Apple's secret weapon - <AUTHOR> https://www.macworld.com/article/151606/2010/05/gartenberg_ipad.html <comment><USER2> The article was pretty spot-on but I would like to add that the value of Apple Stores is not only for consumers' benefit but also (and arguably even more so) for Apple's: it allows Apple to immediately pinpoint exactly what doesn't work, with whom, how frequently, why, etc. Indeed, it was the Apple Store experience -- and user feedback / complaints -- that lead to the innovation of the magnetic power connector for Macbooks. The Apple Store is arguably the most focused consumer feedback system in existence.

More crucially was Apple's -- Steve's? -- recognition that the average (tech) consumer is actually quite lazy and just can't be bothered with technobabble: most people don't really care HOW or WHY something works, they just care what it can do for them. Hence "1,000 songs in your pocket" vs. the more typical (at the time) "8GB vs 4GB" marketing campaign of Apple's competitors.</comment>


Optimizely (YC W10) Its Way To $1.2m In Funding From A Roster Of Top Angels - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/16/optimizely-ab-tests-its-way-to-1-2-million-in-funding-from-a-roster-of-top-angels/ <comment><USER2> Good to see Visual Website Optimizer (<http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/>) mentioned. Go Paras, go!

</comment><comment><USER3> 21 angel investors! any idea why it's such a long list?

<comment><USER4> We took the "army of angels" approach. Maybe we should write a blog post talking about why we did this?

<comment><USER5> Yes, please do. Also (this might be an inappropriate question) - did you end up with less, more, or just about average of what founders end up after a typical angel/VC round?</comment></comment></comment>


How I use Twitter to reach out to my users. - <AUTHOR> http://thedailynerd.com/#1355940585896

<comment><USER2> Your app is well reviewed, so there's little reason not to interact with your users. If you plan on further iterations of your app the importance of user feedback is incredibly valuable. IMHO.</comment>


Say Hello to Our New Web API - <AUTHOR> http://news.spotify.com/uk/2014/06/17/say-hello-to-our-new-web-api/

<comment><USER2> There's already a node module [https://www.npmjs.org/package/spotify- api](https://www.npmjs.org/package/spotify-api)

No code of course, just name-hoarding. FOSS can be really ugly sometimes.

<comment><USER3> Since I've already made one and it's ready for use, I feel I need to piggyback on your comment to mention it.

[https://www.npmjs.org/package/spotify-web-api- node](https://www.npmjs.org/package/spotify-web-api-node)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just as an FYI to everyone, Spotify does not allow any "commercialization" of their APi's / Platform. (Learned this the hard way when I released my Spotify app for $.99 on the app store).

[https://developer.spotify.com/developer-terms-of- use/](https://developer.spotify.com/developer-terms-of-use/)

</comment><comment><USER5> > With a user's permission, developers can now access user profile information > including playlists,

This is awesome news! The last time I tried to write something for Spotify to front-load my last.fm (I know I'm late to the game) account but couldn't get access to the playlists. Going to have to check this out when I get some time.

</comment><comment><USER6> Brilliant! I've been wanting to access my own playlists through an API for a while to back them up

<comment><USER7> Just hacked this together: [http://joellehman.com/playlist/](http://joellehman.com/playlist/)

Which should let you download you playlist in CSV

<comment><USER6> Wow that's awesome. I've needed this for ages

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What I'd really love (and have looked for in the past) is a way to automatically push a song over to a specific spotify playlist every time I tag a song on shazam (thinking like an IFTTT recipe). It looks like that might be possible with this new api.

<comment><USER9> Soundhound has a button to search on spotify after finding a song. It's a bunch of clicks, but that's what I do now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had a quick look, but to play a track, all I can see is a 30 second preview. Am I missing something, or can you not get the track data from this API?

> EDIT: Should've read the first subtitle... "Our Web API lets your > applications fetch data from the Spotify music catalog and manage user's > playlists."

<comment><USER11> Streaming is only available through libspotify or the beta SDK on IOS. Rumors from #spotify on freenode indicate that the SDK for other platforms is still being worked on. But once it ships it will provide a minimal lib for streaming and the web API will do everything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really like Spotify and I love that they're making this API available. But we just saw netflix shutting down their API. Are Spotify committed to keeping this around, or will they just shut it off in a few months when it becomes too much of a pain to manage?

<comment><USER13> I think they hope the API will be used to drive subscriptions to their service. If that ends up being the case, they'll probably keep it around. Of course, nobody can look into the future and see what will happen. Building a business around a public API like this would probably not be a smart move... yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there an (easy to use) Spotify plugin to let my office-mates vote on or suggest songs to play next? I know there are some hacky solutions, but this new Web API seems like it should make that a lot easier.

<comment><USER9> letsparty.fm is something we made, but it's based on rdio, not spotify, since they have easier API access.

<comment><USER9> This web API doesn't come close to helping with this problem, as it doesn't allow you to play entire songs, or know when the current song is over.

Realized I didn't make it a link. [http://letsparty.fm](http://letsparty.fm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would it kill them to fix some of the bugs in the desktop application first? You can't even sort search results any more. This is apparently marked as a "not now" concern. A lot of premium customers are deeply unsatisfied with the way Spotify handled their latest update.

</comment><comment><USER16> Personally this is great timing for some of the features I'm needing to develop [http://Listen2EDM.com](http://Listen2EDM.com) further. I'm sure that music discovery, and the music community in general, will greatly benefit from this!

</comment><comment><USER17> I've just pushed a ruby wrapper for it: [https://github.com/guilhermesad/rspotify](https://github.com/guilhermesad/rspotify) Any contributions would be very welcomed!

</comment><comment><USER18> This sounds great, indeed. With a listening history on last.fm that reaches back to early 2009, I always thought it would be great to have a service to use the last.fm data to build dynamic playlists for spotify.

<comment><USER11> Populate a [http://developer.echonest.com/docs/v4/tasteprofile.html](http://developer.echonest.com/docs/v4/tasteprofile.html) with the listening history and you can use it for dynamic playlisting using the spotify catalog. That is as long as echonest matches the song metadata to an id.

[http://static.echonest.com/enspex/web/ChillRadio/](http://static.echonest.com/enspex/web/ChillRadio/) linked from the demos shows this for artists as a seed, but tasteprofiles as the station seed works nicely as well :-)

<comment><USER18> Wow, that looks great. Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It doesn't seem possible to delete a playlist or remove tracks from one :( Other than that it's pretty great, maybe I can automate my playlist management now :)

<comment><USER11> Same conclusion we also had in [https://github.com/mopidy/pyspotify/issues/139](https://github.com/mopidy/pyspotify/issues/139) when looking at if we should move away from libspotify in favor of the new web API. For now I would stick with libspotify wrappers until a more complete version of the API comes out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was hoping they'd have a Radio API so Sonos and others could make a better all around experience.

Maybe I missed it... or maybe it doesn't exist.

</comment><comment><USER21> Still no access to the current playing track which means I have to continue using last.fm which feels a bit hacky :/

<comment><USER22> You can get that via dbus from the machine running Spotify. Check out my spotify-gnome wrapper script at [https://github.com/jreese/spotify- gnome](https://github.com/jreese/spotify-gnome)

Basically, you write a simple dbus app that listens for the appropriate song- changed signals from Spotify, and then do with that as you wish. This might not be as easy on Mac or Windows though, as I've only ever used it on Linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can you access the API without authenticating? I just want some basic song info, not play anything.

<comment><USER13> You could have spent the 5 minutes on their website that I did to find the endpoint reference which shows that yes, you can get to quite a bit of the API without authenticating:

[https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/endpoint- reference/](https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/endpoint-reference/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder how long this will last.

<comment><USER25> Probably just long enough for them to make a too-polite-to-be-ironic "thank you for using our development environment" blog post where they shut it down and shunt what's left to a private API for the apps they're currently trying to acquire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> My boss let me spend this workday with studying the new api

<comment><USER27> "let"

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Insane. I was speaking about Spotify API about an hour ago on IRC, Google'd around, found this, disregarded it (how new can it be?) and now it's at the top of HN.

This keeps happening to me, with docker release, with deis, with vagrant, so many things I talk about and then I look at hn and they're there, just waiting for me.

This happens so often, we all say here to check HN after we discuss something, because there will no doubt be a link ready for us. Starting to wonder if this is actually just a news feed where you see what you need to see.

<comment><USER29> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader- Meinhof_phenomenon#Frequ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader- Meinhof_phenomenon#Frequency_illusion)</comment></comment>


New iPad hits 116 degrees while running games - <AUTHOR> http://news.consumerreports.org/electronics/2012/03/our-test-finds-new-ipad-hits-116-degrees-while-running-games.html <comment><USER2> There's a point on the outside of my 2010 macbook pro that is currently at 120F - and the computer is pretty idle - CPU temp is over 160F.

120F feels hot - I don't want to keep a finger in that spot for very long

<comment><USER3> Sounds like your Macbook Pro has shoddy thermal paste. If it's under AppleCare still perhaps you should bring that to their attention? If not and they want you to pay, it's fairly easy to fix, ifixit should have a guide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> On a visit to Malta a decade ago, it was 110 degrees.

</comment><comment><USER5> 116 degrees?! HOLY SHIT!

Fahrenheit

Pfft.

<comment><USER6> About 47C. Enough to burn you.

<comment><USER7> 'I just measured my palm at 91.4 degrees, for comparison.' [marco.org]

<comment><USER6> That's in F, which is about 33C.

If it was C, that would be close to the temperature of boiling water (about 100C).

Note: I'm not saying that's hot or cold, that's subjective. I'm just making sure we're comparing oranges with oranges.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I'll Let Myself In: Tactics of Physical Pen Testers [video] (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnmcRTnTNC8 <comment><AUTHOR> Highlights:

\- DoorKing and Linear entry systems all have the same keys, which are legal to buy on eBay, and which let you access relay terminals to pop the doors right open

\- IR Request to Exit sensors on doors can be defeated using a can of air duster to create a cold spot, or even with a cloud of vape smoke or balloons

\- Tactics for cloning RFID passes by passing close to people with a non- contact RFID reader

\- Most police cars in the US are keyed with a fleet key, which again is legal to buy. And the police cars get sold off and become taxis, without the locks being changed...!

\- Lots of ways to defeat latches, door handles, emergency exit bars, deadlock thumb turners

\- Hilarious war stories at the end</comment>


Muji Chronotebook -- Innovative new day planner - <AUTHOR> http://jackcheng.com/stuff-i-love-muji-chronotebook

<comment><USER2> Maybe make a rubber stamp with that analog clock and make your own chronotebook page wherever you need one.

<comment><USER3> Or stickers that you can keep in your notebook.

<comment><USER4> just use your pencil to draw one

<comment><USER5> Nah. I kinda like the clean circle right smack in the middle. I'm thinking right now about how can I retrofit this into my filofax planner. Very nice idea. Thanks for sharing the link.

<comment><USER3> Or you can buy / make a small drafting template:

<http://www.cutting-mats.net/drafting-template-3441.html>

Although the rubber stamp is cool, I don't really want to carry something extra.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Check this out too: <http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/taskwatch/>

</comment><comment><USER7> I love Muji's notebooks anyway. I think I'll try this - luckily, there are Muji shops in Munich and Berlin, in case anybody is wondering how to get their wares in Germany.

</comment><comment><USER8> Picked up a couple. Can a notebook really revolutionize your workflow? Or, is this just going to turn into more productivity porn?

<comment><USER5> Hehe, this comment made me chuckle. :)

<comment><USER5> That would make us all a bunch of productivity pervs! :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I tried to find this in the London Muji stores but they don't stock it. Anybody know where I can find one?

<comment><USER10> The EU online store - [http://www.muji.eu/pages/online.asp?V=1&Sec=1&Sub=4&...](http://www.muji.eu/pages/online.asp?V=1&Sec=1&Sub=4&PID=2550&CHK=Y) and they seem to have quite a few stockists over here: <http://www.muji.eu/pages/stores.asp?str=UL>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> now we need one in web app form... :~)

<comment><USER12> Don't know as as web app, but how long until someone develops a iPhone app?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> We walked into Muji in London a couple weeks ago. It's an amazing store. I ended up buying a few things there that were quite unique and useful.</comment>


Creating Mezzanine themes, Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://bitofpixels.com/blog/mezzatheming-creating-mezzanine-themes-part-1-basehtml/ <comment><AUTHOR> Part 1 — Working with Base.html [http://bitofpixels.com/blog/mezzatheming- creating-mezzanine-...](http://bitofpixels.com/blog/mezzatheming-creating- mezzanine-themes-part-1-basehtml/)

Part 2 — The HomePage [http://bitofpixels.com/blog/mezzatheming-part-2-the- homepage...](http://bitofpixels.com/blog/mezzatheming-part-2-the-homepage/)

Part 3 — Pages, extra DRY [http://bitofpixels.com/blog/mezzatheming- part-3-pages-extra-...](http://bitofpixels.com/blog/mezzatheming-part-3-pages- extra-dry/)

Part 4 — To the blog, and beyond [http://bitofpixels.com/blog/mezzatheming- part-4-style-the-bl...](http://bitofpixels.com/blog/mezzatheming-part-4-style- the-blog-and-beyond/)

Themes developed so far: [http://mezzathe.me/](http://mezzathe.me/)

Finally I love the way its going and the good patterns, its looking like the Python Wordpress. :)

A Great initiative for the whole Python and Django ecosystem. Looks like the next Python Wordpress?

<comment><USER2> I'm the author of those blog posts and I just now saw that this had made it's way onto HN, glad I could generate some discussion and good publicity for Mezzanine. Thanks for sharing it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Title is really poorly worded and could use an edit - Django CMS is the _other_ popular CMS project based on Django. Article is for Mezzanine, an entirely separate project. Really confusing!

Edit: title has been updated :-)

</comment><comment><USER4> It's important to highlight that theming a Django/Mezzanine site is straightforward and does not require any special skill beyond modifying templates and styles BUT if you need to change the basic Mezzanine CMS functionality you must dive into Django.

A designer themed my own site [http://www.nektra.com](http://www.nektra.com) just customizing my Bootstrap styles and giving me templates of the main and inner pages.

<comment><USER2> I totally agree, beyond needing to understand the basics of the Django template language nothing else is required to create a Mezzanine theme.

In the blog posts this discussion is about, I did go into some detail about creating custom content types but none of that is necessary to theme vanilla Mezzanine.

edit: grammar

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> (Looks like this is Mezzanine not Django CMS.)

<comment><USER6> Mezzazine uses the term "django CMS" everywhere they can. I think it is to get some thunder from django CMS. Or SEO considerations.

<comment><USER3> Completely outrageous for a CMS built with Django.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've got my own unpublished, undocumented and a bit-flaky-in-places CMS that I have always intended to release 'someday'.

So it's really interesting to look at mature projects such as this and see where their philosophy and feature-set differs from where I've ended up.

So far I've decided that what I've got is different enough and non-awful enough to at least consider open-sourcing - it's just the task of cleaning-up, documenting and marketing my project seems rather overwhelming.

And I have great admiration for anyone who gets past that barrier for their own projects.

<comment><USER2> I'd say just go for it, maybe make a basic tutorial that would explain to people how to use it then open source it.

With Mezzanine I think the community that has developed around it's google group has been key.

What's your CMS written in?

<comment><USER7> It's Django. There wasn't much around when I started it (I think there was only Django CMS).

In similar in some ways to FeinCMS in philosophy and I borrowed a small amount of code from Fein. It's not quite as cleverly coded but actually simpler in some respects (in a good way).

And there are

<comment><USER2> It looks like you comment may have been cut off, it sounds good. I'd say go for it, see if you can develop a community around!

<comment><USER7> Thanks. I have no idea how my sentence was supposed to end. :-/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Love Mezzanine and Cartridge - very clean code and easy to modify/theme.

<comment><USER9> Agree, it's the first CMS I've worked with that wasn't incredibly painful.

Modifying Cartridge to work with my payment provider was pretty straightforward, and creating a few custom Page types was super easy as well!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Creating posts with a huge photo that takes 3/4 of a 27" iMac screen is a new trend? Not sure if that is part of a Mezzanine theme, but curious to hear the opinion of others.

<comment><USER2> The referenced posts are mine, I enjoy photography and figured it was a good place to mix my hobby and profession. It's nothing specific to Mezzanine, just the particular design of my site which is coincidentally powered by Mezzanine.

Do you find it aggravating, appealing or are you ambivalent?</comment></comment>


35 years ago today: the first domain name symbolics.com was registered - <AUTHOR> https://dofo.com/symbolics.com <comment><USER2> RFC 882, which defined domain-style addressing, was released in 1983:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc882](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc882)

There was domain-style addressing that predated domains like ".com" and ".edu". The original top-level domains were ".arpa" (for ARPANET) and ".mil" (for MILNET).

Symbolics was "symbolics.arpa" before it was "symbolics.com".

<comment><USER3> If anyone knows: How were RFCs distributed before the modern Internet as we know it existed?

<comment><USER4> Before the Internet there was Usenet and a world-wide network network of machines connected together via UUCP, doing email and such over point-to-point dialup (modem) links. Sending mail was a matter of knowing a complete path through the network from your source machine to the recipient's destination machine (and Usenet news implemented public discussion groups over this network). If I recall correctly, you could send specially formatted email messages to the server where the RFCs lived, and an autoresponder program would read your message and email back the requested RFCs.

<comment><USER5> That was still the Internet, it just wasn't the World Wide Web or modern (SMTP/POP3/IMAP) email.

<comment><USER4> No, that was a network, but it was very much _not_ the Internet. Different technologies.

Per Wikipedia, "The Internet (portmanteau of interconnected network) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide."

The network of UUCP-connected machines (also called UUCPNET) did not use TCP/IP and had no inbuilt notion of how to get packets from one place to another. One had to specifically list a set of instructions, a path, from source to destination hosts. UUCPNET was entirely store-and-forward, and sent entire messages, not packets. And it was in wide use throughout the 80's before the Internet became a thing (which happened once researchers started interconnecting networks that used TCP/IP).

To say that UUCPNET was the Internet just without the web, is like saying that radio _is_ TV, just without the pictures.

<comment><USER5> This is quickly going to devolve into semantics, but just because the Internet _today_ is built on TCP/IP doesn't mean that's a requirement to be considered "internet". _An_ internet is just a WAN between LANs, and I don't think it matters what specific Layer 3/4 protocol you choose. ARPANET is widely acknowledged as the predecessor of what we today call "the Internet" and it predates TCP/IP.

<comment><USER6> Then fidonet and every other bbs network was also the internet. No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What was the process of registering a domain name at that time? I've often dreamed about going back in time to when I was a kid and registering a bunch of domains before 1995. What would have been involved?

<comment><USER8> You sent in a text document to an email address of an actual person if I remember correctly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hope someone's remembered to renew it. :P

<comment><USER10> Yeah - it expires tomorrow

<comment><USER11>
        Domain Name: SYMBOLICS.COM
        Registry Domain ID: 57551_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
        Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.networksolutions.com
        Registrar URL: http://networksolutions.com
        Updated Date: 2020-01-16T08:51:05Z
        Creation Date: 1985-03-15T05:00:00Z
        Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2021-03-16T04:00:00Z
        Registrar: Network Solutions, LLC

Probably renewed by an automatic system. Don't even think about it :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This made me go look up when Musk bought x.com, turns out only 1999, thought it was older

<comment><USER13> What does he do with it? The page you get is a simple 'x' only.

I am hoping he has loads of stuff on hidden urls, and uses it for personal email or something. If he's just sitting on it doing nothing, then that's just plain wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is this the same Symbolics that came out of the MIT AI lab? With the LISP machines?

<comment><USER15> Also creators of the crazy Space Cadet keyboard. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space- cadet_keyboard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard)

<comment><USER16> I wish they still made keyboards like that. I'm curious to know the "feel"

<comment><USER17> As gumby says, the Space Cadet keyboards, being Microswitch Hall effect-based, were a bit spongy due to the big plastic case, but the switches themselves were dreamy.

But the whole experience was still not as satisfying as the original Knight keyboards, I suspect because the Knight boards used the original, larger switches, while the Space Cadets used the smaller. Chyrosran22 on Youtube explains all this ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcdN4Vzg6_g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcdN4Vzg6_g) and [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDozftThFMw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDozftThFMw)).

By the way, after 40 years of despairing over the loss of Hall effect switches (I nursed a Space Cadet Livermore Labs clone from a group buy for some years into the mid-80's), there are now two keyboards using this technology, and I'm loving the one that's actually available.

Steelseries Apex Pro is what's now shipping, and it's a dream. ([https://www.amazon.com/SteelSeries-Apex-Mechanical-Gaming- Ke...](https://www.amazon.com/SteelSeries-Apex-Mechanical-Gaming- Keyboard/dp/B07SVJJCP3))

The Input Club Keystone is still coming, slowly ([https://kono.store/products/keystone-analog-mechanical- keybo...](https://kono.store/products/keystone-analog-mechanical-keyboard)), but I'm also really looking forward to trying it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I remember when we exchanged text files with long lists of IPs for FTP servers at the university before most servers had domain names.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder what the first UUCP nodes were named.

<comment><USER20> Not sure about UUCP specifically, but a persistent problem until the introduction of DNS seems to have been that various places in the network sometimes had _different_ names for a single host. Check out the discussion referenced from RFC 298, "What we hope is an official list of host names": [http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc289.html](http://www.rfc- editor.org/rfc/rfc289.html)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> First-ever domain was registered in 1985. Many others were kept being registered since then. But what are the first used domains up to these days?

100 Oldest Domain Names & Their Current Status: [https://dofo.com/blog/oldest- domain-names/](https://dofo.com/blog/oldest-domain-names/)

<comment> ezequiel-garzon Thank you, interesting link. I had for a long time thought symbolics.com was the first "modern style" domain to have been registered, but it looks like it was actually nordu.net, even if the intention was to use it for a root server.</comment></comment>


Life Before Google: A Short Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.jazjaz.net/2010/02/life-before-google-a-short-story.html

<comment><USER2> Yeah, because encyclopedias did not exist and library catalogs were never invented.</comment>


Fasting diets may raise risk of diabetes - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/may/20/fasting-diets-raise-risk-of-diabetes <comment><USER2> Some more info here:

> _"The exact method is unclear from the abstract, but if the rats were fasted > for one day, this is equivalent to an approximately 3 to 4 week fast in > humans! So it's not applicable to the 24-hour or 48-hour fasts practised by > humans on common fasting diets._

[http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to- unpubli...](http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-unpublished- poster-presentation-on-diabetes-and-fasting-as-presented-at-the-european- society-of-endocrinology-annual-meeting-ece-2018/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This article takes a preliminary paper on Rats and turns it into a sensational article; the paper is titled "Intermittent fasting for three months decreases pancreatic islet mass and increases insulin resistance in Wistar rats"

Full abstract: [https://www.endocrine- abstracts.org/ea/0056/ea0056p519](https://www.endocrine- abstracts.org/ea/0056/ea0056p519)

The full paper isn't out yet it seems.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not sure if the evidence is trustworthy.</comment>


Poll: Most say they won't go to gym, restaurants despite reopening - <AUTHOR> https://thehill.com/homenews/news/499135-poll-most-say-they-wont-go-to-gym-restaurants-despite-reopening <comment><USER2> I'd like to see that poll by age. I'm over sixty and personally while I will get a haircut definitely not going back to my life before the virus until there's a vaccine. I've postponed a trip to SF twice and told those I'd be seeing not to plan to seeing me out there until 2021.</comment>


Show HN: Discuss scientific papers on Pubcentral - <AUTHOR>

This is a weekend project from a few weeks ago. I 'm getting bored of playing alone with it, so i thought i 'd post it here. Comments are very welcome:
http://pubcentral.net/
Thank you for your time :) <comment><USER2> Clickable: <http://pubcentral.net/>

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks :)</comment></comment>


Follow Your Passion? - <AUTHOR> http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/follow_your_passion/

<comment><USER2> I'm glad more people are recognizing this truth. Though it's not like no one ever pointed it out. I would say that this was one of the central points of the E-Myth books (E for entrepreneur) [http://www.amazon.com/The-E-Myth- Revisited-Small-Businesses/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-E-Myth-Revisited- Small-Businesses/dp/0887307280/)

That said, it's possible "Follow your Passion!" is still a useful lie... I'm not sure, it's certainly a prevalent lie.</comment>


AWS to Reboot a Substantial Number of EC2 Instances - <AUTHOR> http://www.rightscale.com/blog/rightscale-news/aws-reboot-substantial-number-ec2-instances/ <comment><AUTHOR> This might be bash-related, but there doesn't appear to be any further information.</comment>


Ask HN: What keeps you up at night? - <AUTHOR>

I just found this question on the application form of Techstars. I have no idea what they want to see through this question... <comment><USER2> Computing is too hard. We haven't come as far in the last ten years as we should have in terms of software, and we're hardly making good use of the crazy advances in technology that we've seen in the last few decades. It's still too difficult for a non-programmer to do anything useful and it's hours and hours of menial work for a programmer to do things which he can instantly visualize in his head, all because our devices are still relatively dumb.

Almost every programming language in use today is over fifteen years old, and we still have to deal with stupid things like character sets and the like. Writing a program isn't about being smart, it's about knowing a predefined set of rules that keep the computer from puking all over the brand new carpet.

And my wife snores.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sometimes people worry about general "stuff". They can worry about this stuff so much that they stay awake at night.

Here's an example of that type of usage:

([http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_6380000/newsid_6388...](http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_6380000/newsid_6388800/6388841.stm))

> _Loads of kids in the UK can't sleep at night because of worrying about the > environment, according to a new report. Fears about global warming and its > effects on people's health and animals are some of their biggest concerns. > But what keeps you awake at night?_

Sometimes the usage is more specific, about the jobs that people actually have. Here's an example of that usage:

([http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/news/what-keeps-you- awake-a...](http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/news/what-keeps-you-awake-at- night))

> _Moore, who deals with the rest of the astrophysics portfolio, said his > worry is how to implement the missions called for in the 2010 NRC Decadal > Survey for astronomy and astrophysics with NASA's existing budget, and how > to work with the Europeans on achieving science objectives. He also is > worried about the Gravity and Extreme Magnetism (GEMS) small Explorer > mission that he said has technical and cost challenges. "We hope we can > thread that needle," he said, and "be honest and straightforward about > cost."_

There's a subtly different form of this. People identify challenging aspects of their work, and they key important aspects of their work. These are framed in a positive way. Here's a video of some of this type of use. Note the small difference, the NASA quote is a bit brutal ("We have really tight budgets and we hope we can meet budgets") while the AskTheExperts video is more aspirational ("Progress is difficult but exciting possibilities exist").

([http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and- media/video/a...](http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and- media/video/awake-at-night-en))

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, they are interesting and I'm about to grasp what techstars wants to see now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the question may be asking what do you despise (you despise this thing so much it keeps you up at night.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I love your logic. Then, it will be this <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr- qewC-4gY>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A post by one of TechStars mentors: [http://casnocha.com/2009/06/understanding-what-keeps-a- perso...](http://casnocha.com/2009/06/understanding-what-keeps-a-person-up-at- night.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Insomnia.

The urge to code.

Next door singing karaoke.

Bad colds.

<comment><AUTHOR> Next door singing karaoke haha:)

<comment><USER6> Product/app idea: it works out which song your neighbours are murdering, and plays you the proper version in tune.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fear that they'll find the bodies.

</comment><comment><USER8> funny post..as I sit here in class staring at my rockstar '2x the crack'. My teacher keeps looking at me like he wants to ask me a question. I'm a non- techie trying to launch a startup, I bet you can guess why I went to bed at 3am.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nothing. I sleep peacefully.

<comment><AUTHOR> So do I.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My pet cat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Envy...I wanna have a cat.

<comment><USER10> I've only had him for a week. He's great but he keeps waking me up in the night so in the morning I'm really tired :-(</comment></comment></comment>


Julia Academy: Learn ML, Parallel Programming, Julia and More - <AUTHOR> https://www.juliaacademy.com/ <comment><USER2> I am excited to see something like this, but this website would inspire way more confidence if there was an "about us" page describing who/what/why.

On the other hand, some of the courses are written by very prominent people in the Julia community, so there is some minimal amount of legitimacy already present.

<comment><USER3> Yes, we'll put it up shortly. It is basically put together by Julia Computing, and we expect to recruit more content now that we have a basic set of materials.

<comment><USER4> Why Kent instead of flux?

I've never tried Julia, but looking at the sidelines it always seemed that flux is what makes Julia special for neural networks.

<comment><USER5> The creator of Knet is a professor and he teaches a class using Knet, so he must have tons of material available. If you look at the Knet docs compared to the Flux docs, the Knet docs are much more educational and explains things a lot better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'll probably get downvoted to oblivion as punishment for reporting but I got this error when going to [https://www.juliaacademy.com/](https://www.juliaacademy.com/):

Error 1014 CNAME Cross-User Banned What happened? You've requested a page on a website that is part of the Cloudflare network. The host is configured as a CNAME across accounts on Cloudflare, which is prohibited by security policy.

<comment><USER7> Not sure why you expect downvoting. Thanks for the warning.

<comment><USER6> Ive seen web site down reports get downvoted and criticised. Even basic questions relevant to a article can be downvoted or responded to in blatant hostility.

Just a set of patterns Ive seen. I rarely post now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I always think of ML [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_\(programming_language\)) when people abbreviate Machine Learning to ML :(

<comment><USER9> I too used to, but have realized that almost never is the language referred to as "ML". It would rather be SML or another dialect name.

<comment><USER10> SML is a ML but ML is it's own pre-SML language too.

<comment><USER11> Right, but one that died before what I'm guessing is the average birth date of hacker news readers. It's probably at least as hard to find a pre-SML ML compiler that will run on a microcomputer as it is to find a SML compiler that can understand the code examples from any SML book written before 1997.

<comment><USER10> Probably, i've tried once or twice to find a pre-SML ML compiler, but not had any luck so far.

<comment><USER11> You'd be hard-pressed. Pre-SML, it mostly only saw the light of day as a the metalanguage of a theorem prover named LCF. Which I think ran on a PDP-11 or a VAX or something like that.

[https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/785072.pdf](https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/785072.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Please don't call it "free" if I have to "enroll" and hand over information in order to watch the videos. They're not free. They cost me information/privacy.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, next up they will be requiring an iris and fingerprint scan to authenticate you into the system for watching the videos...read Viral's book about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> These look like great introductions, will there be more advanced courses available at some point? I especially love Flux but I've already written some more advanced networks in it like ResNets to test drive Julia.

<comment><USER15> Open source by any chance? :) I've been hunting for some examples of more modern detection networks written in Flux - particularly CenterNet. Seems like the only built-in examples they have are toys though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm facing Error 1014 CNAME Cross-User Banned error.

<comment><USER3> It's fixed now.

</comment></comment><comment> rajesh-s Are these certified courses or audit only?

<comment><USER3> At the moment they are audit only. We would love to explore possibilities around certification and what people would find helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> you can get to it by [https://juliaacademy.com/](https://juliaacademy.com/)</comment>


Subtle Asian Dating – Dating Bio Generation with Markov Chains - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pshah123/subtle-asian-dating-generator <comment><AUTHOR> Link to GitHub is above, you can try out the demo as well here: [http://subtle-asian-gen.herokuapp.com/index.html](http://subtle-asian- gen.herokuapp.com/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> asdf

</comment><comment><USER2> al;sdjf</comment>


A Prison Riot in Brazil Resulting in Two Inmates Being Beheaded Is Now Over - <AUTHOR> http://tinyletter.com/thecrux/letters/the-crux-tuesday-26th-august

<comment><USER2> Another report on the story: [http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/three- people-beheaded-i...](http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/three-people- beheaded-in-riot-at-prison-in-cascavel- brazil/story-e6frg6n6-1227035762133?nk=31b6d1550eccddbe4a53d5cba4ad3fe7)</comment>


TestObject Quality Report for Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> https://app.testobject.com/#/share/21464867-df6b-409a-9d87-4593a3e85b3a/quality-report

<comment><USER2> Does it only work for Android? And does someone know of something similar for iOS?

</comment><comment><USER3> This just opens a page that says 0 of 0 tests finished.

<comment><USER4> Wait a bit: first the tests are executed and then the results are published</comment></comment>


Lessons learned from our first Running Lean experiment - <AUTHOR> https://tailordev.fr/blog/2016/04/29/crick-lean-failure/ <comment><USER2> Running Lean is a good book. I didn't make it through the whole thing (yet) but some of the concepts stick with me.</comment>


3D scanning by dipping into a liquid - <AUTHOR> http://irc.cs.sdu.edu.cn/3dshape/ <comment><USER2> I expected they'd be either visually watching the changing contours of an opaque liquid, or somehow using refraction to get multiple visual angles of the same features, but…

…they're repeatedly dipping it, and using the volume displacement to reconstruct the shape. Amazing. The site is hammered right now so I can't get more details: anyone see how many dips are required to get the highest-detail models they show on the landing page?

<comment><USER3> In their presentation they have a bit more info. For the elephant model they show the results at 100, 500 and 1000 dips.

[https://youtu.be/yHvyPnkuAiw?t=1m30s](https://youtu.be/yHvyPnkuAiw?t=1m30s)

<comment><USER4> Why is it that all voices sound monotone when presenting a SIGRAP paper.

<comment><USER5> Not everyone has loud, presentational voices.

<comment><USER6> Well... to be fair, if you wanna make sure your study reaches as many people as possible, you must eventually need to improve your presentational skills. Like, you know, we do for everything else. I understand you didn't imply this, but IMHO there is very little pride in wanting to sound introvert forever, intentionally. Now I just hope the parent didn't say that due to misogyny.

<comment><USER7> Voice presenting for a recording is more of a practical art than we really give credit for. Unless you do it a lot, you aren't going to be very good at it.

<comment><USER8> Which is the same as with anything else really. You need to practice to be good at something.

<comment><USER7> Yes, this is another case of the 10,000 hour rule.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That is amazing. I think I've looked at every photogrammetry, desconstruction, hand modeling etc... technique for 3D reconstruction and this one takes the cake for ingenuity, quality and capability.

Not sure how practical it is right now, but I wonder if you could do this with air volume at a high enough delta measurement resolution you might get some amazing results.

<comment><USER10> How about firing air at an object through a series of nozzles, measure the resulting turbulence and then solve for shape ;-)

<comment><USER11> > measure the resulting turbulence

Just a quick solution of a million-dollar math problem ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems#Navi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems#Navier.E2.80.93Stokes_existence_and_smoothness)) and you're on your way!

<comment><USER12> You don't have to solve the Navier Stokes equations analytical for this. You don't even have to solve them explicitly at all: I can see a grad student just getting a lot of experimental data and throwing it all at a neural net with good results.

<comment><USER13> It doesn't solve the hidden cavity problem very well, though.

<comment><USER12> Indeed. At least not in a way I can think of within thirty seconds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My friend created an advanced fluid scanner using a dodecahedron. His method is novel in that it:

1\. Does not require rotation of the DUT, but instead uses just rising fluid level.

2\. Uses permeable fluid so it achieves full density scans.

He spent a number of years trying to get the product to market as a startup, but ran out of personal funding.

He believes Archimedes may have used the Roman dodecahedron as a fluid scanner to test the quality of their projectiles to improve accuracy.

See [http://www.romansystemsengineering.com/our_product.html](http://www.romansystemsengineering.com/our_product.html)

<comment><USER15> What property of a dodecahedron makes it useful for 3D scanning?

<comment><USER16> Wow, this seems like an beautiful technique.

Apparently, it's not that the dodecahedron is uniquely suitable, rather it offers the best compromise between competing factors. In this process, it mostly serves as a cage to hold the object for immersion, although it has some other useful properties as well:

"There is no other 3d platonic structure that has a higher fill-factor (volume that can be inscribed within a sphere of rotation) relative to the entrance hole (i.e. face area), while minimizing periphery length."

"Intuitively, one might suspect that both the dodecahedron and the icosahedron are reasonable choices of structure for the given constraints, with their subjective scores of 4.6 and 4.0 respectively. The dodecahedron offers increased fill factor, aperture size, and minimizes the periphery length, and is simple to manufacture."

[http://www.romansystemsengineering.com/hypothesis.html](http://www.romansystemsengineering.com/hypothesis.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Found a presentation on this technique on youtube:

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

<comment><USER17> Thanks. Video in the article kept timing out.

Edit: it looks like it's the same video (same length and intro).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Comment on the Hacker News system - most combinations of {edu,ac,gov,mil}.{$ccTLD} should probably be collectively treated as a TLD for site-display purposes. e.g. sdu.edu.cn (Shandong University) would be more descriptive than plan edu.cn (some academic institution in China).

<comment><USER19> [https://publicsuffix.org/](https://publicsuffix.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow this is very impressive. I was thinking originally they were using the milk scanning technique - [http://www.instructables.com/id/GotMesh-the-Most- Cheap-and-S...](http://www.instructables.com/id/GotMesh-the-Most-Cheap-and- Simplistic-3D-Scanner/)

<comment><USER21> Does anyone here know if there is an original paper or where this technique originated? It has to be pretty old and I can't imagine nobody thought of it before, but I'm somehow unable to find anything else than the posts on instructable, hackaday and youtube.

<comment><USER20> I was wondering that too, I've not found an authoritative source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> gene-h I once scanned myself at a maker fair in a similar manner. A swimming pool of blue dye with a camera facing above was used so that objects could be scanned by looking at their outline in the blue dye as they were dipped in(a different approach to the volume transforms presented here). Now to do this with a person involved strapping that person to a board and slowly dunking them in. Overall, the experience was unpleasant and what I imagine waterboarding is like, but hey at least I got a 3d scan of myself.

<comment><USER22> From what I understand, which is admittedly not very much, waterboarding is a lot worse than being submerged. It's not so much dunking you into water as it is pouring water up your breathing passages.

<comment><USER23> The approved method is to hold the person down on his back, then quickly apply a sheet of Saranwrap over the face followed by a washcloth, followed by many five gallon buckets of water. The drowning reflex is elicited long before a typical breath hold time. If water gets into the breathing passages, that's very bad - it means the procedure was done incorrectly.

The procedure is terminated quickly once the person is entering distress due to lack of oxygen.

The first few times it's done on a person, it's very frightening. Later, it becomes very annoying, especially if they wake you up at 4 AM for another go.

<comment><USER24> Opinions differ about the adjective 'approved'. I also doubt that, in practice, the procedure is "terminated quickly once the person is entering distress".

You make it sound like the DoD, Amnesty International and the Red Cross had a couple of meetings on this and came up with a humane way of doing this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hey, if you add a force sensor to the dipping arm couldn't you, in principle, obtain a 3d density map of the scanned object as well using archimede's principle?

<comment><USER26> No, I don't think so. Archimedes' principle tells us that the decrease in force required to support the object is equal to the weight of the displaced liquid. The force of gravity on the object itself is the same, regardless of which portion of the object is submerged.

<comment><USER25> Indeed, I also reached this conclusion upon thinking about it a bit more.

So a force sensor on the arm would only be good as a way of measuring what they are already measuring, that is, the volume of the displaced liquid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Also see 2007s Milk Scanner by Friedrich Kirschner

[http://www.instructables.com/id/Milkscanner-V1.0/](http://www.instructables.com/id/Milkscanner-V1.0/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSrW- wAWZe4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSrW-wAWZe4)

<comment><USER28> This is completely different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Awesome technique! But I cannot imagine this ever being a fast process. 1000 dips for a small model, and you cannot dip it with force.

<comment><USER30> As long as the equipment is cheap, the speed isn't that big of a deal. Imagine a thousand $10k machines set up on a studio lot that is constantly scanning items - it would be a boon for the gaming and film industries where production takes months or years and they have several steps of increasing graphics and art work complexity. I bet you could also set up cameras and use the refractive index of the liquid to calculate textures while its scanning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Suggestion for increasing applicability: Start with the optical scan, then only use the method to nail the occluded parts. And instead of just gathering data consider what angle will give you the biggest amount of new information next. Not sure if authors tried either.

</comment><comment><USER32> Isn't this "dip transform" basically the (inverse) Radon transform[0] used in CT and MRI?

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

<comment><USER33> Not quite for two reasons: Displacement is integrated over all slices under the liquid (just take the derivative to reverse). And more importantly, CT reconstruction (can't speak for MRI) is often done slice by slice which cannot be done for this system because you are an area integral rather than a line integral; this means that to get a full reconstruction you have to rotate the object in more than one axis.

There are certainly similarities though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Fun. So make a closed spherical assembly with lidar something to range the fluid height and put it in a three axis mount so the direction of down can be continually and smoothly changed, then drain the water very slowly.

Then change the fluid for something with less surface tension (hurray more uses for chlorofluorocarbons), and put it in a 20g centrifuge, and perhaps scanning times will be reasonable. :)

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if they are taking water cohesion into account.

e.g, some of the water will stick to the sides of the object.

<comment><USER36> Pre-dip the object.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I wonder how much of a role wetting/capillary effects play in this? The liquid interface will distort as it approaches the object, and will try to meet at a certain contact angle (based on surface tensions etc). Correcting for this might help improve the resolution of the scans?

<comment><USER38> I would predict that it would be rather difficult to dip-scan a sponge. Might work if it was fully saturated (waterlogged) in advance, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is a really clever solution!

</comment><comment><USER40> Hugged to death :/

How do they handle overhangs that trap bubbles?

Maybe shaking and scanning in reverse? (can stall cause weird effects when the air can't get back in, but should be more detectable.

<comment><USER41> By dipping from various different angles

<comment><USER42> It's a bit like a fluid pet scan, each angle will give partial information, you "integrate" to gather the surface.

Gives me ideas.

<comment><USER43> Think of the intro to the Ghost in the Shell, where the android body is floating up through a bath, and the manufacturer layer on the body is dissolving and being removed. This method could detect that the material is 100% removed from the body as well as confirm that the body is created exactly to spec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Can someone ELI5 as to how this gathers the spatial data for the samples? In my ignorance, it doesn't seem clear to me as to how this works. I get that you would be gathering different volume data with each dip but it seems to me that this information would look like a graph that rises and falls back to zero. In the video, they showed each dip as gathering an accurate 2d cross section of the object. For instance, the 2d slices of the elephant on each dip graph. They seem to be able to shape a closed 2d polygon slice per dip and it is mystifying to me. Am i missing a part of the process or what? Is there some imaging going on as well on top of the volumetric sampling?

Edit: I should add that this really impresses me regardless of how they do it. Ive always thought it was a pretty big bummer how optical 3d scanning looks so incomplete in a lot of cases.

<comment><USER45> No, they only get a graph of the volume of each slice. They have to do this many times and compute something like a Radon transform (computed tomography) to reconstruct the shape.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Is the software open sourced? This looks like it would translate into a fun hack-a-day project. At first sight, the required hardware seems pretty basic, or? It would be awesome if someone replicated it with a RaspPi or something and posted a step-by-step tutorial.

</comment><comment><USER47> That is very clever. So slow you'd have to run it overnight, but that could be OK for some applications.

A good test: run it on an auto throttle body. Those have lots of voids and holes, and some people need to duplicate existing ones.

<comment><USER48> Doesn't look like they're figured out how to scan voids and holes yet.

<comment><USER47> Yes, they can scan voids. Look at the examples. Blind holes or convexities that trap air could be a problem, but they should be able to detect such inconsistencies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I half expected this to be tongue in cheek exposition on creating molds. I guess it was on my mind after watching a friend artist creates sculpture molds for pewter casting. [https://www.joshhardie.com/fullscreen-page/comp- izfweszu/f59...](https://www.joshhardie.com/fullscreen-page/comp- izfweszu/f59958ca-6f2d-4cb3-b33c-191bc8d851c5/2/%3Fi%3D2%26p%3Ddg5cd%26s%3Dstyle- izlvez77)

</comment><comment><USER50> That seems equivalent to trying to get a joint distribution from its marginal distributions. So the constraint is probably that either it needs to be convex or you need to have a prior estimation of the object's cavities which means you need to know the 3d shape beforehand to have a mathematically guaranteed measurement.

<comment><USER51> No such constraint exists for the Radon transform. There are limitations associated with limited data, but mathematically if you had perfect knowledge of the slices you could obtain a perfect reconstruction for any compactly supported generalized function (I'd usually say distribution but I don't mean the statistical object).

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> cached: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:15m4DWE...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:15m4DWEAMgYJ:irc.cs.sdu.edu.cn/3dshape/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk)

<comment><USER53> No images, but doesn't hang on them like the Google cache: [http://web.archive.org/web/20170711133251/http://irc.cs.sdu....](http://web.archive.org/web/20170711133251/http://irc.cs.sdu.edu.cn/3dshape/)

<comment><USER54> This one has at least a few images: [https://archive.is/QuLKN](https://archive.is/QuLKN)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Note that this only works for objects that don't have any flexible parts and don't interact with the water in any other way than pushing it aside (e.g. soak water).

<comment><USER55> The same approach could be used with any liquids, and possibly gasses too. As a proof of concept, this is incredible. I can imagine a ton of applications too. Scanning fossils is the first that comes to mind. I'm sure there could be plenty of applications in forensics too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How does one come up with something like this? The method is everything but straight forward and not practical at all, but it still produces good results. Amazing work.

</comment><comment><USER43> How does it determine shape when measuring volume displacement? is it only measuring the displacement of the top surface-tension-layer of water as if it were a slice?

<comment><USER56> As it dips the model into the liquid, it displaces an amount equal to the volume already measured plus one cross section at the current water level. By continuously measuring the dips you can determine the area of every slice. By dipping at different angles you can create a large number of those cross section datasets. By merging and doing some hairy math (but well understood, it's the same used for MRIs) you can work out the original shape.

It's a clever technique, but undoubtedly slow since it requires on the order of 500-1000 careful dips of an object to get a reasonable level of detail. I'm guessing they probably aren't using plain old water since then they'd have to worry about surface tension, evaporation, etc...

<comment><USER15> Surface tension and evaporation would just show up as noise that would disappear with enough dips.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Epic!</comment>


External API Caching with Varnish and Nginx - <AUTHOR> http://blog.runnable.com/post/144975295096/external-api-caching-with-varnish-nginx <comment><USER2> Why not use nginx also for cache (you can even use a ramdrive if you want it in-memory) and just ditch Varnish?

<comment><USER3> Varnish is much more flexible than nginx. If you need to do complicated things around caching (and many people do), then it may ultimately be easier to cache with Varnish than nginx. Of course, many people don't, and hence nginx's built-in caching makes more sense. It's a purpose-built tool vs. a generic tool type of argument.

The article doesn't go into the reasons why, but they alluded to doing something interesting with caching:

> By flipping this standard use case around, using the right VCL > configuration, and relying on some advanced Varnish features, we can address > all three problems discussed in the previous section.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Play with arbitrary neural style transfer directly in your browser - <AUTHOR> https://reiinakano.github.io/arbitrary-image-stylization-tfjs/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! A year ago, I shared a demo where you could paint a photograph in the style of one of five paintings, via neural networks, right in the browser.

Since then, a few papers have come out attempting to create a single model that could be used for all styles. I tried porting one of those models to the browser today.

A brief summary of how the algorithm works:

\- For any particular style, a neural network encodes it into a 100-dimensional vector that represents the network's "understanding" of the style.

\- This vector is fed, along with the content image, to another neural network that does the style transformation.

This is also how combining two styles work. The mean of the style vectors of Style A and Style B is calculated and used as the style vector input to the transformation network.

In any case, I acknowledge the results are not perfect and will not look good for all combinations of style and content (particularly faces, ugh), but I think it's a good reason to get excited about what will eventually become possible in the future using the browser alone.

<comment> java-man excellent work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> It world be nice to be able to move the "Stylization strength" bar and see how the image changes, but it's probably too slow for a real time result :(.

What about making a short video or an animated gif? Is the transformation smooth? (Is the image at 53.2% similar to the image at 53.3%?) Or the texture is rearranged in a random way?

You can probably calculate some key points in the bar while the user is wandering, and then use them. This will kill the battery of the cellphones, so perhaps don't enable it by default.</comment>


Primitive Technology: Adobe wall (dry stacked) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzz36cvo88U <comment><USER2> This guys videos are fantastic. A cool little tip: turn on close captioning for narration and details of techniques being used.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have been watching primitive tech for a while. But I'm always wondering if he slept in those shelters or went back to his RV (I suppose?) during the night. Australia is famous of crazy wild insects and I don't see any signs of protection in the huts.

<comment><USER4> My understanding from his various posts online (and website [1]) is that he owns and lives near the land where the filming takes place. In Far North Queensland these sorts of areas would not be difficult to come across, not even far from a major town.

He probably just walks or (more likely) drives home each day.

[1] - [https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/about/](https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/about/) :

"Also It should be noted that I don't live in the wild but just practice this as a hobby. I live in a modern house and eat modern food. I just like to see how people in ancient times built and made things."

Insect-wise, Ross River Virus is a problem in that part of the country. It's spread by mosquito. You wouldn't catch me outside at night up there in summer, at least not without protection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the producers I'm happy to support with Patreon.

</comment><comment><USER6> I had wondered what happened to his videos, as I hadn't seen an update in my RSS feed for a while. Turns out he's just stopped updating his blog!

I've got some videos to catch up on :)

<comment><USER7> If it is of any help, you can get his latest videos via the feed at [https://youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCAL3JXZSzSm...](https://youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA)

The _channel_id_ can be changed to retrieve videos from other channels.

</comment></comment><comment> oh-moses But without mortar, you'd just knock it over with one clumsy stumble, right?

<comment><USER8> He hasn't fired the bricks yet. He's just storing them until he accumulates enough to fire and eventually mortar.

</comment></comment><comment> ur-whale What happens when it rains?

<comment><USER9> There are captions on the video explaining some of it. This wall is only temporary storage of the bricks while they dry. The roof keeps them (somewhat) protected from rain until they're ready to be fired into stronger bricks.</comment></comment>


Gait Speed and Survival in Older Adults - <AUTHOR> http://jama.jamanetwork.com/Mobile/article.aspx?articleid=644554 <comment><USER2> The basic result (old people who walk faster live longer than old people who hobble around) shouldn't come as a surprise at all: if you see two 75-year-old women at the mall, and one breezes by you like she has somewhere to be while the other shuffles past slowly, and you had to bet on which person had longer to live, you'd pick the fast one.

The interesting part is how strong the result is: "Predicted survival based on age, sex, and gait speed was as accurate as predicted based on age, sex, use of mobility aids, and self-reported function or as age, sex, chronic conditions, smoking history, blood pressure, body mass index, and hospitalization."

That's pretty remarkable. For a given age and sex, all of a person's headline medical information, taken together, is as good an indicator of longevity as their walking speed is.

<comment> T-hawk Of course, the gait speed itself takes as inputs many of the rest of those factors. Smoking history, body mass index, and chronic joint or muscular conditions all pretty directly affect one's ability to walk fast. So gait speed turns out to be a very convenient, easily measured proxy for those other variables.

<comment><USER3> Right. I think the way to think of it is that in the context of survival, gait speed is a convenient and easily measured sufficient statistic for all this other stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is _not_ saying that adopting a faster gait speed will cause you to live longer. It's saying that a person's gait speed is a good indicator of how much longer they're likely to live. To me, it seems likelier that there's a common factor which causes both slower gait speed and death, so how fast you _try_ to walk isn't the important factor.

<comment><USER5> But what if by walking faster you _improve_ the common factor? What if it's just that gait speed is a symptom of poor heath, but by attempting to walk faster (maybe even by going for more walks) you actually improve your health?

<comment><USER6> Unlikely. Or the effect might be minimal.

It's pretty common-sense that healthy people will already have a faster gait. I mean for lots of people who are about to die, their gait speed is probably zero because you can't even walk. Your average person doesn't even spend much time exercising, and this study is about average folks, so it's saying that average folks with a faster gait live longer. Most of them don't even exercise.

<comment><USER7> Exercise doesn't have to be intentional. I think this is probably partly causal: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5914630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5914630)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So the question becomes, to how young a person does this apply? How far back can be extrapolated? Is a slow 40something as meaningful a data point as a slow 70something year old?

</comment><comment><USER9> I could see this becoming an interesting metric for targeted health care or health advertising, given the relative ease to determine gait speed from live video feeds. "IF gait speed < X, change display ad to 'see an orthopedist'"

</comment><comment><USER10> My father is nearing 80 and in the last couple of years his gait his stiffened and slowed noticeably. Of course anybody has limited time left at 80, but it's interesting how much _older_ he suddenly looked to an observer. 3 years ago he was confused with men in their 60s.

I think he suddenly felt older to himself as well, this year my parents finally decided to do a top-to-bottom review of their life-insurance, will and other estate issues.

</comment><comment><USER11> So the takeaway from this is if you find yourself in a nursing home you better keep on trucking as fast as you can or the doctors will give up on you.

</comment><comment><USER12> And thank you, colinprince, something that really does _stimulate_ my intellectual curiousity, becoming a rarity on a front page that is starting to re-confirm my intellectual stances.

Walking faster now.

<comment><USER13> I wonder if they were just punning on [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quick_and_the_Dead_%28idiom...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quick_and_the_Dead_%28idiom%29)

> Walking faster now.

Joke there, I suppose, since the authors did seem to find it applied for diagnosis (poor health slows people down, news at 11 ...).

<comment><USER12> Is it sad that my first thought before reading the article was the film with Sharon Stone?

I think it might be more interpreted as "staying vital, keeps people alive"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me of the following study, that had similar results but a better title:

      How fast does the Grim Reaper walk?
      http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d7679

</comment><comment><USER15> It's good to see more data backing the "more active == longer life" anecdote.

</comment><comment><USER16> Obligatory xkcd link: [http://xkcd.com/552/](http://xkcd.com/552/)

(I have this one on a t-shirt.)

<comment><USER17> [http://www.radiolab.org/2010/oct/08/](http://www.radiolab.org/2010/oct/08/)

Radio Lab did a segment on how a cities average gait can predict many things about it.</comment></comment>


Runnable Wants To Become The "YouTube Of Code" - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/02/runnable-wants-to-become-the-youtube-of-code/ <comment><USER8> This might be a minor nitpick, but it always bugs me when Ruby on Rails is listed as a language, particularly by people who should know better (developers). There's even a section for frameworks on the site. People searching for code snippets should be able to understand that Ruby is a language and Ruby on Rails is a framework.

<comment><USER9> Well, that's the problem with dynamic languages, isn't it? The distinction can get a bit blurry.

[http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.0.0/Array.html](http://ruby- doc.org/core-2.0.0/Array.html) vs. [http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Array.html](http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Array.html)

[http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.0.0/String.html](http://ruby- doc.org/core-2.0.0/String.html) vs. [http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/String.html](http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/String.html)

etc.

<comment><USER10> Just because it modifies the standard library classes doesn't make it a separate language in its own right. If you used Java but with a different implementation for, say, linked lists than the standard one you'd still be using Java.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely! Rails is written in Ruby and is run by the Ruby interpreter. No doubt about it. But if you dig in you find that pretty much every Ruby class (including the low-level ones) has been modified for use in Rails. In addition, a lot of Rails code is written in a purpose-built DSL. Rails has built-in DSLs for web routing, email sending/receiving, database queries, &c. You can split hairs and say that these are APIs and not real DSLs, but I think the point about dynamic languages blurring the lines is totally fair. You could implement the core Java spec in Ruby by modifying the base classes, and at some point you aren't writing Ruby any more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really like the idea, but holy hell the site design needs some work. There are a lot of areas that are overlapping, or rendered kind of funky. The mess of purple icons should just probably go. Also when you finally select a language, the list of projects is really hard to read.

Keep up the good work, it's a good idea, just need to push the design way more.

<comment><USER13> Absolutely - why o why do you have random purple icons taking up half the screen, pushing your content below the fold? Ditch em!

edit: Having browsed the rest of the thread I see this may be a bug. If it helps, I am using: Version 28.0.1500.71 Ubuntu 12.04 (28.0.1500.71-0ubuntu1.12.04.1)

<comment><USER14> Thank you Robert! We have now resolved this issue now, turns out some of our servers didnt have the proper css file.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love this site! Like someone mentioned on TC, it's a Stack Overflow meets JSFiddle, SqlFiddle, GitHub etc.

Would be interesting to see how they handle COMPLEX snippets / codebase like Web APIs, Delegates, events etc.

<comment><USER16> Thanks your your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like the idea kinda of wish it was more tongue in cheek.

"Copypasta, the Old Spaghetti Factory of code"

On a slightly more serious note, if they are the youtube of code, how are they going to remove the xenophobia from the comments?

</comment><comment><USER18> Direct link: [http://runnable.com/](http://runnable.com/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Grr, no no no.

Whoever designed this is nuts...that black ajaxy loading screen crap on every page load is incredibly rage inducing.

<comment><USER16> You mean the page loader? Sorry to hear about that :(

<comment><USER20> I like YouTube's page loading bar though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Works great but the site design needs some work. Am I supposed to see three rows of big purple icons at the top of the home page? I tried multiple browsers, looks a bit awkward and takes up half of my screen.

<comment><USER16> Hi, which browser are you using?

<comment><USER21> I've tried in Chrome and IE9, looks the same either way for me:

[http://i.imgur.com/EXI0kdY.png](http://i.imgur.com/EXI0kdY.png)

<comment><USER22> Seeing the same thing in Firefox 24.

[http://d.pr/i/6uwO](http://d.pr/i/6uwO)

<comment><USER14> Thank you kungfooey! We have now resolved this issue now, turns out some of our servers didnt have the proper css file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Founder of Runnable here. We've got some reports that the site isn't loading properly in some browsers. We're working to fix this now, and ask you to retry in an hour :) \- Yash

</comment><comment><USER23> The way the terminal VM works is quite impressive, actually.

<comment><USER16> We're glad you liked it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I like the idea, but as quite a few people mentioned, the execution is really below par, esp the UI and not loading properly on chrome at all.

</comment><comment><USER25> Nice, but looking at the paperclip rails example I really didn't understand where to look. The only file visible was the application controller, and the application wouldn't run because the migrations hadn't been executed.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for reporting this. We'll take a look!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Those guys are terrible IMHO: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6272093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6272093)

<comment><USER27> Just because they didn't respond to your email? I don't follow.

<comment><USER26> I don't think is the way to run any business, what I saw is just no respect and exploitation and for what 100 bucks ? Seriously ?

<comment><USER28> I think you need to gain some perspective. They just didn't respond to your email. It happens. Fwict, it was outside of the expected communication channels for proposals anyway. It would have been more respectful if they contacted you, I can understand your frustration waiting for the reply, but you've completely overreacted. IMO what's most unprofessional about the incident is you taking such a minor grievance to a public forum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> When I read "youtube of code" I was expecting video recordings of developers coding sessions :P. But the current form works too.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm actually very excited about this as an education tool where you can actually learn by coding.

</comment><comment><USER31> Great way to get around the work of setting up the environment to get straight into the API.

</comment><comment><USER32> Congrats on the launch, guys!

</comment><comment><USER20> Top-left header logo is fuzzy because it is being stretched. \- Chrome, PC

</comment><comment><USER33> TL;DR - Runnable only solves the small-picture problem. The best solution to the bigger-picture problem would make Runnable obsolete, because it's an anti- pattern to begin with.

\---

The small version of the problem is that it's hard to find these snippets spread out across the internet, and then figure out if they work, and then copy-paste them into your program. Runnable solves the finding problem.

But the bigger version of the problem is that you shouldn't be copy-pasting these snippets into your codebase all the time, no matter how small they are. If they are useful enough that you find yourself looking them up often, or they are useful enough that they merited being posted on someone's blog, then they are useful enough to make into a package and share them properly. The node.js module system with npm gets extremely close to this goal. And for client-side Javascript, component[1] does the same thing.

[1]: [https://github.com/component/component](https://github.com/component/component)

This is one place where other client-side Javascript package managers completely fall over. There are multiple different "types" of packages.

1\. There are the typical "big libraries"

      - <USER2>
      - <USER3>
      - <USER4>
      - <USER5>
      - <USER6>
      - <USER7>
      - angular.js
      - etc.

2\. Then there are "plugins", which are pretty big in scope themselves. They have to be big enough to be "plugin-worthy", influenced mostly by how annoying it has been to install plugins in the jQuery days, via copy and pasting them into your /libs folder. These are things like:

      - backbone marionette
      - jQuery waypoints
      - underscore string
      - any jquery plugin
      - any angular plugin
      - etc.

Most package managers, with that kind of thinking in mind, stop there, at the "big library" and "plugins" level. Bower has this shortcoming. It's great for quickly grabbing a copy of jQuery and a few jQuery plugins, but it doesn't actively encourage making smaller modules, which is critical to solving the big-picture need Runnable is trying to solve.

3\. The third type of package are tiny modules that at first glance you are tempted to just stick right into your /utils folder. These are so small that in old-school package managers it would be more hassle just to make them into packages. (This is why it's crucial for package managers to have as little beaurocracy as possible by the way, to avoid that line of thinking.) These are things like:

      - https://github.com/matthewmueller/uid
      - https://github.com/yields/has-transitions
      - https://github.com/pazguille/shuffle-array
      - https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/to-snake-case
      - https://github.com/jwerle/to-csv
      - https://github.com/segmentio/canonical

Those tiny modules are the kinds of things you find StackOverflow answers for all the time. People keep having the same problems over and over again, and eventually the answers get voted up. Things like, "how do I convert a camel case string into a snake case string?".

As soon as you take those simple tasks and package them up in a way that installing them is as easy as:

      $ component install ianstormtaylor/to-snake-case

Then you start to see crazy gains in productivity and quality of your code. When you do that you aren't copy-pasting some shoddy StackOverflow answer into your codebase, so that the onus is now on you to maintain it. Instead, you're just dependning on an open-source component that is packaged along with tests to make sure it continues to work. It's visible by tons of others, can be improved when bugs crop up, and you don't need to maintain yourself if you don't want to.

</comment><comment><USER34> Good idea. Site needs definite polishing. Usability is an issue and it just looks mediocre, no attention to detail.

<comment><USER14> Sorry for the design problems earlier mumbi! We have now resolved this issue now, turns out some of our servers didn't have the proper css file.

<comment><USER34> ah, that explains it. It looks great now. Keep up the good work!</comment></comment></comment>


Withings sticks a digital fitness tracker in an analog watch - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2014/06/24/withings-sticks-a-digital-fitness-tracker-in-an-analog-watch/

<comment><USER2> I just got a Pulse last weekend, and honestly it's not bad looking, much better than a FitBit which I bought for Mother's Day.

$390 is a hefty price to pay for limited features and a slightly better look.

You can get something that looks like this with all the normal features for a much lower price with Misfit Wearables. [http://store.misfit.com/](http://store.misfit.com/)</comment>


Ask HN: Decent Inventory Tracking Software? - <AUTHOR>

So I'm helping someone start a business and have been able to point them to all sorts of great web apps that will help them manage their business, including freshbooks and basecamp. But they also need something that can manage their inventory. They'll have a lot of inventory, they help companies manage physical item promotions.
Do you have any recommendations? Just about everything I can find on google is an old really expensive piece of junk.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> No experience with these, but a search through freshmeat shows packages with inventory modules that might work: NOLA <http://freshmeat.net/projects/nola> Zephyr Basecamp <http://freshmeat.net/projects/zbcenterprise> NolaPro (don't know if related to NOLA) <http://freshmeat.net/projects/nolapro> WebERP <http://freshmeat.net/projects/weberp> OpenBravo <http://openbravo.com/></comment>


Oberlin bakery: We paid a high cost for an unfairly damaged reputation - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2019/06/21/oberlin-college-gibson-bakery-lawsuit-column/1523525001/ <comment><USER2> Note: written by a member of the Bakery's family

"Grandpa Gibson has resumed his favorite spot at a patio table outside our bakery. Before the protests, his time there was filled by conversations with passersby. But now, he often sits alone."

Very sad. I once read something that paraphrased to: campus activism for young people can be socially sanctioned sadism. A way to let hate and emotions flow at someone and let any decency go out of the window because the target deserves no empathy or dignity. They must be annihilated.

</comment><comment><USER3> I looked into this because it seemed like there should be more to the story. Then I realized what it was when I saw the date--the incident happened the day after the 2016 presidential election.</comment>


Show HN: Take Control of Your Microbiome - <AUTHOR> http://www.generalbiotics.com/probiotics

<comment><USER3> Gotta get the consumer over the believability hump.

The folks that care about their Microbiome will probably have tried some sort of probiotic previously. Why is this any better than what they can get from Jarrow, New Chapter, etc. from their Whole Foods or vitamin shop?

Is it the formula that's more potent with the 115 different species of bacteria?

Does this formula actually replace the bad stuff that could be in there currently? The n Billion bacteria in a traditional probiotic is not much compared to the Trillions of bacteria already there, do you have some sort of combination of Navy Seal bacteria hunting down the baddies?

Is your product special because of the delivery mechanism that gets it to the right place in the gut? There's a lot of talk about Fecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT). If you can save people from having to go that route that's a genuine selling point.

Can this product help people who have specific problems like SIBO? Ulcerative Colitis?

You're in the right spot, just need to understand the health conscious consumer a bit more because you're competing with a lot of info out there about gut health.

Start by answering those questions and you'll be on the road to getting some early adopters.

<comment><USER4> I am a novice when it comes to biology, but even in my research I had become suspicious about the fact that most probiotics have so few varieties, and that they were predominantly of the "wrong" families as compared with what the research showed.

Much of the research that has been done has been on the importance of increased bacteroidetes vs. firmicutes, the two most prevalent families of bacteria in the digestive tract. But almost all of the probiotics on the market don't contain any bacteroidetes. Most have lactobacillus (which is technically a firmicutes, but considered a "good firmicutes" I guess, and is used to make yoghurt) or bifidobacterium (like Align) which is in a completely separate family (Actinobacteria). When I saw this product on a mailing list a couple days ago, I purchased it because it was exactly what I had been looking for. So I think this has potential for informed early adopters.

There are some people that can read articles on the Internet from google searches and realize that they aren't getting the whole picture because they are obviously from the low-quality content-farmed stuff that google ranks highly on health search results, and I think this is appealing to them (us). Now, it's yet to be seen whether it's a winning move to provide clear, logical information grounded in science vs. tooting the bullshit horn that we see in naturalistic health circles.

I definitely agree that they could have more marketable messaging, but I would expect that they'll be able to develop better marketing presence by gradually accumulating pagerank, becoming well-known in serious health circles, and maybe some affiliate marketing and the like. But all that takes time and this is right out of the gate. Their core value proposition is much better than competing companies, in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am hoping for comprehensibility feedback.

I have seen a lot of interest in probiotic/digestive articles lately, so I think there are people on here who should be interested. What are we missing? What do you want to know that we aren't explaining?

Also appreciated would be ideas for online advertising.

Thanks HN!

<comment><USER5> How long does it take to notice the changes? If I try out a single bottle, as offered on your site, will I likely be feeling as much difference as I'm going to feel by the time I finish it?

I am also curious about the details of the "much more ambitious" study mentioned in the FAQ. Are those still coming soon?

(Accidentally hitting Escape while on the site dropped me into a settings page login. It was disorienting.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> No information on those 115 strains, the quantity, etc. For example, many probiotics contain Enterococcus faecalis (the name is self-explanatory) - <USER2> very questionable strain to put into your body. So, without any specifics on the 115 strains, I'm really gonna stick with Garden of Life Primal Defense Ultra.</comment>


Show HN: HMTL5 distraction-free writing app - <AUTHOR> https://www.justwritedammit.com/#main/write

<comment><USER2> That ..er.. doesn't appear to work?

(Chrome, Firefox, PC)

<comment><USER3> same here, not seeing cursor or typed text</comment></comment>


Ask HN:  Why doesn't nasa.gov get its url to work? - <AUTHOR>

Is it not ridiculous that well-funded high-tech agencies like nasa don't have their direct @ url working?  I can't access or ping nasa.gov, yet www.nasa.gov works. Are they being lazy, or is there a deeper reason for why they would do this? <comment><USER2> They don't have an A record for nasa.gov. For those who don't have dig (or don't care enough to do an actual DNS request and would rather trust some other, lesser tool):

      $ dig nasa.gov

      ; <<>> DiG 9.6.1-P2-RedHat-9.6.1-7.P2.fc11 <<>> nasa.gov
      ;; global options: +cmd
      ;; Got answer:
      ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 40211
      ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

      ;; QUESTION SECTION:
      ;nasa.gov.                      IN      A

      ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
      nasa.gov.               300     IN      SOA     ns1.nasa.gov. dns.nasa.gov. 2008043229 10800 1200 3600000 14400

No A records.

      $ dig www.nasa.gov

      ; <<>> DiG 9.6.1-P2-RedHat-9.6.1-7.P2.fc11 <<>> www.nasa.gov
      ;; global options: +cmd
      ;; Got answer:
      ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 22541
      ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 9, ADDITIONAL: 0

      ;; QUESTION SECTION:
      ;www.nasa.gov.                  IN      A

      ;; ANSWER SECTION:
      www.nasa.gov.           300     IN      CNAME   www.nasa.gov.speedera.net.
      www.nasa.gov.speedera.net. 120  IN      CNAME   www.nasa.gov.edgesuite.net.
      www.nasa.gov.edgesuite.net. 21600 IN    CNAME   a1718.x.akamai.net.
      a1718.x.akamai.net.     20      IN      A       126.96.36.199
      a1718.x.akamai.net.     20      IN      A       22.214.171.124

Looks like the whole site is served through Akamai too.

What's a "direct @ url" ? Now we're overloading the @ for something else too?

<comment><USER3> @ in a BIND zone file refers to the domain defined at the top of the file.

It's been awhile since I've written one, so go look at Wikipedia:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> By saying that it's not working, you assume that a raw domain.com is "broken" if it doesn't resolve to an address which is presumably the same as www.domain.com, which is pretty much baseless. There's no technical reason for a bare domain to resolve to anything, it's just a popular convention to make it redirect to www.domain.com because most people who type that into a browser expect your web site to come up.

Why not just add a CNAME for convenience? Who knows. They may have an internal technical reason, or it may just be a case of "don't do something unnecessary just because it's easy". For what it's worth, government agencies have a pretty good variety - army.mil and navy.mil both have the same behavior as nasa.gov, whitehouse.gov and justice.gov both have redirects to the "canonical" www url and house.gov and senate.gov both serve the same content as their www versions without a redirect either way.

Regardless of their particular reason, I see no cause to assume that it's due to laziness, funding level or how "high-tech" they are. It's just a convention that they don't use, but you expect.

<comment><USER5> It is "broken." You're right that "it's just a convention that they don't use, but you expect." But it's a convention that must prevent a handful of people from accessing their website each day, or at least causing them to Google "NASA" in confusion. There's no valid technical reason for doing this. It's a serious usability/findability fail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Although a smaller scale, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has the same problem. bom.gov.au doesn't resolve to anything.

For what it's worth, Firefox will change nasa.gov to www.nasa.gov.au but won't do the same for bom.gov.au. Internet Explorer won't do this at all.

</comment><comment><USER5> I recall a time (late '90s) when microsoft.com was similarly afflicted. Seriously. That was back when everyone instinctively typed "www," though.

In this case, I'm sure it's a temporary glitch.

</comment><comment><USER7> They must have heard you. Works fine using nasa.gov

EDIT: using firefox. What browser are you using?

<comment><USER6> I think that's your browser adding the www in. Try it in Internet Explorer or try pinging nasa.gov

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is part of a really old host-naming convention from when a domain name's usage wasn't 99.999% web. So people would relegate their world wide web servers out to www.<theirdomain>.</comment>


DEFCONBOTS - An Autonomous Robotics Competition at DEFCON - <AUTHOR> http://defconbots.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> Contest organizer here (Fryguy[1] is the other one). When we were in college we competed at defconbots in 2007 and 2008. The contest ended in 2009 but we continued it at RoboGames (the event at RoboGames was called "Robot Shooting Gallery") from 2009 until 2013.

We really love robotics and wanted to bring the contest back but wanted it to be more programmer-friendly. We're hoping that a simple reference design and less mechanically-challenging contest will get more CS folks interested and participating.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=fryguy](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=fryguy)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for organizing! I did it back in DEFCON 14 and had a blast!

Where's a good place to discuss/ask questions about the rules?

EDIT: Just found [https://github.com/Defconbots/2014_Competition_Rules/issues](https://github.com/Defconbots/2014_Competition_Rules/issues)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 2014 is the year Defcon abandons all pretenses that they were not a fed/military recruiting event.

<comment><USER4> I've never been on the other side of a conspiracy theory. This is interesting.

<comment><USER3> Achievement unlocked!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome! That goes really well with the upcoming course on Controlling Mobile Robots I was gonna take [https://www.coursera.org/course/conrob](https://www.coursera.org/course/conrob)

<comment><USER6> Magnus's Finite Automata course was one of my favorites at GaTech and I'm sure you won't be disappointed with his Coursera offering.

Anyone in the Santa Monica/LA area want to take a stab at this competition?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "at moving and illuminated targets" \- anyone know what size they might be?

<comment><USER8> Unless I missed something, I believe they're all ping-pong balls which are listed at 40mm in diameter.

<comment><USER7> Ah - totally missed that. Thanks - Do we know if they will turn off after being "hit" for >300ms

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This sounds like fun. Perhaps Gen. Alexander could be invited to MC the event.

</comment><comment> X-Istence I'm looking forward to seeing this being submitted as a contest/event :-). It also reminds me I need to update the site!

</comment><comment><USER10> Show me your security credentials and I might compete in a secret event; but not sharing my thoughts with every body.

<comment><AUTHOR> Secret?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seems so much fun. What would be the Hackers News's features for this robot ? :)

</comment><comment><USER12> Would people who do this professionally be part of the general competition?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no ban on computer vision professionals. I'm sure we'll have at least a few competing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Where will the contest take place?</comment>


Ask HN: What would it take for you to buy this service? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I posted this to the Freelancer thread, and got a lot of clicks but no inquiries.
https://www.fiverr.com/users/agavesam/manage_gigs/write-comprehensive-unit-tests-for-your-python-code/edit
I was wondering if this wasn't a service anyone would purchase or if I could emend my listing to make it more salable.
Thanks, Max <comment><USER2> I don't follow the use case for this - if the team is "too busy to write tests" they're going to be too busy to _update_ tests when the software changes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, hiring me again would be nice, but what I was imagining was that a team was way behind on maintaining their tests & I could get them caught up. After that it'd be easier to keep tests up to date & perhaps they'd find use of me again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Lots of clicks but no inquiries might mean the hook is solid but the actual pitch is lacking.

Could you post the pitch here, so we don't have to log into fiverr to see it?

<comment><USER4> The short link from the freelancer thread ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21431914](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21431914)) seems to work [https://www.fiverr.com/share/vv8rRN](https://www.fiverr.com/share/vv8rRN)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> URL tells me to login, even after removing the '/edit' part.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops! My apologies.

[https://www.fiverr.com/share/zWzZbR](https://www.fiverr.com/share/zWzZbR)</comment></comment>


How to use sed to automate mind numbing tasks (with examples) - code-faster https://codefaster.substack.com/p/how-to-use-sed-to-automate-mind-numbing <comment><AUTHOR> Just to make your macOS disclaimer clearer, would you show an example command done both ways, macOS and Linux? And -- if you happen to know -- on the Mac side is this delta a function of which shell is being used?</comment>


JavaScript Promises as EventEmitters - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/dmvaldman/12a7e46be6c3097aae31 <comment><USER2> I didn't actually read your code to see if you account for this, but one problem with this simplification, at least the very brief "that's it" description, is the fact that promises may be resolved before you hook up the thing receiving the callback. In other words, the case where you say .addEventListener but the event had already fired.</comment>


Read 1k Words per Minute - <AUTHOR> http://spritzinc.com/ <comment><USER2> I _love_ the Spritzlet and use it for all long articles now.

BUT, one of the 3 computers I use daily can't run it; it is "gummed up" in some way resulting in the Spritzlet always stuck on the "Loading Spritzlet" phase.

All 3 are Windows 7-8 machines and Chrome is used in each case. 2 have thorough adblock/ghostery/etc installed (the one on Windows 8.1 runs Spritzlet OK, the other, on Win7 doesn't). Reboots and reinstalls have no effect. Anybody else run into this?</comment>