Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you? - <AUTHOR> I saw your top requirement for recruits:
* BS / MS / PhD in Computer Science or related disciplines from a top CS school (Stanford, Berkeley, UIUC, CMU, etc.)
I went to etc. and graduated top of my class.  Can I work for you?  No?  We'll, it's back to my job flipping burgers, I guess... :(
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=313311  <-- (for those saying WTF?) <comment><USER2> This was a total oversight by us -- we didn't really mean "REQUIREMENT" in the sense. Of course that's insane. This is something that we actually discussed with our friends (some of them from Hacker News too). The top CS school discussion DID come up.

Here was our thinking: the true hacker badasses out there will see that and not really give a crap. They know they're good, and will just glide over that line.

What we really mean is: we want people who are smart and amazing.

I can show chat transcripts with dcurtis if you care to follow up with me directly (we really did discuss whether that line should stay or go). email@example.com

But the point is: Mea culpa, we posted it at 2 AM and it was a mistake to put this down as a "requirement". It's absolutely a 'plus'.

<comment><USER3> The best hackers I know didn't necessarily graduate top in the class. A few did and a few didn't. The ones who didn't were usually contributing in other ways - open source or small businesses (sometimes startups but not necessarily). As you stated, most hackers who didn't would ignore any requirements and apply because they wanted to work on posterous.

Here are some of my own personal opinions on hiring / schools / etc.

Which school you graduated from and rank is rarely even discussed when hiring coders with a few years experience. After 2 years no one will ask you where you graduated in your class. After 8 years no one will care where you went to school, other than possibly as a plus. It's not a decision maker at that point. What the applicant did between graduation and applying to the job is really what matters. This seems to be different for other areas of study (and graduate degrees of course). But this is my experience with coders (bachelor degree holding computer scientist and the like). Both hiring and being one.

An individual's family situation, both financial and otherwise, can effect their decisions on schools. Some oft overlooked hackers went to state or local colleges for reasons outside of their control. An example - I knew someone in high school that got into MIT and Northwestern (Chicago area). They ended up cranking through the local college (Northern Illinois University) in 3 years instead. His family had a business and he had to be there to run it. After he finally found someone to manage the family business he ended up being successful and promoted up the chain in a huge company. There are plenty of opportunities outside of the norm. But the burden is on the person applying to show that they are worth investigating further.

[EDIT: Syntax]

<comment><USER2> Agree 100% -- these are all significant considerations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Like a true hacker, hack the system.

I agree, the company HR and recruiting are totally arbitrary and incompetent - most recruiters don't come from a technical background, and will only match up the buzzwords from their position requirement with those on your resume + the "name" of where you got your education (bingo! we have a winner!!)

But there are ways to get around to it:

a) Do a lot of open-source projects; it's actually not very hard to get involved in some of the top-tier projects. This spring, I was applying for jobs at hedge funds and investment banks. Before I put on my resume: "Google Inc. - Summer of Code," none of them wanted to talk to me. After I did, I re- sumbitted my resume to all of the same banks, suddenly, everybody wanted to talk to me. The world is a prestige whore.

b) Do a demo project specifically tailored for the job that you were shooting for. Send it along with your resume/CV from the get-go. This shows even to the HR people, extra-enthusiasm for the job - and might even get forwarded to the technical hiring manager, who's the person that's going to matter the most anyway.

c) F the system. Apply to YC. Corporate Serfdom is only a temporary sinecure for starting your company anyways. It's a means, not an end.

<comment><USER5> "The world is a prestige whore."...

...you said it. If you have lots of funding you can afford to pay the price premiums for people with resumes with prestige shwag on them. If you don't have that kind of funding and need to pay lower rates and are outside of the valley, you are better off being able to identify great programmers in other ways (which has been written about much).

I am a startup founder, <http://shellshadow.com>. I'm in Shanghai. Even if I had the funding to throw at prestige resumes, the supply of such isn't available in Shanghai. I have to rely on the fact that I maintain my own deep programming skills as a 40 year old programmer and therefore have the ability to identify and manage top developers without the aid of keywords on a resume.

But hey, if you've got the cash, go ahead and pay the price premiums...it can't hurt, right? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Yeah, I went to Stanford and got the $200k education so I can work as a JavaScript+HTML+CSS coder at Posterous.com. I'm a real genius."

<comment><USER7> It isn't uncommon for highly educated computer scientists to be working in roles "beneath them" in silicon valley.

The "softer" stuff is usually more fun, better working environment, potentially impacts far more people, and often pays more.

<comment><USER8> In fact I'd argue that is one of the defining qualities of a startup. At YC we have a tenured MIT CS prof as our sysadmin.

<comment><USER9> the single most important quality of a founder is having the discipline to do work "beneath" them. at auctomatic we had two oxford grads figuring out what sizes of t-shirt to buy and decorating stalls at ebay live.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The guy who started Tumblr, the leading tumblelog, didn't even go to college. I guess he'll be working the fry machine.

<comment><USER11> Tumblr also had that severe security hole back a few months ago that allowed anyone to go to /admin and see _everything_.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, that was definitely because the founder didn't go to college!

<comment><USER11> I can see how my comment comes off as that, but in actuality, the question to ask is, "Does going to college give you the knowledge to forsee a situation like that?" Or, "does one acquire this knowledge only from experiences in the real world?"

I was trying to imply that _maybe_ going to college makes you more aware, but I have no clue if this is really true or not... (my assumption is no)

<comment><USER12> Your assumption is right

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thats the one line that stood out in the Posterous job announcement. Sounds pretty elitist to me. I went to one of those schools, but I can tell you that I've met far many brilliant hackers who didn't go to these schools.

<comment><USER14> Here's I think a much better way of saying it:

 _"Awesome at what you do and have some way of showing it."_

I personally prefer links to past projects and code samples. Whether or not somebody knows their way around theory you can sort out in an interview (and having a degree from a top university is unfortunately a frustratingly bad indicator of such). Figuring out if they can code is a lot harder.

<comment><USER2> Agree 100%. We want projects and code samples... the school itself doesn't matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Whatever dude, everyone knows Etc U was a total party school

</comment><comment><USER16> I can see them poring over their US News and World Report rankings right now.

Might I suggest another requirement?

* Expert at tying a full-Windsor knot

<comment><USER17> _Expert at tying a full-Windsor knot_

That would be me. I do a decent bowtie too...

aah the advantages of a classical education come to bear once again...

<comment><USER18> Out of curiosity, were does one obtain a classical education?

<comment><USER19> If you need to ask, then you don't need to know.

<comment><USER20> He means "... you needn't know."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Are they serious? To parse an email and post the contents to a web page?

<comment><USER22> Maybe for today. But what about tomorrow as the product grows and they start to tackle other verticals?

<comment><USER23> They might need someone with practical experience, rather than an academic.

<comment><USER24> Those sets are not necessarily disjoint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I love the Posterous guys (and their product), but I think they are wrong to require this. It would disqualify everyone on my team (which hurts my feelings) and also disqualifies some of the most brilliant/hardworking geeks I know.

If it's a buyers market for employers and you're buried in candidates, it's a great line to throw in to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. In a market like this (where every good coder I know is buried in job offers), you're not going to be too buried in candidates.

<comment><USER2> Mistake! Sorry! =/

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This one's funny. In 1998 I built an app that does maybe 80-90% of what Posterous is doing under the hood. That is, a huge multiuser system that parsed incoming email, ripped out what's inside, stuffed that into the right places in a database, and displayed the right stuff to the right users via the web.

The experience at the time, dealing with email parsing, buggy DB drivers and crazy deadlines was so horrible that when it was finished, I specifically went back to school to finish my degree so that I would never have to work on an application like that again.

That said, I love Posterous - just wanted to suggest that degree from Stanford or not, one man's dream job can be another's worst nightmare. :)

</comment><comment><USER22> When reading that line, I too thought it was somewhat elitist but if you are hiring you want the _best_ talent you can get and more often than not this means people who went to an elite school. Most of the early hires in all the outstanding tech companies followed similar pattern.

However, if you can prove strong or exceptional skill and achievement in whatever you have done tech related, I am sure it won't matter if you went to an elite school or not (and if it does, you probably won't like it there anyway).

For most businesses (startups in particular) that do not have the time or resources to filter candidates, an elite school is a general simple quality filter, but the world is full of examples of people who did not go to school let alone an elite school, from Richard Branson to Dyson to Jobs to the mass of not-so-famous.

Worry not, shine and hopefully you will be noticed.

<comment><USER26> You can probably still get hired, I'm sure, but it reflects poorly on the culture there.

<comment><USER2> a) It was a typo to put it under 'requirement' (see above)

b) Joining Posterous is actually a cool way to avoid bad culture because you'd have a key hand in creating the what the culture would become. Say if you joined us at Posterous -- it would be you, me and Sachin, making great software and building a great company.

So, how about it? =)

<comment><USER26> No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's funny, almost the exact same conversation is going on at Reddit:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/72uv9/want_to_w...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/72uv9/want_to_work_at_reddit/c05j8hi)

<comment><USER28> I found this comment particularly interesting from the Reddit thread:

 _I think it's interesting that I see a lot of people saying that computer programmers don't need degrees, but I rarely see anyone saying the same thing about physicists, biologists, mathematicians, or zoologists. I wonder why that is._

 _Maybe there really are people decrying degrees in those other fields and I just don't hear about it because I'm a computer programmer. But I suspect that degrees are actually required and respected in those fields. What is it about Computer Science that makes people think you can read a few books on your own and you are qualified? What is it about the other fields in math, science, and engineering that make that not the case?_

<comment><USER29> I think it's a misconception.

Computer Programming !== Computer Science

<comment><USER30> I once heard someone say, programming is to computer science what skating is to ice hockey.

(Just don't tell that to a theorist)

<comment><USER31> Show me an ice hockey player wo can do a Bielmann spin or a triple Lutz jump.

<comment><USER32> You're not familiar with Doug Dorsey?

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104040/>

I'm a little embarrassed that I know that movie, but I have an excuse; it's one of my wife's favorites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Haha, I found that part of the job posting to be a joke for multiple reasons.

For example, given that their enumeration of the top CS schools doesn't include the best computer science program in the world, I wouldn't worry too much about being in the "etc." :P

* [http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad/eng/c...](http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad/eng/comp)

* [http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/college/spec-d...](http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/college/spec-doct-engineering)

</comment><comment><USER33> I became an expert at queuing theory during a summer of employment at McDonald's.

<comment><USER34> I hear the Starbucks program is a little more advanced though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It works in the same way as the Google Minimum GPA. The probability that you are wasting your time reading/interviewing a candidate from Etc. U. is simply higher. Is it a better criteria than other bits of info on the CV? I don't know, but I wouldn't dismiss it offhand. If you get a very large number of candidates and time is short, why not?

Everything you have on your CV is ground for similar discrimination. Judging from the response, this is a politically incorrect statement around here (cf.: What You Can't Say). Maybe they should have silently trashed all documents, if !doc.contains(topUni)

Before anyone points it out, yes, this line of reasoning supports gender and racial discrimination. Indeed, anti-discrimination laws make hiring a less efficient process. We have them because discrimination against gender leads to other social evils. Can anyone make such a case for university-based discrimination?

<comment><USER36> >Can anyone make such a case for university-based discrimination?

That's not too much of a difficult case to make. You'd do it the same way you highlighted gender and racial issues: measure levels of income, access to schools for their children etc etc.

I think that those that don't have university degrees are "discriminated" against is an accepted given. This is why you see such an uproar over tuition fees and the like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I can't think of any real hackers who honestly think that this is required to be good at the art of writing software. That being said, I'd imagine that a number of very highly skilled software people probably have an interest in NOT working somewhere that fosters such blatant snobbery.

</comment><comment><USER38> Maybe they were expressing an extra preference for CMU's Entertainment Technology Center grads:

<http://www.etc.cmu.edu/>

</comment><comment><USER7> What I want to know is how to get the telecommute job working on Final Cut Pro from my NYC apartment, now that you guys are working on Posterous...

</comment><comment><USER26> If I were interviewing there I'd just ask straight-up, are there any major universities, elite or otherwise, whose graduates you wouldn't consider?

</comment><comment><USER39> relax guys. we just want smart people. that's all. if you are smart, please apply. simple as that. why all the fuss? stanford has an amazing cs program and has been where some of today's greatest companies started (google, yahoo, etc). But of course not all of the great engineers out there go to these schools.

maybe this was all a test. do you only apply to jobs where you fit the description perfectly? When it says 3-5 years experience, do you skip over it? if i had followed all the rules, i wouldn't be where i am today. "video experience required" - ok so much for final cut pro. "discounted computers 1 per person only" - gee, i paid for college by selling many of those on ebay since I couldn't afford it otherwise. "cs degree required" - my cousin didn't even get a cs degree (he's EE from UCSB) and now he's a director at yahoo.

some people want to be challenged. they want to take positions that are above them, and then work hard.

</comment><comment><USER40> If you had graduated top of class from _/etc_ that would be a different story...

</comment><comment><USER41> Soooo.... politics is not "things hackers would find interesting" and causes numerous histrionic fit news items, but some random guy begging for a job gets 16 points and numerous discussion comments?

<comment><AUTHOR> Random guy? I'm offended sir! I graduated top of my class at etc. Could any random Joe do that?

<comment><USER41> Geez, these lines of inquiry are murder on my karma. But I'll continue because I'm hardheaded, and because I'm not nickb with a bazillion points to lose.

Micah, that's fine and congratulations. But, uh, do you really think that your request for a job deserved >30 points and a hit on the first page? Meanwhile the very interesting Project 10^100 link has 19 points and is falling off rapidly?

And this isn't the first time Posterous-related contentless posts have shown up on the first page: [http://kirindave.tumblr.com/post/50264813/the-problem- tm-wit...](http://kirindave.tumblr.com/post/50264813/the-problem-tm-with- hacker-news)

I don't have anything against you, but if everyone did what you just did, Hacker News would be worse than useless. And crazily enough we can't seem to flag your post down. I'm baffled why so many vote for this story, but your job hunt is not "news" nor is it something that a vast majority of hackers should care about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your deadpan delivery makes me think that you didn't get the sarcasm. I'm not _really_ asking for a job. That's clear, right?

<comment><USER41> I didn't realize you were being sarcastic. I don't think I'm alone in this.

Either way, I don't care. Posterous is surrounded by an aura of crap news.yc posts and I'm tired of it because that aura shines in my eyes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> You just wasted 15 seconds of my life that I will never get back. But somehow you still made me laugh in the morning.

</comment><comment><USER43> maybe you could, but why in the hell would you want to?

</comment><comment><USER44> The one that always makes me laugh is when a job spec asks for a "PhD from an Ivy League university". Apparently, no one only told HR that:

(1) "Ivy League" means absolutely nothing in the context of graduate programs, as the rankings are discipline-specific and many Ivy League grad programs are mediocre. For example, Harvard's computer science program is strong, but not remotely in the same league as CMU or UIUC.

(2) In any case, "Ivy League" is not a synonym for "elite college"; well- regarded universities such as Stanford, MIT, and Michigan are (surprisingly?) not Ivy League.

(3) Related to (2), emphasizing "Ivy League" pisses off nearly everyone who went to a good college. Those who went to non-Ivy elites (like me) consider themselves excluded when they see these ads. Those who went to Ivy League colleges generally dislike the snooty, stuffy connotations of "Ivy League" and don't like the sorts of people who emphasize "Ivy".

<comment><USER27> Eh, I never feel excluded when a job ad says "Ivy League" (I went to a top liberal-arts college). If I like the company, I'll just apply anyway. Most job ads are more like guidelines, anyway.

<comment><USER45> I'm the complete opposite. If I think a job looks interesting and see that the company has elected to limit their candidate pool by putting a lame qualifier like, "a degree from a top-tier university," I don't waste my time. It shows that the company is more concerned with how their employees are perceived than what they can accomplish. Pass.

I sometimes have similar reservations about companies that list arbitrary experience requirements too, especially when they're clearly just going off some industry norm. That's just me tho. YMMV.

<comment><USER27> That's how I feel if, given an obviously qualified candidate, they _then_ reject him.

But I try to give them the benefit of the doubt on the initial job application. They have to put _something_ down, and as spez pointed out on the Reddit thread, it's an easy way of disqualifying people who like to complain instead of do something about it. It's an unfortunate filter that probably turns off a few well-qualified candidates, but nobody's perfect.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Please Do Not Buy Richard Stallman a Parrot And Other Rules - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5853729/ <comment><USER2> ...and DON'T invite him to breakfast!</comment>


Show HN: Quiply – Share work experiences anonymously (no one knows you posted) - <AUTHOR> http://quiply.me

<comment><AUTHOR> We all have workplace experiences - some great, some terrible. Some companies are completely dysfunctional, some have incredible work environments and amazing people. And when we think things should be different, we don't always have a voice in driving change.

Even if we can be heard, we may feel more comfortable sharing our workplace experiences anonymously, so we can be authentic. That's why we created quiply. Share your appreciation. Give compliments. Or share constructive comments about someone.

quiply is available for download in the App Store. Use it and help make the workplace better.

</comment><comment><USER2> Checked out your app. Like the tone that's created when the comments are funny and entertaining. Those will bring me back.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. It's great when people get creative with their comments and also use the app in a lighthearted way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool idea. I'm downloading the app now.</comment>


It's time for a new Internet - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@darkblack_io/its-time-for-a-new-internet-1ff9d475faaa <comment><USER2> [https://www.gnunet.org/about](https://www.gnunet.org/about)</comment>


Practical file system design with the Be File System (1999) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf <comment><USER2> A thread from 2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9430838](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9430838)

<comment><AUTHOR> 50-comment thread from 2017, also:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15261318](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15261318)</comment></comment>


Hiring Perl, Python or LUA Developers in Berlin - <AUTHOR> http://valbonne-consulting.com/job/perl-software-developer/

<comment><USER2> Since you seem to be affiliated with that recruiter: posting job ads is only allowed for YC companies. See [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

You can add the post to the most recent [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822808), [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822810](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822810) or wait until Feb/1st for the new batch.</comment>


Ask HN: Open clinical encounters dataset? - <AUTHOR> Considering creating an open-source dataset of doctor's visits. Would you be willing to record one of your visits to a doctor on a cellphone app and submit the audio and EHR to an open-source dataset paper? Dataset would be scrubbed of any PHI (names, addresses, etc.) during the upload process and the dataset paper would be targeted towards the applied track at one of the top ML conferences. Any comments or features you'd like to see in the project? <comment><USER2> All sorts of lovely ways to misuse the data comes to mind.

Still, a sucker is born every minute and all that...

Incidentally, this would be illegal in a number of states, unless informed consent is obtained from all those who are recorded, including the health care provider.</comment>


A few comments on 'age' - <AUTHOR> https://neilmadden.blog/2019/12/30/a-few-comments-on-age/ <comment><USER2> The real issue with gpg / pgp is the terrible UX. If this new tool doesn't address that it isn't much use.

<comment><USER3> That's not true. It also has old, deprecated crypto. It still works, but it has problems, and not all installations support the same things. I am not well versed enough to regurgitate what other cryptographers here and elsewhere have said about it, but there are lots of problems.

<comment><USER4> > It also has old, deprecated crypto.

That entirely works.Any sort of realistic crypto standard is going to have to support older systems right up to the point where any problems with those systems actually reduce security in some way. To do otherwise would be irresponsible to your users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> IMO the criticisms here make more sense if you also read the author's article series "Public key authenticated encryption and why you want it".

[https://neilmadden.blog/2018/11/14/public-key- authenticated-...](https://neilmadden.blog/2018/11/14/public-key- authenticated-encryption-and-why-you-want-it-part-i/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Happy to see discussion of the age design. I replied on the age-dev mailing list.

[https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/age- dev/505e74e5-1385-4055...](https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/age- dev/505e74e5-1385-4055-9a8f-bd41cd20a409%40www.fastmail.com)

tl;dr: we seem to disagree on what users should want from age—confidentiality or also authentication—and that would lead not only to different design choices, but to drastically different UXs.

<comment><USER7> I had a diff tl;dr:

> _"Unfortunately, the age spec doesn't document its threat model or the > security goals it is intended to achieve ... Most importantly, the spec > should define its security goals."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm wondering if this feedback has been shared with age's author. To me at least is seems like a better place for this would be age's github issues instead of the author's blog.

<comment><USER9> The author has detailed reply [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/age- dev/r-gwwcN3L-0/Eh...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/age- dev/r-gwwcN3L-0/EhEvUbG5AwAJ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a lot of trouble understanding the issue in the comparison with JOSE. The problem with JOSE's header was that many libraries offered an API that was "validate that this is a valid token using one of these keys", but a key was just one part of the unauthenticated header. An attacker could create a token that used one of the keys with an algorithm it didn't belong to and create a token that was signed by one of the whitelisted keys in a wrong algorithm. The solution was to make sure all the libraries had the API where the user whitelisted allowed values of the entire header: "validate that this is a valid token using one of these headers (alg+key)".

I'm not sure what the corresponding version of the first issue would be in age, and then why the answer wouldn't be for age to make sure to check the entire header against a whitelist instead of considering just a subset of it.

<comment><USER11> I updated the blog post, I had misunderstood that part of the age spec.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >or I need to define my own chunked streaming signature verification tool and combine that with age (and hope the chunk sizes line up).

Wouldn't you just need a tool that only outputs chunks after they're verified, and then you pipe that tool's output to age?

I'm not sure that signify or minisign currently support this streaming operation though.

<comment><USER11> Yes, but no such tool exists (yet) as far as I'm aware. You also need to tie the chunks together so that they cannot be rearranged, duplicated, or deleted.

You also need to be careful about what you think this tells you. For example, suppose you ran a competition where the winner is the first person to upload an encrypted+signed correct answer to a shared folder. An attacker can wait for somebody to upload the winning answer and then simply strip the real winner's signature off and sign the encrypted blob (which they can't decrypt) with their own private key - hurray, the attacker has now won the prize!

If you reverse the order of signing and encryption you can run into bugs like [1].

You can securely combine public key encryption and signatures by including extra metadata fields inside each layer. Or you can use a function that provides public key authenticated encryption like NaCl's crypto_box or the mode I've proposed for JOSE [2].

[1]: [https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/sci.crypt/73yb5a9pz2...](https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/sci.crypt/73yb5a9pz2Y/LNgRO7IYXOwJ) [2]: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-madden-jose- ecdh-1pu-02](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-madden-jose-ecdh-1pu-02)

Edit: clarify ambiguous use of "their"

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a user, if I have a key and an encrypted file, aside from actually decrypting the file, all I care about is ensuring that the software can confirm that the encrypted file was encrypted using the same key. Why should this be complicated?

<comment><USER11> If this is all you need use age with a password/passphrase (scrypt). It does exactly what you want.</comment></comment>


The Costs of Keeping Your Rails App Up to Date, Or Not - <AUTHOR> http://www.samuelmullen.com/2014/01/the-costs-of-keeping-your-rails-app-up-to-date-dot-dot-dot-or-not/ <comment><USER3> Colour me naive, but there are two things in an application in a managed language: the runtime, and the actual app. For example, in Javaland there is the JVM, and maybe something like JBoss, and then there is _your code_. You can upgrade the JVM or JBoss, and obviously test, but it's not that big a deal, unless you have done something egregiously stupid, _your code_ will "just work". The same if you have used .NET. Hell the same if you have used Perl CGI, you can upgrade Perl and Apache to your heart's content.

So why is everything in Rails so much work? There are entire books written on "deployment". No other language has this.

<comment><USER4> tl;dr: "Rails: Not even once."

Everything in Rails is so much work because Rails is a rolling disaster; every new major version replaces enormous chunks of framework functionality with enormous _new_ chunks of functionality, which imposes a heavy load on the developer; "convention over configuration", plus major changes to the convention _du jour_ in every major version, equals a necessity to re-learn, at every major version change, where the new magic lurks and precisely how it works. If I'm being entirely fair, I can't say that the Rails developers have _no_ interest in backwards compatibility, but such interest in my experience is both quite spotty and heavily concentrated on obvious and conventional behavior, which means anything non-obvious or unconventional is probably going to need heavy rework. (I have yet to run across a Rails app which did not, at least occasionally, do something non-obvious or unconventional, and necessarily so; no framework can cover _every_ use case, but Rails in particular seems interested in covering only the most common ca. 60%.)

To make matters worse, no one in the Rails community has the slightest interest in yesterday, and even today tends to be neglected in favor of tomorrow. You talk of entire books on the subject of Rails deployment, and while the necessity for such books to exist is certainly a problem, actually _having_ such a book means you're doing better than average; I've recently been fighting my way through an upgrade of a Rails 2.3 app to run under Rails 3.2; it's a difficult enough task to begin with, and is massively complicated by the fact that no real documentation exists on how to perform such an upgrade. What's there is mostly to be found on various Rails devs' Tumblrs, or in IRC logs or commit comments, and these are both poorly curated and evanescent; I've spent quite as much time trying to collate information on _how_ to perform this project as I have actually editing code, and if not for the Internet Archive, a couple of critical Tumblr posts would no longer be available at all, thanks to the Rails dev who wrote them having apparently decided to "reboot" his blog.

The whole process has been enormously frustrating, not to mention slow; I started this project better than six months ago, as a novice Rails developer, and I'm just now getting to a point where I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I am also strongly convinced that Rails is never the right solution; as long as I'm employed at this organization, it will embark upon a new Rails project only over my metaphorical smoking corpse. There's just too much to go wrong, and the underlying ideas of the Rails community are too wrong-headed to make for a reliable platform; the purpose of a framework is to free the developer from having to rearchitect the same infrastructure over and over, yet Rails not only forces developers to do so during upgrades, but the massive changes to core functionality I mentioned earlier make the rearchitecting task enormously more complicated and painful than it'd be in the absence of any framework at all -- I do not engage in hyperbole when I say that I've led upgrades from PHP 4 to PHP 5 which were both less painful and more quickly completed than the task of upgrading a single, rather small, site, from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.2 has been.

Rails, overall, is the worst example I've ever seen of the development model which Zawinski calls "CADT" [1]; between that, and the deep-seated and dangerous problems Shaw identifies with the Rails community as a whole [2], anyone other than a Rails core developer, who involves Rails in a project of any sort save perhaps a tiny single-developer throwaway prototype, is borrowing trouble on a potentially catastrophic scale both for himself and for any unwitting organization on which he chooses to inflict the resulting disaster.

[1] [http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html)

[2] [http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a- ghetto](http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto)

<comment><USER5> I think there is some merit in this, upgrading from Rails 2 to Rails 3 was an absolute nightmare, and after beginning, I had to stop, create a new app from scratch and manually copy files over and edit configuration files to get where I was going ... and that was for a very small Rails app, so I absolutely share your thoughts there.

Upgrading from Rails 3 to 4, though, feels much easier as there haven't been so many fundamental changes in the way Rails does things. And things that have changed have usually been moved to gems that you can include to keep your app working as it was before.

Fundamentally though ... Rails has an attitude that makes it pretty difficult to adopt at big organizations precisely for the reasons that you've mentioned. I'm yet to encounter a Rails version upgrade that wasn't a massive task , and I can imagine having to deal with that as a startup whose life's blood depended on it. (airbnb's experience on this is here [http://nerds.airbnb.com/upgrading-airbnb-from-rails-23-to- ra...](http://nerds.airbnb.com/upgrading-airbnb-from-rails-23-to-rails-30/), and lots of companies don't have the resources or talent that they do). And supporting older versions in the Rails community does get short shrift though it is getting A LOT better these days.

However, I have to take issue with your assertion that

"I am also strongly convinced that Rails is never the right solution"

Which I feel comes from a place of frustration. I think the rewards of using Rails ... developer happiness, productivity and ease of getting from idea to software, make it worth it to put up with some of the warts that it has. Things will only get better (and already are).

<comment><USER4> More "fury" than "frustration", really. That may make it easier for you to understand why your citing "developer happiness" as a reason to use Rails elicits only a hollow laugh from me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This answer would completely put me off building a Rails app, as a business owner.

My we might be using a four-year-old copy of Photoshop, or Word. But my Rails consultant tells me that after he builds my 3 user internal accounting app I'm going have to pay him for 10 hours every time a point release of rails comes out – which is about quarterly – at his rate, which is say $150 an hour. Now my three user app has upkeep costs of 6K year. With no improvements at all.

No thanks – I'll go look for technology where every point release doesn't require $1500 worth of work. Or where I can find a consultant who actually weigh the costs and benefits to me.

<comment><USER7> If every point release requires 10 hours of work, you need a new consultant.

For a minor version releases, some (less than 10) hours are probably necessary.

For a major release, 10 hours may be necessary.

Of course, maybe your test suite needs reworking, which can be substantial. I found that for a small 3.2.x app, upgrading to 4.0 was doable in 2-4 hours, and I'm for the most part a Rails novice.

<comment><USER8> That changes pretty drastically with application size and age. My project at work is _at least_ eight years old and pretty damn huge. It uses a considerable set of libraries, some of which are close to abandoned. Others we've hacked up to the point that we're basically maintaining our own fork.

Version upgrades in that setup are not simple. Mostly because verifying correctness here scales with the interaction of changed features, which tends to grow much faster than pure application size.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely - I was really thinking about the scope of the application as suggested by the parent post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The conversation in this comments has become a lightning rod for Rails hate, and the "impossibility" of upgrading! (Somewhat to be expected on HN.)

However, for almost all Rails developers, upgrading is usually _not a huge issue_ , at least since Rails 3 came around. I've been doing Rails development for 3 years, and I've yet to spend more than a couple hours on an upgrade. All in all, you have to realize this -- Rails upgrading troubles are something that happen once a year, maybe twice a year at best. In the worst case it'll take about half a day of work. Is it really worth tossing the whole framework out just because of that?

Here's my take on the 4 possible issues the author mentioned:

1) If you're >= Rails 3, almost all upgrades are painless. Even Rails 3 -> Rails 4 wasn't that bad, as the only sort of breaking change was strong parameters. The difficulty of changing that varies greatly on the size of your application, but it's more likely just a tedious couple hours of work and you're done.

2) Application size - see above.

3) Use of external libraries - eh, what I usually do is just wait a few weeks when the next edge Rails comes out, and by that point, the open source community has fixed its stuff. Or, even better, contribute!

4) Test coverage - I've never been at a legitimate Rails shop that doesn't do test coverage. Testing is brought to the extreme with all Rails apps -- and if you aren't writing tests, you probably aren't a Rails dev.

<comment><USER10> Apps of how many LOCs have you migrated?

I have been migrating one and the same Rails app from version to version for around 5 years now, and we are currently at around 50k lines of code. When you are taking about "couple hours of work" and "painless" I can only laugh out loud. Every new minor or major Rails version migration takes several weeks with any larger app, only patch versions can be migrated reasonably smoothly. Migration from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0 was a particular catastrophe, it took me more than a month of intensive work, after the switch the application became twice as slow, which turned out to be a regression in the PostgreSQL driver that went unnoticed for a year since Rails 3.0 was first released. Just diagnosing this single issue took me a week of frustration, where I step by step peeled the onion of abstraction upon abstraction, having to profile Rails internals in the end.

We are now looking into the Rails 3 -> Rails 4 migration, and it's not much better, after just changing the gems the application won't start, the console won't start, and the tests run into an infinite recursion and explode the stack. I routinely spend a week even to get just those three basic things to start at all, and it was this way even when migrating 1.x to 2.x. After every upgrade of this kind, some gems turn out to be abandoned are not upgraded by the authors to support the newer Rails, and seldom they will work with them without changes. The ones that were updated, often require a separate upgrade procedure of their own, there goes another week. Just fixing all the deprecation warnings will take another one. It's not just strong parameters, a lot of the old routing code does not work, conditions on relations don't work anymore, config settings become obsolete and so on and so forth, 80% of the things that have to be changed are not even in the release notes, for example Rails 4.0 happened to introduce an internal Options class that is visible from every controller and shadows our global Options constant which is the object with application configuration.

It does not mean Rails "sucks" or anything like this, but keeping a very nice API while adapting a framework to requirements evolving over the years has the cost of sucking at compatibility, that's just a fact of software engineering. So please lets not pretend the Rails team top priority is ease of long term maintenance and lets put things as they are. If you are not systematically keeping up with newer Rails version, after half a year or 9 months since the last update you won't even receive bugfixes, because they often aren't backported even to the previous minor version. That the 37signals guys threw out their own biggest app and rewritten it from scratch is also telling about their attitude to things of this kind. So Rails is bad at compatibility, in exchange it keeps delivering a really nice API for a wider and wider scope of tasks.

<comment><USER11> We've upgraded a similarly large project and for us the two following mistakes caused the majority of headache:

1) Adapting libraries without regards to long term maintenance. I.e. single person project that he/she does because a current client needs it, without planning on having to take over stewardship of the library or fork it when the person eventually abandons it.

2) Adapting libraries that hook into rails internal apis, without writing this shortcut up as a debt that you might have to pay later when the private api changes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While much of this is true, I feel like all complex web applications require almost all of this sort of maintenance. I don't see how rails is any worse in this regard than Django. If you can't afford to address the security concerns in rails, I'd like to know the alternative that provides rails-like functionality while improving the upgrade process.

<comment><USER13> Consider using railslts.com. It's a drop-in replacement for Rails 2.3 and gets you off the security-patch treadmill. (I was sort of the instigator and first customer for it. Great people and a great product, even though things have been much quieter for the last 11 months or so than I was expecting on the Rails 2.3 security front.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a Rails developer, naturally I appreciate the thought that testing is good and upgrading is nice. But it seems a bit odd to advocate a completely context-insensitive heuristic for deciding whether upgrading frameworks is a good idea. Surely there are cases where the costs exceed the benefits, for any number of unpredictable organizational reasons. For instance, the application is on life support and slated to be replaced, and there are other ways of mitigating new security risks in the meantime...

<comment><USER15> >it seems a bit odd to advocate a completely context-insensitive heuristic for deciding whether upgrading frameworks is a good idea.

For a contractor who generates income from upgrading Rails? Not likely. The answer will always be: "If it is possible to upgrade, you should have us upgrading for you." Excellent and traditional way to turn a 5 hour job into a 50 hour job.

<comment><USER14> Not going to disagree with that analysis. Relatedly, there was something odd to me about the tone or implicit audience of that article, as if it was written more to persuade managers than developers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _I can't even guess how much time I've saved by using Arel, CoffeeScript, SASS, and the Asset Pipeline_

I don't think that we've seen these types of "innovations" in 4.0 or 4.1 beta. (not saying they're not valuable, only addressing developer productivity discussion) Also, you have to subtract learning curve from time saved - <USER2> time, it's a net win, but not immediately.

 _By keeping your application up to date, you ensure that you'll have a larger pool of developers who can maintenance your application._

Isn't there a period of time where this isn't true? For a while, you'll reduce the pool of available developers, as not everyone gets up to speed right away on the latest version.

<comment><USER16> Most decent developers will want the opportunity to work on the latest version. Certainly keeping reasonably current is much lower risk than not upgrading.

<comment><USER7> Wanting to work on, and being qualified to work on, are 2 different things. I'll agree that keeping reasonably current is best. To that end, I think there's a sweet spot - probably 6-12 months after a minor or major version upgrade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd rather have semi-painful upgrades if it means making progress and not being stuck with a horrible base of a product.

Being stuck with bad design decisions because the framework core team is too busy worrying about making incompatible changes and moving at a snail's pace for new features is exactly how you become obsolete.

For some reason large changes in society rarely happen until entire generations of people die. Things move so slowly because people somehow fear change.

I for one love rails because I know the core team will make big changes if it's clearly for the better without worrying about pissing people off because in the end it's obviously the correct move.</comment>


Git - Linus is a designer - <AUTHOR> http://www.ivy.fr/blog/index.php/2008/02/25/82-git-linus-is-a-designer

<comment><USER2> I've recently switched from SVN to git. The posting mentioned Mercurial, and I've heard Linus mention Mercurial in his talk at Google. What is the difference between hg and git?

<comment><USER3> I can't verify this from experience, but git is probably faster. Git is written in C and Mercurial is written in Python.</comment></comment>


Find and block impersonator accounts/bots on Twitter easily and efficiently - <AUTHOR> http://fakesblocker.ga <comment><USER2> The "Terms of Service" page does not impress. Screenshot [https://imgur.com/1ELAQal](https://imgur.com/1ELAQal) ... Maybe I am too cynical, but this would be an easy way to hijack one's accounts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed!</comment></comment>


Toyota Central R&D Developing Free-Piston Engine Linear Generator - <AUTHOR> http://www.greencarcongress.com/2014/04/20140422-fpeg.html

<comment><USER2> I predict these won't ever be smaller, lighter and cheaper than traditional design with an rotating engine and separate generator.

In general, the generator weighs and costs more than the engine for the same power level. In the linear design, the generator is used inefficiently because the magnets are moving in a sinusoid instead of a constant velocity past the windings, and the maximum speed of a piston is lower than the optimum speed of a generator. So you'll need more magnet & wire for the same power level, increasing total weight and cost.

<comment><USER3> >I predict these won't ever be smaller, lighter and cheaper than traditional design with an rotating engine and separate generator.

it most possibly will. The reason is that traditional design was built for actual mechanical spinning of the wheels with all the trade-offs coming from it. Generating engine has completely different requirements which would drive trade-offs and optimizations. For example, you can run free-piston at much higher rpm, thus mitigating the inefficiency of magnet/wire usage. Higher rpm would lead to less weight for the same power. The pressure/volume curve can also be optimized and shaped instead of the sinusoid forced by the rotating movement. Etc...

<comment><USER4> Much higher frequency, not RPM! (there is no flywheel to go around...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oscillating piston generators have been around for a _long_ time, they're nothing new and based on the same principle of operation as those shake-to- recharge flashlights; note the date on this one in particular:

[http://www.google.com/patents/US2900592](http://www.google.com/patents/US2900592)

AFAIK they were briefly used in very limited amounts by the Germans in highly- space-constrained applications like missiles, but otherwise they were quite inefficient.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. Presumably there will still be just piston rings in the normal place, although I would like to see more on how they are going to lubricate it. You don't want the gas spring chamber to fill up with oil. My guess for how they are going to get it started is by driving the permanent magnets with the coils. Also, why is it 2 stroke? I'd always assumed that 2 strokes were smaller and cheaper, but had less power. Possibly because there is no momentum to do 2 of the 4 strokes. Toyota definitely has the technology to make it a modern EFI 4 stroke, though. For the fuel intake and compression strokes, the coils could be disconnected from the load and driven so that the strokes complete.

<comment><USER7> Two stroke engines are actually smaller, cheaper, and more powerful than four stroke engines of equal displacement. The issue with two stroke engines is cleanliness. Because there isn't a spare cycle to push all the extra unburned particles out of the chamber and let only clean air/fuel into the chamber, there is some loss of power efficiency due to the attempted combusting of leftover particles. This is more than mitigated by having double the amount of power strokes per equivalent displacement. There's actually some really interesting design techniques that have been used to "coax" the waste particles out of the chamber, take a look at MotoGP technology circa early 2000's if you want to learn more.

<comment><USER8> All the two stroke engines I have used (light aviation) have been terribly unreliable and painful to maintain. Won't start, often fires just on one cylinder, stops randomly, leaks oil everywhere. Is this a "shitty design" problem rather than an inherent problem with two-stroke engines?

<comment><USER7> Probably a combo of both. You know how I said above that there are some cool design techniques to get the old waste gases out of the cylinder? Well those techniques only work over a very narrow band of RPMs, under very specific air/fuel ratios. Your problem is even worse because you're in an aviation setting. Your engines are experiencing very different air densities, and this is causing the air/fuel ratio to change drastically compared to what they've been tuned for. If they get too rich, they stall. Too lean, they explode.

The leaky oil? Yeah, that's probably just a two stroke being a two stroke. Due to the design, they aren't "oiled" like a car, you instead shoot the oil in with the gasoline in the injection cycle, and it just kinda seeps in and around the engine. That's the main reason why they're dirty - both literally and environmentally.

<comment><USER9> Diesel engines have less problems when inlet air goes to the exhaust, since in a diesel, inlet air doesn't contain any fuel. A two stroke diesel has thus some synergistic advantages.

A direct injection otto engine could also work very well as a two stroke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Whatever happened to the Mueller wave disc motor? Does anyone know? It seemed very well-suited as a range extender motor in a series hybrid. Surely there's a Chevy Volt driving around with one somewhere...

EDITED to add: they seem to have run out of funding without producing anything commercializable: [http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2013/...](http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2013/09/04/arpa- e-backing-the-msu-wave-disk-engine/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Already patented by Bill's trolling patent outfit.

[http://jalopnik.com/5210372/bill-gates-files-patents-for- ele...](http://jalopnik.com/5210372/bill-gates-files-patents-for- electromagnetic-engine-plasma-injectors)</comment>


Google to launch flight search service soon - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/05/google-flight-search-engine/

<comment><USER2> I really hope they have smart combinatoric search. I want to be able to search flexible day, flexible airport, multi-leg world travel trips without making my own spreadsheet. Some services do flexible day, some do flexible airport, but I haven't found any that provide these with a multi-leg itinerary. I'm sure this is due to the computational complexity, but Google could handle it.

<comment><USER3> Both OAG and Innovata provide a dump of all possible flight schedules for the next few months (which includes multiple legs and airlines). It is trivial to add the multiple day/airport feature: I've had a vanilla mysql install (on a P4 with a 1gig ram - my dev machine, sadly) return exactly the sort of stuff you mentioned in less than 100ms, so I'm sure the computational complexity is pretty irrelevant at Google's scale.

<comment><USER2> Is any of that data free/cheap for experimentation?

<comment><USER3> A co-founder of the company I did the work for had a few contacts in both companies, so we were able to secure the data through them. It definitely isn't publicly available, but I imagine if you talked to a regional representative at either company, you could get them to generate a sample data dump for you (a gigantic CSV file, for example)

Kayak used to have a free API, but they shut it down "because of constly misuse". I'm not aware of any other service that's targeted at individual developers - most of these APIs are intended for huge companies with correspondingly deep pockets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow. This is going to be interesting. Adioso.com (YC) is an amazing site, Google are going to have to try pretty hard to beat them for Australia, considering what Adioso.com can do without buying out a massive company.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hipmunk looks similar to ITA Software's flight search tool, so it'll be interesting to see Google's take. If Google builds it, they will come.

<comment><USER6> To paraphrase Steven Tyler, they won't have to come - they're already there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if it will have Google+ integration from day one. Planning vacations together, or making sure you're never in the same town as someone? Maybe timing your visit to coincide with a candidate's campaign, or "facilitating serendipity" with people who will be at your destination at the same time. With circles and sparks, this could get real interesting....

</comment><comment><USER8> Curious to see the customer service aspect of the airline booking business.

</comment><comment><USER9> Ah... but would it be better than Hipmunk?

<comment><USER10> Yeah, Hipmunk is really great. The experience is so good I actually sort of wish I flew more often... or at least had to schedule flights more often.

It'd be cool if they could handle other itinerary and reservation tasks. Though I don't know how they'd necessarily make money like that.

<comment><USER9> Well, the money's in hotel reservations, so I guess it's in the pipeline.

<comment><USER11> Exactly, which I'm curious if GOOG will incorporate hotel reservations in it all.

Man Google has it covered. I'm trying hard to think of an online space they're _not_ in.

<comment><USER12> Actually google does hotel pricing already in maps. It's not super obvious, but do a search for "hotels in San francisco" and you should see some prices

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Google might acquire Hipmunk which already uses GWT.

<comment><USER14> Why do you think Hipmunk uses GWT (by which I assume you mean Google Web Toolkit)? The source for www.hipmunk.com pulls in jquery, but doesn't have the history iframe or <module>.nocache.js reference that one would expect to see for a GWT application.</comment></comment>


Myth Busting Banksy - <AUTHOR> https://www.artnome.com/news/2018/10/6/myth-busting-banksy <comment><USER2> > Score one for Banksy, though there are many other ways he could have > protested if they wanted to make the point without benefiting financially > from the protest.

How did Banksy profit from this? The value went up _after_ the sale..

The only other point in the article that I disagree on is the part about why Banksy's piece was auctioned last. He compares it to the random chance of being last and says that it is very very unlikely that it would randomly be last. As if the order is_ _ever_ random in an auction. Obviously we need to know about the other pieces in the auction. Maybe the Banksy piece was last because it was expected to sell for the most, nothing to do with any gimmicks. Asserting that it's either "on purpose" or "completely random" is a bit silly, there's clearly something in-between.

<comment><USER3> > How did Banksy profit from this?

He got his name in all the papers.

<comment><USER4> How does he profit from that?

<comment><USER5> The increase in Banksy's cultural cachet means that his next pieces sold at auction will likely be valued much higher than they would have been if this had not been in all the papers.

I can't say it's not a brilliant piece of art. It's quite similar to Duchamp's ready-mades[1] in that it's a critique of art itself.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)[1]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_\(Duchamp\)\[1\])

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder, like mentioned elsewhere in the art community, if this stunt will have the opposite assumed effect: that the artwork will be more valuable now than it was before. Since now it is a "double-Banksy" in a sense. And if others and I can think of that outcome, most definitely so can Banksy. And maybe that is the real critique of the artworld:

That even if you destroy the art, the destroyed art is still worth millions. Simply because the art has detached itself from its meaning and origin, and has tilted towards who made the art.

<comment><USER7> If I was an art collector I would pay much more for the artwork now, for the simple reasons that

1\. The girl with a balloon print was not the only one of its kind. There are other variations. It was not so unique before.

2\. This is the only one, the first one, even the first (prominent?) artwork that "destroyed itself"

3\. It is still an artwork. It did not destroy itself completely, but stopped in the middle of the destruction process. Doesn't it look great now, sticking only half outside the frame? Any museum of contemporary art would die for having this. And only this, not a similar one or the next one that destroys itself.

<comment><USER8> > 2\. This is the only one, the first one, even the first (prominent?) artwork > that "destroyed itself"

I don't know if you mean specifically Banksy work, but there's a whole discipline of auto-destructive art: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto- destructive_art](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-destructive_art)

A well known example is the poem Agrippa by William Gibson (yes, that one) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_(A_Book_of_the_Dead)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_\(A_Book_of_the_Dead\))

<comment><USER7> Did not know this, thanks. Maybe we can agree that Bansky's auto-destructive artwork is the one with the best publicity.

<comment><USER8> oh, for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The point about it being too much of a coincidence that the Banksy piece was sold last, seems weak to me. Banksy was likely the most popularly known artist whose work was for sale, and it makes sense to me that they would put that last. A better analysis would have looked at how much all of the pieces sold for, as a proxy for fame. If lots of piece that sold earlier than Banksy's, sold for more, then that would be pretty suspicious. I'm guessing, though, that Banksy was the biggest name for sale, and I would not expect Sotheby's to put them for sale in a random order, but rather start with the lesser known artists/pieces first.

Of course, I don't know the art auction world, and maybe it happens the other way, and you do the big names first, I don't know. But I also can't find out from reading this analysis. One thing I'm pretty sure of, is they don't just assign the order randomly.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like Banksy's work well enough, but the thing that has always bothered me about his persona is the collusion in the art and media world to maintain his supposed anonymity. I simply can't believe that there aren't large numbers of people who know exactly who he is, so why is he privileged by the media in this way?

<comment><USER11> As soon as the real person behind is officially known, there is no more story, it's over.

I guess it's interesting (and lucrative) for the arts industry and the media to continue to play along.

Maybe at some point a real investigation media will take the subject and mark the end of the game.

<comment><USER12> Not necessarily, Jean-Michel Basquiat started out as an anonymous graffiti artist, who later revealed himself and did very well under his own name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I disagree with the author's conclusion that Sotheby's will lose any credibility from this incident.

Modern art is crazy. A painting that shreds itself is pretty mundane by contemporary standards. If the shredding was an integral part of the work as intended by the artist, then Sotheby's has done a great job showcasing all the features of the work. Now that they've demonstrated an ability to handle unconventional works like this in a controller manner, I wouldn't be surprised if even more elaborate contraptions that blur the line between art and technology begin to come up for auction at Sotheby's.

Besides, the shredded painting will likely fetch a much higher price if it ever comes back to the auction.

<comment><USER14> Does Sotheby's have an API? I got some stupid easy ideas and in the worst case no one buys it.

"This balloon inflates the more you bid it up. Eventually it pops. Its an allegory for the housing bubble"

<comment><USER15> If only you were famous. You could have made millions from that idea.

<comment><USER16> How does one get famous making art? Magic?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The very first point in the article is about the capability of a wireless device to last ten years on battery charge, and the argument in favor is based on current technology ("I'm amazed at how little power is used by the wireless processors I'm working on now.")

The real question is about the wireless processors designed 13+ years ago (longer than the painting to allow time for it to hit production).

This thing was supposedly designed and enabled before the iPhone was released. The author does not present a credible argument.

<comment><USER18> He also points out that "Banksy's people" had physical access to the painting very shortly before the auction.

I think it's much more likely that a battery was inserted at that time.

<comment><USER19> I know nothing about the art world, but would "Pest Control" be given unsupervised access to the painting prior to the auction? Especially given the artist and his reputation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like this analysis from EEVBlog more: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdKdQWhlNTY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdKdQWhlNTY)

<comment><USER7> Nice one. Here is the "Strip Box" video he showed at the end: [https://vimeo.com/92609964](https://vimeo.com/92609964)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I liked this take on what it would be like living with banksy: [https://medium.com/@electrolemon/the-year-of-living-with- ban...](https://medium.com/@electrolemon/the-year-of-living-with- banksy-f9e1774ec60b)

There's only so much of his shtick that I can stomach.

<comment><USER22> That seems far fetched, and also pretty entertaining. Far better than my old housemates who would fuck in the kitchen and throw knives when drunk.

<comment><USER3> It's obviously fiction. (But Banksy might well be the author.)

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I'd wondered wether it was written by him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not long ago I was introduced to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blek_le_Rat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blek_le_Rat)

who apparently shared a similar sense of style

</comment><comment><USER24> Artists like Banksy are well into their time, that's why they are so successful once they achieve global exposure. Shredding your own work remotely at Sotheby's just after their auction is as artistic as political you can get in the UK these days, that is just a stunt like the Brexit, the fake multiculturalism, the fake social elevator, the fake establishment and so on.

</comment><comment><USER7> I am not buying into the video posted by Bansky. The knives have an awkward angle, how are they supposed to cut?

I think he added something else to the frame afterwards. Something like this banknote printing machine: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE7qHz_cVew](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE7qHz_cVew)

<comment><USER25> The EEVBlog YouTube channel (someone else already linked it) covered the implausible shredding mechanism in the Banksy video. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdKdQWhlNTY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdKdQWhlNTY)

In addition to the impossible angle, the position also does not fit a plausible paper path, and you can also see the curvature indicative of being stuck in the roller of a traditional shredder for days/weeks/months on the bottom of the paper coming out.

<comment><USER7> Makes you wonder how the previous owner could have not noticed the shredder. "There is a slot at the bottom of my insanely valuable Bansky artwork's frame and I can see parts of a machinery through it, but it probably doesn't mean anything."

<comment><USER26> It'd already been noted that the frame was unusually thick

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The one question I had, which the article didn't go into, was shredding only half the painting intended, or was it a malfunction?

<comment><USER7> Intention. It stopped at a perfect point.

<comment><USER27> I didn't agree with you at first, but after seeing the painting out of its frame, I think you are right: [https://1fuzz.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/10/art-owner-shred...](https://1fuzz.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/10/art-owner-shredded-banksy-painting-1fuzz-com-1.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I haven't seen anyone mention that, in the shredder video, the blades are all placed flat, parallel to the painting. I don't see how they could have cut anything in that orientation, unless the mechanism is tuned to score the paper by dragging it across the point. Or am I missing something?

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I assumed I must have missed a detail. Or Banksy is totally messing with us.

<comment><USER29> An angled razor makes more sense (think about how you shave)... less of a chance that it gets jammed if the paper is sliding over an angled razor rather than vertical.

EDIT: A deli slicer also a good example... it works on an angle... not like a chopsaw

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It was convenient that the piece was the last one for the night. However, Banky's piece did have the largest gain from ceiling estimate to sale price. It wouldn't surprise me if the Sotheby's staff knew of this potentially dramatic gap and decided to put it at the end of the night. Combine that with the potential of Banksy pulling a stunt like this, and placing it last seems to be the more conservative option for the lineup.

        %     LOT  PRICE    ARTIST          WORK
        3.47%  67  1042000  Banksy          Girl With Balloon
        2.94%  66  1030000  Kaws            Again And Again
        2.42%  48  1450000  Georg Baselitz  Kopfkissen
        1.77%  29  1150000  Georg Baselitz  Ohne Titel (Der Neue Typ)
        1.71%  42  1450000  Lucio Fontana   Concetto Spaziale, Forma

</comment><comment><USER31> I notice that the shredded portion doesn't line up with the part still in the frame in the photo. The top of the girl's head looks too far up and to the left to be part of the same picture.

<comment><USER7> That was my thinking, too, and it would indicate that the shredded and original picture are not one and the same. Thinking this further, if he actually used something like a banknote printing trick device, the whole process could be reversed at the next auction :)

<comment><USER32> Love this idea! I wonder if this thing is going to be x-rayed by the current owner though... Maybe he left a note in it to convince the owner to play along.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> You can totally hide a slot that is already open. A normal frame has some layering going on in the back anyways:

[https://www.universityproducts.com/pub/media/wysiwyg/how- to-...](https://www.universityproducts.com/pub/media/wysiwyg/how-to- images/framepackage.jpg)

All it would take is a slot in the frame back and a bit more sturdy backing paper covering it. The backing paper that has to be not fixed on the bottom edge.

</comment><comment><USER34> At no point did the author prove that the frame was the same one in the video. I really had a hard time reading after that. The sideways xacto blades would have trouble cutting canvas, even preshredded, at that angle. While the rest seems plausable, no further facts are offered save for "maybe 38" cuts maybe matching with the frame shown hastily in his vid. I was really hoping for something more concrete than the same pontificating.

<comment><USER35> The work is very likely NOT on canvas, but on paper.

<comment><USER36> "spray paint and acrylic on canvas" [1]

[1][http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2018/contempo...](http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2018/contemporary- art-evening-auction-l18024/lot.67.html?locale=en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Banksy is like the Malcolm Gladwell of art. He's really good but crossing over into the world of pop culture has garnered an unwarranted amount of scorn. I like Banksy and I like Malcolm Gladwell, both are really good at what they do.

<comment><USER38> Hmmm. This comparison is really challenges me.

I liken Gladwell to other mercenary concern trolls like David Brooks.

But in my rush to defend Banksy... I realize I have no idea who signs his checks. His schtick could also be just another troll. Bread and circus to keep the hoi polloi complacent.

Indeed, how could Banksy not be? Either by default or by design, result is the same.

Thanks. I relish these types of conundrums.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> If Sotheby's was in on it, then the buyer must have been as well. Otherwise, they would open doors to a lawsuit.

</comment><comment><USER40> Banksy is a sellout.

<comment><USER41> Why is it bad to make a profit from your artwork?

<comment><USER42> Well for being against capitalistic culture, the Banksy movement acts pretty capitalistic...I guess it's not about making a well-deserved profit, but more about being incoherent with your message.

<comment><USER43> Really at this point it has highlighted it is impossible to be mainstream and maintain the status quo. When you start putting out unique works on random buildings and people are willing to pay enough to cut out the wall and replace it for a windfall it is fundamentally impossible. The subversion is fundamentally lost. Even doing something akin to putting Gitmo in Disneyland to force people to confront crimes committed in their name while trying to escape would see it scavenged and sold. Given a choice between making random landowners richer and himself it becomes clear why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If they (Sotheby's/security) let a device with metal, batteries and remote trigger in, how could one assume they won't let a bomb in there?

If they did it while knowing what is inside, it's fun and stuff. If they let this kind of stuff in without checking, this would be very bad... they should be sued over lack of inspection (they are experts!) and lack of security by the buyers and persons who were in the room.

<comment><USER18> The same way bombs don't get taken into almost any crowded place: the fact that vanishingly few people want to take bombs into crowded places.

<comment><USER11> I mean: these are experts, they sell stuff valuated at millions of $, they must inspect what they sell. It's not about about security at first: it's more about if the thing is authentic, if the thing is in good shape, if it will not break during transport or display, how to store/hang it properly, ...

After that, they must have been suspicious about the weight, the bottom hole, ... and must have done additional, more detailed checks, even a scanner to see what's inside. It's not like it was a simple piece of paper they had in hands, it's a million $ strange heavy thing.

Anyway, it shows very bad about them if they didn't see what was "wrong" with this piece.

<comment><USER18> They took it to "Banksy's people" to have it authenticated.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X Is an Absolutely Efficient Monster CPU - <AUTHOR> https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3970x-32-core-efficient-monster-cpu-eco-mode-tests/ <comment><USER2> Intel deserves this pounding after decades of disingenuous business practices that only served to sandbag everybody except Wintel.</comment>


Why sorting an array makes a Python loop faster - <AUTHOR> https://rickystewart.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/why-sorting-an-array-makes-a-python-loop-faster/ <comment><USER2> an interesting measure would be the processor cache miss</comment>


Show HN: API for Sending Handwritten Letters - <AUTHOR> TLDR: We built out an API for sending handwritten letters at https://www.handwrite.io/handwritten-notes-api
Quick backstory: I was helping a small moving company build out some marketing automation as a side gig.
We were ingesting housing data and as soon as a house went up for sale, we'd use lob.com to send a direct mail postcard letting the home owner know we'd love their business.
But the postcards didn't convert well, and were super cliche so I went searching for something that might feel a little more personal.
That's when I met my cofounder, Dan, here on Hacker News! (Here's the comment actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19780024)
We joined forces and worked the past few months to build out a new web application, several new handwriting robots, and of course an API!
We'd love any feedback you have, or if you want to integrate it into your business, hit me up at email@example.com and I'll get you on our special HN pricing (no monthly recurring, only pay per use).
Thanks HN <comment><USER2> Nice!

The one thing that I didn't expect was to pay more per card in the bundled plan than the per-piece cost in that plan. The math still checks out so you're not leaving money in the table by having someone stay on a lower plan.

</comment><comment><USER3> Clickable URL [https://www.handwrite.io/handwritten-notes- api](https://www.handwrite.io/handwritten-notes-api)

> several new handwriting robots

Is that physical metal robots, do you have a photo (unless it's company secret of course).

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, here's a clip: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrYWkVmBgf0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrYWkVmBgf0)</comment></comment>


Deolalikar Responds To Issues About His P≠NP Proof - <AUTHOR> http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/deolalikar-responds-to-issues-about-his-p%E2%89%A0np-proof/

<comment><USER2> There's quite a lot of interest in the proof by some key experts despite their general impression that the proof is wrong and unfixable.

Maybe experts are using this proof as an opportunity to promote theoretical computer science? It's a way to get more grad students and funding?

<comment><USER3> Or, more likely, there are lots of good ideas that can be applied to other difficult problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> But this is not a sure point; the ideas may be fresh, but it's too early to tell whether it's useful for other problems in computer science.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't really matter because if they never care to look they will never find out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Regardless of how this plays out, this needs to be at the top of Top Science Stories of 2010 lists. If it is a good proof, Top News Stories of 2010 (or whatever year it is confirmed).

<comment><USER6> If this indeed proves P!=NP then i would think it would make a bit more top lists than just Top Science Stories 2010.

<comment><USER7> I think you're overestimating the value most people place on math theorems. I doubt this story will be given more importance than "robot who can do the laundry" or some similarly "soft" science stories by the mainstream press, as important as it may be.

<comment><USER5> OTOH, Wiles work on Fermat's Last Theorem was major news in 1993 and 1994.

<comment><USER8> Ask 10 random pedestrians if they remember what the first name was of 'Wiles' and what he did.

People are far more likely to remember things such as the world trade center bombing as 'major news'.

I'm happy enough it rated a mention on the 1993 wikipedia page:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The sad part is that "Vinay Deolalikar is standing by his P!=NP claim and proof."

It will be harder for future attempts to be taken seriously, if even the author of this comparatively-serious effort ends behaving like a crank rather than a scientist.

 _Edited to add_ : I don't mean to give the impression I'm unsympathetic to Deolalikar's predicament. He didn't intend the draft to be public as far as I know, and it's hard to back down from a public claim like this. But all the experts who have studied it believe it to be flawed; there is a wiki documenting specific problems in detail; and Terry Tao is speculating about whether it could be proven that no strategy of that general sort could possibly work.

It is definitely a worrying sign for Deolalikar to be standing by his work at this point. I'm not sure whether the downvotes are because you disagree with this assessment, or simply because I didn't explain myself very clearly.

If you look at any mathematical crank – and there are many, with varying levels of mathematical education – the basic story is always the same. It begins with an honest mistake made in good faith; what distinguishes the crank is refusal to learn from his or her mistakes.

I hope I'm wrong, and Deolalikar sees sense and withdraws his claim at least until he's addressed the concerns that have been raised so far.

<comment><USER10> I have more sympathy. The guy has worked on this for a few years. I'd stick to my guns too (for a while atleast) :)

<comment><USER11> He also didn't intend for it to be published!

<comment><USER12> I am not surprised by OP's response though. A number of people on Lipton's page, including some people with strong credentials, were of the opinion that the researchers were wasting their time.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Python open-source tool that generates images with a URL - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Rydgel/Fake-images-please

<comment><USER2> I have to say, I'm somewhat disappointed that "fakeimg.pl" isn't actually powered by a perl script with the same name, but by Python.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are not the first one to tell me that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Older similiar service: <http://placehold.it/>

<comment><USER4> There's also the lovely and whimsical <http://placekitten.com/>

<comment><USER5> Also <http://placedog.com/> and for the refined taste, <http://placebear.com/> .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Link to the project page (nice simple design): <http://fakeimg.pl/>

</comment><comment><USER7> I whipped up something similar in Go recently. There's no README yet, but it uses cgo to link to ImageMagick for resizing, and serves up a folder of jpgs.

<https://github.com/georgebashi/pugholder> (edit: you can see it running at <http://pugholder.com/>)

</comment><comment><USER8> The one that started them all <http://dummyimage.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> nice work. shameless plug for placeguitar that i put together a while ago - also in python. On github <https://github.com/poissonpie/Place-Guitar>

</comment><comment><USER10> did a fork where i'm adding a "geek mode" for generating images based on the XKCD map <http://xkcd.com/1110/> tiles , but it's gonna take a while

</comment><comment><USER11> génial ! i was searching for something like that , i'll try to make a django app out of it asap . cheers.</comment>


Bloom Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://bloom-lang.net/index.html <comment><USER2> Of note Bloom is an ancestor of Eve. Bloom is a descendant of Datalog via Dedalus.

"Dedalus: Datalog in Time and Space"

[http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/datalog2011-dedalus.pdf](http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/datalog2011-dedalus.pdf)

Here is Peter Alvaro's Strange Loop talk -

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Aa4PivG0g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Aa4PivG0g)

It was a shame that most people, seemingly the Eve devs as well, seemed to focus on making Eve a language for easy programming for the masses. Thats a huge wall of a problem with a limited funding slope.

I think if there had been more upfront work and focus on the distributed programming/database possibilities, that Eve would have founded an actual community to push it along.

Eve as a language for doing business logic against say Kubernetes? As a language to wire up ETL processes?

I think it could have found a niche that would have made it grow in power before trying to take on the mass market.

Just a thought.

<comment><USER3> I assume Lineage Driven Fault Injection stuff [1] has some overlap with Eve's ability to tell you "Why is this blank?": The datalog model allows you to find the logical dependencies of results.

Some other bloom related links:

\- Anna KVS[2] showed up recently on hacker news[3] and morning paper[4]

\- Lasp lang is in the same space[5], Christopher Meiklejohn has a comparison with bloom[6]

[1]: [https://disorderlylabs.github.io/#](https://disorderlylabs.github.io/#)

[2]: [https://databeta.wordpress.com/2018/03/09/anna- kvs/](https://databeta.wordpress.com/2018/03/09/anna-kvs/)

[3]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551072](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551072)

[4]: [https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/03/27/anna-a-kvs-for-any- scale...](https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/03/27/anna-a-kvs-for-any-scale/)

[5]: [https://lasp-lang.readme.io/](https://lasp-lang.readme.io/)

[6]: [http://christophermeiklejohn.com/lasp/2018/03/02/lasp-vs- blo...](http://christophermeiklejohn.com/lasp/2018/03/02/lasp-vs-bloom.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The last version on the site came out in APRIL 23, 2013... is this project alive still?

<comment><USER5> Latest commit in November 2017: [https://github.com/bloom- lang/bud/commits/master](https://github.com/bloom-lang/bud/commits/master)

<comment><USER6> But it requires "Ruby (MRI) 1.8.7 and 1.9. Bud also has experimental support for Ruby 2." which means it's on life support. Fair for a research project started when 1.8.7 was current but not much for doing any real work today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a fascinating language with some great ideas. I tried years ago to create my own implementation in Python but while I found the paper straight- forward the implementation in Bud, to me at the time, was quite dense.

It'd be interesting to revisit it again with some of the advances we've made in deep specifications and dependent type theory.

</comment><comment><USER8> are others having difficulty finding a spec for the DSL?

<comment><USER8> [https://github.com/bloom- lang/bud/blob/master/docs/cheat.md](https://github.com/bloom- lang/bud/blob/master/docs/cheat.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How is this different from elixir?

<comment><USER10> There's practically no overlap.

The short summary is that Bloom's position is that as programmers we have been trained -- to our detriment -- to think too much in terms of order. Thinking of algorithms being a sequence of operations on data is unnecessarily constraining and non-parallelizable, particularly in reactive systems.

Elixir's semantics are functional. Just as with any conventional language, it is your job to write code to track changes to some data structure and explicitly propagate those changes to other parts. For example, read from a socket into a buffer, parse and transform it, then write a formatted HTML output to the output. You are explicitly sequencing the order of computation.

Bloom's semantics are based on logic, so it may seem unfamiliar to the average programmer. It is an enhancement of datalog (itself a subset of Prolog) Its rules are declarative, just as in a spreadsheet. For example, say you enter a formula in Excel for cell A1, "=B1 * 100 + C1". This is declarative. You merely declare what needs to happen, not how the internal data structures are traversed and in which order. It is "understood" (that's the semantics part) that when B1 or C1 change, A1 will be automatically changed. Now imagine B1 has a formula that depends on C1. Now when C1 changes, there are possibly two ways of calculating the value of A1 (i) old value of B1 + new C1 or (ii) new value of B1 + new C1. Spreadsheets resolve this problem by doing a topological sort of cell dependencies, and updating cells in that order. That is to say, the topological sort is part of the spreadsheet semantics. In the example above, the second option will be chosen in all spreadsheets. The limitation of course is that you cannot have B1 refer to C1 and vice-versa. Cycles are not permitted.

Bloom (and Datalog) can have mutually dependent rules, so that if one datum changes, everything else dependent on it also changes, which results in that datum changing yet again, since it is dependent on others. Bloom has so called "fixpoint semantics", which means that the infrastructure keeps evaluating these rules (read formulas) in a loop until there is no more change (reached a "fixpoint") to any datum. As it turns out, the semantics are such that these loops are always guaranteed to terminate. Bloom has only one data structure, a table, whose values are primitives or lattices (the stuff that CRDTs are based on). Bloom's operators allow you to write rules that react to changes to any table and automatically update dependent tables. No explicit sequencing of code is needed; the language has a semantics of evaluation.

Bloom adds two features (to Datalog) that make it suitable for reactive computation. First is time, which is not clock time, but refers to a round of computation; in each round, all pending input events are processed until there are no more changes. There are some operators that permit you to defer changes to the next round. Bloom couples this with the notion of transient tables whose value is only valid for a single round. All I/O is based on special transient tables called channels; these accumulate events that have to be processed (input or transmitted) in a given round.

Hope this helps.

<comment><USER11> I'm inexperienced with this kind of system, so my views might be quite naïve... But my first concern with a language like his would be that it's hard to reason about memory usage and performance. Ultimately your code needs to run in a real system with limited resources. What have your experiences been in that regards? Have you found it's a worthwhile tradeoff?

As a point of comparison, when I learned Haskell I really enjoyed it and found it made expressing certain algorithms much simpler, but I basically kept all resource constraints out of mind.

<comment> a-saleh You can approach this from two sides:

1\. bloom and its descendents/companions are research projects first, so far, in the future, somebody probably sits down and creates a super-optimized reactive database based on this research in Rust or something

2\. our trade has been moving from managing constraints on performance and memory to trying to make more correct programs as easy as possible, resources be dammed. This is just the next step, along-side GC-managed memory, or haskell-like lazy-evaluation</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can Slavery Reenactments Set Us Free? - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/can-slavery-reenactments-set-us-free <comment><USER2> The sensory shock of frigid rivers and (gasp) nature and dirt to teenager or adult addled and pampered by modern life will impart at least some powerful impression.

At the least this won't do harm, at best it provides visceral context above what a boring textbook could provide</comment>


Jotvid - Easy video notes - <AUTHOR> https://www.jotvid.com/remix/295cd434b57f <comment><AUTHOR> Hey there - my friend and I built Jotvid b/c we wanted a way to take notes on videos, and then easily search for them later. We've been using it for tutorials/lectures, but after sharing with friends, we were surprised at how fun the content has turned out to be.

Excited to share with HN and see what ya'll think!</comment>


Facebook Faces Tough Questions in Britain That It Avoided in the U.S - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/26/business/facebook-british-parliament.html <comment><USER2> Have they done any questioning of Cambridge Analytica yet?

<comment><USER3> Yes. From the linked article:

> Mr. Collins' profile has grown along with the Cambridge Analytica scandal. > His committee questioned the company's chief executive, Alexander Nix, weeks > before news broke about its practices. The panel has published audio records > in which an executive tied to Cambridge Analytica discusses how the Trump > campaign used techniques used by the Nazis to target voters. A webcast of > the committee's hearing with the former Cambridge Analytica researcher > Christopher Wylie was so popular it nearly took down Parliament's website, > Mr. Collins said.</comment></comment>