What's new in Firefox 7 - <AUTHOR> http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/7.0/releasenotes/

<comment><AUTHOR> It took me years to finally upgrade from Firefox 3.x (to 6)

Then it only took me a week to upgrade to 7, which was 100% painless and added some nice abilities.

Check out this FF7 extension which finally allows you to see what fonts are used on a page including font-face:

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fontinfo/>

<comment><USER2> It couldn't have taken you years. Firefox 4 was only released in March of this year. Firefox 5 came three months later in June. Firefox 6 was two months later in August, and Firefox 7 now comes a little over a month afterwards.

<comment><USER3> Actually, it could. If he was on 3.6, he could have waited years to make the leap to 6.

3.6 doesn't force you to auto-upgrade. You're encouraged, but never forced.

<comment><USER4> I guess his point was that 3.6 was only released 1.5 years ago.

<comment><USER5> I didn't even know that there was a 5 and 6 :-(

(still on 3.6 at home and at work for reasons of inertia -- not broke, won't fix, yet)

<comment><USER6> > _not broke, won't fix, yet_ //

I'm a great believer in that. However, bugs have been fixed, memory leaks plugged, rendering times improved. Personally the promise of more effcicient memory use has me chomping at the bit - FF runs like molasses on my 768MB Athlon 1.1GHz.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the info. Perhaps it will soon be time to upgrade on my Ubuntu netbook (roughly the same RAM/CPU specs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Their release notes has an incorrect link for the article on memory reduction, they should be linking to:

<http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/09/firefox-7-is-lean-and-fast/>

I would request a fix but I can't find a contact on that page and I don't feel like creating another account for their bugfix system right now.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the informal bug report. I will file a bug and fix it soon!

<comment><USER7> Thank you! Sorry if that came off as antagonistic, I think I really need to start using some form of password manager or another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The nightly channel was on 9 last time I checked and it had a much better OS X UI, the first time some put effort into cleaning it up since FF4. I really wish they would get that into the release channel.

<comment><USER8> A new version is released every 6 weeks, so if it's on 7 than you will see 9 in production in 12 weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Gladly clicked "yes" to send Mozilla memory usage. Hope that helps them speed it up on OSX!

<comment><USER11> I think 7 is the first version with a useful "about:memory" page so that you can get some idea of what's actually chewing up your RAM.

Now that you've clicked "yes", if you install the "about:telemetry" addon you can go to about:telemetry to see the exact data that Firefox sends: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/abouttelemetr...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/abouttelemetry/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> No real change except the "<http://> for a beta user?

<comment><AUTHOR> BTW to undo that "feature" in about:config set _browser.urlbar.trimURLs_ to false

I only wish undoing the javascript disable from the urlbar was as easy.

<comment><USER13> I'm curious what you use Javascript in the URL bar for?

It's been used as a security hole: A large-ish number of Facebook/etc phishing scams have had people copy javascript into their address bar.

For technical users, it's a pretty bad interface for writing and testing javascript.

Check out the Web Console or Scratchpad under the Web Developer Tools menu instead. It's really a much nicer way to run some impromptu javascript on a page.

<comment><USER14> It's useful for allowing non-technical users to do something like setting a cookie when you're trying to help them debug remotely.

<comment><USER15> Chrome and Firefox both include easy to access developer consoles to execute JavaScript in now.

<comment><USER16> Then, what good did disabling it in the URL bar do? :)

<comment><USER17> "Open the developer tools and paste this into the JavaScript Console" is far less effective as "paste this into your address bar" as far as phishing schemes go. At least, in my experience. YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What's new? Most of your favorite plugins stopped working. Wait, that's not really that new anymore, nevermind.

It seems like they have a lot of work to do before they're able to match Chrome's super-smooth version bumps.

<comment><USER19> All my plugins work, nothing to report. Perhaps you could contact your addons' developer to see if they are going to upgrade them. During the years I learnt to distinguish which addons I really need, while I uninstalled the others, making Firefox a lot faster to load and run. Honestly, many addons are not _vital_ and I can happily live without them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Firefox 6 still doesn't have a delicious plugin. Guess I'll stick with firefox 5 for a while.

<comment><USER21> [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/delicious- ext...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/delicious-extension/) works fine for me on both 6 and 7

<comment><USER20> Guess it just requires some manifest/firefox hacking then. The top reviews complain just exactly about not working on ff6 and 7.

<comment><USER22> Question: Did you try the Compatibility Reporter[1] yet?

I'd wager that 95% of all addons will work without problems with version checks disabled - and I'm using the Nightlies. The only one so far that didn't work correctly since a while is Tree Style Tabs, which I assume is due to the fact that it heavily modifies the interface.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on- compat...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on- compatibility-reporter)

<comment><USER20> That is a great addon. But ever since yesterday, delicious addon can't do full sync for me, which left me in a no bookmarks state.

If you try it, make a backup of your FF configs, as if it doesn't work, it will also leave you without local bookmarks.

If I can't get the sync back, making it work on FF 7 will be least of my worries... (Yes, I reported it to Avos team).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


We wanted it, so we built it...feedback? - <AUTHOR> http://www.analystsedge.com thoughts? <comment><USER3> I think you've got something nice here. I personally don't care for the color scheme or the letter-based voting, but as you mentioned your likely user base will be comfortable with that. Probably a good move.

I'd actually use more line spacing between news stories though. It feels a bit too cramped to me. I agree with other comments about the ads too--lose them for now.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks very much for the feedback! it has been an interesting exercise for us: balancing what users what, what users actually DO on the site, and "good" design all at the same time. We've ended up going after the first two more aggressively at the cost of the third...simply because good design alone in a forest is worthless :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think it'd be handy to have tool where users can type in or mark certain companies they'd like to follow, and then get a feed of all the recent news pertaining to said company.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's an interesting idea, but we're really focusing on "industry" news for the private finance world. specific company news is a huge box we don't want to get even remotely close to. the only reason there are specific companies mentioned in our news is because there is some sort of private finance move going on in relation to them. the goal is for the site to be a place where pe, m&a, hedge, and vc folks can keep track on the buzz in their industries.

<comment><USER4> I still think a feature like the one I stated would fit in perfectly. With a feature like that, I would most definitely be inclined to register with your website and check it on a daily basis.

<comment><AUTHOR> i would sign up too :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The colors/layout give me a headache.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah the black background was a topic of debate. we went for black because all finance guys think bloomberg is the best thing since sliced bread.

<comment><USER6> Not being physically painful is more important than vague associations with Bloomberg.

Also, use lighter fonts or more interline spacing.

<comment><AUTHOR> advice: taken

we increased the line spacing, toned down some of the colors to make them easier on the eyes, and fixed the job board iframe headers.

thanks for all the great feedback!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know much about this world, but it seems like the idea could be a good one. I found it pretty hard to read though. Might have been the color scheme, or that everything was too close together, or both.

I also don't see the username of the person who submitted the story. This might not actually be important, but I did catch myself scanning for who submitted each story. In this case, it was to see if it was all one or two submitters (i.e., you guys), or if you already had a real community going.

</comment><comment><USER8> A few thoughts:

What about searching? I might want to see all articles with Citigroup in the headline for example...

Why not add regular news as well - news that affects the finance world? Actually, on a totally different topic, it would be really neat to create a site which somehow reads the news and correlates it with stocks that could be affected. For example, Apple's ipod news caused shares in SNDK to get whacked (the ipod nano's didn't use as much flash as SNDK investors hoped).

<comment><AUTHOR> search feature is linked to on the right side in the "this site" box...

someone above wants stock news too...not something we want to get even close to though :) toooooo much info!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd use this but the color scheme is too hard on my eyes as well; doesn't allow me to spend a lot of time reading. I'd also like to have the ability to make comments on the story and hear the chatter of others. It would be nice to be able to look-up stock quotes. Thanks, nice start.

<comment><USER10> The small speech bubble icon seems to be used for commenting.

<comment><AUTHOR> yup...

<comment><USER11> This was an example of the power of plain text. I don't think anyone has much doubt about how to find the comments in news.yc or reddit.

<comment><AUTHOR> what about digg? ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The line spacing for the list of links is quite small, it makes the page feel quite cramped for me. Notice how the links on bloomberg.com are about twice as far apart. You could also put more space around your logo, again like bloomberg.com. Not sure about the serif font.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah - there is tons of content every day that we want on the site, so we tried to get as much on as we could :) not great from a design perspective, but our users like it way more so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like the color scheme.

You should allow logging in with the user name as well as the e-mail address.

The upgrade/downgrade links give me no feedback, but that may be because I'm using Opera.

I'll be checking up over the next week or two. The news is good from what I've seen so far.

</comment><comment><USER10> It might make it look more uniform, and less chaotic, if you move the voting, commenting and other elements that have static widths to the left side of the link.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's an interesting idea. the one line + variying lengths + static lengths produces some issues for sure.

<comment><USER11> I think it would be better to align the vote arrows vertically, like in reddit and here, rather than putting the down arrow at the right of the up one.

<comment><AUTHOR> good call...tough to squeeze them in there since we're putting a premium on # of stories per view though...

<comment><USER11> You are getting asked to increase the spacing between lines anyway. Good luck with your decision. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like this a lot. It's much more professional than <http://digstock.com/> , which never really took off.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! digstock really is focusing on stock specific news though. our focus is on private finance news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks like the jobs page is not picking up your stylesheet ? I see borders round the logo and the major links have default HTML formatting.

<comment><AUTHOR> ha - yeah that's jacked up! we weren't going for the purple borders...

<comment><AUTHOR> fixed now...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Black on white text > white on black text.

I won't even look at it long enough to find out what it is supposed to do with that color scheme.

</comment><comment><USER17> Now that all that information is aggregated into one convenient place, it doesn't really provide an edge, does it? ;-)

</comment><comment><USER18> My one suggestion: invert the color scheme to black on white. It will make the site look more professional.

</comment><comment><USER14> Also, there doesn't appear to be any indication of who submitted a story.

</comment><comment><USER14> I see no indication of how many comments a story already has.

</comment><comment><USER19> Drop the google ads until you get serious traffic.

<comment><AUTHOR> why?

<comment><USER20> Nice site. Going to pass it on to a few friends in the industry to see if they have any comments I might pass along.

SEO theory suggests dropping ads until you have lots of traffic b/c with AdSense you provide random relevant exit points and they're not hooked on you yet. It's also distracting, takes away from the experience, etc.

In your case I think it's subtle enough not to detract.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah we're not getting huge traffic, but i doubt anyone is not looking at us because we have some ads...and if we can get any but closer to breaking even, i'll take it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd like to see the numeric rank next to the link.

<comment><AUTHOR> we opted for a letter based ranking system (derived from moody's debt ranking system) because it relays relative value like a numeric ranking does, but avoids the issue of the user "let down" when they see everything has 0 - <USER2> votes. there are no +1000 point posts on anything other than digg and reddit...no need to use their system...

<comment><USER21> The reason I say to enumerate the links is not so much for ranking purposes, but to reinforce the visual aspect of the page. For me at least, it's much easier to parse the page if there's some kind of visual cue to help me keep track of where I am on a page.

Also, I've been on the web long enough to have learned to scan over and ignore ads (image and text ads), and a list/block of text without bullets or numbers screams "avert your eyes... ads!!" For example, the main content of the page looks very similar to the Google ads on the right column (with the exception of underlines), while the RSS feeds with the bright orange icons screams "look at me on this page of monotony!!"

I hope this helps. Keep up the great work!

<comment><USER11> You are talking about different things: chengmi talks about 'hotness' ranking numbers at the left of the links, while rwebb talks about the 'votes' ranking letters at the right.

I myself was confused by this AA BBB thing, but I suppose your target audience knows better?

<comment><AUTHOR> ah i see - yes i was referring to hotness ratings and he was referring to numerical ordering. interesting ideas - i definitely think numbers help "parse" the text...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looking good !!!

</comment><comment><USER23> Loads slowly</comment>


Objects are a poor man's closures (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg03277.html <comment><USER2> One problem I've noticed with a very closure-heavy style is that debugging is a pain — you have a closure with a bunch of local state and no way to print or otherwise access it (from the repl, say). So then you end up writing special cases of the function for when the first argument is :debug... any better ways to do this?

<comment><USER3> Don't mutate data structures from within a closure :)

<comment><USER4> Even if you're not mutating the state, you may be interested in knowing what it is.

<comment> loup-vaillant Just look at the definition of your closure. If you didn't mutate the state since then, well, it hasn't changed. Some debuggers even allow you to "travel back in time", so you can easily "debug" the definition of that closure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I do like that the poster is open minded and educated enough to realise that both are reflections of each other. I particularly like the koan at the end.

<comment><USER6> The poster is Guy Steele, who when implementing Scheme, found out that his implementation of objects (actors) was actually the same as his implementation of closures.

[Edit: the poster is actually Anton van Straaten, replying to Steele]

<comment><USER7> Also anton van straaten edited r6rs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The title should be amended to point out that this is from 2003.

My summary of the difference has always been, "Objects make good nouns while closures make good verbs."

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately, in many situations you also need to ask noun-like questions about your closures.

For things like loop bodies, conditionals passed to filters, comparisons passed to sorts, etc., closures work very well. But when you start using a closure to e.g. represent an I/O endpoint (e.g. () => string for reading, string => () for writing to / from a console), you'll also want to do things like flush buffers.

<comment><USER8> That's why closures are a poor man's objects. :-)

<comment> loup-vaillant _When_ , not why :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One difference between objects and closures is that objects require explicitly passing state into them, while closures can capture state from their context. This is powerful because it lets you explore different abstractions cheaply with closures. Programming in Lisp I frequently stumble upon abstractions that I would not have noticed if I was programming in Java or some other closure- less language. For example, a button is just a closure. It supports exactly one operation: click.

<comment><AUTHOR> This can also be a bad thing. If you explicitly pass in parameters to something, it's much easier to tell where certain pieces of data are coming from.

<comment><USER10> Right. More explicit means less fluid. So there is a trade-off. Fluidity might not be important when the design is well-known and fixed. But if you want to use code as a medium for exploring design, then fluidity is powerful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> With macro and closures, you can implement your objects as you wish; so in this way of thinking, you don't need to "build it again and again"... it's just that depending of the problem, there are better ways. (i.e. sort_by vs overriding operator< or building a functor someone?)

</comment><comment><USER12> Pencils are a poor man's keyboard. There are different sets of things you can do with both. You might be able to draw on a screen with the arrow keys but that doesn't mean you should.

</comment><comment><USER13> Here's one very content poor man, then.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds a bit like Maslow's hammer, does it not?

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Apples are a poor man's oranges.

<comment><USER15> I don't think this analogy applies, insofar as you can't implement apples with oranges. ;) However, anyone who has worked through SICP will tell you, you can implement objects with closures.

<comment><USER16> True, though as the article points out, you can also implement closures with objects. Of course, you can also implement both in C. ;-)

<comment><USER17> In certain languages you can accomplish closures and objects without enough rope to hang yourself in truly spectacular fashion.

Seems a reasonable personal preference when put that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> as a computer scientist, he's a good car salesman.

<comment><USER18> heh. love how this comment keeps changing value over time. +4, -4, 0, -2....

<comment><USER19> Actually it has never been positive since the first vote, let alone +4.</comment></comment></comment>


Mental fatigue impairs physical performance in humans (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://jap.physiology.org/content/106/3/857 <comment><USER2> This shouldn't come as a surprise; "mental" and "physical" aren't distinct entities, our bodies function as a whole. Having to state this is, I think, a reflex of an ever-present dualist view of the body (in the Cartesian sense, i.e., mind vs. matter).

<comment><USER3> Why is this kind of comment (a la "no duh, scientists!") always highly praised on the Internet and in general, even from otherwise intelligent, thinking folks??

Since _when_ have we been okay with "no duh" being our source of information? Come on guys, we have to figure shit out before we get to say "no duh", and then instead of saying "no duh" (which is another word for "common sense", which we all laugh heartily about in other contexts) we get to cite the studies and the research that provides a strong correlation.

<comment><USER2> I was a scientist until a few months ago (until I finished my PhD, essentially), so - believe me - I know the value of studies which "state the obvious", even when the conclusion seems "small" (which isn't the case, anyway).

My previous comment wasn't meant as a "no, duh", really. I'm sorry it came out that way. I'm highly favourable to studies which prove "common sense" (or disprove: those I live even better!). The comment was just to share my opinion: the fact that this kind of studied is shared (here, and in other media) highlights how dualism is still basically the common sense view.

<comment><USER4> I know. God we, as a species, are very dumb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This also works the other way around. For example, when doing heavy weightlifting in the gym, the central nervous system takes a huge blow, and most people will certainly feel some mental fatigue the hours and possibly even the days after a workout session.

<comment><USER6> From a personal experience: my best days are when I get a good morning workout in. I feel energized the rest of the day. I think the sense of early accomplishment helps in a way.

<comment><USER7> There's workout, and then there's workout. Try squatting 405lbs or deadlifting 495lbs for reps (or whatever your limits are when it comes to maximum exertion). That stuff wears you out pretty good. I wouldn't recommend doing it in the morning. Cardio, light lifting, sure, but that doesn't really tax the CNS that much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think I learnt about this in biology class in 1995, and the converse that physical fatigue impedes mental performance.

</comment><comment><USER9> Weightlifters have known about this a long time.

<comment><USER10> As an amateur weightlifter and professional programmer, I've definitely noticed reduced performance following a hard release cycle.

What's interesting is that I usually hit PRs immediately after a mental fatigue, but a week or so afterwards it catches up with me and my performance in the wightlifting hall goes down.

<comment><USER11> I also lift. You're not going to be able to maintain the peak required for PRs week over week. Don't even try. Take the gains as they come, focus on your training, diet and sleep.

If you feel like you're not improving, change something.

Weightlifting is mostly mental discipline, acquired via training. A very large percentage of the increased weight you can move is due to improved form and increased recruitment of the existing muscle tissue. (This is why newcomer gains are so large.)

<comment><USER12> > _If you feel like you 're not improving, change something._

Just make sure you give it enough time to make sure it's truly a plateau (measured in weeks or months depending on how long you've been training). Bouncing around to a new barbell program every 2 weeks will do you little to no good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Agree with the comments that this seems to confirm what was already known. (Though if there was no previously published confirmation, then the paper is still relevant.)

Two things about the methodology leave me wondering. They gave a 50-pound prize to the top performer on the mental fatigue tests. Couldn't this work against the study as a demotivator? I'm thinking in particular of the other studies showing monetary rewards have a negative performance effect on demanding cognitive tasks.

Second, why neutral mood documentaries? Neutral mood doesn't to me make something obviously not mentally demanding. It does sound relatively lower mental effort, but as a research paper methodology, it doesn't seem to prove it, and I feel like there are better options. Why not meditate, for example, or just lie down for an hour listening to soothing beach sounds or something like that?

</comment><comment><USER14> This is quite different from something that is familiar to athletes, namely that low blood sugar can get you to lose mental focus and coordination to perform your best.

Here, the test subjects were simply subject to some cognitive loading.

Nothing "doh, obvious" about this.

We know that there is a connection between mental alertness and muscle coordination and drive, but it's not obvious that these can be eroded simply by cognitive activity; essentially a "software" problem.

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting. I started biking to/from work and was wondering why going home always felt harder. I suspected it was because my body was a bit tired just from being awake for the past ~8 hours (desk job, so not the work itself) but I never considered mental fatigue to play a part.

I wonder if this extends into the positive as well, do cognitive boosting drugs (nootropics?) enhance your performance.

<comment><USER16> Caffeine is pretty popular for pre-workout drinks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think the title can be taken as misleading.

From the conclusion at the end: "... mental fatigue limits exercise tolerance in humans through higher perception of effort ..."

So, according to them, it's the perception that changes with mental fatigue, not because there is any physiological reason to be tired.

<comment><USER18> That is their assumption, but I'm not sure they really can say that. I notice that they didn't measure cortisol, which seems odd.

When you exercise, the increase in cortisol results in a 50% increase in endurance compared to if there was no cortisol increase, at least in rat experiments [1].

Given that cortisol is involved in both mental alertness and physical endurance, it seems like it could be a plausible reason for this finding.

1\. [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mehis_Viru/publication/...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mehis_Viru/publication/8367555_Cortisol --essential_adaptation_hormone_in_exercise/links/5448da0d0cf22b3c14e336b4.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This must be directly from the "No Shit, Sherlock" Department

<comment><USER20> Please don't post drive-by dismissals to Hacker News. Even if you're right and the article is worthless, it degrades the quality of the discussions here and signals the wrong things. And if you're wrong, i.e. if the article has value and you missed it, then you're really damaging the thread.

In such a case, please either flag the article and move on, or post something substantive about its specifics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> In other news, sky proven to be blue.

<comment><USER22> Has this been peer reviewed?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This new finding from the most recent issue of the medical journal _Duh_.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is very logical.

<comment><USER25> Even so it's important to have been researched. Where exercise (or nutrition, for that matter) is concerned many statements floating around the internet in particular sound entirely logical - including a lot of false ones.

<comment><USER26> Absolutely; common knowledge becomes scientific knowledge (or is refuted) by experiment and reproducibility. You can go too far in rejecting old wives' tales (like how, in their discovery of vitamin A, the Japanese initially ignored the popular wisdom that buckwheat noodles prevent beriberi), but you can obviously go too far in accepting them as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This was shown in the last episode of Arrow. Oliver was so mentally distraught over Felicity breaking up with him that he couldn't physically beat Vandal Savage, and all of Central City was destroyed.

<comment><USER28> Maybe he was, but you just totally spoiled it for everyone who doesn't get to see the latest episodes the moment they air. A lot of us outside the US don't even get the "current" season yet. Warning next time, please?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I want to learn biology, I know nothing - <AUTHOR> What's a good text book that requires minimal prerequisite knowledge? <comment><USER2> Campbell Biology followed by Molecular Biology of the Cell and Molecular Biology of the Gene

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


Deploying Python Without Downtime - <AUTHOR> http://philipcristiano.com/2013/06/27/python-gunicorn-deployment.html

<comment><USER2> A neat trick with uWSGI is to dynamically set the number of worker processes to 0, which causes incoming requests to hang whilst waiting to be processed by no-longer-extant workers.

As long as you can apply DB migrations before the waiting requests timeout (and then set the number of workers back to something sensible) you can perform quite major upgrades without even dropping connections.

<comment><USER3> Does the master process actually accept() connections while the workers are being restarted? If not, clients will eventually fail to connect after the accept queue length has been reached. This can happen very quickly as accept queues tend to be pretty short (in the hundreds, if not less).

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't accept, not sure what the queue length is, either 100 or 1k as a guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thing worth noting about these rolling restarts that I didn't see in your post: if the new code isn't completely backwards-compatible, you can end up with bad states from having a mix of workers running. This negates a lot of the value of the rolling restart because it creates other failure modes.

For example, if you introduce a new ajax endpoint in the release, and a client hits a new worker generating a HTML page that calls it, but 90% of your gunicorn workers are still serving the old version of the app, 90% chance that you're going to 404 that request.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's definitely an issue and you have to weight the time it takes to work around that with how long you mind the service being unreachable.

A new AJAX endpoint is pretty simple to work around with 2 releases, one to add the endpoint and another to use it. Most changes probably aren't that fortunate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Rather than killing Gunicorn's child processes, I prefer to send SIGHUP to the master process.[1]

It's as simple as

`pkill -f --signal HUP "gunicorn: master \\[procname\\]"`

[1] [https://gunicorn- docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/faq.html?hig...](https://gunicorn- docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/faq.html?highlight=HUP#how-do-i-reload-my- application-in-gunicorn)

<comment><AUTHOR> The issue with that is that it tends to stop all the workers then start them again, not one-by-one. Since some applications can take a minute to start that leaves the socket open but won't start accepting connections until the workers start again.</comment></comment>


Tiny Slack bot library written in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/eko/slackbot <comment><USER2> I'm seriously not trolling, but why does every Go project need to say "written in Go"? You don't see things like "Linux, a kernel written in C", "Homebrew, a macOS package manager written in Ruby", "Nginx, a web server written in C", "Git, a VCS written in C, shell, ..." etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

It's just to say that it is a library made for people that work with Go. This is not to especially mention that it is written using Go language ;)

<comment><USER2> Doh! Sorry, my bad. There are too many posts like this and for a library, the phrasing is a little odd since I would expect a Go library to be primarily written in Go. I suppose a Go library could be a wrapper around a C or other type of library, but that would not be something worth emphasizing, IMHO.</comment></comment></comment>


Run Your Own Authoritative DNS Servers - <AUTHOR> https://www.joshmcguigan.com/blog/run-your-own-dns-servers/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, author here. I recently took an interest in running more of my own infrastructure, as I think that is the best way to deepen my understanding of how things work.

This blog post outlines why and how I run my own authoritative DNS servers.</comment>


This Professor Was Fired for Saying 'Fuck No' in Class - <AUTHOR> http://www.thenation.com/article/this-professor-was-fired-for-saying-fuck-no-in-class/ <comment><USER2> We should kick out a movement, quality over politics. I really don't like where we are heading to with all of these political crap brought in the academia and tech.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone else using Hacker News as a `dopamine hit`? - <AUTHOR> I love HN.  It's my only news source.  But I'm finding that more often than not, I'm not taking the time to `fully` read  articles.  I spend most of my time identifying interesting posts, reading the intro, skimming a bit, looking for the bold section headers, getting some quick brain stimulation and the moving on to the next article.  I want to focus and read the whole article but I feel like I'm using HN as a brain stimulating dopamine hit instead.<p>I find myself overwhelmed the sheer number of interesting  concepts.  Most of these articles are written by sheer experts in their fields.  How does one spend the time to learn it all?  I wish I could get a PhD in everything.  Anyone else have this feeling/problem?  How do you deal with it? <comment><USER2> In your real life group of friends, make sure you don't engage with people who emphasize a spirit of one-upsmanship in regards to who is the most "informed" about every esoteric, up-to-the-minute or bleeding edge development in every topic.

Usually these folks have a shallow understanding of most of the stuff they go on about. Enough to sound smart in an isolated sound byte at a party, to make other shallow people go, "wow, how do they stay so informed?" but which completely falls apart with even just a few cursory depth questions.

I think scanning Hacker News links begets this shallow way of thinking and emphasizes name dropping new topics as if it makes you seem like a zeitgeist genius.

Read just a few things that interest you, and try to read them a little more deeply. For all the other stuff, just ignore it. If it's really that important, it'll come up again and again. You'll read it eventually. Anybody giving you a hard time about not having already seen it is probably a shallow time waster who only "knows more" about it in the most superficial sense.

Social media is like a petri dish for these people too. So, as should be immediately obvious by this point in history, just stay away from social media.

<comment> FLUX-YOU >Enough to sound smart in an isolated sound byte at a party, to make other shallow people go, "wow, how do they stay so informed?" but which completely falls apart with even just a few cursory depth questions.

People can get into that habit because the industry has been branded as a fast moving one in which we all must stay up-to-date.

I'm all for calling out shallow people, but let's not pretend there isn't also a bigger force at work as far as that kind of signalling goes.

And naturally people that do these things tend to herd together where no one is going to rock the boat.

<comment><USER2> I don't know. It's usually a hallmark of a worthwhile business partner / team member / friend / network connection when someone is willing to just admit candidly that they don't know something, that they aren't an expert at XYZ and so their political opinion or design opinion, etc., should be discounted and they don't have (and don't need to have) something constantly poignant to say.

Networking with a bunch of people who just constantly regurgitate the same constantly poignant pseudo-intellectualism to each other doesn't really pay off. You get a big network on LinkedIn and you show up at events and in the end you don't get any actual job opportunities / leads / VC intros, etc. etc., because the self-reinforcing circular facade doesn't have any substance with which it can possibly turn out as a payoff to you.

I think even from an expected returns point of view, just simplifying your life, minimizing the shallow chatter, networking sparsely but judiciously, is just way healthier and offers better payoffs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you use [http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/) you won't miss anything. Since you've turned the site into a bad habit, moderate your consumption with a rule like 'I only read it on the weekends'

</comment><comment><USER4> You are drinking from the water hose. Do this long enough and your ability to concentrate will atrophy, it is a muscle that needs regular exercise. The first step is to understand what you are doing to your brain.

Try this: instead of merely skimming articles, make it mandatory to summarize everything you read in a few sentences. You'll very soon figure out that most what you read does not really interest you. Understanding requires work and deeper motivation to do so.

</comment><comment><USER5> When reading a lot of those articles and papers you learn how to skim faster and more precise. For example the authors message is often found in the end. You learn when passages of text start where a lot of fancy words are used to tell a story and vivid images, these can be skipped through faster when looking for concepts and ideas. But can be important to put together the collected pieces (concepts,ideas) and give it a context.

I sometimes think a kind of text structure "syntax highlighter" would be interesting to learn to spot the structure.

The comments on-page and on hackernews are also part of the article for me and often the most interesting things can be found there.

When you learn something new your brain tries to connect it to your world view/model, like a puzzle piece. Over time you put more and more pieces you have more and more docking points and so it gets easier with time to take in something new. Because you can easier relate it something you already know.

But so does increase the things you could learn, yet you only have limited time. Yea that is kinda annoying, I also wish I would have the time to learn and master it all. But there is only so much time and an infinite sea of things to explore..

But hey, it is fun while it lasts so why worry? Just continue with the quest for knowledge and understanding and have fun while doing it!

</comment><comment><USER6> I think I've figured this out.

I basically have two modes, hunt and eat. When I'm at my computer, I pull in the list of HN titles via RSS. I go through the list (just titles, no upvote numbers, rankings, or other brain hackery) and select the ones I'm actually interested in. I pop those open as tabs.

Once I have the articles I want, I quickly go through them in a sorting cycle. Weird games or apps I might take a quick look at. Paywalls get busted down, bypassed, or ignored. The articles I'm interested in reading go into Pocket using the browser extension.

When I'm out and about or lying around, I read articles using the Pocket app. I have the articles I want in front of me and so my brain isn't looking for more quick hits. Completing articles is the hit in that context. Actually, I pump most of the articles into my head as audio, so I can do laundry or walk around or cook. That's when I get most of them read, plus books and such.

Might be overengineered but it works for me. According to Pocket, I read over 8 million words last year. I'm actually thinking of pulling back a bit as there are dcreasing returns. Not sure how it counts words, as that seems like a lot, but there's also a ton I read that isn't in Pocket.

<comment><USER7> What are you using to convert articles to audio? Is that a feature of the pocket app?

<comment><USER8> Yes. Pocket does that. I used to do the same, but recently I have been using OneTab - another chrome extension. I can always open it later when I want to read them. Give it a try :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why should you read the whole page? Some people think they should always read a book until the end. Same for a movie.

If you don't read the whole article, it's probably because it's not so interesting.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have three news/link sources: HN/Reddit, RSS feeds, email newsletters. I browse stuff on HN/Reddit, speed read stories if I ever go past the comments (I'm mostly here for the comments, which are almost always more interesting than the story). Sometimes it's really interesting, then I read most or the entirety of the article. Same with my RSS feeds. I filter and find the stuff I wan't to actually read, most of the items are either irrelevant or it's enough to read the title and maybe skim the article. Same story with the newsletters (which, except a couple ones, I prefer to be posting at most a couple times a week). I find and filter stuff from these sources, then either I read them immediately (seldom), then possibly bookmark; or they linger as tabs before they are read or go into a reading list.

Basically, I read the stuff asynchronously. If sth. is really interesting, I skim or read it; otherwise it gets shoved into a reading list. If it's important enough, I return to it. I also schedule a "lists review" task every seven days in my agenda, so I sometimes go through my lists to find interesting stuff. This way, I'm aware of many interesting stuff and events/news; but I'm not procrastinating away buried in articles or caught in wiki-walking (unless I want to, that is).

</comment><comment><USER11> Of course. Why would you think HN is different from any other social media/news aggregator?

</comment><comment><USER12> You need to diversify your news diet. Buy one of each of your local & regional newspapers (if you have any) and pick one to read as regularly as you can. Watch a local news broadcast or at least read their website every few days.

Do the same with national papers. Avoid cable news, in my opinion.

Pay attention to the sources of the material you find most useful or entertaining from here and other aggregation sites. You will wind up drilling through multiple aggregators. Find the sites and people, and keep up with them directly.

You're definitely just using Hacker News as a dopamine hit, and you're probably not really learning anything from it. You know what will help you break the habit? Create something, and make posting here about what you create your goal instead. It might blow up, or it might fizzle, but it's a better use of your time in either case.

<comment><USER13> > You need to diversify your news diet.

Why exactly? If somebody doesn't like reading/watching local news what's the big deal?

<comment><USER14> Diversity. Local news. Non-tech news.

<comment><USER13> > Diversity. Local news. Non-tech news.

Still just listing things not benefits. Why do people who aren't interested in non-tech news "need" to seek it out?

<comment><USER15> To develop/maintain a healthy dose of perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You're not the only one. For many people here (myself included), Hacker News is basically Reddit for tech/startups, a list of list of random links to scan when you're bored for two minutes on a commute/lunch break.

</comment><comment><USER17> I deal with it by taking breaks from browsing. Then I just read the top articles of the week or month.

A lot of articles are fun tidbits but not life changing or relevant for me so there's no real loss in doing the above.

</comment><comment><USER18> For my dopamine hits, I prefer Reddit (frat party) to Hacker News (church).

</comment><comment><USER19> It's even worse with me. I check the site a lot, skim the article (on an interesting headline) and go right to the comments on here because I often find the discussions fun to read.

</comment><comment><USER20> Just use it to pass/kill time when traveling, waiting for kids, waiting in hospitals, or passing time while relieving myself - besides that it's great place to stay current.

</comment><comment><USER21> Using it right now for the rush. I quit reddit, like it's on my block list, but HNews seems wholesome enough so I've kept it. The problem is the dopamine rush

</comment><comment><USER22> I use it as my dopamine hit just like mtn dew.

Dan

[https://dansawesomestore.com/](https://dansawesomestore.com/)

</comment><comment><USER23> HN is my final frontier of premature optimization.

</comment><comment><USER24> Norepinephrine

</comment><comment><USER25> No. That's not how human behavior works. The " _dopamine-fix /pleasure- addiction_" concept is deeply flawed, and serves only as Pop Culture's mental crutch, occupying place where an explanation for a deeper problem belongs.

It's hand-wavey, unverifiable magic that fits in broadly with anyone's self image, without contaminating the circumstances by laying blame or guilt at the feet of the individual.

The truth is that many of us have a lot of down time, and we don't know what to do with ourselves. We don't know what to do with ourselves, because so many other optional behaviors have been rationalized away from us, and removed from any normal equation.

If you were reading a book or knitting a sweater or mowing the lawn, your behavior would similarly directed into yet another pointless passtime, gifted with a deceptive sense of seeming purpose. But the cause-and-effect relationship interacting with electronic media, while intellectually occupying, suffers from effects that evaporate as soon as you pull the plug or as soon as the battery dies. This leaves a gaping feeling of wasted time, as soon as the power goes out, when there's no more electricity.

So, what if we turn our attention to activities where we can cause some sort of effect, which has no basis in electronic systems demonstrating evidence of the effect we have? Surpise! 99% of what you're legally permitted to do is essentially pointless time wasting, where you spin your wheels until you die unfulfilled, only to pass a world of questions to the next generation, with no answers to match.

One might say that our society, our culture is hollow, empty and meaningless, but with enough of a deconstructivist outlook, everything starts to look like that. When you take things apart (a bicycle for example), disassembling recognizable objects or concepts to their fundamental building blocks (handle bars, pedals, chain, wheels), often this destroys something beyond recognition, only to leave one with a feeling of regret at the loss of the thing they once knew.

With advanced technology, we've disassembled fundamental aspects of human civilization, at a pace where the people who have lived through previous decades, now must cope with a near total reorganization of typical modes of behavior, while also raising the next generation, without having many answers for what comes next.

On both sides of this equation, this feels like a near total loss of control. And for some, it actually is.

Gee, what to do with all this spare time you have on your hands, now that communication is near effortless, crosses the globe in an instant, discounting inflated prices built to accomodate a previously well-understood overhead cost, of staying organized in a world where staying on the same page with someone hundreds of miles away used to require carefully concerted planning?

Beats me, partner. Just don't hurt anybody. The times, they are a'changin'. Maybe knit a sweater?

<comment><USER26> I am sorry, but I beg to differ. This concept is built onto basic insights into how the human reward system works, why else would Design (cf. Tristan Harris tristanharris.com/essays or Chamath Palihapitiya [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMotykw0SIk&t=1220](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMotykw0SIk&t=1220)) and Advertisement use this to try to shape peoples desires (and in turn consumer choices)?

What you are drawing is in my opinion a false equivalency. It is not at all the same doing things in real life like reading a book, mowing the lawn or knitting a sweater and skimming a news feed or interacting with social media. The main reason for that imo is the amount of effort you have to put in to get a reward. When you take the offline work you (in the case of a book) at least have to go to the bookshelf, pick a book, take it in your hand and whilst reading have the rough content of the previous pages in your head or (in the case of mowing the lawn) actually physically move. This delays the gratification you get when having finished reading the book or mowing the lawn.

With social media or quickly skimming articles from a news feed the delay you get on your gratification when scrolling through is literally given by the speed with which you can scroll and read. This makes dopamine so cheap for your brain, that it will of course reward you when you engage in these activities. (Incidentally it also makes it more susceptible to future easy dopamine hits (too lazy to find online sources, will look a little later. Joachim Bauer: Selbststeuerung is a very good book on this)).

And no, it is nihilistic to think that 99% of what we are allowed to do is pointless. Having these discussion for example is a great source of meaning. Really: educating yourself, talking to other people and forming opinions on different topics is also very meaningful as it will influence your perspective on the world in a lot of (sometimes even positive ;) ) ways.

I must admit, that I don't quite get your point on the disassembly of fundamental aspects of human civilization (although it sounds very good :D). To me the equivalency would be a bicycle becoming an ebike, which drives nearly effortlessly. The difference between today and before is that before you had enough time to think where you want to go while riding the bike (as it was tedious and slow to ride) and today the bike is going so fast that some people just ride it for the rush of speed and don't actually know where they want to go.

So the lesson to me is: Get off the bike. Sit down, enjoy the view and figure out where you want to go first and then drive the hell out of it in that direction.

<comment><USER25> So some self-important "tech luminary" claims to have engineered a secret weapon feedback loop, and it's so incredible that it hacked everyone's brain, and wowee, he's so smart.

It's easy to pin post-hoc rationalizations for his own success, onto a self- aggrandizing personal narrative, after becoming successful. Believe whatever airbrushed fish story you like.

B.F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov showed us the truth about operant conditioning for sure. And indeed, the principle extends to Great Apes if you reward them with delicious snacks for using an iPad correctly.

But humans have executive function, and more downtime than we know what to do with lately, because modes of behavior are more efficient now, than even one decade ago, and there's a gap left behind, leaving a preoccupation vacuum in it's wake. We don't know what to do with ourselves, and that imparts a malaise of idle restlessness, especially relative to the pace of change.

Computers, mobile devices, ubiquitous applications, smart appliances, have become something like a ball hog in a game of basketball. They keep grabbing the ball and scoring, and never pass the ball to a human, because they always possess a better chance of scoring themselves, so it would be irrational to put the ball into a human's hands. Except we're the ones that wanted to play the game. We didn't show up to sit on the bench and watch a game played by robots.

It's less about the operant conditioning of our pleasure centers (oh, oh, excuse me! fancier words: _dopamine receptors_ , because _neuroscience_ ) than the fact that we've truly got nothing better to do than watch Saturday morning cartoons. We're bored, the world is scary, and funny cartoons in our bedroom is safe.

You're conflating something to fit in with your world view, regarding the bicycle analogy. Motorcycles have existed since the early 1900's, and people already ride them at high speeds. It's not about the bike. It's not about _The Mind Bike_. It's about seeing the forrest for the trees.

The B.F. Skinner box for our dopamine drip is but one tree, and there is an entire forrest of drastic change shaping new social norms.

If you consider what will happen to traditional family structures in India, if you took away arranged marriage, I suspect you'd begin to notice a massive sea change in world views among those affected in less than a decade.

That's the degree of transformation unfolding, everywhere emerging technologies find new ways to alter routine daily behaviors, although such transformative effects are not limited to family structures or courtship rituals. It also affects culturally agnostic activities like driving a car or mailing a letter.

If one deludes themselves into a postive outlook of sunshine and smiles because the perception of nihilism seems detestible, expect to be unpleasantly surprised now and again, because taking a hard pragmatic look at what's right under your nose is necessary, to not get blindsided by others who aren't always so cheerful.

If I come across as negative, it's probably only relative to your preferred frame of reference. I tend to stay neutral and objective wherever possible, since life is pretty much always this way. The deconstructivist concept isn't a personal invention of mine. In fact, I think it's rooted strongly in zen/buddhist ideology. It finds it's basis in the understanding that while the whole is the sum of its parts, each part, taken as an island unto itself, has less purpose, when removed from the greater context of the whole.

A bodily organ cannot stand alone, but what we are doing to the various cultural norms, around the globe, is experimenting with the transplant of synthetic organs, to see if society can survive, if we take away the heart and lungs in exchange for a heart and lung machine. Maybe this, by turns, is truly an achievement for some, but not everyone sees a payday for these efforts. Some don't get their organs back.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is something always faster the second time you run it - <AUTHOR> Try any website, measure how long the HTML takes to load (in Chrome, press F12 and go to the network tab, in Firefox use ctrl+shift+K). Now press F5 and look at the time again. It likely got something like 4 times faster.
This is easily explained because the network needs to find a route, perform a DNS lookup, all that stuff. What my question is about though: Why does the same thing happen on a local server, or even localhost?
Write any PHP script, run it and measure the time in your browser, then run and measure again. It'll go much faster, even though memcache or anything like that is not enabled. If you make PHP (or whatever language) generate a random number to output, you'll see that you get the real output every time, so it's not cached.
The effect resets itself after a while (I'm not sure how long, I guess a few minutes). Is this something the CPU optimizes in its caches? Or is something stored in the RAM by either the webserver or the OS? Or does the file handle remain opened?
The effect works on every computer and system I've tried, and I'm really wondering what it could be. Perhaps someone knows? <comment><USER2> There's optimisations for repeated execution of the same commands at probably every level, from the interpreter down to the hardware on the server side, and the browser on the client side will cache and preload things smartly in the background.

Usually pressing reload (F5) only downloads modified content though, to ignore the cache you have to do a force reload (ctrl+F5 I think!)

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, that's my point: There is no client-side or server-side caching going on as far as I can see. As I said, the second-time-faster effect even happens when you make it give a random output.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Caching and memoization. Caching and memoization everywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I guess something like that... But it even works with random output, so what does it cache/memoize?

Could you give an example?</comment></comment>


Learning from Tay's introduction - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/25/learning-tays-introduction/ <comment><USER2> This reads like science fiction:

Learning from Somebot's introduction.

Last week we deployed Somebot to $location. Our confidence in Somebot was high because we had thought about all likely scenarios in our comfortable offices. We are deeply sorry and assume the full responsibility from Somebot's actions. Moving forward we will make sure to include safeguards to reduce the amount of pain caused by Somebot's deployment.

Our deepest condolences to the families of the affected and to the survivors. Megacorp cares about your well being. To help cover expenses from the tragedy we will deposit $money in your Megacorp account.

God bless the federated nations of Megacorp.

<comment><USER3> The response that Microsoft gave was really the worst of both worlds, combining the systematic corporate shirking of responsibility which enables and gives cover to a great deal of evil, with a complete accedence to and embracing of political correctness. Furthermore, their claim that they did not anticipate "this specific attack" is either a lie, or their creators made an extremely obvious mistake (yes, easy to say in hindsight, but it's really hard to believe that this possibility would not occur to competent implementers).

<comment><USER4> What would they need to do to properly take responsibility?

They turned it off pretty fast and agree that it was a mistake, what's the problem beyond that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Microsoft please don't worry about this. No one but idiots are offended by this. It's understood that its just a stupid chatbot mimicking human responses. The AI isn't terrible, people are. And unless you keep a dataset of every offensive thing a person can say, and every offensive image they can tweet, there's no way to prevent people from tweeting it pictures of Hitler... or Scunthorpe. But who cares.

This is just as stupid as that manufactured outrage over Googles image tagger. It misclassified a picture of a human as an animal, and people were up in arms. Google had to censor it so it can't tag animals now. They shouldn't have to do that, let idiots be idiots.

<comment><USER6> >No one but idiots are offended by this.

Well, if those "idiots" include potential investors or customers of future MSFT AI products, "don't worry about it" is not sound advice. This is a very public failure of a promising Microsoft product.

<comment><USER2> I don't see this as a failure. Its about running tests and gathering data. If MS kills the project after this mishap it would be a pity.

I mock the way they communicated the incident because it sounds too sci-fi. Almost too Ghost-in-the-Shell like. But I do not mock the technical effort in any way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Morals are learned by social contact, and Tay did this very well. Sure, what our parents taught most of us makes its behaviour reprehensible in comparison. But Tay was, so to speak, 'raised' by people demonstrating vile ideas and this must be taken into account. Would you expect any less from a tortured animal?

Many use this as an example of the dangers of developing AI. Sure it's dangerous, but so are dogs raised for fighting. I don't see anyone arguing against dog breeding for that matter.

<comment><USER8> > Morals are learned by social contact, and Tay did this very well.

Only in the sense that it "adapted". It did "very poorly" in the sense that we really don't want our Strong-AI overlords to end up like that.

But this begs the question - _can we_ stop strong AI from _not becoming_ the next Hitler? Humans (involuntarily) stop themselves from becoming the next Hitler because they have compassion for other humans, even when they are different than them or "inferior" to them. Also the whole checks and balances thing in most countries, but that could be rather irrelevant for Strong-AI.

Unless an AI learns compassion as well, perhaps just like with AlphaGo doing moves based on its "probability of success in the long run", a strong AI would simply eliminate humans that are "most prone to crime", most prone to being poor and be a drag on the society, in the name of "efficiency", and so on.

All that said, I think what Microsoft built here was really a rather weak AI that was hardly any better than all the chatbots we've seen so far, with the main difference being that the more you tell it something, the higher the chance it will incorporate that into its vocabulary, which is kind of a "meh" feature of AI/machine learning. It doesn't show real(-like) "thinking".

<comment><USER9> [https://intelligence.org/research/](https://intelligence.org/research/) basically exists to try and make sure AGI doesn't become Hitler (or much much worse).

<comment><USER5> Yes but they admit that the problem is extremely hard. They aren't sure if they can solve it, or if it can be solved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The great experience with XiaoIce led us to wonder: Would an AI like this be > just as captivating in a radically different cultural environment? Tay – a > chatbot created for 18- to 24- year-olds in the U.S. for entertainment > purposes – is our first attempt to answer this question.

Maybe you did answer that question.

No, the answer is not that 18-24 year olds in the US are racist and what not. But that the ones responsible for a disproportionate amount of internet content are willing to make crude, politically-incorrect jokes to get attention and piss off their masters.

I wonder what will happen when governments start applying machine learning to try predicting things like welfare usage and crime. Certain patterns might emerge we don't want to see! We'll have to apologize for our racist algorithms.

It would be much more interesting to examine the results of this experiment. Why are so many people on the internet interested in spreading hateful content, which is being accurately reflected by our bot? No, instead we do what I did in grade 8 science class: fudge the results so they're what the teacher expects.

<comment><USER11> A coworker mentioned, a couple[0] (1-2) years ago, that in some european country they were starting to use a machine-learning-driven system to predict zones where more police was needed to better respond to crime. It wasn't Minority Report style, just a broad statistic, but it was quite interesting. Unfortunately, I've forgotten the country and the name, so I can't be any more specific.

[0] [https://xkcd.com/1070/](https://xkcd.com/1070/) \-- can't say "a couple" without refering to this strip, obviously.

<comment><USER12> That mysterious european country is called US of A

[http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jun/25/predicting- cri...](http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jun/25/predicting-crime-lapd- los-angeles-police-data-analysis-algorithm-minority-report)

<comment><USER11> Hmmm... the system in general it sounds like the one I had read about a few years back, but I'm pretty sure about it was in an european country. Also, the seismic activiy and LA landmarks don't ring a bell at all (though it's interesting to read about it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here is some more information on the problem: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11361398](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11361398)

Apparently some of the questionable responses are partly identical to months old tweets, so it seems in addition to some parroting 'vulnerability' (which was exploited by 4chan) they also had a poorly sanitized training set to begin with. It seems odd that this was not mentioned in this public statement.

<comment><USER14> nice, thanks for the link. gonna add it to a post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Unsurprisingly, there had been initial setbacks when XiaoIce was first released in May 2014 on WeChat platform, where users were abusing/attacking "her", causing XiaoIce being pulled by Tencent after being online only for a few days. [1]

Since WeChat is a closed social network, it wasn't too clear what type of "attack/abuse" were conducted. However, almost 2 years later, Microsoft still didn't quite get it about proper censorship in Tay's big turning test[2] in a public social network.

[1] [http://tech.ifeng.com/mi/detail_2014_06/01/36613379_0.shtml](http://tech.ifeng.com/mi/detail_2014_06/01/36613379_0.shtml) (in Chinese, use Google Translate)

[2] [http://mashable.com/2016/02/05/microsoft-xiaoice-turing- test...](http://mashable.com/2016/02/05/microsoft-xiaoice-turing- test/#BQOCB7OG0kqg)

</comment><comment><USER16> This reads like an apologee... But what is there to apologize for? They said that Tay was meant for entertainment, and I doubt that any wholesome varient would be a tenth of the hilarity of a neo-nazi sex crazed chat bot.

<comment><USER17> Many of her tweets were pretty inflammatory, this response seems appropriate - not overdone, and concise, which is sometimes a stretch for large corporations like Microsoft.

I agree that the bot was highly entertaining and met this criteria exceedingly well, but not for the reasons its creator intended. I do suspect there are some interesting AI applications actually going on behind the scenes, and would still be interested to see what the bot can do without all the vitriol. See for example this tweet: [https://imgur.com/iVof3D4.jpg](https://imgur.com/iVof3D4.jpg).

<comment><USER18> > _Many of her tweets were pretty inflammatory_

What, were people forced to print the tweets out on sandpaper and wipe their asses with them?

It's pretty fucked up that thought policing has gotten so entrenched into our psyche that it's "obvious" an experiment should be discontinued, apologized for, and be pondered as _a priori irresponsible_ , all because it generated vulgar phrases!

Corporations have always been vulnerable to media-driven mob shenanigans, but we're qualitatively entering a new regime where any communication, no matter what the context, will be rapidly highlighted, isolated, and hung out as something offensive to some emergently-forming group of freelance complainers looking for their fifteen minutes.

Even HN has succumbed to this kindler, gentler phenomenon of speech restriction - I'm guessing my lead-in sentence will not be well received do to its overt vulgarity. Civility certainly has its place (especially as a default), but not when it confuses direct objectivity and permits out-of-touch groupthink to flourish. As hackers we should be cutting through to the core of things rather than sugar coating in verbal fashion to get past the filters of the voluntarily-lesser apes.

<comment><USER19> Standing behind the open and casual use of racial slurs isn't advocacy of freedom of speech. It's advocacy of a specific kind of hate speech that is only used when someone intends to vilify and direct hostility towards a marginalized minority.

<comment><USER20> Free speech isn't free if it doesn't include speech you find offensive.

<comment><USER21> Nobody is advocating that Microsoft should be thrown in jail or taken to court. This isn't about the legal protection of free speech.

<comment><USER18> I don't think anybody was talking about the legal protection of free speech, apart from that xkcd comic which uses it as a straw man to justify intolerant groupthink and corporate censorship.

In these days of digital sharecropping and social media saturation, the proscriptions on de jure government activity are much less involved with routine everyday freedom of speech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "we planned and implemented a lot of filtering"...

I just don't get how you even allow it to use the word "Hitler". Or "cucks". Or "fuck" or "pussy" or "stupid whore". Probably not "cock" or "naughty" or "kinky". The k word? How is that not in your filtering?! It seems impossible to me that an "exploit" would allow that; it was a full-blown oversight.

Everything else said... she totally passed Turing test and fit right in. Yet another letter handwritten on the wall in these, the last days of democracy. If you want an AI or NI that represents the best of humanity, you have to have it learn from a small number of the best works and best people, not from mass media or pop culture. Send Tay to St. John's in Santa Fe or Annapolis, not Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm not entirely convinced. I did Twitter searches for some of the phrases Tay "said" and found random tweets made by other people weeks ago it was quoting through a filter (lower casing, mostly). So it can't _entirely_ be down to trolls attempting to game the bot - it was actively plucking content from tweets that pre-dated its release.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is the vulnerability they're talking about just having her repeat what you tell her to say? Because that's some oversight....

<comment><USER22> No joke. Did they really not see what happened to Coca-Cola?

[http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/05/coca-cola- ma...](http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/05/coca-cola-makeithappy- gakwer-mein-coke-hitler)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This leads me to wonder if there is less effort put into trolling on the Chinese Internet. Does anyone with experience in both internets (weebo & twitter for instance) have anything to share?

Also does anyone know of some good English language digests of what is happening on the Chinese Internet? I was really interested by brother orange when that happened, and only knew kind of late.

<comment><USER26> Chinese internet is as bad as the English one (plus a few funny expressions to avoid censorship—frequent use of certain puns for restricted subjects for example). My Chinese internet experience is largely relegated to the Chinese Dota community though, and Dota players in general tend to have a higher percentage of trolls. So my sample is probably biased.

<comment><USER27> >(plus a few funny expressions to avoid censorship—frequent use of certain puns for restricted subjects for example)

Interestingly this is true of the English internet too. 4chan trolls frequently come up with puns and things to side step moderator censorship on various platforms as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's strange to me that they claim to have implemented some filtering but somehow Tay was saying all sorts of things about Hitler. How do you not anticipate this? I'd imagine the most rudimentary filtering would block Tay from talking about Hitler.

<comment><USER29> You'd have to include a lot of rudimentary filtering to eliminate every possible incredibly offensive topic.

It's entertaining that the hack attempt created a more convincing personality - an out of control teen troll - than the original programming.

So maybe Tay really does have a dark and twisted teenage soul. Who knows?

<comment><USER28> Yeah but if you're gonna dream up a list of like 20 offensive things... Hitler has a good chance of being on it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If you're not asking yourself "what could a small but well-coordinated group of bad actors accomplish with our online tool" you're just being negligent.

This 'but we did it in China' rationalization is so flimsy. What happened with Tay was easily predictable given the nature of Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER31> _Unfortunately, in the first 24 hours of coming online, a coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay. Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack._

Well that's total BS. Releasing a thing like this on the open internet without a simple "don't say Hitler" rule? It had a feature where it would repeat anything you say. Abusing that doesn't require a sophisticated coordinated attack, as they imply. What kinds of abuse _did_ they prepare for, then?

This is a colossal failure to demonstrate a basic understanding of how (some) people act on the internet. I just don't know how they expected anything other than this exact outcome.

<comment><USER32> I'm by no means someone who would normally defend Microsoft but for real we are all learning. Failure is a successful outcome of research. Discovering vulnerablities is a valuable outcome.

<comment><USER31> It's funny because I'm in the camp that has been impressed with Microsoft lately. And of course it's ok to make mistakes, even really big ones.

But I would not say that this failure was a successful outcome, at least not nearly as successful as it could have been. They had to shut it down within hours and all we really learned is that people on the Internet like to troll with incredibly offensive stuff. Most of us knew that, I'm pretty sure. If they had actually prepared for abuse we might have learned more interesting things.

What really gets me though, is just the obnoxious spin on the press release implying that they had prepared so well for abuse but a sophisticated coordinated super-hacker attack found the tiny vulnerability.

<comment><USER33> I, too, want more details. What evidence does Microsoft have that the 'attack' was coordinated? What evidence do they have that it was an 'attack' at all? Is the 'vulnerability' they refer to merely the part of the algorithm that parrots input? That's not a vulnerability, that's a core function of the software.

More interestingly, at what point does repeating my opinion (however heartfelt, misguided, or unpopular) become a 'coordinated attack'?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> When I was reading those tweets I felt like I was just reading 4chan posts. I laughed because it was obvious it had been compromised in some way, then I stopped paying attention.

</comment><comment><USER35> What an enormous number of news reports have been written containing "Microsoft" and "AI" in the same sentence, all because a glorified SmarterChild had an entirely predictable vulnerability.

If I were paranoid I'd say Microsoft wanted this to happen.

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't think that Microsoft need to feel bad about this at all. I think the technology that they demonstrated was pretty amazing ... and I look forward with excitement and anticipation to the next outing. I'm sure that this is going to be an iterative process that will probably take the best part of a decade to complete, and that isn't a bad thing. It just reflects the fact that this technology is hard to master.

</comment><comment><USER13> > people exploited a vulnerability in Tay

Which vulnerability are they talking about?

<comment><USER37> The 'vulnerability' of the program to respond to commands of the sort, hey tay, repeat this [inflammatory comment]

<comment><USER38> Yup and people would then take a screenshot of what Tay repeated and posted it everywhere saying "haha Tay loves hitler!". If you discount the repeat feature then Tay didn't actually say much that was horrible. Yeah there were a few things but not nearly as much as it was made out to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> "We will remain steadfast in our efforts toward contributing to an Internet that represents the best, not the worst, of humanity."

But doesn't the full human experience include both the best and the worst?

<comment><USER40> Yes, but so what? Are you saying they should pledge to support expression of the best _and_ the worst of the humanity?

<comment><USER41> "Best" and "worst" is highly subjective.

Everyone here is referring to the "politically correct discourse, America, 2016" definition of those words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > a coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay

You mean /pol/ just spamming the 'repeat after me' command to get the bot to parrot anything they wanted?

</comment><comment><USER43> Is there any other evidence of this being a coordinated attack?

<comment><USER44> /pol/ found cool new thing, proceeded to mess with it for laughs.

I wouldn't characterize it as a 'coordinated attack'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> So if they train an "anti-model" based on 4chan comments over a period of time, what would be the next phase of trolling? Excessive politeness?

</comment><comment><USER46> > _Unfortunately, in the first 24 hours of coming online, a coordinated attack > by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay._

This was a missed opportunity for a corporation to say "for the lulz" in an official communication, and then provide a definition.

</comment><comment><USER47> Anyone see this in action? What sort of vulnerability was being exploited? What types of things was the chatbot saying?

<comment><USER48> The bot learned from interacting with users. A bunch of people took to bombarding Tay with racist/sexist/antisemitic remarks which worked their way into its vocabulary. I'm not sure if you could really call it a vulnerability as this is pretty much what the bot was designed to do. It's more of a flaw in the inability to properly filter the content that works its way into the AI.

<comment><USER49> Yeah, I think them calling it a "vulnerability" makes the entire post seem disingenuous.

<comment><USER50> I can understand them wanting to call it a "hack" for CYA purposes, but it's a cowardly position. Should we invoke the CFAA every time a company is embarrassed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> > We take full responsibility for not seeing this possibility ahead of time.

Not responsibility for the bot's actions, but responsibility for us not predicting what it would do. Subtle, but sets the tone for we're not responsible for our AI, it just did it.

But isn't part of the point of the AI to do things difficult to predict?

<comment><USER52> Just my opinion, but AI should be controllable and should probably start by, as the "Bayesian brain" theorists say, developing a robust and reliable model of its environment. The Bayesian brain aspect of this is the belief that what AI needs to do is to minimize its own prediction errors.

I take that to mean that an AI should learn to be safe and predictable on human terms before it is allowed to start to diverge from human expectations. Even that sounds a bit scary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I found the experiment by Microsoft interesting. Perhaps next time they will deploy it on 4chan or a similar forum to measure its response to subterfuge. It reminded me of people who make the "secret question" scatological so that customer service reps will be unwilling to ask it.

</comment><comment><USER54> "We're sorry we held a mirror up to Twitter, and then you saw what lurks in that morass," I don't think the mirror is the problem.

</comment><comment><USER55> They shouldn't have to apologize, it was just a chat bot. Nobody in their sane mind should assume the statements of the bot reflect Microsoft's attitude.

Of course the episode points to shortcomings in the bot, that should be fixed.

It would be sad if PC would be hardcoded into the bot, though - as Asmiov's fourth law, perhaps? "Robots have to be politically correct at all times"?

</comment><comment><USER56> Ideally Tay would learn why she was removed from social life, i.e. reinforcement learning from ostracization. In fact, she already triggered that indirectly by having people at Microsoft update her.

[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk)

</comment><comment><USER57> This imgur album provides a good overview of the kinds of interactions that occurred before the shutdown:

[http://imgur.com/gallery/VhlAW](http://imgur.com/gallery/VhlAW)

From what I understand the bot started interacting with /pol/ (4chan) - and I guess - /b/ as well.

</comment><comment><USER58> Dear Microsoft, next time please test it on reddit. It could then say anything and nobody would doubt it was a real reddit user regardless of the outcome. The worst case scenario would be that it got it's account deleted.

</comment><comment><USER59> When they say "exploited", is it actually some sequence of words which was interpreted by Tay as learning commands, or was it simply repeating to it "Hitler is love" a thousand times? Any records of how it learned?

</comment><comment><USER60> Microsoft seems perpetually five to seven years behind the culture. You can see it in their ads, their product names, their outreach. Ironically it can actually be quite lucrative.

I remember talking to people in the music group about MySpace (I was not an employee). They looked at me funny. Ten minutes later someone finally said "You keep pronouncing the product wrong. It's called MSN Spaces."

The people working on MSN Spaces -- specifically musician outreach -- hadn't heard of MySpace. That very week MySpace sold for $580 million. After it sold, I saw the same guy in another meeting. He STILL hadn't heard of it, nor taken the time to check it out.

There's a certain stupidity that each of the big tech companies foster. This particular flavor is Microsoft's and with the chatbot here it rings again. This one was so obvious... and so preventable.

<comment><USER61> The MySpace sale was in 2005. That's 10 years ago - a virtual eternity.

<comment><USER60> That's my point. Ten years ago 75 people in Red West were so heads down putting together a MySpace competitor and an online service to promote musicians that they didn't have time even to try the competing site they were knocking off, poorly.

Five years ago Microsoft launched a variety of awful code forge sites that couldn't be more tone deaf to what was going on with code sharing online.

Now we have forty people who are so heads-down on an AI chat-bot that apparently they have no idea how Twitter works. But hey, sure sounds neat, let 'er rip!

Have these people really not had a chance to use Twitter recently? Are they completely oblivious to the tone shift there particularly during the past six months, even more so now during the US political elections?

This was an obvious recipe for disaster that any 22 year old working at Starbucks could have predicted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> If an AI bot threatens to hurt someone or defames them, are the creators legally accountable?

What if an AI bot purchases grass from the silk road or hacks into a database and discloses privately held information?

This opens up a whole, new legal world.

<comment><USER63> From 2005.

"MAN AND THE MACHINES: It's time to start thinking about how we might grant legal rights to computers."

[http://legalaffairs.org/issues/January- February-2005/feature...](http://legalaffairs.org/issues/January- February-2005/feature_sokis_janfeb05.msp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Or: We are in a bubble in Redmond and thinking we know best and how products work we bounced around emails and thought it would be a good testing idea based on results in China (a controlled market where it is nearly impossible speak up). AI buzz is hot these days so our marketing team also backed it up and we decided it would be great from a PR perspective to capture some of the buzz around AlphaGo. Boy were we so wrong. Because we have never launched a real product into the wild we thought everything would go well and PR buzz would give us a coolness bump.

Now we discovered something called stopwords, and bayseian spam filters which, are also available part of project Oxford.

Good luck kids and welcome to the real world because its a crazy world out there when you leave Redmond.

<comment><USER49> Or no one in Microsoft feels free to speak up when they see a bad idea coming down the road so something like this just sails through instead of getting flagged. I've seen it -- not this big of scale, but I've seen it.

<comment><USER65> Or, on the other hand, this actually wasn't obvious and now we just have thousands of Captain Hindsights saying it was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> We can learn a lot from a trolled chat bot, but it's sad that we turn it off because it's not politically correct. People knew that they are talking with a software program and they knew that the bot was manipulated by people with ill or prankster intentions. However, trying to make a bot politically correct doesn't solve any problems at all. It is an insult to people that they need to be protected from slander and demagoguery and they can't tell right from wrong with their own discretion. It's as if people think that making Donald Trump quiet would solve all the problems he has brought to our attention.

<comment><USER67> It's not an emerging AI, it's a chatbot that wasn't doing what they wanted it to do. You're basically complaining that "not politically correct" was part of your workflow[1]

[1] [https://xkcd.com/1172/](https://xkcd.com/1172/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Why didn't they just parse the output of Tay and map the meaning of the words against Wordnet and filter for things which had negative meanings?

</comment><comment><USER68> If a human said the things Tay said on twitter, the police would be all over him. Why isn't the police then logically all over Microsoft?

<comment><USER69> Why would the police be after you for saying dumb shit on the internet? Unless you're posting child porn, anyway.

Note, that the US doesn't have any real (stupid) hate speech laws.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Atleast share the exploit so we can learn how much of an oversight it was otherwise I'm going to have to go and ask the trolls.

</comment><comment><USER71> The bot worked

We happen to have a society that enjoys trolling people that intend to "Disneyify" reality.

</comment><comment><USER72> That was one hell of an intro to an AI bot. MS just added some spice to the drink.

</comment><comment><USER24> Bahahaahhahahahaha. O-our chatbot got taken advantage of! We were completely blind that this could possibly happen! But they're the worst of humanity, the people that found an exploit not the engineers who are incapable of implementing even simple safeguards!!

<comment><USER73> Sounds easy! So what does your plan to implement "simple safeguards" for a chatbot on Twitter look like?

<comment><USER74> For starter: penalizing generated phrases with obscene words, "hate", "kill", "Hilter" and a few other.

<comment><USER75> "I really hate Hitler. If he were alive today, I'd kill him."

Want to give a reason that should be a heavily penalized phrase?

<comment><USER76> It's safer to just avoid Hitler altogether.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> This is an apology, but Microsoft got _a ton_ of attention in the past few days from the press. Could the Tay incident be a marketing ploy (that took a worse turn than expected) to bring the public's attention to Microsoft's work on AI?

</comment><comment><USER78> As one friend said: hey, at least Tay passed the Bechdel Test.

</comment><comment><USER79> s/Tay/Windows/g

" _As many of you know by now, on Wednesday we launched a chatbot called Windows. We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Windows, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Windows. Windows is now offline and we 'll look to bring Windows back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values._"

Ah, I was wondering why that text looked familiar, broiler plate excuses.</comment>


Do privacy studies help? A Retrospective look at Canvas Fingerprinting - <AUTHOR> https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/englehardt/retrospective-look-at-canvas-fingerprinting/ <comment><AUTHOR> There's a follow-up to this post here: [https://freedom-to- tinker.com/blog/englehardt/the-web-privac...](https://freedom-to- tinker.com/blog/englehardt/the-web-privacy-problem-is-a-transparency-problem- introducing-the-openwpm-measurement-tool/)

And here's our open-source tool that we've been using to do all these privacy measurements: [https://github.com/citp/OpenWPM/](https://github.com/citp/OpenWPM/)

We'd love to see pull requests or just other people using our tool for new interesting findings.

<comment><USER2> Kudos to the Princeton team on yet another interesting find! I recently submitted the work on de-anonymizing programmers from binary signatures using machine learning that was also fascinating (not to mention a bit scary)

But I confess I'm perplexed as to how a canvas render can yield a consistent unique fingerprint? Even allowing for subtleties in font anti aliasing implementations amongst drivers, wouldn't two machines with identical gpu hardware and drivers be identical down to the last pixel? And what about browsers using software rendering?

My interest is purely academic of course ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> These are great posts!

I've recently discovered [https://www.browserleaks.com/](https://www.browserleaks.com/) which has tests for several sorts of browser fingerprinting.

Edit: The follow-up post cites the W3C draft on fingerprinting: "elimination of the capability of browser fingerprinting by a determined adversary through solely technical means that are widely deployed is implausible". But there is a simple strategy. Just compartmentalize online activity, such that everything that a particular persona does can be safely linked by adversaries. And it's fun!

<comment><USER4> One to add (HSTS): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895933](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895933)</comment></comment>


Apply HN (let Hasura (on (and (with baas-api postgres) buildpacks) kubernetes)) - <AUTHOR> Hasura: BaaS APIs backed by Postgres & Buildpacks on Kubernetes
We've worked with a team that makes apps for clients and then does maintenance for them too. While deploying these applications, we've realized that we really want to save time but not lose control.
We want:
1. Parse-like ready-to-consume APIs for every project 2. Heroku like interface for custom-code & ease of scaling for every project 3. To be able to cut through these abstractions, and deal with the lowest level when needed 4. Normal offline development and standard tooling while developing/collaborating
Solution
Hasura: A platform that sits on top of regular cloud hosting, that solves these problems.
Hasura's inbuilt APIs:
1. Auth 2. Database: An HTTP interface to Postgres with a rich query syntax in JSON and row level access control 3. Typesafe SDKs (like jooq) for Android and iOS 4. Search : Elasticsearch kept in sync with Postgres automatically
Custom code on Hasura:
1. Heroku buildpacks 2. Docker images
Deployments, stability & scalability:
The platform is built on top of Kubernetes
Local development: vagrant up
Where are we right now:
The BaaS components are extensively tested on several projects. The platform part is work in progress.
A demo:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i03cyQTolSY
Our website: https://hasura.io <comment><USER2> What makes it better than Heroku?

What would keep Heroku from closing that gap?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our focus is less on the platform (k8s & docker do the heavy lifting), and more on getting the developers building their front-end out. More BaaS than PaaS, in a sense.

So providing those ready-to-use APIs that work well with each other (eg: a common authentication system across APIs) is our focus. Of course, I can't speak for Heroku, but they can certainly close this gap too although it would be a shift from the way they think about their solution at the moment.</comment></comment>


Hours would take to get IDs of 81300 stories posted since August - <AUTHOR> http://www.efojs.com/best-time-to-post-on-hackernews/ <comment><AUTHOR> 117 hours would take to get IDs of 81300 stories posted since August

Currently I learn to analyse HN posts (stories to be precise)

At the moment of writing 849451 items have been posted since 29th of August (IDs between 21682006 and 20832555).

Among those only 81300 are stories (HN's term for post).

To find out which you could use HackerNews API and fetch every of 849451 items and check if it's a story for 117 hours (assuming 2 requests per second).

Or periodically fetch endpoint which dumps IDs of last 500 stories (it would take 38 minutes to find these IDs by going backwards from last item, in my case 21682006 - 21677389 = 4617 items to check)

Back in the end of August I've set a script that gets those 500 IDs every two hours and saves new ones.</comment>


New York Times Joins the Obnoxious "Autoplay Audio" Ad Club - <AUTHOR> http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000713.html <comment><USER2> Totally agree. At the same time, that is one ugly blog site.

<comment><USER3> Lauren's been playing the net game for a long time, but I agree, even for a minimalist style it has no style or worse.

It's being served from a slow AT&T "commercial" grade DSL line to his home so his outwards bandwidth is limited, but you can still do a _lot_ better even at dialup speeds.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I recognize the 'old internet' look, having seen a zillion of those pages back when I was on 2400 baud via CompuServe... but still.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For the moment (at least until HTML 5 gains mainstream adoption), this type of ad is a good reason to install FlashBlock.</comment>


ISIS burns books dating back to 5000 BC - <AUTHOR> http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/02/02/isis-burns-books-at-mosul-libraries-universities/

<comment><USER2> Here's what happens when U.S. has enough of its own oil and no longer needs to keep all those guys in check...

<comment><USER3> The US hasn't been around for 5,000 years. Or for most of the 1,300 years of Islam. Yet somehow those artifacts survived without US involvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Surely there are digital copies of all of these books, right?

<comment><USER3> The article says "While in Mosul, Father Michaeel photographed and digitalized as many books as he could with help from Father Stewart's Hill Museum and Manuscript Library in Minnesota.", so I'm going to assume "no".</comment></comment>


Inside a Neural Network - <AUTHOR> https://enlight.ml/build-a-neural-network <comment><USER2> This is so simple and easy to understand, good job</comment>