"Find Your Way to Oz" - Stunning Chrome Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chromium.org/2013/02/introducing-find-your-way-to-oz-new.html <comment><USER2> Is showing a blurry bitmap with a spinner over the top stunning to anyone else? It's been spinning for 10-15 minutes...</comment>


Don't drive your Nissan Leaf too much - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/429330/dont-drive-your-nissan-leaf-too-much/

<comment><AUTHOR> Battery fade is an interesting issue, that its this pronounced in the Leaf is not a good sign. The nature of 'commute' cars with short trips and repeated recharging might exacerbate the issue.</comment>


It's time to rewrite Java from scratch, security expert says - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2025160/its-time-to-rewrite-java-from-scratch-security-expert-says.html <comment><USER2> When seeing this title and before reading the article I had the reaction: "This is already done. Google already rewrote Java. For Androi."

Now after reading the article I can quote: "Now is a good time to rewrite some core components from scratch and insure that they're bug-free, rather than patching the application from one version to another," Botezatu said." So it about to rewrite SOME core components and NOT to rewrite Java completely from scratch.

</comment><comment><USER3> Even if you rewrite them from scratch, you probably would still have (new) bugs, and some minor corner cases incompatibilities that would break the old user code.

Things You Should Never Do, Part I: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html></comment>


Company tries to scam iphone developer, claiming they own public data - <AUTHOR> http://sfappeal.com/news/2009/06/who-owns-sfmta-arrival-data.php Does A Private Company Own Your Muni Arrival Times? <comment><USER2> "Muni spokesperson Judson True says otherwise. In fact, he says that, no, Muni owns the data in question and that the public is, of course, entitled to access it."

I paste this here, because it's at the very bottom of the article and it doesn't seem obvious to me that the arrival time of buses is public data that can be used for free. Well, that's what most of us wish but if Nextbus had made a deal with Muni to put their transponders on the buses in exchange of owning the data and giving it to Muni for free, it would be hard to argue otherwise. I wouldn't be surprised if Muni actually got a special deal because I think I remember looking at this exact thing for the buses where I live and that it had to be licensed.

It's somewhat similar to satellite or map imaging, in that companies have invested money to gather the data. It is public data in one sense but that doesn't necessarily mean it can be used freely. I'm glad Muni spoke out and made it clear though.

Another example (of a similar kind of possible deal) would be JCDecaux which offered (I believe) bus-stops benches to cities in exchange of managing the advertising on them.

<comment><USER3> The founder of Routesy should sue NextBus for harassment and Apple for complicity, and see how fast this case gets settled. He'll get his app reinstated and probably get some compensation for lost revenue from NextBus to avoid trial... if in fact the MUNI position is correct.

<comment><USER4> NextBus isn't the company harassing the Routesy guy, "NextBus Informaion Systems" (NBIS) is. Reading between the lines, it appears that NBIS is run by a crafty fellow who got NextBus to grant NBIS exclusive rights to collect license fees for their data, without NextBus knowing the full scope of what they were getting into. (hence their "we cannot comment" stance)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The link is heavily editorialized. The actual title of the article is: "Does A Private Company Own Your Muni Arrival Times?"

<comment><USER5> I bet at least some people outside SF have no idea what "muni" means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Even if NextBus "owned" the data, it's unlikely any claims they made on it would be enforceable. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Tel...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Telephone_Service)

I am not a lawyer, and neither is wikipedia.

<comment><USER7> That case is inapplicable; it deals with static factual data collections.

Bus times are dynamic, _estimated_ facts. The act of estimating, via the use of proprietary means, is what gives NBIS the right to "own" bus (estimated) arrival times b/c estimations are just interpretations.

Obviously, NBIS has no ownership to historical bus arrival times, b/c those are actual, irrefutable facts.</comment></comment>


London's Legendary Taxi-Driver Test Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS - <AUTHOR> http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com//2014/11/10/london-taxi-test-knowledge/ <comment><USER2> GPS routing is awful compared to a person who knows their way around a city.

Uber drivers in hilly cities like San Francisco never, ever think to avoid climbing right up and down the steepest hills - the algorithms don't tell them not to, there's no _traffic_ and it's not a low _speed limit_ , it just sucks for other reasons.

I had a driver last week who had never heard of Valencia St, and then misunderstood the GPS voice and accidently got on the freeway, getting us stuck in cross-bay traffic for 20 minutes just trying to get to the next exit. Of course I rated that ride 5 stars, because I'm not actually a psychopath ( [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/08/14/what- ar...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/08/14/what-are-we- actually-rating-when-we-rate-other-people/) )

It's going to be a long, long time before we put anything approaching the depth of information that years of experience brings into our algorithmic routing systems. And startups are structurally disincentivized from trying to, anyway.

<comment><USER3> It is a trivial problem. Track how anyone with a smartphone and your app on it moves around the city. Aggregate which paths they choose and which turn out to be faster / better. Then propose those paths to other users asking for routing instructions.

I work on a software for routing deliveries ([https://www.fleetnavi.com](https://www.fleetnavi.com)), and although we don't have this functionality built into the platform yet, it's the first thing to do when we get volume.

<comment><USER4> Tracking, aggregating and analyzing thousands of users with slightly varied destinations, focuses (less traffic, faster, scenic), and signals is not exactly what I'd consider trivial...

<comment><USER5> It's not a terribly hard job actually. I worked for a startup in 2004 that was doing this with haulage companies. We had 8000 data points moving around the UK coming in via GPRS and 3rd parties, traffic information aggregated and routing and mapping data, pick up corridors and event data.

It was (bar the web front end) a relatively modest sub-30kloc chunk of C++.

Now the scale is different but in 10 years, the problem isn't necessarily much more complicated, just larger.

In fact I think a derivative of it now runs some of Yodel's operations.

<comment><USER6> 30kloc is not a trivial problem, that's a year's worth of programming.

I also love this:

 _the problem isn 't necessarily much more complicated, just larger_

If a programmer ever said this to me, it'd be a massive red flag that the estimate they're about to give me is going to be very wrong.

<comment><USER7> It's a larger data-set not a more complex problem.

Also, there is no need to get a perfect solution anything better than what's out there is useful.

<comment><USER8> > It's a larger data-set not a more complex problem.

Ummmm... yeah, scaling the kinds of algorithms that one might apply to this sort of problem up to larger data sets is often extremely difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Several times I had London cabbies stop the fare meter when I showed them (the same) short cut near where I lived.

"No, don't go to the lights, turn down this lane!". All of them had their brains explode that there was a better way that saved about 200 meters and 30 seconds of travel.

I'm not sure if there's an (unwritten?) rule that you get the rest of the fare for free if they're taking you a long way, but there was no resentment from them. All of them were incredulous there was a better way to do it.

(Just looked at Streetview. There's nothing special about that lane that should make it a big secret. I guess it must have been No Entry/One Way/something and changed recently before my journeys.)

<comment><USER10> It is honour. Have had free trips because they didn't know a street in eg Swiss Cottage. It encourages repeat business.

<comment><USER11> 25% of cab drivers had no clue where Gaskin St was, and I never had any suggest they were going to knock off the fare in three years...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The "knowledge" is a very valuable skill/infoset. The actual driving and interacting with customers is much less valuable. So maybe the way forward is to separate the two skills.

Folks with the "knowledge" could act as centralized route planners. The can provide many more routes in the time they could drive one (i.e. a single cabby driving might do 1 call every 20 minutes... but could easily do 10 route plans in the same time).

Essentially when someone asks the minicab driver "take me to X", the driver relays this information to a black cab driver at a desk who sends back a custom route. With GPS to identify the starting point and VOIP (via wireless) this could be as easy as a driver using a traditional radio (press the mike button, speak the destination, and viola the route appears on a dash mounted map along with spoken instructions).

Very much like the existing examination question/answer format.

Maybe you would also need to rotate the route planners out as drivers 1 week out of 4 so they keep up with the "knowledge".

</comment><comment><USER13> Here in Brooklyn car services seem to have lost the ability to navigate the city in just a few years. You used to be able to call a car service, have a car show up in 5 minutes, and they'd get there with just the cross streets.

Now most often the first question is "what's the address so I can put it into my GPS", even with metered cabs. I've been yelled at for asking to take routes that the GPS doesn't suggest, even though I know at 3pm on a Tuesday we shouldn't be on the BQE. Or there's construction on Flatbush and we should go around it.

I don't think we need a test quite like London's, but basic knowledge of neighborhoods and major intersections should be required. At least until we get those self driving cars that can optimize routes in real time.

<comment><USER14> My (limited) experience in Brooklyn is that taxis don't know addresses, they know cross-streets.

<comment><USER13> Yes, that's generally true with all of NYC, we always give cross streets as reference. I'd never expect anyone to know just based on address number.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Even though in London black cabs are significantly more expensive than uber x, they are a much better experience. I often order an Uber in the pretty busy area of Soho, only to stare at the app for 10 minutes as my driver turns into dead end streets time and time again trying to get to my location. I don't really understand why this is happening, because they usually have both a separate GPS and the uber app that should display driving directions.

Black cab drivers know so much more about the city it's not even a contest. I have almost totally switched to using Hailo in London for that reason.

</comment><comment><USER16> Reading the article, I can't help but think that a GTA/CrazyTaxi street- accurate video game based on this test would be amazing.

<comment><USER17> You could probably sell it to the Knowledge Boys & Girls cramming for the test - they wouldn't have to log so many hours on the road putting wear & tear on their rented vehicles trying to cram for the test. They can run around for as long as they can stay awake without ever leaving the comfort of their home. Plug it into something like Occulus rift or some VR environment... and if they hit traffic, they can kill that mission and start again, finding a better route instead of in being stuck in the very tiresome reality of sitting in traffic for 40 minutes by taking a wrong turn.

<comment><USER18> The main problem I see with that is detail and the age of your data.

Drawing from experience trying to memorize a journey through the city of Bale, which whilst less large than London is quite winding and certainly suffers from the same compounding of historical and modern buildings. Going through my route, spots where i stopped to take in more details are very much more tangible in my mind. The wide park circled by a walkway where I stopped for a short break is quite vivid in my memory, and I can pull dozens and dozens of points from it. The path along the viaduktstraße leading up to it is far more faint in my memory, considering I only remember the Paulskirche and one of the bridges towards it. Considering only something akin to Google Streetview would be practical, there seems to be just to few points your mind can latch onto to create a detailed image of the location. In addition to that, your other senses do play a significant role in remembering locations.

Also, cab drivers need to know very recent information you're tempted to overlook designing a game like that. How fast does traffic go at this time of day at this location? Are they setting up construction over here? It's often not even realized consciously, but rather factors into decisions on a lower level, turning into the "hunch" you have about a certain route or even more generally a certain course of action.

So unless there is a way to have a perfect representation of the city that is also less than a day or two old, it's not really a replacement for actually going through those streets.

<comment><USER19> Does the test check the best way, or only knowledge of finding Some route? I could see someone learning the city topology with VR, and then using experience to learn congestion patterns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Check out the run calling halfway down the article (Matt McCabe "calls-over" a long run)

<comment><USER21> Yes, and notice how much of the run involves "forward" calls---that's when you stay on the same road, but it changes name. It's mindblowing.

If you want to track the run (it's accurate!) the starting point is right next to this node in OSM: [http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/279219489](http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/279219489)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I thought the coolest fact about the Knowledge is that it actually induces observable physical changes in brain anatomy.

> She has discovered that the posterior hippocampus, the area of the brain > known to be important for memory, is bigger in London taxi drivers than in > most people, and that a successful Knowledge candidate's posterior > hippocampus enlarges as he progresses through the test.

It seems that, like most things, there might be a tradeoff involved. According to this paper[0],

> However, they were significantly worse at forming and retaining new > associations involving visual information. We consider possible reasons for > this decreased performance including the reduced grey matter volume in the > anterior hippocampus of taxi drivers...

[0] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2670971/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2670971/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I would take a London taxi for the same reason that I'd read a paper book, for the experience, not for the result. The Knowledge is such a wonderful anachronism, and I hope that it can co-exist in some form with new services such as Uber and Lyft, but outside of protectionism I can't see any reason why it should - technology is nearly good enough now to replace it, and in some cases probably better. If it does continue to exist I can't imagine that market for people with the Knowledge will be enough to support the number of London taxi's that are on the streets now.

<comment><USER24> Most of the black cab I have taken have a also a GPS, so that's not like it is an exclusive type choice, and I wonder why people assume so. Even connected GPS are fairly bad at finding the shortest way if it means running in the other direction for a while and that happens quite often in London and Black Cab driver are quite good at making those kind of info just looking at their gps traffic info.

The knowledge is a very useful tool, and in any city, a driver with good local knowledge is what you are looking for, regardless the middleman you use. Technology is only making the trade off of using amateur bearable, and in reality the real value of Uber and others is from the rest of the service provided.

A bit like in your example - if you had to go to the bookstore to load a new book on your reader and it could only hold one book at a time, the technological superiority of even the latest generation of kindle would not make them go pass novelty items. Real value of ebook comes from the rest of the services you get from it and that's the reason why even with the shit reading experience, the first gen kindle was a success.

The anachronism here is the segregation between black cab and minicab in London and the services the legal restrictions on the services they can offer. Although, IMO, that is not nearly as bad in London as people on HN experience in other places in the world. Black cab are meant to hailed on the street, now, without booking, review or other overhead by drunk people and tourists. Some licensing restriction to make sure you get a basic level of service in those circumstances is probably acceptable. If you have time to plan a bit in advance, there is Uber and plenty of competitors that have always been freed from the restrictions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A lot of people seem to miss the point that the Knowledge also acts as a deterrent to bad behaviour by proper cabbies - they have too much invested in their license to be likely to throw it away lightly.

<comment><USER26> It's not about how much they have invested; this is a sunk cost. One cannot change the past. It's about the future revenue they would forego if they were to lose their licence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> London Black cabs are overpriced, and there's no market check that stabilises price, as much as I respect the institution of "The Knowledge", you are still bound by the need to trust your driver, and many are just opportunistic.

The Knowledge may make for better navigation, but as a customer, the amount of times it actually comes in useful (road works, accident, awkward route) is very low, 90% of journeys are straightforward.

It certainly doesn't justify the 50%-100% price increase for the privilege of hailing the cab on the street vs. by pre-booking, especially when most of the time the route you are taking is short (no Londoner in their right mind would use a black cab for a long journey, unless they have money to squander or it's so late at night that you're desperate)

The likelihood of getting any real value out of the knowledge when taking a cab in London is very low, and the fact I need to pay for idling in traffic with an un-capped fare potential on top of jacked rates just makes for a terrible proposition.

As a consumer, there's just no value in that, and Black Cabs need to evolve or compete themselves back into relevance, bring on Uber, Lyft, Wheel and any other newcomers.

Source: 14 years of being a grumpy Londoner.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm a fan of the 3 yes/no question survey. It doesn't take much longer than rating 1-5 unless you want to add comments.

Would you use our service again?

Was there anything we could have done better? (+comment)

Would you recommend us to your friends and family?

Also, let's not forget how _people_ sometimes lose their ability to be objective when they're upset which may manifest itself in the form of a less than 5 star rating for a driver that made 1 small error or said something innocuous that we took offense to.

</comment><comment><USER18> Having lived for some time in Beijing, where a "black cab" is a slang term for an unmetered private cab or metered cabs running with the meter off, reading the part of the article detailing "black cab advocacy" and "black cab protests" turned into more of a mental challenge than I would like to admit.

</comment><comment><USER29> As automatics routing software takes into account the extra information of traffic history with real time existing traffic conditions computers will do just as well or better than "The Knowledge Boys". Currently local experience with traffic is very useful, but as that information becomes available electronically and much more comprehensively the playing field will tilt even more to automated analysis. UPS already uses their combined driving history to save millions of man hours and millions of tanks of gas[1]. I have to imagine that Google and others can do even better with all of us implicitly telling routes and existing traffic conditions. Be interesting to know if Google is doing a/b testing with their routes in maps like they do with their website UI.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-30/ups-uses-big- data-t...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-30/ups-uses-big-data-to-make- routes-more-efficient-save-gas.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> Infamous would be a much better description than legendary.

</comment><comment><USER31> I wouldn't be surprised if they gradually start losing cab drivers.</comment>


Should All Children Learn to Code by the End of High School? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/should-all-children-learn-to-code-by-the-end-of-high-school-11582513441 <comment><USER2> It seems plainly clear to me now that these initiatives to get more women in code and more children in code were just poorly-concealed attempts to flood the programmer market with bodies to drive wages down.

Should kids learn to code? Sure, but that already happens. Kids should have some experience with _every_ career field and programming is already well- represented in many schools.</comment>


Ask HN: Alternative to VS Code with vi Bindings - <AUTHOR> I've recently found VS Code very slow - hangs for about 10 seconds - when using the vi bindings on OS X. I'm not sure if this is VS Code itself, vi plugin or some OS X hiccup.
I'm tempted to use vim again. But there are various niceties in VS Code which are hard to achieve in vim without a day or two of vim plugin sumo and another day learning the keyboard shortcuts.
What are people using apart from VS Code? I may try sublime text again. <comment><USER2> I use a trio of VS Code, IntelliJ, and console/vi. I've used vi/vim mode on both VS Code and IntelliJ and they worked fine but I'm already comfortable with IntelliJ shortcuts.

One thing I found that was really cool with VS Code vi mode is that it's local. You can remote-pair with someone using different keybindings/mode.</comment>


Ask HN: Donate Your Idea(s) - <AUTHOR> Great community you are. This is my favourite website every day ;)<p>Sometimes you have ideas but don't have time as other commitments are holding you back. Can you donate your idea to this community for side hustle ? <comment><USER2> Ideas are cheap and easy, like information. It's what wise thing is done with that information is where the money lies.

You need a side hustle?

Talk to people. Get to know them. Focus your questions on what problems they have to solve everyday that they find annoying. Once you have a large list of these annoyances focus on a few you can solve. Solve them in a minimum viable product way. Bounce these solutions off your people. If they like them then continue improving those solutions. If they don't like them then kill that solution and move on.

It's going to be iterative. It's going to take a while. It's going to take a lot of talking to people. Maybe not talking in person, now a days. But real people, real talk, real solutions.

Best of luck! It's a busy world out there and by asking the question you already have a leg up.

:)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's great to see someone's else opinion and I am coming to a conclusion that spending too much time on thinking for a perfect idea is a waste of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ideas are worthless, it's the execution that matters.</comment>


AI-powered photo search, but without paying with my data? - <AUTHOR> I like the AI powered photo-search in GoogleDrive and OneDrive. But I don't want to pay with my data.
So does somebody know an alternative?
Ty! <comment><USER2> So, you're paranoid that your private photos are going to be saved and or used by these companies?

... after a few minutes googling I found a few contenders...

However, nothing is going to be as easy as the google or microsoft ready to go products.

[https://blog.cloudsight.ai/](https://blog.cloudsight.ai/)

[https://imagga.com/solutions/auto- tagging.html](https://imagga.com/solutions/auto-tagging.html)

[https://www.ibm.com/watson/services/visual- recognition/dev-r...](https://www.ibm.com/watson/services/visual- recognition/dev-resources/index.html#devresources)

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/rekognition/latest/dg/what- is.ht...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/rekognition/latest/dg/what-is.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been pleasantly surprised by the face- and object-recognition AI in the Synology Moments app: [https://www.synology.com/en- us/dsm/feature/moments](https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/moments)

Synology is a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) appliance.

I don't _think_ it uploads my data anywhere. If it does, it certainly doesn't upload everything, because I would have noticed the bandwidth usage, but I haven't verified that it doesn't upload some low resolution version of photos.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm building that right now. Want to help test it? [https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing- photostructure/](https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/)</comment>


Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links (1989) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/wheeler.pdf <comment> da-bacon When I found a version of this paper, as an undergrad researcher circa 1995, it changed the course of my life and I spent an amazing decade working in quantum computing.

For those who are interested, the result quoted by Wheeler, which attempts to derive quantum theory via arguments using distinguishability, appears in Wootters' Ph.D. thesis in 1980. 33 years later(!), he wrote a follow up [https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.2018](https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.2018) in which he showed that result essentially only works for the real number version of quantum theory. (Pessimist would say this means it is a dead end, optimist that we are just missing something!)

</comment><comment><USER2> Obligatory posting of Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone [http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/rosetta.pdf](http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/rosetta.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> This looks like a gem, thanks!

Under my elbow as I type is a small introductory book called Topology for Computing, which I'd recommend to anyone trying to investigate such links, for its concise clarity and elegant figures.

[https://www.amazon.com/Computing-Cambridge-Monographs- Comput...](https://www.amazon.com/Computing-Cambridge-Monographs- Computational-Mathematics/dp/0521136091)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the book recommendation. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anyone know what book this is from? Looks like it is Chapter 19?

<comment><USER4> I can't be sure, but it might be this: [https://www.google.se/search?q=ISBN+9780201515060](https://www.google.se/search?q=ISBN+9780201515060)

<comment><USER5> Looks like this paper is the opening chapter of that book. The search continues!

[http://toc.nkp.cz/VSE/201103/contents/vse000191986_1.pdf](http://toc.nkp.cz/VSE/201103/contents/vse000191986_1.pdf)

<comment><USER6> I really would like to know the name of the book from which this index is. It's super interesting and I really want to read that book. Please let me know once you find it. Sincerely,

<comment><USER7> Book already referenced by GP, click your links. These are old classic conference proceedings edited by Zurek [https://archive.org/details/ComplexityEntropyAndThePhysicsOf...](https://archive.org/details/ComplexityEntropyAndThePhysicsOfInformation) but it's a mixed bag unless you really fancy EG quantum field theorist's opinions on workings of visual cortex.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for posting it! It's unfortunate that the entry doesn't include the ISBN number [0], and that it consequently doesn't turn up when searching for that number

[0] I consider "ISBN number" to be a reasonable expression, with the interpretation "the number that goes by the name _ISBN_".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this a "mainstream" view in academic quantum mechanics? It seems so much more "modern" than what I learned.

<comment><USER9> Wheeler was certainly visionary.

The most faithful contemporary worldview is probably the "QBist" interpretation [0-2] espoused by Chris Fuchs (who studied under Wheeler), Ruediger Schack, Carlton Caves, David Mermin and others. It's growing in popularity but is not mainstream.

[0] [https://www.wired.com/2015/06/private-view-quantum- reality/](https://www.wired.com/2015/06/private-view-quantum-reality/)

[1] [https://www.nature.com/news/physics-qbism-puts-the- scientist...](https://www.nature.com/news/physics-qbism-puts-the-scientist- back-into-science-1.14912)

[2] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum- bayesian/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum-bayesian/)</comment></comment>


How to deal with lazy people in a startup? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working for a startup with no equity. I'm very skilled and in my country there aren't many good startups to work to.
Our team is composed of a CEO, a designer, 2 back-end developer(me and another), front-end developer, a social media girl and a secretary.
Here's the deal, the designer is really close to the CEO(friendshit) and gets a day off every fucking week, the front-end guy don't like to take orders(or isn't much interested in the startup success), the other backend guy is dating the secretary, the social media girl don't do shit and send wrong e-mails. I try really hard to find people that I can work with and are passionate about work, but I find none. How can I learn how to lead? How do I fix them without any powers?
I've been working here for a month and since I started the traffic DOUBLED and our main page load decreased by over 10x(shit n+1 queries noob previous developers, lazy load and cache properly configured -- did it all alone).
I don't mind getting fired, I'm going to get a better job anyways. And I don't want to start my own startup: all my projects fail and I don't have high social skills.
I want success way more than money or being right but this is fucking hard when everybody is so unmotivated(or lazy). <comment><USER2> Please, don't take this the wrong way. But reading your post, it comes across a bit arrogant. How is it possible that everyone on the team is lazy and useless apart from you?

When you say: "And I don't want to start my own startup: all my projects fail and I don't have high social skills." I would suggest you to ask yourself WHY your projects fail. Perhaps what you really should do is to improve your social skills and try to be more humble?

My advice to you is, work hard, be humble, don't obsess what other people do. And eventually you will shine.

</comment><comment><USER3> If the work ethic is lacking among your team members, my best advice is to quit and get another job where people are pursuing excellence. Your work environment and co-workers are very important. Don't settle.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice team : <http://shopcliq.it/more/team>

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't know the answer to the question, but ask on Quora - www.quora.com. You'll probably get a great answer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is Quora better for this kind of questions?

<comment><USER5> Quora has extremely intelligent people with a huge variety of experience in all matters. This question looks like broad experience would help to answer it, which is why I recommend it. Just make an account and ask the question anonymously, you will get a great answer

IMO this should be your strategy - this company is shit so you have nothing to lose. More importantly, your efforts alone won't make much of an impact in the long run (and if they do, you have no equity and you hate the company, so who cares). So take shitloads of risks at work trying to understand how to be a leader/get better at socializing. Keep the actual work light so you can spend time outside of work actively looking for other companies, working on side projects - exploring your options. I guess the overarching theme is - if your efforts there are wasted, put less effort into it. You can spend very little time actually doing work and use it as a way to pay the bills while you explore your options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why are you working with them in the first place?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because I live in fucking third world country and good opportunities here(where I can work close to a product) are rather scarce.

<comment><USER7> You said "I don't mind getting fired, I'm going to get a better job anyways.", so why take on a defensive attitude like this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> where are you based? you can mail me (see my profile) and we can then decide if something works out between us

<comment><AUTHOR> Brazil and I can't see your e-mail, use it as your profile description/about.

<comment><USER3> When I see devs calling themselves "rockstars" it's an instant red flag.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bill Gates said that he would always hire a lazy person over a motivated person because they will find the easy way to do things ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> the problem is when the do nothing.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Gmail alternatives? - <AUTHOR> Where do you go? Any experiences? <comment><USER2> Run your own mailserver. If you don't trust Google with your data, there's nobody else I would trust. There are plenty of open-source webmail apps if that matters to you.

<comment><USER3> Did it for years. Loved it. The only problem? Hosting providers and colos often reuse IPs that have been blacklisted because of spammers, so one day you realize some folks just haven't been getting your mail. I use a leased server and would switch back from GMail to Zimbra in a heartbeat if I thought I could reliably insure my email would not get blacklisted. There are services out there you can pay for that offer smtp gateways, but they often charge on a per domain basis, and I need to send/receive email for 50+ domains. Pretty expensive.

If anyone has any suggestions to get around this sort of limitation, I'm all ears and will be back on Zimbra before the weekend is out ;-)

<comment><USER4> I haven't experienced getting added back to a blacklist off a significant webmail host after being taken off one. Once your IP is in the clear, it'd take some abuse to be put back (anecdotal). These 3 steps usually get me unblocked if starting with a bad IP:

1\. Set up reverse DNS for your IP address

2\. Publish an SPF record

3\. Check the Spamhaus lists <http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=18.104.22.168> and request removal if your IP address is on them.

As an addendum to grandparent: extremely comprehensive guide to postfix + dovecot here: <http://workaround.org/ispmail>

<comment><USER5> Spamhaus is one list. There are hundreds. (See <http://www.dnsbl.info/dnsbl- list.php> for starters) Some are nearly impossible to get off of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I pay a small amount yearly for an account at FastMail (<http://www.fastmail.fm>) They have a very solid IMAP service, and a robust (though not Gmail-fancy) web interface. In the five years or so that I have had an account with them, I think I could total up about a half hour of downtime that I can recall, so they are very stable. I recommend them highly. (I'm not affiliated with them, just a satisfied customer.)

<comment><USER7> I'm using fastmail for 5 years now. It's good, but not that great. My two problems are:

1\. Spam false positives. I get order confirmations or mail list subscriptions sent to spam folder occasionally.

2\. Search is really bad. by default it only searches subjects, and I think only in the current folder.

Thinking about moving to gmail, provided those guys sort out privacy issues.

<comment><USER8> (FYI, I'm one of the owners/developers of FastMail)

1\. Just add addresses to your address book to whitelist. Also make sure you use Report Spam/Report non-spam on enough emails (200 of each) to activate your personal bayes db (see the Options -> Spam/Virus Protection near the bottom to see how many of each you've already learned)

2\. At the moment, you do have to explicitly add body: to a term to do a body search. The first time might be slow as it indexes your email, after that it should be faster.

[http://wiki.fastmail.fm/index.php?title=NewInterface#Enhance...](http://wiki.fastmail.fm/index.php?title=NewInterface#Enhanced_Search_Syntax)

<comment><USER7> I'm making orders from all kinds of online stores, there is no way I will add them all to the address book. Especially so because I don't know their address before they send me something, and I don't care about it after their first order confirmation/tracking number email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It might be instructive if you included why you are trying to avoid Gmail in your OP, so we can avoid suggesting other apps that might have the same issues. For example, do you dislike it because of privacy concerns? Or because it's a web app? Etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the Gmail UI is excellent and I love it, but I'm starting to have privacy concerns.

<comment><USER10> Google Apps Premium, unless you're Iranian/Chinese. Then use Hushmail etc

<comment><USER11> Is Google Apps premium guaranteed to actually protect you from the aforementioned privacy concerns? It's still on Google's servers.

<comment><USER12> The government can subpoena your own server in your own house just as easily as they can subpoena Google's servers.

So who are you hiding from? If it's the government, then you must use strong cryptography no matter where you host your email, and you must ensure that everyone you communicate with is as paranoid as you. (I would encrypt all my email, but nobody else I talk too will. So it doesn't work.) If it's advertisers you want to avoid, just run your own server and stop worrying so much. People have been doing it for years.

(Although, I run my own mailserver and am inundated with spam. Thousands of messages a day. So you aren't really avoiding advertisements, you are just avoiding advertisements for stuff you might actually want :)

<comment><USER13> Yes, but if it's in your house, you at least know it happened and can try and fight it. If google hands over your data you may never know. I think in many cases they'd likely be barred from telling you even if they wanted to.

Note: IANAL

<comment><USER14> On the other hand, Google has a lot of resources and lawyers to fight off the government if they come knocking, and they've been known to fight to the max in the past.

You? Not so much. If the FBI shows up at your door, you're toast.

<comment><USER12> Like this guy? <http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/SJG/>

(Hint: the opposite. The government had to pay him damages for seizing his computers.)

<comment><USER15> I was skeptical but I'm really swayed by a victory that occured six years prior to the PATRIOT act.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've run this argument through my head several times. Here's what you should like about Gmail:

1) Google infrastructure is probably more secure than any server you could set up quickly. 2) Google handles all those pesky issue with IP blacklists, Spam, etc that you'll be forced to deal with on a DIY server. Granted, there are solutions for each of these; Its your valuable time, in the end.

On the other hand, for a DIY mail-server: you truly don't gain much besides having an accessible dump of your mailbox(in the event that all the gmail- specific datacenters get nuked in a single day?)

ISPs can and probably wil sniff your plain text email traffic now/in near future due to external police state pressures.

I live in India, and sadly I envision this place turning into a police state by sheer incompetence on the part of the administration who pass half-baked net-nanny laws.

The only solution to email privacy: Hard-to-reverse Encryption of the text (typically GPG). Most of the crowd here know this well. But making email encryption transparent and easy-to-use would be a killer product for those customers that value privacy. FireGPG is trying , but Gmail code changes keep breaking stuff sometimes.(<http://blog.getfiregpg.org/2009/11/05/gmail-issues- fixed/>)

Redundancy/Backup is another issue altogether. You should probably keep backup IMAP dumps in a geographically distant location if you fear Gmail will just cease to exist one day(without any warning).

</comment><comment><USER17> Assuming you are ultimately comparing 'shared/managed' email hosting vs self- managed/self-hosted then Spam (well, filtering spam) is the biggest issue you have to resolve.

Try turning off spam checking on any email address that's been around the net a few years.

The upside of GMail (and other shared-services) is that you are benefiting from their collective wisdom of incoming spam landscape - they see the bigger picture from everyone's accounts in aggregate... which is why their spam filters are so much more effective than bayesian filtering -- which is the only tool you have if you 'go it alone' on email

With an email address that dates back to 1994 and listed all over Usenet before we knew it would be indexed by DejaNews/Google, I need the spam protection and so I'll always go shared-hosted (Gmail for now).

<comment><USER18> _...which is why their spam filters are so much more effective than bayesian filtering -- which is the only tool you have if you 'go it alone' on email_

This is not true at all. Of the top of my head, I can think of three different distributed message hashing services (Razor, Pyzor, and DCC) that function similar to a shared Bayesian filter, not to mention all the various IP and URI blacklists that collect and share data about bad actors. I've actually done mail server installs where I've turned _off_ the local bayes filters to improve results because they were getting confused by low volumes.

SpamAssassin comes with just about every Linux distribution and is used by major ISPs, so you're not "going it alone," you're leveraging what a huge percentage of the internet population is already using.

It's not without effort (maybe 15-30 minutes/week of tweaking when something slips through), but my personal email setup gives me as good or better results than my infrequently-used Gmail account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> <http://www.lavabit.com/>

They (claim to) use some sort of encryption scheme such that they do not have access to the data on their own servers. I don't know enough about crypto to verify, but if your concern for moving away from Google is privacy and/or security, it's probably worth at least a cursory glance.

<comment><USER20> Here's the description. Can anyone tell us if this seems secure? <http://lavabit.com/secure.html>

<comment><USER21> It doesn't seem very secure that they give out their security measures. I mean, "To increase the randomness of our hash outputs...combines the password with the account name," so now I know they use an account name so what is the point in that tiny part? Many little parts of this just give away stuff that should be secret in my opinion. That doesn't necessarily make it insecure, just a dumb idea if something ever did go wrong. Overall the process sounds good if you just want to store data on their server and not have it be readable if someone happens to come across a "dead" HDD that lavabit threw away.

Oh, on a similar note: how do they decrypt these messages after you have verified your user/password during sign in if it requires the plaintext password to decrypt each message? By storing the password in a plaintext session database?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Zoho Mail offers most of the Gmail feature set (including support for custom domains) with an adequate user interface.

<comment><USER23> How is spam on zoho mail?

<comment><USER24> (Disclosure: I am the CEO of Zoho).

We use Zoho Mail for our own 1000 employees. My company email address has been around and active for 13 years. I get 450 spam messages a day. Zoho Mail typically misses catching 1 or 2 a day; far more important to me, I can trust is not to have false positives (genuine mail going into spam).

We invite you to try it out.

On our business model: Zoho.com is free for individuals, without advertising. For businesses & domain based email, first 10 users are free, again without advertising. We charge $50/user/year (note: per YEAR) from the 11th user.

We do not believe in the advertising model for Zoho. Our business model is subscription based, with a generous free edition. We find this model to be financially viable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> You can just get Google Apps...since they release features for that 6-7 months after regular gmail gets them, you'll have plenty of warning if they release something like Buzz.

\+ I doubt they'd be stupid enough to bring buzz to their business users.

<comment><USER26> They already announced they are two months away from releasing buzz for Google Apps.

Edit: [http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/02/google-buzz- com...](http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/02/google-buzz-coming-soon- for-businesses.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Interesting that the motivation seems to be privacy concerns. I could care less about privacy but I'm getting tired of gmail's underperformance (your results may vary). Gmail speed has become Intolerably slow over the past 6 months. I love everything else about it though and wish there was a paid alternative with the same Interface. And no it isn't premium. I had that and it was no better. I think I'm on a bad cluster or something and google support has been horrendous.

I love 90% of googles products so don't assume this is flame / bashing.

</comment><comment><USER28> Here's a comparison of web mail providers:

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

From that list I use fastmail.fm for outgoing (smtp). (Reasons of historical accident.) $5/year, no ads, satisfied so far.

Another alternative is to go the shared host route. Plus: you'll get a shell account without having to/being able to administer a virtual box (and mail server), it's just an account.

I've used pair.com for about 10 years to host my domain. Imap/pop access, or webmail. (Their webmail actually isn't that great, but it works.) Enthusiastic recommendation for pair.

Go register somewhere reputable (pairnic.com is good), then go host your domain somewhere (I like pair.com). Pairnic and pair are the same company, and conveniently integrated, but you can use either separately or not at all if you like. I get so many allowed email accounts with a minimal plan on pair.com that I don't bother remembering it anymore.

</comment><comment><USER29> Dear Fastmail,

I hate Gmail and desperately want to find another email/webmail service. I want to switch to something that feels more secure, something that does email well without any of the extra junk they have been adding to my Gmail account. I don't seem to be alone.

I consulted several friends with more "tech cred" than me, and they pointed me to a few Gmail alternatives, with Fastmail at the top of the list.

I went to your website and after browsing for about a minute, I wanted to scratch Fastmail off my list. Your website came across as clunky, cold, and BLAH. It seemed like the website was designed about five years ago, and it didn't really instill confidence that your service would be a user-friendly experience or something that I could transition to without a huge amount of effort.

I decided to check out another Gmail alternative on my list called "Roundcube". The Roundcube site was simple but elegantly designed. More importantly, it didn't feel like it was trying to put me to sleep. The site laid out its features via simple navigation structure, basic colors, a nice screenshot, and a non-cluttered layout. I wanted to hug it. It gave the vibe that they offered an email service that would make the transition away from Gmail extremely painless and straightforward.

I relayed my thoughts to a techie friend, and he reiterated that your service is far superior to Roundcube. I trust my friend, and I will probably sign up for an account with you.

But seriously... There are so many people out there right now who desperately want to break free of their Gmail shackles. The moment is ridiculously ripe for another service to step into that vacuum and offer a refuge to all of these people.

Your email service might be truly awesome, but your website is total cryptonite for people who are ready to make the switch.

Welcome us with open arms, and we will come in droves!!

Sincerely yours,

Volto Libro

</comment><comment><USER30> If you are looking for open source and to host yourself, roundcube is pretty good and has a powerful interface

</comment><comment><USER31> The two features I want are conversations and easy archival.

</comment><comment><USER32> I've been using <http://www.zenbe.com/mail> for the past 3 months. Shareflow looks interesting.

<comment><USER33> I would recommend this too except zenbe personal is shutting down soon... <http://blog.zenbe.com/personal-shutdown/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just wanted to give a shoutout to Tuffmail: <http://www.tuffmail.com/> . Their spam protection is excellent, and very configurable. They also have the fastest IMAP servers I've had the pleasure of using.

Their web interface isn't anything special, but at least it's proper IMAP so you can use whichever desktop client you like.

</comment><comment><USER34> Rackspace email hosting is $1/10 GB mailbox/mo for IMAP/POP

Cheers

<comment><USER35> I was used to use Rackspace Cloud email, but the server was blacklisted on Network Solution so all my clients using NS weren't able to receive any of my emails... FAIL

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Related question, does anyone know of a mail webapp that allows you to have a unified inbox with multiple IMAP accounts? In other words, something like Thunderbird or Outlook Express but web-ified.

I started doing a custom fork of RoundCube to do just this a few months back but never finished it...does anyone know of anything off-the-shelf that will do this?

<comment><USER37> Gmail supports this.. you just create each one as a google account, have them forward to the one you like best, and then set it up to let you send mail as each of the other accounts...

I have about 50 google accounts and use my regular gmail this way...

<comment><USER36> Yeah, I currently do that as well, but in the spirit of this thread, I'm looking for a non-Gmail way of doing this...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I work at Rackspace and we see choosing our email solutions as alternatives... <http://twitter.com/solevangelist/statuses/9028774642>

</comment><comment><USER39> If find Google Apps for your Domain to be a good Gmail alternative ;-).

</comment><comment><USER40> i've looked but haven't found anything nearly as good as gmail. the most useful feature to me, that other services do not offer, is push (sync) email, contacts, and calendar.

</comment><comment><USER41> I have an account on GMX.com as a backup account.

So far so good - minimal spam (well none so far) has reached my inbox and they are always adding in features like Facebook integration.

</comment><comment><USER42> no-one has mentioned runbox - <http://www.runbox.com/>

that's who i was thinking of switching to (i want to be able to use google "anonymously", and it's tricky when also logged in to gmail). i scanned through the mail providers listed on wikipedia and that seemed the best. hosted in norway, iirc. surprised no-one else has mentioned it here, though.

<comment><USER43> Try scroogle for that; you can make it your default search engine in both Mozilla ... and Chrome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Just use the PGP plugin for Gmail on Firefox. Then it doesn't matter who has access to your email so long as they don't have the private key.

</comment><comment><USER45> My tiny hosting company Varialhosting offers POP and Imap. I did a quick search and there are tons of providers that offer Imap.

<comment><USER45> Not my _personal_ company, the one I use... which is tiny.

They have treated me well, I have not noticed any downtime, but I am not very sensitive to that.

They also allow virtual domains, so I have three websites, two very low traffic, for the price of one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Anyone have experience with atMail? (<http://atmail.org/>)

<comment><USER47> My ISP uses AtMail. It's decent, almost never get spam but the interface is a bit weird, I suppose you could get used to it though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> <http://fastmail.fm> is my poison of choice.

</comment><comment><USER49> Zimbra may be a good option, particularly now that its not controlled by Yahoo anymore.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is the right time for Mozilla to offer firstname.lastname@example.com

Millions will flock to them. Instant win.

</comment><comment><USER51> GMX is not too bad

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm currently using sup (<http://sup.rubyforge.org/>), which has labels and threads like Gmail, but is Free as in Freedom, runs on ncurses and, ironically, has a much better search mechanism, which was the main reason I switched from Gmail. There is also notmuch (<http://notmuchmail.org/>), which is still alpha, but aims to be faster and more scriptable than Sup.

<comment><USER53> Cool! I don't know how long it would have taken me to find Sup, but it looks awesome. I love hacker news.</comment></comment>


A Nuclear Jet at Chernobyl Around 21:23:45 UTC on April 25, 1986 - <AUTHOR> http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00295450.2017.1384269 <comment><USER2> It was interesting that there were firm denials at the time, yet everyone was used to propaganda (yes, fake news) so it wasn't at first clear if there was a coverup or the claim of a problem was western misdirection!

But reports from neighboring countries pretty quickly put that to rest, and then the narrative switched to the heroics of the emergency workers (who were indeed heroic and, sadly, literally self-sacrificing.

The plume traveled over northern Western Europe, but West Germany, at least, didn't take any immediate action. 15-20 years later there appeared to be a slew of unusual cancers (e.g. my mother in law's tear duct; my friend's mother salivary gland...unusual ones in accretive tissue. But I don't know if there's been any systematic survey to see if there was an assignable increase in the death rate, or if I am just divining a signal from what's actually small-n noise.

<comment><USER3> Theres some studies done of the effects of Chernobyl over the years since. Of note are the WHO and the Chernobyl Tissue Bank.

[http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/](http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/) [http://www.chernobyltissuebank.com](http://www.chernobyltissuebank.com)

I went to a talk by Prof Geraldine Thomas, of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank and Imperial College London, sharing her insights and research into radiation and its effects on the body. The key takeaway from the talk is to take into account the type of release, what radionuclides were exposed to the public and their half-life, and then what the passage of that particular element is through the body to determine what damage can be done.

A notable example is of Iodine-131 causing of thyroid lesions and cancers in the direct aftermath of an event because of its short half life of alpha decay directly into tissue that bioaccumulates Iodine, keeping the alpha decay focussed on a very specific tissue. Other heavier elements tend to (I am not a biologist or nuclear scientist, paraphrasing from a talk a couple years ago) can leave the body without being bioaccumulated, having only released 'tolerable' amounts of alpha decay into a broad area of tissue.

It would be interesting to know if those "unusual cancers" were in some part a result of radionuclide exposure from Chernobyl or the result of other factors. But I — a nobody with a causal subject matter interest — would be hesitant to suggest that there was causation in absence of a hypothesis based on biology tied to the known Chernobyl emissions. Either way, we can find out more about radiations effect on biology if a study takes place — or if there is already one out there?

<comment><USER4> the reports you're referring to are very docile to say the least.

"Otherwise, the team of international experts found no evidence for any increases in the incidence of leukemia and cancer among affected residents."

Except that according to official numbers Belarus, which after the explosion was right down the wind from it, has overall 1.5 times higher cancer rates than Russia or Ukraine have (Russia and Ukraine have the same rate) with some cancer rates being 2x-3x in the Gomel and Mogilev region - the regions right next to the Chernobyl. Such cancer picture is a new development compare to pre-Chernobyl years.

>It would be interesting to know if those "unusual cancers" were in some part a result of radionuclide exposure from Chernobyl or the result of other factors.

Anybody is welcome to suggest such "other factors" which would explain the overall rate increase after Chernobyl with the distribution of rate so that it clearly increases in the regions closer to Chernobyl, while these factors must also be Belarus specific compare to Russia and Ukraine.

<comment><USER5> The Belarus officials like to play with the numbers to get money from different foreign organizations. I'm not saying there are no health implication from radiation fallout in these regions but x2 sounds like statistics are used to drive someone's agenda. Instead if blaming drinking and smoking (and trying to solve the societal ailments that are causing that) they blame radiation, because it brings them money.

<comment><USER4> you can google it yourself. NCBI has a bunch of works on Belarus situation. If anything, real situation coming from people sounds even more gloom than official numbers.

I specifically mentioned Russia and Ukraine because such factors like drinking, smoking, food, genetics, lifestyle/habbits are very similar across all 3 countries and thus can't explain those post-Chernobyl appeared high cancer rates in Belarus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > It is concluded that the two explosions in the reactor that many witnesses > recognized were thermal neutron mediated nuclear explosions at the bottom of > a few fuel channels and then some 2.7 s later a steam explosion that > ruptured the reactor vessel. The nuclear explosions formed a plasma jet that > shot upward through the still intact refueling tubes, rammed the 350-kg > plugs, and continued through the quite thin roof and then some 2.5 to 3 km > into the atmosphere where the meteorological situation provided a route to > Cherepovets.

That's pretty crazy. It ended up as a nuclear canon firing 350kg (700lbs) projectiles straight up into the atmosphere, right through the roof. Even more odd is that some lab, for a completely unrelated reason (building a liquid oxygen and nitrogen facility) was sampling noble gases from the atmosphere. And then someone could go back and draw these conclusions more than 30 years later.

</comment><comment><USER7> Previously theorized by Charlie Stross in a significantly more fanciful, but riveting take: [https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall- tail/](https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/)

<comment> le-mark That was new to me, thanks! Excellent example of pulling several plausible ideas into one outlandish tale.

 _Sure, it's a devil's brew, but who wouldn't say no to a specific impulse on the order of twelve thousand?_

That kind of Isp is great for interplanetory/interstellar cruising, not so much for getting off the pad. That's why ion engines aren't used to get to orbit; thrust to weight matters when starting from zero m/s.

<comment><USER8> Isp just says how efficient you are at turning reaction mass into delta-v. Nuclear rockets can attain both high Isp and high thrust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _We decided to analyze this scenario in detail, but the project was postponed at the time [1987] due to the lack of high-quality, high-resolution gridded weather data covering April-May 1986 for driving the dispersion model. When in 2016 the high-resolution regional reanalysis for Europe was published and extended back in time to 1980, it became possible for us to perform good- quality dispersion modeling._

Wow.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm just reading the abstract at the moment, but this paper says that there was a -nuclear- explosion, not just a steam explosion?

<comment><USER11> It's always been known that there was a nuclear explosion, it was just called a "power excursion" so avoid frightening the children.

<comment><USER12> It was an excursion... mind you that if you drenched me in gasoline and tossed a match I'd be, "In a state of accelerated thermal decomposition." That's not a lie, it's just a bland way of saying that I'd be burning like a Yule log.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> And there is a large new release of Ru-106 somewhere in Russia... what's going on?

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia- radioac...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia- radioactivity-986-times-norm-nuclear-accident-claim)

Posted on its own: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15746240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15746240)

<comment><USER14> Russia has just confirmed that they too have detected it, previously they denied they have detected anything

> The highest concentration was registered at the station in Argayash, a > village in the Chelyabinsk region in the southern Urals, which had > "extremely high pollution" of Ru-106, exceeding natural background pollution > by 986 times, the service said.

> It did not point to any specific source of the pollution, but the Argayash > station is about 30 kilometres from the Mayak nuclear facility, which in > 1957 was the site of one of the worst nuclear disasters in history.

[https://phys.org/news/2017-11-russia-extremely-high- radioact...](https://phys.org/news/2017-11-russia-extremely-high-radioactive- pollution.html)

<comment><USER13> Note Ru-106 has a half-life longer than a year (373 days) so it's not going any where quickly except the ground water.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> " _Russia reports radioactivity 986 times the norm after nuclear accident claim_ "

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia- radioac...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia- radioactivity-986-times-norm-nuclear-accident-claim)

"Russia's meteorological service has confirmed "extremely high" concentrations of the radioactive isotope ruthenium-106 were found in several parts of the country in late September, confirming European reports about the contamination this month."

Events repeat, denial at first for a month and than downplaying the accident and the contamination of larger part two continents.

</comment><comment><USER16> There was a documentary some years ago on TV where a guy who repeatedly had gone inside the Chernobyl power plant came to the same conclusion. He based his theory on the amount of core material that was found, and which was less than expected, meaning that some of it must have been consumed in a nuclear explosion.

Thats all I remember, and I can't find the source anymore.

</comment><comment><USER17> I can see how voids in the water cause an increase in neutron flux, but I thought water was needed to slow the neutrons, and that fast neutrons result in reduced reaction.

</comment><comment><USER18> Chernobyl journal by a Elena Filatova, who biked around the ghostly place a few years later, is worth reading: [https://www.elenafilatova.net/post/the- chernobyl-journal-vol...](https://www.elenafilatova.net/post/the-chernobyl- journal-volume-1)

<comment><USER19> Apparently she took a bit of artistic licence with some of the things she wrote, although the pictures are real, the place is real, and she did visit there.

[http://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/chernobyl_trip](http://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/chernobyl_trip)

<comment><USER20> I remember how furious the slashdot community was over this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I still remember the reports on TV from there at the time. Initially there was a flat out denial that anything happened at all, but once the scale of the catastrophe became clear (within about a day), and it became clear that it can't be swept under the rug, we started seeing the coverage of unbelievable heroics that people would demonstrate. I mean literally firefighters pouring water into the molten reactor core by standing at the edge of it, and then dying the same day from radiation poisoning. The radiation was so strong that the TV helicopter filming the reactor from above (which in itself was heroic given the kinds of shit suspended in the air) would show the most radioactive part with sort of a haze. Endless streams of trucks pouring concrete, etc, etc. It was 30 years ago so I don't remember much, but man to get the Secretary General to admit such a bad fuckup — that was something truly extraordinary.

<comment><USER22> Note also this was very close to May holidays (May 1st etc.) when people customary go out, with kids, some go camping, etc. Kiev - a city with population over 2 millions - is 90 km from Chernobyl, and nobody there knew what's going on for a while. I'm not even sure there's any statistics of what health effects this produced. And of course when it was known there was no proper information on dealing with radioactive contaminations, mostly everybody would go by wildest rumors and home remedies. No tools for measuring radioactivity either anywhere to be bought, people made their own eventually. Etc., etc.

<comment><USER4> > I'm not even sure there's any statistics of what health effects this > produced.

My post with some effect summary for Belarus [https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=15737928&goto=threads%...](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=15737928&goto=threads%3Fid%3Dtrhway%2315737928)

<comment><USER22> AFAIR due to the weather patterns Belarus got a lot of the fallout and Kiev area was affected much less.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Adventures in 8-bit Land - <AUTHOR> http://flohofwoe.blogspot.com/2014/11/new-adventures-in-8-bit-land.html

<comment><USER2> Very weird, clicking this link in MobileSafari on iOS8 simply shows a downloaded .webm file and an offer to open it in VLC-for-iOS, which does work for playback... Trying to navigate back briefly flashes something that looks like a blogpost and then just shows the .webm download file window again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Uhoh, thanks for mentioning this. There's an embedded iframe with the webm video in the blog post. Not sure why this would act up in mobile safari though.</comment></comment>


Debug Riot-OS on PineTime Smart Watch with VSCode - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/debug-riot-os-on-pinetime-with-vscode-12f00c69c120 <comment><AUTHOR> Tracking down a firmware bug in PineTime Smart Watch? Or trying to understand an alien chunk of firmware code?

VSCode Debugger with ST-Link can help!

Lemme show you how I used the debugger for my first contact with RIOT-OS...</comment>


Ask HN: Is Node.js recommended in the long term? - <AUTHOR> I'm developing a side project using Vue, Express, and Mongo. I'm wondering whether this is the best idea, since I want the app to last 5-7 years before needing a rewrite. Is it a good idea to choose NodeJS for the backend or should I go with something more old-fashioned? <comment><USER2> While others may suggest clojure or elixir or some equally esoteric development stack, there is one important advantage of nodejs: almost everybody uses it.

Maybe other languages will allow you to program more efficiently, but they have a learning curve and a fraction of the developer adoption that nodejs has.

When you pass your project onto someone else, there's a high chance they are already familiar with nodejs. Whereas if you pass a project to someone else in a less-known language, they are likely not familiar with it and will need to overcome a steep learning curve.

If you want maintainable projects, where a freelancer is always available who knows how to continue development of your project, then go with nodejs. If you want to learn a new language or framework, do it for pet projects with no collaborators.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, Node is fine. Check out the long-term support schedule: [https://github.com/nodejs/LTS](https://github.com/nodejs/LTS)

</comment><comment><USER4> Check out the PEEP Stack - [https://medium.com/peep- stack](https://medium.com/peep-stack)

Since it is a side project, you can swap out Ember and try Elm.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is Mongo recommended in the long term?

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes it's fine..

<comment><USER7> People need to speak up when they want to provide opinion. It's not a vote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would simply say no..

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you explain why? What do you recommend instead?

<comment><USER9> take a look at python+flask and clojure+ring+compojure (and other tech too) before throwing your hat in the node ring. going with a more general-purpose language might serve you better down the road. javascript will limit you to web dev essentially -- which you want to do now, but what about 5 years from now, etc</comment></comment></comment>


Help get this indie game on Steam - <AUTHOR> http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92911221

<comment><USER2> I'm guessing you have a stake in this game, otherwise some random wouldn't just post this. To be honest, the only thing that REALLY caught my attention out of most (if not all) of the Greenlight nonsense was Routine. That game alone makes me cheer for 2013.

This game looks nice but what makes it different from the other rolling physics/puzzle games? It look damn nice and looks like it plays well, I'll give it that. It just doesn't stand out in any fantastic way (other than being made in Australia, awesome to the max). I hope your project turns out well.

Just remember, being the best playing/looking/story/style in any genre doesn't really cut it. All I see is a capable puzzle game which is for everyone. Which you means it lacks character and also means it's for no one. PERHAPS I'm just lacking actually information and it's a freaking masterpiece with a extremely mediocre trailer. I'll just stop now... All the best

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback, I don't personally have a steak in the game, I just know the guy who made it, and have seen him work on it for the last 2 years.

From playing it, I personally find the lack of a personified character refreshing, the game is extremely addictive yet relaxing to play.

But hey, everyone looks for something different in a new game.</comment></comment>


The Skip list - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_list <comment><USER2> Previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229668>

First things first, read Pugh's original paper (ftp://ftp.cs.umd.edu/pub/skipLists/skiplists.pdf). That would be the better link, but HN doesn't let you submit links to FTP sites.

Also: A lecture I watched compared skip lists to subway routes with multiple (randomly routed) express lines. That's one of the best metaphors for a data structure I've ever heard.

<comment><USER3> _A lecture I watched compared skip lists to subway routes with multiple (randomly routed) express lines._

I had Prof. Pugh for an honors CS course @ UMD and that's how he first described it to the class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I read Pugh's original paper in the late 90's and thought skip lists were a heck of lot simpler than red-black trees. Ended up using them all over Second Life's original code base. By 2004 or so we switched the code over the STL and the LLSkipList class was retired to the dark depths of the CVS/SVN repository.

<comment><USER5> Maybe simpler, but better? Probably not so much. I wanted red-blacks on a project that couldn't use STL, and found that porting STLPort's <map> red- black to C-with-void*'s was pretty straightforward. Didn't even have to write and debug a red-black tree: <map> is bulletproof.

<comment><USER6> You can even let the type system guarantee the red-black-tree laws. That's even better than idiot-proof. (<http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/smk/redblack/rb.html> has an implementation in Haskell.)

Shouldn't trees be a nightmare to maintain without a GC? (Are you modifying in-place?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Redis sorted sets are implemented using skip lists (augmented skip lists for O(log(N)) Rank operation in Redid master).

Redis Sorted Sets additional info here: <http://code.google.com/p/redis/wiki/SaddCommand>

<comment><USER8> I was looking at Redis yesterday and noticed this. Is there any particular reason you chose skip list instead of btrees except for simplicity? Skip lists consume more memory in pointers and are generally slower than btrees because of poor memory locality so traversing them means lots of cache misses.

I also suggested a way to improve throughput when you guarantee each command's durability (at the end of the wiki page): <http://code.google.com/p/redis/wiki/AppendOnlyFileHowto>

Also, have you thought about accommodating read-only traffic in an additional thread as a way to utilize at least two cores efficiently while sharing the same memory?

<comment><USER9> Without knowing how Redis works, maybe they were chosen because it's really quite easy to build a highly concurrent (lock-free) skip list?

<comment><USER8> No, Redis is single-threaded so they sidestep all concurrency issues. This and persisting the data in a forked process are my favorite parts of Redis' architecture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How do you develop a persistent (i.e. purely functional) version of them?

<comment><USER10> Brief nitpicking: "persistent" and "purely functional" are not really the same thing.

On the "purely functional" end, any stochastic algorithm is by definition not pure in the "referentially transparent" sense, so that's right out, and building a PRNG into the data structure is probably suboptimal.

As far as persistence/immutability go, the skip list doesn't seem well suited to that, either--any time you change an element, you'd have to replace all the elements with pointers to it, and elements with pointers to those, and so on recursively. There are standard solutions to this, but all would entail nontrivial changes to the structure.

In the end, it would be easy to make something not obviously broken that _looked_ like a skip list, but I don't know whether it would have the same performance characteristics, or even worthwhile performance at all.

Given that skip lists are, in essence, a way of retrofitting some of the benefits of a tree structure onto a linked list, I suspect it would be more worthwhile to find an existing immutable, functional tree structure and retrofit some of the benefits of a linked list onto it.

<comment><USER6> > Brief nitpicking: "persistent" and "purely functional" are not really the > same thing.

You are right about that. But I did not have time for a longer explanation and some people take "persistent" to mean "can be saved to disk".

For stochastic algorithms you will probably use the same trick as with monadic I/O --- you can make the description of the algorithm purely functional, but not its execution.

<comment><USER10> _For stochastic algorithms you will probably use the same trick as with monadic I/O --- you can make the description of the algorithm purely functional, but not its execution._

Certainly possible, but how well this works depends on how, and to what extent, referential transparency is enforced by the language.

For instance, in Haskell, there really isn't a satisfying solution that I'm aware of. Threading a PRNG (as with the state monad) keeps the code "pure", but enforces a strict sequencing on use of the structure, wrecking laziness. On the other hand, any nondeterminism without threading a PRNG probably requires unsafePerformIO.

<comment><USER11> 'Probabilistic' doesn't have to mean 'nondeterministic'. Hash tables are deterministic and probabilistic. You could probably do the same with a skip list: hash the key to see what level of the skip list it gets promoted to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> MIT Algorithms Video Lecture on skip lists:

[http://www.catonmat.net/blog/mit-introduction-to- algorithms-...](http://www.catonmat.net/blog/mit-introduction-to-algorithms- part-eight/)

</comment><comment><USER13> It's certainly a very interesting data structure. However, I don't think this level of an optimization should show up in your code often. I prefer coding to Map<K,V> and constructing the particular instance in some function that starts with a hash table and gets optimized later depending on exactly where performance problems are.

</comment><comment><USER14> There is a very nice implementation of a concurrent skiplist map in Java collections: [http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/C...](http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/ConcurrentSkipListMap.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Is this the week of posting Wikipedia links to HN then?

Interesting, though.</comment>


Ask HN: VC funding competitors? - <AUTHOR>

I'm in the middle of looking for Angle / Early VC investors for my startup. There's news today that a competitor of mine is getting funding from some big name VCs.<p>Is it worth my time to talk to the VCs that funded my competitor? Is it a good idea? Should I worry about my slides showing up at the competitor's offices? <comment><USER2> Most VCs won't fund competing companies, so it would be a waste of time at best to talk to them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I noticed Chris Dixon and Caterina Fake invested in Stack Overflow. They're the founders of Hunch. Is that different because they're playing with their own money?

<comment><USER2> They must think they're not really competing, or they wouldn't have.

<comment><USER3> I know you said "Most VCs" not "all". Howard Morgan of First Round Capitol, said that they'll do competitive investments, but cautiously and with separate partners on the board. That's one partial exception at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If it's a direct competitor, you'd be wasting your time and definitely any insights about the space would be shared with the competing company.

But often, VCs like a certain space and will invest in several non-competing companies. Before you panic, just ask!</comment>


Follow Along with my Rails3 University Class (Week 1) - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinkbohemian.com/2010/07/09/rails-summer-of-code-week-1/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm teaching a rails 3 class, every week we go over a few chapters in the Agile Web Development with rails book and then i present on introduction to rails 3 material to the students

<comment><AUTHOR> let me know what you think!</comment></comment>