was when Larry came instead of Eric Schmidt as a CEO: he's boring (and Sundar is just his puppet) and forces boredom on the employees.

Eric Schmidt had a great way of saying no to employees while still making them excited about the possibilities ahead of Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This sounds like my life. I come from poverty and now I make decent money and my company doesn't request this. I have really been trying to figure out how to turn it off, or at least down. It's very hard. I get depressed and a bit paranoid if I'm not martyring myself for work.

<comment><USER10> Pick one day a week, doesn't matter which one, finish early and plan an activity you enjoy.

Hell or high water stick to that activity on that day.

You'll naturally start to look forwards to that day.

Then make it two days and so on.

Don't try to make massive changes, make little ones that become habits.

As someone who went from working 70 hours a week (or more technically in hindsight sitting behind a computer for 70 hours and working for _maybe_ 30 of those productively to working 37 hrs a week with about the same level of productivity) it matters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Same thing in the real Silicon Valley. Wasn't there adoring stories about "dedicated" people sleeping under their desks or in parking lot vans. Doubt everyone is banging out kids to move into their $3600/month studio apartments.

</comment><comment><USER12> Doesn't every tech worker face burnout before they reach 30. Especially in silicon valley or the startup scene. Why should it be any different in china.

It's pretty much high risk, high reward. The startup I worked at, we all slept in our offices working 24/7 to reach milestones every few months. The point work hard and get the company sold off within 10 years and retire.

</comment><comment><USER13> [https://996.icu/#/en_US](https://996.icu/#/en_US)

</comment><comment><USER14> And also in America's Silicon Valley.

</comment><comment><USER15> Maybe this is a controversial opinion but the world is too competitive but in all the wrong ways.

<comment><USER16> Human society has been great at and thrived on exploiting people for a very long time now. We'd probably have to go all the way back to hunter and gatherer tribes before we find a point in time where that wasn't a normal fact of life. Capitalism is just the most efficient form of exploitation that we've found. It's not really controversial though.

<comment><USER17> It's unfortunate that we can't come to a world agreement to work 32 hours a week or something reasonable like that. There can still be a healthy competition without all of us working ourselves to death.

<comment><USER18> Easy to say when you're salaried. Not so easy when you work for hourly wages. It's not as though pay would suddenly increase by ~20%. Also, 40 hours / week is already a decrease from what it was ~100 years ago.

<comment><USER19> 100 years ago the average industrial working hours was apparently 45, so not that many - I feel like today 40 is more the exception than the rule.

[https://www.jstor.org/stable/1820827?seq=1#metadata_info_tab...](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1820827?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents)

In fact the hours were starting to change to 40 that year. Funny coincidence.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hours_of_Work_(Industry)_Conve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hours_of_Work_\(Industry\)_Convention,_1919)

Edit: Did some more research and in 1890 we have some truly ridiculous numbers. [http://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html](http://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html)

But there's a good reason we turned from those.

<comment><USER18> > I feel like today 40 is more the exception than the rule.

Is it though? Most people aren't you and I. Most are working hourly jobs and their employers are not paying out overtime.

My only meaningful point is that a shorter work week would likely only benefit those among us who are already better off (in terms of compensation.) I don't see how it helps my friend working at the Chrysler plant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > A young couple want their own family but have no energy for sex after work.

Well, I'd recommend against having kids until that situation changes somehow.

If you're too tired for sex, what are you going to do with _an infant_?

<comment><USER21> Correct me if I'm wrong but culturally I believe it's much more important to have children in China vs USA

<comment><USER22> Sorry, but I don't see how this is relevant to what the other person said. Important or not, if you're too tired for _sex_ then wtf are you going to do with an infant?

<comment><USER23> In China the infant gets shipped to the grandparents while the parents continue working.

<comment><USER24> To add, often it's these parents (potential grandparents to be) who pressure their children to have children to continue the line. It goes beyond what people are used to in the US, ie "when are you guys gonna have kids?" No, it's more, "hey, hurry up, you owe me grandkids now, that's why I helped you with mortgage, now get to work and deliver!"

<comment><USER25> One Chinese I talked to said there are two reasons that can play into this pressure. First reason is that the grandparents probably had the same situation themselves, they were raised by their grandparents, so now they have a urge to take the parent role themselves since they never were that close when their own children grew up. Second is the age aspect, they want to do this before they get to old and tired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Tech firms in China typically expect their employees to work long hours to > prove their dedication.

> By the end of 2018, many tech companies were announcing plans to cut > benefits, bonuses and jobs as they hunkered down amid the country's worst > economic slowdown in nearly three decades.

> Yang is pondering what comes next. With more than 10 years of experience, he > now holds a mid-level position at a top-tier internet company but has > reached a career ceiling. He compares himself to a construction worker, who > can earn good money due to high work intensity but can easily be replaced by > younger, cheaper labour.

There's a lesson here. Anyone who asks you to be "dedicated" to their business or cause is looking to exploit you. When things get tough, they will not repay your dedication in-kind.

<comment><USER27> > Anyone who asks you to be "dedicated" to their business or cause is looking > to exploit you. When things get tough, they will not repay your dedication > in-kind.

If you give your time for free to a company. The company will assume that your time is worth nothing. And once the expectation is created, there is no gratefulness for doing it. The only thing that you will get is a bad looks if you stop giving your time for free because now it is expected.

<comment><USER28> Easier said than done when you're only other option is toiling in a field.

<comment><USER27> > Easier said than done when you're only other option is toiling in a field.

Yes. There is times that developer do not have a real option to say no. But, it is good for junior developers to understand what they are agreeing to and what are the consequences.

In the end businesses are going to ask for so much as legally is possible. If 15 hours/day where legalized, it is what people would get.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Maybe this is an excessively callous view, but isn't all of this voluntary and self-imposed? Is the expectation for the reader to pity their condition?

There is no totalitarian government that's relocating these people to a gulag and forcing them into 996 labor work for their motherland. These are people who are trying to break into upper middle class or beyond by pursuing high risk high reward economic opportunities and sacrificing much in exchange. When you start with nothing, and you want a lot, you end up getting exploited by a system that has major leverage over you.

<comment><USER30> > isn't all of this voluntary and self-imposed

> you end up getting exploited by a system that has major leverage over you

<comment><USER29> Is it unfair to voluntarily give another party leverage over you? Or is that a fair choice?

<comment><USER17> I think it's less about fairness and more about the harsh facts of reality. In a perfect world, the workers would be able to come to fair agreements with employers and get exploited less.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chip design drastically reduces energy needed to compute with light - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2019/ai-chip-light-computing-faster-0605 <comment><USER2> Caveat: the paper mainly focuses on the "standard quantum limit" which is the fundamental photon energy needed for the operations. If other things are taken into account (for example, modulation energy for the weights in this homodyne scheme, which scales with N² and not N, or the limits of the ADC) then the energy they are proposing is nowhere near possible. Furthermore, substantial alignment and packaging problems exist for free space optical systems, which prevents them from beating integrated approaches in the near term. In fact, it seems that Fathom Computing has potentially pivoted away from free space, based on the latest verbiage on their website, and they've been trying to get it to work for 3 years now.

However, it still presents an interesting case for the fact that the _fundamental_ floor on optical scaling is absolutely tiny. It'll be interesting to see who wins in this space :)

<comment><USER3> Does the paper propose building these devices in free space? I got the sense this was all intended to be produced lithographically with waveguides, so alignment wouldn't be a problem.

<comment><USER2> The title is wrong about it being an integrated design. Here's an excerpt from the paper abstract:

"This paper presents a new type of photonic accelerator based on coherent detection that is scalable to large (N≳106) networks and can be operated at high (gigahertz) speeds and very low (subattojoule) energies per multiply and accumulate (MAC), using the massive spatial multiplexing enabled by standard free-space optical components"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is not too surprising as analog techniques sometimes require much, much less power, and 8-bit resolution used in these GPUs. A prism can perform a Fourier transform more efficiently than an FPGA, as can a SAW device performing correlation. The first SAR radars used real-time optical processing with direct write to film.

A simple super-heterodyne receiver will run months off a single AA battery. Try that with SDR.

</comment><comment><USER5> "If we don't worry about silly things like network accuracy, correctness, adc energy, detector energy and other weird things everyone else seems to worry about, then we get lower energy numbers than anyone else!"

</comment><comment><USER6> When they use light to perform matrix multiplication, is the product deterministic, or an approximation? Digital computers spend an enormous amount of energy on always getting the same answer, so if an algorithm doesn't need that level of precision, it makes sense that an efficient hardware approximation could be practical.

<comment><USER7> It sounds like it's an approximation, but the abstract indicates that it can be used for training, not just inference, so it shouldn't matter a whole lot-- if the training process includes the errors, the neural net will be trained to account for them.

<comment><USER8> In fact with current neural nets on floating point hardware, people use dropout which is just deliberately introducing random errors.

Which is why, only somewhat tongue in cheek, people sometimes describe the rounding errors from using lower-precision arithmetic as "free regularization".

So any noise from this being an analogue system would likely improve performance (at least in terms of training).

<comment><USER5> It's a popular misconception that neural nets don't really care about precision.

8- bit floats with 16 bit master copies show clear degradation even with careful swamping prevention and stochastic rounding. [0]

In practice, you want fp16 with fp32 master copies, and it turns out that if done improperly, even fp32 can cause accuracy losses sometimes [1].

So, you see, it's not actually the case that you can go proceed directly to analog computing without a worry about silly things like correctness, accuracy and precision.

[0] [https://papers.nips.cc/paper/7994-training-deep-neural- netwo...](https://papers.nips.cc/paper/7994-training-deep-neural-networks- with-8-bit-floating-point-numbers.pdf)

[1] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.03740.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.03740.pdf)

(links are in pdf, sorry mobile users)

<comment><USER9> And yet we have analog neural nets in our heads which most likely don't need more than a few bits of precision.

<comment><USER10> They don't use gradient decent though. The learning mechanism used by biological neural networks has almost nothing in common with the one used by most artificial neural networks.

<comment><USER9> Then perhaps we should try to understand that learning mechanism. Currently there's almost no communication between DL and neuroscience communities.

<comment><USER10> The learning mechanism[1] is actually relatively well understood (at least as far as neuroscience goes) but it isn't used for ANNs because Spiking Neural Networks(SNNs) don't map well onto conventional computing hardware whereas the matrix multiplication used by conventional ANNs does.

I agree that it's worth researching but currently it is quite difficult to compete with conventional ANNs due to the commonality of processors well suited for ANNs.

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

<comment><USER9> STDP is one of the early steps towards understanding the learning mechanism(s) in the brain, but we are a long way from enough understanding to actually reproduce it.

Not only we don't know how to train spiking networks, we don't even know how the information is encoded: pulse frequency or pulse timings or ...? No one knows. How can you compete with anything if you have no idea how it works?

Also, this has nothing to do with computing hardware. You can easily simulate anything your want on conventional processors. Huge computing clusters have been built for spiking model simulations, and nothing interesting came out of it. Invent the algorithm first, then we will build the hardware for it.

<comment><USER10> STDP based SNNs don't take much secret sauce to function reasonably well for basic tasks[1]. Some people have even started to apply reward modulated STDP to the problem which is nice to see since it's a more complete version of STDP[2]. Even so, the amount of research in the area is tiny. I agree that you need to figure out the whole working algorithm before trying to scale things up but to do that you need a research base and currently that is difficult because running large SNNs is very slow for an average researcher without access to specialized hardware. The primary factor which kicked off the deep learning revolution was the idea that suddenly you could train a DNN 10x faster using a GPU rather than a CPU. Without this revelation, most researchers just wouldn't bother because DL research took too long. GPUs are common and lots of people had access to them. SNNs obviously can be simulated on any CPU but for large models it's incredibly slow. SNNs have an incredible amount of potential paralellizeability but all of it is in the form of a massively asynchronous system where the order of events is critically important. CPUs and GPUs are unable to take advantage of most of the potential speedups inherent to this structure outside of specific cases where you have groups of non-interacting neurons. Due to the event based rather than signal based nature of SNNs, batched training also seems to be substantially less effective than in ANNs further complicating training.

[1][https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.01421.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.01421.pdf)

[2][https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.09132.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.09132.pdf)

<comment><USER9> The main problem with SNNs is not that they don't work well. It's not that they are slow to run on CPUs/GPUs. Those would indeed be temporary problems. The fundamental problem is we don't know the right abstraction level to imitate brain operations. It's far from clear that simulating spikes is necessary to implement brain's "learning algorithms". There are two main arguments for using spikes: "biological realism", and "energy efficiency". Neither is convincing: if you want to simulate a conventional CPU you don't want to simulate IV curves for transistors. You don't want to simulate CMOS gates. No, because the lowest abstraction level necessary to understand the computer operation is boolean logic. Anything below that is completely irrelevant. I strongly suspect that simulating spikes is below the lowest relevant abstraction level. By the way, Jeff Hawkins of Numenta agrees with me, and he's pretty strict about "biological plausibility" of his neocortex algorithms. As for energy efficiency - sure, spikes might be the most efficient way to compute and encode information given the constraints of biological brains. But why should we care about those constraints? We are building computing machinery in silicon, using vastly different technology, circuits, and tricks from what's available in "wetware". It does not make any sense to copy biological evolution tricks to improve efficiency when building things in silicon. Neuromorphic hardware papers always mention energy efficiency and then proceed to compare their analog spiking chips to digital (!) chips. That's ridiculous! I can't think of a single good argument why would spiking analog circuits be more energy efficient than non-spiking analog circuits, if we are talking about any existing computing hardware technology (or one that's likely to be developed in the foreseeable future).

Deep learning took off in 2012 not because faster hardware allowed us to develop good algorithms. The algorithms (gradient descent optimization, backpropagation, convolutional and recurrent layers) have been developed -- using slow hardware -- long before (Lecun demonstrated state of the art on MNIST back in 1998). The fast hardware allowed us to scale up the existing good algorithms. I don't see any good algorithms developed for SNNs. Perhaps these algorithms can be developed, perhaps faster hardware is indeed necessary, but as I argue above, the motivation to pursue this research is just not obvious to me.

Note that we shouldn't confuse this SNN research (such as the papers you cited), to efforts like Human Brain Project, where they're actually trying to derive higher level brain algorithms from _accurate_ simulations of low level mechanics. Emphasis on accurate, because as any neuroscientist will tell you (e.g. [1]), these SNNs have very little to do with what's actually going on in a brain on any abstraction level.

[1] [https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech- talk/semiconductors/devices/b...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech- talk/semiconductors/devices/blue-brain-project-leader-angry-about-cat-brain)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why does this photonic chip only work as neural networks? What stops this technology from being made into a photonic CPU?

<comment><USER12> It's comparable to an old school analog computer (like the ones used long ago to simulate differential equations) using optics instead of analog electronics. They build a physical analogue of a neural network that evaluates the desired function.

<comment><USER13> Not a physicist but I think the idea behind this (posted a while back) is relevant

[https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/penn-engineers- demonstrate-...](https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/penn-engineers-demonstrate- metamaterials-can-solve-equations)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sounds amazing and scary at the same time... if it works, the amount of AI power that it concentrates to the company that implements it can get a monopoly in lots of industrial applications.

<comment><USER15> It'll like be pursued by other companies if it's beneficial, but currently this is theoretical, doesn't scale, and while they speak to power consumption there's no mention to computation speed (FLOPS).

Exciting yes, but like battery tech, there's a lot to address in that last mile to market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> These are still results from the simulation phase. It's best to wait for actual results from a functional optical chip

</comment><comment><USER17> Often wondered why we don't use light (photons) for computing. It seems we could control frequency and compute with it?

<comment><USER18> I wrote some unpublished fiction once about a super computer that used light as the interconnect fabric between nodes/CPUs, where each core could talk to any other core with virtually no latency and high bandwidth. I guess it's never been used (widely) because it's easy enough to run copper.

<comment><USER19> Could you elaborate on the work? Did you write about unexpected implications of this technology?

<comment><USER18> Nothing that visionary or even self aware, but imagine a giant sphere, sealed with an inside vacuum and also coated on the inside with IC's connected via copper for power and basic communication but each IC also had a nodule/transceiver that could communicate with every other IC via the light spectrum, because every IC had line of sight to the others, all submerged in liquid nitrogen or some other coolant. The premise was a giant campus like a school that users would be able to carry near-dumb terminals around, like smartphones with very little power but if they needed computational power all they had to do to tap into the sphere, by being in visible range of receptacles all around the campus both inside and out. And the sphere could borrow processing power from unused devices if they were available. So light was the practical connection for users, but also used inside the sphere.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


OOP Alternative to Utility Classes - <AUTHOR> http://www.yegor256.com/2014/05/05/oop-alternative-to-utility-classes.html

<comment><USER2> Please don't do this. This is a perfect example of where living inside your OOP bubble too long has a net negative effect. You really want to construct a new object, set two fields, and invoke a method call to find the maximum of two numbers? This is nothing short of madness.

I'd pick the util method any day, as much as I dislike "Utils" classes. It's not because they're bad code, it's more because they're disorganized (no cohesion). The "solution" would suffer exactly the same problem of organization depending on what namespace you decide to dump the "Max" class in.

There is nothing wrong with having static classes with static methods which are completely stateless. That java decided to omit plain functions from the language was a big mistake, so settling for the next best thing when _a function is precisely what we want_ is the sane thing to do.

A nicety that C# will have now is that you can import static classes as if they were namespaces, thus removing the need to continually write "Utils" everywhere, you can just stick the static method name, and only use "Utils" to disambiguate if necessary.</comment>


Build a KICK ASS STARTUP (on Your Own Terms) – A Chat with Basecamp's DHH - <AUTHOR> https://www.startups.co/articles/build-a-kick-ass-startup <comment><USER2> DHH the new Danica Patrick.</comment>


Danes spend two-thirds of their work week doing nothing - <AUTHOR> https://nordic.businessinsider.com/danes-spend-two-thirds-of-their-workweek-doing-nothing--heres-why-- <comment><USER2> _" A root cause is the strong attendance culture that prevails in many workplaces, i.e., rather than measuring dedication by results and achievements, an employee's physical presence becomes an important measure."_

This is because it's almost impossible to measure modern cognitive work. The result is seat warming and office politics. Bricklayers don't have this problem because it's easy to measure both the quality and quantity of work.

</comment><comment><USER3> Article is spot on. I quit a well paid job at large corp for this exact reason.

</comment><comment><USER4> They keep writing articles about this, but I have yet to meet a manager who cares.</comment>


Git-quick-stats – A simple and efficient way to access various statistics - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/arzzen/git-quick-stats/ <comment><USER2> I think this is a bad interface. Showing a menu that clears the terminal rather than letting one use a specific command e.g. `git quick-stats commits` or `git quick-stats authors` is very annoying. If anything the menu should be a special option e.g. restricted to `git quick-stats menu`.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't call it a bad interface. Although it is definitely orthogonal to the git interface. It isn't officially part of git.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Neat. I may end up using this.

fwiw as feedback:

\- 1 would be far more useful to me if it suggested reviewers based on the files changed in this commit / branch / ?. probably true for most large projects.

\- 7 is a thing I made myself as well (though yours is noticeably faster), and I LOVE it. glad to see it appearing elsewhere :)

\- what Zikes said. non-interactive input is a must for script-ability (e.g. to add an alias to output one option).

\- easily readable awk _and_ bash... nice work. scripts like this are really handy for teaching people about sane complex bash scripting. I'll spread it around at work a bit :)

<comment><USER5> agreed re: #7, heres another project I use that just does that: [https://github.com/paulirish/git-recent](https://github.com/paulirish/git- recent)

<comment><USER6> I have the following aliased to gbl:

        git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate refs/heads/

With formatting:

        git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate refs/heads/ --format='%(HEAD) %(color:yellow)%(refname:short)%(color:reset) - %(color:red)%(objectname:short)%(color:reset) - %(contents:subject) - %(color:cyan)%(authorname)%(color:reset) (%(color:green)%(committerdate:relative)%(color:reset))'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like what this offers, however I would prefer to be able to access each individual "report" via a direct command as opposed to a menu. It would make it much more composable.

<comment><USER8> If you look at the code they are all oneliners so you could just add aliases

<comment><USER7> Certainly, and this project could take on a structure which enables that sort of usage. A really great project with similar utility is [https://github.com/tj/git-extras](https://github.com/tj/git-extras), which I think could provide a good model for refactoring git-quick-stats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This could really use an asciinema showcase: [https://asciinema.org/](https://asciinema.org/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I want this for email! As far as I can tell, there is no great open-source tool for processing my mail archive and giving me similar stats. Everyone wants me to hand over a fully-privileged OAUTH token to some random person's website, and then it never gives me the stats I want.

<comment><USER11> What format do you have your mail archive in? What analytics are you interested in? Most of the ones I've seen focus on basic social network analysis tasks.

Those tools ask for credentials because most folks have their archive on the cloud.

<comment><USER12> While on this, are there any tools floating around for summarizing a Mailman archive into some basic stats? I have a few lists that I'd love gathering some stats for. Things like most prolific writer per week, general mail count per month, first occurrence of authors, etc. I wanted to throw something together myself, but thought I might be able to find something similar online, unfortunately to no avail.

<comment><USER13> mboxstats[1] is pretty good for this if you're fetching the monthly archives from the web interface and desire a quick overview. It supports mbox and maildir, and can produce XML output for easier post-processing.

The mboxstats author has a variety of interesting tools on his site, if you're in to strange stats and log processing like me ;)

I've submitted it here[2] in the hope others pile in with other cool options.

1\. [http://www.vanheusden.com/mboxstats/](http://www.vanheusden.com/mboxstats/) 2\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13418463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13418463)

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the link! Will definitely have a look! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd like this as a GitLab Plug-In.

Sadly the GitLab Team thinks that Plug-In Support is not necessary. :(

<comment><USER15> I'm pretty sure you could wire this up with CI to run and give you output. The only feature that you can't get out of GitLab right now would be suggested code reviewers. The rest looked like they'd be pretty visible via the UI.

disclosure: I work at GitLab, but this is opinion is my own, posted on my own time, reading HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Be good if you tracked sloc, like mine does :) [https://github.com/kaihendry/graphsloc](https://github.com/kaihendry/graphsloc)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm not sure about the HN rules on this; shouldn't the title be "Show HN: [...]" when posting something you made yourself?</comment>


Show HN: Park your domain name with just 2 DNS records - <AUTHOR> https://www.domdb.com/ <comment><USER2> It's important to remember that "just" DNS records are anything but "just" safe. Keep in mind that when you do this, you grant a third-party organization the ability to 'vouch' to anyone that they 'own' your domain or a URL at it, as long as the 'vouch' test supports [http://](http://) or [https://](https://) URLs.

This is the case for all web-hosting everywhere on the Internet. I host all of my domains through third-party providers, knowing and accepting the above- described risk. I consider it so low likelihood and of only medium impact if something ever occurs. The value is immense, the time spent is small, and the tradeoff worth it.

Imagine if someone phoned up your IT department and asked them to fix the MX record due to a mail server outage. Would you notice if your Received headers added a hop you weren't familiar with before? How long would they be able to record your company's email before someone noticed?

So I encourage taking DNS with absolute seriousness, and careful consideration of changes, and _never_ simply assigning "just" 2 records to anyone, ever. Given 2 records, someone can do a lot more damage than any website hack ever could.

ps. "IN TYPE15" or thereabouts is another way to state "IN MX", to further convey why it can be very dangerous to follow instructions. Most admins would pause at an MX change, but most wouldn't think twice about a custom "TYPE15" record 'not supported by BIND yet', given sufficient verbiage.

<comment><USER3> Keep in mind that this is an A record (and a TXT one) not an MX record, the only thing they can do with it is change the content of the site (which is what you want them to do).

Tough I've known extremely incompetent IT support, I think even they would be suspicious of someone proving his identity by making a "this is me" html page.

<comment><USER4> Email will fall back on an A-record if there is no MX record present...

<comment><USER5> Never heard of this behavior before but you appear to be right - [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1666807/email- validation...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1666807/email-validation- mx-lookup). TIL

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sorry for being that guy, but seeing all the enthusiastic responses on HN, I'm wondering…

Am I, in 2017, the only one left thinking that domain parking is a harmful activity? Like… the DNS equivalent of patent trolling…

<comment><USER7> Honestly depends on the situation I feel. If people are just registering up a bunch of valuable names then yeah I'm not a fan.

The other kind of person is (like me, so bias) the type who register domains with a project in mind but time or resources don't get funnelled to the project so the domain may as well be released back into the wild - In this case the domain still has however long it's registered for left on the registration and will likely be scooped up by a domain drop bot by the first kind of domainer. It's always nice for a failed project to at least break even through the domain sale.

When killing off projects I usually try to find someone who might like to own the domain and offer to push it to them gratis if they've got an account on the same registrar if the domain's going to expire within 6 months or so

<comment><USER8> > _The other kind of person is (like me, so bias) the type who register > domains with a project in mind but time or resources don 't get funnelled to > the project so the domain may as well be released back into the wild_

The third type of person is one who comes up with - at the time - a hilarious sounding joke, registers [http://www.cannedgoat.com](http://www.cannedgoat.com), and then continues to renew it year-after-year for sentimental reasons.

Besides, who's going to buy cannedgoat.com off me? Might as well keep it from being a GoDaddy banner site.

<comment><USER9> I'll happily offer $50.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Careful. Pointing your A record to a third party allows that party to use HPKP [1] with a long expiry period and never give you the key, potentially nuking the domain (for anyone who has visited it before you sell it).

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

<comment><USER11> This is a pretty serious attack - is there really no way to mitigate it? An arbitrary HTTP header is pretty low on the totem-pole of trust, so why don't they periodically check DNS records for corroboration?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Other than the "secondes" my only real feedback is the price - Charge more!

I think you may be underestimating a little just how many domains people have if they're in the business of selling them!

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh yeah... Sometimes I mix up my french/english :P About the price, you're right, but I'll probably make different plans. Thanks for the feedback!

<comment><USER12> Also "set up" is the verb form, and "setup" is the noun form. Similar:

Log in with your password, and login will be complete.

The signout process causes the user to sign out.

I will pick up some rocks with my pickup truck because someone asked for a rock pickup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You may want to look into adding a CAPTCHA or some other kind of spam prevention system to the contact form. Spambots these days will fill in any contact forms with all kinds of spam.

If you're remailing those contact form responses through your server to the domain owner, these spambots will damage your IP reputation and legit inquiries might start getting blocked.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just did, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm curious, why do you ask your users to create an A entry for this? I think a CNAME/ALIAS entry to the domain of the service would be a safer choice in case you should be forced to change your IP address (e.g. if you change your hosting provider), which would currently force all your users to update their A entries. Also, using a CNAME domain would allow you to hide your IP address behind a CDN service like Cloudflare, which can be handy sometimes (e.g. for DDoS protection).

<comment><USER15> DNS spec doesn't support CNAME on the Apex record (ex your domain sans www). Alias isn't commonly supported by a lot of services yet either.

<comment><USER16> I saw this as well when using a self-owned domain with Github Pages. Any idea why the spec forbids it?

<comment><USER17> It's mostly due to ambiguity. Think of it like a directory, you can't have a file with the same name as a directory in a path, because operations on that name and path become ambiguous.

Zone SOAs are very much like directories on a filesystem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Maybe I just couldn't find it, but it would be nice to see a template or example of what the parked page would look like.

<comment><USER19> [https://www.domdb.com/img/landing.jpg](https://www.domdb.com/img/landing.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool project. We do something very similar with an internally made lander for our domain portfolio, and it works well. Lots of serious buyers contact via e-mail listed on whois too.

One thing very useful is to have analytics, perhaps you could add a feature for users to input a Google Analytics tag (UA-000000).

Side note: for anyone who actually wants to sell/buy a domain in a private transaction, I highly recommend Escrow.com as an escrow service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks!

I planned to add more options to customize the landing page, including adding the GA tag ;)

Thanks for the tip!

<comment><USER20> Also if someone enters a path other than the index nothing catches the 404. At the least you should have a redirect. :)

[http://backdoor.fr/123](http://backdoor.fr/123)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's fixed ;)

<comment><USER21> What about subdomain?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Thank you so much. I acquired blackmail.io as part of a, now defunct, project and had been meaning to put it up for sale. This was the perfect lazy solution for me :)

Tips for pricing your domain:

1\. Think of how attached you are to the domain

2\. Think of how much you think you'd be willing to pay for the domain in the open market

3\. Think of how much the cleveriness of the domain name is

Add all these values together, and multiply it by 2.

</comment><comment><USER23> Don't like it. There are not enough good reasons to 'park' a domain.

</comment><comment><USER24> I like it, but I wish there was an option to just park it without saying it is for sale.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll add this feature really soon!

<comment><USER21> This is what I want and without registration. Just a welcome to blank.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is there also a way to do it without the price? Putting a price on it directly will either cause people to not bother if it's too high for some side project or make it too cheap if some huge corp wants to buy it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, just do not specify the price, and it won't appear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hi, nice and simple site. Thanks! Maybe in the future can you give analytics as to who is visiting the site? That way we can get an idea of the demographics of who is going to which domain? (paid feature maybe)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea. Would you prefer to have basic analytics in the dashboard, or being able to add Google Analytics and have better analytics from GA dashboard?

<comment><USER27> you are selling and marketing simplicity 'just 2 records'. if you want to stick to the 'simplicity' audience, provide it to them without asking them to configure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Cool idea. I hope you somehow confirm the listing on the dashboard, otherwise someone can just list some domains under your username to cost you money ;)

</comment><comment><USER29> Has anyone tried this service? I haven't had much luck setting this up... and I'm fairly certain I have the DNS setup accordingly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, please use the contact form on the website for support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Look nice. Why not allow users to list their domains and setup prices in dashboard instead of TXT record?

Efty is already doing it.

<comment><USER30> I shared domdb with NamePros community(the biggest community of domainers): [https://www.namepros.com/threads/domdb-park-your-domain- in-l...](https://www.namepros.com/threads/domdb-park-your-domain-in-less- than-15-seconds.1037674/)

You may get good feedback from the people who are in domaining business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, appreciated!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I spent weeks searching for free dns parking. Ended up just removing the name servers. I'll try this!

</comment><comment><USER31> Interesting.. Why would someone want to park domains when web hosting is available for $3.xx/mo

<comment><USER7> People parking domains often have lots of domains. This sort of thing also gives you a prebuilt "contact me" sort of thing which can be a minor pain.

Take the pain out of something and you can sell it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This services could transform to One Page hosting services.

</comment><comment><USER33> Nice! Curious as to the name though. Why DomDB?

<comment><AUTHOR> I had the domain since a while and was not using it. So instead of searching hours for a name, I just used what I had :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Raise the price. $5/mo minimum.

</comment><comment><USER35> Great idea.

What do you use to read the records?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I use this little PHP function dns_get_record() ;)

<comment><USER21> That's why I love php!</comment></comment></comment>


5 Ideas a Day Ebook - <AUTHOR> https://fiveideasaday.podia.com/5-ideas-a-day-ebook/j48ju <comment><USER2> I bought this book yesterday and loving it so far. So many great ideas for new startups.</comment>


NYC's Pneumatic Tube Mail Network (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://untappedcities.com/2013/03/15/nycs-pneumatic-tube-mail-network/

<comment><USER2> The sandwich delivery was reminiscent of "The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel" by Maciej Cegłowski, [http://www.idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda- weehawken_burri...](http://www.idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda- weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm)</comment>


Keeping Pygmy Sloths Afloat - <AUTHOR> http://www.biographic.com/posts/sto/keeping-pygmy-sloths-afloat <comment><USER2> For those who are interested, the first episode of David Attenborough's Planet Earth II has a segment on pygmy sloth in the beginning.</comment>


Samsung patches 0-click vulnerability impacting all smartphones sold since 2014 - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/samsung-patches-0-click-vulnerability-impacting-all-smartphones-sold-since-2014/ <comment><AUTHOR> SVE-2020-16747 [https://security.samsungmobile.com/securityUpdate.smsb](https://security.samsungmobile.com/securityUpdate.smsb)

CVE-2020-8899 [https://cve.mitre.org/cgi- bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2020-8899](https://cve.mitre.org/cgi- bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2020-8899)

From the issues page:

Q: What privileges does the attacker gain in the system after a successful attack?

A: The vulnerable codec executes in the context of the attacked app processing input images, so the attacker also gets the privileges of that app. In the case of my demo, that's Samsung Messages, which has access to a variety of personal user information: call logs, contacts, microphone, storage, SMS etc.

While not explicitly tested, I also strongly suspect that local privilege escalation may be possible with the help of these bugs. For example, the highly privileged System UI process may display arbitrary images supplied by other apps in notifications, and I have observed it crash in Qmage-related code a number of times in my experimentation.

===

Q: Have you tested any attack vectors other than MMS?

A: I haven't devised any end-to-end attacks similar to that via MMS, but as noted in the original bug report, all apps in the system which display untrusted images with the standard Bitmap interfaces are affected by these issues. For example, I have confirmed that the Qmage file which is used as the final payload to get a reverse shell via MMS, also gives the attacker remote access when it is copied to the device's file system and opened with the Gallery app.

===

Q: Are there any mitigations available to users against this and similar attacks, other than updating regularly?

A: For Samsung devices, these issues are fixed in the May 2020 patch. Generally speaking of image codecs, I am not aware of any generic mitigations against these types of bugs. One easy way to mitigate against attackers using exploits delivered specifically through MMS is to disable the "auto retrieve" option for multimedia messages in the Messages app.

From Mateusz Jurczyk of Google Project Zero's YouTube page:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nke8Z3G4jnc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nke8Z3G4jnc)

'This video demonstrates the exploitation of a vulnerability in the custom Samsung Qmage image codec via MMS. The exploit proof-of-concept achieves remote code execution with no user interaction on a Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ phone running Android 10 (February 2020 patch level).

'Vulnerabilities in the Qmage format were reported by the Google Project Zero team to Samsung in January 2020, and were addressed in the Samsung May 2020 Security Bulletin as SVE-2020-16747. The bugs were also collectively assigned CVE-2020-8899.

'For more details, see: * [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project- zero/issues/detail?id=20...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project- zero/issues/detail?id=2002) \- the original in-depth report discussing the codec and security issues. It also includes an FAQ section outlining how the exploit works. * [https://github.com/googleprojectzero/SkCodecFuzz](https://github.com/googleprojectzero/SkCodecFuzz) [currently 404] - source code of the fuzzing harness used to identify the crashes. * [https://security.samsungmobile.com/securityUpdate.smsb](https://security.samsungmobile.com/securityUpdate.smsb) \- Samsung Security Updates website.'</comment>


Scientists to provide update on Thursday on the search for gravitational waves - <AUTHOR> "Journalists are invited to join the National Science Foundation as it brings together the scientists from Caltech, MIT and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) this Thursday at 10:30 a.m. at the National Press Club for a status report on the effort to detect gravitational waves - or ripples in the fabric of spacetime - using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO)."<p>source: http://www.ligo.org/news/media-advisory.php <comment><AUTHOR> Current url: ~ [http://www.ligo.org/news/media- advisory.php](http://www.ligo.org/news/media-advisory.php)

A more permanent url will probably be added at the ligo site later time.</comment>


An iOS dev's experience with React Native - <AUTHOR> https://blog.madebywindmill.com/an-ios-devs-experience-with-react-native-559275b5a4e8#.28jaiktfk <comment><USER2> > The promise is simple and compelling: write once, ship twice. iOS and > Android all in one shot

While this is certainly feasible (largely depending on the requirements of your app), it is important to clarify that RN never promised "write once ship twice".

RN's promise is "learn once, write anywhere", meaning that the technology and mental model is what transcends platforms, not the codebase itself.

Just wanted to make this clear so as to avoid any possible frustration for newcomers after the fact.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention it's something that when making custom components etc., you will be able to do if so desired. A good component structure and composition enables you to handle Android versus iOS, but still have a large amount of sharing available.

I consider this similar to the Xamarin structure of Apps where you have Android and iOS projects, and then a shared common library.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A note on the require issue: this makes sense if you think of requiring as it's compiled equal - importing.

You can't dynamically import dependencies - so if you're wanting to load JSON dynamically you should be using other mechanisms (even if it's just a FS operation or having an internal service to return JSON).

</comment><comment><USER4> Really interesting little memoir on real RN development experience</comment>


Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions - <AUTHOR> https://www.regexfaceoff.com/ <comment><USER2> Sorry, this will be a negative review. This is easily the most frustrating game I've ever played. I can't test parenthesis because it tells me my time 'ran out' with 45 seconds on the clock. I could barely type 4 or 5 characters.

Edit: There are also XSS issues with the player name, you can execute Javascript in the other player's window. That's not good. I confirmed this since an image I scripted to load via HTML (<img src=) was visited by a Mac user. I use Linux.

POC player name:

      Rick<audio style="width: 0px; height: 0px;" controls autoplay><source src="http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/rickroll/images/d/d0/Rick_Astley_-_Never_Gonna_Give_You_Up.ogg/revision/latest" type="audio/ogg"></audio>

<comment><AUTHOR> The Rickroll should be fixed.

<comment><USER2> Still there actually, but in a different place. There's another XSS, if you just paste this in your solution:

      |<audio style="width: 0px; height: 0px;" controls autoplay><source src="http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/rickroll/images/d/d0/Rick_Astley_-_Never_Gonna_Give_You_Up.ogg/revision/latest" type="audio/ogg"></audio>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, now THAT rick roll should be fixed

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> My strategy of "capture the last two characters of each input in the accept group followed by $" hasn't failed yet, and is quick to input and requires no thought. Though I wouldn't say I'm practicing any practical RegEx skills doing so. :P

<comment><USER4> My strategy was ^[].*[^]$ where you first fill in all the first letters of the match words and then all the last characters of the skip group. Works fairly well.

I'm not sure if there is a length limit, but I'm fairly sure I could come up with a vim macro/regex that would allow me to copy the match words and make a (list|like|so) within 45 seconds.

Give the time limit, it would be more fun to automatically let your strategy compete. (maybe with a weight of length vs correctness) Write a function that, given two arrays of words, return the best regex.

<comment><USER5> > Write a function that, given two arrays of words, return the best regex.

I've actually done that with code-golf in the past. I needed a regex shorter than _n_ that would match what I wanted it to match, so I generated valid regexes up to _n_ length and tested them. A bit brute-force, but eventually saved me one character in the program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's definitely a bug in the timing. I feel like it's related to the previous round. Whenever I finished a round early, the next round timed out early.

Also, it should be revamped to always run the full time and award points to the shortest regex. I regularly won rounds with entries like `foo|bar|...` Easy to write, and requiring almost no skill.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is the game about regexes or finding letter patterns in words? The rounds I played aren't realistic or particularly interesting uses of regexes.

</comment><comment><USER8> This game would be better if it was like a pacman style cave with random letters or whatever, and you had to write a regex to get to the other side without running into an enemy

</comment><comment><USER9> Some explanation of what to do and what flavor of "regex" syntax is accepted would be good. I'm guessing it's a javascript syntax, but I don't really remember how different it is from pcre, does it have lookahead/lookbehind assertions and all that. Also cloudflare's free ssl doesn't work everywhere, letsencrypt is better at that and also free. Had to open the thing in chrome.

</comment><comment><USER10> I know people have said this already, but just to update it, the site is still giving 5 second timeouts.

Also when you are playing as anonymous against anonymous, when it says: "anonymous wins" you don't know which of the two anonymous players won. Even if the game says "you won" in the case where it was you, a new player doesn't know that, so it still seems unclear. The anonymous players should be differentiated in some way.. a number tacked on, for example.

Also when the round finishes, it shouldn't just show the regular expression for two seconds and then clear. It should show it for long enough to let me read it and think about it, with the data still displaying, and with a continue button I can click when ready.

Also sadly I think long term this site will have trouble attracting matching players. I expect it to only work during the peak of this exposure on HN. Great idea though.

Finally you should scale down the data so there is less of it to read. You can still make the challenges interesting with well chosen data. And you could add capture and substitution requirements. Again, great idea.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm a bit confused - I'm not sure I understand the practicality of this. I do like challenging regexps, but I did not find them here. I thought the point of code games is to practice a skill you could use in real life, but matching random bags of words while avoiding other random groups of words isn't something one would use regexps for.

Apologies if I misunderstood the point of this.

</comment><comment><USER12> Spoiler warning: super-strategy below.

Not a bad idea but since there's no penalty for long strings I can win pretty much instantly by treating it as a typing test and typing a short (probably- unique) substring from each match separated by |. It'll get me an instant-win but if for some reason it matches some non-matches I make it a little longer. Here's a screen grab of me winning with this super-strategy. on this run for some reason you'll notice there's a bug at the end but normally it just lets me win with no chance for the other person to score. I'm not sure how you could address this... If you keep it this way it just becomes a typing test...

[http://tinypic.com/player.php?v=jf88pe%3E&s=9](http://tinypic.com/player.php?v=jf88pe%3E&s=9)

<comment><USER13> It's more comfortable / fast make a JS that concatenates the strings (class .match) with pipe separator.

<comment><USER12> but I didn't "cheat" \- I literally typed by hand a regex for the matches but not the non-matches. (Exactly as was asked.) I guess a way to fix this would be to make it like "regex golf" where there is a fixed time but the shortest overall regex wins... It could also be defeated if most substrings of each match were also in the things to avoid. For example if you're supposed to match cat but avoid catch then my strategy would be defeated. I would have to addd ^cat$ -- which wouuld cost me time and characters. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Agreed, awesome idea, needs a few bug fixes. Perhaps a description of the game mechanics. Some patterns match inaccurately, and I am also experiencing running out of time with 30+ seconds on the clock, as well as not getting credit for correctly matching patterns. I had fun nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice idea! Unfortunately, here's how to solve pretty much any game in <3sec: firstword|secondword|thirdword|...

you can usually stop typing every word after ~3 chars (no other ones will match).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a little side project I made to learn about Web sockets. Each question consists of a "match" pattern and a "skip" pattern, and then looks up words on wordsapi.com to match those patterns when the question is generated.

It was hard thinking up patterns, so if you have ideas, please let me know.

<comment><USER7> Cool concept, but I think it'd be infinitely better if the challenges were more realistic/interesting. E.g. matching dates in a particular format, but not another similar format.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Game's fun but there's a problem when sometimes the time runs out prematurely. If it didn't do this I'd say 5 stars well done.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I need to add a "I give up" button to the question, and if each player hits it, move on to the next question.

</comment><comment><USER17> Been ORing the first three characters of every to-match string. No one has beaten me in 15 games.

</comment><comment><USER13> Beautiful game but be care of cheaters, you can win just using DevTool (I tried and works well).

</comment><comment><USER18> Really cool, enjoyed playing it for a while. Challenges you to practise your regex golf[1] skills. :)

There seem to be some bugs with the timing mechanisms, probably some JS timeouts aren't properly reset, causing weird game behaviour like running out of time mid-game (the countdown still displaying 10+ seconds). Also correct answers aren't always acknowledged (all icons show the answer to be correct, however it doesn't result in that player winning the game). :)

[1]: [https://xkcd.com/1313/](https://xkcd.com/1313/)

</comment><comment><USER19> the app works to fast and I as a user get confused. It should show who won, with what match at the end of the round for a longer period of time</comment>


Rules to Live by as a Developer - <AUTHOR> https://programmerfriend.com/10-rules-to-live-developer/?hckrnws <comment><USER2> Postel's law belongs on this list, as a rule to live and code by.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for giving this suggestion, somehow missed the name of that principle until now.</comment></comment>


An Onslaught of Mobile HTML Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.borismus.com/mobile-html-games/

<comment><USER2> > In the short term, HTML as a gaming platform is emerging as a real Flash > killer.

ha ha, good joke.

<comment><USER3> This is true, but mostly because Flash currently has better authoring tools which many creatives and game designers already know, as opposed to HTML5, which requires significant programming skill. But in pure performance, I'd say that <canvas> already outperforms Flash for sprite graphics, at least on Linux and Mac.

Long-term? The writing is on the wall for Flash. Hopefully Adobe will realize how money they could make transitioning to selling authoring tools that use open web standards.

<comment><USER4> HTML5 vs. Flash is a very short-sighted argument. The real fight is mobile where it's yet to even be proven Flash is viable. Those native platforms are Objective C, Java, .NET, Unity etc... and those platforms are _strong_ and the vendors are building _enormous_ revenue streams developers can tap straight into by filling out some paperwork.

As business models emerge and if the technical barriers erode down to something players will accept HTML5 will probably end up coexisting alongside Flash games on major portals. SPIL Games is very committed to that outcome and doing what they can to propel it onto mobile devices through <http://www.html5contest.com>. I've got my HTML5 api almost sorted out which will provide JavaScript games some pretty cool tools they can build on top of.

But if it's going to actually _win_ then it needs to conquer iOS or Android. The rest will fall from that because that's where the Angry Birds and Doodle Jump sized success stories are coming from, not Flash where there's just a phenomenally big audience that's not monetized as effectively (excluding social which is so hyper-competitive the platform you build on is the least important decision you'll make).</comment></comment></comment>


Russia's Internet censor reminds citizens that some memes are illegal - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/russias-internet-censor-reminds-citizens-that-some-memes-are-illegal/

<comment><USER2> I thinks these articles are exaggerating a situation which could have been a simple defamation lawsuit.</comment>


Surfer vs. Einstien - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/large-hadron-collider/3314456/Surfer-dude-stuns-physicists-with-theory-of-everything.html

<comment><USER2> This is old news, the article is junk, the _surfer dude_ is not nearly as smart as the media like to portray him, and it's "Einstein", not "Einstien" (unless you're a crackpot).

<comment><AUTHOR> Typo, apologies. And it's still a pretty interesting article, even if you think it is junk.

O.o You have to be a crackpot to make typos?

<comment><USER2> <http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html>

John Baez's crackpot index:

 _5 points for each mention of "Einstien", "Hawkins" or "Feynmann"_</comment></comment></comment>


Review my startup -- Sunbeam - <AUTHOR> http://www.sunbeamsoftware.com

<comment><USER2> What will this app do different from my current FAQ page, why should I sign up with your service?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you have an faq with more than a few entries this product will make it much easier to browse and search. The search handles stemming and synonyms to help users find what they are looking for. It is also a content management system so it is easy to add/edit/delete without touching html or your website. On the administration side it also has interesting analytics to show what people are searching on, what categories they browse and what answers they look at.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sunbeam is an AJAX based self help module for websites.</comment>


Personality Traits of the Best Software Developers - <AUTHOR> https://robwalling.com/2006/08/20/personality-traits-of-the-best-software-developers/ <comment><USER3> _"…people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent." - <USER2> Graham_

Wise words, shows humility in weird way...</comment>


Why SXSW Sucks - <AUTHOR> http://jolieodell.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/why-sxsw-sucks/

<comment><USER2> I think a lot of SXSWi's downfall is due to the "Social Media Experts" who are starting to infiltrate our world. I saw a tweet the other day that said it best... Social Media Experts are just people who can't design or build. I can't agree more.

I went 2 and 3 years ago respectively, primarily because I had heard so many interesting things about the panels. I'd see tweets or blog posts about interesting design panels and new technologies or startups being announced and talked about in Austin. I remember really enjoying the scalability one with the guys from Automattic (Matt Mullenweg), Digg (Joe Stump), etc... I haven't heard a single thing like that this year, and am glad I didn't go. I don't doubt that there were some decent panels, but no one seems to have cared about them.

Why? It's become a place to party among the twitterati and "elite" of the startup and web world. It's like going clubbing on Sunset in Hollywood and hoping to run into Lindsay Lohan shooting up in the bathroom. Spotting guys like Kevin Rose, Daniel Burka (digg designer), Gary Vaynerchuk, Ashton Kutcher, (and girls like) Justine Ezarik, etc.... I'm not saying it doesn't sound like fun going to parties every night and getting hammered, but thats really all that it has become.

I could go on and on complaining about how lame SXSWi was... my company was going to pay completely for me to go last year and I turned it down knowing it would suck. There are much better things to spend money on. If I lived in Austin I might go just for the social aspect... but really the conference itself is worthless.

<comment><USER3> _Social Media Experts are just people who can't design or build._

In other words, they're like the other 99.9% of humanity? The ones we built the web _for_ , the ones who bring all the money and attention and customers? ;)

<comment><USER4> Social media experts are best considered as the power users of the stuff being built by the hackers and designers. They have an audience and can be an influencer for you, but at the end of the day, they're squarely on the consumer side of the divide. As such, it's important to reach out to and build relationships with these folks, but not to act to surprised by the uberconsumer behavior, which we all display at some time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> SXSW isn't a tech conference. It's a music/film festival with an "interactive" section.

I don't think I would consider the interactive section which is primarily made up of bloggers and web startups(and not focused on the tech they use) as a tech section. Bloggers are not tech oriented(unless they primarily write about some sort of new technology).

I went a few years ago for just the music festival and had a blast. Andrew W.K. showed up and did a scavenger hunt under a highway overpass. I had one of those expensive badges and found other badge holders were pretty nice. Chatted with someone from SOMAFM for a while.

<comment><USER6> It's funny, I first heard of SXSW only in the context of the music/film stuff and was thoroughly confused later when I heard it mentioned as some sort of "tech" event and actually thought maybe they were two different events. It's good to know I wasn't totally off-base.

<comment><USER7> I think it's also only recently that the interactive part has been big at all. Not entirely sure, but it feels like 2007 or 2008 was the first year it was one of those big all-the-cool-kids-in-SF-must-fly-to-Austin deals. Certainly the late-90s SXSWs didn't have anyone flying there for the tech content (though plenty were flying there for the music and films).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why SXSW is awesome:

\- Discovering a lot of up and coming talented musicians

\- Seeing artists like Arcade Fire, Beirut, Muse, Ben Harper, and Tom Morello play at small bars.

\- Catching the world premiere of a film where the director and all of the stars are in attendance

\- Free day parties with free beer

\- Seeing Ice Cube, Public Enemy, Talib Kweli, and Del tha Funkee Homosapien perform for free by the lake.

\- Having some drinks with a bunch of business guys at some startup-of-the- month's party

\- Making new friends

\- Making business contacts that lead to jobs or business opportunities

I live here in Austin and SXSW is my favorite time of year. Yes there are some sucky tech panels, but there are a few gems. I saw a few great panels such as "Beyond LAMP", discussions on location based services and mobile advertising, and talks by DHH and Jason Fried. Best of all, I got to do all of this for free by volunteering, and got a free music badge for doing so. Here's my music schedule:

<http://my.sxsw.com/user/schedule/larrykubin>

How exactly does it suck to go to hundreds of concerts, see dozens of movies, and party with thousands of technologists and entrepreneurs?

The author should rename the article to "why SXSWi sucks" at least, because SXSW is a lot more than a tech conference.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone saying the interactive section is not tech-focused is out of the (tech) loop.

Case in point: I attended the Infochimps Data Cluster Meetup. They kicked it off with a debate around SQL vs NOSQL. 5 minutes into one of the NOSQL guys saying why his stuff is great, Werner Vogels gets up and basically lays the smack-down on the guy. This talk is followed up by BOFs on different aspects of working with big data.

I guess this wasn't an official SXSW party, but you'd really have to not be keyed into the events around the conference to not know it was going on.

EDIT: I should also point out that the guys from Factual, WolframAlpha, Rackspace, Cassandra, (oh and me from 80legs :) were there. It was really awesome.

<comment><USER10> First that type of panel was rare. For every panel like that there were four such as "Twitter and Dating in 140 Characters or Less", "Crowd Sourcing Innovative Social Change", "Interactive Documentaries: A Multidimensional Narrative", "Millionaire or Artist? how about Both?"

Second "tech" focused has different meanings for different folks I don't think debating SQL vs NOSQL is very tech-focused. Tech focused for me is here's this thing, maybe some of why/how we built it, but definitely some how you can use it, and esp here's the code.

SXSWi maybe a tech conference. It sure isn't a developer conference. But, I'm glad it's not. People whining that SXSWi is not the type of conference they want need to stfu and go to the correct conference.

<comment><USER9> Well I think your definition of tech-focused is too narrow for me, but fair enough.

User Groups are more for that stuff. The cool thing about SXSW is that you can totally set up an impromptu user group and get 20-50 attendees if you want. In fact, that is how the Data meetup happened last year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've seen a remarkable dearth of "genuinely interesting tech stories out of SXSW" reports in the last...well, _ever_.

The music side of things is rather more interesting; I'd actually like to go to that, one day.

<comment><USER12> I got some good interviews done last year, but this year, it's been much more challenging, if only because I've had to jump through hoops to track down the newsmakers this year, while last year, they were all kinda hanging out together in the Blogger Lounge.

I've been laying low for a couple days and plan to come out only when Interactive is over and Music is in full swing. Next year, I think I'll just buy a Music badge.

<comment><USER11> I hope the music portion is much less douchey. :)

<comment><USER4> Did you read that before you hit publish?

<comment><USER11> Beg pardon? Did I miss your mentioning that you'd be there?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> meh. i've not really ever viewed SXSW as tech-focused. i consider it basically a communal geek vacation/retreat. and if you treat it as such, it fits pretty well into your expectations.

</comment><comment><USER14> I had the same worries about SXSW, and while I agree there was too much walking, talking spam this year, that didn't prevent me from having an awesome time, and great conversations from some of the most genuine people I've ever met. I'm not exactly sure what "we all deserve to have fewer people and more and better technology" means, but it seems we should be happy to see technologies turned into tools that all these "douchebags" can be excited about.

It's sad to see it become less of a grassroots conference than it was, but that's how a market evolves. Then again, the first time I ever went was only three years ago, so maybe I'm just not cool enough?

</comment><comment><USER15> I am on a fight back from Austin. On my trip I got to meet dozens of happy users, answer customer support questions in person, hang out with my co- workers in a non-work setting, meet with a number of company founders and brainstorm on ways to make our products better, and chill out with some really interesting folks from Skype.

So no, it did not suck.

It's ironic that a journalist is complaining about a lack of developer attendance. And I appreciate that the web has a growing and vibrant culture. There are whole categories of jobs that didn't exist when I went a few years ago. I had a great time, the more the merrier!

</comment><comment> joe-mccann It seems that this will be the third time on a reasonable followed site/blog that I have to explain to so many whiners why SXSWi is cool/fun/beneficial: the tech splinter parties/events/hackfests that AREN'T associated with SXSWi. Now granted, to say that there was a "lack of tech" is total horseshit. Web frameworks face-off, server-side JavaScript, CVC not MVC, even the Google hackfest brought out just that: real hackers. And the this list goes on from there...

Moreover, the events/parties with the most DBs (douchebags not databases or decibels) were mainly the ones that were officially associated with SXSWi. Note to anyone especially those trying to find movers and shakers to interview them or simply network: the movers and shakers are NOT at these parties.

You need to check places like the Hotel St. Cecilia, The Highball, the East Side of Austin in general, all within 1-3 miles of the convention center.

Finally, local Austin groups put together some stellar parties/events/hackfests: Austin Rails, Wordpress BBQ, Austin JavaScript Party, etc.

Yes I am a local so I didn't have to pay for flight, hotel, rental car, etc. but what I do have to do is continue to defend the techies of Austin that make SXSWi fun and worthwhile.

BTW, I'll be at the (mt) closeout party tonight at Mohawk. Come say hi, we are friendly in Austin... ;-)

</comment><comment><USER16> Personally I don't see that much evidence that SXSW has gone down hill. Of course things change from year to year, and one year you might have a bad experience with other attenders being rude, but overall I think it is still a great opportunity.

Of course I live in Austin, so I am probably biased. Also I don't have to pay for a flight to Austin to attend, so the value for cost is much higher.

</comment><comment><USER17> Shame to hear it's gone downhill so fast.

I'll always have a soft spot for SXSW, since they pretty much put Twiddla on the radar by giving us the Technical Achievement award a few years back.

That was the only one I attended, so I can't comment on whether it's getting better or worse. All I know is that it was pretty cool back in 2007.

</comment><comment><USER18> The tweets I am reading suggest most everything is regurgitating things we've all read in our aggregators? I heard about the Digg redesign, and that a couple of the interviewers suck, and some other self-help-sounding axioms, but that's all I've seen come out of there. Anyone know of anything else really big?

<comment><USER10> This is the biggest thing I've noticed. For example, the HTML 5 sessions were all stuff I've read about. The thing to know is SXSW isn't for the we're all hardcore HTML5 experts lets get into the grittiest depths of the subject. It's more hey all you folks who don't have a clue, this is why HTML5 is hot.

The key to SXSWi is to go to panels you know nothing about, and/or you're not sure are that applicable to your "world".

Both this year and last year the best panels were the ones I ended up in cause I got lost and went to wrong ballroom or I thought were gonna suck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is no question the growth of the conference has made it harder for the hallway conversations to happen.

As for the changes in the content, you can judge for yourself, here's an archive of the 2006 schedule which includes 14 sessions with the word "blog":

[http://web.archive.org/web/20060315165103/http://2006.sxsw.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20060315165103/http://2006.sxsw.com/interactive/programming/panels/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Interesting variety of "douche" usage:

douchebag (n), douchey (adj), douche up (v)

Still, I think she needs a new word.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I think I had 9 instances of "douche" in one sentence.

Comedic value aside, it wasn't exactly Shakespeare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just another reason the serious hackers and geeks amongst us just stay here in the Bay Area. We can all go get drunk with super famous geeks and then take BART or CalTrain home. And the only douche bags here are at the W hotel.

</comment><comment><USER22> I imagine the event sucks a little bit more if you're a journalist. Or an attractive woman.

The author is both, which probably makes for the worst SXSW experience possible. The theft and hit-and-run are the cherry on top.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interestingly enough, Jolie didn't approve my comment on her blog that suggested she might be out of the loop.

</comment><comment><USER23> Having the best time ever at SXSW. Like anything else, it's what you make of it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Douchebags ruining things isn't unique to SXSW, it's more a universal constant.

</comment><comment><USER25> TL;DR SXSW sucks because when you leave your shit unattended it gets stolen and nothing interesting came and knocked down her door.

Instead of dismissing people she's never met as douchebags maybe she should talk to them and she'd find something "bloggable". "Content" isn't bloggable, it's the context and the story behind it all and how it relates to people. I guess when all you have is a douche, everything looks like a douchebag. The last thing the world needs is yet another blog entry about "twitter" or whatever the latest fad is. The tomorrow's stories are in today's crowds, a big part of finding the next big thing first is sorting an incredibly huge pile of shit.</comment>


Diagram.Codes - <AUTHOR> https://www.diagram.codes/ <comment><USER2> Seems possibly useful, except it's extremely limited.

For example, how do you control positioning? For example in the Graphs option, say I have a Central entry that requires 4 exits to Up, Down, Left and Right. there doesn't seem to be a way to handle that as it quite arbitrary allocates position, I think, alphabetically.

</comment><comment><USER3> I got curious and found [https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoctor- diagram/](https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoctor-diagram/) is available. Important if you're not wanted to "delegate" this to a web-service.

</comment><comment> creative-coder Wow, looks useful online extension of Graphviz.. Thanks for sharing :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think plantuml is a better option, thanks for sharing :)</comment>


Study: Coca-Cola Shaped China's Efforts to Fight Obesity - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/01/10/683919100/study-coca-cola-shaped-chinas-efforts-to-fight-obesity <comment><USER2> > That's bad news for soda giants, who want to grow their market.

Hasn't Coca-Cola been extremely pro-active recently in tackling obesity since it became clear that sweet drinks were a major problem?

They've almost completely replaced their flagship brand and formula with the zero sugar variant. They're not even promoting it as an alternative any more - the 'Zero' on the cans has been getting smaller and smaller and the black branding has been shrinking as well, and they seem to be getting retailers to suggest it as the default as well.

I guess they think they're able to grow their market by being healthier and helping their customers to be healthier.

<comment><USER3> But, they haven't _removed_ the classic variant. They (Coca-Cola) also have hundreds of brands that push for the sugar variant of those other sodas. That doesn't count the use of sucralose which has other issues, as does aspartame to a lesser degree.

If Coca-Cola tomorrow said ("our bad, we're sorry"), switched to a low/zero calorie sweetener blend (Stevia, Erythritol, Monk Fruit maybe a little aspartame) with approximate flavor and completely dropped sugar / HFCS then I'd believe they give a crap about tackling obesity.

As it stands, refined sugars are the single biggest problem with metabolic syndrome. Fructose is only metabolized by the liver into fats/triglycerides which are linked to damaging insulin receptors and elevating insulin resistance leading to higher insulin levels suppressing other hormones and leading to weight gain, followed by full on diabetes and related metabolic problems.

That doesn't mean you can't have some fruit in your diet... juice should never be more than half a cup a day (which was the old recommendation). And high- sugar tree fruits should be minimized in favor of berries. "Fruits and Vegetables" was grouped because a lot of what people consider veggies are botanically fruit. The sweet fruits should be kept to 2 servings a day tops.

Refined sugar shouldn't be consumed more than once every few weeks. It's horrible. All the negative effects on the body of alcohol without the negative reinforcement of a bad headache.

<comment><USER4> Refined sugar seriously isn't poison. Please, I mean that sincerely, stop obsessing over extreme views of diet and nutrition. It is likely not good for your mental health.

It is well established in mainstream nutrition the health effects of high calorie diets. It is also well established that refined sugar is not magically so much worse than any other way to eat a high calorie diet. Obviously, no one thinks drinking soda(or eating pizza etc) all day is good for you. And drinking soda is well agreed to be an easy way to significantly increase to caloric intake. The difference we tend to be able to measure is based upon behavioral nutrition. Not the actual direct consumption.

Seriously, I'm not sure why you, and others, feel compelled to yell to the hills about the secret poisons of sugar. I realize that it is difficult to see who is on the other side of these forums and it is possible that you may have a diagnosed mental health issue that causes you to obsess over something like this. If so I apologize. But if not, please think about why you are so adamant and upset about something like refined sugar.

Is anyone aware of any studies out there about people who obsess about nutrition information? Is it possible that people that get so wrapped up in this are suffering from similar issues in the brain that cause eating disorders?

I always find if fascinating that diet and nutrition discussions on HN seem to be a topic that brings out many very impassioned comments like the one I'm replying to. What is it about diet and nutrition specifically that causes it to inspire such extreme views and excitement?

<comment><USER5> First of all, your comment is extremely rude. Why do you discount people's opinion as mental health issues? Please consider revising your tone, not only on HN but elsewhere in life, if I may so bluntly say.

To cite one example why people are passionate about the topic: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_Association](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_Association)

> The difference we tend to be able to measure is based upon behavioral > nutrition. Not the actual direct consumption.

Can you provide a source?

<comment><USER4> We know that things like refined sugar cause dopamine spikes that cause people to crave them and consume more. We also know that sugary drinks like soda allow people to consume a large amount of calories quickly. Those are well established and studied behaviors.

What we also know, is that consuming refined sugar as opposed to any other source of calories is not very different outside of lack of nutrition etc. This is long established fact in both human and animal studies for many decades. Which means if there is a difference, it is likely not very pronounced.

To willfully ignore hard scientific fact to a point where a person needs to adamantly declare that sugar is akin to alcohol in the damage it does to the body, is a sign of something out of the norm in a person.

The second half of my comment was to see if there were studies about people who have this behavior as I find it interesting. This is one of the topics on HN which seem to get comments with extreme views and I was simply asking if people had research on this type of obsession.

What is it specifically about diet and nutrition that causes such a visceral, irrational, reaction out of a small subset of people? I am genuinely curious.

<comment><USER3> [https://www.dietdoctor.com/fructose-fatty-liver-sugar- toxin](https://www.dietdoctor.com/fructose-fatty-liver-sugar-toxin)

[https://www.webmd.com/cholesterol- management/diabetes](https://www.webmd.com/cholesterol-management/diabetes)

Note: refined sugars are about half fructose. The liver is the only organ that can metabolize it... With refined sugars your getting a significant multiplier of what you would in nature. This turns into triglycerides which is heavily correlated to insulin resistance and diabetes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good alternative to any soft drink --

Homemade ginger paste + sparkling water + honey + turmeric (optional) + lemon + a little bit of salt

Your taste buds will get a kick in the same way as any other soft drink. And of course it is healthy!

<comment><USER7> > And of course it is healthy!

Can you say that? I mean, yeah, it's healthier than refined sugar, but you're still drinking carbonated sugar water, regardless if it's a better sugar.

<comment><USER6> I meant to say -- healthier than soft drinks.

<comment><USER8> That is a soft drink. You mean "commercially available [carbonated] soft drinks". I doubt you can really make that claim without a thorough analysis; there's a pretty big range of soft drinks available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Unsweetened tea is a popular soft drink in Japan, anyway my point is there are a lot of the same brands in China except in China they are very sweet

</comment><comment><USER7> "exercise is medicine" <\- the only thing I really agree with Coca Cola about.

Fun thing they don't mention about Cola beverages - they can lead to chronic kidney disease, even the sugar free kind.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3433753/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3433753/)

<comment><USER10> I like soft drinks as sources of carbs. I'm active, so I really need them. It's how you use them that's an issue, rather than intrinsically being bad. (Outside of the cola issue. Thanks for the pointer.)

<comment><USER7> The cola issue broke my heart - I used to love coke zero. And you're absolutely right, in moderation literally anything is within the bounds of health. If you need sugar fast, that'll do the trick!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was wondering why everyone is obsessed with gym and running those days, and this article provides a good answer.

</comment><comment><USER12> They still have BPA resin lining their cans, which it turns out may be the actual cause of diabetes.

[https://medium.com/@InfinoMe/diabetes-time-to-resort-to- plas...](https://medium.com/@InfinoMe/diabetes-time-to-resort-to-plastic- measures-500cdf1fe528)

<comment><USER7> Isn't that kind of saying that the shot man died of lead poisoning? Like, I get that BPA's can possibly cause diabetes, but so can liquid sugar.

Also, this analysis seems to indicate there's no link: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4058392/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4058392/)

<comment><USER12> There's a number of papers out there that have been strongly influenced by the chemical industry. They actually hired some of the same lawyers that defended big tabacco, and have been caught editing Wikipedia articles

Most of us academics are in quite agreement over it's harm, and with the new genetic data it's even more convincing.

<comment><USER7> > Most of us academics are in quite agreement over it's harm

Could you provide context for your academic credentials? And as I pointed out before, what damage are we talking about when compared to the literal can of sugar water the BPA riddled can is holding?

<comment><USER13> its harm.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but eating meat is harmful to the colon. Booze is harmful to the liver. We need a scale.

Also, do we not see these same results in the different consumption methods? Ie, cans vs bottles vs glass bottles vs tap?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Innovations in UI Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.fernstrategy.com/2011/03/02/innovations-in-ui-design/ <comment><USER2> It can be innovative, but it also can be nightmare, if your application must support all interfaces. I believe abstraction layer in OS or language ease a bit, but won't fix that.

Nevertheless, I'm positive to that trend, actually cannot wait to see what innovative idea (and games on these) will come in near two years (and if I can bring anything).

</comment><comment><USER3> Shouldn't this article be more accurately titled as: Innovations in Human Interface Devices? It doesn't seem particularly relevant to UI design, other than that they affect UI design.</comment>


Show HN: TimeTurtle, a time tracking app with a focus on interactivity (beta) - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I've been working on a time tracker - an app of which there are many already, so I've tried to distinguish it by putting in my experience/love with viz and UX to create a very interactive workflow, which I believe helps get a better overview.
It's in beta now, feedback is much appreciated (especially if you're using tools like this). The first 200 users get a lifelong free account.
https://timeturtle.app
Cheers,
  Almar <comment><USER2> I dont get it clearly ..

> Special offer: during the beta period, the first 200 users get a lifelong > free account!

so it will be free only during beta period or free forever ?</comment>


Ask HN: Free alternative to Campfire? - <AUTHOR>

Is there one? <comment><USER2> there's a free version of campfire:

<https://signup.37signals.com/campfire/free/>

4 chatters, 10 MB storage, no conference call minutes

</comment><comment><USER3> IRC or Jabber MUCs

</comment><comment><USER4> IRC. I honestly don't see why you'd pay for campfire when you can accomplish the same thing with IRC and/or some kind of VoIP system (SIP, Skype, Ventrilo, Teamspeek, etc).

</comment><comment><USER5> irc?

</comment><comment><USER6> Irc and g docs here.

Even though I can't say how secure g is these days.</comment>