Ask HN: How do companies hire junior developers? (it's not from job ads) - <AUTHOR> I am now looking for a job as junior frontend developer with 2 years of experience.
Virtually no job posts I see is for junior positions. Yet, a lot of senior positions job descriptions include a version of "will mentor junior developers". How these junior developers are hired?
I think it is mostly from personal networking (which is bad for me as a brazilian trying to find a job in LA, USA).
I am still applying to the companies I like, starting with the disclaimer "Are you accepting applications from junior developers?". So far, only negative responses. <comment><USER2> Campus recruitment, both college and bootcamp

<comment><AUTHOR> I am planning to go on meetups to start creating a network. I will look for some recruitment events too (that are open to outsiders)</comment></comment>


Fragment Foundry: An Introduction to Fragment Shaders and Distance Fields - <AUTHOR> http://hughsk.io/fragment-foundry/ <comment><USER2> Really cool stuff, though I wouldn't have minded a bit more hand-holding regarding the teaching portion, and slightly more verbose explanations.

That said, I found this quite interesting and educational, and I hope to have use for it soon. I'd love to see more lessons and examples in the future.

Thanks for throwing this together.</comment>


Samsung profits surge 79% boosted by smartphone sales - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18732714

<comment><USER2> Bloomberg's headline for the same announcement:

"Samsung Shares Fall After Quarterly Sales Miss Estimates"

<comment><USER3> Here is a link to that story: [http://www.sfgate.com/business/bloomberg/article/Samsung- Sha...](http://www.sfgate.com/business/bloomberg/article/Samsung-Shares- Decline-After-Quarterly-Sales-Miss-3687420.php)

That's a tough spin on positive news. Just because the analysts blew their estimates doesn't mean Samsung had a bad quarter. Here is the key quote:

"Sales of 47 trillion won ($41 billion) trailed the 49.8 trillion-won average of 35 analysts' estimates compiled by Bloomberg, overshadowing operating profit that rose to a record."

<comment><USER4> > the analysts blew their estimates

Samsung is supposed to give the analysts "guidance" to let them make good estimates. So it's a little bit Samsung's fault.

<comment><USER5> That dance has always seemed so bizarre to me. It's like some kind of weird game of hotter-colder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My favourite part is the image of the model showing the samsung with an interface that closely resembles iOS.

<http://i.imgur.com/nsqFl.jpg>

<comment><USER7> You ignore the three phones in the stock / normal configuration that looks nothing like iOS (showing widgets, etc), focus on the one that happens to be showing the app drawer which is more similar just so you can troll with a comment about copying. It's getting old.

<comment><USER8> "focus on the one that happens to be showing the app drawer"

(1) Hard not to focus on the one being shoved at the camera.

(2) Display models held by display models don't just "happen" to be configured a certain way. Samsung has frequently marketed their stuff with the app drawer although lawsuits have mitigated that lately.*

Given the lack of differentiation with Samsung products compared to other Android vendors your suggestion that this is all a big coincidence is laughable.

* see for example...

original galaxy s announcement:

[http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/images/4/2012/01/medium_af88...](http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/images/4/2012/01/medium_af886b8eea1bd62fc44151bdace09e94.jpg)

galaxy tab original packaging:

[http://www.thegalaxytab.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/10/galax...](http://www.thegalaxytab.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/10/galaxy-tab-unboxing.png)

galaxy tab 2 launch event:

[http://img.ibtimes.com/www/data/images/full/2011/10/04/16859...](http://img.ibtimes.com/www/data/images/full/2011/10/04/168599-models- hold-samsung-electronics-galaxy-tab-tablet-computers-during-its.jpg)</comment></comment></comment>


SEC settles with EtherDelta founder for running an unlicensed exchange [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2018/34-84553.pdf <comment><USER2> "Respondent Coburn shall pay disgorgementof $300,000 and prejudgment interest of $13,000, for a total of $313,000 ,to the Securities and Exchange Commission for transfer to the United States Treasury subject to Exchange Act Section 21F(g)(3)."

"Respondent Coburn shall, within 10 days of this Order, pay a civil money penalty of $75,000 to the Securities and Exchange Commission for transfer to the United States Treasury subject to Exchange Act Section 21F(g)(3)."

Total fine is under $400,000k. I am curious whether the enterprise was net positive factoring the fine into account.

<comment><USER3> Why would the SEC want them to not be net positive? Are they trying to dismantle the business or just ensure that they get their dues?

<comment><USER4> This was a fine imposed against the founder individually, not against EtherDelta, the company, which is owned by Asian investors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> During the boom, I was really glad that ED was around when I wanted to make large buys because it eliminated counter-party risk. With regular exchanges it was common to have withdrawals halted or have deposits not show up for hours with no support, if they showed up t all. Eventually they couldn't handle the volume and it fell apart but when it worked it was a godsend

<comment><USER6> Except it does not eliminate counterparty risk because it still has central points of failure it even got hacked and people lost money.

[https://www.ccn.com/cryptocurrency-exchange-etherdelta- hacke...](https://www.ccn.com/cryptocurrency-exchange-etherdelta-hacked-in- dns-hijacking-scheme/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a great read and not overly long. For a legal filing from the SEC about a cryptocoin marketplace, it doesn't get much better than this.

The size of the fine strongly indicates (in my totally non-expert opinion) that the SEC was actually deeply grateful to the EtherDelta founder for educating them about how his operation functioned and how this marketplace even worked. I wouldn't be surprised if he helped write the document we just read.

This is not even a slap on the wrist, this is practically them saying "job well done, sir!"

The point of filing in the first place and ultimately reaching this agreement was clearly a learning experience for the SEC and a practice run for starting to better regulate this new technology.

They learned the ropes with a defendant who didn't even own the company anymore, and basically hired him to consult for them. The plea lets the SEC put a feather in their hat and try to better establish that they want to regulate even smart-contract based non-custodial trading engines.

Which really kind of sucks because a truly non-custodial smart contract trading engine carries none of the risks that the national exchange regulations were designed to protect against, does it?

Maybe there is still manipulation of the order book that could occur.

And also, which specifically comes up in TFA, the fact that EtherDelta picked which securities were displayed in the book was a key aspect of them being an exchange. If you're going to, even implicitly, endorse specific tokens, you are going to be subject to these regulations.

It would be great to know specifically how far back you would have to walk from the EtherDelta "line" before the SEC would not pursue enforcement. Is any centralization at all fatal?

I'm going to guess you need a fully decentralize trading book, and users need to explicitly identify the token they want to trade (i.e. by selecting the correct book) before there is no longer an individual person they could target as an exchange.

Basically, I am guessing, you have to get to a point where you aren't even capable of collecting transaction fees beyond what the miners require to include the transaction in a block.

Overall a very interesting post.

</comment><comment><USER8> When the exchange was launched, the SEC didn't mention that ether was a security or tokens for that matter. How can they came back years later and back-charge for things that were not illegal at the time? Seems largely unfair and plain greedy. Are 0x protocol relayers next to be charged by the SEC?

<comment><USER9> almost certainly yes

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is why coinbase bought a broker dealer. And this is why you'll see a lot more BDs being setup to properly clear crypto trading.

<comment><USER11> BDs? What does that mean?

<comment><USER12> Broker Dealer: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broker- dealer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broker-dealer)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am no libertarian, but this feels thoroughly unfair on a human level. EtherDelta was a noble pursuit in my book - it was useful, entrepreneurial and did not exploit anybody.

<comment><USER14> There's no doubt EtherDelta's system addressed many of the reasons traditional markets required regulation but EtherDelta is still a clear violation of the Exchange Act. All securities exchanges must be registered, most tokens are securities and EtherDelta was running an unregistered exchange selling those securities.

That being said, this is a classic example of the law failing to keep pace with technology. Up until a few years ago it was a given that exchanges required a neutral third party to facilitate transactions and that, in the interest of fairness and full disclosure, those market makers needed to be registered and regulated. The law simply does not contemplate a self-regulated exchange governed by smart contracts and a decentralized ledger.

U.S. regulators also tend to focus on compliance with black-letter law without giving much credence to compliance with the spirit of the law. In my opinion, this all-or-nothing approach stymies innovation because regulators and innovators become adversaries when they could and _should_ be allies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone have a good high level summary of the complaint the SEC made? How does one avoid those type of accusations while being involved in the crypto space?

<comment><USER13> The "Summary" section in the PDF gives a pretty concise and straight-forward overview.

<comment><USER11> I'll read that. I was assuming the SEC report wouldn't have the backstory but maybe that is just the gossip hound in me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Isn't etherDelta an etherium app/token/contract?

How is that different than running an etherium miner? Actually, didn't it run on an etherium miner? can you get a fee from a contract someone else mined because you are the author? well I guess so otherwise why would the creator be being fined? ...etherium is weird.

<comment><USER16> Sure it's just a contract, but the company still takes a cut (written in to the contract) when traders execute against orders. I'd assume that's what SEC wants their share of.</comment></comment>


A Confusing Dependency (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.autsoft.hu/a-confusing-dependency/ <comment><USER2> > Of course you could run your own internal Maven repository for your company > and have every project rely on that exclusively, with only carefully > reviewed and verified packages being imported there. Most won't have time to > be so careful about dependencies.

If true, that seems like a serious problem.</comment>


FasterPath: Faster Pathname Handling for Ruby Written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/danielpclark/faster_path <comment><USER2> Articles like this one, and the recent project on libraries like Helix [http://blog.skylight.io/introducing- helix/](http://blog.skylight.io/introducing-helix/) make me awfully tempted to rewrite inner loops in certain production Ruby projects in Rust.

</comment><comment><USER3> How on earth can pathname handling be a performance drag? If I read his stats correctly, then `Pathname#chop_basename` is called 24456 times for one page load. Something is very fishy about that.

<comment><USER4> Exactly what I was thinking. You look for the last slash and truncate.

<comment><USER5> This is a naive solution. Try using that on windows.

<comment><USER6> This actually makes me wonder if it would be worthwhile to look for this and similar issues and remove Windows support from the methods for a custom implementation. It might shave off some more time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Rails is such a huge community, and Sprockets has to be one of the biggest pain points for many years.

My solution after years of agony has been to just throw it all out, and use a diff asset packager underneath rails.

Really happy that people are taking this issue on. Wish I had the time to help out.

<comment><USER8> Re Sprockets, I found this recent talk at RailsConf about the history, problems, and future of Sprockets maintenance and development to be an interesting read: [http://schneems.com/2016/05/31/saving- sprockets.html](http://schneems.com/2016/05/31/saving-sprockets.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9>
      FasterPath Rust Implementation  Ruby 2.3.1 Implementation  Performance Improvement
      FasterPath.absolute? 	          Pathname#absolute?         1234.6%

Nothing like getting 3 orders of magnitude performance improvement.

<comment><USER10> Ruby's `Pathname#absolute?` is doing a lot more work[1]. I don't know why, but it is.

If I change it to just check the first character for the file separator, as I understand FasterPath does, then of course it is faster:

        Warming up </comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
                    original     4.109k i/100ms
                      faster   110.202k i/100ms
        Calculating </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
                    original     42.645k (± 3.7%) i/s -    213.668k in   5.017595s
                      faster      2.643M (± 4.4%) i/s -     13.224M in   5.013294s

        Comparison:
                      faster:  2643274.6 i/s
                    original:    42644.5 i/s - 61.98x slower

My implementation:

        class Pathname
          def f_relative?
            @path[0] != File::SEPARATOR
          end
        end

[1] [https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/68ebbbfebe5b666cf76ab41f1e...](https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/68ebbbfebe5b666cf76ab41f1e6191a172d62690/ext/pathname/lib/pathname.rb#L227)

<comment><USER11> That returns a wrong result on Windows paths, and throws an exception on the empty string.

There are a _ton_ of edge cases in path manipulation code.

<comment><USER12> I'm pretty sure his implementation works on empty strings because `str[0].nil?`. So the comparison is false, giving the right (?) answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not at all familiar with programming in Rust or Ruby, but what is the significance of the string "muffins" on this line? [https://github.com/danielpclark/faster_path/blob/7033f5a5673...](https://github.com/danielpclark/faster_path/blob/7033f5a567317d96d8a9cff0ade2327ecfb1d32b/src/is_absolute.rs#L17)

Edit: changed link to blob version which will not change line numbers on me.

<comment><USER14> I don't write Rust either, but I might guess that they are trying to unbox a nullable value that can't be null. They need a default string due to Rusts strong types even if it's not used.

<comment><USER15> A more idiomatic way to write the line is:

r_str.chars().next() == Some(MAIN_SEPARATOR)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not the OP. Just found this very interesting.</comment>


[LIVE] NASA: Earth from Space – Video from the International Space Station ISS - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njCDZWTI-xg <comment><USER2> The Canadian startup Urthecast have cameras mounted on the ISS that they stream - [https://www.urthecast.com/live](https://www.urthecast.com/live)</comment>


Transposing Lisp into Ruby - <AUTHOR> https://revs.runtime-revolution.com/transposing-lisp-into-ruby-32645502f118 <comment><USER2> > Although an objected-oriented language I really enjoy the fact that one > doesn't have to create instances to invoke class methods. This was a big > turn off, not to mention cumbersome, on my previous C# jobs.

Am I missing something here? Fairly certain C# has static methods.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd be more interested I hearing their insights into programming a Windows app in Lisp.

</comment><comment><USER4> WJ, is that you?</comment>


Process and thread fundamentals - <AUTHOR> http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.4.1/neutrino/getting_started/s1_procs.html#Fundamentals <comment><USER2> Is it me, or are semaphores overrated? There seems to be so much emphasis on semaphores in textbooks & guides. Thread pools are just a footnote (if mentioned at all). They did mention them in the article, at the bottom..

Yet in the real world, it's thread pools that are the go to when you need to control the number of active threads. Can't think of any instances where semaphores would be a better choice over thread pools.

Also, I wish I knew how important a role CPU cache plays in performance. Another aspect which seems to be downplayed in academia.

<comment><USER3> You can't really compare thread pools to semaphores. They're don't have the same intended use, where semaphores are a low-level synchronization mechanism and thread pools are a bit higher up. In fact, I would wager that many, if not most, implementations of thread pools use semaphores to some degree.</comment></comment>


Facebook Starts Using a Friend Recommendations Engine - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2008/06/04/facebook-friend-suggestor/ <comment><USER2> What's next, "suggested wall posts"? We think this is what you want to comment on this photo - click OK to make the comment.

I'm fine with (and actually like) the "People we think you may know" on LinkedIn, because it actually gives me a fair number of people I know. Facebook just hasn't gotten it right - I don't know any of those people!</comment>


Taking Another Person's Perspective Doesn't Help You Understand Them - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/taking-another-persons-perspective-doesnt-help-you-understand-them <comment><USER2> I've seen first hand many times how simply repeating the person's position back to them helps two parties understand each other.

You don't have to agree with them, but if you keep repeating their points with the preface "It sounds like you believe..." (or similar variations so as not to sound pretentious) until you get a "Yes" in response, then you've effectively understood them and they've felt understood by you.

Shared reality is different from agreement, but it is very possible with patience and non-arguable phrasing.

<comment><USER3> Or they just got tired of arguing with you.

<comment><USER4> So a win/win!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can we stop with the nautil.us stories? They are badly done science reported poorly and in misleading ways. This is the second or third one this week that makes broad assertions from highly minute data samplesm

<comment><USER6> I couldn't agree more. Their articles are low quality and meander through their subject far too long. It's also suspect that their articles frequently hit the front page, despite having few comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This study is extremely flawed, like many (if not most) sociological studies.

> Participants were randomly assigned to read a short descrip- tion of just > one of these tests and were presented with one sample item. Participants > then predicted which of two groups of people was more accurate in an > experiment: people in a control condition who simply completed the test > without further instruction, or people in a perspective taking condition who > were asked to com- plete the test while "trying to adopt the perspective of > the other person, putting yourself into the other person's shoes as if you > were that person." Participants predicted the outcome of the ex- periment by > choosing one of three options: "Condition 1 (Control) did significantly > better," "Condition 2 (Perspective Taking) did significantly better," or "No > significant difference between the two conditions in performance on the > test."

[http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/nicholas.epley/Eyal_Steffel_...](http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/nicholas.epley/Eyal_Steffel_Epley_2018_Perspective_Mistaking.pdf)

There conclusions are based on a test that is dependent as much on the reading comprehension and decision making-abilities of the participants as their ability to empathize and understand.

>Despite a large scientific literature on the consequences of perspective taking in social interaction, whether perspective taking actually increases accurate insight into the mind of another person is unclear.

I would love to sit down at a poker table with these researchers to assist with their clarity on this subject. Like most sociological "studies", these people (who I will not call scientists) are making broad assumptions based on observations of a small group of people. Their observations may be an interesting novelty, but this is not science.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's only possible to effectively "put yourself in another person's shoes" if you have previously experienced their situation.

If you are just imagining what their experience would be like rather than referring to actual past experience, you will be prone to error because it would come down to how good your imagination is at representing their reality.

<comment><USER9> You'll be prone to error, but it's not impossible to gain perspective through analogy and empathy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "'To understand someone, we should not imagine their point of view but make the effort to "get" their perspective. True insight into the minds of others is not likely to come from honing your powers of intuition,' Epley wrote, 'but rather by learning to stop guessing about what's on the mind of another person and learning to listen instead.'"

It took me a while to learn this with my SO, but now that we try this more often we've definitely noticed an improvement in our disagreements. Of course, I had to be open to listening in the first place, which is something that probably prevents empathizing with a stranger of an opposite mindset.

<comment><USER11> > we've definitely noticed an improvement in our disagreements

You disagree more? Or in the cases were you disagree, the reason is more a fundamental difference of opinion, rather than a misunderstanding?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As one half of a couple that's been going strong for 12 years now I can attest to the fact that trying to "stand in her shoes" was a sure-fire way for me to make a bad situation worse :p

It took a lot of time and gradually developed over the course of our relationship but what we do now mostly resembles debating. Very very fierce debating depending on the subject!

So my personal experience completely gels with the findings in this research.

Aside from that it's also pretty annoying whenever someone else says "I get how you feel because XYZ", when you feel XYA. If the other is off only by a little bit, it frustrates more than it makes you feel heard.

</comment><comment><USER13> Trying to _fully_ understand a living person is as futile as trying to pin down a river so you can dissect it.

That is, a person is capable of changing like the flow of a river, and while you can analyze who they were in the past, and -- if they're alive -- make predictions about who they will be in the future based on their past, or draw conclusions based on similarities with other people's paths, you can never truly know something that is always capable of change at any time.

But you can know them well enough. Is that frightening, depressing or liberating?

      To better understand someone you have to empathize;
      to better empathize you have to understand them.

<comment><USER14> Rivers don't tend to change their flow suddenly or unpredictably, though, and I don't believe people's personalities or opinions do either. Change in both tends to be gradual in the short term, even if diverse over the long term, and can be understood by studying the environment in which flow occurs.

<comment><USER13> I agree. You can know them well-enough for practical purposes; sometimes they will surprise you.

As an aside, I think the antonym of "lonely" is "understood", and when you empathize with someone, you put yourself in their position and feel understood, and thus less lonely.

      A person can feel lonely in a crowd
      but not alone when their self is understood
      even when alone in a cell
      made of all (flesh, concrete or abstract)
      that barriers can be built of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This appears merely to test whether being told to take another's perspective, after already reading the other's words, and having no opportunity to engage with the other or gain new information, helps with "accuracy". Would it be surprising if it didn't help much? The whole point of taking another's perspective is to "get" it and it often involves asking questions.

</comment><comment><USER16> Well telling people to think about how the other one would think might simply add another abstraction on top of normal empathy and therefore cause inaccuracy.

Especially in direct conflict between two parties I think it helps enormously. Usually it can explain how the other does not act in malice, but out of less hurtful reasons.

</comment><comment><USER17> When taking another person's perspective is difficult to do (e.g. because you cannot relate to it), looking at _myself_ from someone else's perspective _does_ help me improve my interactions with them (but it's uncomfortable when you don't like what you see.)</comment>


Small-Business Books That Break the Mold - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/business/smallbusiness/27toolkit.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin <comment><USER2> Good list. Not really sure why, but I especially liked "How to Get Rich" by Felix Denis. Really got my juices flowing.</comment>


GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentralized-github/ <comment><USER3> Lovely work!

 _We ask for the commit we want and connect to a node with BitTorrent, but once connected we conduct this Smart Protocol negotiation in an overlay connection on top of the BitTorrent wire protocol, in what's called a BitTorrent Extension. Then the remote node makes us a packfile and tells us the hash of that packfile, and then we start downloading that packfile from it and any other nodes who are seeding it using Standard BitTorrent._

The disadvantage here is that any given file in the repo could be stored in an ever increasing number of packfiles. Each existing version of the repo will generate a new packfile to get it to the newest version, and it's up to the authenticated masters to generate and seed each of those packfiles, while peers either do or do not cache these replicated datas. In short, this means of syndicating updates ignores the Merkle-DAG-ness (DAG-osity?) of Git.

The un-updateability of torrents is something that seems to seriously limit it's use. There are a lot of interesting attempts to hack around this- LiveStreaming and Nightweb are two that spring to mind. [https://www.tribler.org/StreamingExperiment/](https://www.tribler.org/StreamingExperiment/) [https://sekao.net/nightweb/protocol.html](https://sekao.net/nightweb/protocol.html)

<comment><USER4> I agree it is really stellar. The billion dollar concept for me though is encrypted repo torrents. Imagine a group of servers that are hosting encrypted chunks which form the basis of a homomorphic encryption protocol for distribution using forward error correction to allow recovery of the deltas if n of m components of that delta can be recovered. Basically if you have the key you can pull out of this amorphous cloud your source code, and if you don't have the key you won't even know it is out there.

I started building a toy version of this about 5 years ago but got distracted by work. Essentially the repo key encrypted the packfile, the storage reliability layer used its another key to encrypt the chunks. The latter key would find the chunks, with enough reliability to re-create the encrypted packfile, which the latter key could decrypt and apply to your repo.

A very fun problem in distributed systems and data structures.

<comment><USER5> I've always thought this would be amazing for file storage in general. A Dropbox that just syncs with the cloud encrypting your content with a private key and you can withdraw it at any time. You simply give back say 5 x as much storage as you use for the data mirroring.

<comment><USER6> AFAIK this was the concept behind Wuala. Founded in Switzerland, later bought by French company LaCie. According to their website the clien side encryption is still there, however they discontinued the collaborative disk space business model.

<comment><USER7> We're trying to recreate that concept with peergos, [https://github.com/ianopolous/Peergos](https://github.com/ianopolous/Peergos) we're considering trying to use ipfs, [http://ipfs.io](http://ipfs.io) under the hood which would be nice. Wuala was great but they never open sourced it and stopped the storage earning in 2008.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > It surprised me that nothing like this seems to exist already in the > decentralization community.

There was a GSoC project in 2013 which did exactly this, using Freenet as decentralized storage backend with a Web of Trust for Spam resistant and updatable identities (note that in the gittorrent scheme once someone claimed a username, that username will stick there forever). It works and compared to GitTorrent it adds anonymity and upload-and-run.

A current article describing it is here: [http://draketo.de/english/freenet/real-life- infocalypse](http://draketo.de/english/freenet/real-life-infocalypse) (it got referenced here, too: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9562749](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9562749) )

The GSoC project was done by Steve Dougherty: [http://www.google- melange.com/gsoc/project/details/google/gs...](http://www.google- melange.com/gsoc/project/details/google/gsoc2013/sdough/5650716672655360)

> I'd be happy to work on a project like this and make GitTorrent sit on top > of it, so please let me know if you're interested in helping with that.

Have a look at Gitocalypse: [https://github.com/SeekingFor/gitocalypse](https://github.com/SeekingFor/gitocalypse)

</comment><comment><USER9> Major fan of this idea. But how does one address the GUI challenges presented by leaving GitHub behind? It can't be understated that GitHub provides an amazing (communal/social) user experience.

<comment><USER10> (Author here.)

You're right, of course. This is just a first step.

One interesting followup idea might be that the BitTorrent library I'm using, webtorrent, also works in browsers over WebRTC. But I'm not using that because I wouldn't know what to do with a git cloned repo inside of a browser tab. Maybe someone else will though. :)

<comment><USER11> GitHub provides: - Repo hosting, - Search, - <USER2>

In comparison to decentralized Search and Community, decentralized file storage is easy. Conveniently, centralized repo hosting is the biggest problem. Not being able to Search / Comment / Report a bug during a DDOS decreases productivity, but not being able to push commits / run CI tools is a productivity halt.

The best next move, might be to focus on decentralized repository hosting, solve that well, and allow users to conveniently mirror the GitTorrent repos on GitHub. Giving the best of both worlds until Search and Community can also be solved well.

This may mean GitTorrent would need some form of post push hooks (i.e. to update mirrors or run CI). Which I'm sure is doable.

<comment><USER12> Hmm, decentralized search here should probably just use a Kademlia-like implementation ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia)) where a 'XOR metric' is used to measure distance between nodes. (That way the max number of lookups will be log2(n) where n is the number of nodes (with further optimizations possible))

Obviously someone would need to build a user-friendly interface for all that, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Love this.

The post mentions using the blockchain for unique username registration and mapping to public key hashes, and as it turns out there's a project I and others have been working on that does exactly this called Blockstore.

Here's the link if anyone wants to check it out: [https://github.com/namesystem/blockstore](https://github.com/namesystem/blockstore)

The way it works is there's a mapping between a unique name and a hash in the blockchain, and then there's a mapping in a DHT from the hash to the data to be associated (which can be a plain old public key and can also be a JSON file that references a public key and other identity information).

<comment><USER10> (GitTorrent author here.)

That's great, thanks! I should just use this (preferably with the DHT I'm already using to look up Git commits) instead of reimplementing myself.

What do you think about the idea of making pluggable modules to connect Blockstore with web frameworks (Django, Rails), without the framework/website authors having to get involved in understanding Bitcoin themselves?

<comment><USER13> Oh I love that idea.

As far as Django, Blockstore is on Pypi so you can just install and import the library.

I think it'd be great to have modules for Rails, Node, etc.

I saw your tweet and I'll shoot you an email. Also feel free to open an issue on github.com/namesystem/blockstore and we can discuss the idea openly there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The remaining hard part is the adapter layer to enable the extra applications such as the issue tracker to use the Git repository for storage. Joey Hess has a good article about Git "databranches" here: [https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/databranches/](https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/databranches/)

</comment><comment><USER15> A very interesting idea, GitTorrent, but I have one question which comes to me whenever I read about a delta-based distribution scheme: who is going to generate and share all those deltas?

Some Linux distributions have experimented with delta-based package repositories, examples are deltup for Arch Linux and rpm-delta for RPM-based distros. Some of the known issues are:

\- choosing the number and spacing between deltas. Fine-grained deltas require more storage space, coarse-grained deltas require more download bandwidth.

\- retiring old deltas: periodically deleting all deltas older than a certain version, replacing them with the full package of that version. Again a trade- off between storage space and download bandwidth.

For Git repositories, this would roughly translate to:

\- choosing the number, history spacing, and size of the Git packs per repository.

\- retiring old Git packs: periodically deleting Git packs older than a particular revision, replacing them with a bare repository at that revision.

<comment><USER16> Git is _built out of_ deltas. You're already storing all of them.

<comment><USER17> This is isn't quite how I would describe it. Git does do delta compression in packfiles, but the fundamental primitives lack deltas. It's just:

* The contents of this directory is this list of of files whose contents have these SHAs.

This is called a "tree".

The SHA of a tree is also an object, and can appear in another tree.

To see this for yourself, in any git repository run `git cat-file -p HEAD`. You'll see the (more or less) raw commit object for HEAD, which will point at a tree SHA. To see the contents of that tree-sha, run `git cat-file -p <the tree SHA>`. That tree object has a one-to-one correspondence with what you'll see on-disk in the objects directory, (if the object has not been put in a pack file).

Above I have more or less fully described the contents of the files found in `.git/objects`.

The delta'ing doesn't happen until later, if and when packfiles are constructed. But they're just a storage/bandwidth optimisation. AFAICT, these deltas have nothing to do with what you might think of as "git diff", which is just some fancy porcelain which looks at objects.

The nice property of the construction is that given a large tree, even if nested, if you change a single file in that tree, you will only change as many trees as the file is deep in the tree, so computing changes between two nearby trees can usually be done quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _> There are philosophical reasons, too: GitHub is closed source, so we can't make it better ourselves._

There is GitLab.

<comment><USER19> GitLab CEO here, thanks for mentioning us as the open source alternative. We think in the short term multiple organizations hosting their own GitLab is the way to go. It is hard to do issues and pull/merge requests in a decentralized way (the OP is impressive but it shows distributed git instead of distributed GitHub). I would like to see federated merge requests [http://feedback.gitlab.com/forums/176466-general/suggestions...](http://feedback.gitlab.com/forums/176466-general/suggestions/5097708-implement- cross-server-federated-merge-requests)

<comment><USER20> _It is hard to do issues and pull /merge requests in a decentralized way_

...Over the web...

I mean, Git and Linux are developed via email lists, which is a decentralized way of sending pull/merge requests, isn't it? I guess you could argue the mailing list is hosted on a server, fine. So then fine, usenet.

Yeah, email and nntp are old crufty technologies and there are obviously advantages to having a web based interface and a central place to go for a project. But git itself certainly supports a decentralized mechanism for merging.

So then the question really is, how do you decentralize a web interface, isn't it? The dvcs itself isn't the problem.

<comment><USER21> Wouldn't a decentralized web interface be webmail (i.e. Gmail)? Then along the Gmail theme, a plug in could make things look much like a static website. Where "conversation view" becomes a "repository view".

<comment><USER22> There's nothing decentralised about Gmail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'd love something like this for fossil[1], which can also handle wiki and issues inside it's repos by default.

[1]: [http://fossil- scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki](http://fossil- scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki)

</comment><comment><USER21> I need to go more in-depth on the proposal. But the first thing that strikes me, is if you're going to use the Blockchain (with a capital "B") as storage of usernames and such. Why not use namecoin? It has the process for name consensus down. Also it won't pollute the main Bitcoin blockchain.

<comment><USER10> Hi, author here.

I have a mild bias against altcoins, and have heard bad things about Namecoin in particular: that the anti-spam incentives aren't good, leading to illegal files stored in the blockchain itself, and that there's no compact representation (like Bitcoin's Simplified Payment Verification) for determining whether a claimed name is valid without consulting a full history.

As I understand it, these two design flaws combine to mean that you have to store some very illegal files to use a namecoin resolver, which doesn't sound good to me. (I may be mistaken, since the bad things I heard about Namecoin came from Bitcoin people..)

<comment><USER24> The notion that a file can be illegal makes as much sense to the internet as a plant being illegal makes to the earth.

Especially when it has the side effect of inhibiting what otherwise might be a compelling solution.

<comment><USER25> Your analogy doesn't hold up, as (for one) we have society and plants don't. I'm glad that child porn is illegal (which is usually distributed in files), as it makes the world safer for children.

Also: some plants are serious jerks.

<comment><USER26> If pi goes on forever, it contains any and all representations of child porn that could exist. The first person to calculate pi that far will be breaking the law. No, that doesn't make sense, nor does any sort of information being illegal. What does make sense is to legislate the actions that can generate that data, or the misappropriation of that data.

<comment><USER27> Great point !

<comment><USER28> no, it's a really contrived point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Forgive me if my comment too readily reveals my ignorance on these topics, but would the IPFS project [0] be useful for this?

[0] [http://ipfs.io](http://ipfs.io)

<comment><USER30> Definitely, checkout their example on how to host git on ipfs[0]

[0] [http://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTkzDwWqPbnAh5YiV5VwcTLnGdwSNsN...](http://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTkzDwWqPbnAh5YiV5VwcTLnGdwSNsNTn2aDxdXBFca7D/example#/ipfs/QmThrNbvLj7afQZhxH72m5Nn1qiVn3eMKWFYV49Zp2mv9B/git/readme.md)

<comment><USER31> While integration between git and ipfs is good -- I'm not sure I see how this is much different from just tar-ing up a git-archive and creating a torrent/magnet (setting aside many of the other aspects of how ipfs and torrents work).

Decentralized git pull for only a given hash isn't all that interesting?

If one could pull in updates and/or push changes -- that would be "decentralized git". This is example is more "ipfs.io as a transport for git- releases", rather than "ipfs.io as a transport for git"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Similar to Gitchain [http://gitchain.org/](http://gitchain.org/) ?

<comment><USER10> (Author here.)

Yeah! I was a Gitchain backer. The difference is that Gitchain stored the actual git commits in the blockchain, and I leave the actual commits on the hard disks of each BitTorrent seeder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Stored github in btsync for a startup before. It actually worked ok. We stopped doing it because btsync was trivial to crash with basic fuzzing and was closed source

</comment><comment><USER34> This is an aside but I like the author's writing style. Not only is he clear but also describes why he's doing what he's doing and how it's important to him and others. Really helps me give the ideas more thought!

</comment><comment><USER35> > Google Code announced its shutdown a few months ago, and their rationale was > explicitly along the lines of "everyone's using GitHub anyway, so we don't > need to exist anymore".

I mean, sorta. It was also because running a service is expensive, and containing abuse is a constant thankless treadmill.

> We're quickly heading towards a single central service for all of the > world's source code.

Far from it? Not that a fully-decentralized system seems bad, but there are many things that aren't github. I don't even have anything of interest on github.

</comment><comment><USER36> Can I clone GitTorrent with GitTorrent?

<comment><USER10> Yes, it works.

npm install gittorrent

git clone gittorrent://github.com/cjb/gittorrent

Or for true decentralization (doesn't get the wanted sha1 from github.com):

gittorrent://81e24205d4bac8496d3e13282c90ead5045f09ea/gittorrent

<comment><USER37> I got fatal: Unable to find remote helper for 'gittorrent'

<comment><USER10> How about "sudo npm install -g gittorrent"? It looks like the git-remote- gittorrent binary isn't ending up in your $PATH.

<comment><USER38> Or without polluting global namespace:

export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/node_modules/.bin"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I have to admit that I started reading this post feeling a little snarky about the concept. However, I think Chris makes an excellent case for the concept.

</comment><comment><USER40> How is the new value for a mutable key propagated through the DHT? (as in how sure am I to get the newest commit hash?)

</comment><comment><USER41> This is awesome, but it centralizes on JavaScript.

It is an implementation of a standard without the standard being defined so other implementations can spring up.

Git, one could argue, is language centralized also, which is technically true. That I don't have an answer for. But I don't believe handing off so much dependence to a JavaScript application fits for me.

A C/C++ application like Git I can overlook, at least for a decade or so, but JavaScript feels like a perpetual beta/prototype only. Granted, that's my subjective feeling.

Raised issue: [https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent/issues/12](https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent/issues/12)

<comment><USER42> The word "centralize" in the way you're using it is very misleading. Every piece of programming in existence uses some sort of language.

What you're really stating, I think, is that this is written in Javascript and you don't like Javascript. That's totally fine, and it's your prerogative. I'm sure that, like any other piece of programming, GitTorrent can be rewritten in other languages. If Javascript bothers you that much, then do this: rewrite it in Ruby if that's what you prefer.

But please stop attacking the claim that this is "decentralised github" by claiming that this "centralises" on Javascript. It doesn't "centralise" on any language. It's just a first implementation written in Javascript.

<comment><USER41> That this implementation being uncomfortable for me is my subjective feeling, I've mentioned several times. That I don't want to depend on JavaScript is clear. I don't want to depend on JavaScript. Using the word centralize the way I have, I can't see otherwise. But I'm not defaming anyone. I'm not attacking anything. I'm very motivated to help the standard advance, but I would never for a moment install this implementation. Stupid of me? Sure, maybe. But it's not an attack.

What I wanted I already got, confirmation by the OP that this is in fact a reference implementation and not the all-end-all.

Were that clear to start with, I wouldn't have commented other than to say, awesome! This is extremely exciting to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I could see this integrating really nicely with mailing lists. The commit could be sent out to the mailing list, and anyone who is interested in reviewing the code or doing a merge would already have the information they need, no blockchain required.

</comment><comment><USER44> If a version of this with friendly name support is released, I will mirror all my active GitHub repositories there.

If someone builds on this, as discussed elsewhere in the thread, to make a decentralized service that mimics 'social' functionality such as issues and pull requests, I will strongly consider using it instead of GitHub (depending on the UI, stability, etc.).

I don't even have any particularly popular repos, so there is no real reason for anyone to care about the above, but, y'know, HN comments approving of the idea don't necessarily translate into actual interest in the product, so now you know there's at least one person in the latter category. :)

</comment><comment><USER45> I always thought Github was open source and that you could fork it, like in the spirit of Github. I find that slightly ironic =)

What's stopping a decentralized github from ending up in the same fate as the newsgroups, that the data set gets too large to handle !?

I think that Github is more then just a repository, it's a community. I kinda quit Facebook and signed up to Github instead :P And if it weren't for Github I would have never touched git.

Startup idea: Create something like Github and assembly.com, but with a complete tool-set (git+vps)

</comment><comment><USER46> Well done.

I think this is a great piece to build a "pay for branch merging" way of promoting open source.. use decentralized currency and voila, automated programming.

</comment><comment><USER47> What I miss in the article or discussion is consistency of refs. The moment your remote is a distributed one, it may have two different values for HEAD in single point of time in different parts of network. If two clients push in this time, HEADs diverge even further.

So as in distributed databases, you either:

* need to acquire exclusive lock on the repository metadata, or

* accept, that your push will be eventually discarded because you did not have up to date metadata

</comment><comment><USER48> decentralized web interface? Isn it better to develop native, cross platform app for that?

We have both electron and NW.js now, that should be easy.

</comment><comment><USER49> I like the idea of decentralized, but I'm not sure we need p2p as well.

It'd be interesting to see something like gitlab to have some sort of federation support; where multiple instances can talk to one another ( _a la xmpp /smtp_), so as to clone/send pull-requests, etc across different instances.

<comment><USER19> We would love to see features like that in GitLab [http://feedback.gitlab.com/forums/176466-general/suggestions...](http://feedback.gitlab.com/forums/176466-general/suggestions/5097708-implement- cross-server-federated-merge-requests)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I don't think this is new. [http://code.google.com/p/gittorrent/](http://code.google.com/p/gittorrent/)

</comment><comment><USER51> I don't understand why so many people are in awe of this project when it seems to be based on a number of falsehoods:

 _> "imagine someone arguing that we can do without BitTorrent because we have FTP. We would not advocate replacing BitTorrent with FTP, and the suggestion doesn't even make sense! First — there's no index of which hosts have which files in FTP, so we wouldn't know where to look for anything."_

Actually there is. It's called a mirror list. Most FTP-based repositories support this.

 _> "And second — even if we knew who owned copies of the file we wanted, those computers aren't going to be running an anonymous FTP server."_

Except bittorrent does turn your client into a server. Many clients silently punch holes in your firewall via uPnP, so you don't always realise you're running a server, but it does still happen.

And as for anonymous FTP servers, it depends on what you mean there. If you mean anonymous access, then that's not only supported, but actually the norm. If you mean the server itself is anonymous, then it should be noted that neither github nor torrent seeding peers are anonymous either.

 _> "Just like Git, FTP doesn't turn clients into servers in the way that a peer-to-peer protocol does. So that's why Git isn't already the decentralized GitHub — you don't know where anything's stored, and even if you did, those machines aren't running Git servers that you're allowed to talk to. I think we can fix that."_

Hang on, a moment ago you _didn't_ want to run servers. Now you're complaining that git clones aren't servers?

\-----

Then there's the matter of the github competitors, of which there are many. gitlab, gitbucket, etc. Some open source, some closed but free, but all of them largely offer the same features as github.

These days it seems trendy to use bittorrent as a bootstrap for all kinds of wacky and wonderful problems, but using bittorrent for a protocol that's already distributed and already pretty saturated with github competitors; well it just seems redundant.

<comment><USER52> I think your complaints are disingenuous. [edit: what I mean is that you've pointed out problems with small components of the overall article and used them as an argument against the article as a whole, which I think is unfair. I don't think the components' validity affects the overall idea.]

His argument may have some holes, and people are probably mostly ignorant of those holes so they can't critique them, but I don't think they're in awe of the idea because their awe hasn't been dispelled by identifying those holes.

This is a very neat idea, and none of the issues with the setup argument dispel that.

"using bittorrent for a protocol that's already distributed and already pretty saturated with github competitors; well it just seems redundant."

no, no, it doesn't seem redundant. DHT based distributed indexing is so incredibly fundamentally different than a mirror list for files in FTP or from a series of GitHub clones. It's owner-agnostic. It just exists, by virtue of having participants, with no overhead. I don't have to select a target host or find a server or even identify where my particular file (or git repository, or username, or whatever) lives. It's .. unification. It's elegant and reduces complexity and makes the whole ecosystem more simple.

Maybe I'm blinded by my own awe, but, I love this idea.

Also, yes, some people have thought of components of this before, but I haven't really seen the full stack laid out vertically like this, combined with a narrative that makes me so excited about it.

<comment><USER51> Thank you for taking the time to respond to my comments :)

There's a few more concerns I have:

1) The whole point of git is versioning, having a model like this breaks makes versioning several orders of magnitude harder.

2) If I'm pulling from repositories to install on servers, I'd rather grab them from known trusted sources rather than "the anonymous ether"

I'm normally really receptive to new distribution models, so I don't mean to be negative for negatives sake. But I'm struggling to see the practical upsides of this.

<comment><USER53> The "anonymous ether" isn't dangerous if you have some way of verifying what they're sending you, and with bittorrent, you do, since you request the content using its hash.

<comment><USER51> bittorrent hashes as susceptible to collision attacks.

<comment><USER53> Collision attacks are not really a problem, since they only happen when the attacker gets to specify the hash, which wouldn't be the case here.

Generating a file that hashes to an existing hash is called a Preimage attack, and SHA-1 (the algorithm used by bittorrent) isn't, for now and as far as we know, vulnerable to any.

<comment><USER51> SHA1 is vulnerable to it, but you're right that ive drastically overestimated the practicality of a preimage attack. Thanks for the correction :)

<comment><USER10> Why do you say that SHA1 is vulnerable to second preimage attacks? Zero have been found.

<comment><USER51> Because anything that's vulnerable to collision attacks is _theoretically_ vulnerable to preimage attacks. Where I went wrong was assuming that preimage attacks were practical, but as you've rightly said, there's been no known exploits because of their extreme difficulty.

So it's one of those situations where everyone was right: it's so impractical to exploit that it's as good as not vulnerable even though it's mathematically possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Interesting, I'm also very interested in the other project mentioned "bugs everywhere." Anyone have more details on day to day usage of it?

</comment><comment><USER55> Git itself is already distributed. Do we really need more distribution or do we simply need to learn to work more distributed?

<comment><USER52> It's clear, though, that there are aspects of 'distributed' that Git does not accomplish. This gives you a global namespace and a global identity, just like a website, without a single point of failure or a corporate interest, and with a closed source system and a trivial option for forking the whole structure into your own [friend group|company|private cluster|etc].

An argument could be made that git ought to be augmented with something like this: why run distributed protocol A on distributed protocol B; maybe we should just run distributed protocol AB from the get-go?

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Great. Centralism and monopoly in any form makes me uneasy. This is another point for freedom...

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm very impressed by this, and I'm a bitcoin skeptic and git usability critic.

</comment><comment><USER57> Just awesome idea. The idea of having a torrent for git repos blew my mind.

</comment><comment><USER58> Sweet as hell. My only quibble is the idea of using the blockchain for validated naming. I think it'd end up in a landgrab which is nasty.

As much as we all hate DNS, having the ability to kick a squatter off someone's name is _probably_ a good thing. Personally I don't think having a crazy hash for identification is a bad thing. Rather, what you need to do is just have some sort of reasonable personal contact book so you only have to deal with the crazy hash once (when you decide you want to remember that someone is who they said they were).

<comment><USER59> These are just usernames, not trade marked domain names. What did you do when someone got to gmail/twitter/whatever before you did and picked the name you liked? You just picked a different name, or added some digits to the end of the one you liked. You could do the same thing here.

<comment><USER58> My experience has shown that having names be treated as unique identifiers is a hairy situation. And frankly, unique identifiers in a system for distributing source code are as important as domain names if not way more so.

Domain names only ever run code in an ostensibly sandboxed vm.

<comment><USER60> Unlike domain names they're immutable. So if it's good now, it's good as long as the private key is kept safe.

If you want to cross reference the identity with an email address you could use a keyserver. If you want to cross reference the identity with a domain name, you could use a TXT record.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Haha, that reminds me of my comment earlier: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9578307](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9578307)

And plenty of people schooling me that git is already distributed (git yes, github no). I am happy that someone is working on this.

</comment><comment><USER62> There is also Gogs: [https://github.com/gogits/gogs](https://github.com/gogits/gogs)

</comment><comment><USER63> Well, thats a winning name, to be certain. Pretty great work too.

</comment><comment><USER64> nice

</comment><comment><USER65> sdfs</comment>


Asynchronous video for directly observed therapy of tuberculosis - <AUTHOR> https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jctube.2019.100098 <comment><AUTHOR> Seems like these folks would have a pretty good source of high impact labelled video data.

<comment><AUTHOR> EMocha ([https://www.emocha.com](https://www.emocha.com)) appears to be the app for this application.</comment></comment>


Aam Aadmi Party's open letter to Congress Chairperson Sonia Gandhi [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.aamaadmiparty.org/sites/default/files/Letter%20to%20Sonia%20Gandhi.pdf

<comment><USER2> Why do we care about Indian politics on HN ?</comment>


Bootstrapped, Profitable and Proud: Our Journey to $1M+ ARR at Phusion - <AUTHOR> https://blog.phusion.nl/2016/10/04/bootstrapped-profitable-and-proud/ <comment><USER2> I love phusion/baseimage. Great stuff and has saved me so much time. It's in quite a few projects I've started.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats! guys and girls of Phusion. Always inspiring to read such stories.</comment>


New droplet-based electricity generator: A drop of water generates 140V power - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200205132354.htm <comment><USER2> Voltage is not power, power is voltage*amperes, grmblm...</comment>


Ask HN: Making Audio Plugins as a side-gig or hobby - <AUTHOR> Hi there! I'm looking for any anecdotes or advice about the life of making audio plugins. Is it a viable side-gig? Do you do it as a hobby? What are the best DAW's to target (I grew up using Propellerhead's Reason, but Ableton Live seems like what all the hip people use). Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> the _really_ hip are developing plugins for [https://vcvrack.com/](https://vcvrack.com/)</comment>


One Trillion Dollars Visualized - <AUTHOR> http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/one-trillion-dollars-video/ <comment><USER2> I was hoping for some of my other favorites:

-Placed end to end a line of one dollar bills would stretch from the earth to the sun

-You could could more than cover I-10 from coast to coast in hundred dollar bills (six fifteen foot wide lanes)

-Stacked on top the pile of one dollar bills would stand 63 thousand miles tall or a bit over 1/4 of the distance from the earth to the moon.

</comment><comment><USER3> I did a quick Google on how much cash physically exists. It lead me to this forum post ([http://goldismoney.info/forums/showthread.php?t=174425&h...](http://goldismoney.info/forums/showthread.php?t=174425&highlight=supinski)) which is probably bordering conspiracy theory (I have no idea) but offers some interesting things to consider nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's a lot of scale mixing in this. There's been a lot of inflation since the new deal. Does this factor that in? Australia's GNP for one year and the Canadian stock exchange don't strike me as impressively large. As soon as they mention them your mind jumps to the better known equivalents which are bigger.

<comment> a-priori "The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), a subsidiary of the TMX Group Inc., is the largest stock exchange in Canada, the third largest in North America and the eighth largest in the world by market capitalization." (Wikipedia)

Also, from the same article: "As of 31 December 2007, the TSX had 3,951 listed companies with a combined market capitalization of $2.2 trillion."

To me, that seems impressively large enough.

<comment><USER4> Sure, except as soon as someone mentions stock exchange your mind jumps to wall street. If I say peanut butter you think of jelly right, same thing. And as soon as that happens the TSX is not not the biggest in your mind. Same with Australia, you think wow that's big but not nearly as big as the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Brought to you by people who read much faster than me (and I read faster than all but one person I know personally). Seriously. I had to pause it every single time text came up to even have a hope of reading it. It was even too fast with pausing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Our national debt is going to go up.</comment>


Evernote's July 1st Server Problem - <AUTHOR> http://blog.evernote.com/2010/08/09/july1/ <comment><AUTHOR> Phil Libin always seems to strike the right tone when talking to his customers. I don't know whether it comes naturally or whether he has to work at it, but it sure gives me warm fuzzies.</comment>


How the author of GoRails (screencasts for Rails) makes $15k / month - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/8999c7ac7f <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing Nick! Happy to answer any questions you guys have on GoRails, screencasting, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem. Thanks for doing the interview and making gorails.

At least now I can point people to something concrete when people ask me if Rails is dead haha.</comment></comment>


Living 800 feet above the city - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/06/05/magazine/new-york-life.html <comment><USER2> A complete aside, but the photography of Jimmy Chin is amazing, and the top photo in this article is no exception. His technical skills, both with his camera and his outdoorsmanship, lead to some of the most remarkable and unique images that have ever been captured. And I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a picture that I thought was fabulous only to discover that it was he who took it.

Anyone who's interested in photography or enthralled by nature and action sports should take a web journey through his images. He'll take you around the world and to places you could never visit yourself.

<comment><USER3> I would also highly recommend the movie Meru, which is briefly mentioned in this article. It's a great documentary that shows the crazy shit he (more than willingly) goes through to get some of his shots.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for this suggestion! I'm halfway through, and I'm loving it.

I will never make that trek.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots down there stopped moving forever?"

It's the ultimate expression of looking down on the little people.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately you see the same disregard when looking horizontally across the globe. The death of an American is almost always given considerably more American media coverage than the regular atrocities taking place in other countries. Should proximity make what has happened any more or less significant?

<comment><USER7> Or generically "The death of a local is almost always given considerably more local media coverage than the regular atrocities taking place in foreign countries."

Of course proximity matters. With absolutely no judgement on the victims, I'd rather have updated news about a serial killer in my neighborhood as opposed to one in Germany.

<comment><USER8> News about street maintenance in my neighborhood is more important to me than some serial killer on the other side of the world.

How would the serial killer affect my life? Would my life even be better after having read details of his grisly crimes (probably not)?. On the other hand if parking will be forbidden on near my house for a day while they re-surface the street it is something that will actually affect me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love this picture, of the very top of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai (currently the world's tallest structure!): [http://i.imgur.com/YpANIiK.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/YpANIiK.jpg)

No, not Tom Cruise. _The graffiti!_

<comment><USER10> It's probably signatures of the construction workers who worked on that section, rather than graffiti.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article references the project I have been working on for the last few years. 10 Hudson Yards. AMA

Proof: [https://www.instagram.com/p/BGetG8olfPJ/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BGetG8olfPJ/)

<comment><USER12> How does it feel to be just under the 800ft line? Does article make you wish you could have added just a few more floors? ;)

In all seriousness - I've never been to nyc (never had a reason to I guess). I just don't comprehend the demand to build up. Is there really that much demand? Like at what density level does other infrastructure become a bottleneck (transit/power/water/food)?

<comment><USER13> >Is there really that much demand?

Sure, in any city with lots of people and limited land, island cities especially. Manhattan is one, Hong Kong another.

>Like at what density level does other infrastructure become a bottleneck (transit/power/water/food)?

Good question, would be interested to see studies on this too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Guess I am fortunate to be terrified of heights, no chance of any jealousy or envy on my part.

I do have to ask with regards to that 453 sq ft apartment, whats the point of having a window that opens at its height?

on a side note, the gated communities of suburbia are nothing but shallow imitations of the these vertical communities which are even more exclusive

<comment><USER15> > I do have to ask with regards to that 453 sq ft apartment, whats the point > of having a window that opens at its height?

The same purpose of a window in any tower--fresh air.

<comment><USER16> Or the feeling of freedom that it gives you!</comment></comment></comment>


DIY Wearable Pi with Near-Eye Video Glasses - <AUTHOR> https://learn.adafruit.com/diy-wearable-pi-near-eye-kopin-video-glasses

<comment><USER2> Adafruit asked me to do a writeup of my (very similar) project several months ago. I'm glad that someone else did it instead -- this looks far more slick.

The design is superior in at least five or six ways to mine: 1) there's going to be absolutely no fogging problem (mine was goggle-mounted, and fogging was a killer) 2) there's no problem attaching to prescription glasses 3) the thing looks like it's water-resistant, if not water-proof; mine has exposed boards, and would be quite difficult to seal 4) it doesn't look like there are any torque points on connectors, whereas my design required some re-soldering specifically to avoid some problems with torque 5) there's space and surface for mounting other hardware (for instance, a camera)

Unfortunately: 1) it looks like it'll be tough to replace the battery after the whole thing is assembled (it's a lithium ion soft pack soldered onto the board) 2) I suspect there will be some balance problems: the HMD unit is somewhat heavy, and appears to be mounted on one side of a normal pair of glasses with no band or counterweight. The glasses might skew to the side or put pressure on the bridge of the nose, which limits the amount of time one can use this for.

Now that I have access to a 3d printer, I may need to build one of these.</comment>


Findjango, a django search vertical.  Written in Django.  - <AUTHOR> http://lethain.com/entry/2009/mar/09/introducing-findjango-a-django-search-vertical/

<comment><USER2> There are a whole mess of questions wrapped up in this project, some of the interesting ones are:

1\. Can a targeted search provide a better experience than G/Y/M?

2\. Even if that search is a better experience, would anyone use it?

3\. Managing relevancy on results from unreliable sources.

I think, depending on my integrating more resources and greatly improving the handling of mediocre resources (i.e. the current results of the solr based search for my blog's content, which are often totally irrelevant...), search verticals will be an interesting trend to watch.

</comment><comment><USER3> This experimental search is very well done. Will definitely recognizes a problem a lot of us are having with trivial day-to-day stuff such as looking up documentation for a Django function or class. I know a lot of my time is spent looking up functions.

Because of this, I've been working a light-weight search-engine to sift through the Django source code:

<http://www.djangocodesearch.com>

Hopefully it'll help you find the code you're looking for, fast.

In regards to vertical search, I feel like the biggest barrier to competing with G/Y/M is the relative difficulty a user has to go through to reach the actual search page before entering in the information. If its more than a few key strokes away, then the user has a natural tendency to resort to the Big 3 engine which are situated conveniently in their search bar.

Adding a Firefox Keyword Search would definitely be a step in the right direction, but unfortunately the other browsers don't have that facility.

<comment><USER2> Josh Gourneau setup a MyCroft plugin which makes it pretty trivial to use Findjango 'in browser' for IE and FF, but not sure what the options are for WebKit or Opera.

I agree that exposure is a huge issue there, as we're not likely to sign and distribution deals in the near future.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: When does YC contact references during application? - <AUTHOR> Wondering at what stage YC will contact current employers about a reference check during the application.
1) Is it when they are evaluating the initial application submitted online?
2) Is it after the application is accept and before the interview stage?
3) Does YC respond to requests not to ask for reference checks? Worried about putting my part-time employment at risk during the process.
Thank you, <comment><USER2> Hi - thanks for the questions. We don't contact current employers without your permission.</comment>


Yelp Losses Exceed Expectations; Shares Drop - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/100439439

<comment><USER2> it is mind boggling that Yelp is still in business. Somehow they managed to accumulate such a massive captive audience early on, and instead of using that as an incentive to keep continuously improving search, usability, ratings algorithm, they kept the site as absolute shit for 10 years.

<comment><USER3> Well, while I disagree withy the "somehow" statement (there was nothing comparable to yelp when it arose) I do agree with the second half, they have done a poor job of running with the ball they had.

Yelp has been posting jobs to CL like made for the last couple of months, and all I can think of is "what incentive does anyone have to work there?"

I mean, unless you were given a really large sandbox with their data upon joining (if a dev) or a "take 20% to develop your ideas on how to best improve yelp in any way you want with full access to the data you need" - then the only reason I see to join yelp is if you're just not cut out for the goog and others. This appears to be lose-lose for yelp.</comment></comment>


Chrome reaches second birthday, version 6 goes stable - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/09/chrome-reaches-second-birthday-version-6-goes-stable.ars <comment><USER2> And thanks to Flash being rammed into it without any choice on my part it's the fastest browser to go from 'my favorite' to 'ugg that sucks'.

<comment><USER3> Relax, just go to about:plugins and disable whatever plugin bothers you.

Chrome isn't some experiment on how to make the most tiny browser or the most pure (ie. W3C). It's a browser for everybody and that means, of course, that Flash must be included.

<comment><USER2> I shouldn't have to do that.

And I fail to see how supporting a proprietary standard is somehow good for everyone.

<comment><USER3> The reality doesn't revolve around open or proprietary standard. The reality just IS.

An flash IS part of the current web-reality. You can't just ignore it when you want to make a browser for the mainstream.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


College Kids Doing What Twitter Won't - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/the-college-kids-doing-what-twitter-wont/?mbid=nl_11117_backchannel_p1 <comment><USER2> So much bias on that article against Russia, falsely gives the idea that Russia was the major actor pushing artificial tweets.

Hillary herself is sponsoring since years a small army of geeks in full time that blast biased tweets and comments, posing themselves as normal posters instead of being identified as paid comments: [http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/david-brock- hill...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/david-brock-hillary- clinton-correct-the-record/)

This is a perversion of democracy, not even taking weight the proven federal crimes to which this former presidential candidate seems immune.

The means to bring back balance to democracy are certainly in our hands. This also includes exposing what is wrong with the upper echelons of western society.

<comment><USER3> > Hillary herself is sponsoring since years a small army of geeks in full time > that blast biased tweets and comments, posing themselves as normal posters > instead of being identified as paid comments

You do understand how campaigning works, right?

Not how you want it to work, but how it actually works.

<comment><USER4> Astroturfing is a different thing, yes, but it's still a thing nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They made a ML model to identify twitter bots.

To get their training data, they identified 100 accounts that appeared to be bots, and then assumed that all their followers were also bots. They used verified accounts as their sample of non-bot accounts.

They claim they "identify bots 93.5 percent of the time." No data is given about false positives.

<comment><USER6> While your comment certainly points a flaw in their approach, it is not something that cannot be addressed with a little bit of manpower/insider knowledge/more data.

They have demonstrated a proof of concept that hunting bots on Twitter can be achieved, and that Twitter could do it easily if it wanted

<comment><USER7> Having false positives are quite serious though, especially when it comes to shutting accounts down at scale. Sure it works on their small sample test runs, but anyone who's applied these algorithms in real life in an automated fashion understand the risks of false positives is usually far higher in practice.

You will basically be put at risk for following 'controversial' accounts on Twitter of having your account delete accidentally. And businesses will have to jump through bureaucratic hoops to use legitimate automated scripts to manage accounts.

It also seriously deters anonymous online speech if they force a big percentage of users to provide a unique phone number to prove they aren't a bot (the current Twitter strategy for countering spam). Not to mention the liberal sharing of information with nation states, surreptitiously or otherwise, even for people not trying to be anonymous. A phone number is a critical identifier in the surveillance industry.

Getting this accurate is very important and I feel like that is being heavily downplayed in this article.

<comment><USER8> Deletion isn't the only option for escalation; Twitter could assemble a risk factor for a given account and opt to present captchas, for example, rather than automatically deleting. Scale captcha frequency with the risk factor.

Captchas are certainly not foolproof, but they up the difficulty of running a huge number of phony accounts while having a minimal impact on normal Twitter usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can't help but think of a story (and a company) that helps people out when they can't escape a bad Google search result. For example, you search Bill Smith and only bad things come up.

For a long time, the play book to improve your online reputation was to get rid of those bad links. However, a company (and I can't remember the name) decided it might be easier to just create better links/stories about the person and let google bury the bad stuff. Therefore when someone searches Bill Smith, they see the good stuff.

Anyways - back to the topic at hand here. Perhaps the solution to these bad bots isn't to try and stop them, but to build better bots that spread #realnews and aren't as toxic? Maybe it wouldn't work, clickbait and catchy headlines are more "share worthy" than the latest WSJ front page article, but maybe we need a new strategy?

<comment><USER10> Can #realnews actually exist in a completely objective and non toxic manner?

<comment><USER11> I honestly think this postmodernist take that equates TheHill with the New York Times, and Breitbart with the Wall Street Journal is toxic.

There is a such thing as journalistic integrity, it is possessed in wildly different amounts by different news sources and it matters. A lot.

<comment><USER12> I don't think it's toxic to apply the utmost scrutiny to outlets like NYT. There have been many events that have demonstrated their decided lack of journalistic integrity (silently editing articles after publication, overt bias, playing with release timing...).

The internet has broken mainstream media's monopoly on "the truth" so it seems a natural next step that they are viewed objectively based on their actions instead of their perceived and heavily marketed position of authority.

Postmodernism itself is the byproduct of the Information Age giving people access to multiple viewpoints. I'm glad to see the playing field leveled.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, it's been leveled so much, we're below sea level.

I despise propaganda as much as... Well, I despise it.

Unfortunately, the winners of 'breaking the MSM's monopoly on Truth' aren't any better then what they replaced (And are in many ways, much worse.) Their output is, by far and large, the worst kind of yellow journalism.

Unsurprisingly, nobody actually wants the truth. The people shouting from the rooftops about corruption and bias, and collusion in the NYT turn around and uncritically read about how Hillary is in cahoots with gay alien pedophiles operating out of the back room of a pizza joint. Or, alternatively, how _this_ is totally the week that Trump's finished. (And did you see the great burn some celebrity gave him?)

<comment><USER12> I think that's a bit of a straw-man. You can be critical of the NYT _and_ Brietbart (I know I am!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _But the very existence of their project raises an important question: If two volunteer data science students who are barely out of their teens can figure out how to hang out Twitter's bad-actor bots, why doesn't Twitter do the same?_

Twitter has every incentive to lie, to minimize, to shove this under the rug. As a fairly recent IPO with virtually flat/negative user growth, and lots of fed up people (like me) abandoning the platform all together, it is desperate to squelch any negative info that Wall Street might use against it.

Unfortunately, there's no favorable outcome for Twitter shareholders in either case. Twitter fesses up about its actual percent of bots (reality is likely closer to 50 percent than the 5 percent it claims) and its numbers go down even more. Twitter continues to lie and folks like the ones in this article expose them ... not good either because every advertising dollar it's getting is "truthfully" reaching fewer actual humans.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a repost. What these kids are doing, is what Twitter is doing.

Do these kids not think that Twitter has the ability to do this.

This article comes off as if Twitter does not know what they are doing, which I think is hard to believe.

What I think these kids are going to find out, it's not that easy as it sounds.

Couldn't anyone do what these people are doing with a couple hundred bucks using Google cloud services and their natural langage API to label positive and negative tweets.

Seeing news like this which is not news, makes me realize how gullable people are about what goes into 'models'.

People have no idea how hard nlp is. That is all lol.

<comment><USER15> >Do these kids not think that Twitter has the ability to do this.

Don't know, but they aren't.

<comment><USER16> I'm not at all convinced; the students in the article are getting by because they have no particular fear of false positives. They're just some guys saying "yeah, looks like a bot!"

Twitter has a much harder post-discovery choice. Do they disable or publicly flag accounts, and catch flack for hitting real ones? Or do they monitor internally and wait for high confidence, then get in trouble for not doing enough?

I don't see how Twitter could offer a comparable service even with a comparable tool; being the official overseer of the question leaves them with too much responsibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reminds me of the early days of spam fighting. It looked so easy: just build a Bayesian model and boom! Spam begone!

Sadly, there's a drawback to open systems (like this one), that the robot controllers can keep probing for weaknesses and keep changing their style.

Of course, such extension also begs the question: how will they (the creators) make money? "Volume", you say?

<comment><USER18> hey! One of said creators here! We haven't figured out how to monetize / properly fund this yet. It's more so a problem we saw and attempted to solve. The cost right now is a couple hundred dollars month in server costs.

<comment><USER17> Please don't take my comment(s) as criticism: you're doing a good job. Even if you don't make any money doing this, it's a fun thing to do. In the worst case Twitter will (acqui)hire you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It seems that the people who are most likely to tell human from bot are the ones who would use Chrome extensions. I am glad people are working on solutions, but I'd love to see an approach that works for all users.

For example there could be a Twitter account that replies to every bot tweet and those included in the bot's tweets. Accounts that have a high likelihood of being a bot would get a reply stating that the account is likely a bot.

I'm just spitballing—certainly, this would push up on Twitter's API limitations. But it seems like there a much better way to identify fake accounts than through a Chrome extension.

<comment><USER18> One of the creators here: Yup! Our current users are more engaged and active on Twitter than the average users.

The chrome extension and website release also helps improve our model significantly. We get feedback on how it works in the wild and false positives that we can use to improve our model on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Tried my account. Says I'm a bot. My rating: incorrect.

<comment><USER21> I never used twitter before the 2016 election. I don't use twitter to communicate with people I know in real life, but I know my father and I both started using it as a place we can put on a pseudoname and talk about politics openly, without having to worry about bothering friends & family like on facebook.

Both my own and my father's accounts were classified as "exhibit patterns conducive to a political bot or highly moderated account tweeting political propaganda.", which is in a sense kinda accurate because they are solely political outlets for us. I think this is a feature, not a bug, and probably the only use case the service has provided for me.

I feel like twitter, tumblr, and other semi-anonymous networks have always been pretty political. I think the only thing that has changed is that people see twitter as news - stations actively report about what's going on on twitter - and that online political discussions are no longer dominated by liberal / social justice voices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > If two volunteer data science students who are barely out of their teens can > figure out how to hang out Twitter's bad-actor bots, why doesn't Twitter do > the same?

Because the cost to the kids for a false positive is 0. The cost to Twitter could be company destroying lawsuits.

</comment><comment><USER23> Charge 2c per tweet and the issue will go away. The reason bots exists is because there's zero friction to them.

<comment><USER24> "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong"

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> so what are they doing in one sentence?

<comment> GCU-Empiricist Writing an automated service that classifies if a twitter account is a political bot. No word on their error rates.

<comment><USER26> It's impossible to determine the error rate - there is no way of knowing for sure if an account is a bot or not. If there was, this model would be useless. I'd be interested to know how they trained it though, given they didn't have any true data to check against

<comment><USER9> They could check it against known bots though.

<comment><USER16> That's only valid if the known bots are a random sample of all bots.

They can't test against a large array of public bots because they're only detecting political bots, not everything automated. So they'd have to train/test on "accounts which are definitely known to be bots, but trying to hide it". Meaning, presumably, the least-convincing bots or bots specific to a previously-exposed network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Hot take: false positives don't matter. If somebody is using the service in a way that makes them indistinguishable from a propaganda bot, the platform and the discourse that it's supposed to further are better off without them.

<comment><USER28> Boom!

<comment><USER29> Please stop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hey I used it on some MAGA supports and immediately found BOTS. Check out botcheck.me. Some of them surprisingly didn't come up as BOTS.

</comment><comment><USER31> Monetizing a large user base?

<comment><USER32> No kidding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is a duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15619337](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15619337)

</comment><comment><USER34> Why only mention pro-Trump bots though? There were (and _still are_) tons of pro-HRC bots as well, synchronously posting identical text and passing it off as their own tweets. They aren't even trying to hide it much.

<comment><USER18> Creator here! We do identify bot-like activity on both sides of the spectrum (pro-hillary and pro-trump).

<comment><USER34> The question wasn't actually addressed to you, but to the author of the article linked to the post.

They're also pushing the "Russian interference" narrative, but as far as I can tell your product can't point out the source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Oh boy, this doesn't sound like a biased model at all

<comment><USER36> Yeah, these guys have absolutely no cost for being wrong.

<comment><USER37> What else would you expect would happen? In a town without law, it's only a matter of time until the vigilantes show up. Either Twitter is going to police its platform, or users are going to start policing it for them.

<comment><USER36> I expect this will have no real impact and these guys will have to find something else to do with their time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "a Twitter user who is falsely identified as a bot has little recourse to dispute the charges."

That's the spirit! What was this saying again? "Better to convict 10 innocent men than to let at least 1 guilty go unpunished." That must be it...

<comment><USER39> Oh the horror of being cut off from twitter...

<comment><USER38> In a way, I agree with you. I despise Twitter and what people use it for. However, if being cut off from Twitter is not a big deal, why is this bot hunt worth doing?

If we assume that it's important to get rid off fake users, it must be because accessing a platform like Twitter is important.</comment></comment></comment>


Etsy Carbon-Offset Shipping - <AUTHOR> https://www.etsy.com/impact <comment><USER2> I've had a tab open in my browser for 5 weeks that's a $15 item on Etsy and $10 in shipping. It's the stupidest thing since I would have bought in a heartbeat for $25 and free shipping. I know it's dumb to linger on something so small, but now that I saw this I can justify the additional cost of shipping. I don't get how my brain can rationalize things, but apparently Etsy know.

Five weeks of hesitating, all to be brought in by a catchy video.

<comment><USER3> Etsy needs an Amazon prime equivalent to convert customers like you

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What a bunch of bull. _These investments support environmental projects, such as protecting forests that improve air quality and absorb carbon, sponsoring wind and solar farms that generate clean energy and replace fossil fuels, and developing greener methods for producing auto parts_

The forests already exist, and the solar farms are built for profit. I would love to see Apples to Apples comparison of what this offsetting actually accomplished beyond the hyperbole.

<comment><USER5> Yea I would really like to see their assumptions and numbers for how these projects 100% offset their shipping emissions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6>
      Etsy is the first major online shopping destination to offset 100% of carbon emissions from shipping.*

      *According to research conducted by 3Degrees.

The fine print[1] is interesting. This isn't some save-the-planet-from-the- goodness-of-our-heart-no-strings-attached campaign...if anything, it's a subsidy brokered through a for-profit carbon credit consulting firm designed to directly benefit certain for-profit companies.

[1] [https://3degreesinc.com/latest/etsy-leads-e-commerce- towards...](https://3degreesinc.com/latest/etsy-leads-e-commerce-towards- carbon-neutral-shipping/)</comment>


RedMonk Brew London: Speakers from Joyent, PhoneGap and VMWare (and craft beer) - <AUTHOR> http://lanyrd.com/2012/monkigras/

<comment><USER2> don't forget Greg Avola, founder of untappd, the beer check in network. and not just speakers from Joyent and PhoneGap - the technical founders.</comment>


Solid Principles and Functional Programming - <AUTHOR> http://blog.muhuk.com/2019/09/18/solid_principles_and_functional_programming.html <comment><USER2> It's giving 404

<comment><AUTHOR> Strange. I checked again and it works.</comment></comment>


PSA: You might have over $2,000 worth of cryptocurrency you forgot about - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@marckohlbrugge/you-might-have-204-worth-of-cryptocurrency-you-forgot-about-c9787e788730 <comment><USER2> This actually worked out for me! Thanks!</comment>


JavaScript: The Key to In-Browser Visualization - <AUTHOR> http://eagereyes.org/blog/2010/javascript-key-to-in-browser-visualization <comment><USER2> I could have done without the javascript evangelizing (not that I don't love js too) - it would have been relatively easy to cover flex charts, <http://flare.prefuse.org/> etc. and just make it a visualization article</comment>


Rails Rumble is Complete - Judge the Entries - <AUTHOR> http://railsrumble.com/entries/all <comment><USER2> Not mine, but it hasn't been posted here yet and it looks so damn nice: <http://findthin.gs>

(Made by @sutto, @sj26 and @levibuzolic; team page is here: <http://railsrumble.com/entries/148-grumpy-cat>)

<comment><USER3> Wow. That is awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://railsrumble.com/entries/263-ucommently> <http://ucommently.com/>

Busy weekend but I was able to get my app out. My little brother was all like you should make textsfromlastnight for funny YouTube comments.... Probably wont win any awards, but I had a lot of fun! :) Its cool to see a lot of other people went solo too and came up with some cool stuff!

<comment><USER4> Man! I'm noticing so many bugs and stuff. Not being able to change, fix, or edit this until next week is going to drive me crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My coworker built <http://upti.lt/> \- a trump card game. Pretty fun and very polished for a 48hr project.

</comment><comment><USER6> Imagine that now responding to your customers' appeals is a great fun. You get no spam or junk mail anymore, there are neither dispatching questions to one of your colleagues nor assigning of your own ideas to someone else. How about making a computer classify appeals and assign them to the right person? <http://ideahq.r12.railsrumble.com/>

</comment><comment><USER7> Our team had a ton of fun. Hadn't participated since the very first rumble years ago, which we won in the design category.

Since we spend our days working on serious stuff, for this rumble we decided to do something funny (whether this is funny is actually up for discussion). <http://getreadytojoust.com> is what we built.

</comment><comment><USER8> Our team build Jingle Boogie. It is app for making short jingles from youtube or vimeo movies.

<http://visuality.r12.railsrumble.com/> <http://railsrumble.com/entries/143-jingle-boogie>

</comment><comment><USER9> Our team built Github Death Star to put some order in your hundreds starred repositories.

We also love octocats!

<http://the-cleaners.r12.railsrumble.com/>

</comment><comment><USER10> I've created app for sharing code scraps (snippets) across group/organization. Made just be me, aims to solve real problem, that we have at my company. <http://scrapsapp.com/>

</comment><comment><USER11> Rumble was fun! We finished our app it can be found at <http://www.fixmyglobe.com>

Looking forward too see what others did.

</comment><comment><USER12> We built a Star Trek game. Fun to play with a friend <http://the-glimmer- twins.r12.railsrumble.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Thanks to the organizers and sponsors, it was a lot of fun!

<comment><USER13> Glad to hear that! It's not easy, but it was definitely worth it :)

<comment><USER14> Thanks guys! Looking forward to participating again next year!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I went solo and built Genka - time tracking that motivates: <http://genka.r12.railsrumble.com/>

</comment><comment><USER16> Check out our entry, a mix between Gumroad et binpress. <http://www.gitiosk.com>

</comment><comment><USER17> My (extremely biased) favourite is Folder Chute :) <http://folderchute.com>

</comment><comment><USER18> I missed for this year. I am surely going to hack next one!

</comment><comment><USER19> just stumbled on this via the Koi entrant link further down... some cool stuff here -- thanks! \--v noobie RoR developer

</comment><comment><USER20> wish the contestants would open source their entries so that others can learn from them

<comment><USER4> Some did. <https://github.com/railsrumble/>

Mine was: <https://github.com/railsrumble/r12-team-263>

I'm definitely looking forward to going through the other entries! :)</comment></comment>