Why Python is a great language for teaching introductory programming classes - <AUTHOR> http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/python-teaching.htm

<comment><USER2> Wow! I had to re-read the second point several times before I could get it through my head: "Compile-time type errors annoy students to no end. It's better to at least let their program run and do SOMETHING rather than fail to compile and do NOTHING."

This is non-sense. It's encouraging bad coding practice, and it's the reason why languages like ColdFusion, JavaScript, etc. gave real developers so much trouble: amateurs write code that "runs" but is wholly broken. I agree that Python is a great beginner (and pro) language, but not for this reason!!

<comment><USER3> This may not fit your way of looking at this problem but please, read on.

One of the most fun things about python, or any terse loose language, is that you can now write amazingly massive amounts of code without having to do exhaustive checking as you go. For example, in C, a non-expert will often end up having to write tons of tiny functions, recompiling, and testing _constantly_ in order to avoid the hell that is having written a large chunk of code containing one tiny error and not being able to find that error even after hours of debugging.

Just the other day I reimplemented a rather large network protocol coded in C into ~1500 lines of python all at once. When it was done I decided, with some trepidation, to just run the whole thing and see what happens. It worked! Soon after, my test code did find one small type error in an obscure edge part of the code, but the good feeling from getting the immediate success didn't go away!

So the bad practice is not having tests/asserts anyway -- regardless of whether your language has type checking. He is right that just running as much as possible can be much more encouraging and even FUN, for beginners especially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow! It's frightening how little people learn from history. Scheme/Lisp is much better for that use now and has been for, oh, decades. [But, then again, that's coming from a guy at that little community college on the peninsula. :-)]

It's truly sad to me that Berkeley and MIT seem to have dumped Scheme as the introductory language for the "job skills" approach of using less flexible but more popular languages.

<comment><USER5> fwiw, Harvard still teaches Scheme in its introductory sequence.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but the Harvard course's treatment isn't nearly as deep as MIT's SICP course was, skipping most of the coolest parts, and they put it after a C course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At my university they teach you ML as the first language. It's a pretty cold start, but I think it's worth it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Good points. One that's not really mentioned is that beginning CS students often want to start learning a language that will make them employable, right away. (Or, their parents want them to.) I know professors get a lot of pressure to teach Java instead of, say, Scheme or ML. Python offers a way out of that, by leaving room in the language for illustrating different CS concepts clearly, but also dangling that carrot of employability -- see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181676>.

<comment><USER9> I think this is one of the best points for Python as a teaching language. It's not just approachable, it's also practical. I think most of the positive points mentioned here also apply to Ruby.

<comment><USER10> Ruby requires you to understand OO to understand the language. While every CS student eventually needs to understand OO, it's not something I would want to explain in the first lecture.

For that reason, I agree with the article that Python (or Scheme) is a good starting language. You can start with nothing, and add concepts until you understand the whole language. You don't need to know programming before you can understand "hello world".

(Amusingly, I don't really like Python or Scheme, but I do like Perl and CL. I'm not sure what that says about my personality, but I'm sure it's something :)

<comment><USER9> What's so mysterious about puts "hello, world"? I think you have a mistaken impression of Ruby.

<comment><USER10> You have to explain what "hello, world".puts does.

<comment><USER9> It throws a NoMethodError, because strings don't have that method. And you can introduce that kind of syntax at roughly the same time you'd have to in Python.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> here's something related: [http://okasaki.blogspot.com/2008/02/in-praise-of- mandatory-i...](http://okasaki.blogspot.com/2008/02/in-praise-of-mandatory- indentation-for.html)

(re: indentation-sensitive languages for teaching)

<comment><USER9> There's a difference between "mandatory indentation" (good!) and what Python does. I wrote a rant on this subject: [http://www.hackerdashery.com/2006/09/close-block- delimiter-s...](http://www.hackerdashery.com/2006/09/close-block-delimiter- symbols.html)

<comment><USER6> Your rant is rather silly, but if you'd like to know about the colon at the end of blocks:

[http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- list/2000-December/0...](http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- list/2000-December/062885.html)

[http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- list/2000-December/0...](http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- list/2000-December/063055.html)

If you really want a close block delimiter, python is happy to oblige. Just spell it `#end`. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting that many of the reasons listed for beginning programmers could actually apply to all programmers.</comment>


How you feel as a founder when techcrunch is writing about you… - <AUTHOR> http://startupasalifestyle.com/how-you-feel-as-a-founder-when-techcrunch-is-writing-about-you/

<comment><USER2> You probably shouldn't be continuing to submit these tumblr-esque .gifs because they are very low quality.</comment>


Too Fragile to Open, World's Oldest Multicolor Printed Book Is Digitized - <AUTHOR> http://hyperallergic.com/228207/too-fragile-to-open-worlds-oldest-multicolor-printed-book-is-digitized/ <comment><USER2> The article gives absolutely no impression of the tech used to digitize it. It's made clear in the article that they did actually open it for the digitization (I was imagining a fanciful rig carefully sliding between pages to scan them), but it's basically a puff piece for the actual gallery, which is only linked at the end. Here's what you really want to see: [http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR- FH-00910-00083-00098/1](http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR- FH-00910-00083-00098/1)

My parents have some similar calligraphy watercolors; Korean in origin, though using chinese characters. They're quite a sight to behold (though not nearly as old), with fantastic use of minimalism and color to portray the life and depth of trees and birds.

<comment><USER3> I think they just opened it and took a picture of each page. According to the EXIF data in the images it was taken with a Phase One IQ180 - a _very_ high- end 80MP digital camera that costs $40k+:

[http://www.wired.com/2011/05/phase-one- iq180/](http://www.wired.com/2011/05/phase-one-iq180/)

What I find annoying is that the viewer is yet another one of those JS-heavy web apps... when this could be done much simpler using a static page image gallery, or even better, a PDF. (Contrast it with the digital library at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10006579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10006579) to see what i mean.)

The direct links to the high-res images (not the full 80MP, but ~3.5MP) are here:

[http://188.8.131.52/content/images/PR- FH-00910-00083-00098-...](http://188.8.131.52/content/images/PR- FH-00910-00083-00098-000-00001.jpg)

through

[http://18.104.22.168/content/images/PR- FH-00910-00083-00098-...](http://188.8.131.52/content/images/PR- FH-00910-00083-00098-000-00388.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So... How did they digitise it if they couldn't open it? X-rays? Article completely fails to answer its own title's mystique.

Edit: From the original article at Cambridge ([http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/news/oracle-bones-and-unseen- beauty...](http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/news/oracle-bones-and-unseen-beauty- wonders-priceless-chinese-collection-now-online)):

"Charles Aylmer, Head of the Chinese Department at Cambridge University Library, said: "This is the earliest and finest example of multi-colour printing anywhere in the world, comprising 138 paintings and sketches with associated texts by fifty different artists and calligraphers. Although reprinted many times, complete sets of early editions in the original binding are extremely rare.

"The binding is so fragile, and the manual so delicate, that until it was digitized, we have never been able to let anyone look through it or study it – despite its undoubted importance to scholars."

"

So not too fragile to open, just too fragile to allow _everybody who would like to_ to open it.

</comment><comment><USER5> [IIIF Protocol](iiif.io) at work.

It's finally getting easier to build browser-based, zooming viewers for these resources since the protocol has emerged.

At Stanford I work on [Mirador]([http://projectmirador.org/](http://projectmirador.org/)), another interface to these resources (with a built-in tiling window manager). I hope that one day all large images on the web will be deep-zoomable through IIIF by default.

The internet archive is another institution with an underappreciated wealth of perennially relevant content. They have hundreds of thousands of JP2s of timeless artworks.

It will be a great boon when decent open source software exists for encoding and decoding JP2.

Those asking about the meaning of symbols/translations might be interested in the recent announcement of the [Open Annotation Protocol Specification]([http://www.w3.org/TR/annotation- model/](http://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/)) by the W3C.

</comment><comment><USER6> it's astounding to look at something so delicate put together by human hands 380 years ago

these flowers are particularly catching: [http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR- FH-00910-00083-00098/305](http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR- FH-00910-00083-00098/305)

<comment><USER7> It's even more astounding that this library is asserting copyright on a nearly 400 year old document.[0] This material is unquestionably in the public domain.

[0][http://22.214.171.124/content/images/PR- FH-00910-00083-00098-...](http://18.104.22.168/content/images/PR- FH-00910-00083-00098-000-00305.jpg)

<comment><USER8> It is but the photographs might not be. In the US a straightforward photographic copy is not regarded as a work of art and hence is not copyrightable (see [http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/about/copyright- issues.html](http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/about/copyright-issues.html)), I'm not so sure the case law is so clear elsewhere. If you could somehow take your own pictures of it then you could certainly dedicate those to the public domain.

<comment><USER9> Is it still a "straightforward photographic copy" now that they've added the ruler for scale though? Perhaps that makes it copyrightable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> david-given Is a translation available? I'd rather like to know what the poems say.

(Also, I know someone who'd really like a nice facsimile edition. Er, other than me. Those birds are amazing.)

<comment><USER10> If you meant the poems in the manual, those would be pretty hard to translate...

<comment><USER11> I think he meant in the manual, yes. For example page 12[1]. I don't have a good understanding of Chinese, ancient or otherwise; why would they be difficult to translate?

[1] [http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR- FH-00910-00083-00098/12](http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR- FH-00910-00083-00098/12)</comment></comment></comment>


Help Us Review the Sarah Palin E-Mail Records - <AUTHOR> http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/help-us-investigate-the-sarah-palin-e-mail-records/

<comment><AUTHOR> Posted the article not as a political rally, but in the context of how to approach the journalistic task of combing through 24,000 e-mails that are very relevant.

<comment><USER2> Very relevant to what? Sarah Palin is not a public official. It would have been great to have such journalistic ambition when it came to vetting the presidential candidates of 2008 IN 2008. I didn't see any similar attempts to comb through the Climategate emails or analyze Al Gore's pseudoscience propaganda. Palin is a non-entity. We should be spending our time combing through the current administration as opposed to wasting time on a private citizen. It's a bunch of nonsense -- this Palin obsession. I'm Republican, I vote, but I'd never vote for Palin, but I also don't think it's useful to sift through 24000 emails with the hope of finding something "useful." It isn't a former governor and failed candidate that has any power over taxes, budgets or defense -- it's the current administration. Wrong or right, the Obama (and all administrations) should be fully investigated by journalism organizations -- it's their job and they seem to be asleep, dreaming of Palin.</comment></comment>


Biggest Worry for Traders? They Don't Know Why Stocks Are Moving - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-06/biggest-worry-for-traders-they-don-t-know-why-stocks-are-moving <comment><USER2> If this is the case, why are media outlets explaining the reasons for stock moves?</comment>


Disney Hates On HTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/disney-hates-on-html5-2010-9

<comment><USER2> I fail to see how these 'requirements' are in the scope of HTML. This guy just doesn't understand it, imho. Nothing is stopping them from hiring a developer to figure out a way of incorporating an ad system.

</comment><comment><USER3> What better way to tell the world, "I don't understand technology, and it scares me."</comment>


Dotsies (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://dotsies.org <comment><USER2> It seems like the correspondence should be something other a-z. Something like making the vowels or more common letters more distinctive. E.g., making the vowels the lightest weight, that is make aeiou use the single dot letters dotsies uses for abcde.

</comment><comment><USER3> Was about to pass this off until I starting reading the sample near the bottom of the page that gradually teaches you. It actually amazed me that I could sort of read it halfway through. I can't get to the end though, but at least I have an idea of the difficulty level to read it naturally.

<comment><USER4> Couldn't get past "if you can read this, keep going."

<comment><USER4> Update: it's just because I was doing it on my phone. Having a blast learning this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I cannot tell if this is a practical joke or what. At first, I tried to learn it in earnest but then I fell totally apart and virtually threw my hands up. Either I have some sort of learning disability or this is there to simply waste my time.

Is this a real thing?

<comment><USER6> Have you tried using a spaced repetition system? Sometimes it takes the brain a couple exposures until you "get" it. Otherwise you might think of ways to make the learning more engaging or stimulating: if you can present the same information in a different way, that might work better :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of Marain, which I actually wish was in use:

[http://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/marain.htm](http://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/marain.htm)

<comment><USER8> As a note, the further reading links are dead.

They are available [0] on Web Archive, if anyone is interested.

0\. [http://web.archive.org/web/20080524200838/http://homepages.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080524200838/http://homepages.compuserve.de/Mostral/artikel/marain.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Title shoud be `Dotsies - dot based read optimized font (2012)`.

</comment><comment><USER10> I learned it back then. Used it for a while as a privacy feature for my phone.

<comment><USER11> how was it? easy to read after a hwile?

I whished the downloadable font would be the "densest" setting, not just abc encoding

<comment><USER10> I can read 10-20 words per minute. The main problem is that you cannot "scan" for a word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why not follow the 'natural' scheme of binary? A picture is worth n words:

[http://i.imgur.com/3XIMXcD.png](http://i.imgur.com/3XIMXcD.png) (added the 0-9 digits for emotional effect)

I can't seem to put my finger on what makes a scheme more 'readable' than another.

Edit: Reminds me a lot of Chinese, but in this case there's a clear procedure to decode glyphs as a word!

<comment><USER13> > I can't seem to put my finger on what makes a scheme more 'readable' than > another.

I think one constraint is that the meaning of glyphs should be translation invariant. But this does not hold for dotsies either (the glyph for "a" could be interpreted as "b" depending on where the baseline is chosen). I wonder how subscripting or superscripting works with this font :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like this. I spent 15 minutes playing the game and I feel like I can pick up the basics. I'll try the bookmarklet from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER15> Korean is structured this way

<comment><USER16> I don't see any similarity.

<comment><USER17> It's a loose similarity to be sure. In Korean, syllables are written as a constricted glyph. In dottsies, words are written as a constructed glyph.

<comment><USER18> That would be like saying cursive Latin alphabet produces constructed glyphs. Dotsies is just an alphabet - no letter or syllable acts as a modifier on any other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> imagelike alphabets and languages are harder to process, takes more time, not effective

signs needs to be distinct

<comment><USER12> Under this system the words are what become easier to distinguish (after some practice?), not the symbols.</comment></comment>


Registry for ip addresses that send spam? - <AUTHOR>

Maybe it already exists, if not, would it be interesting to have a registry for ip-addresses that send spam? Volunteers could submit the senders ip addresses for spam they receive (automated), everybody else could check their own ip address to see if their computer has become an unwitting spammer. Could be a widget that checks the computers IP address against the registry.
I guess it wouldn't work because the sender's ip address could easily be faked, or could it? Don't know enough about SMTP...
On a related note, how many nodes does the internet have? Would it be possible to remember all possible spamming ip addresses in memory (4GB perhaps) -> I guess it should be, for the time being (unless EVERY device is spamming, I think there are more devices on the internet than humans alive). I just remember the article about mailinator, they manage to run their service on one server by keeping everything in memory.
In fact, mailinator could probably provide that kind of service. <comment><AUTHOR> OK, thinking on - it's probably all bullshit, but anyway, it wouldn't have to be limited to spam. Victims of DDoS attacks could also register the ip- addresses of their attackers.

There could be a simple website, you call it and see if your ip address was involved in strange activity (with a probability - obviously the bad guys would try to submit false addresses). If another DDoS would make the news, perhaps a lot of people would check the address. Maybe a lot of Trojan horses could be purged as a result.

</comment><comment><USER2> Already implemented, using DNS as the repository, and supported in every Unix mailer for the last decade and the latest Exchange too.

Google for RBL or ORBS. Some are free, some charge for access to their DNS servers (ie, if you find a record for their hostname on the blacklist DNS server, they're a spammer or open relay).

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not talking about open mail relays, though, I am more interested in hijacked private machines (ie with dynamic IP addresses). Does ORBS take care of that, too? If so, all the better, all that needs to be done is a web interface for querying orbs.

How does ORBS get it's list of IP-addresses?

<comment><USER2> I mentioned spammers or open mail relays above. I include bot networks in my definition of spammers as they're a source of spam, though I appreciate not everyone else does.

Yes, most DNS blacklists takes care of bot networks. Most also provide a web based query tool.

To identify spam sources, DNS based blacklists look at mail headers from trusted users. Some DNS blacklists may also use honeypots with accounts that should never be contacted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> they seem to be doing it: <http://www.amihacked.com/>

Except I am not sure how they get their data (Spamcop).

So the question remains, why isn't everybody using their service now and then...

<comment><USER3> Gathering data has got to be a problem. If any service got popular enough, then it would be in spammers' interest to poison it in order to make people not rely on it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: In your opinion, what is the current state of Ruby? - <AUTHOR> I ask because I've been asked to give a talk on the current state of Ruby at a European startup incubator.  In that area, there aren't a lot of Ruby events, and they're just looking for high level information about my experiences working with Ruby in San Francisco, CA.  I have some talking points based on my own experiences & observations, and I'd love to hear what others have to say, too.<p>I'll comment on this thread myself in a few days and/or link to the talk I give if it gets recorded. <comment><USER2> Ruby, ROR, and sinatra are still being used for tons of projects, both small and large. But, there's less chatter about rails online because rails matured/isn't as in-flux as it once was. Ruby doesn't have the as many 3rd party ML libs as python, so that's a bit of detraction from the ruby's motion (pun intended).

</comment><comment><USER3> In terms of the job market, things were a lot better five years ago. People used to be impressed just when applicants show basic competency. Nowadays, interview processes usually involve a lengthy homework assignment, and completing the assignment is usually not good enough; teams seem to be looking for a very specific coding style. I don't know if this is specific to Ruby or more of a reflection of the job market as a whole.

In terms of technology, it's just fine as always. My company succumbed to Javascript fever this year and I miss Ruby on Rails a lot. There are so many little conveniences that you don't really appreciate until they're gone.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm in Atlanta and have been passively looking for a Rails job for about a year. There are not as many as when I was in the Northeast looking around 2014. However the companies I'm speaking with who use Ruby have a mature approach, which is contrary to many peoples' perception of how Ruby shops work. I get the impression from them that they are fatigued from interviewing flocks of weak Ruby devs. From my perspective, if anything is hurting the current state, it's probably people who can build stuff with Ruby but don't necessarily appreciate the craft of building software.

<comment><USER5> lol, I wish I could move back to Atlanta, I'm stuck in South Carolina where there's nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Despite having ventured into FP territory, I still like and use Ruby a lot. The state of Ruby imho has not changed much over the last couple of years. MRI is stable, but still slow and memory-hungry. Demand exists, and supply, too, depending on where you are located and if you accept remote.

<comment><USER7> >... Demand exists, and supply, too, depending on where you are located and if you accept remote.

As a person actively involved in looking for a remote job I have to ask? What do you mean by 'remote'. I have come to realize there are two meanings employers wont expressly state: 1. developers who live within the US 2.developers who wish to work remotely and live outside the US

<comment><USER6> I'm not from the US btw, but with "remote" I mean does not require physical presence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm programming Ruby (on Rails) for 10 years now and the language hasn't lost any of its appeal.

</comment><comment><USER9> Rails with it's insane mop usage almost killed it, and it's hard to make it fast with such an inherently broken killer app. They are trying, but so far only hashes got better, not any jit or pic's (method caching).</comment>


Show HN: Build RPM and Debian Packages from git on Travis CI - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/packpack/packpack <comment><USER2> Isn't Travis already running on Docker? So.. this is Docker within Docker? Is there a reason you wouldn't just use different docker images at the Travis level for this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Travis CI allow you to run any particular command, including Docker, on the top of their Ubuntu Precise/Trusty images. There is no way to choose other images from docker hub in the .travis.yml.

Actually, PackPack is not just for Travis, it can be also used locally:

        ~/gitrepo$ OS=fedora DIST=24 packpack        # Build for Fedora 24
        ~/gitrepo$ OS=centos DIST=7 packpack         # Build for CentOS 7
        ~/gitrepo$ OS=debian DIST=stretch packpack   # Build for Debian Stretch
        ~/gitrepo$ OS=ubuntu DIST=xenial packpack    # Build for Ubuntu Xenial

PackPack automatically bumps version in the RPM spec, packs a source tarball, creates a source RPM and then builds binary packages. You only need a proper RPM spec at `rpm/` and `major.minor` annotated git tag.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Demo: [https://asciinema.org/a/3unm4sw4g889ddk7tr0uettbn](https://asciinema.org/a/3unm4sw4g889ddk7tr0uettbn)</comment>


Side project income 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://simon.codes/2018/01/09/side-project-income-2017.html <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this. Very informative read

I think my most successful side-project stagnated at about $100/month in monthly revenue (which was roughly break-even given my operating costs). When I couldn't get it to grow beyond that, I eventually killed it. I actually didn't have much churn, but getting new signups was difficult (and expensive) and I just wasn't charging enough to make the whole thing worth my trouble.

Things I learned:

\- Spending money on Adwords was basically the same as setting my money on fire.

\- Paying bloggers to review your product seems sleazy, but the popular bloggers in your niche expect it (and the more popular they are, the more money they demand) and it actually works better than CPC advertising.

\- If you think you've found an under-served market, chances are other devs have noticed it too, and they probably have access to more money and resources than you do as a solo founder (it's always great to see a competitor with better stuff launch 2 months after you, so you cut your price, then they cut theirs, so you cut yours more, thinking: "I'm a lone dev, this is a side- project, I don't need the revenue, I can surely win a price war." Which ultimately ends with subscriptions priced too low to be worth the hassle. But at least it was a boost to the ego that those other guys saw me as a competitor).

\- If you whip up something really quick-and-dirty in Ruby-on-Rails, there's a good chance you've failed badly at architecture and adding new features to keep up with the competition will be difficult :)

\- Just use a third-party mail service like mailgun, mandrill, et. al., All my transactional email was going to people's spam folders until I spent many hours learning about DKIM, etc.

\- Stay away from the education market :D</comment>


Scaling Clearbit to 2M API requests per day - <AUTHOR> http://stackshare.io/clearbit/scaling-clearbit-to-2m-api-requests-per-day/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=stackshare_weekly_962015

<comment><USER2> Maybe I'm missing something but as the other comments have pointed out, this is very low scale. I'm not sure it can even be called at-scale in any sense these days.

Also the architecture seems incredibly fragile and complicated for what it's doing. I get that they've built some integrations and backend processes to assemble this data but the API serving could all run on a single app and database server since it's all just reads.

<comment><USER3> Hi manigandham, Harlow here (author of the post). You are absolutely correct; serving 2M API requests from a local data store wouldn't be considered "at- scale" these days.

In hindsight I should have added more information about where the actual work is being done -- I definitely missed the mark on parts of this post.

The lions-share of our work is done in an async fashion. 2M API requests (lookups) turns into 40M+ background jobs. These jobs fetch, aggregate, and scrub data from a number of downstream providers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 2M req/day are roughly 23 req/s on average. I understand there might be busier periods, however it doesn't seem to be impressive figures.

<comment><USER5> Thank you. Using days as your time unit for measuring requests over time is not useful. I'd be more interested in the req/sec numbers during peak.

<comment><USER4> even by saying the volume of request at peak time doesn't tell the whole story, we still don't know how heavy are such requests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 2M req/day = 2000000/24/60/60 = 23 req/s average. With a assumed peak of 10x of avg. this is around 230 req/s.

Hmm. Not something I'd use the word 'scaling' for, even if there is a 1:1 write to DB ratio. With 1000 writes/sec to a DB it gets interesting.

<comment><USER7> Divide that over 18 machines, too!

I end up doing this with customers. "Well we need a solid hosting system. Our site gets 2 _million_ visits a month!" Me: You know, that'd run alright off my iPAQ. (Actually, with a caching frontend like CloudFlare, it really would.)

Edit: Not to be dissing on their post. I think it's interesting and good that people post such articles. It's just that the sense of scale is off. There was a big article here on some large company, I think it was bitly, and the totals came out pretty low. Especially for the amount of servers. Even Twitter was only peaking at a few KTweets/s a bit ago (granted they do a lot of work per tweet but still).

<comment><USER6> " Divide that over 18 machines, too!"

Yes therefor I'd said DB writes, which is the first step stone where you need to think a little in scaling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Git push to only one repository.

I'm interested in that aspect. Do you use a single repository for all your code and configuration? Does it also hold the state of your infrastructure (instances, fleet definitions etc)?

<comment><USER3> We have a Git repo for each of the services, and we have a separate repo for each of the Fleet Unit files.

> Git push to only one repository.

This refers to a per-service repository in our deployer app.

Previously we had to push code to each of the servers running a service. Now we push to the deployer app and it leverages Fleet to distribute the code across the available boxes.</comment></comment>


PageSpeed Insights for Google.com - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=google.com <comment><USER2> To be fair if you do pagespeed insights on [https://www.google.com/](https://www.google.com/) instead of [http://google.com](http://google.com) skipping the http to https redirect they score a 71 on mobile and 100 on desktop.

</comment><comment><USER3> PageSpeed Insights should always be used as more of a guideline than a be-all end-all of optimizing.</comment>


Yap is looking for an Android Developer - <AUTHOR> Hello. My name is Omar Jandali. I am currently the founder and developer of Yap which is a new type of group expense consolidation application. I have been working and developer Yaps web version for a month and a half. I am nearing initial live testing. I am currently looking for an Android Developer / co-founder who would like to developer, working, and create Yaps Android application.
In its essence, Yap is a group expense consolidation application that allows users to seamlessly manage, split, and play for group expenses in a handful of steps. I can further explain Yap and what it is if you are interested in a project like this. Below is my contact info.
If you are interesting in working on a new type of app that can disrupt the market and work on something that people would use, you can message me email@example.com or comment below with information. <comment><USER2> Hey Omar, let me know if you require some help on QA side i should be able to help you out.</comment>


Stubb: Build REST API mocks using your file system - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/knuton/stubb

<comment><USER2> There's another application for this besides mocking: static REST routes.

For example, imagine if all github pages had this enabled. Then, by writing the appropriate files, you could provide a REST interface to static assets in an interesting way.

I can't quite, at the moment, come up with anything I would actually USE this for, but it would be quite neat.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was just writing some dumb hardcoded json mock code here and wondering when my IIS-powered colleague will be available for us to test and implement the proper requests. Then this comes in and allows me code an almost production- ready frontend all by myself on my Microsoftless linux box--which I'll be doing right away.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't get this. How do you handle POST/PUT/DELETE requests with files? It doesn't say much about it in the README.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, this is only for stubbing an API, you don't build an actual API, so nothing in the filesystem is changed when you PUT, POST or DELETE.

What does change though is the state in the working memory, specifically in the stubb server process, by means of which you can change the response by using the response sequences described in the README. You might for example test a client-side deletion procedure, so you specify a stalling response sequence with two members. Your first DELETE request to /photos/5 will be responded to with the content described in the first sequence member (say 200 OK), while all further requests will be responded to with the content described in the second sequence member (say 404 NOT FOUND, using YAML frontmatter for specifying the HTTP status).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Kudos! This is a quite brilliant idea for building simple API prototypes.

</comment><comment><USER6> Well, I think that's rather rude. Why would it mock the use of my file system?

<comment><USER7> That's okay, my filesystem will kill his wife.</comment></comment>


Why Russia no longer fears the West - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/03/russia-vladimir-putin-the-west-104134.html

<comment><USER2> Probably a correct assessment. Plenty of people in Europe really do care strongly about human rights and justice and all that, but when push comes to shove, too often money wins. Especially when it comes to Russia. Too many countries are all too eager to please Russia, to take and hide the money of its corrupt elite, to do whatever Moscow wants in order to get Russian gas, etc.

We need to realize that Russia is unbelievably corrupt. And Putin doesn't care; the only thing that matters to him is that Russia becomes a superpower again, with him at the helm.

We should be cutting ties with Russia, but we want their gas and their business.

</comment><comment><USER3> The way it did in 1956, when it suppressed the Hungarian revolution, or 1968 when it put down the Prague Spring?

<comment><USER4> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SBo0akeDMY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SBo0akeDMY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Russia never played by the rules. Russia wants to be feared and respected at all cost. Russia wants an image of a masculine and all knowing power. I love my motherland but like a parent it can be overbearing and wrong. It won't admit any wrong-doing. It goes back to the power ego.

</comment><comment><USER6> Pretty interesting I just got an email from a .ru with a zip attachment called fax.zip (7kb) saying I had a fax from a friend, and a link to some .ru site.

Probably a coincidence, just wanted to mention it. Curious if anyone else received the same.

<comment><USER3> I get so many bogus attachments in my spam filter that I've quit noticing what country they're from.

What is new is a string of email bounces: somebody is spamming Russians with Louis Vuitton, Dior, etc. etc. ads, and with my work email in the "Reply-To" line. I'll be happy when they move on.

<comment><USER6> Wow, that sounds like a nightmare, are you able to trace back the original sender?</comment></comment></comment>


The Wayback Machine: Fighting Digital Extinction in New Ways - <AUTHOR> https://blog.archive.org/2019/10/18/the-wayback-machine-fighting-digital-extinction-in-new-ways/ <comment><USER2> I'm really curious about how the creators of the Wayback machine are working to save modern (perhaps sometimes somewhat unnecessarily overcomplicated) web pages that are using SPA "techniques". Have they implemented a googlebot-like crawler that interprets javascript and spits out.. some predigested final DOM tree? Or.. do you record all web-page-initiated network traffic and just let it replay, sort of? Lot of interesting research opportunities here, btw.

This is where archival meets browser/web tech, in a kinda complicated way. I would hope that people from both of these backgrounds have been working on this stuff together. If not, please start soon.

<comment><USER3> A crawler has two high level options: parse the page, or render the page.

Most of our parser-based crawling is done by Heritrix (crawler.archive.org) and most of our render-based crawling is done by a proxy-based recorder similar to what you theorize ([https://github.com/internetarchive/brozzler](https://github.com/internetarchive/brozzler)).

<comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing. That lets me sleep a bit easier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> FF frequent-users of Wayback may want to add the Wayback Machine add-on to their toolbar. Along with 'first','recent' and 'overview' selections it includes 'Save Page Now', as well as related Alexa, Whois and Twitter connects.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wayback- machi...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wayback-machine_new/)

<comment><USER5> I see that it's licensed under the GPLv3, but where's the source?

EDIT: Maybe it's this one[1], but it's under a different license, AGPLv3. The repo also hasn't been updated since 2016, but the extension page says last update was in 2018. Are the changes and re-licensed source elsewhere?

[1] [https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback-machine- firefox](https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback-machine-firefox)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does the Wayback Machine have a long term plan that anyone is familiar with? Is their goal to preserve the web indefinitely? Is the hope the storage and compression improvements over time keep up with content creation?

And just to be clear, I think the Wayback Machine is great and the fact that I can lookup my personal, basically zero traffic website from 15 years ago and see it is truly astonishing to me–I'm just curious what this look likes in 10, 20, 50 years.

<comment><AUTHOR> The best way to get this question answered would be to email or tweet at Brewster Kahle, who started and heads the Internet Archive.

If you're in San Francisco, the Internet Archive is also hosting a block part the evening of Oct 23rd from 5pm-10pm, and staff will be there to answer questions (tickets are $15).

Disclaimer: No affiliation

<comment> jonah-archive If anyone's interested in attending our party next Wednesday but the cost is presenting a difficulty, shoot me an email (in my profile) and I'll send you a ticket at no cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Save Page Now seems huge. It's a real bummer going to old forums for an obscure hobby or fandom only to find all the text and none of the images, music, etc.

<comment><USER8> I've had the exact same problem before.

I used to run an old forum that's now just an archive and I've been really meaning to download all the images linked in the posts in case they go offline. At some point during the forum's run I added a file upload feature which seems to have helped a lot (by avoiding external dependencies), but did not solve the problem. Fortunately I believe I have many of the missing images saved, but there very likely are important things missing.

I'm planning to launch a new forum next year and I think I'm going to write a script to periodically archive all images and links posted to the forum. I might make external images not allowed, though that seems rather extreme and might just make people post a link rather than use the upload feature.

<comment><USER9> Tangent:

There's an incredible amount of information stored in obscure web forums, often in posts with photos. The damage that services like Photobucket have done by deleting old files, or by restricting hotlinking, has been _incalculable_. I worry that Imgur has the potential to do even worse damage, as so many forum users have converged on their service after others became unavailable.

(Imgur's popularity with Reddit users leaves Reddit highly vulnerable as well.)

<comment><USER10> Crazy idea: an browser extension a user can install which downloads images as they come across them in their browser and uploads them to something distributed - perhaps built on top of IPFS? Users could choose which domains it would be active on. The network could be split up by either domain or topic (say, people interested in diagrams of space which might include several domains/sites).

Just thinking out loud here.

<comment><USER9> The problems with putting that kind of data in any sort of distributed service are that:

1) It depends upon enough users being able to consistently contribute a lot of storage to the system. It turns out that this is hard. Casual users are actually a _hindrance_ , because they'll suck up a bunch of bandwidth trying to replicate data, then drop out of the swarm forever.

2) The service will inevitably be used to host illegal pornographic content. Without some sort of centralized control, there's no way to stop this, making participation legally problematic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Got me thinking about how much storage Internet Archive uses. The answer is:

Total used storage: 50 PetaBytes

-=--=--=-=-=-=-=-

[https://archive.org/web/petabox.php](https://archive.org/web/petabox.php)

A few highlights from the Petabox storage system:

Density: 1.4 PetaBytes / rack

Power consumption: 3 KW / PetaByte

No Air Conditioning, instead use excess heat to help heat the building.

Raw Numbers as of August 2014:

4 data centers, 550 nodes, 20,000 spinning disks

Wayback Machine: 9.6 PetaBytes

Books/Music/Video Collections: 9.8 PetaBytes

Unique data: 18.5 PetaBytes

Total used storage: 50 PetaBytes

<comment><USER11> And that got me thinking to how much 50 petabytes would cost...

From [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/petabytes-on-a- budget-10-year...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/petabytes-on-a- budget-10-years-and-counting/) on September 24, 2019.

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

Storage Pod 1.0 allowed us to store one petabyte of data for about $81,000.

Today we've lowered that to about $35,000 with Storage Pod 6.0.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

Obviously they paid more in storage in the past than today and it is a different solution but if you were to buy 50 PetaBytes today in one of Backblaze's Storage Pod 6.0s it would be $1,750,000.

And there is ongoing maintenance & costs of drive failures.

I feel the need to donate to Internet Archive soon, as I have greatly benefited from it in the past and am sure to in the future too!

<comment><USER12> If you poke around you can find some more recent stats: [https://catalogd.archive.org/report/space.php](https://catalogd.archive.org/report/space.php)

That yearly graph is pretty nice :)

<comment><USER11> Nice, thanks for that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Love the URL in the example screenshot, whitehouse.gov. Fantastic example of a source that _needs_ to be archived.

</comment><comment><USER13> As much as I appreciate Wayback Machine, it's the responsibility of authors to choose an authoring format that can stand the test of time, at least for content you care about. HTML is built on a rich foundation of markup languages which is more than adequate for preservation. Just that it renders in a browser isn't good enough as browsers have turned into overly complex monstrosities with a high risk of loosing further browser code bases going forward (eg. Moz loosing their Google deal, and developing browsers becoming economically infeasible) at which point we're at the mercy of an ad company to even read our documents.

</comment><comment><USER14> Tip: For people using duckduckgo as their default search, if you happen on a site that's no longer available, just type "! wayback " in front of the URL.

I suppose you can also set it up as a keyword search in your favourite browser.

</comment><comment><USER15> Unfortunate that their crawler doesn't support IPv6. Trying to save IPv6-only websites results in "Couldn't resolve host". Hopefully that'll get fixed soon and not too much will be lost...

<comment><USER16> [https://archive.is/](https://archive.is/) supports IPV6

Whenever possible everyone should be archiving to both anyway.

</comment></comment><comment> white-moss Oh, I donated some of my money to them a few days ago. I'm very happy to read so wonderful news like this :) Outlink feature is great! Ultra useful for blog site.

I'm a fan of them.

</comment><comment><USER17> Who runs www.archive.is and are they related?

<comment><USER18> They're not related.</comment></comment>


Wittgenstein's Poker - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_Poker#Plot <comment><USER2> Ludwig was right: there is no philosophical problems but language puzzles.</comment>


The world's only 3D position/inertia sensor over BluetoothLE - <AUTHOR> Hello Netizens! I wanted to get the word out about something never before done: IMU data (3D XYZ position and movement tracking) with temp and barometer readings, over Bluetooth Low Energy!
 (3V @ 16MHz)
I've been building the earlier prototypes by hand, and in conjunction with the Femtoduino boards, I've hand built about 2,000 boards to date. (Parts are smaller than poppy seeds)
I simply could not keep staying awake till 6am every day to ship stuff out fast enough, ...so I've launched this Kickstarter to get IMUduino fabricated locally, and shipped quickly.
If you want to build Drones, map stuff without GPS, build Smart Home devices, or wearable...using PhoneGap and Arduino, then I invite you to have a look. I've added sample code as well.
http://kck.st/13kxu25 <comment><USER2> What's the maximum sampling frequency? What are the accuracy and precision like? How susceptible is it to changes in the weather? I'm asking seriously, because I could severely use a module like this (actually, the BLE is not a concern), but haven't found anything suitable in an attractive price range.

<comment><AUTHOR> ...I am able to send data about every 200ms or so. I haven't weather tested it yet, but the ATMega32u4 is fairly robust. With practical weather proofing and vent ports, this board should last reasonably well in an average environment. As with any electronics, humidity and temp control factor into its life expectancy. We just got out of beta, so I don't have weather proofing tests to show for it. :-)

<comment><USER2> I'm not worried about weather proofing, I'm worried about the sensors going out of calibration under minor changes in temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very cool!

>Another interesting feature: You can build apps for the IMUduino using HTML and JavaScript thanks to PhoneGap or Cordova and our sample app!

PhoneGap supports Arduino now?!? Or do you provide a cordova plugin that can communicate with the board via BLE? If so, what platforms do you support?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are leveraging a Bluetooth Cordova plugin to access the smart device's Bluetooth Low Energy features. We subscribe to the nRF8001's UART service, sending and receiving 20 bytes of data at a time.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Kickstarter link broke, here it is again:

[http://kck.st/1snekD1](http://kck.st/1snekD1)

</comment><comment><USER4> Well done! :-)</comment>


NYT: Real time Election map - <AUTHOR> http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president <comment><USER2> FYI, the 512 paths D3.js feature has the poll results feeding into it, albeit on a slight delay from the main map

[http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president/scenario...](http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president/scenarios?hp)

I've seen a lot of election maps but I can't think of another informational graphic that so clearly explained what was at stake (the near live vote results are icing on the cake)...in fact it completely sucked the suspense out of watching the election results coming in...which would piss me off if I were a network tv pundit who makes money keeping people in needless suspense.

</comment><comment><USER3> They might be re-configuring things on the fly ... I'm getting 500 Internal Server Error at the moment.

This year is probably bringing election tracking sites way more traffic than any time in the past.

<comment> brown9-2 I keep getting 503 (Service Unavailable) as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> NYT servers are getting a nice stress test.

<comment><USER5> It appears that elections.nytimes.com is actually hosted on AWS (in multiple regions using Route 53 latency based routing), so I imagine they have the ability to keep up with the load.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Make sure you check the counties map!

It's amazing to see how much of the area of the USA is red, even in states that went to Obama.

But in the southeast states there seems to be a river of blue, just inland from the red coastal counties. Does anyone have any idea why that is?

The exit polls show some very strong demographic divides too: [http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president/exit- pol...](http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president/exit-polls)

<comment><USER7> Here's one theory for that line of blue:

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/10/02/162163801/obama...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/10/02/162163801/obama- s-secret-weapon-in-the-south-small-dead-but-still-kickin)

<comment><USER6> Wow, who would've thought it all came back to plankton!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 51 for Romney? Google shows 67 now:

<http://www.google.com/elections/ed/us/results>

Which one is more accurate/up to date?

<comment><USER9> They are both equally current. It comes down to who is more daring or conservative in making calls. All in all, however, that doesn't matter. Those numbers are meaningless. Look at Florida and Ohio as well as all the other swing states. That's all you need.

If Obama wins Florida Romney has to win every other swing state. Obama winning Florida basically means game over for Romney. If Obama wins Ohio there are only few paths for Romney to win.

<comment><USER10> Is there a (reasonably) live map where the swing states are specially marked? I don't know them by heart and I don't want to have to look them up.

Oh I just noticed the big board is what I want. I guess I don't really care about the geographics.

<comment><USER9> This is very great for checking out paths to victory: [http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president/scenario...](http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president/scenarios?hp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> nginx</comment>


Revenue Generating Drinking Fountain - <AUTHOR> https://www.samuelianrosen.com/blog/2019/12/9/the-evolution-of-tap <comment><USER2> This feels one step away from a Juicero: take a basic function (actually dispensing water isn't the hard part of the system), slap an "internet" on it to justify the value add, and attach some marketing terms about water filtration (no actual science or data presented).

<comment><USER3> I think the bigger story with Juicero was the runaway engineering of a product that ... didn't do its job that great for the cost / had some weird packets you had to buy.

If it had just been some marketing hype for a standard juicer, they might have been fine (with a budget).

This thing at least conventionally outputs water... not sure about it's viability, but it seems somewhat less absurd than Juicero.

<comment><USER4> Plus the DRM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can't speak for anyone else, but I always carry a water bottle with me (a Wikipedia-branded one with 28 languages![1]) and hardly ever drink packaged water. So far I've managed. Certainly never needed a fucking app to drink water.

[1] [https://store.wikimedia.org/products/wikipedia-language- wate...](https://store.wikimedia.org/products/wikipedia-language-water-bottle)

<comment><USER6> There are places (even in the US) where people legitimately go and get their water. There are also places where people don't (but probably should). I have gotten sick off of drinking water from a state which will go unnamed in this public forum (if you would like to know message me) _after_ my college roommate who did in-depth research on municipal water systems for a wall street firm, told me never to drink water from that state (so yes, that one's on me)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Rome has at least 2,500 public fountains installed in the 1800s that dispense potable water. Remarkable that 150 years ago they didn't think to monetize these, think of the missed revenues.

Map: [https://www.fontanelle.org/Mappa-Fontanelle-Roma- Lazio.aspx](https://www.fontanelle.org/Mappa-Fontanelle-Roma-Lazio.aspx)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, available drinking water is an essential social good, and one that municipalities typically invest tax money in.

Let's stop trying to monetize everything.

<comment><USER9> I thought I was missing some kind of joke when I read the parent comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me a lot of the water refill stations that the government has in desert areas of the United States (Kelso Junction, California leaps to mind). Except the government ones don't have advertising, and aren't connected to the internet.

I'm a little perplexed about why this needs to be internet connected. Hire someone to change the ads on the machines and you've made a small dent in unemployment, too.

And if an area doesn't have clean water, isn't it reasonable to believe it doesn't have internet connectivity, too?

<comment><USER11> I can imagine plenty of businesses that are more profitable (or even simply viable at all) with automation over the internet rather than paying someone to drive around and change static ads.

It's the same reason we dig ditches with power equipment rather than shovels or spoons or have walk-up ATMs rather than bank tellers on the corner.

<comment><USER12> You can also put a remote-controlled box somewhere annoying to access quickly, like airside in an airport. That's _much_ easier than dealing with the logistics of someone driving around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This has to be a joke, right? This basically boils down to putting ads on water fountains, right?

<comment><USER14> Yes, but the ecological and social virtue signals make that okay. /s

<comment><USER3> When I was looking for a new job last time I kept hitting these sites for these little start-ups who on their site had lifestyle type "about us" areas of their site.

One noted how ecologically considerate. They didn't mention anything they actually do that was ecologically relevant. They did have a photo(s) in that section were the team was outside in the midday sun at some wire tables you'd find at some coffee shops with their laptops working away and laughing ... I guess one of them had a water bottle ... maybe that was what I was supposed to pick up from that.

Anyway the whole lifestyle brand / company thing is weird generally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > The problem is it'll take over $1 trillion to upgrade US drinking water > infrastructure.

That can't be possible — and I think estimation is way off. Even if there were a drinking fountain for every American (which I'm sure is an over-estimate by an order of magnitude as well), that would still imply an upgrade cost of $3,000 per drinking fountain. If there's a fountain for one in ten Americans; that's $30,000.

For context, most modern Elkay drinking fountains are around $1,000.

I think this overwhelming figure serves to enhance the point of the author but I think it bares no basis in reality.

<comment><USER16> I don't think it's just the water fountains themselves, but the pipes and all the other infrastructure associated with transporting water.

Instead of having a central location where water is filtered and distributed from, Tap is trying to have filtering occur at each endpoint in a more distributed manner.

<comment><USER17> Atmospheric Water Generators will also allow us to decentralize where water is filtered and distributed from. Literally made from thin air and requires no pipes. We will add these to our fleet in the future.

<comment><USER18> It's really difficult to take you seriously after seeing this. I thought you were trying to avoid plastic waste, and improve public confidence in the piped municipal water supply.

Who's paying the power bill for these planned AWG units?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is why people hate us.

</comment><comment><USER20> I see this as not much different than those bus shelters that are paid for by JCDeaux in exchange for putting ads there.

Shelters should be free, and so should water fountains. But free doesn't mean nice. I've seen some poorly maintained bus shelters and water fountains.

If people want to slap ads on the side, and increase the quality, then that's great. If your VC funding, or ad funding can pay for a filter on a water fountain, even better.

</comment><comment><USER21> Water is a vital human necessity. It's literally impossible to live without it. Is it possible to have that just be a public service? The idea that everything needs to generate revenue just feels absurd when just _having a water fountain_ would help people stick around longer and be happier.

Also, why is it the size of a vending machine? That feels impractical.

</comment><comment><USER22> Public free drinking fountains use to be something activists advocated for. It's strange that it turned into this.

</comment><comment><USER23> The proliferation of potable water will hitch-hike on other economic expansion projects in the future and (hopefully) we'll see new cost sharing models developed for public infrastructure that are more suited for the future.

The tap project is a noble effort, so nothing is taken away from it, but we're going from phonograph records to HD streaming with logistics in what amounts to a very short period of time and skipping radio, TV, casettes and DVD's in the process.

When all of the pieces come together, the ingredients for rural metropoles/metropoleis to sprout up where the will exists should provide a more reasonable approach than some of the current inferior innovations/policies/codes[1] that they currently have in place for growth and sustainability.

Energy (renewables), water (desalinated), connectivity (low orbit satellite), sustainability (new construction/models/raw materials/resources) and logistics (ML, drones, autonomous roads/vehicles) should make it a whole new ballgame (without having to destroy or burden the existing system).

I do like the fact that tap wants to test and report on water quality, but profitability trumps health. They [utility companies] probably don't want to be reminded of whats in the water. They already know.

[1]I'm more concerned with the accumulation of prescription meds, but heres a pfas nugget instead. Perhaps the expiration date has passed on public water stewardship.

[https://www.ewg.org/interactive- maps/2019_pfas_contamination...](https://www.ewg.org/interactive- maps/2019_pfas_contamination/map/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I think a lot of the comments here are unnecessarily snarky to the point of being unhelpful. If I'm the operator of some public place - let's say an arcade or a store - every square inch of my store that isn't being monetized is inefficient, and for as much as I might like to put a water fountain in as a courtesy, why wouldn't I do the same thing and get revenue for it at the same time?

No one argues that water in the best case should be free and that it's in the public interest to provide it, but that's just not realistic in a lot of cases. And in this specific case, the net good provided supersedes whatever argument people have against the commercial aspects, IMO. If it's this or a vending machine or another rack of clothes, isn't this better?

<comment><USER9> > No one argues that water in the best case should be free and that it's in > the public interest to provide it, but that's just not realistic in a lot of > cases.

I disagree. I don't believe there is a single good reason for why our world has both trillions of dollars of wealth but also people without access to clean drinking water. It's just not right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > the biggest problem we have in putting water on the map is a fundamental > mistrust of drinking sources

I've never met anyone who wouldn't use a public water fountain to fill up a bottle they had. Not saying they don't exist, just that it's not "the biggest problem".

The biggest problem is obviously forgetting to bring your water bottle with you everywhere you go. When that happens to me I buy a disposable bottle and refill it till I lose it. Why don't we just require that all disposable water bottles are built to be reused? With wide mouths so they can be cleaned, maybe even compatible with Mason jar lids.

</comment><comment><USER26> Took me a while to realize this wasn't satire.

<comment><USER27> > _" The problem is it'll take over $1 trillion to upgrade US drinking water > infrastructure. So, the investment must generate a return in order to be > self sustaining [...]"_

Are you sure it isn't satire?

<comment><USER28> The VC (reminder: VC is russian word for "toilet") also invested in Checkr[1], another dystopian joke.

[1] [https://www.samuelianrosen.com/investments](https://www.samuelianrosen.com/investments)

<comment><USER17> serial entrepreneur, actually. I started a similar company but was too early, and invested in a successor. I've never been a VC.

<comment><USER28> Assuming you're the person I linked to, and you're not a VC, how come your website says, for example, that you did a series-B investment on checkr?

<comment><USER17> Because I invested my own money as an angel at the series B...

<comment><USER28> I hate to break it to you bro: you're the literal definition of a VC. And series B is not angel terms.

If what you're saying is you don't work for a VC firm, well then, OK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Thanks, I hate it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder what the economics of "big box that does a task" are. Like Redbox or whatever it is someone wants to put in a big vending machine type thing are, finding locations and etc (water hook up or filling will be interesting).

It seems like it could be a very logistics heavy business and hard to account for a lot of things.

</comment><comment><USER30> What exactly is "smart" about it? It sounds like a dumb terminal for both water and advertisements.

</comment><comment><USER31> As long as the water keeps flowing when the internet is down, we're good.

<comment><USER17> Yes it does.

<comment><USER18> How do you intend to respond to attacks against wire or antenna? What stops someone from disabling the advertisement function without interfering with water dispensing?

And while we're on the subject of internet-connected devices, how much thought have you given to black-hat hackers pwning water fountains remotely, or with a few minutes of physical access, to stream racy videos or promote their garage band's next show?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "fundamental mistrust of drinking sources"

I know a few people like this but I don't understand it. Why is the water coming out of a faucet not safe, here in NYC?

</comment><comment><USER33> Now we just need ads in our public parks, preferably for tobacco products, and the 80s vision of the dystopian corporate future will be complete.

<comment><USER32> I can hear the Liquidator cackling in the background: "Wetter Water!" [1]

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Preying on public distrust for something as essential as public drinking water is horrible.

<comment><USER17> Join us then in the fight against Coke/Pepsi/Nestle which have done exactly that for 30 years to the tune of billions of dollars.

Read up on Coke's "Cap the Tap" program and you'll see why I started Tap

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is just a water fountain with advertising...

</comment><comment><USER17> @findtap Founder here.

[https://findtap.com/](https://findtap.com/)

AMA

<comment><USER35> I've already experienced advertisements on gasoline pumps. I would concede that it is not exactly the same thing - gas pumps are worse, because you're already paying for a product.

However, it is certainly just as annoying and invasive.

Do you ever stop and ask yourself "am I really making the world a better place by doing this?"

<comment><USER17> Every single day.

The reality is your attention had a cost, and the price of quality tap water is less than that cost.

We will also enable a donation based model for water. Future revenue generating opportunities include sparkling and flavored water at a fraction of the cost of what you would buy on the shelf at a convenience store. 65% of the cost of any beverage is packaging and transportation. By carrying your own bottle, you'll save money, save the planet from plastic pollution, and yes, water will be free.

<comment><USER36> I intend for this to be honest feedback from a consumer perspective, not an attack. I know I don't fully appreciate your business. Thanks for sharing your product with HN!

I can't see how this is any improvement over a drinking fountain. Drinking fountains typically dispense filtered water and the idea of obnoxious advertising on them is disgusting to me. On the other hand, if these machines dispensed a selection of flavored seltzer water I would see the value, probably use them and seek them out and not mind the advertising. I might even buy a reusable water bottle from you that was designed to hold the carbonation. I would be getting something I actually value and can't trivially get for free. I would also be really reducing my environmental footprint since I already drink filtered tap water, but do buy lots of canned seltzer.

Flavored seltzers appear to be big business right now. I have no idea if the unit economics could support it, but on the surface, the flavoring chemicals have to be incredibly inexpensive. Seeing something like this would absolutely catch my attention and I would tell other people about it.

It's an important problem to be working on and I wish you all the luck in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> meanwhile, in commie europe: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GceNsojnMf0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GceNsojnMf0)</comment>


Ask HN: What activities are worth doing while working on a startup? - <AUTHOR>

Is it worth reading about startups and stuff?
Is it worth writing/blogging?
What would you recommend doing, and what wouldn't you? <comment><USER2> So, being fairly recent to Silicon Valley myself, I would say without a doubt, start-up reading is insanely helpful. I'd start with some of the books with lots of amazing start-up lessons like the Lean Startup and read blogs from other entrepreneurs and notable VCs (Paul Graham, Bothsidesofthetable, AVC, et al). Hacker News is also a pretty great community to search for help on stuff as it comes up.

Beyond doing lots of reading, I'd say, it depends. The start-up mantra is, build something people want. If you find writing/blogging can help you on that path, do it. Certainly meeting and talking to lots of potential customers is a must. Building a product is also a must. I think about the choices of what I'm doing and always try to filter it by whether or not it will get me closer to these things.

But it will really depend on your business. I'd personally recommend finding certain things to relax you that you invest some time in, whether it be meditation or exercise etc. Other than that, try to focus your energy on the next best thing that will get you closer to customers.

</comment><comment><USER3> and most importantly, save what you have read such as articles, videos, newsletter. You will be needing them in the future.

cheers!</comment>


Cities, innovation, and clustering: an interview with Enrico Moretti - <AUTHOR> https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2019/q1/interview <comment><AUTHOR> The kind of data that's been found on cities and innovation clustering is why I'm skeptical that remote work is going to become a major, common modality.

That said, the way cities practice exclusionary zoning is pushing companies and workers towards remote: [https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/09/affordable-home- jobs-...](https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/09/affordable-home-jobs- building-employment/595195).</comment>


AVG.com hacked - <AUTHOR> http://www.avg.com

<comment><USER2> DNS redirect of some sort? Seems back up for me

[http://grahamcluley.com/2013/10/avg-website-palestinian- hack...](http://grahamcluley.com/2013/10/avg-website-palestinian-hackers/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I just get redirected to [http://www.avg.com/gb- en/homepage](http://www.avg.com/gb-en/homepage) which seems to be un-hacked. What happens on the US site?

<comment><USER4> Here is what I am looking at

[http://imgur.com/a/6UOog](http://imgur.com/a/6UOog)

<comment><USER5> Looks like same guys who hacked Leaseweb

> We owned Leaseweb Servers and kept some of their servers for us. But we only > changed the DNS Server for now, because we faced some problems with the > company website. Here, all what we need… is to add our signature on their > homepage to prove that there is not Completely Secure. If we can pwn them, > we can hack other big providers too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Turn off your speakers...

<comment><USER6> Why the downvote? I opened this at work and music started playing loudly. You don't expect that these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> everything normal...

</comment><comment><USER4> Haha</comment>


Show HN: namespace.js - a 250 byte open source project. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mckoss/namespace

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish there was more uniformity with the way JavaScript libraries manage the global namespace. So, I stripped down the library I use to the bare essentials, and made it a stand-alone open source (public domain) project.

I'm hoping that by removing the idiosyncrasies of my earlier version, I can actually get others to adopt this mechanism.

Is it crazy to have such a tiny open source project?

(BTW: the gzipped/minified version of the library is less than 250 bytes - hence the title).

<comment><USER2> Not crazy but probably an overkill. I'd just post it as a gist.

<comment><AUTHOR> Since I want this evangelize this to others, making a full repo lets me put in a nice read me, make it clear the license is in the public domain, and also provide unit tests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Note that my colleague Dave Herman (on the TC39 committee; i.e. the JavaScript standards committee) is working on an official modules proposal for the next version of JavaScript, code-named Harmony. See here for examples: [http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:simple_modul...](http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:simple_modules_examples)

</comment><comment><USER4> I like it for how single-minded it is. Do one thing and do it well.

Here's my one question (and it's not specific to namespace.js)

How to do imports so I can avoid

var obj = new namespace.com.foo.bar.baz.FooBar(...);

<comment><AUTHOR> I will generally have an "imports" type line at the top of my module, and then use the abbreviated name in the code. This is similar to Python's "from module import name" pattern.

        var library = namespace.com.foo.bar.baz;
        ...
        var obj = new library.FooBar();

It's generally considered a best practice (in the Python community) to leave the external module name (like "library", above) so that someone reading your code can recognize which functions are external to your module, and which ones are local.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the input!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update: I added a project web site with a FAQ here:

<http://mckoss.github.com/namespace/></comment>


Why you should read the book Before the Lights Go Out - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/reviews/2012/04/why-you-should-read-the-book-before-the-lights-go-out.ars <comment><USER2> I haven't read the book, but if you're interested in that kind of thing, also check out Without Hot Air:

<http://www.withouthotair.com/>

Which is a beautifully straight forward book, written by a physicist who deeply understands the field but is writing for the general public. It tallies up methods of energy production, and breaks down current consumption, as well as providing multiple plans for generating that much energy.

My only complaint is that it largely ignores energy efficiency gains (check out some Amory Lovins lectures for instance[1]) - though the Jevon's paradox may suggest that's the right thing to do.

[1] <http://youtu.be/O5txQlEI7bc>

</comment><comment><USER3> "This sets the tone for the whole book: let's skip the reasons and just focus on the solutions and hard choices that need to be made."

vs.

"I won't be buying this book if the opening premise is that the US electric grid is in crisis. This Ars article surely didn't give any justification for that. Must be sensationalism for the purpose of selling books. I've been an engineer in the US electric business for 20 years. It's not in crisis."

Hmm, who to believe?

<comment><USER4> Any book that advocates policy changes without justifying them ("skip the reasons") is not something I personally am interested in buying.

<comment><USER5> Is this such a book? Or is it discussing implementation issues? There's a very big difference. I read books and articles talking about approaches and likely pitfalls. Of course I also read things that are advocacy. Some are both.

<comment><USER4> It's possible the book is just discussing implementation issues. But if it's implementation issues for something that has not been convincingly established to be a problem, it seems like putting the cart before the horse. Why discuss hard choices that need to be made before establishing need? What is the point of such a work?

<comment><USER6> The point was that there are so many reasons. Besides climate change a number of issues were brought up such as energy security, conservation, and nationalism. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of books that discuss these reasons. Should this book be forced to repeat the same things that have been said over and over again just for the sake of doing it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Frankly, if the book indeed focuses on electricity generation only, it misses out on a big chunk of the problem. Electricity is NOT going to be a major issue. We could go on with non-CO2 producing nuclear power plants for another 100 000 years with the amount of fissible material on Earth. The big issue is going to be "how can we replace gas/fuel" ? If I remember correctly, 70% of the oil is the US is used to power cars only. We can have natural gas combusting engines for a while, as a replacement, but what's after? Bio-Fuels won't work: you have to put more energy to produce them than what you get out of it. It has a negative yield. Wind power is not transportable. There's no way you can make a normal car move with solar panels. How about electric cars ? Well, it's going to be massively expensive, unpractical to recharge, and there's nothing indicating you can effectively use it to power heavy trucks needed for goods transportation.

Of course, the issue will not come up suddenly. It's all going to be progressive, and when the petrol prices rise to very high levels and stay there, there will be running innovation to provide good alternatives. I'm not too worried. Market will adapt.

<comment><USER8> If we weren't constrained by how few reactors we've built, we'd probably store electrical energy as fuel using <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process> to create liquid ammonia from hydrogen (electrolyzed water) and nitrogen (distilled air). Batteries may eventually become competitive in recharge rate and useful lifetime, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Because it's really hard to read the book in the dark.

Ba-dum TISH.</comment>


China's plan to give every citizen a social credit score - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28314-inside-chinas-plan-to-give-every-citizen-a-character-score/ <comment><USER2> Charles Stross commented on these reports, [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/10/it- could...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/10/it-could-be- worse.html)

 _" The gamification of social conformity, overseen by an authoritarian government and mediated by nudge theory, is a thing of beauty and horror; who needs cops with nightsticks to beat up dissidents when their friends and family will give them a tongue-lashing on behalf of the government for the price of a discount off a new fridge? ... You can see your score in real time, get helpful tips on what to do (or not to do) to grind for points, and if you're thinking about doing something a bit naughty a handy app will give you a chance to exercise second thoughts and erase your sin before it is recorded."_

A 2014 Chinese planning document for the credit system, [https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/plan...](https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/planning- outline-for-the-construction-of-a-social-credit-system-2014-2020/) said, _"... its inherent requirements are establishing the idea of an sincerity culture, and carrying forward sincerity and traditional virtues."_

In the 1970s, Chile tried cybernetics at a national scale, [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning- machin...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine)

 _" At the center of Project Cybersyn (for "cybernetics synergy") was the Operations Room, where cybernetically sound decisions about the economy were to be made ... One wall was reserved for Project Cyberfolk, an ambitious effort to track the real-time happiness of the entire Chilean nation in response to decisions made in the op room. Beer built a device that would enable the country's citizens, from their living rooms, to move a pointer on a voltmeter-like dial that indicated moods ranging from extreme unhappiness to complete bliss."_

<comment><USER3> and here in the US its done through proxies who sue to get access to donation lists, list of those who supported petitions, access to previously courted locked documents, and such, in order to shut down speech or actions they don't like. sometimes even government agencies get involved with political activist abusing their position.

so while China might codify affecting people's credit scores and "social" score make no assumption that similar hasn't always been in Western countries, we just like to paint others as bogeymen to avoid looking at our own flaws

<comment><USER4> Proxies like college professors? Students gain points by telling professors what the professors want to hear and if the students thoughts manifest in submitted papers are dissimilar from the professors they are penalized. So, while writing and thinking more important the thinking students are trying to figure out what the professors want to hear.

Of course, this doesn't apply to any discipline that is a system like math, STEM, physics, ect.. But in humanities, what students are learning is to think like their teachers.

<comment><USER5> I think you're painting the humanities with an overly broad brush, and writing off an entire field of study because of some presupposed notion.

And that you specifically exempt STEM fields from your ire has you playing right into the worst stereotypes of STEM arrogance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Old-school dictatorships were so brash and clumsy the way they punished dissent with firing squads and trips to the gulag.

It's just as effective to punish dissent by slowly but surely ruining the life of those who express dissenting opinions. That way, instead of making dissenters into martyrs, you just make them look like losers.

Very clever, China.

<comment><USER7> Actually, the Soviet Gulag was mostly about slave labour - they arrested people to make them slaves because they thought this would be efficient - which it wasn't.

If they thought you really were a threat you were executed rather than being sent to a camp.

I can recommend Anne Applebaum's book:

[http://www.anneapplebaum.com/gulag-a- history/](http://www.anneapplebaum.com/gulag-a-history/)

<comment><USER8> "If they thought you really were a threat you were executed rather than being sent to a camp."

True, but the threat of deportation was nonetheless one of the Nomenklatura's weapon of choice. Someone's death was, even in the aftermath of the WW2 mass carnage, perceived as brutal mean of "solving" problems and could spur further backslash/dissidence. Someone's separation from their social circle however, was a much more safer method and the perpetrators were able to sleep at night because there could hardly be any retribution for such a thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On the one hand, this is very spooky. On the other, it seems like it could be a precursor to a social currency similar to the Whuffie[0] in Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom". I remember that reading that book, I couldn't help but feel that, as we move closer to a post-scarcity society, the rise of something like that would be inevitable, and might in some ways be much better than what we have now.

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

<comment><USER10> Admiration and social standing as currency was used by Howard L. Myers in "All around the universe" 31 years earlier than Doctorow.

[http://www.baenebooks.com/10.1125/Baen/0743436075/0743436075...](http://www.baenebooks.com/10.1125/Baen/0743436075/0743436075__12.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> To the extent that my understanding of European current events is aided by shared culture and a much better coverage of history, even including many more modern events, I find my near-complete lack of understanding of Chinese culture is a serious impediment to my understanding of articles like this. My university history classes basically ended at the Boxer Rebellion, with a brief interlude into using the Great Leap Forward as a hit piece against Mao (which, to be fair, he seems to have deserved, but that's all it was meant as. It wasn't meant as history of China).

For example: isn't China supposed to be Communist? How are there so many ludicrously rich people? Clearly, I'm missing some part of the equation in there that explains why I have this perception.

It's vexing because I tend to want to "fix" problems in understanding as soon as I identify them, yet I have no idea how one would gain an accurate image of China from the outside, given how much _I 've been told_ they control information flow.

<comment><USER12> They control their citizen's access to information, but from outside it's not difficult to get a relatively accurate picture. This book [0] for instance was quite helpful in understanding how the CCP controls the country and, as a result, how many things work in China.

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Party-Secret-Chinas- Communist/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Party-Secret-Chinas- Communist/dp/0061708763)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> And the arms race between freedom and control goes on.

" _All that behaviour will be integrated into one comprehensive assessment of you as a person_ "

The ultimate simplification, condensing a human being to a simple number. Gods have always been used to rationalise entitlement to and application of power. This one is electrified and fully programmable.

As a concept, this is so predictable that it's already boring (was only a question of time until machines become capable of implementing this nightmare). There should exist a ton of science fiction literature that explores this scenario. How dumb would people have to be to not see through it? We already had a period of enlightenment that disposed of the "old gods". And they seriously believe an electrified god artefact would fare any better?

<comment><USER14> > We already had a period of enlightenment that disposed of the "old gods". > And they seriously believe an electrified god artefact would fare any > better?

Plenty of people think that way about money, with the ends often justifying the means to astonishing degrees. We create things, then worship them. Plenty of people get manipulated to elect people, and that makes what those do right by definition in their eyes, rationalizing even hard facts away once they're taken; people basically get deceived and "voluntarily" make choices against their own interests as a matter of daily business; that's just more sustainable coercion, not freedom. There's one thing worse than not being free, that's not being free and thinking you are.

<comment><USER15> Money is a curious sort of behavioral information network, in that the information is destroyed at every hop. If you pay five dollars at my hot dog stand, I accept the exchange in value without the slightest clue if the money came from tutoring orphans, or human trafficking. I'm honestly unsure which has greater perverse incentives and moral hazard: behavioral opacity, or behavioral transparency. (Note that the only entities that have access to at least some of the information of each money hop are governments, banks, credit agencies, and to some extent online silos like Amazon.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For additional commentary, there was previous discussion of this topic a week ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10329733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10329733)

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra It seems that people (in power; but especially ones commenting on such articles; those with cynical spin mostly) perceive life in a country as a computer game.

Where "dissidents" will happen to your country, and you have to implement "measures" to make them go away, and then you call it a day. Because game rules incentivize you to do exactly that.

The reality is: Life happens to your country. People happen to your country. Things happen to your country that are outside of your control. DDR's Stasi had kilogramms of dossiers on every its citizen, and it got scrapped in a few days with as little as a handshake.

<comment><USER17> In some areas, it would be so much better if countries were really ruled like sim games. You need more energy for growth and global warming threatens your future? You start building goddamn nuclear power plants. No political bickering, no clueless citizens protesting everything at random because of fear or propaganda.

<comment><USER18> Enlightened despotism used to be a popular idea. I don't think it works because there is no guarantee they despot will optimize for country outcome rather than personal enjoyment.

<comment><USER19> My main worry about enlightened despotism is "what happens when the despot kicks the bucket?". No guarantee their successor will be as enlightened as them.

If you solve the succession problem, enlightened despotism starts sounding very good.

<comment><USER20> Except the term "enlightened" is most often relative to a groups desired outcomes...

<comment><USER17> That's good enough. It's better to have a stable and reasonable ruler that tries to do the Right Thing (i.e. optimize globally in the scale of country) than everyone trying to have it their - however smart or stupid - way.

<comment><USER20> Well I don't fully disagree, but then there are the "enlightened" rulers of ISIS trying to do the "right thing" for humanity...

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I'll grant you that. I guess that I dream of someone pulling off an enlightened semi-dictatorship based on liberal values...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well I guess now we know which government provided the seed capital for Peeple.

</comment><comment><USER22> Looks like all this does is cause people to waste time optimizing the score, and make the wealthy better off since they can hire the service of consultants specializing in this.

<comment><USER23> Pretty much like our current financial system then. You can send ages moving your money from one investment to another. The rich already pay professionals for that and genrally come out on top. Just sticking your money in a normal account and it effectively diminishes over the years.</comment></comment>


A new definition of technical debt (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.georgovassilis.com/2018/12/18/technical-debt/ <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR Technical debt is the cost of reducing the total project cost by X

<comment><USER2> To me, the key technical debt analogies are leverage, interest, and bankruptcy/refinance. Borrowing against the future by doing the easy thing right now is likely to make future changes harder. But "predictions are hard, especially about the future." Sometimes the world changes in ways that entirely eliminates the debt...an organization ceases operations or it merges or it grows into a landscape that could not have been foreseen. Or in the world of startups, the organization grows into problems of scale, problems that the costs of solving upfront would have prevented growth.

Google didn't waste time building Kubernetes in 2000.

[edit] Ideally, the goal is not to pay down technical debt but to sell the asset backing the debt for profit or discharging the obligation to pay.</comment></comment>


Show HN: HgLab 1.0 Released - Mercurial Server for Windows - <AUTHOR> http://hglabhq.com/blog/2013/11/26/hglab-1-0-released This is the thing I've been busy with for the past 18 months, over which it has grown from a skunkworks project into a real-world product. This is going to be my first microISV and even if it's a colossal commercial failure, I'm looking forward to the experience of product development.
To ship HgLab, I first effectively rewrote Mercurial Core in C# (https://bitbucket.org/hglab/hgsharp), and then built on that to first deliver a bare-bones read-only repository browser and then a full-fledged Mercurial Server.
I'm open to any kind of feedback. And wish me luck! <comment><AUTHOR> This is the thing I've been busy with for the past 18 months, over which it has grown from a skunkworks project into a real-world product. This is going to be my first microISV and even if it's a colossal commercial failure, I'm looking forward to the experience of product development.

To ship HgLab, I first effectively rewrote Mercurial Core in C# ([https://bitbucket.org/hglab/hgsharp](https://bitbucket.org/hglab/hgsharp)), and then built on that to first deliver a bare-bones read-only repository browser and then a full-fledged Mercurial Server.

I'm open to any kind of feedback. And wish me luck!

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting idea, like github. Let's see how will this work ;0</comment>