Rape victim rejects judge's offer: $150K for her, reduced sentence for attacker - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2019/11/09/rape-victim-rejects-judges-offer-her-reduced-sentence-attacker/ <comment><USER2> He empowered her to choose her own justice, her own restitution.

On a related note, I'm reminded of an article that examined the effect choice has on us, and that often, we're happier without it. One of the examples was even, I believe, a study about major medical decisions, that showed patients were happier when doctors decided for them. But I forgot the exact scope of the medical decisions, and can't find the article or study - if anyone else can, I'd be very grateful.

In any case, this article serves as a fine example - the victim is unhappy about being given choice over the punishment.

<comment><USER3> I think it's easy to see how the "choice" in this situation comes off as a request to "buy forgiveness" on behalf of the perpetrator. The harm that was done is not primarily financial, financial restitution would never "make it right" at an emotional level, and undermines the desire to quarantine individuals that have proven themselves to be a danger to others. The choice would be insulting to many people, and directly opposed to common ideals about justice.

In light of that, calling it "empowerment" comes off as a little tone-deaf, and I doubt the response would be any different if the judge had unilaterally chosen X years + Y dollars, but it later came to light that X+N years and 0 dollars had been an equally valid option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why offer a trade? Why not just add the restitution to the full jail sentence?

<comment><USER2> An excessive punishment is just as unfair as one that is too lenient.

<comment><USER5> A lifetime in prison is the right punishment for rape.

<comment><USER2> I disagree (depending on the case, I guess), but that's a matter of opinion. My answer was merely to explain the judge's actions, and was not intended as a comment on whether this particular sentence is just. If the judge believes the initial jail term was a fair punishment, then if he were to add a fine, he'd have to reduce the jail term, for the punishment to remain fair _in his eyes_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fundamental error. Imagine if it was a theft case and the victim was WalMart. Bad bad constitutional violation to delegate judicial power to individuals which include both real people and corporeals.

<comment><USER6> It would have been constitutional to offer both choices to the defendant, assuming it didn't violate Timbs v Indiana with the fine exceeding the jurisdictional maximum for the offense.</comment></comment>


Gawk 4.0.0 Now Available - <AUTHOR> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2011-06/msg00013.html

<comment><USER2> Last week I published a book on Awk called "Awk One-Liners Explained."

If you wish to learn Awk the fun way, take a look: <http://www.catonmat.net/blog/awk-book/></comment>


First Clojure conference - <AUTHOR> http://first.clojure-conj.org/

<comment><USER2> It's too bad it's so much to attend $200 sounds unreasonable to me.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is very exciting. I am hoping to attend (Hopefully the pricing fits within my reach).

Maybe we can have a HN Users meet in Durham? They have already listed some HN'ers like stuarthalloway, fogus, technomancy, lukev, liebke - Perhaps a "Ask HN" is in order when they finally announce details?

</comment><comment><USER4> Woohoo! But wait, being a startup guy in a third-world country doesn't help. Back to programming...

</comment><comment><USER5> You can get quite a Lisp fix that week by going to the International Lisp Conference from the 19th to the 21st and the Clojure conference on the 22nd and 23rd. Book your Reno -> RDU flights today!

<comment><USER6> In addition, the Strange Loop conference from Oct 14-15 (<http://strangeloop2010.com>) is an unofficial 1st Clojure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm interested in doing a talk/show on my clojure refactoring mode (for emacs). Is the speaker list already finalized?

<comment><USER8> This sounds cool--is it available for use now?

<comment><USER7> <http://github.com/tcrayford/clojure-refactoring>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here I was trying to build excitement for this all morning and BLAMO -- HN steals my thunder. ;-)

<comment><USER9> Will the book be ready for the conference?

<comment><USER6> It'll be ready, but in print is another story unfortunately.

<comment><USER9> So no signed copies :(

<comment><USER10> Well, no signed physical copies at least. Who's to say what they'll be doing with their GPG keys?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I do hope there will be some Justin.tv feeds for those of us stuck @home? Man, I wish I had an anybot now so I can ship it to these conferences and attend it from my laptop.

<comment><USER12> That's the best anybot use case I've seen. Conference attendee bot. GENIUS!

<comment><USER13> Agreed. It'd be awesome if conferences started selling anybot tickets.

<comment><USER11> You know, now that I think about it, this reminds me of Arrested Development when George Sr. rents a guy with a video cam on his head and a com to make him go places and do stuff.

<comment><USER13> I think it'd be hard to have your own anybot that you ship out (setting up wifi and all). However, if conference organizers provided it as an alternative ticket, and if wifi held up, I think it could really revolutionize things.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Micro-PaaS Dead? - <AUTHOR> Dokku, Nanobox, Deis, Rio, etc, all don't seem to have much activity these days. <comment><USER2> Serverless took over that niche. First with AWS Lambda & Google Cloud functions and nowadays solutions, like Google Cloud Run, do the same thing as Dokku & co without having to care about the ops part. They still make sense for the ones who use cloud providers with less offerings like Digital Ocean and don't want to deal with Kubernetes

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm still maintaining and releasing Dokku though? Last release was less than a month ago, and there have been merges in the past week.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ansible is good enough for me [https://github.com/cupnoodle/rails- ansible](https://github.com/cupnoodle/rails-ansible)

<comment><USER5> This. Ansible is extensible and simple and elegant. It can manage things at scale or can be used for small discrete tasks.

<comment><USER6> I have worked with Ansible for a few years in the industry and consequently I came to learn its dark side. For example, it has some of the most cryptic error messages I've ever experienced. At the time I first adopted it, HashiCorp's offerings were not as open source as they are now, so I would recommend Hashi's stuff as of today. However, I recently discovered "just" ([https://github.com/casey/just](https://github.com/casey/just)) which is a good parity of ansible but minus the cumbersome YAML and the idempotent aspect which is mostly useless in practice for Ansible; so I would recommend taking a look at it and also consider aviary in tandem with Just ([https://github.com/team-video/aviary.sh](https://github.com/team- video/aviary.sh)), together they are very simple and perfect for much of what one does with Ansible except for provisioning and orchestration which is where Hashi's stuff comes into play.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Serverless wiped it out</comment>


Mono's Making Money - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2011/12/12/xamarin-mono/ <comment><USER2> Miguel de Icaza is living the life right now. He managed to get Novell to fund his idea and then effectively bought it off of them for a steal. Well done!

Incidentally, I think this is the best way to start a business if you ever find yourself in the right position. Big companies are ditching / spinning off successful products which are just not "successful enough" and you can often pick them up for the cost of supporting existing customers.

<comment><USER3> >Incidentally, I think this is the best way to start a business if you ever find yourself in the right position. Big companies are ditching / spinning off successful products which are just not "successful enough" and you can often pick them up for the cost of supporting existing customers.

I surely would hope that the same think had happened to several of the Google services that were killed a short time ago; specially Wave and Code Search.

Although I know that at least Wave was made given to Apache, I think what that needed was a company that was willing to polish and provide the service.

<comment><USER4> Problem with that is two things:

1: Those products are build to run on Googles infrastructure, which you can't have if you're not Google.

2: Those products don't have customers, they have users. That makes spinning a profitable business off much harder.

<comment><USER5> >1: Those products are build to run on Googles infrastructure, which you can't have if you're not Google.

Not necessarily. At least with Google Wave [1], Google ensured that they made the necessary modifications to allow users to run Wave servers by themselves. There is at least one provider running wave-in-a-box [2], and there isn't any reason that this provider should be the only one.

>2: Those products don't have customers, they have users. That makes spinning a profitable business off much harder.

Harder yes, but it's still well short of impossible. I was thinking that the Wave Federation Protocol could perhaps be monetized as a shared- editing/collaboration service. It could be positioned as a combination of Sharepoint and chat.

[1] [http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open- source-n...](http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-next- steps-wave-in-box.html)

[2] <http://waveinabox.net/>

<comment><USER4> The mechanism the OP referred to was picking up an existing product and providing a more or less uninterrupted user experience. It's a great benefit for a start-up to be able to hit the ground running with a user base and traction.

In the case of Wave, there was a major gap between the product being declared EOL from Google and until the various bits and pieces for running Wave as an independent vendor was in place - and in that gap all reasonable people ran away, so non-Google Wave offerings are starting from scratch.

As for money, no, certainly not impossible, but it's one more hurdle to hitting the ground running.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "As a result of garnering the rights to Mono and a solid customer base, Xamarin wound up with self-sustaining revenue that covers its staff of some 50 people — without having taken on any venture capital."

That's pretty cool. From the article, it sounds like they were cash-flow positive enough to support 50 people, _from the outset_.

<comment><USER7> To be fair the real outset was about a decade ago when they created Helix Code (later renamed to Ximian) and started work on Mono.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> They now look like direct competitors to Microsoft - providing tools for iOS and Android devs and kind of distracting them from W Phone. Do they have the right kind of agreements to be sheltered from MS anger should it come?

<comment><USER9> Miguel de Icaza works for Microsoft, and Microsoft has extended Mono developers a patent license for all relevant C#/.NET patents,...

Except, said patent grant does not extend to people who don't work for de Icaza, people who distribute Mono, or people who use Mono, or people who have compiled C# apps with Mono.

Microsoft refuses to make Mono patent free, and anyone who distributes, uses, or distributes binaries compiled with Mono _can and will be sued_.

Not only is de Icaza not a competitor to Microsoft, he is helping Microsoft attack Linux and the Free Software movement.

Mono refuses to switch to a license, such as GPLv3, to protect users, distributors, and developers from the patents; not only do they refuse, they are getting rid of all GPLv2 code in favor of BSD code. Once Mono is BSDafied, Microsoft can import all code from Mono and close source it within the main C#/.Net implementation on Windows.

<comment><USER10> If you don't want to be mistaken for a rabid OSS zealot, you should be more knowledgable about Mono's license(s) and not fling RMS-poo around.

<http://www.mono-project.com/License>

The fact that C# programmers can code for multiple platforms thru easier porting makes them more likely to explore OSS options instead of staying solely in Redmonds garden.

<comment><USER9> I see no patent grant that protects users, distributors, or non-Mono/Microsoft developers.

So, again, how does that license protect open source? It is neither GPLv3 or ASLv2, nor will Microsoft stop using patents to attack people.

I'm not sure how I can interpret it any other way. Being sued by Microsoft is something no one wants.

<comment><USER11> How is that different from any other OSS project? If MS wants, they could look at a projects source code and decide that they've violated a patent and sue them. To my knowledge they're yet to do this.

<comment><USER12> The difference is that Microsoft created .Net and the patents covering it together, so they're fairly narrow patents and it'd be a hell of a lot harder to find relevant prior art to use against them. (The same's true of OOXML, incidentally; Microsoft even tried to get a patent covering both it and ODF but the examiner narrowed it to just OOXML based on a huge amount of prior art dating back to SGML in the 80s.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It makes me unfeasibly happy that they have achieved a self-sustaining business model. I wouldn't necessarily have predicted that I would feel this way, but it makes me trust them more.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've never seriously used C# before, but the desire to build an iPhone application, combined with my unfortunate distaste for Objective-C, recently led me to MonoTouch.

MonoDevelop, MonoTouch, and C# have been an absolute pleasure to work with. Completion is insanely fast, with fuzzy matching. C# delegates make implementing event handlers a pleasure. The integration with Interface Builder is a bit shaky at times, but I suspect that may be a bug in XCode.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a great story about a project finding a way. It's also great story of a team of talented developers being able to create a commercial force in very little time. I suppose having a well oiled development team and a ton of contacts for possible clients ready to go is a strong ingredient for quick profits.

This makes me wonder what other projects in a similar situation could make a similar jump.

If you are looking for a home in development but don't yet need to take the plunge of finding a job. This is a good example of how an open source project can create opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER16> Some time ago I ran across a post saying Mono does not do true tail recursion in F#. Does anyone know if this is still the case?

<comment><USER16> Found this <http://www.mono-project.com/Release_Notes_Mono_2.10> Feb 15th, 2011

Under Runtime Notes _Improved tail-call support for the F# compiler._

Not enough information to determine if _improved_ means _fixed_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's great. But, unfortunately, Mono is not making netflix run on my computer. Now that would be an achievement.

<comment><USER18> Netflix will not run on your Linux desktop because Microsoft refuses to issue licenses for its DRM components for Moonlight/Linux desktop. These components run fine on Linux -- look at Boxee et al -- but Microsoft refuses to license the DRM for use on Linux desktops. While I would have thought the spite would run deep enough to encourage a clean room implementation of MS's DRM, I guess most people just don't care since there are so many alternate vehicles that require less work for the same content.

<comment><USER19> Is there a successful (and by that, I mean not entirely useless) DRM system for Linux? I would imagine that MS would not want to provide the source for their DRM component for fear of it being broken.

<comment><USER18> Is there a successful DRM system for _anything_? Again, I think the DRM that remains unbroken is unbroken because there's no point in cracking it. MS's PlayReady protects music and movies, so there's no reason to crack it since you can just rip the DVD/CD instead.

I don't think the argument that their DRM is exposed to a lot more risk by presence on desktop Linux is legitimate. Someone can break it on Windows or Mac without much extra effort if they cared to break it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Zen Photon Garden - <AUTHOR> http://zenphoton.com/ <comment><USER2> Pretty cool!

I like the shareable URLs, but I don't like how it breaks the back button.

Use `location.replace` to avoid this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty.

I had obviously expected that, but the large number of reflective surfaces [1] greatly reduces the performance. The author explained in the blog post [2] that it is a path tracing (Monte Carlo simulation of multiple random rays incrementally averaged) and probably it is hard to limit the number of bounces small while maintaining the image quality. Indeed, the source code [3] says a hard limit of 1000 bounces, not big but not that small either.

[1] Something like [http://is.gd/cFDlq5](http://is.gd/cFDlq5)

[2] [http://scanlime.org/2013/04/zen-photon- garden/](http://scanlime.org/2013/04/zen-photon-garden/)

[3] [https://github.com/scanlime/zenphoton/blob/bea23c1/hqz/src/z...](https://github.com/scanlime/zenphoton/blob/bea23c1/hqz/src/zrender.cpp#L329)

<comment><USER4> Wow, 1000 bounces is huge. 8 bounces is a reasonable setting for a high- performance 3D path tracer. I guess it's that much easier in 2D.

<comment> Ono-Sendai Our default max ray depth for Indigo Renderer is 10000. You just have to be a bit clever about handling it. (use Russian Roulette)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just played with this for too long, and I made some images I'd want to hang on my wall.

</comment><comment><USER6> Every time I see this link, which is about every year or so, I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to build a "laser". It really feels possible, using a combination of diffuse/reflective to "corral" all the light into going mostly in the same direction. Would love to see if anyone has gotten close.

<comment><USER7> A parabolic reflector -- all (specular) reflective, no "diffuse" or "transmissive" \-- will get all the light from a point source going in the same direction. If you really want _all_ the light doing that, you need an infinitely wide parabolic reflector so you'll get an infinitely wide beam. But if you're happy for, say, 99% of the light to end up in the beam, you can make a finite portion of a parabola that does that. Shrink it in towards the source and (aside from discretization issues) you will get as narrow a beam as you like with 99% of the light in it.

A real physical light source can never have zero size as the source here (aside from discretization issues) does. As a result, you can't get an arbitrarily narrow beam from it. There's a quantity called "etendue" that measures a sort of combination of spatial and angular spread-out-ness, and no combination of optical elements can decrease it except by absorbing some of the light.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would love to see a version where you could draw Bézier curves!

</comment><comment><USER9> Very cool indeed. Surprisingly expressive.

My one issue - the diffuse/reflective/transmissive sliders don't seem to cause the image to update?

<comment><USER10> The sliders are meant to only affect newly placed lines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> We had a good discussion going on when this was submitted before.

Zen Photon Garden is always a nice thing to play around with.

I even wrote a patch that made the rays deterministic when you draw extra walls. It reduced the flickering, but I learned that this was part of the aesthetics, so it was less fun to play with.

</comment><comment><USER12> I thought it was a pretty good quality simulation, because after drawing some surfaces, dragging the Exposure tab from bottom to top made me flinch at the seeming "brightness".

</comment><comment><USER13> A stupid question, how this is related to zen?

<comment><USER14> I suspect the author means to liken it to zen sand gardens[1]. Though people also just like the name zen.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_rock_garden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_rock_garden)</comment></comment>


Why one woman stole 47M academic papers – and made them all free to read - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2016/2/17/11024334/sci-hub-free-academic-papers <comment><AUTHOR> Aaron Swartz would be proud, or at least sympathetic.

Shame his name has faded from the media, but we've already forgotten Manning and even Snowden has almost left the American consciousness, will only take another year or two until it is like nothing happened.</comment>


Pentagon's Social Media Propaganda Machine is illegal According to a U.S Act  - <AUTHOR> http://arabcrunch.com/2011/07/pentagon's-social-media-propaganda-machine-is-illegal-according-to-a-u-s-act.html <comment><AUTHOR> "with the power of Retweets, reshare on facebook and Google plus. U.S army propaganda will eventually reach US domestic audience and thus mislead them about the conduct of U.S foreign policy." thus it is illegal by a U.S LAw: The U.S Smith-Mundt Act pointing propaganda campaigns at US audiences is illegal.</comment>


Ask HN: Are there creative rejection pages for IE6 users? - <AUTHOR>

I am looking for examples of cool-designed pages that users see  when they visit your site from IE6 but you just don't want to support it because of any reasons. I mean it should be something like a 404 page. So it's a rejection page that says something like "You are too lazy to update your browser so why should I care about you?" When the user visits the site, he just can't use it and sees that page instead.
There are a lot of creative 404 pages but I didn't yet see something like what I described. These can be pages not specially for IE6, may be for other legacy browsers that are just pain in the ass for developers and designers.
Please list some links if you saw anything like that. <comment><USER2> I have sometimes seen messages displayed, which told me to upgrade my browser to something more contemporary - I'm using the latest version of Opera.

I have sometimes seen messages, that IE6 is not wanted on a site - but I was not using Internet Explorer :-(

If you want to see cool designed pages, you could look for any pages that are cool designed, independent of the purpose.

Maybe you were looking for some compilation of "not for IE 6" pages, like the many collection articles of cool or funny 404 pages. I have not seen any compilation of "not for IE 6" pages so far.

Most 404 pages I have seen listed in these collection articles do miss a very important point: they do not help a lost visitor at all. They more or less plainly state, that something went wrong, and possibly show an error number, which most visitors may find mysterious. It is ok to put something funny on an error page, but I would recommend to give the error pages the same layout like the rest of the website, showing the main navigation, and put something on it, which really helps those lost visitors to get back to existing pages and to be happy. A sitemap might be a good idea and a search input field.

Generally, I'm not a fan of websites telling me what kind of browser I should use. Cool design is a matter of taste and ultimately the visitor has the last word on this matter.

In the cases, where I have seen a message intended for IE6 users, the design was never cool. It was often just some additional text box or a pop-up, recommending a browser upgrade in the less annoying cases, and telling the visitor to leave in the worst cases.

Several bloggers have been experimenting with the proprietary design features supported by IE6 (the CSS filter extension), like putting a blur on the whole page or flipping the content upside down. You can find some information on these filters here:

<http://www.ssi-developer.net/css/visual-filters.shtml>

This may lead at least to some special design, which only Internet Explorer users can see. But this is not a nice thing to do, since many IE6 users may not have a choice.

>> _pain in the ass for developers and designers_ <<

I think, that it is just wrong to let personal frustration caused by difficulties of the design process have an influence on the website and the way a visitor will see the website. One of the worst messages I have seen was:

 _Not for stupid old browsers_.

What will a visitor think, if this is the only text on the page?</comment>


Ask HN: Easy way to cache current HN pages for perusing at leisure? - <AUTHOR>

I read HN differently at different times. It'd be very cool to archive, say, the top 15 pages of results for a systematic going-through later.
Downside: This would make it feel less like a discussion, and be less conducive to up/downvoting and commenting.
Upside: Don't need to see the same articles on page 2, page 3 when I hit next, etc. Could maybe archive HN three weekly to catch all the best stories. Could store a couple archives for the next time discussion seemed to get really focused on something I don't care for. Would be interesting historical data too.
Is there an easy way to do this? <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/best></comment>


Knowledge Engine by Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> http://wittylama.com/2016/02/15/knowledge-engine-by-wikipedia/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is an excellent analysis of what exactly has gone wrong with this grant application.

However, I'd like to add: search is not Wikimedia's core competency. It's an important aspect within the various Wikimedia properties (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikidata, Wikisource, et al) but the knowledge engine has been clearly positioned to the Knight Foundation as a competitor to commercial search engines. The document even states this. And it looks pretty clear that the search was to also involve sources external to WMF sources.

I frankly find it remarkable that the WMF would prioritise search to the exclusion of all the other technical things they need and want to accomplish. And the way this has all been done is breathtaking in its arrogance, secrecy and stupidity.

In my view, and in the view of many others, Lila should resign. Immediately.</comment>


Ask HN: How many professional developers contribute to open source? - <AUTHOR> When I was learning to code and tinker with computers, all my favorite tools were open source. As soon as I had the ability, I started to contribute to open source software. I assumed this was the norm.
However, in the professional jobs I've had since, I've noticed that not many (if any) of my co-workers worked on open source projects in their free time or in their past.
Has HN had different experiences? What sort of people end up working on open source? How many developers end up working on open source?
<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
Note: I don't want to imply that people should be programming all the time just to get a job, I don't mean to perpetuate the ideas that cause developers to burn out. Everything in moderation. </comment><comment><USER2> I'd ask a different question. How many professional developer's employers are investing their resources back into open source?

Since tech companies are the financial beneficiaries of everything open from operating systems to databases and programming languages, shouldn't "they" be reinvesting?

Why would we expect professionals to do this for free? When they do it is extremely generous.

</comment><comment><USER3> My contract says my employer owns absolutely everything, everywhere, any time, so, no, I do not contribute to open source in my free time.

Naturally, we depend heavily on open source software to run the business...

<comment><USER4> Have you asked? I had a similar contract and when I asked if I could contribute to a large open source project they said yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have noticed the same, I have worked with probably 500 developers in my 10 year career - I do a lot of integration work, so I communicate with developers at external companies a lot, I would say only ~5 of them contributed to open source, so roughly 1%

Lots of them wanted to - but it was just a matter of time ... they have full time jobs, families etc

</comment><comment><USER6> Probably 1% or less. Obviously, HN is skewed, but where I've worked I've been the only one or the only one out of a few that codes outside of work (and I don't do it that much).

The thing is, after 6-8 hours of working, most people want to do other stuff. Read, spend time with kids/wife/SO, go take a walk, play video games, etc. If they make any contribution to open source, it's during work time to serve business needs.

</comment><comment><USER7> A large portion of this is dependent on the software stack you end up working with and the associated communities. The Ruby on Rails and javascript communities heavily advocated open source work so many developers have open source work and/or a blog. Then you look at .Net. The amount of open source work is significantly smaller. Most software stacks have communities somewhere inbetween

</comment><comment><USER8> Who are the core that drive this massive, amazing ecosyssytem (yeah, please what's another word for ecosystem? Am I the only one tired of it to describe any system?). Here are some thoughts.

1\. There are the leaders of the movement who often don't work full time it's for themselves or an employer that pays them to be them. A few examples of this group (I'm including both "free" and "open") would include Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Bruce Perens, Eric S. Raymond, Tim O'Reilly, Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum, John Gilmore. That's obviously not a complete list.

2\. There are the __outstanding __professional developers with passion for their FOSS projects. They always seem to work for themselves or always manage to find employers who encourage open source contributions.

3\. There are developers who are learning or otherwise haven't yet started working full time.

4\. The 1% (mentioned by several commenters) who have very busy lives but manage to contribute as much as they're able.

I may be off and I'm definitely over simplifying but I say thank god for all four groups and others. I feel gratitude every day.

Yes, the FOSS world is political and narrow at times, which is a shame but that's human beings anywhere you find them.

</comment><comment><USER9> A tiny fraction, but I suspect many more have tried and been put off by personalities and politics. Quite a lot of better known projects are plain offputting to get involved with.

I know far more who've put out a few bits of solo programmed freeware or shareware, or pushed the odd utility to a library though.

Of all the places I've worked, none have encouraged or suggested contribution, but many have used open source in the business.

</comment><comment><USER10> I used too, but I'm not interested in being pulled into the increasing amount of politics involved or public scapegoating involved in social media.

</comment><comment><USER11> I work on open source projects. but mostly my own projects. Because I'm kinda a anarchist, I hate conforming to other projects' coding standard, naming convention and going through their code review procedure.

most of the time, when I find a bug in an open source project, I would directly report and post my solution in the bug report, instead of fixing it myself.

</comment><comment><USER12> Recently i started contributing to open source projects, I came across a guy who had Java conventions all over the source code for a python codebase i suggested him otherwise but the guy was reluctant. i kind of disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've never met someone else in the corporate world that contributes to FOSS.</comment>


Android beats iOS in smartphone loyalty, study finds - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/08/android-beats-ios-in-smartphone-loyalty-study-finds/ <comment><USER2> If you have the money to buy a new iPhone and are considering a new smartphone, your range of options is effectively any smartphone device in the market.

If you're buying an Android device, you're statistically likely trying to save money and therefore a new iPhone isn't a realistic option. Thus, the range of options you consider tends to be Android-only unless your smartphone budget has changed significantly since the previous time you bought a phone.

These points are worth considering when looking at the chart presented in the link.

<comment><USER3> > If you're buying an Android device, you're statistically likely trying to > save money and therefore a new iPhone isn't a realistic option.

Disagree strongly. Yes, plenty of Android phones come in at lower price-points so they will be more appealing to people looking to save money when purchasing a smartphone. But calling this is "statistically likely" is a gross exaggeration of the situation.

<comment><USER2> Like someone pointed out, there is significant data around this.

I am not exaggerating in the slightest.

<comment><USER4> You're hiding behind bad statistics to basically ignore all high end android phones, Galaxy devices etc. You're pretending the entire high end android market is "negligible" by using such shoddy statistics to essentially claim "Android = Budget". We all know what you're doing when you make cheap, short comments which obscure context to push narrative.

This is a very similar situation to people who use averages because medians don't tell the narrative they want.

You have a narrative, and you have damned statistics, so reality doesn't really get in your way.

<comment><USER2> I'm not making a value judgement about the devices or them being "budget". You're imposing that on my comment because for some reason you feel attacked by my statements.

I am simply pointing out the realities of the market and what the data says. Emerging markets are incredibly important in these numbers and emerging markets overwhelmingly choose Android for obvious reasons. Android simply has more market penetration in price-sensitive areas.

Look at Samsung's device ASP, it's around $300. Apple's is closer to $700. If you cross reference these ASP numbers with market penetration, the narrative will become clear. If Samsung's Galaxy line had significant impact, you'd see it reflected in the ASP numbers.

If you want to have an actual measured conversation, feel free to introduce new facts or data that might help us both gain a better understanding of the mobile landscape. Until then, I don't think this conversation is entirely productive if you choose to throw away all the data I pointed out and attack me personally.

<comment><USER4> Sure. Let's add to the discussion using your data, hope you won't feel offended or attacked since we're only discussing data

"iPhone owners are willing to spend more than double what Android owners are for what is essentially same thing"

"iPhone owners demonstrably have less concept of frugality/value -- is it advertising, branding or something else which overwhelms their judgement?"

I wonder why this is. Is it the marketing which makes iPhone owners spend double? Is it the branding, the social status of buying a $1000 status object? Or do iPhone users really believe that their phone calls and web browsers are actually worth 3X the price?

<comment><USER2> I'll look past your unwarranted snark - even with everything you said, my point is simple and nothing you say contradicts it: if you can only afford a phone for $300 or you only want to spend $300 on a phone, you are going to pick Android because iOS isn't even an option for you.

Whether you think people who buy Apple products have a poor concept of value or not is frankly irrelevant to the discussion.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's irrelevant to a conversation where I explicitly said "what else can we learn from your data", but I understand why my looking for other conclusions from your data made you uncomfortable and made you use a weird "irrelevance" attack to discard the observations instead of actually responding.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi2tjMLVpdQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi2tjMLVpdQ)

I find it interesting that many of the folks who own everything choose Android (unless they need iMessage).

>if you can only afford a phone for $300 or you only want to spend $300 on a phone, you are going to pick Android because iOS isn't even an option for you.

Absolutely, you can get near flagship level Android devices for $250 (I just picked up a Moto X4 for $250 myself) while such an Apple device would be more than twice as much (and be unpopular enough that Apple's average sale is much closer to full price).

I think this data makes a very strong case for iPhone users having a very poor sense of value, regardless of whether or not you think this conclusion from your data is "relevant" to discussion of your data or not.

<comment><USER2> The only point I made is about optionality at a price point and how that can be one factor that's important to keep in mind when looking at the data presented in the article. That's literally all I pointed out.

You can either agree with me, or disagree with me and offer evidence to disprove the value of what I said. I don't understand what you're trying to accomplish by bringing taste or sense of value into this. If iPhone users have a poor sense of value then so be it, it still neither helps strengthen nor helps disprove my original point...

I'm sorry but I don't get your angle. I get the sense that you just want some friends to argue with but I'm sorry - I can't be that person for you. You'll have to find someone else. I think it's best for both of us to move on from this conversation. It's been a pleasure, cheers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We likely have a baserate problem here. Most phones are android, so if someone just picked at random, they'd usually pick android. This doesn't always mean 'android loyalty'. It could as easily mean 'price loyalty' or 'carrier promotion loyalty'. If someone picks iOS, with its smaller market share and number of phones, it is more likely brand loyalty to Apple/iOS.

So the two loyalty numbers are not exactly comparable

<comment><USER6> Question: have you read the article? Loyalty rate is defined as the number of users who switched from one platform to the other in the last year over the number of user on the departing platform. They even say that the absolute number looks different because of the bigger market share of Android.

Now, your argument is that someone who chose to stay with a device with smaller CB is more loyal, but what the article is saying is that out of 100 Android user, around 90 bought a new Android when replacing the phone, while only 86 Apple user bought a new iPhone.

I don't see how you dispute this fact as an evidence that Android users are more loyal. Even an argument on network advantage doesn't work because Android phones are very compatible with Apple ones (not the other way around) and the Apple ecosystem is still pretty big...

<comment><USER5> Let me put it this way. You walk into a Verizon store and see 15 cell phones. 2-3 of them are iOS. The other 12-13 are android. Buying an iOS device is likely to mean that your an Apple fan. Buying an android _might_ mean that you like android. Or it might mean you like the particular phone, or you might be price conscious. All things that are not "android loyalty".

One problem is that iOS is essentially the same thing as iPhone in terms of purchasing decisions. This is not true for android. Ergo, it's not safe to equate the phone and OS in the android world but it mostly is in the iOS world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anybody other than people who actually work in the marketing department of a phone manufacturer care? Is anybody still basing their identity around the brand of smartphone they use in 2018? If so, that's sad. The iPhone vs. Android battles were stupid in 2010 they're beyond pathetic in 2018. Pick the phone you like and move on with your life.

<comment><USER8> Choosing IOS would be incompatible with my identity as an free software / open source supporter. Android is bad enough already.

<comment><USER9> I used Android phones for years due to this, I've been using GNU/Linux exclusively since 1994 and the idea that Android was open was compelling to me. I also believe Richard Stallman is an actual saint. However, Google's appalling data collection practices and coercive dark patterns[0] and the fact that the important parts of an Android phone are not at all open disillusioned me on the virtue of Android. That and bad experiences[1] with my latest MotoG persuaded me to switch. The final straw was that it started dieing spontaneously under load. Too bad they did not think to slow it down when the battery aged.

IOS may be against my free software religion, but bacon is delicious! I really like my iPhone and I hated the last Android phone although the one previous was not as bad.

Of course once you abandon your principles you are on the slippery path with no anchor to prevent you from getting an iPad, Airpods, the watch, and probably Homepod too. However, I'm still on GNU/Linux for desktop/laptop and don't see that changing.

[0] Example: I used to use the Android phone as a pedometer with my treadmill desk. After an update it refused to do this anymore without location services enabled so that it could help me record my routes. I'm pretty sure a) I know where my desk has been, b) I don't want Google knowing everywhere I go.

[1] Example, on the freeway going 75 surrounded by feral Trumpers in giant pickup trucks, ask phone "Navigate to Fremont Costco". Do I get voice navigation? or a map?. No, it puts up a dialog box about "the destination location will be closing in 35 minutes, do you still want to do this?". I can almost picture the product meeting where they dreamed up this feature. But consider - the phone knows: It's only 10 minutes away, I'm headed toward it, I'm obviously driving. Why would it think a little box full of tiny text is remotely helpful or appropriate? IOS has some flaws but is never this obtuse.

<comment><USER8> I can understand your points. It's easier for me because I'm not into phones at all; I just use a $50 phone from a bargain bin. I'd prefer something I could install an open source OS on, even if it was incompatible with everything.

Edit: although since I'm not into phones, the preference doesn't extend to spending money on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Android tends to be more flexible with a few things. At least I see a lot of users using custom fonts and crazy widgets, that would never work out with the iOS sandbox concept. iOS users that i know often have an iPhone because it just works pretty well. They would use iMessage and iCloud and everything is fully integrated.

I am currently on iOS, but I have deep concerns how Apple is controlling the Apps on the App Store and in general is pushing its agenda to everyone's phone just like that. When my 6s breaks I will very likely switch back to Android just for the reason of being able to root my device, sideload applications and control traffic via hosts file. Also, Wireshark and other fun stuff.

</comment><comment><USER11> I would like to see the data for the top end phones. Comparing the iPhone to the Galaxy, Note, and Pixel, who has the brand loyalty?

Many people pick Android because that is what their cell phone provider has for cheap.

</comment><comment><USER12> Between the ecosystems and physical handset variety (Freetel Mushashi vs. Galaxy Note 8), I'm not surprised that the data would show that Android now has higher loyalty than iOS.

Why? I would hazard that it would be the Google ecosystem; Gmail, Google Maps, Google Drive, YouTube, etc are just about irreplaceable without compromises that most non-HN users are not generally willing to make.

Edit: Well, guess who forgot something as elementary as Google ecosystem being on Apple devices too? Me.

It's a strange feeling being embarrassed based on some text on the internet.

<comment><USER13> But the entire Google ecosystem is on iOS too.

One reason I keep everything on Google is because it lets me effortlessly switch between Android and iOS.

(And it used to be that iOS apps were way behind/inferior to Android ones, but that isn't usually the case anymore.)

<comment><USER14> And one reason why I use Android phones is I know that the platform owner will let me use whatever apps I wish, unlike iOS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The headline makes this seem like a recent development, but according to the CIRP data, this has been the case since 2013.

The article even makes note of this, further down.

For Apple, iOS is a differentiator. For everyone else making handsets, the software is not a differentiator.

</comment><comment><USER16> The numbers that don't lie are in smart phone profits. If you have a reasonable amount of loyalty, you will also be able to charge a premium. Yet only Apple and maybe Google's pixel are in that arena.

Money talks!</comment>


Ask HN: Which really famous people do we have on here? - <AUTHOR>

There must be some really famous founders / engineers / programmers hanging out on here.
If you know of anyone or are that person please let us all know. Don't be shy !
Let us know what you've done / do and why you are well known :)
I would really like to learn from you and it would be great to follow your usernames.
Thanks <comment><USER2> I don't think that is really important. I'm sure you can learn a lot by reading comments and always trying to analyze it, might it be a famous or not author.

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously it was just me who thought this would be a good idea. :)</comment></comment>


Think we might eventually travel to other planets? In a way, we already are - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/3/in-transit/worlds-without-end

<comment><USER2> Fun article, but re: the interactive planet map...

"A very cloudy Earth-like planet with a dim star and dark vegetation."

Yes, I'd say it goes a bit beyond what we know.</comment>


HP PC Boss: Shutting down of WebOS is "unfounded rumor" - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/29/hp-pc-boss-shutting-down-webos-is-unfounded-rumor/ <comment><USER2> I think the reality is, they don't know what the hell to do with webos. In owning a touchpad myself, I see a bit of the reality distortion effect that affects all of us webos users. Webos succeeds in the emotional attachment, but fails in just about everything else. I love this thing so much, but it really sucks when you compare it to an iPad, or even an android tablet.

Hp made the best decision by going with windows8 moving forward. Ms has a much better tablet foundation with metro and will have the resources to make sure win8 will be a success. Webos has no hope, I'm sad to say. I think the best thing to happen for us consumers is to see webos open sourced and see what the community does with it.

I'm curious to see what Whitman decides... I bet she gets sucked into this vocal, but minority webs support group and drops more resources on this dead platform. Don't envy HPs situation.

<comment><USER3> i thought it already was open source?

<comment><USER4> Not the fun parts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know Amazon spent a lot of money to develop the Andriod skin they are going to use in the Fire, but I think they should buy webOS. That way they can build the same ecosystem Apple has. If they had their own OS no one else could use, and customers with credit card numbers on file, they could get the same seamless experience that Apple used to capture the tablet market. Also, I think they should sell them at to loss to build a userbase since they'll make a lot of money when customers load the tablet up with content.

<comment><USER4> Android is Apache licensed, Amazon won't have to share any of their custom code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If nobody makes WebOS devices, is the division really operating?

</comment><comment><USER7> Seeing as how HP no longer has any devices for sale which use WebOS, the shutdown of the WebOS unit seems like a foregone conclusion at this point.

</comment><comment><USER8> I truly hope WebOS, or at least enyo, has a bright future somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER9> It may be a rumor. It may even be false. But it is not unfounded.

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems like they up and changed their mind about it, but then again it could truly be an unfounded rumor

<comment><USER11> If so, they'll need to rehire all those people that left the company a few months ago. A friend of mine who worked on the stylus interface left a month ago, and I doubt he'd return.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If it's an "unfounded rumor", why does HP has cancelled some external projects working with WebOS ?

</comment><comment><USER13> If they are actively seeking a sale of the platform, any idea how much they'd want for it? They spent billions on the acquisition of Palm, and somehow I doubt they'll even be able to sell a dying platform.

<comment><USER14> Whatever the patents are worth.

Most journalists, forget webOS integrated Node before most people had even heard of it. The platform has so much potential. If they'd given away devices to developers instead of announcing the platform's demise and giving devices away anyway, it still stood some chance. But now it's been well and truly buried by HP.

<comment><USER15> Does HP actually own Palm's patents? Reading Wikipedia's description of Palm's IP changing hands feels like watching a game of Three-card Monte.

After Palm split its hardware and software divisions into the palmOne and PalmSource companies, Japanese company ACCESS acquired PalmSource. Wikipedia says that palmOne later paid ACCESS $44M for the _rights to the source code for Palm OS Garnet_ and that Palm could "modify the licensed software as needed and did not need to pay royalties to ACCESS." So who owns which Palm patents?

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalmOne#PalmOne>

This Engadget article from October 2010 ( _after_ HP acquired Palm in July 2010) says that ACCESS licensed some PalmSource patents to Microsoft. That suggests that ACCESS still has (some?) Palm patents.

[http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/08/microsoft-licenses- dozens...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/08/microsoft-licenses-dozens-of- patents-from-access-and-acacia-in/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> hmm 75% of webOS engineering staff left HP, I do no think the choice is up to them anymore</comment>


Programmers without computers - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/02/28/programmers-without-computers/ <comment><USER2> I'm a great fan of pen and paper "programming".

Each time I do this, I am amazed once more how powerful thoughts and observations can emerge by turning away from my laptop and rethinking the problem with most basic drawings and without the shakles of my IDE and other tools.

This is espescially important for problem solving and creativity, where your first reflex is almost never the best, or when you got stuck.

Paper gives you the freedom needed to express the problem your wrestling with, and as my old math teacher rightly said: Expressing the problem is halfway to the solution.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is completely terrible, but one of the reasons I've found it so difficult to quit smoking is that the nicotine urge acts as a timer to go outside to clear my head and get some fresh air (ironic, I know).

I've been freelancing for a couple of years now, but about half of the programmers were smokers at my last job. We would coordinate smoke breaks throughout the day, and that time was often spent chatting about whatever projects we were working on. It turned out that it was a good way to get feedback and throw ideas off the wall without interrupting people at their desks.

<comment><USER4> As long as I had smokers in my team, I used to go outside with them with a coffee. I had the fresh air without any harm to my lungs :)

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately second hand smoke is just as bad as first hand smoke.

<comment><USER6> While as a non-smoker I totally understand the sentiment here, as a scientist, that claim seems kind of unfathomable.

<comment><USER7> How so? Numerous studies have shown that second-hand smoke is very harmful:

[http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/tobaccocancer/seco...](http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/tobaccocancer/secondhand- smoke)

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

<http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/secondhand-smoke/CC00023>

<comment><USER8> It's not the fact of risk, it is a question of level. Specifically, the statement "just as dangerous" is just not true. Dangerous yes. Equally so? No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Managers (and many programmers) tend to believe on a gut level that programmers are only truly productive when there are fingers on the keyboard.

Unfortunately, in most organizations you don't want to be 'that guy' who spends half his time scribbling notes, reading inscrutable documents, and frequently talking with peers. It's hard for a casual observer to tell whether you're productive, and many people will assume you're not.

</comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of an oldie but goodie about getting away from my computer:

"How do you achieve laser focus and concentration?"

The single most important thing I do to "achieve laser focus and concentration" is to work in such a way that I don't need "laser focus and concentration" to get my work done.

This has to be done the night before.

I always quit all online work at least 2 hours before bedtime and print whatever I'm working on.

Then I go into any other room with program listings, blank paper, and pens (especially red!) and plan out all of tomorrow's work.

All analysis, design, and refactoring must be done at this time. I do not allow myself to sleep until the next day's work is laid out. I also do not allow myself to get back onto the computer. The idea is to have a clear "vision" of what I am going to accomplish the next day. The clearer the better.

This does 2 things. First, I think about it all night (maybe even dream about it). Second, I can't wait to get started the next day.

I always wake up and start programming immediately. Once I get going, it's easy to keep going. Any difficulties are probably because I didn't plan well enough the night before.

Not sure if that's the answer you're looking for, but whatever gets the work done...

Original thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191199>

<comment><USER11> I used to do large amounts of programming on paper while commuting or waiting somewhere, but in retrospect I threw most results of that away and did in completely different manner when I got to computer. (for example, I wrote most of the macros in dfsch's standard library into my notebook in interpreted code, only to rewrite them in C when I started to actually implement that). But even in that case, programming without computer caused actual boost of my productivity. Unfortunately now I don't have much opportunity to do that and you inspire me to try to somehow make time for that again.

<comment><USER12> Even if you threw the notes away, creating them in the first place primed your brain and helped you understand the problem domain more thoroughly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm reminded of Bill Watterson's description of how he would come up with _Calvin & Hobbes_ strips:

> People always ask how cartoonists come up with ideas, and the answer is so > boring that we're usually tempted to make up something sarcastic. The truth > is, we hold a blank sheet of paper, stare into space, and let our minds > wander. (To the layman, this looks remarkably like goofing off.) When > something interests us, we play around with it. Sometimes this yields a > funny observation; sometimes it doesn't, but that's about all there is to > it. Once in a while the cartoonist will find himself in a beam of light and > angels will appear with a great idea, but not often.

</comment><comment><USER14> _I was even more puzzled when the network went down, which it often did. Half of us worked on Windows PCs and half worked on Unix workstations. When the network was down, the PC folks kept working because they had self-contained local work environments._

Never underestimate the power of a self-contained work environment. Being able to focus your entire development process to a single machine can be extremely powerful in certain contexts.

<comment><USER15> Similar arguments go for using a distributed VCS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It also reminds me of programming in Starbucks, where you have no (or weak) network connection. Because of the network connection, you can concentrate on programming (or design, or thinking) rather than time-consuming and attracting information from the net.

</comment><comment><USER17> i have heard this from my father who was at iit-k, circa 1970's: ibm having installed their machine in the cs-lab on campus, wanted to paint an entire wall in the lab with just a single word "THINK" !

it kind of amused me when i heard it at first. the real truth about it hit home when i started debugging my first program ever (a taylor series 'sin(x)' calculation).

</comment><comment><USER18> I immediately thought of this blog post by Nate Lawson: [http://rdist.root.org/2008/07/03/dead-listing-while-on- vacat...](http://rdist.root.org/2008/07/03/dead-listing-while-on-vacation/)

Wherein he describes the process by which he prints out dis-assembly of a program and goes through it by hand while at the beach.

</comment><comment><USER19> Massages and yoga classes work wonders to clear my head and solve design problems I'm stuck on. It's impossible to see the problem from a new angle by continuing to stare at the same screen for hours.

Maybe Google and Facebook got it right with those walkabout masseuses.

</comment><comment><USER20> Seems like they're programmers without websites also...</comment>


Makisu - CSS 3D dropdown concept - <AUTHOR> http://soulwire.github.com/Makisu/ <comment><USER3> Wow, this comments thread is like a poster child for the unconstructive snark trend of HN.

Anyway, I think it's a neat concept. It runs correctly for me in FF (slow, but FF seems to be having problems taking advantage of my hardware in general for 3D stuff).

On Chrome and Midori it's fast, but the swinging effect gets clipped to the straight edges of the menus, and the text only shows up in the menu headings, rather than for the menu items themselves.

If I change the 'line-height' property for '.list dd' to 0, I can just make out the tops of the menu item ext, so I'm guessing that this is a positioning problem.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately Firefox still lags behind WebKit for CSS 3D transforms in performance and rendering quality (antialiasing). There's a fix for the latter issue, but it involves an even greater performance hit in my experience.

I wrote another library that relies heavily on 3D transforms to do folding effects (<http://oridomi.com>) and it's frustrating seeing the same issues you see in Makisu in Firefox.

Mozilla's been iterating quickly, so hopefully it's just a matter of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For the detractors, notice that the title says "concept". It's like a concept car- you're not going to drive one out of the showroom, but themes, hints and touches will make their way down to the models people drive every day.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. I think HN tends to forget another key point: it's just fun! I love "impractical" little things like this, and it's great to see so many people playing around with browser technologies.

<comment><USER7> The problem is that we'll get people using this in a primary role on their sites/apps because it's novel and people love using novel things. In order to have that "fun" look, you have to have a pretty long animation duration (currently ~3 seconds until they stop moving), which is doing users a disservice by making them wait until they can use the navigation let alone start reading the contents of the list.

It's a neat demo, I just fear what developers will do with it.

<comment><USER8> If someone is building a site with no UX experience, is isn;t the fault of this incredible CSS developer that his site has bad UX. His site would probably have bad UX with or without this menu.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough. I would no more blame the manufacturers of spoons for America's obesity rates than I would this developer for incorrect application of this demo.

Although, this demo is the equivalent of a spoon manufacturer demonstrating their spoons by having a picture of someone eating a giant bucket of gravy. Maybe the manufacturer can't be blamed for obesity, but they could help out by providing a healthier demonstration of how their product should be used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While I agree that this effect probably shouldn't be used for a general webpage, it could be quite effective and appropriate for a game.

In any case, a neat concept. Works great on Safari.

</comment><comment><USER10> Cool. After the menus fluttered down, they felt just a bit too static as rigid rectangles just sitting there.

It'd be cool if you could make them flutter a bit by moving the mouse around or by grabbing and dragging the edges (or some other means).

Think of them as like curtains.

Or perhaps it could be like there is a constant slight breeze, making them move like a curtain in a gentle breeze.

Anyway, just some thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER11> Observations: this is really neat and HN commenters are jerks in this thread.

</comment><comment><USER12> For those interested in the cause of the slowdown on Firefox, it's a bug in the calculation of overflow in 3D transforms that causes the browser to repaint the background every frame: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=804324>

</comment><comment><USER13> I think it's neat. It says "concept" and "experimental" (on the Github readme) so I don't think it's being sold as usable navigation. Always a pleasure to see technology demos like this for CSS.

EDIT: Grammar.

</comment><comment><USER14> It looks cool, but I think the animation should be faster for the demo. Making users wait for animation is bad UX.

<comment><USER15> But the animation is the demo...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> FF 16/Linux is very slow, but works and looks great on the iPad with its hw accelerated CSS.

I agree with some others that the animation speed is a little slow to give that suspension of disbelief, and the menus are a little too static once the animation has finished, but I have useful suggestions there because they would stop being very useful if they moved around. Maybe the effect would work best in the form of a dropdown menu?

</comment><comment><USER17> Hey it's very stylistic which means it's of limited use in general, but I could see it being used in certain situations. I think what makes it impractical is how tall the menus are in the demo. If the menus were smaller then the fold out, roll up effects would happen much quicker (<1s) which would make it less annoying to watch. It takes almost 5 secs to unroll. You can adjust the speed of each menu item (default 0.8) so lower than to 0.4 and it might be less cumbersome to use. I think it's a neat effect.

</comment><comment><USER18> Neat, reminds me of this more general purpose folding library: <http://oridomi.com/>

</comment><comment><USER19> Agreed, cool but ultimately shouldn't be used.

<comment><USER20> Agreed, but a version that fell open almost instantly and swayed just for a moment would be very cool, and perhaps an improvement on the standard UI. I wonder what other subtle animations might be helpful?

<comment><USER21> None, if it locks up your computer while animating at a buttery smooth ~2fps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Works in Firefox 16.0.1 but is really slow. Doesn't really do a whole lot in Chrome 24.0.1297.0.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is also a great example of how far behind gecko is from webkit in the performance game. Look at it on Firefox as opposed to Safari or Chrome!

<comment><USER23> Sadly, on Ubuntu, Chrome and my ATI card's drivers don't get along, so I'm forced to use Firefox when doing anything with 3D CSS Transformations or WebGL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wow superb. This is very attractive for a website and would love to use.

But this might not be usable for a Web App, but there may be some situations.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm reminded of how much I hate DVD menus.

</comment><comment><USER26> This looks fantastic, but it seems really hard to learn. Need some tools, or a CSS physics engine.

</comment><comment><USER27> I like the gravity effect. Next: make it so I can drag around the menus.

</comment><comment><USER28> Really cool. Why so much of the CSS is inline?

<comment><USER29> I think you're looking at the DOM, not the Source. Javascript adds CSS to the style attribute.

<comment><USER28> Yes, I was looking at the DOM. But why add styles as attributes? There is any performance improvement? Couldn't be done with just CSS?

<comment><USER23> Well that is CSS. And of course there's a performance improvement - <USER2> you're applying a transformation to a hundred or so elements, it's usually much quicker to directly manipulate element.style than generate some CSS, put it in a style element, append that to the DOM, and wait for the browser to parse the CSS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I love it so much! Great job.

</comment><comment><USER29> I wish I'd thought of this.

</comment><comment><USER31> Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER32> you had me at unfolding.

</comment><comment><USER33> Spoiler: It's not really amazing.

<comment><AUTHOR> is too

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Hmm, turns my computer into a vacuum cleaner.

</comment><comment><USER35> Why is everyone naming software after random Japanese stuff? ("makisu", or 「巻き簾」 in Japanese, are mats used for food preparation, primarily sushi).

<comment><USER36> Syllables and K's are strong sounds (Kodak). Most English words in English have been claimed; there's no domain name available and there likely at least 5 other businesses registered with that word in their name.

Romaji[1] seems like a fun place to plunder exciting sounding words from.

Anime and Manga became mainstream popular X years ago, where X is long enough for those early fans to become old enough to start naming products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It LOOKS nice but it's just an eye-candy. It is not a good thing to implement into an actual website. I really do not see a purpose for it.</comment>


Why Can't We Have HD Audio and SIP on the 4 Major US Carriers? - <AUTHOR> So, why can't we have HD Audio? We know T-Mobile has SIP servers that play nice with others[1] when they aren't walled off, Sprint supports SIP as that is how RingPlus (which supported G722 HD Audio), Google Voice, Bandwidth.com and others tie in, AT&T offered nearly the same type of interconnection with their WebRTC developer offering they killed a month ago, and Verizon has been showing the SIP URI as of late too[2].
Wouldn't it be possible to get the IPSec cert off a few phones and get access to these PBXes/SBCs, so we can get decent quality audio? As it stands today, carriers are essentially driving away their customers with low quality G711 audio or worse, no one is benefiting from high bitrate, low quality audio.
1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/2y4glg/calling_tmobile_subscribers_directly_via_sip/ 2 - https://www.reddit.com/r/verizon/comments/2y7nrd/is_it_possible_to_call_verizon_subscribers_with/ <comment><USER2> The big one is that cell phone providers aren't that interested in telephony these days.

I did an extended stint of B2B sales over the phone and I can say that cell phones have made life much worse for anybody who talks over the phone. You discover that people in "normal" built-up places like Encino, CA are making calls on their cells with constant dropouts. Or that you can't get a GSM signal two blocks from the intersection of Hollywood and Vine, or you might even be unlucky enough to be on a conference call that is interrupted by a car crash. (It happened to me!)

Any criticism of the cell phone culture will get you voted down, after all, almost every article in a lifestyle publication leads with some reference to how attached we are our to "our" smartphones but the fact is that people are flapping their lips constantly but not all that concerned about understanding what the other people say, otherwise they'd ditch their cells for a real phone.

B2B sales over the phone can vary across the board from tedious to nerve- wracking to a lot of fun, but if you can't hear what people are saying, and they can't hear now, it is much harder. If B2B sales matter at all to the economy I'd imagine that cell phones are knocking a few percent off our GDP.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cell phones definitely have caused a notable drop in audio quality. Massive carriers like Verizon for example felt they could compress calls quite heavily, destroying audio quality in the process.

VoLTE could improve the situation, if we could get the HD audio to actually make it off the cell carrier's network. Currently, no US Cell Carrier does so tho.

<comment><USER2> In Europe, the coming of cell phones brought lower phone bills and better service. I spent 1998 and 1999 in the former East Germany and found it was a mistake to get a landline from Deusche Telecom and I should have just gotten a "handy" instead but I grew up in a country that had a regulated monopoly telecom (AT&T) as opposed to a government- or post-office- run phone company. In Europe, cell phones brought competition and lower prices.

In the US, on the other hand, phone bills went up as cell phones came in, and the quality of the service went way down.

<comment><USER3> When I got my first cell phone at the end of '96, I paid $40/mo with 1000min on VoiceStream (now owned by TMobile). There were no long distance charges. Meanwhile, my friends were paying $60/mo to what is now CenturyLink (Qwest at the time) plus long distance charges.

I realize it's anecdotal, but I think phone service got ~30% cheaper at minimum (much more when including long distance). If you remember at the end of the 90's, the telco's were running crazy amounts of long distance advertisements (i.e. 10-10-220) knowing full well that gravy train was coming to an end.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Towards a Bra-free Instagram Experience (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://shift.newco.co/2017/12/30/towards-a-bra-free-instagram-experience/ <comment><USER2> >Do men on Instagram contend with this many half-naked dudes and their butts all the time? I really want to know.

In a way, yes. Men are shown ads or muscular, successful men with chiseled jawlines reminding us that we're inferior, our clothes style sucks, how we can't be a man because we don't smoke the same cigarettes as he.

<comment><USER3> Sure, but imagine how worse it would be to see the outline of the said muscular men's penises.

Because breasts are similarly sexualized. The muscular man may hurt my sense of self but he does not challenge me to sexually improve or supplement myself.

<comment><USER4> Muscles are similarly sexualized, so you don't really need to get the penis involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Making you feel bad is a proven effective advertising strategy, and a proven terrible world to exist. There needs to be a pollution tax for advertising the way there should be for carbon. If you deliberately pump a harmful product out into the world you should have to pay through the nose for it.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's pretty easy to avoid Instagram and Facebook. Install an ad blocker and the rest of the web becomes reasonably friendly.

They'll just keep ratcheting up the obnoxiousness until they find your threshold for quitting. These are "free" products, so if you're still enjoying the rest of the site, then they're leaving money on the table.

</comment><comment><USER7> I agree with the author and wish I could see less ads for bras. I am a male and mostly follow makers and woodworkers, yet I see a ton of ads for bras. My wife doesn't send me too many links to bra companies either.

I deleted my Facebook 2 years ago, and my Instagram is only about 6 months old. I used the same email address in both accounts.

<comment><USER8> Do you have kids? When ours arrived and I started searching for baby and kid related items The Algorithms decided that I must be a woman.

<comment><USER7> I do. Good point, the algorithms are as biased as societal norms from the 1950s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The objected ads will continue until morale improves.

</comment><comment><USER10> > _says something really depressing about our value as women in the world_

Well, most women want attractive men to be attracted to them. The advertisers attempt to associate their products with being attractive. Men are advertised to the same way, it says nothing about men's "value to the world". This is embarrassing melodrama.

</comment><comment><USER11> Instead of stopping use of a commercial-propaganda-infested app like Instagram, the author continues to use it, but shouts at the wind, essentially, on this is annoying.

Fatalism, defeatism, subservience.

</comment><comment><USER12> (2017)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a ridiculous criticism. Ancient Greeks didn't look at sculptures of ripped dudes and "feel bad about themselves." They got INSPIRED and felt GOOD about themselves. Be like an Ancient Greek.

<comment><USER14> I don't even know where to begin, my friend...

<comment><USER13> You could begin by choosing to feel good when seeing an inspiring (even "unrealistically" inspiring) image like Michelangelo's David. :)

<comment><USER10> AFAIK, David is physiologically impossible; as much as a photoshopped ad.

<comment><USER15> Which parts of him are physiologically impossible?

His biceps and thighs are well within human proportions I see daily in regular men.

In fact, the least likely portion of him would be the modest endowment, something that a modern man would almost certainly not admit to.

<comment><USER10> He's standing in a way that requires activating his missing muscle. ;- )

Apparently Michelangelo knew it was missing, because it's due to a flaw in the marble.

I think individually the proportions aren't crazy, but taken together I think they contradict eachother.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Beeplay.js: Write a song in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://watilde.github.io/beeplay/

<comment><USER2> A friend recently created something similar, and he ended up transcribing the full-length Super Mario theme song! [http://eshiota.github.io/retro-audio- js/](http://eshiota.github.io/retro-audio-js/)

Presentation here: [http://www.slideshare.net/eshiota/web-audio-band-playing- wit...](http://www.slideshare.net/eshiota/web-audio-band-playing-with-a-band- in-your-browser)

<comment><USER3> Very awesome! Interestingly, in both Chrome and Firefox, the song stops playing ("mostly") if you switch to a different tab. I say "mostly" because Chrome seems to play a single note every 10-20 seconds even with the tab backgrounded.

<comment><USER4> Yeap, both setTimeout and setInterval are being sacrificed for performance. Alternatively you could use WebWorkers to offload the timers for precision.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If play returned a reference to the play function you could chain them like

        .play('D#5', 1/4)('E5', 1/4)

Just a thought on cleaning up the syntax a bit.

<comment><USER6> A cleaner way may be to allow the play() method to accept a plain JS array of notes:

      var notes = ['D#5', 1/4, 'E5', 1/4];
                 or
      var notes = [['D#5', 1/4], ['E5', 1/4]];

      beeplay().play(notes);

<comment><USER7> I plan to do it! A 'toJSON()' method is only for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to specify wave types or even more advanced stuff such as FM synthesis. With a little work, modules such as this one may enable a whole new category of innovative/strange browser apps.

<comment><USER9> CoffeeCollider is a coffeescript clone of SuperCollider, it has a lot of options for subtractive/additive/fm/granular synthesis and algorithmic sequencing/composition.

[http://mohayonao.github.io/CoffeeCollider/](http://mohayonao.github.io/CoffeeCollider/)

<comment><USER10> timbre.js (also from this person) is pretty cool too. [http://mohayonao.github.io/timbre.js/](http://mohayonao.github.io/timbre.js/)

This weekend I used it to make a white noise generator for studying, etc.. [http://www.noisemachine.co](http://www.noisemachine.co)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I remember making these kinds of songs in BASIC. Very fun!

<comment><USER12> I remember in PASCAL with the sound() function:

      sound(100);
      delay(3000);
      nosound;

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would love to see a MIDI interpreter for something like this. MIDI is already a series of note events (among other weird things like pitchbend and sustain, so it couldn't be too hard.

</comment><comment><USER12> That's very funny. You should do a Mario theme song also :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Nifty! I'd love to be able to specify tone (sine wave, square wave, triangle wave).

</comment><comment><USER15> An online editor to "play" with it would be appreciated! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://jsfiddle.net/S66zA/](http://jsfiddle.net/S66zA/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> very nice, although the text shadow on the code makes it a bit hard to read

</comment><comment><USER17> now all we need is a javascript powered mod player.

<comment><USER18> You mean like this[0] one?

[0]: [http://tracker.stagas.com/](http://tracker.stagas.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Look very nice</comment>


Parrot Uses Alexa to Order Watermelon, Lightbulbs While Owner Is Out - <AUTHOR> https://www.newsweek.com/parrot-alexa-amazon-african-grey-england-animals-1260318 <comment><USER2> Looks like this is not a new thing among parrots. YouTube shows quite a few results when I searched for "parrot alexa". Also, there are some interesting videos for "parrot siri".

In one case, the owner got the package delivered also: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a43Ea_df0rw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a43Ea_df0rw)

Using Alexa to turn on lights: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeQD4UdGY-A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeQD4UdGY-A)

Petra the Parrot tries to shop on Amazon w Alexa: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFoQ16SEamY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFoQ16SEamY)

Parakeet using Siri to search for chicken: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbPxpi05ruY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbPxpi05ruY)

Not related to technology, but this birds reaction to the man destroying is cage is funny (loud): [https://youtu.be/XM8aBESf8EI?t=61](https://youtu.be/XM8aBESf8EI?t=61)

</comment><comment><USER3> For everyone suggesting that Amazon needs to fix this, the article makes it clear in the first sentence that these items were not actually purchased:

"Luckily, due to a parental lock, none of his attempted purchases went through."

<comment><USER4> The UI needs updating to allow it to have a parrot lock.

<comment><USER5> Not just UI, this goes all the way to the data model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "If you have a parrot and you don't teach it to say, 'Help, they've turned me into a parrot', you are wasting everybody's time."

— Julia Segal

[https://twitter.com/juliasegal/statuses/25763973055](https://twitter.com/juliasegal/statuses/25763973055)

<comment><USER7> It's an old stolen joke, so it's probably not worth quoting her

<comment><USER8> Probably first heard from a parrot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love stories like this, even though my Meyers Parrot has a limited vocabulary and could never pull this off. For me the best part is Marion Wischnewski giving Rocco a good home. After having cats, monkeys, and dogs as pets, I have to say that my parrot is my favorite pet, but most people shouldn't have parrots unless they can devote many hours a day to their care and playing with them.

<comment><USER10> > most people shouldn't have parrots unless they can devote many hours a day > to their care and playing with them

No one should have any pets (or kids) unless they can devote enough time to them. Otherwise you are just making your life and their lives a lot harder. Pets (and kids) are not toys.

<comment><USER11> Many hours a day for a parrot seems surprising though. So is life go to work, go home, parrot time, sleep, every day?

<comment><USER9> Parrot time can also just be letting him sit on my shoulder while I am writing or coding, or make sure he is near us when we watch a movie after dinner. I didn't intend to say that I have to be scratching his head a few hours a day, although he would be fine with that. Also my wife doesn't work and our parrot is near her desk at home during the day. He basically likes to have someone in the room with him.

<comment><USER12> When you say 'someone in the room with him', does it have to be a human? Would another parrot suffice? What about other pets (large dogs for example)?

<comment><USER13> One parrot is a loud pet. Two parrots isn't parrot+parrot, it's parrot^parrot. I know this because I have a metered conure, and an ex girlfriend has a sun conure. I was hospitalized for six months and she volunteered to take my bird. The were LOUD together, each feeding off the other.

<comment><USER14> I had it explained to me as Parrot + Humans, the bird will 'talk human'. Parrot + Parrot, the bird will 'talk bird' i.e. screeches and calls, louder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seems like Alexa should have an option to enable basic CAPCHA/CAPAHA that cannot be defeated by simple parroting, like

"Please confirm order by saying an element in the periodic table"

"Oxygen"

"Order confirmed"

<comment><USER16> How hard is it to just touch the freaking thing to confirm? I mean, how much time is saved, 1.283 seconds?

<comment><USER17> "Waaa it's inconvenient waaa why can't it obey any voice it hears waaa my neighbour bought a lot of crap using my Alexa then got the packages off my porch waaa why didn't they do something?!"

<comment><USER18> Should be good for at least a few dozen opinion pieces in online tech pubs about how Alexa isn't really a voice assistant any longer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Good way to keep the bird from being bored. This doesn't need a fix, it needs to be a feature (for animals to use to keep company).

<comment><USER20> A digital assistant becoming a bird's companion feels like a perfect Disney/Pixar plot. It must either have been rejected previously or be in the works.

Spoiler: the bird accidentally resets or damages the assistant, but manages to get it back up, perhaps with the unwitting help of another digital assistant.

<comment><USER21> Every parrot should have a Palm Pirate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The Internet of Things I Won't Buy.

</comment><comment><USER23> I was curious what would happen if you made a tactile interface for other pets (dogs, cats, turtles).

<comment><USER24> There are many games for cats on tablets. Scratch the mouse/fish etc. From what I've seen on YouTube cats love it.

<comment><USER23> I mean, not games, but more giving food, heating the cat tree a bit, things with more physical implications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Remarkable bird the Norwegian blue.

<comment><USER26> Beautiful plumage.

<comment><USER27> The plumage don't enter into it. It's stone dead.

<comment><USER28> No no, it's resting!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> don't these things have parental controls? Voice fingerprinting isn't that hard, right?

<comment><USER30> Third sentence in the article: "Luckily, due to a parental lock, none of his attempted purchases went through."

<comment><USER18> That's not voice fingerprinting though. It's requiring a PIN for purchases.

<comment><USER31> Google Home has this though it's easy for humans to beat. It would stop a parrot though.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: We oft talk about mental stress in tech, call it PTDS: - <AUTHOR>

  (Post Technology Deployment Syndrome): This causes some/many to suffer in daily life. What from your tech career makes you suffer and how?
 Some drank
Some thrive
Some recluse
Some BOFH
ETC...
How do you deal with tech stress, where the stress of your career is abstracted away from the physical, but may manifest in the physical.
When sedentary in a seat, where all your activity is mental/cerebreal/emotional stress -- how does that affect you IRL?
Is this already a thing being studied? If so, what is it called? How do I read up on it?
(aside from "depression can be from N sources" type of stuff?) -- Yeah, I identified that N=tech.. how fix? <comment><USER2> I try to go to the gym each morning for 60 minutes of cardio + strength

I take frequent trips down the hall and back and that helps me think

edit: get to the gym at 5:15 AM, so I go to bed rather early. Also working on eating better to lose weight.</comment>


The U.S. Postal Service will default on Wednesday unless Congress acts - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/31/news/economy/postal-service-default/index.htm

<comment><USER2> Before you develop an opinion on this, you'd want to know that the bill the USPS is defaulting on is a prepayment for future health costs, which the USPS is required to account for idiosyncratically. The USPS has structural financial issues, but is not on the immediate brink of collapse.

<comment><USER3> You'd also want to know that even without this pension payment, they would still be losing many billions every year, with future projections of even larger losses in the future. Internal USPS estimates say they will have an annual deficit of $20 billion/year within a few years (it's about $10 billion for 2012), but the new pension payment is only about $5 billion/year.

You'd also want to know that "pay as you go" pensions are illegal in the private sector for good reason, so it's not ridiculous for the government to insist that USPS put money in a pension fund.

<comment><USER2> We are spending a lot of money staffing (i) universal delivery at (ii) a single fixed rate on (iii) a 6-day-a-week schedule.

Any of those three could be _drastically_ relaxed without compromising the core value of the USPS in modern US life.

<comment><USER4> Precisely. I'd be happy with 1-2 day per week delivery.

<comment><USER5> You could do 5 day delivery with 1/day pickup and save a ton of money.

But the biggest problem is the post offices. There are so many of them!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The postal service is what it is because at one point in time, it was deemed something that was worth providing to everyone, everywhere as part of being in the same country. Even if that was not always economically sensible, the idea is that there are other benefits to society.

The debate, therefore, is really about that: is that still the situation? If not, then just cut it loose - privatize the sector, and do not require anyone to deliver to places like Lonerock, Oregon ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonerock,_Oregon> ). If so, the debate becomes how to best provide those services to minimize losses.

However, that debate is clearly a _political_ one, which would mean that it's probably not a suitable article for this site (comes from cnn.com, too, to boot).

</comment><comment><USER7> For the USA degrading into a service-only economy, there sure is a funny attitude against preserving a pretty good service.

<comment><USER8> You think USPS is a pretty good service? Have you ever used them? I HATE going to USPS location. The staff is rude and slow. It takes forever to get even the smallest thing to be taken care of.

Compare this to UPS/FedEx. Generally, there won't be any lines and you can be in and out in less than 3 minutes.

<comment><USER7> I guess the experience varies widely. I love USPS, very accessible and affordable, send anything up to 3 ounces in just a few days anywhere in the continental USA for $1.60

However I absolutely loathe, beyond description UPS. I wish Amazon used anything but UPS for prime, it ruins the whole experience.

<comment><USER9> [http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3186/2549379679_5251c541f6_z.j...](http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3186/2549379679_5251c541f6_z.jpg) nuff said. I swear sometimes they don't even ring the doorbell.

<comment><USER10> > I swear sometimes they don't even ring the doorbell.

No need to "swear", they've been caught in that exact act several time by people who'd cleared their daily schedule entirely (or taken a home-work day for office drones) to get their package, either catching them trying to leave after having pinned/dropped a notice or plain not saying them the whole day.

And that's beyond their basic "rules" such as a home number not being clearly visible from the truck means you don't exist and fuck you very much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As I've mentioned before, the USPS is an environmental disaster. 6 days each week thousands of trucks set off to deliver millions of pounds of unwanted paper waste (junk mail) to homes and businesses all across the country.

Every day I clear out my mailbox and 95% of the contents goes directly into the recycle bin. I have tried all the DMA removal forms, various generalized opt outs, etc., but the junk mail keeps coming.

Recently with paperkarma (an IOS app) I've been able to reduce it somewhat, so now junk mail is about 75% of the contents of my mailbox on a bad day.

There is certainly no reason for daily deliveries. I'd be happy with once or twice each week. This would save massively on fuel and labor costs and would not degrade the service significantly since the trucks could still operate between cities every day if necessary.

The USPS and the paper direct mail industry should both have gone away long ago. Alas, it's illegal for any companies to offer standard letter delivery services, so the USPS is also a monopolist, with all the expected bloat and inefficiency.

<comment><USER2> I recommend Jonathan Franzen's postal service essay in _How To Be Alone_ for some perspective on how important the postal service actually is. There are a number of business processes that actually touch normal people's lives that depend on postal mail.

<comment><USER11> I just sat down and read that article and I didn't get any sort of sense of how important the USPS is. I did get a sense of how badly it's run, how powerful the employees's union is, how quickly (even in 1994) businesses were moving to electronic communication in order to route around the USPS, and how unlikely any sort of improvement is. Franzen even writes, near the end, "The attachement of Americans to their post office is pure nostalgia." I have my own nostalgia for post offices of my youth, but the move away from the USPS for important communications has been going on for a long time.

<comment><USER2> I'm not defending the USPS, just observing things like the tens of millions of people who get bills and checks in the mail.

I believe we need some minimal standard of universal postal service, but I certainly do not believe we need the postal service as it exists today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> FTFA: "While default would be a first for the Postal Service and a sign of how deep its problems are, it's largely symbolic. Postal officials have pledged that employees and subcontractors will continue to be paid and mail will be delivered as normal."

</comment><comment><USER13> USPS, to put it simply, sucks. Nobody I know uses them, and when I have to ship something via USPS, I use their more expensive options - things do tend to get lost a lot, unlike UPS and Fedex for example, which have been pretty exemplary as of late.

I hope the Congress does nothing - but then again, I'm one of those who think bailing out the banks was a mistake...

<comment><USER14> Everybody I know uses Flat Rate Priority. I participate in unregulated board game auctions on a forum (geeky, I know), and out of the last 50 packages sent from average boring people across the US, I don't think a single one came UPS. They're all Flat Rate Priority, defaulting into Parcel Post for larger packages.

Bailing out the private and wealthy isn't comparable to bailing out a public service that wouldn't even need to be bailed out if Congress hadn't instituted pension funding standards on it that are harsher than the standards they impose on banks doing the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> edit: said elsewhere. "The Postal Reform Act". end of story.</comment>


The Chirp Distributed Filesystem - <AUTHOR> http://ccl.cse.nd.edu/software/chirp/

<comment><USER2> This is from Douglas Thain's Cooperative Computing Laboratory.

An architecture class assignment had us trying to find the "best" cpu configuration to run a snippet of code (number of registers, issue width, etc). Most people in the class simulated around 20 configurations. Using an earlier iteration of the CCL Work Queue abstraction, I ran ~12000 simulations in IIRC only about 6 hours.

The point being, it's pretty easy to use. The source is mostly straight C, and pretty easy to follow. I would start with chirp_server.c.

disclaimer: I was one of Dr Thain's students before I dropped out to go do some dream job or other.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love this visualization:

[http://condor.cse.nd.edu/condor_matrix.cgi](http://condor.cse.nd.edu/condor_matrix.cgi)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm having trouble finding a detailed explanation of how this works and how it handles concurrency. [http://www3.nd.edu/~dthain/papers/chirp- jgc.pdf](http://www3.nd.edu/~dthain/papers/chirp-jgc.pdf) seems to be the paper, but it has only a small section on this important subject.

</comment><comment><USER5> So does Chirp just turn a directory on each computer into a single big directory everyone can access?

</comment><comment><USER6> It seems to be available in Ubuntu LTS as "coop-computing-tools". Nice.</comment>


Battery Widget? Reborn - Flight Mode does not work after upgrade to Android 4.2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.batterywidgetreborn.com/known-bugs.html?ticketId=77 <comment><AUTHOR> This change in Android API drives me nuts. I get plenty of emails where people asking to fix it. I can only say: sorry it is outside of my code :-(</comment>