Firefox download on SourceForge - <AUTHOR> http://sourceforge.net/projects/firefox.mirror/ <comment><USER3> A notable difference here (as opposed to other open source projects that have received the same treatment on SourceForge) is that Mozilla owns the "Firefox" trademark, and has specific policies governing its use and the distribution of software that uses its name or branding:

[https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/foundation/trademarks/policy/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/foundation/trademarks/policy/)

It specifically precludes distributing modified versions of the software or installer and still calling it "Firefox" (with which they seem to be complying for the moment), and also specifies the manner in which the name and branding are to be used in website copy, like putting a "TM" symbol after the first mention (with which SF seems not to be complying at the moment). In other words: Mozilla has power here and could force them to take it down if they wanted. And they should, in my view, if for no other reason than because SF have been jerks about this whole thing and this is finally a situation where someone can actually do something about it.

<comment><USER4> [http://slashdotmedia.com/terms-of-use/](http://slashdotmedia.com/terms-of- use/)

"By sending or transmitting to us Content, or by posting such Content to any area of the Sites, you grant us and our designees a worldwide, non-exclusive, sub-licensable (through multiple tiers), assignable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to link to, reproduce, distribute (through multiple tiers), adapt, create derivative works of, publicly perform, publicly display, digitally perform or otherwise use such Content in any media now known or hereafter developed. You hereby grant the Company permission to display your logo, trademarks and company name on the Sites and in press and other public releases or filings. Further, by submitting Content to the Company, you acknowledge that you have the authority to grant such rights to the Company. PLEASE NOTE THAT YOU RETAIN OWNERSHIP OF ANY COPYRIGHTS, TRADEMARKS AND SERVICE MARKS IN ANY CONTENT YOU SUBMIT."

<comment><USER3> Mozilla didn't submit it. SF took it upon themselves to republish Mozilla's content and marks. Mozilla isn't bound by these terms, and SF _is_ bound by whatever terms Mozilla attaches to the use of its marks, since it owns them.

<comment><USER4> >Mozilla didn't submit it.

I admit I missed that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Slightly unrelated, I clicked the link and saw this: [http://i.imgur.com/OpbdFfs.png](http://i.imgur.com/OpbdFfs.png)

Apparently this is done by the uBlock Origin's own "uBlock Filters"[1][2] with this reason:

        # http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/anatomy-of-sourceforge-gimp-controversy
        # https://blog.l0cal.com/2015/06/02/what-happened-to-sourceforge/
        # Using `other` will cause the whole site to be blocked through strict blocking,
        # yet the site will render properly if a user still decide to go ahead.
        ||sourceforge.net^$other

I'm a little bit unsure whether this is a good thing or not. But personally, given SourceForge's recent behavior, I'm kinda happy that uBlock Origin did this (as SourceForge have clearly stepped into the ranks of malware-spreading sites).

[1]: [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/ed130afc6f3a70e2c2a68...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/ed130afc6f3a70e2c2a68fb1e716cc1300adeabd/assets/ublock/filters.txt#L101-105)

[2]: [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/commit/c4e82357efaf18bac3f...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/commit/c4e82357efaf18bac3f04900efb304f5a092ffe0)

<comment><USER6> Did you happen to turn on strict blocking behavior? I'm using ubo in Firefox with strict blocking off, and I'm not having any issues.

EDIT: Just tested strict blocking on my install and nothing prevents the link from displaying. I wonder what is different in my version.

<comment><USER7> I went into the extension's settings and forced a filter update. That did it. It's such a recent addition, that it probably hasn't had time to auto update itself yet. I actually just installed it too, which means that it is _not_ using the latest filters on a first install.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Argh, we really need to get Octave-Forge off SF. Octave itself is hosted on GNU servers, but all of the Octave-Forge add-on packages are in SF.

The thing is, there isn't really anything that easy to move to. No, no github, because we don't like git. We have a bunch of Mercurial repos. We could try moving them to bitbucket, but this also leaves the question of what to to do with our webpage hosting, which is currently on SF.

And no matter what we decide doing, it's all a bunch of work that nobody really wants to do.

At least when SF first approached us with their "revenue sharing" bullshit we refused. I think this means our downloads are clean so far.

<comment><USER9> > No, no github, because we don't like git. We have a bunch of Mercurial > repos.

Any particular reason?

> We could try moving them to bitbucket, but this also leaves the question of > what to to do with our webpage hosting, which is currently on SF.

You could move your repositories to bitbucket but mirror the single repository for your webpage content to GitHub to use their hosting. (And if that repository is currently Mercurial, see git-cinnabar by Mike Hommey: [https://github.com/glandium/git-cinnabar/](https://github.com/glandium/git- cinnabar/) )

Or, it looks like bitbucket may have a similar feature: [http://pages.bitbucket.org/](http://pages.bitbucket.org/)

<comment><USER8> > Any particular reason?

Lots of reasons. I'd rather not go into an argument about it. It's not something that can be fixed: git is a no-go for us.

> but mirror the single repository for your webpage content to GitHub to use > their hosting.

I'd rather break free, not change masters.

<comment><USER9> > Lots of reasons. I'd rather not go into an argument about it. It's not > something that can be fixed: git is a no-go for us.

I'm not interested in getting into an argument, but I'm genuinely curious what reasons remain for people preferring mercurial. At the moment, apart from "got used to the UI", the main one I know of is more "native" Windows support (without needing a Cygwin-like environment to work in). I don't know if that's an issue for your project.

> I'd rather break free, not change masters.

Fair enough. In terms of repository hosting, moving to Savannah seems like the obvious choice there then. And assuming you have people available to do the work, you could always move to gnu.org or nongnu.org, depending on your tastes and the nature of the software your directory links to.

<comment><USER8> > I'm genuinely curious what reasons remain for people preferring mercurial

Top-level answers here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9467096](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9467096)

> moving to Savannah seems like the obvious choice there then.

The only issue is that Savannah is static hosting. We have a bit of PHP that generates one page. We might be able to replace that with Jekyll, though.

<comment><USER9> > The only issue is that Savannah is static hosting. We have a bit of PHP that > generates one page. We might be able to replace that with Jekyll, though.

Does it do so from dynamic server-side data, or could you run it on each new commit and serve the result as a static page?

<comment><USER8> Yeah, we can probably do some sort of commit hook. It's not an impossible problem, just annoying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> On the linked page:

>Hey, this isn't a SourceForge project! Check out the SourceForge Open Source Mirror Directory for more information.

which links to: [http://sourceforge.net/mirror/](http://sourceforge.net/mirror/)

>The Open Source Mirror Directory is an extension to our existing software directory, where we'll be mirroring projects that are not hosted on SourceForge, and SourceForge projects that have been abandoned.

<comment><USER11> Exactly this, and it is why I think they really are trying to be download.com. By 'mirroring' anything and everything and some SEO magic (they have a lot of residual link authority with the big G) they get themselves to the top of the list of links where to get package <x>.

Perhaps its time for Google to "adjust" their host rank?

<comment><USER12> Especially when chrome considers sf downloads as hazardous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is quite sad to see this happen to Sourceforge. IIRC Sourceforge was bought for $20M or so. I wonder how GitHub plans to repay the $100M (+ interest) VC 'loan' and generate profit without 'whoring out' to google/other advertisers.

<comment><USER14> GitHub has paid plans for private repositories and it can add up to a fair bit of MRR for enterprise organizations. [https://github.com/pricing](https://github.com/pricing)

They also make money off of their job board ($450 a listing) and could probably monetize a lot more here without angering too many users. [https://jobs.github.com/](https://jobs.github.com/)

<comment><USER13> Yes, Hopefully it will add up to $100M+. Atleast one company must survive!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "229 downloads this week." "Last updated 2/6/2015"

Now, if you click the 'read more' link, you'll find that the Firefox download available on sourceforge was actually last updated 10th June 2014. 53 weeks ago. 10 major version numbers ago.

:(

<comment><USER16> Are you sure? It says version 38.0.5, which is the same as what I'm running right now.

<comment><USER17> I think there's a difference between "latest version" and "latest release". If an admin forgets to update the release pointer, I guess it's possible for that to get stale. Regardless, SF should absolutely not hijack any projects, let alone ones that have pushed new binaries in the last few months (even if they're not releases).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> FYI, to any/all people saying "They aren't bundling malware with this" you are forgetting a VERY important word: YET.

Their past indicates they will and what they have done so far fits the pattern nearly perfectly. I'd put money down that malware will be in this by the end of the year if not sooner.

<comment><USER19> And, really, how do we know they are not? Unless we're checking the hash of the download with that provided on Firefox's on website, who even knows what we are installing?

From a company with a history of stuffing adware down our throats.

Edit:

      % md5 firefox-*
      MD5 (firefox-genuine.dmg) = 71c3d44cd5a612489a70e0f2ef825ba9
      MD5 (firefox-sourceforge.dmg) = 71c3d44cd5a612489a70e0f2ef825ba9

So they are the same binary. All we need to do is create a Chrome extension that downloads the binary from both places and checks the hash then tells you if it's safe to download the SF one. Simple!

Note that it took 8 times as long to download the binary from Sourceforge compared to Firefox's own site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> They also seem to have ownership over the openvz, MySQL, and PostgreSQL projects, too.[1] (You have to click "Show More +" to see the full list.)

[1] - [http://sourceforge.net/u/sf- editor/profile/](http://sourceforge.net/u/sf-editor/profile/)

<comment><USER21> see also [http://sourceforge.net/u/sf- editor1/profile/](http://sourceforge.net/u/sf-editor1/profile/) this SF profile took over like a hundred high profile open source projects on SF (incl. Apache HTTP Server, Apache Hadoop, OpenOffice, Audacity, Google Closure Compiler, Epiphany, Evolution, Fedora, Fritzing, Gimp, HeidiSQL, Joomla, Lua for Windows, MySQL, PostgreSQL, VLC media player, VirtualBox, ... and many more)

Just yesterday VLC was on HN about moving away from SF "The story between VLC and Sourceforge": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9714250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9714250)

The mirrors (HEAnet & co) should refuse to add any new binaries from Sourceforge and we need a community driven website that coordinates open source download binary mirrors (based on what SF uses at the moment), and Archive.org/ArchiveTeam/etc should backup all SVN/CVS/etc repositories on Sorceforge, and Google then should remove them from their index or flag them as adware/scam.

<comment><USER20> Wow, this is a lot worse than I initially thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> uBlock Origin appears to protect browser navigation to all sourceforge.net links now.

</comment><comment><USER16> So, this is Sourceforge mirroring a popular open source project that's hosted elsewhere in order to garner more traffic? Is that what's going on here?

<comment><USER23> Yeah. I'm okay with it because it says right there,

        Hey, this isn't a SourceForge project! Check out the
        SourceForge Open Source Mirror Directory for more
        information.

plus the url also clearly says ".mirror", so they're not pretending to be the authoritative page on the product. It's no more creepy than Tucows or C-Net at this point. Just a regular spam laden download site.

<comment><USER9> Except for the part where they add malware to the download. Mozilla has gone after various shady sites distributing "Firefox" with malware, and I hope they do so in this case too.

<comment><USER24> They don't add malware to the download, geez...

<comment><USER25> They have in the past. And, currently, they bundle additional, unrequested software with at least some of their downloads.

<comment><USER24> No, it wasn't _malware_ , that's software intended to damage or disable a computer. SourceForge isn't trying to hurt anyone, please stop pretending like they are.

<comment><USER25> There are plenty of reports of Sourceforge downloads, in the past, containing malware. I'm not saying they haven't removed those, or claiming - for a second - that they intentionally distributed them. Nor am I claiming first-hand evidence of such.

However, what's clear right now is that if you download an installer from Sourceforge, it could install software that is totally unrelated, that you didn't request. Yes, they might disclose that it's going to happen and give you the option not to install the unwanted software, but it's still clearly their intent that some people end up with unrequested software on their machines. That's pretty questionable behaviour in my book.

<comment><USER9> > I'm not saying they haven't removed those, or claiming - for a second - <USER2> > they intentionally distributed them.

They've put out press releases explicitly admitting to such intent: that they hijacked "inactive" projects (which includes projects who intentionally left), and that they bundled "offers" (malware) with them.

And if you think there's a useful distinction between malware and what they're distributing, note that one of the bits of software they "offer" to install captures all network traffic and routes it via a third-party service without making that clear to the user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Also see [http://sourceforge.net/mirror/](http://sourceforge.net/mirror/) I guess. Weird behaviour.

</comment><comment><USER27> Are they including any "offers" with the installer?

</comment><comment><USER28> Was it _just_ hijacked, or are we only now noticing? Also, is it a strict binary mirror, or have they started to bundle it with crapware?

Considering the incidents involving Sourceforge in the last few weeks, I would be rather surprised if they just did this, considering how hilariously tone- deaf it would look.

</comment><comment><USER29> The phrase "circling the drain" comes to mind. Last ditch attempt at pretending to be relevant by gaming the search industry.

</comment><comment><USER30> Looks like it's there since 2011-11-28.

</comment><comment><USER31> > uBlock₀ has prevented the following page from loading: > > [http://sourceforge.net/projects/firefox.mirror/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/firefox.mirror/)

I can't honestly say I don't agree with it's behaviour

</comment><comment><USER32> You'd think with all the bad press lately that they would lay a little low.

</comment><comment><USER33> A bug has been filed at Mozilla for countering this:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1174745](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1174745)

</comment><comment><USER34> > Description > The first thing you'll notice in Firefox is

all the malware we try and install without you noticing

</comment><comment><USER35> Why am I not surprised that the owner of Sourceforge, DHI Group Inc., is a recruitment firm...

</comment><comment><USER36> "Millions of people use SourceForge every day to search for Open Source software"

</comment><comment><USER37> uBlock Origin blocked this link for me. So thanks, uBlock.

</comment><comment><USER38> I have this weird feeling that there has been some bad force working up against Firefox ever since they declared their all out war against user tracking (was anti ad-bearers).

I could be wrong but there are signs and absurd behavior like umpteen number of resignations at the top, Firefox Apps been published with strange love from private players like telefonica/others etc.

Isn't there a smell somewhere here?

<comment><USER39> Nothing as interesting as that. Mozilla has had a "let's try and be friends" approach with the ad industry for a few years (see 3rd party cookies) but the recent introductions like pocket and Hello are simply features some group in management decided were needed. The open governance approach means our source of income (various search referrals) is all we'd need to stay afloat for quite a while. Having said that it's a smart play to get into the mobile OS game and continue on the browser-as-a-platform path.

The moment anyone decides to add bundleware to the official release would be a golden age for tech recruiters since most of the engineering staff would be already packed.

Source: Mozillian

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> sudo cat "127.0.0.1 sourceforge.net" >> /etc/hosts

<comment><USER41> I don't think this will do what you think it will do. First, you'd want to echo, not cat, and second, the sudo won't affect the redirection, which is done by the shell.

<comment><USER42> I use "tee" for these scenarios.

echo "127.0.0.1 sourceforge.net" |sudo tee -a /etc/hosts</comment></comment></comment>


Against the Smart City (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://urbanomnibus.net/2013/10/against-the-smart-city/ <comment><AUTHOR> And more from Michael Batty* along the same lines: [http://www.spatialcomplexity.info/archives/2138](http://www.spatialcomplexity.info/archives/2138)

*Michael Batty: urban planner, geographer who has written extensively on computational urban modelling.</comment>


18 Spectacularly Wrong Prophecies from the First Earth Day - <AUTHOR> https://fee.org/articles/18-spectacularly-wrong-prophecies-from-the-first-earth-day/ <comment><USER2> This looks like the sort of cherry-picking designed to give a false impression of the general views by picking extreme positions or attributing vague statements as prophecies.

For example, 6 of the 18 quotes are from Paul Ehrlich, 3 from Kenneth Watt, and 2 from Barry Commoner. I can interpret that to mean that so few people made "spectacularly wrong prophecies" that the author of the list had to hit the same sources multiple times. (I use the generic "author of the list" because many sites, mostly anti-environmental movement, seem to repeat this same set of failed predictions, and I didn't track down the original source.)

I picked #9 arbitrarily. It starts "In January 1970, Life reported". That quote is from [https://books.google.com/books?id=bFAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA3&dq=In+...](https://books.google.com/books?id=bFAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA3&dq=In+a+decade,+urban+dwellers+will+have+to+wear+gas+masks+to+survive+air+pollution&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=In%20a%20decade%2C%20urban%20dwellers%20will%20have%20to%20wear%20gas%20masks%20to%20survive%20air%20pollution&f=false) . It's in an editor's note, concerning the views of one of Life's reporters, Pekkanan, who said he was told that at a scientific meeting. This is hardly a "report" any any meaningful sense.

In context, Pekkanan describes obviously worsening pollution in his lifetime. 1970 was only 4 years after smog in New York City killed at least 169 people. As a result of the environment movement of the time, the US passed environmental protection laws, including mandatory catalytic converters. Had we not done so, well, look to Beijing for a modern example of a city where people _do_ sometimes walk around with face masks because of pollution.

I think it's unfair to say it was a "wrong prophecy" when things could and did change to avoid that from happening.

Quote #3 isn't a failed prophesy:

> The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, > "Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance > existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible > extinction."

There's no timeline there. I also think it's true. As a trivial example, we greatly reduced CFC emissions because the loss of the ozone layer would lead to "intolerable deterioration."

Did you notice that #14 has two failed predictions? Outside perhaps of a couple of US states, who uses full service gas and says 'Fill 'er up, buddy'?

I also observe that the title is "from the first Earth Day", but the quotes are pulled from around the time of the first Earth day. This gives many more opportunities to cherry pick.</comment>


Tips for selling to small business? - <AUTHOR>

I'm researching the market for a web based product whose target market is small, local and public facing businesses, such as restaurants, bars, retail shops, dry cleaners and the like.<p>Does anyone have any experience selling to customers like this? In particular, do you have any advice as far as:<p>* pricing (ie. price points, annual, monthly, etc)<p>* sales tactics and strategies<p>* do promotions like free trials work or backfire?<p>* what sort of gotchas or issues might I run into? <comment><USER2> Don't assume any technological knowledge at all, most small business owners I've dealt with know just enough to run their businesses. As such they don't like switching even when their is a solution that could save them a fortune. The key is to automate as much as possible.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's still B2B sales.

To sell to small, local and public facing businesses, it would help if your salesforce can talk intelligently about the business's actual market and the impacts your product will have on the specific services they offer.

To treat it like B2C is a mistake. Or to put it another way, small businesses don't go down to the ATT store and order their cell phone plans one at a time.

I will add that you don't really have a well defined market segment when it includes both restaurants and dry cleaners.

<comment><AUTHOR> Regarding your final point, I agree. I plan on marketing to a specific segment (at least at one time.) At this point I've just been asking different business owners for feedback. The product is a turn-key (no config, no maintenance) customer relationship product with measurable marketing metrics. I'll have a demo available in a week.

Restaurants are actually my ideal customers, and were my original use case, but I have the impression that they are a difficult sell so I'm keeping my eyes open.

I'm really trying to imagine my way through the sales process now to help inform the product design.

<comment><USER3> Here's the issue I see.

A small business like a restaurant best manages relationships face to face not using a computer.

The sorts of targets you are talking about live and breath personal service - nobody wants their bartender entering contact data instead of pouring their beer.

If you walk in and they take care of you, then you come back. If the waitress shares her a bad mood with you then maybe you don't. When you go into your favorite local restaurant and are greeted by name as you walk in the door, that's the mark of a good customer relationship and what really matters for small local businesses. You can't get there with email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Low cost - if possible, based on a percentage of the revenue that your product will create. This way, it will not look like an aditional cost.

Small business tend to think that they are so small to get any software or product, you should work to change this concept.

Be prepared to overdues.

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's a book I recommend (cheap at $5):

[http://www.amazon.com/Outfoxing-Small-Business-Owner- Relatio...](http://www.amazon.com/Outfoxing-Small-Business-Owner- Relationship/dp/B000EHTAJQ/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks very interesting

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have experience with this (depending on your product). Drop me a line and I'll see if I can provide you with some help relevant to what you're selling. email is in profile.</comment>


Here's the Strategy Elite Athletes Follow to Perform at the Highest Level - <AUTHOR> https://journal.thriveglobal.com/heres-the-strategy-elite-athletes-follow-to-perform-at-the-highest-level-5300e1519e30 <comment><USER2> This past summer I read the book "The ONE Thing." If this article resonates with you that book is worth looking into.</comment>


The Soylent Revolution Will Not Be Pleasurable - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/technology/personaltech/the-soylent-revolution-will-not-be-pleasurable.html?_r=0&referrer=

<comment><USER2> Soylent - Juice Fasting re-invented, but now with branding.</comment>


Get Prismatic, content discovery using Machine Learning from Bradford Cross - <AUTHOR> http://getprismatic.com/

<comment><USER2> Personalized news is exploding right now. This looks like a pretty strong contender.</comment>


Best JavaScript books - <AUTHOR> http://bestjavascriptbooks.com

<comment><AUTHOR> A selection of JavaScript learning resources most recommended on StackOverflow and other influential developers.</comment>


Why old-school PostgreSQL is so hip again - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoworld.com/article/3240064/sql/why-old-school-postgresql-is-so-hip-again.html <comment><USER2> Is Postgres really perceived as "Old-School?" I mean it's at least as modern and hip as MySQL these days.

<comment><USER3> It came out earlier than last week. Definitely "old-school" for some.

<comment><USER4> Three JavaScript frameworks and a dozen political scandals ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The biggest gripe I've had with Postgres (and I mention this elsewhere) is the lack of a decent GUI/IDE.

But as Datagrip matures, the landscape can only get better. Datagrip is not free, but I'm willing to pay for something that works better than pgAdmin.

There are some exciting things happening in the Postgres space. Outside of Citus for scaling out, TimescaleDB has a plugin that makes Postgres a strong contender in the time-series database space. Temporal joins have always been a problem with NoSQL time-series databases; otoh joins are what SQL databases have traditionally been optimized for. It'll be exciting to have a large-scale datastore where you can easily combine and recombine different time-series in a single query.

<comment><USER6> PGadmin and DBeaver are nice, just in case you didn't tried them.

<comment><USER7> Pgadmin went downhill, the new version is borderline unusable.

<comment><USER8> Yep. I'm still using pgadmin 3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Postgres fills a niche that has a lot going for it. It's standard SQL with transactions so it's easy to code against compared to Nosql like Cassandra. There are lots of powerful extensions like JSON and full text search. And you can scale it pretty far.

<comment><USER10> Postgres is likely suitable for 90% (or more) of the crap "engineers" currently fall all over themselves to implement Kafka, Spark, and whatever other bizzword laden "big data" or "machine learning" resume driven development for.

It's not a niche.

<comment><USER11> I'm still trying to find an engineer that can explain to me why they use Redis for job queuing over Postgres.

Redis for HTML caching: Cool.

Redis for queueing: Are you _really_ sure you need the performance gain? Really? You can do 10k writes per second with Postgres (100k per second with COPY). If you need more than that fine, but for 99% of web apps out there it's just one more moving piece that probably doesn't get included in your backups.

<comment><USER12> I was looking at that choice for my latest project and the gem recommended (resque?) only using Redis for the job queuing at the benefit of much higher performance over something like delayed_jobs using postgresql in jobs. It didn't seem worth it as job queueing was not the main feature of the server. I suppose if one were doing some sort of real time feature where you had to queue things off a Rails API response thread it would make sense but wasn't doing that for now. But just judging by the number of downloads, the Redis based job queue is possibly more popular for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is it possible that a rise in geospatial applications is partly a driver of Postgres's rise in popularity? PostGIS seems to be the best option for storing geospatial data in an RDBMS (open source or otherwise).

<comment><USER14> Anecdotal, but PostGIS is _the_ reason I started using Postgres several years ago in some of my own projects, which later came in handy at different jobs. At one place, we standardized on Postgres partly because of PostGIS.

I think Django has had some influence too, since they've always recommended Postgres.

<comment><USER15> I selected PostgreSQL for a geo project recently. Still haven't got my head around tuning, but apart from that I've found it great to use. I use psycopg2 to connect from Python. No nasty surprises in use, and found that all my pidgin SQL translated easily. Also worth knowing that ogr2ogr supports PostgreSQL and is an awesome tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wish WordPress would support it. It would make it easier for me to suggest PostgreSQL for people with simple web hosting needs.

</comment><comment><USER17> Looking back, I never understood why it didn't win the database wars in the 90's against MySQL (in the famous LAMP stack)? Was it that it was harder to administrate?

<comment><USER18> Based on the other replies about MySQL being simpler and faster, it makes me wonder again why SQLite didn't win.

<comment><USER19> SQLite was late to the party. The first code for SQLite was laid down in 2000, years after MySQL was already well-established in the LAMP stack.

Also, SQLite is embedded, not client/server. That means that the application needs to run on the same machine that holds the data. And because there is no server to coordinate access, concurrency is necessarily limited.

On the other hand, SQLite arrived just in time to get picked by smart phones, and is consequently the most-deployed database software in the world. There are far more instances of SQLite running today than there are MySQL instances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not everyone jumped on the NoSQL bandwagon. Software development is a horrible gaping maw of fad-driven, ill-thought-out crap.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, what a disappointment.

In the early days of NoSql, a lot of dev were still shoehorning graphs, objects, or giant look up tables into SQL database, and yes, it turns out that there are some wonderful databases to store and query this sort of data that don't rely on a relational model.

And then... yep, a bunch of magpies decided that SQL shouldn't ever be used. It's important to point out that plenty of people who pioneered and promoted graph databases, object databases, and so forth didn't go down this rabbit hole. When the data was relational, plenty of these folks were all for relational databases.

But I don't think you can claim the "NoSQL => never use SQL => SQL is obsolete" crowed was just a few outliers. This opinion infected a lot of software development organizations, and did plenty of harm.

I love SQL, but let's not get too enthusiastic about sending the pendulum swinging back the other direction, even if tempting to watch it knock a few of the overly zealous NoSql types off their perches. Trust me, I still feel a flash of anger inside when I think of some of the arguments I had to go through when I advocated for relational SQL databases. But I don't want to be that guy myself - plenty of non-sql data bases are really well conceived and designed, and are ideal for the problems they address.

<comment><USER22> I would lay some of this at the feet of the fad for object-relational mapping, too.

Trying to deal with object/relational impedance by sticking an object-oriented API in front of the database, and then using that to shoehorn OO ways of organizing and accessing data into an RDBMS, is a great way to place an upper bound on what kind of performance you can get out of the database. It also makes (what should be) routine schema migrations much more painful than they need to be. I think that that can explain a lot of the perceived success people were seeing with many document stores.

<comment><USER21> That's a really good point. I have, certainly in Rails projects[1], seen the strangest databases. They are SQL databases that are useless outside the rails application. You actually can't query them in a relational sense, you have to go through the app and its methods of querying, transforming, and merging data, before you understand what it means.

In short, the developers more or less used the ORM to serialize and object and write it out to disk. The persistent data basically makes no sense on its own, it has to repopulate the objects before it can be accessed in any meaningful way. There's little doubt that the devs behind these project had very little understanding of what an RDMBS actually _is_.

And if you don't, then I suppose NoSql makes sense, because your data is _never_ relational - not because it the relational model wouldn't be helpful, but because the developer can't see the relational model in the data stored, and is incapable of structuring it this way.

I remember this idea (paraphrasing)[2] - the data will outlast the application, and the application will most likely outlast the developer.

To me, this led to a design principle - the database should always be useful outside the context of the application. If you want information about the data you're storing, the DB should be a very, very useful place to get it. I'm not ruling out the value of the app! There are lots of ops you'd want to do as a combination of code and data, lots of UI, plenty of things. But if your data is useless and nonsensical unless your app transforms it, that is _probably_ a sign of a big mistake[3]

[1] I love rails, and I like ORMs. They save me so much typing compared to the old days of JDBC. It turns out it's not all that hard to create a well organized relational database through generators, and if you prefer to design the DB separately, it's not hard to map models to db tables. It really only gets out of control when people are essentially designing an RDBMS through generators and an ORM, but have no idea what idea what it all means on the backend.

[2][https://blog.jooq.org/2014/01/02/why-your-data-will- outlast-...](https://blog.jooq.org/2014/01/02/why-your-data-will-outlast-your- sexy-new-technology/)

[3] _probably_

<comment><USER23> > That's a really good point. I have, certainly in Rails projects, seen the > strangest databases. They are SQL databases that are useless outside the > rails application. You actually can't query them in a relational sense, you > have to go through the app and its methods of querying, transforming, and > merging data, before you understand what it means.

When I converted our application to Rails, I had a database that was pretty home-grown, as we were using a language/framework where you tended to write raw SQL. While I was able to tweak the model files to work with our schema, in most places I found it too challenging to construct ActiveRecord queries, and ended up writing a lot of raw SQL (or rather, copying it from previous iteration). Initially I thought I was doing it wrong because it wasn't Railsie enough, but realized that our database is our asset, and Rails is secondary. We do a lot of ad-hoc querying and report writing, so I definitely think database-first is the way to go in our use case.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does anybody else like the syntax of Algol 60? - <AUTHOR> I was reading the syntax of Algol 60, and I personally think that the syntax is very readable and easy to understand, and I am surprised that it isn't used as a template for new imperative programming languages in the same way the syntax of C is.<p>It also helps that most textbooks, when they need to describe an algorithm, use an Algol 60 kind of syntax as opposed to a C kind of syntax. <comment><USER2> Algol, and its formal EBNF description, is definitely the easiest language I have ever worked with. Burroughs, now Unisys, had an immensely powerful combination of true stack based hardware, a compact OS that supported parallel running across systems as well as programs, and various tailored flavours of Algol for comms, database and other use. A great development environment, decades ahead of its time. Alas C and Unix were cheaper and Burroughs never really understood that there was a market other than big tin users.

But yes, even now when I write Ruby or Python or Go, I miss the clarity of Algol.

</comment><comment><USER3> Algol 60 lives on via Lisp.

If you want to use it, Algol 60 an option with Dr. Racket: <http://docs.racket-lang.org/algol60/>

If you can tolerate a later version, there's Algol 68 Genie: <http://jmvdveer.home.xs4all.nl/algol.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't aware of Dr. Racket supporting it. Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> s/like/know/

Algol perhaps had the disadvantage of being far more popular among academics than among actual programmers. Perhaps for that reason Algol became the lingua franca of pseudocode, while C became the lingua franca of actual code.

(I don't know if this is fair, but I've always had the impression that Algol was a bit like Ada in its time: respected by those who used it, but a bit too kitchen-sink to be popular among implementors.)

<comment><USER5> Algol was the first programming language I learned in college. I also used Ada professionally for years. I believe that Ada is not at all like Algol, even though Ada was nominally based on the Algol family of languages (including Pascal). I think of Ada as a monster of a language, more like PL/I than Algol, and very difficult to learn in its entirety. Algol is an elegant language, and I think you can learn enough of it to make use of its power in a fraction of the time you'd spend getting proficient with Ada.

<comment><USER4> To be clear, I was talking more about how it was _perceived_ at the time, not about how it actually was. (And of course, what was kitchen-sink-worthy in 1960 would be seen as ultracompact today.) But in any case, I bow to someone with actual experience.</comment></comment></comment>


Anotherfox - a tabless browser UI design - <AUTHOR> http://zen.lk/2013/12/01/anotherfox-a-tabless-browser-ui-design/

<comment><USER2> Font rendering seems a bit off on the site, and font choice seems off in the design.

Here's how it looks on a rather vanilla Windows 7 with Chrome: [http://i.imgur.com/hq8wZzY.png](http://i.imgur.com/hq8wZzY.png)</comment>


Hands-on with Windows 8: it's good stuff on the PC, too - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/09/hands-on-with-windows-8-a-tablet-operating-system-for-the-pc-age.ars

<comment><USER2> What looks like a marginal jump from windows 7 UX to windows 8 UX, might be a little too much of a change for XP and older users. It will be interesting to see if this gets tweaked in the future releases.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally. The shift for XP users is really really big.

<comment><USER3> XP is a decade old. Those users are going to have to buck up. Besides, it's not like they could switch to anything else that would be less jarring than Windows 8.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Killing Google Play Music for YouTube Music in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/05/12/google-play-music-shut-down-how-transfer-tunes-youtube-music/3112297001/ <comment><USER2> Announced just short of 2 years ago.

[https://www.musicpressasia.com/2018/05/22/youtube-music- will...](https://www.musicpressasia.com/2018/05/22/youtube-music-will-replace- google-play-music/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not what they said at the time.

[https://youtube.googleblog.com/2018/05/youtube-music- starts-...](https://youtube.googleblog.com/2018/05/youtube-music-starts- rolling-out-today.html)

> To the Google Play Music users out there, nothing will change - you'll still > be able to access and add to all of your purchased music, uploads and > playlists in Google Play Music just like always. For additional information > on what we announced last week, be sure to check out our blog.</comment></comment>


Our office had awful music. So I built this. Thoughts? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mediablazegroup.com/projectveto/ <comment><USER2> I will never again work in an office with music if I can help it. First was the elevator music in a cube farm job, then the dubstep and rap in a small, young office.

The author writes, " because (in my opinion) there's nothing worse than being forced to listen to Metallica when trying to do, well, pretty much anything."

For me, Metallica is nearly optimal. I understand the other perspective, which is why I don't support metallica being played to a whole office. I expect the same courtesy from people who have different taste.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wouldn't it be better to provide each person with headphones? So they can listen to whatever they want.

<comment><USER4> That's the right solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> It may well be. But this was more fun!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool idea but be careful about publicly admitting to using consumer licensed music (Spotify) in a business setting.

Because your company is playing music for your staff it is considered "Public Performance" and therefore falls under a different royalty rate.

More info here: [http://www.ascap.com/licensing/licensingfaq.aspx#general](http://www.ascap.com/licensing/licensingfaq.aspx#general)

</comment><comment><USER6> How about no music?

</comment><comment><USER7> Ah, yet another site that needs JS just _to read text._

This is not the progress I was looking for.

</comment><comment><USER8> very cool! It would be nice to see your code.</comment>


Ask HN: Advice for students about to graduate? - <AUTHOR> I'm one semester away from graduating with my BS in Computer Science. Seeing threads on here talking about folks getting laid off and companies starting to freeze hiring has me somewhat scared for my future job prospects. It looks like I will be graduating into a recession. Many of my peers are having their internships for this summer canceled, further hurting their chances by taking away an opportunity to gain experience and make themselves more marketable to employers. So HN, what is your advice to the thousands of students now in this situation? If you graduated into a recession, how was it then and how are you doing now? What would you have done differently? <comment><USER2> I would get a masters degree in AI or data analysis. or an MBA.</comment>


New letters shed light on Hemingway's unrequited love and early life - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/05/04/to-have-and-have-not/ <comment><USER2> How many centuries does it take for any given person's personal communications to become okay for open public study?

<comment><USER3> do you think hemingway cares?

<comment><USER4> What we do with what Hemingway would have considered private has a bearing on how we treat our private matters now - for we may or may not like how the future treats them.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Linkding, a self-hostable bookmark service - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding <comment><AUTHOR> Linkding is a very lean bookmark service that provides bookmark management, tag categorization and search. It is built to be self-hosted and runs perfectly fine on a Raspberry Pi. It also provides an import/export function that is compatible with other services like Pinboard.in.

After using Pinboard.in for several years I noticed that I basically only ever use the features described above. Also while I like the minimal approach and the quick UI of Pinboard, it could just look a little bit nicer. So I took that opportunity to make a hobby project out of building such a service myself while also learning something new. I decided on Python and Django as stack, as I never really used Python and Django looked impressive. Building the application took me around 2 weeks. I implemented the features above, added a basic CSS framework with minimal tweaks so the UI looks nice and made everything work on mobile. My take-aways from the project are that Django is really awesome. Django is a batteries-included web framework and provides pretty much everything you'll ever need OOTB. The documentation is among the best I have ever seen. Also as someone who has been mostly working on SPAs / rich clients for the last decade I have to admit it was a sobering experience how quickly you can get results with an integrated server-side framework like this. I'll definitely consider that approach more from now on.

If you are interested, the application is basically ready-for-use and easily installed with Docker. I have been running it for 6 months now in a Docker container on my Raspberry Pi and in terms of just dumping links into a storage it suffices for me. I provided a demo instance with open registration here: [https://demo.linkding.link](https://demo.linkding.link)

<comment><USER2> Nice project! But can as well provide a dummy account in the demo because it's damn difficult to register for anything on my phone (especially with complicated password rules)

<comment><USER3> Please start using password manager for your sanity sake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not a fan of the name. I read it as linked in, thinking it was a bookmark service by linked in at first. Perhaps, the counter positive, dinkling.

<comment><USER5> I honestly didn't think of linked in whatsoever when I read that name.

<comment><USER6> I did

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks very nice! It's not mentioned in the README, so I'm wondering how persistence is handled? EDIT: To be clear, I see backups is mentioned, but I'm wondering if it's a database file like sqlite3 or something else.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, currently it uses a SQLite3 DB for storage. The DB is created or updated with Djangos _migrate_ command which runs when the Docker container starts. The DB file can be found in the _data_ folder.

Thanks for your comment, it made me realize I stopped thinking about persistence at some point and now I had to look up on SQLite usage in production. However for the apps current use-case of handling one account / one person it seems fine to use SQLite.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the explanation! I think SQLite is fine for this too.

My use case would be running this on AWS ECS, but since this wouldn't get written to very often (probably) and the file hopefully wouldn't be very big either, I could just have the container or a sidecar pull it from S3 on startup and sync it at regular intervals and on shutdown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Want to call our your password policies. I was on mobile and wanted to see what it was like without opening up my password manager and anything short or stupid (qwerty, ...) was blocked. Was slightly irritating and yet delightful and suggested to me you have a great attention to detail. Will give it a shot!

Edit: originally s/stupid/dumb, but HN changes that to "db". Ha!

<comment><AUTHOR> As the other commenter pointed out, those are just the standard policies provided by Django ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would work well if a browser's share button can send a link directly there.

I use NextCloud's bookmark on Android and it kind of does that but it's pretty basic and there are many rooms for improvements.

</comment><comment><USER10> Very nice, a history of when bookmarks were added would be a great addition.

</comment><comment><USER11> I tried to drag the bookmarklet, but didn't seem to work in Google Chrome?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out dvduval. Just to make sure, you have to drag it to the bookmark bar specifically, and not the toolbar on the right side of the address field. Here is a (linkding unrelated) video that shows the general idea: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dauK_- jcqP8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dauK_-jcqP8)

I think by default Chrome hides the bookmark bar when you are on a page. You can toggle the bookmark bar to be shown permanently from the Chrome Settings. If you're on a Mac the shortcut is CMD+Shift+B, on Windows it should be CTRL+Shift+B.

If that doesn't solve your problem - do you have any specific settings in Chrome, like Javascript disabled?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> hi.. nice project, i can not open the demo right now but seems like a spectre css powered design, i really want to try the demo, guess i have to use play with docker right now

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Yes it indeed uses Spectre CSS which was a very positive experience as well. I actually donated a little to the author since it was exactly what I was looking for.

Docker might seem intimidating at first, but it really isn't hard to get started if you only want to spin up a container.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there an account for demo?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can create your own account. There is a _Register_ link at the bottom right of the login form.

FYI the email is not used, the registration completes immediately without confirmation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This post got hit by a spam filter. Sorry about that; those are tuned more aggressively for new accounts. Can you email us at firstname.lastname@example.com so we can give you some tips about how to repost it?

</comment><comment><USER15> Poor naming, in my opinion. Don't be surprised to receive a letter from LinkedIn's legal team. I suggest renaming the project ASAP to avoid any potential trademark-related issues.

<comment><USER5> That's pretty ridiculous. If Microsoft complained about this I would lose a lot of respect for them. This doesn't threaten linked in whatsoever. What other names can't be used because linked in exists? The possibilities are endless.

<comment><USER15> Ridiculous? It seems that you are not familiar with "trademark likelihood of confusion" and similar concepts (see the U.S. Trademark Act, especially 15 U.S.C. §1052).

<comment><USER5> It's anecdotal but I wasn't confused at all.

<comment><USER15> N=1 :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why egalitarian societies died out - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22071-inequality-why-egalitarian-societies-died-out.html?full=true

<comment><USER2> "You need to log in to read this article" :/</comment>


Fatherhood depletes testosterone, study finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-he-fathers-testosterone-20110910,0,241588.story

<comment><USER2> I read a great book about things like this: [http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get- Sick-Darwinian/dp/067974674...](http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Sick- Darwinian/dp/0679746749)

There are several chapters about the hormonal effects of childbearing and what the evolutionary benefits are for the children. A few i can remember off the top of my head are:

Breastfeeding will often prevent women from ovulating and thus becoming pregnant. In this way mothers resources are not strained by taking care of too many children at a time and the current child will have a better chance of survival.

Fetuses secrete a hormone called human placental lactogen that inhibits maternal insulin, this leads to high glucose levels in the blood and thus more nutrients available to the fetus it can also result in diabetes in the mother during the pregnancy.

preeclampsia (gestational high blood pressure) is another similar effect where hormones excreted by the fetus raise maternal blood pressure in order to increase blood flow to the placenta.

Having a fathers testosterone levels fall during early parenting is probably a key evolutionary adaptation because it would prevent fathers from seeking new mates (in order to make more babies and thus spread their genes) in order to care for the new child. The study noted that testosterone levels later rose when the children became older, this too follows the evolutionary argument because once a child is old enough it is more efficient for the father to attempt to father more children.

By far the most interesting part of this section in the book was about male jealousy. The theory is that because it is fairly difficult for a man to tell whether or not he is raising another mans child. men have evolved to be overly protective of their chosen mates so that they do not invest to many resources (time included) and thus lower their own genetic viability. Jealousy, while present in both sexes is a much stronger emotion in men (according to the authors this is true across all cultures).

<comment><USER3> How does one quantify jealousy? It seems such a measurement must be subjective, and highly-influenced by both your definition and by your environment.

edit: especially when there's an equally-rationalizable reason for women to have jealousy: to keep the man around as provider / protector while they're more incapacitated than usual. They're stuck either risking their child with another man (not an evolutionarily sound action), or preventing him from being tempted away by more fertile prospects.

<comment><USER2> The way the authors quantified it was by taking cross cultural surveys. Basically they surveyed men and women from various cultures about their attitudes around jealousy and determined that in all cultures they studied men appeared to be more affected by jealousy.

You are right that there is a rational reason why women should be jealous as well. But women have a more rational reason to forgive their mate, because it is far easier for a man to walk away from the relationship and thus the child.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would like to know if the reverse effect can be produced on women. Can women produce more testosterone in situations that would generally be considered more masculine? There seemed to be a very significant finding for men who just had newborns, perhaps it is triggered more by a major life event rather than specifically becoming a parent. For instance, does getting married reduce testosterone? Does losing a love one reduce it? Does moving to a new home? Makes for an interesting article and find(?) but I don't think it can be significant until it can be concluded that parenting specifically reduces that hormone.

</comment><comment><USER5> I had to do a double take this wasn't an Onion article. How on earth can the body "know" whether one has become a father? Turns out the term "fatherhood" is misleading or at least ambiguous. As the Hadza vs the Datoga example shows, it's not the act of inseminating a female that causes testosterone depletion but the lifestyle changes often (but not always) associated with fatherhood.

</comment><comment><USER6> You know, I can pretty safely say that fatherhood depletes _everything_.</comment>


Notifo (YC W10) adds Google Voice SMS notifications - <AUTHOR> http://blog.notifo.com/google-voice-sms-alerts

<comment><USER2> This is specifically for the iphone. The Android Google Voice app supports direct push...

Anyways nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, iPhone for now.. working on other platforms. But, as you point out, GV is already integrated with Android platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice, but I wonder how this is different from forwarding all your Google Voice SMS & Voicemails to your gmail and then using Boxcar iPhone app to receive pop up notifications of new emails?

Sounds interesting and potentially better then the set up I have now on my iPhone?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a few differences, but the main one is that this feature is specifically for GV SMS, so when you open the notification you can go straight to the conversation on the Google Voice site in Safari, whereas (as far as I can tell) Boxcar gives just the subject and body of the email when you forward all your email to it.

<comment><USER3> Cool. Yeah Boxcar does not take you to your Google Voice page. Rather it's pop ups display sender & message for SMS(s) though not for GV Voicemail. To read the transcription or listen to the voicemail I have to open the iPhone mail app and read it within the new mail received.

Maybe you can add the transcription within the popup? Would save me step in having to go into my mail client.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What about voicemail transcriptions? These are sent by a slightly different address.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, working on adding support for voicemail alerts and transcriptions as well. coming soon! watch the blog for updates :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Services on top of Prowl have been doing this in the exact same manner for quite some time. Glad to see a service like Notifo supporting this though. It has a somewhat nicer interface than the Prowl app.

</comment><comment><USER5> Notifo logotype reminded me of my old, stalled notification project - <http://nodehub.com/> (not saying anything, they are pretty generic after all)

</comment><comment><USER6> Well, this is totally not relevant to non-U.S users, but great to see notifo progressing. This is one app I genuinely like.

You know what's missing? Google wave and email notifications.

<comment><AUTHOR> how so? i have several international friends that have GV accounts to get a US number. one was actually a beta tester of this feature. maybe i am misunderstanding you?

<comment><USER6> GV does not work internationally, does it? When I log in, I get redirected to a FAQ page with "Coming Soon".

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, not sure how they got their accounts setup. I'll ask around and ping you if you like. Anyone here know?

<comment><USER7> Perhaps they logged in through a proxy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wouldn't this cause me to get 2 alerts instead of 1 (notifo alert followed by SMS alert)?

<comment><AUTHOR> GV currently doesn't send actual SMS to your phone when you receive a GVSMS. And, since part of the point of GV is to be a free SMS service, they don't want to defeat the purpose for their user by sending them a real one.

They do, however, offer the option of SMS for voicemails.

EDIT: Ah, yes. Thanks to jackowayed I see that they do offer actual SMS. Well, the main advantage here is that it keeps it free. I also don't have an unlimited SMS plan, and several people were asking for this feature on Notifo (including myself), so here it is!

<comment><USER9> Yes they do. <http://pic.danieljackoway.com/04_18_2010_16:16:07.png> Just check that box.

But I still really like this--to the extent that I was working on writing the exact same thing before he released this--because I only have 200 SMS/month on my plan, and I don't want to pay the exorbitant fees to get unlimited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> This is specifically for the iphone. The Android Google Voice app supports direct push...

Anyways nice work!</comment>


Matropolis: Scientists of the World Unite (aka "The Matlab/Python wars") - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lBeungEnx4

<comment><USER2> Cleve Moller has now weighed in on the G+ thread: [https://plus.google.com/u/0/101406471263985999518/posts/eaYM...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/101406471263985999518/posts/eaYMgZqyMhB)</comment>


The White House's Draft Cybersecurity Executive Order - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120914/19280020390/leaked-heres-white-houses-draft-cybersecurity-executive-order.shtml <comment><USER2> Extremely boring. The executive branch has to work within the framework of existing laws (like the ECPA) and cannot do things like shielding private entities from liability. So where CISPA and Lieberman Collins had certification programs and information sharing, this EO says only that an "information exchange network" will be established to share "indicators and warnings".

The overwhelming majority of this document has to do with security inside the federal government, which is again the largest IT operation in the world.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if this EO stating the requirement for the information exchange network is designed to serve as de facto budget approval for building it out - circumventing any potential congressional blocks.

<comment><USER4> This was leaked, ergo it must contain something illegitimate and embarrassing...

<comment><USER2> "Leaked"? It's been shown verbatim to reporters.

<comment><AUTHOR> _from the vague-enough-for-ya? dept_

\-- sub-heading.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what this means. Techdirt here claims the EO has been "leaked" (because that will drive pageviews). Reporters at real publications have already read the entire order. It wasn't "leaked". Techdirt is just making things up like they normally do.

Techdirt is horrible and people should feel bad for posting their stories here.

<comment><AUTHOR> _people should feel bad for posting their stories here_

Ad hominem or shoot the messenger? Take your pick...

<comment><USER2> I'm shooting at the messenger for sure.

<comment><AUTHOR> user: tptacek created:1780 days ago karma: 106,895 avg: 8.09

Nice... But you're off base.

<comment><AUTHOR> viz "Reporters at real publications have already read the entire order. It wasn't "leaked".

\-- This makes no sense. To those that are following along.[1]

_________

[1] "Draft Cybersecurity Executive Order" was marked for official use only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reportedly, this might be of more relevance: "There is apparently a different executive order in the works, and it is described in this Washington Post story [http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national- security/white-...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national- security/white-house-drafting-standards-to-guard-us-against-cyberattack- officials-say/2012/09/07/0fbb173e-f8fe-11e1-a073-78d05495927c_story.html) as a 4-page executive order that would create voluntary standards to guide companies in guarding themselves against cyberattacks, and would establish a special council made up of key government agencies to identify cyberthreats. The Cybersec Council would be led by DHS and would have representatives from Commerce, Defense, Treasury, Energy, Justice and the DNI. That seems more of a reaction to non-passage of the Lieberman-Collins bill, Title 1 of which would have done all of these things, than does the 19-page order that Bloomberg described."

</comment><comment><USER6> I read this as "The White House's Daft Cybersecurity Executive Order"

which maybe would have been more entertaining

</comment><comment><USER7> The fact that this draft bill about cyber-security was leaked does in itself highlight that they need to go back to the drawing board and rethink it.

One day this incident will be listed as the definition of ironic.

<comment><USER8> Uh, it's marked FOUO, not Top Secret, and it's going to be made public when it gets issued anyway, troll.

<comment><AUTHOR> Um, "leaked" like pg "not marked top secret" email? Lots of reasons to "leak" all kinds of data. Leaked simply means distributed prior to official release. This is likely a "trial baloon" or sum such. then, they change it after the criticism to avoid further embarrassmnet, nor not. either way.

<comment><USER2> What does that even mean? Graham sent an email blast to hundreds of people with negotiation advice in it. The problem isn't that the mail got out --- of course the mail got out. _He sent it to a giant mailing list_.

The problem is that publications like Venturebeat and Techdirt went to town on the email spinning it into something it wasn't. And the problem is people who promote that cynically packaged excreta on sites like HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Uh, it's marked FOUO, not Top Secret, and it's going to be made public when it gets issued anyway, troll._

.....

FOUO=for official use only, ie = confidential

pg internal email = confidential [1]

almost all leaks = confidential

a PR before embargo = confidential

......

 _What does that even mean?_

This is the world we live in...Leaks are a form of "black hat" PR [2]

......

Calling someone a [troll] for suggesting this may be a [trial baloon] seems un-intelligent at best.

Whether or not its good policy or bad or good pr strategy or bad is a fair topic of discussion.

.......

[1] This was a simplification of "internal", if it technically includes portfolio companies that are legally distinct entities from YC. But being pedandtic here is off point. This was being illustrative that "all kinds of data could be leaked", and in particular all manner of private, non- governmental information, that for whatever reason, people feel should not be sent to the press and have a reasonable expectation of privacy around.

[2] I.e. The leak can be by a friend or foe, for information or dis- information, etc.

<comment><USER2> It's easy to keep an argument going if you just ignore what the other party says and repeat your talking points over and over again. But my last comment was pretty simple: Graham's "internal" mail, which went to hundreds of people on a mailing list, wasn't "confidential".

For that matter, "FUOU" is _explicitly not_ classified.

If you can't make a reasonable analysis of something as simple as Paul Graham's mail to YC companies, what makes you think you're a credible critic of public policy, which is much more complicated?

<comment><AUTHOR> _Graham's "internal" mail...wasn't "confidential"_

And Pg and other VC's don't sign NDAs but confidentiality is understood in certain areas...almost all communication relating to corporate finace and investment, BOD internal deliberations, communications for example...

 _For that matter, "FUOU" is explicitly not classified._

Again, this is off-point...its not "official" use to send internal <government> documents to the press for "public" consumption. This is really "rookie" 101 type stuff, things that in a BigCo job are subject to all kinds of intenal compliance procedures...ect...not even debatable

In addition, there are disclosure rules around market moving informations, and all kinds of stuff...

Routinely dis-respected, but thats another story.[1]

__________

[1] These rules typically apply to Public companies, and revolve around providing fair access to information for retail investors and the like. Reg FD is an example.

<comment><USER2> Also easy to keep an argument going by saying "my point is understood to be correct" instead of backing it up. You seem to be having a hard time with the point that Graham sent his negotiating advice to a _giant freaking mailing list_ with _many tens of companies on it_.

If he wanted it confidential, he wouldn't have done that. Graham is many annoying things but an idiot is not one of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Also easy to keep an argument going by saying "my point is understood to be correct"_

Citations: On NDAs an etc.

....

Why a VC Will Take a Lighter to Your NDA - Wilson Sonsini

[http://startuplawyer.com/venture-capital/why-a-vc-will- take-...](http://startuplawyer.com/venture-capital/why-a-vc-will-take-a- lighter-to-your-nda)

Why Most VC's Don't Sign NDA - Foundry Group

[http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2006/02/why-most-vcs-dont- si...](http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2006/02/why-most-vcs-dont-sign- ndas.html)

One More Time: No NDAs - Anil Dash

<http://dashes.com/anil/2010/05/one-more-time-no-ndas.html>

From PG: YC Library <http://ycombinator.com/lib.html>

The Cult of the NDA.

tl;dr "Cases where trade secrets and/or patents are both protectable and essential are rare."

<http://www.frozennorth.org/C509291565/E1939404619/index.html>

.......

Lots of communication happens in _confidence_ , but not under NDA for various reasons.

<comment><USER2> None of this, none of it at all, has anything to do with what happened to Paul Graham.

<comment><AUTHOR> _None of this, none of it at all, has anything to do with what happened to ..._

Nice try _again_ , but this is directly addressing something else altogether. It seems to show, that you most likely have never personally handled information at this level.

You're just wrong to think unless something is "TOP SECRET" and a government document, its not a "leak" in contemporary usage.[1] YC's email that ended up public was not meant to be public, however you want to debate the wording. It was provided here only as an illustration people are familiar with. There is no opinion expressed here about the situation, nor implied (its been discussed by PG on numerous threads).

There are well-trodden notions of confidentiality, privlege, and confidence outside of govenment. Things that are familiar to people operating at the level of founders, vcs, board members, etc. If you are't familiar with this, that would explain some of your comments. You were the one who needed a citation. Here is a typical excerpt:

 _Most other folks are too nice to actually mention it, but since I'm not a VC or big deal business tycoon, I'll just say the most important point outright: Asking for someone to sign an NDA also often makes you look amateurish. -- Anil Dash_

But, that would genuinely surprise me, to the extent I almost don't believe you would not be aware of this. I'll be charitable and assume you mis-read or mis-interpreted what I wrote. It seems most likely you mis-inferred something about what may or may not follow as a result.

For this reason, you'll note there are [now] more footnotes and citations, for the benefit of others. [This was one]. Some of these were added after you made initial comments -- I'm happy to take advice to make things clearer -- and I happy to aknowldege these changes.

_______

[1] _The original post is at ... and includes a leaked email ..._ [http://uncrunched.com/2012/09/07/turning-the-drama-down- on-y...](http://uncrunched.com/2012/09/07/turning-the-drama-down-on-y- combinator-v-google-ventures/)

[edited for tone]</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Optimizing Ruby lazy initialization in TruffleRuby with deoptimization - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/optimizing-ruby-lazy-initialization-in-truffleruby-with-deoptimization <comment><USER2> Nice to see some TruffleRuby love.

Ruby could have been Swift, if MacRuby had not been killed (well at least it lives on as RubyMotion).

<comment><USER3> Ruby is inherently much too slow to have ever been a Swift. All of its dynamic runtime features give it a pretty low performance ceiling compared to a statically typed, compiled language with very limited runtime introspection/reflection.

<comment><USER4> While it's still very slow, modern Javascript VMs are fast enough for many usages. Ruby is slow, but it could be a lot faster with a lot of time and money.

<comment><USER5> But developing in JS is consideray slower than in Ruby, and time to market should be king.

<comment><USER6> On a mobile device, efficiency should be king... that's not exactly Ruby's forte

I'm skeptical of your first point as well

<comment><USER5> How does backend development reflect on mobile?

<comment><USER6> "Ruby could have been Swift"

Swift's raison d'etre is mobile development

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Benchmarking isn't a perfect measure of how effective this change is > (benchmarking is arguably never perfect, but that's a different > conversation), as the results would be too noisy to observe in a large > project.

So... does that not mean that any micro-improvement would also be too small to be significant on any large project?

<comment><USER8> This was my question as well. If the change can't be measured even with a benchmark, what is the goal?

<comment><AUTHOR> The goal of the blogpost was less about talking about this optimization and more introducing TruffleRuby and making changes to programming language implementations at a high level understanding. The goal I had when I started working on the feature, was to introduce myself to TruffleRuby and was actually my first PR. It's not an impressive change, but it helps get into a lot of the important aspects of how TruffleRuby is engineered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hopefully with Shopify's help we are closer to running Rails on Truffle.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if ruby could eventually officially migrate to Graalvm

<comment><USER11> that is unlikely, matz mentioned a few times how adopting something developed elsewhere as a core vm was something he didn't want to do.

IIRc the reasoning goes along the lines of not wanting the risk of something being discontinued by a third party and having to shoulder the extra labor of supporting something with which the devs are not familiar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I remain skeptical of JRuby. As of about 2-3 years ago, there were many benchmarks touting it's performance, but in our large publicly deployed web app, it always underperformed and switching to MRI on Phusion more than doubled our performance on half the servers. We also spent like a developer- year on issues that accompanied being off the beaten path with JRuby, like various nokogiri complications.

I even contacted the devs at one point with a benchmark that ran jruby directly on strings for several minutes. The answer I got was always that it would eventually perform better than MRI with more warmup. Spoiler: it didn't. Well, maybe I was supposed to run it for another month and it would have.

<comment><USER13> This article is about TruffleRuby, not jruby.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry to be a bit overbearing here~

It's worth thinking about JRuby-performance-skeptical-ness when thinking about TruffleRuby due to some similarities. Not going to outline in a comment, but suffice it to say that TruffleRuby was once called JRuby+Truffle.

TruffleRuby has the power to work through JRuby shortcomings. With GraalVM, TruffleRuby gets to have C extensions! Graal is also open source, so we get more control of what we want it to do and more understanding of what it does. In theory, that gives TruffleRuby more room to get faster.

It's also worth noting Charles Nutter's comment on the post, that mentions that Hotspot C2 already does this optimization! (though they wouldn't have this kind of control over branch profiling)

<comment><USER14> IIRC TruffleRuby is implemented very differently than JRuby and has a lot more potential. So I'm not sure any comparisons can really be made.

<comment><USER12> source: [https://chrisseaton.com/truffleruby/](https://chrisseaton.com/truffleruby/)

> TruffleRuby started as my internship project at Oracle Labs in early 2013. > It is an implementation of the Ruby programming language on the JVM, using > the Graal dynamic compiler and the Truffle AST interpreter framework. > TruffleRuby can achieve peak performance well beyond that possible in JRuby > at the same time as being a significantly simpler system. In early 2014 it > was open sourced and integrated into JRuby for incubation, then in 2017 it > became its own project, and now it is part of GraalVM. Since 2019 Shopify > has sponsored development.

> In early 2014 it was open sourced and integrated into JRuby for incubation

Additionally, we also tried Truffle when it was JRuby, or in JRuby, however you want to put it, but without a lot of success. Things could be different now.

<comment><USER14> I interpreted that sentence as meaning it was integrated into the JRuby project as a "home" for the project, similar to being under the management of a particular github org. Not that its implementation was in any way changed or integrated into JRuby.

<comment><USER12> Your interpretation is understandable, but incorrect.

[https://www.jruby.org/2016/05/03/jruby-9-1-0-0.html](https://www.jruby.org/2016/05/03/jruby-9-1-0-0.html)

<comment><USER15> Concretely, TruffleRuby never shared much in terms of the core language implementation with JRuby (essentially the parser and encoding stuff, never core methods/operators/etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> (btw I am the author of this post, thread questions if wanted. Trying to avoid draining myself addressing all the comments. Take care in these strange times <3)

<comment><USER16> So what's Shopify's goal in supporting TruffleRuby ? isn't Ruby 3x3 promise good enough? Is Shopify looking to optimise memory footprint or speed or both?

<comment><AUTHOR> As a general comment about production applications, memory is less important than speed since computers are cheap compared to having poorer user experience. Also, with JITs, consuming less memory isn't that realistic. You can find "complaints" about Pypy and Java and consuming a lot of memory.

<comment><USER16> > All in all, the goal is most accurately described as "research"

So what is a successful outcome you're hoping for with this project? Or is it purely academic?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really sure there is a good answer for this. A past successful outcome was that we could actually get TruffleRuby to run an entire production application without code-changes. I suppose a future one could be that it's easy, fast and good to develop and ship an application running on TruffleRuby.

<comment><USER17> How close to that goal is TruffleRuby right now?

<comment><AUTHOR> oof that's the big question isn't it. Would take a lot to describe, as well as a press-check since all my information / context about this is specific to Shopify applications

<comment><USER17> Fair enough :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> >'TruffleRuby has high potential in speed, as it is nine times faster than CRuby on optcarrot, a NES emulator benchmark developed by the Ruby Core Team.'

Really? But now the latest results are in apparently and judging by these benchmarks[0], I don't know what to make of this claim given how slow TruffleRuby is when compared to other similar languages or even Ruby. But its clear that its LLVM-based cousin Crystal still blows it out of the ocean in every benchmark if you're really talking about 'high performance'...

[0] [https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks](https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks)

<comment><AUTHOR> There are four benchmarks in there that compare CRuby and TruffleRuby and two of them are slower. TruffleRuby is 2x faster on bench.b (brainfuck implementation), 3x faster on matmul, 3x slower on base64 and 7x slower on json. All four of these are pretty specific benchmarks. Optcarrot has code that is much more representative of what a Ruby program might look like.

<comment><USER19> In addition, it's interesting to see that TruffleRuby does better than CRuby on the longer running benchmarks, and worse on the shorter ones. The page claims that JIT warmup "is applied when necessary", but there are no further details. If I had to bet, I would guess that in the case of TruffleRuby maybe not enough warmup is being done in these experiments.

<comment><USER15> Seems there isn't any warmup accounted for: [https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks/issues/246](https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks/issues/246)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much and How do you read? - <AUTHOR> Hi All, I was wondering that there is huge content online day by day for new things. You get all the long articles. I do not get so much time to read all. Most of time I am not able to completely understand the article. It might help to others also So I just want to know:
1) How much you read per day or what are your reading habbits?
2) Most Important: If you not able to understand some article do you find dig them or just ignore the words or articles not able to understand? or what you do to understand like keep dictionary or search google?
3) How you read? Do you read continuously or there is some good hack?
Please give the advice. Thanks <comment><USER2> The pecking order of quality:

text books/journal articles > books >> online articles.

I'll try to at least read 1 book per week, but on a good week I can get in up to 3. If the books are technical (i.e., programming) on a good week I can get 1 book read. If the books are mathematical (i.e., an algorithms textbook) I'm lucky if I can get 30-50 pages processed.

Audiobooks are the holy grail of passive consumption of content. They are so, so underrated.

IMO, the primary point of online articles is to get your finger on the pulse of what other people are up to. Other than that, they are similar to informational twinkies. Obviously there are exceptions: a Paul Graham article is certainly not an informational twinkie! But, by and large, reading something that somebody spent a year on (i.e., a book) tends to be a much better use of your time than reading something somebody spent 1-5 days on (i.e., an article).

Books go deep. Articles go broad. And textbooks are like "here is a broad summary of what the human race knows about a particular subject, at least up to about a decade or so ago."

</comment><comment><USER3> 1) Online: I just skim articles to find something that interest me. I am not in "knowledge absorbing" mode at this time. It's mostly just fun/boredom. I try to limit how much time I spend reading online. Offline: I read for either knowledge (business books, non-fiction) or for pure pleasure (fiction). For both the cases, my kindle has my full attention. No computer, no mobile phone, no distractions.

2) If the word makes no sense, I will check the meaning. However, if I am not completely sure about the meaning, I might still carry on as it helps not to get distracted from reading.

3) I read for 3-4 hours at a time and make sure it is at a time when I have peace and quiet and uninterrupted time.

</comment><comment><USER4> 1\. Mostly scan content and really read if something strikes me as interesting 2\. I dig deeper and sometimes read other articles or look through wiki pages if the article is something technical which I absolutely want to understand 3\. I have a list of sites that have content that I care about, look through it and know what I want to read seriously. Later in the day I read those articles I would say for about 2 hours

</comment><comment><USER5> Really want to know!</comment>


The Hacker's Manifesto (1986) - <AUTHOR> http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=7&id=3&mode=txt <comment><USER2> _Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me..._

This really spoke to me when I was a kid. Young me was really attached to the notion of creating your own destiny and taking responsibility for your own successes and failures. Back then, felt like a lot of people were just big fat whiners.

<comment><USER3> Every time I read another language rant on HN, it feels like people are still big fat whiners.

<comment><USER4> Most of the population is comprised on big fat whiners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This extend beyond computer hackers. One of my little sisters read this at a speech contest in high school; everybody loved it.

</comment><comment><USER6> A common tongue-in-cheek definition of "hacker" is "one who carves furniture with an axe".

Loyd Blankenship would go on to focus pretty heavily on his woodworking activities.

Make of that what you will. :)

</comment><comment><USER7> >>>"This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...<<<

I actually come to hacker news for a reason close to this. This is a space where no one judges me, belittles me, or criticizes me for things I couldn't possibly choose. I know that I end up wasting a lot of time here, but somehow it is a release that keeps me sane and makes everything else possible. Maybe someday I'll end up being a "hacker". Maybe not, but the lessons I've learnt on these pages will last me an entire lifetime.

<comment><USER5> > _Maybe someday I'll end up being a "hacker"._

It sounds like you already are.

<comment><USER7> That's quite flattering, but no I am not even close to that. I don't even know how to code that well, let alone the myriad of tiny concepts that make up CS.

Even if I do reach that level someday. I doubt it that I would proclaim myself a hacker, or anything to that effect. I don't want to spend my life running around claiming credit for things. If someone finds my ideas or code beautiful then they can point it out and I will cherish that moment with them.

Yeah, I am crazy like that.

<comment><USER5> Being a hacker doesn't have _anything_ to do with coding, or computers.

My Grandfather was a hacker; he built _everything_ himself and I doubt there was anything in his house that he hadn't taken apart and put back together. He worked in construction, and most of the heavy equipment he used was things he built himself (as in: a bulldozer, a backhoe; earth moving equipment).

In early 2000 he started getting into computers (he died shortly thereafter), he is every bit as much a hacker (if not more so) than anybody I've ever met.

<comment><USER8> Hacking isn't even about building things. It's about making things better. And it's about making those things do new things that they were never intended to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Something reminded me of this manifesto and made me think about what a "hacker" really is. Things have changed in the past 25 years.

<comment><USER5> One thing that I've noticed is that "hack" has gone from being something incredibly clever to being some incredibly horrible.

"Yeah, it's a serious hack and it pretty much crashes all the time".

s/hack/kludge/

<comment><AUTHOR> On the other hand, a "hacker" has gone from someone that takes apart/breaks stuff to figure out how it works, to someone that _makes_ stuff (albeit often quick'n'dirty). It's two directions, really.

<comment><USER4> I see them being the same. In order to improve and make something new, you need to break stuff to find faults.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Viva La Hack

</comment><comment><USER10> iHack!</comment>


Tesla using fake MDs at its on-site health clinic - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/PlainSite/status/1059875691263483904 <comment><AUTHOR> Another Twitter thread which links the tender document Access Omnicare used to get the Tesla engagement. Explicit objectives include "decrease in OSHA recordability."

[https://twitter.com/Trumpery45/status/1059899719541915649](https://twitter.com/Trumpery45/status/1059899719541915649)</comment>


On Troll Hugging, Hole Digging, and Improving Open Source Communities - <AUTHOR> https://rakudo.party/post/On-Troll-Hugging-Hole-Digging-and-Improving-Open-Source-Communities <comment><USER2> This reminds me of this snippet from #haskell IRC. The Haskell community's got it right.

[https://gist.github.com/quchen/5280339](https://gist.github.com/quchen/5280339)

<comment><USER3> _Man, I tried to troll 10 different channels and only got kicked from #bitcoin-dev_

Its interesting how hostile and vitriolic the bitcoin development community has been lately, kind of a good proof point for what the original article is trying to say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> note that the "well shaped hole" is shallower and broader than the "badly shaped hole"

this might be OK sometimes, but that depends on how deep you actually have to dig to get at what you want.

grad school, for example, seems to consist of drilling wells that start in very broad holes and go quite deep.

</comment><comment><USER5> Good strategies for low-intensity or casual trolling infestations, bot very efficient or scalable if the number of trolls or volume or content they post exceeds a critical threshold.

<comment><USER6> Off the top of my head, the trolling of an open source project probably differs from the trolling of a political post on Facebook. Part of it is just because the Facebook post is often intended at least partially to be an attractive nuisance when written and the posting to be one when made. Part of it is the emotions involved in the post itself.

An open source project on the other hand, is rarely written to be an attractive nuisance and less commonly shared for that purpose. Most of the people who pay attention pay attention because its purpose might relate to their interests or purpose.

In the case of an open source project, much of what might come across as trolling by people at the edge of the hole is driven by frustration. Part of that frustration is that they do not see the project as exactly meeting their needs. Part of that is frustration with the need itself. Their expressions may come across as trolling simply because they do not speak the same language as those deeper in the hole. Part of it is often the problem most communities have with "endless september".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting, but seems like general community management for dealing with newbies rather than actual trolls?</comment>