Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington to step down - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37047416 <comment><USER2> Huffington post if far from serious newspaper/media.They are yellow journalism. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism) They exaggerates news in order to grab eyeballs. And their "liberal" attributes biased their stances a lot too.

<comment><USER3> I do not think anyone disputes that. Then again, in the copywriter's age, yellow papers are bastions of journalism.

<comment><USER4> > _Then again, in the copywriter 's age, yellow papers are bastions of > journalism._

This might sound profound but it doesn't actually make any sense.

<comment><USER5> I think the parent means that the vast majority of published material is disguised native content such as "submarine" PR pieces, product placement, unmodified press releases etc. Since the overall standards have sunk so low, yellow journalism starts to look good by comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All her talk of integrity, and yet HuffPo writes articles on Uber while she sits on their board. Where are the amazing journalists of our day? Where is the modern day Murrow or Cronkite?

On another note does anyone know any good Indian journalists? Or is the term an oxymoron :P ?

<comment><USER7> Where is the modern day Murrow or Cronkite?

All over. The trick is to find them.

Our world is so much better because newspapers matter less and so much worse because cable matters more.

<comment><USER8> The world is much better off because newspapers matter less? I disagree.

From the Pentagon Papers to Watergate to Edward Snowden to the current water crisis in Flint, newspapers have broken stories that've benefitted the public. If any of you watch the news, a majority of stories are recycled from original newspaper reporting. While papers' circulations are dwindling, they are still making a difference online.

If no one is keeping our elected officials accountable, who will? Surely not Dave and Kelly of News Channel whatever.

<comment><USER7> Less because the "publishable" population has gone from a few to almost anybody. A smartphone is a personal publisher-editor-printer-distributor.

We do not have to rely on the newspaper to be the 1st ordinal of "news"

I can be a news seeker much easier now

Newspapers are important just less so than in 1976, say

<comment><USER9> I'm sorry, but I can't disagree more.

Newspapers are far from being a distribution channel, and to think of them that way is as reductive as thinking of social networks as address books.

Newspapers are organizations that are first and foremost investigative, backed up by quality control, editorial, and research organizations. If you replace this with a smartphone and shift the delivery model out from a newspaper, then the role of being a fact-checker, editor, researcher, and expert falls on the reader. This is a bad idea, not only because it creates more work for the reader, but also because it increase the extent to which personal bias of the readership can increase the incorrect interpretation of facts.

Obviously, no newspaper is a perfect example of this ideal, but they are a great deal further along the curve than almost any individual. As a result, they act as a force against filter bubbles by promoting a whole set of stories and ideas that force people to participate more broadly with real world events and ideas. The mere fact that we worry so much about editorial bias in newspapers is a symptom of the importance that they play in guiding their consumers. The solution is not self-guidance and self-filtering and self research in order to wade through a sea of unqualified, unedited BS.

Furthermore, by being a news seeker, you are admitting that you are still seeking to know what is out there? Is there a particular reason you do not want to consume news through a qualified source? If you want to read the panama papers by yourself then you will likely do that to exclusion of all other reading for a period of days to weeks, and you will need to spend twice that doing research to understand what it means. If you go through a newspaper, they do that work for you.

Newspapers are not broken in any fundamental way. The only reason that this discussion is even happening is that news was traditionally funded by advertising, and that advertising is a shifting business, dragging news along with it. Discussions that center on the decline of newspapers without acknowledging that the shift in advertising revenue is really the problem ignores something very important: that the business of generating news is not at fault, the business of paying for it is. That is the real discussion worth having.

<comment><USER7> Beautifully said!! wish I wasn't working to comment more.

Newspapers aren't just about news. I may choose to consume one investigative report every quarter, say, and am grateful there's a qualified source . Weather travel planning, for sale, advertisements, and government notifications I no longer need a newspaper to get.

We used to buy the Sunday Times just for the Travel section to look at advertisements. We're better off now that we have the internet to find deals

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm sure she feels like she's done enough to destroy discourse on the internet and she has her sights set on destroying some other vital pillar of our civilization to increase her personal fortune further.

<comment><USER11> Ha, there are just some people where the world would just be a better place if they had less drive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was an engineer at HuffPost. I believe the departure of Arianna is going to have a huge impact on the organization. Whether that's net positive or negative, only time will tell.

Many of the company's significant initiatives seemed to come out in unpredictable bursts from the brain trust that formed Arianna's staff. The nominal product and engineering leadership was charged with implementing these initiatives, but subject to rapidly changing priorities. A lot of work was launched under time pressure and then scrapped shortly afterward.

To be fair, a lot of the instincts behind those priorities were pretty ambitious and forward-thinking. But totally disconnected from the work of implementation. There's an opportunity to retain the positive aspects that kept HuffPost on the cutting edge (at least in some ways) and reform the churn and top-down approach. Or maybe the road is clear for the company to be fully assimilated into the Verizonscape.

</comment><comment><USER13> I guess all her compensation finally vested.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm beginning to think that "corporate and consumer well-being and productivity" might be the next big thing, and it's already here. There are incredible opportunities in this space, like biohacking, supplements, self- testing (blood, brain function, etc), computer-assisted learning and meditation, diets and just plain old food a level beyond "organic" (i.e. known origin, local, glyphosate free soil, "grass fed" etc).

<comment><USER15> Awesome, In that case, I will start breeding snakes for their oil.

<comment><USER11> I hear snake oil is the new coconut oil.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One of the least biased media sources on the internet :^)

<comment><USER17> You forgot the /s somewhere in your sentence /s . In the age of bloggers AS journalists because paying real ones is what online media doesn't do (the Huffpo doesn't pay its contributors, nor its interns) , there is very little journalism left on the internet which is a paradox, considered we are drowned with "news" .

<comment><USER18> I think `^` was a pinocchio nose -- implying a lie.

<comment><USER19> That is not the meaning of :^)

:^) indicates that a joke is being made. It's quite similar to TwitchTV's Kappa, if you know about that.

<comment><USER20> Kappa is actually quite an interesting phenomenon - the fluid state of meme- emoticons and the ebb and flow of their popularity in relation to seemingly unconnected events is a nuanced topic in its own right.

Nothing to do with huffpost tho. Kappa</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Linode introduces StackScripts - Custom recipes for your Linode - <AUTHOR> http://blog.linode.com/2010/02/09/introducing-stackscripts/

<comment><USER2> I would _love_ it if they had this at Slicehost. It seems so stupid to have to configure a basic web server from scratch again when it's been done millions of times before me. Set up a great standard setup and then let me tune from there.

<comment><USER3> I built SliceApp.com to solve this problem.

Spent the past couple week reworking it. It will work with Slicehost, Linode, Rackspace Cloud...anything running Ubuntu accessible via SSH.

Actively working on it and open to suggestions on what would make it better.

<comment><USER2> Very nice! In terms of suggestions:

      a) info on versions would be nice
      b) more options (ftp, mail, sphinx, lucene, etc)
      c) maybe a short questionnaire about usage to optimize config
      d) I'd like to see more about security and who you are before I hand over username/pw

PS - You should post this as a "Tell HN" here if you haven't already...

<comment><USER4> Very nice job. I'll be using it soon. I second the idea of submitting it as a "Tell HN."

I don't think the security is a huge deal because, since it's setting up a new server, you really should just change the password afterward. But it probably wouldn't be bad to reassure people (or say "don't worry about security! just use a throwaway password for us and then change it"). It doesn't matter if security shouldn't be a concern if prospective customers see it as a concern.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't matter to a lot of the people that use it. I don't store their passwords and I pipe everything going on in the server to the user's web browser. User's are invited to snoop TTY's.

But yes I agree totally. It's meant to work with cloud servers so if you grow weary or distrustful of the box, tear it down and start over. One thing I've been playing with is API integration. Not that its any more secure, but I think fewer people would confuse an "API key" input field as a "Login here" form (which some have).

Security aside, I'm slowly attempting to monetize this and to be quite honest I'm more interested in people giving me their money than their passwords. I can't pay rent with passwords.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pretty cool feature, but it seems like they're working at the wrong layer of abstraction.

It seems like that's really best left up to Capistrano, Puppet, etc. Stuff you run from your shell where you run the "setup the server with ip/hostname of x", and it does it.

But they want you to raise the barrier of exit for their customers and want to differentiate themselves, so it makes sense. Plus a lot of the stacks say they're tuned for Linode's exact resources. That might be more selling point than actual special setup, but there is potential for them to tweak it for better performance on their exact machines.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure I see the lock in... Other than being a little distro specific, I don't see any reason the scripts would run on any linux platform.

The "tweaking" in most cases just seems to be modifying the default configs for Apache and MySQL to something a lot more sane for a limited memory environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is nice. As a level 1 bofh I love this and will consider Linode as my next VPS (though I'm uberhappy at slicehost!).

Also, just learned what 'LEMP' was (like LAMP, but [e]nginx instead of Apache)

</comment><comment><USER6> I helped beta this and it works great. Since it just just a typical script you can write the script in whatever language the distro has an interpreter for. Bash, Ruby, Python, whatever. If the distro doesn't have the interpreter you want, you could always write a StackScript to install it ;)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is neat. Similar to EC2 AMIs, right?

Something I've these -- who is responsible for security updates? I assume it's the deployer, which can often be someone who may not have much experience as an sysadmin. What's the best way to keep a system secure? Cron + Apt-get update?

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't suggest cron'ing apt-get update, it may break something while you're not there. Better to do a manual update once a month or so and do a quick test afterwards. Ideally you'd do this on a identical non-production QA machine, but if you're only a one box sorta guy then you can likely get away with no issues.

Of course, security issues these days are more often the result of misconfiguration but if you're doing something simple like a single box with a localhost only MySQL, Apache/Nginx and Rails/Python/PHP or the like then it's pretty straight forward. Don't really even need a firewall.

What I would suggest is locking down SSH to not allow root login and to require key authentication and deny password auth. So much automated SSH password guessing bot spam out there.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the info. Are exploits rare enough these days that updating once a month good enough for a well-configured machine? (If so, that's great -- I was worried about taking a vacation :))

<comment><USER8> Depends on your risk profile, but in general if you update once a month you're probably ahead of 95% of the servers out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks like a simpler Puppet or Chef, very cool. Anyone want to comment on the differences ?

<comment><USER10> This looks like an organized collection of bash scripts with standard libraries for basic configuration processes, much like the fundamentals of Puppet and Chef.

This is great for simple initial setup (I'm sure a lot of us already have some short bash scripts to similar effect). However, Chef is great for maintaining multiple similar servers and keeping things standardized across machines with minimal effort. Chef also gives you some handy tools like automatic deployment and ERB templates.

I'm using Chef with 7 servers on Slicehost right now, and it's easy as pie once the recipes are set up and your server is deployed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would be up for building some StackScripts myself but I hate to have to buy a complete plan to do it. I really wish Linode would offer a more fine grained billing.

<comment><USER12> It's pro-rated to the day - so if you add a Linode for the month but remove it after one day, you've ended up being credited back all but $0.67, in the case of a Linode 360.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is very cool ... hope to see some Rails stackscripts soon ... that would save me a few hours here and there</comment>


The 2015 Ad Blocking Report - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pagefair.com/2015/ad-blocking-report/

<comment><USER2> There is an interesting death spiral here. The Ads get annoying so the slightly annoyed block them, that reduces Ad revenue so the Ads get more annoying to get more clicks, which induces even more people to block them, rinse and repeat until all the Ad agencies stop buying Ads on sites that don't force readers to disable ad blockers, and sites go to a pay wall or allow ads model, and then sites virality suffers because nobody randomly reads a site just to see if its interesting, if it forces them to turn off adblocking or pay money.

At some point its going to be profitable to run a subscription web site, and when that happens, well its game over for free content.</comment>


Sideproject Launcher – Curated tools to ship your first SideProject - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@en_kawai/sideproject-launcher-4f9a788407c9#.rzftrccbi <comment><AUTHOR> If you trying to build your sideproject just now, you might wanna check this list out. Know other tools, feel free to post it. Sideproject is a new startup foundation.</comment>


Saverin Says He Will Pay 'Hundreds of Millions' in Taxes - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/saverin-says-citizenship-move-not-made-for-tax-reasons/?ref=technology <comment><USER2> The US already aggressively taxes its citizens living abroad, and merely renouncing your citizenship does not end it. Not immediately, at least. Saverin will continue to owe taxes to the US government the same as any other US citizen living abroad, for ten years after renouncing his citizenship. This generally amounts to paying the higher of the local tax or the US tax. That's how it works for income tax anyway - not sure about capital gains.

So while I'm not surprised to see Chuck Schumer behind this piece of shit bill being proposed, as a US citizen living outside the US: fuck. $148,000 liability over five years, or $2 million net worth and you are assumed to have renounced for tax-evasion purposes. Fuck that shit.

<comment><USER3> the 10 yr thing ended in 2008, thankfully

<comment><USER2> That's good to hear. Do you have a source?

edit: All I've found is something that sounds a lot like the current bill, in fact. Are you saying that income tax is _not_ taxed as though you are an American citizen for the ten years after you renounce your citizenship? I'd really like to confirm that.

<comment><USER3> Not the most clear explanation, but you can find other mentions of this on HN and elsewhere

[http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,...](http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,,id=97245,00.html#_Expatriation_after_June_16), 2008

"IRC 877A imposes a mark-to-market regime, which generally means that all property of a covered expatriate is deemed sold for its fair market value on the day before the expatriation date. IRC 887A further provides that any gain arising from the deemed sale is taken into account for the taxable year of the deemed sale notwithstanding any other provisions of the Code. Any loss from the deemed sale is taken into account for the taxable year of the deemed sale to the extent otherwise provided in the Code, except that the wash sale rules of IRC 1091 do not apply."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The complete archive for DOOM for the 3DO - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/doom3do/blob/master/README.md

<comment><USER2> For those not familiar with "Burger" Rebecca Heineman, she has a game programming resume stretching way back to the 80s at Interplay and elsewhere. Truly old-school.

[http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,34...](http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,343/)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Heineman](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Heineman)

<comment><USER3> Kind of out of topic, but when one changes gender at some point in their life, do you rewrite their whole wiki page saying "she" instead of "he", or should you mark the transition after the official change of name/gender only ?

<comment><USER2> Good question! Short answer: generally you refer to them as if they have always publicly identified with their current gender.

Longer answer: The overarching idea is to respect the person's wishes and stated identity. In most cases, and certainly in Rebecca Heineman's case from what I've read, she always identified as female even when she was known as Bill Heineman. So out of respect we would typically refer to her as Rebecca (or with female pronouns) no matter which part of her life we're referring to.

There could be exceptions. In some cases, a person's former gender might be directly relevant to a story. (Imagine you're writing about a person, now female, who was sent to a boy's boarding school as a child. I think, at the least, you'd perhaps need to clarify that she identified as male at that point in her life...)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the answer ! I'm asking because the change of gender also associates with a change of name, and it kind of seems like rewriting History if ex-colleagues talk about X-woman as X-woman in the past when she was not yet X-woman but Y-guy instead. How about legal documents ? How do they handle the change of gender ? Do they do it like "X-person, Born Y-person" ?

<comment><USER4> There are usually procedures for that; varies a lot from place to place.

Here in the UK, you can go before a sort of judicial committee to do it, the Gender Recognition Panel; costs like £140ish. It's kind of a pain; you need to be _at least_ 2 years in full-time, it does help if you've had SRS or at the very least are going to (and they're going to want medical reports), and you'll need two medical practitioners (one of which must be recognised in a list as a psychiatrist or psychologist specialising in gender dysphoria) to testify that yes, you _are_ trans, yes, _really_ you're not going to change your mind, and this is what you've done/are going to do about it. If you pass (and it's a little bizarre and intimidating that they're judging this), you get a new short birth certificate (and can apply for a long one, and thereafter a passport under your new official identity); you then have two proper birth certificates, the historical document you were born with, and a brand new one listing only your target gender (and name). The fact that you have done all this is confidential (unless you tell someone, obviously).

Your mileage _will_ vary, naturally.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the very complete answer. I had no idea there was such a procedure. Now I wonder how it works in Japan where I live, since such minorities are far from being commonly accepted here and they may have more hurdles to get to the same point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is apparently based on the Jaguar port that id Software did in-house.

Interestingly, it seems to include a translation of Carmack's Jaguar rendering engine into C. The original was implemented in assembly for the Jaguar's proprietary RISC coprocessor. The processor's tiny instruction memory required that the renderer be split into 9 independent "phases", and that organization is preserved in the 3DO code.

[http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Atari_Jaguar](http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Atari_Jaguar)

[http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4215&cid=1225529](http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4215&cid=1225529)

</comment><comment><USER6> Digging through the github org a bit:

"The library builds and runs for the Xbox 360, PS3, PS4, nVidia Shield, iOS, Mac OSX, MacOS, Android, OpenWatcom for MSDOS, OpenWatcom for Windows, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio 2013, Codewarrior for Windows, Codeblocks 13.12 for Windows, Codeblocks 13.12 for MacOSX, OUYA, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DSi and Linux." \- Burgerlib[0]

I don't know why, but I find that immensely satisfying.

[0]: [https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/burgerlib](https://github.com/Olde- Skuul/burgerlib)

</comment><comment><USER7> Some funny things in there:

        switch (gamemap) {
            case 24: /* Secret level? */
    		nextmap = 4;
    		break;

Source: [https://github.com/Olde- Skuul/doom3do/blob/master/source/gam...](https://github.com/Olde- Skuul/doom3do/blob/master/source/game.c#L164)

</comment><comment><USER8> Odd... was this developed on a Mac?

I'm seeing QuickDraw PICT files, the make files seems to use Classic Mac-style file paths (Disk:Directory:File), and there's even an AppleScript in there referencing DeBabelizer 1.6 (who else remembers THAT app?)

edit: looks like the official 3DO development kit was Mac-based, and there was even a NuBus card with 3DO hardware on it for debugging

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm not nearly as proficient in C/C++ as I would care to be (I work with Java web apps by trade), but when I come across these source dumps that I would be interested in exploring, I seem to fumble while getting started.

So I apologize for posting this and being a little off topic, but how do people disect these effectively?

<comment><USER10> I think there are a lot of approaches, and I haven't started on this one yet, but here's my approach, roughly:

\- clone it so I can read the code in emacs, and use cscope or similar tools on it

\- try to figure out the build system and the directory structure: how is the main program built? are there libraries or tools that are also built? where do their sources live? (so, here, I'd start with source/doom.make and look at the things it references)

\- if my primary interest is the main program, I would then try to track down main() and jump through the functions that look interesting with ctags or similar code navigation tools;

\- usually it makes sense to jump back and forth to the header files that are being referenced, not only to understand what the types and globals are, but also because they tend to reveal information about how the code is organized.

I usually focus on an area I'm especially curious about if I'm not trying to understand the whole program. For example, in games like this, I'll try to find assembly files or places with inline assembler, because it's usually interesting to see what the developer felt was performance-critical or hard to achieve from C. Then I'd find the functions that call those assembly routines and read them, et cetera.

Taking notes can help, like sketching the module structure or the major data structures on a whiteboard and trying to fill out how they interact. These days I use org-mode for taking notes about code I'm reading, because it makes it very convenient to capture links to specific sections of code (or specific commits, with org-magit) and make notes about them.

If I really have to understand it, I try to get it to build, add tests to the codebase, and maybe try adding a specific feature. But that would apply more to something like the Doom codebases that still build on modern platforms rather than a retro artifact like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I did not know Burger Heineman did this port.</comment>


Proof of extra dimensions possible next year: CERN - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AE3QU20101115?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FtopNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Top+News%29 <comment><USER2> For a long time I wondered what the Higgs boson was about, and then I saw a good explanation in Scientific American.

Here is what it comes down to. It turns out that the laws of physics become greatly simplified if we can assert that, there are symmetries between apparently disparate forces. For instance we would like the electromagnetic force and the weak force to be exactly equivalent. There is a pretty obvious problem with this assertion though, and it is that those forces are obviously very different, electromagnetism can work at any distance while the weak force works on the scale of a nucleus.

But physicists are clever, and came up with a solution. What happens if the symmetry exists, but there is a field whose job is to differentiate the two which makes it very likely that you'll be in a stable state with them very different? This is called "spontaneous symmetry breaking". In our universe, the weak and electromagnetic forces are different, in another their roles could be reversed. But in the actual laws of physics, they are entirely symmetric.

On the surface this would seem to be an assertion without content. But it is not. According to QM, every field must be be carried by an associated boson. Those bosons are particles that can be detected. We can predict some of the properties of those bosons. If we can find them, then we've verified the theory.

With this approach physicists put together something they call the standard model. It predicts a whole zoo of particles. Every one of which has been discovered except one. And that remaining one is the Higgs boson, whose job is to make the masses of the photon, W boson, and Z boson all different.

Now with that in mind you can read <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson> and some of it might make some modicum of sense. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model> gives more background.

<comment><USER3> There is a great book about the Higgs boson called 'The God Particle'([http://www.amazon.com/God-Particle-Universe-Answer- Question/...](http://www.amazon.com/God-Particle-Universe-Answer- Question/dp/0618711686/)) I haven't read the new version, but I thoroughly enjoyed the original book, highly recommended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Will we have to upgrade our brand-new TV sets _again_?

</comment><comment><USER5> "These experiments have shown the power of the link-up of 140 computing centers around the world known as the Grid which processes the vast amounts of information that ion collisions produce."

I wonder if there is any sort of distributed, volunteer computing program that those of us so inclined could participate in to lend a hand to the processing efforts; something along the lines of SETI@home and Folding@home would certainly be helpful I would think. Such high amounts of new, raw data could surely use any help that they can get in the processing stage.

<comment><USER6> LHC@home seems to be the closest thing, but Wikipedia notes:

> BOINC users who are considering joining this project should know that it > only occasionally has work; the project is used for design and repair > considerations related to the LHC. There are currently no plans to use the > project to do computation on the data that will be collected by the LHC.</comment></comment>


Ed Catmull on outsourcing - <AUTHOR> http://thepixartouch.typepad.com/main/2009/10/ed-catmull-on-outsourcing-1.html

<comment><USER2> This quote ends with a summation of Crawford's _Shop Craft As Soulcraft_, a so-so book from a guy who left a directorship at a DC think-tank to start a shop fixing old motorcycles. The way Catmull phrased it, I'd be surprised if he hadn't read the book.

One of Crawford's points is that as we differentiate and specialize manual labor out of our economy, we lose an aptitude (mechanical literacy, self- sufficiency, the inclination to tinker before giving up on objects) that is subtly important to all the non-manual things in the economy.</comment>


Unreal Engine 5 is meant to ridicule web developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.theolognion.com/unreal-engine-5-is-meant-to-ridicule-web-developers/ <comment><USER2> How does Unreal Engine 5 handle global state management?

It is the most complicated NP hard problem that ever graced web development and literally stifling our progress on building a drop down box that updates all to other drop down boxes on the page.

Like, obviously your health bar is a separate component. But when your health bar updates, how does the other health bar over your characters head also reflect that change? Just drives me nuts, is there like a variable or something that they both subscribe to?

And if UE5 did solve this, why didn't they even mention this technical feat in their demo? Web developers have entire conferences when this problem was discovered, but for UE5 to not even bring up this accomplishment makes me wonder, #conspiracy.

<comment><USER3> Generally things like that in games re-render from scratch on every frame. Since it happens every frame, you don't need state management to push updates around. Everything just grabs the latest value anyway.

The DOM on the other hand is stateful, and is very slow to mutate, which is the core problem of high-level web dev and really not something developers have any control over.

<comment><USER4> > Since it happens every frame, you don't need state management to push > updates around. Everything just grabs the latest value anyway.

This is not true or at least only deceptively so. If you think about "global state" in a game or more specifically in a rendering scene as "all of the objects in the scene" then the main difference is the lack of acceleration structures for the web. Most of the objects in a scene are never touched because AABB or some other structure allows you to cull large number of objects without ever actually touching them. If objects in the scene change, you definitely need to update those acceleration structures. Fortunately for games, those updates are quick and there are typically not that many of them.

<comment><USER3> In the web the performance bottleneck is not figuring out what changed, it's _doing any rendering at all_. Rendering health bars in games is cheap because they happen on the GPU and because they don't have the sprawling layout ramifications ("reflow") that UI changes in the DOM do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just today i wanted to inspect a few MB json file to analyze some API data. I have a $7k custom made developer desktop with all at max. Tried to paste it to the regular web json inspectors like jsoneditoronline.org, basically just hanged all the browsers. Had to spend some time to search for a proper native tool that barely got the job done for what i needed.

Is it so hard? what gives?

<comment><USER6> What tool did you end up using?

<comment><USER5> [https://github.com/WelliSolutions/HugeJsonViewer](https://github.com/WelliSolutions/HugeJsonViewer)

<comment><USER7> vi can easily deal with hundreds of MB if not multiple GB on your custom made machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ha! This was my first thought when I saw the demo. "Am I in the wrong industry? Why the hell does a megabyte of JavaScript take a second to startup? They're doing millions of triangles and even a simple line chart hangs chrome if more than 1000 points. WTF!"

Dom is too complicated. We really need a much simpler primitives pipeline optimized for performance.

We need a binary JavaScript. Just parsing it takes a long time.

The other demo that's really impressive is Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why is this flagged? I'm a web developer and think this was hilarious!

<comment><USER10> Most readers here don't have any sense of humour and can't take a joke! %:-O)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes I know it's parody, but I don't really understand how it is web developers' fault that browsers aren't as powerful as native applications. Web is old, haphazardly planned standard for which nobody really had any idea where it was going. So there's a reason why it's all so cluttered and I still have to check my website in various devices and browsers before deploying it to my users. If using advanced tools like SPA frameworks is the only way to retain my sanity, I'm going to use them. (And yes the author also parodied the churn of web technologies, not going to deny that)

Perhaps there should be a fast alternative to the current web, where the biggest goal is to serve pages with lighting speed. It could be architected from ground up to come with built-in SPA support, that would load the pages in chunks while offering a smooth browsing experience. It could automatically adjust to the device and the network speed of the user, and have all the legacy cruft of the old web removed. So basically like AMP, but without Google's greedy fingers.

Yet the chances of that happening is probably zero, as where's the money in that. A secondary web just for power-users? Hmm, yeah let's see whose going to allocate resources maintaining that.

</comment><comment><USER12> Fell for it like a dumbass, mainly because I agree 101% to the complaints listed in the article.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is mildly funny but a bit of a cheap shot, I'd be more interested in "why is web dev so far behind videogames in terms of performances". Either the author doesn't know and is being cynical/sarcastic/devaluating to sound smart, either they do and could teach the rest of us a thing or two but chose to belittle webdev instead.

Edit: I just realised this is a parody website. Fair enough then, this is their editorial line!

<comment><USER3> I mean, I would still agree with what you said knowing it's a parody.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I laughed harder and harder as I kept reading. Fun!

</comment><comment><USER15> He got me for a sec there, I almost didn't notice how similar the name of this site (The Olongnion) is to The Onion...

</comment><comment><USER16> Never seen this parody site before. Droll.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a lazy, unfunny parody.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Delaware-C Still good, now that patent trolls might move there? - <AUTHOR> I'm seeing articles that talk about how Texas is becoming less popular.
I'm starting a business that will be fairly small for a while (less than $100k for a few years).
Should I bother doing a Delaware C-Corp, because if a patent troll sues me, I'd have to go to Delaware!
Otherwise, should I just start a regular Wisconsin business ( or C-Corp ) <comment><USER2> Where you incorporate your business has never had much to do with the effects of patent trolls. Patent trolls would sue you in E.D.Tx if they were going to sue you, no matter where you were incorporated. A few recent court decisions may have changed that a bit, but the following has been true for years:

If you're in Wisconsin, getting sued in either Delaware or Texas would pretty much stink an equal amount. Lots of travel, lots of legal costs.

The funny thing is even though E.D.Tx has a reputation for patent troll heaven, the win percentage in a few other districts tends to be higher, and also resolution tends to be faster.

If I was to sue on these two bases, I'd file suit in N.D.Tx (Dallas, Wichita Falls, or Abilene) or D.Nev (Las Vegas or Reno) and not Delaware or E.D.Tx.

If you want to go public or be acquired, don't get cute- just get set up in Delaware, where everybody goes. That's what VC's expect to see. If you're going to simply do business in Wisconsin, incorporate in Wisconsin (where you can be your own registered agent, assuming you're going to stay there).

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not looking to raise right away, so is delaying incorporating at all a decent option? Until I get like 10k or 20k in sales... preferably in a few months. Stripe has an option for sole-proprietorship, is that a decent route for a little bit?

<comment><USER2> Knowing nearly nothing about your specifics (weigh that accordingly), I'd go for a single-member LLC, incorporated in Wisconsin. They're substantially more idiot-proof (as long as you stay single-member) than more conventional corporations.</comment></comment></comment>


Québec passes law to test immigrants on Québec values and French. - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/closure-bill-21-bill-9-national-assembly-1.5177520 <comment><USER2> Please see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20199084](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20199084) and please don't do this again on HN.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have PR in Quebec, it took 4 years to get. I really hope this does not adversely effect two guys who work for me who are in the PR queue.

I don't think this headline accords with the article. It is speaking about people waiting for PR who will have to reapply, not people who have PR who will somehow be retested and then thrown out.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why does Quebec have it's own immigration policy? I mean, why can't I just emigrate to Canada in BC and then move to Quebec?

</comment><comment><USER5> Title wrong, and no mention of deporting in article.

</comment><comment><USER6> Canada has open arms but Québec has closed its doors. This is not a deterrent for skilled immigrants as they can immigrate elsewhere in Canada which follows Express Entry system.

Québec is not really a destination for skilled immigrants anyway because its immigration system is bloated and delayed. It takes 4 years to immigrate to Québec while 6 months elsewhere in Canada. Probably the CAQ government is adhering to its voter base by this.

<comment><USER7> Ah interesting, so it's not a federal (central) system. Is there anything to prevent someone immigrating to Alberta and then moving to Quebec?</comment></comment>


Goodbye, Hacker News. I'm going back to Reddit. - <AUTHOR> It was worth putting up with the sycophancy of many of the commenters here who seem to participate only to impress PG, their would-be benefactor...for a while. It was worth it while the stories focused on the niche we are all interested in, startups. The change to more general-purpose news, the attempt to re-create the Reddit of old, seemed to be made without first asking the overall community for input (unlike the way that Craig Newmark makes all changes to Craig's List, for example). Although it has apparently been going on all along, this title-censoring thing is, for me, the final straw. Yes, Reddit has been overrun by the unwashed masses. It has become messy in the way that democracy itself is messy. But this site is getting the feeling of an artificially sterile place for tech elites as defined by PG and his minions. So I'm going back to the unwashed masses, even if it means having to read a few more titles about cat pictures. Best of luck, though, PG, and thanks for the great information this site has given me thus far. I will continue to follow your impressive career and your essays with great interest. <p>PS, Editors, feel free to change my title to "Hacker News Rocks!" <comment><USER2> Thing is, Reddit really sucks now. I was just visiting it today and was amazed by the number of ignoranuses (ignoranus = someone who is both stupid and an asshole) on it.

I wonder if this is the eventual fate of all online communities. I've been through at least half a dozen now, and I've yet to see one survive as something other than trite, meaningless bullshit.

The curious thing is - in at least one case (HP fandom, and possibly the C2 wiki), I kept the friendships that I formed in it. Maybe that's the real point of online communities - form offline friendships, and keep those.

Looking forward to the Boston meetup on Sunday...

<comment><USER3> "I wonder if this is the eventual fate of all online communities. I've been through at least half a dozen now, and I've yet to see one survive as something other than trite, meaningless bullshit."

This is best described as "reversion to the mean". A democratic, non-moderated site like Reddit and News.YC will start off attracting folks on the right end of the bell curve, and over time, gain traction to attract the unwashed masses. Then, someone will get fed up and go start another site, and the cycle begins anew. I'm not being elitist or snobbish; this is what I have observed since the USENET of the 1990s. It always happens.

<comment><USER4> On the other hand, I've been a member of a loosely-moderated community for close to 7 years and it's still going strong (I think the forum first opened in 1999). There is a lot of what might be considered "trite" to a casual observer, but for those of us who have been reading and posting there for a long time we simply ignore the content we're not interested in. There's always enough good stuff to keep me going back.

It definitely was never overrun with ignoranuses, at least not for any extended period of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's the final straw that we fix typos and abusive punctuation in submission titles? That seems a bit melodramatic.

I'm surprised to think anyone didn't already realize we did this. Did you really think people on news.yc had that much better spelling than reddit users?

<comment><USER6> As opposed to caring about the specifics like fixing punctuation, I think that critics don't like the authority (and potential for abuse) implied by administrators messing with user submitted text, no matter in how trivial a way.

At some point users have to decide if they're willing to sacrifice a purely democratic community if it means an increase in quality. Is the point of a social news site to make a political statement, or is it find cool stuff to read?

Edit: Maybe the admins should just be 100% transparent about everything they do; document their actions in a FAQ.

<comment><USER7> Transparency makes this a non-issue. Admin actions like editing titles should automatically show up on a log page.

<comment><USER5> You're probably right. No one complains when whole submissions are deleted as spams, presumably because you can see them if you want by turning on showdead in your profile. So maybe I'll add something to preserve original submission titles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The number of typical comments for a post determine what kind of people want to/are willing to comment:

0-10 comments: People who want to talk about the post _per se_

11-50 comments: People who want to have a conversation.

51- comments: People who want to join a mob.

Obviously, ynews is moving from the first to the second, and that changes the types of comments/people commenting/overall community.

</comment><comment><USER9> I really liked the fact that YCombinator news was a niche site and I often wonder if the future of these sosial news sites is not having every category on a different site to deal with the signal vs noise factor...

<comment><USER10> usenet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wait, what? Dude, a story that's submitted should be titled the same regardless of who submits the story. The only variance in titles should be mere semantics. Any extra information in the title only adds bias or spelling/grammar mistakes. Therefore, editing a title to its correct form is just fine. Relax.

But if you can't relax, goodbye. If this thread title is any indication, you produce great Reddit/Digg titles.

I hope Paul changes "title: " to "suggest a title: " on the submission page so people realize it's not _their_ title. They didn't produce the content, and if they did then the editors aren't retitle it.

<comment><USER12> I actually think this is sort of a dumb argument to get into in the first place, but you have to admit that not letting the original submitters to own their titles (when you allow them to own the resulting karma) is kind of inconsistent.

Ultimately, though, this sort of user revolt is bound to happen whenever you make major changes to how a community works. I think news.yc'll make it with or without the people who are pissed.

<comment><USER11> _".. not letting the original submitters to own their titles (when you allow them to own their resulting karma) is kind of inconsistent."_

I don't see how a user owns a title to content they didn't produce. If they produced it, the editors won't change it.

You get karma for bringing quality content to other people's attention, not for calling the content something it isn't.

<comment><USER12> Well, I've personally had titles edited, all for stylistic issues (none for bias, innaccuracy, or anything I'd deem worth editing). I don't really care, but I would prefer that unless my submissions were clearly in need of correction that they were not changed. They do show up under "submissions" clicking from my profile, so I think they ought to reflect what I submitted unless it harms the site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why not create www.startupnews.com? If you want the code, google 'reddit clone'. I think the lisp community wrote atleast a dozen reddit clones after reddit switched from lisp to python.

I say this because a lot of people have a problem with the change from a startup focused to a hacker focused site.

Since you already have a community which is united around a common vision, it's probably worth acting now and create another site.

The lisp hackers did a similar thing when reddit moved from lisp to python. For some reason they thought that reddit was only for lisp hackers. BTW, I don't think that worked as most lisp hackers were already active on cll or #lisp

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't see any reason to choose between ynews and reddit. The level of technical dialogue here is better, no question -- and for awesome lolcats and social interest anecdotes, like <http://politics.reddit.com/goto?id=2g6mu>, there's reddit.

<comment><USER15> Ah! technical dialogue! Now where did you see that here? ;P

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A good alternative: <http://www.dailyhub.com/> from the owner of <http://www.onstartups.com/>

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow, and suddenly I realized how much it must suck to be an editor...

<comment><USER17> What's the expression? The politics are so bad because the stakes are so low?

<comment><USER14> A bikeshed (from a discussion on the FreeBSD mailing list -- see <http://www.bikeshed.com/>).

<comment><USER18> YES - this is my favorite new dev meme. So incredibly true it's painful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have two recommendations:

1\. Have patience.

2\. Be a part of the solution.

<comment><USER19> Are you suggesting that, if I'm patient enough, they'll change the focus of this back to startup news? 'Cuz I can get "hacker newz" at reddit/digg/slashdot/a-dozen-other-places...

And what "solution" should I be part of? The one that makes YC more money? Or the "sense of community"? I care squat about the YC community; I used to come here to read the startup articles. I can get arstechnica/lifehacker/etc links elsewhere.

<comment><USER4> 1\. "Have patience" means that you should avoid jumping to conclusions about what sort of content you were looking for out of this site, and to let "the dust settle" before leaping to conclusions about whether the new site suits you. If it's really that bad, you'll get bored and won't come anymore.

2\. "Be a part of the solution" was really only half of what I intended to say, the other half being "stop being part of the problem." Being a part of the solution means voting up the articles you like, contributing knowledgeable and insightful commentary, and submitting the sort of stories you want to see. Being a part of the problem means throwing a temper tantrum without including any interesting or startup-related material.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It somehow felt a lot better IMO when it was "Startup News"

<comment><USER21> True. I'm going to miss all those startup submissions. I think he might have ruined the site this time, but we'll see.

<comment><USER22> What are you guys talking about? Can you list more than 10 sites in the past few months that were that informative. Yes, startup news is important, but we can't have submissions like "how to start your company" every day, because they tend to be the same thing. I enjoy this new take on things, starting the company is the easy part. Having the knowledge at the right time is the hard part. This is also a good way for people to get connected. I possibly need a partner for my startup (based on PG's advice) so maybe I'll find my partner here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Any idea on how traffic trends for news.yc are since the relaunch? Was traffic dropping before the change? Has it gone up after?

<comment><USER5> Traffic was climbing slowly before the change, at about the rate it always has. Then there was a huge spike when we changed the focus. It's impossible to predict yet what the real trend looks like.

<comment><USER23> Thanks for letting us know. Any chance of posting a traffic graph in a few weeks time to see?

<comment><USER5> Sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Also, Reddit doesn't have as much meaningless drama. As of right now, anyway.

<comment><USER25> Just wait until the next impeachment petition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I know this isn't the right place to ask this, but why is there no down arrow for submissions/comments? And why when you upmod something does the arrow disappear! Where's the undo?

<comment><USER27> undo: none available--this is a design choice

downmod: a user must develop a certain amount of karma before the down arrows appear. additionally, you may not downmod direct replies to your own comments or stories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think the art would be to stop people joining the site when it reaches an acceptable level of coolness.

Isn't this how Metafilter survives and maintains its excellent quality?

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm starting to feel like we need a meta.news.ycombinator.com, for all this meta-discussion... I'm sure the politics are fascinating, but they feel the same as those of every online community since the dawn of the Internet... :p

Ah well, I guess I could just not click on them in my RSS.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think it is a great idea that a human editor is involved, and site content being edited. A similar process happen on a good wiki, and I always enjoy when my prose is translated to English behind my back :-)

</comment><comment><USER31> Democracy has a weird tendency of favoring idiocy.

Just take a look at this discussion: <http://reddit.com/info/2ga89/comments>

</comment><comment><USER32> To be fair to Paul and the moderators, the title of this submission used to be:

Goodbye, HACKER NEWS!!!! I'm going back to Reddit.

I don't think this site was meant for everybody to post whatever they want. There should be respect for other people's resources; while Reddit and Digg want as many users as possible, there is no such leverage here.

I think the mistake is that users start thinking they can do whatever they want just because a social site is free.

<comment><USER33> BTW nobody is posting porn here .. "whatever" is posted, is somehow related to startups/pragramming most of the times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is PG butt kissing the "elephant in the room"?

</comment><comment><USER35> I am very disappointed at the editing. I understand if the user includes profanity or hate speech but nitpicking? It just seems like censorship when it doesn't need to be.

</comment><comment><USER36> _Although it has apparently been going on all along, this title-censoring thing is, for me, the final straw._

Wow, I was just complaining about something I found annoying; I didn't mean to start a revolt.

</comment><comment><USER37> eh, I'll always use both. Maybe I'm just that big of a slacker.

</comment><comment><USER38> talk about sycophancy</comment>


Show HN: Cubes Challenge: Optical Illusion Game - <AUTHOR> http://cubeschallenge.com/?allidois=win&cupfullof=swag

<comment><USER2> would be cool if the website had a sample game to try so user knows how to play before downloading.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have no idea how to play.</comment>


Let's Try Anonymous Pull Requests - <AUTHOR> https://blogg.bekk.no/lets-anonymize-pull-requests-60f0a34c953b <comment><USER2> I believe this idea is extremely important for improving software through contributions from capable but disenfranchised persons. I just want to suggest one minor process change that could be valuable in many environments.

1\. Everyone is encouraged to make an anonymous pull request.

2\. Anonymous pull requests are immediately visible to everyone who would ordinarily be able to a read a pull request.

3\. However, by convention, nobody should spend any significant time looking at an anonymous pull request until after review by a senior person. At this initial stage, the senior person's job isn't to assess the details of the change, but only to assess the risk that the pull request may be wrong for reasons that aren't apparent within any of the modified files. The senior person then flags the pull request as either OK_TO_REVIEW or CANNOT_BE_ANONYMOUS.

4\. When a flagger has set CANNOT_BE_ANONYMOUS, this means that the pull request -- if it were from a person who is new to the overall architecture or goals -- may generate a lot of review work even though the contribution has little chance of ever being used. In other words, you can waste a lot of time and money by reviewing a contribution when you have no context about the contributor's stature. Anomalies that may be noticed by a flagger vary across projects, but might include:

a. The code changes operate on untrusted data as if it were trusted.

b. The code changes operate on trusted data as if it were untrusted.

c. The code changes add expensive computation to the critical path.

d. The code changes improve a deprecated feature.

e. It violates the primary rule of Office Space ("Is This Good for the COMPANY?"). For example, adding this feature to Product X would reduce sales of Product Y.

5\. When there's a CANNOT_BE_ANONYMOUS flag, anyone can add a non-anonymous comment of the form "I am developer MyName who has previously contributed. I understand the architecture and goals, and believe the flagger is wrong." Then, the flagger and MyName should try to reach agreement.</comment>


Datasets for Country,States,City with ISO Codes,Lat,Long,Population - <AUTHOR> Many startups need reference data as a foundation to their database if they want to build a global product-What is the best source for getting an ACCURATE list of country,state,city with data fields like IDD numbers,Countey ISO codes,Lat,Long,Population? So many sources we have found offer half baked datasets that is incomplete or inaccurate. Why don't YC offer 'core data' datasets that startups can use to help build out their products? ... or do they - and we just need to ask? Hints on where to search would be great as we've lost weeks putting together data only to find it missing some key cities or has outdated data <comment><USER2> Here are a few places I would start:

[https://datahub.io/core/country-list](https://datahub.io/core/country-list) [https://worldpostalcode.com/](https://worldpostalcode.com/) [https://calendarific.com/](https://calendarific.com/) [https://data.worldbank.org/country](https://data.worldbank.org/country)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the links - We were hoping that YC would have a data set of say the top 300 cities in each country with the data and give it for free to startups. The main sources are all paid services, which I understand, as putting the data together is arduous. We will put our final result out there for free on our site once we finish cleaning it up, but it would only be a 'snapshot' - YC have the connections and resources to put out a more real-time version. We just thought it would be a great addition to YC's library of resources if they started to provide startups with some core reference data sets-Stephen</comment></comment>


Show HN: Simple implementation and explanation of Map Reduce using Javascript - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/johnhenry/5487382

<comment><AUTHOR> I saw a few things around the internet that make this concept seem more complicated than it is.</comment>


Tjipetir mystery: Why are rubber-like blocks washing up on beaches? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30043875 <comment><USER2> Interesting, but if the salvagers let the rubber float away then what was "the cargo they are looking for" and presumably kept?

<comment><USER3> I was wondering this also -- what could a ship that sunk in 1917 have in its hold that would be worthwhile to salvage 100 years later?

For anyone knowledgeable about this field: Are these sorts of late salvage operations typical?

<comment><USER4> Steel not polluted by atomic-age testing?

<comment><USER5> Your comment led me to look up low-background steel. Very interesting thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


USB Killer 2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/usb-killer--2# <comment><USER2> It's probably better to open the case, remove the ports, cut the traces, then re-seal the case with security screws and tamper resistant seals.

I'm gently worried about their design for production. That prototype PCB looks pretty tight for machine production.

Be interesting to see how customs react after cooking a computer.

EDIT: The promo2 video (Wife finds USB stick of photos you'd rather she didn't see) is a baffling angle to take.

EDIT: Promo3 video is equally weird (hitchhiking woman is locked in a car and then mugged at knifepoint), and is probably going to cause some difficulties in marketing in the EU / US.

<comment><USER3> The use case of the promo1 video doesn't look very promising. If some thugs kidnap you, and you break their computers, then they will get angry and explain that to you thoughtfully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've watched all the video, still can't understand why I would want this.

Why would I want a device that breaks my computer?

</comment><comment><USER5> Funny thing... If something is Russian it always goes down to burning something to the ground.</comment>


Startup School 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://justin.tv/startupschool

<comment><USER2> Apparently they're also being recorded for your future watching pleasure: <http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/videos>

<comment><USER3> Then I'll watch it later.. the streaming vid breaks every half second..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the best one so far was Github Cofounder Tom Preston-Werner's talk. Almost every sentence of his was a gem, and the fact that he had bootstrapped both his startups made it even more interesting!

<comment><USER5> The GitHub talk was one of the few for me that streamed reasonably. I've been pretty disappointed with the streaming performance today. TC Disupt was flawless for me, this was almost unwatchable.

I agree that Tom Preston-Werner had some great advice especially about "bootstrapping while working your fulltime job to pay the bills."

Watching Adam D'Angelo was a bit painful, he was really nervous and unfortunately due to streaming issues it seemed like some of the bad moments were showed over and over -- that said, the bit of his talk that stood out was "having a good reputation helps open doors". I didn't get to see his whole talk, hopefully he expanded upon how to build that good reputation...

<comment><USER6> Someone actually asked him that specific question. His answer (paraphrased): "Find a small company that you think is going to be big and join it. At small companies, you learn a lot about many different things. As they grow larger, you learn about scaling issues. Throughout the process, build your personal network."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For future reference:

2008 Videos: <http://www.youtube.com/startupschool#g/u>

2009 Videos: <http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/videos?kind=highlights>

2010 Videos: <http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/videos>

Thanks for all hard work that went into Startup School! Especially for going through the extra work to record and stream online! Really hope to make it out next year!

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow, the LinkedIn guy spoke in gold nuggets. I am extremely grateful I am doing systems software, not consumer stuff. Our failures are most spectacular, but at least our success doesn't depend on others.

Waiting for it to resume after lunch break.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious, has there ever been a talk of a failed entrepreneur? So far, the talks that I have heard are ideal discussions of how a startup grows and succeeds. Sure there are rough patches that are described, but I am not given a sense of the reality of starting your own business (besides credit card debt).

How does a person handle a pitiful situation of being broke? When you are having difficulty of bringing your idea of a business to fruition because you are stuck in a rut? When someone screws you over? Or some unforeseen consequence that you weren't anticipating when you entered the startup world?

<comment><USER10> Dalton Caldwell did a good job of that during the talk with his startup Imeem and his experiences with the music industry.

<comment><USER9> Is there a video of this talk?

<comment><USER10> If you skip to 1:08:40 his talk is here:

<http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272002787>

<comment><USER9> Of all the talks I watched, I miss the one I complained was lacking :x

Thanks for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wish there was an Omnisio version ;(

</comment><comment><USER6> To all the Y-Combinator folks, and all the speakers: Thank you for a fantastic event. I had a great time today.

Also, thank you for all the free and tasty food. I guess you really do understand what motivates founders!

</comment><comment><USER12> Is Thailand blocked?</comment>


Secretly recorded call shows how Live Nation places tickets on resale market - <AUTHOR> https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/8521538/live-nation-resale-market-secretly-recorded-phone-calls-concert-tickets <comment><USER2> The airline industry prevents resale by demanding a name when booking tickets, and then checking the name matches when you board.

I think that practice is anti-competitive, but the public seems fine with the idea. Why doesn't the music industry do the same?

<comment><USER3> The answer is right there in the first paragraph of the article - the bands themselves are making money by reselling the tickets above face value.

To use non transferable tickets, the price would need to be increased to the actual price people are willing to pay. This would cause bad PR and outrage.

The price would also have to adjust in a live fashion, so you wouldn't pay the same as the person you're next to. This gives people a bad feeling that they're willing to put up with for something important and not fun like flying, but would decrease their enjoyment of a music event.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the 1990s we thought Pearl Jam was being silly for trying to bring up an anti-trust lawsuit against Ticketmaster, and the nation had lost it's will after Microsoft's joke of a settlement. In retrospect, that was a real loss. Ticketmaster and Livenation abuse their monopolies to the harm of consumers globally.</comment>


WhatsApp users now send over 1 billion messages each day - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgr.com/2011/10/31/whatsapp-users-now-send-over-1-billion-messages-each-day/

<comment><USER2> These guys are pretty impressive, for a company no one really knows about or hears about.

Serious question: who uses it and why? :)

<comment><USER3> Everybody who I know (including myself) uses WhatsApp to text people who are travelling, studying abroad, or otherwise living overseas but don't want to pay an arm and leg for international SMS.

It's just a text message replacement. It's essentially iMessage but cross- platform.</comment></comment>


All chapters from Rust in Action, book published by Manning, are now available - <AUTHOR> https://www.manning.com/books/rust-in-action?a_aid=rust&a_bid=0367c58f&chan=reddit <comment><AUTHOR> Via Reddit. [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/f3pq12/all_chapters_f...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/f3pq12/all_chapters_from_rust_in_action_book_published/)</comment>


Getting more members of your online community active - <AUTHOR> http://www.communityspark.com/get-more-members-of-your-online-community-active/

<comment><USER2> Good article, very thought provoking. Though I had to chuckle a little when I read the author launched a Female Forum because he felt existing online communities aimed at women were "far too complicated" to use.

I understand perfectly what he meant, but that statement reminded me so much of Harry Enfield's classic funny video _"Women know your limits"_ I had to laugh. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjxY9rZwNGU&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjxY9rZwNGU&feature=related)</comment>


Ask HN: Looking for characterless web font for mockups - <AUTHOR> I've seen and am looking for a font face for web that renders as thick lines for characters/words (no matter which characters are in the document). It was pitched as an alternative to lorem ipsum.
I can't find the name of the font that I'm referring to.
Does anyone know the name of this font? <comment><USER2> Flow by Dan Ross

[https://danross.co/flow/](https://danross.co/flow/)</comment>


Show HN: Brick, a free Notion-like tool for zero-hassle site making - <AUTHOR> https://brick.do/ <comment><USER2> Nice work - seems like more and more people are using Notion to publish their own little websites. There are a few custom solutions that attempt to fix the problems that the author outlined, such as custom URLs and styling:

\- [https://super.so/](https://super.so/)

\- [https://fruitionsite.com/](https://fruitionsite.com/)

\- [https://www.notion.so/Hosting-Potion-Fast-custom-domains- for...](https://www.notion.so/Hosting-Potion-Fast-custom-domains-for-Notion- without-code-adeaa466687a4459983783f950ca8310)

I also built my own solution which takes a different approach: [https://github.com/leoncvlt/loconotion](https://github.com/leoncvlt/loconotion) \- it caches the Notion page as a static site - admittedly you lose the capability of "syncing" sites instantly but is also makes the site snappier and more responsive as it removes a lot of bloat.

<comment><USER3> > I also built my own solution which takes a different approach: > [https://github.com/leoncvlt/loconotion](https://github.com/leoncvlt/loconotion) > \- it caches the Notion page as a static site - admittedly you lose the > capability of "syncing" sites instantly but is also makes the site snappier > and more responsive as it removes a lot of bloat.

Nice work! Another benefit you didn't mention is that it also makes it a lot more secure - there's no injecting anything into static pages!

<comment><USER4> Hey thanks for posting this. I didn't know people do this. I think idea to use Notion for publishing is something that I would enjoy and will give it a try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In addition to the already highlighted security vulnerabilities (you have to stop any js injection capabilities), instant publish from your domain means you are about to be swarmed with spammers. From SEO back-link builders, to "download links" for viruses or illegal content, etc. If you enable that kind of spam, your domain's signal to noise ratio goes down substantially for sharing legitimate content.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right — we'll solve that problem once we have it. Do you know how other platforms (Wordpress, Notion, etc) handle it?

<comment><USER6> The first step is to distance the domain of your project from the domain you use for user-generated content.

Examples: github.com vs. github.io, wordpress.org vs. wordpress.com (note that these are not subdomains, but distinct domains).

Doing so allows you to keep the two separate as far as SEO is concerned, so that your main project isn't affected regardless of what users might upload.

Then it's about putting out the fires whenever they appear.

I'd also be careful about JavaScript, since a site hosted on example.com/a will have the same origin as a site hosted on example.com/b (and therefore access to cookies). This is where a separate subdomain for each user comes in handy (so a.example.com vs b.example.com), which shouldn't be much of an issue since DNS providers usually have an API that you can call, and DNS updates should be fast when you're creating entries (as opposed to modifying existing ones).

<comment><AUTHOR> Re/ JavaScript — as of yesterday, we serve everything in an iframe with a different origin. This should make us more robust against screw-ups, and will be essential when we start allowing script blocks in pages.

Re/ SEO — we might banish all pages without subdomains to smth like `page.brick.do/...` as opposed to `brick.do/...`. Hopefully that will help with SEO somewhat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here — me and a friend have been working on Brick for the past several months.

It works like Notion as in "all your edits are instantly visible" — from experience, this feels very different from blogging on Wordpress or making a static site in a git repo.

I love static sites but I'm not going back to them. I can experiment much more easily with Brick.

You can do something similar with Notion, but Notion is aimed at management or personal knowledge-bases, and it shows. We have a different focus. E.g. Notion is unlikely to ever have email subscriptions or ways to let people pay for your writing, while we very well might in the future. Notion also doesn't support custom domains out of the box, or custom CSS.

Try it out! Brick is free and has no ads. The only thing is that you need a premium plan (less than $2/mo) for custom domains.

<comment><USER7> There is no info about pricing on the main page? I really don't want to sign in to see the pricing info and details of other features.

<comment><AUTHOR> Added pricing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't seem to read anything at all about pricing without signing up. I don't want to share my Google/Github account with you before seeing pricing information.

The "see Brick in action" video also doesn't play for me on Firefox.

<comment><USER9> >share my Google/Github account

sign in with google/github doesnt expose any info that you wouldnt through a traditional signup.

however, it's extremely frustrating that the pricing isn't up front or even indicated that'll be an issue

<comment><USER10> It does, in that it's much easier for me sign up with a throwaway username. It's also part of the reason HN doesn't require these SSO integrations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can add a script tag via the CSS. I suppose it's not much of a security risk. Might be wrong though: [https://brick.do/c9878660-42ed-4b95-93b6-10a761488b5a](https://brick.do/c9878660-42ed-4b95-93b6-10a761488b5a)

<comment><USER12> > I suppose it's not much of a security risk.

It wouldn't be much of a security risk if the authors had correctly isolated user content into its own origin, which would have made this a self-xss only. As it stands the app itself runs on the same origin, so this is a real XSS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Isolating user content is the next task on the list — we discussed it internally just yesterday. Unfortunately, we didn't think we'll need it /that/ soon.

Long-term, we definitely need more security-minded folks on the team.

Short-term, I will add an email address in the footer so that such issues can at least be reported privately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can we stop the requirement to use Gmail or Github just so I can use your service?

I want to signup for this service, but I can't - because I use a non-gmail email service and use a non-github Git service.

What happened to thr "good old days" of just using my email address to signup for a service?

<comment><AUTHOR> We want to have a classic sign-up option as well, sure — if only because it's one less third-party point of vulnerability for users (will be relevant when encrypted pages are there).

Unfortunately it's harder than Google/GitHub login, so we focused on other bits for the MVP.

Is there any third-party service you /would/ use for auth? Perhaps it can be enabled quickly.

<comment><USER14> An email/password login is not difficult in the least.

And, frankly, there is zero chance I'm going to host a site with a provider who thinks it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Eh. It's not "hard", it's "harder".

Evaluating mail delivery services and integrating with one; going through all API handlers to check that they handle the extra "signed up but email still unconfirmed" status the right way; handlers for resending email confirmations; the password reset flow. A lot of papercuts.

Oh, and later on — having to debug email delivery issues, which always happen eventually.

This is why adding another third-party auth option is much easier than adding an email signup flow.

An alternative is the "modern" email flow where you just get a sign-in email every single time you want to login, but that's meh. I'd rather have a proper "classic" email signup flow.

All this said, I admit that email signup is one of the basic features, and we're missing it. I want to have email signup too. I just don't think it's as easy (or even /almost/ as easy) as third-party auth, and the rest is a question of priorities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I expected "free" to mean free software. It means freemium here.

EDIT: NOTE: I mean nothing negative by freemium: I just mean there are both free and paid tiers. Not sure what the definition of freemium is.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have paid features, right.

I thought "freemium" nowadays referred more to practices like "we'll actively make your experience worse and annoy you unless you pay", but now I think I mistook that for "free-to-play" in the game industry. Alright then! It's freemium.

<comment><USER15> I'm sorry if I've misunderstood the term. I mean absolutely no offense. I understand freemium as proprietary service with both free and paid tiers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For some reason, the 'See brick in action' video won't play (Chromium, Android 10). Do you have another link to the video that might work?

<comment><USER16> Other than that, the site looks pretty cool, and the idea is solid. I might give it a try ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey — the video should work now. Say if it still doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The only question I have is, If I make a personal website using this, will it show up on google when people search for my name?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, all pages are indexable once Google gets ahold of the links (so if you never share the link with anyone, it's /not/ going to end up in Google — that's important).

I can find my Brick sites when I search for my name, though they are low-rank at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So looks mine is on the right track:) [https://docxmanager.com](https://docxmanager.com)

</comment><comment><USER19> FYI on Firefox on iOS your site renders a bit oddly - the sign in button in particular has text bottom aligned within its box.

<comment><USER20> I'm also observing this behaviour[1] on the latest version of Safari as well.

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/pDgXeJJ.png](https://i.imgur.com/pDgXeJJ.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Please take my advice if you want this thing to last.

Add payment/subscription support for writers. Take on substack directly.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is planned!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The website doesn't work here, which is pretty unusual. win 10 with latest version of firefox. first time it wouldn't completely load (kept loading...), CTRL+R and it loads completely, but video won't play. I'm curious and will be back in a few days to check it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> > first time it wouldn't completely load

Hey! Can't reproduce on vanilla Firefox. Do you have any extensions enabled? Try "Help -> Restart with Add-ons Disabled".

If it works (or if it doesn't even), can you write me at email@example.com and tell about the results? Perhaps this can be fixed from our side.

About the video — it plays for me, but poorly. Will take a look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nice site. With all the "focus" on micro-blogging and dislike for sites like Medium.com (I agree by the way). It might be a good show of faith, to let the users "export" their sites to MD or static HTML, if they want to host and have a copy of their website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exporting is on the roadmap. Currently you can `wget` your own site, but that's not a great solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not sure if it's just me, but playing the 'See Brick in action' video in Firefox results in some strange behaviour: [https://imgur.com/y0zJ0gB](https://imgur.com/y0zJ0gB)

<comment><AUTHOR> Replaced with a better-encoded video (VLC meh, Handbrake yay). Give it another try.

<comment><USER24> Works perfectly now!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sign in button styling issue:

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ITZQHyGMdlK2DJ6KyDYMf8rfU67...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ITZQHyGMdlK2DJ6KyDYMf8rfU67lwHlH/view?usp=sharing)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Will be fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I still want to see some example pages that are done in Brick. Also want to see the pricing details before I sign up. Currently "Sign In" is the only option available there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gotcha.

Sample pages:

* [https://brick.do/55357459-86b9-4274-8ae4-85721987d73d](https://brick.do/55357459-86b9-4274-8ae4-85721987d73d) — a friend wrote a post about webs of meaning

* [https://brick.do/7c494481-f2e5-4a05-9a4d-19b22c76c729](https://brick.do/7c494481-f2e5-4a05-9a4d-19b22c76c729) — my own post detailing all my projects so far

* [https://brick.do/ca51f14c-e600-4afe-b99d-71e46fbd150b](https://brick.do/ca51f14c-e600-4afe-b99d-71e46fbd150b) — a technical post (Haskell-y) that I wrote

* [https://nathanabram.com/](https://nathanabram.com/) — this is how the default style looks like.

<comment><USER27> Should this worry me as a potential premium customer? ———————————————————————————-

I am Artyom Kazak, aka @availablegreen on Twitter. I was born in Belarus, a small Eastern European country, and lived there till 18. ... I am turning 25 in October 2020, and that is when I plan to quit coding—as a birthday gift to myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> The opposite!

Less time coding = more time running businesses.

I'm not writing any code at Brick either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> neongreen, you should really test how it works on Firefox. For example sing in with Github bricked (pun intended ;) ) my tab with your site, even refresh button and address bar stopped working. I had to close it and open again to see the dashboard.

Steps:

\- click on "get started"

\- I choose option to sing in with google.

\- it opens google api in separate modal window and this does not work if you have Firefox extension to keep google in container

\- so I clicked github option, and authorized your app

\- after that, brick.do page has been frozen completely

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yeah, definitely need to test on Firefox (as well as Safari).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Looks like a really good idea. Will be trying this week.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's Notion-like, but did you build the blocks editor from scratch or is there any open-source option for Notion's block-based editor?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are not using a block editor (I think blocks are worse for writing than the traditional model).

The only open-source block editor I know of is [https://codex.so/editor](https://codex.so/editor).

<comment><USER31> Gutenberg is also open source and built by WordPress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Noob question: if I share a brick URL, can it be traced back to my github, or my personal identity in any way by the people that I sent it to?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's designed not to leak any info like that. Anonymity is super important ([https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/23/being-your-selves- iden...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/23/being-your-selves-identity-rd- on-alt-twitter/) is one of the inspirations for what I want Brick to enable.)

If you find any way to circumvent that, we'll treat it with the same priority as we treat security issues.

<comment><USER32> Good to know, thanks!

Edit: Also thanks for sharing that RF article. Great read.

<comment><AUTHOR> That RF article pushed me towards making an anonymous Twitter acc, in February, and it was the best decision of 2020 for me. Literally. Highest quality therapy I've had in my life.

<comment><USER32> Interesting. I don't have an anonymous Twitter, but I'll spout my experimental ideas in private message groups with trusted friends.

Is there something that an anon Twitter could do that the latter couldn't? Broader reach for ideas I suppose.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hard to say. I have friends too (ha) and I'm not afraid to talk to them about my ideas, but alt Twitter still was different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is there a reason these types of sites are trendy now? I am seeing a new note taking/microblogging site every day now on Hacker News.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a microblogging site — we are pretty heavily geared towards true "sites" (places where you write long-form content, organize it, edit often, etc) rather than tweeting into the void.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> lots of questions / comments:

\- how do I publish? how do I see the published version?

\- what does the eye at the top right do?

\- Is all you can do right now just create pages and subpages of rich media?

Otherwise it's actually not a bad experience. Lots of bugs. not sure if I'll stick around or publish an article on it yet, hard to tell right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't publish! Every page you write is already available at the URL you see in your address bar. This said, it's not indexable or findable until you yourself share it somewhere. UUIDs are long enough to be unguessable.

The eye at the top switches the page into preview mode, which is currently very similar to the edit mode. You'll notice the difference if you use Twitter embeds.

All you can do right now is create pages and subpages of rich media, true. Surprisingly, this was already enough for me to start writing much more than I used to before Brick. But we have more features coming, of course (collaborative editing, etc — see the bottom of the landing page).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Looks nice! Any plans to add syntax highlighting to the code blocks?

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely!

Currently we prioritize feature requests from paying users, and nobody asked for syntax highlighting yet. When somebody does, I think it'll appear pretty soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> No imprint, no privacy rules, no terms of service. Big no from me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gotcha.

Do you have an example of a small service with excellent privacy/TOS rules? So that I know what to treat as a high-quality exemplar when designing privacy/TOS rules for Brick.</comment></comment>


Vectr – Live update graphics for webpages - <AUTHOR> https://vectr.com/ <comment><USER2> Hey Guys! CEO of Vectr here! Today's launch was a bit accidental, we didn't intend to launch it quite yet but it got picked up and is blowing up a bit (particularly via Product Hunt) so hey, go with the flow.

Happy to answer any questions guys! We are at TC Disrupt as well if anyone would like to come by and talk in person!

<comment><USER3> It's great to see web design moving more and more towards the web. Looking forward to trying this out. The live update feature could be a big win for slack conversations.</comment></comment>


Introducing emojify.js, the easy way to add Emoji support to your site  - <AUTHOR> http://hassankhan.me/post/38754142749

<comment><USER2> I like the thing. I was really looking for it. I'll test it soon on my project.

but,

"and I haven't got Opera to test it on" ???

We are at 2012, fast internet, unlimited storage blah blah etc. and most importantly you are a developer! And you are still hiding to behind of this sentence? It's not cool man. It's unacceptable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, its still a work-in-progress, and more importantly, a side-project, so I'll get around to it in time :)</comment></comment>


GitHub's Easter Egg to activate your profile's README - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/chandrikadeb7/status/1278948765269803009 <comment><USER2> Lots of people saying it doesn't work, but worked for me. [https://github.com/c-wilkinson](https://github.com/c-wilkinson)

Maybe a staged rollout? I did notice that if I look at my profile when I'm not logged in, it doesn't display.

<comment><USER3> Yep, your profile doesn't show any of this for me, even when logged in.

<comment><USER2> When I'm logged in, it looks like this: [https://twitter.com/SQLCadavre/status/1279039797395435527?s=...](https://twitter.com/SQLCadavre/status/1279039797395435527?s=20)</comment></comment></comment>


Five reasons why the PHP silence operator @ should be avoided - <AUTHOR> http://www.phpvikinger.org/five-reasons-why-the-shutop-operator-should-be-avoided.html <comment><USER2> _Whenever the @-operator is used, PHP needs to invoke the INI settings mechanism to change the temporary value of the error_reporting setting to 0._

Can't make this stuff up.

<comment><USER3> Oh, it's just one of thousands of nonsensical PHP features.

Like the fact that the language's grammar is used to do primitive type checking, meaning some combinations of accessors cause errors.

Or the fact the mail sending function doesn't work if one of the lines in the email begins with a period, but only if you're on Windows.

<comment><USER4> Some of the weirder OS-specific function behaviors can be a rationalized a little better if you view PHP functions not as sane, complete library functions, but rather as thin wrappers to the underlying OS. For mail() it basically just wraps the system's mail program in Linux (which comes with a huge number of dangerous gotchas for the uninitiated) and I imagine in Windows it wraps the local mail program which seems to have a gotcha with periods. I think a lot of the file management functions are the same.

That's one of the many problems with PHP's underlying design philosopy: instead of providing a higher-level interface that stays consistent across platforms, it exposes low-level OS gunk and gotchas through its thin wrappers on low-level-ish functions. I put together phpbestpractices.org a few months ago in an attempt to document some of those common gotchas and provide sane alternatives.

<comment><USER3> >PHP functions not as sane, complete library functions, but rather as thin wrappers to the underlying OS.

Except they're not really that thin.

>in Windows it wraps the local mail program which seems to have a gotcha with periods

Nope, in Windows it implements the SMTP protocol, on UNIX it runs sendmail.

>instead of providing a higher-level interface that stays consistent across platforms, it exposes low-level OS gunk and gotchas through its thin wrappers on low-level-ish functions.

Except it doesn't. There's quite a few things that are _named_ like OS functions, but are implemented internally. For example, all the C stdlib-like string functions.

<comment><USER4> My mistake then :) I admit I haven't read the source, I'm just going off of the quirkiness of cross-platform PHP and the way the functions seem to behave.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Something I found in response to: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5036240>

The opcode examination is particularly damning.

I would like to see what PHP 5.4 generates though, the changelog states

       - Improved Zend Engine, performance tweaks and optimizations: (Dmitry)
           Improved performance of @ (silence) operator

Aha! Found the revision: [http://svn.php.net/viewvc?view=revision&revision=302442](http://svn.php.net/viewvc?view=revision&revision=302442)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's interesting to find out just how many ways @ is bad but this article is going to fall on deaf ears. The people that can be convinced that it's bad are already not using it. Those that need to be told why the "ignore broken things and keep on trucking" operator is bad, aren't paying attention anyways.

<comment><USER6> There are cases where you want something silenced. In my code base, there is one place where it is used and I need it there.

I frequently use file_get_contents to retrieve data stored on external servers. If there is a network error or the external service goes down temporarily, it will trigger an error. I don't want my log files flooded with transient error messages that are outside of my control. Instead, I just want it to try again. @ makes this possible.

<comment><USER7> We opt to use the curl functions for that.

<comment><USER6> I understand that decision, but I actively try to remove any extensions that I can do without to keep the PHP binary slim and even more reliable. My personal way of doing things, that's all. file_get_contents can do everything the curl extensions can, provided that you use the context options, so I just use that and remove curl when I compile the PHP binary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wrote about @ and it's slowness a while back, if anyone is interested: <http://hancic.info/at-operator-is-slow>

</comment><comment><USER9> One reason to use it: to silence functions that generate warnings when the falsy return value would suffice.

<http://php.net/manual/en/function.parse-url.php>

 _5.3.3 Removed the E_WARNING that was emitted when URL parsing failed._

<comment><USER10> A logical first step would be to fix all of those functions in PHP that end up requiring the use of @. Once that is done then we could move forward with removing all @ use.

<comment><USER5> Next step, remove all PHP use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some negative comments about the @-operator seem to be very religious. It's just a tool that one can use for good or for evil. Many of the reasons not to use @ described are valid, but there are cases when it makes much cleaner code. E.g. instead of doing: if (array_key_exists($key, $a) && $a[$key] == $value) dostuff(); you can do: if (@$a[$key] == $value) dostuff(); This works really well when you don't care whether $a[$key]is present or not, and when you care only whether it contains a certain $value. In complex comparisons the code readability difference is huge!

</comment><comment><USER12> One reason you might actually want to silence a warning.

You might be developing an application that functions in some P2P type fashion or is specifically intended to be used in situations where network access will be intermittent (on a boat perhaps?).

In such a case a mysql_connect call may have a high chance of failing and your application is designed in such a way as to assume that this is likely (i.e working with the return code). In such a case failing the connection is not an error but expected behaviour.

<comment><USER13> This flags a design flaw, perhaps in mysql_connect. If a warning is trivial enough that it's reasonable to silence, it shouldn't exist. Otherwise, it's not reasonable to silence it!

I find it hard to believe that this is actually considered acceptable.

<comment><USER12> Surely that depends on your application, in 99.9% of cases where you are using LAMP to host some site a failed mysql_connect is probably an epic fail condition.

My point is rather that there may certainly be applications where this is not the case.

This is an area where exceptions are better than dumb warnings.

<comment><USER14> Using mysql_query is an epic fail condition. Period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The guys at Smarty did some pretty good analysis on the @ operator - specifically in cases where implementing it improved performance: [http://blog.rodneyrehm.de/archives/12-Improving-Disk-IO- in-P...](http://blog.rodneyrehm.de/archives/12-Improving-Disk-IO-in-PHP- Apps.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well it comes down to deciding on avoiding race conditions vs bad opcode generation, I guess.

Maybe the solution is to use php 5.4 if it makes better silence code but I am having a hard time letting go of suhosin.

<comment> X-Istence Yeah ... not having SuHoSin for PHP 5.4 means I haven't deployed it yet. I want to upgrade, but I like the extra security SuHoSin gives me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I fear it's never coming for 5.4, Stefan Esser seems to have moved onto ios security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is a reason scream exists in xdebug. There is a reason it's called scream.

</comment><comment><USER17> @operator is much faster in 5.4.x

$x = @$f["x"] is right place to use it.

$x = @custom_func() - is a disaster, do not do it

<comment><USER18> > $x = @$f["x"] is right place to use it.

No, it's not. There's built-in methods for that: isset() and empty().

<comment><USER7> empty() is not a good idea. What if $f["x"] is an empty string ""? Or 0, or 0.0, or "0", or any of the other values for which it returns true?

<comment><USER18> It completely depends on the use case. My point was, don't use @

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Reason 6: its part of PHP.</comment>


Common Lisp Music - <AUTHOR> https://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/snd/snd/clm.html <comment><USER2> Confusingly, there is also a project called "Common Music" which is a algorithmic composition tool that used to use Common Lisp, but now appears to use Scheme.

<http://commonmusic.sourceforge.net/>

I actually took a course in college many years ago under the professor who created that application. It's nice to see that it is still under development.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anything like this in Clojure?

<comment><USER4> Yes: <https://github.com/rosejn/overtone> <http://vimeo.com/16143967></comment></comment>