An idea for Github to make more money - <AUTHOR> http://umairashraf.me/2012/07/an-idea-for-github-to-make-more-money/

<comment><USER2> I am the developer of Gmvault (<http://www.gmvault.org>) an open source tool having its development hosted on github (<https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault>). I really like the idea of crowd funding and would like my tool to be founded like that if possible as I would like it to be open source and available to anybody while providing enough money to run the development server. I even more like to idea of having bounties on bugs as this would help me prioritizing features and bug fixes while funding the development.

However since the release of the tool in may I had around 20000 downloads but less the 20 persons supported the development by donating something. I still hope that having such a facility directly embedded in Github would allow people to be a bit more philanthropic and rewarding for the developers as often developers would probably want to continue full time the adventure of developing a product or a library.

<comment><USER3> What if I gave you $150,000? Would you make the product to my specifications? Does this illustrate why this could be a channel to disrupt the spirit of open source software?

Imagine Github does implement this. Now you have a bunch of coders who want to work on "open source" projects for money, hoping to get backers as if they did a Kickstarter project. Or maybe it could start an OSS Github "gold rush."

Now that we have a bunch of money-hungry developers, it'd be pretty easy to de-rail or commandeer projects simply by donating a large portion of money. Now imagine a non OSS competitor starts contributing. Multiple things can happen:

1) Any innovation or development of features could be easily copied and incorporated into competitive projects for sale.

2) A developer gets "hooked" on that donation money and starts favoring the large donors' requests over others.

3) These requests could sabotage the quality or the focus of the project.

4) The donor could pull funding at this point and collapse development and support of the project.

Full blown conspiracies aside, the whole point of OSS was to open up development for everyone to grow and learn, and to remove software development from the corruptible influence of money.

I think others on this thread had a great idea, make it a "tip", and make it anonymous. We would still have to limit "tips" because anyone can make a huge tip and then e-mail a "ransom" letter to the developers to do stuff if they want to continue getting large tips. The previous ordered list applies here.

Again, I'm going to an extreme and likely this sort of abuse wouldn't be rampant in a system like that. But involving money at all directly into the process sounds like it could do more harm than good.

If you want to take donations, you can do a Kickstarter to get up and running and then take some sort of "beer" or micropayment service on your website. Github integrating this into their offering seems irresponsible to the OSS community at large.

<comment><USER4> _and to remove software development from the corruptible influence of money._

What? I've been part of the F/OSS world in one capacity or another for something like 15 years now, and I've never heard _anybody_ posit that before. Yes, some F/OSS advocates are somewhat anti-commercial, but to say that "the point" of OSS is about removing the influence of money, is a pretty novel idea from what I can see.

Consider this: The FSF specifically say, in the GPL FAQ[1], that you can charge money for GPL'd programs. The Open Source Definition (OSD)[2] has as it's first plank:

"The license shall not restrict any party from _selling or giving away_ the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale."

And programmers employed by various corporations contribute a significant amount of code to the ASF, and to the Linux kernel, etc. Look at the Apache OOo proposal[3], for example, and now how many of the initial committers were from IBM or Red Office.

[1]: <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html>

[2]: <http://www.opensource.org/osd.html/>

[3]: <http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenOfficeProposal>

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the information. I admit I'm not fully versed. I don't know much about enterprise OSS, but I do know that IBM created Eclipse as a way to get people onto their development tools and Java technology. Not to say that's even a bad thing (although I'm no fan of Eclipse but thats irrelevant), just that I guess I don't want to see things like Github motivated by money, when its worked so damn well without it.

What I don't want to see is programmers begging for "donations" so they can work on their project. Clearly my example was a little overblown, but if its not broken why fix it?

Thanks for the info though - as I'm sure I'm not the only one that learned from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The developer audience is small and targeted. Kickstarter woos the masses. I doubt GitHub would make much money off this idea. The bigger problem is who gets the money from backers. Projects can have multiple contributors, projects can also be forked. There is no way this system could fairly pay the right contributors without massive complexity and pissing people off.

<comment><USER6> I don't see the problem. The money goes to the owner of the repo to distribute as they see fit.

If you contribute code to an OS project, and then someone makes money from that OS project, do you feel pissed off that you didn't get a cut of that money?

If you trust people to build you free stuff, why do you suddenly not trust them to get paid for it?

edit: clarified

<comment><USER7> May I plug <https://www.gittip.com/> up here, too? Gittip lets you pay money to developers on GitHub. It's only a month old. Three weeks ago we moved $30, and last week we moved $380.

<https://www.gittip.com/about/stats.html>

Right now I'm personally grossing $65 a week on Gittip, for example.

<https://www.gittip.com/whit537/>

It's all developed as openly and transparently as possible. It's not a traditional for-profit model like GitHub.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think you make a good point, but I think it'd make a lot more sense for Github to facilitate donations to projects rather than adding a bunch of crowdfunding stuff. Id much rather donate cash to a project in development, much in the same way I can donate my time, than 'fund' it.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. Unless the funds invested returns anything against it, this wouldn't be investment but donation. I am more interested in Github to find a way out of Kickstarter to create a whole new revenue stream for them.

<comment> jack-r-abbit I'm not sure I would consider the Kickstarter crowdfunding to be "investing". I think "investor" has a certain level of formality attached to it. Investors usually get some stake or something. Most of the Kickstarters I've seen give t-shirts, stickers, access to early betas, pre-orders, etc. Giving to a Kickstarter project seems barely more than a donation. I just think of it as an incentivised donation. If GitHub was to introduce some such feature, it would probably need to have similar incentives as well (bug fixed, feature added, etc) although straight donation (or tip jar or what every you want to call it) would be possible too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Github's core offering is a hosted git solution. I'm not sure how a crowd funding add on fits into that core offering.

Like another user already said, more money doesn't necessarily mean a boost in development speed/quality. I think there is something in "Kickstarter for developers" (there are bounty based sites that work like this), but I don't believe it really fits with the product/value prop.

I still think Github's biggest potential for revenue is from the enterprise- sized to medium-sized development shops, by way of creating software collaboration tools. Git can be hosted anywhere, but there are reasons why developers like Github beyond it being a repository.

<comment><USER10> You mean like Atlassian?

<comment><USER11> The atlassian stack (in particular Fisheye) is a Github Enterprise competitor, yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They used to have automatic Pledgie integration[1] -- guess it didn't work out too well...

[1] <https://github.com/blog/57-getting-paid-the-open-source-way/>

<comment><AUTHOR> That was good but I think it wasn't tightly integrated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think this is brilliant for Open Source projects, and running an Open Source project I instinctively felt this is a great idea.

There might be issues if the project has contributions from a large number of unconnected developers (on how to split the amount), or alternatively a project getting a decent amount of funding may put off certain developers, who then might not want to contribute for "free".

On the other hand, it could become a marketplace for contractors. That would be cool. Each project could make a small proposal and invite bids from freelancers, who could all bid on github.

Yeah, lots of interesting possibilities.

</comment><comment><USER14> Something slightly different....

It would be nice if Github gave you the option of adding $1 - N$ onto your membership fee, and then distributed that between the open source projects or authors that you follow.

<comment><USER11> I think Kachingle was trying to do this for online media generally.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, and they got burned because they were staunchly opt-out. That is, they would collect money on your behalf without your permission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I had low expectations for this, but I actually like the idea. facilitating some sort of donation, fund, back, etc. income for the developers making the software could be good.

chosing whether to give to the main dev, a specific dev or equally spread that donation amongst all devs contributing to a project would make it a lot more fair too. i would use this functionality with a doubt.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. Most of the time when I am working on something and if that's a big thing to get turnaround on, I loss my level of energy that I had when I started it because there is no incentive or quick turnaround.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is already a service to give money to some github user: <https://www.gittip.com/>

<comment><USER13> That's interesting but most people don't know about it (and the sums are very small too). An integrated service would take things to a much different level much much more trust that the money actually goes to the developers.

<comment><USER7> Hey there! I'm the lead developer on Gittip. May I say a few words?

First, I think GitHub could definitely make some money doing what OP suggests.

Second, Gittip is starting with GitHub but I hope it will grow beyond GitHub.

Third, sums are growing. Gittip is a month old. We moved $30 three weeks ago and moved $380 last week. We're set to move $480 tomorrow--more if you contribute! :-)

Fourth, the pricing model is different. If GitHub were to do like Kickstarter they'd take a 10% cut. Gittip is priced to cost.

Fifth, Gittip drinks its own Kool-Aid. The people developing Gittip (i.e., me) are looking to make their living through Gittip itself, not from a 10% cut.

Sixth, Gittip is developed in the open ... on GitHub. Jump in! :D

<https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com>

<comment><USER17> I got here from the other thread posted here:<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4236756>

While I generally love the idea and think well of it, your fifth point is actually a bit of concern. I'd rather you took a small percentage and were able to maintain things.

What if you're moving hundreds of thousands of dollars a week, but are still only getting $200 and change for yourself? Will the site close? As an 'opted- in' developer, there goes my revenue stream.

I'm not saying it isn't noble, but while I can appreciate you relying on it for your revenue stream, and would love to get to a point where I could rely on it for mine, there's a confidence factor in the service that doesn't necessarily interact with either of those.

It might not mean anything to anybody else, but I'd have a hard time relying on that until I knew it wasn't going to implode, and that probably means periodically checking your number.

Another small concern I have with it are actually seeing the totals. If you get to $600 on your page, that's $2400(ish) a month. I worry that figure might discourage people -- "Oh, he's already 'rolling in it', I'll tip somebody else that needs it more." I feel like it almost looks like charity at that point.

It'll be interesting to see how things actually shake out though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The problem here is the massive assumption that if the developers of a project had more money, then that would directly relate to more time/effort being spent on the project. That's not always true.

</comment><comment><USER19> A bounty on issues would also be interesting... sometimes you have an issue you can't personally fix and isn't critical enough to get a contributors interest. $100 might get their interest though :)

<comment><USER20> Bug tracking software has played with the idea of bug bounties for many years now. However I challenge you to provide a link to a public bug tracker where these bug bounty features are successfully used.

For further reading, there exists plenty of discussion and analysis surrounding bug bounties for security vulnerabilities. Bounty rewards are typically a token gesture that don't even begin to cover the real costs of the developer/researcher. And for open source projects -- many developers are writing code for fun, as a challenge or as an experiment. Are intrinsically motivated developers going to respond positively to extrinsic motivators?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The news about GitHub raising money and this article came right at the time when I was contemplating moving to BitBucket. While comparing the latter's plans with GitHub ones I couldn't help but wonder how Atlassian is turning any profit on BitBucket (the plans seem quite cheaper, and I already wonder how GitHub turns out to be profitable)

<comment><USER22> BW is cheap, storage is cheap. They probably run filesystem that utilize dedup or/and do it in their applications storage logic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This seems predicated on GitHub needing additional revenue. I don't think their announcement signalled that at all. GitHub accepted an investment partner. My assumption is that they got excellent terms since they are very cashflow-positive, they hope to IPO one day, and they require investment-savvy advisors.

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit I could see this as a possibility but honestly that sounds like a lot of work for GitHub when there is already a means to crowdfund your project. I don't see what is stopping people from just starting their own Kickstarter project to support the project they are storing on GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER24> They could just partner with [0]flattr, that way I could also subscribe to my favorite libraries.

[0] <http://flattr.com>

<comment><USER7> Flattr supports flattring GitHub profiles, I believe via a browser extension.

[http://blog.flattr.net/2012/02/winter-update-github- tweets-e...](http://blog.flattr.net/2012/02/winter-update-github-tweets- extensions/)

<comment><USER24> I have it in the back of my head that there is a way for the site to get a small percentage of the revenue if they 'properly' integrate it. At least I think Instacast, the iOS podcasting client, used that feature.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Readsmart, organize and review your notes and highlights - <AUTHOR> https://readsmart.co/?ref=hackernews <comment><USER2> While I rarely highlight or take notes. I'd be interested in seeing other people's highlights and notes. Is that something you guys would consider putting on your roadmap - sort of a social aspect to your currently utilitarian product?

<comment><USER3> That could be fun indeed!

I personally love taking highlight to use them as quick references and to synthesise content for learning, so a good execution of this concept is really valuable for me.

From the screenshots I provided we can see highlights really lack context haha. I need to double check I highlighted the content properly or if it's somehow truncated.

I wonder if it's possible to optionally get a bit of extra context around the highlights, probably not as I doubt Amazon provides it in their "API".

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/5pj9qvwnonmyl47/Screenshot%202019-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/5pj9qvwnonmyl47/Screenshot%202019-04-25%2012.16.03.png?dl=0)

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/o6y2m3hukn2ey3h/Screenshot%202019-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/o6y2m3hukn2ey3h/Screenshot%202019-04-25%2012.18.25.png?dl=0)

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/7z639z21kiurhqr/Screenshot%202019-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/7z639z21kiurhqr/Screenshot%202019-04-25%2012.19.09.png?dl=0)

Edit: I'm definitely not highlighting properly, but now I know I need to add all the required context to my highlights.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/t4nset4jz6z80cu/Screenshot%202019-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/t4nset4jz6z80cu/Screenshot%202019-04-25%2012.25.03.png?dl=0)

<comment><USER4> Hey! That used to happen to me. Since I know now how I'm gonna use them, I highlight accordingly. In any case, as you mention, Amazon doesn't provide what's necessary to add context (copyrights). However, we can create a link (for books purchased on Amazon) to the location/page and open Kindle App to show you the highlight "in context".</comment></comment></comment>


The Silicon Valley execs who don't eat for days - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/04/silicon-valley-ceo-fasting-trend-diet-is-it-safe#img-3 <comment><USER2> I have done this for the past several years and it has helped tremendously with weight control but has vastly improved energy. The onset of the headaches is intense to say the least but stay the course as it is really worth it. And don't shoot yourself in the foot by going crazy on the days you are eating.

Be prepared for two to three miserable days when you start. You will have headaches and depending on your choice of drinks before fasting you may experience severe sugar withdrawal. If you are/we're a major carbohydrate consumer you will likely feel like you have the flu for hothouse two to three days. Just know that you can get through it and you will come out on the other side feeling so much better. Just do yourself a favor and clean out your pantry ahead of time to eliminate those items that "call to you" so that you don't feel tempted. You can't eat what is not there without making the conscious choice to go to the store to buy something.

<comment><USER3> That depends on what your normal diet is like. But, if you've been eating healthy and occasionally doing some fasting, it'll be much less of a shock to your system.

Personally, i've never got headaches from fasting. But, I do get extreme appetite, just as I normally would when i'm not fasting. Also, occasionally, I do get some sugar withdrawal systems as well, when i fast really aggressively for several days at a time.

I find the most convenient form of fasting to be the 16 hour daily fasts, which I do almost everyday. Those are very easy to execute and stick with.

<comment><USER2> This is interesting. Overall I had a pretty healthy diet prior to my start in fasting. I rarely ate things that contained sugar or no more than a very small amount, I did not drink carbonated drinks (although I drank green tea), but I LOVED CARBS. My go to snack was always Cheez It's or Chips. I did not eat more than a handful but I did that probably 2x a day. I also loved fresh fruit which is very high in carbs. To say that I felt Like I had been run over by a truck from the carb detox was an understatement. But it only last 3 days give or take but it was a miserable 3 days.

Now after years of regular fasting I have no troubles. If I overindulge during a non fasting period I pay for it with mild headaches but nothing like at the beginning. I think at the beginning i simply put my entire body a bit into shock and I was not prepared for the intensity of the headache and achiness. I stuck with it and am glad I did. Now it is very simple and works with my lifestyle really well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fasting has really worked for me. I've been doing it for nearly 2 years. Better mental clarity, better weight and less sickness. I'm doing a version of the 5:2 diet though

<comment><USER5> I've read about this and recognize the potential benefits. I want to give it a try.

1\. How does one get started ? Specifically, how do you combat the irritability and headaches at the onset ? 2\. What are some good online communities to join ? 3.What are the best practices and what should I know ?

<comment><USER6> Headaches at onset have various causes, some unavoidable (coffee withdrawal for many, carb withdrawal for most), some are (insufficient electrolytes or other nutrients).

Make sure you don't start with a vitamin deficiency, and add a little bit of salt to your drinking water.

<comment><USER7> Sodium only is insufficient and bad advice because absorption and retention of most alkali metals is competitive. A balance of potassium, sodium, calcium and traces of magnesium are essential. Playing Russia roulette with a heart-attack or an intestinal blockage is unnecessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fasting done well could be beneficial, but done ad-hoc risks gallstones, muscle damage and heart arrhythmias from insufficient alkali metals.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ketones are a superfood? That doesn't make sense to me as superfood isn't a real term.

Here's an article stating that improvement in BP, lipid decrease, and increased insulin sensitivity occurs in fasting. Not so sure about the rest of the vague claims made in the article.

[https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2...](https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2891-9-57)

<comment><USER9> Instead of picking out one food or another, I'd just like to generally highlight that the human body can use two sources of energy, carbs - glucose, or fats - ketones.

For ketosis to occur, you need to be starved of carbs and loaded with good fats. In effect, your body does turn into a fat burning machine since you literally use fat to fuel your activities and life.

The article stating improvements in various aspects of health seem to align with other studies of positive effects on our bodies upon adapting ketosis as a primary source of energy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Libin looks much better. I've been doing a lightweight 16:8 with quite good results.

(Libin before [https://www.incimages.com/uploaded_files/image/970x450/14814...](https://www.incimages.com/uploaded_files/image/970x450/148143989_PhilLibin_credit- BloombergviaGetty-pano_22909.jpg))

</comment><comment><USER11> Has anyone combined fasting with intense physical activity/exercise? I enjoy long runs and HIIT workouts, but when I've gone straight into a workout after work before dinner, I always seem to lose energy and feel horrible. Would working out during fasting make this worse?

<comment><USER12> I have done multi-day backpacking trips while just consuming water, green tea and some nuts/dried fruit once a day. I was fine. I had plenty of energy each day.

<comment><USER13> How many kilometres did you walk and how much of the trail mix did you consume each day?

<comment><USER12> I backpack about 10-12 miles (19.3 kilo). I ate about 17oz of fruit and dried nuts each day. Now, I am adding 1/2 cup of oatmeal in the morning.

I know people that backpack the same distance and they are consuming 4000-5000 calories per day!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This only really works if you sit in a chair all day. Why not just exercise instead? You can still fast, but eat once a day in the evening if your heart is set on it.

Nobody with a physical job could pull off days of fasting like this, it's totally unsustainable.

This is basically just anorexia.

</comment><comment><USER14> How would you go about adding magnesium, potassium and sodium?

<comment><USER15> I can actually speak from expertise on this! I've done fasting for the last five years (daily, eating once between 6-9PM), but this advice mostly comes from endurance road biking.

You can find "Salt-Free Salt" products in most supermarkets, typically in the spice section, it's a niche product for people on very low sodium diets. I believe the biggest brand name is "No Salt" \-- these products typically contain potassium chloride, calcium, and some magnesium salts. Because of this, they're an excellent hack for athletes, anyone operating in extremely hot weather, and anyone looking to start a fast.

To make a (more or less) isotonic solution for hydration, add one teaspoon of the potassium salt and one teaspoon of normal salt per 1L of water -- this will give you a solution with a balance of sodium, potassium, and small amounts of magnesium and calcium that's around 0.9-1.0% salinity.

Personally, I adjust my diet to include slightly more of the potassium salt.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for this info. I forgot about the No Salt and Salt trick in water from my running days, but it really does work. Thanks for this reminder because hydration is really the key to success in fasting.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Maps timeline - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/maps/timeline <comment><USER2> Is there anything open source like this?

I consider myself a strong privacy advocate but I just get so much benefit out of my Google location timeline that I cant bear to pull the plug.

It's my version of the pin up world map with everywhere I've been.

<comment><USER3> OwnTracks ([http://owntracks.org/](http://owntracks.org/)) could be a good starting point. It doesn't record your location out of the box, but there is additional software for that ([https://github.com/owntracks/recorder](https://github.com/owntracks/recorder)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Utterly useful feature for wet evenings. Can't count all the times people asked me when i left, and google map location history could back me up.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wish this had a better UI...

I want to be able to search by place...

And see a heatmap of all my travels...

And say what percentage of my time/days I was at a location...</comment>


France's Zone Rouge – A Forbidden No Man's Land Poisoned by War (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.messynessychic.com/2015/05/26/the-real-no-go-zone-of-france-a-forbidden-no-mans-land-poisoned-by-war/ <comment><USER4> I used to live in the area of the Battle of the Somme. Red zones are not common, nearly all the land of the former battlefield is now cultivated.

In fact, after the war, the red zones were quite extensive, but there was an intense lobbying to reopen these lands to agriculture.

In the 20ies, a farmer detonated an unexploded ammunition was not an uncommon occurrence.

Nowadays, this is a really rare event, I think there was a case in Belgium about 10 years ago, but it's quite uncommon.

However, when you dig, you always find something. My mother started a small garden (about 4 x 8 meters) a few years ago and when she worked the soil for the first time, she found various leftovers like shell heads, shell fragments, bullets, lead spheres used in shrapnel rounds, etc.

And it's not uncommon to find unexploded shells on the side of the roads, farmers when they find them, put them on the side of their fields.

When my mother was a child in the 50ies and 60ies, she used to help her parents collect these various metal fragments as it was a way to get a small additional revenue for the family. When we cleaned-up my late grand-father's house, there were buckets full of those in fact. There was also an unpinned unexploded grenade by the way. If I recall correctly, they called the local "garde champetre" to deal with it, and it's still in his attributions to deal with such finds.

However, there are some big ammunition depots in north of France with all these WWI shells collected over the years. And a lot of those shells are still not neutralized.

Also, another interesting side effect is all the cemeteries in the area, the land is literally peppered with them. And these cemeteries are UK territories (In fact the Thiepval monument is one of the highest structure on UK soil and in continental Europe). This was actually a blocker for a nearby city (Albert) when they tried to extend their airport, they were blocked by these cemeteries.

<comment><USER5> > However, when you dig, you always find something.

This seems to be something that some British tourists like to do. At Paris Gare du Nord where you board the Eurostar train to London there are signs saying that _you are not allowed to bring explosives that you dug up as souvenirs on board a fricking train_.

> In fact the Thiepval monument is one of the highest structure on UK soil and > in continental Europe

What do you mean? Highest in what sense? According to Wikipedia it's 43 meters high, which isn't a lot, so that cannot be what you mean.

<comment><USER4> Yes, that doesn't surprise me that much. Also, there is a tourism industry that has developed around the years. There are a lot of decedents of WWI soldiers coming to see where their ((great-)great)-grand father fought/died 100 years ago, we see people from Australia, New-Zealand, Canada, the UK.

As for the Thiepval monument, I meant one of the tallest building on sovereign UK soil, but outside the British Isles. However, I've heard in a casual conversation, I'm not sure it's actually true. Yet, it's definitely a big memorial monument ^^, you can see it from miles away.

<comment><USER5> Ah, OK. _Both_ on UK soil _and_ in continental Europe, I see. Yes, that's quite possible, since other than that there's only Gibraltar, I think.

(Though, off-topically, I don't necessarily buy the "UK soil" part. Supposedly even the "embassies are foreign soil" thing is more of an urban legend than legal reality. Also, the monument being the _property_ of the UK should be enough to block its destruction.)

<comment><USER6> > Supposedly even the "embassies are foreign soil" thing is more of an urban > legend than legal reality.

It depends on what you mean by "foreign soil." Embassies are extraterritorial --as the name implies, it does not represent a claim on land, but the laws of the diplomat's country, not the host country, generally apply. This difference is sometimes crucial: being born in an embassy would not give you jus soli citizenship and GWB set up the terrorist prison in Guantanamo Bay to try to ensure that the Constitution wouldn't apply (since Guantanamo Bay isn't US soil, it's a base leased to the US by Cuba).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's something very sci-fi seeming about the idea of a huge battlefield from a long-ago war, still too contaminated with old poisons and weaponry to safely enter. Which nature has mostly reclaimed, except in dead zones so toxic that not even plants can grow there.

And yet, this is a real thing that happened, and is a part of our past. A generation who very soon will only be ancestors the living participated in battles so destructive that they did this to the land they were fought on. I find that difficult to fathom.

Of course, humans have only gotten better at killing each other since, and WW2 was more destructive overall. But the static nature of the Western front, combined with the unrestrained use of artillery and gas, and the total commitment of manpower on both sides in places like Verdun, gave its battles an apocalyptic intensity that I think is unmatched in any war before or since. And that, hopefully, we won't ever see again.

<comment><USER8> It's just not WWI, there are minefields all over the world that still kill people that wander into them.

The only reason WW2 had more combat casualties than WWI is that the USSR decided to defend their country with a meat wall of unprepared soldiers. That generation of Russians had like an 80% casualty rate or something crazy like that. Nearly wiped out an entire generation.

<comment><USER9> Let me correct that phrase: One of the main reasons WW2 _ended_ , was because the Russians defended their country fiercely with their lives, and because the communism establishment industrialized Russia enough to produce war munitions and equipment. I hate to see people injecting anti-communist bullshit everywhere, even when it's irrelevant.

The Russians, and the people of the USSR, like all the allied forces, died heroically in the battlefield fighting fascists. Calling them a "meat wall" really fucking grinds my gears as it's extremely insulting and derogatory to the dead.

<comment><USER10> > communism establishment industrialized Russia enough to produce war > munitions and equipment

They lost most of the munitions and equipment in first _months_ of war, and lost half of the factories as well.

So they had to rely on lend-lease from much-hated capitalists.

And yes, human waves (if you don't like other term) and general disregard for human lives were common in Soviet tactics. That's the reason for staggering losses (they still cannot get their number right, now there are talks that USSR losses were 2x higher, i.e. ~40 millions).

<comment><USER11> I'm sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about. Please read some actual historians work concerning the Eastern Front like Glantz or Zaloga before spewing pop history nonsense.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, definitely no idea. Several years spent researching into WW2 history - and all are for nothing.

Thank you, good sir, I will drink myself out.

But before I indulge myself into drowning myself in beer, can you please elaborate, where you'd saw a 'pop history nonsense'?

<comment><USER11> > Several years spent researching into WW2 history - and all are for nothing.

Well, I don't know where you did, but you shild ask for a refund if that's what you got on the Eastern Front after several years.

> where you'd saw a 'pop history nonsense'?

> They lost most of the munitions and equipment in first _months_ of war, and > lost half of the factories as well.

Indeed, they lost a lot of (mostly obsolete) equipment, but still were able to out produce the Germans from 1942 on in most areas.

> and lost half of the factories as well.

And still had enough to bring back to the Urals (as well as pre-established ones) to keep war industry running.

> And yes, human waves (if you don't like other term) and general disregard > for human lives were common in Soviet tactics.

Yah, that's German propaganda for you man. They were

> That's the reason for staggering losses

Absolutely nothing to do with the litteral extermination of Soviet PoW by the Germans (more than 3M deaths).

> now there are talks that USSR losses were 2x higher, i.e. ~40 millions

Is unsourced rumor that literally more than one out of 5 Soviet citizen died in the war really worth to mention?

> human waves were common in Soviet tactics

Please let me show you some orders directly from Zhukov:

The commanders of the divisions are personally at fault for the 49th Army's failure to accomplish its objectives and for its heavy casualties. __They still grossly violate the instructions of Comrade Stalin and the order of the Front regarding the use of massed artillery to achieve a breakthrough __, and about the tactics and techniques of attacking the defenses of populated areas. The units of the 49th Army for many days criminally continue their head-on attacks on Kostino, Ostrozhnoye, Bogdanovo and Potapovo without any success, while suffering heavy losses.

Even a person with basic military education can understand that these settlements are very suitable defensive positions. The areas in front of these settlements are ideal for firing upon, but despite this the criminally conducted attacks continue in the same places. As a result of the stupidity and indiscipline of the organizers, people pay with their lives, without bringing any benefit to the Motherland.

If you still want to keep your current ranks, I demand:

Immediately __stop the criminal head-on attacks on the settlements. Stop the head-on attacks on heights with good firing positions __. When attacking make full use of ravines, forests and terrain that is not easily fired upon. Immediately breakthrough between the settlements and, without waiting for their complete fall, tomorrow capture Sloboda, Rassvet and advance up to Levshina. Report the execution of the order to me by 24:00 of 27 January.

Yes, there were stupid head-on attacks from inexperienced and/or incompetent officers. No, they were not "common Soviet tactics".

<comment><USER10> > Is unsourced rumor that literally more than one out of 5 Soviet citizen died > in the war really worth to mention?

Are you aware of their reluctancy to show true numbers? In 1946 they've declared the number of losses as 7 millions. 15 years later - 20 millions. 40 years later - 27 millions.

Now, 70 years later, they're talking about 40 millions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've just been listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast and it's amazing. I'm listening to Blueprint for Armageddon, which is a 6 part series (3+ hours each!) About the First Works War and it's fascinating and horrifying.

He speaks at length about the Battle of Verdun. And it toss house list of places and battles he's never want to be at.

<comment><USER13> It's the best. I love Dan Carlin.

<comment><USER14> I was a late Carlin convert. For anyone on the fence, give it a shot - <USER2> material in Blueprint is rarely over the top, it never feels unduly expanded, etc. He shows it respect, but you can feel his passion for the subject and he makes every detail interesting.

I also enjoyed Celtic Holocaust, which is a more approachable length.

<comment><USER15> I have one of his Blueprint for Armageddon episodes a try and couldn't get through it. Seemed very long winded and too much literary flourish.

Maybe I picked a wrong episode or need to give it another try.

<comment><USER16> He does get long winded at times, but it's worth sticking with it. There's a lot of detail in there that is often lost in <hour long documentaries, including a fair bit of comparison to modern times. The first episode, where he discusses the importance of Gavrilo Princip and how his actions depends on the eye of the beholder is particularly enlightening. There are some comparisons to the Kennedy assasination which can feel like a stretch at times, but definitely thought provoking.

I think if you come into the series believing you'll hear a straight up factual recount of events without bias, you'll be disappointed. It's more of a discussion (albeit in monologue form) than documentary. That said I find he treads the topic very carefully, trying hard to present the case in different lights – I think this might be why it's a bit long winded at times. At the same time, this is what gives it color in my opinion. He's also a very good narrator I feel.

I wouldn't base a history paper off of these episodes, but I'd be comfortable in using them as a starting point for deeper dives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They say that a photo is worth a thousand words. This is certainly the case with the the last few photos of the landscape how it looked before and after.

Likewise Black Adder series concluded with a similar visual contrast: [https://youtu.be/vH3-Gt7mgyM?t=176](https://youtu.be/vH3-Gt7mgyM?t=176)

<comment><USER18> Thanks for that

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's important to keep in mind most of those zones are not a No Man's land anymore. I often go around Lens, Béthune and Arras (family live in that area), and never heard about or seen anything like pictured in the article, except in museums.

People live there, there are farms everywhere, and many, many small cities and villages.

Some forbidden areas might still exists, and I wouldn't be surprised about people finding relics of the war (bunkers ruins are a common sight on the nearby beaches for example), but it's nowhere near as pictured on the map.

<comment><USER20> You can't see soil contamination though. The visible scars are the least of the problems.

> _Until the mid 1970s, much of the "clean-up" was only done superficially, > destroying hundreds of thousands of unexplored WWI chemical bombs without > considering the leaks and contamination to the soil and water._

> _Alarming amounts of lead debris scattered by shrapnel were also left in > place, contaminating the soil with non biodegradable lead, mercury and zinc > likely to remain for at least 10,000 years to come._

In addition, you don't get obviously sick from heavy metals such as mercury or lead unless it's a large enough amount to result in acute poisoning symptoms. It has an effect in the tiniest amounts though, and it bio-accumulates.

<comment><USER19> I can see land is actively used for farming, which means it's probably not contamined anymore.

I never saw any of the "forbidden" signs anywhere on the other hand.

Which doesn't mean it's not a thing, I don't pretend to know all the area, it just means it's small enough in size and in remote areas, so that a local don't stumble upon this anymore.

<comment><USER20> > _I can see land is actively used for farming, which means it 's probably not > contamined anymore._

Given my own experience as someone who had a (lab test proven) chronic heavy metal poisoning and what my (university researcher) doctor told me, but also what I know from the history of lead until and even after it got banned from gasoline, your assumption that people (officials) care is probably unwarranted.

What cannot be seen, and what does not have any immediately recognizable and attributable effects, but on the other hand causes large costs, is usually dismissed by most people, and pointing it out is "irrational" and "fear mongering". There are people who want to go back to Chernobyl, only recently (on HN?) there was an article about young people illegally going there, claiming there is no problem. That's individuals - the incentive is even higher for officials not impacted by any negative effects, but who are impacted when they "hinder the economy with useless regulations".

> _a local don 't stumble upon this anymore._

A local won't notice. Not even if they themselves slowly get poisoned by small trace amounts. From experience, you cannot tell the effects of low-dose chronic heavy metal poisoning from thousands of other little problems _(unless you take chelators for long periods to see if they change anything; but they themselves don 't do all that much since they only work in extracellular space, but much or most of the poison is stored inside cells in chronic poisoning)_. Eye sight suffers? RSI symptoms? Dry eyes? Occasional muscle cramps here and there? Bowel problems? Skin issues (e.g. psoriasis, etc.)? Easily stressed? Occasionally slightly aggressive for no apparent reason? It is _subtle_ , and every single symptom can be attributed to "age", "stress", "that's normal" ("everybody has problems"). As I said, you don't get recognizably sick in any traditional sense. In addition, even if a doctor knows about the problem and would be willing to diagnose it, it actually is impossible on an individual basis since you cannot reliably measure body burden unless you cut pieces off of organs and send them to a lab. Alternatively, one can try chelation for very long periods (6-12 months at least) and see if that helps with anything. All very impractical.

So, since it's impossible to reliably recognize (on an individual basis - <USER3> would require population statistics, large samples), nothing happens. See the lead discussions that came up after Flint, when it was in the news that there were a lot more places than Flint with lead problems. It's all out of the news again by now - guess what is going to happen with all those places.... I'd say nothing at all.

For perspective, in the German state of Bavaria there still is an active alert for radioactive wild boar caused by Chernobyl fallout, which I would think was a lot less than what happened in the trenches of WWI (scale, yes I know, one is about radioactivity, the other one about "only" heavy metals and chemical poisons): [http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/a-quarter- cent...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/a-quarter-century- after-chernobyl-radioactive-boar-on-the-rise-in-germany-a-709345.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "German researchers found extremely dangerous levels of up to 17% arsenic in the soil"

That seems too high to be true. The page doesn't give the source, but I wonder if something like bioavailability got misinterpreted as composition.

<comment><USER22> Wikipedia ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge)) states that "as arsenic can constitute up to 17% of some soil samples" and references "Bausinger, Bonnaire, and Preuß, 2007".

I found this study ([https://hal-insu.archives- ouvertes.fr/insu-01267232/document](https://hal-insu.archives- ouvertes.fr/insu-01267232/document)) but I am afraid I don't know how to read the results.

I assume that 17% is the absolute maximum proportion of arsenic ever found in a single small sample.

<comment><USER5> I don't really know how to read this either, but the number 17 as such does not appear anywhere in that paper. This quote may be relevant: "Concentrations of As vary between 72,820 and 1,937 mg/kg" (page 13).

These commas appear to be thousands separators, so that's a maximum of 73 grams per kilogram or 7% per mass of a soil sample. I'm not a doctor, but I would advise against eating significant amounts of these soil samples.

<comment><USER23> I'm not a doctor either, but I would advise against eating soil altogether.

<comment><USER24> Eh, it's good for building up the immune system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Related: there are zones off the coast of Belgium and France that have been used as ammunition dumps after the 1st world war. There's one such zone ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paardenmarkt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paardenmarkt)) that is close to a very busy shipping route and whose existence was forgotten until the 70s, when people realized that they had 10000 tons of unexploded chemical ammunition lying around just off the coast. In practice there's a thick mud layer on top of the dumped ammo which keeps things stable, but if e.g. a ship were to get stranded, this could cause extensive environmental damage...

</comment><comment><USER26> Swedish historian Peter Englund, writing about French and Belgian WW1 front- zones in the early nineties, claimed that the risk of tetanus-poisoning was still highly elevated if you happened to cut yourself in such a place, and that in damp weather the smell of rot decay was still discernible.

I always found that hard to credit, but the man is otherwise always sober in reporting, so perhaps not.

<comment><USER16> I'd imagine the smell of decay is taking creative liberties with the truth. Any damp forest will have a certain smell of decay to it, more likely due to the fungus and rotting wood, than the smell of rotting bodies. That said, I'm sure being in the area will amplify this, given the gravitas of the event. I visited Normandy a couple of years ago and seeing the beaches, the American cemetery, the bunkers... it was like a punch to the gut. I'd imagine going to Verdun or Somme has a similar effect, even if you're only slightly aware of history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Discussed in 2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9609091](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9609091).

</comment><comment><USER28> In all of Eastern Russia, finding shell fragments, bullets, bayonets, helmets, and human bones is quite common to this day. Almost every place was an area of fighting of executions at some point in the last 100 years.

Countless millions of people were killed - not known even to the million precision - in many wars and terror campaigns there during XX century.

</comment><comment><USER29> Verdun and the 30 years war are to me symbols of what happens if you follow people greedy people with an inflated ego.

In each case, there's were lot of red lines that threatened the "country's honour" (read: the governments credibility), quite a few powerful factions that were to gain of a war and somehow , partly with the help of those factions and those read lines, it all spiraled out of control.

Not unlike what we see today with US (or NATO) vs Russia/Iran/Syria/NK and China to a somewhat lesser extent.

</comment><comment><USER30> >Pictured above is an artist's impression of the forsaken territory, originally covering more than 1,200 square kilometres (460 sq miles) in the years following the Great War.

Yea, no, that's S.T.A.L.K.E.R. concept art.

<comment><USER31> The original appears to be a piece called "Fog" by Mac Rebisz:

[https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Dxk4E](https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Dxk4E)

It's been commonly used in web pieces about the Zone Rouge, but there doesn't appear to be any real connection. (And some of the details of the piece make no sense in that context, like the unburied corpse in the foreground or the heavily armed figure on the left side.)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Index – Organize Everything - <AUTHOR> https://indexapp.com <comment><USER2> The idea seems good, and congrats on the launch!

However, after you've worked so hard on this, it seems silly not to put more effort on the website: the description of the app is minimal, and you don't even have screenshots.

By spending 1 day on the site you could probably reap double the results of the previous 60 days of work.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's important advice- I'll take it to heart. It's really hard to change the dev schedule (with 3 guys supporting 6 clients until funding closes), but I totally agree and will elevate the threat level on web landing.

<comment><USER2> Btw investors are also going to check your website, and even though they'd try to stay objective and focus on core (team, idea, market blah blah) the appearance of website will have at least subconscious effect on their image about your company, and thus on the valuation.

In that way "investing" bit more on your website may increase the investment on your company.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see your point. Will address this asap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hiii!

I just released a fledgling 1.0 of Index- a personal productivity platform that gives you a dashboard for the world of digital content.

You use browser and mobile share extensions to save and #tag anything from anywhere. Then you can use the web, mobile, or desktop clients to search, rearrange, and share the content you've saved. You can also use (and develop!) /commands to access and manipulate external services. The idea is its an evil genius control panel, but for nice people.

More about the build: This is 3 people (and a part time contractor)'s work over 2 months in preparation for launch at Disrupt. Was the most physically and emotionally damaging thing I've done in my life, but also the most rewarding. Truly. If you're curious about tech, from back to front: MongoDB, Redis, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Node microservices wrapped in Docker, Swift, Java, React/Redux and Electron on the clients. Tons of services providers for management- love paying subscriptions for my problems to be someone else's job.

Worked as an engineer in popular startups my whole adult life while collecting knowledge, but I'm a first time CEO (CTO too I guess..?). Still feels funny to say. We've been bootstrapped off contract income from my previous agency (and my former savings account) and have been approached by enough investors that taking a seed round and putting 110% of our time into Index could be a wise decision.

I will treasure any advice from people who have been here before, or have feedback about the company and product. Thanks for looking.

<comment><USER3> all the best man, downloading it now will give it a spin

<comment><AUTHOR> Very kind of you. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why is it necessary to download the mobile app and register with it just to test drive the web app?

You lost me there.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like the idea, but I would prefer not to share all this information and instead store an encrypted index, that I can e.g. put in a dropbox.

<comment><AUTHOR> And if we encrypted all your stored data reset, you'd be interested? Its something we want to do later this year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why is this on Show, as opposed to being in Show New? Can anyone shed some light or point me to external resources about this? Thanks!

<comment><USER2> Actually it's on both.

The 'show' has recent top submissions, selected and sorted by ranking algorithm [1], and 'show new' has all recent submissions, sorted in reverse chronological order.

[1] [https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-hacker-news- ranking...](https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-hacker-news-ranking- algorithm-works-1d9b0cf2c08d)</comment></comment>


Craigslist sales of cocaine and stolen passports exposed - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-41652346/craigslist-sales-of-cocaine-and-stolen-passports-exposed <comment><USER2> for whatever reason, the editing style and matter-of-fact manner of how the questions were posed are hilarious to me, _especially_ because of the "omg my mother's gonna kill me"</comment>


Show HN: Web app to join multiple photos together - <AUTHOR> http://www.photojoiner.net/

<comment><USER2> Neat.

Your profile does not read your email. I like to talk with you more. ;)</comment>


How We Really Tamed the Dog (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/how-we-really-tamed-the-dog <comment><USER2> I would _love_ to have a pet fox. I can't imagine the legal hurdles of getting one or two, but man would it be cool!</comment>


How Blind People 'See' the iPhone with Their Fingers - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/david-pogue-on-iphone-voiceover-163733668.html <comment><USER2> Losing my sight has always been one of my biggest fears. Reading this made that (slightly) less scary. It's amazing to see the progress we've made in accessibility as a society in the last decade alone!

<comment><USER3> Apple's accessibility in particular is really good. I played around with switch control(a single binary input) on my Mac a while ago and was blown away by how easy it is to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Happy to know Accessibility is seen as a serious feature. I just hope more apps make use of the accessibility APi</comment>


Fixing your own laptop, and the importance of do-it-yourself to society - <AUTHOR> http://justindunham.net/2012/08/fixing-your-own-laptop-and-the-importance-of-do-it-yourself-to-society/ <comment><USER2> For those that have never experienced it, you should try Lenovo Thinkpads some day. On the underside every screw has a little pictogram so you can easily tell which ones are needed to remove the keyboard versus the hard drive for example.

You can enter a system's serial number at [http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/product-and- parts/partsLooku...](http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/product-and- parts/partsLookup.page) and it will tell you exactly which parts went into it. For example some systems may have exactly the same model number, but some are made with LG panels and some with Samsung. This will tell you exactly.

Then they have hardware maintenance manuals at [http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/guides-and- manuals/detail.pa...](http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/guides-and- manuals/detail.page?LegacyDocID=MIGR-39298) which show you exactly how to take the laptop apart and change/repair parts.

IMHO they have done an excellent job. They even design the keyboard and system so that fluid on the keyboard drains out the bottom. (Note it isn't waterproof, just a good effort to ensure a minor spill doesn't destroy the machine.) One example video is at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7cvi00OZDM>

And the proof is in the pudding - a friend who managed to break one of her hinges was able to lookup the exact part, order it, take the machine apart and replace the hinge and put it all back together without any difficulties or guesswork.

<comment><USER3> ThinkPads regularly obsolete before they get broken beyond reasonable repair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fixing laptops is all good and yes, i too think you should take broken things apart and at least try to repair them and i do it regularly..

Opening the very 17" MacBook Pro i'm writing this comment from has been a satisfying experience when i've replaced my harddisk - it's really beautiful and well-designed from the inside.

However, that whole fix-something-yourself-when-it's-broken may very well become a thing of the past - especially with MacBooks which always prided themselves of being upgradeable and even mentioning the needed steps in the manuals.

You just won't have that opportunity with the new Retina one as most of its internals are directly soldered to the logicboard :(

I sincerely hope that this trend won't continue with newer models.

</comment><comment><USER5> "One wonderful thing about do-it-yourself, as a movement, is that it is a powerful way of creating more skilled technicians..."

The DIY "movement" actually existed since at least the beginning of the "radio movement" back in the late 1800s. Not until about the mid-1980s did it start to wane (as disposable lighters and more complex car engines and electronics packages with oddball fasteners came into fashion, and Japanese electronics displaced US-made). Check back into the early years of PC computing (before IBM introduced the PC and emphasis shifted to business) and you'll find a vital and extensive DIY "computer movement" existed. (Read Kilobyte and Byte magazines.)

This may be one benefit of the financial raping of USA ... the (partial, at- least) rebirth of the realization that it's not rocket science, and the satisfactions of DIY electronics far outweigh the conveniences of box stores.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've repaired quite a few laptops. I was lucky to have inherited a stack of older Dell Latitudes from work when our kids were younger, so I got rather good at swapping parts to keep the best ones running. Besides swapping keyboards and screens, I've even soldered replacement power connectors on two laptop motherboards and re-worked a Nintendo DS with a broken case and upper screen cable. After most of those jobs I've said, "never again" as they've rarely made financial sense after I figure the parts and time spent. But it is a neat feeling of accomplishment.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm sure you do your own plumbing when your pipes have problems and fix your car when it breaks down. You probably even blow your own glass to repair a broken window, right?

Specialization is good, it helps society move forward, don't fight it.

<comment><USER8> You can save a lot of money by fixing a leaky drain pipe with $5 worth of epoxy instead of calling a plumber for $200.

Besides, being able to fix something yourself gives you a sense of satisfaction that you just can't get from paying someone to do it.

<comment><USER9> To me, the most valuable resource is time. Sure, the epoxy might be only 5 dollars, but it might take me half a day of valuable weekend time to fix the problem correctly. Or, I could have had paid the plumber and used that same time to doing something more education/interesting.

<comment><USER10> Yes, time is valuable. Changing wheels and doing basic maintanance to your car by yourself is not only cheaper but way quicker, so better do it yourself.

<comment><USER9> No way can you change your own oil faster than one of those drive through places. Just going to the store to buy oil and a filter is going to take longer than driving through.

<comment><USER10> The case of changing oil is that you need a place to utilize it (workshops have a license for that), because you won't drain it to the sewers, will you? So, changing oil yourself is quite pointless.

<comment><USER11> Not sure where you live but auto part stores in the US accept used oils for recycling free of charge.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Understanding Moore's Law - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/moore.ars

<comment><USER2> I've found this discussion regarding Moore's law even more insightful:

<http://tinyurl.com/4gke7c>

in that it talks about the differing formulations of the law over the years.</comment>


"When you have enough data, sometimes, you don't have to be too clever" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.strafenet.com/2011/12/17/when-you-have-enough-data-sometimes-you-dont-have-to-be-too-clever/

<comment><USER2> When data is easy to collect, someone will ask you to collect it and someone else will query the data and compile a report with _percentages_ in it. Then someone else will worry about some of the _percentages_ being less or more than some _benchmark_. Then your work life will become less happy.

Example 1: Some years ago, I had to sit through a meeting where a committee worried about a _2% drop_ in satisfaction scores on a student questionnaire. No-one checked how many replies were involved (around 400, so it worked out to about 6 people less in the second year than the first as the ratings were something like 75%).

Example 2: I recently had to add comments in a record system about students whose attendance _percentage_ had dropped below 90%. That was 8 weeks into the course...

</comment><comment><USER3> Sometimes I get the feeling that when we had less data, we were forced to think harder and more daringly. I feel we lack new groundbreaking theoretical framework because of this.

I don't know if Newton's law's would jump out of the paper if you simply threw a ball at one million different vectors.

<comment><USER4> On the other hand, a lot of new research (including possibly ground-breaking theoretical results) are only possible now that we have access to large data.

We might be initially processing the large data using relatively simple techniques, but on the reduced data, we can now run more sophisticated methods that actually work because the underlying data comes from a huge number of samples.

As but one example, in computer vision, the concept of "attributes" -- automatically labeling objects using descriptive words instead of categorical ones, i.e., "this thing is _like_..." rather than "this thing _is_..." -- has opened the door to a number of exciting advances. One is the concept of "zero- shot learning": automatically recognizing an object that you've _never seen an instance of before_ simply via a description. For example, one could recognize beavers as "small, four-legged furry rodents with big teeth and a flat tail", without having ever seen a beaver before. The training data for this classifier need not include beavers, but only images which match the individual attributes, not necessarily all in the same image -- small, four- legged, furry, rodent, big teeth, flat tail.

This kind of thing was not really possible before, because there just wasn't enough data to train reliable classifiers for each attribute in any kind of automated way.

Finally, as I alluded to at the beginning, these individual attribute classifiers are often relatively simple algorithms, such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs). Yet, the 2nd-stage algorithms that use the attribute values to do something useful, such as the zero-shot learning application described above, are often much more involved/advanced techniques.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is pretty much the same conclusion Ilya Grigorik (founder of postrank, which was recently bought by Google) came to: <http://vimeo.com/22513786>

</comment><comment><USER6> Naive Bayes: the "good enough" classifier.

</comment><comment><USER7> Looking at the video, you could interpret his statement two ways. Either, the headline - _"When you have enough data, sometimes, you don't have to be too clever"_ OR the sort-of-opposite - _"AI has made so little progress that we don't anything much better than naive Bayes"_

<comment><USER4> I'd say both are somewhat true.

A lot of early "progress" in AI was found to not survive contact with the real world -- for example, most of computer vision. This was because collecting data was so expensive/difficult that only a few images could be captured for many experiments, and the methods they came up with often worked okay for those examples, _but nothing else_! So a lot of clever-seeming algorithms end up being rather useless in the real world, and progress was illusionary.

I find that in computer vision (my area of research), a fundamental component of many disparate problems is that you are trying to interpolate or extrapolate data in a very complicated underlying space, where linear approximations are completely unusable and optimization is too unconstrained. The key is to come up with suitable regularizers that can use prior information to constrain the problem appropriately.

Getting more data thus helps in two ways:

1\. It reduces the amount of interpolation you have to do, since you can get a denser sampling of the space.

2\. It allows you up to build up these priors using real data, making interpolation much better.</comment></comment>


Respect the Power of Perl - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dropfen/just-respect-perl-7421a83f3dc6 <comment><USER2> Why not use sed or awk?

<comment><USER3> you are right, sed or awk are good and would do that nicely

The advantage of Perl is investing a little time in learing some (not all) Perl 5 (not Perl 3 or 4, those are only a bit better than BASH + sed + awk) allows you to do a lot more than you can with BASH + sed + awk.</comment></comment>


Just the personal development links from Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://tinyletter.com/personaldevelopmenthacker <comment><AUTHOR> Author here, giving this one more shot:

Curated personal development articles from Hacker News every week.

First issue is here: [http://tinyletter.com/personaldevelopmenthacker/letters/pers...](http://tinyletter.com/personaldevelopmenthacker/letters/personal- development-hacker-1)

Back story: for over 10 years now I've been reading HN with a certain pattern: I ignore over 90% of the tech / startup / silicon valley stuff and mostly focus on the personal development articles (learning, focus, productivity, health) and also lifestyle business articles (indie hackers, solo founders)

Every week I'll dig up the best links and comments on:

\- productivity, personal development & inspiration

\- small/lifestyle businesses / one man shows

\- side projects

\- some articles on family life or parenting

\- occasional tech articles when they relate to the above

I'll do my best to avoid:

\- political news

\- bitcoin, uber, tesla or other tech giant news

\- latest js frameworks, most tech links

\- startup / VC oriented pieces

To my knowledge there's no place to read just those articles and I know it would save me lots of time digging thorough HN. I'd like to know if this is something the community is wants, so I'm open to all feedback</comment>


Show HN: **vbuild** let you use python components in vuejs app - <AUTHOR> vbuild (https://github.com/manatlan/vbuild) is a webpacker in pure python(2|3); which let you compile yours vue/sfc files components for your vuejs app (without a NodeJS stack !!) ... is now able to compile Python Components (https://github.com/manatlan/vbuild/blob/master/doc/PyCompone...) too.
On pypi/vbuild: https://pypi.org/project/vbuild/ <comment><USER2> so does this compile python into js using webassembly?

<comment><USER3> After briefly reading the source it transpiles python to js, but specifically for vue components. Look at lines ~330 in vbuild.py.</comment></comment>


How to Interpret Site Performance Tests - <AUTHOR> https://fly.io/articles/how-to-understand-performance-tests/ <comment><USER2> Amazing how many e-commerce sites there are out there with time to first byte in excess of 3s, DOM loads over five seconds, as if they have no idea they are throwing away sales and killing their SERP ranks. And the fixes quite often don't require money or that much skill, just a little help from something like Varnish in many cases.

Is the only good way for me to use QUIC with NGINX (or any server that can deliver most of what NGINX does) to use GoQuic and quick-reverse-proxy from github? I realize that, I assume due to the protocol being quite different and using UDP, that it may require a lot of from-scratch retooling by the NGINX devs to light it up (otherwise we'd have had it from them long ago, I imagine), but we need to cut down on round trips baby. Would be nice if Google were to give [https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/net/tools/quic/](https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/net/tools/quic/) an update with a happy .deb to get it running. Kind of a funny page for google not to serve with quic, guess they like a little irony.

Further parenthetically, I am all in favor of Google making the web better both with things like protocol development, pagespeed, image and video things, and also with search signals that give sites with https and speed a ranking boost. Money talks.

<comment><USER3> Also, a note on QUIC. Seems like the spec is a draft and is not going anywhere right now, but Google has made big progress with TCP BBR control-flow algo, and there's also TCP Fast Open and TLS 1.3 0-RTT to look forward to.

Moving more delivery (not just static content) to edges + using HTTP/2+Push should help a lot with perf, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm surprised to see webpagetest.org left out of the list of suggested tools.

<comment><USER5> Also these:

[http://yellowlab.tools/](http://yellowlab.tools/)

[https://varvy.com/pagespeed/](https://varvy.com/pagespeed/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> See also _The Difference Between GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Tools and WebPagetest_

[https://gtmetrix.com/blog/the-difference-between-gtmetrix- pa...](https://gtmetrix.com/blog/the-difference-between-gtmetrix-pagespeed- insights-pingdom-tools-and-webpagetest/)

</comment><comment><USER6> It's fascinating that even 10 years after many people speaking about the importance of RUM when measuring performance, the majority of articles these days completely ignore the existence of RUM.

<comment><USER7> > RUM

Real User Monitoring (for those who don't know the acronym)

<comment><USER2> Any particular recommendations for doing this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Which is more beneficial in today's web: Serving static contents from a cookieless domain but two dns lookups vs. all contents from same domain, but one dns lookup?

<comment><USER3> I think there's no straightforward answer to this. E.g. why would you have 2 DNS look-ups with cookieless domain? I imagine that means cdn.mydomain.com and mydomain.com?

If you're using HTTP/2, then one domain is better, because you can use the same persistent connection to multiplex your traffic. Well, technically, if you use the same IP and SSL cert then you can HTTP/2 Push the contents to the client (doesn't have to be the same domain).

However if your web server is slow or if the distance between the client and your web server is significant then you're likely not going to benefit from the performance gains of using one connection, because of the network propagation delay (vs low latency POPs from major CDNs).

Lastly, your static assets don't have to be on a cookieless domains, you can just strip the cookies and cache the content - that's what many varnish instances do ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing not explicitly mentioned here is what happens to your performance profile under load. You can have a well-designed app with solid, maintainable code, but your overall stack isn't set up to handle simultaneous users. Whether it's node, ruby, python, or php, you still have to consider things like your web server, reverse proxy, load balancer, and database configurations.

When I'm building things that are going to have heavy use I run regular tests at each level with the very simple Loads package in Python. I want to know the answer to the following question as each layer gets added in: what's the maximum number of requests I can handle before a complete page load gets above 50ms? 100ms? 500ms?

I start with no database. Just pure application code with hard coded values. That gives me the practical maximum for the code as written. Is it good enough for the expected use?

Add the database and test again. How much does that hurt? Are we still in good shape? Or do we need to optimize?

Add your reverse proxy in what you expect your production settings to be (i.e. serve your static assets through nginx and not through your application's framework for static assets)

How are we doing now? Often times you'll need to do some tweaking at this stage. I run multiple instances of my Python apps on each box. Usually one per core and reverse proxy them to nginx via a socket instead of the http default, so I have to load balance them. In the simplest case you can use an iptables set up to round robin every new connection, but that's really pretty hacky.

In the real world, I use haproxy because the open source version has sophisticated load balancing tools and health checks, both of which are limited in the free version of nginx. So get that configured and turn it loose and test again. You should see _better_ performance than in your last run because you have more resources. But you're probably going to have to do some tweaking here as well.

Etc., etc. until you've tested your entire delivery stack. Also, _test with TLS enabled before you launch into prod_ it adds overhead to each request. Don't get caught flat-footed when your real-world numbers don't live up to your benchmarks and your product manager wants to know why.

Loads is a pretty blunt tool though. It gives you an early insight in to the max performance you're going to be able to get, and it alerts you when one of your layers have caused a significant decrease in performance or not increased as much as expected.

The tools in the article are good for drilling down into where you need to look when something does go awry. But even when you use all of them and do edge testing on your CDN and all that, if you only start doing speed and load tests after your build is done, it's too late.

You have to speed test and load benchmark early and often, so you know what to expect and you know where to probe if things come up short of expectations (and they will).

It's a good explanation of what various tools and resources mean, but it's only part of what you need to be doing to make sure your app actually performs the way you want it to in the real world.

This is a good reminder to me that that I want to start hitting the pagespeed site earlier in the dev process. I haven't traditionally cared all that much because when my junk is loading in 50ms or less, I kind of don't care. But I'm probably leaving some performance on the table by ignoring that until late in the process.

It's also a reminder that I need to clean some things up and create a github repo with all of this laid out and some starting configurations for a real deployment scenario for each part of the stack. I'll do a show HN if I ever get around to this.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you that the earlier you can catch those performance issues, the better. It's just like with catching bugs early in your development cycle. You could even argue that poor perf is a bug!

The more you know about the performance characteristics of your stack, the better, but given how many 3rd party services you might be using in production it might be close to impossible to predict that. Either way, you should be constantly monitoring the performance of your applications (backends, DBs, browser timings, RUM, cross-stack traces etc.) .

Looking forward to your Show HN on monitoring :)</comment></comment>


We're Hosting a Go Hackathon - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/were-hosting-a-go-hackathon/ <comment><USER2> Since they didn't include a link in the article (or I missed it), for the lazy that haven't heard of Gopher Gala: [http://gophergala.com/](http://gophergala.com/)</comment>