How to convert email addresses into name, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation - <AUTHOR> http://maxklein.posterous.com/how-to-convert-email-addresses-into-name-age

<comment><USER2> There's a little-known world of commercial services like Rapleaf that give marketers information from a list of email addresses. I wrote a test service to show you what information's available on your address:

[http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2009/12/what- can...](http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2009/12/what-can-i-find- out-about-you-if-i-know-your-email-address.html)

The scary thing is that if they can get your full name and rough location, it's then often possible to get a full address (see whitepages.com for a consumer-facing example). That then ties into other datasets that have information on income, occupation, marital status, etc for every household in the US.

<comment><USER3> > The scary thing is ...

Sorry, I remain not scared.

<comment><USER2> What could possibly go wrong when there's an easily accessible database of detailed information on every individual? Move along, nothing to see here.

<comment> loup-vaillant I assume you were ironic. Anyway, what could (and did) go wrong is the systematic extermination of a particular subset of people in this database. (Sorry for the Godwin point reached so fast.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Simple strategy .. but so borderline ethical.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been thinking about this since I discovered it - is it not facebook being unethical here? They give full access to the personal info of a person given their email address. Their new 'privacy' terms is basically about nobody having any privacy.

Small and agile business like mine will capitalise quickly on this info, but sooner or later, big companies like coca-cola will also see nothing wrong with storing public information that a user has 'chosen' to make public.

<comment><USER5> Is it really unethical? Everybody knows that part of their facebook is viewable to the world, and they can change it and make it private if they want.

I don't this tactic makes spamming any more or less ethical.

<comment><USER6> _Everybody knows that part of their facebook is viewable to the world_

No, that was a CHANGE in Facebook's policies after at least 200 million people had signed up. Some of those things can no longer be changed to be private.

<comment><USER7> >Some of those things can no longer be changed to be private.

Which things?

<comment><USER6> Someone else can check the ToS and privacy notice, but if I remember correctly sex and religion went to world-viewable by default if they are specified on the profile at all.

After edit: "The Ugly: Information That You Used to Control Is Now Treated as 'Publicly Available,' and You Can't Opt Out of The 'Sharing' of Your Information with Facebook Apps"

[http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/facebooks-new- privacy-c...](http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/facebooks-new-privacy- changes-good-bad-and-ugly)

<comment><USER7> >Someone else can check the ToS and privacy notice, but if I remember correctly sex and religion went to world-viewable by default if they are specified on the profile at all.

I know some of the defaults changed, but that's not what I asked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pretty much every service pretty much indexes you by email address. If you can get someones primary email you can track them down on all these sites; sure Facebook does a particularly bad job of keeping certain personal data private but it's not alone :)

</comment><comment><USER9> With the recent FB changes, I always thought that marketers getting your details through this method was the least of your worries - I figure identify theft is the bigger worry!

<comment><AUTHOR> Think about it rationally. There are 300 million facebook users. How many people are out there who want to steal your identity? What are the odds of those people actually stumbling upon YOUR profile? What is the damage that they will do, and how much of that damage are you going to be liable for?

Worrying about identity theft is as rational as worrying about getting your eyes gouged out by crow - yes, it can happen - but fact of the matter is that it's not very likely to happen.

<comment><USER9> I disagree ... that's the equivalent of say leaving your front door open and not worrying about being robbed because there are 300 million doors in the city.

Sure you are unlikely to be targeted specifically, but once someone has decided to commit identity theft, you don't want to be the easy target.

And 10 FB users or 300 million is kinda irrelevant with all the automated tools/scripts that are available these days - searching for the 1 vulnerable person out of 300 million is a relatively trivial task. They will 'stumble' upon your profile not because they randomly picked you from 300 million, but because they ran a script that identified you as an easy target.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are companies who make money by scaring you about identity theft. But personally, I just don't think it is a valid concern. Stealing your identity is soemthing that has always been possible, but only nowadays is there some type of hullaboo about it. I just cannot see it happening so often and being such a big problem for me to bother about it.

But it's just my opinion, I don't actually know. Maybe one day when I'm being carted away for ordering a million grandma porn videos without paying, I will realise the error of my ways...

<comment><USER10> Since there's money to be made from stealing someone's identity, then the easier it gets to do it, the more often it'll happen IMO. Services like this are lowering the barrier of entry.

There's a reason companies are trying to scare you about identity theft. They're in this market because they see it as a growth market. They believe identity theft will increase and they're targeting it with their services and products. I agree that some will use scare tactics to get us even more wound up over it and make some extra $, maybe because they've already over saturated the market, however I definitely think it's going to become a sizable problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> An awesome start up allowing you to do exactly this and more is <http://flowtown.com>. Their main feature is allowing you to convert email address into social profiles, you can really learn a lot about a person by what they post online - a great way to learn your customer base online.

<comment><USER12> Thank you for the love Matt ;-)

Businesses that care about their customers / users / clients are the ones that will win in 2010 and beyond. I want to be apart of this future and it's the basis for why @danmartell and I founded Flowtown.

<comment><USER13> Businesses like that "care" about their customers like ranchers "care" about cattle.

I don't suppose you're going to publish a list of your clients? Maybe for a fee?

<comment><USER11> I can vouch for Ethan and say he has personally emailed me a few times to let me know how things are going (with regards to some of my suggestions) and I can tell you he generally cares.

I mean, I don't know him outside of a few email transactions but in any case, he either truly cares or is really good at faking his authenticity, I will go with the former. This would be the reason I recommended his service and the reason I am trying to utilize it at my current place of employment. (head office is not very quick on approvals)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The other service that does something like this is rapleaf.com:

[http://www.rapleaf.com/downloads/sample_free_screening_repor...](http://www.rapleaf.com/downloads/sample_free_screening_report.pdf)

I'm not very trusting of them after that scam email thing they did a while back (basically linked all your social accounts together with your email, and then emailed you and told you someone was checking up on you, and of course you were alarmed that the account for Friendster was linked to Flickr and all your other services).

I'd be loath to give rapleaf a bulk upload of data, as I wouldn't trust them not to resell the email addresses. Still, I could see how the information could be useful (e.g. for advertising buys) even if only presented in aggregate.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update from a reddit comment: Use this url - [http://email@example.com...](http://firstname.lastname@example.com&o=2048&init=ffs) and screenscrape for even more spammy goodness.

</comment><comment><USER13> "So you have somehow begged, borrowed or stolen an email list of 1000 users who you believe are interested in your new service."

If you had to scrounge around to find my name and other details, or otherwise do something besides _ask me_ , I'm _not_ interested, just so you know.

If I ever get an email with my name from a company I've never given information to, I look to see any indication of how they got it - and then delete that email.

I'm sure the people whose eyes are lighting up at this idea don't care that some of their targets won't like this bit of cyber-stalking. I can only hope those who use it get more resistance out of it than responses.

<comment><AUTHOR> The "evil" in this method is that you will never know the company has your email, because they will get your info off your facebook profile without having to contact you. Facebook will give the info to anyone who has your email and they won't notify you.

<comment><USER13> The disrespect and lack of ethics is not limited to Facebook by this behavior. The fact that Facebook is insecure does not make exploiting Facebook's insecurity any more ethical or proper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In the UK, I'm sure the Data Protection Act will kick in. It doesn't prohibit you from storing personally identifying data, but it puts restrictions on what you can do with it and how to interact with it.

IANAL, so take this comment as a simple "be careful with the law" that applies to where you operate.

<comment><USER16> Probably, it's illegal at every EU country which implements the 95/46/EC directive([http://eur- lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...](http://eur- lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:31995L0046:EN:HTML))

<comment><AUTHOR> That text is pretty long, can you summarize the parts relevant to this for us?

<comment><USER16> Points 28, 38, 39 may apply here. I haven't studied this directive but its spanish implementation(IANAL, but if you work with personal data you need to know how to comply), and under that law, users should be asked for explicit permission unless Facebook had stated to them beforehand that they could transfer their data to a third party for a particular purpose at the time of the collection of the data. In that case, there should be a signed contract between both parties (Facebook and you), which states the purpose and duration of the treatment of the data. After that treatment, the third party should destroy that since it's not authorized to use it anymore.

Anyway, as everyone here knows, its pretty hard to enforce this kind of law.

<comment><USER11> Well there is really nothing to enforce when you agree to Facebooks TOS and Privacy Policy upon signing up. Facebook has never forced you to sign up.

Excerpt from privacy policy: _Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can limit the ability of others to find this information on third party search engines through your search privacy settings._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As far as I can tell this is the "trick" that is the basis for Flowtown's business.

<http://www.flowtown.com/>

<comment><USER12> Being completely bootstrapped we've been focused on revenue since day 1 and our "trick" of turning emails into social profiles is our minimum monetizable product.

The current iteration of Flowtown is nowhere close to our final vision: helping businesses scale caring.

We launched with an MVP that had even less features than today's iteration (product is just 9 weeks old).

<comment><USER17> Well, ok. This trick is the basis for the current version of your product, or perhaps "current business."

Is that fair? Or are you doing something other than, say, scraping [http://www.facebook.com/search/?ref=ffs&q=farmerje@uchic...](http://firstname.lastname@example.com&o=2048&init=ffs) when I type in my email address? (At least WRT Facebook; other networks would naturally have different tactics.)

You don't need to be defensive. Every network is bootstrapped off another network. If you can get away with it, get away with it for as long as possible, but make sure you have an escape plan.

I assume that's what you're doing. Am I wrong?

That's not meant as a challenge, BTW. If I misunderstand your current product then the record should be corrected.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure "trick" is a fair assessment, why do you think it's a trick? We don't scrape Facebook for data, but use a variety of data providers for most of our social information.

<comment><USER17> Sorry. Your original response made it sound like that's what you did do.

I knew, e.g., Facebook lets you search by email address to find a friend if you know their email. Since the data on Flowtown more-or-less matched that data I had assumed that was the source of the data.

You'd do the same for the other social networks, plus perhaps get data from Rapleaf and other social profile companies.

If you're saying that's not the case, I can't argue with that and apologize for implying otherwise.

As to whether it's a trick or not, what difference does it make? You can call it a tactic if you'd like.

<comment><USER12> Ah, ok, totally my bad. I had the wrong context around "trick" I thought you were referring to our business and not a potential method we used to uncover social data.

On an totally unrelated note Cassie says "Hi" - I was at her place for one of her roommates bday's and I was on his computer responding to this thread and she's like OMG jfarmer is that who you're talking with... such a small world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> the part that acares me the most is that he is willing to go around giving the list to anyone</comment>


The Thrill of Being Stumbled - <AUTHOR> http://robert.im/post/3576938626/the-thrill-of-being-stumbled

<comment><USER2> StumbleUpon quickly became my largest referrer after about a year. My top 5 days are all from StumbleUpon, with one exception being Reddit. I can't keep track of it anymore.

Some reference: <http://i.imgur.com/OyvbU.png></comment>


Announcing Headless Testling - <AUTHOR> http://www.catonmat.net/blog/announcing-headless-testling/ <comment><USER2> The more the merrier, but this puts you about 2 years behind Sauce Labs and even further behind Selenium as a whole. Also, since the whole app seems to be based on stackVM, a better explanation of what that is would be helpful.

EDIT: fair enough that testingly isn't based on stackVM, I didn't think that was very clear on your site. And you still don't explain what stackVM is. And to whoever downvoted me - I have done enough evaluations of automated test tools to know those should be among first questions that any serious user would ask. Aside from being based on Node, your product should differentiate itself better from the free, more mature tool and it would help to know more about the infrastructure it's based upon.

EDIT 2: Okay, 2 downvotes later, I'm cranky about this. I'm a professional in this field (who would be involved in purchasing decisions with the software you sell) trying to give you free advice. I'm sorry if it's not glowing praise, but you should differentiate yourself from Selenium because it seems very similar at first glance, explain what stackVM is, and put together a more professional looking website for all of them.

<comment><USER3> I don't really understand why you're comparing automation testing (Selenium) with Javascript unit testing?

<comment><USER4> Testling is both!

<comment><USER2> Agreed - if testling/browserling are not positioned for functional testing, I'm sorry for not catching on to that. In my defense, you could easily market it as a functional testing tool (sort of how Selenium could support unit testing in the browser since it can modify the dom letting you mock out external calls, even though it's not a natural fit for the tool)

Also, thanks for explaining stackVM. That's a pretty cool idea - it's not a problem for me where I am now, but anecdotally the flash/java console plugins can run into issues with corporate firewalls and browser security policies so something based on html5 canvases / http long polling (if I'm not assuming too much on the implementation side) could help solve that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> minimalist testing FTW! (e.g. node-tap style). cant wait for a way for this to automatically run for me every time i update my githubz and then send me robot pictures representing my test status (sad robots for failing tests, happy robots for passing tests)

<comment><USER4> Soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks interesting. Kinda like what Jasmine provides (no DOM required), but allows you to target real browsers.

<comment><USER7> Except it's not because it's based on JSDOM, which isn't going to simulate any browsers with real accuracy. You're better off biting the bullet and descending into the painful world of Selenium WebDriver testing, sadly.

<comment><USER8> Are you saying Testling uses jsdom? Because it doesn't, it actually runs in real browsers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Really cool, can one integrate something like Sinon (<http://sinonjs.org>) with this to get spies, mocks, etc? I didn't see a mention of this in the docs.

Edit: Hrm, my bad. Looks like you can just require() standalone file dependancies?

<comment><USER4> Yes, you can! You just module.export your stuff in the standalone files, then tar it all together and run the test!

        tar -cf- test.js module1.js module2.js | curl -sSNT- testling.com/?browsers=iexplore/9.0,chrome/15.0</comment></comment>


Apple introduces the iPhone SE - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/21/iphone-se-apple-small-iphone-seo-is-fun/ <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11330226](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11330226), except for the ones that reference this specific article.

</comment><comment> the-dude Notice the end of the URL.

Fun.

<comment><USER3> ?

<comment><USER4> […]/2016/03/21/iphone-se-apple-small-iphone-seo-is-fun/

SEO as in search engine optimization — they're including the words "apple small iphone" to try and raise their search engine rank.

<comment><USER5> Does that actually have any effect? I recall reading that google doesn't really pay attention much to URL's (or meta keywords for that matter).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article doesn't mention 3D touch -- is that out of the picture for the SE?

<comment><USER7> Sorry but - from the article

"""

No 3D Touch

Sources told 9to5Mac that the reason behind this is that the front-facing flash requires the new display tech we've seen on the iPhone 6s, which brings us to 3D touch.

The flagship feature on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, which offers deeper interaction with various applications on the iPhone through hard taps and long taps, will not be present on the iPhone SE.

"""

<comment><USER8> Not an iOS user: This phone looks interesting to me - how pervasive is 3d touch? Am I missing out on something by getting a phone missing this feature?

<comment><USER9> I am getting used to it as in I've learned now not to press my phone too hard anymore to accidentally trigger it. Most apps replace it by a long press leaving only the force press home screen menus as the thing you'll miss out on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> No new monitors again...

<comment><USER11> There's plenty of them on the market.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: best programming language to learn? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I am wondering what would be the most useful programming language to start learning. The one with more possibilities of growth and diversification. <comment><USER2> If you want to do web browser then javascript

For apple (IOS/OSX) then objective C or maybe Ruby or lua

Embedded programming then C

Microsoft you have a large choice C# or VB.Net perhaps

Android is Java

Enterprise programming then Java or C#

Pose value haskell or scala :-)

It depends on your background and what you want to do. I think every developer should know C or C++ but not as a starter unless you like serious hacking. Javascript is the language of the web browser so you'd need to know that for any browser programming. Enterprises run on C# or Java.

Then of course there are all the scripting languages python is perhaps the most popular for general scripting, or powershell for windows

</comment><comment><USER3> I think that the possibilities of growth and diversification element of your question is less dependent on the language per-say and more dependent on the languages eco-system. Objective C gives lots of options because of this, as does java, javascript and C++. Python is definitely up and coming here because US academia seems to have picked it up, although I think it's slow and I can't work the configuration management elements (I constantly get this egg needs this egg type issues) - still I have just dabbled (for much the same reasons as you!) so I know little. I do know though that there are many interesting projects using python now and that as a language it's very well thought through and powerful semantically.

</comment><comment><USER4> Javascript is pretty hot right now with the advent of NodeJS. Scala and Clojure are the up and comers. Python is a solid choice. Java, C/C++ are classic and have some new features on the horizon. Haskell, Erlang, and other lisp varieties are enjoying a resurgence.

Those languages cover many genres of programs: Scientific, parallel/concurrent, server-side, client-side, desktop, mobile, embedded, scripting, business, gaming, and so on.

The question is what are you most interested in? Are you trying to find a job or are you learning because you find it interesting? Do you have projects in mind? What would be the right tool for the job?

</comment><comment><USER5> C, C++, Python, C# -- in that order. Should definitely start with C.</comment>


Why Cooking Sucks - <AUTHOR> http://www.cafe.com/r/77e4f02a-081e-41dd-a100-2dce15f2596b/1/how-cooking-for-others-can-be-selfish

<comment><USER2> Original title please: "An Argument for Never Cooking Again".

As a personal reflection I suppose it's a decent piece of writing, but I wouldn't call it a strong argument — at least not of HN caliber. The author focuses only on social dynamics and personal psychology, avoiding any pragmatic points such as focused practice to improve efficiency or the economics of ingredient availability and value of kitchen labor.

Also, as a man who cooks with other men and women, all of whom respect the importance of good food and the people who make it... I feel badly for someone whose view of the world includes this massive overgeneralization:

      > People cook — particularly women, but not only women —
      > because they think people are going to notice them,
      > and love them, but almost no one thinks about who made
      > what they're eating or how it got on the table. They're
      > just hungry, and they eat, and they sometimes say thank
      > you, and then they forget about it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Probably doing anything because you feel obligated to or because you're trying to impress people sucks. Not sure if that is particular to cooking or not.

I do think it's possible to find joy in learning how to cook a few things really well, but only if you like it, and only when you want to.</comment>


Bugs found in GCC with the help of PVS-Studio - <AUTHOR> http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0425/ <comment><USER2> I'd have loved to see references to actual GCC bug reports. Did I miss those in the article?

Thankfully, the world is changing. You have languages where variables are immutable by default or can be declared so that would prevent issues as [http://www.viva64.com/en/d/0108/](http://www.viva64.com/en/d/0108/)

Maybe gcc should do better for static analysis of a program. Expressions like `a && a` or `a == 1 || a != 2` should be caught easily.

<comment><USER3> a == 1 || a != 2 needs a warning but it's not necessarily a bug

sometimes I may keep overlapping expressions in a statement to remind me of the triggers I'm looking for at this point - and would likely use some meaningful constant names for the 1 and 2

statements aren't just logic - they're often documentation too - especially on code you might not look at again for months

I used to have many arguments with a professor whose code I was working on - he would factor out everything in an expression - removing all the parentheses and rely on operator precedence - it was often impenetrable (for me) - so I'd unpack it, wrap parentheses everywhere, change single letter vars to meaningful ones etc. - he'd be in my office an hour later ranting

<comment><USER2> > a == 1 || a != 2 needs a warning

Yes, it needs a warning because it's kind of obvious that there is something amiss about this expression. Only the author could tell what was specifically wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a mistake in the analysis of the ternary operator in the assert that doesn't check anything. Not only does the ternary ?: operator have lower precedence than the comparison <= operator, but it also has lower precedence than the logical && operator. So the expression inside the assert doesn't resolve to (die_offset > 0), it resolves to either 0xffff or 0xffffffff, both of which are true. The assertion really doesn't check anything at all.

</comment><comment><USER5> PVS-Studio (or more specifically Andrey) used to do a really nice program called "CppHints", where they would email a little tip each day (and later each week I think).

Anyway, I guess I just wanted to say, Andrey, I appreciated your work and enjoyed reading those tips! Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER6> This is now my favorite blog.

Andrey, any plans to support Objective-C? (You are flagging things I can't get clang to warn about.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet. We are now experimenting with C# support and with Linux support. What's next, we do not know yet. There are two perspective areas: Objective-C and Java.

<comment><USER7> Java or JVM?

<comment><USER8> Since PVS is a static source-level checker, I don't see how it would make sense to check JVM bytecode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I gather there's no relationship to the Prototype Verification System from SRI [0].

[0] [http://pvs.csl.sri.com/index.shtml](http://pvs.csl.sri.com/index.shtml)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. No relationship. PVS: OOO "Program Verification Systems" (Co. Ltd.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Andrey, why did you title this different than your blog post?

I like that one.

"Bugs found in GCC with the help of PVS-Studio"

<comment><USER11> We've updated the submission title from "GCC bugs".</comment></comment>


Ask YC/PG: Dilution and Convertible Note - <AUTHOR>

1.  What are the terms, if any, relating to YC's potential dilution of ownership? (Specifically, is the 2-10% ownership from the initial investment protected by an anti-dilution provision)<p>2.  Relating to the Convertible Note, do the founders sign a personal guarantee or are they protected from personal liability? <comment><USER2> We get diluted.

There is no personal guarantee.

<comment><USER3> The simplicity of this answer speaks very loud. Kudos to YC. All others should listen closely, and try to emulate it.

<comment><USER4> Are people in the real world signing personal guarantees as a condition of funding? That's not an investment; that's a bank loan.

<comment><AUTHOR> Read the first two entries here: [http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/category/convertible- not...](http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/category/convertible-note-bridge- financing/)

The first entry explains the difference between Equity Funding(Give $x for y%) which you refer, and a Convertible Debt Note (can function just like a bank loan) which is what I reference. The second entry is specific to YC's Convertible Debt Note terms, but did not address my question.

<comment><USER4> This seems to be referring to torts related to breach of duty; when a company becomes insolvent, the fiduciary duties its directors owe to shareholders may transfer to creditors. In any case, these are suits in which a creditor alleges bad faith actions; a simple rule of thumb might be, if you go into business, nothing but insurance is likely to protect you from bogus tort claims.

It's something to be aware of, but not something that changes the fundamental nature of convertible note financing. Don't sign personal guarantees.

My question was more along the lines of, does anyone in the "real world" of startup financing ask for personal guarantees? Where is this actually happening?

<comment><USER2> I've never heard of it happening. Insisting on such a thing would be a great way for investors to filter out good startups.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Swift is Swift? - <AUTHOR> http://realm.io/news/swift-summit-joseph-lord-performance/

<comment><USER2> > With most classes, unless you design them really carefully, your methods are > often at risk from being overridden by others in ways that don't meet > expectations — especially if it mutates the object and does so in a > different way.

WAT. Because Ruby and Python programmers are just bleeding to death from the thousand cuts of overriding methods during subclassing. Or... not?

More seriously, is there something to Swift here that I'm missing? Because in just about any language I've run across with inheritance, either the superclass(es) are part of a framework that defines a protocol for the inheriting code (e.g. you may/must provide methods X, Y, and Z. These methods must behave according to the following rules {...}), or else the programmer writing the inheriting code takes on the full responsibility of integration.

<comment><USER3> Anyone who inherits from a class and accidentally overrides a method is a hopeless case or a newbie needing basic review from a senior dev. The bugs are on them. They can either test that their inheritence works, learn from the mistake, or they can piss off and find a new career emptying bins, flipping burgers, or whatever they fancy that doesn't involve making sure that what they just did will work beyond the immediate function.

<comment><USER4> > Anyone who inherits from a class and accidentally overrides a method is a > hopeless case or a newbie needing basic review from a senior dev

That's a pretty harsh stance. I don't mean to be a jerk, but how much professional experience do you have? Even in good code bases there are frequently complicated hierarchies with non-obvious dependencies that are very easy to screw up even by people who know what they're doing. Good teams find ways of automating the checking on these things so that they can spend their time thinking about other problems, or avoiding the complication altogether, rather than blaming the victim.

<comment><USER3> I'm a decade in. I know what you mean about complex hierachies, but inheritence is a very, very dangerous tool; you either take the time to review the results, or you suffer the consequences. That's where the review by senior developers comes in. You learn or you don't. Who would want to work with devs who don't?

<comment><USER5> I do, because I don't consider people's ability to deal with the vagaries of inheritance a valuable skill when you can just avoid it with effectively no negative consequences.

Of course, to clarify, it's not really possible to avoid in languages like Java, where it is more or less mandatory due to the design of its standard library (unless you avoid that too, which is a considerably worse idea), but you can still keep your own CODE clean with liberal use of `final` and interfaces.

Personally, I'm consistently baffled when programmers like yourself, who have come to appreciate that "inheritence [sic] is a very, very dangerous tool," continue to defend it so vigorously. If it offered really powerful or unique advantages, sure--but if you take a hard at what it actually provides, it's just syntactic sugar and a performance "optimization" (thin pointers) that's usually pessimal compared to other approaches. The downsides are significant and well-known (as mentioned above, Liskov substitution being undecidable is one consequence, but there are plenty of others). There's no point in making life harder for ourselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Speaker here, a little late to the conversation though. Let me know if there are any particular questions, I'll read through everything later and respond.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Exactly how Swift is Swift?

Adjectives shouldn't be capitalized.

<comment><USER8> In this case it's Title Case though.

<comment><USER9> Title Case is an Abomination that Obscures the Meaning Imparted by Differences in Capitalization in the English Language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >Function calls are really slow

Really? How can you design a new language with such a problem? It's not the 80ies anymore.

<comment><USER11> Apple is not a software company, they should focus on hardware.

<comment><USER12> I was just going to down vote you, that's all trolling deserves on HN, but on the off chance that you're just ignorant, and not actually trolling:

1) there are 5 OSes with more than 100million users. Apple makes two of them 2) there are 4 major web browsers out there, apple makes one of them 3) there are 3 major office suites out there, Apple makes one of them

Apple is one of the biggest software companies in the world. I suspect they are second only to Microsoft in that regard, and yes, I do include Google in that assessment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> He had a price put on his head by the British Crown.</comment>


The Innumeracy of Educators, or Mark Twain Was Right - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2011/12/the_innumeracy_of_educators_or.php

<comment><USER2> I'm glad to see the article has a link to an actual 10th grade standardized math test from Florida since I was wondering about this after reading that the school board member scored 10 out of 60 and didn't confidently know how to answer any of them, and upon later study concluded that the math in the test was irrelevant to real life. This made me wonder what sorts of questions the test asked.

[http://fcat.fldoe.org/pdf/releasepdf/06/FL06_Rel_G10M_TB_Cwf...](http://fcat.fldoe.org/pdf/releasepdf/06/FL06_Rel_G10M_TB_Cwf001.pdf)

The test proves mostly to be multiple choice with four possible responses. But there are a few questions with a scantron array of numbers for filling in numerical answers.

Calculators are allowed, but do not seem to be necessary.

The test covers at its most advanced basic algebra and simple geometry (no proofs). There is no trigonometry or calculus. There are also topics much simpler than algebra such as calculating percentages, areas, and fractions.

I did about the first half just now and didn't run into any problems. It does not seem conceivable to me that someone who can't answer any questions at all is adequately qualified to evaluate scientific data such as one might need to do when voting on matters of public importance.

It would be a very reasonable idea for all legislators and public servants who work in a decision making capacity to take a test similar to this and be required to post the results. Just for informational purposes of course.

<comment><USER3> I'm an Indian, and a smart 8th grade kid could probably get a perfect score on this test. How on earth did Mr. Roach pass out of high school, let alone earn two degrees?

<comment><USER4> This is at least partly a matter of retention. There was a study on giving algebra tests to adults, and one of the best predictors of performance was how much math the person had taken. So someone who had taken math through calculus did pretty well on the algebra test, regardless of age, while someone who had only taken through algebra had basically exponential decay from when they had taken it. (I can't think of where I saw this -- does anyone else know?) So I would assume that Mr. Roach's degrees are in non-technical subjects, and that he likely didn't take anything higher than pre-calc.

<comment><AUTHOR> _I would assume that Mr. Roach's degrees are in non-technical subjects_

Mr. Roach's degrees are now known to be in education.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3326293>

"Roach, the father of five children and grandfather of two, was a teacher, counselor and coach in Orange County for 14 years. He was first elected to the board in 1998 and has been reelected three times. A resident of Orange County for three decades, he has a bachelor of science degree in education and two masters degrees: in education and educational psychology. He has trained over 18,000 educators in classroom management and course delivery skills in six eastern states over the last 25 years."

I will note for the record that a proper, accredited degree program in educational psychology ought to have a statistics for psychology class included that would provide a mathematics refresher to postgraduate students who don't test out of that course. If not, the degree program was appallingly bad.

<comment><USER5> Yes - but it's reaallllyyy hard to teach a bunch of non-mathematicians statistics in a couple of terms. The problem is that it is an assorted mish- mash of hard and easy maths, the basis of which is too difficult for them to understand, and the brain-bending proper interpretation of a p-value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem is that if you do not practice you forget or get rusty.

I calculate percentages every day. Turns out yesterday the guy in charge of the company I worked for asked me the formula to work out the % difference between 2 numbers. He didn't ask because he is stupid or has no capacity to do Math. He asked because it has literally been years since he has been required to do it.

Similarly, if you ask me what an onomatopoeia is. I learned it in school and I know the word exists but I haven't been asked to define its meaning for so long that I have forgotten. Now I come to think of it, it might be a word that sounds like another word? Anyway, the point is if you do not practice or recap these things you forget.

4 years ago I passed the Cisco CCNA. I haven't touched a router or switch since. If you asked me anything about networking I would look at you with a blank expression and then answer it with 'Google it?'

Now.. failing a 10th grade Math exam then saying that the tests are too hard or not relevant to daily life is ridiculous. Some of this stuff may not be relevant to your daily life but in general a lot of jobs and general task's in day to day life touch on the key Math skills you learned in school.

School should provide you with a firm foundation in key subjects. If 5 years later you have forgotten 70% of what you learned in science because your job doesn't involve this knowledge and you have no interest in reading / keeping up with science in general it doesn't matter. The chances are you will have remembered 90% of what you learned in English and 80% of what you learned in Math because these you depend on to complete your work.

It doesn't matter that a board member completely flunked a Math exam. It doesn't make him stupid. What is worrying is the attitude the educator takes to his failure. The best response is 'wow compared to these kids I am really rusty at Math.' The worst response is 'my math skills are OK, this test is irrelevant to day to day life.' It undermines teachers and tells kids it is OK to be terrible Math. (If the kid has aspirations to be a school board member this may be true but for a million other jobs and situations it certainly isn't.)

<comment><USER7> It might not prove him stupid (though my guess is you could find adjectives that are less fitting), but it does prove that he never understood the math. A concurrent post mentioned forgetting whether slope is rise/run or run/rise. That kind of thing is what you can forget. If you're "forgetting" the basic rules of algebra and can't recover them with a few moments of thought, then you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER8> I'm willing to accept someone was careless if they mix up rise/run or run/rise. But you can readily summon the correct expression if you understand what slope means algebraically/geometrically.

So barring a sloppy mistake, which we all have, it's just as indicative of lacking proper geometric understanding. For example, a basic linear equation y = m*x would readily yield that m being the slope is m = y/x, so it's rise over run. That's one of the things I always treasured about math, that you could work out the formulas if you didn't care to memorize them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I looked over one of the example tests, and spent about 10 minutes going over 6 of the questions. I missed one because I had flipped the fraction on a question regarding the slope of a line - not having had to worry about slopes for a good 10 years or more, I'm not too upset about having missed that one. Similarly, I saw a simple geometry questions that I probably would have had to make an educated guess at because it's been even longer since I've worried about the definition of a rhombus.

So I think it's ok to expect that you may not be able to answer all of the questions that a high school student should be able to answer, but for an "educated" person to claim that he was only able to answer 10 of 60 questions, and those 10 were answered by guessing is stupid. There's no excuse for not being able to answer the basic algebra questions or the questions regarding finding areas of shapes when the equations for finding areas are given to you.

</comment><comment><USER10> The kind of math tested here is specifically what is _necessary_ for a school board member. He needs to be able to answer questions like:

* Last year's budget was $X, and this year we're proposing $Y. What is the percentage increase?

* The teachers' union is asking for raises of 4% /year over three years. What will our final salary expense be at the end of that time?

* If the government cuts our funding by $X this year, and I we want to distribute that fairly over each school in the district, how do we make the cuts proportional to the size of each school?

But I especially appreciated the end of the article. The author discusses the fact that one can be an "intellectual" by completing completely ignorant of practical skills like basic mathematics. Yet we as a society seem to revere such intellectuals, and look to them for leadership.

</comment><comment><USER11> The reaction from some people - "math is pointless and it's fine to not know some really simple concepts" - is profoundly depressing.

In England we have, every year, complaints that the exams are getting easier and easier. There may be some truth in that, but I'd love to see anyone complaining about how easy the exams are actually sitting one of them, and releasing their answer sheet.

(I'd be fascinated to compare GCE / CSE math exams from the 60s, 70s and 80s with GCSE math exams from the late 80s, 90s, and 00s Are any full papers available?)

</comment><comment><USER12> First two questions can easily be answered without doing any sort of calculations. Just by eliminating stupid answers.

</comment><comment><USER13> The school board member claimed that he "managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly"

Perhaps if he wasn't utterly innumerate, he could have realized that 10 out of 60 is one and a half standard deviations _worse_ the expected value of selecting answers by chance. His understanding of math is so bad, he performed worse than he likely would have had he just answered questions randomly.

<comment><USER14> I thought the same thing, but it turns out the test is not all multiple choice ---in the 2006 exam, 28 out of 58 problems were open answer, and the rest were 4-option multiple choice. So the expected value of a _totally_ random selection would be 7.5 questions out of 58---meaning this guy was at least not doing _worse_ than chance.

<comment><USER15> Getting 10 questions right may not be statistically more significant than just answering randomly. I would calculate this myself, but I'm going to bed, however, just eyeballing it makes me think this is quite possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Where in a sane world, complaining that this sort of math is hopelessly > impractical and not the sort of thing we should be testing would lead > educated people to point at Mr. Roach and laugh (as I'm doing above), In > this world, alas, it gets him the central role in sympathetic blog articles > hosted by one of the nation's premier newspapers.

I have no interest in getting into a general debate about school reform, but I think it's important to note that this kind of work at the Washington Post is happening for one reason: because it supports the politically-motivated criticism of extensive standardized testing. Now, there's a lot to criticize when it come to high-stakes testing, but let's be clear that this sort of sloppy reasoning _isn't_ caused by anti-intellectualism. It's caused by politics.

</comment><comment><USER17> Ouch

</comment><comment><USER18> Mr. Roach is a politician, not an educator.

The title of the article is misleading linkbait both in regard to the innumeracy of actual educators and the nature of Mr. Twain's quote.

Generally speaking, most elementary school teachers in Florida have mastery of the FCAT - they spend much of the year teaching to it because the degree to which their students improve plays a significant role in merit pay and contract renewal [disclosure: my sister is a public school teacher in Orange County].</comment>


Ask HN: How do you vote on comments? - <AUTHOR> When I arrived on HN, I immediately gained the impression of higher-quality discourse than other news-based forums. Over time, I grew to understand that this was because lower-quality commentary would get down-voted by the community, higher-quality commentary would get up-voted.
I 'feel' a trend where this may not be the case with a significant number of members.  Amongst my HN-using peers (in meatspace and on IRC), we've seen what appears to be votes for agreement (or lack thereof) rather than for quality. Or maybe the site's secret sauce is a bit more ... acidic?
In any case, I'd like to start some discourse on how we vote: do you base it on whether you agree with the comment? On comment quality? Does the notoriety of the commenter influence your decision? <comment><USER2> Summary: I vote quality.

I upvote plenty of comments I don't agree with that are well-stated. Make a good case, and my agreement or disagreement doesn't matter. And if there's a comment that I agree with but the writer is being name-calling asshole, I click the down arrow.

Reputation matters not, though those with a better "reputation" probably earned it by generally avoiding trollish behavior.

In general I probably don't fit a lot of the group think that HN is frequently accused of. But if someone makes a well-reasoned case for (say) using Bitcoin to pay my mortgage, I may still think they're nuts while clicking the up button because it makes a positive contribution.

</comment><comment><USER3> I vote for quality, clarity and objectivity, regardless of match to my opinion.

Unfortunately sometimes the first come - first claim creates biases as you might have something very good to say, but I starts with 1, far below the other numbers. Other biases - like the majority not agreeing with you, regardless of your argumentation, are effective as well.

Yet, such voting systems are generally effective.

</comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps the perceived higher quality of comments is simply a result of one primary ideology being enforced by the voting system?

I would wager that people tend to feel that comments they agree with are of higher quality than ones they disagree with, and as readers of HN are self selected its entirely possible that the entire effect is just an artifact.

</comment><comment><USER5> I vote for quality as well as agreement. If a comment makes sense and is explained well, but I don't agree with it, I'm still very eager to vote it up.

I also doesn't make sense to comment along the same lines of another commenter. If my opinion is already expressed in the comments, an upvote makes way more sense imo.</comment>


Old McDonald had an app: FarmLogs lands $1M to modernize farm management - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2013/01/25/old-mcdonald-had-an-app-farmlogs-lands-1m-to-modernize-farm-management/ <comment><USER2> Hah. My brother-in-law was talking to me about how much farmers would appreciate software like this the Christmas before last. His family runs quite the complicated operation, and farmers will surprise you with how cutting edge they are technologically. If you search it there's a farmer who rigged up an Arduino to drive his combine (autosteer systems can run into the tens of thousands).

Edit: I just texted my brother-in-law asking about FarmLogs. He said he just did a trial, it was pretty expensive. Now he's liking an app called "Farm at Hand", he's met the main developer and talked with him over email. Personal interaction seems to mean a LOT to farmers. Apparently the app is good and on the right track but needs a bit of tweaking. Also Farm Credit Canada is supposed to be coming out with an app soon that's going to be good at record keeping.

<comment><USER3> This is Himanshu one of the co-founders of Farm At Hand. We are constantly working on improving existing features and adding new features. We appreciate the feedback and are here to talk to our customers any time they would like. As my co-founder is also a farmer she understands the importance of personal interactions with our users. Feel free to contact me at any time. My email is Himanshu(at)farmathand(dot)com

<comment><USER2> Sure! You might be the one my brother-in-law talked to. He says he met you at Manitoba Ag Days. Were you there?

<comment><USER3> I definitely was. It was a great trade show. Please let your brother-in-law (and anyone else) know that we are always looking to speak with farmers. We're always look to learn about what new feature might make their work easier. Feel free to contact me at any time!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Modern farms are high tech operations run by highly knowledgeable experts. In fact, the line in the article "...while farming might seem like an odd place for tech investment.." is laughable. Many farmers in New Zealand, for example, have android tablets in their tractors feeding their GPS coordinates back to base, and giving them live information about rainfall for that paddock, etc. Every cow's hereditary is tracked, and individuals that produce interesting variants of milk are tested and studied.

So, the problem with the SaaS model is that selling to farmers is a lot like selling to a demanding enterprise customer. They know what they want, they have specific requirements and the benefits of a well-matched solution will pay for itself. That isn't, generally, where you want to be if you're looking to scale out a SaaS platform.

Be interesting to see how it goes.

<comment><USER5> Farmers in New Zealand have the advantage of clear transparent markets. In the US and EU markets are severely distorted due to subsidies and related regulations.

[http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/new-zealand- farm...](http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/new-zealand-farmers-dont- want-subsidies)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a good solid niche to work in. Especially since, by creating a shared supply chain, you can tap into network effects to create barriers to entry.

In Australia I know people who are working on a similar product -- Agworld.com.au.

</comment><comment><USER7> The article has a bit of a misstatement about Cargill and its cohorts in regards to this type of technology. They are actively selling this support to farms of all sizes and have been for years. I wish these folks luck, but they are competing against some of the biggest companies in the world who have been pushing this tech for awhile.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are absolutely right that the article is incorrect about Cargill and ADM. Those companies don't actually grow the crops themselves, but rather they buy them from the farmers (big and small). We (FarmLogs) have happy customers of all sizes from some of the biggest farms in the country to very tiny operations. Even though some of the big ag companies do have some limited software for farms, there is still plenty of room for innovation that only a startup can deliver.

<comment><USER8> In Canada, as I'm sure you are aware, the government owned FCC offers software to farmers[1] that seems to attempt to solve many of the same problems your software does. Do you feel it will be difficult to compete in this market, assuming you wish to expand internationally, given their market position?

As a farmer and software developer myself, it is great to see some startups in this space. I'm quite interested to see where you take the company.

[1] <http://www.fccsoftware.ca/en/index.asp>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thank you to all of you commenters from the FarmLogs team! Your feedback helps give us a glimpse of things we haven't learned yet, and it encourages us when you bring up things we're already using to our advantage.

PS - We're hiring an awesome front end dev, and mobile, if you'd like to join.

</comment><comment><USER10> While FarmLogs may have unique selling points, there's already a lot of software targeted at farmers ... I can think of two in my local area:

\- <http://www.agintegrated.com/>

\- <http://www.zedxinc.com/>

</comment><comment><USER11> Awesome job guys. Way to go.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great job Jesse et al.!</comment>


Ujo music, blockchain and the music industry - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@UjoMusic/welcome-back-1addcc06bcc6#.j5rbzj80p <comment><USER2> What they mean is: total sales were $133 (not $133,000 but one hundred and thirty-three), the single can no longer be bought, and Imogen Heap made $121.54 of that and is almost certainly wishing she'd just put it up on Bandcamp. I can't wait for some journalist to contact her asking for how she feels about it a year later. I'm tempted to myself.</comment>


Review of 20 promising projects in 20 minutes - <AUTHOR> http://wwc3-20-projects.heroku.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> It's really just links (not sure if the audio is available anywhere), but depending on what you do, you may not have heard of some of these. (Example: I'm just starting to learn Erlang, so I was glad to get links for Elixir and Kerl.)</comment>


Ask HN: The Female Founders video is now private. Is there another link? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> [http://ycuniverse.com/female-founders-conference-re-cap- vide...](http://ycuniverse.com/female-founders-conference-re-cap-video)

At the bottom of the page. I clicked play and it worked, despite telling me the channel was private on Livestream's site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! Thank soo much :)</comment></comment>


DD-WRT Vulnerability, Heartbleed SSL Vulnerability, VPN, and OpenSSL - <AUTHOR> http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=890355&sid=945a10985948dd1e941a82bcf121d5b3

<comment><AUTHOR> TL,DR: A quick look at the repository says _all versions between ~19000 - 23882 are affected._</comment>


Library Suspends Tor Node After DHS Intimidation - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/library-suspends-tor-node-after-dhs-intimidation <comment><USER2> Having Tor nodes in libraries sounds like a pretty good idea. Helps spread adoption and it can hopefully be a way to bring libraries into the 21st century etc. It's not particularly surprising that some local DHS guy would start fear mongering.</comment>


Memo to Tech Professionals: In 2017, Ask for a Raise - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/memo-to-tech-professionals-in-2017-ask-for-a-raise#.WHzyOPVr_xk.hackernews <comment><AUTHOR> I've heard this advise relatively frequently. But I've heard very little suggestions for effective ways to approach this with your manager. Any ideas?

I've heard the usual 'assemble a list of your accomplishments' but I am also interested in how to get such a conversation started without burning bridges.</comment>


How to deal with a relentless spammer, a WePay April Fools' special - <AUTHOR> http://www.wepay.com/blog/2011/04/01/how-to-deal-with-a-relentless-spammer-a-wepay-april-fools-special/

<comment><USER2> This felt demeaning and mean to me.

I was very uncomfortable watching it. It looks like one of the company's employees showed up... possibly one of the people you claim may already be getting mistreated?

Now what happens to this person after they come back to work having wasted an hour with you?

If it had been the CEO, then I would see some humor possibly.

Where's the line? The CEO of GoDaddy kills an elephant in Africa to feed a village and save its crops and the world shits bricks. Another company goes out of their way to trick and be mean to another fellow human being and it's funny?

What the hell am I missing?

<comment><USER3> I think it's turnabout here. Spamming, being crappy business people, I think this is their 74 minute way of getting the people to never call them again.

<comment><USER4> Only problem is it backfired on them the moment they set up the in person meeting. The offshoring company doesn't know they were being played. Anybody who would agree to an in person meeting- hell, these guys even initiated it- is a hot lead. On top of it, the "CTO" looks like an easy mark. They are going to receive calls for probably the next three years. Sleazy move on their part, and not at all smart if the objective is to stop the sales calls.

<comment><USER5> any suggestions to stop the sales calls?

<comment><USER4> Be firm, but cordial. Tell them you are not interested and the repeated phone calls are a waste of your time as well as theirs. If it keeps up tell them you feel like it's getting to the point of harrassment. Tell them you will call the better business bureau. Look into blocking the calls. The important thing is to not give them the impression you are even the least bit interested in doing business with them. Ever. There is an opportunity cost involved with them making the calls. Sooner or later they are going to realize it makes no business sense to keep this up.

I guess if that still doesn't work you could just tell them to get fucked. No reasonable person is going to keep calling to be verbally abused.

<comment><USER6> I'd go with a C&D letter, ideally from a lawyer, sent registered mail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Rich from WePay here. Definitely did not want this to end up on HN. Awkward...

edw519: I know what you're going to say...and I agree with you this time ;)

<comment><USER8> OK Rich, I know it's just good clean fun (especially today), so I'll see your "We Pay Haiku" and raise you a...

      Hacker News Dilemma

      You work your butt off on your blog
        Providing content that's all the rage,
      But no matter how hard you try and try
        You can't hit the Hacker News front page.

      Then someone takes your picture
        Goofing off or rolling joints,
      And there your are at Number 1
        Voted up with 42 points.

<comment><USER7> Well done, sir.

Again, I agree - I didn't think this belonged on HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of something a friend's game development company did in the 90s. They kept getting fax spam from some local print shop, and after calling them back repeatedly asking them to stop, they decided enough was enough.

So at about 9pm, when they figured everyone would have gone home, they taped together two or three bits of paper to make a loop inside the fax machine, and faxed it back to the company - it went all night.

I have visions of mountains of paper strewn across the floor, but more likely the other fax machine would have had a couple hundred sheets loaded at most and probably quite a bit less.

Still, apparently the print shop was annoyed enough to call the cops, but as you'd expect, nothing ever came of it.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't get it, why cant you name this douchey company?

For the amount of work that went into setting it up, the prank itself was boring, if the 5 minute reel is the funniest part I shudder to think what a yawn the rest was. There was potential for a lot more, could have really made that guy squirm a lot more..

<comment><USER11> PhotonInfoTech.com, I assume they don't say it for legal reasons? PhotonInfoTech.com could claim the claims are fake, libel etc?

It's easy enough to locate who they mean, just google for the quotes they use.

<comment><USER12> Redirects to <http://www.photon.in/>

<comment><USER13> <http://cl.ly/2R1g352G0n3E253p1m2s> priceless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Uh, wow dudes.

Assuming this happened in California in the recent past (post 1994), and the annoying outsourcing guy was not aware he was having audio recorded, congratulations -- you've just violated state law! (California v. Gibbons, 215 Cal. App. 3d 1204 (Cal Ct. App. 1989).) This is California Penal Code SS 630-638. Up to $2500 fine, 1 year in jail.

(any covert audio recordings of telephone/electronic conversations are also illegal in California; it's an all-party consent state, although you can disclose and report recording all business calls as a routine thing (you play a "we record all calls" at the beginning of the call, and staying on is implied consent). )

IANAL, but YGANVP.

<comment><USER14> They could have overlooked this, but it would not seem odd to say it's being recorded, for whatever reason. Or even having a sign that says "audio and video recording in use" would probably suffice.

<comment><USER6> Yes, it's one party consent, two party notification. There was clear expectation of privacy (it wasn't a public meeting in a cafe, or a press conference). Hiding the identity of the outsourcing guy might legally change things -- I actually have no idea. The firm is trivially identifiable, but it might be enough. Regardless, it's irresponsible.

More ice blocks and real guerilla marketing, less bragging about violating employment laws or wiretapping vendors, please.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tivo Android App? Spoilers!

</comment><comment><USER15> Was there anything funny in there? Yeah, they collage buzzwords, mock Louisiana and the blurry guy approves—but how is that funny?

</comment><comment><USER16> "If I'm here and you're here, doesn't that make it our time?"

</comment><comment><USER17> Well played

</comment><comment><USER18> Just over an hour? I thought he'd at least take him out bass fishing for an afternoon.</comment>


Flynn, the open source PaaS powered by Docker, now accepts smaller donations too - <AUTHOR> https://flynn.io/?smaller

<comment><AUTHOR> Flynn was discussed earlier on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058662) Back then their minimum donation amount was $1500, which can be a bit excessive for a lot of people. They now support smaller donations as well. You can enter an arbitrary amount in the donation form.</comment>


Controversial Surgery for Addiction Burns Away Part of the Brain - <AUTHOR> http://healthland.time.com/2012/12/13/controversial-surgery-for-addiction-burns-away-brains-pleasure-center/

<comment><USER3> Some more insightful discussion on reddit.com/r/neuro/15jlxg

 _... read the abstract of this a while back, and it was bilateral ablation of the nucleus accumbens, if memory serves. The nucleus accumbens, of course, is not the "pleasure center" by any definition. It does not exclusively deal with pleasure, and pleasure is not only the product of the nucleus accumbens. As I'm sure many will know, the nucleus accumbens deals with lots of processes such as motivation, reward and both "positive" and "negative" emotion. It is pretty brutal, of course, and naturally this article was primarily concerned with the ethics of the procedure..._

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe it's just me and my warped mind, but there's a part of me that incredibly fascinated with the amount of boundaries that countries like China are pushing (medical, human rights, etc.) with a dearth of any kind of ethical oversight whatsoever. They are rapidly approaching the West's level of technological sophistication but yet they've come down a completely different path...one devoid of any kind of power-checking, one that does not care of what the public thinks/will think or even what groups in other countries think. It's...quite the sight in the modern world.

<comment><USER5> > They are rapidly approaching the West's level of technological > sophistication

really? a few months ago one of their rapid trains crashed into another because a lightning strike disabled it's system and the following one didn't even know the hit one slowed down. all other super rails have systems and procedures to prevent such occurences (let's not even get started on the Japanese one). say what you want, I wouldn't want to live or work in one of those Chinese 'build in 14 days' buildings.

<comment><USER4> >I wouldn't want to live or work in one of those Chinese 'build in 14 days' buildings.

Oh, neither would I. When I say they're rapidly approaching us, I mean they are fast acquiring the means/funding to do so, but not in the sense that everything they make is safe/ethical through a Western society's lenses. This is the lack of oversight I'm talking about and is one of the tenets that sets us apart from the BRIC countries and other developing ones.

<comment><USER5> Brasil and Russia both have various specific to their natures issues, but I wouldn't put them in one line with China _trying too hard_ to become Jetsons overnight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Within five years, 53% had relapsed and were addicted again to opiates, leaving 47% drug free.

"Conventional treatment only results in significant recovery in about 30-40% of cases, so the procedure apparently improves on that, but experts do not believe that such a small increase in benefit is worth the tremendous risk the surgery poses."

<comment><USER7> Since FDA-approved treatments for nicotine addiction can't crack 10% in real studies, this 30-40% number seems quite dubious. Faulty studies for nicotine give similarly high percentages.

<comment><USER8> Not all treatments are medical. Substance abuse is a behavioral problem, and approaches based on clinical psychology have been remarkably successful.

<comment><USER7> What % is "remarkably successful" though? Maybe with current therapy for drug abuse we are fairly close to as good as we are ever going to get but I still doubt 30-40% of people who go into treatment stop using. People just don't change their behavior that easily.

I work in tobacco so can only really speak about that but a quick google is showing similar single-digit success rates for drug treatment.

I'm with Szasz that addiction is not a disease but this is not conventional wisdom. Obviously, drugs are not just given like how an antibiotic is, but drugs such as for related ailments like depression can be given for people in drug treatment AFAIK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Since we're talking about treatments for addiction, I'd like to give a shout- out to ibogaine[0], a psychoactive substance.

Apparently after a successful treatment with ibogaine, it's like an "addiction switch" has been turned off in your brain. I was interested to read this article hoping there would be more about the "addiction switch", which I find a fascinating concept.

Instead, maybe with this treatment, the switch simply gets burned away...

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine#Treatment_for_opioid_a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine#Treatment_for_opioid_addiction)

<comment><USER10> Psilocybin (magic mushrooms) are also being studied as a non-invasive treatment for OCD and addiction: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin#Medical_research>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I read the whole article expecting to find some report of patient opinions post-surgery but it wasn't there.

<comment><USER12> This is exactly what I was looking for too. I'm disappointed not to find it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Neuromancer; the drug-addicted protagonist had been the unwilling recipient of surgery like this (if memory serves).

<comment><USER14> And his solution was simply to find different drugs. Considering there's a 53% failure rate for this surgery, the results sound similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems like the surgery is only marginally more effective than conventional methods, and has drastic side effects.

The only scientists interested in this procedure seem to be sating a morbid curiosity rather than trying to cure addiction.

</comment><comment><USER16> Thing is, the real issues with addiction are due to social factors - <USER2> homeless, depressed and miserable.

</comment><comment><USER17> What could possibly go wrong?

</comment><comment><USER18> There is no information on how patients were selected for this treatment, which does weigh in on the ethics and possibly the technical merits (assume the numbers aren't fudged) of even studying this.

If the patient pool was drawn from consistent relapsers who failed to respond to conventional treatment, then this could be significant.

If they just applied this procedure nilly-willy on first timers... then yeah, this is pretty bad.

We can draw -some- parallels with various procedures designed to fight obesity. Obviously screwing around with the brain is on a whole different level from screwing around with your GI tract, but the purpose is the same - to physically change your body to change your urges.

In fact, given the research raising the probability that the nervous system supporting the GI tract has non-trivial effects on our mental states, the two types of procedures may be closer than expected - though once again, obviously acting on completely different degrees on magnitude in respect to effect on your mind/being.

</comment><comment><USER19> sounds like the methods used in a clockwork orange

<comment><USER20> I thought Clockwork Orange worked by forcefully building strong negative associations

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> In comment section someone suggested using that on sex offenders... Nice, get wrongly accused of rape (might not happen where you live, but where I live it's common way to get money from a man) and be lobotomised. Some other commenter suggests to find anger spot in brain and fix that... I suggest beter surgery- lets behead every morron suggesting such crap.

<comment><USER8> There are already proposals to castrate (chemically or even surgically) sex offenders. It was not all that long ago that lobotomy was common practice, and it was applied to prisoners.

<comment><USER21> Yes, and I hopped that we grew out of "lets do unfixable damage to everyone we don't like" age. And about castration - it might end up common practice, after all radical feminists are pushing for castration of men (and their extermination), feminism keeps fud that all women will be raped...

I would honestly take capital punishment rather than live lobotomised or castrated.

<comment><USER22> > And about castration - it might end up common practice, after all radical > feminists are pushing for castration of men (and their extermination), > feminism keeps fud that all women will be raped...

This is FUD, mandatory chemical or surgical castration for convicts is not a popular thing and isn't being pushed for legislatively or by most activist groups at this time. Feminism does not make a case for exterminating men, and anyone who suggests that men should be exterminated is an idiot. Also, 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime, that is a very real problem, but please get your facts straight.

<comment><USER8> "Also, 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime"

That is a number that came from _one_ study, from the 1980s, which was conducted by a feminist, and which includes _attempted_ attacks. I am not saying that the problem of women being sexually assaulted should be ignored, but the 1-in-4 figure is the second highest to have been reported (1-in-3 is the highest; some studies have found less than 1-in-50) and was meant to be shocking. The experimental methodology used to find that number was based on the hypothesis that using words like "rape" would trigger a denial in the women be surveyed; thus the study asks questions that fit a broad definition of rape, and even the woman who created that survey later admitted that one of the questions about rape was ambiguous and could cover consensual sex.

Don't just parrot numbers you read in feminists literature. Rape is a serious crime; don't diminish its significance or the extent of its harm by claiming that there are nearly a hundred million rape victims in America (which invites people to ask, "Why aren't all those victims in counseling? Is rape really a crime whose victims need counseling?").

<comment><USER22> > That is a number that came from one study, from the 1980s, which was > conducted by a feminist, and which includes attempted attacks.

Upon reading your comment, I went back to look for original source material. You are right, I could not find a source or even mention or that fact. Instead, I found citations for studies that show 1 in 4 women will experience a sexual assault (not just rape) during an academic career, or that 1 in 4 women will experience sexual violence from a partner in their lifetime, or that 1 in 6 American women have been the victim or an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. So I do apologize for having the wrong statistic.

Also, since when does being a feminist automatically disqualify your study or paper?

> Rape is a serious crime; don't diminish its significance or the extent of > its harm by claiming that there are nearly a hundred million rape victims in > America (which invites people to ask, "Why aren't all those victims in > counseling? Is rape really a crime whose victims need counseling?").

There are at least hundreds of thousands of sexual assault survivors in the US, which is horrifying enough. As for what you said about counseling, those kinds of comments are one of the more common kinds of derailment people trot out and you and I both know is there is a large number of reasons why any person is not in counseling (for anything, really): cost, stigma, lack of access to counseling services, etc.

In any case, OPs paranoia about being castrated by angry feminists is laughable and spreads FUD about feminism, esp. in regard to what rad fems consider feminism to be.

<comment><USER23> >Since when does being a feminist automatically diqualify your study or paper?

I think what he was trying to point out was that there might be a conflict of interest with the researcher wanting to over-report rape. Still a bit of a stretch, but possible.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin Challenge - <AUTHOR> https://bitcoinchallenge.codes <comment><USER2> Security by obscurity works, if the algorithm is unknown and is complex enough, so the search space is very big.

However you can only use it once. If the algorithm becomes known, you need another, a substantially different one.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is the discussion thread on reddit:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/9kq7it/introducing...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/9kq7it/introducing_the_310_btc_bitcoin_challenge/)

</comment><comment><USER4> What are we actually looking for here? A private key?

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd love to see some proof that any of the wild claims made are remotely factual.

      I don't want to donate to charity (I have my own reasons for that, don't ask)

Although they managed to do a pretty plausible portrayal of your average bitcoin libertarian lol</comment>


Have U.S. Automakers Built the Wrong Cars at the Wrong Time — Again? - <AUTHOR> http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2012

<comment><USER2> It's tempting to blame the U.S. automakers for being shortsighted... but, really, when gas prices in the USA were (and _still are_ , believe it or not) so much lower than in the rest of the world, how can we be surprised to find U.S. automakers evolving to suit that environment?

Hummer-scale SUVs weren't just an available, overwhelmingly tempting marketing niche for U.S. automakers -- it may have been the only niche that could have kept them alive during the last couple of decades. I remember when we nearly buried the US auto industry the first time, back in the 1980s. Toyota and Honda had already sewn up the market for well-engineered, highly efficient small vehicles. Competing directly with them didn't look like a winning strategy then, just as it doesn't look like one now. But, back then, there was a choice... and who can really blame the automakers for making that choice when the only clear alternative was to go broke?

If you want to change the design of cars you need to change the cost of fuel... just as, if you want people to reduce carbon emissions, you need to increase the cost of carbon emissions.</comment>


Snowden Standoff Threatens Obama-Putin Moscow Summit - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-19/snowden-standoff-threatens-obama-putin-moscow-summit.html

<comment><USER2> This makes no sense. Has there ever been a summit at a time when each side did not host a number of defectors from the other? (Not that I count Snowden as a defector in the sense that Philby or Blake was.) Diplomacy would be impossible if states dealt only with states they weren't spying on. Though really, I suppose, summits are more about publicity than about diplomacy.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow, a systems administrator becomes an obstacle to international relations. Impressive.</comment>


The Promise of Relational Programming [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQL48qYDwp4

<comment><USER2> A great talk by William Byrd

</comment><comment><USER3> Backward evaluation always make me smile. One of the most surprising things I've seen to this day.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is brilliant.</comment>


Linux at 25: Q&A with Linus Torvalds - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/linux-at-25-qa-with-linus-torvalds <comment><USER2> > The fact that I didn't really know where it would end up meant that I was > perhaps more open to outside suggestions and influence than I would have > been if I had a very good idea of what I wanted to accomplish. That openness > to outside influences I think made it much easier, and much more > interesting, for others to join the project. People didn't have to sign on > to somebody else's vision, but could join with their own vision of where > things should go. I think that helped motivate lots of people.

This is so quintessentially Linus. He's criticizing this idealized tech startup CEO character with a big passionate vision, a kind of person which I've heard described as "the captain of a ship where as long as everyone is rowing in the same direction, it doesn't matter where the ship is going." We obviously understand that is preposterous, and yet there are lots of very smart people rowing together on ships that are going shitty places.

Who actually believes things like inbound sales will actually save the world? Containerization? Restaurant reservations? Ad mediation?

Linus's opinion is inviting and has obviously contributed to the longevity of what he is doing. Has he built a huge multi-billion dollar business? I guess not. Neither has Jimmy Wales, as an example. And yet the yield-to-community, my-vision-isn't-first philosophy has firmly solved problems in ways which seriously threaten corporations with billions of dollars to spend on making their own operating systems, drivers, hardware, etc. (e.g., Microsoft).

He didn't just motivate lots of people. He motivated lots of very talented people, with little recruitment, no equity and little money, over decades, with diverse skills, better than far better equipped institutions.

The open source model repeats this success story in lots of places, naturally, but few have been as influential. I think this philosophy of not "having to sign on to somebody else's vision" is essential.

<comment><USER3> >Who actually believes things like inbound sales will actually save the world? Containerization? Restaurant reservations? Ad mediation?

What's this obsession with 'saving the word'? You don't have to 'save the world' to be doing something useful. Restaurant reservations make the world better for people; that's what actually matters.

Unless you're working on something like AI safety, or something that helps people make correct decisions in high-impact positions (military? politics?), you're not saving the world.

<comment><USER4> Seems to be part of the "social justice" culture that has been taken root in universities as of late (though i have also seen it labeled "victim culture").

You can't simply exist to make good products, you have to have some kind of life altering/improving purpose behind every breath you take or you are part of "the problem".

<comment><USER5> I respectfully disagree. I remember hearing that phrase when discussing career options in the late 90's. It probably goes back further. People rarely mean it literally. It's typically shorthand for the idea of making the world a better place, often as a contrast to focusing solely on material compensation. Also, if you do an ngram search on Google Books, you'll see similar phrases spiking in use in the early 90's.

To your point though, you do see an awful lot of articles about how millennials are placing more emphasis on "personal fulfillment" than previous generations. I don't know how true that actually is, but I think it supports your point of people now talking more about doing good, not just building something valuable.

I don't think that's entirely bad though. If you have the luxury of choice, it's good to think about how you and your career focus impact the world. It's good to want to leave the world better than you found it.

However, my problem with the idea is that people approach it at such a shallow level. For example, I did a chunk of consulting work for a major vendor to pharmaceutical companies. My team helped them streamline a bunch of business processes and optimize software systems, saving them (low) millions of dollars per year. On the one hand, you could describe that as us just helping a giant corporation improve its bottom line. On the other hand, our improvements had a direct impact on clinical trials getting bid out and approved significantly faster with better end-to-end reporting and more automated safety checks during the trial. So, was that "saving the world"? Meh, not really. I was doing it for the money and joy of working on a solid team. But I did like the fact that in a small way our work was improving the efficiency of a global system that creates new live-improving, life-saving treatments (and admittedly some bad ones too).

I think I kind of lost the thread of my argument. :) My point is just that people have been considering the personal fulfillment part of their careers for a very long time, e.g., see Maslow's 1943 hierarchy of needs, and I think talk of saving the world is just a specific flavor of that general idea.

<comment><USER3> I definitely agree personal fulfilment is important. But this argument doesn't really apply to the disparaging way OP talked about people working on 'restaurant reservations' or containerization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The thing about bad technical decisions is that you can always undo them. > Yes, it can be very frustrating, and obviously there's all the wasted time > and effort, but at the same time even that is not usually really wasted in > the end

This words inspired me more as this has similar context as what Donald Knuth had said in his book The Art of Computer Programming[0]:

> At this point, it is often a good idea to scrap everything and start over > again at step 1, or even at step 0! This is not intended to be facetious > remark; the time spent in getting this far has not been wasted, for we have > learned a great deal about the problem. With hindsight, we will probably > have discovered several improvements that could be made to the program's > overall organization.

[0] - [http://www.amazon.com/The-Computer-Programming-Volume- Fascic...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Computer-Programming-Volume- Fascicle/dp/0201853922) (Chapter 1.4.1 page 64)

<comment><USER7> I'm also a big fan of Fred Brooks' "The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. […] Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow."

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks)

[http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PlanToThrowOneAway](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PlanToThrowOneAway)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Linux really blew my mind as a kid. It showed me what real computers could do, and i have had many, many adventures under a linux house of one distro or another. I know I would not be anywhere today without linux.

Lets see if I can come up with a list of everything i've used linux for:

* Routers

* DNS server

* Email servers

* VOIP PBX (still crazy that asterisk let me build my own PBX)

* Web Servers

* Monitoring

* Virtualization

* Desktops (I do all my dev in a linux VM)

* Honeypots

* data recovery liveCD

* Automation

* failover (DRBD)

* IRC server

* Print server

* File server

* Media center

A lot of those would simply not have been feasible for a kid to do in his basement with old computers. Most of that list wasn't otherwise economically feasible to do on windows, or possible.

Slackware taught me a lot. I really had to get my hands dirty there, and was using that as my secondary desktop for the later years in high school.

And linux is certainly how I got into programming, via perl, bash and php. And thats what I do for a living now, as a rails dev (thanks DHH!). I NEVER would have thought that a kid (this kid) with developmental disabilities could be a programmer; i flunked out of programming in HS pretty early into it.

The deepest of thanks to linus, and everyone that has created or contributed to open source projects. The socioeconomic impact of your work is beyond measure, all because you put sharing and collaborating with people around the world before profits.

I hope you take a step back from time to time and look at it anew; its an unprecedented and wonderfully human thing; Open source represents the best parts of us.

</comment><comment><USER9> To this day I still can't believe the same person gave us Linux and git. The person might not be the most palatable, but what incredible feats of engineering he's capable of.

<comment><USER10> Yet in a way, both Linux and git are products of laziness... the kind of laziness that Larry Wall called a programmer's virtue.

Linux is a pretty standard Unix kernel clone that got traction as an x86 kernel, combined with the GNU userland and various distributions.

Git was intentionally designed to be "simple and stupid." It's extremely fast and reliable because of this simplicity, and because Linus knows how filesystems and kernel caches work.

So I agree that Linus has helped bring about some remarkable things. But it's not because he's an ultra-productive genius. He has a knack for C coding, an impatient and "lazy" attitude, and a lot of help.

And I think he belongs to this kinda older school of hacking, part of which is his rudeness toward bad patches.

The GPL is also a big part of these success stories.

<comment><USER11> > It's extremely fast and reliable because of this simplicity, and because > Linus knows how filesystems and kernel caches work.

I would add an additional reason that may be unpopular here: It is written in C. A version control system doesn't need to be in C, and indeed Mercurial is written in Python, but C makes it faster.

<comment><USER12> C also makes Linux uncomplicated in ways that hackers love. Because the language is simple and unsexy, the developer's focus is only on what you're doing. You don't have to learn someone else's model in order to add code -- a bunch of proprietary legacy data structures, conventions, and methods. You contribute directly to the koan of Unix in its native tongue, with minimimal mental impedence.

<comment><USER13> Can you imagine if the kernel had been written in C++? With each iteration, C++ looks like a completely different language. If Linux had gone through those changes since the early 90s, it would look like a baroque conglomeration, like the strange twin-spires of chartres cathedral.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > The fact that I didn't really know where it would end up meant that I was > perhaps more open to outside suggestions and influence than I would have > been if I had a very good idea of what I wanted to accomplish.

Not sure if I'm projecting or not but I think I've noticed this too. When I do projects that have some kind of grand goal, few people seem to care and I find I work mostly in isolation. Lots of pride and not a lot of fun.

On the other hand, when I do a project where the thinking is "Let's screw around, quickly throw stuff out there, and see how people react to it", I tend to get a lot more interesting feedback.

Even for smart people, there's something about a friendly game of "idiot ball" that seems to attract other people to come out and play too. Torvalds probably plays that game better than most.

</comment><comment><USER15> 25 years of GNU + Linux and he manages to not mention Stallman or GNU once. Not once.

<comment><USER16> I won't dismiss that he's been successful, but he's one of the people that I dislike the most in the tech industry. If GNU stuff didn't exist, he probably wouldn't even be able to compile and run his own work back in '91\. All of the success of Linux is because there was a userland in search of a kernel. And if it wasn't for thousands of guys coding up drivers for Linux, Torvalds would probably end up an _embedded_ guy in a washing-machine company.

GNU has been crucial to the flourishment of community-developed software today, both with their effort in creating the tooling, and their effort in keeping it accessible and liberated. So, the Linux guys need to learn to say thank you, because it's for GNU that there is a Linux for which development they get paid and feed their families.

After all, who cares about a kernel, as a user? For me, currently, if it supports the ath5k driver, and runs Emacs and supports POSIX, it's OK. I switched to FreeBSD, and, well, I didn't really notice anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Linux has changed my life for sure, like others who have commented here. I just wish there was a bit more commercial support for a true polished, seamless desktop Linux experience (and more OEMs selling machines with it preinstalled).

Google is the only company who has championed Linux for mass market success, but calling Android handsets and Chromebooks Linux computers makes me cringe a bit. But that's what makes it great, being so modular and flexible.

On the flip side, Windows get bashed way too frequently. Say what you want, but since Win8 Windows has been fast, fluid and stable, and gaming and video performance are top notch. That's hard to walk away from when comparing to Linux.

<comment><USER18> > "I just wish there was a bit more commercial support for a true polished, > seamless desktop Linux experience "

You may be interested in Elementary OS, it could be just what you were looking for:

[https://elementary.io](https://elementary.io)

<comment><USER17> I've used Elementary exclusively for a month. I found it lacking many built in tools and utilities, and the UI an OSX ripoff and also rather stripped down and limited.

<comment><USER19> What built in tools and utilities did you find it missing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > S.C.: What's the biggest challenge currently facing Linux?

> L.T.: The kernel is actually doing very well. People continue to worry about > things getting too complicated for people to understand and fix bugs. It's > certainly an understandable worry. But at the same time, __we have a lot of > smart people involved __.

I never thought Torvalds and Trump would say similar things.

<comment><USER20> "We're going to build a firewall, and make Microsoft pay for it"

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> >>Do you think Linux will still be under active development on its 50th anniversary?

It has to be, with the current driver model in Linux!

</comment><comment><USER22> Thank you, Linus.

</comment><comment><USER23> Still fascinated by the mistery of Hacker News. I posted this link a few hours before the OP, and got no traction.

</comment><comment><USER24> > As to why the desktop is such a hard nut to crack—there are multiple > reasons, but one of the big ones is simply user inertia.

Being a Windows user having tried to get into linux, there is a lot more than user inertia. A few reasons:

The desktop is almost dead, what we call desktop today is really laptops, with custom hardware for which the drivers are rarely all available for linux. Try telling my mum: "you need to compile your own drivers".

The UI is extremely limited and you end up having to type command lines almost immediatly, to install a software or change a configuration. First if command lines had even a remote chance to go mainstream, DOS would still be around and Apple would have gone bust. Then, there are many distributions of linux that take a different syntax so it's not even trivial to find help on the web. And again, try shouting "RTFM!" to my mum.

Linux developers seem to be in love with cryptic acronyms which means nothing is intuitive or simple.

For Linux to take over it needs not only to match but to surpass its competition (MacOS, Windows) in term of simplicity and ease of use. And right now it is far far far behind.

I am sure we can make the list longer. But blaming user inertia for linux not going mainstream is exactly what Microsoft was objecting when they were told that the new Windows 8 UI was a piece of shit.

<comment><USER25> My grandfather (85 Years Old) is using linux for 5 years now. Never got a call to fix or do something.. (Installed KDE based distro)

My Parents (55) share a laptop at home (about 1 year now), installed Fedora (default GNOME) - never got a call.

My Youger Brother (18, finishing High-School this year) uses Ubuntu, for 4 years I think, I've convinced him that he could still play games there if wanted.. I get calls from him only when he wants to run some game that needs some advanced Wine tweaking and it involves command like (otherwise he is just using Play On Linux I think or whatever - I just don't game).

None of them is computer savvy or computer literate...

They all use different major Linux DE.. And they all seem to just be fine!

My Wife (27) currently uses Elementary OS (With Pantheon DE, which is not a major DE as we call them) - she's also nor computer literate nor savvy, and also using the Linux just fine!

The only problem I see, which rises from my wifes experience, there is no simple Paint alternative, were you'd have very basic options (cropping, rotating and maybe some brush/text) with a decent UI to make changes to a photo/image.. Same goes for easy PDF editing, but I already made her master Inkscape, but still - something easier and more straightforward would be awesome.

So the lack of software is still true for linux in 2016 in certain areas. I could convert a lot of audio/video editing people to linux, but there is just not enough professional grade software for them on linux..

In the end - apparently average Joe can use Linux today for browsing internet, viewing pdfs and doing Libre Office stuff just as well as on any other operating system (Windows, OS X)..

<comment><USER18> > "The only problem I see, which rises from my wifes experience, there is no > simple Paint alternative, were you'd have very basic options (cropping, > rotating and maybe some brush/text) with a decent UI to make changes to a > photo/image"

How about Krita? It's more powerful than a basic Paint app but the UI looks just as intuitive.

[https://krita.org/features/highlights/](https://krita.org/features/highlights/)

<comment><USER26> The webpage looks fantastic! Let's give Krita a shot.

I'm running arguable the most common Linux distro on this planet, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Let's follow the instructions, I like that they explicitly support Ubuntu. All right, three easy commands I'm familiar with (add PPA, update & install). That was easy! Let's launch it...

> krita: Critical Error Essential application components could not be found. > This might be an installation issue. Try restarting, running > kbuildsycoca4.exe or reinstalling.

I'm sure I'll figure it out, but a great first impression it isn't.

<comment><USER27> If it's ksycoca4-related, try

      kbuildsycoca4 --no-incremental && sudo kbuildsycoca4 --global --no-incremental

Ugly, but it gets the job done. I don't seem to have needed that with KDE 5 applications, so maybe they fixed that, and Krita just needs to update (which AFAIK they're already working on).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>