System Shock 1 source code released under GPL - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/NightDiveStudios/shockmac <comment><USER2> For context this is the outcome of a failed Kickstarter.

It's disappointing that they didn't stick to the goals of the Kickstarter which was a straight update of the original.

[https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.polygon.com/platform/amp...](https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2018/2/16/17016744/system- shock-reboot-hiatus-nightdive-interview)

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system- shock...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system- shock/posts/2115044)

This is probably the next best thing to completing the Kickstarter since clearly they've run out of funds.

I'm not angry that the money is gone but it is s classic software engineering error for scope to blow out and the budget to disappear as a result with inevitable project cancellation.

So it's my money, and the money of the other Kickstarter backers, that gives you this source. You're welcome.

To the credit of Nightdive, this is the most likely path through which system shock 1 will be cleaned up and updated, hopefully with usable controls as opposed to the flat out unusable controls of the original.

<comment><USER3> > "As the budget grew, we began a long series of conversations with potential > publishing partners."

Really? You need a publisher? Sigh. What year is it again?

<comment><USER4> PC/Mac only you are right. I haven't worked in the industry in a while but I vaguely recall one had to purchase production time and essentially predict your sales for Sony/Nintendo if the system was hot in the marketplace. If you aimed too low, one had customers without product for an extended period (most traditional game sales are in the first weeks), if you aimed too low, you had to eat those DVDs/carts at a loss after the retailers returned them. Also with consoles, the devkits for each were priced ridiculously at something like 3000 for PS3 and more for XBox360 (and those things red-ringed like crazy, went through three in three years), and there were test versions and special development versions one had to use to debug, I remember there was one special PS3 that was I want to say 10000 that was the size of a desktop computer that our resident graphics guru got. So deciding to add on console support for a PC game like they did is a huge commitment for a AAA game, it is not simply a matter of using an engine that works on all the platforms, all the QA has to be repeated and there are different extra steps for every platform but they didn't even get to that step.

<comment><USER5> $3,000 dev kit is pretty cheap. Just think of the cash a N64 developer had to drop on an SGI...$100k+

<comment><USER4> True, I remember there was also something of a shortage of Wii kits for a long time at least for my developer shop we were low on the priority list so we only had on Wii developer box for the US branch for at least a year after the Wii came out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a trip, seeing code I wrote 25 years ago. It's actually kind of scary how identifiable my style is; in a lot of ways I am still the same coder, although I tend to work at a much higher level of abstraction now. There was a certain craft to weaving all sorts of linked lists back and forth all the time and maintaining invariants that looking at my old code makes me a little nostalgic for, but I can't say I really miss it much.

<comment><USER7> What was the EDMS business? Also, any good stories from your origin days?

<comment><USER8> According to a Kickstarter update from Nightdive, EDMS was the physics system, written by Seamus Blackley. It stands for 'Emetic Dynamics Modeling System'... Possibly a reference to the way discarded items would go flying out the center of the viewport :)

Edit: EDMS/SOLITON.CC confirms above is correct (speculation about origin of the name is still speculation, however)

<comment><USER6> Oh, that EDMS! I had totally forgotten its code name.

Seamus's physics system was really ahead of its time, but unfortunately a ton of the work of getting a physics system to work in a real game is dealing with edge cases, numerical stability, etc., and we had huge problems getting everything to an industrial-strength state. (You will probably not be surprised if you look at the code.) Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri's full biped physics eventually had to be replaced by run-of-the-mill sphere physics just to make sure that things worked 100% of the time instead of 95%. Flight Unlimited was the real culmination of Seamus's physics work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice! I can only hope the same will be done for Thief 1 and 2 (and SS2) someday.

The Thief games still have a very active community that regularly produces high quality fan missions, and one of the original engine developers has started releasing unofficial patches to make the games run on modern systems a few years ago. I'd love to read the games' full source code and to be able to play them on Linux without bothering with Wine

<comment><USER10> There is a really good Thief clone called The Dark Mod, but unfortunately, it's not compatible with the original games.

[http://www.thedarkmod.com/main/](http://www.thedarkmod.com/main/)

<comment><USER9> The community hasn't really warmed up to The Dark Mod as I thought it would. I guess everyone's more comfortable with how the original games look and feel, and I can't say I don't understand it. Thief still plays great thanks to its minimal controls and UI (much unlike System Shock 1, which feels horribly outdated) and looks nice thanks to its amazing art direction (just look at some of the screenshots in here [https://twitter.com/thiefbsp](https://twitter.com/thiefbsp)), so I don't think people would feel the need to move on to a clone unless it was that much better.

<comment><USER11> Thief controls are still great, they feel "crisp". I think System Shock is fine too, I even like using a mouse pointer to aim and interact with the world. Ultima Underworld I find a bit harder to play.

<comment><USER12> In Underworld, I use wasdzxc keys for gross movement, and the mouse for finer control. 1, 2, and 3 can control looking up and down. Using the control scheme, rather than relying exclusively on the mouse, makes the game more playable for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish more older games would have their source released, even if not under the GPL. I worry that for many games the source is simply lost forever. At least put it out there for preservation in some way!

<comment><USER14> Agree, it's been always surprising to me that companies don't just release sources after say 10 years.

I wish for Fallout 1 and 2 sources. I think there would be strong community interest in hacking it.

<comment><USER15> [http://flarerpg.org/](http://flarerpg.org/)

<comment><USER14> Great, thanks for sharing. I'm definitely gonna take a closer look at these. Now imagine that the effort went into advancing the original sources rather than rewriting things from scratch.

I think that many companies would agree to release sources of abandonware games upon appropriate request from a fan base community, with the goal of preserving, maintaining and advancing the original title. In fact this is strategically beneficial action for the company, not from a financial perspective, but you can imagine some extra attention and buzz being created if the game was to be revived.

It's possible that many companies are not even aware of devoted communities around their older titles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I hope [http://fabiensanglard.net](http://fabiensanglard.net) will do a code review for this!

<comment><USER17> I'm not quite the programmer ~fabynou is, but I have been contemplating following his example for awhile. This might be the right project for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Dunno if just mobile problem, but most code has ^M instead of linebreaks; hard to browse oneline source

<comment><AUTHOR> It's because the code was written on classic Mac OS, which used CR newlines rather than the LF or CRLF styles used today.

<comment><USER19> Well, they could just apply a minimal cleanup for end lines before posting.

<comment><USER20> Then the people who want to compile it rather than complain about it would have to go through an extra hoop to fix it again. They published it the right way.

<comment><USER21> Plus, if they replaced the ^Ms, what would we have to complain about? This truly is the best way. People can complain, and people can compile.

<comment><USER20> That is an excellent point although I suspect your question is going to be answered in spades when people notice who the developer posting the code is.

<comment><USER21> I don't know anything about this developer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can't believe Github's renderer fails on ^M.

<comment><USER23> I sent a feature request in 2016 to GitHub to support Mac line endings, it was "passed to the team for future improvements". Not holding my breath.

<comment><USER24> This doesn't bode well for my wish to list file sizes...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There's also a fan remake that's been in progress since before the kickstarter.

[https://github.com/JosiahJack/Citadel](https://github.com/JosiahJack/Citadel)

</comment><comment><USER26> "This source release does not contain any game data". Can somebody explain what they mean by that?

<comment><USER12> It just has the game engine itself, without any of the images, sounds, maps, etc that make it System Shock.

GOG has a System Shock: Enhanced Edition, which also includes the original version of the game. I have no idea if that version of the data would work with this version of the engine, though. The engine is for the PowerPC Classic Mac OS version of the game.

<comment><USER27> >I have no idea if that version of the data would work with this version of the engine, though.

IIRC the Mac version doesn't use the original data files, but converted them to use the Mac's resource file format. And judging from a quick look at the source code it doesn't contain support for the original data files.

So: no, you'll have to use the Mac version's data files.

<comment><USER12> Thanks. I suspected as much, but haven't had the time to actually look at the source code.

Looks like another bump in the road in getting this thing running on e.g. Linux. It'll be interesting to look at reverse-engineered System Shock file format info, and see if anything but the data-loading functions would need to be changed, to use the more widely-available PC data.

From other comments, the sections in PPC asm and the actual I/O APIs would have to be dealt with too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I haven't played System Shock 1, but this sounds like great news - I'm excited to check it out.

System Shock 2 is the precursor to the more recent Bioshock franchise (Bioshock, Bioshock 2, Bioshock Infinite). They're not part of the same universe, but they share some of the same lineage, and the themes of the game are similar.

To be honest, I didn't know there was still interest in System Shock 1. Normally, Bioshock fans say to skip System Shock 1 and go right to System Shock 2, but maybe that's just because the themes of the first wouldn't appeal as much to Bioshock fans.

<comment><USER29> The timelines are so different they could be in the same universe. Assume plasmids died out when those sea slugs were harvested to extinction or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Love this comment:

// yeah yeah, goddamn, gotta fix this.....someday....soon....i promise....really

</comment><comment><USER31> Glad to see GPL3

</comment><comment><USER32> Nightdive has posted an update[1] which talks about the source code and clearly says they are back to development. Most notably:

"We have been able to re-use the majority of work we've done over the past year and we're making significant progress in a very short amount of time. With that said we'll be inviting our highest tier backers to privately test the game beginning in September at which point we estimate that the game will be fully playable, from start to finish."

[1]: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system- shock...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system- shock/posts/2135868)

</comment><comment><USER33> How difficukt would it be to port it to linux?

<comment><USER34> Nontrivial. There's a significant amount of Mac-specific code in the application, including some PowerPC assembly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Awesome. I've been wanting to finish that, but I scratched my CDROM. True story. Also, I don't have Windows 95 or an optical drive anymore. Is this one of those deals where the art assets are removed?

<comment><USER32> If you scratch a CD, as long as the scratch didn't scrape off the "label"/data side, you can just buff the surface of the disc with Brasso (brass polish) and a lens cloth. I'm not even joking -- you basically smooth away the scratches. I've done this to restore so many scratched discs. Just make sure it's the clear/thick side of the disc you're buffing, NOT the label (as the data layer is just underneath the label).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ooh more source code for classic Mac games! Most of the big PC games that have source releases (like the id engines) just came with DOS/Windows source, not the Mac ports.

</comment><comment><USER36> Yet another reason I'm not backing on Kickstarter any more. Only good thing to say about Kickstarter these days is that at least it isn't fig.co

</comment><comment><USER27> [https://github.com/ToxicFrog/shockmac/blob/master/ShockMac/G...](https://github.com/ToxicFrog/shockmac/blob/master/ShockMac/Game%20Src/BlitLargeAlign.s)

        inslwi   r0,r10,16,8
        insrwi   r11,r10,16,8
        rlwimi   r0,r10,16,24,31

How I missed this!

</comment><comment><USER37> I like is the fact the game is written in fixed point maths.

It's easy to forget that when this game was written computers either a) didn't have an FPU or b) the FPU was so slow it was useless.

I bet if I searched through the code long enough I'd find a sin/cos lookup table too :)

</comment><comment><USER38> Wow!

One question I have wanted to ask for a long time - why is the source code for old games often released under a free license, but artwork and other assets are not?

What are the incentives of the publisher in this case and why are they different for the source code and for the asset?

</comment><comment><USER39> I have a copy of _System Shock_ for Mac somewhere. I played it on the PC but never finished it and picked up the Mac version later at a discount. I was very disappointed to discover it had a crashing bug mid-game for which I could find no workaround.

<comment><USER40> Now that the source is published you can go back and fix it! ;)

<comment><USER39> Which sounds like a lot of work.

Oh, … and find an old mac to run it on …

Oh, and a copy of the right version of CodeWarrior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> CodeWarrior, now there's something I haven't thought about in ages.

</comment><comment><USER42> Is there a particular reason this is only the Mac source code?

<comment><USER43> It's quite possible that's the only version of the original source code that still exists. Many game studios didn't use source control even through the 90s and once a game was considered "done" there wasn't much perceived value in keeping the source code or original assets around. Consequently, many games from that period only exist in release form.

Edit: I stand corrected on Starcraft.

<comment><USER34> > For example, Blizzard only has the source code to Starcraft because someone > found a backup CD on eBay and returned it to them

This is a myth. Blizzard was already well on their way to releasing _StarCraft: Remastered_ when that CD was found -- it's very unlikely that the found CD contained anything unique.

[https://us.battle.net/forums/en/starcraft/topic/20757605637#...](https://us.battle.net/forums/en/starcraft/topic/20757605637#post-5)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is probably my favorite game of all time and I really hope somebody does something cool with this!

</comment><comment><USER45> How can they be "Copyright 2015-2018, Night Dive Studios, Incorporated."?

</comment><comment><USER46> Too bad you can't read any of it with the garbled ^M rendering on GitHub.

<comment><USER27> Use this fork with changed line endings: [https://github.com/ToxicFrog/shockmac](https://github.com/ToxicFrog/shockmac)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very interesting. So native Linux version is possible?

Thanks Nightdive!

</comment><comment><USER47>
      // We need a hack for inner bridge.  Inner bridge?  But I just met her!

The best part is always the comments.

<comment><USER48>
      // Returns whether or not in the humble opinion of the
      // sound system, the sample should be politely obliterated out of existence

      // look around at all my playthings
      // eighteen percent a year, for nothing

      // when all the leaves have fallen and turned to dust
      // will we remain entrenched within our ways
      // indifference, the plague that moves throughout this land

      // not in any way the right way to fix this bug, except
      // that it is the fastest way.  Doug says go.  Ask TJS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Love SS1.

Will never forget the elevator music after relief after being chased by some monsters.

</comment><comment><USER50> Codewarrior => worse IDE I've ever had to use. You literally want to break something/someone once you've used it for any extended period of time (PS2 Game console developement).

<comment><USER51> Really? I never did PS2 development, but I liked it for Mac stuff in the '90s and Palm stuff a little bit after that.

My recollection is that it was much nicer to use than Think C, and absolutely blew the doors off Visual C++ 1.5 and 4.0, which were the other IDEs I had to deal with at/around the time I first picked up CodeWarrior.

The Apple Code Fragment Manager (PPC dynamic loader) made me want to break things sometimes, but for its day CodeWarrior was a breath of fresh air, as I recall.

<comment><USER50> We were shipping the games on 3 different consoles, shipping on the original XBOX with it's superb integration to Visual Studio was such a breath of fresh air, and allowed you to debug directly and step through your code on the console.

Not so much for PS2 and Code Warrior, which was a pain to use and was integrated as an after thought to the PS2 SDK. So maybe using CW on Mac worked well (at the time), but targeting some other machine than the one running the compiler was painful at best with CW.

Sorry to ruffle any CW fans out there, but until you've used it to do PS game dev, you won't know the atrocities our team went through.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Unscreen – Remove video and GIF backgrounds 100% automatically - <AUTHOR> https://www.unscreen.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

We're excited to launch Unscreen today, a tool to remove the background of any video or GIF 100% automatically. It's based on the tech of remove.bg, but adds temporal consistency for smooth results and is super fast.

Thanks for your interest - Feedback is highly appreciated!

<comment><USER2> Seems this was posted a few hours earlier in "Show HN" [1].

Looks like a cool tool though, Can you give any information on what technology you used to make Unscreen and Remove.bg? Tensorflow?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22495518](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22495518)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is anybody working on an alternative to Wikipedia? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Larry Sanger (wikipedia creator) is working on the encyclophere: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Esw3gXK82Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Esw3gXK82Y) Description from that video: Shorter video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PrWG..](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PrWG..). The Encyclosphere will be a decentralized, leaderless, centerless network of encyclopedic content, which does for encyclopedias what the Blogosphere did for blogs. But to make such a network, we need encyclopedia format standards. Wikipedia ex-founder Larry Sanger is starting the Knowledge Standards Foundation to convene a discussion and coding efforts to creating such standards.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very interesting approach!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I know of h2g2 - [https://www.h2g2.com/](https://www.h2g2.com/) .

Wikipedia ('natch) has a list at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_encyclopedias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_encyclopedias) .

</comment><comment><USER4> Considering the quality of Wikipedia and the effort that has gone into it, why would anyone attempt to work on an alternative?</comment>


Why is Dart keeping certain cruft from other languages? - jarek-foksa https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!topic/misc/8vfICVygruE

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I'm missing something big but Dart looks to me like Slightly Better Java, yet another boring incremental improvement on languages that are well past their sell-by date. There are plenty of more daring and yet more mature alternatives that already provide the security of running on a Java or Javascript VM (Scala, CoffeeScript, etc) so I'm really fuzzy on just what they're trying to do here.

<comment><USER2> > CoffeeScript

How is coffeescript 'daring' in any way ? It is a thin veneer on top of javascript, syntactic sugar for your coffee.

Dart is a hundred times more daring. It is trying to push optional typing. No mainstream language has such a feature, and not even so much non-mainstream ones.

It doesn't say anything about my opinion of any of those two languages (i actually use and like CoffeeScript), but it just sounds to me like you're looking at syntax only, where the important part of a language is its semantics.

<comment><USER3> > How is coffeescript 'daring' in any way ? It is a thin veneer on top of > javascript, syntactic sugar for your coffee.

CoffeeScript does compile into JS, but so does Dart. Both are in that sense just syntactic sugar.

CoffeeScript does make quite big changes to syntax though (often inspired by Ruby, Python, etc.) in many cases more than Dart which seems inspired by Java - and I don't think anyone considers Java 'inspiring' (useful and familiar, sure).

> Dart is a hundred times more daring. It is trying to push optional typing. > No mainstream language has such a feature, and not even so much non- > mainstream ones.

ActionScript.

<comment><USER4> > CoffeeScript does compile into JS, but so does Dart. Both are in that sense > just syntactic sugar.

With regards to Dart, that's like saying C++ is just syntactic sugar for assembly. When there's semantic differences between the mapping from one programming domain to another, I would argue that constitutes "compilation". I would agree with the statement for CoffeeScript though.

<comment><USER3> This is a matter of degree.

Dart's types do not affect runtime behavior (at least in the compiled-JS route), so basic types are quite close to JavaScript's, much like CoffeeScript.

There are also no features in Dart that cannot be compiled into JS, like say threading with shared state.

So overall I think it is reasonable to say that both Dart and CoffeeScript are close to JavaScript and built specifically to compile into it.

<comment><USER5> For the most part it's designed to be easy to compile to JavaScript, but there are bizarre exceptions like support for arbitrary precision integers. (I believe this is ignored by the Dart to JS compiler.)

<comment><USER6> This is true, and a known bug: <http://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=1533>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These are all superficial syntactic complaints, following Wadler's law. My experience is that every new language gets more than its fair share of these.

<comment><USER4> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4516619>

<comment><USER4> This shouldn't have been downvoted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One thing I would love to see in languages that can work with single or double quotes is a practice like double quoted strings are text that will be displayed to users and single quoted won't. That way editors and tools can automatically help with localization, and can spot when you mix and match.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can feel myself getting dumber reading this discussion. Christoph Husse is a donkey.

</comment><comment><USER10> when did it become so trendy to hate semicolons?

<comment><USER11> A small but very vocal sub community of programmers hates semicolons. Really, semicolons are nice for readability and nice for your tools, as they make statement termination explicit. I was on the losing side (a semicolon lover) of this debate when it came to scala.

<comment><USER12> I think this is mostly bikeshedding, but I can't agree with your statement.

The claim is not that we shouldn't have explicit statement terminating characters. It's that we already have one - new lines - and that mandating semicolons is both redundant and bug prone.

Personally, and while it doesn't really affect my choice of languages, I think you should be able to use one or the other, but not two consecutively.

In any case, excuse me for posting this, and I promise I won't discuss it here any more.

<comment><USER13> I frequently split long statements over multiple lines for readability purposes. Having an explicit statement terminator makes this possible.

<comment><USER14> I do this all the time in Groovy and don't use semicolons...

<comment><USER15> > I do this all the time in Groovy and don't use semicolons

Groovy's semicolon-less mode has lots of syntax restrictions. E.g.this doesn't compile...

      println true
       ? "yes" : "no"

<comment><USER14> > Groovy's semicolon-less mode has lots of syntax restrictions. E.g.this > doesn't compile...

I would't say 'lots'. It pretty much boils down to one thing: 'leave the operator on the previous line'

println true ?

            "yes" :

            "no"

For example is just fine.

<comment><USER15> This compiles and runs OK in Java...

      class Hello{
        public static void main(String[] args){
          System.out.println( true
           ? "yes" : "no" );
        }
      }

In order to work without semicolons, Groovy's grammar must restrict some things that work in Java. Semicolon-less mode in Groovy has a price.

<comment><USER16> Ok, I've always wondered about that '?' operator. What's the point?

It was said (at the time) that C-like syntax meant a program was a series of expression, not statements. So something like

       (void)1;

is valid syntax. Even compound expressions are valid:

       a=5, b=6;

Where I feel abandoned (betrayed?) is this: why then aren't compound statements also expressions? E.g.

       {
       int x=Foo(50);
       Bar(x);
       }

The value returned could just be the value of the final executed expression (Bar yields a value). No need for 'return' at all.

And no need for '?'.

       int x = { if (i > j) 5; else 6; }

<comment><USER15> You're right about statements being expressions and returning the last executed expression. In fact, since using Clojure I've gotten used to these, e.g.

      (-> (Foo 50) (Bar))
      (def x (if (> i j) 5 6))

I do miss the static typing and more readable syntax, though, and have appreciated Haskell in this regard. Too bad things like powerful macros and convenient syntax don't seem to gel together well in the same language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why does Dart look so boring? I'm just not buying that whole "familiarity" argument. If a language is truly great then I'm sure people will learn how to express their thoughts in that language.

I know syntax isn't everything in a language but it's pretty important. There are much better (IMO) ways to express yourself than the approach Dart takes.

<comment><USER18> > Why does Dart look so boring?

So it appeals to the widest (and thus) more average programmer.

Languages have an implicit audience and purpose. For example I consider Java a language designed to be consumed by code-monkeys. The mentality that you have a large enterprise project and you look to India to hire 200 programmers to finish it for you. The language has to have static typing, it has to be familiar to those learning previous languages (C++, C), IDEs are the preferred work environments, everything is very explicit and verbose.

Take Haskell, it is a language that would appeal to an academically minded developer. Someone who knows about catamorphisms, uses words like endofunctor, or say wouldn't mind struggling for weeks to comprehend what a Monad is.

Those are 2 different audiences. Neither language is better or worse, they are just tools and in some cases one is a better fit, in other case another one is.

Dart is closer to the Java.. It wants to be used in large code bases, by many (including average and junior) programmers. So adding things like fancy list comprehensions, de-structuring assignment, pattern matching and stuff like that, might not fit with its goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If code branches in the woods and no one is around to program it, does it start a flamewar?

Does anyone use Dart?</comment>


HP takes a swing at Apple's MacBook Air with new Voodoo Envy laptop - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2008/06/10/hp-takes-a-swing-at-apples-macbook-air-with-new-voodoo-envy-laptop/

<comment><USER2> The Ethernet-in-the-power-brick is a cool idea. It's like a docking station, but smaller. (Of course, a docking station would have video and USB... but you have to start somewhere and this is a damn cool idea.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Ok, it's a small laptop. Great. So are many others. Does it have anything else in common with the Macbook Air?

<comment><USER4> Does the MacBook Air differ from other laptops on any parameter other than size?

<comment><USER5> MacOS X. It's a deal-killer to a lot of us.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, the Air would be much nicer without the OS X tax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> God forbid you have a baby in the house that climbs up the desk and steps on it. Its going to be a 2 thousand dollar junk :).</comment>


Ask HN: The Bitcoin adoption paradox - <AUTHOR> Am I right in seeing a sort of paradox in the adoption of Bitcoin as it exists today?
There is a finite supply of Bitcoin, and mining speed of new Bitcoins is reducing all the time. Hence as more people buy into Bitcoin, the value tends to increase, since there's more money in the system and less Bitcoin to go around.
Let's say Bitcoin takes off in the real world and various merchants start accepting it.
Since Bitcoin is useful now, more people buy in. But since more people are always buying in and the total pool is limited, the value continues to go up. The more merchants support Bitcoin, the more people adopt Bitcoin, and the more valuable it becomes. The more the value continues to increase, the less people want to spend it. Why spend a dollar if it'll be worth $2 tomorrow?
The more useful it becomes, the better it is to not use it. <comment><USER2> > The more the value continues to increase, the less people want to spend it.

Exactly the opposite. Bitcoin value has gone up, my purchasing power has increased. Now I can finally I can afford that silver Bugatti. Why not spend the money now so I can have the life that I want rather than taking all those nice digits into my grave?

</comment><comment><USER3> > Why spend a dollar if it'll be worth $2 tomorrow?

Why sell your house right now, when you know land prices are going to increase in the future? Factor in the rate on increase (which is not going to be 100% in a day once the currency stabilizes), and the benefit of holding vs spending isn't that skewed anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> The example of $1 to $2 was a deliberate exaggeration really. It still seems to me that if something is a good investment, you are less likely to want to sell it now. The better Bitcoin seems as an investment, the more people can be expected to lean towards holding instead of spending.</comment></comment>


US Embassy Requires Chinese Government Made Hikvision Cameras - <AUTHOR> https://ipvm.com/reports/us-embassy-hik <comment><USER2> What computer technology's not Chinese made?</comment>


One minor point on the comment bullshit - <AUTHOR> http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2012/01/one_minor_point_on_the_comment.html

<comment><USER2> I'm not a fan of Seigler's blog and his recent spate of content-free rants but I doubt very much the reason they don't want comments is because it adds link juice. Those who may have written a reply on their own blog wouldn't choose not to just because comments were enabled.</comment>


NASA astronauts to fly Orion spacecraft into deep space - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9217027/NASA_astronauts_to_fly_Orion_spacecraft_into_deep_space

<comment><USER2> Another article with prettier pictures:

<http://dvice.com/archives/2011/05/nasa-unveils-ne.php>

I suppose that at the very least this new design solves the "looks too much like Apollo" problem of the old Orion.

Other weirdness: given that it's supposedly designed for "deep space", why does the design spec only call for it to support astronauts for "up to 21 days"? Heck, even Gemini 7 lasted nearly 14 days, and that was with two people in a capsule smaller than a fat guy's pants.

Also, do we have a rocket to launch this thing yet? Wasn't Ares cancelled? What do we stick it on?

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone keen on a longbet that SpaceX still beats them there?

<comment><USER2> This sounds like bad news for SpaceX. Apparently NASA has decided (no doubt under pressure from the senators for whatever-states-these-things-get-built- in) to go back to building its own manned capsules. For a while it looked like they were going to subcontract the basic put-dude-in-orbit missions to SpaceX, but I guess not.

NASA has a way of making things sound much lamer than they should be. Hey, y'know what's a good name for a spaceship? Dragon! Y'know what's a bad name for a spaceship? Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle!

<comment><USER4> The sad thing is that most likely, nothing will come of it. They'll be the usual "in 10-20 years" bullshit (i.e. some time way beyond the current Congressional sitting/Presidential term of office) and the whole thing will get quietly cancelled.</comment></comment></comment>


The RF Telecommunications System for the New Horizons Mission to Pluto [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~tcase/NH%20RF%20Telecom%20Sys%20ID1369%20FINAL_Deboy.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Note that the Ultrastable Oscillator they use for their 30 MHz frequency reference has a short term stability of 1 part in 10 trillion! To compare, TCXOs used in commercial circuitry often have a stability of around 1 part per million.

<comment><USER2> While impressive it's not clear why such a low phase noise oscillator is needed. This oscillator looks like it takes up lots of space and power. So some justification for the device should be presented. Furthermore its possible to create a robust FEC that would be tolerant of burst errors due to phase noise. So the paper is incomplete without some mention of phase noise and the FEC used.

Other than the high end parts used in this device, it is fairly low-tech compared to most modern communications systems. That is a good thing for something like this I guess.

<comment><USER3> Keep in mind this was designed in 2002 using technology that was considered rock-solid & mature at that time. Spacecraft technology always seems outdated because of the lead times required: on something like New Horizons, it's between 15 and 20 years from component design to being used for its primary mission.

In addition, as another commenter noted, the reference oscillator is used for REX (the radiometry experiment on board New Horizons) and quality of gathered measurements for this experiment was one of the primary needs here: being able to use the component for the communications subsystem is just good power/mass engineering at work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A couple more comments are available on the submission from 3 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9890476](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9890476)</comment>


Show HN: Bugfender – A State of the Art Remote Logger for Mobile Apps - <AUTHOR> https://bugfender.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Co-founder here. We've also written recently about the 3 years of Bugfender, how we almost killed the product and how we managed to get now to over 10M installs: [https://bugfender.com/blog/three-years- bugfender-9-5m-users/](https://bugfender.com/blog/three-years- bugfender-9-5m-users/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Awesome design, congrats on this new stage of your project!!</comment>


Disabled JavaScript myths - <AUTHOR> http://blog.istvan-antal.ro/2010/10/disabled-javascript-myths/ <comment><USER2> Seems like JS is a hot topic today. Let me try to argue in favor of disabling JS, using the very same three points. I'm one of those more strict JS disable people, but feel free to correct me if I see things wrong.

1) Using JavaScript is insecure: Without doubt JS had security holes in the past, and they continue to show up.

2) JavaScript is a privacy threat: This has a lot to do with what you define as privacy. To my knowledge it is possible to track my cursor in the entire website, while I'm on it. This is a example of what I call a privacy issue. Some people my not care about that. Interactive parts of a website always expose the way I interact with it. Sometimes this is fine, because the product needs it to function.

3) JavaScript saves bandwidth: I think that not so much because of the initial load of a webpage. JS enables a webpage to costantly query back to the server. An example is gmail, and the notification for a new email, while you are logged into gmail.

People should not take this too personal. If your webpage is truthfully, or offers something I'm eager to use, I'll give it to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> > 1) Using JavaScript is insecure: Without doubt JS had security holes in the > past, and they continue to show up.

Those are browser vulnerabilities, not JavaScript vulnerabilities, you should have seen the same happen with PDF, these are browser bugs, they get patched. Example: if your break malfunctions in your car, you'd get it fixed instead of replacing your car with a bike.

> 2) JavaScript is a privacy threat: This has a lot to do...

Native applications can also do that. Here you could easily write a browser extension to disable mouse tracking or whatever you wish, you don't get this so easy anywhere else.

> 3) JavaScript saves bandwidth: I think that not so much because of the > initial load of a webpage. JS enables a webpage to costantly query back to > the server. An example is gmail, and the notification for a new email, while > you are logged into gmail.

If you do this correctly you could mostly get away with few bytes per request. You can't do this without JS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I argue this one all the time, just look at my post history. The fact is the world moves on and this is the way of the future whether one likes it on not. It is happening, has reached critical mass, and users are demanding the increased usability that it provides. Further marketing and accounting departments are crunching the numbers and finding that you spend more chasing this small sub-set of the market. When faced with spending 25% of your budget chasing a slower development model to support 5% of the market or to spend that 25% adding revenue streams or increasing conversion on the 95% then it becomes a no brainier.</comment>


Show HN: Bashttpd – An HTTP Server and a Web Framework in Bash Script - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/x1n13y84issmd42/bashttpd <comment><AUTHOR> So, I wanted to learn more about Bash scripting and make something in it for fun & profit, and here it is — a nearly fully featured HTTP server, accompanied with a small framework for web apps, both written in Bash Script. At the moment it responds to all kinds of requests, fully supports binary files & file upload, form data, JSON requests & responses, has MySQL utilities, does routing, renders simple HTML templates and more.</comment>


Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/11/06/454949422/a-q-a-with-lesley-miley-the-black-twitter-engineer-who-left-over-diversity-probl?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=202606 <comment><USER2> > There's a document at Twitter that lists the schools that Twitter wants to > recruit from. This document was penned by Alex Roetter, the Senior VP of > engineering. He had his other directors contribute to it, modify it and > refine it. It listed Cal, Stanford, CMU, Waterloo, MIT, typical schools like > that. Never listed any state schools. Never listed any HBCUs. It listed > certain companies and excluded certain companies. It excluded certain > titles. So if you're a software engineer in tests [an engineering role] at > Microsoft, that's not a "real" software engineer. And some of the best > engineers I know are software engineers who test for Microsoft!

Leaving aside all ethical questions, it is baffling and sad to see how un- scientific an approach to hiring and staffing we take. This is about pride and self-image; there's zero reason to believe that restricting your hiring to certain universities, certain previous roles, etc. gets you a more effective engineering team. (And I say this as an MIT graduate in software engineering proper.) If anything, being willing to hire from more universities and more career paths gets you different forms of experience, avoiding an engineering monoculture, for less money and time than it takes to participate in the top- university recruiting extravagance or hire away those engineers already in demand.

One of the particularly unfortunate things about the current software industry is that it makes these sorts of policies non-testable. Companies are supposed to compete, but a number of factors, from the wildly inconsistent availability of venture funding, to network effects, to personal connections between founders and people already established in the industry, means the market is remarkably inefficient at determining how productive a company actually was. The fact that Twitter did as well as it did conveys zero information about how much better it could have done. There are so many obvious technical things they screwed up (developer relations, notably) and succeeded _despite_ those failures; it's equally likely that they succeeded _despite_ many of their non- technical decisions instead of _because_ of them.

<comment><USER3> I disagree.

All companies have only a finite amount of time/money to spend on hiring, so they're often forced to use crude heuristics to filter out resumes, especially in companies that get a huge number of applicants every year, like Twitter. Maybe it's just me, but based on my experience, filtering candidates (as a first pass) based on school or previous role does yield many false positives and negatives, but it still works pretty damn well compared to other equally fast/cheap filtering methods.

<comment><USER4> I can get why managers think the important thing is to save managerial time. But as somebody who has just gotten done with a round of hiring developers, I believe this is a false economy.

If I can hire just one good developer, I'll have added thousands of hours of effort. If I can find one who settles in, it could be tens of thousands of hours. If I choose especially well, I'll get somebody who acts as a multiplier on those around them. If I choose poorly, I could get somebody who's net negative, making messes and driving away good people.

Given what's at stake, I can spend what seems like ridiculously large amounts of time on hiring and still come out ahead. Maybe if we were drowning in good people, I could still take the risk of tossing good people in the trash. But demand for developers is incredibly high.

Actually, I take it back. HN, y'all should definitely choose people only with top-3 CS degrees. Because then while you're all fighting over a small number of Stanford job hoppers with crazy demands, I can keep hiring the less obvious candidates, ones who are happy to stay for years.

<comment><USER5> Realistically, I think this policy probably makes sense at a company the size and visibility of Twitter. They probably get enough applicants from the schools listed to fill their needs. I worked at a company of comparable size, and they actually stopped giving referral bonuses because it stopped being useful to pay people bonuses when they had 100+ people apply for every available position.

<comment><USER4> I suppose. But it's based upon a couple of theories that I disagree with: a) the people you need are the ones who apply unprompted, and b) it's ok if you throw out your best potential hires.

My experience is that large companies mostly end up being seas of mediocrity, and I think lazy hiring is a big cause of that. I think one of the drivers of it is companies seeing programmers as fungible resources, so hiring becomes less about getting the best possible people carefully fitted to teams and more about getting adequate people with low managerial effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I dislike how affirmative action has a bad reputation. Affirmative action is not about lowering standards. It's about having a diversified candidate pool. Sounds like Twitter wasn't willing to invest the effort to have a diversified pool.

It definitely pays off in the long run, but it takes some effort in the short run. My company sponsors some student groups and encourages engineers to be active in recruiting outside of their circles. It's paid off as we've moved from a monoculture to a company with a workforce that represents our community.

<comment><USER7> On the contrary, affirmative action is inherently about lowering standards.

If somebody from a disadvantaged group is hired based on having sufficient skill, talent and/or experience for a given job, then affirmative action was not involved. The person was hired based on merit.

But if affirmative action is used to justify the hiring of somebody, it inherently means that they did not have the sufficient skill, talent, and/or experience necessary for the job. The person was hired not based on merit, but based on some other, unrelated factor.

Hiring based on something other than merit automatically means that standards were lowered, or at best they were merely ignored.

<comment><USER6> Affirmatibe action means that you take action to diversify your applicant pool. It's back from when you couldn't just apply online.

Not that you hire anyone based on race / etc. you still hire the best candidate.

I forget that the words affirmative action mean something different to a younger generation who mostly have encountered a weird perversion of the original meaning in higher education.

<comment><USER8> > Affirmative action means that you take action to diversify your applicant > pool.

Wikipedia describes it differently:

"Affirmative action or positive discrimination is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group [...]. The nature of affirmative action policies varies from region to region. Some [...] use a quota system, whereby a certain percentage of jobs or school vacancies must be reserved for members of a certain group."

Wouldn't using a quota system be lowering the bar?

Using your definition, if I recruit in California, and I expand to begin recruiting in Oregon, then I have diversified my applicant pool. Have I successfully employed affirmative action?

<comment><USER9> Well, I went to a magnet school that routinely has the discussion around diversity and affirmative action year after year. Certain parts of the county had far more representation than the poorer parts. They diversified by making sure they picked more people from around the county. It did not improve numbers of disadvantaged groups, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Twitter's response seems pretty untrue. Specifically, they say:

"Beyond just disclosing our workforce representation statistics, we have also publicly disclosed our representation goals for women and underrepresented minorities for 2016, making us the largest tech company to put hard numbers around its diversity commitment."

Are they unaware of Intel's diversity initiative? Intel has set hard goals for 2020, and is continuing to track metrics yearly [1].

To claim that one is tracking the state of the art, and simultaneously be so unaware of what the state of the art actually is, is a sign that an organization is languishing, regardless of what the subject is. In this case, the subject is diversity, and the organization seems to still be Twitter.

There are ways to avoid these kinds of issues: if you run an organization that you want to build a diverse workforce in, I recommend that you hire a diversity consultant. (I believe that Clef, for example, did approximately this, and got staggeringly good results.)

[1] [http://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/diversity/pdfs/Intel...](http://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/diversity/pdfs/Intel_Diversity_in_Technology_backgrounder.pdf)

<comment><USER11> The state of the art in diversity appears to be blaming whites for the under- representation of certain minorities groups (blacks, Hispanics), even when that under-representation is actually due to the over-representation of other minority groups (Asians): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10527668](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10527668)

How will a diversity consultant (whatever that is) help with this? Recommend Anti-Asian quotas, like the kind elite universities in the US already employ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Recruiting from a limited set of schools is widespread:

[https://hbr.org/2015/10/firms-are-wasting-millions- recruitin...](https://hbr.org/2015/10/firms-are-wasting-millions-recruiting- on-only-a-few-campuses)

Which leads to the practice turning into a self-reinforcing cycle:

[http://www.economist.com/node/21640316](http://www.economist.com/node/21640316)

It's a symptom rather than a cause.

</comment><comment><USER13> > There's a document at Twitter that lists the schools that Twitter wants to > recruit from. ... It listed Cal, Stanford, CMU, Waterloo, MIT, typical > schools like that.

> Never listed any state schools.

Err... Cal?

<comment><USER14> And Waterloo. This guy is really not paying attention.

<comment><USER15> Is Waterloo known for a large number of black students? Honest question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> According to the figures in this[1] article, whites are technically _under- represented_ at Twitter relative to their percentage of the general population, yet both it and the NPR article take for granted that there is a lack of ethnic diversity at Twitter and other tech companies, despite non- whites collectively being over-represented at them.

While certain minorities (blacks, Hispanics) are indeed under-represented at tech companies like Twitter, others (Asians) are over-represented, and to such a degree that whites actually end up under-represented. Yet a careless reader could easily be misled by these and other articles into believing that whites are crowding out minorities, which is demonstrably not the case.

I doubt this deception is accidental.

[1] [http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/07/twitter-diversity- st...](http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/07/twitter-diversity-stats-women- race-tech)

<comment><USER8> Another question is: are black software engineers under-represented at Twitter? Not blacks, but black software engineers. There may be more or fewer black software engineers per capita among blacks compared to other races. For example, if more or fewer blacks graduate college per capita among blacks, then we would likely expect to find more or fewer black software engineers per capita.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> He has every right to push forward what he thinks is the right thing. Absolutely, and so does everyone else who wants to bring whomever they want to give advantage to.

I should be able to lobby for my friends and my circle and he should be able to lobby for his friends and his circle.

And no doubt that their workforce does not mirror society at large. But I think this ignores the percentages of people graduating in different fields. Yes, Twitter could suck up more than its percentage, but if there is a limited pool of candidates of group X, then other companies will necessarily be under the average.

One thing I don't get is what the demographics of the user base has to do with anything? If I buy a Nikon camera or Lenovo computer, should I believe they need to hire more Americans, or even Americans of my ethnicity?

That said, I think one measure of bias base-line one could use would be to get the percentages of minorities represented in minority owned and run (tech) businesses and assess the percentage of minorities in those businesses who do not represent the owner or top management.

So look at he percentage of non Black minorities in black owned or run businesses or the percentages of minorities other than Korean or Russian, etc. in businesses run or owned by minorities. This could provide a base-line to work with. To gauge if only majority run or owned businesses are biased or all businesses are biased, or just some and understand why that happens.

However, blindly promoting that businesses (or tech in this case) all more or less show a workforce diversity proportional to the population at large, is likely ignoring other inssues influencing those trends.

<comment><USER2> > One thing I don't get is what the demographics of the user base has to do > with anything? If I buy a Nikon camera or Lenovo computer, should I believe > they need to hire more Americans, or even Americans of my ethnicity?

Twitter's product design has much more of an editorial influence on what happens with the product than Lenovo's or Nikon's. A closer analogy might be a local newspaper: I absolutely would feel uncomfortable if the entire staff of my newspaper were outsiders to my community, choosing which articles to run and how to lay them out and how to seek writers, even if the writers themselves were people who lived in my community.

But since you brought up cameras, it is worth noting that the answer is yes. HP had an incident a few years ago where its webcams' face-tracking feature just could not track black people. (Competitors, like Dell, were fine.) If they had a nontrivial number of black people writing and testing these cameras in-house, they would probably have noticed this well before their customers did.

Google, a few weeks ago, had an incident where it literally auto-tagged photos of black people as "Gorillas." Again, presumably what happened is that the dogfood users were much more likely to train the algorithm with pictures of gorillas than with pictures of black people.

Twitter, like most consumer-facing software, has its product design influenced by its own developers. If everyone at the company uses Twitter, it's natural to prioritize features based on what they themselves use. (And it's because of this that consumer-facing software is generally plain better than enterprise software; the developers and PMs and testers care more.) Given how much of Twitter's userbase is people using it for protests, from Tahrir Square to #blacklivesmatter, and given how much "Black Twitter" is a thing, it only makes sense to make sure that at least some of their employees in decision- making positions care personally about these use cases of Twitter.

<comment><USER16> I do recall the HP camera fiasco. That was proof of some of the deficiencies attributable to lack of diversity.

However, that does not speak to the company doing better or worse over all due to this lack of diversity, unless we presume that lack of diversity is by and large negative and diversity is by and large positive.</comment></comment></comment>


Bash on Windows: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - <AUTHOR> https://www.webreflection.co.uk/blog/2016/04/13/bash-on-ubuntu-on-windows <comment><USER2> You are confusing bash with other packages (apt is not bash - if I installed bash and it "came with" a package manager, I'd be suspicious... or in this case, know that I'm using Ubuntu's bash). Your expressing dismay at lack of anything further than coreutils seems odd.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can someone explain what MS bash will do (or potentially do) better than mingw/msys?

<comment><USER4> It is _not_ Microsoft bash. It's this bash:

* [http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/bash](http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/bash)

Alongside many of these:

* [http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/](http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/)

With that in mind, the differentiator from git bash, MSYS, Cygwin, and so forth should become clearer.

<comment><USER3> What differentiator? They are all using the same source code. Msys, Cygwin, now Microsoft all provide a whole ecosystem of gnu tools. (Git just repackages msys, I think.)

My level of understanding of the difference between cygwin and msys is that, when you build an executable, cygwin requires its own dll's to run it while msys uses the system dll's. The result is with cygwin you have full posix while with msys some things that Windows does in a non-posixy way are missing or wonky. But it is much easier to distribute msys-built binaries.

So what is the differentiator with the Microsoft version? That they are hooking it up to Ubuntu package management?

<comment><USER4> You're missing the difference between this:

* [http://packages.ubuntu.com/source/trusty/bash](http://packages.ubuntu.com/source/trusty/bash)

and what I actually pointed to, which was this:

* [http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/bash](http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/bash)

Your second sentence reveals that you're not getting the differentiator. To get this, read the blurbs and what the Microsoft developers themselves emphasize about this. It's pretty much the very first thing mentioned every time. Sometimes, its even in the headline.

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11391891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11391891) (in the third sentence)

* [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/04/06/bash...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/04/06/bash-on-ubuntu-on-windows-download-now-3/) (in the first sentence)

* [https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/03/30/run-bash-o...](https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/03/30/run-bash-on-ubuntu-on-windows/) (in the fourth paragraph, repeated in the fifth)

* [http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/04/howto-ubuntu-on-windo...](http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/04/howto-ubuntu-on-windows.html) (in the first sentence)

* [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DevelopersCanRunBashShellAndUs...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DevelopersCanRunBashShellAndUsermodeUbuntuLinuxBinariesOnWindows10.aspx) (in the URL!)

<comment><USER3> So what I get from that is that, like cygwin, and unlike msys, the target is full linux userspace compatibility. So is it essentially like MS is bundling cygwin as a windows system library?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Curses is the GUI for Bash. Anyone tied getting it to work yet?

</comment><comment><USER4> There are several problems with this article. In no particular order, here are some:

* The "only missing platform" statement is incorrect. The Bourne Again shell is not part of the BSDs, for starters. It's available through packages/ports. But it's not part of the operating system. If, however, one is including add-on softwares that can be installed by the user; then by that measure Windows was _not a "missing platform" in the first place_, add-on Unix-like shells (not solely the Bourne Again shell, either) having been available for Windows for decades.

* "all it matters is that we are going to have a universal scripting language" \-- As I mentioned at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11417487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11417487) in fact what matters is that the range of tools _expands_ , and does the _opposite_ of shrinking to just one shell.

* "nothing that requires even most basic UI will work" \-- This is demonstrated false by a video of Ubuntu X11 applications running on the Windows NT Linux subsystem; which is on Hacker News at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11466270](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11466270) .

* The answer to "how .. do I install node.js that is not the 0.10 legacy version that apt-get is offering me?" is in fact "Use something newer than the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS that you're installing from by default." Contrast [http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/nodejs](http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/nodejs) with [http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/nodejs](http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/nodejs) . And stop abusing "legacy" to mean "old", while you're about it.

* "everything runs as root by default" \-- Incorrect, and this is in the release notes. [http://askubuntu.com/questions/754942/](http://askubuntu.com/questions/754942/)

* "You can see on the left the Bash on Windows console full of errors after installing PyGTK" \-- Ironically, both of the images clearly show something that is not that; but is, rather, a console full of errors after attempting to install _udev_. Indeed, the image clearly shows the installer stating that "python-gtk2 is already the newest version". It should not be surprising that the Linux "plug and play manager" doesn't install on the Windows NT kernel. Indeed, it should not be too surprising also that an install procedure that requires 14.04's upstart in order to succeed is not going to work too well on a system where upstart won't work. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416376](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416376)

* "I'm not sure how to copy and paste if not through the mouse" \-- This is just a matter of M. Giammarchi not being familiar with the Windows keyboard shortcuts for pulling up the system menu for a console window and selecting "Edit/Mark" and "Edit/Paste", which are just specific instances of the general shortcuts listed in [https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/126449](https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/126449) and which have been there for a long time. Then of course there are [http://withinrafael.com/new-experimental-console-features-in...](http://withinrafael.com/new-experimental-console-features-in-windows-threshold/) , [https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2014/10/07/console-im...](https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2014/10/07/console-improvements-in-the-windows-10-technical-preview/) , and [https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/mt427362.aspx](https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/mt427362.aspx) .</comment>


DNSMadeEasy under major (over 50Gbps) DDoS Attack out of China - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/DNSMadeEasy

<comment><USER2> I'm interning at a major managed DNS provider and this actually happens more often than you think. Most of the time it ends by working with telcos like level3, cogent etc, blackholing routes, sacrificing a certain geographical location in favor of keeping others alive and basically just waiting it out. It's interesting how because of the nature of the internet, DDoSes are hard to deal with.

<comment><USER3> Too bad we can't just permanently sacrifice China.

<comment><USER4> There's an anti-DDOS service out there, Progent or something. Part of their solution adds all of APNIC's ip addresses into your router's bogon list when you're under attack. It turns out for most DDOS's if you turn off china, the attack just ends.

<comment><USER5> I think you're thinking of Prolexic, and my recommendation is that you take any of their claims with a heaping helping of salt. Things may have changed in the 5 years since I've totally forgotten everything I knew about DoS mitigation, but it wasn't the case then that you could simply black hole China to evade them.

A more common mechanism used by real networks to mitigate these attacks in production is to pinpoint the _target_ of the attack and offramp its traffic in the ISP core to a "regional scrubbing center" where advanced filtering tools (for instance, packet filters that can handle ACLs with high tens of thousands of terms) can try to sort through the crap.

<comment><USER6> At my colo that is exactly the sort of strategy they use, they have bought a bunch of routers that use FPGA based filters for that.

The one scenario I can think of where that might be a problem is if they'd start flooding all the known hosts in a network for the specific purpose of overwhelming the routers. And even those hardware based filtering tools have upper limits.

<comment><USER4> There's really no need to do that. A large enough BotNet can take out almost any host doing nothing more than connecting and doing a GET / HTTP/1.1. Few websites can handle a sudden surge in traffic from 100,000 bots.

<comment><USER6> The idea behind an ACL for such an attack is that the same hosts will be used over and over again, taken from a large pool of zombies. So, let's take your example of 100,000 bots, an ACL in the upstream router (as seen from the host) could be used to checked against to identify those packets from the zombies and discard them. After all, a single attack of all 100,000 bots at once will just bring the host to its knees for the time-out of the connections and then it will bounce back up again. So, to increase the effectiveness of the attack they reconnect after every lost connection asking for another resource. If they're smart they'll vary agent strings and other characteristics to make it hard to narrow down who is and who is not legit.

Initially you don't have much to go on during such an attack and packet filtering is a reasonably expensive operation when you want to do it for a large number of hosts. So the strategy is to route all the traffic destined for that particular host through a router that has ACLs that are large enough to hold the total IP list for the botnet that is attacking the host, as these IPs become identified.

You don't want to route _all_ your traffic through there because then you'd have to do the relatively expensive filtering on all of the packets, even those not destined for that particular host.

Now if an attacker were targeting the hosting facility they could thwart this strategy by sending requests to a larger number of hosts in the network in order to make life much harder for the crew fighting the attack. After all, you can't partition the problem anymore in to a portion that is targeted to the host and 'normal' traffic, effectively all the traffic could be bot traffic or it could be normal traffic, for all the receiving hosts.

To be able to partition the problem into a smaller one where you can let say 90% or more of the traffic through unfiltered and only concentrate on the remaining 10% would make solving it a bit easier. On the other hand if the attackers are silly enough to re-use the same bots to attack different hosts they've actually given you a clue as to which IPs are bots.

I hope that makes sense :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm wondering what the implications of DDOS are for website owners. What if you're on EC2 for example, will you be charged for the 300 TB of traffic? If so that would be an easy way to bankrupt a startup.

<comment><USER8> The implications for website owners are that their web sites were temporary unavailable. Traffic simply does not reach the web site. Even normal traffic. For example, you type in your browser www.mywebsite.com. DNSMadeEasy would normally resolve it to your IP address (e.g. 184.108.40.206). But because of the DDoS attach -- mywebsite.com cannot be resolved into any IP address and you cannot open www.mywebsite.com at all.

<comment><USER9> That's the implication is there is a DDoS attack on your DNS provider, but I think FooBarWidget was inquiring about the implications of a DDoS attack on your website, and specifically if you would be charged for the bandwidth consumed by the attack.

<comment><USER6> You can - but not everywhere - negotiate that the service you pay for includes protection against DDOS attacks and that it's up to your provider to protect you. You'll pay a larger fee per mbit because they'll need to do more work for you in case you get hit but it might be worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> No wonder most of my sites were down or not functioning very well this morning. Hope they get everything operational soon, DNSMadeEasy is a great provider.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can someone please explain to me what DNSMadeEasy actually does?

Is a domain provider like 1and1 a client of theirs or is my hosting provider a client?

This entry on Hacker News led me to wikipedia where I went from an article about Level3 to an article about Tier 1 Network to Internet Backbone. I feel like I'm on the verge of understanding more about how the internet works but it's all a bit above my head.

<comment><USER12> They're an anycast dns provider- basically the only kind of third-party DNS service that's worth anything at all. They have some neat domains-related tools that hook into their infrastructure that's kindof a pain to do yourself (even if you've got your own anycast-capable network)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What motivates an attack like this?

<comment><USER14> Probably some motive against one of the customers. If you can extort some cash out of a gambling site with short dns-ttl it could be worth your effort.

Maybe the target's data center is more ddos-proof than the one from easydns, extortionists go for the weakest link.

<comment><USER15> Back in the olden days of IRC, there was times when entire regions of the internet were taken offline resulting from a ddos for personal vendettas. For exactly that reason too - they attack the weakest link and often it isn't the host directly.

In this case - it really could be anything. The cost of one of these attacks is next to zero. Rarely will the botnet owner lose any machines resulting from an attack. The unfortunate thing after one of these attacks is you have no way of preventing it or going after the source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can anyone give an idea of how large, compared to other DDOS attacks, 50 GBPS is?

<comment><USER17> it's fairly large. There are really two factors in a DoS, though, total throughput and packet size. Obviously, your incoming pipe can only handle a certain total throughput, I mean, that's what most of us get billed on.

However, most routers and firewalls also have a limit on packets per second they can process, on top of the throughput limits. I've got a 100Mbps commit on a 1000mbps pipe, and I can handle 1000Mbps of 'normal' traffic... but I got taken out a month back by a 200Mbps DDos that used very small packets. My router couldn't handle it. (now, if I had spent money on a better router, it wouldn't be a problem. As far as I can tell, even, a reasonable software router could have handled it.)

Another way to measure this is the capacity required to absorb the attack. You can get he.net bandwidth for around a thousand dollars a month per gigabit, and he.net is about as cheap as bandwidth gets, so to soak a 50 gigabit attack, you'd have to have fifty thousand dollars a month of spare capacity.

(I'm sure there are further discounts available between the 1GiB and the 50GiB tier... but you get the idea. )

<comment><USER18> Considering the fact I've seen this attack first hand. I can tell you a couple of things about it's strength. It's very flexible one minute they are sending packet size 1500 bytes udp, the other they are sending 48 bytes syn tcp 80. However, filtering them with a Firewall is not hard at all since they do have packet patterns you can detect, but even if you can find a firewall and have it on the edge of your network traffic is STILL reaching your network and if you can handle 50Gbps of traffic all coming from a couple of different ASn than "wow".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> (Brief) discussion on webhostingtalk:

[http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=970837&hi...](http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=970837&highlight=china)

Another 30 gbps attack, discussion on webhostingtalk.com:

[http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=966658&hi...](http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=966658&highlight=china)

Edit: interesting thread, apparently the reason it's 30gbps is that it's maxing out the link from China telecom, so legitimate Chinese customers are getting traffic dropped. FBI are involved. Suggested solution by some is to get traffic routed over more intercontinental links possibly via peering agreement with China Telecom, and beyond that political pressure.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if, long term, DDOS attacks will be to net neutrality as spam was to nice-and-easy e-mail setups. Now ISPs are running spam blacklists, blocking entire other ISPs at times, and it's a nightmare to run your own SMTP server and deliver mail reliably without jumping through hoops. If DDOS attacks become more and more annoying, they could be used as an excuse to violate net neutrality.

<comment><USER21> I'm not clear on how that would work. A good DDoS attack is nearly indistinguishable from normal traffic. How would net neutrality play into it?

<comment><USER20> Really good spam e-mail is nearly indistinguishable from normal e-mail. Crazy layers of whitelisting/blacklisting/new DNS settings/laws/software and policies have been piled on top of the mail system to reduce the nefarious effects of spam sent en masse.

While spam and DDOS attacks aren't directly comparable in terms of what they _are_ , I'm speculating in terms of what negative effects continued and escalating DDOS attacks could have again in terms of laws, policies, white/blacklisting of entire networks/countries, and so forth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if they're going to change the text on their website: "A DNS service with a 99.9999% uptime history is just the start! DNS Made Easy is so confident of it's uptime record that we offer the best service level agreement in the industry. That is why all businesses that require stable DNS decide to use DNS Made Easy. We have an industry leading 100% uptime gaurantee and will credit all accounts 500% of the downtime."

Maybe its a rival DNS provider behind the attack?

</comment><comment><USER23> The GFW of China has a known vulnerability to amplify a UDP traffic to 2x to 3x as much.</comment>


NEC SJC2 subsea cable will transmit data at 144Tbps - <AUTHOR> https://www.itwire.com/business-technology/82132-nec-sjc2-subsea-cable-will-transmit-data-at-144tbps.html <comment><USER2> worth noting that this is the theoretical maximum capacity if the DWDM chassis at all ends were fully populated. Likely using 100, 200 and 400Gbps coherent (QPSK, 8PSK and 16QAM modulated) optics in a 50 GHz ITU DWDM grid. It's not as if it's going to have that capacity at the beginning. And no single circuit will have that capacity.

The math probably looks something like this:

Per 2 fiber pair, 80 channels x 200 Gbps per coherent wavelength = 16000 Gbps

</comment><comment><USER3> 'roughly the equivalent of simultaneously streaming 5.76 million ultra-high definition videos per second.'

What's that 'per second' doing at the end?

<comment><USER4> Even removing the "per second" doesn't quite fix it; a data transfer speed can't be "equivalent" to simultaneously streaming N number of UHD videos; it may be equivalent to the speed necessary to simultaneously stream those N UHD videos.

It should be something like, "... will be capable of transmitting data at 144 terabits per second, roughly the speed necessary to simultaneously stream 5.76 million ultra-high definition videos."

Anyway, it was probably just a brain fart.</comment></comment>


Ask HN:Recommended tech stocks(maybe others) that have potential for 10X returns - <AUTHOR> I am looking for innovative companies that will grow 10x in market cap. Duration is not important. It can be 5 years or 20 years <comment><USER2> I don't know about 10 years but for 1-year returns. It looks like AMZN is set to test $2400 relatively soon and BlackBerry can test $12-$14 in 4 months. Also AAPL is set to test $250.

</comment><comment><USER3> MongoDB ($30 to $130 in last 12 months), Elastic, Netflix, Amazon

</comment><comment><USER4> Pretty much the lower part of NASDAQ. Established companies like Apple is unlikely to hit 10 trillion market cap.

Out of the big ones, only Amazon has huge potential, as they're still mostly limited to developed countries. E-commerce in developing countries is huge, but they make little effort, often have a lot of counterfeit products and such. I can see Amazon coming in and disrupting incumbents.

Chinese companies are in one of the fastest growing markets and they go into it with a good work ethic, and are also highly defensible. They tend to have a strong P/E ratio too, e.g. something like Huawei makes about as much money as Google and has many more products, but is unfortunately not for sale.

What intrigues me about Chinese companies is that they've expanded well into both developing and developed nations. American companies can be flawed in that they have a huge local market to work with but it's culturally homogeneous. And so they have trouble expanding into other countries unless they're willing to learn.

E.g. Uber entered markets that were 80% cash based versus competitors who knew how far they could play dirty. They got a bloody nose in some of the more corrupt countries. Stripe's making effort to expand, but the countries dealing with corruption also have a complex bureaucratic process. I'd also advise to be careful with listed companies that deal with things like finance, as they're going to be tied down by regulation in other countries and often get disrupted by locals who know how the play the game.

Islamic sector looks underdeveloped. Lots of money, lots of people. But don't invest in something you don't understand deeply. A lot of non-Muslim investors overinvest in the halal sector, not realizing that it's not that big a deal. A good example is Muzmatch, where Muslims are looking for a spouse (not a date!). This is something that OKCupid and Tinder can't disrupt.

The Middle East may not have the talent of the West or the work ethic ot the East, but they have a heck lot of money and are eager to invest it into something other than oil. With Careem's acquisition, middle eastern tech ecosystem will probably get a huge boost of both investment and talent in the following years.

Privacy is also a huge trend, especially with the rise of AI. I don't expect it to beat Facebook, but it can certainly grow 10x.

In this "late" era of apps, I'd look at solutions that still haven't expanded globally, or those who did and are riding a growing market. e.g. SE Asia's e-commerce market expected to grow 5x from 2015 to 2020, and e-commerce companies in these countries would start reaping the benefits around 2022.

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice, just some things to think about, and a lot of this is probably wrong.</comment>


Show HN: Color your shell prompt by host function - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/prgmrcom/ansible-bash-color-prompt

<comment><AUTHOR> this was the result of one of us sysadmins typing 'shutdown -r now' on the wrong host.</comment>


Why Internet Explorer will survive and Firefox won't - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/why-internet-explorer-will-survive-and-firefox-wont/3064?tag=nl.e539

<comment><USER2> This reads like linkbait to me. The author doesn't really have a coherent argument: he spends the first half of the article talking about Firefox's relatively slow* release cycle, but never bothers to explain why that's a death sentence.

Instead, he jumps to another argument entirely in the second half: Firefox's lack of an "app ecosystem". This is truly delusional. Firefox has just as much of an app ecosystem as IE: it runs code on websites you go to. It's true that it lacks Chrome's app store (which right now amounts to little more than a glorified link directory and alternate bookmark system), but if that's a disadvantage it applies equally to IE.

* Relatively slow only with sufficient handwaving: call IE's platform previews equivalent to Chrome's full releases, then dismiss without justification Mozilla's new accelerated schedule for Firefox.

<comment><USER3> Chrome apps get downloaded to your machine. They are not links.

<comment><USER2> In my experience, most apps on the Chrome store are what Google calls "Hosted Apps": a link plus metadata and an icon [0]. They also provide "Packaged Apps" [1], which are downloaded and run locally as you describe, but this style appears to be much less popular with developers.

0: [http://code.google.com/chrome/apps/docs/developers_guide.htm...](http://code.google.com/chrome/apps/docs/developers_guide.html)

1: <http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/apps.html>

<comment><USER4> Being hosted doesn't make them just links. Hosted apps still have access to many APIs not available in normal web pages. Such as cross-domain XHR, background pages (apps can run in the background even when the tab is closed), a licensing API that allows Google to handle the registration burden, etc.

<comment><USER2> Do many web apps use those features yet? (Besides payment, that is; see my reply to your other comment for my view on that.)

<comment><USER4> I don't know; how is that relevant? The article argues about the future, of which Chrome and IE have app ecosystems and Mozilla does not.

<comment><USER2> I think I see the source of our disagreement. You seem to say that Chrome's impressive infrastructure for web apps gives it a potential advantage. I certainly agree with that, but the capabilities of Chrome apps aren't widely used _right now_ , so the actual strength of the system is still unknown. The Chrome Web Store could still end up like WebOS: great platform, few developers.

<comment><USER4> I don't agree with the article that Firefox is in trouble, but I'm a Chrome Store dev and I've grown tired of reading people online saying things like "they're just bookmarks", so I apologize if I came across as attacking. I think the advantages that Chrome (and to a lesser extent IE) has will eventually be rolled into the spec, and will be negated, however I don't think Mozilla is doing enough to push their alternative as viable. Their spec, to me, reads as web app best practices and the only original thing they're providing is an install button api.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I believe if Firefox dies, it will be because it did not learn from the Netscape Navigator it was born from.

I switched from Netscape to IE when I realized the application had become bloated beyond recognition. I didn't need an email client inside of Netscape, I didn't need a news reader inside of Netscape, I didn't need all of these things.

I'm seeing shades of this in Firefox. Specifically, Firefox Sync.

It's a great idea, for some people. However in my scenario my tabs and bookmarks in one location are completely different from my tabs and bookmarks in another. I don't need the ability to bridge them. It would be a neat add on, but I don't need it built into the core.

That is what made Firefox great in the first place. Add ons. That's why I've stuck with Firefox. Add ons. Features like Sync are cool, but in my opinion they should be optional add ons.

</comment><comment><USER6> What's the backstory here? You usually only see this style of contrariness in old timers, and it's usually reserved for IBM.

Did Ed Bott have some skin in IE6, and he's upset that Firefox blew a hole in the side of Microsoft's lack of maintenance on IE6?

</comment><comment><USER3> This article argues that apps are the only future for browsers and by virtue of the fact that Firefox doesn't have a dedicated "app ecosystem" it will be extinct.

I don't follow the reasoning since I don't really see why I have to use Internet Explorer to use a Microsoft web app just as I don't have to use Chrome in order to get my Gmail.

<comment><USER7> I would say if it doesn't make any sense, or is making some kind of broad logic leap like this, then it is probably MS purchased FUD.

<comment><USER5> It is incredible how consistently throughout the years ZD Net has been a mouthpiece for MS FUD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I simply beg to differ. <http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp>

<comment><USER3> These are just the browser stats for this site and I see your point. However, the article is implying that there is going to be a trend toward browser apps in the future and Firefox does not have a built-in browser app platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fact is: Firefox had 4.6 Million downloads in the first 24 hours after its launch, IE9 had 2.3 Million downloads in the same period. The previous IE versions have continuously lost ground.

I expect better researched articles from ZDNet.

<comment><USER10> > I expect better researched articles from ZDNet.

I cannot think of a single good reason why you would.

<comment><USER9> touché

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are a couple of good arguments in the incoherent linkbait. Luckilly, Mozilla knows this and has answers for both.

1) A continued slow release cycle will kill Firefox. Very true. Which is why Mozilla is switching to a 3 month cycle.

2) An app story is required. I'm not sure if I buy it, but Mozilla also has an answer to that: <https://apps.mozillalabs.com/>

</comment><comment><USER12> Quite exciting this IE resurgence. It's a good reminder that you can't sit on your laurels - you have to keep innovating - and/or push yourself ahead of the pack.

To the average Joe - what makes the new Firefox any different to the last version?

Javascript and rendering performance tweaks are great - but the UI still sucks.</comment>


Ask HN: How to escape the rat race? - <AUTHOR> What are your thoughts on achieving financial independence? Is doing startup worth it if you have 50k in savings by 31? <comment><USER2> A startup is a toss up. The key to financial independence is _lowering your living expenses_.

Read [http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly- sim...](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math- behind-early-retirement/) to see why, then start at [http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02/22/getting-rich- from-...](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02/22/getting-rich-from-zero-to- hero-in-one-blog-post/)

For a programmer-oriented guide that talks a little about financial independence (and eventually a book with much more info): [https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/](https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Doing a startup is gambling, and it's gambling in a particularly high-risk way. If all you have is $50k in savings, you should not put that money anywhere near a startup. The money that isn't in your immediate checking account should be in a low-fee index fund, especially if $50k is all you have.

<comment><USER4> Startups are are terrible way to retire. Work a boring job for 10 years and save a lot and you are done. Many many many people in startups never make as much as people in boring jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're in the US, and are a programmer, your savings are way way too low for your age. It means you either haven't been changing jobs often enough, getting massive raises every time, or you spend too much.

If you're a US citizen, consider finding a well paid hourly remote job, and move somewhere cheap. You can reduce your work hours to literally 1-2 per week, enough to sustain yourself. Europe is quite cheap if you avoid big cities, Switzerland, and Norway. Most of Asia is very cheap except Singapore and Japan. There's also Africa, South America, and a gazillion island nations.

<comment><USER6> How much should a programmer have saved by 31?

<comment> dev-ious I have 200k at 24...

<comment><USER7> I have just 5k at 23... I live in a third world country where USD 2k monthly salary for programmer is considered top-tier level...

<comment><USER3> Whether or not you have saved enough should be a function of living expenses, not wages.

If you have $5k and can live on $600/month, that's great. If you need $1k/month in expenses, then it's not great at all.

As soon as possible, you need to have enough saved to cover an unexpected, large expense (car/home repair, medical emergency, moving to a new place, etc.) and at least 6 months of living expenses. I personally have at least 12 months of living expenses at any given time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One reason it's worth doing a startup if you know something other people don't. For example, you've been working in an industry, have some knowledge of that industry's inefficiencies, and can efficiently tackle those inefficiencies with technology.

</comment><comment><USER9> A college kid with zero savings can become billionaire. An old rich billionaire can spend millions of dollars trying to build 100 products people don't want. There's no right answer to your question. The only advice I heard that made sense to me was:

%99 of the people are looking for: security, then comfort, then becoming rich

%1 of the people are looking to becoming rich, then comfort, then security

"Simply" re-order your priorities.</comment>


Reviewing 20 years of email clients - <AUTHOR> http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/netscape_email/ <comment><USER2> I feel like not much has really changed since Netscape 4 in terms of interface to the new versions of Thunderbird/SeaMonkey Mail, though there are more options available. I too have most predominately stuck with this family of mail clients for years.

</comment><comment><USER3> s/email/mozilla email/

Thanks for the reference ;)</comment>


Ask HN: Any Good Programming Competitions? - <AUTHOR>

Anyone know of any good programming competitions out there? <comment><USER2> What sort of programming. I've enjoyed the minigame competitions: <http://minigamecompo.weebly.com/> this year's seems quite light on entries so far.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.topcoder.com/></comment>


False Dichotomies in Convertible Note vs Equity Seed Rounds - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/09/false-dichotomies-in-convertible-note-vs-priced-equity-seed-rounds.html

<comment><USER2> am i correct in thinking that convertible notes can be thought of as a way of changing the equilibrium of prisoner's dilemma? i.e., by introducing a temporal element and rewarding early investors you avoid the equilibrium where everyone is waiting for everyone else (akin to the Nash equilibrium of prisoner's dilemma where both prisoners stay silent, instead you want both prisoner's to confess).

<comment><USER3> There's more to the game theory aspect, actually.

Since note holders get a better share with a lower valuation, it could cause collusion with the VCs...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are normal text posts ok instead of using the "Ask HN:" prefix? - <AUTHOR> Should I be manually typing in the prefix? The only instruction I found was: "Leave url blank to submit a question for discussion. If there is no url, the text (if any) will appear at the top of the thread."<p>I checked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html I'm unaware of any other locations to check. <comment><USER2> It does not look like the prefix is inserted automatically. For example, recently I saw the post "How should i document my code?" ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13517171](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13517171)) appear in the main feed. That post also appeared in the "ask" feed, even though it did not have the "Ask HN:" prefix. This tells me that the prefix was not inserted automatically, and since the post I referenced wasn't flagged/killed or otherwise hidden, I think text posts without the prefix are OK.

That being said, I think at this point the "Ask HN:" prefix has become a site convention, and so it's worth putting in the prefix. It also helps make clear which posts are links and which posts are questions or discussion topics.

P.S. Yes, I'm aware that non-links don't have a domain name after the title. But I argue the "Ask HN:" prefix is better: The domain appears after the title, and since titles all have variable lengths, your eyes have to search in two dimensions for the domain; with a prefix, your eyes just have to move in one direction.

</comment><comment><USER3> Whenever I've submitted an Ask HN, I've just prefixed the title with 'Ask HN:' and then put my question in the text box.

</comment><comment><USER4> Prefixing with 'Ask HN' is a community norm.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's just a Nash equilibrium</comment>


Skype Translator is the most futuristic thing I've ever used - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/skype-translator-is-the-most-futuristic-thing-ive-ever-used/

<comment><USER2> Microsoft has been working on this for a looong time, you might recognize the video here:

[http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/research/stories/speech-...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/research/stories/speech-to-speech.aspx)

[http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/about/speech-to- speech-m...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/about/speech-to-speech- milestones.aspx)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJIILew6l28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJIILew6l28)

[http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/05/27/microsoft- demos-b...](http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/05/27/microsoft-demos- breakthrough-in-real-time-translated-conversations/)</comment>


IKEA's Best-Selling Product Is Not a Piece of Furniture - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/better-marketing/ikeas-best-selling-product-is-not-a-piece-of-furniture-bc8c30fcd378 <comment><USER2> I can't tell: Are they referring to individual meatballs, the meatballs in one plate at the restaurant, or one bag of meatballs from their store?

Comparing sales of individual Billy bookshelves to the sale of individual meatballs is bizarre, but it still then leaves you to the individual plate, or the frozen bag, which are completely different portion sizes.

Billy bookshelves come in a couple of sizes, so maybe they mean not individual meatballs (since you can't buy a single meatball), but both the restaurant plate servings and the bags as compared to sales of the large and small bookshelves?</comment>


Money is Not One of the Top Three Reasons Entrepreneurs Start Their Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.stateoftheowner.com/

<comment><USER2> Entrepreneurs almost never start a business just for money</comment>


Google and Facebook unveil big investments in France - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/22/financial-times-google-and-facebook-unveil-big-investments-in-france.html <comment><USER2> 10 million over 5 years, not sure that qualifies as big?</comment>