Vegetables get freakish in the land of the midnight sun (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/08/20/341884706/why-vegetables-get-freakish-in-the-land-of-the-midnight-sun <comment><USER2> When did Alaska become the land of the midnight sun?

I think it must be something more to it than only the sun. I have lived north of the arctic circle in the land of the midnight sun (Norway) most of my life, potatoes and carrots grown here are not bigger than what is grown in the south where the growing season is much longer.

<comment><USER3> According to Wikipedia it's a nickname for Alaska but also can refer to any region above the Arctic circle. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_the_Midnight_Sun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_the_Midnight_Sun)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Rise and Fall of Scottish Tomatoes - [https://food.list.co.uk/article/17305-the-rise-and-fall- of-s...](https://food.list.co.uk/article/17305-the-rise-and-fall-of-scottish- tomatoes/)

 _'At the farmers' markets, people are always delighted to get Scottish-grown stuff. But in the supermarkets, people always buy with an eye on the price. The fact is, heating those greenhouses is always going to put us at a cost disadvantage._

 _'Now if something was to happen to road transport, more attention to food miles perhaps, it could change things. Or if southern Europe was to have more water shortages … But that's looking decades ahead. If there's ever going to be a Scottish tomato revival, I doubt I'll be here to see it.'_

2009 article, likely he is here to see it.

<comment><USER5> Growing veggies in heated greenhouses is madness in the current climate crisis, transporting them even long distances is vastly more energy efficient because freight is quite efficient per kg.

<comment><USER6> Except in Iceland, they do a decent job with their geothermally heated greenhouses. They're very proud of the tomatoes.

<comment><USER7> Which brings up the thought - what about the efficiency of solar powered greenhouses? As solar cells are more efficient at catching the sunlight than plants - might boost the overall efficiency of growing things without negative environment impact.

<comment><USER8> A normal greenhouse _is_ passive solar powered.

<comment><USER9> Modern solar panels and high efficiency GHP, are getting upto a point where it's comparable to the heat you get from direct sunlight. So I don't think it's far off that we see green houses heated purely by solar energy, with the added benefit of being energy sink during low demand (night) and energy source during demand (day).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In addition to long daylight periods during the growing season, you're also using soil that hasn't been farmed continuously for hundreds of years like in the mainland US, or even thousands of years like pretty much everywhere else on earth.

<comment><USER11> You don't need native soil. Compost, manure, and off season ground cover crops that are mulched into native soil do just fine. Where I live in the South there's lots of red clay but if you provide amendments you will do fine. Your county dump will probably provide compost for free. California provides food for a massive portion of the county but without us providing water it would be too arid for most corps.

<comment><USER10> I didn't say anything about "native" soil, just that it's land that hasn't been used agriculturally. Yeah, we can put compost, manure, nitrogen, etc in the soil, but you can't artificially recreate the microbiome and micro- nutrient mixture that nature creates over eons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> NPR seems to use Reddit post/commemts for lots of it's stories. Yesterday some redditor posted about Alaska's large (and sweet) vegetables and not 10 hours later NPR published an article on the topic. I notice NPR using reddit for story leads at least a few times a week.

<comment><USER13> You're reversing cause and effect. Someone saw the reddit story and decided to post this NPR story here from 2014.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > The extra sunlight also makes the produce sweeter. "People often try our > carrots here, and they think we've put sugar on them," Brown says.

That's interesting. The few people I know that live in Alaska or who have purchased local produce have said the opposite. That the strawberries were very large and very bland.

I assume some things get sweeter and some are more bland depending on if they burn their own sugar to grow?

<comment><USER15> Larger strawberry varieties do tend to be bland in my experience. Also carrots are root storage while strawberries are more temporary, so maybe they get prioritzed differently in plants that adapt to really long dark stretches.

<comment><USER16> Tomato fruit sugar content apparently inversely correlates with the sugar content of the fruit.[0] That is, larger tomatoes tend to have less sugar in them as a percentage of the whole. I'm not sure if this applies to strawberries, but it's worth considering/looking into.

[0] [https://doi.org/10.21273/JASHS.129.6.0839](https://doi.org/10.21273/JASHS.129.6.0839)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In my country the potatoes which grow on hills taste wayyy better than the ones produced on flatland.

<comment><USER8> How is that? Is it the "terroir" or the weather or the different variety?

<comment><USER18> My guess would be drainage. Plants don't like usually like wet feet. Potatoes are more tolerant of this than others but that doesn't make it ideal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In the competitive giant pumpkin world, all the largest entries come from northern regions, due to the increase number daylight hours in the summer.

</comment><comment><USER20> Couldn't indoor farming also accomplish this?

<comment><USER21> Growing under artificial lighting is extremely challenging. A lot of study goes into selecting the right kind of lights with a spectrum that closely matches natural light. (An ordinary light bulb won't cut it.)

Once the proper lights are found, energy consumption and cooling are so significant that it's not really economical to grow food indoors.

If you want to understand this more, I suggest looking up how to grow pot indoors. (It's really interesting to read, even if you never plan on doing it.) A significant amount of pot is grown indoors because it's easier to keep hidden than growing outdoors. (And, the stores that cater to indoor vegetable gardens really just cater to people growing pot in their closet or basement.)

(BTW, people growing lots of pot indoors are easy to find due to electricity consumption and strange heat signatures from their homes. Some people get caught after large blizzards because the snow on their roof melts unusually fast.)

<comment><USER22> No idea about pot specifically, but it's not totally impossible for vegetables.

Canada is a net exporter of tomatoes, many of which are grown in massive greenhouses in the middle of nowhere (e.g., [https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/06/16/473526920/ho...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/06/16/473526920/how- canada-became-a-greenhouse-superpower)) As the article says, it costs a bit more to grow, but the yield and quality make up for it.

<comment><USER23> In Australia a major tomato producer built their new greenhouse facility in the high-altitude (1km) New England region because it's cheaper to heat the greenhouses in the cold winter months than to cool them in the hot summer months in low-altitude high-temperature areas. It might be with global warming the economics of Canadian tomatoes get even better.

<comment><USER18> The regions of Canada where we grow tomatoes are not particularly cold. The greenhouse heartland here is in the southernmost part of Canada near Lake Erie and sits at the same lattitude (42) as northern California / southern Oregon, or central Italy.

Yes, it's cold in the winter because it's a continental climate, but the summers tend to be very hot and humid (mid 30C not uncommon and perceptually higher due to the high humidity.) Obviously not in Australia's heat ranges, but warmer than you'd find in most of Europe.

Many of these greenhouses are switching to growing cannabis now, with legalization.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google's Colossus Makes Search Real-Time By Dumping MapReduce - brown9-2 http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/9/11/googles-colossus-makes-search-real-time-by-dumping-mapreduce.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't get it. They were using Map/Reduce as a way to build the index, which they were able to query in mere milliseconds. This article claims that in order to facilitate Google Instant, they had to ditch the Map/Reduce-oriented updating of the index.

How are these mutually exclusive? If you look at quotes like these:

"Goal is to update the search index continuously, within seconds of content changing, without rebuilding the entire index from scratch using MapReduce."

To me, this seems as if this change has nothing to do with Google Instant. This has more to do with being able to respond instantly to new content, instead of being able to query the index quickly.

It sounds like they added support for distributed stored procedures on top of BigTable, which reminds me a bit of the way MongoDB implemented Map/Reduce. But I bet that they in no way at all have dumped Map/Reduce.

<comment><USER2> > To me, this seems as if this change has nothing to do with Google Instant. > This has more to do with being able to respond instantly to new content, > instead of being able to query the index quickly.

Right, this was part of the caffeine update, which happened months ago.

> But I bet that they in no way at all have dumped Map/Reduce.

The old way of doing calculations on the web graph was giant iterations on the adjacency matrix via map reduce. In the new system, they are probably doing local walks in the instantiated graph. These local walks are simple iterations, not map-reduce.

<comment><USER3> > In the new system, they are probably doing local walks in the instantiated > graph. These local walks are simple iterations, not map-reduce.

Actually it using Pregel, a variation on Map/Reduce:

[http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/large-scale- graph...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/large-scale-graph- computing-at-google.html)

[http://horicky.blogspot.com/2010/07/google-pregel-graph- proc...](http://horicky.blogspot.com/2010/07/google-pregel-graph- processing.html)

<http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1582716.1582723>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Register article linked by the blog post ( [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/google_caffeine_expl...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/google_caffeine_explained/) ) is more informative than the blog post itself.

To me, it looks like the blogger makes a few wrong assumptions: He confuses Google Instant with Google Realtime. He assumes that "something like database triggers" is actually very much like database triggers and could be e.g. used to check the integrity of the data. He goes wildly off on a tangent with Internet DOM.

</comment><comment><USER5> This article seems to confuse real-time search (producing results from web pages put online moments ago, such as news articles and twitter feeds) and Google Instant (search as you type results using Google Suggest).

</comment><comment><USER6> Today it's MapReduce but wait a few years...

09/11/2020: Google has found that its BigTable database is very limited in terms of the types of queries it can perform and that the kind of data modeling it enforces leads to a number of nasty inconsistencies. Under lead engineer Matt Codd, Google researchers have been working on a secret project codenamed 'Join' in order to remedy this situation. At this year's I/O conference the search behemoth will present the successor to its dated BigTable system. The new database system is rumored to be named DB2.

</comment><comment><USER7> I doubt they abandoned Map/Reduce, just changed where/how it's being used in their architecture. It's way too powerful of a technique, especially at their scale, to abandon it entirely.

Also, I didn't find this article to have a lot of substance. If anyone knows of any more detailed description of the under-the-hood changes, please point it out for us.

</comment><comment><USER8> As an engineer I'm blown away that they can pull this off at all. As a user one thing that's pissing me off about Instant is that it doesn't honor the 'Number of Results' search setting, it always returns 10 results.

I feel like the Louis CK airplane internet guy, "pfff this is bullshit" <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOtEQB-9tvk></comment>


Jobs In The Time Of Corona - <AUTHOR> http://jittoc.com <comment><AUTHOR> Seeded with some jobs from this thread - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22665398](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22665398)</comment>


EFF's HTTPS Everywhere Firefox plugin - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere <comment><USER2> Just because it surprised me to find it - firewalls we deal with have HTTPS MITM capability built in. You install an SSL certificate which your corporate workstations trust, and it will present that to the workstation while proxying the connection out to the site, and sniffing/filtering the traffic in between.

Until I saw that I thought of it as 'an attack'.

<comment><USER3> I still consider it an attack.

There's lots of security reasons why a company would want to do that, both in protecting from malware and protecting from loss of company IP. Still, a huge trade off between privacy and security, and I am not willing to make that trade.

Maybe I would do it on my own connection, where I was both the MITM'er and the "victim", but the whole ssl system is built upon trust. It's a shaky foundation (do you trust all of the root certs in your browser?), but let's not start poking holes everywhere in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is awesome. It's one of those pet peeves of mine that some SSL-enabled sites don't ever default to the secure version (and sometimes you don't know one exists).

I've actually been using Privoxy (<http://www.privoxy.org/>) to do the same (among other things, like ad blocking).

My privoxy actions file for that: <http://media1.mike.tig.as/files/privoxy- ssl.txt>

</comment><comment><USER5> Something related: there's a recent work called "tcpcrypt" that argues for "ubiquitous transport encryption" and scales better than HTTPS too. It's backwards compatible with TCP, does not require application rewrite, works with middle boxes, etc.

[http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/m.handley/papers/tcpcrypt- usen...](http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/m.handley/papers/tcpcrypt-usenix.pdf)

<comment><USER6> I read this back as a private preprint. Definitely well designed (a good fit for USENIX, where it will be published). They had to overcome some significant technical hurdles in order to get it to be properly backwards compatible (issues with TCP header size, NAT boxes, etc.).

My biggest interest is in the much lower computational overhead for the server, which, I can hope, will mean it will get used much more often than TLS/SSL (thus the idea of it being "ubiquitous").

There's growing interest in the idea of "opportunistic encryption", where the results are transparent and beneficial, but not always guaranteed. (I'm working on this in a different area currently.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I really like this, "normal" web browsing makes it hard to be actually secure. Things like sslsniff (which basically do the exact opposite of this) make it really easy to MITM "normal" use of ssl (go to http site, get redirected to https).

I'm kinda an "all or nothing" person, so when I had previously thought about how to "solve" auto-encryption like this, I thought about requiring https across the board. Of course if you tried to browse like this, you'd have a pretty crappy experience. If you built in an auto fallback to http in case of failure, you'd have the same problem before, where any MITM can trick you to visiting unencrypted sites.

This is a good compromise of forcing encryption on the important sites (like banks), but still being practical for the real world.

</comment><comment><USER7> Isn't there a technical reason for not offering HTTPS to everyone and everything? Like server load? Or is that no longer a problem due to the power of modern servers? Just thinking, won't this annoy website owners if adopted en masse...

<comment><USER8> HTTPS is HTTP over TLS (formerly SSL). TLS is stateful, so it probably won't scale as well as regular HTTP. Also, I think it will render HTTP caches useless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd say that "everywhere" is a bit of an exaggeration.

<comment><USER10> "HTTPS Everywhere Possible" just doesn't have the same ring.

A few years back, I looked into making an extension that relied on an RFC that was never widely implemented, allowing a user agent to request an upgrade to HTTPS whenever possible. This is the next-best thing, relying on the authority of the user rather than the server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Something I'm not clear on: isn't HTTPS a stateful protocol (unlike HTTP)? If so, won't that have scalability implications? I assumed that was the reason most retail sites make you shop in HTTP, and then switch over to HTTPS for the payment step.

<comment> mike-cardwell No. It's just HTTP over the top of SSL.

<comment><USER8> I believe SSL (TLS) is stateful, though, so HTTPS would be too. The browser would keep the TLS socket connection open for multiple HTTP requests, which would tie up resources on the server.

<comment><USER6> TLS/SSL can cache the session in order to actually _improve_ performance and scalability. Otherwise you'd have to redo the exchange each time you made a request.

My guess is that the level of caching you'd want TLS/SSL to do is dependent on what kind of content you're serving, the usage patterns of visitors, etc. As an example, Facebook has relatively long user sessions, and would benefit greatly from caching and just refreshing the session keys. Something like Google search, where a user session may only last a few seconds and a couple requests... maybe not so useful. I'm not familiar (off the top of my head) with any in-depth studies on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What happens when you browse a HTTPS website? Last time I messed with proxies, there was some caveat or something when it came to HTTPS targets.</comment>


The 3 Most Common Arguments Against VR and Why They're Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.roadtovr.com/the-3-most-common-arguments-against-vr-and-why-theyre-wrong/

<comment><USER2> I want to invest into VR. but the thing I 'm mostly worried is the resolution issue. it is said that 16k resolution is needed to fully solve this.</comment>


Celonis raises $27.5M to grow the market for big data process mining - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/celonis-takes-27-5m-led-by-accel-83north-to-grow-the-market-for-big-data-process-mining/ <comment><USER2> Do they also mine personal data? I can't find any clear details on their website. If so, a very ungerman startup considering their culture with private data.

</comment><comment><USER3> Could we have a less click-batey title?

<comment><USER4> Yes.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Path to Craftsmanship: The Art of Throwing It Away - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2016/05/31/path-to-craftsmanship-the-art-of-throwing-it-away/ <comment><USER2> I get the premise but sometimes you need to keep stuff you won't touch for years.

For example, I restore pinball machines and I have stacks of salvaged and spare parts from various games in my workspace. Since there's so many manufacturers, and I restore what happens to come my way via Craigslist, I might not touch a part for years, then suddenly have use of it for my next project.

Since most of the parts are manufacturer or machine specific, and most are decades old and not being produced anymore, the only source of parts is the pile. Also, shipping from the US (I'm in Canada) is prohibitively expensive, so just buying the parts I need for that one project doesn't always work.

If you're just dicking around, I suppose, it's good to de-clutter regularly. I do like to keep my workbenches clear by always cleaning up at the end of a session.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had to read parts of this out loud to my wife and visiting inlaws. You've described my workshop hording practices to a T.</comment>


Everything you've ever said to Siri has been recorded, and I get to listen to it - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2wzmmr/everything_youve_ever_said_to_siricortana_has#HN <comment><USER2> This is kind of scary. I guess I should read terms of service more often...

I think we eventually need to have personal services that we manage ourselves that do not allow anyone but us to access personal data. I am really bullish on sandstorm.io for that (for example instead of using dropbox you can spin up FileDrop server).</comment>


Solar and Wind Energy May Be Nice, but How Can We Store It? - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/04/05/470810118/solar-and-wind-energy-may-be-nice-but-how-can-we-store-it <comment><USER2> I haven't researched the overhead costs, but there are alternative kinetic "batteries" that have been proposed, some of which are already being used:

\- Use excess energy generation to drive a gravel-filled train up a few miles of 2% grade, back down the track to drive turbine(s) for energy to be tapped

\- Run water up an incline into a reservoir. This can simultaneously serve irrigation purposes. Water level is indicative of available energy to be sent through turbines

\- Multi-ton flywheels. I've seen that some fusion experiments use this for massive, quick energy bursts. Magnetism prevents excessive wear/tear on bearings

<comment><USER3> composite thin cylindrical flywheels have the best energy storage characteristics

"greater than 400 Wh/kg can be achieved by certain composite materials"

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage)

<comment><USER4> Flywheels sound exciting but their energy density is about the same as Li Ion batteries (even when carbon composites are used). There are very few large scale deployments of flywheel energy storage systems in the world despite lots of active interest in them. Safety is also a huge concern since if there is a mechanical failure, a huge amount of kinetic energy will have to be safely disposed or you are going to have shrapnels flying everywhere.

<comment><USER5> You can recharge the flywheel over 10M times. Containment is designed in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> By and large, don't. Let the market for electricity react to fluctuations in output via variable pricing.

This is already being done to a certain extent in Germany (aluminum smelters will scale production up or down based upon the supply of electricity).

Over time as fluctuations in electricity supply from renewables become more common, the demand side will react. Those periods when the wholesale price of electricity drop to zero won't recur forever as somebody enterprising will make use of it. It won't happen overnight but it will happen.

It's ironic that the same industry (utilities) that told us the market was a solution to all of our energy problems when it wasn't (see Paul Krugman's defence of Enron's bullshit in the early 00s) is now conveniently forgetting that canard when it's actually true for once because renewables threaten its bottom line.

</comment><comment><USER7> Molten salt batteries are actually really good for this kind of usage. High power output and cycle life are key requirements, constant usage means energy usage for thermal maintenance is less of a factor, and the fact that it's stationary means energy density and impact resistance are less important.

</comment><comment><USER8> Worst case scenario, how many batteries alone would be required: [https://youtu.be/NvCIhn7_FXI?t=4m47s](https://youtu.be/NvCIhn7_FXI?t=4m47s)

Surprisingly low.

</comment><comment><USER9> Molten salts. The world's biggest solar installation being built in Morocco generates energy at night.

[http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/11/technology/solar-power- elect...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/11/technology/solar-power-electricity- morocco-ouarzazate-night/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Not exactly storing energy, but a functional equivalent is load shifting. This means shifting demand from when the electricity supply is low to when it is high. An awful lot can be done with this.

This can be implemented by adjusting electricity rates in real time, and having loads that can be shifted monitoring the rates and turn on when they are low.

<comment><USER11> I live in Shizuoka, Japan where a lot of cars and motorcycles are built. When the nuclear reactors were shut down one of the ways they managed the reduction in power usage was to have the factories cooperate on their work schedules. So Suzuki would open from 9-5 and then Yamaha would open, etc. It only lasted for a few months, but I've heard it made a huge difference in helping the grid meet demands.

<comment><USER10> That makes a lot of sense. Our current system of a flat rate for power regardless of demand is ridiculously wasteful.

For example, consider an electric hot water heater. The water will stay hot for a day in a well insulated one. Having it set to run only when rates are lower would to a lot to match supply with demand, reduce pollution, costs, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe store it in electric car batteries? The ppl already buying Tesla Model 3 at scale.

Why utilities should pay for storage, when they could just offer cheaper electricity when there is excess of it. E.g. charge your car when we told you to and save %30 on your bill!

<comment><USER13> Yes, this is one of the classic suggestions for overnight or at-work charging: cars which choose to charge depending on the owner's goals and energy prices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Nice"? The whole world will be running on solar and wind electricity in 20 years. "Nice" is a bit of an understatement.

<comment><USER15> Hardly. There are fossil and nuclear plants being built today with design lifetimes of 20 years. Adoption is certainly shooting upwards in some countries, but it's going to be a while before renewables go over 50% worldwide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> LightSail energy [0] has been working on this problem for the past five years. They store the energy in (surprise!) highly efficient, long-term storage air compressors.

[0] crunchbase.com/organization/lightsail-energy -- $42M funded

</comment><comment><USER17> Why shall we?

<comment><USER18> As usual, the best storage solution is first to avoid storage. It applies also to network communication, database access, etc. Often used as a first slide of a presentation, but you still need a follow up.

<comment><USER17> One way of thinking about energy storage is traditional fossil fuels, with a whole speculator's oil market attached to it.

There is another way of thinking. When one barely have a shortage of something, like spring water, which flows from mountains (and fluctuates heavily depending on season, monsoon, etc) one probable doesn't store much and let it flow.

For wind and solar, it seems, this is much better paradigm. Send it to the grid when its available, get it from the grid when it is still and cloudy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Water pumps.

<comment><USER7> You need very particular geography for pumped hydro, plus in hot dry climates your stored energy literally evaporates.

<comment><USER20> A more general solution: just use weights [https://www.gravitricity.com](https://www.gravitricity.com)

<comment><USER21> Be interesting to see how you could build this on a smaller scale for home use, using something very heavy but cheap like lead.

<comment><USER22> Lead is actually not that cheap. Lead ingots are $6/pound (at McMaster), while steel is $.50/pound (from Alibaba, but that's a minimum purchase of 1 ton). Scrap lead is around $.40/pound, versus steel at $.02/pound. The cheapest thing would probably be rock/concrete, or water.

<comment><USER23> A clip and pulley system which could hook onto a barbell or kettle bell would be great.

Hrmm, perhaps this isn't so feasible. Performing a clean & jerk of 95 pounds to a height of 7 feet would yield about 900 watt seconds of potential energy. So even if you had a very efficient laptop (15 watts) and perfect energy conversion, you'd have to perform a clean & jerk every 60 seconds to keep computing. Even if you were in good shape, you probably couldn't keep that up for more than a hour.

[http://hyperphysics.phy- astr.gsu.edu/hbase/gpot.html](http://hyperphysics.phy- astr.gsu.edu/hbase/gpot.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: API with the best integration experience? - <AUTHOR> Have you ever integrated against a web service where the experience was memorably delightful? Which service and what made it so? <comment><USER2> I've definitely worked with more APIs that I dread working with, but off the top of my head one of the most pleasant I've used has been Rollbar.

At my workplace we own/maintain/create a lot of custom small apps for various groups, as well as a fewer larger scale ones (and a few of those are pretty legacy). Prior to Rollbar, we just had random apps kinda using things like NewRelic, but most of the time if we needed to track an error, it meant diving into logs. But, getting everything on Rollbar was an absolute breeze, and the best part (and a sign of a good API/Service) is once the initial setup is done, that's literally been it, no constant fussing with configs, service changes, it's been set and forget.

The setup process is more-or-less:

1) Add the app from the web UI 2) Install the gem into the Rails app 3) Setup the token's for prod/staging environments 4) If the app has a JS frontend, add the JS package 5) Setup the client token 6) Deploy

And after that all errors are being piped into the dashboard, and (almost) out of the box, I'll be able to see the line it occurred at, the trace back, the IP it came from, the user it occurred with, number of occurrences, and receive notifications when a shitload of errors starts occurring, all from an easy to use dashboard. It's even a bit better for frontend errors, because you can also see the series of clicks/events the user made leading up to the error.

And a few more clicks in the web UI, you can have it link the errors directly to your source control and issue tracker.

The "RQL" (SQL-like query language) feature initially didn't seem that useful, but overtime it's actually come in really handy being able to query the errors in a fairly powerful way.

The documentation is great, they provide official APIs/packages for almost all popular languages & frameworks (with the caveat being focused on web dev).

Definitely a service I'd recommend to any shop that doesn't have a solid error tracking system in place. I can't think of a single issue I've had with the service in the year+ we've been using it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Those interested in this topic might be interested in my friend's newsletter about developer experience: [https://getputpost.co/](https://getputpost.co/)

<comment><USER4> I'm subscribed to this API newsletter, but I'm not convinced it's still a thing. I have yet to get a newsletter and I've been subscribed for over a year. And their last blog post was in 2017, unfortunately.</comment></comment>


Making the best of Java? - <AUTHOR>

The last few years I've been coding in a Django/Linux environment. Before that I was a .NET programmer for a few years. I love Python and the community very much.
Recently my company has decided to rewrite our server code in Java. I'm having a hard time swallowing this pill. Coding in this language just seems horrible. Obviously there are people out there that love the language.
Do you guys have any tips for making the best of a bad situation? <comment><USER2> Nothing wrong with Java as such. The red flag is the "rewriting" part. Assuming that your current server code is running well and meeting all the requirements, the decision to rewrite has a "smell" and statistically such rewrites are doomed.

If there are good reasons for the rewrite and there are competent resources on the project, then perhaps you could consider Scala or Clojure. They allow you to use JVM and gain many other benefits. Check out the respective web sites if you are interesting in championing such an approach.

Personally, I would just find another project / company. IMHO Java language is not the issue, it is the multitude of APIs and frameworks and the inherent accidental complexity of it all that trips up projects where suitable experienced team members are not available.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you are looking at it wrong. My take is that you are trying to solve problems in java by using things that you may have picked up while you were in django and .net world. Things are different here and the best suggestion I can give is to look at other projects first, get a grasp on some frameworks like springframework, look at samples and learn the patterns others use. Compared to most other languages, java is much more mature and has survived the test of time and has been refined extensively. Have a look at dropwizard from <http://dropwizard.codahale.com/> its a good starting point.

</comment><comment><USER4> Java is pretty grim, but it seems to be a popular choice for writing server side code. Do you want to work server side? if not then maybe do something else; life is too short to do something you hate.

</comment><comment><USER5> stop hating it! Speaking of your experience it seems to me you are still young and it seems you start to work with other languages such as C# in your childhood! there are load of similarity between C# and Java!!! if this is the case then you can't count those years as your professional years of your life! cause you still have problem with a programming language whereas the concept of being a software developer says : there is no comfort zone for you!</comment>


Inside the Federal Bureau of Way Too Many Guns - <AUTHOR> https://www.gq.com/story/inside-federal-bureau-of-way-too-many-guns <comment><USER2> This is absolutely amazing, and horrifying.

Horrified though I may be about gun ownership, I assumed all these transactions would be stored and retrievable on some kind of governmental mainframe, so much so that whenever a character on TV ends up in possession of somebody else's firearm (" _let me keep that_ ") I always thought to myself "whoah, that _has_ to be illegal, some paperwork _must_ be filed to account for the change in possession, right?"

Turns out I'm wrong.

Turns out they're banned from using computers, to ensure it's as awkward as possible.</comment>


Welcome Sharon - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/welcome-sharon <comment><USER2> Sometimes we take certain things for granted - I would bet most people reading this announcement don't know what the continuity fund [0] is.

[0]: [https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-continuity- fund](https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-continuity-fund)

</comment><comment><USER3> Green Dot was an interesting company to me. I knew a lot of people in poor and working class communities that benefited from it. Its proposition was simple with straight-forward benefit and small, easy-to-understand cost. No chance of getting in endless spiral of debt either that hit many impulse buyers. eBay friendly. Got big or dominant. Hard to tell as outsider given every company has cards these days.

Sharon, is there a good write-up on how they showed up, marketed themselves, and expanded to get to their level of success? I think lessons learned might help in many other ventures, including YC's payment investments.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is there a complete list of YC partners? I don't see one one anywhere on the site.

<comment><USER5> [http://www.ycombinator.com/people/](http://www.ycombinator.com/people/) but I don't see Sharon on there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Habemus papam! :) Congratulations!</comment>


Bringing web applications to your Desktop with Prism - <AUTHOR> http://www.khelll.com/blog/web/bringing-web-applications-to-your-desktop-with-prism/

<comment><USER2> Still no extensions and API for notifications?

SSBs are quite cool - but only if you have something than a 'browser without the toolbars' - look at Fluid (mac) or Bubbles (windows).</comment>


The Rise of Reddit: 4chan and Digg Get the Credit While Reddit Booms - <AUTHOR> http://www.theawl.com/2010/09/the-rise-of-reddit-4chan-and-digg-get-the-credit-while-reddit-booms

<comment><USER2> ...And that's why I ran away to HN and MeFi.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your technique to damage-control interruptions to flow? - <AUTHOR> My third kid was born two months ago, so I'm working from home a lot to help with everything. Even though I'm at my desk, interruptions are common.<p>Are there any techniques to resume your flow-requiring task more efficiently? <comment><USER2> Make a quick note of where you where and what you where doing when you are interrupted.

Something as simple as "figuring out why the flexbox grid is doing _foo_ on safari when it shouldn't be".

When you come back to the task in an hour you can then quickly remember what you where working on.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good first step.

However, flow is more than knowing what you're working on.

Maybe there are techniques to not lose that state of mind so easily?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Actual uses and differences between technologies - <AUTHOR>

So I didn't explain what I was looking for in my last Ask post, so I'm going more straightforward for this one. I'm not really looking for how to code, or where to learn to code, but I want to know what different things are and what they're used for so I can go and learn more about what I need. Comments on my last post will be the next step.
1. What it is? (a wiki or documentation page would be good)
2. What it could be used for, actual use-cases? (ex. website, mobile app, database, etc.)
3. Differences between competing/others of the same type? (ex. JavaScript vs Rails, SQL vs NoSQL, etc.)
4. Examples of its usage. (Facebook in PHP, website in HTML5, etc.)
If you could answer any or all of these, that would be really helpful. I know some are related/same thing so combine those if necessary:
JavaScript, React, Node, Angular, Meteor, Ionic, SQL, MySQL, NoSQL, MongoDB, HTML5/CSS3, Ruby/Rails, Python/Django. If there's any other major things I missed that you know well, maybe add that too?
Sorry if I'm being super needy here, I'm just trying to get more of a professional opinion to help with my research. <comment><USER2> Javascript - programming language used in browsers

Ruby, Python - general purpose programming languages. Often used in web development.

Rails, django - server-side web development frameworks. These are sets of related code libraries that make it easy to develop web applications using ruby and python respectively.

Mysql, Mongo - These are databases. Mysql is a relational database and uses sql as the programming language to interact with days. Mongo is an example of a nosql database. Nosql is a catchall term for databases that aren't relational and don't use sql.

React, angular - front-end javascript frameworks that are used to make complex browser interactions I'd like making sortable data tables.

Html5/css3 - Html and css are the building blocks of web pages. The numbers indicate the latest vegrsion which included a number of new ui abilities.

<comment><USER2> Basically html and css are used to create web pages and style them. The databases are used to store data such as user accounts. Rails, django, node, meteor allow you to create dynamic web pages so that the page can store data and do different things based on the data. The front-end frameworks allow you to do much the same thing but all in the browser, which provides different constraints.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your answers. Do you have any insights to #3 or #4, or any good links/documentation I can read for any of the things?

<comment><USER2> For databases here is a decent comparison: [https://www.scriptrock.com/articles/mysql-vs- mongodb](https://www.scriptrock.com/articles/mysql-vs-mongodb). Mysql is heavily used at Facebook and Google and at most traditional companies. They start having scaling issues at around 1 terrabyte of data but there are known ways to scale further. Mongo and other nosql databases are rapidly being adapted. I know Squarespace uses Mongo for some of their analytics.

Javascript + Nodejs/Ruby + Rails/Python + Django - The main difference between the three is the language choice. Javascript/Nodejs offers native asynchronous support and can be faster but can be difficult to maintain large codebases in. The other benefit of nodejs is that you don't need to switch languages when working on the front-end and backend systems which can be a major boon in small teams.

React/Angular - Made by Facebook and Google respectively. Comparison [https://www.airpair.com/angularjs/posts/angular-vs-react- the...](https://www.airpair.com/angularjs/posts/angular-vs-react-the-tie- breaker)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> For those wondering, this seems to be RE: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9861378](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9861378)

If you're using Codecademy you're off to a good start. The question is what do you want to build. A blog? An iOS app? solve some computational questions?

Once you can code, you can work with just about anything because most languages are based on the same fundamentals. So pick a project or a technology and then google "Build a XXX tutorial" or just the technology name and find a tutorial.

I find that the easiest language to learn is Python. Once you know the basics, you can start with [http://projecteuler.net](http://projecteuler.net) for some coding / CS problems. From there move on to [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/intro/tutorial01/](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/intro/tutorial01/) for some Django stuff.

I tell people to learn languages in this order: Python -> JS -> Java -> C -> C++ -> Haskell/oCaml -> whatever you need for work.

Standard web stacks include LAMP and MEAN. Standard mobile apps are written in Swift (with some C++) and Java (with some other random stuff thrown in there). Pick a set of technologies and write something simple (like a blog or calculator or mini social network.) Then swap out one or two components and build it again. I've built a bunch of blackjack games in 10+ languages with 4 or 5 different UIs, solved a bunch of the projecteuler stuff in a bunch of languages, and at work I play browse around the code base (Java, JS, Coffeescript, Typescript, C++, etc.) to read other people's code. When you do the same project over and over you learn the strengths and weaknesses of each project.

At the end of the day, most tools are mostly the same (especially if you don't have to worry about scale) and their strengths and weaknesses are less important that the developers comfort level.

<comment><USER4> Why both C and C++? I'm guessing because some standard mobile apps use C++?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article I wrote explains some of the core technologies of the web from a high level, including many in your list:

[http://illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2014/03/basics-of- web-...](http://illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2014/03/basics-of-web- architecture/)

I suspect you might know most of it already but perhaps you'll find something helpful.

</comment><comment><USER6> I found this rails vs django compassion helpful. [https://www.coursereport.com/resources/ruby-on-rails-vs- pyth...](https://www.coursereport.com/resources/ruby-on-rails-vs-python-and- django-which-should-a-beginner-learn)

<comment><AUTHOR> This was really helpful, thank you. That's the type of format I was looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Haskell - A purely functional programming language that is a general purpose language. It's often cited to be best for making language parsers using Parsec or Attoparsec, but I've found with Snap/Yesod/Scotty it is great for web development.

Purescript - A pure functional alternative to JavaScript that compiles down to very concise readable JavaScript code in the rare case you need to debug it or track down performance issues.</comment>


A persistent key-value server in 40 lines and a sad fact (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://java-is-the-new-c.blogspot.com/2014/12/a-persistent-keyvalue-server-in-40.html

<comment><USER2> PS. The moving gif's make it very hard to read.

<comment><USER3> If you're using Firefox, go into about:config and change image.animation_mode to none, then reload the page.

<comment><USER4> Or just use any browser's inspector to delete them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Couple thoughts.

1\. 40 lines of glue code, sure. How much external code did he pull in/write? 2\. All of this is predicated on the idea that serialization/deserialization is the primary bottleneck. This becomes _not_ your bottleneck when you've got other distributed components in play.

</comment><comment><USER6> ChronicleMap looks really cool, i didn't know about it, but it seems like exactly what i've been looking for.

I've been keeping an eye on apache directmemory, but that project seems to have little activity.

does anyone here have real world experience with ChronicleMap in production systems?

</comment><comment><USER7>
        The test highlights an issue not covered by micro-
        benchmarking: Encoding and Decoding should perform
        similar, as factual throughput is determined by
        Min(Encoding performance, Decoding performance).
        For unknown reasons JDK serialization manages to encode
        the message tested like 500_000 times per second,
        decoding performance is only 80_000 per second so in
        the test the receiver gets dropped quickly:

At 500,000 messages/sec you can burn 6000 cycles per message on a 3Ghz core.

Probably he has a problem with malloc during the decoding phase. Every malloc and every free costs between 300 (best case) and several thousand cycles (syscall is required).

<comment><USER8> its not "he" that's a JDK issue

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> But what is it? The author doesn't bother to describe problem definition and context.

<comment><USER10> He referenced Peter Lawrey, and the off-heap stuff he does with HFT systems, so presumably it's somewhere along those lines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If it is only 40 lines of code, why would you even use Java instead of e.g. C?

<comment><USER8> Then its 4000 lines ..

<comment><USER12> Which is still significantly less than with java.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Might be quick when running but the jvm startup time is a pain. By the time the java solution starts up, my c based solution has already finished.

<comment><USER14> [http://blog.ndk.io/2014/02/11/jvm-slow- startup.html](http://blog.ndk.io/2014/02/11/jvm-slow-startup.html)

40ms sounds okay for me, even for most command line tools. Oh and I most probably don't get a segmentation fault ;-)

<comment><USER4> Sure wish my JVM started in 40ms. Here's ruby:

        $ time ruby -e "puts 'hello world'"
        > hello world
        >
        > real	0m0.076s
        > user	0m0.029s
        > sys	0m0.017s

And here's jruby:

        $ time ruby -e "puts 'hello world'"
        > hello world
        >
        > real	0m1.161s
        > user	0m2.050s
        > sys	0m0.093s

<comment><USER15> Your JVM does. jruby.jar is megabytes of reimplementation and mapping of the Ruby stdlib onto the JVM. Plus in this example, loading a Ruby parser and interpreter.

Here's executing an assembly (über-jar) I wrote in Scala:

      → time scripts/couch
      Please provide a basePath and a valid command. ("backup", "restore", "truncate", "migrate" or "migrate-all")

      real	0m0.375s
      user	0m0.415s
      sys	0m0.073s

That's basically just `java -jar couch-utils.jar`.

A few hundred ms on my 1.2GHz MacBook. And this includes a bunch of Akka Actors.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Increased resident participation in planning produces extreme wealth segregation [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.its.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2015/10/PB-Income-Segregation-and-Land-Use.pdf <comment><USER2> The findings confirm what people who talk about urban planning say, but it never seems to trickle into the wider world. You still hear people say that we have to restrict growth to keep costs down, widen highways to reduce traffic, etc. even though those ideas are thoroughly discredited.

It's incredibly disheartening.

<comment><AUTHOR> What made me extremely disheartened in my neighbors was joining Nextdoor.com and seeing what the majority of my neighbors thought was "bad" for our neighborhood. They literally complained about loud birds in the morning and tried to organize a protest against a stop sign due to fears of "increased urbanization." Also lord forbid you sit in your car while Mexican, very suspicious circumstances!! Turns out it was just dudes eating lunch in their truck between jobs. This is in the Bay Area Peninsula.

<comment><USER3> Nextdoor is much the same in Seattle; not as asinine in my area, but... heh... yeah. It generally represents the distillation of NIMBYism.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. I was actually __shocked __that they were bothering to try and organize a protest against a stop sign- at an intersection where there are always accidents from people not merging correctly! - of all things. Unhappily for them, the stop sign was ultimately installed.

<comment><USER4> Wonder how effective that turned out to be in preventig accidents. I don't drive so I really have no clue but a stop sign seems like something that wouldn't influence me much - then again that's mostly why I don't want to learn how to drive :)

<comment><USER5> Do you not know that you're required by law to come to a complete stop before a stop sign? It's legally not up to you how much a stop sign "influences" you.

<comment><USER4> From what I've seen when I pay attention to someone driving it seems more of a judgment call - but then again I don't usually pay attention because I find driving boring.

It obviously sets the rules so you can assign blame easier but is it really effective as a prevention tool ?

<comment><USER5> > it seems more of a judgment call

Ummmm maybe things are different where you live, but I certainly hope whoever drives you around doesn't drive near where I live. Here it's definitely not a "judgment call" and people will be quite angry if you ignore stop signs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >>> Such restrictions do not appear to lead directly to the concentration of poverty but rather to the concentration of affluence, a finding which adds important nuance to the way in which exclusionary zoning techniques isolate the poor.

Is it any great surprise that wealthier people are also more mobile?

>> Cities that have more separate regulatory oversight mechanisms are more segregated.

I wonder how much time the author has spent in zoning meetings. These days nearly everything requires some sort of rezoning, variance or special permit. So it's all about developers with the savvy to get such things from whatever board/counsel is in charge. Developers are only interested in high-value/high- profit developments. So what gets built is expensive. It's no great social mystery.

<comment><USER7> Yes it's quite amusing where I live. The local planning board wants "affordable housing" as a component of everything, but they are so micromanaging and require so many repeated applications and presentations (often which are sent back with comments like "windows need to be bigger"). Thus we have large, expensive developments because anything "affordable" would never meet all the criteria on appearance, building materials, etc., and the only developers who can get anything approved are ones with enough wealth to fund the team and the time needed to navigate this process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am not sure how I feel about this. Now that I have a family and children, I want to live in an area where my neighbors are at the same socioeconomic level. I don't want my neighbor to be way richer or way poorer than we are. I don't see how that is bad, wrong or racist!!!

<comment><USER9> Stop and think of it not in terms or whether it reflects badly on you but on the consequences for society. There is nothing good that can be said for creating enclaves of poverty.

<comment><USER10> As a parent, you have an obligation to provide your child with the best, safest, environment that you are reasonably able to provide. More upscale neighborhoods generally have better schools, activities, opportunities, and so forth. It is absolute madness to disregard this solely because of some vague, unknown societal effects hypothesized in a policy paper.

<comment><USER11> And rightly so. But are poor people not allowed or entitled to have the same level of safety and benefits for their family like everyone else, or is it ok to associate and tar an entire socioeconomic group with crime and drugs as some seem to do and leave them to their fate? How is this an egalitarian, equal or democratic society that discriminates against kids even before they are born?

Poor people have no choice but to live with it while the more resourceful can afford to isolate and protect themselves but that's not an equal society or one that aspires to be one. No one can advocate that one should not try to get the best for themselves and their children but the if the bare basics of education, healthcare and safety are reliant on socio economic background that there is little incentive for those in power who are always from a privileged socioeconomic background to actually provide meaningful equality beyond posturing.

I think there is a danger of an exclusionary way of thinking that encourages ghettos and the kind of entitled thinking often seen here itself on hacker news that presumes in spite of all these disadvantages somehow all these children should compete fairly and succeed with their more privileged counterparts and if they don't and get stuck in a cycle of poverty they only have themselves to blame.

This kind of thinking leads to a bigoted society, and you then can't complain when you or your children are similarly excluded by those from a higher social-economic background in neighborhoods and other aspects of life, when not possible legally by financial or social means. This doesn't produce an enlightened and egalitarian society, you reap what you sow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Correlation =/= causation. High-end housing located within poorer neighborhoods is priced lower because home-buyers value those units less than the same house located within richer neighborhoods.

As a thought exercise, create 100 towns with different distributions between wealthy and poor areas and price the homes in your head. The random distributions are related to what the article would describe as "resident participation".

</comment><comment><USER13> I love this sort of non-intuitive research.

My neighborhood built a fancy public-funded park last year. It's amazing and all, but it cost an absolute fortune to build, especially when considering the park two blocks down! It's completely unbelievable that so much time and energy went into this park. Hell, once the park was finished, a two million dollar house was built right next to it. Go figure. It's completely feel-good civics and it seems to be getting harder and hard to explain why things like this are very bad for communities overall.

Silly anecdote - at the opening of the park's construction, there was a giant pile of puke on the sidewalk where the park's staff put a tent. When walking past them, my dog tries to eat the puke, the head of staff comes up to me and makes a comment about how he's probably just eating a brownie. Disregarding the chocolate nonchalance, she was completely oblivious to the giant vomit stain two feet aware from her until I corrected her. Talk about not seeing the trees from the forest.

</comment><comment><USER14> The communist underpinnings of this study are laughable. The author is attempting to assert that the quality of life of people in the nicer areas of town would be enhanced by mixing in lower socio-economic groups. That's funny... none of the people in the nicer areas believe a shred of that, else they'd move to the other areas of town. Beyond that, the author's solution to this imagined problem is to _dismantle_ the things that make the nice part of town the nice part of town. Perhaps we should get rid of nice hotels and restaurants, while we're at it.

Wealth is not a resource, it's an indicator. It's directly related to a person's integrity, drive, ingenuity, intelligence, education, and physical capabilities. There are people that have genuinely been kicked in the teeth by life, but we have never lived in an era of greater opportunity in the US.

</comment><comment><USER15> So why is Houston so economically segregated?

<comment><USER16> Very valid comment. It is quite segregated (goo.gl/MbPC5N).

After a bit of research, it seems that maybe Houston does have something like zoning after all. Apparently, there are lot size restrictions, density restrictions, buffering ordinances, and private "deed restrictions" which limit the types of business that can be in a neighborhood.

From an article about Houston: "Instead, it's the communities with the time, resources and political clout that essentially have the power to restrict development within their borders. That pushes it to other areas without a meaningful discussion of the citywide implications.

The result: as Houston becomes more dense, not all places will change equally. "We're coming up with rules to make Houston liberalized in terms of density and development … but giving particular neighborhoods tools to opt out," Festa said."

[http://goo.gl/cTMO2d](http://goo.gl/cTMO2d)</comment></comment>


The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/jedisct1/status/1201927500223438854 <comment><USER3> In case anyone's interested, here's the Chromium bug(s) that's one of the main reasons the WYSIWYG editor has such issues in Chrome(/Electron):

\- [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102937...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1029374)

\- [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608393](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608393)

\- [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608162](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608162)

The gist of it is that they "canonicalize" the DOM selection when you have two adjacent inline elements, so that it can _only_ ever be at the ending edge of the first inline element. Which makes certain selection states impossible. And on top of that, they don't draw the cursor in the right spot when doing the canonicalization. So for instance, it might look like your cursor is here:

        one|two

But it's actually here:

        one|two

Drawn in the wrong place. And impossible to put it at the beginning of "two" at all! It's crazy!

I don't know how much the take "starring" into account, but it can't hurt to star them in the hopes they're fixed sooner.

\---

Edit: If you want to see the craziness in action, check out this sandbox:

[https://codesandbox.io/s/amazing- breeze-6elsy](https://codesandbox.io/s/amazing-breeze-6elsy)

1\. Try to put your cursor at the end of the word "one"

2\. Try to type a character at the start of the word "two"

<comment><USER4> Not sure Chromium is to blame here. All the WYSIWYGs in all the environments I've ever seen I found fiddly and unpleasant to use.

<comment><USER5> The above demo works fine in Firefox, FWIW. I had a large hand in building a WYSIWYG email editor a few years back, using direct DOM editing, that was the most full featured available at the time. I would only recommend it to people with very high pain tolerance, as the differences between browsers are stark, undocumented and hard to work around.

<comment><USER6> In firefox it skips one letter at a time and maybe that is the intended behaviour, but it doesn't seem consistent with what I'd expect from a WYSIWYG editor.

I'd expect there to be 2 positions between the "e" and the "t" that the cursor would stop at so I can either insert text with the formatting of "one" or "two"

<comment><USER7> There is a position at the start of "two" in Firefox, but you have to approach it from the right. That feels sane to me.

<comment><USER8> The "approach from the direction you want to take styling from" breaks down when you cannot approach from the other direction, or if there are >2 possible insertion points in the middle of a piece of text. I'm going to use Markdown to show the markup in HN, but pretend like it's rich HTML:

      A string that ends in *bold!*
                                 //
                                AB

Only position A is possible in Firefox's "approach from" algorithm; there is no way to tack on non-bold text to the end, short adding it and then re-/unformatting it.

You can then pretty quickly see what goes wrong here:

      A string that have *_italic bold_ and bold!*
                        ///
                       ABC

In Firefox, only positions A and C are possible; there is no way to start editing at B.

I think you could turn any of these into interesting box forms like one of the links in this thread that has two colored boxes, and you could have text somewhere (like between A & B in the second example here) and delete that text, and suddenly not be able to get a cursor back there, short of laying some text down and reformatting it.

Markdown, and other markup/syntax based inputs, make this trivially obvious, to a large degree. (Some ambiguities in the syntax can cause issues, but those seem to be rarer than issues w/ Slacks WYSIWYG editor.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a good reminder that sometimes complaining about companies on social media like Hackernews and Twitter does actually help. Not always, maybe not even usually. But Slack went from, "no, we have no plans to adjust this", to "yes, we'll include a toggle", and the reason was that a bunch of people publicly complained and wrote a bunch of messages to support.

It is a very, very, _very_ small victory, and if I was going to choose a victory, Slack's Markdown editor would not be very high on my list of priorities -- but I'll take it.

<comment><USER10> Isnt that just a silent admission that modern tech support is woefully broken, more than a twitter is good message?

<comment><USER11> Broken how? This feels like a good example of a company building and launching something, then watching and responding to how the public/users react to it.

Isn't that more or less what you should do as a company? Build things and then adjust your strategy based on how the market likes or dislikes it?

<comment><USER12> _Broken how?_

Broken in the sense that Slack kept going forward even after the complaints kept rolling in. How hard would it have been to pull the latest release?

<comment><USER13> Every release will get complaints. They have to wait to see if it is more than normal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Still waiting for an option to disable "drafts" (channels all of a sudden jumping to the top of the channel list)

<comment><USER15> Your mistake is showing a channel list. Hide unread channels; it's the only way to use Slack IMO.

<comment><USER13> You mean hide read channels? If you hide unread, how will you find your new messages?

<comment><USER15> Yes, sorry

<comment><USER16> You can edit your comment to fix it

<comment><USER15> Not after 5 hours you can't. The cut off is 60 minutes.

I've been on this site since 2007, I've been around the block a few times ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Dark mode, better performances, option to disable divisive new features: Slack might be making it harder to focus at work but the product itself improved quite a lot in 2019, kudos to the PMs.

<comment><USER18> Side comment: I've tried to use Slack's dark mode but had to quit. I was constantly having to download images to be able to read the black-over- transparent background of matplotlib images (that's apparently the default for the axis, markings, legends, etc.)

It's not a matter of changing my code, too, because I want to see the images posted by _other_ people

<comment><USER19> I wonder if you could add a CSS rule to set the background colour of images to white?

<comment><USER20> Or use a pseudo element with z-index -1

<comment><USER21> Parent suggested a very sensible, simple, and efficient solution. Why suggest a less efficient and more involved one?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's pretty incredible to think that for all the billions of dollars around Slack it's still fundamentally the same product with the same value add that it was when it first launched.

Sure, maybe it's faster or more efficient or whatever now, but what it is at heart is the _exact_ same thing it was on Day 1.

<comment><USER23> Does it need to change?

I don't _want_ Slack to be a different or more comprehensive tool.

<comment><USER24> Yes, in order to provide a competitive advantage over the numerous clones that are already coming along, Slack _must_ continue to innovate.

<comment><USER25> And become what, Microsoft Teams? Everything for everyone ... executed badly?

Staying focused is orthogonal to continued innovation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Don't understand the need for a WYSIWYG editor in the first place. It's not a word processor. The need to add formatting to a Slack message should be rare enough that the WYSIWYG overhead just isn't worth it.

<comment><USER27> They want to make the product appeal to all users and not just techy ones. And If I product managers or CEO or whoever can print his message bold he's happy.

Very few non techy people know what markdown even is. (From my own experience asking friends etc.)

<comment><USER28> I'm sorry, but what users ?

AFAIK Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter doesn't have a WYSIWYG editor.

Are there some hidden users that send font size 30 all capitals red colored text in Times New Roman to each other ?

<comment><USER29> Office productivity tools do typically have WYSIWYG editors: Word, Outlook, Gmail, ...

<comment><USER28> Thank you, it didn't occur to me that some users are actually using slack to replace e-mail communication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The ability to format markup with keyboard shortcuts seems to be gone now. Previously you could select some text, type ctrl-i, and it would add the necessary markup to make the selected text italic. Same for bold text etc.

Still, I'll take it over the WYSIWYG editor which was a nightmare for code snippets.

<comment><USER31> You're right, after disabling WYSIWYG editor keyboard shortcuts don't work. That means I'm staying with extension for Firefox...

<comment><USER32> Judas priest this blows monkey goats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The big recent thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589647](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589647)

A smaller one: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21591950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21591950)

</comment><comment><USER34> Looks like this doesn't bring back the markup help text in the lower-right corner, which is a shame.

I really wish they'd just highlight your markup in the appropriate style while leaving the markup intact. That would solve the "I want to see what the markup I just typed will do" without any of the problems of the WYSIWYG approach. Basically just syntax highlighting for markup.

<comment><USER35> This is pretty much what Bear does. It's great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Amazing to see how Slack turned from something everyone raved about to something everyone is sort of annoyed with and critical of. Maybe that isn't that surprising for most products as they age/mature but it seems particularly acute with Slack.

<comment><USER37> "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." -- Bjarne Stroustrup

I've found this quote extremely true, but not just with programming language but with all things. People complain about Slack because they use Slack a lot, so minor quibbles become a daily frustration.

It is when people go quiet about a product that you should really worry. They're either extremely happy or aren't using it, might be critical to find out which.

<comment><USER38> > "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and > the ones nobody uses." -- Bjarne Stroustrup

> I've found this quote extremely true

My impression of Python, Ruby, etc. hasn't been that they're in either of those categories, though I'll grant you that they don't compete in the same space as C++...

<comment><USER39> I use Ruby(not Rails) daily. I love the language. It's really good for fast prototyping or small scrips but I can complain all-day long for how bad is to maintain big codebases because of the dynamic nature of it. I really miss type hints that can make this much easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Thank the maker.

I'm sure it is perfectly fine if you just bold stuff sometimes, but it's so wonky with anything slightly complicated, and completely messes with my muscle memory compared with every other application I use that doesn't mess around with this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER41> It is interesting to me that the rant post about Slack's WYSIWYG editor was the 18th most upvoted HN post of all time.

No idea what conclusion should I draw from it, if any at all, but surprising for me at least.

<comment><USER42> lots of hn readers use slack

lots of hn slack users disliked the feature

lots of hn slack users who disliked the feature went straight to hn to vote up any post complaining about it

that's how communities around tech broadly tend to work

<comment> o-__-o a few people figured out how to change their workflow to deal with the change. turns out the same problem that exists between non-technical users and technical users exist between power-elite users and the non-PE users. when you try to show a non-technical user a different way to do things, they get really frustrated and give up easily because their entire mental model needs to change (they were used to clicking on an icon in a certain spot, goto a menu, select an option, get a dialog etc.). To them this represents a massive unknown if they do even one step wrong and so instead of accepting and using the new feature, regardless of the perceived benefit their anxiety takeover.

The correlations here is astounding. I'm the kind of person who will vocally speak out about emacs vs vi or the pronunciation of "c-out" vs "sow-t", but the WYSIWYG editor didn't fundamentally break my mental model of Slack. I just learned to adapt, but seeing the blowback.. holy cow.

<comment><USER43> > or the pronunciation of "c-out" vs "sow-t"

Wait, "cout" from C++? "Clout" is a real English word, I always figured it was pronounced the same minus the "l", which is neither of the versions you have there.

<comment> o-__-o I didn't do a good job, "see-out" vs "sowt" (the t is not hard)

<comment><USER43> Still, I'm thinking of "kowt"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm a bit amused because:

1\. Their customer support emphatically told me they wouldn't make this an option AND

2\. They didn't even need to do a new release to turn on the option.

At least their engineering team is still making good decisions :)

<comment><USER45> Customer Support having outdated/bad communication with Product is not surprising at all. For every person where the person who makes the decisions is not the person to relay the decisions, this error can be introduced. It's like a big game of telephone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> What's more ridiculous is that this WYSIWYG editor is not only a front-end change, it changes the backend. And broke our bot. I have no idea why anything else should care. Their changelog didn't make the problem obvious.

Took me a bunch of time to track down the issue, as it worked for a few people, but the bot would completely ignore other people – including my boss.

[https://github.com/nlopes/slack/issues/630](https://github.com/nlopes/slack/issues/630)

</comment><comment><USER47> Well, they put it in the "Advanced" settings section, which I interpret as reluctance, but it's there.

<comment> munk-a I am a bit afraid they might be supplying it for just a limited while for them to fix it up and re-enable it for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I just changed to the ripcord desktop client, and couldn't be happier. While not as superficially polished, it is super responsive and does what you would expect of a chat app very well. Overall, I think the UI is less ugly, because I judge latency as one of the ugliest warts in UI.

</comment><comment><USER49> I was never a fan of their pseudo-markdown (it's so close, but the minor deviations are _annoying_ ), but it's a great to have it back instead of that other train-wreck of an editor. At least you can now edit text without regularly wanting scream in frustration.

<comment> munk-a For someone who habitually uses old MUD style emote lead-ins I was constantly needing to back edit comments to fix:

* sigh * this was disappointing

being turned into a list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Now all we need is a setting to make employers not require you to run it.

I have thought about why ggl hangouts at my current employer has been ok. We mostly only use direct, 1 to 1 windows so any activity is certainly to be relevant, and nothing important scrolls off screen.

</comment><comment><USER51> Thanks to all that ruckus I discovered Ripcord and have been enjoying how snappy it is. Not pretty but works well for me.

</comment><comment><USER52> Bring back the IRC gateway.

<comment><USER53> Just bring back IRC

<comment><USER54> Ugh no. IRC was great in its day, and I'm sure there are things today that it's still good enough for, but at work, I vastly prefer Slack (and possibly other similar tools, but I haven't power-used any of them yet.) I've been a very, very regular IRC user up until a few years ago. I wouldn't want to go back.

With IRC, there is no simple, just-works-for-non-techies way to receive messages if you aren't online; running irssi in tmux is not such a solution. No proper history to scroll through to catch up on what's happened on your day off, or search for that analysis summary someone posted back in June.

No way to embed images or code snippets in a way that makes them visible without clicking a link or DDC-sending things.

No custom emoji, e.g. for making alert messages easier to scan (like, aws icon, server icon, triple exclamation mark -> EC2 instance(s) have issues and someone should check this right now).

Security and data protection are terrible by default in all ircds I know. Last time I checked, securing channels was a very cumbersome interaction with some custom network bot.

It's harder to get alerts sent to IRC; everyone and their mother offer Slack integration nowadays, and you can literally curl some text against a webhook if none is offered. We do that a lot.

No emoji reactions, e.g. checkmark on someone else's request to say "I did this, everyone else don't bother" or for thumbsup-thumbsdown voting on lunch places or for some sometimes-much-needed comical relief. We use gifs very, very seldomly, but they, too, are great for some comical relief.

No treads, like for "I just finished this analysis, this is the summary, details in thread" – extremely useful.

No functioning way to edit or delete messages for everyone after the fact (and see the edit history if needed) – great for "oops wrong channel", "i copy- pasted the wrong numbers", etc.

Yes, some could be improvised on IRC in some way, others could be replaced by lots of redundant messages, and if everyone agrees to use the same client (like irssi in tmux), and you sink enough time into hacking your ircd, it might even come somewhat close – but I vastly prefer the ready-to-use UX candy. Well worth the cost of the Slack premium package, IMO.

<comment><USER55> No way to embed things... no emojis... no editing or deleting... seems like you are enumerating the advantages of IRC

<comment><USER56> Reminds me of trying to explain why Markdown is so good.

Alice: "But why do you use it? It doesn't do so much!"

Bobbi: "Exactly why I love it."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> What is the proposed utility of moving from being Markdown-friendly to getting all of these WYSIWYG solutions or " Simpler than Markdown " editing options on boards and chat solutions.

I really struggle to comprehend it, would it not be better to just have some sort of "standard" we all can go after?

Genuinely interested in knowing what companies are thinking, is it feedback- driven?

</comment><comment><USER58> Thank God. This was the worst thing ever.

</comment><comment><USER59> I don't get the commotion about this. The old slack editor was really poor, and the new one is just as poor, but differently.

But at least with the WYSIWYG you can see before you send what parts of the markup it got wrong.

<comment><USER60> yes, but with the new one there are situations where you can't correct a mistake once you see it.

just start with a backtick escaped piece and then try to add extra text at the beginning of the line...

<comment><USER59> Okay lets say that that action would cause me to write outside the backticked area.

How would I go about adding something new to the beginning of a backticked area placed at the beginning of a line? That would either be impossible, or there would be a move of the cursor that doesn't move a character (to go in and out of the backtick/code segment.)

Isn't that just how it always is when working in WYSIWYG? The same struggle is real in word or google docs, where you constantly have to add a remove formatting when editing around inline blocks with styles or formatting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> When will they add tabs for open conversations? Why is there a limit one of open conversation at a time? Many times I lose the person I was talking to and have to hunt down few names to find it out again.

</comment><comment><USER62> The iOS client regularly loses large swaths of messages, with no clue that they're missing except a time gap. The only way to fix it is to log out and log back in. I imagine a large percent of users are just oblivious to the missing messages. Me and others have been hitting this bug for at least a year at this point, probably much longer. Is anyone at Slack aware of this? Missing messages should be a priority 1 bug for a tool advertised as a replacement for business email.

</comment><comment><USER63> Looks like markdown for bullet items is still broken. Try

        * test1
        * test2

</comment><comment><USER63> Thanks for fixing something that shouldn't have been broken in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER64> Not sure if it was a regression, but I found myself _having_ to use the editor to insert an image in a thread. I couldn't drag and drop in the threads view.

</comment><comment><USER65> That's great! I've been using a JavaScript hack to avoid it for a while. The current editor has so many not well thought through corner cases!

</comment><comment> k-godwin Just fyi for anyone who finds it MIA in the brower, you just need to refresh to get the option.

</comment><comment><USER66> Do not forget you can say thank you via the /feedback command in Slack

<comment><USER67> "Thank you for giving us a hard to find, poorly named option to opt out of your buggy shit"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> How to force this option for the whole organization/workspace?

</comment><comment><USER69> Moral of the day: Grumpiest programmers win !

</comment><comment><USER70> Now support real Markdown.

<comment> munk-a In particular their ``` code block support is super frustrating, especially since copying a code block produces invalid markdown even if it was originally written properly, they like to pull new lines out of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> "I apologize for the disruption to your existing workflows. Our aim is to build an editor that works for all Slack users to better format their messages and clearly communicate in channels, regardless of their technical expertise. While we are taking all feedback on board, disabling the new formatting tool isn't an option that we will be offering."

<comment><USER72> Source?

<comment><USER73> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592828)

<comment> munk-a Well, I'm quite happy they had to shamefully walk that statement back - <USER2> like it might have been a feature pushed arbitrarily by a C-level fiat rather than user research.

Having the WYSIWYG thing as an option is nice - forcing everyone into it less so.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Website T&Cs and Privacy Policy - <AUTHOR>

We're launching a paid web app in beta very soon and I want to know 1) if we have to launch with terms and conditions and a privacy policy on the site 2) where I can find the authoritative templates for Australian T&Cs. Thanks Hackers. <comment><USER2> You've read this, yes?

(<http://www.privacy.gov.au/business>)</comment>


Full Reddit Submission Corpus now available for 2006 thru August 2015 - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/3mg812/full_reddit_submission_corpus_now_available_2006/ <comment><USER3> This is not as cool as the comment dataset, but it's still pretty cool. I think in the future AIs will make extensive use of these kinds of datasets. It's amazing how much useful information is in there.

Last year I made a simple IRC question answering bot that just searched reddit for your question and returned the top comment of the top result. It worked surprisingly well. It's amazing how many questions someone else has asked on reddit before. And the comment quality is usually pretty good. Sample conversation with it: [https://i.imgur.com/LDD9isL.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/LDD9isL.jpg)

I improved on it a lot with a whitelist of subreddits and some machine learning to select the best thread. But I was only touching on what is possible with that data.

You can play with it here: [https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.snoonet.org/mybots](https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.snoonet.org/mybots)

EDIT: It does only work well with certain kinds of questions. Thing's that would have been asked before and without too many unique keywords. I see some people ask it really unique questions, or talk to it like a regular chatbot without even asking questions. And then get frustrated when it returns nonsense. There are a lot of improvements that could be made with this with natural language processing and stuff. But right now it's pretty simple.

<comment><USER4> Do you have any of the source on Github? I'd be very interested in taking a look and potentially using it as an excuse to get playing with a natural language toolkit (in all my spare time haha)

<comment><USER3> Yes [https://github.com/Houshalter/amabot](https://github.com/Houshalter/amabot)

<comment><USER5> Could you share "C:\\\Users\\\Daniel\\\Documents\\\Programming\\\AMAbotData.txt" as well or it is not neccessary to run the bot?

<comment><USER4> Presumably that's the large dataset he was referring to.

<comment><USER3> Ok I added it and removed some of the stuff that was configured specifically for me. It _should_ work. Please report any and all issues. I'm not sure if javascript supports local filepaths so you might need to edit it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if an analysis of this and the comment corpus could quantifiably show shifts in the opinions of the Reddit "hivemind" since the start. Has the Reddit userbase turned more conservative over the years, or is that just my impression?

<comment><USER7> There sure as hell is lot more fear-mongering since the refugee "crisis" started.

<comment><USER8> Why quotes on crisis? I'm not challenging it, because I also find it weird that overnight the phrase started popping up in the news daily. And what is the fear-mongering going on at Reddit?

<comment><USER7> > And what is the fear-mongering going on at Reddit?

The usual:

• The Arabs will outbreed us! (Before or after the Turks will outbreed us? Or was it the Somalis? I lost track.)

• The refugees will cripple our economy! (153 million EU citizens are on tax- funded pensions or unemployment benefits. Please tell me how a million refugees is going to make a dent in that.)

<comment><USER9> They don't need to outbreed us - they are just sending us their displaced population, costing €700K per head in social services for "integration". And of those refugees "integrated" at vast expense, how many are already ISIS operatives? How many will be radicalized and return with full bellies and full bank accounts to fight for jihad in Syria and Iraq?

Europe is doing the wrong thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Last year, I did a statistical analysis with the same data and can confirm that the data is robust: [http://minimaxir.com/2014/12/reddit- statistics/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/12/reddit-statistics/)

The Comment data set is already on BigQuery, allowing for quick analysis without having to download that corpus (example: [https://www.reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/3kfnmq/reddit_sub...](https://www.reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/3kfnmq/reddit_subreddits_dataset_900000_subreddits/) )

Once the Submission dataset is also on BigQuery, I'll write a blog post with more info on how to use it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Submissions Corpus Magnet Link:

        magnet:?xt=urn:btih:9941b4485203c7838c3e688189dc069b7af59f2e&dn=RS%5Ffull%5Fcorpus.bz2&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969

Comments Corpus Magnet Link

        magnet:?xt=urn:btih:32916ad30ce4c90ee4c47a95bd0075e44ac15dd2&dn=RC%5F2015-01.bz2&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969

Note: The comment corpus was built a few months ago (2015-01), so the two datasets don't overlap completely.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. Yes, that data was publicly available, but it 'feels' different that there is now an unalterable snapshot available to the public. No more comment deletion.

<comment> grey-area There's also a backup copy in Utah with all your comments from every site tied to common selectors like your usernames, emails, passwords, ip, credit cards etc. No doubt that'll leak at some point too.

So comment deletion was never going to save you.

<comment><USER13> But we cannot download that one.

This is actually what has been bothering me for a while now. In the past where search engines (well at least the big one) weren't that thorough, you didn't mind if something stayed on the Internet, since it wasn't easily accessible.

But it's a major difference if it's indexed/searchable or downloadable.

<comment><USER14> This is why, I think we need to make ICT (Information Communication Technology) a mandatory subject in our schools.

Teach kids about the internet. Many people are still under the assumption just deleting something would make it disappear for ever.

Maybe a lot of people from our generation are doomed to sharing too many things online, but we can at least save the next generation from themselves.

You make a mistake 10 years ago, may be a few close friends in your town know about you. Now you make a mistake, the whole world has access to that information.

Government regulations, bans are not going to do anything to stop the spread of information, we need to educate people to protect themselves from their own selves.

<comment><USER15> Judging by how much of a hash lots of schools are doing with literacy and numeracy (and we've been teaching these things for ages), I don't have high hopes for ICT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've spent some time turning this dataset into a Torrent - magnet link is here. If the Reddit OP doesn't want it to be shared in this way for whatever reason, I will of course kill it. Just trying to save him some bandwidth.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:9941b4485203c7838c3e688189dc069b7af59f2e&dn=RS%5Ffull%5Fcorpus.bz2&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80

<comment><AUTHOR> magnet:?xt=urn:btih:9941b4485203c7838c3e688189dc069b7af59f2e&dn=RS%5Ffull%5Fcorpus.bz2&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&ws=[http://reddit- data.s3.amazonaws.com/RS_full_corpus.bz2](http://reddit- data.s3.amazonaws.com/RS_full_corpus.bz2) adds the S3 link as a web seed.

<comment><USER16> That's pretty cool. So would it pull the data from the web or the seedbox? Sorry - I'm fairly newbish with p2p technology.

<comment><AUTHOR> Both, if the client is new enough. I'm not sure what weight is given to each. You have no contact details and the site on your keybase profile is dead - <USER2> you get in touch? I'd like to experiment with this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The same author just posted about a realtime stream of comment data: [https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/3mk1vg/realtime_d...](https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/3mk1vg/realtime_data_is_available_including_comments/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Now we wait for someone to train a RNN and produce a fake but believable reddit parody with generated titles :)

<comment><USER19> Have you seen this?

[https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator](https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator)

<comment><USER18> Some of them are amazing - "TIL Robin Williams died a year ago yesterday, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders Will Consider Legalizing Dank Maymays if Jet Fueled"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Correlate the comment corpus against LinkedIn DB and other public data sources, and one could create an auto-dox system.

</comment><comment><USER21> Crossref did some analysis on when DOIs are submitted to reddit. DOIs are identifiers / persistent links, mostly for scholarly content.

[http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/09/dois-in- reddit.html](http://crosstech.crossref.org/2015/09/dois-in-reddit.html)

HN thread here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10303295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10303295)

</comment><comment><USER22> Is it it possible to directly use it with Spark? (I.e. without downloading it from AWS.) I mean, if the file is public, does it mean that there is a s3n:// address and it is accessible?

</comment><comment><USER23> I couldn't see from the source what form the data are in? It mentions what properties are available, but is it a DB snapshot? Are 'submission objects' only text?

<comment><USER24> Hi there. I'm the one that released this. The data is just a bunch of JSON objects separated by new lines (\n). It's basically the exact same info you would get in JSON format from Reddit's API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone know what license this would be under?

</comment><comment><USER26> Damn shame this excludes all my censored content.</comment>


Nintendo seeks to trademark 'On like Donkey Kong' - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/gaming.gadgets/11/10/on.like.donkey.kong/index.html <comment><USER2> why did they wait this long?</comment>