Teen Marijuana Vaping Soars, Displacing Other Habits - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/health/teen-drug-use.html <comment><USER2> The thing that sucks here is the health issues have nothing inherently to do with THC and everything to do with vaping a black market product that has shitty ingredients in it.

I live in CA where it is becoming more and more regulated. I have a 'church' down the street where I can buy stuff at a steeeep discount (no tax, lower prices)... but I go to the regulated places the next town over (higher taxes, higher prices) that do lab testing and have their products sealed with a lab certificate.

As soon as I learned that the underground trap shops were buying, cleaning and refilling used cartriges with god knows what I stopped going to the churches.

<comment><USER3> I am not a doctor but from what I have been reading, consuming THC on a regular basis before 21 (the commonly accepted age for the latest stage of brain development) is definitely a bad idea, as it will prevent the endocannabinoid system to develop correctly. I would not dismiss teen smoking/vaping as a public health concern, it's not just about counterfeiting, I think we need better education about the risks and benefits.

<comment><USER4> I'm very much for pro-fact-based drug education. Not just for THC, but for the most common things that folks can come into contact with. No scare tactics, just answering questions like what happens to one's body, what "high" feels like, realistic methods of ingestion, and benefits.

Unfortunately, the greater public - the government at least - hasn't been so keen on such things because the focus is more on keeping drugs a scary evil. Even current drug education is such, though thankfully it isn't so "Drugs are bad, mkay?" as it was during the 'just say no' heydays in the 80's and 90's.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, we seem to have ample evidence that Tylenol seems to be strongly associated with autism[1] and weakly with ADHD[2], yet its use is not only widespread but unquestioned. The problem, of course, is that it's complicated; correlation isn't necessarily causation. So how to respond? Should all high school students be taught how to think critically of bioscience results? It's not easy to distill down to distinct usable facts. Suggesting at all that it is safe for teens to vape THC is a very dangerous proposition. I think you'd have to at least prove that it is safer than lead in gasoline, and that is not easy.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18445737](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18445737) [2] [https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2017/10...](https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2017/10/26/peds.2016-3840)

<comment><USER6> Your first source is a bad one but here is a review: [1] The association is really not strong but the authors do advice against indiscriminate paracetamol use.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29341895](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29341895) [2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26930528](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26930528)

<comment><USER7> Is there any alternatives suggested for this medicine?

<comment><USER8> Naproxen is far, far better for pain, and doesn't have anywhere near the possibility of cooking your liver.

<comment><USER9> Umm NSAIDs like Naproxen have their own list of issues which may be worse than Tylenol. Another issue is that Tylenol is often used because it does not interact with other NSAIDs so if you are not sure if someone has taken medication with a NSAID in it, you can safely give them Tylenol, generally speaking, where as if you give them more NSAIDs you could potentially risk an overdose. So its not as simple as Napoxen is superior to Tylenol. IANAD,

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >Vaping of marijuana was at the root of a public health crisis that unfolded this summer

The fact that it takes the author two more paragraphs to elucidate that the illness was in fact linked to bootleg, vitamin E-containing cartridges is disappointing, but not surprisingly. That fact seems really material to the argument.

<comment><USER11> The investigation is ongoing, vitamin E is not confirmed as the causal agent.

Anyway, the problem is actually people inhaling random chemicals, a problem which vaping has gifted to us. There will be other cases of lung injury unrelated to vitamin E.

Frankly, even 1 more dead guy is too many, I support a total ban on vaping.

<comment><USER12> So I also assume you fully support prohibition of alcohol then? Since it kills 1,000s a year in the US?

<comment><USER11> This is a foolish argument. 1. Vaping is at the stage where it can be controlled, whereas alcohol is beyond that point. Public health is not best served by a logically coherent approach where every product is treated fairly. 2. Alcohol will not burn your lungs and kill you in a few days at recommended usage levels, whereas vaping random juice apparently will.

<comment><USER13> Drinking ISO alcohol will make you go blind. Drinking moonshine can kill you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's funny because for years, as the opening of the article suggests, usual teenage vices (booze, drugs, and sex) have been dropping contrary to 80s teen movie stereotypes. FWIW, apart from the potential concerns with inhaling vaporized anything--something people skeptical of vaping point to although the science hasn't really established if it is harmful or not yet, weed is certainly the weakest of drugs (including alcohol) wrt harm for the body.

<comment><USER15> > weed is certainly the weakest of drugs (including alcohol) wrt harm for the > body.

is the brain a part of the body?

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3930618/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3930618/)

[https://www.apa.org/monitor/2015/11/marijuana- brain](https://www.apa.org/monitor/2015/11/marijuana-brain)

<comment><USER16> I know people who are extremely dependent on weed, who will have anxiety attacks without it. It's less dangerous than most drugs, but there are people who are important to me that I wish could function without it. I'm talking grown adults, with families, who do nothing but play video games.

Their problems would exist without the weed, but it seems to play a part in their stagnation. I guess I just don't know that many people who will just occasionally smoke it, it seems to turn into a lifestyle as much as any other drug.

<comment><USER4> "... who will have anxiety attacks without it."

Honestly, I've met _many_ daily smokers in my life. Heck, I've been one off and on and tend to like to do it most weekends. I greatly prefer it to alcohol.Most folks can quit quite easily: At most, a few weeks of decreased appetite and trouble falling asleep. The worst effects wear off in the first week. The few folks I've met that have trouble without it have mental health issues, such as anxiety attacks. The worst thing about that situation is that one has to be able to find decent medical care and risk getting anxiety attacks - which I've read are horribly scary - to feel comfortable giving up smoking. And even then they might find that the smoking helps the best with the fewest side effects...unfortunately.

Also, most adults I've met who smoke regularly do all the family stuff just fine. They work, they play with their kids (more happily when a little stoned!), and so on. I mean, sure, it makes you more happy with a slightly messier house and more happy just _being_ , but the other thing with that lowered happiness thresh hold is being happier when going on walks or playing boring kids games. Sure, happier with a slightly messier house but also happier to do the cleaning. Happier to eat more healthily, and so on.

<comment><USER16> I'm definitely not trying to blame weed, if people can use it responsibly I say great! The problem is people who have conditions like anxiety who become dependent on it to get by. Some people become alcoholics because they have stuff going on that they can't deal with, and that doesn't mean I think alcohol should be illegal. But just like them, I wish the drug wasn't a numbing agent that prevents them from dealing with the underlying problem.

<comment><USER17> How do you feel about people becoming dependent on prescription ADHD medications?

<comment><USER16> Oh, don't get me started on that. Not just ADHD, but antidepressants and anxiety medication as well. Of course there are people with legitimate needs, and boys who truly can't pay attention, but the over-prescription of these medications is negatively effecting way too many people.

Not working on your issues, and just masking them with a chemical should be a short term solution. These drugs are worse in my opinion, and I could ramble for a long time on my reasons.

The money they cost and dr's never having an exit strategy for the patient, are my biggest concerns. I've never heard of a dr informing a patient on how difficult getting off these things are. Presumably because they want you to take it forever, or they have no clue. And there are definitely too many boys who just don't get the attention they need, or have more energy than someone likes, so their behavior becomes a disease.

I drink sometimes, and have been known to do other things. But I feel like everyone should be striving for the ability to get through life without 'needing' chemicals. Sometimes people forget how wonderful you can feel when you are clean, eating right, and exercising. They start to think they are incomplete without some chemical. Of course we all fail at being perfect, but it's a goal worth struggling towards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm an avid user for many years, and when I used vaping pens for a couple weeks, I felt the damage in my lungs, it was uncomfortable. Burning oil was a little better but it still felt like the hot air was burning your lungs, and burning wax had a completely different problem where I literally felt wax on my esophagus and lungs the more I vaped. Never had any of these problems smoking from a bong. I'll stick to what has been tried and tested for centuries if not millenia.

<comment><USER19> You may have been a bit paranoid, wax isn't actually wax it's just pressed weed so you remove plant matter. When you smoke it through water it you're inhaling a healthier product because you're not incinerating leaves and stems, and typically you're doing it at a more controlled and lower temperature.

<comment><USER18> This was wax/shatter inside a vape pen. I'm sure it was the correct use. Whether or not that is actual wax, it definitely left some kind of residue that I could detect just by breathing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The article starts with something that is, by most accounts, harm reduction among teenagers: "Teenagers are drinking less alcohol, smoking fewer cigarettes and trying fewer hard drugs, new federal survey data shows. But these public health gains have been offset by a sharp increase in vaping of marijuana and nicotine..." The statistics, unused in this article, are quite clear: alcohol, tobacco and hard drugs more harmful to personal and societal health than marijuana.

But then the NYT proceeds to whip up some nonsense about how harmful vaping marijuana is, staring, and really ending, as we have no clue how harmful this behavior is, with a quote: "'This is a very, very worrisome trend..."

This is fear mongering, pure and simple.

<comment><USER21> But are they vaping _instead_ of those other things, or were we witnessing a decrease in the other things until vaping happened?

<comment><USER20> I doubt the data source can tell us this information. It asks students what drugs they have taken at what intervals, and does not seek to address the "why." Hence the pearl clutching by the NYT to provide the "why" for us.

Either way, we have no clue as to the harm that vaping causes us; we are rather certain of the harm alcohol, cigarettes and hard drugs cause us. The numbers in TFA are still pretty bad: ~17% of these kids have vaped THC in the past month where as ~50% had drank alcohol. Even if this was a tradeoff, it seems like a good one at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here are the factors that come to mind regarding the popularity of vape pens.

1) Availability Bias - The weed pen can be on your desk or in your pocket. Coca Cola exploits this human misjudgement, and that's why you can have Coca cola all around the world. The takeaway is that you're more likely to consume because it is there.

2) Mobility - It's mobile, unlike a bong. Get high right before your favorite song at a concert. Whip out the vape pen.

3) Stealth A) (Form Factor) - I think these are becoming popular with teenagers primarily because, if a teenager wants to smoke in their parents house, and avoid detection from their parents, a vape pen is less obvious. The pen is objectively easier to hide than a flower setup.

B) (Stench) Vape pens don't smell as much. I've seen signs on businesses refusing service due to the marijuana stench on customers. People even smoke vapes in public and it's indistinguishable from vaping tobacco unless closely inspected or smelled. (The smell from vape pens exists, it's less noticeable than flower.)

4) Convenience - The steps to smoke a vape pen (push of a button and inhale) are simpler than the process of smoking out of a bong. We're dealing with stoners here! (Not all stoners are lazy, but many stereotypes are loosely based on truths.)

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't understand why everyone moved away from directly smoking the flowers so readily. I hated the idea of shatter/resin when I first heard it and there is no way I would use a vape pen.

<comment><USER24> Because lighting carbon-based molecules on fire creates thousands of carcinogenic components that are difficult to enumerate.

Vapor, on the other hand, (theoretically) contains only 3 chemicals: glycerin, propylene glycol, <nicotine/THC/active stimulant>. In practice though, vapor has probably thousands of compounds as well due to "flavors", additives, and side effects of the heating coil on those things.

It's all about perception though. Lighting something on fire and inhaling smoke is perceived as dangerous compared to inhaling "vapor" (which everyone does every day in the shower, right?)

<comment><USER25> vape flower and you cut out glycerin and propylene glycol.

<comment><USER26> I always thought rosin is the best since it sounds like the cleanest extract. Is that true? If you vape rosin, then you should eliminate even the carcinogens from the plant matter?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is great news. Vaping is far better for your health than alcohol or cigarettes.

<comment><USER28> "Teen Marijuana Vaping Soars" is objectively not great news. Subjectively it might be great news if the vaping THC dose was low, but it is not.

There is no technology that makes alcohol 100X stronger for todays teen than what it has been historically. But that's not true for THC products. On a personal note, I lost my hearing in one ear immediately after trying a strong MJ product. I just assumed it was congestion at the time but 10 months later I still have 70% hearing loss. I don't share this story with anyone because speaking ill of THC is heresy these days and a sure way to get downvoted.

<comment><USER29> I've never heard of anything like that happening (and admittedly I'm skeptical) - can you expand on the event that caused you to lose your hearing? What did your doctors say about it?

<comment><USER28> I had perfect hearing in that ear, smoked a high THC joint, and felt immediately congested. Congestion usually makes hearing diminish temporarily. But the next morning I still felt _congested_ and then spent several weeks trying to yawn it away and get my ear to pop. Three weeks later I went to the doctor who diagnosed me with "sudden nerve deafness". Medically there is no known cause for sudden nerve deafness and the doctor had no idea either. But I did have a cold the weeks before, so who knows.

So yes, it could be this was all just a co-incidence but the precise timing of it all should give everyone pause. I did Google for similar stories and I did find one person with a similar story who was immediately dismissed because no one ever heard of such a thing. I do wonder how many people restrain from reporting such effects since the counter-argument is to provide casual evidence or get a doctor to confirm which is often not possible.

For sure there is a gross disparity in tolerance these days and you should avoid sharing hits of THC with _anyone_ if your tolerance is low. They'll be fine, you on the other hand may have an experience you weren't expecting.

<comment><USER29> Thanks for sharing, hard to tell what to make of that - I think it warrants some investigation though. I wonder if there's anyone who'd want to make an anecdotal report on something like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Marijuana extracts for vaping become legally available in much of Canada tomorrow.

<comment><USER31> Yesterday actually. My local dispensary had them in stock from Canaca already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Let them vape just like we, as a society, let people smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, and consume fast food and sugar. I feel like the trend to outlaw things like kratom and vaping is so hypocritical, I can only assume it's because they compete against big tobacco/pharma, not any kind of altruistic research.

</comment><comment><USER33> Imagine how many people would still be alive today, how many kids wouldn't have lost everything to truly harmful drugs, if this ridiculous prohibition had never been in place.

</comment><comment><USER34> The piece is built for fear mongering but I'm curious how the developing brain of an adolescent will be changed from constant marijuana use and compared to if it had never happened. I'm guessing how the drug is used would also be important in the longterm outcome because someone using it to help with anxiety might benefit compared to a developing brain under a lot of anxiety.

<comment><USER35> overview of studies [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3930618/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3930618/) Every measurement of brain function decreased significantly with marijuana use, long term abstention seemed to clear up some problems, though physical changes in brain did not go away in users who started as adolescents, there were long term permanent changes to brain function.

<comment><USER34> Thanks for replying with that research. I'll check it out and I'm not sure why my comment is being downvoted for curiosity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Two of the worst seem to be pulegone (mint flavour) and benzaldehyde (almond). The heating of the compounds is what causes the changes they are OK to eat but not heat and inhale.

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/vaping-liquid- tests-1.5381363](https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/vaping-liquid-tests-1.5381363)

</comment><comment><USER37> [http://archive.md/d62Cr](http://archive.md/d62Cr)

</comment><comment><USER38> > The rate of overall marijuana use held steady for high school students who > reported using it once or more over the past year, but there was an uptick > in daily use.

Marijuana use has NOT increased and more teens are vaping instead of smoking, consuming it in safer ways than ever before. Sounds like great news. Too bad the headline is clickbait bullshit.

<comment><USER39> Maybe teen reporting of marijuana use has increased now it's more socially acceptable to be out the closet about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> makes sense to me!

</comment><comment><USER41> That's wonderful. It's the most dangerous form of vaping and the most dangerous use of cannabis (aside from DUI), finding popularity with one of the most at-risk demographics.

<comment><USER42> Vaping is the most dangerous use of cannabis? Can you share some citations on that claim?

<comment><USER41> I was referring to the whole vitamin E acetate fiasco. Smoking marijuana doesn't kill people, at least not directly. Of course this risk decreases if you're not using black-market products, but since marijuana is generally prohibited for teens, they're already guaranteed to be acquiring them through illicit channels. Placing responsibility for their safety in the hands of their drug dealers seems disingenuous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Unlike other drugs (smoking, drinking) adults (at least the noisy ones online) very much want marijuana.

And because of that they are very poorly motivated to stop its use among teens.

So this isn't going to get better, it'll get much worse.

Adults also believe marijuana use is perfectly fine, and risk free, which may or may not be true for adults, but is not true for teens.

But because they believe it's risk free they aren't exactly telling teens not to use it.

And keep in mind: those adults who really want to use marijuana are the "nosiest" online, which is where teens get all their info.

<comment><USER44> It's very true on HN. Marijuana it's heavily promoted here.

<comment><USER45> Some promote the drug itself. Probably a lot more are behind the freedom to use what you want (and against the heavy criminalization). There are probably a fair number that would see the drug continue to be banned, but are just against the biased, fear-mongering, moral panic inducing "journalism" we see from once reputable establishments like the NYT.</comment></comment></comment>


The Vista Death Watch  - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2209837,00.asp <comment><USER2> And what's the deal with tater tots? Are they potatoes, or are they children who haven't yet learned to walk? Doesn't everyone like curly fries better anyway?

Reading this column is like watching an elderly man try to imitate Jerry Seinfeld.

<comment><USER3> agreed. i clicked on the link because pcmag.com confers some credibility, which dvorak squanders.

the dude has openly admitted to being a troll. i think it's time to move on.</comment></comment>


This Food Was Once Packaged Military Rations - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/military-rations-mres-michelin <comment><USER2> Theres a guy with a whole youtube channel about eating military rations.. He loves em' !

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA)</comment>


A Permanently Magnetic Liquid - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-printed-droplets-of-permanently-magnetic-liquid-and-boy-is-it-trippy <comment><USER2> _" Before our study, people always assumed that permanent magnets could only be made from solids."_

If you finely divide a magnet into tiny magnets and suspend these particles in a liquid, is that really a liquid magnet, or just a bunch of solid magnets floating in a liquid?

<comment><USER3> You've actually stumbled upon the central premise of this discovery.

If you finely divide a magnet into tiny magnets and suspend the particles in a liquid, you get... a normal ferrofluid. It's magnetic in the presence of an external field, but will lose its magnetization once that field is removed. This is because permanent magnetism (i.e. ferromagnetism) _is a bulk property_.

Every atom has a magnetic moment, but they are normally randomly aligned and thus the macroscopic field cancels out. It's only when these moments are aligned that a macroscopic magnetic field arises. Permanent magnets have the requisite crystalline structure for this to happen. As you chop it up, this macroscopic organization is destroyed.

If you get into the details, what they've done is to use the surface tension of the oil-in-water to "jam" an outer layer of magnetic particles and prevent them from rotating, thus preserving their magnetic alignment. This, in turn, is apparently enough to keep the free-floating, unjammed particles inside the droplet aligned as well, thus turning the entire droplet into a magnet. Pretty interesting, because without the membrane, none of the ferrofluid is magnetic, but with the membrane, all of it is.

<comment><USER4> This is a better explanation than the original article.

<comment><USER5> I second that

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This may be useful in actually creating something I theorized about a few months ago. I call it a chemomagnet (as opposed to electromagnet).

The basic premise is that individual magnetic domains are free to float and are unorganized until a chemical signal locks them into place in some sort of structure. The energy required to align and bind them would be chemical in nature, and once bound, another chemical signal could be sent to unbind them.

The magnet would be controllable, like an electromagnet, but would not require any electricity at all to operate.

<comment><USER7> Isn't a chemomagnet magnet just a scaled down version of a mechanical switchable magnet?

<comment><USER8> Yeah, but you could program it with any number and position of magnetic poles. Imagine a ring of this material as a stator in electric motor, you could reprogram it with 4 or 6 poles on the fly.

<comment><USER9> liquid programable motors with possible temporal formation capabilities! Sounds one step closer to Skynet's liquid metal terminator :-)

Fascinating!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it possible now to make a completely silent water/magnetic liquid cooler for a CPU by forcing this liquid to flow inside a heat pipe by a few electromagnets? Thus removing the noisy motor driven pump.

</comment><comment><USER11> Great. Now we're one step closer to the T-1000.

<comment><USER12> Came to make the same comment.

<comment><USER13> I figure Skynet probably sent back an editorbot to flag your comment if you succeeded, but you tried your best to alter the future. John would be proud.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Looking for feedback on my pet project, "CubeScrewed" - TK-421

Found here: http://www.cubescrewed.com
Hi all! As a hopelessly bored corporate desk jockey, I made CubeScrewed as a place for people to vent/rant/share their office misfortunes anonymously. It's driven by user submissions and runs on Tumblr since I don't have the technical know-how to implement something more custom.
I started this to learn about user-driven sites and to see how the whole viral content industry works. It's a personal project and I haven't put much time/money into it because of this.
I thought I'd share it with everyone to get some feedback as I'm completely new to the whole internet business game. Let me know what you think, thanks!
PS: Oh and submissions gladly accepted. :) <comment><AUTHOR> i think the idea is awesome, brother. i would say to expand what kind of content is included or else it might just be too bitter or mean-spirited of a site. i would try to create a tool, process, environment, function etc that lets people RESPOND TO and ADD TO what they already see and hear, that way they don't have to come to the site only to complain but instead they can add to a story/discussion by jumping in. create a conversation people want to jump into. only 1 person writes an article, but zillions might respond to it, right? aesthetically it is very minimalist right now so think about sites that look good to you and see what they are doing--imitaion is a good way to learn. a facebook page is plain and ugly until bells and whistles accumulate.

<comment> TK-421 Thanks Che! I was hoping it would remain on the somewhat light-hearted side but I know people get frustrated with their work environments so I'd like to offer them a place to let some steam off. :)

In terms of interaction I have the ability to implement Disqus and I actually had it on there and working for a day but then removed it because I wasn't sure if seeing a lot of "0 comments and 0 reactions" on the homepage would drive people away from the site. I was going to implement it again once traffic/participation numbers were up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> <http://cubescrewed.com> \- great domain name

</comment><comment><USER3> Make it a meme like FML. Say, "I'm TCS" (i.e. Totally Cube Screwed), or something like that? I enjoy the posts so far, keep them coming.</comment>


Typed Python: new Mypy release - <AUTHOR> http://mypy-lang.blogspot.com/2016/05/mypy-04-released.html <comment><USER2> HIGHLY recommend watching this video

[https://vimeo.com/74354480](https://vimeo.com/74354480) linked to from: [http://games.greggman.com/game/dynamic-typing-static- typing/](http://games.greggman.com/game/dynamic-typing-static-typing/) linked to from: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10933524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10933524)

<comment><USER3> Thank you, that's really one of the best talks I've seen lately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> MyPy works surprisingly well once you add this in a few places: # type: ignore

The (now documented) --silence-imports option will remove the most frequent use for ignoring types though.

This project is very similar to TypeScript or Flow and I have found it provides a similar huge boost in reliability.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't try it yet but it remember me Groovy type system. It is a great feature.

No type checker was one of the bigger flaws in Python.

When in Groovy, I use type checker in public functions and APIs. It is a good communication tool.

In my opinion, Python is better than Groovy. This feature still make it better.

<comment><USER6> I've used Python a lot more than Groovy but one thing I find myself missing from Python and other scripting languages since I discovered Groovy is the ability for a standalone script to retrieve its dependencies on startup. What this means is that if you put

      @Grab(group='foo', module='bar', version='1.0.0')

at the top of randomscript.groovy you will have bar available to import by the time the script starts.

<comment><USER5> You could use:

import pip

pip.main(['install', 'bar'])

<comment><USER6> It's not this simple. That code will only work if you are root or in a virtualenv — and having to create a virtualenv manually contradicts the idea of a self-contained, standalone script that manages dependencies on its own. To install bar as a non-root user you will have to do

      import pip
      pip.main(['install', '--user', 'bar'])

which throws an error, e.g., if bar is already installed, meaning you will have to wrap the calls to pip.main() in a "try" block and differentiate between the types of errors they throw.

The above already makes it noticably less convenient for a script to manage its own dependencies. The killing blow, however, comes form the fact that pip won't let you install multiple versions of the same package in parallel: the most recently installed version overwrites the previous one. This means that a script that relies on a per-user package store can only be safe if it checks the version of every package it uses and replaces it if needed each time it is run. This can a take a long time and is error prone (what if your Internet connection goes down?) but the alternative is simply to deal with the brittleness.

I can see this being solved for Python but the solution will probably involve automatically creating and caching per-script virtualenvs. For now, though, something like PyInstaller (i.e., binaries) remains more practical if you want to distribute standalone Python scripts.

<comment><USER5> I am sorry I made a mistake. You are right. Thanks for the explanation.

<comment><USER6> No worries!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why has no one mentioned the Python 3.5 has type hinting?

[https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html](https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html)

The PEP 484 proposal:

[https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I am looking forward to the feature of strict optional types checking which will not treat None as a inhabited value of any type.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can the type information be consumed by a compiler like nuitka to produce fast binaries?

<comment><USER10> You might be more interested in Cython.

<comment><USER9> Cython is uglier and without type inference.

I wish we could just use mypy when we feel like making our code faster :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> is there such thing as a typed interpreted language? I mean one with a REPL, not Java.

<comment><USER12> Presumably, ultimately, all languages are typed in some way. Otherwise, how would the interpreter (or whatever execution environment is relevant) deduce what binary data was what?

I think the question you mean -- which I'm also interested in the answer to -- is: How can a _dynamically_ typed language be statically type checked? Presumably Hindley-Milner style inference doesn't/can't work. Do static analysers such as Mypy therefore trace the execution of the code until it finds something that conflicts? Are there cases where this approach won't work, either technically or practically?

<comment><USER13> Forth is what I would consider an untyped language. It deals with numbers on a stack in a way that it is totally up to the programmer to decide what they represent. One number may be a IEEE 754 number, an unsigned integer, a signed integer, the address of a string, a fixed-point number, a couple of ASCII characters etc.

<comment><USER14> Same deal with most forms of assembly language- the values you work with are just numbers, and the operations to which you apply them are what give them a particular meaning at a particular point in time- addresses, offsets, integers, booleans, etc. It's possible to argue that such languages are "unityped" rather than "untyped", but I think to do so is to produce such a loose interpretation of "types" as to be uninteresting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Still no support for await / async :( Guido worked on asyncio and works on this tool, I was expecting more love.

</comment><comment><USER16> They should also implement a generics/template system.

(Barking at the wrong tree intensifies.)

<comment><USER17> > They should also implement a generics/template system.

What are you talking about? MyPy has supported generics since before the 0.1 release: [https://github.com/python/mypy/blob/v0.1.0/docs/source/gener...](https://github.com/python/mypy/blob/v0.1.0/docs/source/generics.rst)</comment></comment>


Measles Cases Surpass 700 as Outbreak Continues Unabated - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/health/measles-outbreak-cdc.html <comment><USER2> Correct me if I am wrong, but I am remembering that all of my daughter's vaccinations had to be current before she started school in CA in 1975. [https://www.mobileinforeviews.com/](https://www.mobileinforeviews.com/)</comment>


PCG, a Family of Better Random Number Generators - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcg-random.org/ <comment><USER2> This was posted 7 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10579745](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10579745)

You'll find insightful discussion from 12 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10544943](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10544943)</comment>


RasPiThon - Young programmers code live, raising funds for RasPi Foundation  - <AUTHOR> http://raspithon.org.uk/

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's great these young guys have decided to do something like this, and learn Python at the same time! Also awesome that the RasPi Foundation are behind them too! <http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1633></comment>


Follow the Grads - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@exponentvc/follow-the-grads-a112623c8289 <comment><USER2> This is pretty spot on. Are the best new grads still going to the giants(Google, FB, Microsoft)?</comment>


Medical devices: A ticking time-bomb  - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/05/medical-devices <comment><USER2> "the average error was a staggering 24 minutes"-- The average is a terrible measure of centrality for data that is unbounded at one end, because one outlier (the 42 year off clock) skews the measure disproportionately; the median would be much more appropriate to report. That's unusually sensationalist number crunching for The Economist.

I'll bet that out of the clocks that doctors actually use to decide on treatment (tallying _every_ device is a bit unfair; if a blood pressure monitor on some cart in a closet has the wrong time of day who cares) 80% of them are within a few minutes of the right time. And at the end of the day, doctors are supposed to be able to reconcile conflicting information, it's part of their training. This is a little bit like tallying up every textbook lying around a high school and getting concerned that the average book is three editions out of date and has 142.8 errors--calm down, most of those are not in active use and have some faith in teachers to check their material.

<comment><USER3> Average is a fine measure. You've inferred that they used a mean average. The article doesn't say what kind of average they took.

Let's assume they did take a mean. If the mean error for 1700 devices was 24 minutes, the total error is 40,800 minutes. That's 28 days.

Therefore, they didn't include the outlier of 42 years in their average. It's most likely a median (or mode) average.

<comment><USER4> It's pretty unlikely to be a median; if 20% of machines are 30 minutes off and 24 minutes is a median, then 30% of machines are between 24-30 minutes off, which would seem to be a strangely narrow band.

More likely, the 24 minutes is a mean average after excluding outliers. One of the standard ways to compute outliers is to measure the inter-quartile range ---the "distance" between the 25th percentile value and the 75th percentile value---and call everything that is more than 1.5*IQR past the 75th percentile an outlier. You can do this without computing a mean first, and you can use it to exclude values before computing a modified mean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> NTP is great and all, but...

When you're timing something that needs accuracy, you use a timer not a clock. If you need to use a clock, you use one clock not all the clocks. Yes, I work in the medical industry. Yes, we generally use timers not clocks. Yes, our clocks are all wrong too.

If you really do need a solution to the "time" problem (accurate time all the time), you need to issue everyone a smartphone.

<comment><USER6> im a doctor also and the need for highly accurate timing is exceedingly rare.

A lot of medical timing is guess work - why are antibiotics commonly prescribed for 5, 7, 10 or 14 days? Whynot 6?

Automatic filing of EMR information would be important and the legal aspect would unfortunately demanc the greatest amount of accuracy.

Surely connected devices could use one centrally calculated timesource?

<comment><USER7> > "Surely connected devices could use one centrally calculated timesource?"

... like NTP?

Sorry, but I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here. Anything with a computer, even a microcontroller, and basic network connectivity can use NTP, it is an extremely simple protocol.

Anything that doesn't connect to a network could be kept in sync via a wireless pulse/tick, though then you have security issues unless you cryptographically sign the clock signal. Though I'm not sure why anybody would try and screw up a clock signal like that other than general asshattedness.

That aside, I'm unsure why they are using local time for logging data anyhow. If the folks managing the hospital were rational, shouldn't there be a regulation to use GMT and 24-hour clock? My home town is right on the Eastern/Central timezone split, and I know it causes all kinds of problems in day-to-day life. I just hate that kind of ambiguity.

<comment><USER8> > _If the folks managing the hospital were rational, shouldn't there be a > regulation to use GMT and 24-hour clock?_

People are _not_ rational, that's the problem! Just look at any web app that can't get timezones right.

In addition, most Americans swear by EST, CST, PST, etc. and have no idea how many hours behind GMT they are. Record everything in GMT and soon there will be a similar article documenting how medical professionals routinely misinterpret GMT timestamps. Especially in March and November.

<comment><USER7> When lives are at stake, people tend to be more amenable to changes like GMT and 24-hour clock. If the military can do it, a civilian organization with sufficient motivation (insurance terms, regulation, etc) should be able to make the same shift.

However, I was referring more toward the recording system than the staff. If the recording systems were all using unix time stamp with a GMT system clock synchronized over NTP, there would be no ambiguity as to when a record was added to the system. End user systems could be responsible for keeping track of what time zone the user is in, and could convert as necessary. The important thing is that the "One True Datum" have the appropriate stamp.

<comment><USER8> > _End user systems could be responsible for keeping track of what time zone > the user is in, and could convert as necessary._

That would require routine updates to the timezone database, which is a bit more complicated than NTP. (Yes, DST rules change all the time. The U.S. changed its rules just a few years ago.)

Hopefully, the rise of cheap and powerful ARM SoCs will make it impossible for device manufacturers to make excuses about not running a proper OS on their machines anymore. I would love to see more Linux and BSD on medical devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have two questions:

      Since the EMR is updated constantly, data from devices
      whose clocks are way off would simply never be recorded.
      Others might bury current information in older files.
      Worse, they may insert the data into the EMR when the
      patient they concern has left the given clinical
      environment and another has come in.

1\. Why does the central EMR trust timestamps from the devices?

      Daylight saving time corrections twice a year require
      tedious manual tweaks that the MD PnP Program, an
      initiative supporting networking standards for medical
      devices, estimates cost American hospitals over $17m
      annually. At Massachusetts General, a patient-monitoring
      system deletes an hours' worth of data when rolling back
      from 2am to 1am every autumn, while drug pumps are kept
      permanently on standard time, so they are (at least) one
      hour off for half the year.

2\. Why are they using time zones at all?

<comment><USER10> Hi. Written EMRs and built medical devices (10-12 years exp between them). In many cases messages from devices and external systems are processed asynchronously, so there isn't much choice but to trust remote timestamps.. I may be getting data minutes or hours later. Just a distributed system challenge.

The time zone issue is a human one. Historically clinicians schedule doses at "Every 3 hours" or "Once per day, 8am". Humans figure out what that means, but a dose scheduling system that shifts 8am an hour after daylight savings (because it interpreted the schedule as "every 24 hours" is going to run aground with nurses when it tells them they're late). However, every 3 hours is pretty obviously an interval and likely shouldn't shift by 30% of the interval!

This isn't a distinction that clinicians are used to making, but as someone who had to write some of the first dose-scheduling systems focused on clinical accuracy, we ran into this challenge and did a lot of thinking about which schedules really meant 'intervals' of specific units of time and which ones meant 'due at these calendar times every day'.

It's an interesting example of a problem that introducing technology introduces/exposes while showing up to fix other things.

<comment><USER9> _Hi. Written EMRs and built medical devices (10-12 years exp between them). In many cases messages from devices and external systems are processed asynchronously, so there isn't much choice but to trust remote timestamps.. I may be getting data minutes or hours later. Just a distributed system challenge._

So I'm guessing you might solve that by asking the device what its internal clock is at the time of synchronization, and adjust the logs by the offset between device time and EMR time (with manual device time changes included in the log)?

<comment><USER10> Sure. If there was a 'time of synchronization'. There's generally not. The device often doesn't know when/if/who is consuming it's data. Likewise the EMR systems don't generally have any access to the device other than receiving a stream of messages some non-deterministic after they were produced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wrote software for medical devices for 3 years. Saying 'just use NTP' is all well and good, except that getting Internet access inside of a hospital is usually impossible. So of course we offered a configurable setting so that they could use an internal or firewall-allowed server. I think one hospital took advantage of that setting. Everybody else was just wrong.

<comment><USER12> NTP settings can be distributed by DHCP, which in a managed networked environment should be reasonably trustable.

Unfortunately Windows ignores this, and also sets the system clock to a timezone-specific time, not UTC as nearly all other OS's do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Previous submission, with a few comments:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4013021>

I'm glad that there is some more discussion of this issue, as medical devices are some of the main high technology products in my part of the United States, and my son (also a Hacker News participant) worked as an intern at one of the medical device companies here last year. Medical device businesses are much more regulated as an industry than are most Web-based SaaS businesses.

</comment><comment><USER14> I just hope this doesn't result in poorer security between outside networks (including the internet) and medical devices. I'd argue there should be an "air gap" between the two, but I'm probably more paranoid than most.

Certainly it's fine to use NTP, but I'd want to use some kind of GPS-receiver NTP appliances at each site (possibly redundantly).

</comment><comment><USER15> why is the EMR automated at all if it isn't accurate?

<comment><USER10> accuracy isn't boolean.</comment></comment>


Allocation Adventures: The Buddy Allocator - <AUTHOR> http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2015/08/allocation-adventures-3-buddy-allocator.html <comment><USER2> Very unclear. Would not recommend, instead search for some actual commented code.

<comment> qu4z-2 I found it quite clear, on the other hand. It provided exactly the sort of explanations that are probably slightly too large for in-line comments, and it did include code in-line...

<comment><USER2> Luckily there exist multi-line comments and that the code provided are two short snippets that aren't really useful. No, what this article desperately needs is an actual implementation which can be referred to when needed.

<comment> qu4z-2 Well, sure, multi-line comments are a thing. Personally I feel if you're gonna write an explanatory essay like this, though, it should be in a separate file, but probably referenced in the implementation (or you could put it on the internet, I guess).

Out of curiosity, what parts did you feel were unclear?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Learn Datalog - <AUTHOR> http://www.learndatalogtoday.org/ <comment><USER2> This isn't Datalog, but using a proprietary syntax. Downvoted for attempting to capture a term.</comment>


Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work) 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eladgil.com/2010/11/6-startup-ideas-every-nerd-has.html <comment><AUTHOR> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1954852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1954852)

</comment><comment><USER2> > A Giant, Purposeless, Unfocused Machine Learning System.

Timely, so very timely.</comment>


Rust is NFG. Try again in 2030 - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/798054/ <comment><USER2> The author is completly clueless and on top probably trolling.</comment>


Some ideas matter, just not the ones you think - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2013/02/some-ideas-matter-just-not-the-ones-you-think.html <comment><USER2> "Startup wisdom holds that startup ideas don't matter too much because execution is everything."

Boy I hope that's not what people really think.

Ideas are everything. Execution is everything. You get one wrong, you get everything wrong.

You have to think holistically top to bottom. I like his overall point, which is basically that _ideas about execution_ are the ones that matter. But the ideas at the beginning matter too.

<comment><USER3> _Ideas are everything. Execution is everything. You get one wrong, you get everything wrong_

That's pretty much my take on the whole "ideas vs execution" debate, with a nuanced caveat or two. Neither a good idea nor great execution is _sufficient_ to build a great startup, and I'd argue that both are _necessary_ depending on how you define "good idea".

IOW:

bad idea, poorly executed: FAIL

bad idea, well executed: FAIL

good idea, poorly executed: FAIL

good idea, well executed: MAYBE

I say it depends a bit on how you define "good idea" though, because I strongly believe that a "good idea" does not (necessarily) _need_ to be something earth-shattering, brand new, never-seen-before, etc. Sometimes your "good idea" can actually be something that already exists, and you plan to win by simply executing better than the competition.

All of that said, I agree very much with gweinberg on the point about ideas _within the context of execution_ mattering. In fact, reading that just sparked a couple of actionable ideas on my part. Those are the articles I love reading on HN.. the ones where I walk away with a new TODO (other than "read this later").

<comment><USER4> Definitions are kind of problematic.

In our community, "bad idea, well executed" is also a _maybe_ \- not a "fail" - on succeeding - as by definition if you're executing well you know when to pivot and aren't afraid to do so, or you are simply succeeding despite a bad idea[1], or are doing what it takes to push it through.

Also I'd like to point out that the definition of executing well is almost begging the question. To answer the question "Was it well-executed?", we apply the heuristic "Did they succeed? get numbers up? generate sales, investment, etc..". Then we are only 'testing' our own definition and every successful company will be "well-executed" and vice versa.

I'm not sure how to improve these definitions, but it's important to realize that asking how well a team is executing is problematic.

You would need a definition of "execution" that lets you point out teams that are executing well and failing, before you had a concept of 'executing well' that is useful and not just a proxy for 'succeeding.'

[1] Plenty of big, multibillion dollar product categories (McDonald's for one, two year mobile phone contracts for another), are a really bad idea. If either category didn't exist, I doubt an investor would think you could convince people to like it, on a national scale.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure if it's "begging the question" so much as just over-generalizing. That is, I'm not sure there's an easy, binary distinction between "good idea" and "bad idea". It may be that ideas are on a continuum from "really bad" ---> "ok" ----> "really awesome" or whatever. And a slightly dodgy, but not great, idea may succeed if coupled with sufficiently awesome execution. OTOH, a kinda good idea, with dodgy execution, can fail out.

And, this is skipping the issue of refining the actual idea itself as you learn, which may not be quite as dramatic a shift as an actual "pivot".

Your point is definitely valid though, that there is a some semantic confusion around this whole discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The thing is good execution can make a mediocre idea into a success.

The reason we ascribe so much more to execution around here is because coming up with good ideas doesn't seem incredibly difficult. However it is one of those things that looks easy but isn't in reality.

<comment><USER6> Experience has taught me otherwise. The idea _is part_ of the execution. Meaning that you cannot do well what you have not defined. Doing something requires knowing how and what you are doing. There are the same thing, and not different entities. The whole notion of idea versus execution is wrong. You cannot execute something which you have not thought of properly. Thus, the idea is bad, and the execution will be bad. You can, however, improve on the execution and end up with something entirely different. But it will also improve on the idea itself.

The idea and execution are the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Markets are where good ideas go to die.

<comment><USER6> Markets are where ideas are tested. If they die, then the idea was not good to begin with.

<comment><USER7> think of the test. What is being tested? If you haven't noticed, most software is paid for by advertising, or selling people's private information. The 'market' where a lot of software can survive is being tested on several criteria.

1\. does it trick people into giving away as much info as possible? 2\. does it make people Dependant on it? 3\. does it provide any important social value to those who have lots of money?

Even in a market where people pay real money for software, typically either people need the software but won't buy it because it costs too much, or the software is so cheap that they sacrifice some of their needs.

The market is where good ideas go to die.

Let's have a thought experiment. Imagine a world where we can get our best and brightest people to work on any software for free. There is no need to pay them or the hardware they use.

Do you think society would dedicate their brightest people to working on advertising (Google, Facebook), or peddling cheap Chinese goods (Amazon), or locking businesses into perpetual software cages (Microsoft, Oracle, Apple).

Do you think the market could have created the Internet? Do you think the market could have created PCs? Do you think the market could have selected Tablets?

(It is a hypothetical question, because none of those things were created under market pressure.)

<comment><USER7> correction: none of those things were invented under market pressure.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Omega 3 fatty acids from fish make mice less likely to overreact to loud noises - <AUTHOR> http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006805.html

<comment><USER2> I haven't noticed a dramatic difference with omega 3's. I am rather sensitive to noise; I find it quite difficult to tune out particularly human background noise when I am trying to concentrate on something else and am not participating in that noise.

Thunderstorms, etc., are fine. Neighboring conversations, music, TV, etc., not so much (not at all).</comment>


Technology has not yet beaten the frontal lobe - <AUTHOR> https://ocalog.com/post/22/ <comment><AUTHOR> I also write technical articles, including my Ethereum series starting here: [https://ocalog.com/post/10/](https://ocalog.com/post/10/)</comment>


A Child's Puzzle Helped Uncover How Magnets Work - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/a-childs-puzzle-helped-uncover-how-magnets-really-work/ <comment><USER2> This is reprinted from Quanta Magazine. Previously discussed: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19013993](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19013993)</comment>


Ask HN: What are some creative decentralized lending ideas? - <AUTHOR> Inspired by thread here: https://twitter.com/mmay3r/status/1093289126202228736?s=21
What are interesting ways to bring lending to the distributed world?
Keep in mind you might want anonymity, while also having a clear, accurate picture of a debtors ability to pay back the loan.
What are the most creative and/or viable possibilities you can think of? <comment><AUTHOR> Note: Please either link interesting projects that are related, or simply spell out how you would go about implementing this.</comment>


Nimrod 0.9.2 released - <AUTHOR> http://nimrod-code.org/news.html#Z2013-05-20-version-0-9-2-released

<comment><USER2> An apparently decent language with a soft real-time GC. Interesting. Macros, type system and sane syntax are nice bonuses.

<comment><USER3> This would look to me most useful as a sort of C++ replacement, for systems programming.

It has a nice big Standard Libary[1], and seems to have good tools for using compiled libaries, and generally interop with C++[2], which would be important if you wanted to use if for that.

We have a large C++ codebase, and I'd sometimes like to use a higher level language like this to knit it together. But I'm not convinced this is better than the alternatives.

[1]<http://nimrod-code.org/lib.html> [2]<http://nimrod- code.org/nimrodc.html#importcpp-pragma>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've had the Nimrod homepage sitting on my favorites toolbar for months; a previous HN post had me interested in giving it a spin. Does anyone have suggestions on approaching development in a work-in-progress language? Do most people build toys or try to contribute a useful library right off the bat?

<comment><USER5> Perhaps I can give you some useful nimrod-specific advice as I myself have created many Nimrod projects[1][2][3]. The best thing to do is to keep up to date on what's happening in the Nimrod world, breaking changes are rare but when they do happen they are announced in the changelog on the Nimrod website and in the Nimrod repo on github, IRC is also a good way to stay up to date. I started my contributions to Nimrod by basically writing and improving the standard library as well as creating random fun toy projects. I've also seen other people learning the language by contributing to all sorts of Nimrod projects on github, mainly my Aporia repo which includes a todo list and is generally pretty easy to modify as it's still quite small.

[1] <https://github.com/nimrod-code/Aporia> [2] <https://github.com/nimrod- code/nimbuild> [3] <https://github.com/dom96/jester>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm pretty excited about the type inference and the simple syntax for doing normal things.

I really like the package management of npm and Node and the amount of packages (~30000).

So this may just annoy you, but is anyone planning to make a way to run Node.js modules, or a way to convert Node.js code?

Or is there at least a package manager like npm planned?

edit Oh I see there is a JS back end.

How does the performance of a nimrod dict-like type compare with V8's object properties?

</comment><comment><USER7> This seems naïve: "A character is not an Unicode character but a single byte."

Disappointing from a developer who presumably types several ü characters each day.

<comment><USER8> <http://nimrod-code.org/manual.html#character-type>

In particular:

> The TRune type is used for Unicode characters, it can represent any Unicode > character. TRune is declared in the unicode module.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Compiled, no runtime, static typed and Python-like syntax - this is pretty much my wish list for a new language.

<comment><USER10> It's actually more of a Pascal like syntax (imho). It took me quite a while to get used to some of the more interesting bits...

Most surprising things I've found so far are allocation by reference (new(your_variable)) and a "return variable" (result).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A possible way out of Java 6 language level stagnation on Android.

<comment><USER12> If you really want to beat Java language stagnation on Android, I would suggest Kotlin. You can create a Kotlin-based Android project with zero effort using IntelliJ (and, presumably, the new Android Studio).

<http://kotlin.jetbrains.org/>

<comment><USER11> Yes, that has occurred me today, now that Google is migrating to InteliJ.

Currently I am actually also looking into C++ (I do like it to certain extent) as it also allows me to target other platforms.</comment></comment></comment>


Zoom closes accounts of Chinese activists–including one in the US - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/zoom-cites-chinese-law-to-defend-censorship-of-human-rights-activists/ <comment><USER2> "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

-Martin Luther King Jr.

I don't like just spamming quotes but this seems much more immediate than it used to be with the internet.</comment>


LinkedIn Industry Trends: Winners and Losers During the Great Recession - <AUTHOR> http://blog.linkedin.com/2012/03/08/economic-report/

<comment><USER2> Interesting to see Renewables fare so well during the sample period, given the negative press the industry attracts. Is there a source for the segment that goes into further detail? It would be interesting to see if the biggest winners within the segment were high-tech areas (solar panel development), or service-related areas within the industry (specialized service technicians, LEED certified contractors, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this data highly dependent upon _who_ signs up for LinkedIn? The busboy at a local restaurant seems less likely to sign up for LinkedIn than a software engineer would -- which seems like it would skew the data.</comment>


Facebook and McAfee to blur photos (unless you have a plugin) - <AUTHOR> http://allfacebook.com/mcafee-social-protection_b96336

<comment><USER2> this sounds like a horrible idea. so much for Mark's vision of everyone sharing more of their lives.</comment>


Electra: Pre-Training Text Encoders as Discriminators Rather Than Generators - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/QWu7j1nb_jI <comment><USER2> Great stuff.

Talking w/ people who work in the intelligence-military-industrial complex south of the Beltway I've learned some tricks for very high precision systems and the method of having multiple classifiers, one out front that does the easy cases, and one in back that handles the hard cases is one of the best.

They are doing something quite similar here.

<comment><USER3> The equivalent in ML to that would be having a cascade of classfiers.

For example, the old facial detection based on Haar Cascades works like that, where weak classifiers in the 1st tier look at the image. The cascade is trained such that a "false" on any tier is only returned when there's very little chance for a false-negative (ie: there was a face, but I didn't detect it).

Now if a tier says "looks good to me, there might be a face" it moves on to another tier that is more thorough. Still, they are geared towards "in doubt, say True and move to the following tier".

A Haar cascade for face detection (it can be trained for object detection in general too) takes quite a lot of training, and it has many many tiers (I'm probably off with the numbers since it's been such a long time from the last time I used them) think ~30 tiers with hundreds of weak classifiers each.

On the plus side, a cascade approach based on weak classifiers can usually run super fast inference (since the classifiers are simple estimators and you work harder only when there could be a positive). On the down side, they usually take a lot of training time (you're training hundreds/thousands of classifiers!). Another "bad" thing here is that, as better techniques came to exist, little effort was made to improve training (and the tooling around it -- if you look for examples of training with OpenCV that has the capacity to do Haar Cascades training, you'll see it's a mess).

With time better techniques were developed, like HoOG classifiers, PCA based classifiers, neural nets/convnets. In these more complex models you trade computational complexity for flexibility/"quality results" (I'd say performance, but that might be confused with inference or training speed).

In theory nothing prevents you from having a cascade-like approach with deep learning. What is usually convenient is to have it embedded inside the architecture (a multi-objective model) such that the weights of the whole net are update upon training cases, instead of having isolated classifiers on each tier. That allows the whole network to learn from every case, instead of only training the 2nd, 3rd, ..., n-th tier on the cases that failed the previous steps.

Edited: a few types and tried to be clearer

<comment><USER4> > In theory nothing prevents you from having a cascade-like approach with deep > learning.

Sure, people do that in DL. There are plenty of 'adaptive' or 'anytime' or mixture-of-experts architectures for classification. And lots of things take that cascade approach naturally, like any object detection or localization NN: you make a bunch of proposals and check those rectangles; the more computation you have, the more you can check.

<comment><USER3> Right, I meant the specific approach of making a cascade "outside the model" by programming it by hand, as in:

        clf1 = FirstTierModel(...)
        clf2 = SecondTierModel(...)
        clf3 = ThirdTierModel(...)
        # and then imagine downwards
        pred1 = clf1.infer(data)
        if pred1 == False:
            return False
        pred2 = clf2.infer(data)
        if pred2 == Fase:
            return False
        # ... and so on

(did a bit of a python-y syntax)

Then I went on with how it can be embedded inside the architecture and that's a better approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those like me who hate videos, here's a link to Open Review: [https://openreview.net/forum?id=r1xMH1BtvB](https://openreview.net/forum?id=r1xMH1BtvB)</comment>


Printing images in the terminal with 9 lines of Ruby - astro- http://radek.io/2015/06/29/catpix/

<comment><AUTHOR> That's neat but I'm sure those gems are far more than 9 lines. I was expecting something more like: [https://donatstudios.com/Damn-Simple-PHP-ASCII-Art- Generator](https://donatstudios.com/Damn-Simple-PHP-ASCII-Art-Generator)

<comment> astro- You're absolutely right.

I was trying to showcase what can be easily done with things that are there. And in particular the possibility to use RGB directly in the terminal.

Really like your ASCII art generator, by the way!

</comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord I've always thought the fact that our modern VTEs still being stuck in pure text mode is a regression. We've already settled on terminal control being VT-100 (or more accurately ANSI sequences).

Given experience from prior windowing systems like rio and Oberon, why isn't it standard fare to have programmable text, built-in text processing in terminal windows and bitmap images? TUIs are only the tip of the iceberg, and the inclusion of aforementioned features would obsolete plenty of use cases for GUIs, along with making a lot of task automation so much easier. Application launchers and things like "let me hack a quick script to do a processing job" then become unnecessary.

<comment><USER2> The above has been tried in mid-1990s, with some success, then suddenly exploded, and now we ended up with HTML5 + CSS3.

<comment> vezzy-fnord No, the web is nothing like what I had in mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's scripts like this that makes programming fun.

</comment><comment><USER4> Really like this! Merging text with a png to render to the terminal could be the future of cowsay! ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> "This is not the Star Trek actor you're looking for…" (Patrick Stewart /Capt. Picard, not Leonard Nimoy /Spock). Love the script BTW, great work.

<comment> astro- Whoops. Thanks for pointing it out! I fixed it right away, sorry about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very cool! Did you specifically choose RMagick over MiniMagick?

<comment> astro- Thanks! No, it was the one that came up first on Google I guess. Since all that I'm using is change_geometry and resize! I might switch it over to something more lightweight.

Made a note here: [https://github.com/pazdera/catpix/issues/1](https://github.com/pazdera/catpix/issues/1)

Thanks for the suggestion, Matt!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much equity should a lead developer joining a startup during YC get? - <AUTHOR> I'm considering joining a startup that will be in this summer's YC batch. It's currently just the solo founder (and YC as an investor), they have some users and a modest amount of revenue (<$100k).
I'll be joining as the lead developer/CTO. The startup plans to raise $1-2M at demo day.  What's a reasonable amount of equity that someone in my position should get?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Are you getting competitive pay? Is there vesting? are they options? Are you bringing something special to the table? Do you have previous CTO experience? Are they trying to do something technology wise a lot of people can't do? Do you have a lot of experience in the space?

<comment><USER2> If they can't do it with out you then you deserve a lot. If they can hire 20 guys off the street to build a product and they just want to use your dev skills until they find a "real" CTO you should demand a lot of cash as pay.</comment></comment>


Netlify raises $53M Series C as microservices approach to web development grows - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/04/netfily-nabs-53m-series-c-as-micro-services-approach-to-web-development-grows/ <comment><USER2> I've used Netlify as a "Heroku for static sites".

I deploy my React apps and landing pages there and don't need to worry about the underlying compute, or load balancing, or anything else. Thankfully I didn't do any frontend work before Netlify was available!

I don't really get all the hype around the Jamstack ([https://jamstack.org/](https://jamstack.org/)), though.

Netlify's hypothesis seems to be that if you deploy websites on CDNs, instead of on web servers, then you'll get better performance.

Also, because it's just a static site, there's no backend or database, so you get better security.

I accept this hypothesis, but it seems like you still need a backend. Netlify is promoting functions as a service [1] so you can avoid having web servers for the backend too, but I'm a little skeptical you get the flexibility to build applications with dependencies or non-trivial business logic or design with this approach.

If anyone's tried a FaaS and this is incorrect, please describe your experience!

[1] [https://www.netlify.com/products/functions/](https://www.netlify.com/products/functions/)

<comment><USER3> In my experience you can achieve a lot with FaaS - but you still need an API, database and storage - which Netlify Functions doesn't offer out of the box. I have a couple of sites deployed on Netlify with a 'serverless' backend deployed to AWS separately.

Their functions are also limited to triggers relating only to Netlify events: [https://docs.netlify.com/functions/trigger-on- events/#availa...](https://docs.netlify.com/functions/trigger-on- events/#available-triggers)

<comment><USER4> Netlify is glorified S3 + Cloudfront hosting.

They did a very good job at marketing "HTML5 hosting"

<comment><USER5> It's glorified in the sense that it's much cheaper. I have had small sites on s3 plus cf and have gotten a bill that boggles the mind because I could be hosting the content for free on netlify.

<comment><USER6> Make sure that you've set the correct cache control headers on the S3 objects. So "Max age" should be something far future for static assets and something near future for HTML files.

If you forget that then Cloudfront will retrieve the objects from S3 every time there is any activity on your site and your bill will go up really fast.

<comment><USER7> This is precisely why netlify's offering is valuable. It works out of the box with zero config. If you're using a common static site generator you don't even need to setup the build process, just give it your git repo, and push when you want to deploy.

<comment><USER8> That's not really a compelling reason when it's literally a single input field on a form to setup. Also, if you're in the business of web development, HTTP cache control headers are something you should know about regardless.

<comment><USER7> As with a lot of AWS, it's easy if you know you need to do it, but there are a lot of gotchas which can be very expensive if hit (and there's no way to limit expenditure).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am an experienced user and avid customer of Netlify. Netlify is amazing for small sites, blogs and what not. But as you go up in traffic, that's when you start to realize how over-priced their charges are, atleast for bandwidth. I'm not saying they're bad, they still need to get back all the money they lose on their free users. But for enterprise customers, it's really bad.

I'll give you an example - My client has a high traffic website with over 300TB of bandwidth which is being served via cloudflare on a $20/mo plan (probably free plan also works well I guess).

Migrating this to Netlify would cost us roughly $6000 per month. (Netlify charges $20/1000GB). To me that's insane if you really want to adopt JAMstack.

For 6 grand, I can host an elaborate GCP setup with load balancers on compute engine. Or I can have a dozen instances on AppEngine all automatically handling my load for me. What am I missing?

This is not to say I don't like static sites - it's a different thing. I am 100% proponent of static sites, maybe just not Netlify.

<comment><USER10> FYI: 300 TB egress at standard GCP pricing is already more than $17k.

<comment><USER9> Which product? Cloud Storage?? Is there Cloud CDN (or some other CDN) on top? If not, it's not surprising. With a proper CDN setup (say with Cloudflare) that number should be much lower than that of Netlify. Particularly with Cloudflare since your CDN cost is almost 0.

FYI Netlify doesn't work well with Cloudflare. That's the reason why it's so expensive as a standalone option.

[https://community.netlify.com/t/how-do-i-use-cloudflare- dns-...](https://community.netlify.com/t/how-do-i-use-cloudflare-dns-with-a- netlify-custom-domain/1557)

<comment><USER10> I'm talking about regular network egress. CDN egress is cheaper, but still $13k+ and more depending on destination/cache hit rate/etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like netlify but it's weird how little them seem to do. They released analytics like a year ago and it's had almost no improvement/progress, lots of people on the forums clamoring for more and it just seems to fall on deaf ears.

I paid for the per-site analytics for a few months, the server side analytics means it captures much more of the traffic than client-side GA style, but the metrics available were just too basic for any real commercial use.

<comment><USER12> This has been my issue as well, I started using their analytics when it launched. I thought they must still be working on it from the state its in, it is absolutely not worth the cost currently. You cannot even see the data from the previous months! Despite having paid $9 for them just to store page view totals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Netlify's co-founder Chris Bach says they weren't looking for new funding, > but felt with the company growing rapidly, it would be prudent to take the > money to help continue that growth.

Never understood this. Is there an example of a company that took funding "just in case" and it was worth it?

I love Netlify (my business currently depends on it), but I'm getting the idea they are feeling the pressure of "We got something big we have to make it as big as possible", which is not inherently bad but in Netlify's case could easily take the product in the wrong way.

Their focus on enterprises especially worries me, as their current feature set works amazingly for "indie hackers" and small businesses.

<comment><USER14> Its smart to raise money when money is cheap (right before a recession), especially if your business is particularly dependent on business from other startups. The startups-serving-startups ecosystem is incredibly fragile to downturns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've always been an indie hacker, more adept at building applications/front ends than infrastructure and devops, so things like Netlify, Zeit Now, Firebase etc make a lot of sense to me because they abstract those parts away.

I've recently started at my first enterprise contract (10+ years into my career) in the cloud team (as a front-end engineer building the interface to a cloud console) and am amazed at the level of resources poured into infrastructure and devops.

I'm obviously new to enterprise - and there are probably reasons I'm not aware of that prevent them from going all in on things like static site hosts and managed infrastructure - but I do feel that there's a lot of room for enterprise to shift in this direction.

<comment><USER16> Enterprises have infrastructure teams because they have applications that need to solve business logic that cannot be solved by static sites alone. Even the simplest businesses invest in data processing pipelines to extract value from their data. When the scale of data processing becomes very large, they need to rearchitect their systems in different ways to better handle that kind of traffic.

So it helps to have in house infrastructure teams that can somewhat consolidate and invest in long term planning and architecture for computer systems and services required by these enterprises.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've hosted a few things on Netlify's free tier. Very, very convenient, I must say.

A bit like Heroku also.

And just like with Heroku, you get the nice free offering and the second you out-grow that, costs explode like crazy (and leave you wishing you'd just rolled your own anyway).

For example, you have to pay $19/month/site for 1,000 form submissions on Netlify.

Say it with me: PER site, $19/month, 1,000 form submissions. I am not sure how they can possibly justify charging that much.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I think as soon as you need "backend" functionality, netlify is no longer a good option.

<comment><USER18> Still fine to deploy your frontend there, if it's a SPA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think Netlify's success has got nothing to do with "microservices". The new (not so new now actually) trend that allowed it to prosper is when people started splitting up backend-rendered webapps (where the backend was effectively rendering most of the html, classic mvc/rails style) into a static frontend/single page app making api calls to an api backend (or multiple but it doesn't really matter here)

</comment><comment><USER20> Can anyone who's used both Netlify and Zeit comment on how the two compare? I personally use Zeit and I really like their interface. The work they've been doing with nextjs has also been very interesting.

<comment><USER21> also zeit fast for build, netlify build tool overload and over price

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Scraping away the JAMStack hype…

Netlify's core USP appears to be making the process of deploying and operating a static site easier - auto-deploys from GitHub in build process, HTTPS cert management, simple CDN config etc.

Claimed 'performance' gains come from static hosting closer to visitors but AFAIK their CDN runs on AWS, and relies on nginx which means HTTP/2 prioritisation is broken - they've got a lot of work to catch up with Akamai, Fastly or Cloudflare on this front.

The whole JAMStack approach seems to result in companies re-inventing the wheel in non-performant ways - Contentful CMS delivers sites via Netlify but all the content is requested as JSON which JS components then render to the page.

Taking away the deploy pain is definitely a win for many of use but it's something I could imagine Cloudflare launching, which coupled with their other features - image optimisation, edge workers etc could probably blow Netlify out of the water

<comment><USER23> Couple of clarifications:

\- Netlify is multi-cloud: [https://www.netlify.com/products/edge/](https://www.netlify.com/products/edge/)

\- Content from a headless CMS like Contentful is generally retrieved at build time, not rendered in the browser

<comment><USER22> Doesn't matter if it's multi-cloud or not, the HTTP server Netlify are using still has HTTP/2 issues

Suggest you look at at few more Contentful sites in DevTools the Contentful site itself has no content in it's HTML and requests all content as JSON which is then rendered via JS components.

The content is in all the page-data.json responses in this waterfall - [https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200307_EQ_e60b0b3388b452b...](https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200307_EQ_e60b0b3388b452b8d01001bccab5a0b8/1/details/#waterfall_view_step1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Throwing "microservices" in there seems like a reach. I'm not familiar with Netlify, other than the static content generator CMS thing, but I don't see how its more beneficial to a microservice design versus any other API backend.

<comment><USER25> It's not a reach at all if you've been keeping up with their product offerings [1] [2] [3].

[1] [https://www.netlify.com/products/functions/](https://www.netlify.com/products/functions/)

[2] [https://www.netlify.com/products/forms/](https://www.netlify.com/products/forms/)

[3] [https://www.netlify.com/products/analytics/](https://www.netlify.com/products/analytics/)

<comment><USER26> I don't understand how these 3 offerings prove your point? I wouldn't consider AWS Lambda as a microservice partern.

<comment><USER27> FaaS seems to be the microservices concept taken to the extreme

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Can someone clue me in on the benefit of Netlify over say, S3 bucket fronted by cloudfront? Seems like the cloudfront solution is much cheaper with not much more dev time investment

<comment><USER29> Yeah, but does your S3 bucket talk about something called JAMStack the whole day? \s

There isn't really an advantage. It is static page hosting. I remember the days when you would just FTP those sites onto a server, serve with Apache and call it a day, but I guess everything needs to be behind a CDN these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Netlify makes it easy to deploy static sites. I've used it and it's been a decent experience. Their UI is quite complex and the notifications are annoying (they don't turn themselves off after you read them).

GitHub can roll out something like this very easily. They already have GitHub actions and GitHub pages. Netlify's core proposition is when you commit to a branch, a build command is run that outputs assets to a directory. Netlify will put those assets in a cdn. You can route your custom domain and they'll provision the letsencrypt very for you and you have a https site. Boom!

They have other value adds like forms which seem quite overpriced. That's when you need a db.

Overall my experience is that it's good to get something out of the door but you prolly will need to move to a cloud provider if you need full control like caching headers and any form of backend.

Basically as a dev all I want is something simple. Here's my script that builds the frontend. Here's the docker files for various services. Here's my requirements for a database. Lastly here's my routing rules of urls to different docker services and how to scale them. Go host it and give me a good log analyzer so I can monitor how things are operating.

Render.com has nice things but there's definitely value in simplifying most webapps deployments and still making the whole thing dirt cheap to operate.

</comment><comment><USER31> I just switched to Netlify from GitHub Pages a little under two weeks ago. The process of setting up DNS and switching everything over was seamless, I'm very pleased with the site under the free plan. I was choosing between Netlify and AWS and chose Netlify due to simplicity and a better free tier, even though it costs a bit more (or theoretically would in the long run).

A bit of economics:

The free plan offers 300 minutes of build and 100 GB of bandwidth. To compare, AWS S3 offers 20,000 GET requests for free. Given my pages average about 1 megabyte (other stuff is served from third-party CDNs, which are free). Thus 1 GB of bandwidth is approximately 1000 page views. In other words, Netlify offers about 5X as many free page views per month as AWS. I'm under absolutely no danger of getting to 100K page views, in a good month I get a couple of thousand. However, let's assume that I start writing better content and more people read it, like more than 100,000 page views per month. In that case, Netlify overage costs 20 cents per GB, AWS costs 9 cents. Overall, "at scale" Netlify is about twice as expensive as AWS S3 for static sites, but it's better at modest scale.

<comment><USER16> What made you leave gh pages?

<comment><USER30> AFAIAK GitHub pages require that the built files are stored in the repo.

Netlify checks out the repo, runs the build command and then takes files from your dist directory. I'd love for GitHub pages to behave like this. A much simpler setup.

<comment><USER16> Well, you can technically push the src changes to `master` branch, have a github action build + update a `deploy` branch and then have gh pages read from there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've used Netlify to host small business client brochure sites and everyone is happy.

But I did it on the free plan.

I'm quite unsure where the valuation comes from.

<comment><USER33> what valuation do you impute from a $53m Series C? (i have no knowledge, but am curious)

<comment><USER34> Hard to say but i would gather 10-20% dilution. Later rounds are less so valuation $250-$500MM

SaaS valuations have reached all time highs companies doing $2MM ARR are raising at $100MM+ post

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't know about all those extra feature, but to ship a static create-react- app, netlify has made my life super easy. Happy customer here. I hope they keep their core offerings solid and don't go crazy with new features to justify the Series C.

</comment><comment><USER36> I run endoflife.date on top of Netlify, and it has been great. Deploy previews are amazing and a life-saver.

</comment><comment><USER37> I really wish Netlify would start charging money for their core service, which is SUPER slick. A pretty big portion of their offering is that they don't just do hosting, but also do CI/CD for static sites, which is incredibly convenient.

I currently pay $18 for analytics for my podcast page ([https://kompilator.se](https://kompilator.se)) and my agency's page ([https://yoisho.se](https://yoisho.se)), just to pay _something_, but the quality of the "analytics" is unfortunately extremely sub-par compare to the rest of their service.

</comment><comment><USER38> For the love of God why does TechCrunch hijack the browser back button.

</comment><comment><USER39> MetLify really exploded when we several other static hosting services didn't. Kind reader, what are your thoughts on why that was?

<comment><USER35> UX.

You can do similar stuff on AWS, like host a create-react-app but the aws ux is terrible.

<comment><USER40> Now they've put in Amplify Console it's a lot better for this kind of work, personally I'm a big fan.

<comment><USER35> I was specifically referring to amplify console. it's still terrible UX compared to netlify.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Images of Do-RA Radiation Sensor Module for Ara Modular Smartphone - <AUTHOR> http://www.modularandroid.com/new-images-of-do-ra-radiation-sensor-module-for-ara-modular-smartphone/

<comment><AUTHOR> Not much new available for persons interested in Google's Ara modular smartphone as Google is trying to keep a lid on information these days. It sure was nice to see some new photos of modules.</comment>


Safari on Mac stores credentials from previous session in plaintext - <AUTHOR> https://www.securelist.com/en/blog/8168/Loophole_in_Safari

<comment><USER2> >We have informed Apple about the problem.

>At the current time we can't confirm whether or not there is malicious code out there that targets this file, but we're ready to bet that it won't be long before it appears.

yes, because kapersky values publicity and attention before all else.</comment>


MacKeeper 0-day flaw more than 20M users affected - <AUTHOR> https://thehacktimes.com/mackeeper-0-day-flaw-more-than-20-million-users-affected/ <comment><USER2> Not sure if anyone knowingly installs MacKeeper but I accidentally accepted the download for MacKeeper when I was trying to install a Camera app. Big mistake and I tried to stop the installation.

MacKeeper is a nasty piece of malware. I couldn't quit the program, it would immediately start back and putting it in the trash did nothing. Ended up having to boot into safe mode and remove.

Well as soon as I got it off my computer in Safe mode and restarted I get a prohibited sign. Mac will not boot. Ended up having to reinstall OS X. Thankfully you are able to reinstall and keep your files. Now I stay up to date on my backups!

I don't see why apple doesn't ban them. Obviously they are shady.

<comment><USER3> I once saw a coworker accidentially installing it and it surely is a nasty piece of malware. The problem is that one can never be quite sure whether every piece of the software was removed, which is why we ended up just reinstalling OS X and avoid guessing.

Since then, a few of my friends, who aren't into tech, almost installed MacKeeper. They all had a long history of using Windows and felt that installing some Anti-Virus, Anti-Malware junk was the most natural thing. For normal users it's really hard to distinguish between legitimate applications/websites and shady stuff.

<comment><USER4> Their website[1] looks awesome, I don't own a Mac (Windows user) but if I were to buy one I would definitely consider buying and using it. It's good that this site[2] is the second result on Google for "mac keeper" though.

1\. [http://mackeeper.com](http://mackeeper.com)

2\. [http://www.imore.com/avoid-mackeeper](http://www.imore.com/avoid- mackeeper)

<comment><USER5> Interestingly the toolkit shown is the Ikea toolkit "Fixa" \- I wonder if there's not IP restrictions on their use of such an image.

Edit: I saw this quote on the Mackeeper website you linked (it is good design) "MacKeeper was noticed at Macworld by a journalist from Cult of Mac". So I chased that phrase and all I found was algorithmic page generators like this [http://drgogek.com/is/is-mackeeper-really-a-scam-cult-of- mac...](http://drgogek.com/is/is-mackeeper-really-a-scam-cult-of-mac.html).

Using a different tack CoM mention Mackeeper in a single page found from their search box, an affiliate promotion page ... using Google unearths more promotions, [https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Acultofmac.com](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Acultofmac.com) mackeeper.

So, it looks like their quoted reviews are from people they're paying to sell the product, that's a warning sign.

Didn't investigate further.

<comment><AUTHOR> good find.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The person who found the 0-day set up a website that exploits the flaw by uninstalling MacKeeper.

 _Mr. Thomas released a proof-of-concept (POC) demonstrating how visiting a specially crafted webpage in Safari causes the affected system to execute arbitrary commands – in this case, to uninstall MacKeeper._

Source: [http://securemac.com/MacKeeper_Security_Advisory_Revised.php](http://securemac.com/MacKeeper_Security_Advisory_Revised.php)

<comment><USER7> Proof of concept and solution, sounds like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _make sure to run MacKeeper Update and install the latest version 3.4.1 or latest_

Or, you know, don't use MacKeeper ever?

<comment><USER9> Exactly. I wish someone comes up with a way to get rid of this thing f-o-r-e- v-e-r

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Proof of Concept is brilliant. Hopefully MacKeeper fails to patch the issue and the PoC goes viral to rid the world of this spammy app.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope so also, really hate that spammy app specially when i open a popular hub site we all know, and it opens it in background wtf ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why am I not surprised that a software mainly famous because of its pop-up ads is not the most reliable thing ever?

<comment><USER12> I have rarely seen someone advertise (any product) as aggressive as they do.

<comment><USER13> They used to run this beautifully integrated ad on speedtest.net, where the robot character was rendered in the same neon green motif. It looked like it was just part of the site. That meant that Ookla must have had an incredibly close working relationship with the ad people at MacKeeper. Feels so dirty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> MacKeeper will execute arbitrary base64 encoded commands on a custom url as root.

I guess it's a "flaw" but whoever put that in knew that would come back to bite. Haha, it's so insanely irresponsible that I don't even know where to start.

We need something like a hippocratic oath, and probably a governing body (or however grown up industries manage themselves), to stop people responsible for this sort of code from having a license to practice.

</comment><comment><USER15> Please to consider cleaning your Mac from MacKeeper.

Seriously, given the intensely spammy nature of the product's ads I'm unclear if this counts as a 0-day or a FEATURE.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wait, MacKeeper is actual software? I just thought it was just another piece of malware with a strangely good pop-up in comparison to other malware pop- ups.

<comment><USER17> You're not wrong, that's pretty much all it is.

(Oh, and it bundles a bunch of inferior versions of features already built-in to Mac OS X, like backups, file searching, data encryption, secure delete, login item disabling, default app selection, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> 20M MacKeeper users seems like an extraordinary number.

<comment><AUTHOR> not to mention over 700k paid subscribers ..

<comment><USER19> I was wondering from where this number is coming from...

<comment><AUTHOR> Their compani is based in Ukraine so you would probably need russian language to dig a bit in tho publicly available documents, but i found that number somewhere on twitter, and am sure its correct. Another proof how much dumb people are living on this wonderful planet..

<comment><USER19> I honestly thought it was an out of mind number, but thinking about how aggressive is their advertising campaign, sometimes almost misleading and the average knowledge of a user, well, I am not sure is out of mind anymore...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Consider cleaning your Mac from junk"

\-- MacKeeper campaign, 2013

</comment><comment><USER21> The amount of things I miss by running ad blockers.

</comment><comment><USER22> Given their advertising methods, I always figured installing MacKeeper was a good way to hose yourself.

</comment><comment><USER23> "We found users in the US typically use more data and the alternative plans start at around 500MB."

This is interesting considering that the UK providers generally provide more data to users for less money than US providers (with quite a few offering unlimited).

</comment><comment><USER24> I have a MacKeeper related question: are apps such as this (cleaners, antivirus etc.) necessary for Mac computers? Judging by the number of users affected by this, there are a lot of people thinking they do need it, I guess.

<comment><USER25> I don't feel they are necessary, even for less advanced users. Apple do a reasonably good job of keeping things safe and up-to-date.

The number of users may also reflect their pushy "you need this!" marketing. I installed MacKeeper a few days after switching from Windows to Mac, as I had no idea what I was doing. Ended up uninstalling it, then reinstalling OS X from scratch just in case.

<comment><USER24> That's what I thought, thanks. I'm a newish Mac user, so I was a bit confused by the whole situation, since other Mac I know told me not to install anything of that kind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How does one block MacKeeper popups in Safari? Why isn't Safari blocking it?

<comment><USER27> uBlock - [https://chrismatic.io/ublock/](https://chrismatic.io/ublock/)

<comment><AUTHOR> ublock over adblock for safari ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I really hope Apple uses this an excuse to add this crapware to their list of malware that OS X blocks the installation of.

</comment><comment><USER29> how to view the hidden friend list of any facebook user

[http://haktuts.blogspot.in/2015/05/how-to-view-hidden- friend...](http://haktuts.blogspot.in/2015/05/how-to-view-hidden-friend-list- of-any.html)</comment>