Do Artifacts Have Politics? (1980) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://innovate.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Winner-Do-Artifacts-Have-Politics-1980.pdf

<comment><USER2> Yes. In the same way that Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman have described our media as being or shaping the contents of the messages we send, our technologies and processes shape the way we live, act, and view the world around us.

Take military drones, for instance. People are not concerned about drones because they can be used to kill each other; we have been killing each other for millennia. What makes drones concerning is the relative ease and safety with which they allow us to kill each other. We no longer have to risk the lives of our sons and daughters to wage war in far-off lands; we can do the same from the comfort and safety of a bunker.

What does this mean? We are risking less when we wage war. Waging war is easier. This makes us much more likely to be warlike. What we previously may not have seen as a worthy cause for risking the lives of our troops may yet be seen as a worthy cause for risking our money, in the form of UAVs, robotics, ammunition, etc. On the side of the attacker, war becomes more about spending money than risking lives. That is a big difference.

Moreover, these changes have consequences for the people war is waged against as well as innocent bystanders. An occupying soldier is less likely to target and execute a civilian than a soldier piloting a drone from far away. Innocents are much easier to mistake for insurgents on a computer screen.

The psychic distance between two people is far larger when they are separated by digital rather than physical space, meaning less empathy is involved. A reduction in empathy makes it easier to risk the lives of the people you intend to ignore or protect. This is the same reason people are so mean to each other on the Internet.

<comment><USER3> Another slightly more recent philosopher who has taken up this discussion is Peter-Paul Verbeek, with his book "What Things Do." Only "slightly more recent" because it's already from back in 2005:

[http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02539-5.html](http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02539-5.html)

> _The psychic distance between two people is far larger when they are > separated by digital rather than physical space, meaning less empathy is > involved. A reduction in empathy makes it easier to risk the lives of the > people you intend to ignore or protect. This is the same reason people are > so mean to each other on the Internet._

I agree, but also think it's kind of a double-edged sword in a way, because the internet also brings distant people more together. This is nothing new of course, movies and TV were closing distant gaps long before it: ignoring the valid criticisms of Live Aid for a second, people got motivated to do something because they empathised with distant people thanks to this _tele_ -vision.

Similarly the internet has been a boon for niche interest communities that would have either never gotten off the ground, or in the case of older traditions died out if the enthusiasts wouldn't have been able to find distant people with similar interests online. The older mass-medias homogenized society because they were top-down, but I firmly believe the internet is our best technological bet for bringing back cultural diversity, paradoxically by connecting everyone globally.

<comment><USER4> A major movement in recent years has been towards an object oriented ontology: [http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/p/ooo-for- beginners...](http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/p/ooo-for- beginners.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This essay by Langdon Winner is pretty much required reading for technologists who are interested in real-world uses of our tools and their impact in society. The idea that technology is apolitical is a common misconception, or self-delusion, of too many engineers. Our ideas are influenced by the systems we grew up in, learned our trade in, and benefit from.

For a current example, contrast the products created to solve the problems of 25 year olds with too much money ([https://medium.com/matter/the-shut-in- economy-ec3ec1294816](https://medium.com/matter/the-shut-in-economy- ec3ec1294816)), and those for people who have experienced the horrible scale of mass incarceration ([http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/24/pigeon- ly/](http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/24/pigeon-ly/)). Both tap potentially huge markets, but posit very different worlds.

Getting outside of your own experiential bubble can make you a stronger product designer and user advocate, and potentially a more successful startup founder.

</comment><comment><USER6> Take with a grain of salt. Especially the accusations that Moses is a racist and that his parkways have politics are not only gratuitous but also false. This makes for a clumsy claim ("Yes, artifacts have politics!").

Robert Moses implemented parkways according to the "spec", and did not spend actual effort trying to prevent poor people from going there. His wife was also in charity, IIRC. If you read this then I refer you to "Do Politics have Artifacts"[1] which, as the name suggests, is a brilliant counterpiece.

TLDR: Don't believe what you read, and don't write down what you believe without any factual corroboration.

My claim is based on research done by Professor Lutz Prechelt for a course I can only recommend (slides[2]). It's in german, sadly.

[1] [http://www.wzb.eu/2000/met/pdf/do_politics.pdf](http://www.wzb.eu/2000/met/pdf/do_politics.pdf)

[2] [http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/ag- se/teaching/V-AWS-2011/1...](http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/ag- se/teaching/V-AWS-2011/14_Techniksoziologie.pdf)

<comment><USER7> The cliché comparison for Robert Moses is the urban planner Edward Logue. [http://www.edlogue.org/index.html](http://www.edlogue.org/index.html)

My mentor, the late David Crane, FAIA worked for Logue at the BRA. Crane's opinion of Moses reflected the standard criticisms. His actions over the course of the time I knew him and the portions of his career about which I am aware reflected values running opposite to those of attributed to Mr. Moses. The peers who he associated himself with and the projects he undertook later in his career did not reflect the values Mr. Moses is accused of having.

None of which is to deny that politics has artefacts. Crane's work on Sadat city was halted by Sadat's assassination and Mubarek's subsequent rise to power in Egypt. Logue's work for the BRA likewise reflected political will and has its own high and low spots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A classic in the field. And of course, the reverse, "Do Politics have Artefacts" [http://sss.sagepub.com/content/29/3/411.abstract](http://sss.sagepub.com/content/29/3/411.abstract)</comment>


Lisp, 50th Birthday this October - <AUTHOR> http://www.franz.com/services/conferences_seminars/lisp_50th-birthday.lhtml <comment><USER2> _"... John McCarthy has already agreed to give a talk about the early history of Lisp, returning to OOPSLA after his successful keynote talk at OOPSLA 2007. ..."_

Anyone going?

<comment><USER3> _after his successful keynote talk at OOPSLA 2007_

The talk wasn't all that successful. It was about Elephant (his new language) and a friend who was there told me it was "rambling" and hard to understand. Apparently things brightened up, though, when McCarthy started answering questions about Lisp.

<comment><USER2> _"... It was about Elephant (his 'McCarthys' new language) and a friend who was there told me it was "rambling" and hard to understand ..."_

Rambling, hard to understand, maybe. But given the time this guy has been around (Lisp will turn 50 in October) and he's been thinking about computing for so long I'm not surprised. The ideas will be dense. But I did find a copy of McCarthy talking about Elephant just before this talk. Listening to it now ~ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116403>

I often wonder why <http://startupschool.org> has never asked McCarthy along to talk about languages and language choice?</comment></comment></comment>


A Story of a Fuck Off Fund - <AUTHOR> https://thebillfold.com/a-story-of-a-fuck-off-fund-648401263659#.zdu88diz5 <comment><USER2> I know this was geared towards a woman's perspective. But living life on your terms own terms is everyone's right. So good advice for everyone</comment>


Waterfox developer has plans to salvage Firefox XUL extensions - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/5ysn9e/proposal_please_turn_waterfox_56_into_an_esr_and/deut7uq/ <comment><USER2> That's going to be quite a monumental effort, I think it'll take a bit more than some plans.

</comment><comment><USER3> what is waterfox? A FF fork?</comment>


Show HN: A Chrome extension for Delicious/Pinboard - <AUTHOR>

My partner and I are avid users of Delicious/Pinboard and wanted a quick way to add to and access our stored bookmarks. We created a Chrome extension to scratch that itch. It shows your ten most-recent bookmarks by default, with a fast search interface to find older bookmarks, and keyboard shortcuts for navigation. We plan to add pagination in an upcoming release, and have considered adding support for Safari as well as alternate bookmarking backends.
The (mostly CoffeeScript) source is up on GitHub, and may be interesting as an example of caching Backbone Collections in localStorage or using in-page iframes to simulate opening a Chrome extension popup via keyboard shortcut.
Is this something you find useful? We welcome comments or suggestions.

  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ndjggnnohdkheiijjhbklkanjcpibbng
  https://github.com/cabin/linkhunter
 <comment><USER2> Looks well put together. A few comments:

1\. I suggest adding they keyboard shortcuts/other instructions to <http://madebycabin.com/work/linkhunter>

2\. I suggest making the "Linkhunter" item in the context menu opened by right-clicking link to <http://madebycabin.com/work/linkhunter> instead of <http://madebycabin.com/>

3\. Ctrl+j (for me) opens Chrome's Downloads page. Since you use a capital "j" in describing the shortcuts, I tried ctrl+shift+j, but that opens the console in developer tools. How can I use the keyboard shortcuts?

4\. Autocompletion of tags when adding a bookmark would be a very good feature to add (IMO).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for taking the time to critique!

1 & 2: Great ideas.

3: We obviously dropped the ball on Windows QA. On the Mac, the Downloads window is cmd-shift-j, so I figured it was similar on Windows. Ideally we should make the keyboard shortcut configurable, but could you suggest a good unused Windows shortcut for the meantime?

4\. Absolutely. It's on our list!

<comment><USER2> Ctrl+Alt+p seems open. Same with ctrl+alt+d. You could use 'p' in Pinboard mode and 'd' in Delicious mode. If only one, I'd default to 'p' - feels easier (to me) to press.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable links:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ndjggnnohdkheiijjh...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ndjggnnohdkheiijjhbklkanjcpibbng)

<https://github.com/cabin/linkhunter>

<comment><USER3> Hrm. Won't let me log in.

At least, I think that's what the "Something smells rotten" error is supposed to mean.

I just registered for Delicious to try this out, as apparently my old account didn't survive the acquisition, so I know my username and password are valid.

Thoughts?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is indeed the "auth failed" error. Only two things I can think of: either you toggled the service slider to "Pinboard" without noticing, or Delicious authentication was down briefly. There was at least one other report of that:

<https://twitter.com/#!/egebhardt/status/176776297106771968>

Are you still getting that error?

<comment><USER3> I am. I've verified username, password, and have tried both the Pinboard and Delicious options, and now I'm getting the "Oof! Delicious rejected that username/password" error.

Logged out of delicious, logged back in to verify the credentials. Restarted the browser and tried again -- same error.

On the upside, it's easily one of the best login screens I've seen, and the error animation is quite nice. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> (I responded to the email address in your profile.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is fantastic. Thank you.</comment>


DevOps Engineering: Who does your automation? - <AUTHOR>

Here a brief intro for those that aren't familiar with DevOps: http://www.jedi.be/blog/2010/02/12/what-is-this-devops-thing-anyway/
Before being introduced to the concept of DevOps, we at Twilio struggled with what to call the role. It requires a different kind of thinking.  To us, DevOps is about automation to improve productivity, reduce risk, and achieve scale.  DevOps engineers should always be striving to deprecate themselves.  It has been more then 2 year since we founded Twilio and we've never had a sysadmin or an ops person.  This has forced us to write better software automation from day one.  However, having someone that can provide leadership on DevOps issues (and fundamentally understands distributed systems/CAP/etc) to the whole team is extremely valuable.
Configuration management tools like Chef and Puppet are the beginning but a more complete view of infrastructure and service automation (e.g., http://redeyemon.sourceforge.net/) seems inevitable in the long term.
We are looking to hire a Lead DevOps engineer.  Here is the detailed job description if you know someone that might be interested: http://twilio.jobscore.com/jobs/twilio/devops-engineer/bSHjYWq2Sr37U6eJe4aGWH <comment><USER2> Sometimes I wonder if DevOps isn't really just those who would truly prefer to be developers but don't mind sysadmin work and, for whatever reason, started out doing the latter.

I, too, cringe a little when I hear the term, perhaps because I've always viewed myself as a "pure" sysadmin. That is, this is the kind of work which continues to bring me joy after 2 decades. Application development, on the other hand, despite an ability to code, does not.

CM tools (current and their predecessors like cfengine) as they tend to be implemented strike me as a way of avoiding administering the whole _system_ , by focusing on a single component (servers) and reducing them to a lowest common denominator.

It also fits the pattern of trying to solve problems entirely in a custom software solution, a trait I associate with developers, not sysadmins. This is the source of my inference of DevOps' true leanings.

The reality is that the system consists of considerably more than fungible servers[1]. There's the underlying hardware, the peripheral hardware like disks, database software[2], network hardware and configuration, and service providers.

These are all traditional sysadmin areas, with _plenty_ of room for professional growth and overall benefit. So much so, that I have difficulty imagining why any SA (not a developer in SA's clothing) would wish to do more dev at the expense of increaaed mastery of the infrastructure.

By way of example, something I wrote on LinkedIn, in response to why I'm not a fan of puppet:

      I'm uncomfortable with any system that attempts to maintain state in place
      on a running system, as well as possibly override the native packaging ethos.
      That the client takes its own local file inventory on a fresh system, rather
      than trusting the one the package manager has, is wasteful at best. What's
      worse, to me, is that it creates yet another system to administer. I haven't yet
      found anything similarly suitable for the Ubuntu/Debian world, but I very
      much liked Cobbler a couple years ago, as it was primarily a wrapper for
      what could otherwise be standard, standalone services (kickstart, package
      repo). Even without such a wrapper, yum/rpm or apt/dpkg can do nearly all
      the work"

[1] Virtualization and "cloud" notwithstanding, as anyone who's experienced an outage with a hosting provider or an i/o perofrmance issue with a cloud server can attest.

[2] Which can be like an encapsulated OS itself

</comment><comment><USER3> Yea I think like some the term DevOps makes me cringe as well since people use it as a job title when it should be more thought of like agile development, just another term to describe a process of working.

I use chef because I needed a way to consistently deploy software in exactly the same way every time to multiple servers. A repeatable deployment process that scales. Why did I pick chef over puppet or cfengine? Because I also wanted to learn ruby and the entire thing is in ruby, win. Plus we have a ruby on rails team in the office, if ever I needed a hand, they were there or if they wanted to write recipes to deploy software thats not an issue either.

DevOps is just a new buzz word. My title is System Administrator. I have a depth of knowledge in the infrastructure of all our technologies and how they are interconnected. I know how to deploy, maintain, scale and do it all over again. My knowledge in programming in second to that but is necessary to automate repetitive processes. DevOps I guess is being classed as a way to bring the IT team together, making sys admins and developers aware of each others "agendas" when it comes to running apps on servers. I as a sys admin have to understand what each of our applications does throughout its life cycle, from the browser right down to the database. Because if something goes wrong, I'll be the first to figure out where that happened and relay this back to the developer. By understanding core functionality of the code I can make it clear to the developer, "look you are executing a query on the database thats scanning millions of rows because its not using an index, its occurring in this controller in your code". We are seeing this term DevOps be classified now as more and more startups are emerging, because its essentially alot easier to execute in a startup environment where everyone is talking to each other to roll things out, everyone is trying to solve problems together. In large companies you'll see a massive separation and segregation along with processes to keep people in their place and slow results.

I hope that all makes sense. DevOps as a process is not new, the classification of it as this term is.

</comment><comment><USER4> Linky - [http://www.jedi.be/blog/2010/02/12/what-is-this-devops- thing...](http://www.jedi.be/blog/2010/02/12/what-is-this-devops-thing- anyway/)

Call it what you will, 'DevOps' is just what you'd expect a _good_ sysadmin to do in a sufficiently large org. That there is on going friction between developers and sysadmin ("it works on my box" is a valid excuse?) is perhaps a larger sign of the culture and people involved.

<comment><USER5> Whenever I hear that term I cringe a little. I think this was a word invented by developers (please correct me if I'm wrong) to bring sysadmins into the fold. It is definitely good to have an understanding of the application layer but developers also need to understand the systems running their applications.

I work in a large organization (5000+ employees) as a unix/linux sysadmin. You have to automate deployment, monitoring, configuration management because there just isn't time to do anything else. We have a group (about 4) out of 30+ that have an overall view of what you might call devops. The rest specilize in development or sysadmins. We meet once a week and review all progress on the dev/ops issues.

I like the term OpSec (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_security>) someone who looks after Systems/Security ;) Since a good system admin should also know a great deal about security. Maybe Dev/Op/Sec.. haha, but really ;)

p.s. I found that job posting to be full of PR fluff. It would be nice to see job posting actually post what their looking for in a distilled form.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the pointer to OpSec term. DevOpsSec... I sense a tshirt in the making?

<comment><USER5> I first heard about OpSec from Roland Dobbins with Arbor. Really smart fellow who has many suggestions on network design / defence.

I just think people need to specialize in their field (+ a general knowledge of how the overall systems works).

Almost how a carpenter, plumber, and electrician each specialize but probably have a general idea how everything works. Do you really want a plumber building the foundation of your house? Just seems a little silly to me. Each domain is so large that I would rather have deep expert knowledge in a area than a general handyman who might cut corners or waste time with solutions he doesn't know about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 40 years ago IBM called these guys "systems programmers". That this is a new concept to some people is symptomatic of a wider problem in the industry: everything needs to be shiny and new so every 10 years we reinvent the wheel with new jargon.

<comment><USER7> DevOps is not just "writing automation tools". If that's all you're getting out of this, you're missing 90% of what's going on.

<comment><USER8> What else is it, then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is a bit of the same movement in CCP Games where I work, it's not called DevOps here, but there are groups forming in both the EVE Online software team and the Core technology group with an engineering focus on QA, which in practice translates pretty well to the DevOps style of thinking about the needs for this type of development and quality work. Here's one of the advertised positions for example:

<http://www.ccpgames.com/en/jobs/job-details.aspx?jobid=101></comment>


Where's Your HEAD? Keep Git Heads on Display while not in terminal (Mac util) - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/heads-on-display-your-current/id1038300346?mt=12 <comment><AUTHOR> We have promo codes available, if anyone is interested. Reply here, and we'll get 'em to you. Thanks!</comment>


With its mountain of cash, Apple could buy… - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/24/with-its-mountain-of-cash-apple-could-buy/ <comment><USER2> During the earnings conference call, one of the analysts, discussing the cash mountain, said that Apple could hire every engineer in Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs said that that was an interesting idea...</comment>


Ask HN: Do you still use jQuery? - <AUTHOR> JS-land has typically been moving from one framework to the next. However, are any of you still using jQuery? If so what issues do you face and what are the advantages? <comment><USER2> I recently migrated a personal project to a newer version of a library it is using and that version dropped its jQuery requirement. In that process I also rewrote my own code using jQuery and moved to vanilla JavaScript.

A lot, that required or semi-required jQuery before can now be done with vanilla JavaScript, however jQuery is still going strong with invoking code on sets of elements as well as cascading calls.

jQuery has been a fantastic library and deserves all the praise, however a lot of its functionality has made it by now into the language itself.

To answer your direct questions, I couldnt think of any "issues", at worst you download an additional 30 kilobytes (gzipped) but with today's mentality of megabytes and megabytes for websites, that really shouldnt matter much. As for advantages, as mentioned, JavaScript did take over a lot of functionality, but as direct advantages I'd consider aforementioned features. Additionally, there certainly is also still a lot of libraries/plugins which depend on jQuery.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks. this is really helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Working with jQuery for years and i love it. Very simple an fast. Done some things in react and angular, went back to jQuery.

</comment><comment> nana- jQuery is universal . No issues, its clear and concise code working on every browser.

Understandable code as one programs the controller logic entirely and exposes it without magical hidden behaviour nor framework version dependency.

With no framework caveats nor non-intuitive behaviour to lookup in obfuscated documentation.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't like the size of it, but it is a comfort zone and a dependency of bootstrap.

<comment> nana- Jquery's size is better than most framework sizes.</comment></comment>


Apple's new subscription management prompt seems to be working - <AUTHOR> https://www.revenuecat.com/2019/10/09/iOS-13-subscription-management-prompt <comment><USER2> Jacob here, RevenueCat co-founder and the colleague who ran the data for this post.

The most interesting thing for me about the data is that there was a fairly flat 9% absolute drop in conversions across apps, independent of their base conversion rates. This might suggest that this modal is educating a set of users who simply didn't realize how iOS subscriptions worked.

It's gonna hit apps with already low conversion rates, they might lose half their new business, but I think this will create hardier subscriber bases, and maybe lift the sometimes negative perception of in-app purchases.</comment>


Ask HN: What exactly are the implication of kernel.org hacking? - <AUTHOR>

many people like me depend on kernel.org to download android kernel and linux-rt patches etc.
I can see that http://android.git.pub4.kernel.org/repo is not working and I am also unable to download various other patches from kernel.org.
Can someone confirm if this is due to hacking incident ? <comment><USER2> Looked up "Kernel.org" [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/06/linus_torvalds_dumps...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/06/linus_torvalds_dumps_kernel_for_github/)</comment>


The quest for the sacred diskettes - <AUTHOR> https://retro.moe/2016/06/06/the-quest-for-the-sacred-diskettes/ <comment><USER2> I feel the joy. A few weeks ago, I stumbled across my old Apple II, which I thought I had long since thrown out. Alas, I fear the disks were thrown out long ago.... _sigh_</comment>


Telemedicine market to hit $36B by 2020 - <AUTHOR> http://www.econotimes.com/Telemedicine-Market-to-reach-US$3630-bn-by-2020-Growth-Spurred-by-High-Personal-Healthcare-Demand-324522 <comment><AUTHOR> I know I know poor form to comment on own submission, but I do feel compelled to add the counterpoint: [http://www.mobihealthnews.com/content/small-study- pokes-hole...](http://www.mobihealthnews.com/content/small-study-pokes-holes- direct-consumer-dermatology-telemedicine-services)</comment>


Show HN: Fireant Social – Social tool providing actionable data - <AUTHOR> http://www.fireantsocial.com/features

<comment><USER2> Why is your tool different from your competitors? I need some compelling evidence before I sign up.

<comment><AUTHOR> We provide genuinely actionable data, we do not limit mentions you set up your account based on keywords then we track every mention of that keyword. We are not a social media management platform we are focused on increasing the ROI on your campaigns by making sure you engage at the right time, never miss an opportunity and have the data you need to tailor the content to fit the conversation.</comment></comment>


Make your startup ridiculously easy to write about. Put together a press pack - <AUTHOR> http://thestartupfoundry.com/2011/03/18/make-your-startup-ridiculously-easy-to-write-about-put-together-a-great-press-pack/

<comment><USER2> Can anyone give examples of #2, a good story?

I've spent the last few weeks trying to brainstorm the story for my biz and just keep drawing a blank.

<comment><USER3> Anything with a human connection is great. For example , my wife and I got our app covered in the NYTimes because the reporter liked this narrative we gave her of a husband-wife team writing code on their honeymoon. Every news outlet including TC mentioned that though that is probably the least important thing about our app :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great post, but how do you structure a press package in the first place? Is a great landing page, and a good 'about' page enough, or do you look for something more?

<comment><USER5> If you've built a good web app, you've already done 90% of this work on your main page. All that information you're trying to get across to potential customers is information that will inform the journalist.

A good about page can fill in some of the rest if you write it well. Your greater mission, team history... whatever's interesting. Write about it here.

A media or press page can do the rest if you decide to go with it. If you've done your work elsewhere, this can be as simple as a preferred contact e-mail and a clean, hi-res logo file (and yes, the transparent PNG is best here). Or, just put this stuff onto your about page for the same effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I agree with this in spirit, but it's important to realize that a pitch and a press kit aren't the same thing.

Having these things on-hand is great, and on your site even better (perhaps in a /press or /media URL). However, turning a pitch, especially a cold pitch, into a press kit can be seen as presumptuous and a turn-off to some members of the media.

</comment><comment><USER6> If anyone would like some pointers about press relations for their startup, you can contact me. My email's in my profile. I left the PR industry after several years to pursue a career in development and know a bit. I'm not a superstar or the world's greatest BSer but I know a thing or two.

The thing about these general press relations articles written by a journalist or media outlet is that it's tailored to them. What works for one may not work for another. (Though to be fair this article does have good general principles!)

(edit: I'm obviously not charging for this, just a friendly offer.)

</comment><comment><USER7> I run a startup news website. I review press-releases and pitches every day. The basics in this post are solid, but the two most important things in a pitch are 1)exclusivity 2)currency (that is a media term for "the story is relevant and current for right now, it has currency") Here is my guide to getting a write-up about your startups [http://www.scandinavianstartups.com/article/how-get-write- yo...](http://www.scandinavianstartups.com/article/how-get-write-your-startup)

</comment><comment><USER8> For anyone interested, there's a service to help you along with this at: www.pearwords.com</comment>


Show HN: Doing file encryption with SSH keys - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gregretkowski/sshcrypt <comment><AUTHOR> I infrequently have the need to encrypt some files; and traditionally I've used symmetric encryption with passphrases. But I feel like we're in a post- password world where any phrase that I as a human can remember is short enough that a computer could brute-force it. So I wanted to have something more secure which uses a secret key.. It's infrequent enough that keeping track of a GPG key would be a problem. But as a developer there's a secret key I use on a daily basis which I could leverage - my RSA SSH key. So I wrote a script to use my public/private key to encrypt and decrypt files. Posting this in case others would find it useful. >>>All the usual caveats/disclaimers about using crypto stuff written by a random non-crypt-expert developer etc...<<<

</comment><comment><USER2> What a coincidence! Earlier today, I was wondering whether SSH could be used in place of GPG for encrypting messages; a common answer was that SSH was designed for a different purpose and that it wouldn't make sense to use it this way.

And here you've shown how it could be done. The script is interesting and educational to read through. Thanks for sharing.</comment>


Pocket's 30M Users Are Great for Publishers - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-09/pocket-s-30-million-users-are-great-for-publishers <comment><USER2> > Pocket is also experimenting with personalizing recommendations for certain > users based partly on each person's Firefox browsing history.

Why does an open-source web browser have a proprietary cloud synchronization service installed by default?

EDIT: I know that Pocket is owned by Mozilla. It doesn't change anything.

<comment><USER3> Mozilla actually owns pocket now; they seem to believe that giving people recommendations from around the web is the best way to combat walled gardens who want all your content going through _them_. This article is pretty revealing: [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires- po...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/)

I still don't think it should be proprietary, and I don't use it, so

      extensions.pocket.enabled = false

is my friend.

<comment><USER4> I wish that where off by default, it actually makes me feel uncomfortable installing firefox on my laptop at work even though it really is better than chrome when you want to read docs and don't have a ton of free memory.

<comment><USER5> So, what do you use? Chrome is more comfortable?

<comment><USER4> Yes, chrome doesn't dump news articles on my screen every time I open a new tab.

I use firefox anyway, it just makes me uncomfortable.

<comment><USER6> Turn off site recommendations: [https://help.getpocket.com/article/1147-hiding-pocket-in- you...](https://help.getpocket.com/article/1147-hiding-pocket-in-your-firefox- new-tab)

Disabling Pocket: [https://help.getpocket.com/article/1025-disabling-save-to- po...](https://help.getpocket.com/article/1025-disabling-save-to-pocket- features-in-firefox)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not having read the article, I'll just chime in and say anecdotally that since I use Firefox on my iPhone I've clicked on numerous Pocket articles suggested on the new tab screen. Even though they only show two suggestions at a time, they tend to be really interesting reads and fit in well with my interests. Clearly they have a good algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER8> Pocket is one of my most used apps on my iPhone. It's fantastic, simple, and best of all truly an app I believe the more time I put into it, the better I feel about how I've used my time, which I can't say for a lot of the social media and game apps that are out there today.

</comment><comment><USER9> > _Pocket is, however, sending almost 75 percent more traffic to Parse.ly's > publisher network than it was at the start of 2018._

That's meaningless without knowing what percentage of traffic Pocket represents to Parse.ly. Did it go from (for example) 5% to 8.75%? Or 0.1% to 0.175%?

</comment><comment><USER10> I recently moved from Pocket to Instapaper because of the way Pocket seems to be adding all these things to get in your way.

I dislike Instapaper too because of the whole GDPR thing.

I should engineer a solution I like, but could do with some help generating text from the articles. What is the best way of doing that? Something like Mozilla Fathom?

<comment><USER11> [https://github.com/mozilla/readability](https://github.com/mozilla/readability) (that powers Firefox's reading mode)

[https://github.com/buriy/python-readability](https://github.com/buriy/python- readability)

[https://github.com/goose3/goose3](https://github.com/goose3/goose3)

[https://github.com/codelucas/newspaper](https://github.com/codelucas/newspaper)

For a complete solution, you can also look at Wallabag, which can be self- hosted.

<comment><USER10> Thanks, I threw together a little nodejs+express API using Readability and wow its very powerful

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Odd that people have privacy issues with Pocket but not embedding a search engine in the awesome bar. At the end of the day Mozilla has to pay the bills and Pocket looks like an unoffensive way to do so.

<comment><USER13> I do. I removed all the integrated search engines from FF.

You are right, Mozilla needs to pay the bills. I accept that and don't hold a grudge. But they are not getting anything from me. I use FF to get away from the internet business model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pocket is a nice idea, but probably a poor substitute for Search Engine money.

If it worked, Mozilla would publish real numbers. (The way Mozilla works nowadays, they would probably publish a blog post with an overly excited tone describing how Pocket saves the internet, destroys fake news and even averts climate change)

Just like they don't publish real data anymore for Firefox absolute user numbers, which have gone downhill in recent years.

The 75% number is meaningless without revenue numbers and an explanation what this 75% even pertains to. There shuold be around 100 Million Quantum users who have Pocket in their new-tab section.

Finding a long-term strategy will be a challenge for Mozilla. Since the browser is losing more and more users, if they don't invent themselves completely new there will be no way to keep the revenue stable.

<comment><USER15> It indeed seems like Mozilla does not publish user stats for Firefox, though detailed statistics for AMO are still available.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/statistics/addons_in_use/?l...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/statistics/addons_in_use/?last=365)

<comment><USER14> When you look at the major Addons, usage is consistently going down.

Mozilla pulled the plug for the user raw data after this blog post:

[https://andreasgal.com/2017/07/19/firefox-marketshare- revisi...](https://andreasgal.com/2017/07/19/firefox-marketshare-revisited/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I see why Mozilla want to do this sort of thing, and I also understand why lots of people like it.

But I do wish Mozilla would make a version of Firefox available for people that just want a fully-FOSS browser.

The efforts of various GNU+Linux distributions to do this (Icecat, Abrowser) are fantastic, but ultimately it's too difficult for me to judge how quickly they can act on security issues to feel comfortable using them.

I'd have no problem sending telemetry data back if I could get a browser binary with Widevine DRM, Pocket etc. completely removed.

I'd also be more inclined to send Mozilla cold hard cash.

</comment><comment><USER17> I recently switched from Pocket to Instapaper. Instapaper is more stable without a doubt. When I used the pocket app on my phone, MULTIPLE PHONES/TABLETS (at least 5), I would get stuck in home screen loops that I was unable to exit out of without rebooting. I tried contacting their support but they were not effective. When it works, it was my favorite app. I got top %5 reader awards from them 3 years in a row.

I would have gladly paid for a premium edition but their lack of support, victim blaming, and passive aggressive responses to features I suggested left me with a bad taste in my mouth. So far, Instapaper is everything I was hoping pocket to be. The text to speech feature actually works, it's stable, and the interface is much cleaner and easier to use.

I don't usually write yelp tier reviews like this on HN but I figured I would express myself just in case someone has the same sentiment as me (they should immediately switch to Instapaper).

It is night and day in terms of quality.

<comment><USER18> If, like Instapaper, Pocket strips out publisher ads and gives you a pleasant reading experience, why would publishers pay a fee for Pocket to promote articles?

If Pocket doesn't strip publisher ads and give you a pleasant reading experience, why use Pocket?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I live on Pocket and absolutely love the service.

</comment><comment><USER20> Ok. How do you growth hack pocket now?

</comment><comment><USER21> pocket is long dead

</comment><comment><USER22> I assume I am is considered a user.. but I quite frankly haven't used it 2 years. That 30 million is probably grossely exaggerated.</comment>


Scientists crowdsource atmospheric data from phones to improve weather forecasts - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2013/uw-scientists-crowdsourcing-atmosphere-data-smartphones-improve-weather-forecasts/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the developer of the pressureNET app and CEO of Cumulonimbus. We're looking to dramatically increase our measurements per hour (12,000 right now globally, need to get to 100,000 and then 1,000,000 by summertime). Building the pressureNET SDK is our focus right now as it will allow other app developers to include pressureNET in their apps, thus helping us grow quickly. There's also a data access API (which is what the scientists are using) if you're interested. Last month I left my job to build this full time. I have only some savings left - so we're looking for funding. We just got the YC rejection email, but there's a lot of other opportunities out there so I'm quite confident we'll find something.

The most excited part about this right now is the Galaxy S4 coming out in a couple of weeks: It has a barometer, hydrometer and thermometer so we'll be collecting all sorts of new sensor data as well. All of our work is open source on GitHub if you'd like to help out!

Data visualization: <http://pressurenet.cumulonimbus.ca/>

GitHub: <https://github.com/Cbsoftware?tab=repositories>

<comment><USER2> Do you interact much with the OpenStreetMap community? They are a group who are no strangers to putting geotagged information on to the internet, and are, for the most part, keen on open source, so I'm sure you could pick up a few users there.

Also, I recently saw OpenWeatherMap[1], which seems like a project that would be aligned closely with you. I'd be interested to know if you've communicated with them/if you've got some sort of partnership going on?

[1]: <http://openweathermap.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I have been investigating a switch from Google Maps inside pressureNET to OSM for a while but haven't interacted with them yet. Thanks for the tip, I'll look more into it!

OpenWeatherMap looks fantastic - I definitely want to use their API in pressureNET. Thanks, I hadn't seen this before. We really want to focus our work on collecting large amounts of pressure data, so building top-level UIs and other features like regular forecasts hasn't been priority. But this API looks great.

<comment><USER2> Nice, looking forward to the switch to OSM.

A message to the `talk' OSM mailing list might attract some attention, although there may be a more appropriate list.

An idea I had was that maybe you could form an arrangement where any OWM apps include PressureNET reporting. (In fact the same for OSM apps, you could talk to some of the developers (there are lists of android apps on the OSM wiki) because I know a few apps already include optional reporting of other things to Open _XYZ_ Map-like projects)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Proposal for a Friendly Dialect of C - <AUTHOR> https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1180 <comment><USER2> > _3.Shift by negative or shift-past-bitwidth produces an unspecified result._

I never understood why this is not defined as something that returns 0 (or -1 for a signed negative number, with a long right shift).</comment>


Ask HN: Apple Vs. Android, how bad will Google be sued? - <AUTHOR>

With Apple's big win over Samsung, Android is next. Remember what Steve said...<p>"I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."<p>"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong." <comment><USER2> There isn't much that they can sue Google over. Most of the stuff that Samsung got sued over was due to hardware and Touchwiz customization. Samsung main problem is that it can't roll out updates quickly enough. Samsung updates are really painfully slow - I know because I have a Galaxy nexus, and have owned a Nexus S and my wife had a Galaxy S. Updates are non-existent.

Android has had work around for everything since a couple of versions ago but touchwiz hasn't been updated at all. The bounce-back effect was replaced with the 3d tilt. Android is safe from Apple litigation. Samsung would have been too, if they had better programmers. Kies is an abomination.</comment>


Magic Leap founder to step down - <AUTHOR> https://www.roadtovr.com/magic-leap-founder-rony-abovitz-step-ceo/ <comment><USER2> So much promise; so much investment.</comment>


Antarctic penguins release an extreme amount of laughing gas - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200519114237.htm <comment><AUTHOR> Summary: "In a new study, researchers from the University of Copenhagen have demonstrated that penguins in Antarctica emit copious amounts of nitrous oxide via their feces. So much so, that the researchers went 'cuckoo' from being surrounded by penguin poop."</comment>


Ask HN: DaaS Recommendation - <AUTHOR> I am looking to run windows 10 Desktop securely in the cloud (remotely, RDP, ssh?). I probably need this machine for 8 hours every month. Security, reliability, and a good price are my major concerns. Any recommendations? <comment><USER2> Curious about the use case.

\+ Is there a need to save state between sessions?

\+ Why in the cloud?

\+ What needs to be secure?

Cynically, eight hours a month is probably closer to ten counting time spent dealing with Windows updates.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My use case: Run an accounting software that is shared between multiple users. I need to save data between sessions.

<comment><USER2> To me, it sounds like what needs to be persisted is the data specific to the accounting program rather than the internal state of a Windows installation.

At eight hours a month, I'd wonder whether the overhead of shared responsibility would be worth the effort versus just having one person take responsibility. In an activity highly dependent on standards and accuracy and consistence such as accounting, I'd suspect errors to correlate casual or infrequent or disinterested users and adding layers of implementation complexity such as the cloud to increase the odds of errors as well.

So my gut would be to just put one person on the task. If information had to be shared, I'd look at storing the data centrally and distributing copies of the executable. As the third option, I'd package the data and OS in a VM image and treat it as a file under version control. For something with sensitive information, the least desirable option would be a running Windows installation accessible from the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> OVH DeskSaaS, 10€/mo for a decent box

<comment><AUTHOR> Link please?</comment></comment>


Rands In Repose: I Don't Multitask - <AUTHOR> http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2008/03/06/i_dont_multitask.html <comment><USER2> I multitask, in fact I'm completely capable of doing two seperate things at once without a problem. Although they have to be different tasks. It's psychologically proven that you can't do two things at once using the same area of your brain, and this does impede performance. Example: You're seriously crippled if you try to draw a tree when you're being told to imagine a cat. You can, however, draw a tree easily when you're told to count to 15 bajillion because Math has its own processing area to imagination. In fact, some people can learn ways around things like being told to count while reading a book as they'll count visually instead of verbally and this uses different imagination/processing centres (for more information see: Baddeley's Model of Working Memory).

Today I was plastering a wall (you know the thing people used to do to walls to make them look pretty before they invented drywall) and the entire time my mind was in a completely different world to my body. So much so, that the entire time I was coming up with plot ideas for my writing (which have now been written up), and when I wasn't doing that my mind somehow ressurected the Ewok song from Episode VI; I can tell you, singing the Ewok song for an hour is seriously harmful to your brain.

The thing is, this happens to me daily at work. The entire time I'm working, my mind is barely on the job because 95% of it is merely repeating actions I've done before. Essentially it's just a complex version of riding a bike, usually with wires and screws and electricity or power tools, but pretty much like riding a bike.

> "Attending quite strategically, distributing their attention between toy > play and viewing so that they were looking at what for them were the most > informative parts of the program. This strategy was so effective that the > children could gain no more from increased attention."

I do this regularly. In fact, right now I have an episode of Stargate Atlantis running in the background and I just zone in and out at the good parts as I've seen it before. I believe I just called YC my toy... hmm.</comment>


Buckmister Fuller's almost-suicide - <AUTHOR> http://bfi.org/about-bucky/biography/guinea-pig-b <comment><USER2> Favorite Bucky quote: "Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable."</comment>


Print Isn't Dying, Serious Journalism Is - <AUTHOR> http://teddziuba.com/2009/06/print-isnt-dying-serious-journ.html <comment><USER2> This is needed satire on the sad state of investigative journalism.

> Print media isn't hurting because it's an outdated business model, print > media is hurting because it's boring. Blogs and Twitter are succeeding > because their shit is clearly not retarded. And you know what? I love it. > Intellectualism is dying, and the news is now anything we want it to be.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> One of the take aways from this post is something that's been talked about on HN for quite some time: the call for quality content.

It would be a better world if the amount of people who knew what they were talking about was directly proportionate to how much they talked.</comment>


I Hate the Agile Manifesto - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2008/08/okay_i_hate_the.php

<comment><USER2> Honestly, I think this is exactly backwards. The voodoo juice in "agile" comes from the mindset, and _not_ the specific practices. The mindset is encapsulated pretty well by the manifesto, IMHO. Could someone write a better one? Maybe.

But if you want to know what agile is all about, read the manifesto. Decades of experience in XP, *DD, AUP, etc... isn't going to teach you much about the "why" of those paradigms. If I were an agile proponent (and I'm really not) interviewing a candidate, I'd want to know that they can explain the handful of ideas in the manifesto. Process stuff is something any monkey can implement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoa horsey. Nobody is arguing specific practices here. I'm arguing that feel- good marketing bleck doesn't make a project run. In fact, it confuses more than it helps.

Want a good checklist of what agile is? Try [http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2008/04/the_agile_che...](http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2008/04/the_agile_check.php)

Or:

        * Adapt - Always ask yourself what is wrong and what you need to do to fix it. If you continuously communicate to identify problems and fix them, I believe that in a normal world you will do the following things that I can observe:

        * Time-Box - You have a fixed, immutable time-box in which you deliver tested changes (either code, documents, processes, beans, whatever) that be demonstrated

        * Togetherness - The closer everybody is, the better. Co-located, non-cubicle, non-office spaces are best. Highly matrixed, separated teams are worst.

        * Value - You have a clear way of determining the most valueable thing to do each iteration. Business Owners give you business value. Technical Owners give you architectural value.

        * Ownership - The team, and only the team, owns its estimates. Outside factors are considered and can be communicated, but at the end of the day the team has the power to determine the amount and type of work it can take on for each iteration.

        * Forecast - Being agile and empirical does not preclude precictability or forecasting. In fact, the value of agile teams is their ability to take highly-changing environments and put some kind of predictable forecastable order in them.

<comment><USER2> Horsey?

I don't much disagree with any of that. I might quibble with a few things (I'm not sure that "forecast" is really a central theme in most schemes, lots of very successful, nominatively "agile" development gets by without much of a timetable), but that's not particularly at issue. Your list looks good to me.

But it also looks like a manifesto. And that's fine. So maybe your point is that you like your manifesto better than the official one? I like the poetry of the original better, but yours seems good too.

But I don't understand the idea of "feel-good marketing bleck". The points of the original look awfully profound to me. I think you're being too hard on it here. If you like concrete guidelines more than statements of purpose, feel free. Just don't throw tomatoes at those of us who prefer the poetry.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you miss my point.

I'm not crazy about manfiestos or checklists period. If you made me pick something, it'd just be "Adapt" But if you insist on having some list of statements that define what agile means to you, at least pick something that is measurable and doesn't leave you in a confused quandry.

Valuing one thing over another has the impression that it is giving you information, when in fact it's leaving things more murky. If it's all relative, when would the other thing hold true? Why must there be tension between the two things?

People come to me all the time because they don't understand that the manifesto is empty of meaning. Instead they think there is something profound there. They say things like "we should eliminate all documentation because it's in the manifesto" or "we value people over contracts, so offshoring can't work"

But the manifesto says no such thing. In fact, it doesn't give much practical advice at all. It's just feel good, mom and apple pie stuff.

<comment><USER3> I'd take the manifesto over any stack of "Agile Programming with Blub" books any day, or the advice of any Agile Coach, for that matter.

Each statement is giving you information. "When faced with one of these two things to concentrate on, we suggest you concentrate on the first one." That information might be obvious to you as an expert, but is non-obvious to some people, including many decision makers that don't develop software on a day- to-day basis.

Is it an exact recipe to follow? Nope, but neither is development an exact science, or something you can do by rote following of a checklist. Which is exactly the point of the first item in the manifesto, incidentally.

<comment><AUTHOR> You've lost me, festivusr.

It's not an exact recipe to follow. This we can agree on. We don't need recipes.

The quote I think you're looking for is "That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. "

Which tells me exactly diddly-squat. In fact, there are times that the things on the right are critically important; vital pieces without which the project will surely fail. How much more value could you put on something than that?

How about "Working software over comprehensive documentation"? Ever work on a project at the PMO level? How about doing a build-buy decision? Or perhaps splitting up a couple billion in work into small pieces for vendors to bid on? There are a zillion ways working software is a bullshit way to value anything. Working software is great. But it's not the opposite of documentation. For each bit less of documentation, you don't get a little more working software. The topics are not opposites and inversely proportional to each other.

You want to start a marketing campaign? Sell a lot of books, do a lot of public speaking engagments, all of that? Then come out with something like "Contract with America" or "The Agile Manifesto" or "The Swedish Bikini Team" -- anything that gets your point across easily and memorably. The Manifesto does that.

So now that you've bought the freaking cereal, it's time to put away the box and actually get to eating the dang stuff. And guess what? All of that sales stuff on the box? It's just sales stuff. The real stuff requires you to think and participate, not have happy feelings about the great revolution you're part of.

I've ranted enough. Seem like a nice person fest. Have fun with the manifesto and don't listen to any of those books or coaches. Probably just confuse you anyway.

I'm done.

<comment><USER3> I guess we've lost each other, then. In my opinion the ideas in the manifesto are the best part of anything that has had the agile label slapped on it. I guess you don't get anything out of them, but I'm not sure why not. If you want to try to apply them to things that they obviously don't apply to, like writing RFPs, then yeah, they don't make any sense.

In many cases you DO have a direct choice on which of the items (column A or B) to focus your efforts on. You can tell your developers to focus on writing code, or write control gate documentation. You can spend your time as a manager working on procuring the next new silver bullet tool, or on hiring, retaining, and working with top talent. Now there's nothing that says you can't do both, but you certainly have a choice on how much time and effort to spend on each.

As far as a sales slogan goes, yes, the manifesto is the headliner for the books and coaches and everything else that costs money in the writing and consulting world that is selling methodology silver bullets. But you can use the ideas in the manifesto without spending one thin dime on any of that stuff.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How do I find a co-founder to, you know, run the business? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm starting a media network by producing weekly news and commentary shows. I know what I need money for, but I'd rather spend my time making creative decisions (writing shows, editing scripts, working with designers) than dealing with investors, accountants, and lawyers. I know I won't avoid that altogether, but I'd feel more confident with a co-founder who had run a startup before, even briefly. Am I right to want this, and if so, where do I start looking?

<comment><USER2> Are you kidding me! Is it really you, Nick? I love you, man! And stop this charade of "seeking advice" on a startup forum.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you'd followed my Twitter account, you'd know I'm not kidding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You could try the OnStartups Linked-In group (800+ members now -- most of whom are interested in startups in some capacity).

I know at least a couple of people have made contact through that mechanism (though the LinkedIn group functionality is severely limited and can be an exercise in patience);

https://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/2877/30950504D0B7/

Joining is free and easy (though finding someone will likely not be).

</comment><comment><USER4> I would suggest setting up a website (nothing fancy, but enough to get the message out) that had your ideas, show transcripts, etc. It would also be beneficial to get some shows out on your own through YouTube. You might find that you don't even need a co-founder. And if you do, you'll have a solid framework to show him/her to help the decision.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nick - Your best resource are people you've worked with in the past. Even if you can only get them to work some nights and weekends, it's going to be easier to get up and running. Your ability to sell the idea to your team is the first thing an investor is going to look at.</comment>


Why Response Times Are Often Measured Incorrectly - <AUTHOR> https://java.sys-con.com/node/1866141

<comment><USER2> I tried to visit the site in Chrome and got a fat error telling me the certificate couldn't be trusted - can you explain?</comment>


Nerd or Geek? - <AUTHOR> http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2008/05/nerd_or_geek.html

<comment><USER2> _"... So - which is it? Nerd or Geek? What's the difference? ..."_

Neek: union of nerd & geek ~ <http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157594218253963/></comment>


Teaching Your Computer To Play Super Mario Bros - <AUTHOR> http://www.ehrenbrav.com/2016/08/teaching-your-computer-to-play-super-mario-bros-a-fork-of-the-google-deepmind-atari-machine-learning-project/ <comment><USER2> I believe that mario bros is deterministic and doesn't involve any randomness. Did you implement random start for fair evaluations to make sure that he found patterns instead of learning what to do by heart (which is a lot simpler). Random evaluations is a chain of random input at the start to randomize the environment a bit.

<comment><USER3> No - I actually didn't use a random start. But when Mario dies far enough along in a level, he starts from near that point rather than from all the way back at the beginning, which kind of serves that purpose. I agree that what's most interesting is truly learning to generalize rather than just learning a sequence of moves that happen to work...

<comment><USER2> Well not really since the fact that he dies and respawn at that point is still deterministic. Cool project though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if you were to train a single NN on multiple games (say maybe Mario, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem 2, Battle Toads, etc) if it would perform better against any one game than say a NN trained against just the one same game? I know I have gotten better on any particular game when I have played more games of the genre. If that;s the case could we use this approach to make a General Game Playing AI.

<comment><USER5> The original DQN was created to do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a similar project written in Lua, with a different Mario game: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44)

<comment><USER7> Referenced in the article as one of the two predecessors to this project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Neat! I also did a similar project but haven't invested the time in letting it run for very long. 4 million frames is about 37 game play hours, right? What were your results? Can Mario clear the first level?

When I implemented this, I scored the q-learning using real score and live count. I didn't need to add in a bonus for running right because it would randomly grab the first coin or randomly jump on the goomba quite frequently.

Also, I implemented mine using tensorflow, so it's possible I just sidestepped some bug.

<comment><USER9> if you check the video you can see it clear the first level and fail a couple of times on the second one

<comment><USER10> Fail a couple of times is generous, it get's a game over around half way through the second level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been collecting these videos. So far I have Mario, an RC car, Montezuma's Revenge, and a NLP for grammar.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/watchmachineslearn](https://www.reddit.com/r/watchmachineslearn)

</comment><comment><USER12> This was a great explanation. Thank you. I wonder if similar technique can be used for lane following robot that would understand stop signs, traffic lights and avoid collisions.

I've been thinking of creating a simulator game for driving, however have absolutely no idea how to program the AI side of things.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, you'd need to "punish" it somehow for running stop signs and lights :)

If there's a good driving sim game on Nintendo, it should in theory take minimal modification of my existing code to make it work...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really wish someone could try deep neural networks on my favorite mario doujin game that combines mario with portal: [http://stabyourself.net/mari0/](http://stabyourself.net/mari0/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Also, check out [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44) for another cool ML-Mario implementation.

</comment><comment><USER15> How long did the training take? I am still training the default breakout game and it still has not learnt yet. I have been training it for a week on a 4 CPU machine. Should I go for GPUs?

<comment><USER3> Definitely use a GPU if you can - it's just so much faster. You could also try training it on a powerful machine in the cloud if you don't mind spending the money for it...

I'm running a 8 core machine, 12+ GB RAM, and a 980 GPU. It takes roughly 24 hours for 1 million steps in Mario...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sorry for content-free comment, but this is _really_ interesting, and I wish it had gotten more discussion. Starred and saved for later.

<comment><USER3> Glad you think so! It was a lot of fun to put together and I'm contemplating working on something like Zelda next now that I have a computer-controllable NES emulator working...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> missing the best video about teaching computers to play video games: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCurBYI_gY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCurBYI_gY)</comment>


Backup your entire Google Latitude history - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/latitude/b/0/apps/history/kml?startTime=1000000000000&endTime=1313445600000

<comment><USER2> That's only your entire history if you stopped using it on or before 3 PM PDT on August 15th. It's interesting, but that end number needs to be a whole lot higher.</comment>


DEFCON web certificate expires – what's going on? - <AUTHOR> https://dan.enigmabridge.com/defcon-web-certificate-expires-whats-going-on/ <comment><USER2> The cert does not contain the apex domain.[1]

[1] [https://dev.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.defcon.or...](https://dev.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.defcon.org&latest)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> ... or is it a part of a grand scheme to return back to blackhat roots?</comment>


Show HN: I built this to keep track of framework syntax like React, Vue, Svelte - <AUTHOR> https://syntax.wiki <comment><AUTHOR> Link: [https://syntax.wiki](https://syntax.wiki)

Github repository: [https://github.com/ngduc/syntax.codes](https://github.com/ngduc/syntax.codes)

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks nice! However clicking on the names on the cards doesn't seem to work: when I click on "Vue" my URL is updated to syntax.wiki/#vue. When I click on the Vue logo, my URL is updated to syntax.wiki/vue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice catch! I'm working on the fix now. Thanks.

Edit: fixed.

<comment><USER2> Great!</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Unveils Facebook at Work - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/14/facebook-at-work-ios-android/ <comment><USER2> Awesome, pretty soon companies wont have to store any of "their" data on their own servers.

Facebook - Company info/announcements/chat

OneDrive/Google/Dropbox - Company documents

VOIP Services - Company communications

All stored in clear-text obviously (or at least not encrypted by company using the service before transfer to said services, same thing really).

I myself think this trend is hilariously ridiculous, but I'm in a shrinking minority I assume.

<comment><USER3> Well, what's your threat model that you are worried about? I would imagine all of these companies have much better security and reliability than most internal IT departments. And I don't see them snooping for their own purposes. The NSA can get what they want anyways.

The one big issue is subpoena's / third party doctrine issues, but I imagine for many companies that's a decent tradeoff for the reduced IT overhead / security / reliability issues. Other industries, like law, should obviously avoid such services.

<comment><USER4> > And I don't see them snooping for their own purposes.

Well, Google does read your email to show you better ads. But they never made a secret of that.

> The NSA can get what they want anyways.

If they really want to, yes. That doesn't mean one shouldn't try to make it as hard as possible for them. They won't bother if their cost/benefit analysis says you aren't worth it to get out the big guns. (Reliable 0 days aren't cheap and using them too often soon makes them worthless.)

<comment><USER5> > Well, Google does read your email to show you better ads. But they never > made a secret of that.

I really wish this trope would die already. Google is not a person. Google does not read your emails. Employees at Google aren't sitting there reading your emails. An algorithm scans your emails for certain keywords, and displays ads based off of what it finds. That is not the same thing as reading your emails, and it's ridiculous that a forum like this would fall for such fear mongering.

<comment><USER4> I'd change that 'read' to 'scan' but I can't anymore. I really don't care about that particular phrasing. Not being a native speaker I don't think I'm even qualified to argue the semantics of the word 'read' and whether it can be applied to an algorithm or not.

I was trying to point out that some level of snooping by the cloud providers themselves is going on right now. Note that I tried to defend Google's behavior by saying that it is no secret and people are opting into it willfully.

<comment><USER6> I think the important point here is that you still have some anonymity in the sense that your data is processed in the same way as everybody else's. Saying "Google reads your emails" is basically a fear-inducing way of saying "Google scans everybody's emails."

Yes, they scan your emails. But not _particularly_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" Lars Rasmussen, the engineering director at Facebook who is heading up the project, had in his past once headed up one of the failed efforts at an enterprise social network, Google Wave."_

Lars Rasmussen was also the guy behind google maps. Seems a little unfair to set it up like the above.

<comment><USER8> Was Wave even a social network? I vaguely remember it being more like a real- time Google Docs before Google Docs went realtime.

<comment><USER9> The original vision was "email replacement".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm very happy to see Lars Rasmussen releasing something new again. He's the (ex-Googler) guy behind Google Maps and the much loved (and perhaps also hated) Google Wave project. Google wave was (in my mind) one of those "ahead of it's time" projects when it was released. I'm not aware of any significant contributions he has had since his time in Facebook. So is this his first?

<comment><USER11> And Wave was a rehash of Ray Ozzie's Groove, which got bought by Microsoft when they hired him, and then they shelved it. This was c. '97, so how much more was Ozzie ahead of his time, and when is it going to be BE time for this? I still want it. I think the problem with Groove was that it stored data on your local machine, and replicated between clients, and the big companies aren't interested. Best I can figure is that they want all that data on their servers so that they can examine what's in it and how it's being used.

<comment><USER12> Microsoft bought Groove in 2005 and renamed the client to Sharepoint Workspace 2010. It was not that great and it got canned.

[http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Groove](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Groove)

<comment><USER11> Well I never used it after Microsoft put it through their software "enterprizer." I seem to remember reading a product announcement when they released it, and understood that they had nerfed it pretty badly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Has anyone seen a work social network that wasn't a joke? We have one, and the only use is that your director/VP asks their org to follow them, and then posts various strategic stuff they want you to see. There's zero peer-to-peer usage at all.

<comment><USER14> I think this is because of the inherent inequality that exists at work. In a typical social network, everyone is essentially "equal" when it comes to who you know and interact with. At work, you necessarily are very closely involved with people who hold significant authority over you. Because of this, you have to act incredibly more guarded at work and on its related networks.

<comment><USER15> That's definitely a big part of it.

For a social network to have value, you need users who are compelled to frequently submit content. By adding a power structure, users have to evaluate their decisions, which can generate anxiety or extra work, leading to a drop off in contribution rate.

It's one of the reasons teenagers ditched Facebook once their parents joined.

<comment><USER16> Do you have any data to back that up? Don't mean that in a snipey kind of way. Fascinating observation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't Facebook already Facebook for Work? I'm sanitizing my internet presence for employment reasons and their moderation kills anything approaching NSWF so facebook can be wide open on work desktops.

They're not naming any of their hot new collaboration tools, so they're just ripping off google docs then?

<comment> vertex-four In this case, it's a walled-off Facebook _about_ work. You can use all Facebook's tools to communicate with your coworkers about things you're doing at work, without making it public.

<comment><USER18> That happens already, with share to group which happens to contain friendly coworkers. Only difference is linking it to corporate active directory such that we won't be able to share to "work friends" group but will have to share to the whole department. Probably lower overall use, possibly because of negative gossip but also self censorship in that I know the work office cooler club or whatever all talk about minecraft, but I'd think twice about having to spam that to the entire department not just the people who are into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder what guarantees on data confidentiality will be offered? Facebook doesn't have a good reputation when it comes to privacy. I do not believe any serious workplace will trust them with handling any company data and IP.

<comment><USER20> The same way that no serious workplace trusts Google/Dropbox with handling any company data and IP today, right?

<comment><USER21> Presumably, he's referring to SSAE-16 auditing, like for Google's products. The problem of auditing suppliers of parts and services is decades old and effectively already solved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Whoa, it had been so long since I saw a social network pivot into the business space that I'd forgotten how desperate and overused a strategy that had become

</comment><comment><USER23> It's 2008 all over again, when freemium enterprise social networking was still hot.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if they might put it on a subdomain. Facebook is blocked at my company. That might make using Facebook@Work a little harder.

<comment><USER25> Maybe that's the point. They noticed declining traffic during work hours and try to reestablish their access to bored employees at work by essentially forcing IT admins to unblock the facebook domain.

<comment><USER26> I think they might want to sell access to users' private account data to their employers. This will give them an in.

They can pretend to sell collaboration tools while they sneak analytics with interesting stuff on the users' personal facebook usage (and maybe browsing habits) in along with it.

This won't come immediately, of course.

<comment><USER27> > I think they might want to sell access to users' private account data to > their employers.

Why do you think that? User data is the crown jewel and competitive advantage Facebook has over other companies. It would never give up that advantage. This meme refuses to die somehow.

<comment><USER26> Selling it does not necessarily mean giving up that advantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> And here comes highly personalized B2B advertising. Smart move, if you ask me. Wonder why they limit themselves to relatively large sized companies.

</comment><comment><USER29> So for those of us who don't have a Facebook account and refuse to create one, this means our employer can force us to sign up?

<comment><USER30> That's up to you and your employer.

Edit: Worth pointing out that it's not really a Facebook account in the typical sense. You can have an FB@Work account without having an FB account, though it seems you can also use your FB account for both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Sounds like tibbr, which works okay. My employer is pushing yammer as a replacement, but as others have said, adoption is spotty. Bunch of senior managers with time on their hands thr post popular platitudes and feel good nonsense. Not very much information sharing goes on.

</comment><comment><USER32> Yammer was twitter for work. Facebook rolled out its own version before anyone else does. But thats pretty much it. The very fact of facebook having an addiction component will work against it.

I think managers would think twice before introducing a collaborating software where team would end up spending more time than actual work. I think for this very reason softwares like work wikis, sharepoint are so successful.

Also from user point of view, I do not see myself using the same tool at work and then at home. Hopefully they have a radically different UI rather than just changing the logo with companies logo.

<comment><USER33> We use Yammer at our company and it's much more like Facebook than Twitter. It's not the be-all and end-all of our collaboration tech nor do I think people spend more time on it than actual work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> "Users can then link their work and personal accounts together so that they are logged into both at the same time." Wow, that's really different from what I expected.

<comment><USER35> What could possibly go wrong!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I couldn't work out from the article if you could run Facebook on your own servers or not. This will be a massive hurdle to jump if they really want to sell to enterprise.

<comment><USER17> I see them targeting the market of businesses too small to run their own communication infrastructure. The people using google docs and hangouts because it's already there. Or Office 365 because they can't/don't want to host internally.

Why would anyone already running their own communication want internal Facebook? Because email lists aren't hip enough?

<comment><USER37> I don't see it as an email replacement. I see it as truer to it's name. A Facebook for your company.

Let's say you are going to do some work with Molly from the Customer Support department. You don't really know much about her, so you bring her up on the company Facebook, and you find out that you both went to the same university around the same time. You also find out that she has experience in testing. You also see a picture of her, so that you don't have to go walking around customer service area of the office asking if anyone knows where Molly is until she finally overhears you and introduces herself.

Is any of this stuff hard to set up internally? Not really, but someone has to prioritize it, sort through existing options and pick one, or develop it in house, there needs to be support, and maintenance. All barriers to implementing something that can help foster a more open and collaborative culture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Honestly, I don't see anything here that will make them competitive with offerings like Jive Software, currently being used by the majority of Fortune 500s and more SV companies than you'd think.

[https://www.jivesoftware.com](https://www.jivesoftware.com)

<comment><USER39> Most important: I can run Jive in my own IT environment. At least I can defend myself from espionage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I wonder what it would take to get a passable OSS substitute to Facebook going in this space. You could host it on your own server(s) the same way you can host your own internal wiki that looks/feels just like Wikipedia. Why don't we have this already?

<comment><USER41> Would you pay for that? In something like a GitHub Enterprise setting, closed source but self-hosted?

Something like FB-Groups for organizations of all kind fell out as a byproduct of our startup and we are toying with the idea of trying to sell that part in isolation. Basically you get your own, hosted / self-hosted FB-Groups, plus a bit more flexibility regarding permissions and group management. For example you could introduce someone external into a sub-topic in one of your groups, without exposing him to the rest of the group (not sure if that is possible with FB groups).

[Edit: Grammar]

<comment><USER40> I think that would be basically competing with Yammer, which is owned by Microsoft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It took them 8 years to figure out there's a market in Enterprise? I hope they make it easy to convert from private FB Groups to 'Work' accounts because any company I know who would use FB for work is already doing so using that option.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is going to destroy Slack

<comment><USER44> No, this is going to destroy Facebook.

Picture it this way:

      1. You show up to work, and Facebook is now mandatory.
         It's attached to your real name, and Facebook
         helpfully connects your real profile to all your
         co-workers.

      2. You now have to delete ALL of your non-work contacts,
         for fear of gossip contamination, and NEVER use
         Facebook outside of work again.

      3. Everyone who has Facebook at work, now needs something
         to fill the gaping void of recreational social media.

      4. A new upstart fills the void, and Facebook crumbles and
         implodes.

<comment><USER45> This is a separate account from your existing Facebook account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think this could be a Good Thing for many firms, but let me add that some firms will want something more customizable, and with better support for integration with their other apps, content, events, etc. For the firms that want something that's:

a. built by a company with an enterprise focus as it's core

and

b. built with integration with your other enterprise applications as a core principle

c. is open source

Then I have another option for you.

[http://fogbeam.com/products.html](http://fogbeam.com/products.html)

[http://fogbeam.com/quoddy_enterprise.html](http://fogbeam.com/quoddy_enterprise.html)

[https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy](https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy)

</comment><comment><USER47> *still not using Facebook

</comment><comment><USER48> If you're running a business and you want an internal social network then you're _far_ better off installing redmatrix.

[https://github.com/friendica/red](https://github.com/friendica/red)

It's easy to deploy and you can do things such as end to end encryption, and there are many sharing/privacy options.

If you install some version of Facebook then chances are they'll try to find some way to exfiltrate or monetise your company data. Also, if you're not a US company then 100% of everything you enter into Facebook is regarded as fair game to be exfiltrated, stored, analysed, etc. Probably that's not in your best interests.

</comment><comment><USER49> Not sure why one would need a work specific social network. Work != social, at least for me. I've never shared anything or wanted to on my fb with my work colleagues.

<comment><USER37> We were just talking about doing a work only social network, with basic bio info, a photo, and background. We have been growing rapidly and it's getting extremely hard to keep everyone's info straight. I know that it's going to be useful for me since I end up working across departments fairly often. Do I expect everyone to get value from it? No. Will it make the workplace magically better? No. But it will give us the tools to be a little closer as a company, and hopefully promote cross team communication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I think they should change the name. "Facebook at Work" has gotten many people fired. It might reduce friction to adoption, but maybe that's not the goal.

</comment><comment><USER51> I feel bad for Yammer.

<comment><USER52> My first thought was, "So Facebook released Yammer?"

But after some thought...

It will be interesting to see how this will be differentiated from Yammer. Yammer may actually benefit from this ... companies that are considering workplace social networks may evaluate all options, and then realize that Yammer has been out for quite some time and touts over 200,000 corporate customers.

Many companies have Facebook restrictions in place, and I don't see that trend reversing due to this announcement. Yammer, separate and distinct from Facebook, may see a bump due to more companies "being interested" in work place social networks.

<comment><USER53> Agreed. I've used Yammer before and it's pretty decent.

If I was a company looking to use a "Social Network for Work" I would prefer a separate product like Yammer instead of Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It might work because of Facebooks scale but it's not like there aren't a million other FB like enterprise social networks out there.

</comment><comment><USER54> I know it's not really a competitor, but I would _love_ to see Facebook (or anyone else) eat LinkedIn's lunch.

So sick of their awful practices.

<comment><USER55> Working on it - www.somewhere.com - but they have a huge lead. As a networking tool that nobody likes but everybody uses, that's quite some lunch :~/

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> If it is not on-premise and completely shut from the outside, it does not exist as a product.

What else could it be used for? Publishing news?

</comment><comment><USER56> They have tried this before and failed,they will fail once more.

Even if they had something to offer, in the senior managers mind Facebook ≠ productivity.

</comment><comment><USER57> What a waste of effort!

</comment><comment><USER58> Facebook is no where near being a true technology company like Google. So facebook copied MySpace and is now copying LinkedIn. Neat.

<comment><USER59> facebook got big when they copied twitter

<comment><USER58> They also got big when they started scouring peoples inboxes for contacts, one of the largest security breaches in Net history.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> > By making this free, Facebook could potentially drive a lot more users to > its wider network

Who would use "Facebook for work" that isn't already using "Facebook"?

<comment><USER13> You can be mandated to use it for work.</comment></comment>