Python post-Guido - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/759756/931b0f4617723184/ <comment><USER2> Please no democracy, not a voting madness or anything like groups decision making.

Just another BDFL, that's it.

<comment><USER3> > Just another BDFL, that's it.

I think a lesson to take from this is that the concept of a "BDFL" doesn't really stand up. Putting an individual in charge dramatically increases the chances that they will suffer some kind of burn out compared to a situation where there are more people to share the burden with. That means the "For Life" part is more like "until they decide it's not worth the grief".

It's also clear that the "Dictator" part isn't really true; the stated reason for Guido leaving the project was the difficulty he had in getting the wider community to agree to a change he was in favour of.

The idea that having a single individual in charge produces a consistency of design seems false over the long term. Each time you burn through one leader you have to pick a new one who might have a relatively different aesthetic sense or set of priorities. And individuals change. Someone who was indifferent to functional programming, for example, in 1995 could be a huge advocate of it 20 years later, making quite different design decisions as a result.

Instead I would strongly encourage the Python community to look at what the Rust community have been doing. Leadership there is group-based, and the core team sets out an explicit vision for the project each year. This allows feedback from the community on direction and enables changes to be assessed against the explicit shared vision (vs assuming that vision exists in someone's head in the BDFL model). Ther exists a process for making changes that ensures that all (unique) feedback is considered before making a change, so that when decisions are made they're made based on shared facts. There is also emphasis on growing contributers into leadership positions, which togther with the team-based approach provides continuity when people move on from the project.

I'm not claiming it's a perfect system, but it seems to be working relatively well in a language that is going through a much more active phase (in terms of adding features) than Python.

<comment><USER4> > That means the "For Life" part is more like "until they decide it's not > worth the grief".

That is what "for life" means lots of the time outside of BDFL, too.

Federal judges retire, too. Monarchs and even regular, non-benevolent dictators abdicate or otherwise step down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting that Guido finally gave up dealing with the haters at roughly the same time that Py2 is finally being replaced by Py3. It's almost as if there is some kind of maturity milestone that has been crossed, and it's time for things to change for good.

<comment><USER6> [https://pythonclock.org/](https://pythonclock.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hope for another BDFL or at least a king. Democracy is going to be a mess. Choose someone who wants to do it, agrees with Guido on as many as possible fundamental things and isn't too much of a revulotionary please.

<comment><USER8> This is speculative, but project dictators might be too risky for succession. They can be good at managing the project, they can be bad at managing the project, and there's no reliable way to tell in advance.

Guido was good. If he hadn't been good, Python wouldn't have caught on like it did. If someone who starts a small project turns out to be bad at it, that's no great loss - there are a lot of small projects. You don't see the ones that fail.

But if you put someone in charge of a large project and they mess it up, that's a large problem. It's better to go for a safe option with a reasonable expected value than for the option with the highest best-case value.

<comment><USER9> One can always fork.

<comment><USER10> IMHO, it is too soon for Python 4.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Dennis: What I object to is you automatically treatin' me like an inferior. Arthur: Well, I am king. Dennis: Oh, king, eh? Very nice. And how'd you get that, then? By exploiting the workers! By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society! If there's ever going to be any progress-- Dennis: We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as sort-of-executive officer for the week-- Arthur: Yes. Dennis: But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting-- Arthur: Yes, I see. Dennis: By a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs-- Arthur: [getting bored] Be quiet. Dennis: But by a two thirds majority, in the case of more major-- Arthur: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet! Dennis' Mother: Order, eh? Who does he think he is? Arthur: I am your king! Dennis' Mother: Well I didn't vote for you. Arthur: You don't vote for kings! Dennis' Mother: How'd you become king, then? Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, [Angel chorus begins singing in background] her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. [Angel chorus ends] That is why I am your king! Dennis: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. Arthur: Be quiet! Dennis: You can't expect to wield supreme power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you! Arthur: Shut up! Dennis: I mean, if I went 'round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away! Arthur: Shut up! Will you shut up?! [Grabs Dennis and shakes him] Dennis: Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system! Arthur: Shut up! Dennis: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!

</comment><comment><USER12> OK, now that's cool. I wonder if Christian Heimes saw my post† on the HN topic on the 12th, or if we both proposed the idea independently?

†: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17516186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17516186)

</comment><comment><USER13> Guido's leadership has really been what's kept Python so consistent during its evolution. This is in contrast to languages governed by committee or corporation.

Hopefully Python continues to be guided in this manner, and Guido can help rally the Python community around a successor.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why not try a president of Python every 4 years with no term limits? Similar to BDFL, except there are chances for change and a consistent voice throughout a term. Voters would consist of core devs and PSF.

<comment><USER15> Basically the Debian model. It has some drawbacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm just hoping this leads to a more multiparadigm Python that doesn't have a seemingly irrational fear of FP

<comment><USER5> This comment puzzles me. For one, I can't recall meeting a stong FP proponent that accepts anything less than a language designed from the ground-up to be true FP. Second, how is Python afraid of FP? This[1] document has been part of the Python docs for as long as I can remember.

[1] [https://docs.python.org/2/howto/functional.html](https://docs.python.org/2/howto/functional.html)

<comment><USER17> There has been some pushback on the inclusion of common functional idioms in Python, though. For example, GvR has expressed regret about allowing map, filter, etc. into Python, on the grounds that comprehensions are a more Pythonic way to accomplish most of the same stuff.

<comment><USER18> But comprehensions are also a functional idiom.

<comment><USER19> FP means referential transparency. For-comprehensions operate on iterators and iterators are not FP, being a very dirty and mutable protocol.

Do not confuse FP with declarative programming or with laziness. FP often implies declarative APIs and laziness but not vice-versa.

<comment><USER8> Python's comprehensions were lifted from Haskell, and its map and filter functions also operate on iterables. They can't be purely functional because of the surrounding language, but they do follow a functional style.

(expr for item in iterable if cond) is more or less another way to spell map(lambda item: expr, filter(lambda item: cond, iterable)), except readable.

You could define "functional programming" to absolutely require referential transparency, but that's not what the rest of the thread is doing.

<comment><USER20> I don't mean to be pedantic but IIRC Python's comprehensions actually came from the SETL language.

Obviously it's ultimately the same thing either way, but that's the lineage (SETL -> ABC -> Python).

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

<comment><USER8> I didn't know about SETL, that's interesting.

[https://docs.python.org/3/howto/functional.html#generator- ex...](https://docs.python.org/3/howto/functional.html#generator-expressions- and-list-comprehensions) claims Python borrowed them from Haskell, but the ABC link seems more likely.

<comment><USER21> ABC didn't have list comprehensions though, in spite of being influenced by SETL.

As I recall, Python did get them from Haskell, which in turn got them from Miranda, which got them from KRC. Before that it gets fuzzy, but it's likely that SETL was eventually at the root of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> AFAICT, this article repeats the disaster of PEP572: it makes almost no effort to discuss how Python is used. Specifically, it implicitly holds that the BDFL + core contributors model that served Python so beautifully from, say, 1992 to 2002 when Python had perhaps 2 orders of magnitude fewer users than it does now and ran on—how can we know—3? 4? orders of magnitude fewer machines, should be taken for granted as the default governance mechanism for Python in 2018, when it is a key part of the world's infrastructure. I have no idea how to manage something as important as Python, but reading python-dev and seeing the brilliant Tim Peters, who was indispensable to Python's early growth, argue for a significant change in the language's semantics by using it to refactor a few samples from his personal code base, strikes me as prima facie evidence that neither do the core contributors. Millions. Of. People. Write. Python. That. Affects. The. Lives. Of. Billions. Of. People. Start there.

<comment><USER23> > Millions. Of. People. Write. Python. That. Affects. The. Lives. Of. > Billions. Of. People. Start there.

I don't think this is how open source development works. Probably most of the core contributors are doing it for pleasure, not for satisfying the needs of the users.

<comment><USER24> This idea that are large and influential project like Python is just the same as a hobby project I put on github and do in my spare time is ridculous. I am pretty sure most of the core contributors of Python are doing it as part of their 9-5 job.

Then there is the implication that because they are doing it for pleasure, they don't owe anything to anyone. It's ridculous. This software affects millions of people and it's not a dumb hobby project.

<comment><USER25> actually, by using Python you explicitly agree that PSF doesn't owe you anything :)

[https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/LICENSE)

4\. PSF is making Python available to Licensee on an "AS IS" basis. PSF MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. BY WAY OF EXAMPLE, BUT NOT LIMITATION, PSF MAKES NO AND DISCLAIMS ANY REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR THAT THE USE OF PYTHON WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY THIRD PARTY RIGHTS.

5\. PSF SHALL NOT BE LIABLE TO LICENSEE OR ANY OTHER USERS OF PYTHON FOR ANY INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR LOSS AS A RESULT OF MODIFYING, DISTRIBUTING, OR OTHERWISE USING PYTHON, OR ANY DERIVATIVE THEREOF, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY THEREOF.

<comment><USER24> I'm talking about social responsibilities. Not about legal liabilities.

If there is not implied social responsibility that PSF keeps python running, then no one will be using it.

<comment><USER26> Why? As long as python.exe runs code, people will use it. And there's too much money invested in it for people that have done so to let it just die.

<comment><USER24> Because PSF says they will support Python? What happens when there is a bug? You fork Python? PSF gets 3 million in revenue per year. Where do you think the money goes? Python is not a hobby project.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Moronic Acid - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moronic_acid <comment><USER2> In chemistry class we used to make jokes about the "ferrous/ferric" oxidation states. You'd get full points for saying "ironic", as long as you added a winky face ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> What a name... I thought it was a joke</comment>


Asciinema - <AUTHOR> https://asciinema.org/ <comment><USER2> ttyrec is a tiny terminal utility that does this on your terminal. It was released in 2000, it's one of those nice little gems one is glad to discover. It records and playbacks terminal sessions. The recorded files are in kb's. [1]

It's simple to use. 'ttyrec filename' starts recording, ctrl-c to stop recording. 'ttyplay filename' to playback.

Of course with asciinema.org, you get the benefit of an html player for the files, that you can link and playback on your own website.

[1][http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/index.html.en](http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/index.html.en) [2][http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/maverick/man1/ttyrec.1.h...](http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/maverick/man1/ttyrec.1.html)

<comment><USER3> You know this calls for a ttyrec html player...!

<comment><USER4> I've spent the last week producing just that, and I'm just applying final polish before publishing it. It's a drop-in replacement for <video>.

<comment><USER4> And here it is: [http://tty-player.chrismorgan.info/](http://tty- player.chrismorgan.info/) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9763062](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9763062).

<comment><USER5> Looks like your link was somehow submitted with a null title: your thread appears broken to me. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seriously when people will stop using that for installation....

"curl -sL [https://asciinema.org/install](https://asciinema.org/install) | sh"

Still a cool product!

<comment><USER7> What's wrong with that? It is SSL secured.

Once you agree to install software, it had local access with your accounts privileges.

<comment><USER8> piping random shit into sh is wrong because domains go away, yet installation instructions might be repeated in countless other tutorials. easy to snap up domains and host malware.

and SSL has nothing to do with it. packages are not cryptographically signed either and once on the system can easily become root.

<comment><USER9> Would this be better if the pasted command included some checksum which was checked before piping into the `sh`? Can anyone who's better at bash than me give an example of how this could work in a relatively cross-platform way?

<comment><USER10> You would need to have a GPG signature with a well-known public key that is verified before executing the code.

<comment><USER9> Sorry, can you explain why? If the checksum is provided (as part of the sh snippet) by the website with the SSL certificate, isn't that enough reassurance?

<comment><USER11> If the snippet and the download are on the same site, then whoever controls that site at the moment can provide an accurate checksum of whatever malware they want to host. A signature is an improvement because it can give you some confidence that the current controller is the same as the original controller.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find the timing of this amusing—I was just, in putting the finishing touches on my own project <tty-player> which is basically <video> but with ttyrec scripts for src, writing down my analysis of all the different options there are out there, and I saw this entry up here just as I was writing about asciinema.

asciinema's player has the distinction of being the only one I know of not based on term.js ([https://github.com/chjj/term.js](https://github.com/chjj/term.js)).

<comment><USER12> On the subject of amusing names, since this one looks so similar to "ascii enema", wouldn't yours be the "titty player"? :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been using Asciinema and personally I love this product. I don't have to make my recordings for demos or presentations nor do I have to do live presentations, just pre-record and let everyone view it themselves while I present so they can follow along at their own pace.

Its been great as a teaching tool as well. We've been running it on our internal network but its always hilarious to see which people accidentally have it running so we get to see people do some really dumb shit during their terminal sessions.

</comment><comment><USER14> Previously: [http://showterm.io/](http://showterm.io/)

<comment><USER15> Are these related?

<comment><USER16> Only in the sense that they are pretty much dead-on the same thing and Showterm has been around a lot longer and is in wider use.

<comment><USER15> When I see "previously" on HN, I tend to think "this was previously posted to HN." In this case, I thought the poster was indicating that asciinema.org was previously showterm.io - neither is the case.

<comment><USER17> asciinema was initially called ascii.io. It got renamed about 2 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was really hoping this was short animated clips of famous movie scenes rendered in ASCII.

<comment><USER19> Here you go: [https://asciinema.org/a/6heuukhda9ozykt72gkw5fkog](https://asciinema.org/a/6heuukhda9ozykt72gkw5fkog) :)

<comment><USER18> Now that is what I was hoping for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why does it have to be in the cloud? Can't you guys provide a player in html css whatever and the recording program to generate data files for the player so we can use your technology everywhere and are not tied to this website and its hosting policies?

/rant

<comment><USER21> Code is open source, install it [https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema.org](https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema.org)

Link is in the FAQ.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I love script[1,2] for this sort of thing. Why wait for a video to play? Or host it on a third-party site? Having the entire session visible on a single, static page is less frustrating in most circumstances I encounter.

Having said that, Asciinema certainly looks like fun.

[1] [http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man- cgi?script](http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?script) [2] Sample session: [https://tinyapps.org/blog/nix/201107170745_copy_terminal_tex...](https://tinyapps.org/blog/nix/201107170745_copy_terminal_text.html)

<comment> ezequiel-garzon I was thinking the same thing... but then I realized it works, say, for an ed session, but not for a vi session. Of course, all that visual mode nonsense is just bloatware ;).

<comment><USER22> _When I use an editor, I don 't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!_

[http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html](http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This reminded me about the Dwarf Fortress Map Archive, where you can play back ASCII recordings through a flash player: [http://mkv25.net/dfma/browsemovies.php](http://mkv25.net/dfma/browsemovies.php)

Dwarf Fortress records the game to CMV format: [http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/User:Jifodus/CMV_file...](http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/User:Jifodus/CMV_file_format)

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks great. But I think quite a few people (the audience with which the recording would be shared) would like to see the entire session at once instead of watching the entire video. It would also be helpful for the writer to quickly verify if they missed something.

<comment><USER25> Yeah maybe a button to "View Transcript"

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> From the title I was expecting this to be a link to [http://www.asciimation.co.nz/](http://www.asciimation.co.nz/) :-)

<comment><USER27> A better title for the submission is "Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions" (extracted from the main header of the page)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is there any solution for me wanting to have my recordings be private, or only distributable within a small group?

<comment><USER29> With an account your recordings are private by default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I quite like this service, used it a couple of months ago ([http://steinn.org/post/brute-force-still-going- strong/](http://steinn.org/post/brute-force-still-going-strong/)) although I would love it if I could change my terminal dimensions (char width/height) after recording. That way I could make the terminal window fit the surrounding container on my blog.

But A+ for usability :-)

</comment><comment><USER31> That might be against the point of this project, but I really miss the possibility of an audio-overlay. I found the demo _really_ stress- and unhelpfull, because you have to read rockey text while typed in absolute silence… brrr. I'd rather talk while typing and explain what I am doing and have that synched to the recorded text-session.

</comment><comment><USER32> Wanted (or at least I wanted last time this came up): (Multiple) terminal streams in an OGG container (or similar) and integration in VLC/mplayer. Could make for nice precise output in addition to regular video instead of just having either the raw terminal _or_ a video only screencast.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is very cool. I'd love to adapt it to help members of my team collaborate and share workflows, but GPL makes it hard to integrate with any internal tooling.

<comment><USER34> Should be fine as long as you're not distributing binaries, and the code stays internal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> If you don't know about it, check out the unix command 'script'. You can use it to stream or record terminal sessions.

</comment><comment><USER36> I have used Asciinema couple of weeks now and I am very happy with it.

Our open source project contains a command line tool for Docker orchestration and Asciinema is a perfect solution to introduce its features and use cases ([https://asciinema.org/~kontena](https://asciinema.org/~kontena)).

</comment><comment><USER37> It's be great to have a polished product like this but for programming sessions in a text editor like Sublime.

<comment><USER25> Just curious, what benefit would this have over something like git? Just to show your programming process?

<comment><USER37> Looking at a git diff is one thing, but seeing the commit as it was coded would introduce the dimension of time; giving you better context for how everything came together.

Add some interactive controls for slow-mo/fast-forward or scrubbing forward/back and you would have a powerful tool for learning & review.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Another option for the common case of static output is to render command or script(1) outout directly to static html with something like [http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ansi2html.sh](http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ansi2html.sh)

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm not sure why, but when viewing the recordings in full screen on my Galaxy S5 in landscape mode, a bottom portion of the cast is cut out. For example in the irssi/tmux cast, I don't see the commands typed below the status bar.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm disappointed to see this getting so much traction when showterm.io is clearly the superior product with rewinds, custom speeds, scrolling up and down and linking to a specific point in time, and has been around so much longer. Here is an example of a longer Showterm session: [http://showterm.io/a0616ce5e6f411f292e18](http://showterm.io/a0616ce5e6f411f292e18) taken from [http://www.bitfalls.com/2013/08/autofight-php-job- interview-...](http://www.bitfalls.com/2013/08/autofight-php-job-interview- task-part-3.html)

<comment><USER17> asciinema is here since 2011 (although it was called ascii.io until 2 years ago).

As for rewinds, you can click on the progress bar to jump to a time you want. Also, the upcoming version of the player supports fast-forward/rewind/jump keyboard shortcuts: [https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema- player/blob/next/src/...](https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema- player/blob/next/src/cljs/asciinema_player/view.cljs#L145-L160)

As for the playback speed you can set speed, theme, font size etc (embedding docs say this - [https://asciinema.org/docs/embedding](https://asciinema.org/docs/embedding)), and you can append these options to any asciicast URL too, like this: [https://asciinema.org/a/21743?speed=5&theme=solarized- dark](https://asciinema.org/a/21743?speed=5&theme=solarized-dark)

Looks like these are not easily discoverable from the player UI, so noting this down. Thanks for bringing this up!

<comment><USER40> Ok, that's quite a bit of news. Thanks for clarifying, shines a new light on things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I was about to write few blog post about hacking some websites and servers, now it's pretty cool to record live and post later to blog.

</comment><comment><USER42> It's really bad to curl | sh. You shouldn't do it, and you shouldn't recommend doing it...

The app looks neat though, good job

<comment><USER17> Yeah, see here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9755166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9755166)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I really love lolcat. It makes my day. I'm making alias and adding lolcat -f allover my bashrc files now :-)

</comment><comment><USER44> How does it work?

<comment><USER45> [https://asciinema.org/docs/how-it-works](https://asciinema.org/docs/how-it- works)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Impressive.

</comment><comment><USER47> Cool product and nice execution, but I'm a little stuck on the name. I keep reading it as ascii-enema.

<comment><USER48> Me too. Is this a sort of allusion to something?

<comment><USER49> It's supposed to read as a portmanteau of "ASCII" and "cinema", but yeah, I can see the misreading.

<comment><USER48> Oh that makes sense, as it is quite close in spelling. I have been reading as (As-Key-Nema).

<comment><USER17> You were reading it right :) I guess I should add spelling info to the site ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Two arrested in Turkey for praising failed coup attempt on social media - <AUTHOR> http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/two-arrested-in-turkey-for-praising-failed-coup-attempt-on-social-media-.aspx?pageID=238&nID=101858&NewsCatID=341 <comment><USER2> Compared to the widespread sweeps that have been going on in Turkey post-coup attempt I'm confused about why these two cases are of particular note? What am I missing here?</comment>


No more lolcats in tech presentation, plz - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1614-no-more-lolcats-in-tech-presentation-plz

<comment><USER2> DHH likes to complain pretty much about everything!

Now because of that in my next presentation I'll use LOLdogs.

BTW, I love Federico Mena FAIL!s in his presentations.

<comment><USER3> Oftentimes, the people complaining about everything are the people classy enough to recognize how many things are worth complaining about.

Do you have a link to one of Mena's presentations?

<comment><USER2> <http://www.gnome.org/~federico/#conferences>

Document-centric GNOME is pretty good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find this odd coming from someone who is known for highlighting profanity in presentations - which seems at least as much of a gimmick as a LOLcat.

Not that I care - I enjoy Rails and generally find DHH a fine speaker when I've seen him at RailsConfs - but it does seem mildly hypocritical to me.

<comment><USER3> Swears aren't a gimmick. They're a part of the English language.

When DHH tells a hypothetical person to fuck off, that carries certain undertones. We're all aware of those because it's part of the English language. Same with him calling a product a piece of shit. If he said "This product is severely lacking," that _means_ something difference than "This product is a piece of shit."

I don't know where this taboo against professional swearing comes from, but curse words are a natural part of the English language and should be used as such.

Meanwhile, using LOLcats says nothing good about you. "Hi, I'm immature enough that while you're supposed to regard what I'm saying, I still think that text attached to cats is funny." "Hello, I missed the meme bandwagon and I'm catching up three years later." I would respect somebody using "All Your Base" more than I'd respect LOLcats, and that's not saying I'd respect AYB at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mark-Jason Dominus proposed a different gimmick, long before LOLcats were invented:

[http://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/samples/slide024.htm...](http://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/samples/slide024.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Should there be a not-for-profit social network? - <AUTHOR>

A platform where users can control their own data completely and will never be subject to data mining or targeted advertisement.
Facebook and the like will always be around and they have their place, but many people don't want to be at the mercy of a for-profit organization when it comes to what happens to their personal info. The specter of targeted ads and data mining just don't appeal to a lot of people.
If the model was more open-source and not-for-profit, then you don't have to try to balance user privacy vs. company profit. <comment><USER2> for what benefit?

why isn't there simply a decentralized _for profit_ social network, where your data is stored on your _personal_ web hosting

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with the comment re: defraying costs, but Open source software has been able to find a way to survive and THRIVE with a not-for-profit model, so there must be a way to do it.

Decentralized and for-profit is an interesting idea, but my main concern is that a for-profit model gives the organization a reason to mine the data and monetize it, which could be done even if the hosting isn't centralized.

The reason I like the not-for-profit model is because it tends to (partially) preclude some of the shady privacy intrusion that the for-profit model could push a business towards.

<comment><USER3> Open source does not thrive on the fuel of non-profit alone. Red Hat and Sun are for-profit, but they're major contributors to open-source projects.

Open source is successful with not-for-profit models because people like hacking on open source. I don't think that's necessarily impossible for a social network, because people like to waste a lot of their lives on social networks, but are open-source hackers going to be interested in working on a project they aren't interested in using? I'm assuming that the primary appeal of social networks has long moved past the techie demographic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Foundations might fund online networks that help people contribute more to society. One example is Cogito.org,

<http://www.cogito.org/default.aspx>

which has full membership for young people who pass a screening process, but good resources for lurkers too.

</comment><comment><USER5> Who would pay the hosting costs in such a scenario? Costs have to be offset some way or other. Unless users want to do "donations" or something like that, as what wikipedia recently did.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, you do need money from someplace. Open-source projects manage to make it work so I think there must be a way.

Or let users decide how they want their data to be used. Whats say you have the option to opt-in for anonymous data mining but you get a share of the profit? The main point being that each user has absolute control of the personal data.</comment></comment>


How to show that we are not "cheating" but helping - <AUTHOR> Sometimes people misunderstand what our startup does and assume we are unethical. We feel that we are ethical and our Clients(professors, employers, and students) love us and thank us for our efforts every day. Yet some people(not our client groups, but perhaps future investors) jump to the conclusion that we are helping people "cheat". I think it may be in the way we word our services.
We are helping amazing, and often genius level students from around the world get into western universities and secure funding. We do this because so many times we have seen the erected barriers hold back many bring minds- "If you can cure cancer, but can't write an essay, you might never get your chance."
Our services include:
1.A super-massive university search 2.CV writing software 3.Reference letter writing software which helps non-native English speaking professors, and employers write clear, precise letters for students. 4. Software that explores the personality of non-native English speaking students, and uses the data to prepare rough essays and personal statements that show western universities the quality and potential of our student-clients.
Service 3 sometimes brings on the stoning, but service 4 almost always does. Will we always face this problem or is there something we can do to prevent this misconception?
A case study: We had a client, Sam. Sam was, without question, a genius. As an undergrad, he was accepted as a research assistant by a top professor where he developed an impressive array of self-driving algorithms. He then applied for graduate school in the USA and failed. He had no idea how to write an essay and he was so modest that he ignored all of his stellar work. On top of this, his highly-awarded professor had a weak hold on English and had been unable to write a clear reference letter. We took charge, we helped Sam, and he was offered several full scholarships from top American Universities. <comment><USER2> Couple thoughts:

* On #4, this is absolutely academic misconduct if you're "preparing" an essay that is subsequently submitted as the student's own work. They didn't WRITE IT.

* In general, this ignores a substantial part of why universities offer scholarships: to bring scholars to the university who will collaborate and contribute. Part of the intent of an essay is to demonstrate the applicant's ability to communicate clearly and effectively, as that's generally a key part of collaboration in most fields.

Short story shorter: helping people revise documents they've written is fine, but writing the whole thing isn't.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your input, it is helping me shape a clear set of mission/values for us.

*Our software(not me) assists our clients it expressing themselves. It asks dynamic questions(based on client's country of origin, personality, education, work, passions, life goals) in order to help applicants organize their thoughts in their distinct voice and overcome the intense biases that they are facing(Most cultures just don't do personal essays, and modesty kills most applications). The output is unique but follows a basic outline. Students later add information or make edits as needed so that they can produce their own work. We sometimes proofread their post edits.

In essence, they are writing it. My software just assists them in the same way that an excavator helps one dig or an autotuner helps one sing.

The cultural limitations greatly hurt students, modesty is a HUGE issue that we have to deal with, perhaps the biggest issue of all. I think universities are looking for these kinds of students, however, the current essay system fails to uncover most.

<comment><USER3> TL;DR: Do less automated work, and call it a "coaching service".

\----

I think the challenge here is that the student is NOT writing the essay. Or at least that's the way it looks to me.

Your thesis holds if the intent of the essay is simply to communicate information. With that viewpoint, asking a set of dynamic questions is a great solution. It's the automated equivalent to having a journalist interview the candidate, and prepare an initial draft.

However, I suspect that for many universities, the meta-intent of the essay is to judge not only information, but also the ability to communicate that information. If a university offers a scholarship to a high-level student, who does potentially groundbreaking research but is unable to communicate the findings, that can still be considered a "failure". Your software will not be there to ask dynamic questions and write the research paper.

If you want to continue to offer the service, but you want to retain the ethical high-ground, I can think of two possible options:

1) Disclose to the university that the essay was written with significant help. This may impact your candidate's chances. However, it allows universities to self-sort based on the desire for raw information and accomplishments or communication skills.

2) Provide the same service, but make the output VERY VERY rough. In this sense, the essay builder becomes more of a writing coaching service. This would allow you to overcome barriers of self-modesty and grammar, but would force the candidate to do more work.

From your various posts, it sounds to me like option #2 represents the goal of your product, and is your true desire. However, reading between the lines, I also get the impression that you're going rather far beyond that point. It seems like (?) you may be doing more work than you'd like to admit and are trying to cover that fact. I could be wrong here though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are you writing the essays for them or helping them write their essays? Why not just partner with a service like Essay Edge that has has already dealt with these concerns?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll see what they are doing as well.

Our software(not me) assists our clients it expressing themselves. It asks dynamic questions(based on client's country of origin, personality, education, work, passions, life goals) in order to help applicants organize their thoughts in their distinct voice and overcome the intense biases that they are facing(Most cultures just don't do personal essays, and modesty kills most applications). The output is unique but follows a basic outline. Students later add information or make edits as needed so that they can produce their own work. We sometimes proofread their post edits.</comment></comment>


Don't Negotiate Your Lease Before Reading This  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.officespace.com/2012/04/13/dont-negotiate-your-lease-before-reading-this/

<comment><USER2> it's like going to court without a lawyer.</comment>


Show HN: Pictorical, Crowd-illustrated books startup - <AUTHOR> http://pictorical.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, we want to share with the HN community our startup, Pictorical.

We are two nomadic entrepreneurs from Chile, and a growing community of artists worldwide. We illustrate classic stories, publish them as ebooks (in Apple iBookstore- Kindle and Google coming soon) and sharing the profits with the artists fifty-fifty. Artists then can earn money doing art, thats quite difficult for them.

We look forward to your constructive feedback!

<comment><USER2> Saludos!

Great idea. The book covers on the front page look nice too.

1) $0.99? Why so cheap? For reference the Kindle edition of "A Hunger Artist" costs $2.99.

2) Any plans of selling dead-tree books using a print-on-demand service like Lulu? Some of us still like the feeling of good old paper books. I realize it might be much more expensive but with print-on-demand you have little risk.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hola!

1\. We will probably be selling longer books a little bit more expensive. We can't forget we are competing against free ebooks!

2\. Yes, we will sell illustrated paper books in the near future. And also t-shirts and all sort of things with your favorite illustrations.

Thanks for the feedback!

<comment><USER3> If you're selling books, you're not competing against free ebooks. People who buy free ebooks are not necessarily the same people that pay money for books.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the screenshots, the quality looks incredible. How long have you been developing the site?

A couple additions that I think would improve the site:

* A "coming soon" section

* A link to the artist's web site

* Artist bio

The design of the site itself was very nice, too.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! We did the website itself in 3 days. The company, business model, publishing platform, payment system etc we have been working on it for 6 months part-time and since december full-time.

The coming soon section is a good idea, maybe we can do a "work in progress" where artists show sketches of their illustrations and future readers can comment on them.

The bio and portfolios are coming soon!

Thanks for the compliments on the design... I did it myself and I'm an engineer so I need a little of reassurance there :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh wow, these look lovely. I will try out with my kids tomorrow, and report back.

p.s. First Chile startup post I've seen on HN, did you take some of the government money that's been much in the press?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, please tell me if your kids like them. Would be good field-testing ;)

<comment><USER5> OK, we bought Rapunzel.

The good -- my five year old daughter loved the illustrations, she thought they were cute and rated the book '5 stars' when I asked her to rate it 1 - 5.

The bad -- the illustrations are placed in funny spots from my perspective; many of them give away bits of the story, and are placed before the text. This is fine for an adult who knows the story, but it ruined some of the fun for her, since she only kind of knows the story.

The weird -- one of the illustrations, the one showing the prince's eyes getting healed -- showed up once, then disappeared and would not re-render; I tried changing fonts, orientation, etc. No go; he's missing. But I'm sure I saw him!!

Overall, fun, and we'll buy another one. A little more time on the layout side of life would have made it a more fun experience. Thanks for getting the artists together, I'm glad to have some classics with fresh illustrations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many thanks for sharing your experience :)

About where to place the illustrations: That's a great challenge for us. We are trying to get as much feedback as possible from kids, dads, professional storytellers, psychologists, writers, professors etc, to learn where's the best spot to place the illustration. There's no consensus, but we hope to have a formed opinion soon.

About the layouts: iBooks renders EPUBs in a funny way. We have improved many times the way illustrations are formatted each time updating our books in the iBookstore. We are in the process of updating once again our styling template, using new CSS3 properties supported by iBooks. We are learning along the way and improving our books a lot! (If you send me an email to victor at pictorical com I will send you an updated version of Rapunzel when we have it ready.)

Thanks for buying the book, supporting Paola and giving us feedback. Please do a "like" to Paola (the Chilean artist who draw Rapunzel) to send her thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How do the artists make money? I hope you are part of the solution, too many operators think they can get art for free by throwing the lable "emergent" in front of "artist".

<comment><AUTHOR> The artists get half of the profits i.e. half of the money that we receive from the store. So, for a $1.99 book, Apple will get $0.59, the artist $0.70 and we get $0.70.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a pretty cool idea! I'm more an artist than a programmer, so I could see myself maybe using this. I keep on thinking about doing my own edition of _Alice in Wonderland_...

Do you have plans to hook this up to Amazon as well? I'm nerdy enough to consider doing the markup myself, but if you can automate sending stuff to multiple formats that would start to make it worth half the profits for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are now working on the Kindle conversion, and we will have it -hopefully- by late May. And also in a print-on-demand hook so you can sell paper (or dead-tree) books in Amazon as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congrats, it looks great! Another revenue stream could be offering a customized book based on customer submitted story.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea, thanks Ruchi!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a great idea and I know it is going to be successful. Please fix your typography though by using balanced 'single' and "double" quotes and right- single-quote for apostrophes such as in it's. It does not look professional to have typewriter style quotes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback, I will check the quotes. Thanks bugsy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a great idea, and the books look beautiful. I'd suggest making the site title a horizontal header and lining up the books under that, instead of having two columns. But then again I'm not a designer either. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I will try that tomorrow. Thanks for the good wishes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Way cool! This must be the best way I have seen for new artists to get their foot in the door. A great way to build a community around it might be to let users vote on future artist/book pairings.

<comment><USER12> Thanks schultzi. That's kind of a great idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Simple and Amazing at the same time : Congratulations ! I have a feeling that there are going to be some copycat businesses soon, but still wish you all the best !

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Please help us to spread the word :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> That is AWESOME! Congrats. I think it's a fantastic idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Peter! Please help us to spread the word :)

<comment><USER3> Tweeted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


BigDog: The Most Advanced Quadruped Robot on Earth - <AUTHOR> http://www.bostondynamics.com/content/sec.php?section=BigDog

<comment><USER3> That video has been around for a while and is actually very out of date. Here is a more humanized version of it now:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJZVZFRFJc>

<comment><USER4> Wow, that's amazing. It looks so life-like! Those engineers got it right on this one like they made it out of some spare human parts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Its impressive, but what I find depressing is that for it to be portable they have to use internal combustion engines (that have the side effect of making it look sound like a mosquito).

Its sad because I guess that makes fossil fuels still the most energy dense and practical portable form of energy.

Its am amazing achievement on the robotics side though.

</comment><comment><USER6> Some more footage: <http://www.youtube.com/v/VXJZVZFRFJc>

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+b...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+bigdog)

[http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%22big+dog%22+video)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I did a search but failed to find it. The advice is - in that case - <USER2> just post it.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=276660></comment></comment>


Soros Says Europe Faces 25-Year Slump Without Overhaul  - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-12/soros-says-europe-faces-25-years-of-stagnation-without-overhaul.html <comment><USER2> GDP Uber Alles! Growth Uber Alles! Stagnation? Oh my gosh...how can corporations and their plutocrat owners get richer like that?

Who cares about the quality of life of the citizens of a nation? Growth at all costs...because that makes corporations and their plutocrat owners richer.

Corporations and their plutocrat owners get richer when they are able to control the governments of western nations to force-feed those nations with...what? You tell me....

<comment> workhere-io _Who cares about the quality of life of the citizens of a nation?_

Actually, many European countries, especially the Nordic ones, have so much redistribution of wealth that whether or not we experience growth means a great deal, not just to corporations. Having said that, things aren't bad at all in Northern Europe right now - quite the contrary.</comment></comment>


Google launches store for web apps - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore

<comment><AUTHOR> No special development toolset required, just publish a text file with the proper metadata and you're good to go. They're even planning an integrated payment system.

This could be huge.

</comment><comment><USER2> Hello back, proprietary software. I still don't like you, even with new clothes.

</comment><comment><USER3> I cannot see how the apps are meant to be "installable". Will Google run them on the AppEngine (or similar)? What if my app requires a set of services running on another machine?

<comment><USER4> I think at the most basic level the "installation" process simply sets up shortcuts to existing web apps in Google Chrome.

There's the ability to install serverless (static file based) things too; the example given is browser-based games.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My knee jerk reaction is this is a giant step towards the web as we know it becoming "GoogleNet". I hope they get some sizable competition in this space.

<comment><USER3> No, I don't think so. Until the URL concept is dead, it will always be easier to promote your web site directly, via multiple reviews, affiliates, other software, etc etc. Google app store will be just one of these.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> More discussion going on over here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1361543></comment>


The Angry Drunk: Why I would never buy a Google-made phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.theangrydrunk.com/2008/09/24/dont-drink-the-google-ade/

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry, but I have to say that article made little sense to me.

First of all, was writing in that arrogant, insulting tone really necessary? Please. There's no need to insult your readers.

And also: _"Unlike my friends at the Free Software Foundation, I believe in choice. At the end of the day though, I'll keep my iPhone."_ Is that sarcasm? I found it hard to tell, but I hope it is. Because if anything, 'choice' doesn't come into play anywhere in the iPhone... And his mistrust of Google is completely irrational (well, given his trust of Apple or whatever other smartphone company; personally, I think I would avoid putting all my assets into one company anyway.)

So yeah. Either I failed to understand this article and it was supposed to be funny or a parody, or this is just slightly pointless and aggresive... (Although upon further investigation, if this is by you, unalone, I suppose that's just your writing style, given your profile.)

<comment><AUTHOR> The Angry Drunk makes his name from that arrogant, insulting tone. He's absolutely at the core of the "Mac elitist" crowd, so people tend to take for granted WHAT his opinions are. They come from the level of rancor he spits at things. Similar to John Welsh, actually.

There was an incident with the FSF where they wrote an article bashing the iPhone for absurd reasons (lack of OGG support was one of the points). The Angry Drunk and Welsh both took a lot of offense to that and bashed them. A member of the FSF posted on Welsh's blog explaining and Welsh ripped him apart. Later, the FSF told people to make appointments with Apple Store Geniuses just to waste their time and raise dissatisfaction, and the Mac community was rather pissed off. The attitude since then has been that the FSF is an attention-whoring little sub-cult that doesn't tolerate dissenting opinions.

The idea of "I believe in choice" means "I'll let people pick whatever phone they want, but I'd never get a Google phone myself." The idea being that he chose the iPhone and he's happy with that choice, and he's fine if you're prefer Android.

Why the mistrusting Google? They are advertisers. And while they're honest advertisers, they're still determined to make as much money selling other people's products as possible. I use their stuff, I'm a big fan of Gmail, but I'd really not want an open system designed by an advertising company. It makes me feel fairly skeevy.

I write my own articles. I link to my blog here, actually, when I feel like people would care about my stuff. For this one, I just thought it was something that would provoke some debate, which it has. (I'd like to think that I'm a bit more sober when I write, but I doubt I'm anywhere near as fun to read.)

<comment><USER2> Fair enough. Although still, I fail to see how Google being an advertising company makes it any better or worse than any other company?

The only possible Google-related complaint I can see towards Android (ignoring the usual, tech-wise complaints) is that since it's made by Google maybe it will have advertising... Or something along the lines of that? But I haven't seen or heard anyone saying anything about ads on Android, so I don't think Android being made by Google is any worse than Mac OSX for iPhone being made by Apple.

Quite the opposite, since at least Android gives you some sort of freedom in the source.

And speaking of the FSF - I have to agree, they do seem a bit like crazy cultists sometimes. Stallman, for instance.

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't make it better or worse, but it means that their motivation in all things is to figure out how to spread their advertisements elsewhere.

The fact that you need a Google account to use the phone means that they have the ability to monitor what you're doing, and that's slightly skeevy. I mean, don't get me wrong: I don't think Google will abuse that information. I gladly use my Google account when I have to. But some people are rather worried by that sort of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Drunkenness and ranting should not go together...if you want to put together sentences that contain a modicum of sense.

I give it a D for spelling, C for enlightened anger, and a B+ for trolling.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would buy a phone from a company that was only in advertising until they were in advertising and operating systems for mobile phones.

Who cares what other things they do? Why wouldn't you evaluate it on its merits? Is this the poor judgement of being an angry drunk?

</comment><comment><USER5> Someday you may think of working there..then this kind of post will haunt you ;)

<comment><USER6> <http://xkcd.com/137/></comment></comment>


Hound: A Fast Code Search Tool - <AUTHOR> https://codeascraft.com/2015/01/27/announcing-hound-a-lightning-fast-code-search-tool/

<comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8960068](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8960068).</comment>


Ads on pirate sites can hurt sales survey finds - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/ads-on-pirate-sites-can-hurt-sales-survey-finds-190814/ <comment><AUTHOR> This isnt only about pir8 sites, its about problematic/negative content being associated with brand[s]

it looks like this sort of survey should be done with some true statistical rigor, the true numbers would be somewhat usefull. the horses mouth spouts from here:

[https://www.brandsafetyinstitute.com/blog/survey-brand- safet...](https://www.brandsafetyinstitute.com/blog/survey-brand-safety- crisis-consumer-backlash)

"The survey of 1,017 adults in the United States was conducted via SurveyMonkey from July 24-26, 2019. The survey had a margin of error of +/-3 percent at a 95 percent confidence interval."

with results:

[https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/4962377/TAG_BSI%20Brand%20Saf...](https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/4962377/TAG_BSI%20Brand%20Safety%20Survey_results.pdf) [PDF]</comment>


How G2A sold $450k worth of TinyBuild game keys - <AUTHOR> http://tinybuild.com/g2a-sold-450k-worth-of-our-game-keys <comment><USER2> For keys sold on their own web site, can they not de-activate the keys that were bought in a transaction that was later reversed? (of course, they would still be out any chargeback fees)

For keys sold by resellers, isn't it the reseller who is out of pocket, not tinybuild?

<comment><AUTHOR> They could, but that would lead to players that actually paid complaining (to tinybuild, not reseller). Ubisoft did it, I don't remember it playing out very well for them. But I guess that's the only way to stop G2A and the likes from dealing stolen keys.

And I don't think tinybuild would get money from keys "stolen" from resellers, but I might be wrong.</comment></comment>


Graph Convolutional Networks (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://tkipf.github.io/graph-convolutional-networks/ <comment><USER2> This related paper gives a great overview of ML methods on graphs: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.05584](https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.05584)

It was written by the authors of GraphSAGE, who also implemented it at Pinterest: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.02216](https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.02216) and [https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01973](https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01973)

</comment><comment><USER3> There is an upcoming Manning ebook for graph-machine learning. Its a lot less technical than the papers. Fingers crossed for them.

[https://www.manning.com/books/graph-powered-machine- learning](https://www.manning.com/books/graph-powered-machine-learning)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the recommendation, I haven't heard of this book yet!

Any recommendations on an up to date book on Social Network Analysis and Graph Clustering/Community Detection?

<comment><USER5> There is a new Graph Algorithms O'Reilly book that covers this area: [https://neo4j.com/graph-algorithms-book/](https://neo4j.com/graph-algorithms- book/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I didn't get a chance to look at the paper, but I wanted to share my experience working at two social network companies and publishing an academic paper on the topic of machine learning on a social network graph. Many people think it's necessary to use graph based machine learning (or graph databases).

In practice I found it almost always better to just use a "flat" representation and do regular machine learning (or database schemas). I would love to hear if others disagree.

<comment><USER7> I think it's highly task-specific. In network biology for example, taking advantage of the network structure, either through node embeddings or directly, is almost always helpful (even necessary). I'm not as familiar with applications to social networks, or graph DBs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Variational graph auto-encoders, also by Kipf and Welling, is another great short, understandable paper. [1]

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07308](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07308)

</comment><comment><USER8> Previous discussion (Show HN): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12619694](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12619694)

</comment><comment><USER9> I recently came across this nice intro into how to get started with ML on Graphs [1]

[https://medium.com/octavian-ai/how-to-get-started-with- machi...](https://medium.com/octavian-ai/how-to-get-started-with-machine- learning-on-graphs-7f0795c83763)

</comment><comment><USER10> If somebody wants to help Julia community to support any types of GNN, there is an issue[1] for FluxML to support those.

[1] [https://github.com/FluxML/Flux.jl/issues/625](https://github.com/FluxML/Flux.jl/issues/625)

</comment><comment><USER11> A Keras-like tool for graph ML for those interested in tinkering: Warning: I have yet to useit. I am a complete noob in this area.

[https://danielegrattarola.github.io/spektral/](https://danielegrattarola.github.io/spektral/)

</comment><comment><USER12> > Also I'd like to thank Ferenc Huszar for highlighting some drawbacks of > these kinds of models.

As someone who understands ML concepts but hasn't used ML in practice, can someone elaborate on these drawbacks compared to using a traditional neural network?

<comment><USER13> In a traditional CNN you use the same convolution kernel across an entire image. Here you do the same but you convolve the features of a person (pixel) with the feature of its neighbors, but those change depending on the network. Drawbacks are: I) you add one new person to the network, the whole thing has to be retrained; ii) convolutions are more complex and expensive

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A great paper ([http://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2017/papers/Monti_...](http://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2017/papers/Monti_Geometric_Deep_Learning_CVPR_2017_paper.pdf)) on Geometric Deep Learning, which builds upon the concepts used in GCNs.

</comment><comment><USER15> Has there been any recent progress on GCNs or similar for embedding graphs rather than nodes?

<comment><USER7> Yes. This problem is of particular importance in drug response prediction, where small molecules are represented as graphs where the atoms are nodes and the bonds are edges. These are difficult to work with because of the variability in the number of nodes.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.09292](https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.09292)

[2] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.00856](https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.00856)

[3] [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v48/niepert16.html](http://proceedings.mlr.press/v48/niepert16.html)

[4] [https://persagen.com/files/misc/xu2017seq2seq.pdf](https://persagen.com/files/misc/xu2017seq2seq.pdf) (PDF)</comment></comment>


My Remote Work Office Setup - <AUTHOR> https://anjuansimmons.com/blog/my-remote-work-office-setup <comment><USER2> I appreciate sharing of work spaces because it helps people understand what works.

For me, this space has too much going on. I prefer a much simpler workspace. Standing desk, macbook, monitor and a notebook.</comment>


Ask HN: Who is looking for a cofounder? (June 2016) - <AUTHOR> I thought this may be useful to those of you working on your own startup and seeking partners. Same discussion from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9795503. <comment><USER2> Hello, I'm a Seattle-based engineer working on a decision-ranking system that scores options, by aggregating data from the web, and also allows users to do task tracking on the options they choose to pursue.

This is a pretty interesting concept with applicability to a range of domains. For example, imagine automatically ranking the "fit" of tech job postings, by comparing information gleaned from the post and other web sources (e.g., Joel test info, GlassDoor info, etc.) to your personal weighted criteria, and then tracking your applications and communications with the top ranked employers all in one place.

I'm looking to link up with two other co-founders (preferably based in Seattle):

1\. A semi-technical generalist who is good at ideation and can see the big picture in terms of product/market fit and the like, but also has a decent understanding of the technical side of things

2\. A good marketing/salesperson, not necessarily a person with a formal background in sales, but someone who can clearly communicate the value in a product and build relationships with customers

Please send a message to my email (in my profile) or reply here, if interested. If you are in Seattle, we can arrange to get together soon to discuss in more depth.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm working on video-based tracking software (targeted at traffic studies users, but with potentially broader applications).

The technical core is OK and I'm mainly working on getting the MVP out there, getting some feedback, marketing, etc. Finding the right non-technical cofounder would be a blessing.

Ideally I'd like someone familiar with B2B sales and selling to government (RFPs, relationship-building).</comment>


Hacking Your Strength Training - <AUTHOR> http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/sports_body_training_performance/hacking_your_strength_training

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting interpretation of what "hacking" means, stripping away non- essentials to focus on achieving results.</comment>


Winners announced for the 2011 Pwnie Awards - <AUTHOR> http://pwnies.com/winners/

<comment><USER2> Congrats to those that took home a Pwnie.

I think VUPEN would've won Best Client-Side Bug if their vulnerability had been for the HTML sandbox rather than the Flash sandbox, but it's still nice to see comex win after all the hard work he put into JailbreakMe 3.0.

Still can't believe Sony won a Pwnie for Most Epic FAIL, especially since they had some tough competition.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best videos to watch about building startups? - <AUTHOR> There have been a lot of videos mentioned over time on HN, from Mixergy to Startup School to TC Disrupt to many others.<p>I've watched very few and would like to start watching more, but I am overwhelmed by the options. Please share your recommendations, either for a specific video or a series of videos. Thanks. <comment><USER2> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5E38frHo1U> \- (Steve Blank / Eric Ries - part 1)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwW2Q-09g9Y> \- (Steve Blank / Eric Ries - part 2)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mZUcWt2Q3M> \- (Steve Blank / Eric Ries - part 3)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSk2I8tlzdA> \- (Steve Blank at the Startup Lessons Learned conference)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-H7TAcqGko> \- (Steve Blank: The Democratization of Entrepreneurship)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynQasjpBTCk> \- (Alexander Osterwalder speaking @ Google)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEvKo90qBns> \- (Eric Ries speaking @ Google)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7K0vRUKXKc> \- (pg at Startup School '08)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNjJTgXujno> \- (Peter Norvig at Startup School '08)

</comment><comment><USER3> This one is awesome: [http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/25/absolute-must-watch- office-...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/25/absolute-must-watch-office-hours- with-paul-graham-at-tc-disrupt/)

If you could just absorb some of Paul Graham's thinking... I've seen this one like 3 times.

</comment><comment><USER4> Very Useful videos <http://ontwik.com/category/startup/></comment>


The one million tweet map - <AUTHOR> http://onemilliontweetmap.com <comment><USER2> I have no idea what use this could be to anyone, that being said it was extremely cool to zoom in on my little town and see five tweets going out from people just on the estate I live.

*Edit I've just realised this is a demo show the power of <http://v3.maptimize.com/> which is very cool.

<comment><USER3> Correct, I worked hard on that new version and I thought a lot before finding the idea of that demo to show what you can do with maptimize.

I really like that tweet demo. You can find a lot of interesting information, like tweets in your area as you said.

The heatmap is also interesting when you need to analyze huge amount of data like this.

You can also see where twitter is very active. I was surprised to see that Indonesia is very active.

<comment><USER4> I was also surprised about the activity in Indonesia. Another spot that caught my eye is halfway between Taipei and Japan. Turns out this is Okinawa which has a large US military base. I had expected much more activity in India.

When I zoom in, so that I can see city names, I find the selection of cities that are shown strange. Large cities seem to be missing outside of the US. For example I wasn't shown neither Rio de Janeiro nor Sao Paulo nor Belo Horizonte but Vitoria was there. In southern Germany there is Augsburg, Ingolstadt and Fuerth, but Munich (the only city with over a million inhabitants) is missing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe other people does not appreciate your work, but my girlfriend (who study marketing) and me have gained some insight about Twitter users and countries with Internet access _[1]_.

 _Great work and thank you!_

[1] I know this last is arguable: In some countries, Twitter is not the main microblogging service.

<comment><USER6> You might want to take a look at this for a view on Twitter Demographics:

[http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/amislove/publications/Twitter- IC...](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/amislove/publications/Twitter-ICWSM.pdf)

and this for how one might be able to do "serious" predictions using Twitter as a proxy:

[http://www.bgoncalves.com/component/jdownloads/finish/3/39.h...](http://www.bgoncalves.com/component/jdownloads/finish/3/39.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very nice and more interesting than the bar charts/graph that other twitter visualization tools give us. It would be really cool (and informative) if you could add a small word cloud when the cursor hovers over a city.

I did a similar non-interactive dataviz a while ago during the big student protests in Quebec this spring. I clustered (using LDA) the tweets talking about the protests and I mapped and identified them.

<http://olihb.com/?p=199> (in French, though)

</comment><comment><USER8> There is quite an intense location on west coast of Africa, a bit below Nigeria that appears to be coming from somewhere in the ocean, just to the west of Sao Tome. Google maps is not showing me anything from that location like an island. Any idea why this might be?

Also useful would be some sort of Distance scale/measure.

<comment><USER9> Looks like 0 degree latitude, 0 degree longitude. Probably tweets with no location info or bad location info.

<comment><USER10> That is Null Island

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

<comment><USER8> Should be an April 1 entry

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is quite brilliant! Good job.

</comment><comment><USER12> According to what I saw, there were 2 of the last million tweets from canada, Toronto with 5.5 million people had 0 tweets, this seems highly improbable, perhaps Canada has some sort of privacy laws that prevent their data from showing up?

<comment><USER3> This map shows only geolocalized tweets. Usually, tweets are geolocalized when they are sent with a mobile.

Also twitter stream don't send 100% of the tweets, it will be to huge. But statically speaking, it should be enough to have a good picture.

May be there are some restrictions in Canada.

This map give us a lot of information about twitter more than the first fun and wow effect. I like that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can't see anything. Tested it with Chrome and Safari on OS X but all I see is <http://i.imgur.com/V8FZe.png>

<comment><USER3> weird gonna check right now! thanks

<comment><USER13> Working fine now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It would be interesting to aggregate the top similar tweets in these hot areas and show that as a tool tip. No idea how difficult that might be :)

</comment><comment><USER15> I would love to watch this during some sort of global event, whatever the context. Maybe I'll remember to visit it on Election Day.

</comment><comment><USER16> That's one big data. Do you have firehose access?

<comment><USER3> What do you mean? We just display data from twitter stream. You can use their stream if you want to

<comment><USER17> Which stream are you using exactly. Are you applying any filters? Afaik the complete firehose has restricted access, or did that change?

Edit: very cool visualization btw. What are you using exactly on the backend for stream processing?

<comment><USER3> I use the public stream with a filter on location (:locations => '-180,-90,180,90') Twitter doesn't seem to have limitation for that.

The backend is written in Ruby. The daemon to index tweets use the great Intridea gem <https://github.com/intridea/tweetstream>.

The page <http://onemilliontweetmap.com/> is simple Sinatra application, and I use REDIS pub/sub to push tweets to the browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very cool. I would suggest revising the scale of the bubbles so that 100 tweets does not have equal representation as 1500 tweets

</comment><comment><USER19> Really cool visualization - wish it went a step further when you got closer in (trendsmap.com style).

</comment><comment><USER20> Is there a way to permalink to a specific location/magnification?

<comment><USER3> not yet, but good remark. I will use history API to update the URL

<comment><USER20> That would be great! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is pretty cool. Geolocalized data is huge

</comment><comment><USER22> This blows my mind

</comment><comment><USER23> A million tweets isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion tweets.</comment>


Warren's Higher Education Plan: Cancel Student Debt and Eliminate Tuition - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-student-debt.html <comment><USER2> I fail to see how this solves the root cause of the problem such that we won't see another student debt bubble arise again in 20 years.

Students loans must be dischargeable via bankruptcy. Until that happens, student loans will continue to be an issue. I feel like Warren is just attempting to score political points here because her poll numbers are dwindling.

<comment><USER3> > Students loans must be dischargeable via bankruptcy.

How many fresh graduates would _not_ be bankrupt immediately upon graduation?

<comment><USER4> Assuming a traditional college student, declaring bankruptcy at 22, with no credit history to speak of, on the one significant debt you have ever been granted, will destroy your credit for at least a decade.

Also, many loans are co-signed, so it isn't just the student affected by bankruptcy.

<comment><USER5> > Also, many loans are co-signed

Which suggests an industry will simply pop up of lending to parents. Probably wealthy ones.

Anything that doesn't address the ticket price is simply squeezing around air in the balloon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've often wondered why it is the school's brand that matters. That seems to be all signaling, as in "look I got into Harvard". Of course when you get there it's not like they teach you secret math that nobody else knows about.

What could be done relatively cheaply is to make an examination org. You recruit a bunch of people to make a math test. You get a bunch of people to certify that it's hard. You publish a syllabus.

Then you examine people who sign up for it, and give them a diploma if they pass.

No need to live somewhere for 4 years. No need to study things you don't like. Prodigies will pass the test at 16 and get on with their lives. People who've had a life beforehand can do it in their own time after the kids are gone.

There will have to be some marketing done to convince people these tests aren't easy and can't be gamed. But everyone will benefit once believable and cheap certification is common.

<comment><USER3> College attendance is not about learning specific topics in order to pass an exam, IMO. It's about learning to think critically, work in project teams, evaluate superfluous and incomplete data, learning how to learn, learning time and priority management, interpersonal relationships, etc.

I went to MIT. Most of what I value (personally and economically) that I learned at MIT could not be readily "tested" in a straightforward certification exam.

<comment><USER5> > College attendance is not about learning specific topics in order to pass an > exam, IMO. It's about learning to think critically, work in project teams, > evaluate superfluous and incomplete data, learning how to learn, learning > time and priority management, interpersonal relationships, etc.

My take on that is that by having a bunch of different exam passes, that is what you demonstrate. You're not going to pass a bunch of math and physics or whatever classes without having at least some degree of personal organisation and commitment. And you'll certainly learn overarching things like critical thinking by learning a bunch of different topics.

I went to Oxford, where you ostensibly learn by sitting in tiny little classes of 1 or 2 kids with a prof three times a week. You discuss the topic at hand and they evaluate whether you understood anything. They'll probe whether you understood things properly or just recited what you read. And you get to ask the prof whatever you want.

But at the end of it all, everything simply depended on taking a bunch of sit- for-three-hours exams.

<comment><USER3> _Graduating_ may have depended on sitting for those exams, but did all of your _learning_ depend only (or even primarily) on those exams?

I'll bet you learned more from the years you spent outside the classroom interacting with your fellow students in the residences, dining halls, student activities, etc.

<comment><USER5> Depends on what you mean by learning. I don't think I learned anything about thermodynamics, control theory, or algorithms anywhere other than while reading and doing exercises. Even the tutorials are of limited use for that, mainly providing a shortcut to the answer when needed.

The larger learning of "how do you you get stuff done in your life, what kind of stuff do you want to do?" is one of those things you get once you look back. It's actually hard to do while cramming for exams.

I really do think a lot of exam prep is a waste of time, but then we're looking for a replacement for a 4-year degree costing $250K or something like that. Surely if you just do the exams at a cost of $1K you can find communities of like minded people for a lot less than what remains?

<comment><USER3> > [surely] you can find communities of like minded people for a lot less than > what remains?

I'm not so sure. The amount of free time available to discuss the topics of life with other like-minded people _who also have that same amount of free time_ I have not been able to replicate (nor come close to) since graduating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I paid my student loan off in July 2017. That September, I got back into housing.

When I was mostly bedridden for 3.5 months, I had trouble getting doctors to take me seriously. When I was reacting anaphylacticly to the polluted air in the LA basin while pursuing my certificate in GIS, I explained to a doctor that I had taken out a student loan and really needed to complete the program that I was already halfway through. He loaded me up with the most drugs any doctor has ever given me.

Twenty-two months of withdrawal followed. I failed to get the internship at a National Lab that I had applied to. It took me forever to finally get a job.

A lot needs to go right for someone to complete their program and turn it into an adequate income for converting those loans.

We need to admit something went systemically wrong and stop acting like a whole bunch of individual young people just made bad decisions.

I don't think letting some current student loan holders off the hook and moving to try to make sure this can't happen again is a bad idea. Though it's certainly possible that this will turn out to be the first iteration, so to speak, and can be improved upon.

<comment><USER7> This sounds like we need insurance, not subsidy. Some higher education is risky bet; we have good solution to that, insurance. But some higher education is just bad bet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This could be pitched as a stimulus program. Freeing up this much debt would allow young people to spend a lot more.

<comment><USER7> I think this actually _is_ pitched as a stimulus program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How about instead holding schools to account for their shoddy product? Universities routinely sell shoddy degree programs to unsophisticated consumers (18 year olds). They have even enticed the government to guarantee unsecured loans for the products. As a result, the purveyors of these shoddy products have proliferated. Who would have thunk?

</comment><comment><USER7> Subsidizing tulip is not the right solution to tulip bubble.

<comment><USER10> Education is not a tulip, though.

<comment><USER11> _Higher_ education may well be a tulip. Or, it may be for many people.

Let me put it this way: Out of a year's worth of high school graduates, how many should go to college? I'm pretty sure that the answer is considerably less than 100% - not all high school graduates are _capable_ of doing college- level work. If college is free, how do you keep those who aren't qualified from going? Yeah, the admissions process - but it's run by the school, which is going to get more money if it admits more students.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I paid off my student loans around 6 years after college because I:

\- Chose a degree that would lead to a profitable career ( Computer Science )

\- Worked during the day and went to school at night, paying for my books and other expenses as I went through school. ( I was a manual QA worker at a tech company. )

\- Lived below my means. Always took public transit, never owned a car, always had multiple roommates.

\- Avoided large purchases or expensive trips

\- threw a large part of my paycheck at the problem. I wanted to get ahead of that compound interest.

I support student loan cancellation. Over a trillion in debt. SOMETHING needs to happen. I understand why it needs to happen. But as someone who "did the right thing", it stings to get left out in the cold on this one.

And either way: Even people still IN debt paid a LOT of money towards our student loans. What happens to the money people have already paid off? There will still be a 10-year wealth gap for people around my age. I will be outbid for homes by people a decade younger than me.

I delayed retirement contributions, home purchases, and having a family to pay off my student loans.

<comment><USER7> > Lived below my means. Always took public transit, never owned a car.

I worked >10 years in the industry and am quite well-to-do, but I always take public transit and never owned a car. I never thought that was living below my means. Maybe it's different in US...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This doesn't sound like a solution at all.

Some of these $50k loans have over an additional $100k in interest and penalties. So, this would not help.

Make the debt dischargeable under bankruptcy, and the market will correct itself.

Let the borrower's credit take the hit, not the taxpayers.

<comment><USER14> There's no penalties unless they're not paying in which case this is a different problem than student loan debt in general.

Another issue with this is that the vast majority of students hold way less than $50k in debt. This would help out people who either will be earning substantial incomes, e.g. physicians, or who used student loans to subsidize their lifestyle well beyond their school expenses (this might include living in New York City/San Francisco for four years without having any income.)

Making student debt dischargeable via bankruptcy would eliminate student loans all together.

<comment><USER13> There are a significant number of instances where the loan payer has been making payments, but not to the proper entity. The amount paid cannot be recovered and does not apply to the loan.

And, eliminating loans all together would bring tuition prices back to earth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The reporting on this plan so far seems to be very light on the details of how the federal government is going to eliminate something it doesn't control (public university tuition).

<comment><USER7> I am rather ignorant of US system, but do you mean the federal government doesn't control tuition, or can't? Can't the federal government just pass law to start to control it? I seem to recall it can regulate interstate commerce?

<comment><USER3> It's not clear to me that on-premises state university education is interstate commerce. (Not that that would necessarily stop it from being tried, but we have, at least in theory per the Tenth Amendment, state supremacy for areas not granted the Feds by the Constitution nor reserved for the people.)

<comment><USER15> > It's not clear to me that on-premises state university education is > interstate commerce.

It's already heavily federally subsidized, and challenging changes to the subsidy conditions on the grounds that the feds have no right to be involved at all would be suicidal for state universities since it wouldn't just kill the new conditions if it succeeded but the subsidies themselves.

<comment><USER3> So treat it like the federal highway funding being conditioned on the states "behaving" with respect to speed limit, DUI laws, and other items.

I don't love but accept the feds exerting economic power based on economic grants they decide to give or withhold. I do have a problem with them asserting regulatory power reserved to the states/people by the 10th.

<comment><USER15> > So treat it like the federal highway funding being conditioned on the states > "behaving" with respect to speed limit, DUI laws, and other items.

That's already the case on a per-institution basis for federal funding, all that a policy goal of eliminating tuition requires is changing the conditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Paywalled, but the original post from the Warren campaign is here:

[https://medium.com/@teamwarren/im-calling-for-something- trul...](https://medium.com/@teamwarren/im-calling-for-something-truly- transformational-universal-free-public-college-and-cancellation- of-a246cd0f910f)

Warren lays out the main cause of the student debt problem here:

> The enormous student debt burden weighing down our economy isn't the result > of laziness or irresponsibility. It's the result of a government that has > consistently put the interests of the wealthy and well-connected over the > interests of working families.

Although this may be true, it avoids another important part of the problem:

Federal student loan guarantees have flooded the higher education market with easy money for decades. Families who have no business being in this market (either on academic or economic grounds) have been lured in by artificially low rates. This problem is not unlike the one created by the federal guarantee on mortgages.

In both cases, the outcome was similar: skyrocketing prices, decreasing affordability, massive debt burden, and systemic risk.

In the case of higher education, there's another factor - college has moved from being an option for some kids to a mandatory thing every kid must do. This, despite the proliferation of high-quality information sources on every topic imaginable. Many universities publish their lectures in full.

Higher ed has become an expensive, seemingly mandatory credential as a result. An unnecessary four-year detour that hobbles many young people for decades afterwards.

Maybe it's time to think differently about the problem. Maybe it's time for the federal government to step away, completely, and let the price of a college credential collapse under its own weight.

</comment><comment><USER10> I went to university in Sweden, where there is no tuition for citizens (EU citizens, actually.) I think this is one of the reasons the Scandinavian countries have such high social mobility.

Now, that doesn't mean going to university is free, since you still have to be able to pay room, board, textbooks, etc, but the student loans I have are structured such that the payback is indexed to my income. Not being able to pay your student loans because you don't make enough money is not a thing, so there's much less risk in taking out these loans that there is in the US.

I would happily fund other people's education if that means a citizenry that doesn't believe the Earth is flat, that vaccinates their children, and whose world view in general is based on critically assessing sources of information...

Now, the Swedish universities are also mostly state-run. In the US, I'm not sure how the system would be sustainable if the private institutions of higher education can just charge what they want and then have the state pay the students for it. Seems like a recipe for runaway costs. I guess her proposal is only for public universities though?

</comment><comment><USER17> Why doesn't she propose a plan to subsidize home buying or raise salaries? This seems like another doomed trickle down economics plan. I somehow also feel this penalizes those who have exercised healthy financial planning and made the conscious decision not to get into crippling student loan debt.

<comment><USER15> > Why doesn't she propose a plan to subsidize home buying or raise salaries?

She has. The latter, at least, as that's one of the things behind her corporate governance reform proposal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hmmmm. So there's a great gap between the Haves and the Have-nots.

I don't think forgiving college debt is going to help.

</comment><comment><USER19> Let's not let HN become a political shit hole like Reddit please

<comment><USER20> It's a bit late for that.

<comment><USER21> > _Please don 't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Free stuff for middle class people in America? Someone else is going to pay for it?

I'm sure this will be very popular.

<comment><USER23> It's a benefit of being a member of a wealthy society, as are other non-free things like public education, libraries and clean water. Societies strive to benefit citizens more over time, not less. That's how societies work, and early humans formed tribes because of the mutual benefits.

<comment><USER24> Government != Society

<comment><USER23> All societies have governments, even if it's as simple as a tribal leader or elder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> _" She would eliminate up to $50,000 in student loan debt for every person with a household income of less than $100,000;"_

So she plans to reward the people who made the worst decisions. As someone who made responsible decisions: nope. Just no. I will not support tax dollars going to bail out people who paid upwards of 50k for worthless degrees.

<comment><USER26> I don't think its fair to judge the worth of someone's degree simply based on how much they earn.

<comment><USER27> In an economic context, why would it not be fair to judge the economic worth of someone's degree on the basis of that degree's ability to influence their earnings?

<comment><USER28> Because there are a litany of counterexamples to the myth that earnings equate to economic value. Teachers, police officers, and social workers immediately come to mind.

<comment><USER7> The obvious solution is to subsidize teacher pay etc, not to subsidize education to be teacher! If teachers are well paid, you wouldn't need to subsidize teacher education.

<comment><USER15> Subsidizing teacher pay is subsidizing education.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> So instead of me directly paying just for my own education I would have to pay for everyone else's education in the form of taxes? Freeing up what I am currently paying for student loans would be nice, but if you take more money from me to subsidize ALL public colleges am I really gaining anything? Sure this is a good talking point for her and the progressive left, but realistically it isn't a feasible plan.

<comment><USER30> >"She would pay for it with revenue generated by her proposed increase in taxes for America's most wealthy families and corporations, which the campaign estimates to be $2.75 trillion over 10 years"

Unless your household is making over $50 Million year, or you are a billionaire, your taxes wouldn't change for this particular plan.

<comment><USER29> When have you seen taxes on the wealthy actually work or even pass the House or Senate? Again good in theory, but not good in practice. All that is going to do is get the ultra wealthy and corporations to use more loopholes than they already do. Again it is a great talking point, but not something that is realistic. But it'll get all of the people hampered by tuition and student debt to say "yeah stick it to them". I personally still have loads of debt and would be nice to get rid of. Would be nice to see my son be able to go to a public university for free. However, the logistics of it will make it never happen. In fact it would probably affect public universities, and the quality would decline more than it is now.</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft outsources IT services to Infosys - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/04/microsoft_outsources_its_own_it.html

<comment><USER2> Microsoft's response to the article:

 _This is simply a consolidation of work that used to be provided by multiple vendors to a single provider, Infosys. As you know, we have had a concentrated effort to be more efficient and save money. This was a major area where we could do this. This new contract will not impact our internal resources. And it won't affect the usual internal exercises we do._

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice to know that even Microsoft employees can't get good answers about how Windows works. At least they can RTFS, I guess...

(But seriously, my guess is that only non-programmers are getting their IT outsourced. The HR people don't need the latest dev build of Windows, after all.)

<comment><USER4> Microsoft IT is responsible for all workstation computers. They force you to install an anti-virus, updates, etc. They are also who you call if you have network connectivity problems or other general IT issues. Everyone is an admin on their own box, but they run tools to verify compliance via nagging. Generally, MSIT is a bit of a joke to the engineering teams. One more joke that I won't have to deal with any longer: I've got a meeting at 3pm to inform my manager that my last day will be April 30th. Startup world: here I come.

<comment><USER3> Do you guys use Windows 7 yet? (I only ask because I work at a big company, and I estimate we will get something other than XP shortly after hell freezes over.)

<comment><USER4> Absolutely everyone is on Windows 7, but only because it is that much better and people upgraded on their own. A significant number of brave souls also dogfood _pre-release_ Windows, Office, and many other products.

I personally avoid extra beta software like the plague, as MSIT volunteered us for dog-fooded Exchange. System crashes and document loss is not something I want to add on top of unreliable Email delivery, but a lot of people feel obligated to take the pain to help other product teams.

Oh, and it's official: I just quit :-) Really, I think Microsoft is a great company. However, at this stage in my life, I just need to do my own thing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought Microsoft was all about eating their own dog food. How can they sell IT software when they don't use it themselves?

I'd imagine Microsoft IT would have been a great place to solicit feedback about what sucks about their own products. Guess not.

<comment><USER6> Did you read the article? Microsoft addressed that very point.

<comment><USER7> They basically address this by saying, "It's not a problem. Trust us."

<comment><USER6> No, they addressed it by claiming that nothing that wasn't already outsourced has been outsourced; they simply centralized vendors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yawn.

Call me back when the organization that's now running Microsoft IT services starts swapping in Unix servers on Power or z/OS on System z10 boxes or other notable migrations.</comment>


Linux Hardware Database - <AUTHOR> https://linux-hardware.org/ <comment><USER2> Since the website isn't loading properly (HN hug of death?), here's the summary from the homepage:

""" This is a project to collect hardware details of Linux-powered computers over the world and help Linux users and developers to collaboratively debug hardware related issues, check for Linux-compatibility and find drivers.

Make a probe of your computer in order to participate and discover the world of hardware in details. Share your probes and logs with Linux developers to debug and fix problems on your computer. Please read more in our blog. """

All I can say is how glad I am something like this exists!

Edit: Here's some pages I was able to archive since the site is still struggling:

* Computer: [https://archive.is/XuUGV](https://archive.is/XuUGV) (Dell XPS 15 9570)

* Probe: [https://archive.is/0CTI0](https://archive.is/0CTI0) (Dell XPS 15 9570 on Ubuntu 19.04)

<comment><USER3> It uses hwprobe[0] to collect the information. Very happy that this exists and it would be great if it were opt-in on distros.

The website makes it very nice to check if the hardware you're going to purchase runs with linux. Invaluable to me.

The trends [1] page is also pretty interesting.

[0]: [https://github.com/linuxhw/hw-probe](https://github.com/linuxhw/hw- probe)

[1]: [https://linux-hardware.org/index.php?view=trends](https://linux- hardware.org/index.php?view=trends)

<comment><AUTHOR> Here are a couple of requests for integrating hw-probe if anyone wants to work on them:

[https://github.com/calamares/calamares/issues/1454](https://github.com/calamares/calamares/issues/1454) [https://bugs.debian.org/964853](https://bugs.debian.org/964853)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am currently running Ubuntu 20.04 live boot on a Surface Pro 4. Considering full install. Depth of kernel patches, firmware, knowledgeable community just devoted to the Surface family of devices frankly surprised me. Now multiply that across every device, from RPi4 to the Nintendo Switch ;)

[https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface](https://github.com/linux- surface/linux-surface)</comment>