Unity Comes to Linux: Experimental Build Now Available - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/08/26/unity-comes-to-linux-experimental-build-now-available/ <comment><USER2> It's an unfortunate title for this post since unity is something altogether different for a lot of linux users

see: [https://unity.ubuntu.com/about/](https://unity.ubuntu.com/about/)

Though there is a certain appreciable irony in having two totally different things named unity.

<comment><USER3> People who are aware of Ubuntu's Unity will also know that it obviously has long existed on Linux, so there is no confusion. Simple heuristics made abundantly clear more than any additional title clarification could.

There are a lot of products in tech, and a huge number of name collisions. Context (such as the fact that the linked domain is unity3d) saves us all from having to add caveats and clarifications to every mention. Just as I can talk about Microsoft Windows without noting that I'm not talking about panes of glass.

<comment><USER4> This is all true. The title could have had some more context, though, for people who have no interest in this particular Unity.

<comment><USER5> Well, the title has context -- the URL of the site hosting the title, Unity3D.com, is right next to the title, both on the main page of Hacker News and on the discussion page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hooray for Linux!

But there's something that has been bothering me for a while about games for Linux compiled with the Unity SDK.

Does anybody know what kind of dependencies a game written with the Unity SDK has? I'm pretty clueless about that stuff but I'd still like to know what it would take to get a game running on a minimal Linux install (like a naked Arch or Gentoo). Ubuntu obviously comes well equipped for the task but I don't really care about that.

So where do the graphics come from? Does it need some special libraries apart from OpenGL? Where do fonts come from? How does it interface with hardware, i.e. does it need X, or does it come with its own drivers for keyboard, mouse, gamepad?

I fear that it is necessary to install half of Ubuntu to get the games running but - as I said - I don't really know anything about that.

<comment><USER7> So, having tried to offer support for a game on linux before it's a giant nightmare. If you don't want to open source you end up with a never ending support task.

Unity should solve that now. Maybe.

To answer a few specifics with out getting too ragey:

To get real usable 3d you need to be running the proprietary drivers. The opensource ones at least a year or so ago when I was paying close attention were uniformly too slow and supported such a limited subset of the specs that the were usually pointless.

The take away for me was to always assume that the user system is completely dumb and to ship EVERYTHING. We ended up packaging the kitchen sink to get rid of the majority of the "I installed this on <nightly build of obscure distro> and it says it can't find libc" issues.

<comment><USER8> Offering support for a game is a never ending support task. If you aren't willing to support your users, you aren't ready to publish games. Don't blame Linux users.

<comment><USER7> Linux users aren't the issue. Nor am I attempting to blame them.

The problem is that basically you are always aiming at a moving target of system configuration when you release. Do you bet that your users have mechanical disks or SSD? If you aim for the latter you can make different choices. Windows as an operating system moves pretty slowly compared to the broader linux ecosystem, your percent users running a particular version of say DirectX is easy to guess, and easy to predict.

The problem when you move to linux is that the landscape is shifting rapidly. Everything from the kernel to libraries to what Distro is hot this week change nightly.OT steal mikepavone's example; In the last few years how many new families of windows video card drivers have come out? How much change have we seen in their capabilities? On linux the answer is, frankly, impressive.

This is great for linux, but it makes it hard to reach out to the smaller percent of the small percent of users who are having an issue and fix their issues.

The result is that at release you can just let that windows binary sit there and maybe fix a few bugs that crop up in your code. Your linux binary is more of a surfing act where things are great, then you are slowing down, and something breaks, and the whole tower comes down.

Fundamentally, it's why things like Unity are popular. The fewer people on a team, the less time you have deal with things like compatibility issues.

<comment><USER9> > Your linux binary is more of a surfing act where things are great, then you > are slowing down, and something breaks, and the whole tower comes down.

This is why you use Steam Runtime and don't worry about that. It's does work even outside of Steam:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/26pck1/selfcontain...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/26pck1/selfcontained_linux_builds_without_steam/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I thought it already had Linux support? For example, Wasteland 2 was built with Unity and works on Linux.

Or are there multiple game engines called Unity (on top of the existing confusion between the game engine and the Ubuntu thing)?

EDIT: I _think_ the announcement is about Linux support in the SDK, not the actual software developed with Unity?

<comment><USER11> The end-products - games - do have linux support. But the support is not that great, for example the unity engine on linux doesn't seem to support vsync (it says it does, but it doesn't in practise) which results in horrific and annoying tearing. It has been like this for well over a year, with no sign of any urgency to fix it.

It is nice that "linux support" is a bullet point that companies feel is worth having, but it isn't a significant enough part of their market for them to make it work without glaring issues, often.

<comment><USER12> Not sure why you were downvoted as I've read similar reports that the Linux builds from Unity are not the best.

Hopefully though now that their main product is expected to work 100% correctly on Linux, that this will lead to fixes in their Linux compiler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been considering switching from Windows 8.1 on my main machine for a while but not being able to work on my game in Unity3d has held me back. This might finally put me over the edge.

<comment><USER14> Windows 10 is pushing me in that direction all by itself. ;-)

It's been about 2 years since my last attempt at Linux for my main desktop OS... about time for another go at it. Been my HTPC OS for almost a year and a half (since switching to xbmc/kodi for most playback anyways).

<comment><USER15> Exactly the same situation here.

I jumped over to Fedora and have been pleasantly surprised to find out that SLI, multi monitor, and sleep work flawlessly. Zero problems so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Today's build is what we call an experimental build; future support is not yet guaranteed. Your adoption and feedback will help us determine if this is something we can sustain alongside our Mac and Windows builds."

I think we all know the future of this then.

</comment><comment><USER17> Misleading title: should be "Unity Editor Comes to Linux". Unity games have been running on Linux for a while.

<comment><USER14> Minor tweak.. "Unity3D Editor Comes to Linux"

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am dissapointed in it still requiring 32-bit libraries, like Steam.

      $ gdebi unity-editor-5.1.0f3+2015082501_amd64.deb
      ...
      Requires the installation of the following packages: lib32gcc1 lib32stdc++6 libc6-i386

</comment><comment><USER19> Nice, so Unity is finally an option for me. Now it would be nice if the Unreal editor had official Linux support as well. (I know there's Wine, but it didn't work too well for me.)

<comment><USER20> The UE4 editor can be built for Linux, though they don't have official stable builds yet.

[https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Building_On_Linux](https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Building_On_Linux)

<comment><USER21> Are they comparable? I thought UE was geared towards FPS while Unity was more generalist.

<comment><USER22> Both are general purpose engines and can be put towards a wide variety of game genres. Out of the box, UE4's editor comes with about half a dozen templates (FPS, top-down, side-scrolling platformer etc) for rudimentary intro projects.

Unreal Engine is somewhat harder to use, but it's graphics engine is a bit closer to the cutting edge - it's the go-to engine for AAA devs these days. Unity's main user base (for people who use it to make games - some use it for academic ends, or for tech demos) tends to be the indie game scene.

They do the same job, but differ in the technical aspects and ease-of-use, and business model (though both are aiming to lower the barriers to making games), and they tend to cater to different segments of the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _grumbles something about developers saying "Linux" when they mean "only supported on Ubuntu"_

<comment><USER24> What would you have them do? Support it on every single distribution out there? They pick a mainstream one and run with it - I get it. It's normal. It's sad, but you can't blame _them_ ; you gotta blame the ecosystem we're in.

I'm an Arch Linux guy. I _strongly_ dislike both Ubuntu and Canonical, on technical, political and ethical grounds. But I get it.

And you know, a huge part of the problem is that "we", as the Linux community, have no direct interest in pushing compatibility between distributions. It takes a _lot_ of effort, a _lot_ of political reach, and the distros will just run with their own thing a few months later anyway, nullifying the efforts.

Besides... have you seen what happens when people are actually successful at pushing compatibility? Have you _seen_ the shit people throw at Lennart/RH for Systemd? Why would anyone ever want to play that game?

Anyway, not to detract from the topic - it's fantastic news. Unity3d is huge in the game development world and this is a big win.

<comment><USER25> > What would you have them do? Support it on every single distribution out > there?

No, say that Unity comes to _Ubuntu_.

<comment><USER26> Ubuntu is Linux, I don't use Ubuntu. I use mostly OpenSUSE/SUSE and sometimes Arch or a Redhat version and if I must Ubuntu or Debian. It will work in Linux just wish we had a solid second tier desktop Distro.

Gone are the days when distros decided if something worked or didn't. Thanks to things like SystemD this will continue down that road (Ducks). Also hoping we finally do package management in a elegant modern way soon and not like we are right now.

<comment> vezzy-fnord _Thanks to things like SystemD this will continue down that road (Ducks)._

How? systemd touches a completely different layer. The main thing that might prevent ELF interoperability across distributions is if the distro has some esoterically configured binutils/glibc toolchain and the provided application is a dynamically linked binary blob.

<comment><USER26> SystemD pretty much takes over the core of the OS. This has helped the trend of Distros being interoperational with each other. This is why some people HATE SystemD.

Before SystemD we had init scripts in our thousands of packages. Each package system would have different init systems and procedures. This is one of the big reasons why things were not inter-operational between distros. This is why Arch and Debian among others distros jumped off their old init systems and adopted SystemD.

<comment> vezzy-fnord The package systems never had init system integration. What some PMs did was they ran procedures in the postinstall scripts to do things like update SysV symlink farms. In Debian, this was done by sysv-rc and in RPM-based distros, chkconfig or something similar.

They're completely orthogonal tools.

And no, it was hardly a "big reason" why distros weren't interoperable. Initscripts were rarely supplied by upstream vendors and frequently written downstream. Then many other people didn't use them at all, but wrote runscripts for some flavor of daemontools in about 4 lines or something.

The main reason has always boiled down to the toolchain. One proposed way to get around it was fat ELF binaries, but that effort got metaphorically curbstomped by the Linux community. Universal package managers aren't supported for political/branding reasons.

In any event, systemd doesn't help with this.

<comment><USER26> > The package systems never had init system integration

Never said integration saying packages have scripts to init themselves and that was different based on your distro.

Don't know why you feel the need to correct a point that distros are becoming more and more alike and that systemd is one of the elements that has helped this? Anywaysssss SystemD is the standard now for most of Linux and I am hoping for MORE standardization.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Distros are undeniably becoming more alike thanks to systemd, but from this premise does not in any way follow that package interoperability will be improved, which was the topic at hand.

(To be pedantic, there is no "standardization" so to speak of. It's more like an informal fiat than anything.)

<comment><USER26> BUT deamons are now standardized on how to init them into systemd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This came just in time when I was thinking of switching to Mac. Blender game engine has features but not upto the mark to compete with game engines like Unity. The python scripting in Blender is good.

<comment><USER28> Unity has been available for Mac for quite some time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Personally, I'd rather they spend time making webgl production ready to ensure Chrome player support.

<comment><USER30> But the news say that this is Unity3d editor - program you make games in, not the game.

<comment><USER31> S/he's talking about the HTML exporter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yay. Nore more having to run it in Wine :)

</comment><comment><USER33> for me, Unity is too expensive. I hope Unreal can do the same. there is an unofficial build instruction for unreal.

<comment><USER21> I thought it was free until you started making an amount of money that made buying a license a non-issue.

<comment><USER22> That sounds like Unreal. Unity has a free version and a pro version, the latter is either a subscription-based one, or a one-off payment of $1500 or similar, which does sound awfully cheap to me.

<comment><USER34> They've had a bit of capability difference before. From the version 5, they've changed their model so aside from mandatory Personal Edition splash screen, the engine is identical but they do offer support and external feature for their paid version. (And they have $100000 revenue/funding limit to license Personal Edition.[1])

[1] [http://unity3d.com/legal/eula](http://unity3d.com/legal/eula)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> yay!

</comment><comment><USER36> problem with games is that they are only good if multiplayer.

and it's only good multiplayer if you can't cheat.

that means every dumb game system rush to try to run as root. as you can see with steam.

then after they have that excuse they also use that new power to enforce DRM. as you can see with steam.

and cheaters continue to cheat. but now you have malware.

running games in Linux is easy. heck you've done it on windows, you can make it on Linux with better docs and apis. the problem with Linux gaming is catering to users that don't have their heads up their buts. that is the real problem, and nobody sees the monetary incentive.

that said, true Linux gaming holy grail will be achieved when you can run a windows vm with full 3d support. period.

<comment><USER37> > that means every dumb game system rush to try to run as root. as you can see > with steam.

You are tragically misinformed:

      user@host:~$ find ~/.local/share/Steam/ -perm -4000
      user@host:~$ find ~/.local/share/Steam/ -user root
      user@host:~$ find /bin -perm -4000
      /bin/ping6
      /bin/ping
      /bin/su
      /bin/fusermount
      /bin/ntfs-3g
      /bin/umount
      /bin/mount
      user@host:~$ find /bin -user root | wc -l
      201
      user@host:~$ ps aux | grep -i steam  | grep root | wc -l
      0

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> It seems to be some kind of game development platform.

<comment><USER39> Yep, Unity is a 2d and 3d game engine. It's pretty nice. I used it in a couple of class group projects in college.

It's often compared alongside the Unreal editor, which I unfortunately haven't taken for a spin yet.

<comment><USER40> I have used both Unreal DK and Unity 3d. On any day, I'll pick Unreal based technology over Unity3d. Unity 3d was a total pain in the neck and is more suitable for art-heavy and relatively less programming kind of games.

Unreal is far more mature as a platform and you can do a lot more with it. (The code of the internals sucks a bit though).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I got excited and thought Canonical was finally getting close to making Unity a pleasant experience, but I guess this is cool too.</comment>


Coffeescript, VowsJS, & Asynchronous Testing - <AUTHOR> http://www.plainlystated.com/2011/07/coffeescript-vowsjs-asynchronous-testing/

<comment><USER2> Actually, if you do:

      return undefined

in Coffeescript, then the resulting Javascript just won't have any return statement at all. Has the same effect, but good to know anyways.

<comment><USER3> Or better yet, just `return`.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Updated the post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I rewrote the examples from VowsJS site in Coffee a while ago:

<https://github.com/igorgue/vowsjsexamples></comment>


Surviving AWS Failures with a Node.js and MongoDB Stack - <AUTHOR> http://www.kinvey.com/blog/104/surviving-aws-failures-with-a-nodejs-and-mongodb-stack <comment><USER2> Here's how I do it:

      $ pip install dotcloud
      $ echo 'frontend: {"type": "nodejs"}' >> dotcloud.yml
      $ echo 'db: {"type": "mongodb"}' >> dotcloud.yml
      $ dotcloud push $MYAPP
      $ dotloud scale $MYAPP frontend=3 db=3

This will deploy my nodejs app across 3 AZs and setup load-balancing to them, deploy a Mongo replicaset across 3 AZs, setup authentication, and inject connection strings into the app's environment. It's also way cheaper than AWS.

The only difference with OP's setup is that the Mongo ports are publicly accessible. This means authentication is the only thing standing between you and an attacker (and maybe the need to find your particular tcp port among a couple million others in dotCloud's pool).

(disclaimer, I work at dotCloud)

<comment><USER3> "It's also way cheaper than AWS."

3 AWS Small instances cost under $200 / mo and come with 1.7GB of RAM each.

The dotCloud pricing calculator is coming up with $700 / mo for 3 mongodb instances with 1.7GB of RAM.

Obviously this isn't an apples to apples comparison. But How are dotCloud instances different from AWS instances?

<comment><USER2> It's cheaper at equivalent level of best practice:

* For a clean architecture you want to isolate each Mongo and node process in its own system. So you need 6 instances, not 3.

* You'll need load-balancers in front of these node instances. That costs extra on AWS, and is included on dotCloud.

* Did you include the cost of bandwidth and disk IO in your estimate? Those are extra on AWS, but included on dotCloud.

* Monitoring is extra on AWS. It's included on dotCloud.

* I love to have a sandbox version of my entire stack, with the exact same setup but separate from production. That's an extra 2 instances on AWS (+io +bandwidth +load-balancing +monitoring). It's free on dotCloud, and I can create unlimited numbers of sandboxes which is killer for team development: 1 sandbox per developer!

* We only charge for ram usable by your application and database. AWS charges for _server_ memory - including the overhead of the system and the various daemons you'll need to run.

* For small apps specifically, you can allocate memory in much smaller increments on dotCloud, which means you can start at a lower price-point: the smallest increment is 32MB.

I didn't even get into the _real_ value-add of dotCloud: all the work you won't have to do, including security upgrades, centralized log collection, waking up at 4am to check on broken EBS volumes, dealing with AWS support (which is truly the most horrible support in the World, and we pay them a lot of money).

\+ Our support team is awesome and might even fix a bug in your own code if you're lucky :)

<comment><USER4> Recommendation is to validate "best practice" claims. Doesn't matter what hosting solution used. Measure, measure, measure to make sure not only are you getting said claim but also that the end result meets your expectations. An example is in the past I had 7 "instances" (as shykes points out make sure they are hosted on separate nodes!) 4 of which where load balances Python web app. One of the nodes was overloaded so 1 out of 4 requests was very slow (5-10x). This was a big ajax app so initial page load would hang on the request(s) to that one instance. My point was since I had measured I could see that the node was the problem and now that I am on dedicated EC2 each node is consistant. Good luck.

<comment><USER2> That's good advice. As the saying goes: "trust, but verify".

Regarding your performance issue - most platforms (including dotCloud) enforce ram and cpu separation between nodes, but are vulnerable to IO contention at some level. This is also true for EC2 if you use EBS: your standalone instances will almost certainly, at some point, suffer from degraded and inconsistent performance because another instance is competing for IOPS [1].

You can avoid this with the new "provisioned IOPS" volumes [2], or by skipping EBS altogether for stateless components.

[1] [http://blog.scalyr.com/2012/10/16/a-systematic-look-at- ec2-i...](http://blog.scalyr.com/2012/10/16/a-systematic-look-at-ec2-io/)

[2] [http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2012/07/31/announc...](http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2012/07/31/announcing-provisioned-iops-for-amazon-ebs/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Considering how often EC2 outages are EBS related, we've moved all our servers off of EBS to ephemeral drives. I'm surprised there aren't more people advocating this route.

<comment><USER6> I think part of the problem is that EBS issues also cause ELB problems, from that I read here on HN. I wouldn't know because we only use us-east for Hadoop.

On the other hand, our Cassandra cluster runs on ephemeral drives and it's way better than EBS even with the guaranteed IOPS thing. Everyone should definitely give this option a try.

<comment><USER5> Yup. ELB is great except it uses EBS. So part of our migration was to move off of ELBs.

<comment><USER2> Same here, dotCloud originally used ELB and we eventually moved off, which brought immediate and huge gains in latency and overall reliability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reddit refuses to move away from their current infrastructure, despite being held together with little more than string and silly-putty.

According to a dev, they haven't even _talked_ about it. Simply hasn't ever come up.

So Reddit's gonna keep going down like this. Don't be like Reddit.

</comment><comment><USER8> You need to be in multiple regions to tolerate EC2 outages, not just multiple AZs. Even then, this is only good until AWS's first multi-region failure; this doesn't seem to be an impossible event given EC2's recent track record. Though I can well understand that designing for EC2 region failure is not worth the cost for most systems.

<comment><USER9> > Even then, this is only good until AWS's first multi-region failure; this > doesn't seem to be an impossible event given EC2's recent track record.

Doesn't everything in their track record indicate that regions are nicely partitioned from each other? Even the biggest region failures they've had have stayed completely isolated to that region.

<comment><USER8> AZs were supposed to be that unit of isolation, then when multiple AZs failed that shifted to be Regions; it seemed like a "blame the victim" mentality to me.

Given that AWS are running the same software across regions and have the same people & processes in place, and further that there's software that runs across regions (e.g. S3), I'd wager it's not long before we have a multi- region outage.

Finally, some of the multi-AZ problems in the past were compounded because as one AZ went down everyone hammered the other AZs, taking out the APIs at least. That's when everyone believed that AZs were isolated. Now that people know that's not the case, those same systems are going to be hammering across multiple regions.

<comment><USER10> Regions are 100% independent of one another, both physically and also control plane wise. Also code pushes to regions for new features don't ever happen on the same day.

<comment><USER8> Source?

AZs were supposed to be independent; they aren't. Fool me one...

<comment><USER10> I used to work on the EC2 team. The regions are wholly independent of one another.

<comment><USER8> I hope you blog more of these practices then. AWS doesn't put this stuff in writing, which is very convenient for them when something goes wrong, but makes it nigh on impossible to build a reliable system on EC2.

I don't think it's an easy problem to solve, but to suggest that the regions won't go down together strikes me as "the Titanic is unsinkable" hubris. I hope the AWS team doesn't share your attitude :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nuclear Fusion Startup - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5327451/a-pack-of-wild-canadians-claims-they-can-deliver-nuclear-fusion-on-the-cheap <comment><USER2> I couldn't help but laugh out loud at this line:

"General Fusion's basic approach isn't entirely new. It builds on work done during the 1980s by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, based on a concept called Linus."

On a more serious note, I wonder how they will deal with metal fatigue on the sphere being rammed by the pistons once every second. Not all of the energy of those compressions will be transferred into the fluid, that sounds like the reactor core might become a wear item.

Another question regarding this:

"likely because the technology to precisely control the speed and simultaneous triggering of the compressed-air pistons simply didn't exist two decades ago."

What is so critical about controlling compressed air pistons ? They move at a snails pace relative to electronics from the 70's, why is it that only now this would be possible based on controlling essentially very slow devices once-per-second ?

And wouldn't it be easier to do this using electromagnets attached to the outer shell at strategic spots ? _much_ faster response time and higher frequencies possible, also much easier to synchronize than 220 pneumatic hammers striking a sphere. Is there really no other way to get the required wave pattern ?

What will happen to the fusion energy if one of the hammers would fail due to a seizure or seal failure of a single pneumatic ram (this is not a theoretical failure, it happens).

</comment><comment><USER3> More details at <http://www.technologyreview.com/business/23102/>

<comment><USER4> Thanks. OP should have posted this link instead, it is much more comprehensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I get very excited about hearing of things like this ...even if there's a strong possibility of failure. In our lifetimes, a few of these efforts will lead to great things.

Michio Kaku described in 'Parallel Universes' the concept of 5 civilization stages (with respect to energy harnessing) and the concept that if we get past the next 50 to 100 years, well ...we might have an easier time of things.

Those who are willing to look under every stone get my well wishings.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wandering if its one of many possibly dangerous start-ups. Few weeks ago i read about Copenhagen rocket science engineers, with great plans for future (moon landing was in their aims). What with bioengineering start-ups?

It's off topic, but do you know some of this groups? And what don't you think that freedom in such fields can jeopardise large population?

<comment><USER7> Dangerous?! Do you even know anything about fusion?

If _anything_ goes even the tiniest bit wrong with a fusion reactor, it simply stops. That's why it's so difficult to make one.

The only danger here is to their investor's money... But I wish them luck!</comment></comment>


Solving Big Startup Problems With Email: The Square Case - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mailjet.com/post/64682818912/solving-big-startup-problems-with-email-the-square

<comment><USER2> I don't see how it solves a bigger problem: no use cases. Paypal started out trying to make it easier for people to give each other money. That foundered, so they pivoted into a commercial payment tool. It's like Square is reenacting the Paypal timeline backwards.

</comment><comment><USER3> I haven't used Squarecash so not sure how it solves the problem of phishing. Reciving an email, clicking a link and typing in my credit card / bank details. Are we just expected to trust Square?

<comment><USER4> It's as easy as Paypal (or easier) using email to sending money. If they can figure out the secure concern (time will tell) or say it's 100 percent secure, it would be quite awesome. I agree, not sure how it prevents spoofing or email being compromised problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> It wasn't that easy for Paypal :) [http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1028](http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1028)</comment></comment></comment>


Kendo UI vs. ExtJS or other frameworks? - <AUTHOR>

We've been trying to identify a framework we can use to replace a traditional Windows back office application with a web-based equivalent which ideally we could build on Rails.
In the process we've been evaluating Sencha and ExtJS but found this post here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7152922 (amongst others) which practically mirrors our own experiences.
The sample applications and controls are obviously what attracted our attention. Specifically inline editable tables like this: http://dev.sencha.com/extjs/5.0.0/examples/grid/row-editing.html although weve also been inspired by both of these: http://dev.sencha.com/extjs/5.0.0/examples/desktop/index.html and http://dev.sencha.com/extjs/5.0.0/examples/portal/index.html
I'm hoping for your opinions regarding KendoUI IE do you use it? do you like it? if you had a choice, would you use it again?
Is Kendo UI any better/worse than others frameworks regarding usability, functionality or even the learning curve? <comment><USER2> Just a quick answer - I am actively developing with ExtJS for about 3 years now. It depends on what product are going to build. I always say that ExtJS is great for 'excel on the web' kind of applications - desktop like apps. The grid component is unbeatable, so is the layout system (which limits the CSS nightmare pretty much).

However there are caveats of which mostly discussed is steep learning curve. It's true that it takes some time till one uses ExtJS in the right way. Blog posts like this one are a good read before starting new project [http://www.sencha.com/blog/top-10-ext-js-development- practic...](http://www.sencha.com/blog/top-10-ext-js-development-practices-to- avoid)

I have no experience with KendoUI, but from what I saw it is the closest match to ExtJS in terms of developing desktop-like JS apps. And it's free.

Edit: looks like KendoUI is not free anymore.</comment>


SuperShuttle is going out of business - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/travel/story/2019-12-12/supershuttle-says-it-will-stop-service-to-lax <comment><USER2> Let's face it, Ridesharing ate their lunch. I was a religious SuperShuttle user until Lyft showed up - it usually cost me roughly the same amount to take a Lyft shared, I didn't have to wait on the right van to show up, and instead of winding through taking a half dozen other people home first, it often takes me straight home, or at most with a couple of stops.

It's a hard world for traditional scheduled taxiing to be in, when you can summon a vehicle to you on demand.

<comment><USER3> I remember one time my wife and I took the Super Shuttle home from SFO to Mountain View. It took about two hours since we were the last stop and in fact the shuttle went north a little first before turning south. That was the first and last time I used their service.

<comment><USER4> I love Lyft but I took a shared lyft for the first time and the driver did three circles around a busy block trying to find a GPS dot (that never moved) that was obviously on the other side of the street, and after an extra 10min jammed an extra person in the car when we hardly fit, despite our protests. That was the last time I took a shared ride.

<comment><USER5> I am curious how hard a problem it is for the system to figure out what side of the road the driver should be on. Could they put a little arrow or something in the UX so I could point to which side of the street I'm on? Ideally before I order the car so the dispatch algo can prioritize cars that are more likely to approach from the correct side.

If the street is busy it can be hard as a pedestrian to safely get to the other side of the street. I've also had drivers just go the wrong way like I was standing between Gough and and Octavia on Market maybe 10-15meters from Gough. The driver came down Gough and turned left on Market at which point I knew it would be > 10 minutes before they could make all the correct turns to get back to pick me up. I cancel the ride and was surprised the system didn't direct them better.

<comment><USER6> Looks like civilian GPS accuracy is 4m or so. I could imagine that dropping someone's dot in the middle of a street, and then a driving having to guess which side of the street the error is coming from.

<comment><USER7> ...or know that even numbers are on one side of the street and odds on the other as happens (I'd guess) everywhere.

<comment><USER8> Some places will put both evens and odds on the same side of the street if there's only one side, and then use more numbers if there is subsequently development on the other side of the street. Some places will assign a new house number whenever a new building is added, no matter where it is located. Some places will number in clockwise (or counterclockwise) direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> More than once I had a SuperShuttle driver tell me their credit card machine wasn't working. When I told them I didn't have cash, they'd insist we stop at the ATM on the way home. When I pointed out that the website where I booked plus the outside of the actual van we were in said they accept Visa, they'd really get in a huff. Always magically had paper credit card slips, though. Some of them really sounded vaguely threatening, with the Always Sunny style implication that I needed them to get home. Lucky for me I'm a reasonably large guy and could've just called a cab if needed - I'm sure their shtick worked on a lot of foreign travelers and people who felt intimidated or wanted to avoid confrontation.

For all the hate that Uber gets, I'll always appreciate them for being the first mode of transportation where you have some form of recourse against your driver via ratings/complaints, so the driver has an incentive not to be a total scumbag.

<comment><USER10> I took my first SuperShuttle on my last conference trip to SF. I didn't talk about payment until I was already at destination, at which point he told me he didn't have a machine. I thought it odd, and just gave him cash. He told me $19 even though the guy at the airport told me $18. Gave him a $20 and went on my way.

Also the ride was very odd. The guy mentioned how he wished he could drive a tank, and even had tank models in the shuttle. And he drove very aggressively and angrily. I couldn't help but thinking he was in the wrong business...

<comment><USER11> Nobody is in the right business. There arent exactly lines to become shuttle drivers for dismissive people who assume malice when the damn machine is a POS.

<comment><USER9> When someone in that industry tells me the machine is broken, I presume they're being dishonest because it benefits them (they avoid fees and presumably tax reporting to the income) and I've seen too many cabs have their machines magically working if you tell them it's CC or they aren't getting paid.

Also, if the machine _actually_ isn't working, they always used to have paper slips to make CC charges. Those are never mentioned unless you tell them it's CC or they aren't getting paid. Dishonesty by omission is very much still dishonesty, and telling someone that the CC machine is broken implies that they can't accept CCs at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I used to fly between SFO and Boston, I would always use Knights in Boston. They are a shared van service that often has 2-3 well-planned stops per ride.

I did Supershuttle once, and the length of time it took for me to get home was absurd. All the other stops just made, what should be a 30 minute ride home, absurdly long.

Good riddance. Supershuttle only made sense if you have a large group and can take up most of the van.

You'd think it'd be obvious that they needed to cut down on the number of stops.

<comment><USER13> I distinctly recall texting with a friend in 2013 who was a Stanford grad student who opted for Super shuttle instead of Uber/Lyft back to his campus housing. Took him 2+hours instead of the ~30 minutes.

<comment><USER14> Exact thing happened to me on a shared shuttle ride from LAX to Redondo. Went all the way down to drop off people at Long Beach first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I miss the Quake City airport shuttle drivers at SFO. They were usually over- educated liberal arts graduates, sufficiently "alternative" in their grooming to thwart their hiring in ordinary jobs (even S.F. employers used to be uptight about that). Spent one ride home getting a useful summary of the latest Terence McKenna book.

</comment><comment><USER16> I use SuperShuttle pretty much all the time. I understand why the service is widely disliked. Most people expect a predictable shared ride with least surprises. The pick up is predictable but not the ride itself. Sometimes it's like 3-4 stops and the whole thing takes a long time.

On the other hand, I have tried uber shared ride from airports and it's way worse (at SFO). The rides keep getting cancelled. Late at night, you have to keep re-booking or do a non-shared ride for a very high price. Atleast with super shuttle, pick up is never an issue.

<comment><USER17> I thought this, until my ride _to the airport_ was cancelled , _20 minutes before the arrival_. I almost missed my flight, good thing Uber wasn't particularly busy that day (this is in Pittsburgh where rider supply can really screw you).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> City to city shuttles and buses seems to be growing. The one I'd been taking from Flagstaff, AZ to Phoenix and back got bought out by a national company called Groome, while FlixBus, Megabus, and OurBus have been adding routes in Arizona (my home state) and Florida (where I live now). In Colorado there is a publicly run bus called Bustang that goes long distances including from Denver to Fort Collins. I also took a publicly run bus from Merced to Yosemite, and its service had recently expanded. There seems to be a lot happening in the space with reduced rates of car ownership [1].

I think the place they're in between got squeezed on both ends, and so did some of their customers, for whom neither UberPool nor city to city shuttles is as good of an option, or an option at all.

1: [https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/demographic- shif...](https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/demographic-shifts- shaping-future-car-ownership/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I preferred supershuttle over uber/lyft because of more certainty and it works as a good forcing function for me to be at the airport well in time. Just this Friday was my first bad experience where they called me at 2:30 am to cancel my 4 am shuttle. A double whammy as it killed any chance of getting a few winks. I was really annoyed and thought that that was weird because supershuttle never cancelled on me before. This probably explains it. I'll miss the service but I see why it's not viable.

<comment><USER20> Same. I generally take rail to my airport except it doesn't run at all hours. I know I can count on a shuttle to get me to the airport but don't want to risk a rare Lyft driver at that hour deciding against taking me an hour to the airport. Helps that shuttle is half the cost and doesn't make it take all that much longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The first time I landed in the US, I took SuperShuttle from the airport to my apartment 60 miles away. The company I worked for had paid for it ahead of time and they dropped me at the door. Sad to see the business go away, because of VC subsidies.

</comment><comment><USER22> this is hardly surprising. a ride to SFO from my home using uber/lift is about $23. $19 using supershuttle. And I don't have to schedule anything or take a long van ride while other passengers are being dropped off.

Very unfortunately for the mom & pop supershuttle franchisees, though, with van payments and a dried up source of income.

<comment><USER23> The one reason I take super shuttle to the airport is because I can schedule it ahead and I can at least be certain they will do whatever they can to honor the reservation. While for now uber/lyft are probably available often enough there is no guarantee that one is going to be available especially if you are flying very early or late.

<comment><USER24> You can schedule an Uber ahead of time.

<comment><USER25> That's not what scheduling an Uber actually does, though.

"The Scheduled Rides feature allows you to select a 10 minute window for a driver to come pick you up. At the start of the window, the app will send out a ride request on your behalf."

So if you "schedule a ride" at 7pm, it is exactly the same as just using the app manually at 6:50pm. There is absolutely nothing remotely close to a guarantee that anyone will you pick you up at all, much less at the time you chose.

<comment><USER26> In my case, there is no way there are going to be drivers available at 4am to take me 45 miles to the airport which is fairly typical of what I need. There are barely drivers available to do it during the day and cancelations for going into the city are not infrequent. I just use a private car service even though it's about 2x the price.

<comment><USER27> You'd be surprised. Try doing a dry run sometime. I did countless early morning pickups.

<comment><USER26> Why bother? I can book a reliable service and it's a business expense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Another indication of the super-poor state of public transport in the US.

This super-nation is so ridiculously behind in this regard in every aspect of development of public transport that you have to consider if the people in force have all their senses together.

<comment><USER29> This is _private_ transportation, addressing needs that public transportation doesn't address anyway (mostly random residential to/from airports).

<comment><USER30> Why wouldn't that be a need public transport addresses? Most airports are connected via railway or subway, right?

<comment><USER31> In the US? My experience is that most airports are _not_ connected by railway or subway. Admittedly most of my trips were more than 10 years ago, but I would be very surprised if things have drastically changed. Yes, in Europe it starts to be become rarer that major airports have only bus connections.

<comment><USER32> There's probably no more than twenty airports in the US with rail/subway connections. Notably the second busiest (LAX) does not have a rail connection but they're finally building one.

<comment><USER8> I count 25:

Boston, Cleveland, Chicago O'Hare, Chicago Midway, Providence, JFK, LGA, Newark, Philly, BWI, DCA, Atlanta, SFO, Oakland, Denver, Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Portland, Seattle, Dallas/Fort-Worth, St. Louis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Milwaukee, Salt Lake, Phoenix.

If you include proposed or in construction links, there's also Honolulu, Washington Dulles, Orlando, LAX. There's also a few more airports that have bus service to the light rail line (e.g., San Jose airport).

Essentially, every city with a subway system has a stop at the airport, LA and San Juan being the two exceptions here. Some commuter rail networks stop at the airport. Several light rail systems don't stop at the airport, particularly if the airport is well out of the center of town. So it's more of indictment of the degree to which US cities lack rail transit.

<comment><USER33> LGA has no rail connection and JFK isn't directly connected, you have to transfer to and pay extra exorbitant fare for the AirTrain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Back in the day, I used SuperShuttle over taxis for airports, but when ridesharing arrived, it was just much more convenient. For early morning flights, there was no more getting up super early so you can be on a shuttle that picked up a few more people.

That said, I miss SuperShuttle because I met some really interesting people on it in the SF Bay Area. Some of the more notable people I talked to included one of the original engineers on the Apple Lisa and one of Larry Ellison's private plane pilots. It was neat to listen to stories from both.

<comment><USER35> Care to share some :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Very interesting in that SuperShuttle was sold to a PE firm specializing in distressed assets in September. This bankruptcy was likely already a given at that time.

<comment><USER37> You wonder what analysis went into that deal. Just the month before, Uber had announced a $5.2 billion loss for the quarter, which gives a sense of the competitive landscape SuperShuttle faced.

There are also arguments that PE has been doing a lot of poor deals lately and institutions allocating to them are going to be disappointed:

[https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/02/private-equity- ov...](https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/02/private-equity-overvalued- overrated/)

<comment><USER38> Thanks for the link - this article is eye-opening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The problem with Supershuttle was the variability and never knowing quite what you were going to get. You could get a straightforward ride home (+25% for the extra dropoffs), or you could get a 2x of your journey time and a shady driver.

The manual pooling of rides (suboptimal), low volume, and subjectivity of the driver deciding how to drive just couldn't make for a consistent and good experience. And add to that the inability to enforce or provide feedback essentially gave you taxi driver incentives to cheat / work the system.

Much as Uber/Lyft has its disadvantages, I say good riddance to Supershuttle.

</comment><comment><USER40> Oh wow that's sad. I have been taking SuperShuttle for over 15 years and have always had positive experiences. Being able to schedule rides outweighed any uncertainty around how long the trips might be, particularly around busy holidays. I also appreciated how local franchises took pride in building their businesses. A shame to see it run aground on the shoals of VC subsided gig work.

</comment><comment><USER41> I started in 2013 to have a yearly trip to Miami for a cruise at the beginning of February. For a solo traveler, taxi had been rather expensive unless you managed to pool with someone right at the airport, so I was glad to find the shuttle operators sitting next to the taxis right at the curb, and I could just walk there and get a ride. Nice low barrier to entry. Especially after realizing that indeed, public transport of the kind typically found at international airports in most other countries (trains, buses) was almost non- existent there.

While I clearly see how Uber and Lyft can provide an identical or better service (because of less drop-off stops) I still think the higher barrier to entry of a) having to know about them and b) having to download an app and open an account is a significant downside, especially for foreigners who haven't been in the US yet. It's another slightly weird thing that you have to know about and prepare for in advance.

<comment><USER42> I have been the foreigner using an unfamiliar terminal. Since it was a cruise to Vancouver, my cruise travel agent recommended I use a cruise message board for that city. I thereby got info on the whole range of options. Plus of course we could have used the cruise line's transfer (i.e. big ole bus) from cruise ship to airport. We hired a car and got a description from the driver of the places we passed through. Thus I learned to use such message boards as a starting point. Plus I learned to have contacts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Good. They almost killed my late wife and I. While we were on board I watched the Shuttle driver force a car up onto the side walk to avoid a collision. If anyone had been standing at that corner they would have been killed. That was only one incident in a half hour ride!

In LA I found it was cheaper to have a Limo on call than use a taxi and more reliable than the ride sharing services. The Limo driver made it seem more like a tour explaining the things we drove by, unlike they others that had no interest in anything other than our $.

</comment><comment><USER14> Good, fuck these guys. Twice at LAX, following a paid reservation, they just _never picked me up_. I got refunded but believe me it's no fun waiting 2+ hours, past midnight, and then getting the last cab there when you realize your ride has dropped the ball. Rideshare apps are vastly better. If we didn't have the legacy of taxi system today, we'd have just gone straight to Lyft.

</comment><comment><USER44> Super shuttle was too expensive for what it was. For less than twice the cost I could schedule a town car. For a single rider the shuttle was cheaper, but for me it was always to log. And I was shocked when I saw two and three people groups take the shuttle. The turning point for me was when the shuttle refused to take the faster hov lane.

<comment><USER45> > _when the shuttle refused to take the faster hov lane_

Any guesses as to why?

<comment><USER46> I doubt this is why, but... on Hwy 101 near SFO, I see lots of rear-end accidents in the HOV lane. Speeds often go from 65 mph to 0 in seconds (crash), whereas the other lanes go from 30 to 0 (hard braking).

Granted, _if_ you're alert, the HOV lane can offer some median space to swerve into.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I had a GREAT super shuttle experience years ago [https://medium.com/this- happened-to-me/supershuttle-gave-me-...](https://medium.com/this-happened-to- me/supershuttle-gave-me-a-lift-baff171951e9)

</comment><comment><USER48> Not only will some not miss Super Shuttle because of its occasional marathon ride, but also others will not miss it for their drivers' tendency to appear and disappear from the pickup location at a random time without even calling.

</comment><comment><USER45> > _In November, Lyft, Uber and taxis were relegated to a pickup lot next to > Terminal 1; travelers can either walk there or wait for an airport shuttle > to ferry them._

I really hate cities that do this.

<comment><USER49> LAX is a nightmare to drive to for dropping off passengers, though, so I'm actually fine with the policy here. It's the busiest origin and destination airport in the US so it has the most people entering and leaving landside.

If and only if there's a decent public transit alternative (train, metro, etc.) from the original terminal to the city then I really like cities that do this. That's rarely the case in the US and isn't at all at LAX, for now, but hopefully that will change within the decade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> SuperShuttle is garbage. Unpredictable timing, you don't know how many stops so you have to budget in more time. If you aren't traveling alone (e.g. family of 2,3 or more) it is substantially more than a taxi, uber, or lyft. Miserable reviews on Yelp. I have a hard time buying the nostalgia here... It was a bad version of UberPool to compete with taxis back in the day, but obsolete now.

[https://www.yelp.com/biz/supershuttle-south-san- francisco-2?...](https://www.yelp.com/biz/supershuttle-south-san- francisco-2?osq=supershuttle)

</comment><comment><USER51> They had $20 dollar rebate that was really hard to claim and had relations with a shady company called Great Fun I'm sure pissed of many customers ...don't blame Uber or the new stuff... SuperShuttle thrived in era where there was little real competition but company had mismanagement issues, bad employees, and it was not innovative and when competition came along they just tanked

</comment><comment><USER52> Sad to see profitable businesses falling prey to "new, cool, trendy" businesses that will hardly ever be profitable and are waiting for the investment bubble to deflate.

</comment><comment><USER53> I had to catch an AM flight in Austin. Used SuperShuttle to book my trip to the airport. I literally was the first person he picked up. We drove for like an hour all over Austin picking up a couple more people. It was night out still so I had no idea where we were because I was tired. Anyway, Finally got to the airport. After that no more SuperShuttle. This was ten years ago and I'm glad things have changed.

</comment><comment><USER54> Ah, SuperShuttle. Great idea, poor execution. Back in 2011, one 10pm ride home (from a very nice trip to Kauai), the driver was apparently dozing off during the ride, and veering into the opposing lane - this happened multiple times and he was resentful to anyone who corrected him.

I bet during that ride lost their business for good for every single passenger on that ride.

</comment><comment><USER55> Just wanted to point out that every Soviet citizen could have predicted this. They have tried marshrutka: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka)

</comment><comment><USER56> SuperShuttle hasn't served Denver International for a while. I remember seeing their vans frequently, but I have to imagine here the new airport train as well as ride sharing ate their lunch. I haven't not used the train ever since it opened.

<comment><USER57> I use Green Ride Boulder which is the same concept as SuperShuttle but way better execution. Scheduled rides, most people get on and off at the office, but they will drop you off at your door after the office customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> They could have pivoted to solving intercity shuttles. Works well in that 1-2 hour range between cities without good buses or trains.

Groome Transportation in the southeast looks to be doing this well!

</comment><comment><USER59> I only remember their Vans leaving SFO driving very slowly on 101 , which seems to match what people is commenting

</comment><comment><USER60> I can't believe it took this long. SuperShuttle offers worse-than-Greyhound service at UberX prices.

</comment><comment><USER61> In the mid 1990s, I commuted from San Diego to SF for a tech lead job on an AI project. Super Shuttle at the time worked very well for me, even though I typically lost twenty minutes waiting forthe van drop offs before my drop off point. With a 6am flight, I arrived at the office earlier than almost all my local colleagues. Yeah, today, I would use Uber or Lift.

</comment><comment><USER62> If its too good to be true, it's probably subsidized by venture capital

<comment><USER63> Sure is, but it's an arbitrage opportunity for everyone who wants a ride.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Huge in Mexico, especially cities with rideshare ban (Cancun).

<comment><USER57> Cancun needs to get their shit together and stop taking bribes from the taxi unions.</comment></comment>


Tell HN: Programmer interview "test" status ... - <AUTHOR>

In reference to this item:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1383169
I've had 76 submissions from 73 people, and although there are a few stragglers still submitting, I'm in the process of commenting on the code and writing up a summary.
If you think you've submitted code you should have an email from me saying so, giving you a reference code, and quoting the code I've extracted and am testing.
If you think you've send me code but have not received an email, check your spam bin, and if it's not there, send me an email.  Please use the details in my profile, including the anti-spam measure.
The code is interesting, especially in the spread of techniques.  It's clear that not everyone codes in C anymore.  Those who do produce similar code, those who don't have a clear accent, and speak with varying degrees of fluency.
I'm starting the write-up, even though some entries are still dribbling in.  This is your last chance to be included. <comment><USER2> After submitting, I was embarrassed when I compared my solution to other people's elegant 4 liners.

But then I had another look at my code and it captures exactly how I thought about the problem. I think I would be happy to write code like this in an interview.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thank you for doing the job of compiling(pun intended) the entries. :)

I, for one, am looking forward to the summary.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry - forgot ...

If you reply to me, please quote your submission reference to make my life easier.</comment>


Security Advice for Sysadmins: Own IT, Secure IT, Protect IT - <AUTHOR> https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/cybersecurity-month <comment><USER2> Oh, thanks for that advice. Really insightful! WTF do think we've been all these years?</comment>


Ask HN: Haxe or Unity? Why? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I will submit my answer in the form of an article: [http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LarsDoucet/20150217/236674/Ga...](http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LarsDoucet/20150217/236674/Game_Maker_Security_and_Freedom.php)

My vote is for Haxe :)

Summary: depends on your specific needs and where you fall on the security/freedom threshold. Do you have some more specifics about your project rather than just comparing the two in the abstract?

(Also as josefiene pertosa pointed out to me on twitter, you can use Haxe's C# target in conjunction with Unity so the answer can easily be "and" instead of "or")

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you; very useful

It is my understanding the Haxe to Unity arrow is one way ie Unity does not support Haxe

I will give you the specifics when possible :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can do Unity with Haxe, but not the other way around, so clearly Haxe > Unity :p

<comment><USER3> see [http://waneck.github.io/wwx-unity3d-haxe/](http://waneck.github.io/wwx- unity3d-haxe/)</comment></comment>


New Apple Patent #825265: Will Apple clone you to save you from Big Brother? - <AUTHOR> http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8,205,265.PN.&OS=PN/8,205,265&RS=PN/8,205,265 Apple has just been awarded patent number 825265, which describes how Apple could create a cloned version of your digital identity in order to protect you from corporate or government electronic surveillance. <comment><USER2> This looks to me to be a useful way to detect leaked datasets.

</comment><comment><USER3> No one can save you from Big Zuck.</comment>


Forest Man - <AUTHOR> http://www.viralsoil.com/forest-man/

<comment><USER2> (I'm still not sure that this is on-topic ...)

The Gizmodo article has more information (linked at the bottom): [http://gizmodo.com/the-man-who-planted-a-forest-bigger- than-...](http://gizmodo.com/the-man-who-planted-a-forest-bigger-than-central- park-1606128111)

Direct Youtube video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkZDSqyE1do](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkZDSqyE1do)</comment>


Hackathon for 6th-8th grade students - <AUTHOR> http://www.firsthack.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's terrific to see high school students serving as mentors to the participants.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your company's open-source policy? - literate-potato I work at a company with 10,000+ employees. We make and sell software for banks. Here's our corporate open-source policy (names changed): https://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=Mw1BgzfT
What do you make of it? Obviously it's rather enterprisey. I think the "easy removal and replacement" dictum is unrealistic.
Does your company have an open-source policy? What does it say and do you follow it? Does your product include open-source libraries? Do you contribute bug reports and fixes upstream? Have you open-sourced any of the code you write? Do you maintain them? <comment> what-no-tests We haven't established any official open-source policy, per se.

Our software (mostly ruby and python with some C firmware and Objective-C for iOS) does make considerable use of many open-source libraries.

While working, I often find bugs in these upstream dependencies and will:

      * Find the project on github
      * Search existing issues for the problem I've encountered.
        * If found, see if there's an existing patch (and use it).
        * If no existing issue is found, I'll open one, then try
          my hand at supplying a pull request that addresses said
          issue.

My PRs aren't always accepted.

      * I generally fork -> PR under my personal github account,
        since I'm not acting at an official level for my company.
      * I don't mention my company in the PR.

</comment><comment> literate-potato Here's our corporate open-source policy (names changed): [https://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=Mw1BgzfT](https://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=Mw1BgzfT)

What do you make of it? Obviously it's rather enterprisey. I think the "easy removal and replacement" dictum is unrealistic.</comment>


TekSavvy ordered to hand over names of movie downloaders - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/teksavvy-ordered-to-hand-over-names-of-movie-downloaders-1.2546477

<comment><AUTHOR> Despite the title, there are some positive points for Canadians in this decision:

\- Voltage is required to pay TekSavvy's legal fees and overhead for getting the information.

\- The court must review the language in Voltage's letter to alleged infringers.

\- The court will also likely tend to reject damages much over the minimum $100.</comment>


Scribal abbreviation - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation

<comment><USER2> I do transcribing of old manuscripts. The first time I ran into Scribal abbreviation was on the first printing (1519) of the parallel Greek / Latin New Testament of Erasmus von Rotterdam. It turns out that many printers had taken to adopting scribal abbreviations as ligatures in order to save ink and paper.

It was very frustrating, as at that time finding information on these ligatures was difficult at best. I had to work out most of it on my own.

<comment><USER3> How many of these can you faithfully represent in modern character sets? How do you capture this information in its raw form?

<comment><USER4> Those that aren't in Unicode are often coordinated in a Private Use Area by the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative¹, which periodically makes proposals to add characters to the standard.

¹ [http://folk.uib.no/hnooh/mufi/](http://folk.uib.no/hnooh/mufi/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sometimes I would just like a little context as to why a link to a seemingly random Wikipedia page has hit the front page of Hacker News...

<comment><USER6> I expect it is because of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8113410](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8113410) (Medieval Manuscripts online).

This article exposed folks to the images of the manuscripts, which use the abbreviations.</comment></comment>


Three Worlds Collide: Great work of fiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky - <AUTHOR> http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/three-worlds-collide.html <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing this. I'm going to enjoy spending my evening reading it :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is amazingly interesting. Thanks for sharing. I read the first few chapters, then forced myself to defer the rest until after work!</comment>


Go implementation of Apache Arrow - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/influxdata/arrow <comment><USER2> I admire people who go through libraries and re-implement them, especially because I found Arrow (and Parquet) code very annoying to understand.

The documentation doesn't cover the design decisions that the crew took, and what the concepts are in-depth.

At least Arrow improves upon Parquet, by actually adding a type for INT_8 and INT_16, which for some reason Parquet actually stores as (a less efficient column of) INT_32s.</comment>


Immunotherapy cancer drug hailed as 'game changer' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-37588541 <comment><USER2> If you have cancer, as I may still do (after prostate surgery), PD-1 and PD-L1 immunotherapy simply is NOT a game changer. On average, you live another 6 months, but only if you pass a screening to get the treatment, which most patients fail. So in practice, even with these drugs, the outcome of getting cancer is significant only in a statistical sense. Hardly a breakthrough.

I also happen to work for one of the two pharmas making these drugs, and it PISSES ME OFF no end how much overpromotion this advancement is getting. Fact is, if you have cancer, you're still going to die, at best a year later than if you were on chemo. So the lucky few who pass immuno-screening and then get these drugs will benefit mostly by avoiding chemo, not by living significantly longer, much less getting cured.

Added to its modest actual outcome, the COST of this treatment is insane - profiteering of the worst kind. Charging a dying person $80,000 for an extra 3-6 months of life while promoting the drug as a 'breakthrough' is just plain wrong. It's a violation of the Hippocratic oath. And it's caused me to lose the little bit of my remaining faith in the value of working in this industry.

'As good as it gets' is a pitiful rallying cry when battling cancer, IMHO.

<comment><USER3> It seems like the PR engine is on overdrive for this drug. And it looks the BBC are spewing it out without giving it any thought at all. Or perhaps the reported was paid?

I'm not saying it has no value, I'm saying that their PR is wildly out of control and it's reflecting on the poor state of journalism more than the efficacy of the drug.

Here is a scathing review of it and the PR engine behind it from the NYT just a month ago, ironically: [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/cancer- drug-ads-vs...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/cancer-drug-ads-vs- cancer-drug-reality.html)

OPDIVO is another name for nivolumab.

No one should call a cancer treatment drug a 'game changer' unless it literally cures cancer in something like 90% of cases. Otherwise it's spreading false hope and it is actually immoral - if you consider that nearly everybody has been affected by cancer either directly or indirectly.

<comment><USER4> Actually any drug that cures people with cancer even a small percentage is a game changer. A drug that cured 5% of all cancers would be fantastic given most drugs just delay progression with very bad side effects.

Our metrics are really skewed - we reward companies that develop drugs that increase average life expectancy by a few months in a large percentage of the target population and which cure nobody, not those that cure even if it is only a small percentage of the target populations.

The really bad thing is we are doing almost nothing to develop treatments that prevent cancer in the first place (well nothing gets to the clinic). The three really big advances in cancer treatment in the last 100 years have been the HPV vaccine, Hep B vaccine / anit-Hep C drugs, and antibiotic treatment of Helicobacter (stomach cancer). All of these are preventive treatments that have "cured" millions of cancers.

<comment><USER3> How would you consider a drug that cures 5% of cancers a "game changer"?

Do you know what a game changer is? Hint: It means the game changes. In this case it would mean that cancer is at least 50% obviated.

<comment><USER4> The reason it is a game changer in we are now trying to cure not just increase survival. Once you have a method that can cure people with advanced cancers that all other treatments types fail on you have a game changer.

<comment><USER3> I'd certainly like to think that's the case, although unfortunately it does not seem to be. If you read the article I posted in my initial comment, for example, it seems like this involves value combined with PR BS.

If you think that's not the case and it truly is a game changer please do share why

<comment><USER4> The immunological drugs really are game changers. Up until now we have had three basic ways of treating cancer: cut, irradiate or poison. These basically never work on advanced cancers, or cancers that come back after initial treatment.

The immunological drugs turn the immune system against the cancer and this approach can cure cancers that are untreatable using other methods. It is still really early days, but the immunological drugs are able to take patients that are weeks from death, and for which everything else has failed, and cure them.

What we really need to know if why it does not work for everyone, but it provides a crack into which we can hammer a wedge.

<comment><USER3> Indeed the class of immunological drugs look like they could be a game changer at some point in the future.

However the question is around the use of the term for this specific drug right now.

<comment><USER4> Well this drug is curing people with terminal cancers - something we have not ever been able to do before. Game changer does not have to mean we have perfection, just the previous approach is no longer valid and we are tackling the problem in a new way.

In the field, immunological drugs have given investigators hope that we know that cancer is able to be cured and we now just have to figure out the best way to do it - in the past we really didn't have an approach that had a chance of making cancer a curable disease. Sure there were some approaches that might work on some cancers or some approaches that would hold the cancer at bay for a time, but nothing that gave hope of general cure.

To put it more succinctly, terminal is no longer terminal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To some folks this may not seem like much of a benefit, but these improvements add up over time. I could only find this example, but in the last 40 years, the 5-year survival rate for breast cancer patients has gone from ~75% to 92%. All of that benefit was recognized at once, but rather incremental benefits added up over time.

I wish I could have the table I saw for colorectal cancer. Really amazing. We're talking average overall survival going from 6 months to 5 years in the span of a few decades. This isn't the one I was thinking of, but it's a great example.[1]

[1][https://www.bowelcanceraustralia.org/images/Bowel_Cancer_Aus...](https://www.bowelcanceraustralia.org/images/Bowel_Cancer_Australia_Advocacy_Therapeutic_Progress_660.jpg)

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately a large percentage of this increase has been from detecting early cancers which push out the time to death by pulling back the time of detection - we are not having an impact on the course of disease that the numbers would suggest.

I hate 5 year survival as a metric. We should be targeting 10+ years survival (or death from any other cause) as a metric. Five years is just too short a time to know if you have beaten cancer.

<comment><USER6> For measuring survival my old lab championed the Kaplan-meier estimator for its ability to censor non-cancer causes of death. The 5yr survival can be heavily skewed if patients are dying from secondary causes such as heart attacks, getting hit by a bus, etc. Oftentimes patients with cancer have other serious comorbidities.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. Most people getting cancer are pretty old. Time to death might make sense in paediatric cancers, but not in 80 year olds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just to clarify, this immunotherapy is legit science has nothing to do with the typical "immune system booster" bullcrap.

</comment><comment><USER8> Apparently, these tumors proliferate because they are able to trick killer T cells into not attacking them. The antibody, nivolumab, inhibits this signaling pathway so that the T-cells are capable of attacking the tumor.

From: Gettinger SN, Horn L, Gandhi L, et al. Overall Survival and Long-Term Safety of Nivolumab (Anti–Programmed Death 1 Antibody, BMS-936558, ONO-4538) in Patients With Previously Treated Advanced Non–Small-Cell Lung Cancer. Journal of Clinical Oncology. 2015;33(18):2004-2012. doi:10.1200/JCO.2014.58.3708.

 _Programmed death 1 (PD-1) is an immune checkpoint receptor expressed on activated T cells, which normally serves to dampen the immune response to protect against excessive inflammation and the development of autoimmunity. However, in the setting of malignancy, PD-1 signaling, driven primarily by adaptive expression of programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1) within the tumor, inactivates primed T cells that recognize tumor-specific antigens, allowing tumor growth and metastasis. PD-1 pathway blockade with monoclonal antibodies offers a novel approach to restoring T cell–mediated antitumor immunity, with the potential for application across a broad population of patients with NSCLC._

From the article:

 _In a trial of more than 350 patients, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 36% treated with the immunotherapy drug nivolumab were alive after one year compared with 17% who received chemotherapy._

That seems like a small improvement rather than a "game changer."

<comment><USER9> Doubling survival rates while having far less severe side effects along with proven effectiveness on multiple different types of cancer is definitely a major breakthrough. This is also based on human trails and not rats in a lab.

<comment><USER4> I wish most cancers treatments were tested in rats in the lab - most of the time they only get tested in inbred mice which are a terrible model for human cancer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Forget flying cars. I'd love to live in a future where we can say, "Remember when cancer was a thing people had to worry about?"

And the anti-vaxxers would be stupidly blessed to not know what it was like.

<comment><USER11> Hey if they have their way, we'll all "continue to study" HPV vaccines so that more girls can die of cervical cancer.

Fuck those cynical monsters. I don't wish people ill lightly, but they're taking chances with the lives of their children and of others, and I just can't stand that.

<comment><USER12> I think you're a cynical monster. And, by the way, this is not a binary situation - you either get vaccinated, or you don't.

I'm not per se against vaccines, but I'm against the following I can think of right now:

\- To lower insurance costs, we inject infants, and toddlers with many vaccines at a time, often without much space between shots either. My kids are fully vaccinated but on a spaced-out schedule, and our family doctor fully supports this as a smart choice. There are toxins in vaccines and the more you put at once, the greater the toxicity, so, an intelligent person would try to space out, don't you agree?

\- Again, to lower costs, all kinds of questionable preservatives were/are used in vaccines - just like with drugs where you have generics and brand ones, I'd rather have choices and pay extra to get a less toxic form if available. Although ethylmercury is pretty much out (mostly thanks to anti- vaxxers), I'm pretty sure there are other better choices at higher costs;

\- Hepatitis vaccine given to infants is usually not justified and could be delayed unless justified by a simple blood test;

\- Studies just confirmed that tetanus vaccine works twice long as previously thought - why schedules are not immediately adjusted to both cut costs, and reduce risks?

\- Flu vaccine is useless if not harmful.

<comment><USER11> The only reason you know that Tamiflu is useless is "cynical monsters" like me who bite the hand that feeds them.

As far as spacing doses, just like anything else it's subject to revision.

Nonavalent HPV vaccines produce antibodies against nearly every HPV variant known, reduce the likelihood of HPV integration, and for someone who has verified that at least a quarter of head & neck squamous, almost half of anal, and far better than half of cervical carcinomas show HPV integrations, typically right into the middle of tumor suppressors or onto oncogene promoters, this is a big deal. These cases are preventable. Not preventing them, when it's relatively cheap and available, is (to me) APPALLING.

The antivaxxer pricks are cynical for relying on the rest of us, who are responsible enough to assume a TINY risk to our kids in order to protect them and others, to take the risks so they can enjoy the benefits of herd immunity.

If that isn't the definition of cynical, I don't know what is. It's on a level with the Soviets celebrating the "eradication" of smallpox while internally working to weaponize it.

Provided a child develops appropriate immunity by the time they're regularly interacting with others, I could care less about the spacing. But that's not really what this is about, is it?

If you have kids and you don't get them vaccinated on an appropriate schedule, you are being a cynical prick. If you fight HPV vaccination because it might "make girls promiscuous", you are a cynical prick. You are presuming to judge risks for others, risks which we as a society have determined are unacceptable. And that makes you a cynical prick, if indeed you do it. (Maybe you're playing devils advocate, I don't know. But I really hate this line of reasoning, and on balance, it doesn't hold water.)

<comment><USER12> Sorry, but Tamiflu is an anti-viral drug, not a vaccine, and it is effective.

Everybody's entitled to their opinion, and instead of low-class name calling, which is what cynical pricks do for a living, use solid arguments, and clever policies. So far, there's being only arrogance from the pro-vaxxer community.

<comment><USER11> I see. Where's your rebuttal regarding nonavalent Gardasil, the actual topic of conversation here? When you can provide some evidence (any evidence, really) that the immediate risks outweigh the benefits, I'll be impressed.

Meanwhile, enjoying the benefits of herd immunity while other people and their kids take the risks is the definition of cynicism.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unsticker Me – Get rid of Facebook stickers in comments - <AUTHOR> http://unsticker.me/

<comment><AUTHOR> By popular demand, Unsticker Me is open-source at [https://github.com/folz/unsticker.me](https://github.com/folz/unsticker.me) with a link there on the homepage!

<comment><USER2> There have to be 50 lines of supporting metadata for package managers and whatnot per line of actual code.

It's not bad, per-se, in fact it's wonderfully complete. None of my projects have the support structure this one does. It's half inspiring, half shaming, and half exhausting.

Edit: Oh, thanks for open-sourcing!

<comment><USER3> The real work is done here, in all of 8 lines of CSS:

[https://github.com/folz/unsticker.me/blob/master/firefox/dat...](https://github.com/folz/unsticker.me/blob/master/firefox/data/contentstyles.css)

This makes me think all the bloat could be avoided by making this a userstyle (usable via e.g. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/stylish/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/stylish/) ) instead of an entire addon.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but that cuts the potential user base from {people using either Chrome or Firefox} to {those people, but they also have to have a niche addon already installed}.

Also I wasn't sure if I'd need fancy javascript logic or not to get unsticker.me working. I'm just happy it only took those 8 lines of CSS.

<comment><USER4> Well, the user base is already people using Chrome or Firefox who are willing to install a niche addon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A warning to OP. Be careful writing chrome extensions that alter Facebook functionality. It's against their ToS. Extension authors have actually had their accounts revoked for producing these.

</comment><comment><USER6> This looks pretty useful! Is the source available?

If you're looking for recommendations for a next project, how about "unbaby.me" and hide all baby photos from my Facebook feed.

<comment><USER7> That used to exist! And it was even called unbaby.me for a while, then it was called Rather, but now it's gone :(

[https://twitter.com/GetRather](https://twitter.com/GetRather)

</comment></comment><comment> andrey-p As a person who killed off his FB account a couple of years ago, my first reaction upon seeing this was "Stickers? Wow, Facebook seems to have gone downhill since I used it." Then I remembered I absolutely LOVED the stickers in Trello Gold.

<comment><USER8> Trello stickers don't suck _that_ much compared to Pusheen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://www.pinterest.com/pin/526428643914715054/](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/526428643914715054/)

You make Pusheen cry.

</comment><comment><USER10> some people are just no fun :(

<comment><USER11> As a Line user, I've found stickers can be more expressive and a lot more fun than text. But there are sticker abusers. What would make this way more useful would be if you could have a blacklist of the sticker abusers

<comment><USER12> There is. There is a large "unfriend" button right there on their profile. Or if you want to remain friends with them, you can always hide their posts if you find them annoying. I really don't understand this whole problem here. I don't believe people have an inherent problem with stickers - only with people that abuse them. But then those are the people you have added to your friend list yourself, they didn't magically appear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this really a thing? I've never heard of or seen Facebook stickers before.

<comment><USER14> My guess is they haven't taken off in NA/Europe as other parts of the world (most notably Asia Pacific). But they are definitely available. They look like very large emoticons.

<comment><USER15> They just became available recently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like the "OMG" pack featuring all those internet acronyms the kids are using these days - YOLO, SRSLY, and uh.. SNAFU.</comment>


Someone asked about my return policy today. I didn't have one, but I do now - <AUTHOR> http://www.devilsadvocategame.com/return-polict <comment><USER2> Off topic, Len, an observation and suggestion: I navigated to the homepage, went "cool, game sorta like Cards Against Humanity but what are the questions like?" This wasn't immediately apparent but I eventually scrolled down to the video area and squinted to try to read the cards. I'd suggest having some sample cards, perhaps randomly displayed, at the same level (or more) of feature/focus as the box of cards.

This looks right up my family's alley, I'm ordering a set. :)</comment>


SUPERHOT is super hot  - <AUTHOR> http://superhotgame.com/

<comment><USER2> OMG. This is awesome. I love it. It is almost kind of strange. You can stop and analyze the situation a little bit. While you can see the bullet slow down. And you move, you get hit</comment>


The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-birth-age-gap.html <comment><AUTHOR> It's not too surprising that people are generally waiting to have kids later in life. But still a very interesting analysis of 4 decades of birth in America and how socioeconomic and geographical factors play into it. With lots of good data to look up based on county, age, etc.

Some quotes I found interesting:

"Lower-socioeconomic-status people might not have as many opportunity costs — and motherhood has these benefits of emotional fulfillment, status in their community and a path to becoming an adult."

"But if going to college and achieving an upper-middle-class lifestyle seems unattainable, then having a family might seem like the most accessible source of meaning to you."</comment>


Show HN: Vue-ApexCharts – Interactive Charts for Vue.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/apexcharts/vue-apexcharts <comment><USER2> ApexCharts looks nice!

I completely understand building a modern charting library.

We've built something similar at Chartly [1]; makes a big difference having great interactivity and styling out of the box!

[1] [https://chart.ly](https://chart.ly)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! What do you use under the hood for Chartly?</comment></comment>


Don't Get Used to Mobile Apps–Their Days Are Obviously Numbered - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/10/24/the_future_of_mobile_apps_looks_bad.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_ru

<comment><USER2> Good riddance.</comment>


Ask HN: Why does Oracle keep VirtualBox alive? - <AUTHOR>

Myself and a friend are discussing this and honestly can't figure out why.  It definitely is widely used, but we don't see how it is anything other than a cost center like Oracle.  If it was a company with open source in their blood I would understand, but it kind of baffles me why Oracle has kept VBox alive for so long, almost like it's out of some sense of obligation to the huge community which is using it. <comment><USER2> I would guess this is their attempt at going after the virtualization market. They bought Sun for the hardware(among other things) so now they need the software. VMware was probably too expensive for them.

VirtualBox is not in the same playing field as VMware but it does work well and is popular etc. The team already knows how to build virtualization software. To me they're just missing some management tools.

Big companies like Google and Oracle don't really think about what's coming next year. Sometimes they invest in something that will pay off big in 10 years. I think this is one of those deals.

This is pure guesswork obviously. I have no idea...

</comment><comment><USER3> My guess is that many of their customers want to run Oracle software inside VMs. Probably big server farms that want VM containers it can deploy, boot, and reboot quickly as needed. For enough VMs, a VMWare or Parallels license will add up.

<comment><USER4> This is probably true, but VB is not servergrade VM software I believe. In those cases you use Xen or VMware. Virtualbox is for the desktop.

First, I think many engineers at Oracle use it to test software locally without having to fallback on complex solutions. Second, it's probably a small development team, maybe three or four FTE, and how much money is that for a company like Oracle? VMware licenses are probably more expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> dottrap made a good point. Adding to it, perhaps someone could chime in on whether the company uses VirtualBox internally.

<comment><USER6> Yes, they do. E.g., excellent tool for testing server products on developer systems. It's free. It works.</comment></comment>


IPhone Disappointment Hammers Suppliers, Fuels Taiwan Outflows - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-25/iphone-disappointment-hammers-suppliers-fuels-taiwan-outflows <comment><USER2> You know why, right?

Because you can't plug in the lighting connector headphones into old lighting ports on other devices pre-dating the 7, and get an audio signal.</comment>


Facebook will now ask users to rank news organizations they trust - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/19/facebook-will-now-ask-its-users-to-rank-news-organizations-they-trust/ <comment><USER2> > We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly > trusted would be most objective

If the goal is to determine what people _trust_ , sure. [0]

If the goal is to determine what is _trustworthy_ , no.

You can't really fight fake news with the first, since obviously a successful propaganda outlet will be trusted.

[0] Well, if user accounts mapped 1:1 to people, which Facebook liked to pretend they do but, well, they don't, in part as a mechanism to game FB algorithms, and this just adds another incentive to that.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, ask the users (who are obviously already victimized by fake news) to choose which fake news outlets aren't fake.

That should go well.

The problem is that there is an objective, measurable truth, so the most accurate outlets can be objectively quantified. If honesty/accuracy is really what they're after, then the only option is to measure and favor the best outlets.

But, it seems that they are more interested in not upsetting their users than in dealing in truth, which is really reinforcing the very problem: that non- facts are given truth-status as long as they make enough people feel good.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are a lot of problems with this.

First, the obvious answer is one Facebook itself would never come up with, which is: STOP USING FACEBOOK so much!

You can never get most people to help rank anyway. The results are going to be skewed for lots of reasons, starting with whatever subset bothers to vote, whatever subset of people even have accounts or bothered to log in, etc. And that subset can be further biased by things like who has the most time on their hands, who is being paid, who set up 100 bot accounts, etc. This couldn't possibly produce a sensible result except completely by chance.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sort of like how people vote up or down comments based on how much they agree or disagree? The masses will vote down the news sources with opposing opinions, and vote up the news sources that already support their opinions. Only a minority of people seek integrity of truth, and even then you can never expect a fully unprejudiced outlook.

It smells absurd to me.

(Repeating my comment from the other thread)

</comment><comment><USER6> What will start fake users from leaving fake ranks? FB has no business being in the news business. FB provides gossip and entertainment.

<comment><USER7> > FB provides gossip and entertainment

other users, not FB

<comment><USER8> FB provides a platform for gossip and entertainment

<comment><USER7> that's being optimistic

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> i don't think this fixes anything.</comment>


Stanford's new MS Computer Science/MBA Joint Degree Program - <AUTHOR> http://www.stanford.edu/group/mba/blog/2013/03/new_ms_computer_sciencemba_joi.html

<comment><USER2> Techendo is starting a degree plan where we help you build a real company. It's called a NoB.S. degree.</comment>


Ask HN: What is currently the most secure home security system? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> There are so many areas security could cover... What are you looking for exactly? From a physical standpoint, simplisafe is cheap and effective to catch break-ins. Pair with a decent live view camera system (let's face it, live view is all you really get from a useful standpoint unless you want to shell out some money) and you've got a great monitoring system. Add a ring doorbell or similar to top it off.

Or are you looking at network security and IDS-type equipment? In that case, how skilled are you? Bitdefender Box is great for home users. A powerful firewall such as pfsense or mikrotik pairs will with snort or mirikata and dns filtering if you're advanced.

You really need to provide more context to the question if you want the right answers.</comment>


Ask HN:  Good, enthusiastic intro to Scala? - <AUTHOR>

I had been designing a hypothetical programming language in my head, and I was surprised to discover that Scala has a lot of the features that would have gone into that language.  For instance, "call by name", and the "lazy" keyword.<p>Does anyone have a recommendation for a good introduction/overview of Scala?  I'm looking for something that is also entertaining to read, like a Scala version of "_why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" (I don't expect anything to be quite like that, but maybe closer to that side of the spectrum than the other). <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1346040>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1302151>

[http://scala-programming- language.1934581.n4.nabble.com/The-...](http://scala-programming- language.1934581.n4.nabble.com/The-right-tool-td2220305.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> a book-free way to do it would be to start with reading an introduction such as: [http://www.codecommit.com/blog/scala/roundup-scala-for- java-...](http://www.codecommit.com/blog/scala/roundup-scala-for-java- refugees) (not really entertaining, but good content)

Once you are done with that, read articles on the fantastic Daily Scala blog: <http://daily-scala.blogspot.com/> . There are LOTS of useful little morsels in there.

For a beginner asking questions, stackoverflow is IMO the place to go, the people on the mailing lists can sometimes be a bit hostile towards newbies.</comment>