Bringing asm.js to the Chakra JavaScript engine in Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2015/02/18/bringing-asm-js-to-the-chakra-javascript-engine-in-windows-10.aspx <comment><USER2> Prior to asm.js I spoke out against Mozilla's hard stance that making JS faster was the _only_ option -as opposed to making a whole new VM or at least working to make PNACL more portable.

But, this here is exactly why I changed my tune. The primary advantage of asm.js is not technical. It's political. It would work without requiring Apple or Microsoft to take _any stance at all_. The big, slow, stubborn players did not need to be convinced to make any investment of any form. And once it worked, it would not be embarrassing or risky for them to join the party late.

And, here is the evidence that asm.js is working where no other option would. I look forward to the day when we can move on from JS to a better-designed VM. But while I wait, I'll be satisfied for a while with asm.js (once the SIMD support goes mainline).

<comment><USER3> I have doubts about asm.js. I'm not super informed so I might be wrong, feel free to correct me :)

1\. I don't know how helpful open source is if that source is inscrutable. The JS generated by Emscripten isn't super useful.

2\. The only reasonable way to use a non-JS language with asm.js is to use Emscripten to compile its runtime or compile a "native" binary. One of the arguments against PNaCl is that you basically need to use Google's implementation. While the tie-in with asm.js is for developers, whereas the tie-in with PNaCl is for users, I think it's tie-in nonetheless.

3\. asm.js is billed as an 'open platform', but it's still limited to platforms that can run browsers with asm.js optimizations implemented. The number of these platforms, when you consider phones, consoles, appliances, and legacy platforms, is pretty small. They can also ill-afford a 50% speed decrease. Since this is basically Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, your native applications are going to work just fine on those platforms. Sure you might have to do some platform abstracting, but not tons, and especially little if using something like Unity.

<comment><USER4> > Since this is basically Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, your native > applications are going to work just fine on those platforms.

But, you need people to download and install your app in that case. The reason major game companies are investing in asm.js ports, even though their engines work great natively, is because the web is a very good distribution platform. That's really all there is to it - no one controls the web, there's no charge to ship a game there.

<comment><USER3> The web is a great distribution platform for one subset of applications (news, email, social, etc.) and a bad distribution platform for basically all others. Pixlr is a great example; GIMP will do everything Pixlr does, faster, and without a network connection (yeah load time is bad, but that's a GIMP- specific problem). GIMP doesn't have to pay any money, other than hosting (which an asm.js application also would have to pay) to distribute their app. I can use GIMP without downloading it every time. I can also continue to use GIMP if/when its developers decide to give up. When Pixlr's developers give up, it's gone for good.

I also think pouring millions of man hours into a transpiler and JavaScript engine optimizations is probably the least efficient and most convoluted way to take advantage of the web as a distribution platform. I think the way this should all be framed is, "it would be better if browsers supported a lower- level bytecode, or more languages, or both, but that's politically impossible to achieve, so we have asm.js". That's the only thing that makes sense to me here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apparently Google's toying with the idea of using "use asm" as a signal to opt into TurboFan[1]. While not the AOT compilation envisioned by the asm.js creators, it speaks to the importance asm.js has already gained.

That said, personally I'd rather see time spend optimising the new ES6 features so they can be used without a big performance hit.

[1] [https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=2599#c77](https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=2599#c77)

<comment><USER6> Mozilla tracks TurboFan performance on its "Are We Fast Yet?" benchmarks. TurboFan is clearly a work-in-progress because it is not scoring well on the common JS benchmarks:

[http://arewefastyet.com/](http://arewefastyet.com/)

<comment><USER7> To be fair, the arewefastyet benchmarks are intentionally very broad, and stress test many different parts of a JS engine. It may be the case that TurboFan has a very fast sweet spot for numeric code (which would explain why they'd want to use it for asm.js), but is slower for the more general cases.

I'd be interested to see how TurboFan performs on individual test cases; for example, Octane has several asm-specific tests, and based on their planning I wonder whether TurboFan is faster than Crankshaft for those individual tests even if it's slower for the rest of them.

<comment><USER8> You can see breakdowns for various subtests on awfy. Of possible interest are [http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=28&view=breakdown&suite=asm...](http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=28&view=breakdown&suite=asmjs- ubench) and [http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=28&view=breakdown&suite=asm...](http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=28&view=breakdown&suite=asmjs- apps) as well as [http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=28&view=breakdown&suite=oct...](http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=28&view=breakdown&suite=octane)

<comment><USER7> Huh super interesting. It looks like currently TurboFan is competitive w/Crankshaft on the asm.js benchmarks, and much, much slower on everything else. I wonder if the V8 team expects TurboFan to someday beat Crankshaft on the asm benchmarks, given current perf differences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice, now that Firefox, Chrome and IE will support it, I think asm.js will become available in most serious browsers, which is a great thing.

It will be interesting to see what kind of impact it will have. For example, will asm.js eventually take over traditional web development? Theoretically, you can compile any compiled language to asm.js, so you'll have a lot more choice for the language you want to use to create your webapps. It won't really be web though: no markup, no links, but yeah, with the current heavily based javascript apps that's also debatable. Also asm.js still has a lot of limitations and disadvantages that won't make it just as easy yet.

<comment><USER10> "For example, will asm.js eventually take over traditional web development? Theoretically, you can compile any compiled language to asm.js, so you'll have a lot more choice for the language you want to use to create your webapps."

I've outlined this progression before, which seems obvious to me, but I haven't seen anyone else discuss it.

        1. Get asm.js into every browser.
        2 or 3. Observe that asm.js is very verbose, define a simple
                binary bytecode for it.
        3 or 2. Figure out how to get asm.js decent DOM access.

The last two can come in either order.

And the end result is the language-independent bytecode that so many people have asked for over the years. We just won't get there in one leap, it'll come in phases. We in fact won't be using Javascript for everything in 20 years [1], but those of you still around will be explaining to the young bucks why certain stupid quirks of their web browser's bytecode execution environment can be traced back to "Javascript", even when they're not using the increasingly-deprecated Javascript programming language.

[1]: [https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and- death...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of- javascript)

<comment><USER11> I think that eventually we might ditch DOM and use WebGL or canvas or something instead of it, like on the desktop.

<comment><USER12> You use WebGL to create standard GUI applications on the desktop? WebGL and canvas are in no way replacements for the DOM.

<comment><USER11> E.g. Mac OS X uses OpenGL to render GUI, I guess I should have made myself more clear.

> WebGL and canvas are in no way replacements for the DOM.

That's kind of debatable. If you have access to a fast graphics layer from the browser, you can build a DOM replacement of sorts. I think that famo.us works kind of like that.

<comment><USER13> It's true that OS X uses OpenGL for GUI compositing, but that's only the lowest level. Above, there's a very important piece of the GUI stack called Core Animation which provides layer compositing.

Core Animation is used by both the native GUI as well as the browser DOM. When you use layer-backed compositing on a web page (e.g. CSS 3D transforms), WebKit implements it with a Core Animation layer. So DOM-based rendering enjoys the same benefits of GPU-accelerated compositing as native apps -- although obviously with rather different semantics since HTML+CSS doesn't map directly to Core Animation.

If you implement your own GUI framework on top of WebGL or Canvas, you're not getting Core Animation compositing for free, so you need to replicate that functionality in your custom framework. (This applies equally to native apps: a WebGL app is equivalent to a Cocoa app that renders everything into a single OpenGL view, and a HTML Canvas app is equivalent to using a single CoreGraphics view.)

I don't think the WebGL/Canvas route makes sense for most apps other than games and highly visual 3D apps. You'll just spend a huge amount of time building your own implementations of all high-level functionality that is already provided by the OS and/or the browser: layer compositing, text layout, view autosizing, and so on. If you're doing standard GUIs, why go to all that trouble?

<comment><USER12> > You'll just spend a huge amount of time building your own implementations of > all high-level functionality that is already provided by the OS and/or the > browser

Not only that, but you can't make a 100% guarantee that your implementation will look and work exactly the same as the native one on the underlying OS. For instance, I can re-create all the native Windows UI controls and re- implement all their behavior in exactly the same way, but what if the user has a custom theme installed? Everything breaks. (WPF has a similar problem.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't know why but I am starting to like Microsoft. Things seems to have changed quite a lot in the past 6-12 months. .Net going open source ,new web browser spartan, CM acquisition are some of the things.

<comment><USER15> Never forget that the core product of Microsoft is Windows, and most of people are forced paying a new license with each new computer. So any decision MS makes is,as an ultimate goal to sell windows licenses. Today there is a consensus on Open Web Techs. Nobody can tell if it will still be the case 5 years from now.

<comment><USER16> Latest financials here: [http://www.microsoft.com/Investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earn...](http://www.microsoft.com/Investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earnings/FinancialStatements/fy15/q2/SegmentRevenues.aspx)

It's a little tricky to read the Windows impact since (as I read it) it falls into both Commercial Licensing (for business sales) and Devices and Comsumer (for consumer sales). Some articles which break it down a bit:

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/8936/microsoft-q2-fy-2015-fina...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/8936/microsoft-q2-fy-2015-financial- results-8-revenue-gain)

[http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/hardware- surprisingl...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/hardware-surprisingly- strong-windows-weak-as-microsoft-posts-solid-q2/)

So while the exact percentages aren't obvious, the big picture is that Windows is definitely significant, but Microsoft has become a lot more than Windows.

[I work for Microsoft until they notice I'm wasting time on Hacker News and "fix the glitch".]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Would be cool to see TypeScript compile to asm.js, would open up some cool optimizations for hybrid development.

Seems like there was some discussion[1].

[1] [http://typescript.codeplex.com/discussions/438243](http://typescript.codeplex.com/discussions/438243)

<comment><USER18> I've been playing around with compiling small subsets of JS to C++, then running it back through emscripten.

It works, but you have to keep the subset small, otherwise you end up implementing a meta circular interpreter. The problem will be that the subset is never the subset that pleases everyone. When your implementation doesn't support one person's code, it's labeled 'crap', and the negative cheerleading begins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Who's putting their bets on Microsoft going open source with Trident and Chakra next? Spartan is an opportunity for them to clean up the mess before releasing the codes I think.

<comment><USER20> At least for Chakra, this would make a lot of sense - I can't think of a downside for them. For Trident there is the theoretical downside that IE becomes fully independent of Windows. This currently doesn't matter, but might decrease lock-in in the future.

<comment><USER21> Windows dependency of IE is one of the worst things about IE - like having to restart your PC to update your browser. What year is this again?

<comment><USER22> The fact that it was stagnant, ubiquitous, limited to Windows, and encouraged ActiveX were the major issues, since it made it more difficult and expensive to develop and transition to web applications for about a decade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nice to see Mozilla provide some good, portable standards, as opposed to Google with their own "native client" ActiveX-like nonsense.

I honestly just see Google retiring NPAPI-plugins as a way to push their own non-standard, at the cost of all other browsers. I'm glad to to see that's not winning them any wars.

<comment><USER3> All of Google's development of NaCl and PNaCl is open source. The only thing stopping other browser vendors from working on it is themselves.

It's also worth pointing out (being maybe just a bit too pedantic) that asm.js isn't a standard. It's a subset of ECMAScript, which is a standard, and Mozilla has published a spec for it. The spec is more how to use asm.js, not how to implement asm.js optimizations. I'm not saying this is bad, but if you're arguing that Google's stance is, "hey here's the code for PNaCl and how to use it, good luck!", you can't argue that Mozilla's stance is any different.

<comment><USER23> While what you're saying can't be said to be "incorrect", it isn't the full story either.

What Google did was in-house, behind closed doors, develop a solution, embed it in Chrome, push it out in production, and start using it according to their own specs right away.

Then they told other browser makers "Hey. Here's a neat ActiveX-like idea, which kinda makes the web platform-specific again, which you will have no say in how is implemented, because it's already in production, and unless you implement it as we see fit (and will continue to in the future), exactly as fits our browser-model and code (although it may not fit yours). Take it as is or we will be discriminating your browser on our web-services". And so they did.

It may not be proprietary by definition, but it's not "open" by a mile either.

Counter that with what Mozilla did: They proposed a way to make highly optimizable code-sections even faster, machine-code fast, in a backwards- compatible, web-friendly and portable way and invited people to join in. Those who didn't, would not suffer a lock-out, but those who joined could benefit from the work already done.

I don't think there's any point even _pretending_ that these two actors are playing on the same moral level here. Google is acting scumbaggy and everyone but apologists knows it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Does this mean we'll soon have mobile web apps that rival native apps in terms of performance or will DOM manipulation still slow everything down?

<comment><USER25> JS is already plenty fast, it's just the DOM manipulation that screws it up. But asm.js with direct access to a <canvas> tag, WebGL or not, would probably be interesting.

<comment><USER26> Which is why ReactJS native is so compelling.

<comment><USER25> And React Canvas: [https://github.com/Flipboard/react- canvas](https://github.com/Flipboard/react-canvas)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Other languages compilers/interpreters may be compiled in asm.js and let us program in something different than Javascript (e.g. [https://github.com/replit/empythoned](https://github.com/replit/empythoned) ). Is this realistic?

</comment><comment><USER28> I feel like I must be missing something but I fundamentally don't get why people are so excited about asm.js.

Does the web really need more people manually managing their memory? Do they not get that that's what asm.js is? It has no GC.

<comment><USER29> I mean, you must know that applications with particularly high performance requirements can't afford a GC.

asm.js is really about trying to turn the "web" in to a true runtime for applications and a direct competitor to "closed" ecosystems like iOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Would be cool to see TypeScript compile to asm.js, would open up some cool optimizations for hybrid development.

Seems like there was some discussion[1].

[1] [http://typescript.codeplex.com/discussions/438243](http://typescript.codeplex.com/discussions/438243)

</comment><comment><USER31> asm.js + WebGL allow to completely skip the web stack making the browser just another platform of execution.

Strangely or not, C/C++ strike back.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think since IE6 Microsoft should be banned from touching anything related to the internet.</comment>


The Magic of "Untranslatable" Words - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-magic-of-untranslatable-words/# <comment><USER2> The idea that "our world [is] parsed and circumscribed as it is by the limits of our vocabulary" is nuts. Just because there's not a one-to-one correspondence between a word in a language and a word in another, does not mean you can't express the same content through a combination of words and sentences.

The fact that the author was able to write this article and convey these concepts in English shows that the idea that vocabulary limits our experience is incoherent.

<comment><USER3> The idea is that it shapes your thoughts. You're drawn to things that are easier to express. It's not that you _can 't_ express any arbitrary concept, but if you happen to have a concise word for something then you're more likely to use that than to try to ramble through something that takes a paragraph of explanation.

<comment><USER4> can't really relate to that.

I often have thoughts that can't be phrased in language

<comment><USER5> > I often have thoughts that can't be phrased in language

Is it that they can't be phrased or that you can't phrase them? I often have thoughts that I can't express through drawing, but that doesn't mean it is an impossibility. I think that we often ignore that the act of putting ideas or thoughts to words is a skill that can be made easier through training.

<comment><USER6> That does not mean that all human experience is communicable. In fact, internal mental states are only communicable to the extent that they are universal. Suppose I am eating cake and you ask me what it tastes like. I say strawberry.

Ok, but now supposed that you never tasted strawberrys. How do I describe in language the flavor of strawberry to someone who never tasted them? I can make an approximation based on flavors you know, but once you taste strawberrys you realize that, although what I said is true, it does not convey the sensation of eating strawberrys at all.

Even more: the less types of fruit you have tasted, the harder it is to convey an approximation of the flavor of strawberrys through language. So a lot hinges on culture and shared experiences.

Languages come from different cultures and sets of shared experiences, so it is natural that they develop more conceptual density in some things than others, and it is also natural that the grammar more naturally fits a certain way of thinking and seeing the world. You can discuss German philosophy in English, but it is a bit clunky. If you ever had the experience of learning a foreign language, you probably felt that you achieved proficiency when you were finally able to "bend" your thought process like the locals do.

<comment><USER7> Aldous huxley describes the idea that our own minds are "island universes" and that the way those we call "geniuses" think is an experience that can be described but never fully communicated, "that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten"

[http://www.maps.org/images/pdf/books/HuxleyA1954TheDoorsOfPe...](http://www.maps.org/images/pdf/books/HuxleyA1954TheDoorsOfPerception.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is an interesting concept in machine learning called "word vectors" or word2vec. They measure how often words occur near each other, and then try to reduce it to a vector that carries most of that information. This results in similar words having similar vectors. And even a very interesting result that you can do math on them. E.g. "king"-"man"+"woman" gives a word vector very close to "queen". I imagine this is at least somewhat similar to how words are represented in the human brain.

I wonder if you looked at the space of all word vectors, and found areas where words were missing. Do to some quirk of language, there was no word to represent that point in concept space. You could also compared the vector space for multiple different languages, and automatically determine what words don't have equivalents.

<comment><USER7> Seems like these could be visualized in interesting ways using trees/graph theory. I worked on a project called wordTempo that had an interesting approach, if anyone is interested in discussing

<comment><USER9> I'm interested. Did you apply graph theory to categorise words and language? Was it machine learning or was it more hand-crafted algorithms?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Kiasu on his list is essentially 'FOMO' \- fear of missing out. I think acronyms are an interesting way to integrate some of these untranslatable words into our own cultural lexicon.

[http://www.drtimlomas.com/#!lexicography/cm4mi](http://www.drtimlomas.com/#!lexicography/cm4mi)

</comment><comment><USER10> There are also vocabulary items that do have direct translations into other languages, but none with the same precise connotation.

For example, 斯文 from Chinese most directly translates as 'refined' or 'cultured' in English.

In Chinese, the term has a strong positive connotation and can be used an almost any context to compliment any person; it carries the implication that the person is of good character and education.

In American English, 'refined' feels mostly neutral (shading into a pejorative with 'effete') and while 'cultured' has a positive connotation, it doesn't directly speak to the person's character.

What we see is that cultural norms and values become embedded in the vocabulary of languages. Even a directly, literal translation will not capture the same implied attitude. That's why translations of books and the like tend to avoid close word-for-word readings.

<comment><USER11> >In American English, 'refined' feels mostly neutral (shading into a pejorative with 'effete') and while 'cultured' has a positive connotation, it doesn't directly speak to the person's character. //

Your point still stands I think but it sounds like you're describing "classy" in en-gb.

<comment><USER10> I don't know about en-gb, but classy in en-us seems to me mostly focused on the person's outward appearance and mannerisms.

<comment><USER11> It's often used in en-gb in a sarcastic insult way to denigrate [in the sense of disparage!!] someone's behaviour "yeah, real classy mate" but that only works because its use conveys the opposite meaning without the sarcasm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Signed Languages of the Deaf people have many «untranslatable» expressions. Especially of forms, movement and dynamics like the way a flock of birds is flying around in the sky, or the specific way a toon is squashed in an accident and pops up again.

<comment><USER13> To what extent can speakers of other languages compensate using gesticulation?

I am sure gesticulation is much cruder, but it has an advantage too: the signs for toon-squishing don't have to share configuration space with a big vocubulary of ordinary words.

<comment><USER14> Well, there's a saying amongst italians (and italian descendants) that in order to shut an italian up, you have to tie his/her hands. Conversely, they say you are never "trully speaking italian" until you start gesticulating as much as a native-speaker :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a musician, I've often wondered how a performer whose native language contained such words as "allegro", "largo", "andante" interpreted those markings vs me, whose native language does not contain those words.

To me, "allegro" is a tempo marking, not a state of being, for the most part.

I'm not actually sure who is getting the short end of the stick, in this particular instance, to tell you the truth.

<comment><USER16> It's easy to assume that a word has some sort of underlying notion, and that an Italian might think of "largo" slightly differently because it also means "generous" or "free". However, in practice, words often develop distinct meanings that don't necessarily affect each other. For example, the notion of bar (a musical notation, a pole, an alcohol establishment, or the law exam) are quite separate even if they may have had some common ancestry.

<comment><USER15> I am thinking it's a question of filters. I first encountered 'despacio' in a piece of music. Now that I'm living in a spanish-speaking country, whenever I come up to that word, the first filter is that piece of music; the second filter is the actual meaning of the word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Amusingly one of these untranslatable words is is in fact both a direct back translation from another language and has actually taken on an entirely different meaning.

"Take the German noun Treppenwitz, which literally means 'staircase wit': that all too common phenomenon of a witty rejoinder that comes to mind just after an interaction!"

Only that's not the meaning in German.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier)

<comment><USER11> Is there an explanation for how the modern usage you're describing of _treppenwitz_ relates to staircases?

<comment><USER17> Well, I think the development was that Treppenwitz originally was just a Germanisation of l'esprit d'escalier. However Hertslet's book "Der Treppenwitz der Weltgeschichte" (The Treppenwitz of world history) mentioned on the Wikipedia page became a well known phrase and caused a shift in meaning, although the usage in the title of the book itself was still basically the original one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone know if there is a word that roughly expresses: A feeling of anxiety or unease because you strongly believe there is a problem with a thing but don't know exactly what

<comment><USER18> Foreboding.

<comment><USER7> [http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/227950/a-word- to-...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/227950/a-word-to-describe- the-feeling-that-you-are-forgetting-something) actually I just found this. Also saw the term "nagging feeling" a few times and they mention "hyper vigilance"

Also, it seems like it is some form of dissonance - I'm going to try to nail it down lol

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A similar idea is that of abandoned tech and terminated/less lucrative branches of tech within functional branches, like image display tech (I.e. mechanical TV>crt>plasma>lcd>oled)w where research grinds nearly to a halt. We can learn a lot by looking back and seeing some odd tech that was a neat demonstration 100 years ago, that we basically forgot about, but might make commercial sense today.

</comment><comment><USER19> For those who speak multiple languages: can you think of some examples (besides technical words) that don't have clean translations into languages besides English?

Surely there must be some... English speakers (especially native ones) just don't consider them to be notable due to familiarity.

</comment><comment><USER20> There's no such thing as the "Untranslatable" Word if universal grammar is for actual. At least up to turing completenes, as any language should suffice to describe a turing machine. Yeah, I don't know about "Magic".

</comment><comment><USER21> So are there single English words that are somehow untranslatable into some other language?

</comment><comment><USER22> problem: in language L there is no word with meaning M

solution: propose/coin new word W in language L with meaning M</comment>


Inside Automattic's Remote Hiring Process - <AUTHOR> http://davemart.in/2015/04/22/inside-automattics-remote-hiring-process <comment><USER2> Cutting to the chase, they seem to depend heavily on a month long trial period, where the work is performed as a contract resource versus an employee, at a $25/hour rate.

<comment><USER3> Why such a low rate? This seems like it would automatically disqualify any but the most desperate job seekers.

<comment><USER4> It should be noted that per the article, this is for a single project for which the candidate has up to a month to complete. It's not a whole truth to describe the $25/hr as compensation for a "full month's work".

This is also, per the article again, undertaken while one has a job.

Not playing sides, just adding context -- I have no affiliation with the company.

<comment> jon-wood I can see why companies want to do this sort of thing, since it gives them a decent look at how people really do their job, but it almost entirely rules out people with a life outside of work. I'm already working a more than full time job, and Saturdays are entirely spent looking after our son so that my wife can get some work done.

That leaves one full day off, and a few hours each evening, by which I've likely been up since 5am, done a full day's work, got our son off to bed, and cooked a meal. Even if I thought I was likely to produce anything worth submitting, there's no way I want to give up the few hours of time my wife and I get together as a couple for the sake of a glorified job interview.

I guess I could take some time off work and treat it as my day job for a week, but then I've given up a decent chunk of my leave allowance in return for a job interview, and the addition of some tax paperwork to my life because I've been doing freelance work.

<comment><USER5> Yea, I recently turned down an interview with a company that included a similar 'trial' period as part of their hiring process.

From now on, any long, drawn-out interview process gets a 'pass' from me. I've had my time wasted too many times (employer suddenly goes dark after the final interview, no communication, no responses to any attempt at contact, etc). In fact, I've given up on my most recent job search after experiencing two of those in a row (need to save my vacation days for an actual vacation at some point).

On second thought, I suppose if I were unemployed and desperate I might be willing to put up with an onerous hiring process.

<comment><USER6> Or, conversely, if you had very little commitments outside of work, time to regularly hack on side and sufficient interest in the job to say "ok, this month, my side project is going to be for someone else". But the point remains that this puts an uncommon expectation on applicants, one that maybe Automattic can afford to select for, but that would potentially cause untold problems if all employers hired this way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That works for everyone except those who would have to declare to their employer that they're working on the side, for whom they're working and on what. Also, there are places in the US which allow an employer to claim any ideas related to your occupation that occur both on the job and off it (i.e. any code a developer writes, period.)

I'm assuming that type of thing is a no go and leave off a larger chunk of candidates than most people would be willing to admit.

<comment><USER8> I know there are places where that truly is a requirement to employment but I've twice successfully negotiated (once at a startup, once at an ad agency) those clauses out of my contract and I highly suggest others at least try to.

It resulted in a few awkward conversations with HR / legal but I stood my ground and insisted that them owning my entire life was unfair and said I was happy to have them own my output during work hours but nothing more. If they don't come around I'd consider it a red flag.

<comment><USER9> >I know there are places where that truly is a requirement to employment but I've twice successfully negotiated (once at a startup, once at an ad agency) those clauses out of my contract and I highly suggest others at least try to.

I don't do this any more. I realized after a couple of these jobs that this level of explicit disrespect written into a contract pretty much tells you all you need to know about working there before you've even joined.

Now I just pass politely and move on.

The pay at places that would try and ram that in there was never that great anyway.

<comment><USER10> I've had contrasting experiences. The employment contract was boilerplate and after a single awkward conversation it was removed.

I was happily employed At each company for years with an amicable "break up".

One company was <5 FT and another was >50 FT. Both in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _In that time I've reviewed a total of 251 resumes.

63 of those have gone on to an interview (25% of applications received)_

That statistic stuck out to me and it looks really high. When I've gone through resumes for technical positions, less than 5% looked like something we'd want to set up an interview for. I'm guessing places like Google and Facebook interview less than 1% of their stacks of resumes. Is anyone else in that 25% acceptance range for interviewing programming positions?

<comment><USER12> This is probably because the resumes that the writer receives have already been pre-screened by the CEO.

I tend to think that this pre-screening likely means that they are underinclusive—if anything—in moving candidates through the process. That is probably OK for a company like Automattic, which gets tons of resumes. But for a startup that has less name recognition, it could be more of a problem. Very interest read, overall!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Someone needs to program Watson to get itself hired via this system.

AI will have arrived when AI systems can get hired for remote jobs, competing directly with humans.

<comment><USER14> That's great. Should try a chatterbot first as a Turing test for HR department. If they think it's real, they're too robotic to work for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Matt used to put in the wordpress.com page headers something like "if you are looking at this you should apply"

But that was when he only had like 12 people working for him.

(edit: it's still there on every page served a decade later)

Look at just a handful of people in 2005 [http://web.archive.org/web/20051223160551/http://automattic....](http://web.archive.org/web/20051223160551/http://automattic.com/about/)

a dozen in 2006 [http://web.archive.org/web/20061225011025/http://automattic....](http://web.archive.org/web/20061225011025/http://automattic.com/about/)

to the insanity of today [https://automattic.com/map/](https://automattic.com/map/)

and still Automattic is mostly a one-trick pony, it's 100% WordPress all the way down. Even when Matt had a chance to have a second program with bbPress and fix many of the nightmares with wordpress, he doubled-back and had them rewrite it into an insanely bloated plugin for wordpress instead.

<comment><USER16> Eh, bbPress used to be on BackPress, which was a relatively unmaintained fork of the functional core of WordPress -- rather than having it run on unmaintained software or duplicating effort by pulling code across, it was changed to a plugin -- which is now much easier to set up and share users and content with your main site. It was a good change.

Also, while WordPress.com is WordPress some of the way down, some of our other stuff is anything but. We've been migrating to much more API-driven functionality, and the current WordPress.com dashboard (codenamed Calypso) is purely Javascript, based in React, and fully open source. You can download and run it yourself if you like -- [https://github.com/Automattic/wp- calypso](https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso)

And yes, as noted, Simperium/Simplenote, Cloudup, PollDaddy, Gravatar, others -- these aren't WordPress.

<comment><USER15> bbPress originally was a standalone forum written by Matt over one Christmas and greatly improved by a few other folks over a few years.

It was exponentially faster than wordpress and fixed a great deal of WP legacy nightmare.

Then Matt ruined it by having them create backpress and porting it to that.

Then he destroyed it by making it into a wordpress plugin and just kept the name even though it was completely different.

(I'm somewhat of a bbpress standalone "expert" perhaps the last one for what little it is worth)

<comment><USER16> Right, when you add functionality, speed may go down. Okay. It's a worthwhile tradeoff, largely because very few websites are 'just a forum' anymore, and forums aren't distinct parts of a website, they're fully integrated into the design, and by having it be a plugin it can be more integrated throughout the full site, sharing data and widgets and such back and forth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Note: Replying to applicants takes top priority over every other > responsibility I have.

Although I don't care for his example rejection letter, I like that they actually respond to applicants whether they interview them or not. It's nice to get feedback that your CV was actually read and reviewed by a human.

<comment><USER18> I applied and had to follow-up a month later to receive that notice. They completely ignored me until I applied for a 'second' time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Aside from trial payrate, the overall process seems really good. I'd like to see experiments in this method in other companies. Maybe even in large companies at the branch or store level with manager taking place of CEO in pre-approvals.

The more interesting part, though, is questions to gain the most insight. There are forums where experts in marketing, site optimization, etc detail the results of their experiments to show what had real value and what didn't. They become sets of tactics one can throw at new, but similar, problems. If it doesn't exist already, hiring people should create such a site for coming up with assessment questions and tactics. Curated by good moderators and industry veterans if possible. Thoughts? Existing examples?

</comment><comment><USER19> > At any point in time, Matt knows better than anyone else which roles in the > company have the greatest need for additional resources.

I'm skeptical of this statement. It seems to rest on many unreliable assumptions (e.g. at a busy company, it seems that a team lead may know better than the CEO when his team needs additional resources to deliver).

Other than that, I love their approach to interviewing: casual, asynchronous communication.

When people are actively seeking a new role, they may not be the best version of themselves. They may be stressed, feeling frustrated, dealing with a life event, and attempting to conduct a job search on the side. This gives such candidates a better chance to be able to put a better foot forward IMO.

<comment><USER16> > I'm skeptical of this statement. It seems to rest on many unreliable > assumptions (e.g. at a busy company, it seems that a team lead may know > better than the CEO when his team needs additional resources to deliver).

As a team lead at Automattic, pretty much all of us have regular chats with Matt -- some on bi-weekly group hangouts, others casual private conversations in Slack -- but we all communicate our personnel needs and concerns to him, and sometimes the solution isn't "Hire a new person for X squad" \-- it may be take someone looking for a team switch and shift them around internally.

Having actually experienced this in practice, Matt really is stellar at making sure we have the people we need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Once I fire off a contract, I'll post a comment on our internal hiring P2 to > give HR a heads up that a trial contract will be incoming shortly.

> NOTE: P2 is a WordPress theme that makes threaded discussions incredibly > simple. We use P2 for a large portion of our internal communication.

> I'll then create a new private WordPress.com blog and invite the applicant > to be an editor. This is where I'll post the project brief. This is also > where I'll move the conversation for the remainder of the trial.

I understand WordPress is their business, but I feel that using WordPress for internal chat and interview board is kind of weird.

<comment><USER16> We also use Slack extensively, but P2s are a pretty solid choice for us (we used to have the unofficial slogan "more p2s than people!") -- it makes onboarding really easy, as the full history is easily searchable and you don't need to forward emails to new people or the like. It also defaults communication to open, which is super nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I interviewed, made it to the paid project stage and got cut loose. Since then I've contributed to a number of open source projects and built some great things in production. Would now be a good time to apply again?

<comment><USER22> yes

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Well, in essence:

Nothing there is difficult, people just need to think outside (the tiny) box they live in. Especially HR drones

But still, the classic answer "not being a great fit" reeks of cynicism.

</comment><comment><USER24> "consider re-applying as your skills and contributions to open source projects grow and expand."

It's not us - it's you. I'm surprised they feel the need to blame the candidate, especially since I'd guess experience isn't always the issue.

<comment><USER25> I've got that kind of response from various places a number of times. You can't take it personally.</comment></comment>


WindowSwap: View someone's window somewhere in the world - <AUTHOR> https://window-swap.com/ <comment><USER2> > We need all the window views we can get. So, please send yours to > firstname.lastname@example.com. A 10-minute, horizontal HD video of your window and > frame, with your name and location for credits. Horizontal, vertical, > square, round or decorative, all kinds of windows are welcome!

Oh, I guess it makes sense now that I think about it, but I really thought the views were live at first. Watching what I thought were live feeds felt super cool. :(

<comment><USER3> Huh. I recall coming across a Tor onion site with links to various security cam systems. Nothing exciting, just live video of lobbies, elevators, parking lots and garages, etc.

<comment><USER4> Are you sure it wasn't just a plain old website? There was one posted here a few years ago (and I thought the site went down but it's actually still going):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13272112](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13272112)

<comment><USER5> I have recently scanned addresses within a radius of my town and there's still a lot of cameras with default credentials or with no password at all. It's getting better over the years, but not quite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not normally interested in novelty sites like this but I think it's absolutely wonderful. I live in a leafy Seattle suburb and am constantly smug about how lovely it is here. Most of these were at least as pretty.

<comment><USER7> > I live in a leafy Seattle suburb and am constantly smug about how lovely it > is here.

Submit your window to the linked site, so others can enjoy it too if you didn't already :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been streaming the birdfeeder on my balcony on youtube. mostly for fun and my mom. It makes a new stream every morning at 6am PST8PDT time, [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0hyjYFftwe8vKnpERMS8ug](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0hyjYFftwe8vKnpERMS8ug)

The finches that visit mostly come around in the morning and before noon, with some around in the afternoon.

<comment><USER9> Neat! What sort of camera setup do you have for this?

<comment><USER8> It's a raspberry pi with a logitech C920. The software is just some shell scripts + gstreamer to do the actual streaming. It goes to a server and then to youtube from there, so that I can have a much less laggy version of the video for my own use when positioning things or otherwise working on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> can you add a button to get a link to some of these so you can go back to them?

for instance this is a nice sunset going on at the moment

[https://player.vimeo.com/video/431141355?autoplay=1&title=0&...](https://player.vimeo.com/video/431141355?autoplay=1&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&wmode=transparent&background=1&muted=0)

but had to go extract it out of the code

<comment><USER10> oh, these aren't live, just recorded videos? even recorded, these are interesting.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, it is an exponentially more difficult problem when done live - aka Bill O'Reilly Rule.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Beautiful project. I once had an idea to do some similar but with real time live camera feeds. And some sort of subscription/marketplace where people with amazing views would get paid to share their amazing views, and other folks would subscribe to that realtime 24/7 feed.

<comment><USER13> Some surfers use services like this to check if the wave conditions are right before they go out.

<comment><USER14> A friend had a startup that did this for nightclubs so you could see which club was really going hot and which was dead. He got a couple of places to sign up but think ultimately it failed to gain traction because no nightclub wants potential customers to know ahead of time that it's dead inside.

<comment><USER15> You could achieve this by selectively showing what it was like last Friday night at 1am instead of a live view at 8pm when nothing is happening but people are deciding...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There another site that adds live radio to canned video

[https://driveandlisten.herokuapp.com/](https://driveandlisten.herokuapp.com/)

Was here on HN a couple weeks back

<comment><USER11> This gave me such strong feelings of location nostalgia. Thanks for resharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is so relaxing to watch. I think the lack of a 'bookmark' function actually makes me linger on certain windows longer; I know that if I hit 'next' I probably won't be able to come back to that window.

<comment><USER18> They are 10-minute recordings anyway, so you won't see anything new... That being said; there is a workaround until it gets implemented: Right click the video and select "Inspect". You will see the link to the Vimeo hosted video file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> awesome work! we're gonna submit one tomorrow!

it would be cool if you tagged the videos by time of day and showed daytime/nighttime ones based on the client's local time (or preference)

</comment><comment><USER20> I think that will work best if you display all the windows on a map and let the user select the location.

</comment><comment> richsu-ca Love this. Best internet idea in a long time. The pre-recorded video is key.

I am recording one right now!

</comment><comment><USER21> Found someone who was playing Beatles in the background, half a world away, overnight in Dubai... (I know it's not live but it was still dark). Nice to have the sounds/ambiance as well as the video...

</comment><comment><USER22> Not being familiar with London, this is probably a popular spot, but just watched The Old Guard on Netflix last night and noticed James Sandham's window and 1:48:12 in the movie are the same.

</comment><comment><USER23> I would enjoy a "slideshow" or auto-advanced feature that automatically moves to the next window when the video finishes or after some fixed period of time.

</comment><comment> gjsman-1000 Not working on Safari.

<comment><USER6> Works perfectly fine on my Safari v13.1.1 on MacOS 10.15.5

<comment><USER24> Not working on iOS 13.5.1 Safari on my iPad. The thumbnail shows for a brief moment and then the page goes blank

<comment><USER25> Click the next button. Somehow on safari the first window is broken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Nice! Too bad I didn't find a way to save/share a good one (some mountain landscape, etc.); maybe that's not the point?

</comment><comment><USER27> All I get are static images in mobile devices. No video. :(

</comment><comment><USER27> All I get are static images in mobile devices. No video.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is so neat! Thanks for this!

</comment><comment><USER29> This thing makes me so happy.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is so cool..

</comment><comment><USER31> Loved it!

</comment><comment><USER32> not working on firefox, x-frame blocked...

<comment><USER2> Huh, I'm also on Firefox and it worked.</comment></comment>


Private equity firm wants to buy .org for $1B. Berkeley-based coop:'not so fast' - <AUTHOR> https://www.berkeleyside.com/2020/01/16/a-private-equity-firm-wants-to-buy-org-for-1-billion-a-berkeley-based-cooperative-says-not-so-fast <comment><USER2> Woodcock:

" We're talking about Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross. We're talking about the IATA that does international air traffic control. Do we really want international flights grounded for three days a year so [Bain founder and U.S. Senator] Mitt Romney can make a few hundred million more?"

</comment><comment><USER3> > In this particular cooperative, if we're successful, the members are every > .org registrant, which means 10 million members. We'd need to get five > million and one of them to agree, to change the articles.

Okay, so... what is their plan to get these five million .org registrants to "agree"?

The article seems to be entirely fluff.

<comment> em-bee the point is that they don't.

they set up an organization with a charter that protects their well intentioned goals, and by having lot's of members they insure that no majority is ever able to change the goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is just pure rent-seeking by "Ethos Capital".</comment>


Silver Bullet -- Time Travelling Debugger [Google Tech Talk] - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpfmKIxusZY Though I think using the term "Silver Bullet" is a bit cheeky, I'll admit I'm curious, this seems like a pretty impressive leap forward. <comment><AUTHOR> Though I think using the term "Silver Bullet" is a bit cheeky, I'll admit I'm curious, this seems like a pretty impressive leap forward.</comment>


Hidden warning message found in Samsung's Galaxy tablet - <AUTHOR> http://www.chipworks.com/en/technical-competitive-analysis/resources/technology-blog/2011/02/hidden-warning-message-found-in-samsungs-galaxy-tablet/

<comment><USER2> Summary: "IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU ARE MUCH TOO CLOSE" etched onto one of the internal chip's dies at a ridiculously small scale. Plus various other cartoon characters.

Edit: Yeesh, what's with the downvotes? I'm just providing a summary for other people who check the comments first, to catch the gist of an article quickly.

<comment><USER3> I must protest. 2 microns is not ridiculously small. _This_ , built by some former colleagues, is ridiculously small:

<http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/july97/guitar.ltb.html>

Though it is - god help me - nearly fifteen years old so presumably it is no longer that ridiculous. [1] These things probably ship inside every iPhone by now, or something.

Of course, none of this banter should lead you to conclude that the OP's chip art is any less than _awesome_. Remember, it's not the microscopicness of the equipment that matters, but how you use it. The colors are a very nice touch, for example.

\---

[1] And I'm not even going to talk about those AFM folks, or the self- assembled nanomaterials folks. They are just _too_ ridiculous.

<comment><USER4> 1 micron is not cool. You know what's cool?

<comment><USER5> ...a bicron?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Microprocessor easter eggs aren't new.

Here are some of the existing menagerie...

<http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/>

<http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/chipshots/dec/index.html>

<http://simh.trailing-edge.com/dsarchive.html>

And then there's the classic "VAX - When you care enough to steal the very best" that was etched (in Cyrillic) on the some of the MicroVAX chips:

<http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html>

<comment><USER7> From your VAX link - it was written in Cyrillic, because it was meant to be read by the inevitable Russian reverse-engineers. Russia lagged on chip design, so they stole US chip designs for their own computer industry, and told everybody they were original.

<comment><USER8> Interestingly, it's a word by word translation of the English phrase so it doesn't make any sense in Russian. I don't know if those reverse engineers would have guessed what it meant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The cartoon chicken is Calimero: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calimero>

<comment><USER10> This makes me wonder if they risk a copyright infringement lawsuit...

<comment><USER11> I think under fair use provisions this might count as _de minimus_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The dragon wants to become a firefighter =). It's an Italian cartoon and it was also popular in Germany.

It seems that there is no English wikipedia page for this one.

<http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grisu,_der_kleine_Drache>

</comment><comment><USER13> To me this is a sign of healthy engineering and management team that's confident enough to have fun with what they're doing.

</comment><comment><USER14> The man playing drums looks _very_ much like Conan O'brien to me. Just saying.

</comment><comment><USER15> _a smiling hat-wearing hippo/dragon/whatever,_

Aka grisu the firefighter.

 _and last but not least was some silicon art showing a baby duck_

Aka Calimero.

Both popular series produced in the late 70s and shown in the 80s and 90s.

I wonder wheter I'm already too old or too young to know these..

</comment><comment><USER16> Is it just my copy of Firefox, or does everyone have to manage to hover over and click on a 1x1 dot in order to change the images? Not very easy on a touchpad.

Seems like a "Previous | Next" UI would have been much easier to use.

<comment><USER17> In Chromium the thumbnails were something like 20×20.</comment></comment>


Icinga - a Re-architected Nagios fork - <AUTHOR> https://www.icinga.org/nagios/architecture/ <comment><USER2> I've had the opportunity to work with Icinga during my internship last year.

Nagios development has stagnated somewhat but Icinga is thriving. It is 100% compatible with all Nagios plugins and most of the configuration tools. Most notably, NConf works very well with Icinga.

They reworked the old Nagios interface and offer entirely new web and mobile interfaces. I must say it's a pleasure to use.

<comment><USER3> Is it capable of adding new monitoring checks on the fly yet, or storing its configuration in a database? Those are things that I really want.

<comment><USER4> Not 'on the fly' but very close. Add them, then click the recompile button and it will rewrite the configs and restart the deamon in a matter of seconds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I needed an open source monitoring solution some time ago I eventually went with Zenoss. Nagios felt a bit clunky. Zenoss had a (IMO) better structured web interface and also more options for log-filtering/monitoring. Also it's based on Python so easier for me to extend.

The only drawback of Zenoss is that it is a bit of a memory hog, which eventually became a problem as it was running on a cheap VPS...

Icanga does sound promising, as it looks like it redesigned Nagios from a bag of old perl scripts to a better-integrated solution.

<comment><USER6> There is Shinken as well (<http://www.shinken-monitoring.org/features/>) which promises 100% compatibility with Nagios plugins... plus is written in python (<https://github.com/naparuba/shinken>). Not sure about performance comparisons

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We are using Icinga to monitor stuff around our office. Its nice and robust, but sometimes you have to work around the architecture to do what you want. Like, maybe you don´t want icinga to poll data, you would rather send data to it.

Anyways, Ive forked the Greplin-Nagios-Utils to address this issue and added some stuff to read from Memcache, now your super importatnt services can supply data to Memcache, Icinga will then do some haxx and poll the data when it pleases, so you will end up with the data in your frontend. Its in an early stage.. But hopefully I will have the time to make it better, faster, stronger. [https://github.com/simonjohansson/greplin-nagios- utils/tree/...](https://github.com/simonjohansson/greplin-nagios- utils/tree/master/checkserver_memcached)

<comment><USER8> You should be able to send data using passive checks. As far as I know, that has always been the model in Nagios.

<comment><USER7> In that case I should read the documentation a bit better. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This has said "Error establishing a database connection" for a few minutes now. Quite ironic.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm guessing this is their first HN slam.

I submitted it because i found very few mentions of it via HN-search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Agavi FTW!</comment>


Many using recent Pangu jailbreak report hacked credit, debit, PayPal accounts - <AUTHOR> http://9to5mac.com/2016/07/30/pangu-jailbreak-potential-hack/ <comment><USER2> People who write jailbreaks would love to get paid, I'm sure. In China, shady stuff like this won't get anyone sued, at least if they don't rip off anyone from within China. Do the math.

I used to jailbreak, but then I realized I didn't want to fight my device at every turn and switched to Android. I don't mean that Android is better, just that iOS is highly locked down, and asking it to do more than for what it was designed is a losing battle. Not to mention that the coders are fighting jailbreakers at every turn, too.

Raise your hand if you'd love to get on the bad side of Apple.

<comment><USER3> You are an idiot.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the most convenient payment method for enterprise customers? - <AUTHOR>

Almost every startup these days have an enterprise/corporate plan on their sign up pages. I wonder if these corporates would really find the "pay by credit card each month" appealing. Or do they prefer paper Cheques?Would love to hear from someone with experience in this regard. <comment><USER2> The primary reason why a lot of SaaS businesses charge a monthly premium instead of an annual premium is due to purchasing policies at corporates - which usually dictate that purchases over x amount (x=$500/$1000+) require multiple sign-off and follow long-winded acquisition processes that tend to take forever. By charging less than the threshold or by charging a large amount that would normally exceed the threshold over time; it's a lot easier to get such purchase orders signed off. Credit card is the preferred method for smallish amounts (< $2000).

Without generalizing too much - corporates are generally price insensitive - they would rather pay a preferred supplier more than risk their business on a cheaper alternative (without great motivation).

It's in your best interest to dictate the terms that are the least risky for you - they won't choose another supplier because he offers payment via cheque and you don't. If they do, I'm not sure that you do want them as a client considering the hassle you would potentially have to go through to get your money (good luck if the corporate is in another country!).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, that was along the lines of what I wanted to know, extremely helpful :)</comment></comment>


How to build your own bio-bot - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-to-build-your-own-bio-bot <comment><USER2> Is this a muscle tissue with actual cells, and if so, what species is this and how it's... sourced? If it's not muscle of an existing species, why is it called muscle?

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how practical living tissue as actuator for bio-robots. It needs to be fed, kept healthy and clear of infections, and replaced when beyond certain age.

I remember all those (temperature/pH/electro/magneto-sensitive) hydrogels actuator publications: Really cool experiments, but not really useful to engineer a replacement for electric motors.

<comment><USER4> I can give you a lower bound on the practicality of bio-robots...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> already known: see Kama Sutra and many other how-to manuals.</comment>


The four categories of NoSQL databases - <AUTHOR> http://rebelic.nl/engineering/the-four-categories-of-nosql-databases/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter-publisher-main&utm_campaign=twitter

<comment><USER2> Imho this article is too much of an oversimplification. It's forcing artifical labels on some things that don't really fit very well.

It's fairly useless if you've already heard about most of these and it's a false start if you haven't.

If you do want such a list, a much more accurate and complete one is at <http://nosql.mypopescu.com/kb/nosql>

<comment><USER3> You could be surprised about the efforts many folks do to try to put the different DB solutions into some kind of schema. The reason for this is mostly opaque for me...

<comment><USER4> It can be useful to have a sort of map of the landscape if you're looking around. Sort of how in PLs, it's nice to be able to have a categorization better than "there are thousands of programming languages". Coming up with a _good_ map is hard, though, and any categorization does tend to emphasize some factors and gloss over others...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Categorizing the stores by their data model is misleading. Tokyo Tyrant and Voldemort are very different: later is a multi-master, partitioned, distributed system; former is a network attached database. In fact, one could easily use Tokyo Cabinet as the persistence engine in Voldemort in place of BerkeleyDB.

A far better classification should be done along the lines of the distribution models and handling of failures. Do they use consistent hashing or range based partitioned? Under failure, is consistency or availability given up? Are there barriers to nodes rejoining after recovering from a failure? Is there an ordered, distributed commit log, etc...

It's much harder to change the distribution model than it is change the query model. Riak, HBase and Voldemort also have support for running custom code against which queries may be made. On the other hand, adding a totally ordered commit log (via serializing through a floating master or using consensus) to Voldemort or Riak, or adding multi-master (in the sense of multiple region servers taking reads and writes for the same partition) support to HBase is going to be far more difficult.

Creating a "grand classification scheme" that ignores the most important aspect suggests a dilettante approach (not saying the author is a dilettante, but it's a much more complex topic which requires more than dabbling).

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm puzzled by their describing Riak as a column oriented database. It is a key/value store. Perhaps they are thinking of the highly beta Riak Search? <http://wiki.basho.com/Riak-Search.html>

<comment><USER7> Key/value store or _maybe_ a document database. But it certainly has nothing to do with being column oriented.

<comment><USER8> Basho themselves have complained about being called a document DB. Probably because you can store absolutely anything in Riak. Regardless of the reason I think we can safely call it a KV store and be done with it.

edit: And by Basho themselves I don't mean some official statement, I just mean people who work for Basho.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Describing Redis as just another key value store kind of misses the point.

<comment><USER10> I agree. Anybody interested in Redis should get to know its hash tables, lists, sets, sorted sets, etc. It's sometimes amazing how many problems Redis can solve out-of-the-box, just because it provides these common data structures as a persistent service.

<comment><USER11> redis is key-structured-value db

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I believe his description of document-based databases is mistaken WRT versioning: it's a central concept for couchdb, but not for mongodb.

</comment><comment><USER13> It would be great if there was a very basic web site that could guide you to the most suitable storage solution based on the problem you are working on. Sorta like a guide or wizard.

I think it's a shame that the movement is called NoSQL because it sorta creates this false dichotomy that the field of web data storage is divided in two camps. In reality, you need to, as always, pick the right solution for the problem you are facing. NoSQL databases will never entirely replace SQL databases and I think it's important to not shoehorn NoSQL in places where it doesn't really belong.

<comment><USER14> Philip Greenspun has a short article on the subject at:

[http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/three-day- rdbms/beyond-...](http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/three-day-rdbms/beyond- the-rdbms)

And there's a discussion about the article on his blog:

[http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2011/01/13/rdbms- versus-n...](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2011/01/13/rdbms-versus-nosql- article-drafted/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article is a summary of this: [http://blog.monitis.com/index.php/2011/05/22/picking-the- rig...](http://blog.monitis.com/index.php/2011/05/22/picking-the-right-nosql- database-tool/)

The review of Cassandra: [http://blog.monitis.com/index.php/2011/05/24/nosql- databases...](http://blog.monitis.com/index.php/2011/05/24/nosql-databases-a- look-at-apache-cassandra/)

</comment><comment><USER16> What about non-relational object databases?

</comment><comment><USER11> how about EAV, OOdbms, functional and deductive db?</comment>


Winning Kashmir and Losing India - <AUTHOR> https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/2019-09-20/winning-kashmir-and-losing-india <comment><USER2> For over 50 years Kashmir has enjoyed autonomy at the cost of all other states in India. The only people that have benefited from these provisions are the people who've ruled Kashmir at the cost of other citizens in the State. The minorities in the state have been pushed out violently. Another large part of the state - Ladakh - that shouldn't have been a part of Kashmir to begin with was tacked on and completely forgotten about, even though it has its own distinct identity.

Is that incorrect and unfair? Most Indians think so, including all those that were exiled from their homes.

This isn't just a "Hindu Nationalist" idea. Most Muslim Indians, Christian Indians, Buddhist, Zoroastrian and Jewish Indians think so too.

<comment><USER3> This. To non-Indians who are reading: When it comes to opinions, India is a deeply divided country due to our democratic nature and sheer size of population. Almost any topic will find opposition or support from a large section of people. But this is one topic where almost a billion people were on the same page and supported the Government's decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Regarding the Kashmir issue,

When British left India, they divided India into 565 princely state, eventually almost all princely states joined either India or Pakistan.

Jammu and Kashmir decided to stay independent by Harri Singh(King). Pakistan looked out it as opportunity and tried to seize J&K, later Harri Singh, came to seek out help from India. Then Vallabhbhai Patel(Deputy Prime Minister) took advantage of this situation and suggested J&K to become part of India.

There Harri Singh have signed making it part of India.

Indian government didn't occupy the area which is occupied by Pakistan, they have stopped Pakistan. But didn't push back Pakistan.

This part of area which is occupied by Pakistan is called as POK(Pakistan Occupied Kashmir) in India.

Later Article 370 was introduced as temporary provision for J&K, giving them special status in Indian constitution. Article 370 goes something like this:

1\. Nobody can buy any land in J&K.

2\. If a women marries any Indian citizen, she was denied as citizen of J&K.

3\. ...

Most of the J&K citizens were unemployed because there is no investment. Terrorists have always seen this as opportunity and infiltrated into India and many Kashmirs were trained as terrorists. India lost nearly 40,000 soldiers in Kashmir.

From nearly 70 years, Kashmir have been easy target for terrorists groups, because citizens have got nothing to do, and some of them turned into extremists.

Indian government is used to pump in lot of money for some of J&K citizens for basic necessities with subsidies.

Regarding abrogation of article 370, Jammu and ladakh people were happy, some Kashmirs were not happy, and almost all of India is happy, regarding this change.

Regarding Muslims being suppressed, .... We live like brothers. With such a huge population, sometimes disputes happen, media take it to another level, showcasing it as if though this is how whole India is like.

Media turns even normal disputes into religious. Despite all this we live well.

</comment><comment><USER5> India has long waited for this. Just to remind the readers who don't know the whole story, The Hindus of the Kashmir Valley, were forced to flee the Kashmir valley as a result of being targeted by JKLF and Islamist insurgents during late 1989 and early 1990. Of the approximately 300,000 to 600,000 Hindus living in the Kashmir Valley in 1990 only 2,000–3,000 remain there in 2016. On 19 January 1990 mosques issued declaration that Kashmiri Pandits were Kafirs (Disbelievers) and that the males had to leave Kashmir, convert to islam or be killed. Those who chose to the first of these were told to leave their women behind. The kashmiri muslims were instructed to identify Pandits homes so they could be systematically targeted for conversion or killing. Kashmir was a peaceful state till 1990s. It was only after exodus of Kashmiri Pandits and insurgency of militants government had to send in troops. The abrogration of article 370 is not going to take away any rights.It will just make them equivalent to other Indians.

</comment><comment><USER6> How can he gut democracy by removing an article which prevented integrations and women's rights? 370 only helped Islamic extremists as no one else could invest in the area giving them autonomy of control

</comment><comment><USER3> The author says that _Modi is Gutting Indian Democracy_. But apparently whatever the author described, happened through democratic and constitutional means. Strange.

<comment><USER4> Regarding the Kashmir issue,

When British left India, they divided India into 565 princely state, eventually almost all princely states joined either India or Pakistan.

Jammu and Kashmir decided to stay independent by Harri Singh(King). Pakistan looked out it as opportunity and tried to seize J&K, later Harri Singh, came to seek out help from India. Then Vallabhbhai Patel(Deputy Prime Minister) took advantage of this situation and suggested J&K to become part of India.

There Harri Singh have signed making it part of India.

Indian government didn't occupy the area which is occupied by Pakistan, they have stopped Pakistan. But didn't push back Pakistan.

This part of area which is occupied by Pakistan is called as POK(Pakistan Occupied Kashmir) in India.

Later Article 370 was introduced as temporary provision for J&K, giving them special status in Indian constitution. Article 370 goes something like this:

1\. Nobody can buy any land in J&K.

2\. If a women marries any Indian citizen, she was denied as citizen of J&K.

3\. ...

Most of the J&K citizens were unemployed because there is no investment. Terrorists have always seen this as opportunity and infiltrated into India and many Kashmirs were trained as terrorists. India lost nearly 40,000 soldiers in Kashmir.

From nearly 70 years, Kashmir have been easy target for terrorists groups, because citizens have got nothing to do, and some of them turned into extremists.

Indian government is used to pump in lot of money for some of J&K citizens for basic necessities with subsidies.

Regarding abrogation of article 370, Jammu and ladakh people were happy, some Kashmirs were not happy, and almost all of India is happy, regarding this change.

Regarding Muslims being suppressed, .... We live like brothers. With such a huge population, sometimes disputes happen, media take it to another level, showcasing it as if though this is how whole India is like.

Media turns even normal disputes into religious. Despite all this we live well.</comment></comment>


IKEA's brilliant Facebook campaign - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10404937-71.html

<comment> brown9-2 I don't understand the last sentence in the quoted article:

 _Before Facebook could take credit for its own wonderful ingenuity in creating the world's most needed Web site, thousands of Swedes were spreading pictures of IKEA showrooms all around the personal galaxy known as their profile pages._

Before Facebook could take credit for creating Facebook, thousands of Swedes were spreading pictures of IKEA showrooms around Facebook? The video states this took place during the Autumn of 2009. The chronology and weird verb tense makes the sentence super confusing.

</comment><comment><USER2> Blogspam. Original story is here:

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10404937-71.html?part=rss&...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10404937-71.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5)

<comment><USER2> It got fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Giving away free products will always be labeled a "brilliant campaign."

The game that was given away free a few weeks ago, Radiohead, NIN.

I'd say the campaign would be brilliant if you could measure an increase in consumers after the campaign. I would just claim my free furniture and that's it. Not necessarily shop there any further.

<comment><USER4> The brilliant part of it was making people tag their names into the Facebook profile's photos. You get those photos showing up in the Walls and news streams of contestants who then explain what they're doing to their 150+ friends who then tag themselves and share the promotion again.

Brilliant use of the tool to capitalize on network effects of Facebook.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, this seems especially excellent for getting initial awareness of a product – in this case, that specific IKEA location, as represented by its manager.

It also seems like a good way to build a mailing list, as the Obama campaign did when they got everyone's phone numbers so they could text them the name of the VP pick. That was some brilliant use of social media for old-fashioned mailing-list-building disguised as a gimmick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm assuming that Facebook would use data gathered from people being tagged in images to optimize their own shape recognition software.

People tagging themselves as furniture must really mess that up :)

<comment><USER7> Does Facebook recognize objects in photos?

I remember reading a paper about this a year ago (where they concluded it would take to much processing), but the site seems to be down. Here's Google Cache of the PDF if anyone's interested: [http://188.8.131.52/search?q=cache:A9_-uStMjeIJ:www.enriqu...](http://184.108.40.206/search?q=cache:A9_-uStMjeIJ:www.enriquegortiz.com/publications/FacebookPaper.pdf+facebook+facial+recognition+paper&cd=2&hl=nn&ct=clnk&client=safari)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Come on. It's Sweden. It's IKEA. I think most Swedes have heard of IKEA by now and would be aware if a new IKEA was opening in the vicinity. And Malmo is not exactly a tiny, unknown backwater. They've probably had IKEA in Malmo for decades.

I suspect the Facebook campaign was novel but not a brilliant runaway success, as measured by an increase is sales.

<comment><USER9> >Come on. It's Sweden. It's IKEA. I think most Swedes have heard of IKEA by now

Basic rule of advertising, repetition means reinforcement. Also even if they of course knew about the brand, now they saw products they might not have seen before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think Ikea is great, but I hope this is not replicated massively by other brands.

<comment><USER11> Ikea is a part of people's lives.

"It has even been estimated that one in 10 Europeans are conceived in an Ikea bed."

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4254181.stm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cardigans are from Jönköping..not Malmö...totally different.</comment>


Torrent users freak out over shift from Xvid to x264 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/4/2843937/torrent-user-controversy-format-x264-xvid

<comment><USER2> Typical stubborn users who can't stomach change, even if it's for the better. Amusing, but no different from those who complain about Facebook changing their layout.</comment>


Show HN: Random Guitar Riff Generator - <AUTHOR> https://riff.joeldare.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone. I created this as an app some time ago but I decided to pull all the tracking, user login, and other junk out and release it on the web. It could use some love but 30-minutes was about all I could give it tonight. Hope some of you find it useful.</comment>


As many as 6B Earth-like planets in our galaxy, according to new estimates - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-06-billion-earth-like-planets-galaxy.html <comment><USER2> The estimates for the number of stars in the galaxy continues to grow. Just a few years I remember reading 100 billion stars, then it became 200 billion. And in this article it's 400 billion. And supposedly there are hundreds of billions of galaxies. One of the things I don't get is why did the universe have to be so big and unfathomable and spectacular? If it isn't teeming with life, feels like it's essentially one spectacular wasteland. Or alternatively, perhaps we are in a simulation?

<comment><USER3> > Or alternatively, perhaps we are in a simulation?

A relatively cheap one, considering that if this planet is the only one inhabited, the other star systems can be approximated and don't require full simulation.

Consider that time slows down when the speed is increased. This would be a good thing to do to restrict the computational requirements. And there's growing evidence that everything is quantized. Given that we probably can't measure anything smaller than a Planck length, that's the simulation resolution.

That's probably not what's going on (the simulation hypothesis could be the 'magnetism' of our era) but it is fun to think about.

<comment><USER4> Would if be computationally cheaper to just simulate our brains (our just one brain. Yours!) to give us the illusion the universe is whatever it is (quantized or not) rather than simulating the actual universe?

<comment><USER5> What do you mean? Wouldn't you still need to simulate the world in pretty much the same way to be able to feed consistent inputs into the simulated brain?

<comment> g-b-r You're just _feeling_ like you're being fed consistent inputs :)

<comment><USER4> And if you ever feel otherwise, the simulation will be rolled back and fixed :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Off topic but I just want to give a shoutout to the astrophysicists in UBC. As an UBC undergrad alumni the physics department professors/TAs were probably the most 'caring' profs I had.

Jaymie Matthews is a hilarious professor according to my sister, and I was scheduled to take his classes...until he tried to save a random woman from an attacker in LV, went into a coma for the better part of a year, and pretty much missed all my classes.

</comment><comment><USER7> From my very naive understanding, isn't there a belief that habitable planets are a bit more rare than we thought? Since most stars are red dwarves, the tidal locking zone overlaps the Goldilocks zone. Neither the abstract nor the phys.org article mentions tidal locking.

And don't forget the nasty flares that tend to fire up from red dwarves, either.

<comment><USER8> Yes, the article (and most articles of the kind; from what I've read) don't take into considerations those dynamical and astrophysical features. They search for Earth-sized terrestrial planets in a zone where liquid water can exist on their surface ("habitable" zone). Nevertheless even determining the abundance of those planets is an ongoing problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> We're finding exoplanets at an incredible rate. See NASA's Exoplanet Archive ([https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/](https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/)) for the current 4164 known exoplanets.

Related: The Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile just confirmed the existence of Proxima Centauri b, a roughly Earth-sized exoplanet in Proxima Centauri's habitable zone—the closest star to Earth, just 4 light-years away! [https://www.universetoday.com/146262/powerful-telescope- conf...](https://www.universetoday.com/146262/powerful-telescope-confirms- theres-an-earth-sized-world-orbiting-proxima-centauri/)

Oh, and here's this topic's prerequisite xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/786/](https://xkcd.com/786/)

(We write about exoplanets really frequently on [https://orbitalindex.com](https://orbitalindex.com))

<comment><USER7> Hate to be a Debbie Downer, but Proxima Centauri B is likely not habitable due to its star blowing away its atmosphere.

[https://phys.org/news/2018-04-proxima-centauri-flare- powerfu...](https://phys.org/news/2018-04-proxima-centauri-flare-powerful- visible.html)

<comment><USER10> This was mentioned in the original article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't help but post this Youtube video, for those never saw it:

Star Size Comparison 2 (watched 28M times)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoW8Tf7hTGA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoW8Tf7hTGA)

</comment><comment><USER12> Many of them are bound to have life on them.

<comment><USER13> The problem is we have only 1 data point. I think we ever get a second, then the likelihood of lots is much more imaginable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Awesome. We can't possibly mess all of them up!

(But sadly, the Milky Way is still over 50,000 light years across.)

<comment><USER5> Don't underestimate us. I wouldn't be any money against human ingenuity in this regard.</comment></comment>