Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.forbes.com/parmyolson/2011/03/16/is-this-the-girl-that-hacked-hbgary/ <comment><USER2> This could very likely be a carefully (and cleverly constructed) identity.

This girl might not exist; but because we all really really want a _16 year old girl_ to be the hacker the discrepancies are glossed over (the art of a good lie is not giving too much detail and letting other people's imagination fill the gaps).

On the other hand the personality strikes me strongly as female, so if it is an facade it is a very well constructed one, which the imposter empathises with.

But, on the whole, the setup "feels" wrong (and I tend to trust my instincts in such matters).

<comment><USER3> When I had a lot more time, I would go into Yahoo chat and basically phish for pedophiles usernames/passwords. I can tell you that a "hehe" after anything will set the hook.

I could on average phish about an account a minute and I was never figured out. I only fell out of character once to warn an 18 year old kid, that talking to 14 year old girls sexually online wasn't the best use of his time. He freaked out and thought I was a cop!

It's relatively trivial to do this, most people will ignore minor slip ups provided you have the right context. I would set context by doing the following:

1\. I would set my profile to the geolocation of the room I intended to work. I would then find a school and neighborhood to say I was from.

2\. I would suggest I was home sick (and thus alone).

3\. I would use an innocent, although, sexual name in my username like "booty"

4\. I would use emoticons and "hehe" on probably 75% of all messages sent.

5\. I would let them contact me first. If you contact them they get scared. If they contact you, they feel like they are in control.

For example, I could tell them the wrong name and many wouldn't notice, or if they did simply saying, "Oh, that's my middle name" is usually sufficient.

With all that said, anyone know of a way I could use my experiences and ability at social engineering online in a legit manner?

<comment><USER4> Welcome to the internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the kids are cops.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1546789>

<comment><USER5> That phrase is older than Hacker News. I could have sworn that it used to be on bash.org, but the best reference I can find is:

[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=kids+are+the+...](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=kids+are+the+fbi)

I'm pretty sure the phrase even predates 4chan though... Mostly likely originates from USENET or IRC.

<comment><USER6> Definitely older than Hacker News. I got it from Reddit, and I think Reddit got it from UseNet (possibly via 4chan or IRC).

I paraphrased though, and the grandparent post must have a better memory (or better Google skills) than me, which is probably why you can't find an exact match...

<comment><USER7> The oldest versions I've heard went something like "Welcome to the internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents."

Example from 2001: <http://www.bash.org/?2832>

Pretty sure the line goes back further than that though.

My guess is that it's a parody of A Prairie Home Companion's line about "Lake Wobegone, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." Though that might itself be playing on some earlier such line?

<comment><USER8> I think of the hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy (from the 70s?): "Where men are real men, women are real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centori are real small furry creatures from Alpha Centori."

Which is presumably itself a parody, I'd guess of some standard line from a Western. But I couldn't pin it down to exactly where.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My bs meter was high for a number of reasons. This paragraph was the most notable:

"Meanwhile she refuses to be chained to her computer, limiting herself to a few hours a night online. She rarely visits online forums "they're boring"and a few days a week takes a course in college to further her goal of being a teacher. She lives in an English-speaking country not the U.K.but won't say more about it"

So the previous paragraph stated she was "memorizing Windows Opcodes and scouring source code for exploitable bugs", but then suddenly she only spends a few hours online? Not likely. Most hardcore hackers I know don't just drop off the radar. The hunt to break into systems is like a drug. I have yet to read about, or know any hacker who simply spends a few hours online a day. At the speed internet security moves, this person's knowledge would be useless inside of 6 months.

Also, how does this person maintain her expert hacker knowledge with a few cursory hours a day on the internet? Literally impossible. Add in the admission she deletes all her emails and wipes all her drives clean? Really? Does this person memorize every line of code she uses then?

My conclusion? A carefully crafted profile of an Anon personality. Although I have no doubt this person probably exists, it certainly is not a 16 year old girl, and a majority of the information in the article is total BS. When you apply some very basic logic, the story just falls apart.

<comment><USER10> > Add in the admission she deletes all her emails and wipes all her drives > clean? Really? Does this person memorize every line of code she uses then?

I agree that the persona is bullshit and that 'she' is a probably a mid-to- late 20s male but...

Where does it say that she/he deletes wipes all her drives clean? It only says that (s)he wipes her web accounts. From reading the article, (s)he keeps her personal files/documents on a MicroSD card; quite a smart and disposable solution really.

Perhaps the personal files are encrypted also? It's interesting to imagine what other steps you could take to protect your privacy, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to do alternating sharding at the bits and bytes level over SSH with off-site storage (Half on MicroSD, half off-site), does any tool do something similar currently? You could even put a self-destruct timer on the offsite storage (if last_login > 5 days ago: format hard drive with 40-pass erase) or maybe a kill-switch containing sensitive informatoin (ala Wikileaks).

<comment><USER11> _She has no physical hard drive and boots her computer from a microSD card. "I could hide this card anywhere or chew into a million pieces in a few seconds," she says by e-mail._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Dad allegedly showed her how to find bugs in C source code and exploit them. It was all harmless and Kayla had only been using the Internet to talk to friends on MSN. But she began looking into hacking, and learned scripting languages like Perl..._

I've always known C was just a gateway to the dangerous stuff.

<comment><USER13> Everywhere I've lived public service announcements say that "E" is the gateway to dangerous stuff

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox. She has no physical hard drive and boots her computer from a microSD card. "I could hide this card anywhere or chew into a million pieces in a few seconds," she says by e-mail. She keeps her operating system on a USB stick and uses a virtual machine (VM) to carry out her online shenanigans._

And people call _me_ paranoid. :)

<comment><USER15> >Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox ...

If that is true, online account operators, email providers could link this type of behavior to one of their members quite quickly.

<comment><USER16> Not to mention that she gave a lot of personal history surrounding her parents and family history. That might not uniquely identify her, but it does narrow the search considerably. My guess: if he/she is even a single real person, much of this is fabricated.

<comment><USER17> I think it reeks of fabrication. It's probably some geek living out their alter ego or something.

<comment><USER18> Though getting it into Forbes is quite brilliant especially if it all revolves around a real person.

<comment><USER19> Someone is having quite a blast at the moment, unless Forbes made the whole thing up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wait, Forbes actually linked to <http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Lulz> ? HAH.

<comment><USER21> I'd really like to see the look on the face of the average Forbes reader after clicking on an ED link.

<comment><USER22> And "ED" likely means something entirely different to what I imagine the typical Forbes reader to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is the phrase "Windows Opcodes" (from the article) a subtle troll on the part of "k" or a journalistic goof? I'm no programmer by any stretch, but that phrase jumped out at me as phony. I know there are system calls for operating systems, and opcodes are processor instructions, so this use of the term raised my b.s. meter a notch.

<comment><USER24> Hate to break it to you but that actually means something. The technical details are surprisingly on target for being written by a tech journalist.

Ex. <http://www.metasploit.com/users/opcode/syscalls.html>

<comment><USER23> Not sure I see your point. Sure, the URL has "opcode" in it, but the page clearly says "Windows System Call Table" -- nowhere is the word "opcode" mentioned on that page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm not particularly close to this issue, but the sexism I'm seeing here is pretty astounding. If this were a 16 year old guy, no one would bat an eyelid. Seriously.

Look at Mafiaboy back in 2000 -- he took down Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Dell, Inc., E*TRADE, eBay, and CNN. I'm not even sure that he was 16 yet (I don't have his age offhand).

Is this a crazy and possibly fake story? Of course. Does that mean that it can't be true? Not by a long shot.

I work in information security, and at 16 knew a hell of a lot about SQL injection, buffer overflows, cross site scripting and oodles of other vulnerability classes. This girl didn't work alone, but part of a hacker group -- to me, it seems totally feasible.

I'm not saying that we should take every word an anonymous "16 year old girl" says on the Internet as absolute fact, but discounting this attack because it seems like a girl couldn't pull it off seems sexist and wrong. Again, if this were some pimply-faced male high schooler, no one would bat an eye.

<comment><USER26> Nobody's saying that it _can't_ be real because girls don't grok tech and 16-year-olds are stupid. They're saying it's _unlikely_ to be realy because statistically, the number of 16-year-old girl hackers is very small (relative to 25-year-old male hackers), there's a huge history of fake personas in hacking (and especially around Anonymous), and a 16-year-old girl is a very useful persona to get attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Using the quotes from the article, however too few words to analyze properly, so inconclusive, but still...

From <http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php>

Genre: Informal Female = 171 Male = 182 Difference = 11; 51.55% Verdict: Weak MALE

Weak emphasis could indicate European.

From <http://bookblog.net/gender/analysis.php>

Female Score: 94 Male Score: 133

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

<comment><USER28> Everything I write comes out as female and I'm... not. I wouldn't trust that (or maybe I should question my gender...)

<comment><USER29> Perhaps you should use... fewer ellipses? There are several grammatical patterns females use more than males (and vice versa). I assume that's how the test works, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is Anonymous we're talking about. Isn't "16 year old girl" a well-known colloquialism on 4chan, normally used to convey the stereotype of a middle- aged, balding geek still living in his parent's basement who likes to use fake online personas? Forbes got trolled in a monumental fashion.

<comment><USER31> It's a synonym for attention whore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Whoever it is, they are a genius of deception. Check this out: <http://pastebin.com/tSiQevxe>

Kayla first asks for root password using two passwords that she already has but might not necessarily be the root one. She also already knows that remote root isn't allowed. This way:

1) She'd get the root password e-mailed to her if it wasn't one of those two. "No, it's not those, it's '<password>'."

2) She sets up her point of entry.

Great stuff.

</comment><comment><USER33> so she goes to extraordinary lengths to coverup her online activity, but grants an interview to a national news outlet where she divulges a large part of her personal history?

obvious troll is obvious

</comment><comment><USER34> This story reminds me Hit-Girl and Big Daddy from Kick-Ass movie.

<comment><USER35> I heard there is excessive camp in this movie, but I'll check it out.

<comment><USER36> No, no there isn't. There is just awesomeness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> If the government is going after these people it should be for one reason only - to hire them. Maybe with this kind of talent working together we could find out where rogues like OBL are hiding.

<comment><USER38> Work offer for a hacker is sometimes feared to be just a bait of a trap. The trap is said to spring once the hacker admits taking part in the hack.

Compare <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2245786>

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think the reason people keep saying she is fake is because they don't want to believe someone so young is capable of doing what she did. I've spoken to her via email and she said she doesn't care what people think about her, shes going to do what she does regardless and she has my full support.

Maybe instead of asking questions about her here, you ask her like i did?

firstname.lastname@example.com

If she really is who she said she is that's one smart kid!

</comment><comment><USER40> Soon you are not going to know if anyone that you interact with online is who they say they are. The Pentagon has awarded a contract to a Silicon Valley company to develop software that creates fake personas that can then influence the "conversation" by spreading US propaganda. Each operator will be able to create up to 10 "personas". A friend just sent me a link about the Pentagon's decidedly Orwellian "sock puppet" software:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy- oper...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation- social-networks)

</comment><comment><USER41> >By the time Kayla was 14 she could fully program C and x86 assembly.

FML, I have a CS degree and still can't program ASM.

</comment><comment><USER42> If you're going to pick a fake identity would you pick one that would get you attention like this? Seems like a fake identity but not sure it's the best one.

<comment><USER43> The best fake identity is a real one that everybody believes is fake.

<comment><USER44> .. and one that everyone wants to be real.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> > In December 2008, she wrought havoc on one of the most famous forums of all, > 4chan's notorious /b/ channel, finding and exploited an SQL injection bug on > its content management system, hacking in and causing mayhem on the forum > for a few hours.

I don't remember any such exploit. You could produce that image by posting a lot.

</comment><comment><USER46> Forbes is being trolled.

<comment><USER47> I don't think they care. Forbes is full of yellow journalism and fake stories drive hits just as much as real stories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Since the girl is a person and not a thing, it should be "... girl _who_ hacked hbgary". r11t copied the mistake from Forbes-- How do national magazines make grammatical errors like this? Don't these people have editors who at least earned a passing grade in middle school English?

<comment><USER49> Shakespeare wrote in the Merchant of Venice of "the man that hath no music in himself". Mark Twain wrote a short story titled "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg". Ira Gershwin wrote a popular song titled "The Man that Got Away". These are just the examples easily available on Wikipedia.

Your complaint does not represent _majority_ usage in English, let alone modern usage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Ways they track you:

1\. Using same computer that connects via phone, wireless, etc and than using any email service. 2\. Machine characteristics since they cannot get the machine ID they go for the next best digital finger print ..ie operator grammar/typos..cpu speed, ram size, etc. 3\. Websites have visitor logs..the track back to you eventually gets fleshed out.

I think the Forbes article writer got played..

</comment><comment><USER51> If this is true lol, it makes me feel small haha. Kudos to omg@ Kayla (if she exists lol) = D lol hehe rofl omg</comment>


Python is becoming the world's most popular programming language - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/07/26/python-is-becoming-the-worlds-most-popular-coding-language <comment><USER3> As a huge fan of Python, my go-to statement is that Python is the second or third best language for whatever you want to do.

Want to do web server development? Flask, Django, Tornado, etc... can do that. Probably not as concurrently as Go, but it'll do.

Scientific computing? Its no Matlab, but the syntax is easy and the time you lose in processing you make up for when developing.

Desktop computing? PyQT is pretty good. Electron may be faster to build with, C will be faster at runtime, but Python, even with Tkinter, is ok.

Functional programming? There are list comprehensions, map, reduce and filter. Not as good as Haskell or Lisp, but it'll do.

Python isn't the killer language for any of these really, but its good enough in almost all cases that you'll be very productive and can iterate to a good MVP quicker than with most other languages.

<comment><USER4> For me python's killer feature is readability years later.

I've gone back to websites and tools YEARS later and the code as quick to pickup and easy to modify.

35 years of programming and I've never met a language so well integrated with my mind.

<comment><USER5> Any language with static types should be easier to make sense of, though. I get it's faster to write dynamically typed code, but your point is specifically about reading code, which I can't follow.

Of course Python nowadays has support for static types too.

<comment><USER6> I program in Python professionally, and I agree with your sentiment in general. Dynamic types hurt readability. Also, in general, Python is faster to develop with than most statically typed languages. There are two nits that I'd like to pick: the first and lesser is that Python's static typing story is in an alpha stage. It's not ready for prime time (but I'm cheering it on) and Python shouldn't be considered as having a static type system yet.

The second is that I realized that Go is a statically typed language that is quite a lot easier to develop with than Python and other dynamic languages. It strikes a good balance between protecting you from mistakes while not making it hard to express your intent (most of the time, anyway). As I advance and become more concerned about my time, I find myself reaching for Go more often because the static type system has my back. I spend less time writing unit tests or iteratively running my code to make sure things still work. (People said this about Haskell and Rust and OCaml too, so I understand the skepticism dynamic language proponents have for claims like these). The deployment, dependency management, and performance stories are also quite a lot nicer in Go, and these are undervalued components of "developing velocity" as well, especially if you're on a small team. It really changes the calculus for static vs dynamic language discussions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Languages have always come and gone; Python has always mattered, it's simply finally showing itself as a much more suited tool for certain tasks (such as CS education, lightweight scripting by data scientists, glueing together large frameworks, ...). While popular, it can't really hit every single spot required in software development; try to maintain > 10k LOC codebases in Python to understand what I mean.

The point that I'm trying to say is that, while we're living in a moment where python is at the center of everything, it won't last forever; it never does. Something better always shows up, given enough time.

<comment><USER8> > try to maintain > 10k LOC codebases in Python to understand what I mean

Lots of companies successfully manage far larger Python codebases.

We have a 35M LOC Python codebase with 2500 active developers making 25000 commits per week and continuous deployment globally of new code.

(I gave a talk on it at PyData London in April: "Python at Massive Scale")

<comment><USER9> Is there a quick way to find out your LOC in a python project? Does it include whitespace and comments? What about HTML and JS code?

<comment><USER10> The typical measure is "Source Lines of Code" (SLOC), which would be calculated on a per-language basis and doesn't include comments or blank lines. You'd sum these together for your codebase overall. Not sure how you'd do it for HTML or mixed code. Presumably the same since it's such a rough measure that that level of accuracy really doesn't matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _With such a rapidly growing user base and wide array of capabilities, Python might seem destined to become the lingua franca of coding, rendering all other competitors obsolete._

I realize it is weasel worded not to mean what it implies but statements like this is a surefire way to lose any credibility. Not that there was much underpinning besides some search engine popularity.

Nevertheless I'm baffled by python's popularity. With my admittedly limited exposure I would not reach for it again any time soon. When it is the right tool for the job?

<comment><USER12> How does that make The Economist "lose any credibility", when the _very next sentence_ is

> That is unlikely, according to Grady Booch, IBM's chief software scientist, > who compares programming languages to empires.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I understand it (and code a hell of a lot of Python) - but it's a shame. While it's a lot better than the many low-barrier-to-entry languages that came before it, it is such a heavily compromised, suboptimal language in so many ways. I feel like a whole generation of programmers is becoming stuck in a local optimum that will cost us very dearly later on.

<comment><USER14> While you're likely correct that FORTRAN, COBOL, C, Visual Basic, C++, Perl, ColdFusion, Java, Javascript, and Python, were sub-optimal choices, they're just tools whose popularity boils down to current programming pop culture.

That being said, it could be something much worse than Python.

<comment><USER15> When ever you start feeling like this, just think to yourself how bad things would be if it was javascript that won and was used everywhere...

oh wait :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can see the sudden jump in popularity for python alongside data science - <USER2> really is great for that.

My view is: python is great for offline tasks, like functional testing and training in machine learning - tasks that do not have huge, direct customer interaction. But to put something in production, please give me a strongly typed language with compiled binaries and no additional installations/VMs (and for me that's Go).

<comment><USER17> Python is strongly typed, insofar as the term has a meaningful definition at all.

You meant "give me a statically typed language". Which may not actually be what you want, since statically typed languages can be, and some historically have been considered, weakly typed (C, for example).

<comment><USER16> doesn't strongly typed mean that the type cannot change once assigned? and you can do that in python, can you not?

<comment><USER17> No, again you're thinking of "static", not "strong".

Strong versus weak is historically poorly defined, and there's no single universally-accepted definition, but you can get the gist of it from considering the following:

        a = '1'
        b = 2
        c = a + b

In JavaScript, the above code results in the name 'c' being bound to the string value '12'. In Python, the above code raises TypeError. Generally, "weak" typing refers to the idea that the language may coerce the values of operands to other types in order to make an operation succeed (in the above, JavaScript coerced the value of 'b' to a string and interpreted the '+' operator as asking for string concatenation, hence the result is the string '12'). "Strong" typing generally means the language won't do that, and will error out on you if you attempt an operation on values of incompatible types.

"Static" versus "dynamic" typing is a completely different set of terms. There's also some debate over definitions, but broadly, consider the following expression:

        a = 1

In a statically-typed language, both the name 'a' and the value 1 have types, and in order to bind names to values their types must be compatible. So in the above, it's likely that both 'a' and 1 are of type int, so the assignment expression would be legal. Later attempting to bind 'a' to a value of a type incompatible with int (say, 'a = "foo"') would fail. Statically-typed languages also come with an expectation that all expressions can be checked for compatible types without needing to execute the code, and that a tool will exist to do this checking for you.

In a dynamically-typed language, however, only values have types; names do not, so binding a name to a value of a particular type does not foreclose later re-binding to a value of a different type (i.e., the name 'a' might be bound to an int now, and get re-bound to a string later). This means there will be cases in a dynamically typed language where the only way to verify correctness of an expression is to execute the code (though you can usually check a high percentage without running the code).

Python is strongly typed and dynamically typed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Having worked in Python as a way to pay for food nearing 7 years now, the biggest complaint I have at this point is that, at an enterprise level, it's severely under-equipped to enforce its touted "There's probably one right way to do things" mantra.

People are often introduced first to Python by way of scripting, but the tricks and tools learned while scripting are exactly the sorts of things I've found cause dirty code. Applying clean code principles to Python is _hard_ , because it's so easy to write dirty code, and that's a byproduct of how easy everything is to do in Python. That ever-nagging "but it's working" continues to get in the way.

It's a weird problem. I dunno what to do about it, and currently end many of my debates with colleagues on topics related to the problem without agreement.

<comment><USER17> _People are often introduced first to Python by way of scripting_

I don't believe this is true, and I don't believe it's been true for quite some time.

First encounters with Python now tend to be via frameworks, whether for web development, machine learning, data science or automation.

<comment><USER18> It was true recently enough ago that the people writing Python code professionally were introduced to Python from a scripting entrypoint.

For non-programmers, I think it's definitely still true that "scripting" is their primary use case for Python, and when those non-programmers shift into software development jobs because they have "3 years experience" with Python, they bring all of their bad habits with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> At the bottom of the page, there's a link to "the full article":

[https://www.economist.com/science-and- technology/2018/07/19/...](https://www.economist.com/science-and- technology/2018/07/19/python-has-brought-computer-programming-to-a-vast-new- audience)

It's fascinating to see the differences between the two. The OP is a bit shorter and a bit more awkwardly worded. It also inlines some names (for instance, referring to the package manager as "an online repository" instead of "the Cheese Shop").

I wonder if the OP was written for the website (with a lower quality threshold) and the "full article" was edited/expanded-upon for the more prestigious print edition.

</comment><comment><USER20> Here's a nice combination of _Python_ and an _economist_: Paul Romer, this year's Nobel prize laureate in economy, moved from publishing recent research using Mathematica to Python and Jupyter notebooks.

[https://qz.com/1417145/economics-nobel-laureate-paul- romer-i...](https://qz.com/1417145/economics-nobel-laureate-paul-romer-is-a- python-programming-convert/)

</comment><comment><USER21> StackOverflow has the data on this: Python for most purposes is entirely static. Python for data science is utterly dominant. That's what's driving the stats.

</comment><comment><USER22> Non-canvas fingerprinting summary: [http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/10...](http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/10/econo_chart_py.png)

I found the data points coarse (x = 5 years) but useful to see similar trends of popularity between C, Javascript, and Python. Note: these metrics are defined by global search engine popularity.

<comment><USER23> I wonder if those statistics are accounting for people searching for snakes.

<comment><USER24> Took me a while to figure out what you mean by snakes, I thought what do snakes have to do with programming languages then it bit me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Python is really widespread, but at least in my company it's used for analysis and prototyping only. Then the prototype is ported either to Java, C# or C++.

I don't know if it's common practice, but we work like that and totally makes sense to us.

<comment><USER26> Depends on the organizations needs, for what we work on performance does not matter terribly much, thus a MVP in Flask is often cleaned up and put up on Gitlab (with a Github mirror) once its vaugely usable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> How do you compare the popularity of full featured languages like Python to languages like JavaScript that have numerous frameworks built upon. Were React, Angular, Vue, Typescript search results taken into account to draw this graph ?

<comment><USER28> In your reductive analysis x86 ASM is the most popular language or every Python application is a c application.

<comment><USER29> That's not the point. Many JS devs google "Node xxxxx" but still code with JS. Not many people search for "Python xxxxx" and code in C.

Offtopic: I disagree with grandparent, for different reasons.

<comment><USER28> Many people google "boost graph library" but are c++ developers or google "pandas how to drop columns", "numpy how to append to array" but are python developers.

<comment><USER29> I still don't see how this leads to

> x86 ASM is the most popular language or every Python application is a c > application

<comment><USER28> He states people using typescript count as people using javascript. If that is true people writing python or c++ are writing ASM

<comment><USER30> Not really. TypeScript is just a JavaScript superset, and developer code JS with all its good and bad with some annotation types. TypeScript is not like Dart or reasonML for which your analogy would have been correct if someone said Dart count as JavaScript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is a shorter version of this July 19, 2018 article: [https://www.economist.com/science-and- technology/2018/07/19/...](https://www.economist.com/science-and- technology/2018/07/19/python-has-brought-computer-programming-to-a-vast-new- audience)

</comment><comment> village-idiot A few jobs ago was in Python. Joy to write, absolute terror to deploy.

Seared into my mind was a failure caused by delivering .pyc files (oops) to a server whose shared libs were compiled with different flags than our CI box.

To be fair, this was before docked (or at least before I'd heard of it). Maybe that's improved things a bit.

<comment><USER32> Deployment is still mostly awful. The community is still tackling this issue as of 2018.

[https://realpython.com/pipenv-guide/](https://realpython.com/pipenv-guide/)

<comment> village-idiot It's a shame. I rather like the language, but failing to fix the deployment story for this long is frankly unacceptable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Well now we have to wait for a v8 equivalent for python. I guess pypy doesn't really make python that much faster, can it be faster?

<comment><USER34> Python is, despite its simple appearance, a _much_ more complex language than JavaScript. A V8 equivalent for Python is certainly possible, but would require even more work than went into creating V8 itself - who would be motivated to spend that much effort on Python?

Dropbox? They seem to be the company driving Python nowadays, but gave up trying to speed up Python in favour of writing "performance-sensitive code in other languages" [1].

PyPy uses a meta-tracing approach in an attempt to reduce the amount of work required. Its speed is impressive, but I'm sure meta-tracing leaves some performance on the table.

Another way to reduce the amount of work required would be to support only a subset of the language - for example, a V8 equivalent for MicroPython rather than for full Python. I'm sure this could be made very fast, but it would have very poor compatibility with existing Python code, so what would be the point?

[1] [https://blog.pyston.org/](https://blog.pyston.org/)

<comment><USER33> What makes python so complex? What are the features that if removed could really improve performance?

I love python's syntax, but I could do without its lazy interpretation, without duck typing if possible, and without its reference system.

In short I just like the syntax of python, I don't really care about its modules.

<comment><USER34> I have replied to your post on /r/Python [1].

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/9n18ot/ive_read_abo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/9n18ot/ive_read_about_python_and_how_its_a_complex/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's interesting that by this metric, vb.net beats javascript. It's remarkable for a language which maintainers have placed in maintenance only mode.

I think it is a language that people should consider for beginners. Rich and helpful IDE, easy and permissible syntax (english keywords rather than symbols, case insensitive, optional parenthesis). You can do pretty much anything with it (console, desktop, website). And it provides an upgrade path to business users which only programming skills are usually toying with VBA macros.

</comment><comment><USER36> Wait wasn't JavaScript supposed to be most popular? Every device in the world shipping with at least one environment for JS?

Or does it not count because you don't distribute binaries?

<comment><USER37> I was thinking the same thing. Their google search language comparison is probably incorrect. For example no one includes the keyword "javascript" when searching for nodejs or react. Instead they should have used Stackoverflow's developer survey results.

From an article that analyzes Stackoverflow's developer survey results[1]:

      1. JavaScript
      2. HTML
      3. CSS
      4. SQL
      5. Java
      6. Bash/Shell
      7. Python
      8. C#
      9. PHP
      10. C++

[1] [https://www.businessinsider.com/14-most-popular- programming-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/14-most-popular-programming- languages-stack-overflow-developer-survey-2018-4)

<comment><USER35> But nodejs and react aren't programming languages. No one is including "c#" when searching for spreadsheetgear, asp.net or wpf even though they are .net libraries and frameworks.

<comment><USER38> Precisely the point. If you don't count searches for popular libraries and frameworks into their respective language buckets, the results are mostly bullshit, and at best probably reflect the undergrad curriculum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Never been a fan of Python , but all the comments about Java are legit.

I'm a big Java User mostly for Enterprise Apps & Services. A third of my code is boilerplate, Python really shine when it comes to making stuff concise but in the same way not having type is something that has always bothered me.

Dynamic typing is something I have accepted with JavaScript but for Python for some reason it has always bothered me...

<comment><USER40> Python is a strongly typed language.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=python+strongly+typed&t=fpas&ia=qa](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=python+strongly+typed&t=fpas&ia=qa)

<comment><USER41> Strong typing and dynamic typing are not mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER40> Exactly my point.

<comment><USER41> Sorry, I misunderstood. I thought the OP's reference to dynamic typing was what you were referring to, but they were actually the ones confusing static with weak typing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Just because people are searching for it doesn't mean it's popular. It means people are trying to answer a question about it. I'd posit there is more of a correlation between searches and newusers/issues/problems with the tool/language than how much it's being used. Stack Overflow is a better source for these stats anyway.

</comment><comment><USER43> I learned development with Python (after trying to grasp the concepts of C for a while) and I have to say that alongside .NET it is one of the easiest languages I had the pleasure to work with. So much so that after 10 years of mainly Javascript and Node.js work I have decided to go back to Python simply to make my life easier and be more productive.

</comment><comment><USER44> Python is great, I just wish it had JS-like object destructuring applied to dicts – so convenient!

<comment><USER45> If you can think it, it can be done. There is probably a library for it. It is just not standard.

<comment><USER44> That I have no doubts about, but having it in the standard lib would be awesome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Question: How is python on more mechanical systems, like robotics in such? Will we see a migration there besides web env?

</comment><comment><USER47> I found it funny/interesting that the title called it "coding" instead of "programming" language!

<comment><USER48> Yes, you can imagine the author of the article saying Nikon is the best for clicking, or that Gordon Ramsey is the best at chopping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> While pythons popularity is undeniable, Im sceptical to the article as it's based on the TIOBE index.

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm not surprised.

Python is a very easy language to learn and use. In the end, ease of use always wins.

<comment><USER51> I picked up Learn Python the Hard Way. Really enjoyed it. Was super easy even for someone new to programming.

But got lost when I reached the OOP part. This speedbreaker, along with a few other distractions effectively eroded my enthusiasm for coding

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Is it really?

Seems unlikely Python can be more popular than JavaScript/TypeScript since they are equivalent to Python and have the critical advantages of working on the web (and thus being known by all web developers) and having optimized engines in web browsers.

<comment><USER53> The computing world is a lot larger than the web, believe it or not. Python is huge in scientific computing, and is used for lots of server-side scripting. JS/TS don't have much of a presence in scientific computing beyond the web presentation layer, which can be generated from Python libraries. Python is used everywhere in science, and the ecosystem is incredibly rich.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Non-paywalled summary [http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2018/10/09/python- worlds-m...](http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2018/10/09/python-worlds-most- popular-language-in-2018/)

<comment><USER54> Hey Mikko!

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I started programming in python in 2010. It has been a good tool for solving a variety of problems.

I do have to wonder though. Is python popular right now because so many more people who have never programmed before are now starting to program?

I came from a biology background and my hatred for matlab following one quarter of exposure was sufficient to push me to python because that was what was offered as an alternative (taught by a gradstudent rather than the guy who funded the lead dev for the Octave project). There was no other choice. Julia didn't exist etc.

In the 8 years since I have written a lot of bad code have come to very much dislike python (though I still write it daily). The reason is not because of any of the visible failings of the language. It is due to the deep hidden inconsistencies, and unexpected and unpredictable behavior of the runtime (try using list comprehension in class scope (What is class scope you ask? Well. Python is a language for newbies... so by the time you can ask this question you are too invested to realize that you might have made a bad decision)).

Python is kludge on top of kludge without the diversity of implementations to take another path when someone calls bullshit. Python can get away with it because they have runtime hacks that let you sort of do what you want, but there will be a corner case that doesn't work because there is some unspoken and undocumented assumption that you are violating and will be duly punished for.

None of this is the language's fault. It's the runtime's. The python runtime (don't even bother with discussion about the GIL, which is a red herring and a bad case of Stockholm syndrome at the same time) is a mess. The language is fine, even great. But the fact that different scopes have radically different meaning and that expressions only work in certain scopes [0] is a complete nightmare.

My main emotional interaction with python is that if I follow the BDFL approved path, everything will work. If I stray from the fascistic predetermined happy path, good luck to me, I was on the wrong side of history TM. 99% of the code that I write that doesn't start as a class I end up rewriting as a class (probably because python doesn't have closures ...). Python lures you in with promises of easy to write easy to read, but when you get to that point where your actions are _no longer approved_ then then pain and sadness and rage are all you have left. I won't name the language that has almost the opposite interaction that I come to vastly prefer, but the emotional experience is radically different, I get extremely frustrated because I don't understand something in that language, and eventually come to realize it is because I did not understand something simple. In python I initially think that I am the one to blame, but after months or years, I finally realize that it is actually the language that is fundamentally broken and inconsistent and I have been mislead the entire time. I get frustrated because there no possible way for me to solve my problem by increasing my knowledge, I would literally have to fix a 4+ year old problem in the language (which I'm sure I couldn't do and that I'm sure has not been done for very good technical (debt) reasons), or find a library. There are a lot of libraries, but don't be fooled. Every library is a new language. Python is just the gatekeeping runtime.

Python will thrive for a large set of use cases, but when you hit a wall in python, the problem is not because you don't understand, it is because python is broken. That is not a happy realization. It is like growing up and realizing that people are actually evil, not that you were just misunderstanding them. Or more generously, that expecting people to be on their game 100% of the time is unrealistic. The difference is that python is that attractive person that is great at first impressions, but a disaster in the long term, and if I hadn't had the good fortune to meet a language that was super awkward for the first 6 months or so, but turned out to be a keeper, I'd believe that python was the only thing there is.

Python is and abusive language, and probably exists and is successful because things like perl also exist (and because it solves a whole bunch of practical problems). I'll keep using python for a long time, and the coming of age of pypy brings me great hope for the future, but there are classes of problems where I now go elsewhere. There are problems everywhere, but in some places they seem to be rational rather than contingent.

tl;dr Don't pick a language, pick a runtime.

0\. [https://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/62](https://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/62)

<comment><USER56> _" a language that was super awkward for the first 6 months or so, but turned out to be a keeper"_

I wonder, do you consider the language's awkwardness somehow related to its quality? Do you see it as a prerequisite to avoiding language shortcomings?

<comment><USER55> No. In this case that part of the analogy is actually not apt at all. To use another bad analogy I think my point is that the feeling awkwardness actually comes from the fact that I was doing the equivalent of holding the hammer by the head and trying to pound nails, only to later realize that I should have been holding the handle, and that there actually was a handle. In python it is like having a sledge hammer that you can't possibly hold by the head, but that no matter how hard you try you keep putting holes in the wall when you try to hang a picture.

Someone will say 'but why not use the tack hammer?' and, at that point I argue, I am no longer using python the language, but a whole new language that happens to look like python but that has a different runtime and a different set of assumptions. This even happens inside of the core language where `[d(a) for a in b if a == c]` can be valid in some scopes but not in others. The other language does the opposite, it says "you can't do that" and so I try to hold the hammer by its head and think that it is the language that is awkward because I don't know how to use it and that there is an fact a nail gun that is configurable along every dimension from nail diameter, to nail length, to insertion speed and pressure profile over the whole insertion timecourse, it is just not there in plain sight and I the first few times I used it I accidentally nailed my feet to the ground with railroad spikes.

I guess it is more that every time I learn more about python it is about what I have to NOT do in order to be safe. In the other case I learn what TO do in order to solve the problem the way I want to. Maybe the clearest example I can think of is lambda, where you have something that looks like a lambda, but that doesn't doesn't even work like the def (): that it copies due to the biases of the language designer. Honestly it would be better if Python just removed all the syntactic features that don't have generalized runtime support because that way you don't have to know which features you can use where. Sure, there is a use case for lambda in certain contexts, but if Python refuses to support lambda as a general abstraction that I can use everywhere, then it should be removed from the language, because including it leads to those hidden inconsistencies which require an enormous memory burden on the developer just to know what is not allowed. That is dead knowledge that in no way empowers and enriches the programming experience.

In essence the push for pythonic code is not just about maintainable code, it is about keeping people on the happy path without removing delimited abstractions, which is fine, except that the explicit solution to this problem would be to have `from __i_know_what_im_doing__ import lambda, comprehensions` so that the core language didn't misleadingly offer these delimited abstractions. Of course this means that many of my favourite features would be thrown out until some core technical challenges were resolved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> What about Asp.net?

<comment><USER58> It's not a language</comment></comment>


A Look inside Russian 28nm MIPS CPU – Baikal-T1 - <AUTHOR> https://zeptobars.com/en/read/baikal-t1-mips-Imagination-Technologies-P5600-Warrior <comment><USER2> Are the black areas in this picture [0] residue or destruction from removing the heatspreder? What about the large areas that are not as dark? Is that residue from the solder/thermalpaste?

I'm especially curious because the die shot from AMD's Ryzen has smaller but kind of similiar looking areas. [1] But there they look too uniform to be damage.

[0] [https://s.zeptobars.com/baikal-Si-HD.jpg](https://s.zeptobars.com/baikal- Si-HD.jpg)

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/le2atYb.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/le2atYb.jpg)

<comment><USER3> It's a flip chip design, so the heatspreader and thermal paste does not touch the part that you are seeing in these images. The areas that I think you are referring to (the big "blob" areas) are computer place and routed standard cells (primarily transistors) that the PNR tool brute forces efficient placement under certain constraints. While it does not produce the most pretty or clean design, it does a good enough job in optimizing for speed and area for most designs.

<comment><USER2> Yes, that are the areas I was reffering to. Thank you for the explanation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any one of those pictures should look great on my screensaver. Getting a bit tired of all those scenic sierra and half dome pictures.

</comment><comment><USER5> Judging from the title, I was expecting something like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll)

<comment><USER6> Your stereotypes aren't funny. Please check them at the door.

<comment><USER5> Oh come on, this was supposed to be a harmless tongue-in-cheek comment. I come from a country which is far behind Russia in terms of technology and I really didn't think anyone could take it as some way of mocking. My bad

<comment><USER7> I thought it was funny and particularly relevant because the article is written in a macro->micro progression in the tear-down. Hackernews does tend to want to stay dry. It reminds me of my second post where I got dinged trying to be funny. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10211855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10211855)

<comment><USER8> Also recursion theory. And Russian turtles. And recursion theory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Man, those die images are phenomenal.

</comment><comment><USER10> Are these only used in supercomputers, or is it common for PC's and workstations in Russia?

<comment><USER11> These are mostly for government structures, military etc. No one is using them (or, say, Elbrus) at home for PC's/workstations. Maybe only some geeks and just for fun. Usually you can't even buy them in normal computer stores (at least I have never seen any).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How can this be purchased? Imagination claims that CPU and associated GPU both support hardware virtualization.

<comment><USER13> Right now you have to be a legal entity (hope this is a correct term) to buy them, but I'm pretty sure that their board will be available for public soon: [https://habrahabr.ru/post/320840/](https://habrahabr.ru/post/320840/) (review in russian)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Russian", as in licensed from Imagination Technologies (UK) and manufactured in Taiwan.

<comment><USER15> Hey, chipmakers deserve more credit than that! I'm a chip architect and we license from IMG and we license IP from others as well, but then there's a shitton of work and plenty of things which can go wrong, costing loads of money and big delays. For those chip makers rolling their own IPs, this is rarely the biggest risk, the biggest risk is integrating everything into a working, marketable chip delivered more or less on time and within budget.

Incidentally, the reason why chip companies are worth so much more than IP companies is that the cost and risk of making chips is much larger. IP and chip companies are both fabless, if the costs and risks were about the same, then I don't see why profits wouldn't be about the same.

Now it could be that in this instance, marketability, schedule and budget weren't a particularly big deal, and maybe the performance is so bad that this in itself made a lot of problems disappear. But I think it's likely that someone still sweated quite some to make it work. (TFA claims they were the first to implement this CPU in silicon, BTW - again, could be easy enough if they didn't care about performance at all, or if Imagination did all the work on the synthesis scripts and the backend or held their hand, but if they wanted high performance and had to optimize synthesis and placement themselves, that's serious work. TSMC won't do it for you, either - they want a GDS-II file, and I don't think they outsourced the actual chip design.)

<comment><USER16> >I'm a chip architect

Many people with an ECE/CS background have probably had a FPGA + VHDL/Verilog course.

What are some additional skills needed to enter the chip industry?

<comment><USER15> Don't ask me, it was mostly luck in my case. In general I think in chips even more than elsewhere you want to work at a small place to get big responsibilities quickly, and from that angle, right now doesn't look like a great time to enter the industry, since FinFET mask costs are 10x what they used to be in bulk CMOS and so the expected payout needed to justify risking the capital went up a lot, so less projects starting small. Maybe if node shrinks stop and mask costs go back down and people will start making plenty of specialized lower-volume chips since you won't be able to win just by shrinking high-volume architectures, it will be a good time to enter the industry again.

<comment><USER3> > "... since FinFET mask costs are 10x what they used to be in bulk CMOS"

Not true, it is closer to 2 to 3x, and it is (slowly) getting cheaper. While it will take a long time (~3 years) for 14/16nm FinFET processes to reach price parity with what 28nm is now, it is dropping in price faster than when the 28nm generation came out due to the massive volumes of Apple, NVIDIA, etc.

It is looking like the 28nm generation will be a mainstay node, with continued investments by the major pure play fabs to keep bringing costs lower.

<comment><USER17> >> It is looking like the 28nm generation will be a mainstay node, with continued investments by the major pure play fabs to keep bringing costs lower.

Is that because it's essentially the last planar node? IIRC 20nm kinda sucked for both planar and FinFET so 28 is the last planar and 14/16 is looking like a long term node as well. Is that why you think 28 will be a mainstay?

I'm seeing 28,14 and 7 as pretty much stable and widespread over the next 10 years, with 14 and 7 being significant for cost/perf and cost/density reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting chip - under 5W usage and yet powerful enough for lots of things. I wonder what one of these with 8GB RAM and 1x10Gbe, 2x SATA connectors would use for power.

EDIT: the Broadcom chipset used in the Rasp. Pi 3 is still at 40nm process, according to what I can find. So not sure why people would question the 28nm process' usefulness.</comment>


IPv4 endgame; follow the money - <AUTHOR> http://crookedtimber.org/2011/03/17/ipv4-endgame-following-the-money/

<comment><AUTHOR> I nice behind the scenes look at the politics behind the internet. Not pretty at all.</comment>


Stuff To Do - prioritize and share tasks, time tracking (beta) - <AUTHOR> http://stufftodo.dedasys.com <comment><AUTHOR> Still quite beta, doesn't work with IE, but I think I have hit on a few good ideas with it. It's certainly an area with a lot of competitors though, so I'm not sure how far I'll take it. Thoughts?

<comment><USER2> You should try WorkHack.com, it is a todo list compatible with IE and firefox.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't worry, I'm busy working on Stuff To Do right now to make it work with IE.

Also, some extras that Stuff To Do has:

* Groups - share tasks with other people in your work group with simple drag/drop.

* Time tracking. Keep track of how much time you've spent on each thing.

* Reports. No fancy graphs, yet, but it does break things down by day and task over preselected time periods.

<comment><USER2> Cool, good luck, also consider reading http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_It_Just_Doesnt_Matter.php

I recommend reading the whole book "Getting Real" (free from 37signals) especially chapter 5 on feature selection.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've read the book. Basically, the features I have are the minimum I needed where I first rolled out the system (my day job). We had to have something that lets people share tasks, and keep track of time. Like they also say in the book, I realize those features aren't for everyone, so I'm happy to concentrate on the niche of people who need them. At work, they really like the system, so I'm confident they're out there.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


RescueTime (YC W08) (finally) Releases Project Time Tracking - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rescuetime.com/2009/11/13/rescuetime-for-project-time-tracking-finally/

<comment><USER2> I was all very excited, but as it turned out the launch was clearly premature.

First off, the blog post does not link to pricing page or even the product page.

Second, the price on the pricing page (which is here <http://www.rescuetime.com/solo>) is not related to the prices you see when you click through - some of them are much lower (<https://www.rescuetime.com/signup/solo?plan_id=38>), some are higher (<https://www.rescuetime.com/signup/solo?plan_id=29>) and some are in the middle of the volume-discount table (<https://www.rescuetime.com/signup/pace>) but not matching any particular price point. In addition, the first page does not render correctly in firefox 3.5 on Mac OS.

Next, the ad copy at the bottom of the consumer plan page (<https://www.rescuetime.com/solo>) extols virtues of business plans which was very confusing.

I have sent an email about the preceding problems to tech support on Saturday and received no reply yet.

So this all should have alarmed me, but the problem was so bad for me I rushed in and punched my credit card number. What did I get?

The project tracking didn't work. I created project GeeTasks, specified GeeTasks as a keywoard and starting browsing my site GeeTasks.com and using XCode project GeeTasks to code my iPhone app GeeTasks (XCode displays the project name in the title). None of that time was accounted for - my project time is empty. I did get hour-by-hour accounting of what I did and there I could see "XCode - GeeTasks" line for XCode, so data collector seems to work.

I have sent an email to tech support about that and received a reply that said they are aware of the problem and working on it.

Last night, all tracking data has disappeared from my account. I have sent an email to tech support and received no reply as of yet.

It doesn't help that Tony bragged about steaming full speed ahead without doing backups: <http://twitter.com/webwright/status/5695689067> I don't care how confident you are, please do backups on a regular schedule.

Lack of updates about mentioned problems from the blog or twitter is also not encouraging.

<comment><USER3> The backup tweet was a joke-- Of COURSE we do backups. I just thought it was funny that we were doing it on Friday the 13th. Good lord, man.

We probably should have set better expectations (maybe a beta label on every new feature)-- we're a release-early-release-often shop. Jump into a new feature on the DAY of the release, and you should expect bugs (potentially show-stopping ones, but hopefully not). Jump into it in the first WEEK, and we'll probably still be ironing out little wrinkles. Jump in next year and you could STILL run into a snag-- we're happy to help;

Thanks for the thoroughness-- some of the above stuff is helpful (though I tend to think that if that was your motivation you would've just emailed us). I'm certainly sorry for any delay in response. On a weekend after a big release we can sometimes fall behind a bit (the support team IS the dev team).

<comment><USER4> The challenge is that these new features drive a bill that your customer sends to their customer. I am a little surprised by this response to problems that could undermine your customer's business relationships.

I am also surprised that none of your current customers would give feedback or comments on how the release worked for them: why not just deploy it to current customers who want to use it (since it's appears to be free to them) and make this announcement after you have had more than a week's testing? Or was that also a joke?

You should consider appending the "jump" sentences (e.g. "jump into a new feature...") to your announcement blog post so that new visitors are aware of your approach to developing and delivering software.

<comment><USER3> Yaw, I agree in hindsight-- the language should have been more "beta-ey" to warn off the risk-averse. We did have a small collection of private beta users, FWIW. There are some scattered issues, but the release is pretty solid.

These new features CAN drive a bill (though most of the users were surveyed who were interested in this feature were NOT billable folks, interestingly enough). Given that the feature has existed for less than 1 business day, I think the chance of undermining business relationships is pretty darn slim.

Did I do something to offend you, Sean? I can't QUITE tell if your comment is snarky or not.

<comment><USER4> No snark, concern that your new application has more serious consequences of failure: sending a client an inaccurate bill is much less recoverable than a poor understanding of how I use my time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Apart from the launch problems how was the product?

It didn't show promise to me as it doesn't integrate into my work-flow. The way I track my time is by recording the start time into a spreadsheet and then the end time. Later I tally up the number and not only record how much time I spent on project GeeTasks but also what work item I was doing. This is very disciplining and should help me plan future work with greater accuracy. For example, now I know that I spent 8.3 hours to localize my GeeTasks iPhone app into the first foreign language, 8 hours for second two languages and 2 hours for the fourth language - clearly I am getting better at this localization thing. My biggest problem is that sometimes I get excited about a project and dive in head-first without recording when I started on it. The end time is usually clear from source control logs, emails etc. As a reuslt I feel uneasy about accuracy of some of my project data and I feel it may taint all of it. So I was very excited about prospect of autmotically tracking everything that I did.

Alas, RescueTime doesn't seem to help with that - it records in a given hour how much time was spent here or there. In other words it's too coarse for my goals as it does not allow tracking workitems. Given that the project tracking didn't work I could not evaluate the UI for it, but the regular tracking UI was not quite what I wanted to see - summary display was too coarse while the drill-down was too detailed with each few-second interval being reported.

<comment><USER5> i totally agree, though i'd phrase it as: RescueTime is too granular, whereas i want something with low but abstract resolution.

i manually track every hour of my day into categories such as startup, sleep, professional-fun, social, sports or waste.

1) some of these can't be tracked by computer usage; eg, sleep, social, sports and unprofessional-fun which includes making music and reading books.

2) when i'm doing work i don't want to sift through which websites i'm visiting. localhost:8000 could mean i'm doing startup work or i'm doing a professional-fun side0project. i visit hundreds of online blogs and APIs for help with coding, but i also procrastinate via hn.

i use iCal to mark my time and leave notes, though i can see using a spreadsheet work as well if not tracking 100% of your time.

i wrote python scripts to analyze my iCal files and create weekly stats and graphs:

<http://github.com/diN0bot/iCal-Analyzer>

<comment><USER2> Yes, I do have a problem with not tracking 100% of my time. It started when I still had a day job, so I was curious how much time per week I spent on my startup (as it turned out 21 hours/week, 20 LOC/hour). It worked well back then but now I need something more comprehensive to track all my time.

Oh wait, I figured it out! You know whats needed? I need a low-bandwidth screen recorder that would run for the whole day. In the evening I would replay it at 10x and see what I was doing and properly account for it. I'm off to check if Camtasia or ScreenFlow can be coerced into low-fidelity...

<comment><USER5> ha, that's not bad, though it still has the problem of not accounting for: \- non-computer time \- conceptual activities (eg, tabbing between Eclipse, Terminal, Emacs and FF is all part of project A for these hours, and project B for those hours)

i'd love to see a blog post or open source code if your project works out. good luck.

edit: interesting you wanted to know time/wk and loc/hr

i'd be curious to know more metrics people are interested in.

personally, i like to see weekly deltas in addition to averages, as well as ratios between categories. i'm still figuring out the sweet stuff, tho. for instance, i haven't found "activity length" or "activity switching" useful, but i keep thinking it might be meaningful.

finally, i sometimes also track my subjective states, eg satisfied, motivated, anxious, down, tired. it would be interesting to detect patterns in both activity and state and then see if they correlate. the ultimate goal is to determine what i can do to promote good states or lessen down time.

i've worked on many projects in this area (mostly hobbies), including a full- time startup right now, so if this is an area you're interested in working in let me know.

<comment><USER2> So the $100 Screenflow records screen at a rate of about 6.5 Mb/minute, 388Mb/hour or 4.6Gb for 12 hours. That's pretty good! There is no built-in way to replay at 10x speed, at least not without exporting. However, I can actually drag the slider along the timeline, so it's kind of manual playback. It works!

I have already discovered that I spend 14 minutes banging out my previous reply in this thread. No wonder I don't have any time!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm checking out the product in a few minutes.

One thing I think that's missing from big-project tracking (and time tracking) is Realtime. I'd love stuff to push ajaxwise into a page, even if I'm on it already. I need to see what's happening now, just not when i refresh.</comment>


Take Away Harvard's Nonprofit Status - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/take-away-harvards-nonprofit-status.html

<comment><USER2> After reading the article, I guess I don't really have an opinion on the tax.. but is it really reasonable to tax endowments over $1B, if the school has $4.2B in operating expenses? Seems like they should be able to keep a larger buffer than 3 months.

If the problem is "hoarding," then why have a fixed amount at all. Why not 1 year of operating expenses? That would encourage all educational institutions to spend more every year on ongoing expenses (like research).

<comment><USER3> Agree in principle, but 1 year seems low. Isn't the purpose of an endowment primarily to generate ongoing income?

I think somewhere in the neighbor hood of 20 years worth of expenses would be more reasonable. (Assuming a conservative 5% return on investment, the endowment would not be taxed on capital required to generate 1 year of operating expenses in income each year.)

Alternatively, perhaps a tax could be levied only on any income to the endowment beyond 1 year's worth of operating expenses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author notes (a) ways Harvard could spend its money that might have more public benefit and (b) that other non-profits are more deserving of donations. Even if all true, that doesn't mean it should be stripped of its non-profit status. Perfect management to optimize public benefit isn't the standard for whether an organization gets non-profit status.

The more interesting argument is about what organizational traits our government _should_ require in order to be blessed with special treatment.

</comment><comment><USER5> Put more abstractly, "we should take money from successful nonprofit A even though A has done nothing improper because I disagree with A's goals and/or methods and think it's wrong that people continue to give A money."

That's ludicrous. The hubristic desire to control others is extreme progressivism's worst attribute.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a bad idea. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other well endowed schools spend more money per student than they receive from tuition. If they were for- profit institutions, they would be further incentivized to raise tuition.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't think there's much popular understanding how non-charitable an organization can be and still qualify as a non-profit.

Essentially, to be a non-profit all you need is have a purpose other than profits and use your income to further that purpose. The purpose made to increase the profits of businesses in a certain industry and you still qualify. There's nothing in the definition that say "you must be good, benevolent and not greedy", all you need is purpose.

See: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization) etc.

<comment><USER8> > I don't think there's much popular understanding how non-charitable an > organization can be and still qualify as a non-profit.

OTOH, most people when they talk about "non-profit status" and, particularly, taking it away, are actually talking about "status as a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity to whom donations are tax deductible as well as the charity's own income being untaxed". Either because the equate "non-profit" with the more specific type of non-profit, or because they are talking about the specific non-profit status of a named institution that happens to be a 501(c)(3), so that referring to that particular institution's non-profit status (rather than non-profit status in general) is a reference to status as a 501(c)(3) specifically.

As Harvard University _is_ a 501(c)(3), this clearly applies in this specific case. Context matters.

<comment><USER9> Thank you, but I don't think you actually explained why Harvard fails to be a 501(c)(3)?

<comment><USER8> Probably because I don't think it does fail.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Oliver Sacks Reading List - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/08/the-oliver-sacks-reading-list/401993/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> His essay "Sabbath" is a graceful look at what that tradition meant to him. It has inspired me to start a practice of "Technological Sabbath", putting away items of technology each Saturday evening at sunset and not picking them back up until Sunday at sunset. This has allowed me to focus more on family, friends and meaningful activities outside my normal viewpoint. Definitely recommend reading it and other works of Sacks.

</comment><comment><USER3> "To See and Not See" is missing from this list:

[http://www.willamette.edu/~mstewart/whatdoesitmean2see.pdf](http://www.willamette.edu/~mstewart/whatdoesitmean2see.pdf)

This piece always makes me think of how older generations approach technology, and its a good read if your building for a demographic that has low technology exposure.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've read that the best way to rewire your brain at an old age is to always learn new things. This keeps brain cell activity high and stimulates the creation of new synapsis</comment>


NBC Ruins The Fun, Fires Employee Over 'What's The Internet' Video - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/04/nbc-ruins-the-fun-fires-employee-over-whats-the-internet-video/

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems like everyone has to watch what they say and do these days. With brand reputation and social monitoring, the big brands aren't messing around. I can see both pros & cons to these type of policies at larger brands.

</comment><comment><USER2> buzzkill</comment>


Ask HN: How many hours do you work per week? - <AUTHOR>

I have always been very curious about how many hours typical startup founders work in a week, as well as what constitutes "work".
I'm a sophomore in college bootstrapping my startup with a co-founder, and it's now summer vacation, so I work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week -- with 1 day off in which I don't do anything startup-related.
"Work" for me includes planning stuff, coding, email, investigating startups, reading "how to" articles on blogs, viewing slideshows on my industry, even reading TechCrunch and listening to interviews on Mixergy (I try to minimize those, but I treat them as part of the necessary learning process in building a startup).
What about you? How many hours do you spend every week building your startup, what do you do (provide a breakdown if possible)? <comment><USER2> 4 hours a day, 4 days a week. Then I get drunk. 8 hours a day, 3 days a week.</comment>


The New Failwhale: Twitter Homepage - <AUTHOR> http://giantrobots.thoughtbot.com/2009/7/31/twitter-redesign-fail <comment><USER2> The author completely misses the point of the redesign. The point is to brand Twitter AWAY from being a tool to update your friends and towards being the world's cultural epicenter. There's a reason Twitter deliberately took away the "you" and focused on the world. They're trying to convince the people who don't think they have anything to say to join.

It's easy to not use Twitter because you have nothing to say. It's harder to ignore Twitter if it's THE place to go for all of the world's events.

<comment><USER3> There is precious little news that I want to receive in real time, for me the s/n ratio on twitter is simply too large.

Even the 'best' twitterers can't seem to control the urge to spout junk on a fairly regular basis. Too much stream-of-consciousness for my taste. Better filtering would go a long way towards making twitter more usable for the general public.

<comment><USER4> _shrug_

My colleague does a twitter search on his subway stop every morning. A bunch of tweets complaining about crowded platforms means he takes a different route. I like the redesign. It's about time they recongized that _using_ the great twitter feed is more useful to _most_ people than personal microblogging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the new home page, but why don't I see it when I'm logged in?

It seems that someone might be confused by twitter since the search focus disappears after you create an account.

</comment><comment><USER6> He says this makes Twitter more confusing for new users, and I'd argue that is becoming less important.

My Grandma knows about Twitter, which puts the total number of websites she can list offhand to 2, the other site being Google.

</comment><comment><USER7> The search is absolutely useless without the status updates. I don't mind them getting away from the status updates some but they cannot completely abandon them.

</comment><comment><USER8> I like your popular tags better. Twitter went away from "tell us what your doing" - to a more - "share what is happening anywhere in the world" - I think they and everyone is tired of "Froot loops were great this morning, now in I-40

<comment><USER9> Still, the whole point of the service is to broadcast "you" to the world. That is, what's happening around you, affecting you etc.

To that regard, I think this guy's redesign conveys that message better to someone who has no idea what twitter is. People who already have a twitter account will almost never see this page. Thus, it should be focused entirely on acquiring new users.

<comment><USER10> Like Mystalic said above, Twitter is purposely trying to get away from the status updates.

<comment><USER9> Then, what is Twitter without status updates? I don't see how they can "get away from them". An Iranian at a rally is just as much "updating their status" as they 35 year old who hasn't left their basement all day.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can I improve my email deliverability through Google Apps? - <AUTHOR>

I use Google Apps for my start-up's emails. I've heard a lot of reports on my emails not making it to the inbox, getting marked as spam, or just getting deleted by spam systems. I've added the SPF recommended by Google but the problem still persists. <comment><USER2> Does the problem happen with all email accounts or just some? (microsoft servers such as live.com and hotmail.com notoriously delete and reject valid emails when others do not).

Besides spf, make sure that you comply with can-spam guidelines. Ensure that your DNS entries are correct and that the url that you are sending from @example.com resolves to the same ip address as that url example.com. Here is some more info <http://postmaster.msn.com/Guidelines.aspx> . I had to add sender ID to my dns to get hotmail to accept forwarded messages from my disposable email service <http://whyspam.me>

[http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/technologies/senderid...](http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/technologies/senderid/resources.mspx#ESE)

get back with some more info, and i'll help you troubleshoot, seeing as how email is my current specialty.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for that information. Since I use google apps for my email, the emails originate from Google's servers and I cant make their IP's resolve to my domain, any ideas? The domain: aonic.net

I'll definitely check out sender ID.

Edit: it's usually AOL, and company/custom domain email addresses that seem to be blocking me

<comment><USER2> Hmm. i've never sent anything to AOL (that i know of). There is some more info about google apps and DNS settings here: <http://forum.slicehost.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=291></comment></comment></comment>


Synthetic biology lures Silicon Valley investors - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/synthetic-biology-lures-silicon-valley-investors-1.18715 <comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting to consider what synthetic biology actually is in comparison to what investors think it is. The term is sexy, and the reality of it can be, too-- but only with advanced scientific understanding, which investors absolutely never (and I do mean never) have. I'd give "synthetic biology" a lifetime of two more years as a buzzword.

I work at a synthetic biology company, and largely the term is ill-defined even here. We make constructs that as a whole are not in nature, yet the separate pieces are more or less unchanged from their natural counterparts. Is this actually synthetic, or merely grafting of odd bits together for a new purpose?</comment>