CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/06/07/cloudflare-a-website-security-product-accidentally-makes-sites-60-faster/

<comment><USER3> Perhaps someone can demystify CloudFlare for me?

Their value proposition is completely absurd ("protect websites from hacking"), yet they're still around and get quite a bit of seemingly expensive PR-spin like this article.

Who pays for the "accidental CDN" that, according to the article, pushes as much traffic as the 10th largest website on the internet? Their optional $20/mo subscription plan can't possibly cover that.

<comment><USER4> > Who pays for the "accidental CDN" that, according to the article, pushes as > much traffic as the 10th largest website on the internet? Their optional > $20/mo subscription plan can't possibly cover that.

They use VigLink to add affiliate tags to the external links of the sites that use them.

<comment><USER5> Somewhat offtopic, but why do affiliate programs go along with this? If it's a link that was _already_ going to Amazon, then adding the tag brought in no new business and CloudFront does not deserve a cut.

<comment><USER6> You mean CloudFlare. CloudFront is Amazon's CDN service :-)

For Amazon at least, intercepting and tagging URLs is in violation of the Associates agreement, and if detected Amazon will not pay these fraudulent commission claims.

If the URLs are being tagged with the Associates account of the web page owner, then this auto-tagging is a CMS feature, which is reasonable.

If the URLs being tagged are content created by NOT the website owners (like, say, forum posts), then we might be back in fraud territory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I doubt I'm your target market, so feel free to ignore me, but do you have a page that explains what you're really offering minus all the marketing hand waving? It sounds like it might be interesting but it's difficult to wade through the 10,000 ft view stuff.

For example, I just picked this mouseover that interested me:

 _The threat challenge page stops known threats and alerts infected humans that they need to take action._

Is there anything that elaborates on that? From a security perspective, I'm drawing a blank as to what a reverse proxy filter is achieving there. You're rewriting html destined for ddos zombies?

<comment><USER8> If a threat is detected (either because the IP has a bad reputation, or a request contains a malicious payload) then, depending on your security settings, instead of the request being passed to your web server it is answered by the proxy. The answer is a web page that, again depending on your security settings and the type of threat, includes a CAPTCHA. If the visitor passes the CAPTCHA then their session is marked as valid and they're allowed to pass through the proxy unhindered.

<comment><USER9> Do you stop scrapers that use browsers, and rotates 100 different proxies with different C classes, and uses fake headers?

<comment><USER8> The nature of the system is that we're seeing data across tens of thousands of websites so we get smarter as we grow larger. We have a birdseye view into overall flow patterns and can spot attacks that are very difficult to see if you're only looking at your own logs from your own sites. For example, if the same IP hits multiple, unrelated CloudFlare websites then it is an indication that it is some kind of automated crawler. We can then look at whether it comes from a known, legitimate entity (e.g., Google) and also watch its behavior for other characteristics that indicate it may be a threat.

<comment><USER9> The chances are pretty low a scraper would hit multiple unrelated Cloudflare websites since Cloudflare is only used in very very few websites... Scrapers usually are interested in particular websites, they dun just scrape random sites.

What other characteristics can you detect? Can't really look at IP address, since ISPs such as AOL use the same IP address for the same user. Can't look at headers or referral strings since those can easily be faked. Also search engines such as Google have been known to use non-Google IP's to check if a site is cloaking or not. And you say you analyze the reputation of an IP - <USER2> addresses for users change all the time. And many scrapers do use data farms/cloud services such as AWS, but a lot are moving to European data servers as well, and these IP addresses are harder to get reputation for (they're not in ARIN, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have been running my site through it for some time now as well as testing an uptime monitoring script via Google App Engine someone on Reddit wrote.

If anyone is interested in the very limited data, it is at <http://isitupordown.appspot.com/v/urbad> with "ActualServer" being the VPS itself, and CDNCache being CloudFlare.

</comment><comment><USER11> Has been used by Lulzsec effectively to hold up against DDoS attacks and popularized by them on Twitter as well. It works.

<comment><USER12> In CloudFlare's Features page ( <https://www.cloudflare.com/cloudflare- services.html> ), "Denial of service attack protection" is marked as not available now or even soon.

Not sure how this stands against a DDoS.

<comment><USER13> A CDN is always going to have DDoS mitigation as a side-effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I saw this article and took the plunge on one of my sites. It took the standard time for the DNS to update and I was up and running shortly after. It maintains all of your MX records, etc and I did see a jump on Google Page Speed Score (went from 81-87) after installing.

One of the side benefits was their one click "apps" where you can install Google Analytics, etc and manage it from one place.

I did have one question that I didn't see a clear answer for. If I am using Amazon's Cloudfront for many of my images, how does the Pro account handle the caching of these seemingly conflicting services?

</comment><comment><USER15> Not having heard of the service before, am I correct as characterizing this product as a WAF (web application firewall)? That also as a consequence of its architecture acts as proxy/CDN for its customers?

</comment><comment><USER16> I use cloudflare and I LOVE THEM. My site serves up tons of static content and thought I'd offer some specs. Previously, I had been considering moving all my static content to the rackspace CDN, but thought I'd give Cloudflare a whirl.

Since configuring with cloudflare on May 26th, I've had 26,133 page views, 368 from crawlers and 755 from bots.

Without cloudflare my average page load time is 2.66 seconds. With cloudflare my time is 1.55 (my google pagespeed score is 97/100: <http://bit.ly/k3MDGk>)

Out of 125,183 total requests, 72,405 have been saved by cloudflare.

10GB of bandwidth has been served since that time and 4.9 has been saved.

Cloudflare makes my site 41% faster as well.

I was getting hit with a lot of exploit attacks, mainly from China, so I was glad to see I could block by IP, IP Range and Country in their Threat control Panel. I'm aware that's not a foolproof method but it helps.

link to my site: <http://www.alphavr.com/tours/properties/virtual/240>

</comment><comment><USER17> I think I understand how it works -- and they have an option for installing a firewall on your server (htaccess file?) that will block any traffic that didn't come from them. That's optional, and I'd imagine that if you didn't use it you could be SQL injected right around this service by the attacker using your server's IP address.

But I'm going to hook up my nearlyfreespeech.net sites up and see how things go.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've been using it as well and wow does it cut down on my bandwidth as well.

<comment><USER11> Just wondering, how many different lionhearted-folk are there on HN?

Here's the ones I've found so far:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lionheart>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lionhearted>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=theli0nheart>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ligerhearted>

Any others hiding in the woodworks that wanna show themselves?

<comment><USER19> I doubt your nickname exposes your true identity any better. Some names are just more common.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> At Torbit, we make websites faster... intentionally. :)

<http://torbit.com>

<comment><USER21> Yes!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember signing up for the beta of this service not really understanding how it worked and was pretty weirded out when it asked me to point my DNS to their server.

That's not an anti-spam product, that's hosting.

<comment><USER8> CloudFlare is reverse proxy. You keep your existing hosting provider. It's just like how Postini, MX Logic, or MessageLabs stopped email spam via a change to DNS.

<comment><USER22> What do you guys use for your reverse proxying? Custom software with very good on-the-fly HTML processing?

<comment><USER8> We use NGINX as our underlying platform, but have extensively extended it for our purposes. We actively contribute back to the NGINX open source community where there are developments we've made we think may be useful.

<comment><USER23> Sorry, but what/how exacly are you actively contributing? Other than yesterday's naive port of mod_pagespeed, I didn't find any of your contributions and you make it sound like something you're doing on the regular basis.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of your product from the very beginning, but don't say that you do things when you don't.

<comment><USER8> Yes, one of our engineers contributed a his work on a native port of mod_pagespeed two days ago. We have made a number of other contributions along the way as well, most of which aren't nearly as sexy as the one you pointed out. And we'll continue to do so.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An Evolved View Of The Participating Preferred - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/05/an-evolved-view-of-the-participating-preferred.html <comment><USER2> It's clearly well past time for early employees to start negotiating preferences as well.

If we're not in the same boat ....</comment>


How to Make Your Open-Source Project Successful - <AUTHOR> http://codelike.com/blog/2013/04/21/how-to-make-your-open-source-project-successful/ <comment><USER2> The sad part is now there is a pressure to put _your_ OSS project on GitHub instead of BitBucket just to boost its chances...</comment>


Apple almost bought MagicLeap - <AUTHOR> https://www.roadtovr.com/report-apple-nearly-acquired-leap-motion-but-the-deal-fell-through/ <comment><USER2> The article is about Apple almost buying Leap Motion -- _not_ Magic Leap.</comment>


Twitter's 280-Character Tweets Officially Go Live - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitters-280-character-tweets-officially-go-live-1510088401 <comment><USER2> Hopefully now people will start typing "you're" instead of "ur".</comment>


We are in an abusive relationship with our phones - <AUTHOR> https://conversationalist.org/2019/09/13/feminism-explains-our-toxic-relationships-with-our-smartphones/ <comment><USER2> > "Put up your hand if you like or maybe even love your smartphone," I asked > the audience of policymakers, industrialists and students.

> Nearly every hand in the room shot up.

> "Now, please put up your hand if you trust your smartphone."

> One young guy at the back put his hand in the air, then faltered as it > became obvious he was alone. I thanked him for his honesty and paused before > saying,"We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust > is the definition of an abusive relationship."

For this and other reasons, I'm switching to the Light Phone 2 [1]. I get it later this month. Devices like this don't solve all of our problems, but they certainly solve many.

[1]: [http://lightphone.com](http://lightphone.com)

<comment><USER3> > An abusive relationship is an interpersonal relationship characterized by > the use or threat of physical or psychological abuse.

I.e. the author is manipulating facts. Trust has nothing to do with it. Obviously, if a person does not trust anybody, not every relationship they get into is abusive to them.

<comment><USER4> Within the framework applied, trust has everything to do with it. What makes a relationship abusive isn't the distrust, but rather the distrust combined with the inability to escape (which is often about love). We love our smartphones, but we don't trust them. That's very different than, say, distrusting some random stranger. The way to deal with not trusting a stranger is to not engage with them. How do you deal with, say, not trusting your father?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Something I like to do to minimize this effect is to forward my calls to a dumphone whenever I don't need the smartphone.

My family uses alternative messaging with me while I'm at work and you'd be surprised how people really don't care if you don't text them back until the end of the day.

When I get home, the smartphone goes upstairs where I'll hear it ring if someone calls. At this point, it's a glorified GPS and Spotify/Audible device. The only time I'm actively on it is in between sets at the gym in the morning.

</comment><comment><USER6> > _Feminist analysis of Gamergate first exposed the online radicalization of > legions of angry young men for whom misogyny was a gateway drug to far-right > politics._

Um. I feel that the article could have done without this snipe.

Like I once wrote¹, this came out of nowhere, and is presented as if every reader should obviously agree with it. Is "far-right" supposed to be something which is obviously inherently bad? I can see the case for using the term "alt- right" in that sense. But right/left? The whole point of the right/left terminology is that it's not settled which of them is correct. If it _were_ , we'd just call them good/bad instead of left/right.

In an article which has nothing to do with actual politics, to bring up "far- right" as a stereotypical bad thing, shows that it's written by someone living in a bubble.

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18160488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18160488)

<comment><USER7> keep reading after that sentence and this article continues to undermine itself by actively portraying feminists as the greatest thing ever and men as evil.

> Next thing you know, women will be wearing trousers and thinking they can > vote.

what does this sentence in the article have to do with anything phone related? Women can wear whatever they and they've had the vote for over 100 years.

the article makes a decent point and then goes full crazy. Too bad.

<comment><USER8> >> Women can wear whatever they and they've had the vote for over 100 years

Women have had the vote for ALMOST 100 years.

August 18, 1920

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a really interesting and spot-on analysis. If it makes you uncomfortable, it should.

<comment><USER9> What exactly should make us uncomfortable? Except from the writing style. Everything she writes as harmful side effects from smartphones has been written before. Probably even in 2012. There is nothing novel

<comment><USER4> Using highly developed feminist framework and applying it to cell phones is novel, or at least I haven't seen it before. Developing solutions to problems requires understanding the problems, and putting it into a well-understood and successful framework points to solutions.

Unfortunately, feminist thought makes a lot of men uncomfortable and often ugly in their reactions. Just read the comments here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't know - judging by the cracked screen, missing pieces, cracked back, I am not so sure who is abusing who ...

On a more serious note - that we are overdepended on smartphones is common knowledge and not some epiphany. Ditto with them helping alienating from the others. The second part of the article is extremely cringe inducing. She is trying to cram every feminist buzzword and talking point ever.

</comment><comment><USER10> She's not wrong on a lot of points about what tech and phones do to individuals, just it's a super contrived topic that's existed for as long as tech has - she said nothing even close to new there.

The elephant in the article is _so what?_. What are we going to do about this? This is why so many people feel as though feminists are plagued with a victimhood complex - the only agent in the relationship she draws parallels to is the person. There is only one person to blame.

I understand the vast social consequences of not owning a phone - but I know plenty of people who have healthy relationships with their phones. Probably the one thing they have in common is that they don't blame others for their problems.</comment>


Purported Android 4.4 KitKat screenshots and new features revealed - <AUTHOR> http://www.androidauthority.com/purported-android-4-4-kitkat-running-key-lime-pie-nexus-4-image-gallery-279440/

<comment><USER2> Android 4.4 and the next Nexus device are pretty much the only new topics I can remember attempting to follow in the news recently, and it's just ridiculous. When I bother to look I see a solid dozen new articles every day regurgitating the same speculation, with and without sources.

I don't know if these shots are new, but considering this is the second to last paragraph...

 _With all that said, we'll note that these screenshots hardly confirm any of the recent Android 4.4 details we have talked about – not that those are any more official. We'll again add that we're not looking at a confirmed Android 4.4 build here, so take everything with a grain of salt. And finally, even if it's an Android 4.4 version here, it's most likely an older one – from mid- to late August – which means things may have changed since then._

...I just can't imagine why anyone would follow tech 'journalism' if this is what it actually amounts to. "Here are some exciting photos... of we're not sure what."

<comment><USER3> What was once known as journalism is now all about the SEO. It's like those "reviews" of gadgets from someone who held it for 5 minutes at the unveiling.</comment></comment>


Make your screen touch sensitive (sort of) - <AUTHOR> https://sidleeparis.github.io/knock/#sidlee <comment><AUTHOR> Demo video right here: [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2251898/SidLee_Knock.m4v](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2251898/SidLee_Knock.m4v)

Only works on Chrome and Firefox (uses getUserMedia), should only be used on non touch devices.

It analyses the translation of the image of your webcam to detect if your screen has moved.

Best usage conditions:

\- laptop with webcam on top

\- laptop on a flat table (not on your laps)

\- decent luminosity

\- make sure you're not sitting before a monochrome background</comment>


Alex Jacobson on HAppS - <AUTHOR> http://blip.tv/bay-area-functional-programmers/alex-jacobson-on-happs-432845

<comment><USER2> This is fairly old. HAppS has been developed further into Happstack:

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

<http://happstack.com/>

Here is a quick intro:

<http://happstack.com/docs/crashcourse/index.html></comment>


Tell HN: want to make a movie, but got no script (metaphorically) - <AUTHOR>

I've created an anonymous account to post this.
I'm kinda stuck with my life, my professional career and my entrepreneur ambitions. I was hoping that some people on HN have gone through this successfully and could give me a few practical advices.
My problem is that I'm only excited working for myself. No amount of money can get me excited and motivated enough to work on someone else's project, no matter how cool or challenging it is. The reason is that I see no future in it. I want to make a lot of money and be wealthy, while working for someone else always has the limit. The problem is not that I don't have the money to make a living while working on my own project - I could come up with something or I would even combine working for someone and my startup. The problem is that I don't have any idea I personally believe in. Last year I've implemented a few (didn't take off) and filtered over 50 ideas, I guess, and this has just left me really empty. What I learned is that you need to have enough motivation to get through the toughest times. I don't mind working really hard, but I couldn't come up with any idea that I loved enough to make such a commitment.
As a result, I'm not actually that skilled, because I don't have enough practice. I'm not excited by the code itself, I'm excited by the promise of selling the product or the project, by the promise of welfare and respect. Only when I have this promise, I become excited writing the actual code and solving difficult problems.
To summ this up, it feels like I want to make a movie whatever it takes and I'm trying to shoot the scenes having no script at all.
Additionally I live outside US which makes it harder to do something for US market (not excited with the local one). On the other hand, moving to US to work for some company also makes no sense to me, because H-1B visas are basically a temporary ticket for you and most companies won't help you settle in US and apply for a Green Card. And then again, you work for someone with no promise of getting a reward that you really want.
Having said all this, to me it feels like a really complicated puzzle. I'm not whining, really. I'm just slightly depressed, but still very willing to solve it. So I would love to hear your thoughts, specifically, what would you do? <comment><USER2> I think you need to find something beyond the thought of "success" to drive you. Ambition is good, but it sounds like its having a demotivational aspect in your case because you aren't finding the right ideas and your situational isn't ideal. But reproducible success is about execution, and you can't learn to execute without practice, so whatever you do you need to get as many reps in as possible. Your breakthrough may not come for years (or ever, frankly), but by becoming really good at what you do you will increase the chances of long-term success geometrically. And remember, you don't need to do glamorous things to improve your skills, instead you need to learn as much as you can, figure out where your talents lie, and then (eventually) figure out how to apply this to a market.

Also, not wanting to work for other people may be a detriment, because you are unlikely to be able to attract the best people to your company if you are not already at the top of your field. The experience of working with the best people will potentially teach you much more than trying to go it alone with a cast of B players.

</comment><comment><USER3> To continue the metaphor, you've got two choices: write a script, or buy the rights to a script that excites you.

It's good that you're excited by the prospect of selling the product/project, and not by the code itself. Projects that are driven by a love of the underlying technology rarely solve other people's problems effectively, and that's what it's all about.

Don't focus too much on "the promise of welfare and respect" or wanting to "make a lot of money and be wealthy"-- it's easy to get too self-involved that way. The trick is to focus outwards-- to identify a problem that some group of people are having, and find a way to solve it for them. Relieve the suffering of others-- that's the surest way to gain welfare and respect.

You say you've filtered over 50 ideas. That's a good start. You might have to go through 500, though. That's the way it goes, sometimes. Fortunately for you, there's a lot of suffering out there, calling out for solutions.

From where I sit, it's not such a complicated puzzle at all, really. It's a pretty straightforward puzzle. That doesn't make it easy, of course. But you didn't think it would be, did you?

</comment><comment><USER4> This line really said it all. "The problem is that I don't have any idea I personally believe in."

My advice is don't even write the idea down on your list unless you completely believe in it, then you will be tenacious and motivated enough to get you to a milestone which motivates you further.</comment>


Ask HN: How to become better at writing concurrent code? - <AUTHOR> I am mostly backend programmer. From time to time I need to solve various concurrensy problems and this may take me a lot of time. I may spend a week trying to solve some problem that looks pretty simple. Note, I know basic stuff like mutexes and semaphors work etc. My problem is that combining these primitives to invent solution that is deadlock and race conditions free is very time consuming and exostive. Do you have any advice on how to become better at this? Any approaches, ideas, notations, formal methods, books anything? Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> Two techniques that have helped me:

1\. Diagrams that help visualize what's happening. I prefer a hybrid of sequence, timeline and activity diagrams. I don't have a ready example at hand, but [1] comes close to what I use. YMMV though - I know some team members in my past jobs preferred state transitions to these, because they found them clearer to think through.

2\. A technique we used during team reviews was borrowed from the book "Debugging Applications" by John Robbins [2]. Although the book was about debugging Windows applications, it had good tips on general software engineering and debugging, and I still recommend it now. One technique in it was the multithread simulation review - an excerpt:

 _The trick is to assign one person to each thread in your code and one person to each synchronization object. When you review the code, pretend that each thread is running at realtime priority on its own dedicated CPU. Each "thread person" walks through the code paying attention only to the particular code that his thread is supposed to be executing. When the "thread person" is ready to acquire a synchronization object, the "object person" literally moves behind the "thread person." When the "thread person" releases a synchronization object, the "object person" goes to a neutral corner of the room. In addition to the thread and object representatives, you should have some developers who are monitoring the overall thread activity so that they can assess the program's flow and help determine the points at which different threads deadlock._

Obviously, you need a number of like-minded and enthusiastic team members to carry it off.

[1]: [http://community.qnx.com/sf/wiki/do/viewAttachment/projects....](http://community.qnx.com/sf/wiki/do/viewAttachment/projects.core_os/wiki/KernelSystemCall/threadpreempt.gif)

[2]: [https://www.amazon.com/Debugging-Applications-DV-MPS- Program...](https://www.amazon.com/Debugging-Applications-DV-MPS-Programming- Robbins/dp/0735608865)

</comment><comment><USER3> Mostly KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), try not to be creative, try to reuse simple patterns as much as you can.

For instance, in the Java ecosystem there are the various Executors; Executors aren't good at everything, but they are good at many cases that turn up, and I've frequently spent a few days trying to understand what was going on with "sophisticated" solutions in Scala and/or Clojure and then spent 20 minutes coding it up with an Executor and at that point had something that worked correctly all the time and used all the CPU cores to boot.

<comment><USER4> > Mostly KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), try not to be creative, try to reuse > simple patterns as much as you can.

I'd agree with this! I'd go further and say in most languages avoid concurrency entirely if you can if it's not going to lead to measurable improvements. Concurrent code can be a minefield of problems and creates difficult to debug code so go with non-concurrent if it's all the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tools choice may be an alternative. For example, Erlang addresses many concurrency issues by design and the required code may be easier to develop and the finished code may be easier to understand.

Of course the price of using a tool like Erlang [1] is that all that knowledge of mutexes and semaphores goes to waste and different concepts like immutability and let-it-crash must be understood if not mastered.

[1]: or perhaps Clojure or Go.

<comment><USER6> How about Rust? The safety features for threads are really neat and make the workflow of designing systems without deadlocks or race conditions simpler.

[https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/second- edition/ch16-00-concur...](https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/second- edition/ch16-00-concurrency.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> collaborate with other experienced dev folks. You learn a lot from reading people's code in a professional environment. Or, use high level libraries. If you still manipulate semaphores in 2017, you are wasting a lot of time since there are a couple of high level libraries out there that do the job for you. They're maintained by the open source community, etc.

Part of being a good programmer involves trusting other developers. Sharing code, reusing code, etc. That's how our community works and trying to use basic principles in your code isn't always the way to go. To manage concurrent code today it's better to use a Queue for instance. Setup your queue and just push task into it. Synchronously or asynchronously, you get to pick what ever you want. It usually comes with a bunch of other features, like maintaining a certain order when asynchronous tasks get executed. In most of the modern languages, they offer thread safe and none thread safe data structures. Pick the one you need. And that's just one example.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have no problem with reusing existing libraries, queues whatever. But sometimes you have to work with lower level stuff. Even in 2017. So the question is less about general recommendations and more about specific methods that can help in designing and analysing concurrent code. Sorry if I did not make it clear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You could try learning a model checker for concurrent algorithms, like TLA+.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have experience with it? How hard is it to use TLA+ to solve every-day problems? Are there any other model checkers that worth looking at? Or TLA+ is the most sutable for concurrency problems?</comment></comment>


People are inherently good - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/people-are-inherently-good-9202d3afd024

<comment><USER2> You did have a tough day. I'm glad to see you solved all the problems at last.

I don't think we can avoid bad luck, but we can lend a help to someone who need it around us.</comment>


Philosophers Who Like Stuff - <AUTHOR> https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2017/fall/feature/philosophers-who-stuff-0 <comment><USER2> > Marco Polo's awestruck description of the palace of Kublai Kahn at Xanadu > belongs to the same genre.

Uh, what? Do they mean Kubla Kahn, a poem about a fictional world by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which came to him in an opium dream? When did Marco Polo come into it?

<comment><USER3> Kublai Khan, an emperor of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting article, including the subtitle, "Their case against frugality", may help people understand what the article will be about. The article title alone is quite vague.

</comment><comment><USER5> They don't mention countersignaling: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling)</comment>


Content blocking in iOS 9 is going to screw up way more than just ads - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apple/2015/08/27/content-blocking-in-ios-9-is-going-to-screw-up-way-more-than-just-ads/ <comment><USER2> Why is it called "content" blocking. This is network filtering. There is nothing especially substantial to ADs other than they hoover up your browser fingerprint and target the wrong ADs at you. Something I am not content with (no pun intended)</comment>


Improved query fields extraction helper for GraphQL - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Mikhus/graphql-fields-list <comment><USER2> Very cool. I have a bunch of code to parse the info param in various projects. Glad you took the time to publish it as a library.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Hope it would be helpful.</comment></comment>


Robotic Fabricator Could Change the Way Buildings Are Constructed - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603429/robotic-fabricator-could-change-the-way-buildings-are-constructed/ <comment><USER2> I admit i am out of my depth here. Correct me if i am wrong.

I dont think construction needs to be made faster. I needs to be of higher quality. ( Ignore the land issues for a moment ) You could built a 60 floor Skyscraper in less then a month.

What we need is a much faster, semi / automatic way of internal renovation in each floors. Door, Glass Fitting, Pipes and Electrical Wiring etc.

And all of these needs to be of high quality finishing. Taking into account of Temperature variation, lighting. Making building with the precision level of a Smartphone.

Even today, you could see building with Windows not aligned perfectly, floor line running slight wide, floor not perfectly level. Or even Windows with Leaking Water.

May be all of these are specific to Hong Kong, where we paid the highest price per Square Feet in the world and get absolutely dismal quality of building.

<comment><USER3> My grandparents just moved into a new home, only after the deal was closed did anyone notice that the washer and dryer water tap was built directly above the washer and dryer electrical outlet.

I've never seen such a thing, it's basically the same as an outside garden hose tap, installed directly above the electrical outlet.

that's not something I'd normally know to go looking for, so I doubt I'd have seen it myself if I was with them looking at the place.

<comment><USER4> Surprised that it would be up to code and pass inspection really.

<comment><USER3> I thought the same thing. What can be done though?

They have a home warranty that's good til next year, but I doubt it covers incompetence, and I don't think they could survive another move financially or physically.

It covers shit like garage door openers (which was installed backwards, as we found out after moving in) but we'd have to pay a service fee we can't afford just yet.

The guy they sent out to help with our plumbing emergency doesn't give me high hopes in who they'll send to fix the garage door.

The guy who built this place stripped it to the frame and rebuilt it with a team of the lowest bidding crackhead contractors, from what I can tell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reads exactly like a press release, especially the way it addresses the limitations of the robot.

Makes me think of PG's essay Submarine: [http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

<comment><USER6> Thank you, very interesting essay.

"...I didn't realize you could write as candidly and informally as you would if you were writing to a friend..."

<comment><USER5> His essays are definitely worth diving into if you haven't done so already. I don't agree with everything he writes, but I often find myself thinking back to points he's made or just ways he looks at problems. The one on Schlep Blindness is particularly insightful.

<comment><USER6> Also good, thx :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why "must" it be connected to the Internet for the architect (or more realistically the contractor) to make changes? Why can't they do it on site from a console?

<comment><USER8> Because then they can't get shafted by the company's crazy storage and service costs and they'd miss out on a few bucks at the expense of usability. And I mean who cares about that while developing? You aren't the sucker using it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The photo kind of makes me laugh. There's the robot building this nifty spiral rebar sculpture when we just want it to do some regular framing.

<comment><USER10> Spiral rebar layouts are very common in circular columns, especially in area of high seismic activity. It's a bit more difficult to manufacture than the alternative (evenly-spaced "hoops"), but it gives the column higher ductility during a failure event so that the affected people inside/on the structure have more time to escape.

[http://www.insteel.com/media/8177/Spirals%20Brochure%20wo%20...](http://www.insteel.com/media/8177/Spirals%20Brochure%20wo%20Back%20Page.pdf)

Edit: I have to admit, I didn't look too closely at the photo until just now. That _is_ a weird thing they're doing, but I could see it possibly being useful for fancy architectural columns, even decorative ones. (I suppose that sort of application is where they're likely to find early adopters.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjcXJ8EU48o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjcXJ8EU48o)

<comment><USER12> > It can build stuff using a range of tools with a precision of less than five > millimeters

So a precision of 10 millimeters, or worse than that? Obvious lexical ambiguity aside, I wonder what they're doing to drop the precision of that ABB arm so far. It looks like it's built around an off-the-shelf IRB2400 to me, which comes from the factory with a repeatability of _0.06mm_. 5mm might be an approachable number to a civil engineer, framing carpenter, or bricklayer, but it's not impressive at all in robotics.

Also, the Thinkpad T430 and W540 made me smile. So much more appropriate for this bot than the Macbooks or iPads you see in so many videos.

<comment><USER13> Can it still provide that kind of repeatability along all degrees of freedom at full load though? Last time I worked with robotic arms (Staubli) the real world precision was much worse than the specs claimed. With something as heavy and imprecise as a construction brick, I wouldn't be surprised if there was at least a few millimeters of wiggle room close to the edge of the arm's reach. In my experience, the tolerances on parts used in automated assembly lines don't have such high variability as those in construction (and this seems like a very general purpose robot capable of some complex architectures).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting read. I question though the need for a robot: why don't we use said sensing tech to empower Bob the Builder to "position brick within a seven mm" tolerance, and have the added advantage of well honed human heuristics judging a much wider variety of situations?

From personal experience, the constraints that robotic manufacturing introduce in the design of an architectural object are huge: you end up designing specifically for the affordances of these tools, to the extent that you sometimes get nonsensical results.</comment>


Brighkite Integrates with Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/brighkite_integrates_with_facebook.php <comment><USER2> Someone needs to buy Brightkite stat. I vote Yahoo!, not Facebook.</comment>


GitHub Issue: mpv is not written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/7724 <comment><USER2> From the last comment:

> we talked about this on an IRC channel, and Akaricchi opened this issue as a > joke.</comment>


Brain Simulator - <AUTHOR> http://www.goodai.com/brain-simulator <comment><USER2> Haha, that name, I want someone to script some OS destroyer with it.

edit: Is this a political comment? We might have to downvote!!!</comment>


Origin Demo DApp is now live on Ethereum testnet - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/originprotocol/origin-demo-dapp-is-now-live-on-testnet-835ae201c58 <comment><USER2> My first time using Rinkeby Testnet. A little rough to use with the faucet but amazing to be able to use the demo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tweet at @originprotocol or DM me if you want to play with this but need some test Ether to get started.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my website, please. - <AUTHOR> http://www.babynameclusters.com I built my site a few months and have been tweaking it and trying to get more exposure.  There are some really bad baby name websites out there - and lots of them are in the top 10 search results for "baby names"  I thought I could make something better, and here it is. <comment><USER3> On the home page, it says "lighter is more popular, darker is less." That's the inverse of what people expect. I recommend switching it around.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting... I seem to intuitively think that brighter/lighter is more popular and darker/dimmer is less popular. I wonder what the ratio is overall of people's perceptions. Upvote this comment if you think lighter is more popular (the parent comment had a vote of 8 when I posted this comment).

<comment><USER4> Why? In all honesty I've _never_ seen it done your way before. Lighter=weaker impact=less. Darker=stronger impact=more.

:D

Especially as your using red! light red / pink is a very wishy washy colour and the darker reds draw the eye much more easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My two cents: I'd change the design: I'd make the front page more like Google. (Search box in the middle)

And your site is full of features - like "Browse baby names..." and "We have amazing maps..." those thing are features - what you need to do is list the benefits. You should tell the users what value they get. Example: Our coats have double lining = feature: Our coats keep you warmer = value.

And from a users experience point of view: The site isn't very instructive and its hard to navigate.

For me I want to use the site to find the least "popular" name - I guess a user can figure it out by your maps and boxes - But wouldn't it be great to just type in a name and get a page back with a "name popularity" map? Or if I need suggestion for names maybe you could do that too via popularity - <USER2> entering a state?

Like I said just my two cents.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback about features vs value.

When we picked out baby names, the first letter was really important (to name the kid after an older family member) for browsing names, but I guess some people want to search for a specific name.

I used to have the tables sortable, so we could re-sort the names based on least popular. The idea behind the clusters is that if you like a popular name, but it is too popular, then you can immediately look at its "cluster" and see all of the related names, then pick the least popular variant.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I built my site a few months and have been tweaking it and trying to get more exposure. There are some really bad baby name websites out there - and lots of them are in the top 10 search results for "baby names"... grrrr.

I thought I could make something better, and here it is.

At first, my unique angle were these scalable "clusters" of names (based on word similarity). And, I also had links to wikipedia grouped by name. I also had very detailed popularity charts over time.

Just recently, I made these US maps which are shaded by popularity for each state. That is a totally unique feature which is not available at any other baby name website. They are actually really interesting to explore.

Anyway, what do I do now? I want more visitors and better search ranking. I have some other ideas for the site itself - like to simplify the multiple page types ("cluster" page vs. "single name" page) into one page for name details. And I have a few other ideas with respect to the maps.

I think I am going to re-brand/rename my site to: BabyNamesAcrossAmerica.com since my main feedback from friends is that my URL is kinds of geeky and hard to remember. But, there are so many domains with "babyname" already taken.

Thanks for any suggestions.

<comment><USER6> Clusters makes it a bit too tech for regular people and a nice interface will be a plus; you don't want this site to be just for hackers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree, get rid of the "clusters" name.

But not only that, the search results page is too complex. What is "rank (modified)"? What is the "cluster popularity"?

The entire concept of the cluster chart is probably something most parents aren't interested in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, I have changed the column names. I'm not sure which chart you are referring to when you say "cluster chart" Are you talking about the bar chart? If so, then that is just the popularity over time, which each bar being a decade. Or, are you talking about the flash chary showing all the indivudal names' popularity?

[http://www.babynameclusters.com/?search=wes&search_gende...](http://www.babynameclusters.com/?search=wes&search_gender=Search+Both&view=search)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I found the site a little confusing (like the others on here).

Good concept - needs tweaks in the execution :D

Like: \- Needs plain english (no jargon) \- Explain what everything means(I still dont quite get what the clusters are and how they work).

This page is probably your best! <http://www.babynameclusters.com/map/> nice and clear and intuitive.

The clusters page really needs a map. The graph can be a little confusing? no?

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks interesting. Keep in mind that this site is probably your best known competition when it comes to baby name charting: <http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager>

I heard about it probably 2 years ago when it first started getting some major press. Since then I haven't bothered looking for other baby name info sites (and I actually named a baby 5 months ago, so I speak from experience).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, Baby Name Wizard is very popular. I reviewed that site and other on this blog article:

[http://www.babynameclusters.com/d/review_of_baby_name_websit...](http://www.babynameclusters.com/d/review_of_baby_name_websites)

But, I think those charts are really confusing... I don't know why everyone likes them so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pretty cool, I think simplifying the layout a bit would be good. Make it easy to access names by location, time, etc. Also, it would be cool to suggest other names based on preferences à la Amazon.com.

</comment><comment><USER10> Blue links with yellow backgrounds on top of pink and lighter pink rows? With red graphs and a purplish logo? Get some advice from a professional designer. :)

</comment><comment><USER11> It'd be sweet if you had name forecasting--based on trends, what names are due for a rise in popularity and which names are at their peak.</comment>


Reviving the 1973 Unix Programmer's Manual - <AUTHOR> https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20171119/ <comment><USER3> > _The text of the manual was written using the_ ed _text editor._

I guess I should have known, but I had no idea that anyone had written a 50,000-word 300-page manual in _ed_. It has a bit of a, uh, reputation.

[https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt](https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed- msg.txt)

<comment><USER4> What kind of "reputation"? It is quite usable for typing in text. Hell, even

      cat > myfile.txt << EOF

works fine in many situation. Sure, if one can't think straight, makes a lot of typos and errors that cannot be quickly fixed with a simple backspace, needs a lot (and I mean _a lot_ ) of complicated refactoring to be done many times over, then sure - _ed_ is not for them. (Also, do not forget _ed_ 's close cousin - _sed_ , a "stream editor" that is widely used even today.)

<comment><USER5> I'd like to think that programmers back then most likely "graduated" from using punch cards, hence they have a higher mental guard against typos and mistakes when writing their program (or essays), compared to programmers that grow up with unlimited undo/redo. Back then if you had a typo you'd most likely have to wait overnight, or even days to get the notice so you spend a lot of time proofreading your text, and over time it becomes a second nature to write something right (most of the time).

<comment><USER6> Back in the day you wrote your program on paper and sent it to the punch operators

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" The number of UNIX installations is now above 20, and many more are expected."_

Understatement of the year, 1973.

<comment><USER8> Nice pick :) Added to [http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

<comment><USER9> I don't use `gem`. Are these available in a format other than hardcoded into the source code?

<comment><USER8> [https://gist.github.com/globalcitizen/dba12c237722811e64fb86...](https://gist.github.com/globalcitizen/dba12c237722811e64fb86ac1faa341c)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was amazed to see speech synthesis (speak / vs) as a standard feature. A little googling lead me to this: "Donald Sherman orders a pizza using a talking computer, Dec 4, 1974"[1]

I seem to have a personal difficulty imagining the level of sophistication that existed prior my own awareness a particular technology; in the same way that it might sometimes appear that before color photography, the world was black-and-white.

I'm grateful to the technology archaeologist who set the record straight.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94d_h_t2QAA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94d_h_t2QAA)

<comment><USER10> >personal difficulty imagining the level of sophistication that existed prior

I think this is something that happens in our industry specifically - <USER2> few years (to me it seems like every 4 years) - we go through these phases of amnesia. I honestly think it has to do with comp-sci grads launching themselves into the industry, and .. rather than catch up on their history, re-invent things that have been standard for decades.

As you get more experience in this industry (in my case, 30+ years worth) you start to see this more and more. Something to do with the cyclomatic complexity of comp-sci history, in my opinion ..

<comment><USER11> I usually feel bad telling somebody he's spent 6 months re-inventing either Expect or Inetd (for some reason it's those two more often than anything else). But it's ultimately for the best to tell them.

<comment><USER10> Many, many good things come from re-invention in our world. I only wish there were a longer-term awareness .. because there is a devolutionary angle, where people sort of forget why its important to do/not-do things certain ways, and end up leading us all into the abyss; cf- encryption, video games, internet, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As Diomidis says, the language is wonderfully clear; for example see the sentence on grep's -v option.

Nice also to see the permuted index and BUGS sections.

Lastly, wonderfully literate. Finding things like _hapax legomena_ is great.

</comment><comment><USER13> From the manual:

      Logging out.

      There are three ways to log out:

       1) You can simply hang up the phone.

</comment><comment><USER14> This was an update of the previous edition because of the many changes that had been made in the intervening _months_. They went at a torrid pace for a few years there.

It's amazing how much they got so right in design philosophy. And of course I'm a huge fan of the readability of their documentation. All documentation should be this good.

</comment><comment><USER15> As highlighted on TUHS maling list:

> When you type to UNIX,a gnome deep in the system is gathering your > characters and saving them in a secret place. The characters will not be > given to a program until you type a return (or new-line), as described above > in Logging in.

</comment><comment><USER16> I fondly have paper copies of Vol I and Vol II on my shelf next to the Multics book. The PDF referred by the above seems to be only one volume, with command references not the technical papers.

<comment><USER17> You may be interested in the similar process I went through in 1997 to make a PDF of the Sixth Edition manual, including the papers: [https://github.com/ericfischer/v6man/](https://github.com/ericfischer/v6man/)

The files for the Fourth Edition papers did not survive, only what is what is archived at ftp://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixArchive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v4/

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there an emulator that can run this version of Unix and ideally has the software available?

<comment><USER19> SIMH is a good emulator for 70s-80s minicomputers. The Unix heritage society (TUHS) has a lot of software, including early Unices, at their Unix archive. Some of it is a little tricky to get to work, but v6 and v7 Unix both work like charms in my experience.

Look at [http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Boot_Images/](http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Boot_Images/) for software (you have to look around in the readmes a little). Debian and Ubuntu both have SIMH packages.

Edit: This article ([https://connect.ed-diamond.com/GNU-Linux- Magazine/GLMF-102/8...](https://connect.ed-diamond.com/GNU-Linux- Magazine/GLMF-102/88-miles-a-l-heure)) explains how to run some of these old Unices, and the author also builds and uses an IRC client on 2.11BSD. It's written in French, but Google translate does an OK job on it.</comment></comment>


Student with over 600 spare hours is looking for cyber security project ideas - <AUTHOR>

Hello everyone! I am a student who is finishing a Masters degree in Cyber security and Digital Forensics, and to complete my course I have to develop and submit a project by the end of the second semester. Originally, I was planning to develop an automated platform for internal penetration testing that runs on Raspberry Pi, but unfortunately for me, ScoutBot was released (http://lansec.net/project/scoutbot/) which means that my project idea is not unique anymore. Because of that, I am looking for another project idea and hopefully - you can help me.
What can I offer you? Over 600 hours of work dedicated to the project by a student who is hardworking and eager to learn new things. Although I am not a Programming Guru, I have some skills in C#, Java and Python.
What am I looking for? A project idea that is related to Cyber security (and it would be perfect if it is directly related to Penetration Testing since that is the career I pursue).
I am still interested in using Raspberry Pi, so maybe someone can suggest me something related to it?
I will also be grateful for links to places where I could look for projects.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Did you go through the Matasano crypto challenges ([http://cryptopals.com](http://cryptopals.com))? I'm sure they could inspire you.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to have a lightweight firewall monitoring tool for the RPi with graphs and pies who will give straight/easy to read informations.

There are tons of old programs based on PHP and Cacti, etc. Most of them are not _easy_ to read, let alone to configure. Most of them look like relics more than anything these days.

</comment><comment> ko-da-za Why not help with ScoutBot? I didn't mean to take away your enthusiasm :). Between ScoutBot and ReconBot, there's plenty of coding to do! Send me an email, I could definitely use help! email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER4> If you are still looking for project ideas, feel free to contact me (info in my profile). I'm working on some cool stuff. Good luck and have fun!

</comment><comment><USER5> Believe it or not something relevant just popped up - I'd like to connect you if you're interested. I'm at "tom" at [my hn nick] dot net.

</comment><comment><USER6> Well, I mentioned one the other day in another thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8401867](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8401867) ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> I think I may be able to connect you with some worthwhile opportunities. Information is in my profile - please feel free to contact me :-)</comment>


First Look: Ubuntu 'Intrepid Ibex' Beta Delivers Improved UI, New Features - <AUTHOR> http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/First_Look%3A_Ubuntu__Intrepid_Ibex__Beta_Delivers_Improved_UI__New_Features

<comment><USER2> I just fired up the beta on my MacBook Pro (which hasn't had an upgrade since 7.10) and... wow.

No hardware issues, everything installed itself, even my keys light up again. Multiple monitor support has gone from being a 3 hour configuration nightmare to two clicks.

Far and away the best bit is the UI polish. It seems to have everything functional I liked about clunky old KDE 3.x (window shading! focus on mouse!) plus all the good bits they could swipe from OS X and Vista.

However I wish they would enable the dark theme by default, it looks much better than the light one. None of the review screen shots do it justice.

<comment><USER3> The dark theme is nice until you open Firefox. Web pages weren't designed with dark buttons, checkboxes and text inputs in mind.

<comment><USER4> To me, the first thing they should get to look nice is firefox. Everything else is secondary.

I don't understand when people complain that "XY release sucks because they included the wrong BitTorrent client". I've read serious reviewers stating this.

They need to become discriminate about what they include in their releases, to curate their art, as Jason Fried would say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks very nice. I finally installed Ubuntu Hardy on my main desktop and got dual monitors working after a lot of hassle, but now I'm excited to try this out. Going to hold off on the beta until a final release though

<comment><USER3> The first time I've ever had dual monitors working in Linux was two days ago when I installed Intrepid. It took a couple of clicks and (unfortunately) restarting X. Compiz doesn't work with Xinerama (multiple screen support) either. I don't really need the extra space, so I stick with my large monitor and turn off the laptop display.

<comment><USER2> I think it must be card dependent.

My ATI card worked with dual screens and Conpiz, and didn't need an X restart.

<comment><USER5> You're right it is. Some cards work wonderfully, the one I have has apparently "many reported problems" trying to get it to work with fglrx drivers

I stuck with Radeon for now. My only loss is that I can't get any desktop effects on because my Virtual Screen size is over 3000 in width which far exceeds my cards limitations. Would be nice if it could somehow "ignore" the second monitor (my TV) only until when it's on so I could get the effects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I tried installing the beta... But the fglrx graphics driver for my ATI card doesn't work :(

So now I'm just downloading an ISO and trying that first.

<comment><USER7> You could probably try new radeonhd driver.

<comment><USER6> Whoa, thanks so much. Didn't know about that. I haven't tried it yet, but based on it's latest 'supported devices list' it supports my ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT.

<comment><USER7> I've just found there are two open source drivers for ati cards under development: xf86-video-radeonhd and xf86-video-ati. One maybe better than the other.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Idea on Crowdsourced Deal Hunting - <AUTHOR>

Just bouncing a idea around, let me know your thoughts.
* Background: User wants to a buy a product, Laptop XYZ, best price he finds is $1900, wants better.
* Idea/Solution: User visits website, says they want New XYZ Laptop for $1800.
* Internal: Crowd-sourced people or outlets/stores can look at requested product/price and see if they can match it. Someone finds a deal for $1750.
* Finish: The original user gets the product at the requesting price $1800. The deal hunter keeps the difference $1750.
Current issues: How to handle the money/item transaction. One way is for the service it self to charge the difference first before revealing the original deal site.
If you are interested in this problem and want to work on it, contact me. (Just trying a open approach see what happens). <comment><USER2> Maybe you could set it up so that the buyer clicks on your affiliate link for the product, and you kick back a percentage to the deal hunter?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, instead of the difference using a % good idea. The trick is probably convincing the actually seller to give out a certain percentage back for the referral.

Definitely makes things easier for the Buyer.

<comment><USER2> If you sign up for LinkShare and Commission Junction, you'll have thousands of retailers covered, so you should be able to find most products and collect 1-15% in referral fees. Here's how I would set it up:

      1. Sign up with affiliate networks (LinkShare and Commission Junction, etc.)
      2. Set up website to allow people to post product price requests
      3. As requests come in, automatically create Amazon Mechanical Turk HITs to search for product and price
      4. Use affiliate API or have outsourced team (India, Philippines, etc.) create link for product.
      5. Reply to user (a la Priceline.com) or post to site that you have found their price, and display link or require registration to get link, whatever you decide works

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Isn't Amazon (or Newegg) the cheapest place to buy pretty much anything like that online already?

</comment><comment><USER4> check out <http://bit.ly/Lw6Id> \- I know who developed this site, in Israel</comment>


Worlds first 20 minute voice call from a Free Software GSM stack on a phone  - <AUTHOR> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2010/08/14/#20100814-dieter_tch_voice_call <comment><USER2> Now if only there was an open cell network.

Just imagine if next to the commercial services the government actually reserved an amateur cell network for open use. I guess wifi is the closest we will ever get.

<comment><USER3> They do!

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

<comment><USER4> Except ... not really. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-STAR#Criticisms>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Careful with the patents...

Cellular technology is an IP minefield. However, as long as you stay small and do it for educational value and fun -- you're OK.

Also -- there's a big difference between making a call and sustaining the call across handovers, dealing with base stations from different manufacturers, etc...

</comment><comment><USER6> If we mix that with <http://openbts.sourceforge.net/> or <http://www.tombom.co.uk/blog/?p=144> 'all' we would need is a frequency?

</comment><comment><USER7> Mixed feelings about this.

Opensource good M'kay

But what if somebody gets a number in the wrong place and their call drops every other call in the cell? So makers have to suddenly start hardening their cell controllers against bad packets, the cost is passed onto users by some networks, others just crash whenever anyone with an XYZ brand phone starts a call.

<comment><USER8> That's like saying "What if we let people develop open source web browsers?! They might make a mistake that causes a buffer overflow on my webserver, then I'd have to harden it!"

See: Postel's Law

<comment><USER7> More like allowing everybody to build their own electrical generator and connect it to the grid.

<comment><USER9> You mean like this? [http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071018201850AA...](http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071018201850AAhY5si)

"In many states, power companies are required to buy any "negative" power that comes from home or business users, at a slightly higher rate; this is known as "net metering.""

<comment><USER7> exactly my point. This involves you gettign an expensive heavily enginered power converter built by a certified company, installed by a certified electrician and then approved by the power companies inspector.

Now imagine anybody with a spare bit of wire was allowed to connect anything to the grid to test what would happen?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Next Evolution of SCOTUS Predictions - <AUTHOR> http://joshblackman.com/blog/2014/07/29/the-next-evolution-of-scotus-predictions-predicting-7000-cases-over-60-years-with-71-accuracy/

<comment><USER2> So the algorithm is correct 70% of the time, while (later in the article) the Supreme Court reverses 65.9% of its cases?

This is not much of an improvement over always guessing "reverse".

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I'm surprised to see them repeatedly reporting accuracy, when recall and precision are so widely established as the appropriate measures of binary classification quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not very impressive, I would say, at 70%. Although there are some data points at 90% that interest me.

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

</comment><comment><USER5> Url changed from [http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/07/algorithm-predicts- us...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/07/algorithm-predicts-us-supreme- court-decisions-70-of-time/), which points to this.</comment>


Frasier on the Electron Microscope - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS41-JeZ3EE <comment><AUTHOR> Only just started watching Frasier. The delivery of this joke is perfect.</comment>


A wild bug: 1970s Intel 8271 disc chip ate my data - <AUTHOR> https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-wild-bug-1970s-intel-8271-disc-chip.html <comment><USER2> Pretty interesting behaviour, but I don't think you can claim this is a fault in the controller. The contract was being invalidated when he wrote invalid data to a register. After that, anything may happen.

Today, most hardware has some protection against abuse, but in the days of the BBC micro it was common for hardware and os to completely trust the software. There were plenty of storys of damaged monitors because of invalid timing parameters.

One of my own storys, and I'm a bit hazy so some details are probably wrong: We found an old computer in a university dumpster some night, and decided to mess with the floppy drive. More beer than common sense around. There was some way to tell the hardware which track to read/write, with sane values from 0 to 79. But it was a byte , we could go to 255, so we decided to go up up up!

Well, the drive did exactly as commanded. 80 - 85 worked quite well, except the floppy wasn't guaranteed to be magnetically coated. But once we pushed it too far, the read head went literally over the edge: It jumped off the axle, dropped on the spinning disk below, got a serious yank, and the tiny wires got snapped off.

All of this with a single x86 out instruction, I think in dos 3.x debug. The OS was not stopping you if you did something stupid, there was no hardware protection or anything.

<comment><USER3> At least the drive I accidentally tried the same had a mechanical stop. Although banging the head against it 170 times or so wasn't exactly beneficial for its alignment.

Even today, one is better off not to write undocumented values to registers. True story: I had to investigate a SW bug report concerning a modern, fairly popular microcontroller. (I won't name which.) Sometimes data in RAM changed without our code writing to it. Turns out that our startup code accidentally wrote to a 'reserved' bit in a register, activating some kind of internal RAM test mode. This was confirmed by the µC's manufacturer.

<comment><USER4> > Although banging the head against it

This was how an Apple II made sure you were in track zero - by banging the head against the stop. This is why it makes that typical noise when booting up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Fascinating read, although I take issue with its title that implies that it's a bug in the chip. Maybe a bug in the author's code (when he wrote wrong values to the register), definitely not a bug in the chip but a feature. If you write undocumented values into a register, undocumented stuff happens. A lot of ICs have undocumented test modes that are used by the manufacturer.

</comment><comment><USER5> So _that 's_ how those Mission Impossible messages to James Bond would self destruct!

<comment><USER6> Forgive me for being pedantic. The agent's name in Mission Impossibles is Ethan Hunt.

<comment><USER4> Forgive me for being even more pedantic, but the person who received the self- destructing messages was Dan Briggs, who was replaced by Jim Phelps on season 2. Ethan Hunt only got the job on the first movie of the series.

<comment><USER5> Good catch. And yes, I intentionally conflated the two series, which might be unforgivable.

<comment><USER4> The fastest way to get an answer on the internet is to post a wrong answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good reason to get a Gotek floppy emulator and work with copies instead. With the open source FlashFloppy software, they work great, and are pretty cheap.</comment>


Show HN: Adapt Generative Arts for your needs without coding - yury-n http://adaptiff.com <comment> yury-n [https://github.com/yury-n/adaptiff](https://github.com/yury-n/adaptiff)

I've been very impressed by talented coding artists on sites like codepen and codesandbox and wanted share creative possibilities their generative artworks provide with people who don't know how modify variables in the code.

A bit later I discovered a similar project ([https://github.com/dataarts/dat.gui](https://github.com/dataarts/dat.gui)) originating from chrome experiments but it was too late as at that point I was introducing new features on top of it: integration with googles fonts, palettes, inserted images so that it can be used for creating social media banners.</comment>


RFID chip found on new Intel processor (in German) - <AUTHOR> https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/RFID-Tag-im-Intel-Core-X-Prozessor-3730254.html <comment><USER2> [http://thehackernews.com/2014/06/intel-developing-rfid- track...](http://thehackernews.com/2014/06/intel-developing-rfid-tracking- and.html) perhaps?

They might have just decided to put them on everything and not activate them on most as a cost measure.

<comment><USER3> In the german article they speculate that it could be used for tracking the details (freq, cores, bin, cache etc) of the chip when the lid is off. They also believe it might not be able to communicate via NFC when the lid and CPU fan are on the chip.

Unless they've hidden an antenna somewhere this feels right to me.</comment></comment>


List of probabilistic model mini-language toolkits - <AUTHOR> http://anyall.org/blog/2009/12/list-of-probabilistic-model-mini-language-toolkits/ <comment><USER2> i don't know much about machine learning, but is the idea that i can use these to generate synthetic random data? for example, samples from a given distribution? or, in astronomy, start with the distribution of stars (brightness and spatial clustering), and hardware (sensitivity, resolution) and generate images, complete with noise?

<comment><USER3> The idea of some of these packages (Blog, BUGS, Church, HBC) is that you describe how you _would_ generate synthetic random data if you had to. If you don't know any intermediate quantities, you specify distributions from which plausible values could be drawn. This is a way of defining your model and your uncertainties in a way that is easy to critique ("Your synthetic data looks rubbish!"). Then given some observed images, complete with noise, the systems can infer what the underlying quantities that generated the image were. A simple example: "is that smudge of pixels one star or two, and how probable is each option?"

Some of the packages (Alchemy, Factorie) ask you to define joint probability distributions differently. Rather than asking for a sequence of steps that would sample from the distribution, you specify _factors_ or soft constraints amongst variables. The product of the factors evaluated at a setting of the variables gives its probability up to a (often hard-to-compute) constant. The point of these packages is also to infer interesting quantities given observed data. The factors may have unknown parameters, which can be fitted to the data ("learning"). In the first set of packages unknown parameters are just variables, infered along with everything else.

The first group of packages let you define _directed graphical models_ , the sampling schemes can be defined on a directed acyclic graph. Factor graphs, used by the second group, can be defined on undirected graphs. Infer.NET lets you express directed models, but internally for algorithmic reasons it converts to undirected factor graphs.

PMTK while not finished, seems to be aiming to provide special support for a variety of machine learning techniques, in addition to generic graphical model support.

Dyna doesn't really fit in with the rest. It is a programming language that makes dynamic programming easy, which is useful in some inference tasks.

<comment><USER2> ah, ok, thanks - i had it backwards.

thanks for the details reply. i keep reading it, understanding a little more each time. this sounds like something i should look into more.</comment></comment></comment>


Another US Voter Database Leak - <AUTHOR> https://mackeeper.com/blog/post/239-another-us-voter-database-leak <comment><USER2> MacKeeper.com?

Here's what MacKeeper is — and why you should avoid it [http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-mackeeper-and- should-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-mackeeper-and-should-you- avoid-it-2015-12)

MacKeeper Leaks 13 Million Mac Owners' Data, Leaves Passwords Open To Easy Cracking [http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/12/14/mackee...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/12/14/mackeeper-13-million- apple-mac-data-leak-passwords/)

MacKeeper to pay out $2M in proposed class action settlement [http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/08/10/mackeeper-to- pay-o...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/08/10/mackeeper-to-pay- out-2m-in-proposed-class-action-settlement)

What 'MacKeeper' is and why you should avoid it [http://www.imore.com/avoid- mackeeper](http://www.imore.com/avoid-mackeeper)

Do not install MacKeeper [https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3691](https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3691)

<comment><USER3> I did a double take when I saw the url.

<comment><USER4> Even weirder, the article claims to have been written by Chris Vickery, who discovered MacKeeper's unprotected user database(!). Did they hire him?

<comment><USER3> i have never heard of vickery, however his contact information lists a kromtech email address. Kromtech has an _our products_ section which lists mackeeper, trackmymac and memorykeeper.

[https://kromtech.com](https://kromtech.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wait Mackeeper is a legitimate company?

<comment><USER6> I am just as surprised as you are. I had skipped the link assuming it was some very optimistic phishing ploy until I saw your comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This data is generally public, right?

Unless it's a dataset that is linked to other metadata, I don't get the big deal here. In my state, I'm pretty sure you just walk in and can see the voter rolls without even a FOIA request.

<comment><USER8> In some states (but not necessarily all counties in the state) you can search voter rolls online. With a last name you get someone's address, which elections they've voted in, and what party they registered as in the primary. It's been a while since I've checked, but a phone number may also be available.

<comment><USER7> Totally get that. Candidates and parties have much more data. They link people to all sorts of datasets. DMV, public employee rosters, union membership, etc.

If a good political operation needs to engage with a bunch of gay teachers with household incomes >$100k who drive trucks and own a home, they can ID those people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Basic voter file data is available from many states directly under FOIA, sometimes for free. It's public records. If there are secrets that shouldn't be disclosed in these records, the bad guys already have them.

</comment><comment><USER10> Didn't click the link because it's from MacKeeper. It's safe to read, right?

<comment><USER11> [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XGoq5F...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XGoq5Fom9McJ:https://mackeeper.com/blog/post/239-another- us-voter-database-leak+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us) google cached

<comment><USER10> Much appreciated. I'm surprised the submission hasn't gotten flagged given the notorious reputation of MacKeeper.</comment></comment></comment>


Gary Vaynerchuk Tells How He Built Wine Library TV - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/wine-library-tv-gary-vaynerchuk/ <comment><USER2> I hope I can get my boss to watch this. He also has 'it' and has built a little TV show around the concept of entertaining (not just the food, but the party planning etc.). Thank you so much for posting this.

I have bent over backward to try to stoke his interest in new/social media, but he wants to make the expensive-looking TV show with big-ticket sponsors first and collect money off it later. Nobody wants to cough up tens of thousands to sponsor a media brand that hasn't quite gotten off the ground. If he would give me a free hand and go the Vaynerchuk route I could make this work for him easily. Instead he's wedded to a financially top-heavy business model which combines the worst of all worlds.

He was an innovator back in the 90s of things like diet informercials but he just does not get the idea of audience-building on the internet and is avowedly technophobic. You would laugh/cry if I told you how this plays out day-by-day.

I know it's kind of antithetical to 'hacker news', but does anyone else have experience of dragging an unwilling boss or co-worker into a modern paradigm? How did you get them to let go of the anchor that was visibly sinking the venture?

<comment><USER3> I often find that when a boss is stuck in the dark ages of technology, the best route is to work around them. If they don't expicitly tell you how to do something, do it the way you want, but be prepared to fix it if something goes wrong.

If they do tell you to use some antiquated method and won't budge, then do it that way. When it doesn't work, they'll move on to the next bad idea. Eventually, they'll exhaust all of their options and will choose the best of the worst. Your job is to be out of there by then.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. This is not new, but it's reassuring to know it's not just me thinking along these lines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> wow I didn't know he was an investor in twitter</comment>


Safari Technology Preview 33 - <AUTHOR> https://webkit.org/blog/7751/safari-technology-preview-33/ <comment><USER2> Has anyone ever come up with an explanation of why Mac users need an alternate version of Safari, a perfectly fine browser? If so, does the explanation make any sense? Just asking.</comment>


Ancient tools found in India undermine the "out of Africa" hypothesis - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/01/new-discoveries-raise-critical-questions-for-out-of-africa-hypothesis/ <comment><USER2> Original Paper

[https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25444.epdf](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25444.epdf)</comment>


HBR Blows The Lid Off C-Suite Over-Compensation - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/02/22/hbr-blows-the-lid-off-c-suite-over-compensation/

<comment><AUTHOR> I have said for a while that no incentives is better than wrong incentives for a while now.</comment>


The Aha Moments That Made Paul Graham's Y Combinator Possible - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3002810/aha-moments-made-paul-grahams-y-combinator-possible <comment><USER2> Skimming this, I noticed a few mistakes.

I was 30, not 31.

My degree is in CS, not computer engineering, which is a hybrid of CS and EE.

We were already working on another company when we decided to work on ecommerce. We were making software to generate web sites for commercial art galleries (who didn't want web sites). So we didn't suddenly decide to write software to make stores. It was more a question of switching to a market that wanted what we could make.

Robert's apartment was not in NYC. I was the one who lived in NYC, and I was visiting him in Cambridge.

I didn't wake up with a specific sentence in my head. I just woke up with the idea that we might be able to control the software on the server by clicking on links.

It's an overstatement to say that the idea of Viaweb was too strong to fail. We came close to failing several times. It is true though that the best thing we had going for us was the quality of the software (rather than, say, marketing, or connections).

We weren't the only ones "insane enough" to make web-based software. At least one of our competitors did. It was a big help though that our most dangerous competitor took a long time to grasp the idea.

The story about the origins of YC omits Jessica. We decided to start it one night while we were walking back from dinner in Harvard Square (<http://ycombinator.com/start.html>).

Robert never devoted his time exclusively to YC. Jessica and I did, but he and Trevor have always done it part time.

As far as I know, no one has ever tried to put a valuation on YC. You could value our current assets fairly precisely, but that would come to less than 500m.

<comment><USER3> $500 million valuation?

YC could probably sell their stake in Dropbox alone for more than that.

<comment><USER4> YC's stake is common stock. It was presumably somewhere between 2-7%, like is advertised for current YC companies, back then. I assume it got diluted a lot since then, as Dropbox has had multiple rounds of financing.

Dropbox is worth maybe $5b. I think YC's stake comes out to 1-2% after the rounds. So, off by an order of magnitude or so. Just based on published info about the distribution of YC companies and their value, it's probably more like $200mm total fund value. Given that money-in was say 300 x $20k, and maybe triple that to account for salaries and other overhead, say $20mm, it's a 10x return so far.

Which is pretty baller for a VC fund.

On the other hand, I suspect PG etc. could have created a single startup of their own worth >$300m x 2 (to account for dilution) and probably exited it, in the same amount of time.

<comment><USER5> They might have actually done that anyway. Like PG said, YC itself is worth ~ $500m when marked to market, and I imagine they get acquisition offers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think the moral of the story is clear: If you want to build a successful startup, you must first hate Windows.

<comment><USER6> That did make me laugh; however, I think there is some truth to it, in that it helps to dislike the standard way to do _something_ in order to innovate.

After all, if you like the standard way, and practice it, what you are going to get is standard results - which are mostly average. Yes, there exist crazy creative innovations, but the vast majority of successful business are not new inventions - but rather, a better way to do something everyone is already doing. It's evolution -- sometimes a big step, but still, way more often evolution than revolution.

<comment><USER7> My mother used to wonder why I seemed so negative all the time. "I'm not being negative, I'm just figuring out all the stuff I have to fix." I expect I'll be on the other side of that conversation in a few years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Robert Greene is the author of the international bestsellers The 48 Laws of Power, ...[list of books]. His highly anticipated fifth book, Mastery, examines the lives of great historical figures such as Charles Darwin, Mozart, Paul Graham, and Henry Ford and distills the traits and universal ingredients that made them masters. ...more filler..."

Wow, Darwin, Mozart, Graham and Ford. PG's head must be spinning. ;-)

<comment><USER9> Author of "The Art of Seduction", "The 50th Law (with rapper 50 Cent).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _The lesson is simple--what constitutes true creativity is the openness and adaptability of our spirit. When we see or experience something we must be able to look at it from several angles, to see other possibilities beyond the obvious ones. We imagine that the objects around us can be used and co-opted for different purposes. We do not hold on to our original idea out of sheer stubbornness, or because our ego is tied up with its rightness. Instead, we move with what presents itself to us in the moment, exploring and exploiting different branches and contingencies. We thus manage to turn feathers into flying material. The difference then is not in some initial creative power of the brain, but in how we look at the world and the fluidity with which we can reframe what we see. Creativity and adaptability are inseparable._

What a huge load of bull (in the last paragraph) on an otherwise good story (albeit some inaccuracies) of how pg started YC.

</comment><comment><USER11> What he did - he made a pipeline, same like Ford did with a car assembly line. But it not just that.

Usually there are very mediocre people who works at assembly line. The trick is that YC filters out the best people possible, like Google does.

This is why the odds of successful exit (one way or another) are much greater than on average. They don't need each project to turn out into Airbnb. More than one is enough.)

Everything else is second. It is a pipeline of people who motivate, control themselves and push themselves to the limits. This is the cheapest (but hardest) way to get work done.

</comment><comment><USER12> > We do not hold on to our original idea out of sheer stubbornness, or because > our ego is tied up with its rightness.

Sometimes sticking it out is what is needed. These days it is fashionable to "pivot" -- I believe that in most cases you've gotta to stick it out enough with the original idea to see where it takes you. The data only tells you what you want to measure. The best insights/pivot you'll get by following your @gut (or as PG did with his "aha" dream of converting into a web-based store)

</comment><comment><USER13> Hustle, as a personality characteristic, sets top entrepreneurs apart from the pack. It's the one that really matters because those with hustle know how to pivot when a chance encounter arises. Although this particular word is avoided, Greene's description of PG reads much like his description of 50 Cent in The 50th Law.

</comment><comment><USER14> Nice article but I think it over-emphasizes hating windows a little too much and fails to explicitly make the more important point, which Greene did in this Mixergy interview:

"Robert: Well, the other person that I've interviewed . . . I've interviewed five so far. I've got about three or four more to go. It was a gentlemen named Paul Graham. I don't know if you're familiar with him.

Andrew: Y Combinator.

Robert: Yes, and Hacker News, yes. He's really brilliant. So, one of the things I'm talking about in the book is the power of being a non-conformist, and it comes to what we were talking about earlier about your life's task that you're unique. There's something different about you. When you find it, there's power in that uniqueness. It's almost like Harry Potter or something. When you find what makes that what it is about you, you've got this little diamond that's going to give you power.

So, Paul Graham, what I liked about him was he's always been a complete non- conformist and has gotten away with it, not because his parents had money or he was privileged, but because he didn't care and he took risks and he just followed what he wanted to do. And that's sort of the end of this book. That's like the ultimate thing.

So, when he first started out, he didn't really want to get into business, but he needed to make money because he was living in a really crappy apartment in New York. He came up with this other friend who was a great hacker. His name eludes me right now. You might know his name, and they came up with Viaweb, basically, because he was so good at this one code which name also eludes me that he writes in.

So, he kind of backs into being a successful businessman, and he doesn't really care. Then, when Yahoo buys out Viaweb, he doesn't suddenly try and morph into a conventional businessman working for Yahoo. He quits after a year. He becomes a writer. He writes articles that create a great following, and then he kind of backs into Y Combinator, which is a brilliant business model, I think, for the future for entrepreneurs, for tech startups.

But he doesn't give a damn about what other people think. He doesn't follow what other people do. He does what he thinks is right for himself, and I just think it's a brilliant formula. I'll be more explicit in the book and make it more, something you can understand. But that's sort of the gist of it."

(Both audio/video and full text transcript can be found here: <http://mixergy.com/robert-greene-power-interview/>)

<comment><USER15> He definitely goes more into that in the book. Robert tells the stories of the masters from a couple different angles, I think this is just one of the more interesting ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why the Y Combinator model don't work/exist in other countries? If this model spread to other countries it will be awesome, imagine the number of good ideas dying, when they just need a push.

<comment><USER17> It does, TechStars in particular has a huge number of affiliates around the world.

<comment><USER18> In fairness, the TechStars model isn't _quite_ the same model.

For instance, YC rather explicitly doesn't provide shared office spaces. The shared office space of a TechStars location is a large startup community galvanizer in the cities where TechStars has set up shop - and partially offsets the need to be in the Valley for those companies.

There's no question that TechStars is tweaking the YC model subtilely in its attempts to get global outreach. (This is a good thing, the world could use more experimentation.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It seems the author has already updated the article with edits based on PG's comments in this thread.</comment>


Jay Fields' Thoughts: Recent Thoughts On Hiring and Being Hired - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jayfields.com/2011/09/recent-thoughts-on-hiring-and-being.html <comment><USER2> I strongly disagree with one small bit of this: "Hit the job boards and see what the largest technology need is and get to work learning it."

This is optimizing for finding _jobs available via job boards_. These jobs generally disproportionately suck, in the way that applicants from job boards also disproportionately suck. Do not willingly sign up to be either participant in two blind geriatric elephants attempting to tango.

Instead, survey the hiring market which is actually decent to be in, where decisionmakers hire people directly. This does require talking to people, but only a little bit. "Why hello, CEO I just met at a networking event. Quick question: what can't you hire for right now?"

The answer you'll get to this question is going to sound a lot more like "devs who speak SEO" than "Enterprise Java monkey." I've been both. One is much, much better than the other in terms of material and non-material rewards to working.

<comment><USER3> HN ought to have a 10x upvote button that you can only hit once a month, and a way to separately track who gets them. This would be my vote for the month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The point of owning your self improvement and taking pay cuts to learn is very true. Most of my big bumps followed tactical stepdowns. People who only chase today's dollars are suboptimizing.

The one point I disagree with the author is referrals. It doesn't matter the finders fee, I always try to help with the connection. It's karma. If you aren't doing it for karma, 500 and 5000 are both too cheap.

<comment><USER5> I watch for places I could refer friends. But at this point, I probably get 8-10 job queries per week between LinkedIn, email and phone. I don't know 1% as many Rails programmers (or embedded/mobile programmers, or misc other things I get bugged for) as I have recruiters asking for referrals.

Besides, what if the recruiter and the job both suck? All I know is they're willing to email me cold, usually with a job that sounds like it's no fun. That doesn't make me want to pass it on to my friends, you know?

<comment><USER4> Good points. I guess the caveat is I know a lot of unemployed folks who appreciate the connection. It is true - if you don't know of a match, don't make the connection. I'd still assert that the $500 or $5,000 still doesn't make a difference in that case.

If you're doing a favor, you don't need the money. If you're professionally searching, you deserve a much higher share of the fee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good advice, but I would modify it a bit: instead of just letting job skill statistics from job boards inform your choices of where to invest learning time, I would tailor it more to what potential customers and employers who approach you ask for.

I spend my learning time split between Java technologes (huge job market) and Ruby + Lisp languages (smaller job market, but still plenty of work).

BTW, Jay's book "Refactoring, the Ruby Edition" is very good. Obie Fernandez (the series editor) sent me a copy a few months ago and I really enjoyed it. Recommended.

</comment><comment><USER7> He had me until he said "If you're out of work right now there should be a significant reason why."

Really? ~10% unemployment and they need a significant reason to be out of work? That sounds like something you'd say when unemployment 2-3%, not 10%.

<comment><USER8> I guess you are a troll but I will hassard a reply: Among educated people the average unemployment number is 4% (educated = those with a college degree, including communication and womens degrees).

In The Valley? Properly more like half to one percent.

<comment><USER9> What are "womens degrees"?</comment></comment></comment>


Battle of the CSS Frameworks - <AUTHOR> http://capsizedesigns.com/blog/2008/04/battle-of-the-css-frameworks/

<comment><USER2> Blueprint to me seems like a conceptual step backwards. While it does still separate markup from style _physically,_ conceptually it's just moving the layout descriptions from the HTML attributes into the classes; there's 0 semantic value to the classes. It looks like the design still ends up being tightly coupled with the markup.

The results _are_ beautiful, and I can see how designers might find it easier to work with conceptually. But from the perspective of a programmer I find it pretty unappealing.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you that its a step backwards, but I find that I have to add divs and classes all the type to my html that are there purely for layout reasons. Browser support just isn't there yet for truly semantic markup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Really, you don't need a framework to write CSS. It isn't even very helpful if you know what you're doing. For a rapid prototype, you might save yourself five minutes by using a framework, and you'll come out with crappy code that you can't use outside of the prototype.

I can see the value for wireframing, but really, the browser defaults do just as good a job in that case. This is why I've largely stopped development on my own CSS framework. If you watch the video at <http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/reset/> , the main engineer states explicitly that you shouldn't be using YUI CSS for production sites.

<comment><USER5> LinkedIn uses the framework on their site, and they gave a number of great reasons why.

[http://yuiblog.com/blog/2008/06/05/implementation-focus- link...](http://yuiblog.com/blog/2008/06/05/implementation-focus-linkedin/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Useful info. The author thinks BlueprintCSS + Tripoli make a great combination. I use Blueprint but in an effort to get away from understanding more, I would hate to integrate Tripoli with Blueprint myself. Does anyone have a good stock solution for such a combination?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, he does :)

[http://capsizedesigns.com/blog/2008/04/bluetripcss-a- fusion-...](http://capsizedesigns.com/blog/2008/04/bluetripcss-a-fusion-of- blueprint-and-tripoli/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One advantage of YUI grids over Blueprint was the ability to easily switch to fluid layouts by modifying a single DOM id. Took another look at Blueprint, though, and saw a fluid plugin is now available.

</comment><comment><USER8> I was very dissatisfied when I used blueprint for a recent project. For a grid based layout i've found YUI grids to be a lot better.

</comment><comment><USER9> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=218597>

</comment><comment><USER10> I've planned to actually look at YUI grids. This was a nice discussion, and I need to check out the others too.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is news from April!? Interesting my Framework "Hartija" is on the list :)</comment>