Golang tool for automating loud installations of packages/libraries/binaries - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alistanis/silentinstall <comment><AUTHOR> I've submitted this to some people in the reddit community for feedback in /r/golang, /r/programming, and /r/devops, and figured I would post it here as well. It seemed to do pretty well in the devops community.

Any suggestions, requests, improvements, or critiques are welcome. This package is basically aimed at being "expect lite." There's more info in the readme!

<comment><USER2> Uhm... Weren't package managers (APT or Yum, for instance) designed specifically for such thing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, absolutely. But packaging requires there being a package for your distribution, which means there needs to be a maintainer. There's also Oracle, Atlassian, and MySQL Secure Mode (for example) installations that are a pain to automate. Did you look at the readme at all? This isn't meant to be a replacement for apt or for yum, this is a special purpose tool - and I don't expect it to be a universal one. Expect can already do everything my tool does, but in the case of expect, instead of using a simple configuration file, you need to learn how it works and learn the dsl. That being said, there is an expect module for ansible that can handle things in a similar manner: [http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/expect_module.html](http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/expect_module.html), though I would say that the documentation doesn't give a good indication of how to respond to a specific question other than the order in which it's asked.

Either way, I hope this is useful to some people, and if not, well, that's cool too. Thanks for the interest either way.</comment></comment></comment>


The Mothers of the Mother of All Demos - <AUTHOR> https://schmud.de/posts/2020-08-04-mother-of-mothers.html <comment><USER2> Whenever the von Neumann EDVAC paper is mentioned, I feel it is rightful to point people to the book that gives proper backround to what we incorrectly call von Neumann architecture:

[https://www.amazon.com/Eniac-Triumphs-Tragedies-Worlds- Compu...](https://www.amazon.com/Eniac-Triumphs-Tragedies-Worlds- Computer/dp/0802713483)

<comment><USER3> Also, if you're interested in that sort of thing, the book "From Dits to Bits" by Herman Lukoff is a good read from an engineer in the trenches. Seems that it's now available on the Internet Archive: [https://openlibrary.org/books/OL4436586M/From_dits_to_bits](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL4436586M/From_dits_to_bits)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Edvac paper is notable for the ways in which their debugging process is almost, but not quite, modern.

Another early gui-driven networked computer system was Sage:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi- Automatic_Ground_Environm...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi- Automatic_Ground_Environment)

[https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sage/](https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sage/)

</comment><comment><USER5> How was that camera feed done? analogue? cannot have been digital

<comment><USER6> There were no satellites involved, and yes it was purely analogue. They did build most of the equipment themselves, the hardware to connect the computers to the video equipment.

But let Douglas Engelbart explain it by himself: "we leased two microwave lines, up from our laboratory at SRI, up in Menlo Park, so it's roughly 30 miles, and it took two dish antennas on the roof there, four of them on a truck up on SkyLine, and two on the roof of the conference center". [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG3PWet8fDk&t=19m50s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG3PWet8fDk&t=19m50s)

Edit: btw, a few seconds later he mentions Bill English: "but anyway it worked, and the main reason it worked is because Bill English is a genius".

<comment><AUTHOR> That quote on English is a great find! I added it to the article and made sure to give you credit. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its notable how defective our current computers are compared to glorious days of 60s-70s.

</comment><comment><USER8> Heh, I thought this was going to be an article about Engelbart, et. al.'s mothers!</comment>


Ask HN: "Founder" Status - <AUTHOR>

I recently started a pretty popular outdoors website. I let a friend of mine invest a considerable amount of money into the site's development. He also helps to manage the site on a day-to day basis. We've worked out an equity split and we have clearly defined roles, but we haven't discussed titles. He puts about as many hours into it as I do. We worked on a project similar to the current one about two years ago. This new site is a pretty big variation of the old one, and it's rightfully my idea.<p>Are there any downsides to giving him "founder" status? Am I being egotistical by not calling him a founder? <comment><USER2> Based on what it sounds like, there would be no monetary implications, no VCs to impress, no legal considerations, right? This may sound callous, but there is really no reason why you should waste time even thinking about titles when you are a two-person shop operating a bunch of websites. Just let it go.

On the other hand, if you already started to divide your stuff into "his idea" and "my idea", this might be an early warning sign that something is in the process of going wrong, if you previously worked together as a seamless team.

</comment><comment><USER3> If equity issues have been resolved, just give him the 'founder' status and hope he takes it - I mean really takes the site as his baby as opposed to just the title. You want as many people as possible rooting for your success and if a title is all that you need to do it to make it happen then I think you should totally do it.

</comment><comment><USER4> It can be a tricky situation when there is not a distinction between investors (those writing the checks) and the operating team (those spending the money). There are different incentives and motivations for the two sides and it has a tendency to create power dynamics that are not always best for the business. The fact that you worked together previously and presumably had a positive experience, is a good sign.

Based on your description, I would make the observation that titles are not the biggest potential issue here, but who is making the decisions that drive the business forward. If the investor/cofounder is trustworthy and has the success of the business as the key motivator, then you could be ok.

The other issue is that investors and operators get two different classes of stock: investors get preferred shares and employees/team get common stock. This is another potential issue.

I would suggest talking to him and getting clear on what is best for the business and what he wants out of this: an investment or a job.

</comment><comment><USER5> Don't go overboard with titles - its bad for expectation management.

The important questions is what his relationship to the business actually is. If he's going to be an equal partner go ahead and call him a founder. If he's more like Employee #1, don't.

</comment><comment><USER6> Unsure, and somewhat.

You had a good idea and I guess technical skills, he has good judgement and business skills.</comment>


5G specs announced - <AUTHOR> https://www.itu.int/md/R15-SG05-C-0040/en <comment><USER2> \- minimum 100 MHz bandwidth all time availability

\- peak data rate downlink 20 Gbit/s

\- peak data rate uplink 10 Gbit/s

\- minimum million connected devices per 1 km^2

\- standard requirements for connection speeds from indoor hotspots (10 km/h) to rural high speed rail 500 km/h (high-speed trains)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> tldr;

\- 20Gbps downlink and 10Gbps uplink per mobile base station \- 1 million connected devices per square kilometre \- energy efficient \- maximum latency of just 4ms \- download speed of 100Mbps and upload speed of 50Mbps (bummer!)</comment>


ChronoLogger writing is 1.5x faster than ruby's stdlib Logger - <AUTHOR> https://coderwall.com/p/vjjszq/chronologger-writing-is-1-5x-faster-than-ruby-s-stdlib-logger?p=1&q=author%3Ama2gedev

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote about why ChronoLogger is faster than ruby's stdlib Logger. I'm looking forward to your feedback. Thanks in advance.</comment>


Dubai Plans to Top Its World's Tallest Tower - 200 Stories - <AUTHOR> http://iphone.foxnews.com/story/0/432893-Dubai-Plans-to-Top-Its-Worlds-Tallest-Tower.html <comment><USER2> * He also brushed aside concerns by some analysts that Dubai's property market is becoming overheated and due for a potentially sharp correction.

"In Dubai, demand outstrips supply," he said. "There might be a slowdown, but there definitely won't be a crash."*

Good luck with that...

I can't tell if it's over-exuberance or if Dubai really plans to attract more multinationals to headquarter there ala Halliburton.

<comment><USER3> Dubai is the world's Las Vegas, and I agree is not immune to the worlds impending economic slowdown. Thankfully they have essentially unlimited cheap/free/slave labor to continue building.

Oh, and the rich keep getting richer, which doesn't hurt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> An iPhone formatted page? That's a first for me. Odd, but I like it due to the lack of ads and clutter.

</comment><comment><USER4> So... where'd you get the financing?

</comment><comment><USER5> YouTube video about the Nakheel Tower (0:55):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtWFN6vBYx8></comment>


Hunt's Ketchup Removes High Fructose Corn Syrup From Entire Retail Line - <AUTHOR> http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/less-is-more-hunts-ketchup-removes-high-fructose-corn-syrup-from-entire-retail-line-93920479.html <comment><USER2> Isn't this the version that also substantially reduces the salt content?

</comment><comment><USER3> My favorite was the unsalted ketchup. it tasted kinda sweet</comment>


Iran kills the internet for its people's own good as riots grip the nation - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/19/iran_kills_internet/ <comment><USER2> Iran kills the internet for _the government 's good_, not for the people's.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really hope that citizens of Iran would finally topple their oppressive totalitarian government. Would be nice if internet shutdown would be that final straw that breaks the ayatollahs' backs.</comment>


The Importance of Excel - <AUTHOR> http://baselinescenario.com/2013/02/09/the-importance-of-excel/

<comment><USER2> This article has interesting takes on Excel's role in recent financial collapses due to poor debugging support and systemic biases that lead to particular types of errors.

</comment><comment><USER3> Alternate title: the importance of peer review.

Spreadsheets are awesome because they let us organize analysis visually which more programming-based quantitative tools cannot.

This makes everything easier, including auditing. But someone's still got to do it.</comment>


Parícutin: "Here Is Something New and Strange" – A volcano is born - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/rosetta-stones/2013/02/20/paricutin-here-is-something-new-and-strange/

<comment><USER2> It continues at [http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/rosetta- stones/2013/02/2...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/rosetta- stones/2013/02/28/paricutin-save-me-from-the-dangers-in-which-i-am-about-to- die/).

</comment><comment><USER3> I find it remarkable that a pit five feet deep, that cannot be filled, is regarded as ordinary by the people who live near it their whole lives.

<comment><USER4> Well if it was always there when you were growing up and your dad wasn't scared of it and he didn't talk about how strange it was, who would teach you to think it's anything out of the ordinary?</comment></comment>


Google poaches 14-year Mac veteran from Apple to bring Fuchsia to market - <AUTHOR> https://9to5google.com/2019/01/22/google-fuchsia-poaches-mac-veteran/ <comment><USER2> On a bit of a tangential note: I am really not a fan of using the term "poaching" for this. The engineer is not a piece of property, and it is certainly not an illegal or immoral act. Employees are allowed to leave for a different job (Interestingly the headline is the only place that term is used, they use "hire" in the article and in the HTML Header).

<comment><USER3> employee poaching is a legal term with a long historical precedent.

<comment><USER4> The expression might have precedent but it does express a notion of property and dehumanizes the employee, as if he's a product without free will.

<comment><USER3> I gave this some thought and I can't really see this as a reasonable statement.

<comment><USER2> ....care to elaborate? I think its perfectly reasonable

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've tried _really hard_ to find a way to contact someone at Google who works on Fuchsia about joining. I've got low-level Rust experience, and I think the concepts behind the OS are fascinating. It's kind of funny just how little public "face" the project has. There's some code, and... that's it. I found very little information about the people or project sides of things. It's interesting to me how much press it gets given the minuscule amount of information published by Google.

<comment><USER6> I can put you in touch with someone, I know some people on the team. I see your info is in your profile.

<comment><USER5> I would appreciate that very, very much!

<comment><USER6> I sent something into the wind, we'll see what happens. Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Who in the world wants to use an OS built by an Ad company. I imagine it's going to be hostile to anything that prevents ads and tracking.

<comment><USER4> > Who in the world wants to use an OS built by an Ad company.

Apparently around 75% of the world's smartphones run android, so pretty much the answer is the vast majority of people.

<comment><USER8> "Want" and "do" are pretty different though.

Most people in the world want to eat well, many do eat poorly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'll use fuchsia as long as I can make UI's in languages other than dart..</comment>


The Fermi Paradox Is Not Fermi's, and It Is Not a Paradox - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-fermi-paradox-is-not-fermi-s-and-it-is-not-a-paradox/ <comment><USER2> What a timely coincidence. I just finished reading Cixin Lui's "The Dark Forest" (it and the first book in the series "The Three-Body Problem" I cannot recommend enough). I think the central premise of the book is probably the worst of the possible reasons we haven't found anyone else out there...

"The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there's only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It's the explanation for the Fermi Paradox."

<comment><USER3> Except that we've been pumping radio waves out of this rock as loud as we can for decades. We're the loud cousin who can't keep quiet when hunting.

<comment><USER4> And, if one civilization found another it would take massive amounts of resources and time to launch an interstellar attack. I doubt humanity's first reaction would be to embark on a giant project to somehow try to destroy the other civilization. This idea makes no sense.

<comment><USER5> I assume that because in this metaphor we are the baby. Reduce the scenario to, say two small human villages that just discovered each other, and it's not so hard to see how our tendency is to overrun and destroy, either by intention or by mistake. That's certainly something that has played out over and over again in our history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > and since we don't see any obvious signs of aliens here, searching for their > signals is pointless.

That is a huge over simplification. The fermi paradox doesn't really conclude. It is called a paradox because we need to solve the riddle that combined with the drake equation it is awfully quiet in our universe, why is that?

If you have 20 minutes: [http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi- paradox.html](http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html)

This is probably one of the best long reads on the internet dealing with this question.

</comment><comment><USER7> The real issue is not that we haven't been visited (for which read, we exist, because the matter of the solar system wasn't turned into computronium by some group billions of years ago), but that everything we see is a wilderness. All of the observable universe appears natural in every place we can assess whether or not it is natural. No dyson spheres in evidence, no class 3 civilization in any of the nearest 100,000 galaxies, etc, etc.

This makes no sense given that we exist, and the laws of physics show no indications that we are a special case, or that transforming the universe into intelligent matter is impossible. All it takes is one small group in one species to create the self-replicating probes that dismantle every natural grouping of matter to create more efficient arrangements to support more intelligence, and on a small timescale compared to the age of the universe entire galaxies are turned from wilderness to structure.

[https://www.exratione.com/2015/05/the-cosmological- noocene/](https://www.exratione.com/2015/05/the-cosmological-noocene/)

"Per our present understanding of physics and intelligent economic activity, we will turn every part of that great span into our descendants if not diverted or stopped by some outside influence, stars and all. The cosmological noocene, an ocean of intelligence. That the natural universe remains present to be used by us indicates that something is awry, however, that some vital and important understanding is missing, and as a species we are still just making the first fumbling explorations of the bounds of the possible with regards to what it is that we don't know."

<comment><USER8> There are two main assumptions in those "where are they?" Scenario. One is that self replicating probes are feasible and the other is that ots practical for them to travel interstellar distances.

I think the problem of designing and building self replicating probes, capable of recreating themselves from asteroidal matter, is greatly underestimated. We currently have little to no idea how to design such a thing, and no real idea what the lower bound on the mass of such a thing might be.

The next problem is nterstellar travel. The difference un scale between traveling to the moon and travelling to a nearby star is about the same difference in scale between throwing a rock down a typical garden and launching astronauts to the moon. The Daudalus project did down good work on this and their very modest proble of just a few tons, doing a flyby of a nearby star, took a large to portion of the mass of Neptune to construct in terms of fuel. The resources available in a typical planetary system might not be up to the job.

I don't honk magic future technology hand waves these problems away. Any future technology will have to work with the same elements on the same periodic table we have now, manipulating the same physical forces we work with now. We can't wish magic unobtainable into existence and the limits of what is achievable with matter and energy are already pretty much computable.

So it really may well be that going sustainably interstellar might be impractical.

<comment><USER9> The mass number you through out (large portion of the mass of Neptune) seemed really off to me so I looked it up and found some comparisons.

For a flyby: Daedalus mass = 5.0 * 10^7 kg (500 kg of scientific equipment)

With a slowdown to stay in the system: Daedalus mass = 10^10 kg

Mass of Neptune: 10^26 kg

So even for an extended stay, the mass of the Daedalus is no where close to a significant portion of Neptune.

I looked for equivalent mass objects, here is a few:

1.4 * 10^18 = all oceans on earth combined

10^12 kg = 1.4km diameter asteroid (Icarus)

3.5 * 10^10 kg = 0.5 x 0.3 x 0.2 dimension asteroid (Itokawa)

Estimates put the number of asteroids larger than 1km diameter in the belt between mars and Jupiter at 750,000

These are just straight mass conversions, no idea about the real content of fuel. If all those asteroids were straight fuel then you could launch upwards of a million Daedalus class ships that stay in the orbit of their target star.

<comment><USER8> I was thinking of the successor project, Icarus. It's not the mass of the probe, it's the mass of the gas giant's atmosphere you need to process to extract the Helium-3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is not my understanding of the Fermi Paradox and I've never heard this interpretation before. The paradox is; given the Drake equation, where is everyone? That's all it amounts to, hence the paradox. The author of the article states the paradox differently, that, because we can't see any evidence, we shouldn't look. That is not the Fermi Paradox.

One of my favourite responses involves cryptography: Given a sufficiently advanced civilisation, one might imagine that their ability to encrypt information is perfect, therefore any signal is indistinguishable from noise.

<comment><USER11> See Stanislaw Lem: His Master's Voice [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_\(novel\))

<comment><USER10> That's been recommended to me before, but I'd forgotten about it - I shall act this time. Thanks!

I started to read Solaris, but found the translation stilted and difficult, so gave up. I've just read that Lem himself didn't like the Rnglish translation! It's unlikely I'll be learning Polish this lifetime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Another possibility is: they never feel like it.

It's possible intelligent species inevitably overcome/loose the desire for infinite self replication.

It's clear other animals will breed to occupy all available habitats. But it seems humans uniquely are developing the idea of the preserve in which environments are intentionally left unoccupied. I have even heard a tiny amount of talk questioning the impact of even a Mars landing. If that question is already coming up centuries before interstellar travel, one wonders what attitudes will be prevalent then.

Just a century ago it was quite desirable to intentionally release new species of bird's into new continents purely for aesthetic reasons. Now such an attitude would be abhorrent.

I suppose if one could demonstrate that the desire to endlessly replicate across the universe is somehow beneficial to individuals currently living then I imagine their values will embrace it. If endless self replication is not beneficial to the exiting population then they will eventually reason their way clear of that instinct and that reasoning will be integrated into their ethical code.

So while I, like most people reading this, am very excited by space exploration, that attitude may not be a permanent cultural characteristic.

</comment><comment><USER13> Fermi:

> ...technological civilization doesn't last long enough for it to happen."

Writer:

> Both York and Teller seemed to think Fermi was questioning the feasibility > of interstellar travel— _nobody thought he was questioning the possible > existence of extraterrestrial civilizations_

What happens when a technological civilization 'doesn't last long enough'? It stops existing.

<comment><USER14> That's assuming a technological civilization's natural progression is towards space travel, which may or may not be true. The Aztecs were way "behind" when explorers first discovered them, but were doing pretty fine.

<comment><USER15> Indeed and wouldn't they have been "interrupted" they very well might have developed further towards space travel or is there anything to suggest that they wouldn't have progressed further technologically?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "The other is the so-called Fermi paradox, which claims that we should see intelligent aliens here if they exist anywhere, because they would inevitably colonize the Galaxy by star travel—and since we don't see any obvious signs of aliens here, searching for their signals is pointless."

Either this is worded wrong or illogical. If this is true, as it's worded now, then we humans either do not exist or are not intelligent, by its very definition. Both are ridiculous conclusions. The assumption is "because they would inevitably colonize the Galaxy by star travel". What if they're not advanced enough to do so yet? Does that make them not intelligent? If so, that would make us non-intelligent. Does that prove aliens don't exist? If so, then we humans are proven to not exist (which is ludicrous).

Finally the stupid conclusion: "since we don't see any obvious signs of aliens here, searching for their signals is pointless." So as a corollary, other aliens searching for us would be pointless since we humans don't exist since there are no signs of us on other planets.

This is incredibly stupid. No wonder Fermi never wrote it. He would never write something this dumb.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've heard this before, that Fermi was really questioning interstellar travel, not alien existence. Given all the matter we've found in interstellar space, from dust clouds to brown dwarfs, it seems pretty clear that travelling near the speed of light out there would be perilous indeed. Even a small rock, colliding with your ship travelling at .5c is going to destroy it.

</comment><comment><USER18> In a universe that is very old and very large, anything that can occur will eventually happen somewhere. This includes the launching of interstellar self- replicating von Neumann probes. All it takes is one civilization somewhere lobbing one sufficiently automated sublight probe, and in a few million years the galaxy is full of them for the rest of time. Either the galaxy is full of interstellar self-replicating probes, or empty of them. Their absence here is strong evidence that nobody, at least in our galaxy, has evolved a technical civilization, and that we are the first or only to approach that level.

<comment><USER19> Not sure why you wouldn't just manufacture a bunch of probes in one system and then send them out en masse. You wouldn't need to worry about creating self- replication units, you'd get to each system more quickly (you wouldn't have to deal with multiple accelerations/decelerations or manufacturing time), you'd have more control (wouldn't have to worry about drone swarms and could inspect each probe before it's sent to its destination), you'd probably have quicker manufacturing (since it'd be done by specialist machines rather than hybrid manufacturer/probes), could probably give the probes a boost form the home system when you send them out, etc. Self replication doesn't seem to add much, but certainly takes away a lot.

This is also assuming that aliens will want to scout out the universe, and that probes are the best way for an advanced civilization to do so. We might be like someone from the past who comes to the present and determines that we don't have any long distance communication because they don't see any smoke signals.

<comment><USER18> You missed the point. I'm not arguing that civilizations would be likely to launch self-replicating probes. What I am asserting is that the probes will be out there UNLESS every single actor capable of launching a self-replicating probe chooses to not do so, and that over billions of years and hundreds of billions of stellar systems in the Local Group, that probability is vanishingly small. All it takes is one launch; if it's possible, it'll happen. And it hasn't. So either there's never been a civilization that launched a self-replicating probe, or it's not possible, or we're the first or only civilization to approach that level.

<comment><USER19> I don't know about that. Even if we're talking about a large sample size, can we really say "that probability is vanishingly small"? It's kind of like saying, "Sure, I don't see any reason why someone would build an underwater city, but with a couple hundred countries in the world, and 7 billion people, the probability that no one is going to do that is tiny."

But are we even dealing with a large sample size? Maybe there's "only" been several dozen large interstellar civilizations out there, and a few hundred small ones that never really got far beyond a handful of planets. Or maybe there were a couple of attempts, but they failed horribly. The problem with the "paradox" is that there seems to be a huge number of possible answers. It ends up being "how come this one scenario I'm thinking about hasn't happened."

<comment><USER18> Thinking about this paradox in terms of probabilities:

P(probes) = 1 - (1 - P(a civ can launch a probe)) ^ N(civ)

If we don't see probes, and if we don't think P(can launch) is exactly zero, then N(civ) just has to be small.

EDIT: HN deleted my Fortran-style exponentiation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Necessary read for reasonable discussion:

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

"the Rare Earth Hypothesis argues that the origin of life and the evolution of biological complexity such as sexually reproducing, multicellular organisms on Earth (and, subsequently, human intelligence) required an improbable combination of astrophysical and geological events and circumstances. The hypothesis argues that complex extraterrestrial life is a very improbable phenomenon and likely to be extremely rare."

<comment><USER21> Bottom line is we only have one example. We simply do not know. For all we know the frequency could be less than one per galaxy per billion years, in which case we are likely alone.

<comment><USER22> There are hundreds of billions? of galaxies though.

<comment><USER21> Intergalactic travel or communication is exponentially harder than interstellar.

<comment><USER20> Exactly. As far as I know, except for the Andromeda galaxy, which will collide with ours, all other galaxies zoom further away.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision)

Far enough in the future, even if we survive, we won't see any other galaxy -- they will zoom out of our observable universe! The expansion of the Universe accelerates, according to our last estimates.

<comment><USER23> Wouldn't this imply that future generations may actually lose this history?

There would be no way to prove that another galaxy ever existed.

<comment><USER20> The universe is still "young enough" for galaxies to be close enough to each other for a while. But yes, based on the current knowledge of the constants that drive the universe, in some very distant future we can imagine some potential civilizations that will be able to learn dramatically less about the Universe than we already know now, their model will be: What's the Universe? Only the stars around us, all in the group. What's behind them? Nothing.

In even more distant future, eventually the supply of gas needed for star formation will be exhausted:

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

In the exponentially distant future the Universe is going to get always more and more boring.

<comment><USER23> It's actually fascinating.

When future civilizations read "old" science texts it will be virtually impossible for them to not think of them as crackpot science or fairy tales. The idea of other galaxies ever having existed will have about as much verifiable scientific evidence as the tooth fairy

<comment><USER20> The "Big bang" can't be proved anymore then too -- not billions of galaxies all flying away from us, but just: nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Given the sheer size of the galaxy, forget the universe, C is unfathomably slow in comparison.

It's no wonder, at least not to my imagination why we haven't found any other life yet, or visa versa.

<comment><USER25> _c_ may be slow relative to distances in space, but the universe is incredibly old as well. A civilization a million years ahead of us could have colonized the entire galaxy by now.

And in any case, if there is anyone out there, there should be _some_ evidence. Scientists have looked in various ways for megastructures ( _e.g._ Dyson Spheres) and have found no evidence for their existence, even in the oldest of galaxies.

The picture in my mind is quite bleak. The evidence seems to point to a very limited number of scenarios:

1\. We are unique (in existence, in our technology, in our desire to expand, etc.) 2\. We are first. 3\. Civilizations destroy themselves before they can expand. 4\. Civilizations do something else we don't yet understand that doesn't involve gathering more and more energy from surrounding space.

<comment><USER24> Maybe such civilizations instead have value in limited reproduction and doesn't have the need for colonies all over their galaxy and incredible resource consumption.

Just because humans breed with no point or purpose and even invent religion to insist on unmitigated population growth, doesn't mean that's a value shared with a more intelligent alien race.

If anything, there is proof that more educated humans breed far less than their counterparts. Extend that further and imagine a planet the size of earth with only a few million sentient life forms. They might not feel the need to leave, outside of general exploration, but even then they might just use probes.

<comment><USER25> Which points to either our uniqueness (1) or our not understanding their alien motivations (4).

A few points I'll make for fun:

1\. Life on Earth propagates as much as possible. It is only external factors (mostly resources, but also predation and other factors) which keep populations in check. This is likely a shared trait of all (successful) life in the universe. This doesn't preclude the possibility of a species moving beyond this trait* but it does suggest that either the trait fails at some point prior to stellar engineering or interstellar colonization or that _all_ advanced civilizations move beyond it.

2\. Even if spreading throughout the universe is not a species' goal, whatever their goals are will require energy. It is likely those goals will require greater and greater energies as our own goals have and will continue to do for the foreseeable future. The only way I see around this problem is novel physics which seem impossible in our current understanding of the universe.

3\. At some point every species must leave their host star or perish. (However, if they find themselves around a red dwarf, they will have quite a bit of time - and will not have to have moved since the beginning of the universe. So it may be we are freaks because we are around a shorter-lived orange star.)

But this is speculation at best. I'd rather speculate that they all created their own pocket universes that are ideally suited to their species and left the rest of us behind. :)

*Although I would suggest that natural selection is an unlikely candidate for the development of such a trait. In my opinion, this would require directly modification of whatever passes for DNA in the species. Even enforced population controls would probably not be enough to contain a species.

<comment><USER24> You're going off the deep-end for fantasy when you start saying "pocket universes". Even dyson spheres are an exponentially advanced civilization problem, not just for energy but for material to build it from.

To achieve frequent non-robotic travel beyond a solar system, a species would have to first master unlimited "free" energy (ie. fusion). This seems to be an extreme non-trivial problem. Even a civilization tens of thousands of years ahead of us may not have mastered it on a portable scale, limiting their travel and making "home" far more comfortable.

And again, with unlimited energy, they still might not even feel the need to leave their solar system except for basic exploration, they might be xenophobic.

If the spark of the dna for virtually all life on earth maybe came from somewhere else, injected into our potent primordial soup, perhaps it happened when the galaxy, even the universe was closer together so it didn't have to travel so far. But now the few other "cousins" of life we have in the galaxy/universe may be too far away simply from the expansion of space itself, not just big-bang momentum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A better measure of whether there is other life in our universe might be the percentage of us which really believe, at our very core, we are the only life in a vast universe we understand less than the soil we tread on each day.

It can't be a paradox if you know you can change the question.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm skeptical on looking for radio waves. How could interstellar intelligence use radio waves to communicate anyway, they're traveling at C and are still too slow

<comment><USER28> Interstellar intelligence can still travel at time frames much longer than human life.

It's like complaining that a letter from America to Europe would travel for many months in 1495. There were still incentives for Europeans to go to America.

<comment><USER27> Even our own plans for such a thing included lasers not radio [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Longshot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Longshot). Still not solving communication speed limits

<comment><USER29> I think the previous commenter was saying that the communication speed limits may not be a problem that can be, or needs to be, solved.

If the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit, technological civilizations may just have to accept it and work within that limit. Just because a method of communication is slow doesn't mean it's not worth using.

<comment><USER15> If that limit can't be broken, it would massively slow down space travel though. Our civilization currently consumes more resources than can be replenished. What if other civilizations have the same problem and can't travel to other planets before resource starvation comes in?

<comment><USER30> > What if other civilizations have the same problem and can't travel to other > planets before resource starvation comes in?

They probably die.

<comment><USER28> Traveling to other _planets_ is relatively easy; in our system it takes just a few years using the cheapest chemical boosters + ion engines. A nuclear rocket engine (quite feasible) would probably lower the travel time noticeably. Communication delays in the range of a few hours maximum are not a significant problem either.

It's traveling to other _star systems_ what is hard.

OTOH we live in a relatively sparsely populated neck of galactic woods; thicker clusters of stars exist with much shorter interstellar distances. Conditions there are usually deadly for us, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Our civilization has had radio communication for 100 years but we're well on our way to environmental collapse within the next thousand years. The milky way is over 100k light years wide. By the time our signals reach any other potential civilizations we'll be long gone. If the average civilization broadcasts for a thousand years but they're tens of thousands of light years apart, communication is not be possible within a civilization-span.</comment>


Ask HN: AI Sign Language translators - <AUTHOR> Can AI be made to translate between different sign language variants? I would think computerized avatars could easily be trained, and grant money for such projects should be easy to come by. Computerized vision should be able to read sign language - especially in specific, limited visual settings and backgrounds. <comment><USER2> It's not simple to do.

First you need a whole lot of data to train the system which doesn't really exist (unlike the case of speech to text or one language to another(text to text)). You would need to set up a big data collection project.

Secondly there are a whole bunch of different things to track. Movement of multiple fingers, +palm, +entire hand, +facial expressions. Current state of the art would be tracking a single thing like a ball or a player for sports and that still requires a number of cameras and a couple people sitting behind the scenes fixing issues.

I think Microsoft's Kinect came close to achieving something akin to sign language recognition at a very basic level. But from what I remember reading they spent a whole lot of time and resources training their system just to get there.

Maybe 3-4 years away I'd say.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am currently studying sign language in Germany (ie DGS - Deutsche Gebärden Sprache, german sign language).

In the long term I can not think of anything why it should not be possible but here a few difficulties that come to mind:

1\. Sign languages are in general not yet as well understood as spoken languages (the grammar, the vocabulary). For example the University of Hamburg is running the "DGS-Korpus" project[1] in order to create the first real dictionary for DGS, currently there is none. i.e. even humans have not a full explicit understanding of the language (DGS) and afaik it's similar for other sign languages

2\. As video recordings are not older than 100 years and the community of native speakers per language is much smaller than for spoken languages the amount of recorded speech is much smaller

3\. Large parts of sign languages are very productive. That means that the speaker/signer is not limited to a fixed vocabulary and a fixed grammar but allowed to reenact a situation he is telling about ("constructed dialogue" and "constructed action"[2]). Eg when retelling a conversation the storyteller can shift her body to the left or the the right in order to embody multiple people. Instead of saying "I drove the car. I had to turn left and then I saw her on the right side" the signer can just move as he was sitting in the car, holding the the steering wheel, moving it to the left and turning is head to the right. I would compare that to making "phewww... ohhhhh, whoaaa" sounds in order to tell how the plane you sit in took of. Additionally the signer is allowed to allocate locations around her upper body to establish references to previously mentions objects and refer back to them via pronouns.

4\. There is no agreed upon notation for writing down signed texts. Sure there are notations for various hand forms and movements directions but especially the productive part of language mentioned above is hard to formalize. E.g. spacial locations that can be used for placing references are not predefined. Some person still learning the language may only be able to use two positions "left to his body" and "right to his body", but a very eloquent signer may be able to establish even 10 references points in front of him and still enable the audience to keep track of them. Such arbitrary reference points can not be written down in a sensible notation.

5\. Various sign languages differ much more from each other than one might initially think. Each sign language has its own grammar and vocabulary. For german sign languages it's not even entirely clear what marks a sentence.

6\. Sign languages are not sequential but simultaneous languages ie it's possible to express one thing with one hand and another thing with the other hand in parallel

So some first steps might be:

* find a formal grammar for sign languages

* find a formal notation to write down arbitrary sentences

* collect a large corpus

* Train some AI to translate video data into your notation

* Train some AI to translate the notation from one sign language to another (and to spoken/written language as well)

* Train some AI to translate spoken/written language to your notation for some sign language

* Build an avatar that accepts that notation as input and translates it into movement

[1] [http://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de](http://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de) [2] [https://www.signteach.eu/index.php/podcastsall/item/construc...](https://www.signteach.eu/index.php/podcastsall/item/constructedaction- dgs)

<comment><USER4> > find a formal grammar for sign languages

Might not be necessary. Modern statistical machine translation techniques use formal grammars as an auxiliary signal at most.

> find a formal notation to write down arbitrary sentences

Some sign languages might not be representable in SignWriting, but most should be covered. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting)

> collect a large corpus

Many (all?) European (and other) countries have laws requiring news broadcasts, parliamentary debates etc. to be made available in sign language. Similar to the EUROPARL corpus, that could be used as a starting point for signed <-> spoken translation. Also similar to EUROPARL, colloquial language would be underrepresented.

Of course there won't be any SignWriting transcriptions, so the corpus would be essentially unlabeled.

> Build an avatar that accepts that notation as input and translates it into > movement

I'd do that before/while attempting to create a large number of transcriptions, both to ensure accuracy and to enable unsupervised pattern mining in the later steps.

> Train some AI to translate video data into your notation

What I mean by unsupervised pattern mining is that the transcription AI would be trained to output a transcription that makes the avatar ouput something like the original video, as well as reconstructing the avatar's input from its movements.

> Train some AI to translate the notation from one sign language to another > (and to spoken/written language as well)

It'd probably be easiest to start with translating between the signed <-> spoken pairs in the corpus and then leverage that into signed <-> signed translation.

<comment><USER3> Yes you can do all that and as I said I do not think it would be impossible. And some of what you describe is already done (eg [1]). I just wanted to point out some difficulties.

[1] [http://www.michaelkipp.de/slides/Kippetal11slides.pdf](http://www.michaelkipp.de/slides/Kippetal11slides.pdf)</comment></comment></comment>


Apple seeds devs with Safari 5.2 for Lion, Xcode 4.4 with new LLVM compiler - <AUTHOR> http://9to5mac.com/2012/02/16/apple-seeds-devs-with-safari-5-2-for-lion-xcode-4-4-with-new-llvm-compiler/

<comment><AUTHOR> Finally, Safari also has a unified address bar</comment>


Principles of good data analysis - <AUTHOR> http://www.gregreda.com/2014/03/23/principles-of-good-data-analysis/ <comment><USER2> Helpful; thanks!

"Ten Simple Rules for Reproducible Computational Research" [http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...](http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1003285)

* Rule 1: For Every Result, Keep Track of How It Was Produced

* Rule 2: Avoid Manual Data Manipulation Steps

* Rule 3: Archive the Exact Versions of All External Programs Used

* Rule 4: Version Control All Custom Scripts

* Rule 5: Record All Intermediate Results, When Possible in Standardized Formats

* Rule 6: For Analyses That Include Randomness, Note Underlying Random Seeds

* Rule 7: Always Store Raw Data behind Plots

* Rule 8: Generate Hierarchical Analysis Output, Allowing Layers of Increasing Detail to Be Inspected

* Rule 9: Connect Textual Statements to Underlying Results

* Rule 10: Provide Public Access to Scripts, Runs, and Results

Sandve GK, Nekrutenko A, Taylor J, Hovig E (2013) Ten Simple Rules for Reproducible Computational Research. PLoS Comput Biol 9(10): e1003285. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003285

<comment><USER3> This is way more useful than the original post, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great post! You mention that it is important to "be skeptical" \- I concur and would add that it's helpful to approach the analysis from a non-biased standpoint. Even if you are going into your analysis with certain goals in mind, it is not only more ethical, but also more persuasive, to indicate any inconsistencies in your findings.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think for "Profile your data", some tools like OpenRefine really help. [http://openrefine.org](http://openrefine.org)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I forgot to mention reproducibility. Show your work (share the code).</comment>


Ask HN: Feedback for justpay.io - <AUTHOR> I just started this side project with a friend, and we'd like to ask for some feedback! We know that getting paid on time as a freelancer is not easy, and we think we can crack this problem. To cover our startup costs, we're planning to start an indiegogo campaign, and we'd love to hear your opinion about it before before we get there! Site: https://justpay.io <comment><USER2> How do you intend to handle disputes/arbitration?

<comment><AUTHOR> We will handle them by acting as an arbitrating 3rd party (with professional lawyers). Our plan is to pass on our costs to the party who's wrong.</comment></comment>


Set the default branch for newly-created repositories - <AUTHOR> https://github.blog/changelog/2020-08-26-set-the-default-branch-for-newly-created-repositories/ <comment><USER2> Key highlight:

> On October 1, 2020, if you haven't changed the default branch for new > repositories for your user, organization, or enterprise, it will > automatically change from master to main. You can opt out of this change at > any time

<comment><USER3> To add emphasis to this: they changed the default branch name for _new_ repositories.

You can opt-out of this _change of the default_. I don't know why I'd read that as changing existing repositories unless opted out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why not 'trunk'? It's a tree after all... there are 'branches'... SVN got it right.

<comment><USER5> I've been in software since I was a teen, and this comment finally made me realize what "trunk" was actually supposed to mean before Git took over.

[https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/)

<comment><USER6> As a non-native English speaker I never connected SVN's trunk with the concept of a tree from which branches grow. I mean, I knew of this meaning of the word trunk but I never thought of it in this context. I was more familiar with the other meanings, the long body part on the elephant and the storage compartment on a car.

<comment><USER3> For some reason I'd associated it with trunk, a word for the human torso.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pretty easy to opt-in. I also used Scott Hanselman's guide to change existing repos from master to main.

[https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EasilyRenameYourGitDefaultBra...](https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EasilyRenameYourGitDefaultBranchFromMasterToMain.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't know if it's because I'm on my phone but I can't opt out?

Edit: oh I miss read. Thought this affected existing repos.

Opted in for new repos.

<comment><USER9> Clicking "change default branch name now" just opens a form to change it, thats how you opt out by typing master in that form. It's not super clear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a secondary developer, this offensive to me. Now I'll have to work on a branch named after the main developer, reminding me every day that it's THEIR project and I'm just a code monkey.</comment>


Apple reports second quarter results - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/04/20results.html

<comment><USER2> Incredible. Their revenues were over 1.5B above analyst estimates.

And now they're within 30B of Microsoft, market cap wise. Unbelievable! Seeing the momentum their stock is on, and considering they'll have IPad revenue coming in over the next couple of quarters, it looks like sometime this year Apple will be worth more than MS...just think of how epic a comeback that is</comment>


Facebook Connect Increases Registrations By Up To 300%? - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/six-months-in-facebook-connect-is-a-huge-success-2009-7

<comment><AUTHOR> Some impressive number here, particularly:

"sites that use Facebook Connect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-200% increase in registration on their sites."

Has anyone here done this with their site? Are you seeing those kind of numbers?</comment>


The Vulkan Graphics API Is Here–and Your Nvidia  GPU Is Ready - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/02/16/vulkan-graphics-api/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11109839](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11109839)</comment>


Code Poems - <AUTHOR> http://www.code-poems.com/book.html

<comment><AUTHOR> A quite nice examples here: <http://www.mariosangiorgio.com/pages/codePoem></comment>


Playing with 80M Amazon Product Review Ratings Using Apache Spark - <AUTHOR> http://minimaxir.com/2017/01/amazon-spark/ <comment><AUTHOR> If you want more insight into the data processing (and code which didn't work out), I strongly recommend looking at the R Notebook for the post: [http://minimaxir.com/notebooks/amazon- spark/](http://minimaxir.com/notebooks/amazon-spark/)

R Notebooks have been a tremendous help for my workflows. (I do have a post planned to illustrate their many advantages over Jupyter Notebooks)

<comment> semi-extrinsic This is really cool. Looking forward to the R Notebook vs. Jupyter shootout.

Question: under "Distribution of average scores", I notice both distributions have a trend of oscillating up/down on every other bar. Is that a binning artifact, or somehow inherent in the Amazon rating system? With counts of O(1e5) I was expecting much smoother histograms.

<comment><AUTHOR> Keep in mind the cumulative distribution of reviews. With 5 reviews minimum, the average has few sig-figs of precision, which is why the binning is also set to 1 sig-fig. It also makes the chart more readable. (2 sig-figs would add up to 10x as many columns, with potential for gaps with missing values)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Average Amazon product review:

        I haven't used it yet but I'm sure it's great!! (Five stars)

or

        Looks neat! (Four stars)

or

        GOT THIS LAPTOP FOR MY GIRLFRIEND AND SHE COULDNT FIGURE OUT HOW TO USE IT. I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS. FOR $200 I SHOULD GET A TOP-END MACHINE NOT THIS TRASH. I AM RETURNING. (ONE STAR)

Should be interesting.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention all the fake reviews and reviews that hide the text 'I received this product at a discount/free for my honest unbiased review'.

Sidenote: I refuse to buy products that have reviews like that. Instantly lost my trust.

<comment><USER4> It's difficult to sell an item when you have no ratings at all or very litte ratings and a competitor has hundreds, so I can understand why they give products away for ratings. I think Amazon are looking into marking those reviews more clearly.

When I am looking for something, I go by the amount of reviews, too, so I really can't blame them.

Personally, I just ignore those reviews. Reviews in the 2-4 star range are more useful anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why in the world would use Spark for such a tiny data set?

<comment><USER6> I imagine the author used this as an excuse to play around with Spark. If it were me doing this for work, yeah I'd drop this in Postgres. Most of these analyses would be short SQL queries.

<comment><USER7> lets say i tried to load up postgres and a data set on my ..fairly powerful.. laptop to run queries. how many records could i get up to? 100m? 1b? say 16gb ram

<comment><USER8> One would need to know the size of the record. This is an exercise you'll often do if you're doing capacity analysis / growth analysis for planning (or in conjunction with FP&A).

1,000,000 4kb records takes up, as you'd guess, 4GB of RAM. You can obviously go well beyond your allocation of RAM and still have the database perform, but you'll find you're now bottlenecked on the speed of IO from your SSD / HDD. Throughput will quickly decrease, queries will run slower, etc.

This is why you'll often find that DB benchmarks that never exceed RAM can be "false" comparisons if the expected workload will always exceed available memory, and data not resident to memory will need to be loaded.

So, to truly answer your question, it's actually less a question of RAM, and more a question of HDD. The 2015 ACS (American Community Survey) plus some geographic data is around 100GB, and I comfortably run analysis against it on my wimpy 2015 Macbook (8GB RAM, 1.3Ghz Core M).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very cool to see R playing nicely with Spark via sparklyr package. The new flex dashboarding feature out of knitr is awesome. The R/RStudio team definitely knows what they're doing and very excited to see what's next for the data science community.

<comment><USER10> Shiny is slowly expanding its dashboarding capabilities. I have rolled out dashboards with hundreds of thousands of rows which don't need any explicit pagination and can be used simultaneously by dozens of internal customers. All this spun up in a matter of hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can one use this data set for commercial purposes? May sound like a silly question, and the answer may be no, but this sort of data would be very useful to build something cool.

</comment><comment><USER12> "And this post doesn't even look at the text of the Amazon product reviews or the metadata associated with the products!"

time to bust out the sentiment analysis

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting write up. Where did the data come from? Does Amazon publish the raw data in the format that is loaded or was it scraped?

<comment><USER14> From the article the data is available at: [http://jmcauley.ucsd.edu/data/amazon/](http://jmcauley.ucsd.edu/data/amazon/)

"I wrote a simple Python script to combine the per-category ratings-only data from the Amazon product reviews dataset curated by Julian McAuley, Rahul Pandey, and Jure Leskovec for their 2015 paper Inferring Networks of Substitutable and Complementary Products"

<comment><USER15> Anyone have a torrent?

On the page it says:

Amazon review data will be made available (for research purposes) on request

<comment><USER16> Just make a request. When I did so, I heard back within a few hours and the only requirement was that I cite their work, which is entirely reasonable. Similar datasets are more likely to be created if people are at least mentioned for their efforts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We've used this dataset to build a product review classification pipeline as an example application that can be developed using our project, KeystoneML (which runs on spark) - code is here: [https://github.com/amplab/keystone/blob/master/src/main/scal...](https://github.com/amplab/keystone/blob/master/src/main/scala/pipelines/text/AmazonReviewsPipeline.scala#L25-L39)

</comment><comment><USER18> It would be really interesting to see the same analysis for verified reviews only, and contrast it with the overall numbers and non-verified reviews. I would actually want to read that more than this (which was still interesting).

<comment><USER19> Do you mean reviews done by verified purchasers? I believe I have read that firms buying reviews get around that qualifier by giving the reviewer money/gift cards to purchase the item, then write a positive review. They could easily set it up so that the reviewer has to send back the sample item, too, to reduce the cost.

<comment><USER3> Exactly this. Amazon claims they're fixing it but I don't think that'll stop the problem. If anything it'll cause them to do reviews without posting a notice about it being sponsored or potentially biased.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does make you wonder what value the ratings have. Given that most of the ratings are 4-5 you would think most products are wonderful on amazon. Also makes you wonder how many are real users and how many are paid.

<comment><USER21> I think that has to do more with bias...

I've noticed on a few applications/sites I've made...

Star ratings tend to bias high, but ratings attached to reviews tend to bias low. If you're happy with the product, you just give it a 5... if you're unhappy, you give it a 1 and a review... but that takes more effort... so the happy outweighs the unhappy it seems... just my own theory, but its played out in a few places...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What kind of api did you use to pull all reviews out of amazon? As I see they have blocked giving reviews via api they give it via iframe in api nowadays. How did you curate the list of each and every product present in amazon?

P.S. Awesome analysis.</comment>


Deaths per TWH by energy source - <AUTHOR> http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

<comment><USER2> Unless the point is to say "Wow, Coal is a very dangerous energy source on a global basis." or "Wow, China is really bad at operating coal power plants", this isn't very informative.

Obviously, the coal figures are reflecting the health issues created or exacerbated by using the product. So miner deaths, cancers, respiratory illnesses, etc are probably all factored in there.

Just as Chinese coal sticks out as outlier, nuclear sticks out as well.

How can you make an argument based on deaths without accounting for future risks? Some waste products of many nuclear energy generation are dangerous for 10,000 years -- longer than recorded history. And as the article states, one of the issues with nuclear accidents is the difficulty of attributing deaths:

"4000 people may eventually die earlier as a result of Chernobyl, but those deaths would be more than 20 years after the fact and the cause and effect becomes more tenuous."

It just seems bizarre to me that someone would discuss at length the hazards of working on a roof, while the US has hundreds of nuclear power plants with adjacent waste ponds that will require active cooling for an indefinite period of time.

<comment><USER3> "4000 people may eventually die earlier as a result of Chernobyl, but those deaths would be more than 20 years after the fact and the cause and effect becomes more tenuous."

This figure is far less than the number who will die just this year from mining coal (mostly in China and Africa), let alone from the direct health effects of secondary causes of coal pollution which will number in the hundreds of thousands to low millions.

There is very little nuclear waste (currently less than three Olympic sized swimming pools for all of Canada's nuclear waste) compared to the primary and secondary industrial waste from coal, oil and other forms of energy production, including solar and wind manufacturing.

Solar and wind are only "environmentally friendly" after the units are installed and working. If you add in the production, installation and land requirements, as well as maintenance, solar and wind are not as helpful as claimed.

I live between two of the largest nuclear generating stations in the world, within 20km, and I have few concerns. Having visited the sites and educated myself independently on the nuclear issue, I am far happier with this solution than the alternatives, including industrial wind and solar, though solar roof panels can have a place in helping reduce electrical heating of hot water.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title of this article should read: 'How not to monetise a blog post using advertising'

<comment><USER5> True, but kind of trivial when the topic at hand involves the preventable early deaths of millions of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have to admit these statistics are beautiful. Arguing that Nuclear is more save than Solar because of more people dieing from falling down their roof instead of dying by Nuclear catastrophes is just supreme quantitative logic. It demonstrates so beautifully how numbers are excellent for focusing on a narrow feature (i.e. "correlatable" action-death relations) while totally blending out aspects such as long-term effects of nuclear waste and so on.

<comment><USER7> The long-term effects of nuclear waste tend to get blown out of all proportion. The _total_ amount of nuclear waste produced so far is so tiny that even if you were to spread it in the atmosphere you're unlikely to cause worse damage than what coal or oil does. Not least given the amount of radioactive material that gets spread by coal power plants. When you take into account the number of reactor designs that would allow using current nuclear waste again as input to other types of reactors, and the problem diminishes further.

<comment><USER8> This post and your comment remind me of Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth'. As a politician, he went straight to fear-mongering rather than actually being a leader and moving us forward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If we spent the same $/TWh on coal/oil safety as we do on nuclear, maybe this would look different. Obviously, coal and oil are simply used, abundant, and cheap.

<comment><USER10> Most of the deaths from coal are related to air quality, so simply improving plant safety isn't going to do a lot to reduce the death rate.

<comment><USER5> There are plant upgrades, like various types of scrubbers, that can remove some of the worst particulates from coal plant emissions. I don't know what the marginal decrease in deaths per TWh per dollar would be, though, or how low it can go.

There are also a considerable number of deaths from mining accidents, which of course are drastically smaller for nuclear than for coal. Considering the relative amounts of mining required, this should not be a surprise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "sorry page does not exist"

<comment><USER12> That's weird - works for me. Here's a cached copy: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jvGUABA...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jvGUABAHz4wJ:nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths- per-twh-by-energy-source.html+http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh- by-energy-source.html&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Let's not have this discussion. I predict lots of heat and very little light.

<comment><USER2> It should get amusing when the crowd of folks who claimed that Fukushima was no big deal show up. Oh wait, they're here already.

<comment><USER14> It was a big deal. The point is that statistically such incidents kill and injure far fewer than coal, natural gas, or even hydroelectricity.

<comment><USER15> it's not about deaths. it's about lives.

<comment><USER14> I'm unclear as to what you're trying to say there. Are you contending that nuclear power disrupts and ruins more lives than coal power does?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Packer 0.8 released – WinRM, Windows AWS, SSH agents, SSH bastions, and more - <AUTHOR> https://hashicorp.com/blog/packer-0-8.html

<comment><USER2> woot! release monkey finally showed up, thanks guys. keep up the good work.</comment>


The Bottleneck of the Web - <AUTHOR> https://css-tricks.com/the-bottleneck-of-the-web/ <comment><USER2> > Today, the main bottleneck is JavaScript. The amount of JavaScript on pages > is growing rapidly (nearly 5x in the last 7 years).

How about we stop placating developers that create trash heaps like that? If the browsers become twice as fast they'll just add twice as much ads and tracking.</comment>


Tell-All Book About the Legal System Coming Soon - <AUTHOR> https://xyrlo.com/blog/6/the-end-of-my-legal-career/ <comment><USER2> Doesn't sound like anything new. Never heard of the guy.</comment>


Manufacturing is taking off in India. But not in the way many hoped - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/21560263

<comment><USER2> >But "commodity manufacturing is unsuccessful. It is the opposite of China…We have archaic labour laws. Nobody in their right mind is going to set up a plant employing 10,000 people."

This. The labour laws protect unions; many businesses simply do not want to create large manufacturing jobs due to historical labour trouble. The communist ruled states of Kerala and (previously) West Bengal have been very prone to labour troubles and strikes in the past. We don't have a Scott Walker (R-Wisconsin) here to take these labour unions on. Most of our politicians consider the unions as a good place to buy votes for cheap, and wouldn't consider reforming the old labour laws. Indian IT has far less union laws and has had a higher growth rate in the past decade, whereas manufacturing and textiles are still laggards in terms of growth. There is just too much socialism in this country. And people want even more.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the comment. To add to that, <http://www.voxeu.org/article/why- india-lags-behind-china>

_The most important factor that still holds back large firms from entering these products is a set of draconian labour laws in India. Under these laws, it is virtually impossible for a firm with 100 or more employees to fire the workers even in the face of bankruptcy. It is equally difficult for the firms to reassign the workers from one task to another. These provisions impose very low worker productivity or a high real cost of labour. Large-scale capital- intensive sectors such as automobiles, where labour costs are a tiny proportion of the total costs, can profitably operate in such an environment. But the same is not true of large-scale labour-intensive sectors labour. Few foreign manufacturers are willing to enter India outside of a small subset of capital- and skilled-labour intensive sectors._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there any other place in the world, called a "nation" but made up of 28 different states, each with its own unique language and culture (not _minorities_ , but full blown states)? Just see what happened in Europe when they tried to unite their currency.

In reality, India is more like Europe than the US (shared culture and history, different national entities, never really jointly ruled until modern times), yet its government is centralized and cultivates hopes of becoming like China. I'd be extremely sad to see India break up into separate states, but I'm becoming more and more convinced it's the only way to solve its real problems.

<comment><USER5> You would surprised to see how mind numbingly similar the middle class is across all the states in India. Or for that matter similar to middle classes across the world.

Also - I dont think breaking it up will solve anything - If anything pakistan and bangladesh are excellent examples of states that were broken out of what you could call old India, and their struggles are getting worse after 60 odd years, not better.

<comment><USER4> I'm not Indian, but I do know Tamil, Bangla and Hindi, and love this country. I've been watching the rise of the middle class in India, and was devastated to see how the poor have become much much poorer (I'm thinking about Adivasis and migrant workers mostly), and how some north Indian families that were semi-middle class ten years ago, are poor now. The situation is really bad, IMO, and I hope there will be some improvement in the near future, perhaps after the imminent fall of the UPA2 government (though the alternatives seem just as bad...).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is indeed possible that India may become 'the next workshop of the world'. This will, at least in the short term, lift the country more in the span of a decade than it has risen, against all odds I might add, in the last 50 years. The only thing we Indians need to do is change our cultural bias against physical labour. And every passing day I can see this changing.</comment>


How to make your startup successful - <AUTHOR> http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/03/how-to-make-you.html

<comment><USER2> "The difference in diagnosis is success or failure. Succeed and you are a brilliant visionary. Fail and you are a delusional loser. The line between them is very fine."

I love it!

<comment><USER3> Yeah... doesn't really make my list of "great advice", although it is a great observation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note: the capsized ship in that picture was salvaged/righted and brought to shore (<http://tinyurl.com/2bwzdr>)

<comment><USER5> The story was mentioned here as well: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124608>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don Dodge seems so friendly!</comment>


ClojureCL – Parallel computations with OpenCL 2.0 in Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://clojurecl.uncomplicate.org/

<comment><USER2> Not to be confused with the Common Lisp Implementation Clozure CL ([http://ccl.clozure.com](http://ccl.clozure.com)).

</comment><comment><USER3> Does it work on NVIDIA GPUs?

<comment><AUTHOR> As soon as NVIDIA support OpenCL 2.0 in their drivers, which may be this year and is technically possible, but depends on their strategy to promote CUDA. But, you can write OpenCL 1.2 code with ClojureCL and it will work on NVIDIA. Or, if you need 2.0, use AMD...

<comment><USER4> Nvidia only supports OpenCL 1.1.

<comment><USER5> They recently updated their drivers and now support OpenCL 1.2 on recent GPUs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


NASA Telescopes Set Limits on Spacetime Quantum "Foam" - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/nasa-telescopes-set-limits-on-spacetime-quantum-foam.html

<comment><USER2> The "foaminess" of spacetime is a new concept to me. Thanks for sharing!</comment>


Web Developer Checklist - <AUTHOR> http://webdevchecklist.com/ <comment><USER4> Liked the favicon part, very often forgotten...

Would be nice if this was open sourced so more items could have been added by the community (also framework specific checklists) but I like the concept

One thing I would add which is driving me crazy on mobile / tablet sign up pages

      - make sure your email fields are annotated with type="email"

Another common issue is with SSL mixed content waring, so I would also add

      - make sure to use protocol relative / https only URLs

(with a reminder to NOT use protocol relative URLs in email templates, your outlook users will appreciate it)

<comment><USER5> > Would be nice if this was open sourced so more items could have been added > by the community

<https://github.com/ligershark/webdevchecklist.com>

<comment><USER6> It is open source, but I can't seem to find a license on that page, so it may not be free software. I would be reluctant to modify and redistribute copies of it.

<comment><USER7> An Apache 2.0 license has just been added

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I see that Jakob Nielsen's venerable "Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design" checklist

<http://www.nngroup.com/articles/top-10-mistakes-web-design/>

just got new styling the other day, as I work on updating my seventeen-year- old personal website.

There are still a LOT of websites that make several of those top ten mistakes. They are higher priority than many of the other issues mentioned on the checklist kindly submitted here. As other comments here have pointed out, it's desirable in a checklist to establish priorities.

<comment><USER9> Nice list, but I think it can be condensed into one:

Use your own site and make sure you don't hate it yourself.

<comment><USER10> Simple but effective advice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A no-www domain might not be the best solution if you ever want a 'Cookie-free Domain' (static.) for images etc. which speeds up your site. If you start with a no-www domain you have to setup a different domain (no subdomain) for it: like sstatic.net for SO, ytimg.com for YT and yimg.com for Yahoo.

 _When the browser makes a request for a static image and sends cookies together with the request, the server doesn't have any use for those cookies. So they only create network traffic for no good reason. You should make sure static components are requested with cookie-free requests. Create a subdomain and host all your static components there._

 _If your domain is www.example.org, you can host your static components on static.example.org. However, if you've already set cookies on the top-level domain example.org as opposed to www.example.org, then all the requests to static.example.org will include those cookies. In this case, you can buy a whole new domain, host your static components there, and keep this domain cookie-free._

[http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#cookie_fre...](http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#cookie_free)

<comment><USER12> I never considered this before. A great tip, thanks

<comment><USER13> Bear in mind that making sure requests for static content don't send cookies is pretty far down the front-end optimisation ladder - there are normally a lot of things you can do first that are quicker, easier, and have a bigger impact.

<comment><USER11> Well another thing is that it's easier to setup GEO-ip stuff in a CNAME (so www) instead of the root A records, for now at least in PowerDNS (used by Wikipedia etc.). You're completely right, but if your sites ever scales to something big you're not in the best position with a no-www, in my view having a www record (and no-www redirect) has more benefits that a no-www.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interestingly enough this website doesn't have:

1) Custom 404 page

2) robots.txt

3) PICS label

4) viewport meta-tag

5) Google Rich Snippets

6) Fails the recommended CSS validator

<comment><USER15> It has the top items now..

<comment><USER16> Does it? I typed in <http://webdevchecklist.com/robots.txt> and it gave me a bog-standard IIS 404 page, not a custom one.

<comment><USER17> At least it was nice enough to reveal a bunch of server information, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> sorry but that

       Remove 'www' subdomain

is just harmful. force 'www.' instead. why? shitty URL parsers, marketing people and DDOS attacks, that's why.

let's imagine you write a

      - blog post
      - blog comment
      - press release (distributed via free and paid press release services)
      - <USER2>
      - <USER3>
      - forum post
      - ...
      - ...

if you have a non-www URL it's a game of chance, your in text "whatever.tld" domain will get transformed into a clickable link. yes, a lot of modern URL parses will transform whatever.com into a clickable link, some will even transform whatever.in into a useable link, but a lot of old, shitty, idiotic, strange URL parsers won't. and well, a big part of the web, i would say most of it, is not up to date. so using non WWW will lead to a loss of inlinks and to a poor user experience of users who want to reach your site, but can't click on the in-text-domain (they need to copy/paste instead)

and the situation will get worse with the new commercial TLDs to come.

yes, you can - in most cases - force a domain to link conversion in most CMS if you write <http://> in front of it. but well, in a promo text most marketing/pr people will not write "and <http://whatever.tld> has a new feature to give people endless bliss" they will write "whatever.tld has a new ....".

oh, and by the way. whenever a journalist will write a piece about you, in print or online, they will always (or at least in a lot of cases) write www in front of your domain anyway. yeah, that's not an issue if you have redirects in place, just annoying if you have an non-www webproperty.

plus

having a subdomain is another layer of defenses agains DDOS attacks. see this discussion on hacker news from may 18 2011 (my birthday by the way) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2575266>

go for www.

<comment><USER19> And yet, I find no-www so much cleaner. With 301s it's generally not a problem, and link parsers will look for the protocol anyway. I think the only valid point is mitigating DDOS attacks, but I don't know enough about that subject to comment.

<comment><USER18> but in marketing, as in mails and comments, you or your loyal users do not always write <http://> in front of your domain.

i consulted a sh-tload of companies on this question (and yes, i also think i have better things to do), any company that chooses non-www URLs regrets it down the road.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Custom 404 page under usability? hmm.

I'm sure just about anyone who has used the web for any length of time has hit the standard apache "Not found" page hundreds of times now and pretty much knows what it means.

Custom 404 pages of often quite confusing as they will try to be clever and redirect you to other content that may be interesting. Sometimes these aren't clear and give the impression that the link was not broken and that this is where the site designer intended you to go which leaves you looking around the page for the content you thought you were going to get.

<comment><USER21> I prefer the 404 pages that something to the effect of "Sorry, that is broken" and then include the results of a site search of the keywords or friendly url that was provided.

It's less confusing and keeps people on site.

<comment><USER22> If you do this (which you should in my opinion), please return the 404 code. For example Facebook used to return 200 on error. Very confusing.

<comment><USER21> Absolutely, I assumed that was a given.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Would be nice to have this automatically generated for a given URL.

</comment><comment><USER24> A document that bills itself as "The ultimate checklist for all serious web developers" should not hide most of its content (via CSS) and require trusting some unknown author's javascript to display it.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's sad how "Security" there's only _one_ very generalizing item. "Implement best practices". Right.

Is the author just ignorant, or am I a fool thinking that _if anything_ it should be "Security" which has the most elaborate items?

<comment><USER26> Security checklist: [https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Application_S...](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Application_Security_Verification_Standard_Project)

Lowest level 1a has 22 things to verify, highest level 4 has 121 things to verify. That's a lot of checkboxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I would add one: Make sure your log-in form is uncomplicated so that browsers can remember passwords correctly.

</comment><comment><USER28> So "SEO" has four different checkboxes but "Security" has just one: "Implement best practices"

Uh...I think that can be broken down to at least two different things...

<comment><USER29> The second being 'cross your fingers'...?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What would be the best approach to automate this so I could put in a URL and it detects as much as it can about the website?

<comment><USER31> I was thinking about this a couple of days ago. The way I would do it is to submit it individually to each of the checks (e.g. W3C validator) and scrape the results. There may be APIs available for some, I've not looked into that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Good stuff, I'll probably use this for clients who say, "What have you been doing? It looks done to me!"

<comment><USER29> This drives me nuts. On the surface there is very little difference between `just functional' and `production ready'. And it's a hard sell if the client is not aware of the benefits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Another nice list: [http://www.boxuk.com/blog/the-ultimate-website-launch- checkl...](http://www.boxuk.com/blog/the-ultimate-website-launch-checklist)

</comment><comment><USER34> I have a sublist of that, that I built over the last ~year of hacking on web projects. One of my biggest to dos in each project is automate stuff like validating. I still haven't really found a good way so I either go to w3c and check everything once in a while or I just don't. Usually I just don't.

This to me is like a checklist of things to automate. Is there any "build" system for the web?

</comment><comment><USER35> Great start. Wish it were set up to be collaborative so we could suggest some of the missing elements.

<comment><USER36> Perhaps you could fork it (<https://github.com/ligershark/webdevchecklist.com>) and send a pull request.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Solid functionality that I'll personally use. Good work.

</comment><comment><USER38> I did something similar - a checklist for prelaunch which you might find some useful things to add to your list: <https://bitbucket.org/steerpike/checklist>

</comment><comment><USER39> Nice work, I use this at the moment <http://lite.launchlist.net/> as it has more checks and well a prettier interface.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'd add: check your SSL certificate installation using a tool like this: <http://certlogik.com/ssl-checker/>

<comment> lost-theory Cool, I haven't seen that one before. I also like this one: <https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I built a public trello board from this list: not quite sure if that's the best presentation (should it be one card for each heading?), but ideally people would clone it to work on their own sites, and make contributions of new cards/info for existing cards on the main board. <https://trello.com/b/hkC4B6HA>

</comment><comment><USER42> What do people here think of no-www? I personally hate www and see no reason to unnecessarily increase my url length by 4 characters.

<comment><USER18> sorry, saw this too late, please see my comment above <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5025293>

</comment></comment><comment> zupa-hu WoW I am building an automated tool right now for exactly that. It is in private beta. Anyone interested in test riding it drop me a line!

<http://site-analytics.org/> The intro is already outdated, I'll make a new one very soon.

</comment><comment><USER43> Thx for sharing. For a newbie in web dev (like me), it is a great resource. Bookmarked.

</comment><comment><USER44> I have a template project in Basecamp that contains a similar kind of list of tasks that I use to launch all projects.

Just have to create a new project with the template for each launch and then work your way down.

</comment><comment><USER45> Is it time for feature requests? It'd be great to get integration with common management tools (e.g. Github Issues, Trello), so that the list can automatically be imported for a given milestone.

</comment><comment><USER46> And people say web development isn't difficult.

</comment><comment><USER47> Really good for showing customers/bosses/coworkers why a site need those extra hours of love after the proof-of-concept stage.

</comment><comment><USER48> Security > Cross-site scripting > XSS cheat sheet link is broken. Funny considering the first item in the checklist.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is cool, I expect a lot of people could get use out of this. The security section is kind of amusing, though.

</comment><comment><USER50> The spellcheck item didn't have a link. Any good spellchecker bots out there?

</comment><comment><USER51> You might want to link your href-s to new tab/window.

<comment><USER52> No. That's what the back button, middle-click, or (cmd/ctrl/whatever it's mapped as) + click are for.

<comment><USER53> I prefer links away from 'apps' like this site to open in a new window or tab. I'd like the app to preserve its state, not replace itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> No clean URLs?

How about setting up automated backups?

<comment><USER55> Clean URLs aren't really necessary and can be difficult with some frameworks.

Automated backups also aren't necessary for all sites, particularly if the entire site is in a source repository somewhere and doesn't have users.

<comment><USER54> Clean URLs are just as useful and visible as the favicon, or custom error pages, or many other "unnecessary" features.

You need to backup production sites. A repo could do that, but it's just another backup system that needs to be implemented and verified.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Nice list. Missing: HiDPI images.

</comment><comment><USER57> Big time bookmark. Thanks!

<comment><USER58> +1 thanks for this!</comment></comment>