Amazon Doesn't Consider the Race of Its Customers. Should It? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-amazon-same-day/ <comment><USER2> The article answers its own question. Amazon decides which neighborhoods get Prime Same Day service by the number of Prime subscribers in that neighborhood. Predominantly African-American neighborhoods have fewer Prime subscribers, so they don't get Prime Same Day; presumably it would be even less profitable to serve those neighborhoods than it is to offer Prime Same Day to neighborhoods with high concentrations of Prime subscribers.

The article feels to me like a stretch. It isn't up to Amazon to solve racial and income inequalities in the US. And, by all accounts, Prime Same Day isn't a money-maker for Amazon. So the writers of this article are asking Amazon to lose even more money in an effort to offer same-day deliveries to underserved neighborhoods. It's a valid ask, but I won't be too outraged if Amazon continues on its present course.

<comment><USER3> Of course, there was that bit recently where some arm of the US gov't said that discriminating based on criminal record might be illegal because minorities have proportionately more criminal records, making discrimination based on criminal record, racism. So I no longer know which way is up in regards to this stuff.

<comment><USER4> Black people are more likely to be convicted of drug crimes even when they use drugs at the same rates as white people. Similar for traffic crimes.

Many crimes are poverty-related theft for subsistence, which rich people never need to be tempted with (as they get handouts from their parents) aren't particularly relevant if someone gets a job that eliminates poverty. And childhood poverty is correlated to race.

So yeah, screening by criminal record is intertwined with structural racism.

<comment><USER5> >>Many crimes are poverty-related theft for subsistence

Is poverty an acceptable justification for crimes? If yes, there are many issues: how much poor one should be to justify this? how much rich the other person (whom the poor one robbed) should be to justify this? What are the acceptable reasons why the poor one remained poor in the first place? what kind of reasons/ways how the rich become rich due to/using are acceptable to make the rich person a right target for the society to accept his/her being robbed by a poor is justifiable? What about the poor ones giving birth to children when they know they cannot afford things, and then they rob others to justify that they did this for their children and did so out of poverty? and so on.

There are many, many such issues. I am not saying that there are not any racism related issues but just trying to hide everything behind racism and/or trying to sideline such issues is not going to help either the black people or in general the USA.

edit: added more examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "White areas get organic grocers and designer boutiques" \- no faster way to get out of poverty than shopping at Whole Foods

<comment><USER7> The basics at WF's are reasonably priced. I want to hate stores, but the CEO did a good job lowering prices on certain items. 1/2 gallon milk is $2.29. Some bread is reasonable. Their store brand (nature someting) is a good deal. They got a $2.49 bottle of wine that's a lost leader.

Everything else is priced for Thurston Howell III.

<comment><USER8> Been a bit since I bought a gallon of milk, but I distinctly remember it being <$3. How is $2.29 for a half gallon a reasonable price?

But then again, I also balk at paying >$1 for a loaf of bread so maybe I'm just a cheapskate.

<comment><USER9> Prices very significantly depending upon where you are.

Across the whole country, $2.29 is fairly average for a half-gallon, but in Detroit the average is about $1.50.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm disappointed though not surprised by comments suggesting that Amazon only pay attention to their bottom line. Why _shouldn 't_ they do more for racial inequality? That's just as meaningful as $$. Powerful corporations are more and more like governments -- they _should_ be looking out for us, and we _should_ be asking them to.

Why not raise our standards?

<comment><USER11> You're proposing that Amazon's employees, customers, and shareholders pay out of their pockets to fund your social engineering project.

How about this instead: You get together with a bunch of your social justice-y friends, pool a few hundred million dollars, then offer it to Amazon, on the condition that they start serving these neighborhoods.

Everyone wins! The only difference is that now _you_ are the one who has to pay for your virtue-signaling social crusade. But you're cool with that right?

<comment><USER12> Hmm. Amazon puts a few pennies extra onto my items, and poor communities get access to a service that's much cheaper than shopping at a convenience store? Freeing up their capital to spend elsewhere in the economy, like on products and services my company offers?

Where do I sign up?

<comment><USER11> Great! Hey lusen - you've got a guy here willing to pay _a few pennies_ to the social justice virtue signaling fund!

This guy really puts his money where is mouth is!

Just find a billion more people at his level of commitment and you'll be golden.

<comment><USER12> Sarcasm aside, what's a few pennies per sale on $105bn in sales?

<comment><USER13> Because Amazon's profit is only a few pennies per sale.

You're basically asking Amazon to double their profit margin by raising prices, and then give away half of it to fix social injustice?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How about Amazon just focus on maximizing profit within the boundary of the law of the given area?

<comment><USER15> That would be racist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> No.

That was easy. Next question?

<comment><USER17> Not only that, the article doesn't even consider the question posed in the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> They're also pretty bad at rolling out their services to countries outside of the US. In Canada we've been told that we're getting Amazon's MP3 music store for years, but it still hasn't come, let alone any Amazon video. I'm actually somewhat surprised that we got Kindle books, although that was years after the US. You can forget things like the Echo at all.

Amazon Prime is just shipping in Canada. Where I live, I'd get shipments about a day sooner than free shipping so it's not worth it for me.

<comment><USER19> Amazon is also pretty bad with services in Europe. Amazon Germany is used to try out new services and was also the test region for Prime years before Amazon US got it. The Prime advertisement and nag screens are so annoying on Amazon Germany, so many now many use Amazon UK and US which have a far better user experience and things are cheaper as well. The packages come from the same warehouses anyway. And Amazon Germany's warehouse label now all packages with a Prime package. And the package come on the next day. (Due to introducing Prime as testing object in Germany many years ago, the delivered slowed down from 2-3 days to 4-6 days for any non-Prime member) Maybe it's the fault of their chaos. No wonder the Amazon Germany webshop is running on an years old software version, with good but long gone features like sorting items by lower prize or popularity, but otherwise rotten experience. It used to run on the 1999-ish version until 2006 or so, basically unchanged. The US version got several new relaunches back then. If an Amazon exec reads this, please do your A/B tests and product testing somewhere else and scrap the old forked codebase of Amazon Germany.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> AMZN can take a clue from [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325502/Map-shows- wo...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325502/Map-shows-worlds- racist-countries-answers-surprise-you.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> Duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11541612](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11541612) (4 days ago)

</comment><comment><USER22> My god, how could anyone be expected to overcome poverty and inequality without same-day prime delivery? Sure there's still two-day prime delivery that the majority of Amazon Prime members of all races have, but clearly that's no different than the grim inequality of segregated water fountains and poll taxes.

The implied conclusion is that a business should do something that loses them revenue if the alternative is a vague insinuation of structural racism. By this same logic, luxury car dealerships should build their showrooms in inner- city ghettos and rural areas because everyone has a right to test drive a Ferrari, economics be damned.

<comment><USER12> That's a bit of a reductio ad absurdum. Same-day Prime service is a bit of a luxury now, but so was internet access twenty years ago. Widespread internet access has had many positive economic effects in poor communities. Better Prime access may do to the same, as the article says, by increasing the range of available goods and reducing their prices - both positive effects in poor communities.

<comment><USER22> This is equivalent to an article arguing that 50 mb/s internet isn't fast enough and every community should be offered 100 mb/s internet, even if doing so causes large net losses to the providers.

They don't produce any evidence that the difference between one day and two day shipping has a negative impact on people's ability to increase the amount of available goods and obtain them at lower prices. Is there some mysterious perishable, necessary good that can only be ordered 24 hours in advance that unlocks upward mobility?

<comment><USER5> Great response Dr_tldr. One day vs two day shipping should not even be an issue to whine about. Tomorrow these socialist-minded activists may demand many such things (same day delivery, 1gbps internet and so on) in the name of social good and these they demand invariably at the cost of other businesses and other people. They should do that on their own. Besides, anything given for free isn't much appreciated by the receivers too.

Even the government should be cautious, as too much of tax money spent on "such social" projects is not much good for the society as a whole. UK welfare system is a good example how bad such "social" projects can be for the society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Betteridge's law.

<comment><USER24> And an incredibly lazy iteration of it, at that. Business Week was much better reading before Bloomberg bought it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Clearly Amazon.com is racist.</comment>


Rendering HTML at 1000 FPS – Part 1 - <AUTHOR> https://stoyannk.wordpress.com/2017/10/25/rendering-html-at-1000-fps-part-1/ <comment> c-smile If the only what you have are static images then it does not matter is it HTML or anything else - it will be rendered fast enough as images are on GPU side already.

For the note, here are two HTML layers and one DirectX layer rendering on the same DXGI surface: [https://sciter.com/sciter-and- directx/](https://sciter.com/sciter-and-directx/)

In tests it showed 400 fps or so ...

I mean that HTML rendering is in principle not different from rendering by any other means. You just need to know how particular browser in that particular version does that and optimize for that...

<comment><USER2> If this is targeted at VR apps and running alongside 3D content, 400 fps would already mean snatching 10% of the render time allowance from a 40 fps app. Or 25% of render time from a 100 FPS app.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Rate My App - <AUTHOR>

http://zhongd.org
I made this online Chinese dictionary over a year ago because I didn't like anything else available. I've only shared it with my friends studying Chinese, who seem to prefer it.
I'm attempting to bootstrap a startup in Boston at the moment and was thinking about trying to increase traffic and make a few bucks off ads to fuel my real baby.
I'd love feedback on its functionality, appearance, or how you would approach making money off of it.
Thanks HN! <comment><USER2> it seems pretty functional and useful. the design could use some polish, though.</comment>


Building historical road layouts from todays data - <AUTHOR> http://sk53-osm.blogspot.com/2014/12/city-stripping-building-historical-road.html

<comment><USER2> It's an interesting work, but it's difficult. I found a few historical inaccuracies.

For example, in the reconstructed map the Avenida de Mayo ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenida_de_Mayo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenida_de_Mayo) ) ends with a curved path near the Plaza Congreso ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Plaza](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Plaza)). I live only a few blocks away, so I know the zone very well. Perhaps a link to the current Google map may help you to understand the discussion: [https://www.google.com.ar/maps/@-34.6094993,-58.3877341,17z](https://www.google.com.ar/maps/@-34.6094993,-58.3877341,17z)

In the scanned map at the top of the article, the Avenida de Mayo is a straight line and ends in a perpendicular intersection. In the current map, it ends with a curved path that allows the cars to go into Avenida Rivadavia. The Wikipedia article about Plaza Congreso explains that they didn't want to cut the Plaza Loreto because it was used a as water supply for the carriages, and the new extension was created in 1910.

Also, many of the Avenues marked in the map, in that time were usual narrow streets. The increase of the wide was a much later project, but I can't find the date now.</comment>


Ask HN: What non technical skills do you think are valuable to startups? - <AUTHOR> Forget anything CS-related, what other skills do you think are valuable to startups in the first 3 years? <comment><USER2> Sales for b2b. Marketing for b2c.

No matter how good your product is, if you don't get traction, you're dead in the water.</comment>


Ask HN: Any open AR library out there for mobile like Pokemon, Ingress, etc? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Unity has great tools -> [https://artoolkit.org/documentation/doku.php?id=6_Unity:unit...](https://artoolkit.org/documentation/doku.php?id=6_Unity:unity_about)

see also, the wiki answers (scroll slightly down the page) ... [http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/15215/unity-3d-and- augm...](http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/15215/unity-3d-and-augmented- reality.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks great I'll check it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some Javascript/Browser resources:

[1] threeVR, an orientation-aware Virtual Reality controller built on top of three.js: [https://github.com/richtr/threeVR](https://github.com/richtr/threeVR)

[2] Full-Tilt, device orientation + motion detection, normalization and conversion library: [https://github.com/adtile/Full- Tilt](https://github.com/adtile/Full-Tilt)

[3] Compass demo, by the same person as Full-Tilt: [https://richtr.github.io/Marine-Compass/](https://richtr.github.io/Marine- Compass/)

[4] Mirror of some of the older Full-Tilt demos: [https://jbmoelker.github.io/Full- Tilt/examples/](https://jbmoelker.github.io/Full-Tilt/examples/)

(There was also a good 360-degree VR demo before Full-Tilt changed urls, it used to be also hosted under richtr.github.io, I can't find it anymore but I'll try... this was a distinct but similar demo to [1] and it had a beach end-of-pier scene)

[5] gyronorm.js, to correct some DeviceOrientation bugs: [https://github.com/dorukeker/gyronorm.js](https://github.com/dorukeker/gyronorm.js)

[6] An MDN blog post on DeviceOrientation: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/Apps/Fundamentals/gather...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/Apps/Fundamentals/gather_and_modify_data/responding_to_device_orientation_changes)

</comment><comment><USER4> What exactly are you looking for? The augmented reality in Pokemon Go basically amounts to them using them opening the camera and using the gyroscope to position a character on screen. It's a cool effect, but it's probably something like ten lines of code in Unity. Well it is, I've done it myself. You don't need a library for just that.

<comment><USER5> The non-flying characters are also positioned on the ground. Thats something you'd want a library for.

<comment><USER6> There isn't any ground detection. It pretty clearly just positions it about 40 degrees bellow straight ahead. And 40 degrees above for air Pokemon. It's especially evident when you have a desk or something behind you, the Pokemon will look distant.

As far as AR goes the math needed to do what they do is pretty trivial.</comment></comment></comment>


Is OOP dead? - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/100130971560879475093/posts/1AALz7uuHLy

<comment><USER2> IMHO barring OOP from CS curriculum is just as ridiculous as basing your entire curriculum on OOP. I can understand certain people's hatred of OOP but it is certainly appropriate in certain circumstances. The most well educated will be those who know when to use a design pattern and when not to.

<comment><USER3> I think that people that hate OO, never learned to use it properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> First comment: "...At least this way, CMU students will be inoculated against blind indoctrination." Because functional programmers are never trying to indoctrinate you... Right?

</comment><comment><USER5> No.

Gustavo Niemeyer Yesterday 10:51 AM

Probably a wise decision to introduce people to the idea of programming. I doubt CMU would be making such silly overarching claims, though. In fact, it isn't [1]:

_"Our planned 15-214 course on software system construction will have much more extensive coverage of concurrency, as well as object-oriented abstractions. Both of these are key components of most large-scale, distributed software systems."_

"Although object-oriented programming (in its myriad forms) remains a dominant theme in industrial software development, the use of object oriented languages, such as Java, at the introductory level introduces considerable complexity and distracts from the core goals at the introductory level. It seems preferable to give fuller coverage of OO design and implementation methodology to later in the curriculum to allow more focused concentration on basics at the introductory level."

[1] [http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/2010/CMU- CS-10-14...](http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/2010/CMU- CS-10-140.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> I think that OOP is undead. It will be in its current incarnation a zombie that will live on and on because we have a lot of legacy code. But if you start project from scratch ... there are better approaches.

I think that Kay was thinking of objects in the context of messaging and terminating network nodes, not stuff that shares same memory space.

<comment><USER3> > But if you start project from scratch ... there are better approaches.

In what languages? Except for C, Pascal and pure FP languages, most modern languages are anyway either OO based or multi-paradigm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Given that all mainstream languages have some form of OO support, it is a bit hard to consider it dead.

OO is not the only way to code applications, it all depends on the domain.

Additionally I think the future is anyway multi-paradigm.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think it is good to focus on only one paradigme initially, and functional programming is a good choice. Later they learn other paradigma's and how they can be combined.

Good work!</comment>


Show HN: UCM – useful cmake macros for cleaner CMakeLists.txt files - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/onqtam/ucm <comment><AUTHOR> eases working with \- compiler flags \- precompiled headers \- unity builds \- static/dynamic runtime \- source file globbing \- filters in the solution explorer of IDEs</comment>


Ask HN: What are the common sensors you would buy to make your own ECG? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> you mean this? [https://www.getqardio.com/en/qardiocore-wearable-ecg-ekg- mon...](https://www.getqardio.com/en/qardiocore-wearable-ecg-ekg-monitor- iphone/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup! Qardio is one of the interesting ecg I discovered online. Many more out there and I was wondering what kind of sensors are used.</comment></comment>


Confirmed infected Covid-19 case growth conforms to a power law curve - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200428112535.htm <comment><AUTHOR> Researchers in Brazil analyzed the growth of confirmed infected COVID-19 cases across four continents to better characterize the spread of the virus and examine which strategies are effective in reducing its spread.

Their results, published in Chaos, from AIP Publishing, found the virus commonly grows along a power law curve, in which the social, economic and geographical features of a particular area affect the exponent to which the infection spreads rather than affecting traits of the infection itself.</comment>


What does News.YC think of distributed version control? - <AUTHOR> http://www.madstop.com/development/distributed_version_control.html

<comment><USER2> I rank distributed version control as one of the most significant advancements in software development in the past decade. Why?

1\. Ease of branching and merging.

Branch as often as you want, merge as often as you want, from as many different branches as necessary. The importance of isolating stable releases, bug fixes, experimental features, etc can't be overstated and DVCS makes doing so very easy.

2\. Offline use.

All of the popular DCVS provide full functionality within each local repository/branch/whatever. Being disconnected won't keep you from branching or merging, which gets back to #1. It's also very easy to share branches between two laptops for instant mobile collaboration.

3\. Ease of sharing changes.

Most DVCS support easy sending of local changes to a project maintainer. This really does make it much more likely that a user will grab a copy of the source, make some improvements, and submit those back to the community. No more messing with diff formats, finding the maintainer's email address, etc.

\--

Of all the DVCS, I recommend mercurial (hg) for the best blend of ease of use, performance, portability, etc. Darcs is my real favorite, but currently has issues with conflicts. Bazaar-NG (bzr) looks promising as well. I avoid git like the plague... far too complex and unwieldy for my taste.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd recommend darcs or git. Check out Linus' talk on git, he basically spends 70 minutes talking about why a distributed VCS is vastly superior to any centralized system.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8>

<comment><USER4> Do you use either one?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds good, but I'll take a wait and see attitude, let the dust settle, and see what has emerged. The benefits to me of using one aren't enough to justify being on the "cutting edge", so I'll just stick to subversion for now.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm working with a client whose chosen Mercurial. I like being able to group relevant changes into one commit, comment it and then move on to the next commit, without interfering with the trunk.

Mercurial leaves much to be desired in the efficiency of it's copies -- it's file backed, not db backed, using copy on write for copies; whereas Subversion delta encodes everything. While cheap storage is not such a big deal for managing source code, it does matter when using version control for art assets.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use mercurial and am very happy with it. All you need to use it is a python implementation.

I haven't checked out the other distributed revision control systems.

</comment><comment><USER4> The MQ extension for Mercurial lets you manipulate and version control the _patches_ as well as the actual code. It's kinda weird -- "higher-order version control".

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been wanting to try Mercurial for a while now, but I've not gotten around to it.

<comment><USER7> Why the mod-down?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am happy git user

<comment><USER4> Why was this post down-modded?</comment></comment>


Debian Now Defaults To Xfce Desktop - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE1NTk <comment><USER2> This is what I love about linux on the desktop, on one thread we've got serious complaints about usability, on another thread we're switching window managers because it won't fit on a CD.

A CD? In 2012? Windows and OS X haven't fit on a CD in almost 10 years and you can barely find a copy of OS X on DVD. Yet the primary concern on linux is not usability but whether it fits on an install CD.

I think there might be higher priority concerns than whether a user is able to install a modern operating system on the Pentium MMX & 8X CD drive they found in the dumpster.

<comment><USER3> Your point is understandable, but distribution restricted to the size of a CD is a major feature.

It fits right in with the linux way of supporting really old hardware. It's not about the newest and shiniest hardware. Debian is known to be a slow moving but very stable distribution. Support for older hardware (without DVD Reader/Writers) might have been a big point of consideration.

<comment><USER2> People like you and me will have no problem creating a custom install CD that defaults to XFCE to run on our really old hardware.

Normal people will download a debian CD and get XFCE and think that's linux on the desktop.

What I don't understand is why linux always optimizes for the corner case of a couple ultra cheap geeks who can't stand the idea of upgrading their 300 mhz celeron.

<comment><USER4> Linux is used a lot in countries where buying the last and greatest is not an option, nor is fast internet connection.

<comment><USER5> My understanding was that even in those cases, most people just pirate windows xp. I am not even close to a windows lover, but have you seen the system requirements for windows xp? <http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314865>

Basically a 233MGhz processor and 64mb of ram will get you a usable windows xp installation.

<comment><USER6> "usable"? No. Those specs are simply wrong.

But even then, you're showing incredible hubris by saying "screw those guys, let them pirate XP". Debian's strength is that it tries to be universal - platforms and languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since all desktop environments in Debian are maintained with equal commitments and you can install any of them easily, change of "default" desktop environment is a rather symbolic gesture.

Technically, the reason for the change is that GNOME won't fit in a CD without a diet and Xfce will. I am not sure how many people install Debian with CD (not DVD, not USB, not network install, etc.) though...

<comment><USER8> One point would be that if you're setting up rackmount server hardware, it still tends to come with a CD drive rather than DVD. That's one of Debian's primary purposes nowadays, given that Ubuntu has eaten most of its desktop market-share away.

<comment><USER9> The last few rack-mounted servers we bought came with DVD _writers_ , which seemed a little redundant to me. In our case, we only ever use the DVD drive once, to install CentOS, and then it's closed up and never used again. I can't imagine any situation where you'd want to write a DVD using a server...

<comment><USER10> I've talked to many an admin writing their backups to dvd. Not the way I'd do it, but..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm glad XFCE is finally getting the attention it deserves. It is clean, simple, usable, and well-designed. Gnome 3, while arguably having better design, has awful usability.

<comment><USER3> Call me paranoid, but I'm scared it's also getting the attention it probably shouldn't.

<comment><USER12> 6 years ago, you could simply install xfc4-panel - or any other XFCE package - individually without too much fanfare. It would happily install and run no matter what WM you were using. These days, trying to install xfce4-panel individually is impossible as it will force you to install an army of "additional" packages, some even originating from GNOME.

XFCE is not the same "lightweight" desktop environment it once was. That task is now handed over to LXDE.

<comment><USER13> In the meantime, GNOME and KDE have moved on to something else: shiny, full of animations, and resource-hungry. I think it's only natural that some other desktop environment has moved to fill the void where GNOME 2 and KDE 3 used to be. LXDE now fills the place where XFCE used to be. Sooner or later, something else will fill the space where LXDE used to be, etc, etc, and life goes on!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I just rediscovered XFCE myself after the brutal letdown that was KDE "plasma" 4.x.

I still load on the full KDE groupinstall so I can run KDE apps, but I use XFCE as the desktop. I had fogotten just how "snappy" a desktop could be.

<comment><USER15> Absolutely. I've been on Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE) for several years, but I tried out stock Ubuntu on my netbook a few months ago — just to see the Unity desktop firsthand. This is a cheapo Dell netbook from 2009, 1024x600 resolution. Unity was so slow as to be completely unusable, and it took up precious screen real estate with a launcher bar I could not remove. It basically turned that netbook into a brick.

Now that I'm back to XFCE, with the panel set to auto-hide, I can hack with that laptop again, no problem.

I don't think you ought to need the latest and greatest machine just to run a responsive OS. XFCE is simple, fast, and gives you what you need with no unwelcome surprises.

<comment><USER16> I run 12.04 on a similar netbook but I don't feel Unity particularly slow. Of course, the Atom processor in it isn't designed to be fast, but it's usable.

And the launcher can be turned off.

<comment><USER15> You might have a different definition of "completely unusable" from mine, but have you ever compared XFCE and Unity on the same machine? I'm accustomed to a snappy DE. I don't expect to wait 30 seconds+ for the most basic desktop to show up on boot, and when I drag windows I expect them to move instantly with no visible lag. Unity didn't meet those expectations on my Mini 10v. XFCE does easily.

<comment><USER16> Yes. I'm running xfce right now, but I really don't see much of a difference apart from the lack of glitz. Memory seems to be a little bit lower, but not that much.

Another option for the memory constrained is Unity2D (and hiding the launcher for the pixel-constrained). It uses screen real estate a little bit more efficiently than xfce and looks nicer.

<comment><USER15> Weird, I might have to try it again sometime. I definitely remember thinking Unity's performance was horrible, but some of that may be confirmation bias (I expected going in that XFCE would be lighter than other options). And I was unaware the launcher could be hidden.

<comment><USER17> I'll second that. The first release with Unity (11.04?) was dradful. The second fixed some major issues, and now it's perfectly usable (unless you're particularly set in your ways). I run 12.04 on an older Eee, and it's not noticeably faster or slower than when I was running Xubuntu before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Call me old fashioned, but I would really like some "old new distro"

Put modern packages, but not "new" packages . No pulseaudio, packagekit, networkmanager. You don't need to worry about automounting usb for example

Get me the latest version of KDE 3

That would be very fast in any modern machine

<comment><USER19> Honestly, most of these are necessary evils these days. New sound cards are cheaper than old ones, and don't support software mixing. Hence Pulseaudio. (Not to mention things like Bluetooth headsets, which don't appear as ALSA devices and instead are natively supported by Pulseaudio.)

NetworkManager is similar -- editing wpa_supplicant configurations is a nightmare. It works from the command-line now, so it's not like it's imposing anything on you anymore.

<comment><USER20> Hasn't software mixing been in ALSA for ages, with the dmix plugin? I don't think Pulseaudio is necessary for everything.

I do see the Networkmanager is a necessary evil, but why does it have to be so awful? It's great if it works, but if it doesn't then solving the problem is extremely hard because of the bloated, uncommunicative nature of the program.

<comment><USER19> Pulseaudio can abstract over multiple devices, allowing you to mute individual applications, move streams between physical pieces of hardware, and so on. Audio mixing in kernel-space is brittle and the wrong place for the code anyway. Doing it in userspace is more secure, more flexible, and generally a good design.

<comment><USER20> In theory, maybe. In practice, Pulseaudio is just horrible and gave me troubles I have never experienced with ALSA. I'm personally convinced it's one of the biggest mistakes made in the Linux world.

However, if we're going to put the sound server in userspace, which isn't a bad idea, the kernel side should be broken down. This would be an excellent time to deprecate ALSA!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Are you a dev? Try awesome. Invest two hours of confusion and RTFM and you may never go back.

<comment><USER22> Or DWM, or Xmonad, or i3, or Spectrwm, or StumpWM... You don't even need to be a dev, just want to learn!

<comment><USER23> Find a comparison of all the tiling window managers here -- [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Comparison_of_Tiling_Wi...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Comparison_of_Tiling_Window_Managers)

The Arch community is great for support with these types of WMs.

<comment><USER24> Heck, the Arch community is great with regards to getting software (including the latest branches) up and running on a machine. Definitely a helpful community with admirable goals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Direct non-phoronix link [http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=tasksel/tasksel.git;a=co...](http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=tasksel/tasksel.git;a=commit;h=2a962cc65cdba010177f27e8824ba10d9a799a08)

</comment><comment><USER26> The information is incorrect according to Jeremy Bicha:

> Yet another poorly researched news item from Phoronix. Debian hasn't > actually switched the Wheezy default desktop to XFCE. GNOME is the default > today and could still be the default for release.

> It was changed in the git but it wasn't actually released yet. Several GNOME > packages have already been rebuilt with xz compression to make the binaries > small enough to fit on the CD.

> Switching the default desktop would be controversial and there's a lot of > inertia behind GNOME.

[https://plus.google.com/110356875332222535709/posts/46wiyitn...](https://plus.google.com/110356875332222535709/posts/46wiyitnqpJ)

</comment><comment><USER27> I was weary of xfce, it appeared to need a couple of gnome libs for some things, but man oh man, do i love it now. I have to have it everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER19> That's good. The new GNOME doesn't work very well with Xmonad anymore, so I switched to XFCE. How much code does one need to display a list of my windows at the top of the screen along with some tray applets anyway.

<comment><USER28> How so? I'm running Xmonad with GNOME 3.4 right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sounds cool to me, since I have migrated to xfce as my DE of choice anyway...

</comment><comment><USER30> Is this even lighter than Cinnamon? I've been using Cinnamon with Mint 13 for weeks now and I love that OS. If it weren't for my Hitman games, I wouldn't even boot to Windows at all these days.

</comment><comment><USER31> Looking at tasksel's changelog on a Sid installation, I see the last change was v3.12 from 21 July 2012 and I cannot find anything about changing the default desktop environment for the desktop task. So, maybe this change is not meant for the frozen Wheezy, whose taskel is already behind Sid's (v3.11 compared to Sid's v3.12).

Maybe someone familiar with Debian's decision-making and development processes could enligthen us.

</comment><comment><USER23> Coupled with the eventual shift to Wayland, a default install of Debian should be a lot slimmer and internally less chaotic.

</comment><comment><USER32> There's a fork of Gnome 2 <http://mate-desktop.org/> works very well.

</comment><comment><USER33> This makes sense to me, since >I< now default to XFce. (Been using XUbuntu as my Vbox image for awhile.)

</comment><comment><USER34> very nice i've been hoping for this for a long time ... and will be giving this consideration when my current crunchbang desktop needs a reinstall: <http://figital.typepad.com/blog/2006/06/xubuntu_with_a_.html> (hoping to see more javascript hooks now in the XFCE widgets)

</comment><comment><USER35> About time. Gnome has been suffering from 'feature' creep for years. As of late it has gone from merely unpleasant, to barely usable.

</comment><comment><USER36> Wouldn't the Wheezy feature freeze a few weeks back mean that this wouldn't apply in Stable until Debian Jesse, not Wheezy?

</comment><comment><USER37> This is because they could not fit Gnome on the disc. It was about 40 megs too big. I saw the memo the other day.

</comment><comment><USER38> I still use a self-customized BlackboxWM for my graphical mode needs. It's great on debian. =]

</comment><comment><USER39> It can still change before release.

</comment><comment><USER40> Good move, why not?

If I recall correctly, Debian is all about keeping things fast, stable and usually chosen as a good fit for a server.

In any case, most users that expect a "fully blown with bells and whistles" WM would use Ubuntu.

I'm still loving using fluxbox in my old laptop.</comment>


Ask HN: Express, Koa or Hapi – which framework would you use? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
Been googling NodeJS frameworks and there's obviously tons of options. I've narrowed it down to Express, Koa and Hapi.
Had a look at how each handles user management and it seems that there's some additional work involved.
Just wanted to see if anyone's had experiences with any of these frameworks and wanted to learn about them. <comment><USER2> I still am using express. Express 4 really solved some of the headaches of prior versions, and we have custom middleware we wrote and have good patterns for separation of routes/controllers and views. So it works well for us, and the community is the largest so support and help is easy to find.

hapi is good but to me requires more forethought on the application and usage etc. Not a bad thing at all, but sometimes during rapid iteration this just isn't possible so then you wind up redoing larger chunks then you would with say express. For a team that has more time or is more mature in process it would be good. Although in all fairness I have not researched the updates to hapi in quite a while so this may be a bit stale.

koa I never considered seriously when we were starting our projects so I can't comment.

One other you should look at depending on your needs is restify. I haven't used it yet for a production application, but do have it wired up in a experiment right now.

*EDIT: Also for user management, yes we rolled our own. There are npm modules like passport but we didn't like it before and haven't gone back to reevaluate since ours works good.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing.

How have you find the coding and debugging experience of server-side JS in general? I'm most familiar with Python and Java but wonder if server-side JS is going to cause me a headache trying to learn everything. The one thing that's slightly holding me back is the development time (i.e. more documentation and libraries for Python/Django means it's easier to figure out how to do stuff)

For your own user management, do you have any reference material to share? I haven't been able to find many good articles on getting everything all set up.

<comment><USER2> Your welcome.

I love node, don't get me wrong there are frustrating parts to it like any language, but overall it has been super productive after you get past the learning curve. Coming from Python you will have little trouble, and the learning curve isn't too bad if you have a reasonable handle on javascript. For node there are a ton of libraries, code snippets and modules that are available, way more today than even just a few years ago. Searching npm is a good start and from there most people link directly to their code on github so you can see how things are done.

As for debugging, I use Webstorm as an IDE and I can set breakpoints, walk thru code and do all the normal things you would in an IDE environment. I personally still use vim at times to when I am doing simple things and don't need to fire up the IDE, but all our node projects are in Webstorm just because it speeds up development. I also still dump a bunch of stuff to the console when I am debugging just because I am weird that way, plus in some cases I found it is faster than debugging code sections where timing can be different every run.

Some learning curve issues. Remember node is event driven, code is not necessarily synchronous when you read it top down. Callbacks wind up getting deep and ugly if you aren't careful, generally IMO when I see too many callbacks nested it is either a place where promises should be used or even more likely it is a place that just is trying to do too much and screams for breaking steps up. There are some modules to familiarize yourself with too that you will use a lot, async immediately comes to mind in addition to the express series.

As for our user module, no we haven't open sourced it or even written it up externally yet, but I think I might do one or both soon. Honestly passportjs is a great little module from all that I know, but when we started writing our systems we evaluated it and just didn't feel it fit what we were doing. Today that decision might be different if we had to start over.

In general, our systems use MongoDB for the database, Mongoose for schema's and then we rolled our own authentication, utilities and errors. We use winston for logging as it works well and gives us a ton of flexibility. As part of our middleware too, we added methods to the request object to allow us to simply call our api backend, so we have an apiGet, apiPut, apiPost, apiDelete. These handle all the complexity of calling the API and remove a lot of headaches and in turn makes the code way easier to debug and far cleaner.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for all that input. I'm excited by using node but at a previous workplace, I've been through JS hell where everything becomes spaghetti so I am slightly more cautious about things.

Debugging was a nightmare although it could probably be down to the fact that JS best practices weren't used.

I'll check out passportjs for sure and evaluate whether or not I should roll my own thing but yes, the user module will be absolutely invaluable!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Philosophy of Death - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/books/review/Holt-t.html?ref=books&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> this really ought to be further up in the cue. Well above all the resubmit crap.

</comment><comment><USER3> While we are on the subject of philosophy, I find on something of a philosophical note, the interesting ways and manners in which truth can unveil itself. Of course "unveiling" has a distinct meaning in Heidegger, but I am using this more generally, just to mean how the "deep truths of life" come to us/emerge/unveil from unexpected sources. I am reminded, then, in this case of a 'Charmed' episode where Prue Halliwell (Shannen Doherty) is trying to save somebody from the Angel of Death. She ultimately is confronted by the Angel of Death who tells her that he is not good or evil, but simply inevitable. She has to let go of her hatred of Death and see him as simply part of the natural course of things. Thus death from the point of view of hairless apes like us or the point of view of galaxies or even the whole universe, is in fact neither good nor bad, it simply is. Fearing it does not make it not so. Thus, one way or another it must be accepted, it must be seen as an inevitable part of the "rerum naturum". I really think on this subject the only way to sort of deal with our own annihilation or the fear thereof is to say that as long as we are fearing it, we have not encountered it. To fear, we must be alive. Therefore we have not an object of fear to fear. What is it to fear without an object? Anxiety. Undirected fear is anxiety. It is the antithesis of rationality. As human beings we must seek to be rational. We must seek to free ourselves from irrational fear. It is not rational to fear that which by definition we can never experience. We cannot by definition "experience" annihilation. We cannot experience annihilation, anymore than we really "experience" falling asleep. One moment we are drifting off in bed. The next moment the alarm clock goes off. Death is the same thing, except without the alarm clock. Either way, there is no "experience", and therefore no object of fear. Death is not bad. Death is not good. Death is inevitable, as Prue Halliwell came to see. I take comfort in knowing though that as death is inevitable so is birth. And perhaps even out of the ashes of the current universe new big bangs could spring forth, as some theories hint at. And so life (and death) goes on, ad infinitum.

We are, as Gregory Corso wrote in one of his poems, 'Homer', "alive, as always, forever ignorant of that death you'll never know."

Fearing the inevitable which cannot be even experienced is just not rational. The only thing to do is enjoy our moment in the sun. We all die, but spending our time fearing this just means we are not ever really alive, and that is just sad. Myself, I will leave eternity to the multiverse, and enjoy my brief tenure as a gene-carrying robot for all it is worth! :-)</comment>


Ask HN: Is Amazon's Glacier heading for the deadpool? - <AUTHOR>

AWS Glacier is probably the single cloud storage that hasn't seen a price drop. It used to be the cheapest storage solution by an order of magnitude now, it's MORE expensive than... Dropbox. Is it a sign it's heading for the deadpool? <comment><USER2> I think Glacier works on very different principles, for very different scenarios. Dropbox, Drive...they're more for everyday usage. Glacier's more for archived storage, where you're looking at a platform to store historical files, that aren't used everyday, but you never know when you might need them. IMO, I'm not entirely sure it's accurate to compare it with Dropbox, in these terms.

</comment><comment><USER3> AFAIK, up until recently there's been no competition, so why lower the price?

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course they did. 1TB costs the same in Glacier and Google Drive. Now it costs even less on Dropbox.

<comment><USER4> Here is the difference:

Dropbox: you spend $9.99 no matter whether you use up the 1TB or not.

Glacier: you spend $10.24 only if you use up the 1TB, of course there is extra cost on data transfer-in/out.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Industries/Companies to Get into Today? - <AUTHOR> Those just reaching escape velocity like MS, Apple, Google, Fb, Netflix during their days <comment><USER2> Let's make a shortlist step by step. There's a good chance that we find the next big company in the Unicorn List. There are around 500 startups in such a list:

[https://www.cbinsights.com/research-unicorn- companies](https://www.cbinsights.com/research-unicorn-companies)

Which startups in this list have the potential to grow rapidly in the next few years? Not all of them for sure! But there are a lot of them: SpaceX, Stripe, 23andMe, Discord, Grammarly, Duolingo, Calm, Intercom, Brex, Airtable, Figma, Canva and Udemy to name just a few.

The final factor? How many of them are in a market big enough to make big companies like Microsoft? This factor gonna make our list way too shorter! But it's hard to be sure. If I want to guess? I easily remove names like Udemy, Canva, Calm, Grammarly and Duolingo from our list...

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I think Udemy might be in a very big market. It competes in the market for continuing learners who could not get an education they wanted during their 18-25 year ages. I would love to work at Stripe and perhaps Discord. SpaceX too, but I am not a resident American.

<comment><USER2> Although I have my serious doubts about educational startups, seeing them more successful will make me happy for sure. They make a real difference in the world...

I'm not sure which Unicorns are outside US or which one hire remotely... But there are a lot of them. InVision is the only one that comes to mind right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> US companies are ok, just not defense related companies like SpaceX because they can only hire citizens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Brain Corporation makes cleaning machines autonomous and is thriving during COVID-19</comment>


Now Google is threatened with criminal action over Street View data theft - <AUTHOR> http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/409263/Now-Google-is-threatened-with-criminal-action-over-Street-View-data-theft

<comment><USER2> I doubt google will actually delete the data. It makes me angry to know that google went into my neighbourhood and stole data of my neighbours that forgot to protect their wireless or don't even know what that means.

<comment><USER3> Since the article says:

Google had previously pledged to destroy all data collected in this manner - but admitted last year that it had "accidentally" retained the additional discs

Then Google will likely just delete the data since it only needs MAC addresses and SSIDs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> But this isn't data theft. It is more like suing someone for sexual harassment because they looked at you while you were parading naked in front of everyone.

We currently don't have a Wi-Fi signal or setting that says "Do Not Take" like the "Do Not Track" browser header so the matter of theft is an open case.

<comment><USER4> Analogies suck, and this analogy is particularly poor.

The UK has laws, in statute and case. Google operates in the UK. Google should ensure that they obey the laws of the land that they operate in.

It does not matter that you think the law is stupid or wrong. Obey it; campaign to change it; or just don't operate here.

IT's a pretty weird case, but Google isn't particularly bad here. A few people had a dumb idea and followed through; there wasn't suitable oversight to say "this idea is dumb and probably illegal. Don't do it". They appear to be trying to do the right thing, even if it's tricky. (Finding hard discs at google is possible like finding a needle in a big bucket of needles.)

I agree that "data theft" is a stupid term. But that's what happens when people link to god-awful UK "news"papers like the mail, mirror, sun, express, etc.

<comment><USER3> Although the analogy doesn't suck and while the article points out:

Google had previously pledged to destroy all data collected in this manner - but admitted last year that it had "accidentally" retained the additional discs

it looks like nothing more than a click-throughs generating headline by some website.</comment></comment></comment>


DE-Cix – Power failure leads to Downtime in germany - <AUTHOR> http://www.heimatzeitung.de/nachrichten/bayern/2904220_Internet-Nutzer-melden-DSL-Stoerungen-Probleme-bei-DE-Cix.html <comment><USER2> Kinda fun to see the increase in AMS-IX traffic: [https://ams- ix.net/technical/statistics](https://ams-ix.net/technical/statistics)

Keep in mind this is only one of the many DE-CIX datacenters, they exist in at least 8 datacenters in Frankfurt: [https://twitter.com/goebelmeier/status/983453047543214081](https://twitter.com/goebelmeier/status/983453047543214081)

Only those peers who are single-homed to Interxion FRA5 / DE-CIX6 will have experienced an outage.

<comment><USER3> In fairness, we're in FRA8 but DE-CIX is not directly, so we're connected to their switches in FRA5.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Imagine it being 8pm, you sit in a operating room of germanys largest internet knot with up to 6,027 Tbit/s throughput and then the power goes down.

I am concerned that this even happened in a place important like this.

pic related: [http://img.pr0gramm.com/2018/04/09/9286baa4b2261184.jpg](http://img.pr0gramm.com/2018/04/09/9286baa4b2261184.jpg)

The article states internet was down for users at around 10pm (I expirenced it live). So they might have been on generators for two hours (speculation).

Shouldn't we decentralize more?

<comment><USER2> Only those peers who are single-homed to Interxion FRA5 / DE-CIX6 will have experienced an outage. The whole of DE-CIX isn't down.

<comment><USER3> > Shouldn't we decentralize more?

> The whole of DE-CIX isn't down.

Largely agreed with you, though as general advice I would say that redundancy by adding more exchanges to your network serves you better than adding diverse connections to a single exchange.

<comment><USER2> Yep, that makes a lot of sense, especially since 10G/100G waves and such on the FLAP route are so inexpensive. Getting a remote peering port on AMS-IX or something is probably a good move.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> We were hit by this.

In fact, we're hit by this again, down again at 22:09:19 EST for me and still down. Their website is broken too ([https://www.de-cix.net/](https://www.de- cix.net/)) and their email servers are offline which makes contacting them amusing.

Not much to be done, really, fortunately the impact for us is very trivial.

</comment><comment><USER4> General home connectivity also suffered, at least a few people (and myself) had connectivity issues, if you search for @vodafone_de on twitter you'll see a lot of people complaining (though I assume it was not just vodafone with issues)

</comment><comment><USER5> Just received an email update from INTERXION acknowledging they did indeed lose power again at FRA5. This leaves us in a bit of a mess.</comment>


The Orignal Hackers were Black Hats. - <AUTHOR> http://tickletux.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/

<comment><USER2> This is a completely incorrect conclusion. As I wrote on the blog:

Actually, you're the one who's mistaken — history _does_ support the benign view. As you note, the term hacker dates back even to the Tech Model Railroad Club. The term was generalized to include all sorts of neat but benign tomfoolery (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_hack>) including white hat phone phreaking. At MIT, there's definitely always been a sense that hacking has a code of ethics and that people who do bad things under the guise of hacking aren't hacking at all.

The Tech's 1963 reference to malicious phreakers as hackers is the same as modern day references to crackers as hackers: a mistake.

<comment><AUTHOR> The secondary source of wikipedia doesn't count as evidence, relying upon third-hand anecdotes like the wikipedia article does is incredibly poor academic form on wikipedia's part (notice the lack of citations to primary evidence).

While you're right term "hack" was used in a "positive" sense with regards to model railways, "hack" in the context of computers wasn't. In the earliest days at TMRC it was used with regards to gain unauthorized access on MIT's computer systems (although with less negative connotations then it has now). The modern geek "hacker" sense which is in common use now of an elite programmer didn't come around until much later.

Saying that, if you read the descriptions of "hacks" given in the wikipedia article most of them would now be considered "black hat" under modern definitions anyway.

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry, I didn't mean to present that in a way that would make you feel like you need to get defensive.

I was trying to use Wikipedia for your benefit. My opinion is actually based on primary sources from my time at MIT (e.g. alums who were actually students back then).

Pontificating about my "poor academic form" is harsh, unnecessary, and, frankly, it doesn't suit you; not when your argument -- that you _know_ the first hackers were black hats because you found some article in The Tech where someone said something negative about one -- lacks any semblance of validity to begin with.

Given that you're the one with a contrarian opinion, you should present strong evidence if you don't want people to be skeptical. The burden of proof is with you on this one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I didn't find it, my post is based upon research by Fred Shapiro (editor of the The Yale Book of Quotations, and a highly respected language researcher), but that's beside the point.

It's pretty standard practice in etymology to research the history of a word by finding all the earliest usages of it, and that's what Fred did in this case. And the early usages pointed towards a "black hat" usage.

Etymologists don't normally use evidence based upon individual memory due to people being very bad at remember exact word usages from decades ago. A few years ago I did some work for the Oxford English Dictionary and while they would use people's memory to guide them to potential recorded sources of evidence, they wouldn't use someones memory alone due to the problems inherent with it.

Especially in a emotionally charged issues like this one where people are likely to "want" to remember things being a certain way.

btw, the poor academic form thing was about wikipedia (from whom which we would expect a reasonale academic form), not you personally, sorry if it came across that way.

<comment><USER2> That's cool -- my bad if I came off rude to you in anyway. I just don't agree with your conclusion.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know I might be wrong, and that's one of the reasons I made the post. Maybe some who was in the TMRC in the 60s might read it and realize they have a diary or minutes from a meeting from that time which provides evidence for a non-"black hat" meaning.

But as probably one of the few people in the world who has credentials in both etymology and geekiness (I was president of a student computer society :P), I feel like it's my duty to let the world know what the current evidence points to :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vitalik Buterin Has Left VC Firm Fenbushi Capital - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/15/vitalik-buterin-fenbushi-capital-exit/?ncid=rss&utm_source=tctwreshare&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&sr_share=twitter <comment><USER2> Sorry for going off-topic, but is there any good community I can join if I am interested only in understanding the technical side of blokchain and blockchain development, its potential use cases and pitfalls.

<comment><USER3> There's no shortage of materials to use for self-education before you seek out a community.

Bitcoin resources: [https://lopp.net/bitcoin.html](https://lopp.net/bitcoin.html)

Ethereum resources: [http://www.ethdocs.org/en/latest/](http://www.ethdocs.org/en/latest/) [https://raiden.network/](https://raiden.network/) [https://www.plasma.io/](https://www.plasma.io/) Vitalik's recent scalability blog post with many links to further reading: [https://blog.ethereum.org/2018/01/02/ethereum-scalability- re...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2018/01/02/ethereum-scalability-research- development-subsidy-programs/)

All of the legitimate projects have a decent technical community, and many maintain good docs and/or blogs. Personally I find Tendermint and Cosmos very interesting, and I gained a better grasp of proof-of-stake by reading their articles.

Run your own nodes and interact with them from your favorite programming language.

After you have a grasp of the existing technologies used by Bitcoin and Ethereum, I recommend learning about the issues both are trying to tackle going forward (second layer channels, proof-of-stake, sharding). Then you'll be in a good place to understand the alternatives proposed by newer projects, like using a DAG instead of a blockchain.

<comment><USER3> Oh, and if you're concerned about the cost of testing on mainnet, consider running a dogecoin node to start off. It's an early fork of bitcoin, so the functionality and interface is similar, but it's extremely inexpensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ironically, the discussions are not related to the posted link.

</comment><comment><USER5> What will BTC or ETH hard drive usage look like 100 years from now? Has anyone run the numbers?

It seems like the disk usage will become untenable, but maybe someone has a plan to deal with it.

<comment><USER6> Actual disk-storage-use* data here:

[https://anduck.net/bitcoincore_vs_geth_full_node_stats.png](https://anduck.net/bitcoincore_vs_geth_full_node_stats.png)

Ethereum's blockchain has a growth rate 2X bitcoin's. If it continues to grow at this pace, it'll eclipse 1 TB in size in 2018. If you aren't verifying the blockchain that you're reading and writing to, then you're using a trusted third party. If you're using a trusted third party, why are you even using a blockchain to begin with?

Even BitGo, a commercial payment company, has trouble maintaining datacenter servers that can keep up with the io demands of running an Ethereum node. [1] Doesn't bode well for the long-term viability of ethereum.

Bitcoin's philosophy has been, rather than broadcast every single state update to every single network participant (an unscalable network design approach[2])

[1] The Challenges of Building Ethereum Infrastructure [https://medium.com/@lopp/the-challenges-of-building- ethereum...](https://medium.com/@lopp/the-challenges-of-building-ethereum- infrastructure-87e443e47a4b)

[2] Lightning Network enables Unicast Transactions in Bitcoin. Lightning is Bitcoin's TCP/IP stack. [https://medium.com/@melik_87377/lightning-network- enables-un...](https://medium.com/@melik_87377/lightning-network-enables- unicast-transactions-in-bitcoin-lightning-is-bitcoins-tcp-ip- stack-8ec1d42c14f5)

*Storage is only one part of the scaling engineering issues. Also important is the CPU and time requirements to keep a blockchain node synced.

<comment><USER7> > If you're using a trusted third party, why are you even using a blockchain > to begin with?

This is a common misperception of the benefits of a blockchain. It's like saying, if you are trusting a third party on science, why use science at all? You don't have to verify science yourself, but know that you could repeat the experiment if you wanted or needed to. The fact that the blockchain _is_ fully stored and verified by a number of distributed parties, and that you do have the ability of downloading and verifying if you want or need to, is enough to keep the system honest.

Now this statement does make sense if you are referring to your private keys. Don't ever let any third party hold those for you.

<comment><USER8> > but know that you could repeat the experiment if you wanted or needed to

The point is that at this rate, quite quickly you won't be able to, the costs would just be too high.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Let users share your site with ALL of their Gmail contacts - <AUTHOR> http://gmailsharebutton.com/?lu

<comment><USER2> Hmm, 7 points with no comments.

I think all of the customer service and accounting reps I've ever talked to would probably find this kind of strange...</comment>


Unearthing the Secrets of New York's Mass Graves - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/15/nyregion/new-york-mass-graves-hart-island.html?_r=0 <comment><AUTHOR> This NYT article made me about whether people have a right to the preferred handling of their body after death. It's an interesting topic economically and philosophically.</comment>


New Official jQuery Plugins Provide Templating, Data Linking and Globalization - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jquery.com/2010/10/04/new-official-jquery-plugins-provide-templating-data-linking-and-globalization/ <comment><USER2> Notably, contributed by Microsoft.

I... I have nothing bad to say about that.

Hmmm.

<comment><USER3> I was kind of surprised by this. Has Microsoft done this before (contributed to an Open Source project not of their own making) or is this new for them?

<comment><USER4> IIRC they've contributed a few bits and pieces to Apache and the Linux kernel (drivers), though I think they've just been for interop with other MSFT stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is interesting. Just the other day I saw a flash ad on Reddit touting all the new features in Visual Studio 2010. I was surprised to see that one of the slides mentioned "Support for including the jQuery Framework".

Glad to see that riding the jQuery train rather than making their own or something along those lines.

<comment><USER6> No kidding, now if MS would just give up the whole Silverlight waste of time (no we do not need _another_ flash-like proprietary format).

<comment><USER7> Microsoft is supporting the development of Moonlight (an open-source implementation). The only part that Microsoft won't license is DRM.

It can't be compared Flash - Adobe has shown NO interest in helping open- source implementations.

<comment><USER6> Irregardless of MS's support of Moonlight, I question the entire effort. Wouldn't those talented programmer be put to better use on something with a higher chance of actually being used?

I actually really dig mono and in my mind those resources would serve the community better focused on Mono, MonoDevelop, MonoTouch and MonoDroid.

I just don't see wide-scale adoption of Silverlight/Moonlight whether it's available on *nix or not, with or with MS's blessing.

<comment><USER7> Moonlight isn't useless.

There was a goal (a while back) of getting Moonlight embedded in Firefox (on all platforms). The goal hasn't come true but think about that. A general purpose VM embedded right in the browser!

I have no doubt that Moonlight would be used if it was embedded within the browser. CIL is an open-specification, we already have many compilers that target it. We could run C#, Scala, Java, Python, Ruby, Haskell, etc on the client side.

But all we're stuck with is a JavaScript VM to use.

<comment><USER6> I think the fact that this thread has only the two of us interested sums of the interest in Silverlight/Moonlight in the hacker community. ;)

I guess I wonder why I would want to write C#, Scala, etc on the clientside? Javascript is an already established cross-browser standard that I'd say any good developer is already familiar with; certainly jQuery strengthens the case for JS and also is bringing more people into the fold.

And with Node.js - which clearly has a lot of interest in the HN community (node.js stories always get upvoted as well they should) - it seems that things are moving in the opposite direction from what moonlight/ms is trying to accomplish with this particular tech.

For all those reasons it just seems like a fools errand to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm disappointed that template syntax uses own {{if}} tags:

        {{if cond}}
...
{{/if}}

TAL and Genshi have IMHO much nicer solution for that:

...

Use of attributes on existing elements also ensures that you can't create ill- formed structures like {{if}}
{{/if}}
.

<comment><USER9> We opted not to use this particular technique for two reasons: 1) It's not nearly as versatile. You can use the if statements on elements, attributes, text - anything you wish - there is no restriction on its contents or location. 2) In order to actually use something like that we'd have to serialize the DOM tree first, traverse it, and then manipulate the nodes into the proper shape. This is _slow slow slow_ and absolutely must be avoided at any cost.

<comment><USER10> A little off topic but I expect this to go well with jQuery Mobile. Can we expect any updates there? Been a bit disappointed by the relative quiet since the announcement (not that you owe me anything). Also, is there any publicly available code to check out? Thanks!

<comment><USER9> Only quiet because we're working so hard. We're releasing the alpha on October 16th (at the jQuery conference in Boston) so we're a bit frantic at the moment. Either way we're hoping to get a blog post up this week.

<comment><USER10> Thanks, I'm looking forward to it and trying to be patient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm little confused: Yehuda Katz who is a member of jQuery team announced Handlebars.js (templating engine with similar syntax) less then month ago...

Would someone clarify differences between these libraries?

<comment><USER9> The jQuery project has been working on this this particular plugin for a while now. Based upon what Yehuda wrote up in his original Handlebars.js blog post: <http://yehudakatz.com/2010/09/09/announcing-handlebars-js/>

He also recommends the official jQuery templating plugin. As is the case with most templating plugins there are minor syntax differences - although it does appear as the two plugins tackle the underlying problem in very similar manners (leading to fast execution time). I've pinged Yehuda so that he can comment here, as well.

<comment><USER11> John, thank you for clarification!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yuk. Why does it introduce a new global namespace for "named templates"? In other words, why:

        $.template("foo", ...);

When what I mean is:

        foo = $.template(...);

</comment><comment><USER13> Data binding! Finally. That is one of my favorite features of the Flex framework. I remember reading about Microsoft working on this with jQuery, but never knew when to expect it. Great news.

</comment><comment><USER14> The Globalization sounds like a good idea. However the template library scares me. There are so many different template use cases in JS that having one ordained jquery one seems like it might have to be too many things to too many people.

<comment><USER15> JavaScript templating may sound scary, but if done properly they can be so ridiculously powerful that at this point I think it's inevitable that server- side generation of HTML will eventually be obsolete.

Imagine being able to throw away all the hideous and incompatible JSP, eRuby, PHP (smarty etc), and Django templates with a universal template language.

<comment><USER8> Technically there's nothing preventing universal server-side templating language (e.g. XSLT & TAL are available for all languages you've mentioned). It's just a matter of everyone agreeing on syntax — and that's the hard part.

<comment><USER16> You can't just agree on syntax, IMHO the reason for that is the best template languages have the full language available. You need a full-language for a great template language. Smarty, for instance, sucks. HAML, which is terse, but has access to the full syntax of ruby rocks. You can do things like:

      = @users.map {|u| sprintf("%04d: %s",u.id, u.status.capitalize)}.join(', ')

Sure there's some special operator is smarty to do this, but I don't want to have to learn it, and they're always more clunky.

Additionally, I always hit complex, weird situations where I need a full- language, and migrating that logic out of the view makes no sense. For instance, I was working on a site where I had repeating content, with ads at predetermined offsets. I rendered it something like:

      ads_positions = Set.new(2,8,10,12)
      content.each_with_index do |content,i|
        if ad_positions.include?(i)
          content
          ad
        else
          content
        end
      end

I hate expressing that stuff server-side or in half-baked templating languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How does using javascript templating effect the SEO of my pages?

If I'm pulling the content in as json and using jquery to place it on the page. Will Google understand this or see my pages as content-less?

<comment><USER3> Yes, if you load in all your content through AJAX/AJAH or some other form of client side process, google won't get that content when crawling your page. The best way to see what search engines will see is to load the page in a browser and then use "View Source".

There are ways to help search engines find your dynamic content, however, which typically involve creating static versions of the content in addition to your more user-friendly AJAX versions. Google outlines some methods for doing this using specially formatted hash tags here: <http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/index.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting technique... I wonder how long until someone sets up a Haml clone in a similar vein, however. Less[1] is already moving in that direction, the next step is to do HTML in a similarly-friendly way. I'd use _that_ ; this is a pretty hideous, clearly-MS-influenced Enterprisey implementation.

[1]: <http://lesscss.org/></comment>


What They Know - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk/

<comment><USER2> It is amazing how quickly you can shift a debate if you get people to agree that a "cookie" is really a "tracker file."

<comment><USER3> Yep - this feels like fear mongering. 234 files, oh my!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Funny thing about paywalls is that they require even more intrusive tracking.</comment>


Long Live Social Engineering! Identify Theft in Real Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=157855&WT.svl=news1_1 <comment><AUTHOR> This hearkens back to the good ole' days when we had to steal data in person! We didn't have no Internet! Just our wardialers, blue boxes, Jolt cola and raw personality.</comment>


World Population Graphed By Latitude And Longitude - <AUTHOR> http://chrisblattman.com/2010/08/12/graph-of-the-day/

<comment><USER2> <http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/gpw/index.jsp>

I posted this as a comment on that page, but it's worth showing here too. It's an interactive map of population on earth as a heatmap - basically both of those graphs mashed together, at very high resolution.

<comment><USER3> Both India and China have vast areas of relatively high-density rural population. If a part of the raw material for economic progress involves the shift of people from rural/farming to urban/professional lifestyles, then there's a huge potential here.

<comment><USER4> Yes, that's been the primary source of China's economic boom.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but seeing how vast the stretches of high-density rural population are is quite amazing. (Other map from gp post)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unfortunate choice of a histogram. Colouring the whole width in different saturation (or color) would have been a much better visualisation. Currently the upper graph suggests the population is in the US while the majority of that bump comes from India and asian countries.

</comment><comment><USER6> original source: <http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?histpop>

<comment><USER7> I just went and found that too. Required a lot of clicking. It's a shame the people posting these blog posts don't dereference the intermediate pointers for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be more interesting to see this map corrected for land mass to see actual density.

</comment><comment><USER9> How about by altitude?

<comment><USER10> In this article, <http://www.pnas.org/content/95/24/14009.full> the author may show this in figure 2a, <http://www.pnas.org/content/95/24/14009/F2.large.jpg>

It contains these tidbits as well:

 _As of 1994,… 33.5% of the world's population, lived within 100 vertical meters of sea level… The median person lived at an elevation of 194 m above sea level._

<comment><USER11> That is cool.

There's even a little bump on the histogram especially for Mexico City (2300m, 25m souls). Other than Mexico it's monotonic all the way up.

I'm amazed how many people live in the lowlands. I've never been able to be happy outside the mountains myself. There's this whole vast majority of my human brothers and sisters who cluster on the seacoasts with the opposite preference. I'm in the tiny group with Tibetan shepherds and Inca campesinos. Those aren't people I usually identify with.

<comment><USER12> Except for the further spike at 4000m---what the heck is that?

<comment><USER13> Nepal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The map viewer they use [1] is familiar, I've seen it on several other sites (same exact icons). Anybody knows if it's open source and what's the name of the project?

1\. <http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/mapviewer/>

<comment><USER15> Obviously, the map portion itself feels a lot like earlier google maps iterations.

What sites have you seen the app on, specifically? They state in the help pane to have broken it into it's own self contained web-app to facilitate it's use by many different sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The latitude map is a nice visualization of how our species is clustered around the equator. Not surprising, but still neat to see the data.

<comment><USER17> Well, there's going to be much less space further from the equator, as parallels on both directions from equator are getting shoter and shorter. The equator is 40,000 km long, but the parallel I live on (50th north) is just 25,000 kilometers long (if I'm correct).

<comment><USER18> Actually around equator is mostly sea. And land space is rather irregularly distributed over the earth.

<comment><USER17> Well, I wonder if there is some specific latitude where there's more land than sea, of course, except Antarctica.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love graphs like this that convey a lot of information in a very simple concise way.</comment>


Storytelling and chatbot making - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@vaisaghvt/storytelling-and-bot-making-5fb1b5eaff9#.slxy35r7a <comment><AUTHOR> One thing I hate about chatbots vs. apps is that I have to keep using the "help" function when I forget what input I need to use to get something out of it. Well designed apps are much better at educating people what they do than a blank chatbot. In my opinion desktop apps are for more advanced users than apps and apps are for more advanced users than intended or imagined users of chatbots.</comment>


Georgia Officials Quietly Patched Security Holes They Said Didn't Exist - <AUTHOR> https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/georgia-officials-patch-security-holes <comment><USER2> Finding and reporting an election vulnerability to the Secretary of State (who also happens to be running in that election and simultaneously could benefit from exploitation of those holes) is met with this:

"These power-hungry radicals should be held accountable for their criminal behavior," he said.

Wow. Stunning.

<comment><USER3> Kemp is the governor who oversaw the election in which he was subpoenaed and then suddenly the server and all backups were degaussed three times. And somehow the election wasn't thrown out?

This is some serious banana republic garbage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> wonder if he's breaking any election laws or ethics regulations?

this is pure fud; spinning a reported security vulnerability as if it was his competitor trying to hack the election?! that's begging for a lawsuit in the least, too bad he's the controlling attorney general to boot.

this from the same guy who just recently said he didn't need any help with election security in Georgia... fire him.</comment>


Why Are So Many Monsters Hybrids? - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/why-are-so-many-monsters-hybrids <comment><USER2> My gf's brother pointed out to me that this seemed to be a major driver of Kosher rules/Kashrut (and maybe Halal too? I don't know much about religions).

Apparently those Bronze Age guys were really into taxonomic orthodoxy, so animals that violated their world view (e.g. live in the water but don't swim; cloven hoof but don't chew cud) had to be shunned.

Though is it that different today? Everybody seems to have a section of knowledge where they plug their ears and say "na na I'm not listening..."

<comment><USER3> Regarding Kosher at least, I think it had more to do with health than taxonomy.

The birds that were forbidden tended to be scavengers (such as vultures). These could carry diseases. Likewise, the main livestock they were forbidden from eating were pigs, which could present a health hazard at that time. They were also forbidden from eating most insects except locusts, probably for similar reasons.

I would disagree with the taxonomic interpretation mainly because there are a couple examples where I don't think it makes sense. For instance, pigs were "beasts of the field". They weren't in any way challenging to the Jewish taxonomy. Catfish also weren't challenging. They were fish (that is, basically, they lived in water). But they don't have scales, so they're not kosher (they're also bottom-feeders, so again could carry diseases if prepared incorrectly).

The health interpretation also extends to preparation rules. Animals must be slaughtered and bled out. This was likely to reduce risk of blood-borne diseases. Animals found dead also cannot be eaten, reducing risk of eating diseased meat.

Of course, these interpretations aren't mutually exclusive. I just don't see much support for the taxonomic interpretation aside from the fact that of course the regulations classify animals as fit to eat based on certain characteristics.

I'm also only familiar with Kosher rules, so can't comment about how the taxonomic interpretation might apply to other dietary rules.

<comment><USER4> A strange story I read was in the earliest polytheistic era its an evolutionary economic advantage for an entire region or culture to enforce a level of economic protectionism on villages. Stops one village from gaining total economic ascendancy over the region. Its an inoculation against civil war, we could kill them and take their pigs, but we can't eat pigs, and since we're not in economic competition we're not much richer than they are so there's no guarantee they won't end up killing us and taking our cows, which they can't eat... Sort of pre-history zoning rules. Naturally things look weird later on if one tribe takes over the whole region, much like it would be weird to have a city zoned entirely for nothing but an endless sea of McDonalds restaurants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Anthropologist David Wengrow argues that hybrid monsters proliferated during > the Bronze Age, because new trade routes and cultural mixing elicited > psychological anxiety. Creating monsters is a way of channeling our cultural > and political fears into tangible forms, into objects of loathing and dread.

Or most stories were written and/or propagated by entertainers (including parents or babysitters who want the kids to shut up and sit in one place) and it's cool to hear about Bellerophon defeating a superbeast. Note that many monsters are just big and super powered, like the Erymanthian Boar. But in this case, it's fun to see if the hero can take on a beast with the intelligence of a man and the bloodlust and strength of a bull. These beasts are also strange, which makes for a fun and surprising story.

Compare to the Super-Skrull, a Fantastic Four bad guy whose powers are (basically) the powers of the Fantastic Four combined:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super- Skrull](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Skrull)

I mean, we _can_ peel the onion back another layer and talk about whether it's entertaining _because_ of some widespread psychological issue, but I think Occam's Razor would indicate "because it's fun" as a valid answer.

<comment><USER6> >I mean, we can peel the onion back another layer and talk about whether it's entertaining because of some widespread psychological issue, but I think Occam's Razor would indicate "because it's fun" as a valid answer.

No, it really isn't, and this is a gross misunderstanding of the function of these stories. They weren't created explicitly as entertainment in the way comic books are. Jack and Stan were not claiming to be relating true tales of the gods or the past.

These stories weren't created "for fun" anymore than the tales of the Greek pantheon of gods or tales of saints and miracles from medieval Christian Europe. They were actual beliefs of actual people, they weren't faking it. Yours is a very modern perspective removed from the cultures that created these tales.

<comment><USER5> Well, _someone_ made up the story of the pegasus. They didn't see a pegasus and just make up a poem about it.

Even if we restrict the elaboration and propagation of these stories to true believers, these memes are subject to selection effects. Entertainment value is surely a competitive advantage for a long-lived folk tale.

<comment><USER7> These stories were passed down word of mouth, so you'd have to expect that by the time Pegasus had wings it'd passed through a number of people. Further, you have to understand these people had a basic understanding of the world around them. It's not inconceivable that they saw these types of things without the opportunity to investigate further. So whatever they think they saw is what becomes fact. Pegasus could come from some dude that was looking at a horse coming over the horizon and thought for sure that thing had wings. Told some buddies about this crazy horse over some wine, and before you know it the Pegasus is a real thing you ask for when you're 16.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the author is reading too much into this. Even in ancient times it was known that hybrids were frequently larger than the parents. Take Ligers for example (lion tiger hybrid).

People were probably more familiar with animal husbandry than today, so it makes sense to exaggerate that natural tendency to make somewhat believable monsters.

I don't think it had anything to do with xenophopia or "category violation" . The Earth has all kinds of weird shit like flying squirrels and humans

<comment><USER9> I think it's just easier/better storytelling to use shorthand descriptions based on things people may already have seen. Griffins, Chimeras, and Sphinxes are easier to picture in the mind's eye than Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, and Shub- Niggurath.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Isn't some of this just the difficulty of describing something unique?

If you asked me to describe what the aliens from the Alien/Aliens movies looked like, I'd completely fail. If you asked me to describe the alien from Predator, on the other hand, it'd be fairly easy. The Predator is a guy in a costume so I could just describe the differences.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps the recent Alien movies use CGI or something, but the original Alien from Alien (in the adult form) was the Nigerian actor Bolaji Badejo in a suit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting that the author references Vishnu, since Krishna (an avatar of Vishnu) refers to "the mixing of the castes" as evil in the Bhagavad Gita. And yes, this evil is some mixture of existential and sociological, i.e., religious.</comment>


Sci-Hub founder blocks access to the site in Russia - <AUTHOR> http://sci-hub.cc/ <comment><AUTHOR> A screencap of Alexandra Elbakyan's rant: [http://imgur.com/a/xGwD6](http://imgur.com/a/xGwD6).

Basically, she expresses her disappointment that other people get awarded for promoting and popularizing science in Russia while she never did.

She is also unhappy that a group of Mexican researchers named a parasite insect in her honor, because it's Elsevier and other publishers who are parasites and not Sci-Hub (this is crazy, I know, but it's her logic, not mine).

So she says her farewell and wishes researchers in Russia to boil in their own shit.

This is not the first time Alexandra does crap like this; she is also known to purge all critical comments from SciHub's social accounts and to ban anyone from the community who disagrees with her or praises someone she doesn't like (such as Dmitry Zimin, who was a longtime generous sponsor of some of the most important scientific and educational foundations in Russia).</comment>


Sex and Power: 'Powerful Men Have an Overactive Libido' - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,765316,00.html <comment><USER2> Does not explain who Van der Dennen is or why their opinions on this matter are significant.</comment>


Ask HN:Where to find good help for an idea? - <AUTHOR>

Have a great idea and very passionate about it; however,need help with finding someone to help me make it happen. Any Advice? <comment><USER2> What do you need help with? The development of the idea? Marketing the idea? It's hard to answer the question because I can't tell what it is you're looking for.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The development</comment>


Sexism and Women in Computing  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.acthompson.net/2013/05/sexism-and-women-in-technology.html

<comment><USER2> Imho the issue is not about sexism (women make jokes about sex too). I think this is about treating people unequal.

Men looking down on women, managers looking down on developers, white looking down on black, black looking down on white, men only seeing women as object, whatever...

As long as you treat people unequal they will never feel safe and home.</comment>


Intel anounces OpenVINO, a deep learning framework - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2018/05/22/intel-openvino-funny-name-great-strategy/#5ba8a8cc6301 <comment><USER2> A quick perusal of the OpenVINO site ([https://software.intel.com/en- us/openvino-toolkit](https://software.intel.com/en-us/openvino-toolkit)) didn't turn up much evidence that there's anything particularly "open" about this. :-(</comment>


Container-Ready Rails 5 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2016/5/2/container_ready_rails_5 <comment><USER2> I wrote the article, ask me anything.</comment>


aerc: an email client for your terminal - <AUTHOR> https://drewdevault.com/2019/06/03/Announcing-aerc-0.1.0.html <comment><USER2> Hi! This looks very interesting. I use mutt but have two pain points. The big one is that mutts locks up when the network connection is broken (e.g. on suspend). My understanding is that this has been known for a long time and can't be fixed without a major rewrite of mutt to be multi-threaded and non- locking. My current solution is to either kill mutt once frozen or to remember to close it whenever I suspend. Would aerc solve this?

My other common issue is that it is not easy to search a GMail inbox over IMAP. I have seen some solutions such as using notmuch and offline-imap, but these are kind of a project so I haven't implemented them. I usually just sigh and open a browser tab when I really need to search.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, aerc solves the networking issue mostly, and the remainder of the problem can be solved without major refactoring. This was a design goal of aerc from the start.

As for searching, I'd like to have notmuch support in the future. There's also some IMAP extensions for multi-folder search I'd like to add support for in the future, but I'm not sure if gmail supports those.</comment></comment>