Facebook Partnership Is Proven by $3,000 Check, Lawyer Says - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-17/facebook-claimant-ceglia-says-he-has-copy-of-2003-check-to-mark-zuckerberg.html <comment><USER2> It says the cheque was "cancelled", so no payment was transfered and so no claim of ownership. Right?

EDIT: Thanks for all the replies. I didn't know the cheque is called "cancelled" after it's paid.

<comment><USER3> Once a cheque is approved and all appropriate accounts involved have been credited, the cheque is stamped with some kind of cancellation mark, such as a "paid" stamp. The cheque is now a cancelled cheque. Cancelled cheques are placed in the account holder's file. The account holder can request a copy of a cancelled cheque as proof of a payment. This is known as the cheque clearing cycle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This doesn't really prove anything or say anything that we don't already know. All it proves is that this guy hired Zuckerberg to do some work for him

</comment><comment><USER5> How does this make sense? The contract says Ceglia was going to pay $1,000 for one project and another $1,000 for The Face Book. Why is the check for $3,000?

</comment><comment><USER6> This guy is a douche for doing this 7 years later, but at the same time I hope Zuckerberg gets what he deserves. Karma's a bitch!</comment>


Please Stop "Fixing" Font Smoothing (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://usabilitypost.com/2012/11/05/stop-fixing-font-smoothing/ <comment><USER2> The author of this post gives the impression of being unaware of potential color fringe artifacts that crop up with subpixel rendering. The real design crime is allowing a property like this (or WebKit, for that matter) to ignore the user's operating system's preferred font smoothing method.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm glad we have Retina displays now — the ultimate weapon against those annoying web designers who change font smoothing.

<comment><USER4> imo if you browser accepts any font-smooting setting from a website, this is reason to open a bug report: "does not respect anti-aliasing settings from the operating system" (Now personally I never noticed, so I never opened a bug report.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've met enough graphic designers with "better than perfect" 30/20 vision that I am starting to wonder if the color fringing of subpixel anti-aliasing is more visible to them than "normals".

</comment><comment><USER6> Blame apple instead for having broken font rendering. Most designers are painfully aware of the blurrier text, and would be happy to remove the fix as soon as the os stops being broken.

</comment><comment><USER7> Subpixel crap was always a workaround for not having enough pixels to begin with. Now that that logjam is finally broken, this kind of argument is increasingly moot.

<comment><USER8> Higher resolution displays also mean that the difference between rendering techniques is smaller. It actually made me stop caring about rendering techniques.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bad support for font-smoothing bothers me more than abusing the antialiased property.</comment>


The Blocky visual programming system - <AUTHOR> http://blocky.io/

<comment><USER2> I really like the idea of visual programming languages. I know nothing about LISP though, is knowledge of LISP needed to play with this?

<comment><AUTHOR> For simple stuff using the built-in blocks, no; to really make use of it though, yes. It follows a (fairly common for visual-programming systems) two- tier programming approach where you do visual programming using units ("blocks"), but new blocks are defined non-visually, in this case in Common Lisp.

I'm no expert, though; I just recently ran across it.</comment></comment>


Snagging Parking Spaces with Mask R-CNN and Python - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ageitgey/snagging-parking-spaces-with-mask-r-cnn-and-python-955f2231c400 <comment><USER2> This is pretty cool and a great use case for a DeepLens. Since the DeepLens can do the inference on the machine it would save a ton of bandwidth and you could even make it play a sound when a spot opens up, so it would work disconnected from the internet.

</comment><comment><USER3> > With a modern GPU, we should be able to detect objects in high-res videos at > several frames a second.

How much power does this thing use?

<comment><USER4> And which modern GPU... my 1050ti struggles with out of memory issues and pytorch.

<comment><USER5> Well a 1050 is pretty underpowered for real-time object detection...

<comment><USER6> For training maybe. Inference uses far less memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Add all the public traffic cameras from your neighborhood to get more data.

I want to monitor the traffic cameras on my commuter bus route to see if I can better estimates than google maps.

Now I'm interested in using the public cameras to track myself around the city.

<comment><USER8> which publically available cameras are there? which city makes traffic cameras publically available?

edit: [https://webcams.nyctmc.org/multiview2.php](https://webcams.nyctmc.org/multiview2.php)

holy crap

<comment><USER9> Holy crap indeed!

I wonder if London's network is public.

<comment><USER10> With some delay, indeed it is.

[https://www.tfljamcams.net/](https://www.tfljamcams.net/)

<comment><USER11> Wow! And the delay is only a few minutes. This is awesome and also scary.

<comment><USER4> Do you live in London? It has been said, without too much digging on my part, that London has more cameras than anywhere in the world.... (or is closely behind Beijing).

<comment><USER11> Yes. And yes, it's not news that there are loads of cameras. But the reality of actually seeing them all there on that page like that, for all to see. Knowing that anyone could easily watch my commute tomorrow, that's still a bit weird. Does that make sense?

<comment><USER10> Sure. I mean, this is what privacy advocates bang on about all the time.

I'd guess that page is probably <5% of CCTV being recorded in London.

Hell, my car has an always-on camera.

<comment><USER11> There are local Facebook groups I'm in where people ask for cam footage after their car parked on the street gets damaged and there always seems to be at least one video offered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cool. Can we add infrared detection to determine if the car is just standing rather than parked, so you can eliminate the cases where a car is not in a parking spot, but would appear parked to this detector?

</comment><comment><USER13> But if stationary cars are considered as parked, what about cars that are momentarilly stopped due to a red traffic sign?

Wouldn't it cause false positives?

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm a user of Mask R-CNN. While the masks it generates are great, I find too many false positives. So in applications like this, the alerts you get may not be what you think. Actual available parking spot may not be there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you experimented with having confidence level filters on your detections and further training the model with more data on the types of object you are trying to detect in the environments that they appear? Depending on what you are doing, it might just be a case where some fine-tuning of the model would solve your accuracy problem.

Sorry if this is an obvious suggestion and you've already tried all that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised stores that offer time-limited free parking don't utilize something like this to identify/tag cars that park past the limit.

<comment><USER10> In the UK this is fairly common using number plate recognition.

On entry and exit your plates are recorded by a camera.</comment></comment>


Show HN: sachet – handcraft your Vim environment online - <AUTHOR> http://yoursachet.com/ <comment><USER2> Good concept, this can become a marketplace to find and discover Vim plugins. You have moved one step ahead to easily install(but manage the same?)

Little feedback:

1\. Add options to see what a developer just installed. I find it very interesting to see other's development environments, their workflows, history and .rc files.

2\. Create a system where developers love to share their workflows, environments, history, vimrc, bashrc settings. Following and connecting with similar workflow developers would be cool.

Overall your first step is perfect!

<comment><USER3> Seconding step 2 -- vim environments, to vim-heavy developers, are a little like office spaces to me. Each has its perks; each person likes a different desk calendar; I like my door open and my coworker likes his closed.

It'd be awesome if you extended your site such that I could upload my vim configuration and plugins to share them with others -- and then discover someone who has done me one better!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great concept!

I'd suggest offering Vundle[0] as an alternative to Pathogen, or even replacing it altogether. I've found it to be a better system managing bundles by config in your vimrc and running :BundleInstall/Update/Remove/etc instead of git cloning into a bundle dir.

[0]: <https://github.com/gmarik/vundle>

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice! Maby a small video preview or gif would help new users to understand what each plugin actually does? Links to the plugin sites would be great too, as they usually have documentation on them.

</comment><comment><USER6> On the plugins page, I'd suggest adding links to the plugins themselves (whether that be a github repository or some other page) for more information about them.

<comment><USER7> Also I would move the description of the plugin to be under the title but above the photo. It took me a few seconds to find where the description was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I notice that soft-tabs setting is a dropdown adjusting size. Does this not support a standard tab configuration?

</comment><comment><USER9> Awesome tool. Seems super useful not only for new vim users.

Being a vim-pro, but using it for very specific tasks only, it always annoys the crap out of me, setting vim up with reasonable defaults on a new machine/OS.

One thing which I found missing from your nice selection of options is how vim handles the clipboard. Please let me choose (or include useful defaults if you have not done so already) how vim's internal clipboard interacts with the clipboard of the OS.

<comment><USER10> how about your dotfiles. I can bootstrap everything in new computer in one or two scripts :)

<comment><USER9> For OSX I have my vim files synced via Dropbox. But when you want to use vim on Windows or Linux you have to reconfigure quite a bit.

I love fiddling around with editor settings as much as the next guy. But when you have a specific task at hand and just want to quickly use vim then realising its not already set up. Copying configs and googling around to make them work in the current environment can become a very unwanted time sink.

<comment><USER11> I'm an OSX user, but I just created a repository (on Github) and anytime I add new plugins/configurations I try to commit those changes...as I spent a good deal of time customizing my setup at one point.

You could create one for Windows & one for Linux.

<comment><USER12> Yes, I also store my dotfiles in GitHub – <https://github.com/roryokane/dotvim>. To make installation on other computers easier, in the README, I list the shell commands to install the configuration for each OS. Installing my config is just a matter of copying and pasting those commands, and waiting for each command to finish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was on Windows while I saw this ... and took a few googling to find out what goes where to get it working in gVim (which I hardly use).

\- "autoload" and "bundles" from "vim" folder in the downloaded archive should go inside "C:\Program Files (x86)\Vim\vimfiles"

\- rename the _vimrc in in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Vim" as _vimrc.old

\- copy the vimrc from the downloaded archive as _vimrc into "C:\Program Files (x86)\Vim"

</comment><comment><USER12> I just randomly discovered this similar site: <http://vimrc.info/generate>. It lets you choose to leave settings out of your file as well as turn them on or off, but it doesn't include color schemes and plugins.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a nice effort. I'm probably in the tiny majority of people who have been using Vim for ~15 years but have never bothered with any customization or plugins (I'm also a philistine who uses the arrow keys for navigation).

<comment><USER15> I would argue you haven't actually used Vim then :)

<comment><USER16> So one has to have customized Vim to have actually used Vim :) ?

<comment><USER17> I read that as a reaction to the use of arrow keys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks great! I just found a few plugins that I didn't know about yet.

Suggestion for future enhancement: You should add a script that we can run on the download page that downloads and installs the new configuration to our local machine. This would be especially helpful for installing on a remote machine, or even on a local machine. Something like:

wget <http://url.com/newconfigurl.zip>

unzip newconfigurl.zip

//Move files

</comment><comment><USER19> I know this makes me some sort of monster but I'm disappointed in the lack of ability to have noexpandtab. Otherwise though, good tool, looks great.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm so happy you've done this; just a few weeks ago I was helping a friend who had just bought a new MBP set up their environment and I googled for this site but found nothing great, I was considering doing it myself. Great job!

</comment><comment><USER21> This is cool. While VIM is not my main text editor I use it quite often and this is just the amount of configuration I needed. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER22> Finally I can disable syntax highlighting in vim!

</comment><comment><USER23> People are still putting up Google+ buttons?

<comment><USER24> You have one on your blog, for example.

<comment><USER23> Yikes! I never put that there. Sneaky Google... _disables navbar_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Awesome tool man :D It's really convenience for new user to learn and use vim like pro :)

Great contribution to VIM community.

</comment><comment><USER25> I thought about purchasing vimrc.it for nearly this exact purpose this morning. This is fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER26> Now I just need something like this for Emacs :P Although I like Vim too, so I'll try it.

<comment><USER27> I'll second that, I would pay for something like this for emacs, the constant configuration and switching between linux/windows is pushing me to sublime text...</comment></comment>


Why is Ireland's ccTLD .ie? - <AUTHOR> While discussing ccTLDs with a few friends, we realized that Ireland's ccTLD is .ie. In digging in a little further, we discovered that the ccTLDs were originally assigned based on the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes assigned in '74 - something which I never knew but makes perfect sense. So it follows on that Ireland's .ie TLD stems from it's ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code also being IE. I also understand that Ireland originally went by the name Eire. But what I still can't figure out is why Ireland's original ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 designation wasn't .ei instead of .ie?<p>I've dug around as much as I can but I'm now at a loss - hoping someone has some historical information as to how this came about.<p>[EDIT] - Just to add to this, one thing I just found out was that a historical name of Ireland was "Inis Ealga" ("Noble Island") - via https://enacademic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/739995. This is the first reference I've seen to any name that could possible align with IE. It's tenuous obviously, but thought it worth adding. <comment><USER2> I suppose you could backronym it to mean Ireland/Eire, if you wanted.

Funny. I've never really wondered about this before [and I'm Irish!] but now you've got me puzzling too.

IR not being available [Iran] the next most logical would seem to be:

.EI --Éire

.ER --could also work for Éire

.RI --Republic of Ireland [Official name of the country in English]

.PE --Poblacht na hÉireann [Official name of the country in Irish]

I've never heard of Inis Eagla by the way. Must be very obscure.

If someone fancies asking the .ie official registrar, on the off-chance they actually know, their Twitter account is at @IEDR_dot_ie [I'm not on Twitter, so I can't do it]

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh wow, the dual meaning of Ireland/Eire for .ie is actually a really interesting take that I hadn't considered before.

Thanks for the suggestion as well - it's a good one. I'll send them a message shortly.

In the meantime, I actually reached out directly to ISO yesterday re: this and actually received the following reply last night:

"Dear kaishiro,

By way of reply, I'm bringing your query to the attention of the Secretariat for the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency, which perhaps may have some historical information to offer on the subject.

Best regards"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It might as simple as: IR is Iran (bigger country and follows UN designation so did not want to change). Next letter after 'r' in 'Ireland' is 'e'. 'ie'.

Edit: And that ties with "Inis Ealga" mentioned by OP. So it must be one or the other, or both.

</comment><comment><USER4> > I also understand that Ireland originally went by the name Eire

It still does:

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, of course, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reading [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_vehicle_registra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_vehicle_registration_code#Codes_no_longer_in_use), they abolished EIR in favor of IRL as vehicle registration code in 1992.

Possibly, if you find why they did that, you have your answer (¿possibly because they didn't want to choose between the Irish and English names of the country, just as ISO was picked as abbreviation for "International Organization for Standardization"?)

The 'logical' two letter equivalent would be IR, but I guess that was taken by Iran.

</comment><comment><USER6> im going to make a guess that because Eire is the "Irish" of the the name, and most of the rest of the domains are based on the English of the name... since the ISO standard name for Ireland is IE, that would make sense... Also, look at the UK... the official ISO code for that is GB, but they use UK for their ccTLD...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I did notice that actually - and apparently it's because the UK asked ISO to place UK on the "Exceptionally Reserved" list - which is interesting in and of itself. What I don't understand is why they decided to go with IE/.ie instead of the (seemingly) more obvious EI/.ei,

I know how ultimately inconsequential this is - it's really just a curiosity that I can't get my head around.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Moving Nomads – Tips Platform for Digital Nomads - <AUTHOR> http://movingnomads.com/web/ <comment><AUTHOR> We just launched Moving Nomads for web today and the 2.0 version of the mobile app. Moving Nomads gives you user generated tips to help you find the best co- working spaces, Wifi cafes, sim cards, coliving spaces & Digital Nomads around you. We have data on over 300 cities with about 8000 Digital Nomads on the platform. The web version is a light version of the app that only provides you city information and tips. For advance filters, Nomad connect, Hop, tips map, profile, add tips you can get the mobile app. Looking forward to your feedback!</comment>


The many languages missing from the internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200414-the-many-lanuages-still-missing-from-the-internet <comment><USER2> The world has always had a handful of linguae francae. Greek, Aramaic, Latin, English (Python, JavaScript), etc. each serve(d) valuable purposes. This article seems to cast standardized communication in a negative, borderline (if not outright) discriminatory light, which struck me as odd.

<comment><USER3> A language carries a history, a culture, a literature (not necessarily written!) and an identity. Abandoning a minority language abandons those.

It's very easy for native English speakers to say English should be the only language because it has only upsides for them, and they need not give up anything, and they have never been coerced into using it. Whereas I suspect 99% of people who say things like "we don't need UTF-8, the world can be ASCII-only" would go absolutely bananas if they woke up tomorrow and found that HN was now a mandatory-Mandarin forum.

Some minority languages were actively suppressed during the colonialism of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was part of the point of the "residential schools" system of Canada, Australia and elsewhere: take children away from their parents and beat their language out of them.

A few languages have managed to go from repressed to national language status: Irish, Hebrew, probably others.

<comment><USER4> >A language carries a history, a culture, a literature (not necessarily written!) and an identity. Abandoning a minority language abandons those.

I don't see how me writing a tech article in English or my own language means abandoning others "culture, literature (not necessarily written!)".

Am I required to learn 7000 languages?

<comment><USER3> It doesn't and you're not. That would obviously make no sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it funny. In my small country, progressives prefer the English language and borrowing customs from the West because they think maintaining our own identity, our customs, our local food, our traditions, our culture, our language and our identity as people is something "conservative", "subversive" and "reactionary".

Meanwhile, progressives in English speaking countries think the contrary is true.

<comment><USER5> Progressives hate what they have, so they want to change things. Unfortunately, they never seem too concerned whether the changes improve the overall situation or not. Conservatives love what they have or had, so they want to keep things as they are or go back to the way things were. Unfortunately, they too aren't looking at the overall situation.

It seems both camps are emotionally attached to their positions not being capable of considering that they are wrong about something. To err is human and so it is to think to be always correct in the important matters, I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Obviously I'm not part of a real minority language but I've tried to use my software in English over German for many years just because it's a lot easier to search for error messages.

OK, maybe I'm just a pessimist, but some real reasons (if you understand the language well enough) is that English is usually the original and so the localization can be ok or bad, but it's usually not better than the original. And as I said, this is German and not some language spoken by just a few people.

That said, I'd love to know more about the generic impression of how well localization works for Spanish or Russian, languages with a lot more speakers. I suppose with UTF-8 it's at least only a few mojibake errors and not total mayhem like in the ASCII times...

And no, I'm not arguing other languages should not be on the internet but for technical stuff (and news) I somehow really prefer English, maybe it's because I've been hanging around online and in chatrooms in English for too many decades.

<comment><USER7> I've been doing the exact same with French for the past few years : you manage to find a lot of decent quality stuff in French overall, but as soon as you need to look up GitHub issues or stack overflow answers, using French is a clear issue.

<comment><USER5> Interestingly enough, while using the Internet, learning English came naturally, but I don't really see a point of learning other languages. I wonder why that is.

Maybe the benefits are just too deeply hidden or there aren't enough benefits. Possibly there is a bias in search engines that enables the hiding of resources in other languages. (While they are quite persistent to offer me results in the language of the country I'm residing in, despite doing all my searches in English.)

<comment><USER6> Maybe my view is skewed by the fact (well, I think it is so) that I learn languages a lot faster by speaking or surrounding myself with them. Studying at home simply does not work for me. I love languages, but I'd prefer to be fluent before using them for important stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some website make an effort te be in as many languages as possible.

Check jw.org, it's in 1017 languages !

<comment><USER9> This is impressive. I clicked on that link to show you that my language isn't there. I don't even know how it is possible. The whole website is available in Pular! (Aka fulani / fulfulde / etc) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20702404](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20702404)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I am addressing to my home folks, I write in my native language.

When I am addressing to an international audience, I am writing in (poor) English because it is the lingua franca of the world now, pretty much like latin was 1000 years ago.

<comment><USER10> >because it is the lingua franca of the world now

One of the characteristics I love about English the most is the wanton, shameless adoption of not just words but entire phrases into the lexicon. 'Frankish Tongue', nah lingua franca it is. 'long time no see' is another favorite example. Ungrammatical in English, direct word-for-word translation from Mandarin? Sure, come on in, the water's fine. No one bats an eye.

<comment><USER5> No, English isn't the weird one, French is. All languages except for French just adopt phrases from other languages. But for French they couldn't just use "computer" or "PC", like pretty much every other language out there. They had to invent their own word: l'ordinateur, if I remember correctly. And they do this with every foreign word.

<comment><USER10> French certainly does take it to extremes. I get the feeling (I don't live where French is spoken often, so I mostly interact with it online, so I could be mistaken) that most people ignore what the Académie Française has to say on the matter, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> M. Á. Oxlaj Kumez: I have no sympathy for you. You play the victim and complain ceaselessly to foreign journalists. Be the change you want to see in the world!

Let's imagine a different universe where the interviewee can proudly recount his achievements:

• Added a megabyte of Kaqchikel text content on the Web.

• Contributed a 1st party Kaqchikel keyboard layout to Xkb and a 3rd party layout to Android and Windows.

• Published a free to use Kaqchikel dictionary and spell checker.

• Worked with the Linux user groups in the four biggest cities to add a Kaqchikel locale pack to KDE, and spin a variant of an existing popular distro that comes with Kaqchikel out of the box.

• Distributed ten thousand kits to convert Mesoamerican Spanish keyboards into Kaqchikel.

• Found like-minded individuals and raised funds and coordinated efforts through the Kaqchikel resource centre at the university in Guatemala City.

• Lobbied the government to give indigenous languages equal status under the law.

None of this is particularly technically challenging: Kaqchikel is written in Latin.

<comment><USER12> sorry, but pointing at a problem is the right way to go. You are basically angry he is not a technologist. but that's more your problem than his problem.

Also: "Oxlaj Kumez is working with other activists to create a version of Wikipedia in Kaqchikel Mayan, as well as a translated version of Mozilla's Firefox web browser."

So, he tries to do whatever he can. And perhaps he has also a life and a real job.

I didn't know him and i have no axe to grind. i just find you reaction very weird and overly aggressive.

<comment><USER11> > You are basically angry […] i just find you reaction very weird and overly > aggressive.

False, you chose to interpret my post that way.

> not a technologist

This is relevant to two points out of seven, both of which he could just delegate and oversee.

I am disappointed in the substandard level of discourse you bring into this thread. The site rules prevent me from speaking my mind any further, so I'm out of here.

<comment><USER12> thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like that the article present two different points. One is that the Internet is a reflection of the socioeconomic reality of the world. Languages with less, or just poorer speakers are less represented. The lack of representation causes a feedback loop that also makes access information harder for poorer communities. Being aware of this reality helps us to understand the challenges that less connected societies have to work with.

The other important point, is to look forward on how the Internet can help to preserve languages for future generations. We are in an unique place were we can save human culture for future generations to study.

I know the feeling from my travels thru China. I was able to access Internet, but the language barrier was always present. It was an interesting experience to see how many non-English speakers experience the Internet.

<comment><USER5> What's the point in preserving failed cultures? What are the benefits we can gain from preserving them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Relatedly, I'd like to plug Wikibabel ([http://www.wikibabel.com/](http://www.wikibabel.com/)). It's translating wikipedia from English to Swahili, with hopefully more languages to follow.

</comment><comment> red-indian I've found the lang attribute and :lang pseudo-class to be pretty useful in publishing for private tribal use documents in my (critically endangered) language. Unfortunately there isn't any standard way of distinguishing between the various scripts/orthographies, so we've extended the language names for that purpose.

Our work isn't listed on any of these pages about which indigenous languages are on the internet because we don't want it to be, these pages are for tribal citizen use only. So, there may be a lot more written languages in use somehow than the author believes. But who knows.

<comment><USER15> Would you mind sharing what language this is?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is silly. I don't write in my native language because I want everyone to understand what I have to say. If you want to be part of the conversation, just learn English. It's really, really easy. I never even spend any effort on learning the language.

<comment> rvp-x I make an active effort to use my native language whenever I get an opportunity to do so. I see it as an accessibility feature. Much easier to understand things when they're in your native language.

<comment><USER5> How is it accessible when you're limiting your audience to people speaking your native language? Also, English is easier to understand than my native language, which lends itself to getting unnecessary convoluted. Especially when studying, I always look first at English resources, since the one in my native language are made more difficult to understand because of the complexity of the language itself. (My first language is German.)

<comment> rvp-x If I have an audience that entirely speaks the language I try to take advantage of it. It's very common here for people to use English unconditionally in conversations about technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The rules of linguistic evolution apply just as much online as they do face to face. The complexity and uniqueness of a language is inversely proportional to how much contact its speakers have with non-speakers, especially ones learning the language as adults. Some contact starts to grind the sharp edges off, like losing clicks. More contact begins morphing the grammar, such as changing order from subject-object-verb to subject-verb-object. Eventually they blend together, or if their populations are too uneven, one is absorbed.

Ultimately you have to make a choice. Do you wall yourself off to keep foreign language from overly influencing you or do you give up a part of yourself to join the conversation?

Anecdotally, the working class people I've talked to care a lot more about the opportunities they get from learning English than they do about preserving the legacy of their language.</comment>


Teaching an AI to write Python code with Python code - <AUTHOR> http://www.benjamintd.com/blog/spynet/ <comment><USER2> Look, I was told that I wouldn't be automated out of my job for at least the next five years. Can't they start with Java?

<comment><USER3> Java is so verbose, any character-based network will probably get sidetracked before finishing a function declaration...

<comment><USER4> ...thereby becoming indistinguishable from the average Java developer

<comment><USER5> You can never fire the AI because without it the whole place would burn down and nobody else understands how the code works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Python's context-sensitive grammar makes it a particularly unsuitable target for text-based generation of code in this manner. If you continue with this project I expect you will find you get far better results from generating ASTs or choosing a language with a simple grammar in which most possible compositions of tokens are valid.

<comment><USER7> Read the article, these type of algorithms have an easy time with syntax. The real issue is that the code produced is meaningless.

<comment><USER8> Exactly, the difficulty is not really in producing valid code but meaningful code. Same with text generation - while a recurrent neural network might produce grammatically correct sentences, I don't think we're close to it producing an story with an actual plot, discernible characters etc.

<comment><USER9> What about a statically analyzable language? That could be factored into the loss function.

<comment><USER10> I was thinking the same. Not only that, if you would add multiple networks that, for example, weigh the possibility that a full line is "good" code, and another that evaluates a whole block (like google deep mind did with AlphaGo) so it looks like dense and complex code this could be a nice program trolling with pull requests on github :-D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So it's just a char-RNN? I was hoping this was using one of the seq2seq frameworks for actually writing code, like [https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06640](https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06640)

<comment><USER12> Yeah, there's no effort to direct or encode intent. It's just producing what it probabilistically wants to produce. If it happens to run...cool?

Here's a interesting example from Google DeepMind learning to generate code for Magic The Gathering and Hearthstone: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.06744v2.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.06744v2.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a cool project. I did something similar with LSTM in Tensorflow to generate Reddit comments. The biggest problem I found in my experiment is that the comments generated had not real meaning, nor even tried to deliver a message. Real Reddit users identified this right away, resulting in my Bot being banned. I think the author faced the same issues here.

Does anyone has any suggestions on papers that try to solve that problem?

<comment><USER12> The problem is that the latent space of a model trained on all comments is still massive. For any sort of coherence, you need to condition the probabilities on smaller spaces, or enforce structural bounds.

Here's an example of a paper where they simultaneously optimize high-level semantics with token-level sequence probabilities: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.00776v2.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.00776v2.pdf).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What should we do, If computers are going to be coding?

<comment><USER2> Unionize?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It'd be interesting to make sure the minimum data (code) sent to the neural network is all meaningful or purely functional. Perhaps as somebody pointed out taking ast and then figuring out stateless chunks might be a good idea?? I'll take a shot..

</comment><comment><USER16> Much like I can learn to speak Chinese by listening lots of sound tracks of people speaking Chinese and over time building a probabilistic model of what sound will come next.

</comment><comment><USER17> Here's a similar example that writes LaTeX code: [http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn- effectiveness/](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/)

</comment><comment><USER18> This is cute, but the title got me excited for something well beyond this. Heck, even if an AI produced spontaneously code that defined a function and later used it, I'd be ecstatic. This is just a fun piece of art.</comment>


Terms of Service update - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/policies/terms/changes/ <comment><USER2>
        We are updating the Google Terms of Service. The new Terms will go
        live on November 11, 2013 and you can read them here.

        Because many of you are allergic to legalese, here's a plain English
        summary for your convenience.

Why not just write your TOS in plain English, then? Also, if a company supplies both a "legalese" version and a "plain English" version that differ, which one takes precedent?

<comment><USER3> "Plain English" is the legal equivalent of pseudocode. (By similar reasoning, the courts are analogous to CPUs.)

The TOS isn't in plain English for the same reason that Android isn't written in pseudocode: the CPUs won't run it.

Also -- pseudocode ignores edge cases, boundary conditions, etc. to make it readable. Production code (and legal documents) can't escape these requirements.

<comment><USER4> "the CPUs won't run it"

A TOS is a contract between Google and its users. The "CPU" in this case should then be the two parties to the contract (as these are the people meant to directly consume the contract's contents), not the legal system.

The legal system is more like an attached debugger. You wouldn't want different code being interpreted in the runtime and the debugger. Similarly, there should not be a different contract being agreed to and being litigated.

<comment><USER3> If you routinely sign contracts that you do not believe will stand up in court, you are asking for trouble. If you trust the other party in a contract to adjudicate on your behalf, you are asking for trouble. If you don't trust the other side to adjudicate, you will need an independent third party who can back up its rulings on your behalf. Conveniently, you've already paid for one with your taxes.

The courts are the arbiter of contracts, period.

Edit: your analogy struck me as off, but I couldn't put my finger on why. The parties to the contract don't directly consume the contract, they use the fact that the legal system can do so. So: you and I don't consume the bytecode of our respective Web browsers, but we do use the fact that the CPUs in your respective devices can, so that we can debate this online. The applications are written for the CPUs; the contracts are written for the courts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Diff: [https://www.google.com/policies/terms/archive/20120301-20131...](https://www.google.com/policies/terms/archive/20120301-20131111/)

<comment><USER6> Thank you! Most interesting bit imo:

"If you have a Google Account, we may display your Profile name, Profile photo, and actions you take on Google or on third-party applications connected to your Google Account (such as +1's, reviews you write and comments you post) in our Services, including displaying in ads and other commercial contexts. We will respect the choices you make to limit sharing or visibility settings in your Google Account. For example, you can choose your settings so your name and photo do not appear in an ad."

Now the question is where are the settings? I assume it will be allowed by default. Will my choice be respected in the long run?

<comment><USER7> The link is immediately available under the same text in the actual TOS: [https://plus.google.com/settings/endorsements?hl=en](https://plus.google.com/settings/endorsements?hl=en)

From: [http://www.google.com/policies/terms/changes/](http://www.google.com/policies/terms/changes/)

It's very clear and had saved my previous restrictive settings, which is solid in my opinion.

<comment><USER6> Ah I didn't realize this was only for google+?

Doesn't this apply to gmail (my real name), google calendar, my youtube account, my android usage...? My searches?

<comment><USER8> I hope not as I still managed to escape all the pre-selected checkboxes to tie my account with g+

<comment><USER7> Godspeed gcb0, Godspeed!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That was actually almost pleasurable to read. If only all services made their TOS updates that easy to read, or that easy to see what has changed.

</comment><comment><USER10> You can opt out of Shared Endorsements (mentioned in the new ToS) here: [https://plus.google.com/settings/endorsements?hl=en](https://plus.google.com/settings/endorsements?hl=en)

<comment><USER11> If you don't have a Google+ account, this link forces you to create one. So I can't access these settings and I do not want a G+ account.

I'm unsure if they still can use my info on shared endorsements...

<comment><USER12> Endorsements require an action on behalf of the user and therefor require Google+

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish other companies would borrow this "format" when they update their ToS. Even providing an easily accessible diff without me doing the work would be helpful. Too many times have I clicked on a ToS update to be directed to the new terms with a short note saying they're being updated on a certain date.

<comment><USER14> Use the wonderful Docracy Terms of Service Tracker:

[https://www.docracy.com/tos/changes](https://www.docracy.com/tos/changes)

They provide handy diffs of hundreds of sites' ToS and privacy policies (and you can mail them to add others). You can also get Docracy to mail you when selected sites update their ToS.

[EDIT] - hmm, last updated in July, looks like they might have abandoned it :(

<comment><USER13> It seems to have been updated on October 11th... this site definitely will come in handy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > So if you're asked for your password, think twice and consider whether there > might be safer and more secure ways to share the information.

Interesting, given the recent hullabaloo around people submitting their Gmail credentials to Linked In for contact-scraping.

From some of the technical measures Google outlines as 'unusual activity' it sounds like they might be closing that hole...

</comment><comment><USER16> Where is the option for Google to pay me if they choose to use my image or likeness in "Shared Endorsements"? I can't see why anyone who is even a minor celebrity/blogger whose livelihood depends on being in the public consciousness would want to enable this option.

The other question is "what happens should Google fail to respect my choice not to enable shared endorsements?".</comment>


Show HN: Podium – Listen to clips and highlights from university classes - <AUTHOR> https://www.podiumedu.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey Guys, I'm one of the founders of Podium, a university streaming platform that lets anyone listen to the best parts of university classes. We differ from MOOCs in the sense that you can listen to content that's most relevant to you rather than having to take an entire course. For example, if you're interested in entrepreneurship you can find and stream 2 to 5 minute clips on "product market fit" or "raising capital" rather than taking a 4 week course. You can also listen to the full courses and classes if you choose.

We're doing this by building out a 2-sided platform where professors can go to record their classes with our web recorder, and where users can go to stream those classes with our web player.

<comment><USER2> Hey Bretts89, this seems cool! I'm curious, who expressed that they wanted this? It's an interesting place between a MOOC and a podcast, just curious why this intersection was interesting to you?

Did you make it for you? Friends? And is there a reason you picked audio as a medium?

<comment><AUTHOR> We looked at the user data around MOOCs and saw completion rates hovering in the single digits. Most people are exploring different classes, universities rather than doing deep dives on full courses. We even spoke with a former administrator at Princeton who helped form their partnership with Coursera and they admitted that MOOCs fall short in catering to this type of learner. We built Podium to cater to the 90% + of learners using MOOCs who want to explore content and listen to what's relevant to them. I had this problem myself which is why I'm passionate about this. Initially audio is the simplest way for professors to DIY record their classes. Capturing video brings a lot more complexity also some legal hurdles with images in slides, access for the blind, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very cool! I've been thinking of building something similar but never got around to it. I've always wanted something like that for Youtube or Khan Academy videos where I can fastforward to the "tags" I want, and where the videos/lectures would automatically skip over the tags/sections I already know.

</comment><comment><USER3> suggestions:

-root url / Home should be where I can search audio, not that corporate/description page. when i go to podiumedu.com i want to be able to search for the audio right away. It took me a few seconds to figure out i had to click on "Player"

\- Should be able to see audio without having to login

\- URLs: it'd be sick if i could send a link to a friend "podiumedu.com/Idea+To+Product" and it show them a list of the audios with that tag

\- The images for courses takes up way too much real estate. I went to this course "[https://www.podiumedu.com/player/#!/course/5930b2fcdbc7c250c...](https://www.podiumedu.com/player/#!/course/5930b2fcdbc7c250cadc0e30") and all i saw was the image, the title, and one row on the table. (I'm using a Surface Pro 4)

-x2 speed like Youtube/Audible would be nice</comment>


Picol, a Tcl interpreter in 550 lines of C - <AUTHOR> http://antirez.com/page/picol.html <comment><USER2> Tcl is a strangely beautiful language. For those who haven't tried it, it's a little bit like Lisp (minimal homoiconic syntax, code is data) but without closures. Which of course sounds awful until you realize you can implement lexical scoping with the [uplevel] command: <https://gist.github.com/874370>

It's also very easy to embed a Tcl interpreter into a C program, or into a Tcl interpreter itself via the [interp] command. And asynchronous I/O is baked into the standard library.

If you're interested, the Tclers Wiki (<http://wiki.tcl.tk/>) is a great place to learn more about the language.

<comment><USER3> Tcl seems a bit in a slump nowadays, but I don't think it would need much to get out of it. With a nice interface builder or some "automagic" layout classes the GUIs could be up to par again, although that's probably not even the most important aspect right now. Probably the biggest part missing are packages. TEA isn't that bad, but compared to Eggs/Gems/CPAN it's a bit lackluster. Although this is a bit of a catch-22, I guess.

Hmm, was thinking about what language to use for my next project. Wanted to go with Python, but I think I'll give my old Tcl muscles a good workout again. Had much fun using it in an industrial context, let's see how much hurdles I have to jump for a current web project...

<comment><USER4> It suffers a bit from public perception as being "old" but of course it's up there with all the modern features, it's exceptionally easy to learn and use, there are no surprises or special cases. Probably because Tcl/Tk attracts the sort of programmer who happily uses it for real work and doesn't spend much time on advocacy forums...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The original reddit discussion: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1aefl/picol_a_t...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1aefl/picol_a_tcl_interpreter_in_550_lines_of_not_line)

</comment><comment><USER6> Very nice project. I'd like to show it to every nay-sayer in the recent ``C, The Beautiful Language (tenaciousc.com)'' [1] thread.

\----

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2325065>

</comment><comment><USER7> Obligatory link to Stallman's "Why you should not use Tcl".

<http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0000.html>

This set off a war a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away.

Edit: This has been downvoted twice now. Could be accident, but could be that people think I'm saying you shouldn't use Tcl. I've never used Tcl and hold no strong opinions about it. I'm simply linking to a piece of usenet history.

<comment><USER8> I didn't downvote you, but I didn't upvote you either.

Maybe it is the reaction to doing something cool and having someone post a link to criticism that is peripheral to the project. Maybe some Tclers are a little tired of people continuing to post this particular piece of criticism. Maybe a random few don't care about RMS's opinion. It is like people posting the Tanenbaum / Torvalds thread in every Minix article. It just seems a little mean-spiritted after a while.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. In particular, it's hardly "obligatory".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's quite impressive, especially since he managed to do it in 3 hours. Hats off!

Regarding the name: I'm guessing it's an _altered_ version of the word _piccolo_ , which stands for _small_ in Italian. Nice one ;)

<comment><USER5> From Reddit:

\- someone: "Picol", as in "piccolo"?

\- antirez: No, it's an obscure joke about the way Tcl is usually pronounced: "Tickle" that in Italian sounds a lot like "Ticol", so the small version of it is "Picol".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ah, I was hoping this was going to be about a stored procedure mechanism for Redis.</comment>


People who haven't bought clothes for a decade - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2020/mar/12/i-wear-my-grandads-old-boxers-meet-the-people-who-havent-bought-clothes-for-a-decade <comment><USER2> A guest on my podcast -- Lorna Davis, the key leader behind the largest B Corp to date, Danone USA, and a c-suite executive from Danone and other multinationals -- committed not to buy clothes for a year. Within a few weeks she started getting rid of clothes she didn't wear and even relationships that were distracting her from more meaningful ones.

Within months she was sending me contacts of other high-powered executives from big corporations who were following her lead. She sent me pictures of clothing she repaired that she would have thrown out before.

When she was invited to give a TED talk that year, she told me she felt liberated from wondering what to buy to wear, instead getting to feel like herself and focusing on her message.

Hear for yourself. Our conversations, before and after: [https://joshuaspodek.com/guests/lorna- davis](https://joshuaspodek.com/guests/lorna-davis) (also a great primer on B corps, given her significant role)

Her TED talk: [https://www.ted.com/talks/lorna_davis_a_guide_to_collaborati...](https://www.ted.com/talks/lorna_davis_a_guide_to_collaborative_leadership)

<comment><USER3> For women: it may be worth your while checking out Project333. I have searched for a respective project for men, but haven't found something similar/worthy.

When I finished listening to the Minimalists podcast (first 120 episodes) for the second time I was already immersed in minimalism. I donated 90% of my clothes, I now have 5 t-shirts, 4 sweaters, 2 jeans, 10 pairs of socks, 2 pairs of shoes, and some snow/skiing related accessories (hoods, etc.)

I also have "office clothes" which I don't count as clothes, I treat them as a uniform, when not in the office, they don't exist for me (and Coronavirus-->remote working was a great 'gift' for me on this area)(I hope the deaths stop and we continue the WFH).

I see fashion as a "subscription" scheme. You spend £€¥$, you get clothes and after X seasons you need to spend another load of £€¥$ to renew your "trendy- ness".

I can never forget that in the term "fashion VICTIM" the word that sticks with YOU is the word "victim".

<comment><USER4> > I now have 5 t-shirts, 4 sweaters, 2 jeans, 10 pairs of socks, 2 pairs of > shoes

I take it you don't live in place with cold winters?

<comment><USER5> Or do much in the way of outdoor activities.

 _2 pairs of shoes_

Having to decide between wearing my climbing shoes and my ski boots to work would suck :)

<comment><USER6> I've the same single pair of 20€ shoes since 5 years. Some holes, but they still work well, probably for another 5 years. The only drawback is when it rains, I need to dry them with newspaper. I do a lot of sports (mostly bike (I've no car) for all my commuting, hiking/trail, ..

<comment><USER7> Okay, but _why_ would you want to put up with drying your shoes with newspaper?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I didn't know that the normal way I live my life is anything worth commenting on. I still wear clothes from when I was in college 25 years ago. But this is more from laziness and a generally dislike of shopping, combined with zero fashion sense, than from any altruistic values.

<comment><USER9> I try to only buy good quality clothes that are made to last, then I wear them until they develop holes. I repair them and wear them again until they don't really look presentable anymore. At that point they become home/work/workout/concert clothes. When they can no longer be repaired, they become cleaning rags.

I did not know that this was something to be applauded for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had some Levi's 501s that I got at a farm supply store for $12 when I was in college (early 80s). I wore them regularly for about 15 years then occasionally until a few years ago. They had no holes when I donated them. Newer 501s don't last anywhere near that long.

Carhartts are more functional for me now, but they wear out after 5-8 years depending on the style (model?). I haven't noticed any change in durability since I started wearing them 18 years ago.

I have several pairs of Injinji socks that are close to 10 years old, and still in great shape. I have also worn out two pairs of those socks after about 5 years, and the newer ones are softer so I suspect they'll be less durable.

<comment><USER11> Carhartts, Blåkläder - probably other brands that still actually sell work clothes - tend to have separate "fashion" models that sell through typical fashion stores. They're generally higher price and less durable in my experience.

In the US it's not hard to find regular carhartts work wear - in Norway I've only seen the fashion stuff. On the other hand, Blåkläder operate a few outlets that are aimed at the business market - and there it's possible to buy their "actual" work clothes.

Ed: in addition to such work wear, military surplus & second hand is also a good bet.

<comment><USER12> I've found my 5.11 pants to last a lot longer than Carhart did. I was really disappointed in the later. Another brand that suppressed me was undrarmor. I avoided them because they were expensive and popular. Then I got a deal on a hoodie and it outlasted many other goodies. Since then I've picked up a few more on eBay and have been just as happy. I want quality that will last for a decade (or more).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hate shopping for clothes. Hate it. When I was growing up my parents made sure that buying clothes was as painful as possible and I never got over it.

I still year the same members only jacket my father bought in the 80s and gave to me in the 90s - the lining could use some work but otherwise completely functional. I've had the same umbrella for almost twenty years - was a niche brand that built heavy duty frames and it's taken punishment that would have broken a lesser umbrella dozens of times over - but aside from some thin spots in the canopy it's perfectly fine. I wrote the company that made it but only got a form letter in response so guess they weren't impressed with my long lived umbrella that's been to every continent except Antarctica.

I do have to say that buying clothes from amazon is a pleasure. They remember your orders forever so if I'm not sure of size or brand I can always look at order history. If the style or color I want is no longer available the purchase recommendations are good at finding me something similar. Best of all I don't have to buy what's available and get it tailored, I can buy clothes made for my exact size. I used to spend as much getting pants legs shortened as I did on the pants because I have an odd size that the stores don't carry and can't get for weeks. I still have to typically buy shoes two sizes larger to accommodate the width of my feet - Allen Edmonds is about the only places that makes affordable shoes in my exact size, but those soft leather soles get torn up quickly by NYC streets.

I'm sure that in another ten years I'll just give Amazon my measurements and tailored clothing will magically appear whenever I order it.

<comment><USER14> > They remember your orders forever so if I'm not sure of size or brand I can > always look at order history.

Ironically, I've heard complaints from people who've re-ordered things this way that the fit changed between orders.

> I'm sure that in another ten years I'll just give Amazon my measurements and > tailored clothing will magically appear whenever I order it.

Other sites do this. I'll be a bit sad if Amazon crushes this market too.

<comment><USER15> > I've heard complaints from people who've re-ordered things this way that the > fit changed between orders.

When you start ordering clothes online you discover in a real hurry that sizing is agonizingly approximate on the best of days. The same size can be significantly differently sized between batches. I figure it's due to fabric being tricky to work with in a factory setting. One worker might sew the seam allowances a smidge tighter than another which can easily add up in a garment.

That said, there's nothing quite like knowing exactly which size of which model of which brand shoe to buy without having to go shopping. It has changed buying shoes from a weekend-long hunt to a 10-minute online order which gets me exactly the same shoes as the old pair. I've been looking for a good brand of socks to do the same trick with, If I can just find a single model of nice wool socks I can order online I'll be _so_ happy -- cold feet and ill-fitting socks are no fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's me.

More then ten years ago my fiance have converted three bedrooms into additional wardrobes (or more like storage rooms). All expensive designer stuff that she has been rarely using (if at all) just purchasing and storing for later.

Since then I wear mostly Uniqlo, $1 t-shirts from a heap or almost new re-sold stuff.

Clothes and especially cotton are killing the planet.

> About 5 % of household expenditure in the EU is spent on clothing and > footwear, of which about 80 % is spent on clothes and 20 % on footwear. It > has been estimated that in 2015 EU citizens bought 6.4 million tonnes of new > clothing (12.66 kg per person). According to European Environment Agency > (EEA) estimates, between 1996 and 2012, the amount of clothes bought per > person in the EU increased by 40 %. At the same time, more than 30 % of > clothes in Europeans' wardrobes have not been used for at least a year. Once > discarded, over half the garments are not recycled, but end up in mixed > household waste and are subsequently sent to incinerators or landfill.

> the global textiles and clothing industry was responsible for the > consumption of 79 billion cubic metres of water, 1 715 million tons of CO2 > emissions and 92 million tons of waste. It also estimated that by 2030, > under a business-as-usual scenario, these numbers would increase by at least > 50 %.

[https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2019/6331...](https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2019/633143/EPRS_BRI\(2019\)633143_EN.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't want to buy new clothes either. Where can I find clothes that will last 10 years. The article didn't help with any specifics.

<comment><USER18> Leather and denim are probably your best bet. Higher quality leather jackets can last for 10-20 years if you take care of them.

Personally I recommend Schott in NYC. A bit pricey but my jacket still looks great 5 years later. I imagine it will be wearable for at least another decade.

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

<comment><USER19> Denim, specifically jeans, is getting ridiculously thin. I used to be able to count on jeans lasting well over 5 years, but now they'll wear holes (particularly around seams or pockets) in a year, tops. And these are Carhart branded work jeans; not exactly a brand I associate with low quality clothing.

<comment><USER15> A personal pet peeve of mine is this newfangled stretch denim that more and more jeans seem to use. At the start of the day the fit is fine but before the end of the day the elastic has relaxed enough to where you need a belt to even keep them on at all. Add to that the magically shrinking pockets and I haven't been able to find reasonable jeans in a few years now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Something that is consistently reducing the lifetime of my t-shirts is that they tend to get small holes on the front side at the height of my trouser belt. I can't figure out what is causing this, as the both the belt as well as the trouser buttons do not have sharp edges.

<comment><USER21> This is from the metal button on your jeans rubbing against the surface through your shirt. Happens most frequently to people who do the dishes.

<comment><USER20> I don't know. The holes look like individual strands of cloth get cut, rather than gradually worn by friction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I thought this might be about people that mostly only use clothes they got as swag. Like me. I am a walking billboard for companies of which only a few I know what they do.

<comment><USER23> During my early government grant years, I did not buy new t-shirts nor jackets. It's almost a requirement for every conference or new grant program to order shirts. I even got one heck of a winter jacket because someone in DC decided we needed winter jackets. I guess it all constituted acceptable publicity.

<comment> blaser-waffle Same. I was able to snag at least 1-2 work shirts or other swag from vendors, conferences, etc.

Puppet (the server software) seemed to go hard on this and I think I ended up with 5-6 shirts even through we never rolled it out into production. I mostly wear em to the gym or use em for sleeping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The biggest changes to my wardrobe and what require me to buy things most often are external factors. For instance I went from a business casual office environment to working form home, I lost a lot of weight, I took up a new sport, I have a new injury requiring different sorts of footwear.

I'm not sure how to work around some of these issues without buying more clothes. My main rule is that if I buy a piece another piece has to get donated. This keeps the size of the collection in check but wouldn't put a brake on new purchases in and of itself.

<comment><USER25> The real solution is to buy 2nd hand clothes.

Most people hate the idea of wearing someone else's clothes...

Having visited a small town in south western Ukraine, no shops even sell new clothes - everywhere is selling 2nd hand clothes, and they sell it by weight. Underwear is one price per kilo, and everything else is a higher price per kilo.

Even then, a kilo (2 lbs) of clothes (maybe 3 items) cost around $1.50, which was pretty expensive compared to other prices.

<comment><USER24> For me I have no problem wearing used clothes and grew up effectively always shopping second hand. My issue is _time_. I hate shopping for clothes. Finding something that fits, is in good condition and meets my needs involves searching for hours at second hand shops.

<comment><USER3> (Not promoting/affiliated to eBay) When I made the decision to buy second hand clothes, I only though of eBay (have been buying stuff since 2001(?). I always seem to find a nice sweater etc, I don't mind if the size is a bit off, I can always resell. I would love it if anyone can suggest any other online stores that sell 2nd hand clothes at the volume/options that eBay (it's sellers) can provide.

<comment><USER25> A consistent sizing code system would dramatically simplify online shopping for both new and 2nd hand clothes.

Imagine a system where say 10 critical dimensions of a bit of clothing could be embedded onto a QR code on the label. Then you could scan the code with some app which has your measurements (or potentially just take an average of the existing clothes in your wardrobe). It could tell you "Yes, this fits quite well but will be slightly baggy round the waist."

The dimensions could also include "stretchability" figures, so the software could know which dimensions are critical to be correct, and which are "fits all sizes".

The QR code could also include a manufacturer code, and blacklists could be made of manufacturers who mis-measure clothing.

<comment><USER26> I'm on board. I'm a small male, and buying clothes that fit is difficult in the US. Buying online is always a such a crapshoot, but at least smaller sizes are available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I make my own clothes. Have been for a bit more than 8 years. It's a nice hobby to have.

I also started [https://freesewing.org/](https://freesewing.org/) which is the most geeky way to get into sewing :)

<comment><USER3> Shameless plug, but thank you, this looks cool!

If your logo wasn't a "scary skull" I would be showing this to my kid in our "where clothes come from" lesson (we do everything ranging from pottery to NASA space missions)(buy scary skulls are a no-no)(let them figure it out when they discover my Iron Maiden albums - many years from now!)

<comment><USER28> What are you going to do when its time to teach your kid an "anatomy" lesson?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> So most men then? Black tshirts from Marshalls, dark levi jeans, darn tough wool socks, smartwool underwear have served me well in 99% of situations for a decade without much replacement.

<comment><USER30> Interesting how even in an anti-consumerist comment like yours, every item mentioned comes with a brand.

<comment><USER29> That was intentional, because they last ten years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> My underwear was a decade old. It was in shambles. The wife finally convinced me to buy new underwear recently. This is boxer briefs and undershirts. I prefer heavier undershirts, kind of like t-shirts.

My everyday shoes are suede military boots. I don't think they last a decade but they last a long time and can take quite a beating. They are certainly worth the expensive retail price though I typically get mine for free. I will ultimately end up replacing the laces 2 to 3 times before replacing the boots.

Many of my shirts last well over a decade. I prefer business casual long sleeve button up shirts. They wear less quickly because I only wear them over undershirts. I have one shirt I still wear that was from my first year in college more than 20 years ago. The thing that kills my shirts are stains. Stripes and plaids show less stains than flat colors and thus last much longer.

What doesn't last: running shoes, jeans, and watches. The battery on my Timex watch is only good for 3 to 5 years and that is about how long I hold onto my running shoes. My jeans are good for about 4 years and then they see to completely fall apart. I don't even care if they get minor stains.

<comment><USER32> do you mean random stains like coffee/juice or armpit stains? if the latter, you might consider switching to an aluminum-free deodorant. I switched a few years ago and I get much more use out of a tshirt now.

as for jeans, these can also last a long time if cared for properly. in my experience, jeans are pretty resilient to day-to-day life but take a real beating in the washing machine. I wear my regular pants one or two times before washing and jeans two to four times. I still have a pair from ten years ago that's a little too worn for going out, but is perfectly fine for yard work.

<comment><USER33> I heard once the ceo of Levi doesn't wash his jeans. I decided not to as well (unless they get stained from kids) and they've been great. Just hang them up to air outside.

<comment><USER32> maybe he only wears them for public appearances? I like my levis, but tbh I would probably buy more expensive jeans if I were worth millions of dollars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This feels like 'light news day" item. I have w number of things that are 10+ years old. I buy new pants when they too worn out to leave the house. I buy shirts when I don't have enough industry handouts without holes. I can't imagine ever needing another jacket because I have plenty. I buy lots of things but clothes seem like a necessity and I get new ones only when I need to.

</comment><comment><USER35> From my experience all of the clothes I buy, whether they were expensive clothes from a place with a stellar reputation for longevity, or cheap clothes from Walmart, nothing lasts more than a few years.

I buy a $20-40 dress shirt. After about 2 years the cuff splits or an elbow spontaneously explodes. I could patch it, but the surrounding fabric is still threadbare and it will just rip again.

I buy a $100+ dress shirt, it wears out just as fast, it just looks nicer until it does.

I bought some $450 Allen Edmonds shoes based on numerous people talking about how they had a pair for decades and it looked brand new. I got them for far less than that, but the quality wasn't even close to worth it.

The first time a single drop of water gets on the leather for longer than 2 seconds, that part of the surface is permanently damaged and puffs up, ruining your ability to even shine them again properly.

After about 6 months of only wearing them to walk from a parking lot to my office job and then back into my house when I got home, the heels started falling off of the shoe. I thought surely something must be wrong and I contacted Allen Edmonds. They wanted me to send my shoes back for an extensive investigation before giving me a refund or a new pair. So much for their reputation for amazing quality and customer service. They also recommend I wear them only once or twice a week instead of 4-5 days. So presumably I'm supposed to have $1300 of shoes on rotation even though I'm not even putting a mile on them a day.

Probably the only thing I have had last longer than a couple years would be some cheap underwear that lasted probably 7 or 8, and some cheap T-shirts most likely from walmart or kmart.

Anyone got a source for high quality clothes that actually last?

<comment><USER36> You really shouldn't wear the same pair of leather shoes two days in a row. Keep several pairs in rotation and let each dry out properly. They'll last much longer, whether they're Allen Edmonds or any other brand.

This is one reason why minimalism taken to extremes is counterproductive.

<comment><USER35> That's probably good advice, but I've had many pairs of leather shoes that didn't simply fall apart after 6 months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I stopped buying clothes because my size is never available. I guess I am physically more than a sigma away from the norm, and it sucks.

<comment><USER37> By the way, there are shops specialized in "extreme" sizes but their offerings are limited and frankly quite boring. Hurray for the free market ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Apart for the kids, who need clothes regularly as they grow, I agree there is no use in buying clothes every year too.

<comment><USER3> Depending your bf/gf, spouse, social/peer pressure and giving into them. I have broken up with a girlfriend because her hobby was shopping and mine was running. She couldn't understand what I needed ONE GOOD pair of running shoes, and the shoes didn't have to match the colour of my running shorts. I hope she is happy with someone else, but as far away from me as possible. Some other people would accept some "character adaptation" to be with a bf/gf and I wish them all the best!

<comment><USER32> was this a dealbreaker for her or for you? for me, I generally don't care how the other person spends their money as long as they can pay their share of fixed costs we have agreed on. this might be in part because I don't want to invite questions about my computer budget ;)

<comment> frosted-flakes If you're married to someone, you still separate your finances? That boggles my mind.

<comment><USER38> Can't speak for others, but in France, you are partially responsible of the loss of your company (for example).

My wife and I are married with a full separation of goods and possessions contract. Not because we don't want to make financial choices together, but more to protect her for the possibility of me being ruined if my company fells.

When she was working, we agreed on the money we each put in the family budget for groceries, kids stuff, etc...

Never been a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Surprised there is no mention of Goodwill. It's fairly good for donating clothes as well as getting used clothes. Some of the shops are very un-orderly so be sure to checkout atleast 2-3 stores before making a judgement.

</comment><comment><USER7> There is a healthy balance here that seems lost on a lot of people here.

There's not a binary distinction between fashion victim and enlightened minimalist.

Yes, reduce your purchases. Yes, prefer high quality products. Yes, reuse your clothes instead of throwing it away.

No, don't spent your life constantly worrying about what you need to repair before it falls apart. No, don't put people through enduring the summer smell of your only t-shirt. No, don't look awful because appearance matters on a basic level.

Above all, don't virtue signal so hard because it makes you look ignorant to people with more complicated lives.

<comment><USER40> AMEN

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm 39 and still to this day the primary way I get clothes is at Christmas time from my mom or wife. Or random conference t-shirts :) I have rarely bought clothes for myself.

<comment><USER42> Second that.

It feels like my version of the black turtleneck and jeans.

And free shirts are for wearing to bed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I buy all my tshirts from [https://jiffyshirts.com](https://jiffyshirts.com) They supply folks who print on the shirts.

</comment><comment><USER44> I rarely if ever buy new clothes (maybe a few times per decade). And, even on those rare occassions when I do, for jeans, its usually a used clothing store for less than 10$. As for t-shirts, I think I have a lifetime supply already (20 or so), so I won't need to buy those for a while. Those t-shirts last a long long time. I still have some cheap ones from 20 years that are still going strong.

</comment><comment><USER45> I buy pants from Costco but they always wear out after 2 years with big holes in the seat. Where do you even buy something that lasts 10 years?

<comment><USER3> I had a pair of Levi's jeans, my weight is pretty stable, so they were good on me for a decade. Someone else above also mentioned having Levi's for a decade. Treat them well and they tend to last a long time.

<comment><USER45> When you say treat them well, does that mean air drying?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I graduated 12 years ago and I still have clothes from college that I wear. The only new clothes I purchased after college was a few more dress shirt and pants for work, heavier jackets when I moved further north...I don't understand people who purchase clothes for the 'new season' every year.

</comment><comment><USER47> > 51% of Brits are opting to purchase expensive but longer-lasting clothes

Careful there. Lasting long doesn't always mean it's higher quality. Plastic clothes will last a long time... in the landfill.

I haven't bought clothes with plastic in them for 3 years now. No polyester, no spandex, no nylon.

<comment><USER25> 25 years ago I put a cotton cloth in my compost heap thinking "it'll break down".

Every 5 years or so, I discover it at the bottom of the heap and chuck it back in again hoping that next time it will for sure break down... It hasn't yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Life is short enough, I might as well refresh the wardrobe every now and then. Plus I'm helping the economy! A winning strategy all around.

</comment><comment><USER48> Most of my clothes are that old, especially clothes I wear at home. Why would I buy new ones for that? The only reason is if the old ones are too broken/worn.

</comment><comment><USER49> Researchers find that there are people who have not bought any clothes in a decade. Then attribute it to "Greta effect" which is, what less than a year old? We would have been so lost without Greta.

</comment><comment><USER50> Obligatory listening gals and guys: [https://open.spotify.com/track/1CmUZGtH29Kx36C1Hleqlz?si=Jbm...](https://open.spotify.com/track/1CmUZGtH29Kx36C1Hleqlz?si=Jbm54o4cQ-6HQ9uEsDJ1Tg)</comment>


Why you should disagree in an interview - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kablamo.org/2014/03/16/disagree-interview/

<comment><USER2> One of Amazon's leadership principles says:

      Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

      Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree,
      even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting.
      Leaders have conviction and are tenacious.
      They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion.
      Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

Yes I admit it does look as the usual corporate mumbo jumbo, but Amazon really believes in it. While working there I managed to successfully steer projects course by challenging the decisions and the various assumptions those decisions were based on, just by presenting data.

When I'm interviewing I appreciate when the candidate challenges something I've said and provides information on why she/he doesn't agree with me. It really helps the candidate to showcase her/his knowledge and it helps me in probing his thought process, which is ultimately what I'm really interested in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I have never heard of these. Here is the complete list of Amazon's leadership principles: [http://www.amazon.com/Values-Careers- Homepage/b?ie=UTF8&node...](http://www.amazon.com/Values-Careers- Homepage/b?ie=UTF8&node=239365011)

If you are interested in more of this type of writing you might try Dalio's Principles: [http://blog.kablamo.org/2013/12/15/dalios- principles/](http://blog.kablamo.org/2013/12/15/dalios-principles/)</comment></comment>


Moving from Node.js to ASP.NET Core - <AUTHOR> https://thomasbandt.com/moving-from-nodejs-to-aspnet-core <comment><USER2> Just to throw out the obvious: it should be trivial to get some old Node code up and running, particularly if you don't mind using an old runtime version. If you've run npm shrinkwrap you have a log of the exact versions of each package used. You don't have to use ES6 or Typescript, you can keep on trucking the same as you ever did.

It sounds like the author was an ASP.NET developer, dabbled a little in Node, then worked with Xamarin (also .NET) then moved to ASP.NET Core. Nothing wrong with any of that, but it only stands to reason you'll find ASP.NET easier to work with than Node when you've used it extensively and Node not very much at all.

<comment><USER3> As a node developer, I've learned the value of shrinkwrap the hard way. I imagine many companies don't use it until it comes back to bite them.

I've had to deal with downstream dependencies breaking things in our dev environments more than I care to admit. I'd suspect that most old node projects of any meaningful size won't just boot up and run without some tinkering.

<comment><USER4> Thankfully Yarn is here to solve most (if not all) of these problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I personally find the title could better be worded "Moving my blog from Node.js to ASP.NET" or "I just found out that ASP.NET got much better than it used to be"

When I first read the title I thought it was a node.js dev moving to ASP.NET.

TL;DR The poster of the blog found out that ASP.NET fits his needs better, since he seems more capable on that bit etc and he wants to highlight that ASP.NET has improved a lot towards supporting other platforms than Windows and other capabilities other than webforms etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> "very mature und stable"

Sorry but please don't spread these kind of lies. I love .NET Core to death, but the ecosystem is VERY immature. Just today I have been trying to authenticate with the Azure API for 8 hours because:

1) There is barely any support for .NET Core in the Azure SDK.

2) The documentation on the website is very outdated and does not take .NET Core into account. For example the documentation about Table Storage is talking about a TableQuery function that does NOT exist for .NET Core (and this isn't mentioned anywhere), the Azure Webjobs SDK does NOT support .NET Core (again, never mentioned anywhere).

3) .NET Core itself and the tooling surrounding it is full of bugs still. Yesterday I've been trying to reference the TableEntity class in my file, but VS couldn't find it anywhere. I've been trying really hard to get it working, even decompiling the source code to see what's up, but in the end apparently I just had to unload the project and reload it.

Developing for .NET Core is still very, very, very painful. So many things will break and will not be supported (yet).

<comment><USER7> .NET core itself is actually very very stable. The TOOLING for .NET core is what's in flux the most right now.

<comment><USER8> Hey, c'mon, we hit 1.0 on the tooling _weeks_ ago, with VS2017. Net Core has only been out since end of June last year. ;) /s

(I started working on a .net Core project in January last year, transitioning into it as a new language from PHP/Coldfusion - perhaps not the ideal learning path with all the changes between the betas/RCs yet quite exciting at the same time)

Now that we're here, though, we have e.g. NCrunch working with Core and from this point on it's becoming much more viable to develop in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> He moved from a dynamically served website using node.js backed by mongo DB to a website that reads markdown files in asp.net and renders them. The website is his personal blog. Alternatively the author could have used Hugo and generated his site statically before deploying it.

</comment><comment> git-pull There's absolutely nothing wrong with having a static website, but there are already tools like pelican, hugo, jekyll, sphinx and stuff that are better suited for it. So while I'm happy for the person's effort and that he got to use Azure, the more glaring thing is I suspect he could be happier using a static site generator.

Also Armin Ronacher released a new one late 2015, Lektor. [https://www.getlektor.com/](https://www.getlektor.com/)

Show me a team replacing their medium-sized django or rails website with ASP.net Core. Or a YCombinator startup huddling up to their screens late at night in Visual Studio pushing code to azure. And them shipping and making customer's happy.

</comment><comment><USER10> Rather lacking in details on what actually went wrong. Then, instead of figuring it out the best solution is just to switch stacks? Seems a bit.. lazy to me.

Tons of breaking changes between 2 years ago node and current stable node.. that's like.. 0.12.x to 6.x? Is it a package issue? I've not had a problem as long as my package config was the same.

</comment><comment><USER11> One critical thing I don't feel the article answers is why you would want to move to .NET, what the advantages are over Node.js, TypeScript et al.

I don't mean this as criticism, I'm working on some Node/TS projects and I'm very interested to hear the strengths .NET has over Node.

<comment><USER12> I've been working with TypeScript a lot over the past year and prefer it to some other languages now(like Python). I would still probably prefer C# and dotnet; all the way if it ran in the browser.

* .Net is faster * ASP.NET Core is faster * .Net uses thread pools for task scheduling; parallelism * Run time type information * An mostly complete task(async/await) based stdlib(node hasn't even started on this to my knowledge) * Linq -> fantastic * Entity Framework -> not without some quirks, but fantastic * Roslyn; feeding dev-time code generation back into your compiler/tools allows for some really cool IDE aware tooling. * Cool JIT/IL stuff like Jil * More number types than "number" * etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Do you really need to stick a an animated gif in the middle of the article?

The one thing I would say about JS on the server is writing EJS templates is much faster than something like razor.

Otherwise, go trumps node in every other way.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why weren't they using nvm? Did they have a build server? I'm confused how it suddenly stopped working, but TBH I got a bit confused and bored.

</comment><comment><USER15> Just did the opposite. So far so good.

<comment><USER16> From Core specifically? Any additional insight?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can't figure out the circle jerk around Node. Debugging sucks A LOT, JS syntax sucks, single thread sucks, NPM is filled with 95% junk.

Python, Java, golang, C#, and maybe even PHP have more mature and reasonable stacks.

<comment><USER18> I completely agree. The fact that there are so many abstractions that compile/transpile into javascript is also a big red flag. What other languages do you see that in? And then of course there is the horrible standard library, where the most obvious functions don't exist and require a package and maintainer.

[https://mobile.twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/7126249140717281...](https://mobile.twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/712624914071728128)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4bjss2/an_11_l...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4bjss2/an_11_line_npm_package_called_leftpad_with_only/?st=J1182X6I&sh=d6f61965)

<comment><USER4> I find it extremely telling that both of the issues you linked are now included in the core language library, and what happened with left-pad will never happen again after amends were made by npm to make sure that it indeed never does.

If you want to critize JavaScript you can do better with something more substantial. If anything, the speed at which problems you linked get remedied is a plus for the language. Even more so if you take into account the extremely unique position JavaScript is in where you can simply never change an API after it goes public.

> The fact that there are so many abstractions that compile/transpile into > javascript is also a big red flag

What did you expect? JavaScript is the _only_ language browsers natively understand. If you want to write code in your favorite programming language you will have to transpile/compile it to JS.

<comment><USER19> Javascript is the reason WebAssembly came into existence.

<comment><USER4> That statement is highly uninformed.

I would suggest starting reading from here [https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FAQ.md#is-...](https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FAQ.md#is- webassembly-trying-to-replace-javascript)

<comment><USER19> I never said it would replace it, I was saying that it was for those who didn't want to use javascript.

<comment><USER20> No, it really isn't... it's for code that absolutely must perform well, without the need for browser plugin/extension installation. Gaming logic, transcoding streams, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Are you crazy ??????</comment>