Ask HN: So what was Knuth's "earthshaking announcement"? - <AUTHOR> Knuth's mysterious announcement at the TeX user group gathered some interest on here, but even several hours later no specifics about it seem to be anywhere online. Can someone who was there or found out about it share what it was about? <comment><USER2> I did a quick twitter trawl an hour or so after, and it seems like it was actually a joke: a new successor to TeX, using XML, arbitrary precision, and auto-layout.

Also, my favourite was this one: <http://twitter.com/elmindreda/statuses/17444964495> "Anyone looking to profile Twitter users can easily identify all programmers today simply by searching for "Knuth"."

<comment><USER3> Knuth's sense of humor shouldn't be underestimated-- there are a lot of great jokes hidden in the index of TAOCP, among other places.

And, of course, his first publication was in Mad Magazine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I tweeted about it from the event but the corresponding news.yc submission got killed.

<http://twitter.com/jeyjey>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476674>

<comment><USER5> I truly worry about the overzealous killing of yc news stories. I can't be the only one who's noticed a recent uptick in the number of stories killed for no apparent reason.

<comment><USER6>
      1. It's a tweet submitted as 'news'.
      2. It seems that the 'earth shattering' announcement was boring.

I think there's a couple of good reasons why it got killed.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately, when they killed it I assumed that it was because it was a hoax submission. It was news that this community was waiting days (months?) to hear about, so, although perhaps not a full news story, it was certainly of interest here. And probably of more interest than "X reasons I love/hate Y" for a lot of us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I the only one who's a little disappointed?

<comment><USER9> In retrospect, if Knuth had an actual "earthshaking announcement" to make, he probably would have pre-announced it a bit more prominently, or not at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Knuth played a joke and "announced" iTeX.

<http://search.twitter.com/search?q=knuth>

<comment><USER11> The problem is, now if he really proves P=NP, nobody will believe him.

<comment><USER12> If Knuth announces that he proved P=NP a lot of people will believe him.

<comment><USER11> That was kind of the joke...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You can see a video of the talk, uploaded with Knuth's permission, here:

<http://river-valley.tv/an-earthshaking-announcement/>

</comment><comment><USER14> TeX 3.15

<comment><USER15> Tex 6.28

<comment><USER16> Tex Tau

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A "joke".

</comment><comment><USER18> I wasn't aware adults actually used twitter. I thought it was for 12 year old girls

<comment><USER19> There are twits of all ages.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: SQL engine reclaiming space from DELETEs - <AUTHOR> Both PostgreSQL and MySQL are poor in that regard, especially PostgreSQL: after many DELETEs/UPDATEs, the disk space is not released to the OS, and the re-use of the space by the DB engine is often not working well due to the fragmentation. The only option is rebuilding/DROPping the whole table which requires downtime.
I'm essentially looking for an SQL engine that would be suitable as a storage for a queue server. I would like it to release the freed disk space to the OS immediately, even if this requires making extra I/O.
I see that MariaDB comes with multiple engines, maybe some of them could work like that?
I know that Amazon's Aurora is even worse than raw MySQL/PostgreSQL. <comment><USER2> Juggle tables to meet your use case. Switch queueing to new table, wrap up work in old table, drop old table.

Or switch to RabbitMQ if you can (you mentioned queueing, which Rabbit is designed for), which can journal to disk on a per queue basis if necessary.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/sql- vacuum.html](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/sql-vacuum.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Regular VACUUM only marks space as available for reuse. VACUUM FULL returns space to the OS but it requires an exclusive lock and a multi-hour run for a large table.

<comment><USER4> Shouldn't plain vacuum be enough? The space is going to be reused for new items anyway, it won't take more of the space not already reserved by the database?

On another topic, do you require using a SQL database for your queue?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Shouldn't plain vacuum be enough? The space is going to be reused for new > items anyway, it won't take more of the space not already reserved by the > database?

In theory, yes. In practice, I've seen a lot of bloat being preserved despite using aggressive autovacuum settings. I'm guessing this is due to fragmentation?

> On another topic, do you require using a SQL database for your queue?

I'd need some way to browse the queue and select items for processing using arbitrary queries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When delete or update records, the database engine basically marks the space as available, then the next record will be filled in.

Because the file system only allows append or update content on a file. To release the disk space, it will need to completely rewrite the whole data file, which will cause much more things to handle and time.

So it is not a way to design a database engine

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, you're describing a typical design of a DB. I'm looking for an alternative design. I'm guessing it could use multiple small files (a few MBs) and merge them to avoid fragmentation.

<comment><USER6> Maybe check out TokuDB, I haven't tried it myself, but it has things like tokudb_cleaner_iterations [1] and tokudb_cleaner_period.

There is also MyRocks based on RocksDB fork of LevelDB, but LevelDB is piece of garbage, not sure about how much RocksDB fork fixes it though.

[1] [https://www.percona.com/doc/percona- server/5.6/tokudb/tokudb...](https://www.percona.com/doc/percona- server/5.6/tokudb/tokudb_variables.html#tokudb_cleaner_iterations)

<comment><USER7> TokuDB won't release the allocated blocks (it will reorganize its internal blocks to achieve max compression but as far as I know and saw won't release what it has allocated previously, but I might be wrong :) ).

<comment><AUTHOR> And it looks like TokuDB is no longer developed?

<comment><USER7> Noooooo, please tell me that it's not true - it's the foundation of many of my experiments delivering huge performance and flexibility compared to anything else...!

Where did you read/hear it?

<comment><USER7> TokuDB still active - last bugfix was on 29.Nov.2018:

[https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-server/5.6/release- notes...](https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-server/5.6/release- notes/Percona-Server-5.6.42-84.2.html)

List of which TokuDB version is integrated in which MariaDB version:

[https://mariadb.com/kb/en/meta/tokudb- versions/](https://mariadb.com/kb/en/meta/tokudb-versions/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In SQLite you can use the VACUUM command to minimize the disk space needed. (And from another comment, it look like PostgreSQL also has a VACUUM command, but I do not use PostgreSQL and do not know much about that)

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/introducing- pg_squeez...](https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/introducing-pg_squeeze-a- postgresql-extension-to-auto-rebuild-bloated-tables/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Vacuum?</comment>


New RFS: One Million Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-rfs-one-million-jobs <comment><USER2> Creating jobs is a strange goal. The effective, simplest and most probable solution is working inefficiently. Working efficiently, on the other hand, typically eliminates jobs.

All politicians talk about creating jobs. 99% of the time it leads to bad regulation that creates jobs through incentivizing inefficiency. People of course will vote for politicians that advocate job creation because people want jobs. The extreme form of this is ludditism.

People miss the whole point of companies. The goal should never be providing jobs but creating value. If a company could be made automatic and all it's employees jobless, then that would obviously be positive. The company would still create the same value to society, but would require less people.

The main counter-argument is that those who advocate job creation only advocate "necessary jobs or "meaningful jobs". In practise that doesn't pan out. It's simply a backwards way of trying to create more products and services.

<comment><USER3> I also fundamentally disagree with this post. My goal as an entrepreneur is to eliminate a million jobs. I am reading a book about the Shipping container, and it massively reduced the number of jobs for longshoremen and merchant marines.

I can also say that working at a big company that is people's mentality. They want to manage a lot of people. That's their goal. Not to create value. And imho the results are often poor.

I think it would be great for society if there were less jobs and people were able to pursue more creative endeavors than menial jobs. imho the goal should be to find a way for people to meet their basic needs without needing a job. NOT to create tons of jobs.

<comment><USER4> I think you are confused with his proposal. YC is looking for any company that can create demand that requires 1 millions workers to fulfill it.

It is not to create a huge company. It has nothing to do with eliminating jobs. It has nothing to do with provide basic living standard.

For example, if a new technology that allow us to regrow part of organs easily, but it requires living persons to carry the organs within their bodies until organs mature to be transplanted. Those people may have a job as 'organ incubator'.

<comment><USER3> My goal would is (as an investor in Organovo) to regrow organs and it's agnostic to whether it creates, eliminates or displaces workers.

<comment><USER4> Of course you should not. But in the end, you need other people who are willing to trade something for your investment.

Your investment would be valued 0 if no one wants or needs it. And valuation is how much they are willing to pay for it.

So in the end. I think creating jobs is just a mask for 'creating demand for new things for people have no new creating wealth'. Since total aggregation of time of lives of oligarchs and their families are much limited than total populations. So it is better to create demand for consumer market.

But of course, if one day, oligarchs have technology to enable them to live forever, they will have unlimited time to live and my argument won't sustain under that condition.

<comment><USER5> This is a bizarre tangent. An oligarch could just enslave people through brute force or more subtle means of mental and psyhcological manipulation into working feverishly in a self-defeating system of exploitation.

Is that "creating demand" for labour? Or for the products?

Is demand for slave labour a good kind of demand?

<comment><USER4> It is a valid argument. If an oligarch desires to enslave the rest of human being for its own amusement. And the rest of human beings are willing to trade their precious time of lives with the oligarch by being enslaved.

But I feel if the oligarch overplays the enslavement, everyone can choose to commit suicide and having no pain anymore in their lives. Then the oligarch will have no one to play the game with.

So to keep the system working, the oligarch has to fulfill desires of people.

My main point is the most precious wealth for everyone is the time of their lives. And we all trade our time in lives with other people in either products or services. Progress in technologies has enabled us to enjoy growing purchase power of our time and enable us with more fulfillment of desires. But for the moment the whole economy system somewhat gets stuck and we are having problems to figure out what demand can we create to allow people to trade with. Even an oligarch has to trade wealth for desires.

<comment><USER5> "An oligarch desires to enslave the rest of human being for its own amusement. And the rest of human beings are willing..."

That's not how _slavery_ works.

"I feel if the oligarch overplays the enslavement, everyone can choose to commit suicide"

Again, this is not historically aware.

=====

I will agree with you on a broader point, which I think you've left unsaid: that everything you want in life is almost always in the hands of someone else already.

For example, if you want a thing someone else has already owned it (or its component parts). If you want a friend, someone else has already been in a relationship with them (either earlier friends, or their family etc). If you want to build anything you need tools, and raw materials, and other resources that somebody else has already found, claimed, owned or handled.

And in that logical sense, "success" is nothing more than taking what (some) other people have already got.

But you've over-abstracted the point to much:

*Even an oligarch has to trade wealth for desires."

True, but this is still consistent will chattle slavery.

I may "trade my wealth" for weapons, and food, and the means to keep you chained to the cotton field. But that says nothing of the way in which the threat of violence co-erces you into doing my bidding--that type of coercive consent is an interesting but ultimately tangentially related academic rabbit hole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would not like to use Uber as an example of creating jobs.

I see them as KFC in the egg farming world - pushing all the capital expenditure and risk onto smallest individuals whilst then aggregating what should be a distributed market.

I think any company capable of directly claiming to create one million jobs will be this abusive on a massive global scale - not something I would want to invest in personally.

I can imagine plenty of ways to create a million jobs - invent fusion power, invent a foldaway surgery theatre, but they are not things that capture the value back to the originator (that is the genuine use for patents).

So this seems like "build a market platform, make sure it is not interoperable, find a business model that makes individuals dependant on you, while pretending they are businesses". I think I understand what YC is reaching for here - there is a coming hollowing out of jobs, somehow we need to create new jobs. I agree - but a business model that creates new jobs _and_ captures that surplus seems to me abusive - or it is a marketplace open to competition from other marketplaces and that's rarely a way to make money. So far.

Edit: clarify as much as I can this early before coffee

<comment><USER7> How many Uber drivers have you talked to? Every driver I've asked has been quite happy with the job. While they might avoid open criticism, often they've provided sufficient details about their other or previous job that it's clear that this is an improvement.

<comment><USER6> As many as I have chicken farmers, long haulage truckers and other "capital at the lowest rung" industries. Which is one.

But that's not the point - Uber has no obligation to their drivers to provide work, or a fixed amount of pay not does it want to operate in an environment where it Ilis forced to do that. And history shows that if you have all the capital requirements at the bottom of the ladder (you own the car / the chicken shed / the 17wheeler) then the bottom of the ladder will keep cutting its own throat.

Uber would not be in business if it owned the capital.

What surprises me is the taxi firms do not seem to be fighting back with a (open) app of their own

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> most people seemed to have picked up on this, but we aren't looking for a company that wants to have one million _employees_.

i can envision a future where a million people drive for uber, or where someone creates a healthcare platform that lets individuals find people who need care, or an education platform that matches up people who want to learn with people who want to each, or...

<comment><USER9> So it's "a million jobs with no healthcare or retirement benefits," then.

<comment><USER10> How about a company that figures out how to provide _very_ affordable high- quality health care to large numbers of people, so they aren't dependent on an employer for their healthcare? That would allow many more people to become free-lancers, or to work for companies too small to get good health insurance prices. Such affordable healthcare might make it possible for a million more people to work for startups.

Such a company might not be feasible in the current regulatory climate, but some people say the same about Uber.

<comment><USER11> You are describing universal health care.

<comment><USER12> I read it more like a machine in everyone's basement, next to the water heater. It would diagnose illnesses, set broken bones, stitch up wounds, and inject you with all the drugs you need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work." Bertrand Russell [http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html](http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html)

<comment><USER14> Great quote! Job creation is such a short-sighted goal, when we should really be looking at an organised transition to less and less work. Things are going that way anyway, but in an entirely uncontrolled fashion which will lead (perhaps is leading already?) to a lot of social problems. Instead of attempting to go down _that_ path, Y Combinator just wants to prop up the existing system it seems?

<comment><USER15> The RFS talks about sparking a million jobs, not necessarily a million full- time, long-commute, high-stress jobs. They could be the sorts of opportunities where the takers can get a fairly painless way to cover some bills for 15-20 hours a week from home.

Or a way of handling job sharing so that a million full-time jobs are just as easily managed by two million people who'd prefer to reduce their hours. (People going on maternity/paternity leave would love an opportunity like this.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I know "jobs" are a goal with good intentions, but I have to disagree. While it's political suicide to claim otherwise, aiming for job creation simply plays into the idea that more jobs are the things we desire, when what we really want is a comfortable existence and a sense of fulfilment.

What new consensus might we converge on if we continue to automate away jobs quicker than retraining can reasonably be expected?

Personally, I'm excited when technology can expose the lie that 40-hour-per- week paying jobs are required to be a contributing member of society. Unfortunately, exposing that lie likely involves some period of high unemployment before a critical mass of people start to reject the premise that holding a job equates to worthiness in society.

I've recently come across the term "accelerationism" on HN, and it seems to at least partially describe the above position:

> Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the > insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to > protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate > its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.

</comment><comment><USER17> edit: To answer my own question, I guess it has to be a "job platform" like EBay or Uber, and not a company (as sama is saying). Otherwise the economics are quite challenging.

There is the distinction that EBay sellers get most of the revenue; EBay just takes a cut and thus doesn't have to have a huge amount of revenue itself.

\-----

Doesn't this mean the company has to make more than $50 billion in revenue? Assuming a $50K wages a year, 1M jobs takes $50B to pay for.

Do the jobs have to be in the US?

Seems like an interesting idea, but my first thought is that you would want to find some way NOT to pay $50B a year... that would be a lot of profits. More profits than the vast majority of companies make.

It seems risky because it's hard to imagine getting to 1M jobs in less than 10 or 20 years. But in 10 or 20 years, computers will have gotten a lot better at the things that they are currently poor at. It's very hard to predict, but it will change rapidly.

Did EBay create 1M jobs? i.e. a significant number of people have made their entire living on Ebay. I think it might have been on the order of 1M, but not sure.

edit: [http://investor.ebay.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=170073](http://investor.ebay.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=170073)

Ebay in 2005 claims 724K as primary or secondary source of income. If I had to guess it would be more like 72K "jobs", as 1/10th of those people might have Ebay as their primary source. That was 2005, but I don't think the order of magnitude has changed in the last 9 years.

<comment><USER18> _Did EBay create 1M jobs?_

This is pretty difficult to determine, if you want _net_ jobs created, not merely people who currently make a living selling via eBay. For example, when a consignment store closes and that business moves to eBay, those are jobs shifting from one location to another, not really net-created jobs. Figuring out how to net that out is pretty complex, and I'm not sure solid enough data is available to determine to what portion of eBay's business are new transactions, versus existing merchants shifting sales channels.

This is perhaps even more clear with Amazon Marketplace, which has a number of booksellers making a living selling used books full-time there, but probably a number actually amounting to _fewer_ employees than have been displaced by the same Amazon's impact on brick-and-mortar used book stores. Many of the full- time sellers are even direct continuations of such used-book stores, which have laid off most of their staff and "gone virtual", transitioning from meatspace to online storefronts. (This isn't to say that Amazon Marketplace doesn't produce other advantages, but creating net new jobs in the used-book sector is probably not one of them.)

<comment><USER19> To further complicate things, you also have to count the _customers_ of the firm in question. Amazon made certain things cheaper, and there are probably at least a few marginal businesses out there that can exist because of it.

A similar argument goes for eBay -- there are probably entrepreneurs out there who make a living in part because they can use eBay to buy things. This includes obvious stuff like resellers, but also less obvious stuff like a business that just uses eBay products as one of many inputs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A lot of people are treating this like a genie wish, or an unreflective prize awarded to the first team to accomplish this by any means, or something...

This is a _request for startups_ with a particular feature. Funding them still needs to seem like a sufficiently good idea. Somehow, I don't imagine Sam leaping to fund slave labor(!), or even less-obviously-absurd things that only technically meet the requirement while not actually doing so in a meaningful way or having any chance at a profit.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is moving the wrong direction. We want to use automation to reduce the number of jobs, not to create makework for it's own sake. This is the key statement:

 _There are a lot of areas where it makes sense to divide labor between humans and computers—we are very good at some things computers are terrible at and vice versa—and some of these require huge amounts of human resources._

As entrepreneurs it's our task to make computers better at the things that they aren't good at. It will require groundbreaking technology, a lot of work and incredible amounts of risk...but if not us, then who? We're blessed with the ability to make tools that make lives easier, we should be doing everything we can do make machines do more work so that humans can do less.

If Adam Smith was right and land, labor, capital is the relevant equation, then automation is a way to create nearly unlimited amounts of labor. Human brains are probably the most powerful computers to ever exist, it's unlikely that busy work is the best way to utilize them. A focus on creating jobs just exacerbates the social problems of capitalism. When people mention basic income, they usually also mention automation as a way to mitigate the loss in the labor force. If we push for more jobs instead of automating away jobs, we're just delaying the best outcome.

The most important question of the 21st century is "What can be automated?". Reducing the number of jobs is our great calling. Paradoxically, we'll have to employ at lot of smart people to make progress toward that goal. I think that's the real challenge, and it's one that we can rise to.

</comment><comment><USER22> List of companies/organisations on that scale: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers)

<comment><USER23> Dreaming big is good, but may be that goal is off by an order of magnitude or two? For comparison, just look at [1].

I'm not discouraging, but what startup even has the potential to hope to employ even 100000 individuals within the next 10 years?

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers_in_th...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers_in_the_United_States)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Commenters aren't realizing you can create jobs without hiring people.

Uber has created many jobs. Airbnb too.

<comment><USER25> Created or moved? I would argue that the Uber/AirBnB jobs have just taken market share from existing jobs. That's not to criticize or make it less worthwhile, I just don't think that is the intention of the RFS - though its brevity leaves it quite open.

<comment><USER26> Uber has definitely created. Typically speaking there's a hard cap on the number of taxi drivers. For example Seattle hasn't issued a new taxi license since 1990 [1]. That's insane! The area has grown dramatically in that time. That said there is some amount that are moved rather than created. It's definitely something that should be considered.

[1] [http://www.change.org/petitions/seattle-city-council- break-t...](http://www.change.org/petitions/seattle-city-council-break-the- taxi-monopoly-and-level-the-playing-field)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm reading this as "one million indirect jobs" as opposed to "one million directly employed jobs". I'm not sure that a corporation with one million direct employees is currently a desirable end goal due to large organizational overhead, political infighting and large inertia. Of course redefining what "jobs" are, would help.

<comment><USER28> I am reading it as several companies that create an aggregate of 1 million jobs rather than one absurdly large corporation.

<comment><USER29> I am reading it as the creation of an entirely new industry which will spawn sub-industries, hundreds or thousands of firms, and a million jobs over the course of the next 20 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What about YouTubers? Or people with Etsy stores. These businesses focus on letting people be able to make a living off their service.

<comment><USER31> Agreed, but how many people make enough for it to be their full-time jobs?

65% of Etsy sellers make less than $100/yr: [http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/11/08/etsy_economi...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/11/08/etsy_economic_impact_report_etsy_crafters_generate_895_million_in_annual.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> There are only two types of things which can be produced: information and material.

Most people aren't very good at working with information beyond basic pattern recognition/recall and to some extent, human interaction. Most of the people who are good at either or both of these things are already gainfully employed.

In the material realm, we already produce enough food, clothing, housing, and computers to suit the needs of the public. We have more empty residences than homeless people. As technology advances in the imminent years we will become less reliant on people for producing these things--not more. Most significant material advances will come from knowledge work discoveries (e.g. larger capacity batteries), not from material work (assembling batteries by hand more quickly or using more people).

Dolphins do not derive their self-worth, happiness, or other aspects of their life from a "job." Perhaps humans are poised to become as advanced as they are?

Imagine if a million people had the freedom to experiment in whatever way they chose: to make music and art, to enjoy their lives without the approval of others as expressed by dollars of consumption. How much would the culture they create be worth?

</comment><comment><USER33> Curious if there are any companies which currently create millions of jobs?

I suppose one could create a new market which could have capacity for such jobs. That might still be in the best interest of a startup.

<comment><USER34> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers)

Seems like walmart and the Chinese energy companies are the only private employers of >1m humans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The toughest part of this is the idea needs to help _expand the economy_ that is how real jobs are created. There are many ways folks! From the absurd, such as moving money from inefficient areas of the economy (i.e. _taxation_ to efficient areas of the economy, private individuals, or from banks to small businesses.)

If there is a legal way for example for an employee that pays $10,000 in tax to employ someone at $10,000 and save that money then for each tax-payer a new job is being created. This can be for example be channeled via a non-profit (which scales via software) which would legally employ the individuals assign tasks to the individuals, provide training (which can employ trainers) help in seed money etc., basic health care and other similar services.

Another counter-intuitive idea, is to target high worth individuals, rather than low end individuals. Thousands of people are in jobs and interested in getting out of them to start a business. A Job + investment scheme in businesses that need financing might or might not work, but worth thinking. This keeps the individual employed and if the business expands would probably create another 2-5 jobs easily.

Franchising as a co-op rather than sending money to the mother ship, can easily scale in many sectors.

I think this is the greatest RFS ever and wish it success from the bottom of my heart. If no single scheme can achieve it, maybe 100 schemes can. It is not impossible.

</comment><comment><USER36> Can we use Tim Hudak math?[1]

context: in the recent election for the province of Ontario in Canada, Tim Hudak promised 1 million new jobs if he got elected. There were several questionable ways he arrived at that number, one of which was counting 8 years of a single new job as a new job.

1: [https://www.google.ca/search?q=tim+hudak+math](https://www.google.ca/search?q=tim+hudak+math)

</comment><comment><USER37> This demonstrates a severe lack of understanding about basic economics. Jobs are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. Paying someone $1 to dig a ditch and refill it is a job.

What we need is not jobs. What we need is the ability for everyone to make a living they deem acceptable (TV, heat/AC, car, electricity, plumbing, internet). That's the real issue here...

</comment><comment><USER38> I dislike the new, hyper-ambitious side of YC (also in the other new RFSs: AI, HealthCare...). Have any of the truly revolutionary inventions (like steam engine, automobile, microcomputer, internet) started out as something developed to have such an incredibly big scale, or did they merely turn out to have big implications? It's the latter, and I think it's not just a correlation, but a causation: To make something truly disruptive, it needs to be _new_ , and it is very unlikely to come up with something that is new while at the same time aiming to solve a problem that everybody can agree on (like let's build one million jobs, let's build AI, let's fix healthcare etc). That's usually the reason government projects fail, and the reason startups succeed, and having YC now focusing on stuff with the "could-this-be-a-big- company"-shaded glasses is a 180° turn from their original heritage.

<comment><USER8> you will be happy to hear that 90% of the companies we fund still get mocked on HN and elsewhere for "being small".

certainly agree that's usually the way to get huge. and even the "hyper- ambitious" companies we fund have to start with going after a very small market--in fact, their first products mostly sound like toys, and that's a feature not a bug.

it's a mistake to build a startup that looks like a huge government project. it's also a mistake to not think about how to be a huge company one day. in fact, i remember one of the first meetings i ever had with airbnb. i told them how i thought that this silly-seeming thing they were doing could one day change the way most people travel. i think it seemed crazy even to them at the time.

<comment><USER38> Indeed, most of the yc-funded startups still focus on building practical stuff. But isn't the airbnb example showing that it works to "not think about how to be a huge company one day"? I mean, if the size of their idea (changing the way most people travel) was not clear to them at the time, and yet they've succeeded (or are on their way to do so), it obviously worked out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I really like this perspective. Computers are tools that can enormously increase the power of a single individual. There are huge opportunities to increase both human productivity and computing productivity if we can figure out how to create tools that foster more symbiotic interactions between humans and computers.

</comment><comment><USER40> I would also be looking for the opposite. Software that eliminates the need for people, especially consultants, can be huge opportunities too.

That's what we're doing with MindOps–an easy-to-use OCR API. Currently humans transcribe receipts, we automate it.

</comment><comment><USER41> I know it's not what sama meant, but these are the only employers that have 1MM+ employees (excluding the DOD, the PLA, the NHS, and the Indian armed forces):

Walmart 2.1 million (United States)

McDonald's 1.9 million (including franchises) (United States)

China National Petroleum Corporation 1.6 million (People's Republic of China)

State Grid Corporation of China 1.5 million (People's Republic of China)

Indian Railways 1.4 million (India)

Hon Hai Precision Industry (Foxconn) 1.2 million (Taiwan)

Note that Indian Railways, the State Grid Corporation of China and the China National Petroleum Corporation are state-owned.

<comment><USER5> Finally some data. Most of the big companies with "real jobs" top out around 300K. Of course its easy to create "mc-jobs" or the equivalent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Its not a million, but the Pathak's[1] created around 100,000 jobs by effectively creating the British curry house, supplying ingredients and recipes to largely Indian-Ugandan refugees after they were forced out by Idi Amin. Thats why most have the same menus.

[1] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/finance- obituarie...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/finance- obituaries/8222809/Shanta-Pathak.html)

</comment><comment><USER43> Interesting. Thinking about what computers can't do now or in any foreseeable future, I wouldn't be surprised if spending time with people in need of human interaction becomes a huge industry in coming years. I first laughed at ideas like Awesomeness Reminders etc, but I can see there's a future in that direction!

</comment><comment><USER44> Just for some context Google have ~50,000 employees according to this [https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html](https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html)

<comment><USER45> And has created/expanded jobs in SEO, SEM, android development, etc. How many, do you think?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Seems like Uber is such a company - I can see how "this could potentially create 1 million jobs" would be a conduit for "this could potentially be a win on a scale yet unknown"

</comment><comment><USER47> Does "job" refer to the traditional sense of a primary source of income? I guess what I'm asking is, do services like TaskRabbit and Airbnb also fall in this category?

</comment><comment><USER48> How the RFS works? i see that there are different "calls", but if i click to "apply" the deadline was in march. so, what should one do to apply?

</comment><comment><USER49> An interesting request -- it's asking the question "what can people do that computers and mechanization absolutely cannot?"

Care for one another?

<comment><USER50> I'd venture to say, anything creative. That is, until we get strong AI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> We have managed to create around 4000 jobs for audio transcribers. Around 10% are regulars on our platform. Long way to go for a million.

</comment><comment><USER52> Perhaps a better phrase than "jobs" is "earn income". The former comes with a lot of assumptions.

</comment><comment><USER53> MobileWorks is an example of an existing YC (S11) company that has the potential to do this.

</comment><comment><USER25> That's just under the size of the Active duty US military or major industries!

Quite a task.

</comment><comment><USER54> Find another planet, or the moon.

Populate it.

There are jobs here, there will be jobs there.

A million will not be sufficient.

</comment><comment><USER55> RFS?

<comment><USER56> [http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/](http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> What does RFS stand for?

<comment><USER58> Request For Startups. Was first posted by PG some years ago:

[http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/](http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/)

Might have been a play on the acronym RFC (Request For Comments).

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Sooo...marketplaces?</comment>


Ask HN: Did I pick the right career path? - <AUTHOR>

I just recently attended a wedding. A number of old school friends were there. As usual there were a number of people who wanted to discuss what they were doing, and more importantly (to them), what they were earning. I couldn't help but notice that a number of people in other fields who did not take the university route, but rather the apprenticeship route, earn significantly more than those in jobs relevant to the degree they did. I also know some people who work in this industry that only possess college level qualifications and earn more than me, but are certainly less effective, less knowledgeable and more narrow-minded. I am not by any means suggesting that all people who possess degree level qualifications are better than those who do not, or that they should earn more. I just can't help but wonder if a degree was the right choice. I certainly feel it has made me much more open-minded and well-rounded and has opened up avenues to areas of CS which I do not feel I would have been exposed to unless I did a degree. What are peoples thoughts on this? Should I be bothered by what I earn? I am happy in my job but would really like to increase my salary. Is this just a whole lot of whining/boasting? <comment><USER2> Whether a degree was the right choice or not, it was the choice you made and you can't unmake it, so there's not much point in dwelling on that. Dwelling on things you can't change will just drive you crazy.

HN is full of threads on how to make more money, whether it's by learning new skills, starting a product-based business, negotiating salary and raises effectively, or freelancing. If you want to earn more money, there's plenty of advice out there. But don't undervalue being happy and enjoying what you do - this is the most important thing, and you've already got that.

<comment><USER3> Seconded. It sounds like you could probably get a higher salary if that's what you're after. But it almost always comes at a cost. Free time. Dating. Kids. Time. Geography. Less interesting work.

Switching positions to more powerful/money takes time, but if you make that the center goal of your life, you will be able to achieve it in time. But you have to seriously stop and think if that is what you want out of life. (And maybe you do - that's okay).

Personally, I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that I may be smart-ish, but I fiercely guard against making work sacrifices for: free time, S/O, kids, time, geography.

Therefore, my peers will probably excel beyond me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What are you saying? That welders and plumbers are making more than you? There's two good reasons that's the case, if it's so. (1) They work way harder, physically, and have to deal with burns, OPP (Other People's Poop), and a bunch of engineer-types as customers who try to "fix" things first and then finally give up and call a pro, but want to learn from the pro the whole time he/she is working. If that doesn't command $50/hour, I don't know what does. (2) You should be doing more intense programming. I don't know your skillset, but if you're mainlining Cobol with a dose of Lisp and keeping some foreign government from collapse, you'll make more than a plumber. But if you're honing CSS all day and your workplace cubicle is surrounded with Manga and everyone has corporate logos on Macbooks, and there are "decompress rooms" filled with Herman Miller furniture, well, keep in mind your comfort level at work may partially explain your salary. I kind of think the poop guys should get more money than you.</comment>


A beginner's guide to microblogging on Mastodon - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.com/article/17/4/guide-to-mastodon <comment><USER2> Mastodon sure is gaining popularity! Pretty cool to see decentralized FOSS being widely used.</comment>


Apple whistleblower goes public over 'lack of action' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/20/apple-whistleblower-goes-public-over-lack-of-action <comment><AUTHOR> The amount of «telemetrics» these days is out of hand. If you monitor your home network you will be surprised of the data you are giving without any idea. Default should be set at «no data sharing» by law . If you take windows for example, even on maximun privacy, the OS tries to call home double the amount of Apple, which is also a lot.

<comment><USER2> It's ironic how we have more and more telemetry and yet software is becoming worse and worse.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's ironic, I think it's entirely predictable. We're removing people and their brains from all decision making and turning it over to data and algorithms.

If the data doesn't "show" a problem, there is no problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm all for privacy, but having worked on a few systems that involve audio/video/speech, I always dread having to debug some rare problems/edge cases while not having access to the original files that cause them...

</comment><comment><USER5> The article doesn't mention what he wants.

<comment><USER6> He seems to want Apple to be investigated for privacy law violations related to unauthorized listening to Siri recordings:

"These practices are clearly at odds with the company's 'privacy-driven' policies and should be urgently investigated by data protection authorities and Privacy watchdogs"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Apple is too big to fail, so they can afford to break the rules

</comment><comment><USER8> It's a guy who worked on a siri recording grading center, not exactly someone who can judge what data get's saved inside apple.

<comment><USER9> This recordings must be saved somewhere before some people are asked to listen and grade the feature, I imagine the recording is kept so a developer can debug or train the system if the results are not that good.

Apple needs to ask permissions when they send this kind of stuff (including telemetry) and also give you the option at any time to review all your stuff and delete it.</comment></comment>


A Paxos-based Redis replication layer with dynamic reconfiguration in 500 lines - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gryadka/GryadkaJS <comment><USER2> Paxos-based means what exactly? How much of the specification does it implement? [0]

[0] [https://github.com/tlaplus/Examples/tree/master/specificatio...](https://github.com/tlaplus/Examples/tree/master/specifications/Paxos)

<comment><AUTHOR> It uses single decree Paxos to implement rewritable distributed register. The implementation supports dynamic reconfiguration of the cluster and the distinguished proposer optimization.</comment></comment>


Visual Studio 2015 announced - <AUTHOR> https://www.visualstudio.com/products/vs-2015-product-editions <comment><USER2> This is a confusing announcement from Microsoft.

They are actually announcing a new product _lineup_ (1) and not a new _release for actual download_. The article predicts that the actual release (RTM) will be in the summer. The current (beta) release is still CTP 6 which was already announced a few weeks ago.

I suppose this is a press release intended more for the corporate IT manager planning his purchasing budget (what SKU do I buy/upgrade) rather than developers to actually install and play with today.

(1) e.g. Premium and Ultimate editions will be merged into one Enterprise edition

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure how this is confusing. It very clearly says that it is announcing a new product line in the first sentence of the announcement.

<comment><USER2> It's confusing because when Microsoft has put prior splashy pages announcing VS2010, VS2012, and VS2013, the _actual_ RTM downloadable iso images were available the same day.

Therefore, it's not unreasonable to read their verbage of the first sentence _[with interpretation in brackets]_ as:

 _> Introducing the newly announced Visual Studio 2015 product line _[so go and download the new RTM iso image that's in the link below] _, including the all-new Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN, Visual Studio Professional with MSDN, and the free Visual Studio Community edition._

... instead of reading it like Microsoft intends:

 _> Introducing the newly announced Visual Studio 2015 product line _[and you've already got the latest beta version last week so don't go looking for the RTM until summer] _, including the all-new Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN, Visual Studio Professional with MSDN, and the free Visual Studio Community edition._

A bit of Pavlov's conditioning based on the last 3 VS releases makes the bold headlines a little confusing. The fact that it's on HN's front page makes it seem like a more newsworthy announcement than it actually is. The expected summer RTM would be more typical of rising to the HN front page(1). This announcement of reshuffling SKU editions doesn't seem to warrant the hype of being voted to the front page -- unless -- people misunderstand what Microsoft is actually announcing. :-)

(1) it was #2 on the front page before I wrote this post. In the 5 minutes it took to write this post and save it, it's now #236. I suppose an moderator pushed it down into oblivion as a service to HN readers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can now use "extensions" in the community edition and you can create whatever project you want, without installing 3 different versions of Visual Studio.

Which makes Visual Studio actually attractive for a community edition (the express edition is deprecated though - that's a good thing).

<comment><USER5> Express isn't depricated

>Visual Studio Express 2015 editions. (Non-enterprise customers are encouraged to check out Visual Studio Community 2015, which is also free and provides a more comprehensive solution)

<comment><USER6> That's pretty much the definition of "deprecated".

<comment><USER7> It might seem that way... but "non-enterprise" based on the Community Edition's licensing terms is basically just open-source + hobbyist use. Your company becomes 'enterprise' the moment it surpasses $1 million of revenue. Not even revenue from software created, revenue period.

<comment><USER8> I'd have thought there was a decent space between "hobbyist" and "$1m annual revenue". A lot of small software businesses would fall into that bucket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> VS2015 seemed to be pretty much the same as VS2013, although my experience was limited to the enhanced project support for Apache Cordova.

Findings:

\- There's a very bad (known) bug that renders the entire IDE unusable. If you attempt to modify the markup of certain databound elements (possibly others), an error message will pop up and the IDE will cease to function in a predictable manner

\- The VS Android Emulator is great, but it needs a bit more work. For example, it modifies you network settings without notifying you (installs Virtual adapters). Now if something else modifies those settings, the Emulator will refuse to start. You have to poke around a bit with the Hyper-V manager to get things working again. They should have a "restore default settings" option. (My Emulator refuses to work now even after I removed and reinstalled it).

\- The VS emulator would be better if it had a default "Shared" folder that could be used to transfer files between the device and host.

\- You can't specify the port you want to run Ripple on. I believe they are planning on fixing this, but it's a big problem at the moment as VS will just choose randomly from 40 different ports, each time creating a new folder and recreating your local databases. This makes it hard to track down bugs, or continuing from a known state.

\- Build support is very limited. You have to muck about with the project settings to do trivial things like redirecting output based on Project configuration

\- The Javascript debugger needs work. It will sometimes break whenever a new Javascript file is loaded. Or it will break on lines where no breakpoints have been set, even though no (visible) error occurred.

Other than that the IDE seems more-or-less the same as what I'm used to in VS2013.

</comment><comment><USER10> Been hearing a lot about Visual Studio 2015 recently, as far as I am aware it is not even in Beta yet...

I am a .Net developer in a Corporate IT job, so I am exactly in the demographic Microsoft aims for as users (not buyers though). Visual Studio is hands down the best IDE, period.

The pricing is absolutely, absolutely insane.

<comment><USER11> MSDN (especially in the enterprise/corporate environment) is absolutely worth it.

If you're just doing basic development, the community edition is actually really good and completely free.

<comment><USER12> Interesting. What value would msdn give me?

<comment><USER13> Looks like all the microsoft catalog [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/subscriptions/downloads/def...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The pricing for Visual Studio kind of blows my mind. I happen to think it's a great product and I don't mind paying for software (as a developer I want people to pay for software, or at least value it highly) but it creates a pretty high barrier to entry for developing Windows software.

Although maybe I'm wrong: I don't know exactly how restricted the free Community edition is. Also, Resharper apparently works with the free Community edition so that's a huge plus.

<comment><USER15> The Community edition is basically the Professional edition with licensing restrictions. Meaning extensions are fully supported. From the [official page]([https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio- co...](https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community- vs.aspx))

> Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community?

> A: Here's how individual developers can use Visual Studio Community: Any > individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own > free or paid apps. Here's how Visual Studio Community can be used in > organizations: An unlimited number of users within an organization can use > Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning > environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source > projects. For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations, up > to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations > (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), > no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom > learning environment scenarios described above.

From another [article]([http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dorischen/archive/2014/11/12/q-amp-a...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dorischen/archive/2014/11/12/q-amp- a-on-visual-studio-community-2013-and-2015-preview.aspx))

> Q: What are the specific features of the Visual Studio Community 2013?

> A: Visual Studio Community 2013 shares the same features as Visual Studio > Professional 2013 today and licensing terms determine who can use this > product. Based on the target audience for this product, SharePoint, Office, > LightSwitch and Cloud Business Applications are not included in the > installation.

Edit: formatting, can't figure out how to quote the text.

<comment><USER14> I'm extremely happy to know that I was extremely wrong about how restricted the Community Edition is. Thanks for the informative reply!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Gah, _announced_ is really misleading.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm not an F# dev but I kinda miss it from the list of supported languages.

<comment><USER15> It might have been a marketing mistake. F# is fully supported. [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/fsharpteam/archive/2014/11/12/announ...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/fsharpteam/archive/2014/11/12/announcing- a-preview-of-f-4-0-and-the-visual-f-tools-in-vs-2015.aspx)

<comment><USER18> Good catch, F# is fully supported and its my mistake for not adding it into the page, ill get it fixed. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is an Android version. I am curious, are there people out there who use Android device to code? I tried a bit QPython but it was frustrating not to be able to use the app I created from outside of QPython.

<comment><USER20> It can build for Android (aka you can make Android apps with it); it does not have a version running on Android. And yes, I use tablets and phones to code on, but nothing production yet. Cannot say it's that much less productive than on desktop though for what I do.

Edit: is iOS/Android building Xamarin or?

Edit2: Yep , this is Xamarin.

<comment><USER19> > And yes, I use tablets and phones to code on, but nothing production yet. > Cannot say it's that much less productive than on desktop though for what I > do.

Interested in that. What's your "mobile stack"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is really cool. VS is ideal for someone like me that occasionally needs an IDE that works out of the box for button + code behind it type projects. (Tried Python GUI frameworks...what a mess)

</comment><comment><USER22> Looks like the prices have been dropped and CodeLens is now available at the Premium level.

I can't wait until I can target builds against CoreCLR.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is Visual Studio made with .NET? If it was I could dream of a Mac/Linux version one day...

<comment><USER22> Yes. It's a WPF app running on the framework. MS has no plans to open source WPF or include the required assemblies into the CoreCLR so I doubt we will ever see VS running on a *nix platform.

<comment><USER24> The majority of the Visual Studio code is still C++. The shell was rewritten to use WPF and MEF. So, I wouldn't exactly call it a WPF app. More like it uses some WPF.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Has it been released as well ?

(Sorry, non-MSDN subscriber here)

<comment><USER26> It's still in CTP.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone have a good map of web technologies? - <AUTHOR> I used to have a really useful tree of commonly-used web development tools/technologies. Included everything from databases to front-end frameworks to hosting services.<p>Anyone have something like this, relevant in 2016? <comment><USER2> Someone posted this on HN a few months ago under "Tools of Trade". Could be useful:

[https://github.com/cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade](https://github.com/cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade)</comment>


Can You Measure Developer Productivity? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/can-you-measure-developer-productivity/ <comment><USER2> Great post. It's good to see thoughts on productivity from a manager's perspective.</comment>


Unexpected Interaction of Features (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/UnexpectedInteractionOfFeatures.html?sb17h <comment><USER2> Technically speaking, this may be a case of undefined behavior. From my man page:

        -u, --unique
      Unique keys.  Suppress all lines that have a key that is
      equal to an already processed one.  This option, similarly
      to -s, implies a stable sort.  If used with -c or -C, sort
      also checks that there are no lines with duplicate keys.
      ...
        -n, --numeric-sort, --sort=numeric
      Sort fields numerically by arithmetic value.  Fields are
      supposed to have optional blanks in the beginning, an
      optional minus sign, zero or more digits (including
      decimal point and possible thousand separators).

When you use -n, without a key fields specification, the whole line does not meet the requirement for numeric sorting.

This sort does give me the intended output:

      $sort -k1,1n -k2 -u ~/tmp/sort.txt
      1 a
      5 which
      10 exotically
      15 aerodynamically
      15 differentiation
      20 electroencephalogram

Whether or not deduplication on _keys_ is ideal behavior, it is what is specified here. What is not explicitly specified is what is considered to be the key when you try to sort a non-numeric line numerically.

This is the sort of problem that you get with duck typing: it does what you expect and intend, except in those corner cases where it doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ah, yes. The sort command definitely has a few gotchas like this. It's too bad that we all seem to learn them the hard way. :)

Another one that used to bite me: locale-dependent sorting. These days, I rarely use the sort command without LC_ALL=C.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Excellent, but now I realise there are repeated lines, and I need to de- duplicate. So I use sort -u to do that_

I would just pipe it to uniq, the ultimate solution proposed --- because that seems to make more sense to me. I have not ever used the '-u' option of sort before, nor would I have expected it to have such an option (sort is for sorting, not removing duplicate lines.) Maybe because I'm more used to the "UNIX philosophy" instead of the GNU one?

<comment><USER5> I agree. Often when I want uniquing, I want counts as well, so I have to go through uniq -c anyway.</comment></comment>


Phishing Sites Hosted on Google's Servers - <AUTHOR> http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002168.html <comment><USER2> At the very bottom of the post:

"We got contacted by a Google employee. They informed us that, surprisingly, the questionable page is indeed the official Google form to request Google Voice account transfer. They also told us to remove all references to the form in this blog post. But I'm afraid we can't do that."

<comment><USER3> That actually is more troublesome as it is now impossible to distinguish between a legitimate form and a phished one.

<comment><USER2> yep. Don't know what they're thinking over there.

They'll probably start putting up a disclaimer when its not actually google's doc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've used the Google Voice form they used in their example long ago. It was legitimate and worked just fine.

But I'm not surprised to see some people would use forms on Google Spreadsheets for phishing attacks. Seems ideal.

<comment><USER5> I have been refraining from doing so as I cannot shake the suspicion that it might be a phishing attack. It doesn't help that most links to it seem to be from Google Groups and other discussion type sites, sometimes posted by people claiming to be Google employees, sometimes not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Related: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2599592>.</comment>


Canada Invests in Ontario's Electric Vehicle Network - <AUTHOR> https://www.canada.ca/en/natural-resources-canada/news/2020/02/canada-invests-in-ontarios-electric-vehicle-network.html <comment><USER2> This will be good additional charging infrastructure for Canada. More chargers charging more EVs is good for everyone.

Petro-Canada has a trans-Canada CCS charging network already: [https://www.petro-canada.ca/en/personal/fuel/ev-fast- charge-...](https://www.petro-canada.ca/en/personal/fuel/ev-fast-charge- network)

Electrify Canada is working on it: [https://www.electrify-canada.ca/locate- charger](https://www.electrify-canada.ca/locate-charger)

<comment><USER3> Looks like they both charge per min, not per kw/h. So you are at a disadvantage with a slow charging car?

<comment><USER4> From what I understand, there are energy regulator laws in various Canadian provinces that have made it difficult to charge per kw/h.

Some combination of the two (time and energy) is ideal to prevent station hogging, though.

<comment><USER5> Surely households are billed by metered kWh?

> Some combination of the two (time and energy) is ideal to prevent station > hogging, though.

That's a good point; in the extreme you wouldn't want someone sitting there trickle charging for ages when already charged.

If it were up to me it'd be tiered like:

        t <=30min: £V / kWh
        30m < t <= 2h: £W / kWh
        2h < t <= 4h: £X / kWh
        4h < t <= 8h: £Y / kWh
        t >= 8h: £Z / kWh

where V < W < X < Y < Z, and probably per daily billing period rather than per charge, to avoid cheating it by unplugging and re-plugging if you were nearby at work or a motorway service station say.

<comment><USER4> Utilities can do it, but not non-utilities like charging stations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's great. I wish the government would work with the provinces to standardize and rationalize charging rates and prices.

Due to laws that prohibit reselling of electricity, getting charged by the minute is the standard, yet, how much energy you're getting in that minute varies wildly based on: whether the charger is shared, how cold it is, what car you drive, which station you pulled into etc. Figuring out how much you paid for a unit of energy is very hard and makes it almost impossible to cross-shop.

Tesla gets partly around this by having a high-speed rate (~44 cents/minute > 60kWh, 22 < 60kWh), but it still makes it very hard to pull into a supercharger and know how much your charge will cost.

At the end of the day, each charger should have a posted price of $/kWh. High- speed chargers should charge more and you should be able to know what you'll pay before you plug in somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER7> Unfortunately the conservative Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford cancelled EV rebates last year.

</comment><comment><USER8> Pardon me for being cynical, but this feels like shallow tokenism to show how "progressive" the liberal-minority federal government of Canada is, just as most of their actions seem to be.

Canadians, especially those in densely populated cities with poor public transit like Toronto and Vancouver, already struggle to _live_ day-to-day. Where are they going to get the money for an electric vehicle when:

\- the average income in Ontario is $50-$60k (CAD), less than $4k per month net

\- the rent on a one bed apartment is now averaging $2300

\- despite zero service improvements, the cost of transit continues to be put up

\- groceries are now extremely expensive compared to US and EU

\- Internet, cellphones, etc. plans are more expensive than anywhere else

As a result, vast amounts of even "well paid" white collar workers can't live in the cities and instead move hours away and are forced to drive essentially everywhere, including into the cities for work.

30 years of stagnant incomes, increased taxes, soaring costs of living and unapproachable costs of housing and the government makes a song and dance of $8 million on EV chargers? Trudeau spent $600m keeping the fed-friendly media afloat [0], has committed $1.4bn to foreign "women's health" [1] and more.

The friendliness of Canadians is echoed in their sheer complacency with regards to their own governing. Whether it's a strength or a weakness is up to the individual to decide.

[0][https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/ottawa-bolsters- struggling-m...](https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/ottawa-bolsters-struggling- media-with-600m-in-tax-measures-1.4186881)

[1][https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-trudeau- ann...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-trudeau-announces- billions-in-foreign-aid-for-maternal-and-child/)

<comment><USER9> Having lived through the years of federal Conservative fiscal mismanagement under Harper and now (what feels like 100 years) under utterly incompetent and blatantly corrupt provincial Conservative leadership here in Ontario I know I am not alone in hoping for a much bigger change in the next election.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sadly the current Ontario government is against this kind of thing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Tesla and Volkswagen are already selling government subsidized electric cars and installing government subsidized chargers. Now they get the chargers for free. No one voted for this enormous wealth transfer from poor to rich. Nor a car ban in under 20 years.

<comment><USER2> > _Now they get the chargers for free._

The car industry gets fuel stations and roads for free as well.

Charger costs will reduce. Battery based chargers will be a game changer for infrastructure cost:

[https://www.engadget.com/2020/02/13/volkswagen-battery- based...](https://www.engadget.com/2020/02/13/volkswagen-battery-based-ev- charger/)

They can be installed anywhere with no need for big transformers or high power cabling. And they offer some charging capability during power outages.

<comment><USER11> Gas stations are built without our tax dollars.

Imagine a future where we wait for our government-mandated chargers to charge. Hopefully there's an app for that.

If costs keep dropping, EVs will become a no-brainer for most. Scrap the government incentives and we will achieve the inevitable.

<comment><USER2> > _Gas stations are built without our tax dollars_

Are they? They need fuel to sell. Where does that come from: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/15/climate- change...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/15/climate-change- canada-fossil-fuel-subsidies-carbon-trudeau)

> _Imagine a future where we wait for our government-mandated chargers to > charge_

This is infrastructure building. Canada's got the right idea here. Build roads, build chargers. Makes sense.

<comment><USER12> You're comparing charging stations to gas. A more logical comparison would be electricity in charging stations vs gas in gas stations.

<comment><USER2> It's all part of the same system. What use is a gas station without gasoline?

Do you want $3.3 billion going to fuel subsidies or do you want $8 million going to EV chargers. If you're interested in a smaller government spend, you want to pick the EV chargers.

<comment><USER13> That's what I though too. 8 million is peanuts for Canadian government. Even for the provincial one. I think it's more a PR move.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Restrictive covenants for software developers? - <AUTHOR>

I am wondering whether any HNers have any experience with restrictive covenants / restraints of trade for software development in the UK?
Situation 1: what's a reasonable time (if any) for an employer to block an employee developer from going off to work for someone else and help them develop a similar/the same product which may either a) compete with employers product or b) compete with employer's client's product
Situation 2: what kind of restriction can a client place on a software consultancy who's been hired to develop product X for them from then going off and developing the same product for another client? <comment><USER2> while I am not in the UK, for me #2 is simple, don't sign a contract that tries to impose those restrictions, they are too damaging to a consultancy.

To some degree, I can understand employee restrictions as there is a long term commitment to that individual (well there is supposed to be). As well, as an employee I would not sign a contract that placed those restrictions on me and did not remove them under the circumstances of termination by the employer.

For a consultancy though, they don't pay the bills after the project is done, I would not sign a contract that extended restrictions beyond the time that that pay runs out. Simply if they are not paying, they don't get a say in what I do, unless they paid me a big chunk of money for me to be bound to a covenant that extends beyond the work.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, I agree with you, I think that's right. But it's good to know what others think! thanks.</comment></comment>


Do Drug Expiration Dates Mean Anything? - <AUTHOR> http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/drug-expiration-dates-do-they-mean-anything <comment><USER2> Yes. When I was on zoloft I had some pills that were about a year expired. Started taking them and they were not effective; even taking the entire dose I went through withdrawal.</comment>


Opkg-upgrade – a useful upgrade script for OpenWRT - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tavinus/opkg-upgrade <comment><AUTHOR> I've been using this for the last 3~ months or so on my OpenWRT 18.06.1, r7258-5eb055306f (but with the latest packages) setup on my Linksys WRT3200ACM and it's been so useful and saved me a lot of time (hence sharing).</comment>


When time became regular and universal, it changed history - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/when-time-became-regular-and-universal-it-changed-history <comment><USER2> Our conception of micro time is also modern. The Babylonians (who came up with the excellent system of 12 hours in a day and 12 in a night) divided the day into equal increments or hours, but the length of a day's hour changed from day to day as the length of the day changed. As far as I know the modern, fixed-length hour was an invention of the English (pre British) navy who used it to manage watches.

When clocks were developed the hour length became fixed, and the modern invention of the divisions of minute ("tiny") and ultimately second ("even more tiny") became first feasible and then, as the Industrial Revolution progressed, became useful. I've always assumed we had RPM and not RPS because of this, although very slow rotations would be easier to work with with a more find-grained denominator.

<comment><USER3> Has anyone here written a 12 hour day, 12 hour night clock as described? I'm fascinated now, it seems like it could be a cool watch face to superimpose fixed length hours over day/night hours.

<comment><USER4> You should look up the way they measure time in Ethiopia, they have a 12 hour clock - 12-hours of darkness, and 12 when there is daylight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fascinating: the idea that end-time cults happened to emerge in a society with an "endless monotonously increasing" numbering scheme for years, as a kind of response to some cognitive dissonance about the inevitability of time to go on forever.

For those who also find this stuff fun, I'm reading and highly recommend "When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation" by Paula Fredriksen [1], about the very early Christians.

I find it a vivid and history-backed picture of those times. It's hard to appreciate just how apocalyptic the first believers were, and how the continued failure of the end-times to come would change the messaging and focus of the religion over the first few generations.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Fredriksen#Books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Fredriksen#Books)

</comment><comment><USER2> > In ancient Mesopotamia, years could be designated by an outstanding event of > the preceding 12 months:

This system was also used more broadly in Japan, where the "Era" name (元号) would change after a momentous event, typically a few years apart but occasionally in rapid succession. Since Meiji they only change with the Emperors, as just happened last week.

In countries like the UK, laws are still numbered using the year of the reign of the monarch.

The process described in the article makes me think of the modern transition of land (property) being the spaces between the roads rather than roads being something that runs through land. The latter sort of remains in Japan as well, where ordinary roads are typically not given names.

</comment><comment><USER6> Another good read on time and clocks:

> _By the 16th century, European cities were so well synchronized that > Rabelais could state "a city without bells is like a blind man without a > stick." The clock and the bells it chimed synchronized the relations among > men._

> _Clock time is a fungible measure of sacrifice. Of all measurement > instruments, the clock is the most valuable because so many of the things we > sacrifice to create are not fungible. The massive clock towers of Europe, > with their enormous loud and resonant bells, broadcasting time fairly across > the town and even the countryside, rather than the last relics of the > medieval, were the first building block of the wealthy modern world._

[http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CD...](http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/synch.html)

<comment><USER2> It was however not consistent town-town; noon was set locally by moving the arms to the "noon" position when the sun was overhead....something that varied from east to west.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The way I experience African history is that there is no devision of time at all into numeric quantities. There is rain, and the sometimes short and sometimes excruciatingly long wait in between.

</comment><comment><USER8> I thought this article might bring it full circle and touch on the "time denier" theory, essentially claiming that a globally universal time does not exist. Carlo Rovelli's book The Order of Time goes into greater detail.

<comment><USER9> Einstein already eliminated universal time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The opening paragraph confidently asserts we know it's the year 2019, but there's one fun theory that suggests it might not be: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis)</comment>


Manmade Antarctic snowstorm 'could save coastal cities from rising seas' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/17/manmade-antarctic-snowstorm-could-save-coastal-cities-from-rising-seas <comment><USER2> Decades from now those of us left alive will be on a train perpetually circling the frozen earth having a laugh about this article.</comment>


Steve Wozniak: How I Invented the Personal Computer - <AUTHOR> http://fora.tv/2006/09/26/Steve_Wozniak#fullprogram

<comment><USER2> I highly recommend reading his book 'iWoz'. Wozniak is simply a genius inventor with highest ethics.

His book will inspire & motivate you ( as an engineer and person) & may even leave you completely in awe of this genius.

good talk btw , thanks for posting.

<comment><USER3> Not only that, it also shows you that it's possible to make a bundle without sacrificing your ethics.

What I do wonder about is how Steve Wozniak would fare if he had to do it all over again in todays environment, it certainly feels as though the world of IT has become a lot more aggressive.

<comment><USER2> yes Jacques , thats what i thought for a while, but i hope he would do well , at least create something good. for he still would be an inventor in his heart.

<comment><USER3> Oh, I'm not at all worried that Steve Woziak would be anything but an inventor. It's just that he seems to be the kind of person that might get taken advantage of a lot easier in the world today than back then.

It's not at all rare to see posts here on HN about uppity founders that want to 'ditch' one of their co founders, and not always for the right reasons (it gets presented one sided and usually in the form of an Ask HN post).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Any musicians on here? What do you think of Gigmor? - <AUTHOR> https://www.startengine.com/startup/gigmor <comment><USER2> for Los Angeles its kind of a waste, the whole attitude here is that even David Bowie should never play more than one show a year, here the system is setup to prevent anything new from coming up to compete with the dinosaurs, if your little indie venue has more than 2-3 people showing up to hear one band you can expect to get your ass beat in by LAPD. Not to be negative, but if the Doors had come out in 2015 instead of 1966 if they lacked any kind of nepotistic connection to the industry they would have to switch to cleaning floors or working as snitches for LAPD, in the city of LA music is dead, dead, dead.

<comment><USER3> "David Bowie should never play more than one show a year, here the system is setup to prevent anything new from coming up to compete with the dinosaurs"

David Bowie is a dinosaur. Don't get you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just tried to join, and the web site is beyond broken. I don't know how anyone uses it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yikes. That's bad news for sure.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would you explain time management to a middle school kid? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Work backwards from what needs to be done to develop a realistic plan.</comment>


Smashing the stack for fun and profit  - <AUTHOR> http://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html

<comment><USER2> Gosh I was closing the tab and noticed with the corner of my eye this title. Almost couldn't believe it - it has been so long since I remember reading Phrack and this ground breaking article in particular.

Thanks for bringing up good old memories!

Here is the Phrack archive: <http://www.phrack.org/> and the article in particular (I like the design better): [http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=49&id=14#article](http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=49&id=14#article)</comment>


Short-lived light sources discovered in the sky - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191212105854.htm <comment><USER2> Argh! That really long Peter Hamilton novel is coming true!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga#Pandora's_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga#Pandora's_Star)

<comment><USER3> 768 pages? I have not read any book that long in ages..

<comment><USER2> Also there's a sequel, which is basically part of the same book. I'm pretty sure he just split it up because the publisher wouldn't let him publish a 1500 page novel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's the paper on Arxiv:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.05068](https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.05068)

</comment><comment><USER5> I often wonder what's the best humanity can do. Maybe we will never go lightspeed. Maybe we can't build a wormhole. But I think that we can watch all of the sky, all of the time and in high-resolution. We can get there.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is it possible that the disappearing stars are really just fictitious entries designed to catch copycats?

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

<comment><USER7> In the scientific literature? It had better not be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's the OnOff star from _Deepness in the Sky_ :-)

<comment><USER2> That one had a slow switch-off process, tho, right? It was the light-up that was abrupt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is gravitational lensing ruled out (i.e. the idea that when these sources were found, their images were abnormally brightened or displaced through lensing by an object relatively close to Earth (close enough that relative motion and parallax accounts for the disappearance.))

<comment><USER10> Could that account for 8-9x magnitude shifts? Seems unlikely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is also recurring novae (objects that have been seen to experience multiple nova eruptions), and the idea that our sun might be one of them.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova#Recurrent_novae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova#Recurrent_novae)

</comment><comment><USER12> red stars?

"Captain Christopher Pike takes emergency command of the Discovery and explains that the Enterprise was investigating seven mysterious red signals when it was catastrophically damaged. All but one of the signals have disappeared,..."

<comment><USER13> "Oh, those. You see, there's actually a very coherent and canonical explanation for the super space suit/ship that produced them, which is clearly well beyond any known technology, Federation or not.

Unfortunately, no one shall speak of it under penalty of death. Yes, we just introduced death penalty to Federation law."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Do we really need to bring ET into every unexplained observation, just for the PR bump maybe?

TL;DR: some appearing/disappearing objects were found using old sky images. New stellar lifecycle ideas may be required.

<comment><USER15> And why not? Extraterrestial life is a hypothesis just like many other possible explanations. I had hoped we've long past the anthropocentric attitude, at least the discovery of exoplanets should finally end it.

<comment><USER16> Human exceptionalism seems to have a lot of cognitive inertia behind it, regardless of how educated we are. What _do_ you do when first contact is made? There are a lot of mental hurdles to overcome trying to answer this question.

<comment><USER17> It will be same shit different planet, trust me.

<comment><USER18> The way I see it humans are the stupidest possible animal that can form planet-spanning civilization (in a sense that other homo primates failed to do so despite being _very_ close to us in mental capability). There is absolutely no reason to think that the scale of intelligence does not extend further beyond humans. One problem is that since we are stupid and we don't know anyone qualitatively smarter we do not have the tools to reason about super- intelligent behavior.

Even the smartest chimp performs incomparably worse in most mental tasks than a median human, even the smartest human will perform incomparably worse than median super-intelligent being in most mental tasks. At least chimps can learn to avoid poachers since they have experience with humans, despite not being able to reason about reasons why poachers do what they do.

<comment><USER19> Or, humans are so stupid that they decided to cover the planet, shit all over it, destroy their habitat, and pat themselves on the back.

<comment><USER18> The reason other animals on Earth didn't do it is not because these animals made a _choice_ to not pollute/destroy habitat/etc. There are very real very significant mental deficiencies in all other animals relative to humans.

Whether smarter beings might act differently is entirely a hypothetical; it is unreasonable for us to think we can imagine the thought process of a super- intelligent being. Maybe resource consumption + migration is optimal for some objectives, maybe conservation and reuse is optimal for some other objectives, etc.

<comment><USER19> Not going to disagree that there are clearly differences in intelligence. However, the same intelligent humans managed for tens to hundreds of thousands of years to not destroy their environments until all of a sudden that became their imperative. In numerous parts of the world during the last 10,000 years there have been plenty of humans living within their means until they were assimilated or eradicated into the culture that dominates and destroys.

People hopefully say, "at least we're becoming a space-faring society." As if we're really going to be able to outgrow this planet and move on and destroy another one. We're definitely an exploring species, and for that space is gratifying, but there is no indication that there will be another Earth to colonize anytime soon.

<comment><USER18> Re: environmentally conscious primitives. It is a myth that early/primitive societies didn't destroy their environments. Basically all recent (past 100k years) megafauna extinctions were driven by human migration. Plenty of fragile environments (eg Easter Island) were wrecked by early/primitive societies. The only thing that prevented previous generations from wrecking the environment the way we do now is the same thing that prevents chimps: lack of capability.

Re: space as the new frontier. I agree that resource net positive space exploitation is a long ways away. So long away that we might have critical resource/environmental catastrophe here on earth before space can bail us out. I am not super positive on human long term survival (heck, even 1000 more years; we're too dumb and have too many ways to kill ourselves), but if our descendants do live in a million years, I am fairly certain space exploitation will be part of the equation.

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure what your position is. That we're very smart? Smarter than the "primitives" who also destroyed their habitats? But definitely smarter than the humans who managed to live in their habitat for at least a hundred thousand years until our culture came along?

I can agree we are more _capable_ than chimps, but only in the sense of being able to plan and make tools, that sort of thing. But chimps are adapted to their environment, at least until it gets upset by habitat loss or change.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Cloud Customer: We incorrectly stated your account was terminated - <AUTHOR> Dear Google customer,
You are receiving this email because you are a Google Cloud Platform, Firebase, or API customer.
Your billing account has been terminated for failure to provide a valid payment instrument or for not making all overdue payments within 30 days of notice. In addition the related Project(s) and/or Service(s) have been terminated.
If you wish to request reinstatement of your billing account and to pay all amounts past due and to update your account with valid payment information, follow this link: https://console.cloud.google.com/billing/settings
If you have any questions please contact us using this form: https://support.google.com/code/contact/cloud_platform_billing
<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---- Hello Google Cloud Customer,
On Tuesday, June 12, we incorrectly sent you an email stating that your billing account had been terminated for non-payment. No action is required on your part, and there has been no change to your active billing accounts. This email was sent in reference to billing accounts that had already been terminated.
The email subject read "Urgent: your billing account [billing-account-id] has been terminated" and was sent from CloudPlatform-noreply@google.com between 14:45 and 15:53 Pacific Daylight Time.
We have corrected the cause of this error and apologize for any confusion these emails caused.
If you have any questions or require assistance, please contact Google Cloud Billing Support. </comment><comment><USER2> Holy crap. That's not a great user experience.

</comment><comment><USER3> Classic Google!

<comment><USER4> They're not alone, a few weeks ago I received "billing alerts" from AWS despite my outstanding balance being minimal and way below my alerting- threshold(s).

Scary to receive such things, and definitely not a great experience though.</comment></comment>


System UIcons – icons designed for products, no attribution - <AUTHOR> https://systemuicons.com/ <comment><USER2> Icons look pretty good, always grateful for free stuff like this.

Minor side: the first thing I typed into the filter box was "save" because I wanted to see how the designer thought about the whole "floppy disk == save" problem in a greenfield icon set. I thought it was even more remarkable (or just notable, I guess) that there's no Save icon at all, which really speaks to where the world is at around cloud-based web apps.

Why require someone to click Save at all, right?

<comment><USER3> > Why require someone to click Save at all, right?

Sometimes saving is a high latency operation.

Sometimes you don't want to show others data as it is being edited, think product data for an online story. Heck the "reply" button beneath the text box I'm typing into right now is a form of "save".

Paradigms matter! Saving was necessary for all disk IO for a long time due to technology limitations, but even now days it is still the appropriate paradigm for certain circumstances.

<comment><USER4> > Sometimes you don't want to show others data as it is being edited, think > product data for an online story.

In modern CMS workflows (used by e.g. newspapers), the software will auto-save _draft versions_ ; while you then explicitly _publish_ particular versions (or, more likely, submit particular versions for the next stage of the pipeline, e.g. editing) by changing your latest version's _state_ in a drop- down.

This process really has no analogy with _saving_ per se. It's more like tagging a commit.

<comment><USER5> Yes I agree that "draft" / "published" as a paradigm maps users' intentions better than "saved" / "unsaved", which is more like an implementation detail borrowed from apps exposing raw filesystem concepts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Please though, if you ever use these (or any icons, frankly), PLEASE accompany the icons with text so my aging parents -- and heck, me too -- know what they mean.

All too often I am helping my family members navigate UIs that are "clean" yes (plenty of whitespace! too much) but with icons that hide everything and don't mean anything.

"Oh, to send it to your daughter? Click the 3 lines in the top right corner, then click the two lines joined by a circle. Er, the one that looks like a chart. Yeah, that means 'share' apparently. You just have to know that."

I kind of miss the days when software didn't change so much and came with instruction manuals.

<comment><USER7> The symbols are pretty standardized these days. I am always perplexed on the rare occasion I encounter a physical radio, but I wouldn't ask them to waste space by adding text to the buttons! On the web, hover text is probably good enough.

<comment><USER8> For the love of everything that is holy, if in your design the icons for "Undo" and "Jump Backwards" are practically identical -- as in this font, where only the outline of the arrows differs -- , please, _please_ "waste space" by adding text to the buttons.

Don't make people discover which one's "undo" and which one's "discard the current screen" by trying the buttons out. That's not a friendly interface. An interface can be friendly without looking like a five year-old's doodle. A wall of text is intimidating and unfriendly, sure, but nobody older than eight is intimidated by having to read six or seven words.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough! I didn't look closely at this icon set, and definitely agree that we should strive for high-clarity icons if they're the only signal about what a button does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks pretty neat

Though I'm always afraid of using icon sets (especially for a big product) because if I couldn't find an icon I need then sometimes it's not that easy to find this icon from another source with similar styling

<comment><USER10> you could always bribe the author, I hear he's a nice guy :)

worst case you might end up paying some other designer to supply the icon you need in the desired style. shouldn't break the bank, "especially for a big product".

<comment><USER11> Can confirm that I'll listen (no bribe necessary) haha. It's going to take a while to knock off every icon, but we'll get there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's the license? Are these in the public domain? And are the source files somewhere?

<comment><USER11> I've opened up the repo now ([https://github.com/CoreyGinnivan/system- uicons](https://github.com/CoreyGinnivan/system-uicons)), the licence is officially "Unlicense License" \- it's all public domain. The SVGs are all in the repo (or can download on the site). I'll be releasing Sketch and Figma files soon :)

<comment><USER13> I'm curious about reasons you chose Unlicense

I like the icons, especially the bells, look cleaner than other fonts, to me

<comment><USER11> Thanks! I chose it because I want it to be public domain, people can copy, remake, improve, do whatever they want with it. Don't having to worry about any infringements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hey everyone, I'm the one that made these - happy to answer any questions :)

<comment><USER14> Great set! "Hierarchy" is misspelled as "Heirarchy".

<comment><USER11> Oooo good eyes haha, thanks! Pushed an update.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thanks, I love me some icons. Looks like it could work well stylistically along side those also using Github's recently redesigned octicons ([https://primer.style/octicons](https://primer.style/octicons))

</comment><comment><USER16> I've used [https://ikonate.com/](https://ikonate.com/), and this service looks pretty similar and of equal quality if not better.

> _Use how you want, without attribution_

This license reminded me of Sam Hocevar's [0] _do whatever the fuck you want_ license [1].

[0] Probably one of the first to advocate DNS based ad-blocking way back in _2002_ : [http://sam.zoy.org/writings/internet/doubleclick.html](http://sam.zoy.org/writings/internet/doubleclick.html)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL)

</comment><comment><USER17> Maybe it's just my particular setup, but these icons look blurry to me, especially when you mouse over them. It looks as if there is no antialiasing. I'm on Ubuntu with Firefox for whatever it's worth.

Other than that they look like nice icons and this is a nice effort.

<comment><USER11> I'll look in to it, thanks mate! Might just be an image rendering issue when they're scaling

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would prefer more usage of ISO 9995-7 symbols. They might be equally inscrutable, but at least they are an international standard.

<comment><USER19> As far as I'm aware, ISO 9995-7 only specifies symbols which would be used on or in relation to a keyboard -- glyphs representing functions like Shift, Control, Escape, Scroll Lock, etc. Useful if you're trying to describe keyboard shortcuts, useless if you're trying to describe a more concrete operation like "zoom in", "add a comment", or "delete this".

<comment><USER18> Keyboard keys have an extremely similar role to buttons in an application program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks good! Push left vs. push right icons are inconsistent though. The "push left" icon makes sense (arrow pushing on a line), but the "push right" icon is more like a __pull __right icon. The line needs to be shifted to the other side of the arrow.

</comment><comment><USER21> Some of them are great, but some of them aren't aligned with the pixel grid and thus look terrible.

</comment><comment><USER22> That's pretty cool! Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER23> Tiny inscrutable icons are a terrible design fad.

The solution isn't "yet another free icon collection"

<comment><USER24> These do not have to be tiny as they are available as SVGs.

<comment><USER25> Just because a logo is a vector art doesn't mean you can just naively scale it up.

<comment><USER24> I'm aware, that's why I checked a few to make sure these actually scale well.

<comment><USER25> Normally when you make a logo bigger, you'll increase the level of detail, and tweak line widths.

<comment><USER26> Obligatory: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AxwaszFbDw#t=17s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AxwaszFbDw#t=17s)

(aside: These guys sound like Deep #800080 don't they?)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>