Jesse Jackson to take on Silicon Valley's lack of diversity - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_25369262/jesse-jackson-take-techs-lack-diversity <comment><USER2> _" Jesse Jackson wouldn't be heading to Hewlett Packard or any of the other big tech companies if they had done their job and accomplished diversity," she says. "He's shining a spotlight on one aspect of the growing inequality of this country."_

I think that the problem of diversity in tech starts long before your interview at a Silicon Valley company. It starts at home, and at school. If you get more children of color exposed to technology (the making side, not the consuming side), math, and science early, then you'll have more of them in college, and more qualified candidates of color applying for Silicon Valley companies. What you expose kids to early on shapes what they'll become later on. If you emphasize basketball and football to Black kids, you'll get an NBA and NFL that are 70% Black.

<comment><USER3> This. I don't think companies that are fighting for qualified employees are turning down candidates because of color. I'm in a CS program at a university and I can only think of a few CS students who aren't white/Asian/Indian. The issue isn't with hiring, but with early exposure and education to all races/genders/whatevers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like another Jackson shakedown that will benefit his children:

[http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1964&dat=19810901&id=p...](http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1964&dat=19810901&id=p_4sAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1MwFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1398,149634)

[edit, here's another] [http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2001-04-08/news/01040800...](http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2001-04-08/news/0104080087_1_jesse- jackson-busch-yusef)

</comment><comment><USER5> I really wish we could be more pragmatic about the lack of diversity in tech. Do we really care about "diversity" or do we care that we are losing out on potential talent? And why is it always that those wringing their hands over the situation (so often non-programmer outsiders) seem to have their own axe to grind? Could it be because the valley is filled to the brim with money?

I'm in it to win it. I'm not here to help somebody else get ahead. Not that I want to kick anybody on my way to the top but this industry is very competitive. The lack of women, racial and sexual minorities is terrible and unfair and it should change, but I'm more concerned that we are shutting out smart, creative workers. In the end, isn't that the point of our (supposed) meritocracy? Diversity must come from within our community and for the right reasons, not out of the terror of being shamed by a self-appointed guardian of righteousness.

<comment><USER6> You should consider the advantage you have of being aware of the industry at all. Not everyone has that opportunity. Some portion of responsibility devolves on you to share the (not entirely meritocratic) good fortune you've received. As the song goes, check your privilege.

<comment><USER7> This is just silly. One fifth of the world is on Facebook, they are aware of Facebook and that it makes ton of money, they are aware of the industry. Interest ≠ Privilege. I grew up very poor but was always VERY interested in technology every way possible. I got a 20 year old computer used for very cheap in my early teens and learned to program on this. Almost any child is capable of this. Its not privilege, its interest. Anyone with _interest_ is perfectly capable.

<comment><USER8> There are environments in which interest is much less likely to develop. For instance, what if your peers had thought and repeated that learning and reading were stupid? Or what if your parents were completely apathetic about your education? Or what if one of your parents was in jail your entire life? What if you had no choice but join a gang?

There are children, and maybe you were one of them, who can persevere despite these circumstances. But I think it's important to note that the differences in interest can also be a result of 'privilege'.

<comment><USER9> That wouldn't be donatj's fault, it would be the fault of the culture holding their people back. Maybe JJ should look inward instead of outward for a solution.

<comment><USER8> I agree. I think that Jesse Jackson is indeed being ridiculous in what he is targeting. We should be investigating the systems that lead to a lack of minority candidates applying to work at these companies.. Namely, systems like the entirety of the criminal justice system with discriminatory policies such as 3 strikes or the war on drugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At my last company, I interviewed around 100 candidates for senior/principal software engineering positions.

There was filtering before things got to me, and maybe the people doing the filtering were racist. (I don't think so, but how would I know?)

But of those 100 candidates, only one was black.

I think somewhere upstream the pipeline is broken.

</comment><comment><USER11> I find this sentence very weirdly written from a stat viewpoint and not helpful at all to the "average" reader.

>>>>About one in 14 tech workers is black or Latino both in the Silicon Valley and nationally. Blacks and Hispanics make up 13.1 and 16.9 percent of the U.S. population, respectively, according to the most recent Census data.

Why didn't they say about 7% rather than 1 in 14?

1/14 ~=7.14..%

I accidentally scrolled into the comment section and my head imploded. Thank goodness for HN :)

<comment><USER12> Because the average reader may be inclined to think the numbers are reasonable, and then they'd be less likely to spark an outrage, and then this newspaper wouldn't get as many ad impressions.

<comment><USER13> I'm confused, black and hispanics make a combined 30% of the U.S. population but 7.14% of tech workers and that seems reasonable?

What am I missing here?

<comment><USER12> Yes, it does. The number that matters is number of available black and hispanic tech workers versus the number of employed black and hispanic tech workers. If there was a large discrepancy between unemployment rates for technology workers along racial lines, then we could claim discrimination by companies.

Instead, what you and this article are talking about is that perhaps not enough black and hispanic people are being exposed to technology as an industry. In which case, the failure would be on a lot of variables: community, family, schools, socioeconomic status, etc.

Blaming a company for not hiring non-existent people is sure great for Jesse Jackson's business model, though.

<comment><USER14> It's also possible that there is a legitimate reason (from a business perspective) they'd preferentially hired white tech workers, such as socioeconomic class leading to better training. (We see this effect in other places.)

I highly doubt that many of the confounding variables (age; exposure over time; socioeconomic status; etc) have been ruled out to come up with that statistic.

Not that I don't think there's a problem, just saying, the businesses might not be racist so much as minorities underperform (relative to their potential) because of socioeconomic factors. If that's truly what's happening, I'd argue that the place to combat that is the economics of the situation, and not attacking businesses for making prudent decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I didn't know most of the people named as minority influencers were non-white (with the exception of Microsoft's Satya Nadella). I read every blog post by Drummond and I had no idea he was African American. These are thought leaders who, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, are not "expert about being black" and I think they do a lot more good than Jesse Jackson.

I'm not saying there isn't a problem -- but the solution seems to me that it should come through a system that allows a candidate to say: "There are rumors my skillset is going through a shortage. I believe I have been discriminated against by the recruitment process (no matter what that was: if you list grievances, too young, too old, too female, too male, too nerdy, too black, etc. they pretty much define a pavement of all job seekers) and it doesn't matter. Give me a job, tell me what I can learn to be the ideal candidate, or sh-t the f-ck -p." I haven't been to San Francisco a lot, but everytime I was shocked by the amount of candidates throwing their CV at me; they were of every age, color, skillset and gender that I could think of. I represented a company based in Europe and they complained that European companies do not open offices in SF fast enough to hire the local talent… (which came out as… well, mind-blowing self-serving and unworldly to me).

I hate to ask but… Is he really going after a guy called Gomez about diversity in power positions? And I'm sur HP was iconic when Jesse Jackson was more active, but… isn't there more iconic companies around? They might not have public shareholder meetings.

</comment><comment><USER16> There is plenty of diversity in the Valley... Indians, Asians, Europeans... What is his issue here?

<comment><USER17> As an Asian American male, I've seen a great mixture of white and Asian men in tech companies in Silicon Valley. I've never worked in a frat house type startup, but rather ones with a great mixture of high end talent. So I concede I might be only experiencing an outlier.

Asians in America put a much higher priority on education than other races, at least based on college graduation statistics. If you look at marriages, the pairings which have the highest rate of possessing a college degree are Asian/Asian, White/Asian, and Asian/White. Most engineering jobs require a degree, so is it really a surprise that Asian's have higher representation in tech than perhaps other races?

I chose to do coding and design because it was something I enjoyed. Growing up, I did it on my own time despite the fact that it wasn't a particularly socially attractive endeavor especially compared to sports. I'm not griping that the NFL/NHL/MLB or Hollywood have few Asian American men or that I didn't end up going into those industries.

I get annoyed when people just assume that 'men' in tech purposefully exclude other races and genders. I couldn't care less the race or gender of the applicant.

<comment><USER18> How wealthy were your parents and neighbors?

<comment><USER17> Parents: Upper-class

Neighbours: Upper-class

That being said, I went to a no-name high school and no-name college. I worked my way into startups through connections in college and living abroad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is why I get annoyed when I hear people claim that their workplace is a true meritocracy and 20 of 20 employees are white males. So only white males have the intellectual talent to make it in tech?

I totally get that it's not meant that way, but that's what it looks like to people who are not in SV tech.

Off topic but since this has come up this week several times: Meritocracies seem great in theory but rarely work in practice. What exactly are we measuring? How much code you can write in an hour? The quality of the code? What if you spend more time helping other members of your team with new concepts and that limits the amount of code you can write? What about the people in the office who support you and help you get things done faster? Do we include things like pairing skills?

The only time I worked at company who claimed to be a meritocracy I benefited greatly but people whose skills weren't as easily measured were unfairly left behind. We had a PM quit after being denied a raise and his departure set us back quite a bit, clearly we weren't measuring his value accordingly.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Not that I have any particular stance on the legitimacy of meritocracies, but why would a meritocracy imply racial diversity, exactly?

<comment><USER19> If the system were fully meritocratic, you'd expect a lot more females in the industry, for one. Unless you suppose that females of all races are objectively less capable in some way. But then you'd have to explain why there are so many females being successful in other hard sciences like biology.

The fact is that many people aren't given early access and encouragement to technology, and the ones that do experience constant pressure and put-downs. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not. I've done hundreds of interviews and dozens of interview trainings, and have personally observed lots of silly behavior, from treating women more harshly than men, to dismissing a candidate because their family name implied a background of poverty.

A "safe" example to think about: it's very common to rubbish people who went to this university or that one instead of yours, which is obviously the best. You can write that off as good-natured play, but consider that I've had to build a career in tech without a degree. It's only by the slimmest chain of coincidences that I was able to even get the opportunity to be seen and evaluated. The "meritocratic" system simply doesn't _believe_ that anyone without the nous to afford college is worth even noticing.

The hiring manager at the end of that food chain is often unaware of all that. He (and it's usually a "he") passes over resumes and chuckles at their university choices, then picks "the good ones" to jump through hoops and from there picks "the best". To him, that's meritocracy.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Alright, I can agree with that.

Once again though, meritocracy would only mean equal opportunity and not necessarily facilitate any particular effort for equal representation. A system can still be meritocratic (although I'm not saying ours is) while social influences still skew the demographics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If Rev. Jackson (or anyone) knows of an untapped pool of talented developers with some combination of skills in C++, C#, crypto, network security, and/or machine learning, my team is hiring.

Even the degree could be negotiable if (as in my own case) the candidate has acquired a solid understanding of CS principles some other way.

</comment><comment><USER21> Perhaps Jesse Jackson should contribute to an open source project of his choice then.

<comment><USER13> You don't have to be an expert in a field to criticize it's culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> a noble task in ignoble hands</comment>


Internet Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.swatch.com/zz_en/internettime/ <comment><USER2> If only there was some sort of universal coordinated time we could all use...</comment>


Apps for development | Competition by the World Bank - <AUTHOR> http://appsfordevelopment.challengepost.com/ <comment><USER2> First prize being $15,000 US DOLLARS, to me seems very low for creating an "app to help developing countries".

Is this competition more a gimmick than a desire?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. Only motivation to do this would be notoriety/prestige. I think it may be also a way to push for people to use the WB data sets.</comment></comment>


What Happened to TCP Flags URGENT, MSG_OOB, and SIGURG? (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://blogger.popcnt.org/2007/07/what-happened-to-tcp-flag-urgent-msgoob.html <comment><USER2> What the what? I knew of the URGENT flag but had no idea the client discarded the last byte. What is the rationale behind that?

<comment><USER3> A misunderstanding of what the "Urgent Pointer" field in the header means. I go into it in more detail here: [http://blog.mecheye.net/2017/10/urg/](http://blog.mecheye.net/2017/10/urg/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> WinNuke! Those were the days... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinNuke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinNuke)

</comment><comment><USER5> as a network engineer the best way is to have excess bandwidth on your entire path on a dedicated link. there is no other way to guarantee anything across the public Internet, yes you can make best effort assumptions but if you are doing something critical there are no guarantees over public networks.</comment>


Spacebook: AGI's near Real-Time satellite viewer - <AUTHOR> http://apps.agi.com/SatelliteViewer/ <comment><USER2> This one is pretty good too, and doesn't eat all my RAM - [http://stuffin.space/](http://stuffin.space/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting stuff, it appears to be their own data (I'm guessing aggregated from sources like the UN registry and observation). I was curious about the statistics on satellite missions so I put it into a table:

      Operational satellites by mission:
      total                   2154
      Communications          740
      Scientific              592
      Navigation              135
      Technology Development  109
      Earth Observation       99
      Surveillance            58
      Engineering             20
      Weather                 13
      Not Recorded            8
      Early Warning           3
      Search and Rescue       1
      Space Station Flight    1

<comment><USER4> A few interesting things :

The sum of all mission-detailed satellites is lower than the total (even thought there's a « no recorded » line

There's a grand total of 58 surveillance satellites around the earth today ? Yeah... I think there's a few missing

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is wonderful.

If it catches your fancy, I have also found termtrack to be a great way to fill in a corner of a tmux window.

[https://pypi.org/project/termtrack/](https://pypi.org/project/termtrack/)

</comment><comment><USER6> So the Cesium you see at the bottom is actually a new startup they spun out of AGI (note the letter order, very different from AIG).

They build an open-source WebGL-based competitor to Google Maps' engine.

Patrick Cozzi, the driving force behind the technology is one of both the smartest and nicest people I've met during my career.

<comment><USER7> We use Cesium at [https://ayvri.com](https://ayvri.com) (with some of our own magic sprinkled in). It is an incredible bit of software, completely agree with your comments regarding Patrick. He's also the driving force behind glTf and wrote the book on virtual worlds in webGL. [https://www.amazon.com/Patrick- Cozzi/e/B004LGLPIA/ref=dp_byl...](https://www.amazon.com/Patrick- Cozzi/e/B004LGLPIA/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> [http://www.lizard-tail.com/isana/lab/orbital_decay/](http://www.lizard- tail.com/isana/lab/orbital_decay/)

If you want to see how long it takes for satellite orbits to decay in LEO, check this out. Illustrates how quickly some of these satellites would reenter without station keeping.

</comment><comment><USER9>
        Total objects:          17,642
        Status non-operational: 15,389

Yikes?

<comment><USER10> Yea for sure.. I would hope that there is some rule now related to making sure things can be deorbited with some scheme relatively easily? For example a mandatory unit that attaches to the side of your satellite that has a small antenna only possible to communicate with using a high gain antenna on the ground that can transmit back using a battery that is only for that unit and can only command some relays to fire thrusters to de orbit the thing and read back basic telemetry to help validate what the slow down burn direction is.. anybody know how they accomplish this?

<comment><USER11> To deorbit a satellite, you need an antenna (to receive the command), electricity (working solar panel / battery), working on board computer, fuel, correct attitude determination. So basically you need a full working satellite. As soon as one of these element fails, your satellite is dead. At 10-20 k dollars per kg, you dont want to add another satellite to your already expensive satellite.

Concerning rules, there is some progress, because nobody wants a Kessler syndrome, too much is at stake. For instance, European satellites are launched only if they naturally deorbit in less than 25 years (for LEO, of course. Above a certain height, atmospheric drag is too weak).

<comment><USER12> Actually, the newly-proposed FCC rules would require fail-safe deorbit systems when operating above 550 km and below 2000 km. Above 550 km, most stuff takes more than 25 years to deorbit, and the NGSO volume below 2000 km is considered the most useful (and thus most likely to get crowded). These fail-safe systems should be designed to cause the satellite to deorbit within 25 years of activation.

[https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-18-159A1.pdf](https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-18-159A1.pdf)

The FCC hasn't proscribed exactly what these look like (that's implementation), but electrodynamic tethers would seem likely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I made a similar site 20 years ago (an applet, what else) and a lot of people seem to be wondering "how does it work" or "where does the data come from?". I can only describe how I implemented it, but it's probably similar.

Data is not "real time" for each satellite in any sense. But since satellites follow orbits, it's enough to have recent state, and you can extrapolate where they are. The data comes from places like NORAD, and has a standardized format called a "Two line element set". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two- line_element_set](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-line_element_set)

Here is the current state of the international space station for example as described in a TLE:

        ISS (ZARYA)
        1 25544U 98067A   19238.30917157  .00002323  00000-0  48072-4 0  9991
        2 25544  51.6438  13.4147 0007728 328.5901 233.9236 15.50389701186137

It's mostly opaque but we can see near the end of the second line that at the current orbit means it does around 15.5 orbits per day. When I implemented my app, I just grabbed some data from a public link with up to date TLE's. Such as this one, for the 100 brightest satellites is a good start for a simple visualization app.

[https://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/visual.txt](https://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/visual.txt)

Once you have the TLE for a satellite which describes where it was a while ago, you need a function that gives you the _current_ state vector for the satellite, given the time delta since the known state. Far from earth this can be done approximately with simple orbital mechanics, but close to earth you need to account for athmospheric drag and also the uneven or "bumpy" gravitational field. At some point someone devised a set of algorithms for this called the simplified perturbations models in 1988 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_perturbations_model...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_perturbations_models)

Basically current_state = SGP4(old_state, time_since_old_state)

Luckily, these functions were released together with a Fortran implementation, so porting it to whatever language you want is fairly straight forward. Here is an example port of SGP4 to python [https://github.com/brandon- rhodes/python-sgp4/blob/master/sg...](https://github.com/brandon- rhodes/python-sgp4/blob/master/sgp4/propagation.py)

</comment><comment><USER14> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome)

<comment><USER15> I hope we get the GPS III constellation up and running before any catastrophic LEO cascades. Having a self sustaining common clock system that can run for centuries has a very high scientific value (and really, just a huge value for any industrial, commercial, and consumer applications).

<comment><USER16> From what information are you assuming these will run for centuries? Most sats have a design life of like 10 to 25 years max. Also keep in mind that station- keeping and correction data is mandatory to keep the accuracy in check. I think I read somewhere that after 180 days of un-corrected drift the GPS would be able to get you within a few km of your target - not meters/feet.

<comment><USER15> I was told by someone who follows theses things more closely than me that block III GPS would have an inter satellite network that could share clock information independently of ground control. While looking into it the closest I could find was references to OCX, which is ground based controls. So maybe we're not there yet idk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If people want to see some good satellite data, I very much recommend [https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/](https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Are there standard libraries or agencies or something for aggregating the latest data and then based on your satellite's planned trajectory, ensuring that you aren't getting too close to another satellite?

I am guessing that space is pretty big even in low earth orbit and so probabilities are small even with thousands of objects. But even so, if you are spending millions of dollars, you would want to have some idea rather than just keeping your fingers crossed.

<comment><USER19> NORAD tracks everything in space, and works directly with satellite operators to reduce collision risks on the rare occasion that it could happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there a global database or protocol or blockchain or something where satellite positional data is aggregated? Like if you are launching a satellite then you log into a website or something and enter the planned orbit. Or something.

Or is it just a bunch of random tracking efforts with duplication and incompletion?

<comment><USER20> The data for Spacebook, like almost all public satellite position data, comes from tracking radars run by the US Air Force. They have a public website and database with API at [https://space-track.org](https://space-track.org).

I've been working on my own website using the space-track.org API to show you when/where/how to see satellites in the sky with your naked eyes from your own backyard. Hopefully launching soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> So many dead satellites. Is there solution to that, or is there a problem with it in the first place?

<comment><USER22> Most of the current debris comes from an anti-satellite missile test (China) and 1 collision caused by an out-of-control (Russian COSMOS) satellite. So, basically stop blowing shit up in orbit and it should be ok.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What's neat is you can see the actual Starlink chain and a few other defined satellite trains. I'd link to it but I don't see a way to link directly to a particular satellite.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow that's a lot.

</comment><comment><USER15> Using this I just learned that Beidou's orbit is geosynchronous with a high inclination. That's a lot of delta-V!

<comment><USER25> Not really. They're launched from a base at 28 deg N. So assuming they launch due east, you can get to a 56 deg inclination and spend less delta-v than you'd need to drop the inclination to zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Was expecting social media, al la seveneves, but that is much better. I wonder where the data comes from?

<comment><USER27> I might be wrong, but I don't think they are data captured in real-time.

Based on a cursory understanding of the AGI STK, these satellite positions are calculated from ephemeris data which are updated on a regular basis (e.g. weekly). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeris)

<comment><USER20> The ephemeris data is updated approximately daily and also allows you to predict the satellite's position fairly accurately several days in the future. Satellites change orbits very infrequently, so it's close enough to real time for most purposes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> so cool</comment>


Apple & App Makers Sued Over User-Tracking - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/12/apple-user-tracking-suit

<comment><USER2> This is a bit troubling as an iPhone developer. It'd be nice to be able to keep a profile on your users not for the purposes of advertising, but for the purposes of developing meaningful use-case metrics.

I suppose the proper thing to do would be to provide a opt-int one-time popup prompt that notified users what you were planning to do... sort of like Visual Studio, Netbeans, or Eclipse in what they do.

Any thoughts on other ways for developing analytics for parts of your app?

<comment><USER3> I don't think there's much problem with Apple providing a unique ID to an app — the problem is that Apple is providing a unique ID that's _universal_ to every single app, making it far easier for some very troubling data correlation and identification by third-party services. Just a simple hash of the UDID and an app's bundle ID would probably be sufficient.

Edit: Now that I think about it, it would probably need to be a salt that Apple keeps privately — since bundle IDs are known and UDIDs are fixed-length, those that really wanted to could brute-force UDIDs out of the resulting hashes.

<comment><USER4> Probably would be better to use a vendor-specific salt, so you can compare users between your application.

Since the UDID is just SHA1(SerialNumber + IMEI + WiFiAddress + BluetoothAddress), adding in a "vendor ID" at the end when generating it was a _huge_ mistake in the original iPhone SDK, and they can't fix it now.</comment></comment></comment>


New Portfolio -- Thoughts? - <AUTHOR> http://www.taiyab.co.uk/portfolio/ Need feedback/reviews of my new portfolio design from the HN community. <comment><USER2> 1\. AAARG contact form. Get rid of the form please. PUT YOUR EMAIL ON THAT PAGE! Thanks.

2\. Put your location, phone number and email at the top of the page.

3\. If this is your portfolio to sell your design services, what's up with "blogger entrepreneur"?

4\. Please explain what kind of work you specialize in. It may seem obvious to you, but it's not to us. Mobile experience? etc.

5\. The examples are too small, and should link to a larger image, not to the actual website (which will change).

In short: right now, I can't tell what kind of work you do, and I can't contact you easily.

<comment><USER3> I don't mind the contact form personally, I get it that spam sucks and it's an easy way to help prevent _some_ spam. The bigger problem is the field labels being inside the input elements. Once you enter them and put anything the labels go away at which point you no longer have any reference for what was supposed to go in the fields. Also, if js is disabled as it was when I first entered the page you have to erase all the crap in the inputs before you can fill out the form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You really need an about me page. I don't care nor do I want to read your blog, I want to know who you are and what you bring to the table.

Having links to work you did do nothing for me. Did you design and code the whole site or did you just create the search button? You need a separate page just for your work that explains what you actually did.

I don't mind a contact form to be honest, but that also should be its own page. You should provide email and a link to an actual resume on your about me page and/or home page. If they would like to use your form they have the navigation option to dive into that page. Majority of the time they will email you from their mail client so that it is documented.

Your page shows how good or bad you are. What it shows me currently is that you have some design skills but your UX is terrible. The Organization of content, easy of use and relevance of content is done poorly. Create some page flows and really abstract pages for a single purpose not an all in one page that shows everything. I want to get to where I'm going and bounce not search.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cabose, taken on board your feedback. I definitely need to accompany the work with a case study page detailing what work was done for each project. In terms of keeping everything on one page, the initial goal was to keep it a one-pager (or at least try to), but I guess I'll need to iterate on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tayib, Overall, it is a nice portfolio. The flow from the top left logo to the "get in touch via email" button works well. A few things stood out at me.

1\. Get rid of the Emerson quote. On a smaller display, it hides your contact information.

2\. "Spam my inbox" sounds pretty negative. When combined with using a contact form (not how I like to email people) it would prevent me from writing you. Also, you call this email, but it is a contact form.

3\. "Write your kickass message here". I'd change this - not because of the swearing but... "kickass"? I like the enthusiasm but I do not have a kickass message for you. Keep the enthusiasm, iterate on the message.

4\. Keep the contact form but visually integrate my email address into it.

5\. You're going to get a lot of comments about your form. I think it is a nice form, one of the better ones I've seen, visually, but some people will find it hard to accept that you have a big focus on user experience if you continue to use it. Not me, but some.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points Daniel. Definitely valid - I actually re-considered the "Spam my inbox" tag a lot, and didn't come up with anything better so stuck with it for the time being. I'll definitely be re-thinking that.

Overall, seems to be a big hate towards contact forms -- I don't quite understand why as maybe I want a bit more information to qualify the contact (like info on where they found out about me, or budget)? Just giving an email address doesn't allow for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the use of textures on the site.

Did you do the UX of the sites in your portfolio? Everything? Since there are so few, maybe turn them into case studies and describe what the client needed and why you did what you did.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looking for feedback/reviews on my new portfolio design from the HN community!</comment>


Messenger chatbot that interviews programmers instantly for new jobs - <AUTHOR> https://m.me/recruiterwazlo/ <comment><AUTHOR> [http://wazlo.io/](http://wazlo.io/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Seems down for me?</comment>


Ask HN: Should IT Adopt "Black Box Thinking" in Relation to Cyber Attacks? - <AUTHOR> As someone who designs enterprise software for a living I find it strange now little detailed analysis available in the public domain there seems to be regarding major cyber attacks and security breaches. I do wonder how companies are supposed to learn from other's mistakes when the information is so rarely available?
There was an excellent analysis* of the recent BA credit card leak which prompted a great deal of internal debate into the level of exposure and risk, however this was conducted by a third-party analyst and not an official investigation.
https://www.riskiq.com/blog/labs/magecart-british-airways-breach/
However, this is rare and there have been several high-profile breaches which do not seem to have been so thoroughly investigated and the results published.
When an airliner crashes there is a forensic level investigation and the results are shared with the wider industry. At the end of the day it is in everyone's best interests, as not only do companies face financial losses compensating their customers, they also risk damage to brand reputation and ultimately fines from regulators.
What are people's opinions on the IT industry adopt a similar black box thinking approach to reporting the causes of security breaches. <comment><USER2> Partner up with a security engineer/team. The mindset that creates is different from the mindset that destroys. The gap between enterprise software and security has a very wide gulf. Security exploitation might require intimate hardware details lower than understanding how the OS works, things such as understanding the architecture of CPU as we have seen with recent speculation attacks on CPU. Nevertheless, tons have been published on security.

Rule 1. Trust NO INPUT Rule 2. Trust NO INPUT Rule 3. Trust NO INPUT

Outside of being compromised due to bad inputs, the other vectors are either logical flow emanating from complex system with different moving pieces, or stemming from bad practices such as using poorly vetted libraries, encryption schemes, running on insecure platforms, etc.

As someone who works in both spaces, I can assure you that the there's a strong strain between the demands of enterprise to release their vague requirements to market and the demand of security to keep everything together. If you try to do both it's easy to end up with some blindness. Hire a security team, the airline engineers don't do the forensic, a different team does and tells them lessons learned.</comment>


Effective team management (even when you're working remote) - <AUTHOR> https://jitha.me/effective-team-management-101/ <comment><AUTHOR> Effective team management can be distilled into five key principles. And they apply even when you're working remote.</comment>


Save $31.16 on your Parallels 8 upgrade - <AUTHOR> http://thrysoee.dk/parallels/

<comment><USER2> How does that save over $30? At most, it saves about $6 with the Brazilian currency. The upgrade price is $50.

<comment><AUTHOR> OK a little contrived, I know. But if you normally prefer to pay in Japanese Yen you would save $31.16 by instead paying in Brazilian real.

Mostly I was just surprised how much the effective price varies by currency.</comment></comment>


Old-school programming techniques you probably don't miss (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://www.computerworld.com/article/2523920/app-development/old-school-programming-techniques-you-probably-don-t-miss.html <comment><USER2> fanfold paper ... reseating boards in computer (the heat made them shrink/expand and they needed to be pushed in again) ... hex conversion by hand ... single-step button on console ... hand punching paper tape one hole at a time (not one row, one hole) ... tty ribbons ... 8 inch floppies ... key sequences for bootstrap ... JCL statements ... 73-80 column sequence numbers on punched cards ... overnight turnaround ... floating point magic ... modem switches ... n-8-1 ... voltage vs current tty links ... uppercase only code ... EBCDIC ... binary coded decimal ...</comment>


My thoughts on SF after living here for six months - <AUTHOR> http://dzoba.com/thoughts-on-sf-after-six-months/

<comment><USER2> I suspect that the quantity of homeless folks in the bay area is due in part to the weather. It is pretty difficult to die of exposure here given the relative narrow temperature band we stay in (30 - 95 degrees F with rare excursions outside that) A warm coat and blanket in the winter, a place of shade and fresh water in the summer, and you're pretty much protected _from dying of exposure._

I found the comment about the dirt and the street repair interesting because I've heard the complaint in reverse, which is that the peninsula / south bay cities are 'too clean and neat, almost like plastic.' For those people they were looking for the 'gritty urban appeal' of San Francisco which, as the author points out, it has in some places.

It is interesting the competing memes about what a high tech utopia should look like, Blade Runner or Logan's Run? Or somewhere in the middle? I sometimes wish I could get Californians to have the same courage as the Swiss do when zoning towns which require only walking. I would love to see one of the Peninsula cities commit to that, create people mover transport to the edges and then ban cars in the interior. Imagine that your kids can ride their bike anywhere in the neighborhood or city and not be threatened by a car on its way to work? Don't have the stones for it though.

<comment><USER3> >I sometimes wish I could get Californians to have the same courage as the Swiss do when zoning towns which require only walking.

I would settle for just making pedestrian-only some small bits of San Francisco, ostensibly the most progressive city in the state.

For example: Oh what I wouldn't give to have Third Street shut down from say Folsom to Market. I walk every day most of the length of Third Street and it is an automotive hellscape.

Literally six lanes of cars all going in the same direction. And it's anarchy. At nearly every single light change, someone ends up blocking the intersection because they tried to make it across with no room. Cars nearly mowing down pedestrians as they try to turn into parking lot/hotel access roads. Cars clogging the bus lanes. And the honking, oh the honking.

Just shut it down. From the convention center through Yerba Buena Gardens, the St Regis, MOMA, all the way to Market. Giant outdoor cafes and restaurants and biergartens. Some protected dedicated bike lanes. Nice pedestrian paths. Dedicated spaces for outdoor exhibits from MOMA, the African Diaspora museum (in the St Regis) and Yerba Buena Center.

Earmark the extra tax increment for something nice, maybe for improving mass transit, or the police, or the art scene, as penance for taking away the six- lane artery of transit misery.

Then do it again on some other miserable street. And so on.

<comment><USER4> For those of us who don't have cars, this seems like a great idea (and honestly, I don't know why they even allow cars on market; as it's set up now, you already have to turn off every few blocks, even though most people ignore that and merge into the bus lane in the intersection often enough).

But really, if a road is completely packed with cars, shutting it down is not going to end the traffic problem. Those cars (and the people in them) have to go somewhere.

Also, speaking of third street, the new muni line from Powell to the caltrain station is already costing ~$1B/mile, so expanding such things is not at all cheap. Or effective, based on ridership estimates.

What might reduce traffic congestion would be throwing up more high rise buildings so people can live in the city and work near where they live. Reduced commutes means reduced traffic, reduced rents means less gentrification in outlying areas...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reads like "I don't like big cities" which is totally fair, but not a general comparison. To each their own. Dirty, loud, expensive: It's a big city! I personally love big cities. I grew up in the suburbs, but have chosen to spend my adult life in Toronto, NYC, London, and SF. I love the kinetic motion, the bars, the rowdiness, the closeness of social classes, the camaraderie of being 'miserable'. I love it!

But, I also see how someone who only moved here for a tech job and to be financially comfortable, who previously lived in a very middle-class suburban area, wouldn't be totally thrilled. Fair enough! Lots of good jobs in lots of decent places.

I do want to throw in one small defense item in the middle of SF hating. I didn't move here because of the tech stuff (which I am a part of) or because of the weather. I moved here for the crazy, wild, weird city that SF is without technology. For the hippies, the dropouts, the drag queens, the commies, the environmentalists, the capitalists, the techies, the artists, ... the great mashup of people that make up SF as a big and wild city.

Before anyone moves to SF, they should read "Tales of the City" by Armistead Maupin. If reading that doesn't make you want to immediately move to SF, then you'd probably do better in some other city with a decent tech scene. Or, as another reader pointed out, you'd probably be happier in the Valley if you are looking for a more NC-feel.

PS: the homeless problems being right next to the rich reminds me of the Settlement Movement of the early 20th century. check it out: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_movement)

</comment><comment><USER6> It always cracks me up that people feel like they NEED to live in SF when they come there. I lived in the SF Bay Area for most of my life and NEVER felt the need or desire to live in SF.....at all! There is so much to do in other parts of the Bay Area that are much more affordable, less filthy, and just overall better for your sanity.

If you move to the Bay Area and move to SF without looking at other areas then you have no reason to complain. BART may not be the best thing ever but it is everywhere. People move to SF for the same reason they buy an iPhone. They want to fit in. Go to the East Bay, buy an Android phone, and be different.

<comment><USER7> Based on weather and cleanliness, I'd rather live in San Mateo than SF proper. None of that annoying fog-mist.

<comment><USER8> I was in SF for Google IO a couple years ago and was somewhat fascinated by the fog-mist. Also surprised to find that it shows up almost every day. Seems like a better place to visit than live though. Streetcars are a nice novelty, but I can't imagine commuting on that every day.

Anyone know if there are there any cities in the US/Europe that are as clean and convenient (walk-ability and public transport) as Tokyo?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I moved from Cleveland to Seattle, and I would agree with most everything here (referring to Seattle of course). My only differences would be:

1) It is not as dirty. There is some level of dirtiness, but I found Cleveland to be much worse.

2) The government here isn't anywhere near as bad as SF or Cleveland. SF is NIMBY hell with a counter-intuitive positive feedback loop (They won't build, so they get gentrification, which oddly enough reduces their propensity to build), and a transit system that is so far gamed in the Transit Union's advantage that it has stopped functioning for society. Cleveland is playing the bribe-the-fortune-500 game with tax breaks that they can't afford, and city services which are mismanaged and underfunded.

Seattle has a nimby problem, a noise problem, and their public transportation is pretty weak and poorly designed. But I love it here.

<comment><USER10> +1 for Seattle. For the outdoor oriented tech types Seattle is the place to be. The access to amazing skiing, hiking, climbing, boating, mountain biking from Seattle cannot be beat. You can work until 5:30 and be skiing powder at Alpental at 6:30. In the summer you can access world class sport, trad or bouldering after work, or you can shuttle awesome MTB trails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I too moved from RTP to SF. The two biggest reasons I had a desire to leave NC were the technical aptitude and proximity to the beautiful places. On the technical aptitude side, I remember more than one drunken conversation with Russian nationals about compilers. I remember thinking by the end of the conversation I was wholly outmatched in technical skill. Seems like more of a good thing since technical people are celebrated like gods in some areas. I loved being able to paraglide or ski on the weekends. Having real mountains that close gives you ample opportunity to do all sorts of things that aren't possible in other cities. Not to mention the ability to get a good bottle of wine and drink it on the craggy coast at sunset.

Alas, the dirtiness of the city and production that is getting groceries home on the MUNI caused my wife and I to relocate to Santa Monica. We're further away from some of the outside things we like to do, but the day to day quality of life is 100-fold better.

<comment><USER12> Three cheers for the tech life in Santa Monica! I also moved here after a short stint in SF and decided this is a much better life overall. I even have a nice hill to live on if I want to pretend I'm back in SF. Groundworks is great coffee, but I will miss Philz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> San Francisco is over-hyped, possibly because of the high concentration of bloggers who live in and around the city. I prefer New York, Chicago, Boston, and Seattle.

<comment><USER14> The weather really matters to a person like me. I find that in snow, and rain, I don't get on very well. I tend to get very sick in extremely cold weather, and my mood isn't great either.

For this reason, London, Boston, Chicago, and New York are effectively ruled out for me as places to live for a large enough chunk of the year.

I don't really like Seattle very much. Their airport uses TSA. The employers in the area that are within walking distance of any of the places I would like to live don't greatly excite me either.

San Francisco meets a lot of special requirements that are hard to meet: -Very walkable -Decent transportation options (Uber) -Temperate -Good collection of employers -Empirical data appears to show a great number of interesting people

I don't think I've read a single pro-San Francisco blog, and even if I did, someone's opinion about San Francisco would only factor into a small part of my decisions to live here.

<comment><USER15> > I don't really like Seattle very much. Their airport uses TSA. [..]

So does SFO. Don't all airports in the US use TSA?

Also, literally every other city you mentioned has Uber available. Speaking specifically to Seattle, we also have Lyft and the other "popular" transportation-as-an-app services available.

<comment><USER16> Technically SFO is one of the very few airports (and the largest one I believe) that contracts out its airport security to a private company. The company and its operations are regulated by TSA, and for all practical purposes offers the same experience as any other airport, but the people who look at your bags and such are not TSA employees.

See: [http://www.flysfo.com/about-sfo/safety- security](http://www.flysfo.com/about-sfo/safety-security) and [http://blog.tsa.gov/2010/11/airports-who-opt-out-of-tsa- scre...](http://blog.tsa.gov/2010/11/airports-who-opt-out-of-tsa- screening.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've lived in a few tech cities, and SF is pretty high up thee for not sucking. Lots of jobs if you have skills, areas around the city have less horrid rent, pretty warm without being too hot, and neat culture.

I'll give a slight edge to Seattle, because I like the geography a bit better. It's where I'll land next. But for now I've spent half a decade in Boston. Good .edu jobs, lots of startups, and Pharma jobs too. Nice folks, and living in Cambridge or Somerville is on the subway and more reasonable for housing costs. Yes we have snow, but I grew up near Philly, so this doesn't phase me. I tried NYC and Austin, but too packed (NYC), and too damn hot. (~105 in May in Austin, and rarely lower...)

</comment><comment><USER18> > The government must be terrible. Taxes are very high. Services are terrible > (particularly bus). The city is gross.

amen brother

<comment><USER19> For a city that in theory has everything in the world going for it and an endless supply of rich people to tax, it must have one of the worst city governments (albeit most highly paid) in the country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I moved to the area about six months ago, and after living in Oakland for 3 months, moved to the city.

I'd agree with most of these points (though a lot of the upside, particularly the huge range of people who are welcomed here, are left out).

I disagree that the transit system is falling apart. The BART strikes were a huge embarrassment, but all things considered, I haven't felt handicapped not having a car since I've been here.

Also, after the dirtiness stops bothering you. Ditto on the noise (though I may be spoiled by an 11th floor apartment).

The rents and the NIMBYism (which does drive up rents) is the worst of any city in the United States. Certainly in terms of the cost necessary for the "right to build" _, and as far as rent goes, it 's either SF or NYC.

_(From 2007, but: [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/a-tale-o...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/a-tale- of-two-town-houses/306334/))

</comment><comment><USER20> Making friends is what ultimately drove me away from SF. I went in knowing one person, whom I relied too much on socially. As he and I were both working long hours, in separate startups, it became more and more difficult to sustain myself and fulfill that personal need.

I loved the size, the atmosphere of where I was living, the noise, the weather (MN kills), the amazing coffee and food, and the lack of need for personal transportation. It was strange in that everyone I met outside of tech was great, while a majority of those who were I really didn't care for (this is being kind; although it's not my intent to state that everyone in the SF tech scene is my enemy). But again, working in a startup, with those expected hours and meeting deadlines, it would've been borderline impossible.

</comment><comment><USER21> I love coming into the city, but I choose to live in Moraga because of some of the reasons you list here. Rent prices out here are actually down a bit from 6 months ago - you can rent a 3br house in Concord for around $2.5K a month. While that's exceedingly expensive compared to the rest of the US, it puts you within an hour and some change's striking distance of most Bay destinations, which can be valuable depending on your skill sets.

Also, it's stunningly gorgeous out here: [https://plus.google.com/100735767683148801066/posts/Y2ugoKdp...](https://plus.google.com/100735767683148801066/posts/Y2ugoKdpnG4)

</comment><comment><USER22> Just want to point out that it's not fair to call the government incompetent here, when the issue is more complex. I see the sidewalks being cleaned every morning only to be covered in filth again the next day. And it's hard to deal with the homeless issue when New York is buying bus tickets to San Francisco to deal with their homeless.

<comment><USER23> As a NYer, just wondering where you heard this? If true, my opinion of Bloomberg just went up even more.

<comment><USER24> NYC has a program to send homeless people back home with a one-way ticket: [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/nyregion/29oneway.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/nyregion/29oneway.html)

<comment><USER25> The article makes the program sound reasonably humanitarian, while the initial description made it sound more like "dump the problem elsewhere". With the examples of homeless people who had relatives in France or Puerto Rico they could live with, but they just couldn't afford to get there, buying them plane tickets seems like an actual solution to the problem that's good for both the people in question and NYC. And it sounds like it's only done on request, not some kind of involuntary exile (compare: [http://money.msn.com/now/post-- columbia-sc-to-exile-its-home...](http://money.msn.com/now/post--columbia-sc- to-exile-its-homeless)).

I have no idea if the article is cherry-picking unrepresentative positive examples, though. To determine if it's solving or just shifting the problem, it'd be interesting if there were any statistics on what % of people NYC bought one-way tickets for were homeless again N months or years afterwards, vs. in a more stable situation. Admittedly it's probably quite difficult to collect reliable data on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >The government must be terrible. Taxes are very high. Services are terrible (particularly bus).

Infer about state of gov't, don't bother finding anything out about it let alone get involved, then griping online? You probably deserve bad government.

<comment><USER27> 6 months residency is more than enough time to become acclimated to the cities problems and be a champion of fiscally acceptable infrastructure solutions, right? No. It is not.

The author makes a very fair observation. Side note, the idea that some people "deserve bad government" is one if the single most ludicrous things i have ever read on HN

<comment><USER26> _6 months residency is more than enough time to become acclimated to the cities problems and be a champion of fiscally acceptable infrastructure solutions, right? No. It is not._

It's not. But it's more than enough time to start investigating local governance beyond "must be" statements if it is a thing you care about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Taxes are very high." "Want to clean up areas of the city? Put a cop on every block!"

Someone elect this guy to city government, he seems to have a unbelievably solid grasp on the complexities of running a city like San Francisco.

<comment><USER29> The taxes are very high, and they are mis-spent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't think we live in the same City. But it's good that you came here to follow your dream. Life is a buffet -- try a little of everything, and everywhere, and then move on.

</comment><comment><USER31> In North Carolina the population density is much lower than SF so of course you are dealing with more pollution.

</comment><comment><USER32> interesting blog post but could have just been titled: "my thoughts on moving to a big city"

</comment><comment><USER33> just moved to SF from Ohio 3 months ago myself and i feel the exact same way as this guy...(its been more of a positive than a negative for me though)</comment>


Ask HN: What sort of database would be a fast backing store for git? - <AUTHOR>

In this thread, mhodgson explains why Postgres would not be a fast data store for git. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9833548
mhodgson says: "Once you understand how git works under the hood it's actually fairly easy to predict that performance will be poor. A simple checkout involves accessing 100s if not 1000s of objects. Also, you can't fetch these all at once because the objects you need to fetch are determined based on a nested tree. So you have to query the tree all the way down, getting each nested tree or blob based on the previous tree's contents. So ultimately you're doing 100s-1000s of queries for any given git command. Each query is fast, but even at 1-2 ms per query it adds up quickly."
So the question is, what sort of data store would be extremely fast and scalable for storing git?  A graph database? A key/value store?  Seems a little odd that the plain old file system is the fastest option. <comment><USER2> > mhodgson says: "Once you understand how git works under the hood it's > actually fairly easy to predict that performance will be poor. A simple > checkout involves accessing 100s if not 1000s of objects. Also, you can't > fetch these all at once because the objects you need to fetch are determined > based on a nested tree. So you have to query the tree all the way down, > getting each nested tree or blob based on the previous tree's contents. So > ultimately you're doing 100s-1000s of queries for any given git command. > Each query is fast, but even at 1-2 ms per query it adds up quickly."

You can do such queries on the server side if necessary. Doubt that'll immediately be possible with the given API; but there's nothing stopping you from doing that.

> So the question is, what sort of data store would be extremely fast and > scalable for storing git? A graph database? A key/value store? Seems a > little odd that the plain old file system is the fastest option.

But git is not a "plain old file system". It has its own indexing and builds up search datastructures in memory.

</comment><comment><USER3> Indexing speeds up a data store. If an extra layer that builds an index was added to git, or was build on top of git, that would make git queries faster.

This changes the question. Could one build an index for git? Why doesn't git have an index already?</comment>


A new way to learn how to program - <AUTHOR> http://www.scirra.com/blog/82/a-new-way-to-learn-how-to-program/

<comment><USER2> I have little coding experience and have been using Construct 2 for the past few months. Overall it has been an enjoyable experience. The tool allows you to apply programming logic in a "safe" environment where you don't have to worry about mistyping a function name or forgetting a ;.</comment>


Least squares fit of a surface in Python (with ridiculous application) - <AUTHOR> http://pingswept.org/2009/06/15/least-squares-fit-of-a-surface/

<comment><USER2> It would have been much cooler if you'd included a picture of the stack of masonite inverted so we could see the actual topology. Otherwise, pretty awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> An excellent point. I finished the masonite cutting around midnight on Sunday, the garage where I did the cutting was too dark for a good picture, and I wanted to see if it was going to work.

It did look cool with all the contours showing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> That's more permanently (and aestethically) corrected by ripping up the floor and re-leveling it... But I grant that would be more work.

<comment><USER4> It looks like the platform rests on the edges of the masonite. I wonder if it will leave depressions in the hardwood floors underneath? Assuming they don't own the place, their security deposit may help pay for the proper fix.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'm a little worried about that.

For better or for worse, we do own the place. I've thought that I might add a single flat sheet of masonite under the contours as protection, but that would involve another trip to the store and pulling the whole thing apart again, so maybe not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very clever approach. But my big concern is that the floor is not level to begin with. If it's because the wood flooring was laid poorly, then fine. However, if it's because the floor structure itself is bowing down due to the weight, then I would be very concerned. Hope it's just a cosmetic deficiency and not structural defect.

<comment><AUTHOR> From what I can tell (I'm the owner of the house), the first 6 feet of the floor were built slanted. A friend of mine with some contracting expertise has suggested that the room was likely a porch that was later closed in; such a slant would be typical for an exterior floor to shed rain. The flooring also changes slightly in how it's nailed down around the 6 foot mark, suggesting that the underlayment might change there too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Are we still allowed to express surprise that anyone who would choose such a geeky solution has a girlfriend? Or have we all grown up?

<comment><USER7> I think we're allowed to express surprised at the fact that the girlfriend would put up with a relatively unaesthetic solution to this problem.

Although I guess in the end they'll probably cover up the bare materials with something nice. Maybe a rug.

<comment><AUTHOR> You will be gratified to know that the first suggestion that "the girlfriend" made was to cover it with a rug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me of the tale about the US spending millions of dollars to build a pen that would work in zero gravity. After it was made, it was noted the Russians simply used pencils!

The parallel here is to get a chair without wheels. I find all these calculations interesting as a geek but in terms of the efficiency of the task, "fail" :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I am familiar with this "chair without wheels" technology you mention. The slope is steep enough that the tilt is still annoying, but a chair with legs of unequal length might have solved that.

The efficiency was, however, very close to 100%. You're just measuring the wrong thing.

<comment><USER8> _we have found that this is steep enough to make a desk chair roll– kind of irritating_

The only premise I could sense was related to the rolling.

 _The efficiency was, however, very close to 100%. You're just measuring the wrong thing._

As you seem to have focused on how fun the exercise was, you are more than likely right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very cool indeed. Is there a list of people like him that I can follow? Waking up to something this nerdy would make my day.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the list you speak of is called "Hacker News."

Glad you liked it. I actually went and stood on the platform for about 30 seconds this morning, just to experience the joy.</comment></comment>


Growth AMA with YC Partner Gustaf Alströmer - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/growth-ama-with-yc-partner-gustaf-alstromer/ <comment><USER2> > _Do you have any tips for leadgen / growth, for B2B SaaS startups? Right now > all the available leadgen tools out there, costs thousands of dollars, which > is expensive for startups!

Create a Google Spreadsheet, put 100 linkedin profiles in the spreadsheet that fit the profile of the potential buyings, then use a tool like Hunter to figure out their email-addresses. You can check the email format on their website if there is no response.

Email them a plain-text email saying you are the founder of your company and you are reaching out a small group of people who you think would be perfect or the product you are building and you ask them to try it. You could also include a short gif/video (like really short) of how it works.

Use an email software that allows you to check open-rates and click-through rates. If your email is opened many times it means its being forwarded around/getting attention. Email again if no-one responds.

Expect about 40% to open your email. 5-10% to click on whatever link you included and less than 5% to try your product. If that works, then you just have do the same thing 20x and you have 100 users. The biggest mistake people use when doing this is sending too few emails._

So nice to see a partner at YC advocating for spamming businesses and never mentioning the compliance issues and potential fines (up to $41,484 per email):

[https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business- center/guidance/can...](https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business- center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business)

Probably just an oversight though.

<comment><USER3> No one in the history of US law has ever been fined for manually sending out pitch emails. I think he's okay.

<comment><USER4> He is advocating sending out at minimum 2000 emails.

Pretty sure you will be automating that.

<comment><USER5> Or use BCC</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why it is so much harder to do TDD with iPhone development than with Rails. - <AUTHOR> http://joecannatti.com/?p=291

<comment><USER2> I think the biggest reason is that testing client side GUI code is generally much harder than testing server side web based code.....regardless of what platform you're working with.

It has less to do specifically with the iPhone vs Rails. I've experienced the same phenomenon trying to test a Python desktop app vs something like Django.</comment>


JVM is neither compiled nor interpreted - awinter-py https://abe-winter.github.io/rant/2017/10/24/jvm-neither.html <comment><AUTHOR> Not much substance to this; just aimless complaining.

There's a better write-up, which escapes me at the moment, which clarifies the smoking gun of Java's painful slow performance under certain circumstances as rooted in L2 cache churn, due to the deadly combination of the _java.lang.String_ class' immutability in memory, and all _java.lang.Object_ instance references (literally everything, including the references themselves) being passed around as messages which are... you guessed it, Strings.

This is why a GUI on a Desktop java runtime environment _feels_ slow (no one cares about your Swing app, and go out and buy four times more RAM (64GB maybe? oh, why not?) just for your IDE), but server processes, while also memory-hungry, are capable of reasonable performance in exchange for marginal code readability (even if verbose), when processing mostly primitives, threaded in parallel (yay, stateless protocols!), and packed into highly normalized formats serialized as JSON data structures, or XML/HTML DOMs, handled by proven libraries with good API's.

</comment><comment><USER2> I haven't seen such bullshit for a long time. Lots of negative claims with no serious data backing up any of these claims looks totally bullshit and amateur.</comment>


HQTP v.2: Holy Quran Transfer Protocol version 2 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Muneer_Bani_Yassein/publication/306927553_HQTP_v2_Holy_Quran_Transfer_Protocol_version_2/links/57c1d3d108aeb95224d7461d/HQTP-v2-Holy-Quran-Transfer-Protocol-version-2.pdf <comment><USER2> I don't understand why they need to invent a protocol specific to the Quran.

I have seen before people develop markup languages specifically designed for the Christian Bible; this page has links to a few of them: [http://ebible.org/usfx/Bible-encoding.htm](http://ebible.org/usfx/Bible- encoding.htm)

So, I could see the need for a markup language specifically for use with the Quran. But an entire application layer protocol seems like overkill, why not just use HTTPS?

Their protocol includes roll-their-own-security using SHA-1 and DSA. Much more advisable to just adopt TLS and use one of the existing widespread implementations of it, then they can easily adopt some much stronger algorithms than SHA-1 and DSS.</comment>


The sad positive feedback loop of lotteries - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/05/lotteries_2.php

<comment><USER2> I wish I remembered where I heard this concept, as it helped make the tendency to purchase lottery tickets by low-income individuals more understandable:

       Buying lottery tickets is buying 'hope insurance'

From my own perspective, there are a few different ways in which I could become fabulously wealthy, or at least much more financially secure than I am now. I could create or work for a hugely successful company. I could make a killing in real estate. I could win second place in a beauty contest. Lots of different things.

I try my best not to be materialistic, but there are times when I see beautiful homes or fancy cars or $650 Prada shoes and I think "I could so totally enjoy that someday". There's at least a little bit of hope that I could, someday.

There are lots of people out there who, without the ability to buy lottery tickets, would feel they have no possible way to become fabulously wealthy (even if that feeling isn't strictly correct). For these people, there's no sense of hope for breaking out of where they are, and the absence of hope is very painful. Spending a few dollars a week on lottery tickets to keep that hope alive becomes a sort of rational purchase. People aren't actuarial robots.

I'm not saying that I think that buying lottery tickets are a good idea, or that government-run lotteries aren't a form of abusive regressive taxation, but the conclusion of the linked article that people are still poor because they keep on buying lottery tickets is naive and condescending.

<comment><USER3> 'Hope insurance' makes a lot of sense. The question we should ask is, do lottery ticket buyers get their money's worth?

If it makes them feel more hopeful and happier, it might be worth the price, even if they never win anything substantial.

But if it becomes an addiction that ruins their lives, then it's pretty obvious that they aren't getting more than they put in.

<comment><USER4> I don't think lotteries are ruining a lot of lives the same way casinos do. One's lottery spending is pretty limited.

<comment><USER5> You could buy your child a netbook -- or a shelf of real books -- for the average yearly lottery expenditure in Chicago's poorest neighborhoods. Or you could save the money and use it as a cushion against cash shocks, preventing you from having to go to payday lenders, which are another unsavory business which exists to keep people poor and stupid.

See: [http://www.chicagoreporter.com/index.php/c/Cover_Stories/d/I...](http://www.chicagoreporter.com/index.php/c/Cover_Stories/d/Illinois_Lottery:_The_Poor_Play_More)

<comment><USER3> Indeed, or simply go get a couple of personal finance books at the library and turn your life around. Too bad that few people actually do simple things that could improve their situation... If the money wasn't spent on lottery tickets, I'm not sure it would be spent on much better things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> In the This American Life episode #329, there's a great interview with a person who buys up lottery winners' annuities for (discounted) lump sums. After seeing what happens to the lives of so many "instant millionaire" lottery winners, he starts seeing winning the lottery as a horrible curse instead of as a wonderful blessing.

[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/329/N...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/329/Nice-Work-If-You-Can-Get-It)

The interviewee, Ed Ugel, wrote a book on the subject: <http://www.edwardugel.com/money-for-nothing.html>

<comment><USER6> I used to work for a company that did this. Rather, they had moved on to advising people who did this. Cashflow brokering is sometimes a sensible business for actual businesses, eg you have $1M in firm orders and need some cash today to fill them.

But I feel the same way as that guy about most lottery winners. Being rich really is a habit of mind that you can't learn overnight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember when California first instituted its lottery and, upon hearing that 1/3 of the proceeds would go toward financing education (the political justification for the system), 1/3 would go toward administrative expenses, and 1/3 would go toward paying off winners, I immediately envisioned a poker game with six guys being told that a stranger would be taking away two-thirds of every pot for each hand they played and thought, "what a sucker game that is."

In his autobiography, Malcolm X spoke of the numbers-game racket that so decimated Harlem in his day. They used to call this exploitation. Now they call its modern counterpart enlightened public policy. Pretty sad.

<comment><USER8> "I picked strawberries, and though I can't recall what I got per crate for picking, I remember that after working hard all one day, I wound up with about a dollar, which was a whole lot of money in those times. I was so hungry, I didn't know what to do. I was walking away toward town with visions of buying something good to eat, and this older white boy I knew, Richard Dixon, came up and asked me if I wanted to match nickels. He had plenty of change for my dollar. In about a half hour, he had all the change back, including my dollar, and instead of going to town to buy something, I went home with nothing, and I was bitter. But that was nothing compared to what I felt when I found out later that he had cheated. There is a way that you can catch and hold the nickel and make it come up the way you want. This was my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn't gambling, he's cheating."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> See also: <http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/1126.html>

There are plenty of stupid governmental policies, but few as _maliciously_ stupid as lotteries, where the government spends hundreds of millions of dollars buying advertising to encourage poor people to lose their money.

<comment><USER9> Yet can you imagine a public and political campaign to remove lotteries? Any kind of reasoning will sound condescending, especially with the reward structure build around infrequent but noticeable payoffs keeping the players coming back to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Lotteries are a sad story of Government policy gone awry. They prey on the poor, uneducated. It seems they could be just a devious plot to get back the tax refund the poor (as in sad) people get every year.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, the article fails to recognize that the lottery's returns are so poor because the government has a monopoly on them. At least private sector lotteries would have to compete on payout levels.

<comment><USER12> No, they wouldn't. All that they'd compete on is _perceived_ payout. In other words, if you have private competing lotteries, they'd optimize the heck out of the feedback loop explained in the article, ruining people's lives even more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I buy lottery tickets occasionally (few times a year). I have few 'justifications' for that:

* The money goes to charitable purposes. So if I don't win, I have given money to charity, which is kinda nice.

* Somebody always wins (eventually). And hopefully she/he will be bit happier, at least momentarily.

* It is actually possible for me to win. Even a small chance of winning is a lot more than zero possibility.

Overall from my perspective it seems a net positive for a few dollars a year. Of course poor people spending tens of dollars a week is quite different matter, and bit problematic.

</comment><comment><USER14> The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math.

<comment><USER15> If you actually ask a lottery customer, you'll find that they have a basic grasp of the math. I prefer to think of the lottery as a tax on people willing to pay taxes, and that's as moral as taxation can get.

Anyway, the real motivations of the lottery customer are not as stupid as people think. Consider:

1\. Odds of Joe Beercan getting rich through the usual methods (years of hard work, inheritance, rock stardom): Zero. And Joe knows this better than anyone.

2\. Odds of Joe Beercan getting rich through the lottery: One in 600 billion. He knows this is a longshot, but that it's better than nothing.

If you want even the _merest_ shot at getting rich, the lottery's not so bad. (Though hoping for 10 blackjacks in a row is probably still better.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good thing poor people are protected from investing in private securities offerings, via regulation and 'accredited investor' limits, so that they can spend more on government-issued lottery tickets.

<comment><USER4> the odds are pretty similar though</comment></comment>


Nearby Connections 2.0: offline high bandwidth peer to peer device communication - <AUTHOR> https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/07/announcing-nearby-connections-20-fully.html <comment><USER2> _Today we 're announcing the availability of this API across all Android devices running Google Play services 11.0 and up._

Of course, Google had to lock up peer to peer communication by tying it to their online store. It's also unencrypted and unauthenticated, so you don't want to use this for home control.

<comment><USER3> It used to be that these kinds of protocols would be reversed and reimplemented pretty quickly. See Pidgin (GAIM) and countless other instant messengers. I wonder what's happened - I see a lot less reverse engineering going on these days.

<comment><USER4> [https://microg.org/](https://microg.org/)

Google play store APIs and protocols ARE being reverse engineered and re implemented.

I run microG with store apps with no issues with everything I have tried.

<comment><USER3> I meant more broadly: no one's reimplemented AirDrop, and MicroG won't have this new one for quite a while.

<comment><USER5> Did people used to widely reverse engineer protocols that weren't related to communications and chat?

Doing it to a chat-app has an obvious benefit: you can use your own application with your custom UX, and connect it with multiple networks at once, or multiple accounts at the same time on the same network.

Doing it with something like Airdrop is kind of a nebulous proposal. If you want to share files with someone next to you, and for some reason you hate Airdrop, then there's lots of other alternatives. Reverse engineering Airdrop gets you nothing special.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is one of those features that really needs cross platform support. If Apple and Google could just work together and let MultipeerConnectivity and Nearby Connections work together maybe developers would actually develop interesting applications for peer to peer.

<comment><USER7> It's presumably built around WiFi Aware, which is cross platform, but the WiFi "Alliance" (owners) won't tell you what it is or how it works or how you can make use of it.

So this is what we get.

100% agreed though. IMO is poison and a major regression from where things stood- barely working wifi p2p- since it doesn't make any interoperability affordances/offerings.

<comment><USER8> WiFi Aware is an OS-level feature that's being added in the upcoming Android O release. It also requires new hardware support, which means most phones don't support it yet.

Nearby isn't using WiFi Aware. We want it to work on all existing Android devices.

Internally, it's using a mix of WiFi, WiFi Direct, Bluetooth LE & Classic Bluetooth.

Getting proximity-based P2P messaging to work correctly across all devices is complicated. With Nearby Connections, we're trying to provide an abstraction layer that makes it easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another Google specific API. Please use open standard based communication framework [0] for your "connected" things.

[0] [https://openconnectivity.org](https://openconnectivity.org)

</comment><comment><USER10> > the TV urging you to continue binging on your saved guilty-pleasures > watchlist

The shelves in the grocery store calling out to me because they know I like potato chips! Can't wait!

<comment><USER11> I would love to go full Watch_Dogs on those shelves. They'll probably have those e-ink price tags that are now popular; it would be cool to make them display "IT'S A TRAP" instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _Imagine walking into a hotel room and having the temperature set just > right, your favorite sub-genre of progressive-math-rock playing in the > background, and the TV urging you to continue binging on your saved guilty- > pleasures watchlist._

I really can't help but cringe. Please let that never be my future, where I broadcast out personal information to the entire room everywhere I go.

</comment><comment><USER13> 1\. cross platform support and interactivity - at protocol level. 2\. innovators build platforms and apps. 3\. success and liberty for all!

Seriously though, totally agree with a few commenters (pat2man, mataug), open standards will win the day; any day...including future days.

<comment><USER14> I am genuinely curious in wondering what proportion of the open standards in technology begin as innovative evolutions of existing standards with only limited support at introduction, like this is. Isn't this essentially one of the accepted pathways to open standards, build the system, invite collaborators, and see if it gains acceptance and traction?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can see this as a way to configure IoT devices more easily. For example, setting up a new printer is often a hassle; using a tiny, barely workable, touch screen and an inefficient menu system is no fun. Imagine you could just plug it in and your smartphone comes to life with a nice GUI. It could even pre-configure it for you. Another example is Amazon's Alexa devices. Currently, you have to push buttons and install a custom app on your phone and it can be very confusing.

The classroom examples also ring true to real world experiences. My wife is a teacher and has used several different proprietary "voting" devices in the past to great effect. However, they all used different hardware/protocols and didn't integrate with their current environment at all. This year they are moving to Chromebooks and my hope is that Nearby Connections might provide an "open" foundation on which a new breed of apps can be built.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is basically Air Drop with extra features and an open API .

As @pat2man mentions, It would've been great if Apple and Google made this an open standard instead of having their own proprietary solutions.

<comment><USER17> It's amazing how much things have changed since AirDrop. In the last two offices in which I've worked (both creative), AirDrop was indispensable. Even in a small team of 20 or so people, it was used hundreds of times a day.

The new Apple era has strayed considerably from "it just works," except for AirDrop, which has been nothing but a pleasure to work with.

<comment><USER18> Can you describe the workflow of using AirDrop? Because for some reason AirDrop never really clicked for me. It is far too many layers or options before i get it across devices.

And I assume you are all using Mac?

Because In Cooperate World it is pretty much Windows Only.

<comment><USER17> In Corporate World of the 1990's it was pretty much Windows Only. Much of the corporate world has moved on, largely spurred by managers adopting iPhones.

The last two companies I worked for — a creative agency with ~50 people, and a larger more anonymous company with ~2,000 employees in 10 states — both were 100% Mac. The first one, because that's how creative agencies have always been. The second for security. The IT dept's policy was no Microsoft hardware or software allowed other than Office: Mac.

As for the workflow, it's like this:

\- See file on desktop. \- Right-click and select "Airdrop" \- Choose destination computer \- Notification appears on target computer stating that someone wants to send a file \- Destination user clicks "Accept" \- File transmits super-duper fast in the background and lands in the destination computer's download folder

Or if you're sending a file to yourself (both devices have the same iCloud/.mac/.me ID) skip everything after the third step.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We need a net neutrality version of this, not networks built for specific verticals like weather alerts.

</comment><comment><USER20> I hate google for things like this. "Dont be evil" they said. But why do they hate freedom?

</comment><comment><USER21> No thank you. I hope there's a simple way to disable this.

<comment><USER22> Can't wait for the peer to peer mobile malware!

<comment><USER23> No need to wait, the recently announced Broadcom wifi vuln discussed here[1] can be used to spread to nearby devices (see the section titled "The First Wifi Worm" near the end).

1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14859602](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14859602)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In 2014 there was MeshMe, an Ad-Hoc Mesh Networks it disappeared shortly afterwards. [https://hacked.com/meshme-messaging- app/](https://hacked.com/meshme-messaging-app/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Wherein Google realizes it needs AirDrop for its self driving cars too.

</comment><comment><USER26> hopefully this will accelerate development and adoption of ipfs based apps! [https://ipfs.io/](https://ipfs.io/)</comment>


Jolla Mobile: website launch and Sailfish OS sneak peek - <AUTHOR> http://www.jolla.com/ <comment><USER2> Isn't this "Meego" based. There's an Android logo at 0m50 <http://cl.ly/image/2D1l2X470d3C> does it means it will run Android apps or that is an Android fork?

Edit. [http://www.slashgear.com/jolla-planning-3-5-phone-with- andro...](http://www.slashgear.com/jolla-planning-3-5-phone-with-android-app- compatibility-20243313/) It will run Android apps. Nice.

<comment><USER3> Does that mean Jolla will be banned from shipping on any phone from Samsung, HTC, Acer, ASUS, Lenovo, LG, Sony, Motorola(cough), Huwaei, Toshiba, Dell, ZTE etc. ?

[http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/google-blocked- acers-...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/google-blocked-acers-rival- phone-to-prevent-android-fragmentation/)

What major OEM is left to make the phones? Nokia? (har har) Apple? (Yeah right.) RIM?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am happy.

I've always wanted a real Linux phone that is well-supported both by a community and a commercial vendor.

Consider the alternatives: iOS and WP are closed, Android is based on Linux but needs a JVM to do most things - and of course is heavily controlled by Google.. Why is a true Linux phone where you can run native apps important? Because you can port existing libraries that people have worked hard to make on the desktop, easily onto the phone, and create awesome experiences without reinventing the wheel - consider Telepathy-supported unified IM.

You could also do lots of geekery - use your phone as a first-class development device (I've served a couple of websites for development work straight through my N900 over 3G, running a LAMP stack on the phone, while coding the whole thing in a shell using Vim and it's associated addons, _right on the phone_ ). That's not the point here though.

The point is that this gives you true freedom to do whatever you want. This involves building amazing apps, porting excellent libraries previously used on the desktop, and lots more.

From what I've read, I'm assuming that Sailfish lets you do all that.

<comment><USER5> We'll see. I saw an interview with them this year, and something they said worried me. They basically admitted their OS would be heavily controlled by carriers, but they tried to spin it as "working very close with carriers". If that's the case, it might provide an even worse experience regarding carrier bloatware and whatnot than Android.

Plus, leaving the control up in the air, means that it could become as fragmented as the Linux world - which is much more fragmented than Android. At least you can run an Android app on virtually any Android-based phone.

To be honest, I'm more excited about Firefox OS. I even like its UI more than this, which looks like a mix of different UI ideas from different operating systems. Not that I have anything against borrowing ideas and building on them - it's just that I don't think the result is very good.

<comment><USER6> What is your expectation for the relationship between a manufacturer and carriers? The carriers are their customers. If they want to stay in business, they have to make their customers happy, like any other industry. The idea that they are going to put their foot down and strong-arm the carriers is not a realistic one. I take that comment to mean Jolla wants to stay in business.

<comment><USER3> Hopefully they take and stick to a stand that preinstalled carrier bloatware should be able to be uninstalled very easily and disallow always running services like on WP.

This is a happy medium between the hardline no-preinstalled-carrier-apps of iOS and the anything-goes Android phones.

<comment><USER6> Jolla has no clout. They can't take a stand on anything. The best they can do is build it into the system that all apps can be uninstalled and hope no one at the carrier brings it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Additional video, showing Sailfish OS in use: <http://www.katsomo.fi/?progId=154747> Person in video is Marc Dillon, CEO of Jolla.

<comment><USER7> Youtube version: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHn3qp_E3_A> for those who don't have Silverlight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I must say it is really an innovative and a usable UI concept. It seems that Jolla has all those MeeGo engineers from Nokia who developed the Swipe UI of N9.

The pulley menu is a great conept. You slide the menu to make the selection. Nice touch.

Another useful feature is the stuff you can operate on the "multitasked windows". I wonder though, how would the UI display more than 4 multitasked windows - displaying smaller icons or may be provide a horizontal navigation for 4+ windows.

Definitely an OS worth waiting for. It would be awesome if I can deploy it on my N9!

<comment><USER9> Deploying on N9 seems to be a real possibility. Currently they seem to be doing their development on N950, the qwerty-equipped sister model of N9 that never was brought to the market.

<comment><USER10> That's great news! Maybe I'll find some use for my N950 soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hope Sailfish implements the Swipe UI from N9. That was one of the best UI paradigms in recent years.

<comment><USER12> You and me both. I miss it whenever I use a phone that isn't my N9. It just seems so natural. The actual shape of the phone helped a lot though - I don't think it would work as well if the front was completely flat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Any screenshots?

<comment><USER14> There is also a hands-on preview here: [http://www.arcticstartup.com/2012/11/21/jolla-comes-out- of-h...](http://www.arcticstartup.com/2012/11/21/jolla-comes-out-of-hiding- launches-sailfish)</comment></comment>


Oscilloscope Music - <AUTHOR> https://oscilloscopemusic.com/watch.php <comment><USER2> This is pretty cool. If you couldn't tell, he is using a dual trace oscilloscope in X-Y Mode [1]. The left audio channel is driving the horizontal deflection. You can usually pick up one of these old analog scopes for under 100 bucks if you look around!

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscilloscope#X-Y_mode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscilloscope#X-Y_mode)

<comment><USER3> There's also this HTML5 XY 'scope that crops up here from time to time:

[https://github.com/Sean-Bradley/Oscilloscope](https://github.com/Sean- Bradley/Oscilloscope)

Edite: corrected link

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This gets even neater if you take a moment to ponder the theory / math behind how it actually works.

The same signal is driving the video as is driving the audio. Since the oscilloscope is in X-Y mode, the horizontal position is the voltage for the left audio channel and the vertical position is the voltage for the right channel.

So if you drew a fixed dot somewhere on the screen, you'd get DC in both audio channels, which doesn't produce an audible tone. If you want a sound, you must move the dot. But of course that will affect the picture too. The two are not independent.

So what the guy has done is created a single signal that is carefully crafted to both look and sound good. (It's kind of like those clever programs that compile in two languages.)

Once you appreciate that, it sounds nearly impossible, but I believe there are some tricks involved that make it more tractable. You've still got the time dimension to play with, so that gives you some freedom. Due to persistence of vision (and phosphorous on the CRT), you can, for example, move the dot between two positions quickly, and the eye can't tell how quickly so you can vary the frequency of a sound without changing the picture. I'm sure there's a lot more to it than that, but that's just one trick that it seems like he must be using.

<comment><USER5> also, frequency would be unaffected by DC bias, I assume. I guess FFTs will also be useful...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is very sophisticated modern art. It's worth taking a moment to view and listen to his videos on YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFgoUhNvMLrr8izq38HX6...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFgoUhNvMLrr8izq38HX6rjFR- nkfklxw)

</comment><comment><USER7> I love this guy's stuff. I have his Max plugin for MaxForLive in Ableton and it is a blast to play with.

</comment><comment><USER8> Be sure to use headphones to fully experience this.</comment>


Brooke Hart, San Jose, and the Last Lynching in California - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooke_Hart <comment><USER2> For those driving through San Jose: you can still see the old railway warehouse for Hart's downtown SJ department store as you drive south on Coleman Avenue and climb the overpass just before it becomes Market street. Look down to your right and look for the ruddy red building with the faded white heart.</comment>