Google Raised Android Market App Size Limit From 50MB to a Whooping 4GB - <AUTHOR> http://www.techieapps.com/google-raised-android-market-app-size-limit-from-50mb-to-a-whooping-4gb/ The availability of highly resourceful and rocking apps at our disposal, has actually revolutionized the world of technology. <comment><USER2> That is awesome. The experience of download a high quality game on Android Market and then have to download the data (usually quite big) from the game company server (that can be slow/unavailable/unstable) is frustrating. Be able to download it from Google itself and the possibility to pause/resume is great.

</comment><comment><USER3> Official announcement: [http://android-developers.blogspot.in/2012/03/android- apps-b...](http://android-developers.blogspot.in/2012/03/android-apps- break-50mb-barrier.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> That is a bit sad. In most every case applications can easily shrink in size. On my ipad the other day I noticed I had several games (little more than flash junk, not massive 3d assets) that were 300+MB in size with one at 600MB. When your silly game is using almost 1/10 of the space on my device something is wrong. Compare this to Google books which is 3MB! Props to that group for doing it right. Large downloads can mean download errors, users can cancel the download, users that forget about the app and never run it... And even 50MB assumes that they have a reasonable connection, imaging most of the world that doesn't have 3G trying to download several GB. Maybe their shouldn't be a limit, but apps should be some sort of incentive system (rewarded for small downloads and penalized otherwise?)

Edit: with 4GB I could release apps that include my backups...

<comment><USER5> Apples and oranges. Apps like e-readers are mostly code and have only a few images assets for icons, logos, etc. A game has a large code base, but it also can have tons and tons of image assets for textures, as well as video and audio assets. While obviously you don't have to have all of that for a great game, I don't think you can say that just because such an app is large it could easily be smaller without impacting the quality of the final experience. Look at Battlefield 3 on the consoles, where they had to use two DVDs because the texture files wouldn't fit.

<comment><USER4> I would understand if Battlefield3 used up a lot of space, but when apps similar to the complexity of bejeweled are using hundreds of MB clearly the developer is just being lazy. Most apps/games on my ipad seem to be around 20MB so when there are a few that are 20 times larger they quickly get deleted.

As for Google books, they clearly took the time and effort to make their download small. Even "hello world" flashlight type apps on my ipad are bigger in size. And saying their app doesn't do much as the reason is also silly (ibooks in comparison is 50MB). I single them out as they definitely did take the extra little bit of time to make their package small.

Go into itunes and view your apps by size. You might be surprised what is small and what is big.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This changes nothing. App developers that needed more than 50mb would just download assets after they downloaded the app. So a small app download (1-2 megs) and then another 500mb of assets. Usually only games did this.

This really doesn't make much of a difference outside of the fact that the download now comes from Google's servers which are much faster than the game companies servers.

Also, this is probably to accommodate the crazy 3d games that nvidia is pushing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome, I can fit four of these on my galaxy nexus.

<comment><USER8> Hard to have sympathy when there's a version with double that capacity available and you passed on it.

<comment><USER2> Actually there isn´t. The 32 gb model never was released and was recently canceled. [http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/15/32gb-gsm-galaxy-nexus- can...](http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/15/32gb-gsm-galaxy-nexus-canceled- google-hopes-you-really-like-str/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> *Whopping

<comment><USER10> Exactly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> PREDICTION: Google is prepairing for Online Learning Videos being added to the app store.

The only thing that comes to mind is that they're prepairing for an onslaught of media like Movies (which is the only thing that would take up that much space).

<comment><USER12> many 3D games already take that much space.

The new limit means that instead of installing large resource files that need to be hosted on your own infrastructure and downloaded through your own code, you can now have Google host these files for you.

This also improves the user experience, because there is no second tier install process and the users sees the correct space requirements on the market page.

<comment><USER13> Also I've seen many people complain that because of this two-step install, you can't use the 15 minutes window to decide you don't like the app.

<comment><USER14> Is it only a 15 minute window where people can call and ask for a refund? I've been wondering that. I see ~10-30% of my android app's purchases then cancelled.

<comment><USER3> Yes, 15 minutes: [http://support.google.com/androidmarket/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/androidmarket/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=134336&topic=1046718&ctx=topic)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This really sucks if you have an old phone on a crappy connection.</comment>


Vim and composability - <AUTHOR> http://ferd.ca/vim-and-composability.html

<comment><USER2> "using ctrl+x as a prefix for file handling shortcuts in emacs, or just holding ctrl or meta is modal editing"

Jef Raskin coined the term "quasimode" to distinguish between vi-style modal interface and the emacs interface of holding ctrl or meta keys. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_%28computer_interface%29#Q...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_%28computer_interface%29#Quasimodes) .

The original text is visible at [https://books.google.com/books?id=D39vjmLfO3kC&pg=PA55&lpg=P...](https://books.google.com/books?id=D39vjmLfO3kC&pg=PA55&lpg=PA55&dq=raskin+quasimodes&source=bl&ots=CQoD943VS3&sig=K-ngO6m5beIiWPkvrwzOHPu_BIY&hl=sv&sa=X&ei=YRX0VPuLOoLMyAO_poGoCQ&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=raskin%20quasimodes&f=false) . It mentions another's phrase to distinguish the "spring loaded" temporary modal of ctrl+x prefix in emacs vs. the "spring locked" modal of vi.</comment>


Is C or C++ better for hacking? - <AUTHOR> Is one language easier to learn hacking than the other?<p>How do you google how to do things without leaving a trace? if you search for "kali, how to run at startup" a lot of times that would leave a trail back to you. <comment><USER2> I would say neither is very good for hacking in the short term, unless you are doing something very low lever (compression, data processing, drone automation etc)

If you are wanting to build a web product then, a quick google search will recommend things like Python, Javascript, Ruby etc

Need more details</comment>


E.coli at worst-ever levels in Lake Ontario: advocacy group - <AUTHOR> http://www.citynews.ca/2017/05/05/e-coli-worst-ever-levels-lake-ontario-advocacy-group/ <comment><USER2> "Tully said it's mostly because of the heavy rain, which carries sewage into Lake Ontario and into creeks and rivers."

Yes, this is the problem. Anyone in the GTA can tell you about the wonders of our Combined Sewer systems:

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

<comment><USER3> This is like seeing some potentially horrific error handling logic in critical infrastructure. Wait, it is actually that.

The storm drain should have the overflow-to-river mechanism _before_ it's combined with sewage?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I attended a few meetings in which the city of chicago is attempting to predict the E.coli levels in the water for the next day using data science techniques.

It was a frustrating experience since the current day's E.coli level measurement can vary wildly depending on various factors such as time of day, water depth at site of measurement, month in year, weather, etc...

or maybe sometimes it's just a bunch of birds that all pooped in the same area on a given day.

Plus, each beach has it's own pattern and correlations; some folks started adding rules

the USGS has some method of averaging readings, but I was very tempted to try to find the ideal model that could handle the non-iid beach data. someone on the net suggested multilevel hierarchical modelling, which i don'f fully understand.

i think part of the issue is that data is already semi-structured, as well as time based. one approach is to flatten the structure (assume iid) and make the data stationary (remove the time component).

but i wonder if something like an RNN would handle the multiple time steps better.

</comment><comment><USER5> Should be "E.coli at worst-ever levels in Toronto Harbour and Lakeshore". It's an issue, but the entire lake is not teeming with unsafe amounts of E.Coli. In the summer, there are updating signs about water quality on every beach.

<comment><USER6> > entire lake is not teeming w/ ...

Just the parts where the most people live and want to swim. Sad state of affairs when the land we value most [both fundamentally (water is life) and culturally (waterfront land most expensive)] is toxic to humans.

<comment><USER7> Toronto beaches are usually very safe (the are measured by the city in the summer). This is a one-off event caused by a huge storm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I swim in Lake Ontario pretty regularly. Think I went until late November this year. They'll generally put up advisories at the beaches when there is an uptick, so if you're in the GTA / Niagara region don't keep this from letting you get out there.

<comment><USER9> The Toronto Islands are a good example. Swimming on the harbour side is probably a super bad idea. Swimming on the lake side is probably fine.

It's like a few hundred feet in some cases and a world of difference.

<comment><USER8> Yeah I generally swim at Hanlan's Point. The beach is pretty nice and if you're ok with some butts the lack of children or large crowds is kinda nice. Though during pride its pretty packed.</comment></comment></comment>


Real Men Don't Rent - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/style/men-rent-rental-clothing.html <comment><AUTHOR> > _But, he said, "the concept of ownership is changing drastically and very > quickly. We used to think that we needed cars, and now we have Lyft and Uber > and Car2Go. We used to need homes, and now we have Airbnb."_

Does anyone use Airbnb instead of owning a home? For me, Airbnb is a competitor to hotels, not home ownership.</comment>


Protest in front of the FCC - <AUTHOR> http://www.goldenfrog.com/blog/this-is-happening-right-now-in-front-of-the-fcc

<comment><USER2> It would be far more effective to go picket in front of City Hall to keep them from throwing up stupid roadblocks to companies who want to build fiber and other competing infrastructure in their cities: [http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21477376-Wilmington- CityDE-...](http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21477376-Wilmington-CityDE-Turns- Down-FIOS-TV-Application;) [http://williamcole.net/what-are-we-chopped-liver- where-is-ba...](http://williamcole.net/what-are-we-chopped-liver-where-is- baltimore-fios;) [http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20140219/TECHNOLOGY/140...](http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20140219/TECHNOLOGY/140219845/mayor- pushes-verizon-to-discount-fios-for-poor;) [http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2011/04/25/att_you_want_to_put...](http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2011/04/25/att_you_want_to_put_that_box_where.php).

"The mayor [of New York] recognizes this as an economic justice issue, and economic justice issues tend to be fought in the courts," said Andrew Rasiej, chairman of the NY Tech Meetup. "It's natural that [the mayor's] counsel would be engaged in that fight."

When you turn fiber deployment into an "economic justice issue" you can't be surprised that nobody wants to compete in your community.

<comment><USER3> Yes, build out requirements are stupid. If the government wants companies to build infrastructure in locations where it isn't profitable then they should supply the money to do it rather than imposing a severe hidden tax on the locations where it is profitable and driving out investment.

But I still don't see how competition is going to fix it. It's obvious why a newcomer would want to enter a market where its incumbent competitors have build out requirements and it doesn't -- it would have a cost advantage with which to bludgeon the incumbents. But that would _destroy_ the incumbents. How could they compete in the long run on such unequal terms?

<comment><USER4> _If the government wants companies to build infrastructure in locations where it isn 't profitable then they should supply the money to do it_

Some people think that they _did_ : to the tune of $200 billion. See [1]: the $200 BILLION Broadband Scandal

[1][http://www.free-conversant.com/realtruth/686](http://www.free- conversant.com/realtruth/686)

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709910](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709910)

The government can't build fiber with money it never had. Read the referenced PDF. Its Glen Beck-worthy, "connect the dots" bullshit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great for what looks like a spontaneous turnout!! Every bit helps (look at this photo/post reaching the top of hacker news) -- I've been a part of much smaller demonstrations :-)

Net neutrality needs to be protected & it's great many are getting involved and angry about this & not just because their netflix is going up $1 and they're already paying Verizon or Comcast or someone else a small fortune every year. I predicted abuses like Verizon 5+ years ago and strongly advocated to only allow what I call "Net Prejudice" or prejudicial networks (what Verizon/Cisco euphemistically call QoS) if there is no additional payment involved, otherwise such networks would strongly tend to be extortionist. Sadly only Wikipedia & the Economist of more mainstream publications picked up on it & cited the warning.

(Great coverage from Golden Frog & I love their VyprVPN though Hulu seems to have them and everyone figured out ;-)

</comment><comment><USER6> It's disgusting that this is necessary but it's a fight we have to win.

<comment><USER2> What exactly is "disgusting" about the idea that the FCC is hesitating to implement something that was struck down by a federal court, and is inconsistent with Congress's regulatory agenda for telecom, and amounts to telling companies what they can['t] do with their private property?

I can understand believing that net neutrality is, on the balance, the most beneficial regulatory solution. But dismissing the opposition as "disgusting" shows nothing more than small-mindedness.

<comment><USER7> Because these private companies have monopolies on their infrastructures and use protectionist measures to keep it that way. And on top of that, companies like Comcast have created a huge conflict of interest by owning content providers like NBC. Is it fair if the only high speed internet in an area is Comcast, and they make CBS video load slow because it is a competitor? I run a VoIP company. Should comcast be allowed to charge me so my clients get quality phone service since Comcast offers its own VoIP service? The Internet should be treated as a utility. If you want to be an ISP, you have to treat all sites equally.

<comment><USER2> > Because these private companies have monopolies on their infrastructures and > use protectionist measures to keep it that way.

Cable companies are not legally monopolies almost anywhere. Any franchise renegotiated since 1992 must be non-exclusive under federal law. And if you dig into it, it's cities that kill competition deals, not cable companies. Houses have FIOS in the shadow of Comcast Center in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, San Francisco blocked U-Verse expansion because AT&T's cabinets were ugly. Who exactly is at fault of perpetuating the lack of competition?

> The Internet should be treated as a utility.

That's how we got in this mess in the first place, monopolies and all. Cable companies were treated as public utility monopolies. Capital investment stagnated, because public utilities have little financial incentive to do anything other than simply keep infrastructure (barely) functional. The 1992 reform to deregulate cable and make exclusive franchises illegal wasn't a total success, but look at what happened to cable technology and investment since then relative to DSL (which remained relatively more regulated).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not to be overly obvious about this, but we're asking a pool of power (the FCC) to use their weakly held power to force another pool of power (large companies) to do things for us, the public (a highly distributed pool of power). Given the public's trust has been continuously violated by the US Government over the past years, I'm not sure why we're expecting much out of them and why we're not looking for other ways to implement a fair and equitable Internet for ourselves, by ourselves.

Looking at the blockchain for answers.

<comment><USER9> The opposite of apathy is empowerment.

Don't underestimate the power of an outraged public.

It worked for SOPA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> When I saw the url goldenfrog.com I thought they were playing a game of real life Frogger to represent slow lane/fast lane internet speeds.

Needless to say, I was disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER11> Shite turnout.

</comment><comment><USER12> \+ Bump

</comment><comment><USER13> I used to be unconvinced that physical 'on location' demonstrations with signs and whatnot were useful. I no longer think that.

Now I suspect that they are actively harmful. The moment you do that, you invite easy comparisons between yourself/your cause and several heavily maligned causes/groups which use similar tactics, such as anti-abortion protesters, tea party groups, and worse of all: "Occupy [location]" groups.

If the objective is to increase public awareness, then there are more media- savvy ways of going about that. If the objective is to influence the opinions of the people who are in the immediate geographic neighborhood of your protest, then it might work but not in the way that you intended... You will likely inspire disdain where there was once apathy.

<comment><USER14> On the other hand, physical protests actually get covered by the news, while you'll never see "person got mad on the internet" on CNN.

<comment><USER13> They are "covered" by the news for values of "covered" which include "mocked".

When you give a third party (the media, in this case) the ability to MITM your message (through selective editing, and 'editorial' segments in which the talking heads openly insult and belittle the protesters), _" any publicity is good publicity"_ is no longer true.

The way to avoid this is to not rely on the media to broadcast your message, but to do it yourself. That way concerned or interested members of the public can access your unadulterated message, not just a version of it that was hashed up by cable news.</comment></comment></comment>


Create your own adventure software - <AUTHOR>

Hello, I'm looking to create some software to aid in the creation of gamebooks/choose your own adventure stories/interactive novels. It gets hard to write these kind of books and I am looking for ideas and feedback from anyone who has tried to write this kind of thing before and may have fallen into problems. <comment><USER2> Inform 7 is a popular piece of software for interactive fiction: [http://inform7.com/](http://inform7.com/). It might give you some good ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, that is interesting! And very wordy. I was thinking of creating something more visual.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Review my app, WAYWN (What are you wearing now?) - <AUTHOR>

It's up and running at : http://www.waywn.com/
The gist of the app is building a community around fashion that fits an individual's style.  Understandably, there are similar applications that have launched recently, but we feel that ours is distinct enough to still have a valuable place in the fashion ecosystem.  The biggest difference from ours and sites such as Pose, Fashism, Tryiton, Lookbook, etc. is that we want to capture a lot of the forum based discussions and create a community out of them.  The existing sites tend to skew heavily female (to the point where the design often alienates men) and don't facilitate much in the way of a community, or they really only cater to fashionistas and cause 'regular people' to not feel especially comfortable posting pictures of themselves.
Ultimately, we want to build a site that feels comfortable for people who aren't especially fashionable (such as ourselves!) to want to share outfits and create discussions around them.
Given the recent state of online outfit/fashion sharing sites, is this something you feel is valuable to continue pursuing?  Any feedback is greatly appreciated! <comment><USER2> Catering your site to everyone rather than females only is certainly a better approach for what your trying to do. There are plenty of times where I ask female friends which shirt they like better on me or shoes etc. It inspires confidence before you go out on a date or a big job interview. WAYWN suggests that you want to be critiqued before you head out in public rather than after? The user should be able to apply options (2 different shirts) for the community to help make the decision. Interesting idea, I think your on to something. Goodluck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, definitely angling to have people post before they go out rather than after. We've been discussing ways to expose 2 outfits and have people choose between them, but for now we want to just get discussions going around outfits in isolation.

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Don't ask HN, most of us only wear things that we got free at trade fairs. Go ask the guys at Styleforum and AAAC.

<comment><USER4> Definitely the next step.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there a way to sort by nationality of user, i.e. see what the Italian users are posting, etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet, but we have been thinking about ways to expose filtering. Certainly, at the very least, we'd want people to be able to filter easily by tags they care about, gender, location, etc. Just tough to get the level of control in there without an abortion of a UI. We'll keep thinking about it though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great design, great looking interface. I haven't signed up, but how does photo uploading work? Support for mobile?

<comment><AUTHOR> No direct mobile support yet, we're tied to the Instagram API and will autoupload any photos tagged with #waywn from a user who has connected their Instagram account to our service.

From the web, we support drag and drop photo uploading (one thing we haven't figured out is an easy way to expose that to the user) as well as via webcam.

Certainly, a mobile app would be a high priority if we push forward with it.

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Awesome site and even more amazing team ^^

<comment><USER8> Agreed, great group of dudes behind this. Personally I haven't posted an outfit yet because I find it incredibly awkward to take a pic of myself in the mirror or have my wife do it in poor lighting...

Any tips?

<comment><USER4> It's fairly common for people to take pictures of the outfit laid out (as opposed to while wearing it.)

Maybe that'll work for you!

<comment><USER8> no way, then I couldn't show off my sexyness!! I'll just have Tivs take it for me ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://www.waywn.com/>

<comment><USER9> nice work guys =) ps it would be cool if I could browse by gender.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like it. The immediate focus on content is a winner. Good luck!</comment>


How to Permanently Disable Chrome Full-Screen Mode - <AUTHOR> https://geekermag.com/permanently-disable-full-screen-mode-chrome/ <comment><USER2> Windows only. :(</comment>


Supreme Court Denies Google Appeal on Oracle Suit – APIs Now Copyrightable? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/article_email/supreme-court-denies-google-appeal-on-oracle-suit-1435585873-lMyQjAxMTE1MDI2OTQyMzk0Wj

<comment><USER2> It's not clear that this means APIs are now copyrightable.

CAFC is not normally in the appeals path for copyright lawsuits, so it is not clear if district courts will take CAFC's decision as precedent. They should follow the Court of Appeals for their numbered circuit.

Oracle vs. Google only went to CAFC because it was also a patent case, and that dragged the copyright side of the case with it.

It certainly makes things more complicated, though. I suppose that is an inherent problem when you set up a system where there are two independent courts that are in the appeals path of the same trial courts, and neither of these appeals courts is in the appeals path of the other.

This could be fixed by changing it so that on a mixed case like this, the copyright aspects of the appeal go on to the Court of Appeal for the numbered circuit, and the patent aspects of the appeal go on to the CAFC.

Normally when a court hears something that it normally would not because that is part of a larger case, this is done to avoid duplication of effort. For instance, if I sue you over a California contract and a copyright which all arose out of a failed business deal, the case will be heard in Federal district court. The Federal court will hear the California contract case, and apply California contract law.

This makes sense because the contract case and the copyright case all arose out of the same business deal. The two cases are going to have largely the same witnesses, and the same issues of fact to be decided. It would be wasteful to conduct two different trials, in two different courts, to adjudicate this.

But appeals courts do not have witnesses, and are not trying to determine facts. All of that they get from the record from the trial court. Appeals courts are dealing with matters of law, not fact. I don't see how it would be much of a burden to argue the copyright matters of law in one court and the patent matters of law in another court.

</comment><comment><USER3> You have got to be fucking kidding me.

I would really love to see an industry wide exodus and migration plan away from Oracle if you're using them now, as well as a very wide boycott.

</comment><comment><USER4> So it's down to deciding whether copying an API is "fair use", eh?

<comment><USER5> The problem is that it will be a case by case basis.</comment></comment>


The Complexity Barrier (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://babylon.acad.cai.cam.ac.uk/people/dmh/engineering/engineer03/cecomplexity.htm <comment><USER2> "The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do."

Short of super-intelligent general AI writing programs for us yadda yadda, I believe the answer will be to adopt formal methods more widely: Bake the intended semantics of your software with regards to some formal system into the program itself and have it only be valid if you or the computer can prove that it meets that specification (and have the specification be complete and correct of course (which can be difficult when you consider what e.g. cryptographic strength or "real-time properties" actually mean); if proof is not feasible, add in checks that make it fail gracefully at least or generate tests).

Where today the "engineering mindset" is more prevalent (Look, I can do things with it! And it does them correctly I hope.), there needs to be a shift to a more mathematical view on computation (Your program is an instance of a certain calculus and claiming to fulfill a formal specification, which needs proof), if the software complexity mentioned is to be managed better (there's a whole zoo of specification techniques and low-level formal systems available, which doesn't make this any easier).

Unfortunately support for any of this is severely lacking in popular tools (yes, there's a lot going on in academia, but I don't feel this has spilled over yet): Languages lacking a formal spec and changing frequently, compilers not proven correct, programs running on buggy processors, operating systems with unclear semantics, written in (from a type-system PoV) weakly-expressive languages using meaningless types (void, ugh), black-box peripherals. In that light I'm amazed my computer does anything at all, but clearly most of the time these things don't matter.

Then again, I'm not aware of a fully-featured and usable (comparatively to today's personal computers) formally-specified (whatever this would mean here, surely there's more than one way to define an OS for instance) and proven computing system that goes from high-level language to operating system and application ecosystem to whatever machinery is used at the bottom.

Coq and co. to the rescue (see e.g. [http://compcert.inria.fr/](http://compcert.inria.fr/))?

<comment><USER3> >and have it only be valid if you or the computer can prove that it meets that specification (and have the specification be complete and correct of course

Hasn't this just moved all the issues with writing code over to writing the specifications?

<comment><USER2> Somewhat, yes.

A specification framework is there to help bridge the semantic gap between what you are trying to achieve in the real world and the world of bit-banging if you will. And even if you forget a part of a specification (like saying a sorting function needs to leave behind a sorted collection but forgetting to mention that the input and output collection need to contain the exact same elements or that the input collection needs to be finite for the function to terminate), you'll still have a notion of "incremental correctness". That's why I added in the part with what specifying "cryptographic strength" would mean (e.g.: strong against what exactly?). You could leave that or time- critical properties (e.g.: this function encrypts x bits in y seconds) out and retain the notion of "functional correctness" (i.e. the ciphertext always corresponds to what the definition says it should be).

When you're writing code you'll (most of the time :)) have an idea of what you're trying to achieve. Formal specification should enable you to write that down in convenient form.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The disease one is pretty silly. How awful, now that we've eliminated smallpox and have cures for tuberculosis, malaria, and all the other major killers of humanity we are

"increasingly concerned by new rather subtle diseases (SARS, HIV, BSE etc,) which are very difficult to understand, often difficult to diagnose or only become apparent long after the infection, and which often seem to originate through some change introduced by modern practices, such as use of antibiotics on farm animals or a change in the practices used in preparing meat."

Except new diseases have been constantly arising through human history and those examples arise from the usual ancient zoonotic transmission routes: eating wild meat and living in close proximity with animals. (With the exception of BSE, which inherently will never be anything but an extremely trivial disease.) The only thing 'modern' or 'complex' about them is the names, and that medicine has advanced past witchcraft and is able to notice them.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been pondering a similar idea. It is more about optimization and failure tolerance.

Highly optimized systems are great, until they aren't. F1 race cars are notoriously touchy and require a team of specialists to keep running, while a 1950's pickup truck I happen to know of may be slow, uncomfortable and horribly polluting, but has been in operation for pushing 70 years and is currently maintained by a single person who doesn't have to do much to it.

Just in time inventory control is great for margins, until, for instance, the bulk of the hard drive production capacity in the world is flooded.

Optimization and resilience frequently sit in tension, if not outright opposition.

</comment><comment><USER6> Joseph Tainter has a theory (The Collapse of Complex Societies) that civilizations gradually increase in complexity, then collapse when the benefits of additional complexity become negative.

Collapse can be, and occasionally has been, prevented through making simplifications, but there's usually resistance to that. There's only one civilization left. If it collapses, collapse will be global.

</comment><comment><USER7> I believe _truly_ complex systems will mimic the organic ones which are so successful. They will be chaotic with systems that have an emergent property of order.

These systems will _gain_ from chaotic input rather than fail.

For More: [https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics- theory...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of- life/)

</comment><comment><USER8> _The central processor in my computer contains about 10,000,000 transistors._

The party may not last forever, but VLSI is basically a profession of scale. It stands for _Very Large Scale Integration_. Tools continue to improve, allowing ever more complex designs to be managed by the same team of people. And we aren't talking factors of 2x.

</comment><comment><USER9> Tangentially related, the SF author Roger McBride Allen mentions a similar concept as part of the backdrop of one of his novels, "The Ring of Charon". I actually find the idea more and more plausible as time goes on. The relevant excerpt (which is also the only detailed mention in the book) is:

" _... And hatred for the Knowledge Crash. If you could hate something that might not even have happened. That was perhaps the surpassing irony: no one was ever quite sure if the Knowledge Crash had even taken place. Some argued that the very state of being uncertain whether or not the Crash had occurred proved that it had.

Briefly put, the K-Crash theory was that Earth had reached the point where additional education, improved (but more expensive) technology, more and better information, and faster communications had negative value.

If, the theory went on, there had not been a Knowledge Crash, the state of the world information economy would be orderly enough to confirm the fact that it hadn't happened. That chaos and uncertainty held such sway therefore demonstrated that the appropriate information wasn't being handled properly. QED, the Crash was real.

An economic collapse had come, that much was certain. Now that the economy was a mess, learned economists were pointing quite precisely at this point in the graph, or that part of the table, or that stage in the actuarial tables to explain why. Everyone could predict it, now that it had happened, and there were as many theories as predictions. The Knowledge Crash was merely the most popular idea.

But correct or not, the K-Crash theory was as good an explanation as any for what had happened to the Earth's economy. Certainly there had to be some reason for the global downturn. Just as certainly, there had been a great deal of knowledge, coming in from many sources, headed toward a lot of people, for a long time.

The cultural radicals—the Naked Purples, the Final Clan, all of them—were supposed to be a direct offshoot of the same info-neurosis that had ultimately caused the Crash. There were whole communities who rejected the overinformed lifestyle of Earth and reached for something else—anything else—so long as it was different. Raphael did not approve of the rads. But he could easily believe they were pushed over the edge by societal neuroses.

The mental institutions of Earth were full of info-neurotics, people who had simply become overwhelmed by all they needed to know. Information psychosis was an officially recognized—and highly prevalent—mental disorder. Living in the modern world simply took more knowledge than some people were capable of absorbing. The age-old coping mechanisms of denial, withdrawal, phobic reaction and regression expressed themselves in response to brand-new mental crises.

Granted, therefore, that too much data could give a person a nervous breakdown. Could the same thing have happened to the whole planet?

The time needed for the training required to do the average technical job was sucking up the time that should have gone to doing the job. There were cases, far too many of them, of workers going straight from training program to retirement, with never a day of productive labor in between. Such cases were extreme, but for many professions, the initial training period was substantially longer than the period of productive labor—and the need for periodic retraining only made the situation worse.

Not merely the time, but the expense required for all that training was incredible. No matter how it was subsidized or reapportioned or provided via scholarship or grant program, the education was expensive, a substantial drain on the Gross Planetary Product.

Bloated with information, choked with the of a world-girdling bureaucracy required to track information and put it to use, strangled by the data security nets that kept knowledge out of the wrong hands, lost in the endless maze of storing and accessing all the data required merely to keep things on an even keel, Earth's economy had simply ground to a halt. The world was so busy learning how to work that it never got the chance to do the work. The planet was losing so much time gathering vital data that it didn't have a chance to put the data to use. Earth's economy was writhing in agony. ..._"

</comment><comment><USER10> We manage complexity with abstractions. Works well on software.

The problem is, how do we apply that to real things? I guess I'll hear "robots" somewhere on the answer, but don't really know where.

<comment><USER11> Open standards and modular design, I'd believe. It's easier to handle a mechanism with recognizable and well-known parts. Proper documentation would help too.

I'm not so sure hardware has gone this way, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can anybody figure out the year of this? Content suggests mid-90s but I haven't been able to pin it down.

Edit: wow you guys. I'm impressed. 2003 it is.

<comment><USER13> I would go with: End September / Start October, 2003

Based on the evidence the other posters mentioned, and: "In the last few days the entire area of mainland Italy was hit and some 50,000,000 people were left without electricity."

and Google finding this (only blackout that size that comes up): [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3150788.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3150788.stm)

<comment><USER14> Further, point 5 refers to the SARS outbreak ('02-'03) and BSE (mad cow disease, which I believe entered mainstream US news around '03-'04), so I'd place it another year out, in '04.

I do find it a bit bizarre that he cites his CPU's clock rate in Mbps, though, since it makes it a bit more difficult to identify his particular CPU. Further, processors in the early-mid 2000s had 10x as many transistors per chip. Although, it's not unreasonable to assume he was simply using a computer that was several generations old.

edit: ah, I see. Specific pointer to relative dates in the article. Good catch!

<comment><USER13> > edit: ah, I see. Specific pointer to relative dates in the article. Good > catch!

Also, your post spurred me to more searching: [http://babylon.acad.cai.cam.ac.uk/people/dmh/engineering/eng...](http://babylon.acad.cai.cam.ac.uk/people/dmh/engineering/engineer03/)

File modification dates between 30 Sept and 06 Oct 2003! The easy way to do it :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a pretty old concern, and I'll worry about it when it looks like computers are going to be taking over their own design. Right now, it's a trick just to get them to learn unsupervised.</comment>


FbFund Finalist, Live Music Discovery Site Seeks Technical Cofounder - <AUTHOR>

fbFund Finalist, Live Music Discovery Site Seeks Technical Cofounder
About us:
- We're  fbFund 2009 finalists. - We graduated from Stanford University in an entrepreneurship focused Master's program that spanned coursework from the Graduate School of Business, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, and Stanford HCI. - We're well connected to the music industry, from music startup veterans to the major ticket distributors. - We're passionate about live music, and hungry to attack the $4.2B primary ticketing market. - Above all, we're here to build great products and user experiences.
About you:
- You're as opinionated about software as you are about music. - You rock out every morning to the tune of your own calling, even if that morning begins at noon. - You do it because you love it. - Code is your calling—music, your muse.
We're artists, creators, coders, and shakers of music on the web. Our mission is to connect people to live music experiences—and the artists behind them—with affection. Help us revolutionize the way people discover new shows. Let's talk music.
Contact johnny at damntheradio.com.
Reqs:
-Experience developing, launching, and scaling web applications -Experience leading and managing technical teams -User-focused product creator with pointers to projects you've accomplished -Expertise in JavaScript, HTTP, HTML/DOM, CSS, and Flash -Command of programming on a web server: Python, Ruby, Java, C++, etc. -Proficiency with Fireworks, Photoshop, etc. -Knowledgeable foundation in interaction design principles -Great written communication and documentation abilities <comment><USER2> Is location important? If so, what is your location? (I'm assuming SFO or thereabouts, but I figure it is worth asking.)

<comment><AUTHOR> location is important. our location is the mission district of san francisco.</comment></comment>


We've just made a FREE Rubik's puzzle app, your critique is appreciated - <AUTHOR> We're adding some more cubes, any specific cube that you'd love to solve, please let us know! Your comments and suggestions are also appreciated, we strive to build the best app we can for Rubik's puzzle enthusiasts. Thanks!
The app is available on the App Store and Google Play:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1127743804
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cliqurs.speedcubers <comment><USER2> [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1127743804](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1127743804)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cliqurs.sp...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cliqurs.speedcubers)

And nitpick: free with in-app purchases.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're good at solving the puzzle, you'll be awarded enough gems to unlock all the cubes, no need to make any IAP. We think it's more exciting that way than having all the cubes already unlocked, it's good to have goals to pursue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ask the mods to edit the title. The title should be ShowHN: We've just made a FREE Rubik's puzzle app

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, kartD! I'm still learning my way around HN.</comment></comment>


All the World's a Game, and Business Is a Player - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/technology/all-the-worlds-a-game-and-business-is-a-player.html?hpw&_r=0

<comment><USER2> As you read the article, little reader badges pop up. Cute.

</comment><comment><USER3> So HN is a game too?</comment>


How P2 Changed Automattic - <AUTHOR> http://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/ <comment><USER2> So... it's an ajax-y forum?

Don't get me wrong, I really like what they've done, but it isn't mind blowing. The design and user experience are stellar. It's amazing how the guys at Automattic can take an old concept, pare it down the the minimum viable product, and polish the hell out of the experience.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, and Twitter is just a database of content items with a 140 character max, right?

My point is, user experience does matter...and as Matt's post indicates, they've actually solved (or attempted to solve) some pretty big UI obstacles with this theme.

Combine that with the fact that I could probably have this up and running in 5 minutes or so and I think they've definitely accomplished something pretty cool here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd expect this to suffer from extreme 'youtube effect' - having complete idiots post at each other at high velocity and hurting the spirit of your site. Any reasons why it wouldn't?

<comment><USER5> One would hope that, if you're using it for internal business purposes, you'd have insufficient critical mass of idiocy to sustain the reaction.

<comment><USER6> This is my favorite comment here, ever. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this is a hugely exciting development and can see numerous ways our startup can use this internally.

Our team is spread between San Francisco, Cape Town and Rio De Janeiro and the real time nature of this makes for an excellent internal dashboard/forum/news/tweet/status mash-up. Matt talks about how it's changed the way they communicate internally and I see this as the biggest win here.

We had started to do some of the above with Campfire, but Wordpress+P2 looks so much more powerful. Imagine tweets, exception reports, business alerts, notes and more, all showing up in one place, tagged, discussable and in real time.

<comment><USER8> So it's like Friendfeed?

<comment><USER7> Yes, but locally hosted, configurable (you have the source, Luke) and optionally private for your team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I need to redo my personal site, and this video convinced me to use P2.

</comment><comment><USER10> Love it!

Can we add this as a subset of an existing blog? So the readers can meet and talk on the P2 subsection while the main blog content still exists.

<comment><USER11> You could do that pretty easily by rolling some custom templates, yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is TED.com using P2 ?

<comment><USER6> Nope.</comment></comment>


On Losing A Mentor - <AUTHOR> http://stemmings.com/on-losing-a-mentor/

<comment><USER2> this def. hit home with me.</comment>


The illusion of job stability - <AUTHOR> http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/07/11/the-illusion-of-job-stability/

<comment><USER2> It's also a popular myth that innovation only comes from small businesses and entrepreneurs. A huge amount of true innovation actually comes out of well- funded universities, businesses, and government projects.

<comment><USER3> Innovation has two main components, r&d and commercial application. While giant organizations produce decent amounts of r&d, it's generally small businesses that come up with the commercial applications. Hence, the myth.

<comment><USER4> _Disruptive_ commercial applications come from small businesses for obvious reasons. This may just be perception bias in the end.

The amount of innovative R&D that is implemented and commercially applied by large companies is nothing to sneeze at. Of course, the best examples of such behavior probably comes from outside the IT sector, in more traditional engineering disciplines (think e.g. car manufacturing (outside the US, maybe)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In my personal experience, working as a consultant or for a startup is a lot more stressful.

But as far as job stability goes -- I like keeping doors open with former colleagues, associates, customers and also with local software companies in general. That way, if the shit hits the fan, I can find another comparable job in a week tops; while being picky about it.

And all modesty aside, it rarely goes a month without being contacted with a job offer. Not all offers are good; some are downright insulting. But it keeps my confidence up.

But the advantage of a big company is in the stress levels -- you can take medical leaves, you can go on vacation without freaking out your bank balance will be negative on return, you can switch projects if bored. In many companies work assignment and the process are so fucked-up that you could also do nothing all day, while pulling a fast-and-furious before the and of the sprint.

But this kind of life won't make you rich and your salary will always be an average one in your industry.

</comment><comment><USER6> Don't put your eggs in one basket. Having one source of income that can be easily cut off is like driving a car without seat-belts or airbags. It's an illusion, yes, perpetuated by those who benefit from it.

I've worked with a company like that and it was an incredibly depressive experience (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2374271>). Don't be naive, people, it's in business's best interest to keep you as close to a slave as possible, while cutting off the rest of your options by making you stay in the office for as long as possible for as little of a pay as possible.

You think your boss is your friend and likes you, and cuddles you but in reality he is an actor; it's his job to create that illusion, and he gets paid very well for playing the role properly. I do not see how this is much different from scam-artists.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's not about 'stable' or 'unstable', there are degrees of stable-ness. And founding a company is riskier than working for a bank, a few outlier notwithstanding. What's the point of this article?

<comment><USER8> Some people really feel the need to say that traditional jobs aren't stable, even though they are more stable than non-traditional jobs. An attempt to make themselves feel less insecure of their decisions? Seems to me that creating fake reasons is a great way to drive insecurity, since at some point your whole platform could be supported by lies to yourself.

<comment><USER9> There's a big difference between job stability and personal risk. People who work in startups will sometimes have jobs that stop existing when the company goes under. So what? They move onto the next project, or join a bigcorp, or do consulting. There's a filter between business risk and personal risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is right on. If you contract you make more money, if you amortize that versus a large company and are good they are at least equal if you factor in time to get a new gig etc..

</comment><comment><USER11> I was expecting infographics. :-(

I've always suspected this to be true, but I would love to see some data to back it up. My parents have seen enough instability in their career paths to agree with my decision to actively pursue starting my own company. They are pretty risk averse...

</comment><comment><USER12> It seems like the author started out talking about stability, but then ended by talking about personal satisfaction, or some deeper meaning.

I'll say something more direct: full-time work at any company is not meaningfully more stable than contract-based work. The difference is that employers attempt to instill a sense of loyalty in you which is not reciprocated. Work for yourself. Create product independently and generate passive income. Work for others on a contractual basis and formalize the exchange of lifetime-hours for money.</comment>


All your metaphors about computers are wrong - <AUTHOR> http://blog.scaramanga.co.uk/2012/02/29/all-your-metaphors-about-computers-are-wrong/

<comment><USER2> What's the point ? Of course all metaphors are wrong and none is a demonstration.

But metaphors are great tools, if wisely used, to reuse mental patterns and find ways to use new tools. What would be the computer without the metaphors of the windows, buttons, files, and so on ?

<comment><USER3> If the computer understood natural language, you wouldn't need most of the GUI elements commonly used today, like windows and buttons.

Our brains also don't use files and folders, these metaphors having a direct analogy to our physical world in which we need to group things for easy access and distribution, however we are limited by the constraints of our world and the way we interact with it, constraints that will sooner or later vanish and pretty soon files and folders won't make much sense anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A computer is a machine for following instructions. At first it only knows a limited set of logical and arithmetical instructions. You can use these instructions to teach it new things to do, and new commands to follow (and if you buy a computer, somebody probably already has). However, if you phrase these instructions wrong, it will do what you say rather than what you mean.

So you could say that programming a computer is like training a new soldier or worker, and using a computer is like being in command.

</comment><comment><USER5> Computers are an extension of consciousness. What I believe the author is trying to say is that programming is more than just a skill task. It is akin to giving someone hands in a handless world allowing people to manipulate their environment.

</comment><comment><USER6> Metaphors about computers may be wrong...though the metaphor of architecture seems apt (even in light of my personal bias).

Metaphors using computers as a model for the mind are more interesting, because such metaphors follow a long tradition of equating the mind to technologically advanced systems.

Brain as computer metaphors are just the contemporary version of brain as hydraulics (e.g. Avicenna's humorism) or the more recent brain as mechanics (e.g. Leibniz's mill). Turing's test and Searle's Chinese room are relevant thought experiments pointing out the problems inherent in mapping systems to thought.

</comment><comment><USER7> Learning to use computers is like learning reading and writing. Learning to program computers is like learning papermaking and typesetting and bookbinding. The metaphor does hold.

<comment><USER8> Since when could books execute computations that their readers don't understand?

<comment><USER9> You could perhaps argue that books sometimes contain instructions that readers execute but don't necessarily understand.

<comment><USER8> True, but it misses the central point that books don't execute anything themselves, and so computers are fundamentally different from them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The metaphors are not fully isomorphic analogies, but they can still be helpful. Framing programming ability as being a form of modern literacy, for instance, conveys more urgency to the public.

When they start actually programming, these metaphors will leave their mind and they'll focus on the concretes, or at least find better metaphors.

I think the only worry comes from basing long term policy decisions on crude metaphors.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. People - we computer programmer magicians included - understand new things by relating them to other things that they already know. I expect there are readers (or viewers) of the BBC or The Guardian who only know that programmers do things with computers. That is the _entire_ _breadth_ of their knowledge of computer programming. These metaphors help them frame this new information in terms of things they already understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a person in the comments references from Steve Jobs "The computer is a bicycle for the mind."

I think that is the best metaphor for a computer I've ever heard. But I'd say the increase in potential a computer brings is more like from walking to flying via a plane than from walking to cycling. Even so, that really is a quote I'll be keeping in mind.

</comment><comment><USER13> One of the metaphors that I think is most damaging is inherent in the way most decision-makers think of programming _languages_ \-- the decision is treated as comparable to the selection process for natural languages, which is trivial and obvious for natural languages but very complicated for PL.

With natural languages (a) there aren't order of magnitude differences in power or quality, and (b) the switching costs associated with becoming fluent in a new one are very high, so businesses usually default (without conscious choice) to "the standard", which is the language most familiar to the people in that location. (In New York, that's English; in Tokyo, it's Japanese.) For natural languages, this is the obvious right decision.

When this metaphor is taken literally and applied to PL selection, it results in Java and C++ being used, because those languages are "the standard". The difference is that, (a) there _are_ languages that are orders of magnitude better-- just compare Scala against Java-- than mainstream PL, and (b) switching costs are a lot more moderate. Using "the standard" in PL, for a new company, is a horrible decision; you won't even get off the ground if you start in Java or C++.

Oddly enough, the term "programming language" is, technically speaking, completely correct (a PL _is_ a language) but metaphorically detrimental.

<comment><USER14> "There are 2 hard problems in computer science: caching, naming, and off-by-1 errors."

Is there a better name for "programming language" that avoids the problem of association with natural language?

<comment><USER13> I would say "platform" in these discussions since that's what we're actually comparing _in practice_ when we're arguing about what technologies to use for business. By 2006, it was obvious that Java-the-language was deficient in comparison to alternatives like Python and Ocaml, but people (and here I include smart people who understand technology) continued to prefer it because it had the best libraries.

Paul Graham argued that language fundamentals matter more than libraries and tooling. This was true in his case (Viaweb) but it's not true in general and for long-term adoption trends, which are dominated by small, part-time projects (innovators and early adopters) for which having to write a bunch of libraries (CSV parsers, for example) that already exist in Java would be a killer.

Java won the late '90s and 2000s because of the _platform_ , not the language. The language sucks, and even by the standards of 2005 (when Scala was immature and Clojure didn't exist) it sucked, but it had the best tooling and therefore won.</comment></comment></comment>


German government officials trying to ban Google Analytics - <AUTHOR> http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/11/24/google-analytics-illegal-germany/

<comment><USER2> I have read through the comments on Techcrunch, and I don't think anyone there gets it - unless _I_ am the one with the misunderstanding.

Installing Google Analytics on a website allows Google to track users visiting the site. Can Google not follow this same user across different GA-enabled sites (e.g. through a cookie)? And can Google not connect this user with search terms entered on its website? If that is the case, that seems to be a significant amount of data that would potentially fall foul of European privacy laws.

The commenters on Techcrunch, however, seem to think the issue is with the users of Google Analytics (the web site operators) gaining private data. It isn't. It's with Google getting this data.

<comment> brown9-2 Analytics sets it's cookie under the site's domain name, so it is not available to other GA-enabled sites.

edit: whoops, I misunderstood your question

<comment><USER2> I don't think that's what the Germans are worried about (though it's what most commenters on Techcrunch _think_ they are worried about). I think it's about Google having access to this data, and being able to link visits and search terms - not the _users_ of Google Analytics.

<comment><USER3> The main criticisms are that GA collect users' data without consent, without telling them what they collect and without giving them a simple way to get their data reliably deleted, all of which are forbidden according to german law. And before people start complaining that GA doens't collect personal information: there seems to be an emerging legal consensus in germany that an IP address is in fact a personally identifiable information. Nobody has ever been taken to court for running an apache with the default logging configuration, but there are people who think that that is an offence worth a fine of up to €50.000,-- too, just like running GA.

For those who can read german, here is a better text: [http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Bundesdatenschutzbeaf...](http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Bundesdatenschutzbeaftragter- kritisiert-Usertracking-bei-Krankenkassen-864903.html)

<comment><USER4> And soon this will be the way the whole EU works. And then the advertising market will collapse there and maybe they'll decide to come up with privacy laws that make sense...

<comment><USER5> Not EU, this is how _Europe_ works (certain parts of it at least, and certainly where I live). There is a certain political culture in european states that causes a sense of unease when anything of no trivial size is not "regulated". The "regulation" instinct is almost theological, it does not stem from problems or desired results or policies. When something important is not "regulated" somehow, it is perceived as potentially dangerous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 _The government officials are particularly wary about the information Google is able to collect on websites of health insurance companies and the like, saying Google could conceivably create profiles of people that would include information about their interests, lifestyles, consumption patterns, political and sexual preferences._

Then shouldn't the regulators be looking at the health insurance companies, making sure they aren't using tools like this (or exporting this usage data to other companies), rather than the provider of this free service?

</comment><comment><USER6> The way I understand it, saving any personal data without consent (or warning? Not sure.) is illegal in Germany. And, far as I can tell, IP adresses are considered - like telephone numbers or email adresses - personal data.

Now, as far as I can tell, there has never been a court case about Google Analytics or similar solutions. I know that already, some providers of analytics solutions are anonymizing the saved IP adresses. Google Analytics (and many others) don't do that. So the German government might just have a case.

<comment><USER6> Just to clarify myself here: I think the owner of the site is allowed to store the data, she is just not allowed to hand it over to any third parties (in this case: Google).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> but webtrekk.net is allowed???

(A sampling of clients include Allianz[insurance], Esprit[lifestyle], Siemens[almost anything], Flatex, Map24[location], Bosch, and Die Zeit[pol].)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is rediculous. GA is simply a log of ip addresses that request data from your server. Its no different than a hotel keeping a guest log.

If you weren't explicitly giving away you ip address, there's no way the server could send you data.</comment>


Exploring Fake, an F# Build System for all of .Net - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ExploringFAKEAnFBuildSystemForAllOfNET.aspx

<comment><USER2> The title is unfortunate marketing. Fake is great for building a lot of stuff, not just .NET things.

<comment><USER3> Wasn't intended in ANY way to be marketing. I didn't realize folks were using it to build other stuff. Gimme some links and I'll update the post.

<comment><USER4> This is what happens when you write about something without knowing much about its context. There is an awesome "new" universe out there - it's called functional programming. You are orbiting around it, but we all hope, for the better, that you discover it more.

<comment><USER5> Not sure why the negative attitude..? A great thing about FAKE is that it can be used without worrying much about the context. Yes, it is written in F# and F# is mainly functional, but FAKE is just a great tool for anyone - and as Scott correctly points out, you don't even need to understand much F# to use it.

<comment><USER4> I stand by what I wrote and it has nothing to do with any negative attitude, I meant no disrespect. Perhaps it's enough for you that people "don't even need to understand F#" to use F# tools (of which there are many excellent ones, FAKE being one), but I would much prefer that they did. This "context" would make any .NET developer more informed and I see no reason why we should hide F# from anyone. Perhaps I am too carried away, but I certainly want Scott to learn about and embrace FP so that he can pass that onto others, which, I hope you agree, he does pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like this could replace PowerShell for deployment scripts. Something I personally would find very interesting. Could this work with Octopus Deploy?

<comment><USER3> Yes, I mention Octopus. There are some plugins I think.

<comment><USER7> There is a small tutorial: [http://fsharp.github.io/FAKE/octopusdeploy.html](http://fsharp.github.io/FAKE/octopusdeploy.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can I use it as a substitute of psexec.exe executing my scripts on remote machine?

</comment><comment><USER9> LOL, I totally love that name!</comment>


Russia's MPs "who wants to buy gas has to buy rubles or freeze to death" - <AUTHOR> http://rt.com/politics/russian-dollar-abandon-parliament-085/

<comment><AUTHOR> it's nice to see that the world is moving backward instead of moving forward in 2014...</comment>


The Complete Guide to Not Giving a F**k - <AUTHOR> http://inoveryourhead.net/the-complete-guide-to-not-giving-a-fuck/

<comment><USER2> Reminds me of this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wS5xOZ7Rq8>

</comment><comment><USER3> "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care"</comment>


Code-of-Conduct VS No-Code-of-Conduct? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fisherman/fisherman/issues/83#issuecomment-181138839 <comment><USER2> The original article which sparked this issue ([http://dancerscode.com/blog/why-the-open-code-of-conduct- isn...](http://dancerscode.com/blog/why-the-open-code-of-conduct-isnt-for- me/)) states that CoCs will cause people to censor themselves out of fear of offending people.

I think this is fine. You _should_ think about how you will make people feel and how people will interpret what you say. And this is good for _you, too_. By empathizing with the listener, you can find more diplomatic and effective ways to communicate. You'll reach more people.

And if you can't think of a way to do that (which I think is unlikely in most cases) then maybe your thoughts deserve marination and should be shared later, or perhaps not at all.

<comment><USER3> _should_ is relative. I'm not sure I can agree that it's my responsibility to care how other people feel, or their responsibility to care how I feel.

It's nice. And I'd hope that would be the default mode. But if you're having a bad day and don't have the patience for a lazy question and instead send me over to lmgtfy, I don't think you've done anything wrong. It's not your responsibility to provide me some service for free just because you've put some code into the world I think might be useful to me.</comment></comment>


Demoscene Twitter – (re)discover the demoscene - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/planetdnews <comment><AUTHOR> We show off classical or less known intros / demos, from different platforms, each with:

      - appealing screenshots
      - pouet.net link to get the binary and launch prods yourself
      - youtube video captures for the lazy or when commuting

Would you prefer mad modern tech or oldschool + chiptune vibes, you'll feel at home with us!</comment>


Public Transit in iOS 6 - <AUTHOR> http://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/06/public-transit-in-ios-6/

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry if I missed the point of the article, or if it seems like it when I say this comment, but I hate it when people say that lacking a feature is a feature; it just seems like a lame excuse.

<comment><USER3> I think he's saying that the route Apple chose is more appropriate in this case given the hybrid nature of ownership of all the various transit systems. And he's just providing (good) examples of why having a centralized system like Google's can and has been problematic.

<comment><USER4> He provides one example - Vienna. Where I live the transport companies are privatised but realise that by providing the data to Google they get more people using their services.

When Apple releases ios 6 they will have to create a new app just because Apple doesn't want to be compatible with the existing feeds that these companies are already providing.</comment></comment></comment>


Photographer Robert Frank has died - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/arts/robert-frank-dead-americans-photography.html <comment><USER2> Robert Frank was the father of the modern snapshot aesthetic that took hold in the 60s. He defined a whole generation of photography where the capturing of the singular uninfluenced moment was more important than the perfect lighting and facade present in previous work. With purpose, he showed the people ignored by the collective myth of what it meant to be American and did it with a raw style that influenced how all future documentary photographers work. I highly recommend flipping through a copy of The Americans if you never have.

<comment><USER3> Frank was great but I prefer Winogrand for aesthetic. That said he was one of the first to do street photography as a road trip. Now it's kind of like s rite of passage for street photographers to do the roadtrip format.

Here[1] is a bracket (not best format) of some of the seminal as well as current greats of the street photography aesthetics.

[1][http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3daWmT7PPCY/S-Bo97ub2MI/AAAAAAAAFk...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3daWmT7PPCY/S-Bo97ub2MI/AAAAAAAAFk0/mZ1YMPRaUgY/s1600/bracket.gif)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you enjoy photography, please consider buying a paper copy of The Americans. The digital reproductions don't do the series justice. Absolutely phenomenal and moving. RIP Robert Frank.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you want to understand a bit more of how influential his work has been look at this small edition book that elicited responses about The Americans from a lot of the big name photographers: [http://jasoneskenazi.com/americans.html](http://jasoneskenazi.com/americans.html)

Also, anything Jason Eskenazi does is great.

</comment><comment><USER6> No way. I JUST bought a copy of The Americans two days ago. I know this isn't an interesting comment to read, but I can't help it. It was on sale for less than $20. I imagine there will be a rush to snatch up copies in the wake of the news, so get it while you can.

<comment><USER7> It's one of the great photo books, there's no doubt.

It's been in the back of my mind to get a copy since I first saw the BBC's Genius of Photography documentary[1].

The entire series was great but the section of Frank particularly stuck with me. (Not enough for me to get off my arse and buy my own copy it seems though).

I remember going through it at my local library afterwards. Well worth it IMHO.

[1] [http://www.bbc.co.uk/photography/genius/](http://www.bbc.co.uk/photography/genius/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> His films are also really amazing. Me and My Brother is a classic: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_and_My_Brother_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_and_My_Brother_\(film\))</comment>


Amazon Aurora Global Database - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/global-database/ <comment><AUTHOR> > _Amazon Aurora Global Database is a feature that allows a single Amazon > Aurora database to span multiple AWS regions. It replicates your data with > no impact on database performance, enables fast local reads in each region > with typical latency of less than a second, and provides disaster recovery > from region-wide outages. In the unlikely event of a regional degradation or > outage, a secondary region can be promoted to full read /write capabilities > in less than 1 minute._

AWS continues to innovate consistently on Aurora. This is much more approachable and affordable than something like Spanner. Your app definitely needs to be modified to use it, and you need to seriously consider the 1-5s latency impact, but they really do take care of the most difficult parts for you.

My biggest beef is that all the new Aurora features (Serverless, Parallel Query, Global) are only available or MySQL 5.6, not 5.7. God knows how long it will be before they support 8.0</comment>


The new Digg - <AUTHOR> http://digg.com/ <comment><USER2> From a technical point of view this "redesign" scares me a bit:

All the old stories and user accounts 404 now. That is a major loss to their SEO. 14 million pages just thrown away and not passing any juice.

They don't employ canonical or robots.txt.

They have character encoding issues. ("'Superbird' Discovered")

They use a meta keywords tag, and it contains "celebrity news", which doesn't appear anywhere on their site.

They hardcode CSS with styles on div's. They don't use text-transform but type headers in all-caps.

They use the HTML5 doctype, but none of the new tags or practices (like ditching the obsolete 'type="text/javascript"' on script tags).

The layout breaks without javascript on, and the "upcoming stories" section doesn't get loaded. They provide no warning as to why the site's functionality stops working.

They don't combine or compress resources like CSS and Javascript.

They left debugging and TODO's statements in their javascript.

      $(".story-image-marquee-standard").empty().html("<img src='http://imoscar.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/imoscar11.gif' alt='' />");

tries to load content from a discontinued website.

A lot of empty placeholder divs to js-load content into. TPL's are also stored inside the page contents.

URL's are not properly encoded (space instead of %20).

Links to the same article are both with 'target="_blank"' and without.

They don't use microformats or schema.org.

<comment><USER3> _The layout breaks without javascript on_

I see this bandied about on reviews of various sites, and I continue to believe it doesn't matter. If you have Javascript turned off and a page doesn't load, you should know why that page isn't loading. It's because you deliberately broke it for yourself.

<comment><USER2> You are free to believe that. But let us say I want to cater both to you and to another user that browses the web with NoScript (assume it is my goal to cater to as many users as possible). I have two options: A) make the layout accessible without JavaScript B) break the layout without JavaScript. Only with option A do I cater to both of you -- Regardless of deliberate breaking or bandied opinions ("Thou shalt never mix style and script").

<comment><USER4> >assume it is my goal to cater to as many users as possible

The thing is, it's _not_ your goal to cater to as many users as possible. It's your goal to optimize your ROI on development time. The reason we have to have _laws_ about accessibility is that your average fast food place knows that wheelchair-bound hamburger sales will never make back the cost of constructing a wheelchair ramp. The economics of the situation wouldn't provide for disabled people, so we have to have regulation to make sure they get taken care of.

(And before anyone jumps on that and misinterprets me, I am _not_ comparing disabilities to turning off JavaScript. I'm simply showing by example that it is not good business to try to grab every possible customer at any cost.)

<comment><USER5> I'm tired of having this argument over and over again, so let's approach this Javascript issue from a different angle:

It is bad practice to couple content (the "what") with functionality (the "how"). The content itself should not depend on how it is displayed. From an engineering standpoint, this makes your code unmanageable and unmaintainable in the long run. These stupid shortcuts of forcing users to have Javascript on just to display content only cause me minor inconvenience, but it will cause you much more harm when it's maintenance or upgrade time.

But you or everyone else on the JS bandwagon don't need to listen to me - I'll "temporarily allow" only the minimal amount of scripts on your page to see what I want to see and I will move on. You will need to live with this code during the next update cycle.

<comment><USER6> There are certain design elements that translate into a single line of JS, but require a couple of pages worth of CSS voodoo. Guess what's more maintainable.

<comment><USER5> So we compensate for a lack of CSS libraries by mixing presentation layer with content layer. Nice.

<comment><USER6> You brought up the maintenance angle, and the response to that is that in some cases it's far more practical to use js for atyling than to rely purely on css. I gave an example below - a sticky page footer - do show me how to do it in the confines of your abstraction model.

Abstarting things for the sake of abstracting is a rather naive approach. It's a good starting point, but some abstractions complicate things way beyond what's needed.

<comment><USER5> While I agree that exceptions in very rare cases are needed, exceptions are becoming the norm and, like I said, are coupling functionality and content. This is why CSS was created, to decouple style from content, and now? We are are throwing all that work away because an entire generation of web devs are just too lazy to look it up.

By the way, a quick search for sticky page footer on Google turned up this as the first result -- no JS needed, and it didn't even look that hard (<http://www.cssstickyfooter.com/using-sticky-footer-code.html>).

<comment><USER7> All CSS solutions, including yours, require vertical margins on all page elements to be 0px, which is clearly an obscure and senseless restriction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Personally, and I'm probably in a minority, I _hate_ these huge, slabby, infinitely scrolling displays of photos/images with precious few items on the screen. It's a lot of work to try to find any sensible number of items of interest.

I seriously prefer an interface like HN - spare, clean, and information rich.

 _Added in edit: I my POV differs significantly from that of jgrahamc:<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4321826> _

<comment><USER9> I don't like it either, I personally find it hard to establish any sort of importance or order.

<comment><USER10> That's what I dislike most. It doesn't have the feeling of flow that you expect from a community-content site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is great. The large scrolling format (similar to pinterest) is a good idea as the last thing that was needed was something that looked like reddit or HN. Sites like the Daily Mail have been very successful with this style.

Good luck to the new Digg team!

<comment><USER12> Looks like a sparse Huffington Post to me.

<comment><USER13> ...that sounds fantastic to me. I'd read a lot more HuffPo if the pages weren't so laden with crap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Read their blog comments <http://blog.digg.com/post/28441399381/welcome-to- digg-v1>

It is impressive how much hate and negativity the comments include. Sometimes we forget that while traffic keeps up community quality can easily degenerate. They will have to put also a lot of effort into community-re-building.

This shows again shows to me how hard and impressive the task is they picked. It's social software. It's not only the rewriting of the software part but also rewiring te social part. Truly inspiring!

<comment><USER15> Quite frankly if it upsets all those people going "Facebook login?! I'M NEVER COMING BACK" and they don't, I'd probably be more interested in using Digg again

<comment><USER16> Why would they tie their future to Facebook, though?

<comment><USER17> They say it's a short term solution to fight submission spam. See second to the last: <http://digg.com/faq#why-facebook>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> OK, I fire up the site. I see 6 big pictures, 6 links to actual content and minimal navigation. A whole screen and only 6 bits of actual content? Its like a children's book. And more and more sites age going for this style. Is this the web now? The BBC Olympic site has gone this route and its awful to navigate.

Why is this the new way to go? IMHO, it is terrible.

Look at this site, a simple and clear list of links to stories and associated comments. Simple, easy and lots of content on one screen, in my case, 27 linked stories. Please don't ever let HN go this way. I don't want big pretty pictures taking up my screen when Im trying to look for written stories to read. I am not a child.

</comment><comment><USER19> The team had to make drastic changes. They wanted people to forget about the old Digg and its fiasco. The best way to do it? Become completely different. They also needed to become different from their rivals.

That's why I don't understand why people here are complaining on the new format. I personally find it great and novel. The clean design and only six stories in sight allow you to focus and actually pay more attention to each of the stories.

When I see 30 stories clumped into one page, I run through their titles like a mad man, often reading just 50% of the words. Having just 6 stories eliminates the haste, it allows me to relax and slowly study all the stories before deciding if I want to read them further.

I like the new Digg. I think the team made a right move with the new format. Now all they need is really good content on the front page and users will come. I know I will check it again tomorrow.

<comment><USER20> No they absolutely didn't. All the team needed to do is put a fresh coat of paint on Digg, similar to it was in the beginning, and capitalize on the traffic before they wanted to make drastic changes.

Digg's whole problem started with when they tried to become the Twitter of news. That's not original intent of the site. _If_ you purchased all that data, all that SEO linking, you'd have to be absolutely crazy not to migrate over at least the stories into your new design.

These guys completely dropped the ball.

<comment><USER19> So, put a fresh coat of paint on a product that failed miserably? Why is that a good idea?

They didn't pay for the data and SEO linking, they paid for the name and buzz in the media. In my opinion they are not using the old data on purpose, they don't want to have anything in common with the v4 at all. It's not modified Digg, it's a completely new Digg. This is how I'm reading their message.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'll be honest, I'm surprised by how much I like it. For a quick "give me something - anything! - to read over lunch" it serves the purpose for me very well.

Best of luck to the new team!

<comment><USER22> Same here. Looks like a good front page for general news, whereas something like reddit mostly shows it benefits when you get actively into the subreddits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't mind the whole facebook sign up process. They have a justification for it. But then when they ask can they start posting to my feed it makes me feel like they were fibbing to me the whole time!

They just want free advertising via my social feed. Pft.

<comment><USER24> What about when you click the "x" next to that permission and you don't have to worry about it anymore?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I must admit I haven't even visited digg in over four years, but wasn't it originally intended to feature user-submitted content? The front page pretty much screams the exact opposite to me. I instantly pictured a bunch of hired goons sitting in an office, submitting content in return for their weekly pay.

The headlines, photos and layout reminds me of Ars Technica without the original content.

</comment><comment><USER26> There's far too much scrolling for far to little content.

This just wont be able to compete with reddit in its current format. People who used Digg before wont come back to Digg because this Digg isn't what they want.

Also, as I have the tab open, I have a notification at the bottom of the screen:

"We're hard at work on finding new stories for you... Try refreshing in a few minutes."

Extremely professional.

</comment><comment><USER27> Things I wanted to do but couldn't/couldn't immediately figure out:

1\. Comment. What is the point of an aggregator without comments? 2\. Go to a specific category. Are those things above the titles categories? Why aren't they clickable? WTF?

<comment><USER28> Their argument is that commentary on the original Digg was essentially the first of its kind, whereas commentary happens "everywhere" and they need to spend time aggregating commentary too. Not sure how they can do this effectively, but will appear over the next few releases.

<comment><USER29> Honestly, it's like releasing a car without wheels. Comments are the bread and butter of social news sites. I'm shocked and horrified that they omitted comments. It's a glorified Pinterest at the moment.

I'm really disappointed - I really hoped they had learned some lessons.

Comments are where community forms.

Without community, you have nothing but a shiny, editor-controlled front page. Congrats, CNN 2.0 (No wait, even CNN allows comments...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This thread makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a toothpick. The nitpicking is outrageous. Think about your last project with a tight deadline. OMG a bad meta tag made in! Should we delay the release? If you are running a business not a personal site the answer should ALWAYS be no. This is a website not shrink wrapped software. It can be updated a hundred times a day. Meta tags can be changed. It's ok to roll out a site that isn't 100% where you want it to be. I, for one, welcome the new Digg and look forward to them improving their meta tags.

</comment><comment><USER31> If anyone from Digg is reading this, please make #site-header-container 2px wider. The right edge of the header is bothering the crap out of me.

Other than that, great job new Digg team!

 _Edit: after a few refreshes and zoom in/out, the header appears to be centered correctly. it seems to be offset if i resize my window and/or other random times. the header css is kinda janky, but who cares, you guys did great for a 6 week build from scratch. :)_

</comment><comment><USER32> The new Digg doesn't look terrible, by any stretch. But - the developers' insistence on an arbitrary six week push deadline when there clearly remain unsolved problems is fairly amateurish and reeks of self-indulgence.

Users /with existing expectations/ (which Digg invariably presents) do not care about "release early, release often." They want something that kicks ass and gets it right on the first try.

<comment><USER33> Kind of disagree, if users are still on the site to voice opinions that means they are pretty resilient. They aren't going to give up right away because the first release doesn't have everything.

<comment><USER32> Maybe. On the other hand, it seems like a fair amount of these opinions are "fuck this noise, I'm going to Reddit/etc."

Don't get me wrong - I would absolutely love to see the new Digg rocket into popularity again... but I'm just not certain that's going to be the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I find the look interestingly different to what I expected. The loss of colour is brave (given the Digg green) but is at least a clean break, which is perhaps what's needed.

It would be nice to have a small bar at the top that when clicked would show the most popular and upcoming rather than having to scroll to the bottom (although I'd keep the material at the bottom as well for those that don't notice).

The Popular section looks too big for my liking.

Of course the big thing is the content. How relevant is the content? Sadly on face value, it looks like it fails (but then again it would as the content will be the same as v4).

In conclusion it looks nice and is a welcome break, but the content doesn't make me want to sign up. I do wish the new Digg team the best of luck though, and will check back in a while to see if the content's improved.

</comment><comment><USER35> Design wise. It's clean, and lacks personality - which I presume is the point to impartiality.

The makes me think of the phrase 'go big or go home.' This is not a big enough departure from the last Digg to really warrant a whole rewrite and losing the original posts.

To be honest; it seems only a step away from traditional newspaper websites - which have the benefit of the zero-hour news feed. They need to inject yet more community back into this.

As someone who's spent a decent amount of time leading the redesign on a newspaper site - I remember putting far more innovation into a traditional newspaper site than this has.

</comment><comment><USER36> Digg, Reddit, and Hacker News are easy to browse for a reason.

I like the redesign, but I don't think it fits with social news Digg-style. When I go to a site like reddit or Digg, I know I'm not going to like every article posted. Mostly, I want to find what is interesting to me as fast as possible. Sites with large images and scattered, newspaper-style layouts make it hard for me to find what I want. This layout would work on a focused blog where I know that I am interested in most of the articles, but not on a mass news aggregator.

</comment><comment><USER37> Pinterest 9gag for links.

<comment><USER38> ...And therefore not like either Pinterest or 9gag.

<comment><USER37> Turns out it's very much like Flipboard. The idiot box is succumbing to the idiot trough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The new Digg....

504 Gateway Time-out nginx/1.1.19

Well I'm underwhelmed.

</comment><comment><USER40> I opened the page, was overwhelmed with images, scrolled down a bit, saw that the information overload continued, and closed it.

When I open it, I have no idea what I am supposed to do. Information dense pictures are being shown to me across two dimensions, my eyes have no clue what flow to follow.

Newspapers have had hundreds of years to learn how to make these sort of layouts work, it seems like Digg said "screw that, we're just going to shove it all out there!"

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm surprised to discover I actually _like_ the layout. Mainly because, with sites like Reddit, much of the time the content is just an image, and you're just interested in the top couple of comments. If they can put this content straight onto the main page, it's actually more efficient to consume.

I hope they implemented threaded votable comments soon, though -- the community discussion is the main thing, for a lot of people!

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady Seems good, I like the layout. I can already see myself visiting for a daily dose of news. Reading through the comments on the blog makes me think they are going to have problems with the community. Lots of complaints about use of Facebook login even after Digg explained it was a temporary system so they could launch quicker (they are working on a system of their own).

</comment><comment><USER42> The design is quite ok for me, but what about the provided value?

I skimmed through the links, and I saw many of them already, on other social sites I visit, I mean HN, Techmeme and reddit. What would draw me to digg could be a community of great commenters, like one on slashdot, which would add value by providing insightful/funny commentary. Without that, it's a bit redundant to me.

</comment><comment><USER43> This has been on the front page <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4320147> and had received pretty negative reviews from many HN users as well.

Personally, I don't think that looking like a newspaper/magazine and adopting a techmeme like share mechanism is a significant enough change that the market would need.

</comment><comment><USER44> Facebook requirement is a nonstarter. Even if it cuts down spam, requiring FB already eliminates a good portion of the population.

</comment><comment><USER45> Looks like <http://www.likabl.es> and <http://dropula.com>. I still prefer the Reddit/HN style layout. Feels like reading a magazine (no sense of rank) now rather than a list of ranked articles.

</comment><comment><USER46> It looks like a plain version of yahoo. What is their goal here?

If I were digg, I'd just hire a bunch of engineers, and let them put out a new product under the old name. Something not directly related to their past. Though I would keep their archives online for SEO.

</comment><comment><USER47> 504 Gateway Time-out nginx/1.1.19

Looks like they're trying to replicate Reddit's feel too closely! I like it!

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm surprised (not really) how people complains about how this will cause the last remaining Digg users to leave.

As I see it, this is not just a redesign of the old Digg, but a whole new site with a diffrent concept. Much like "Dig is dead. Long live Digg!"

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I would point to Best Buy as a prime example of this "release now, worry about the flaws later" philosophy. Their website has been a mess for years mostly because of this very approach.

It's an old adage, but you should really do it right the first time.

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm personally not a fan of this layout. Looks like Pinterest. It's good if you have some time to spare and looking for pretty images, etc... like most Pinterest users, but for power users it's too much distraction.

</comment><comment><USER50> The layout is nice but the stories are still rubbish.

I'll stick with Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER51> "502 Bad Gateway". I see the HTTP standard has already captured everything you need to know about digg's relationship to the internet in one succinct phrase.

</comment><comment><USER52> I like the fact that they incorporate fb likes and tweets to the score.

This helps battling the social site chicken/egg effect and makes spam stories hopefully less likely.

</comment><comment><USER53> I am getting "504 Gateway Time-out" when I visit the page

<comment><USER54> Me too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> It looks good, here's what I see:

504 Gateway Time-out nginx/1.1.19

</comment><comment><USER56> As much as I think the new design is great. I do not believe it's going to solve anything let alone Diggs fundamental problem.

</comment><comment><USER57> Are there no comments? To me that's half the reason I go to a site like reddit of hacker news, maybe more.

</comment><comment><USER58> I like the minimalist look of it, but it's useless for me until they add categories or tags.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What it looks like to me:

Pinterest on top Weird section in the middle Hacker News type thing on the bottom.

</comment><comment><USER59> Where are the comments?

The comments are much more important than page layout or the number of tweets.

</comment><comment><USER60> Consistently crashes Safari on my iPad 1 when zooming in. Did they QA the new look?

</comment><comment><USER61> What CMS did they use; the URLs look from something enterprisey like Vignette?

</comment><comment><USER62> I really hate, unless I am missing something that they got rid of categories.

</comment><comment><USER63> <http://about.digg.com>

</comment><comment><USER64> The new Digg took longer than 3 seconds to load so I didn't bother.

</comment><comment><USER65> By removing comments, the Digg staff deserve to all get laid off.

</comment><comment><USER66> aaaaaandddddddd they are down... <http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/digg.com>

</comment><comment><USER67> "504 Gateway Time-out". Seems quite a radical redesign.

</comment><comment><USER68> The new digg == 504 Gateway timeout. Great job guys.

</comment><comment><USER69> 504 Gateway Time-out , that is a big improvement

</comment><comment><USER70> I hope they kept the old passages pages for SEO.

</comment><comment><USER71> Good luck Digg team! You have achieved a whole lot in a short time.

Some people love it, some people hate it. Whatever you do, it will happen. Stay true to your vision!

<comment><USER18> Haven't they just changed their vision, what ever a vision is?

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> It's trying to look like Flipboard.

</comment><comment><USER63> 504 Gateway Time-out -nginx/1.1.19

<comment><USER73> Block the FB script. Then you can see the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Oh the irony. I get a 503 error.

<comment><USER74> Make that a 504.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Feels like the New York times ?

</comment><comment><USER76> Looks a lot like Mahalo.com.

</comment><comment><USER77> > © 2012 Bananastand Inc

That made my day.

</comment><comment><USER78> Hmm .. I kinda like it.

</comment><comment><USER79> annnnd it's down.

</comment><comment><USER80> F __king shit</comment>