America is separating into peasants and scholar-gentry - <AUTHOR> http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.ch/2013/12/america-is-separating-into-peasants-and.html <comment><USER2> This is another example of caging the eyes to a nation when the network effects are global.

Worldwide inequality is falling, that is well documented. So the Keynesian prognostication about a life of desirable idleness based on re-investment of capital into local markets and automation was slowed because the capital found cheaper means than automation for growth.

So when you want to talk about social equality look at the impact global capitalism had on South Korea from 1950-today (as just one example).

<comment><USER3> Where is the documentation for worldwide inequality falling? According to this page for instance GINI (a measure of inequality) has been rising in most countries since the 1980s: [http://geo-mexico.com/?p=5044](http://geo- mexico.com/?p=5044)

<comment><USER4> The stat I've heard (in soundbite form; I don't have solid data for this) is that inequality _within_ countries is rising across the board, but inequality _between_ countries is falling. In other words, a rich Chinese person is now much richer than a poor Chinese person, a rich Mexican is now much richer than a poor Mexican, and a rich American is much richer than a poor American. However, a rich Chinese person or Mexican is now almost as rich as a rich American, while a poor American is now nearly as poor as a poor Mexican. And a rich Chinese person is significantly wealthier than a poor American, while it used to be that poor Americans were significantly wealthier than even wealthy Chinese.

There's plenty of anecdotal evidence to support this, eg. the richest person in the world was Mexican from 2010-2013, and it also makes a lot of sense when you consider how globalization works.

<comment><USER5> Forgive me for asking, but are you suggesting this is a good thing?

<comment><USER6> How is it not? Or are you saying there is some sort of nationality inferiority that should drive the attainment of non-Americans below that of all others?

Over the past half century, China has brought the most people out of poverty in world history. These are the forces at play.

<comment><USER7> Depends on your worldview. Do you care about some kid in rural China, or your unborn grandchild?

A globalized economy will eventually pull everyone towards the mean. That's not good news for your descendants if you live in the west.

It's a dark moral place. It's also why realpolitik rules the day.

<comment><USER3> Inequality within a country is a far greater (inverse) predictor of your unborn grandchild's standard of living than worldwide inequality. There's enough wealth in the world to go around if evenly distributed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >the American government was responsible for much of the social equality

The people that fought for social equality are the ones who are responsible for making it politically desirable. After their fight came the post-war economic boom which made US labor an economically valuable resource worth treating well. Globalization and the rise of automation now brings us back to considering US labor a surplus to be had cheap. Government policy will likely claw back expenses that contribute to social equality accordingly until unrest grows.

<comment><USER9> > The people that fought for social equality are the ones who are responsible > for making it politically desirable.

Absolutely, but I'm pretty sure when writing for a US audience it's foolish to so much as hint that good working conditions may in any way relate to the work of union organisation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Basically, America is separating into aristocrats and peasants._

There's one very, very important difference: aristocrats were generally in a heritable position that couldn't be taken from them, and peasants were generally in a heritable position from which they _couldn 't_ rise. In the U.S., at least, relatively wealthy / successful people can fall and relatively poor / unsuccessful people can rise. In classic feudal societies, this was basically impossible without revolutions.

 _To be honest, I have no idea what will do the trick. There is unlikely to be another WW2, another G.I. bill, another 50s-type broad-based economic boom._

This is really true, and it's arguably the most important part of this blog post, of Tyler Cowen's recent book _Average is Over_ , and in many of the more honest discussions by people who are trying to get a handle of what's going on in the larger world.

<comment><USER7> You're right -- Ye olden aristocrats had land, and land produced rents and taxes. Today's plutocrats aren't in as stable a position as a feudal lord, but many are in effect landlords, either literally or figuratively via control of critical businesses.

The postwar US was a totally different story. Europe and Asia's losses were our gain. The government had billions of dollars in off book debt, (ie. social security trust fund) and used that capital to launch the computer revolution.

Will it happen again? I wouldn't dismiss it... No nation is more strategically embedded in the new information economy than the US. At the end of the day, the US is the devil the world knows and needs.

<comment><USER11> "At the end of the day, the US is the devil the world knows and needs."

Probably easy to grasp and agree with this political thought when you're being part of the US, bot otherwise... could you elaborate?

<comment><USER7> The US provides order. The seaways, markets, etc are largely what they are due to US power. Sort of like the British Empire v2.

Consider 2013 vs 1913. A 21st century WW1 scenario could be set off by some two bit nuclear power like Pakistan without US dominance.

Everything isn't all roses, but I think the net impact is positive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Remember when HN was about programming and startups, not class warfare and income inequality?

That was nice.

<comment><USER13> What does it say that HN is becoming increasingly aware of these issues?

For that matter, a hell of a lot of startups are predicated on the existence of a large middle class as a mass consumer market.

<comment><USER14> Indeed. And middle-class consumer demand not only drives significant parts of the economy directly, it has major spin-off effects that impact the health as the economy as a whole and the potential healthy growth rate of the economy.

For anyone who depends on a healthy, growing economy for their livelihood and/or wealth, there's a pretty good case to be made that it is in your enlightened self-interest to do anything within reason to promote a large, prosperous middle class with the surplus purchasing power to drive future economic growth.

<comment><USER15> This should be on every CEO's wall when he wakes up in the morning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The book is really good and definitely worth a read, especially for the analysis he presents in the first few chapters. The "Fishtown" vs. "Belmont" graphs are brilliant. They do a great job illustrating just how much trends in marriage vary between classes. The upper 20% still marry and divorce at the same rates they did in the 60s, but the bottom 30% has changed dramatically.

Murray also does great analysis on what he calls "SuperZIPs": the zip codes in the top 5% of combined income and education. You can see you score here:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/local/2013/11/09/washington...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/local/2013/11/09/washington- a-world-apart/)

It's not just neighborhoods where the elites cluster -- it's entire regions.

<comment><USER17> Counterpoint from David Frum, a guy I disagree with on many issues but nonetheless respect immensely:

[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/06/charles- mur...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/06/charles-murray-book- review.html)

<comment><USER14> Thank you for this link. I've only gotten through part 1 so far, but it's a devastating critique of Murray's framing of the problem.

One particularly interesting bit:

> As I looked backward and forward in time, however, I had to face this > awkward fact: America became more culturally stable between 1910 and 1960 as > it became less economically and socially libertarian. As it became more > economically and socially libertarian after 1970, America became culturally > less stable:

> "The greatest generation was also the statist generation. Like them or > loathe them, the middle decades of the twentieth century were an entirely > anomalous period in American history. Never had the state been so strong, > never had people submitted as uncomplainingly, never had the country been > more economically equal, never had it been more ethnically homogeneous, > seldom was its political consensus more overpowering."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> People with education and good parents are at the table playing the game. The poor and disadvantaged are playing a different game, with its own pressures and psychological frame. Decision making is dependant on psychological frame, and decisions made by players either game look strange to players in the other. The OP makes the mistake of moralising when he should be empathising.

<comment><USER19> The problem with that thinking is the poor and uneducated make demands on the educated and productive. If they want to live in squalor, who am I to judge. If they want what I have, I have something to say about that.

<comment><USER18> Surely you don't begrudge them wanting/aspiring to something better. I presume you mean that if they _expect_ to have the trappings of success without putting in any effort then you have something to say. But even then, that is merely an expectation that will remain unfulfilled. If a group of people actually receives the trappings of success without effort then, I agree with you, but this is not born out by everyday experience. The poor and disadvantaged are comparatively, well, poor and disadvantaged when compared to the successful. So, if my anecdotal experience matches reality then the problem becomes, "how best to help?".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _Just the other day I got my hair cut in a poor white neighborhood, and the barber spent the whole time telling me about "that bitch" who was the mother of his children._

Hm. My barber talks that way too, in fact that could easily be a direct quote. And his shop is in a very liberal, progressive university town. Maybe that's just the way guys talk when there's no women around?

<comment><USER21> None of the guys I'm around, nor myself, think that's okay just because women aren't present.

<comment><USER22> plenty of the guys i'm around do, and plenty don't.

i would posit that you're not getting as whole a picture (definitely of men, possibly of women) as you could if nobody you know does.

<comment><USER21> My point was not that no guys do, of course I know some do. The OP used 'guys' to seemingly include all men. My point was that, no, not all men do, so you don't get to play the "everyone does it so it's okay" rationalization card.

<comment><USER23> _My point was that, no, not all men do, so you don 't get to play the "everyone does it so it's okay" rationalization card._

Well, we aren't stupid either, and I'm sure most of us didn't take it that way, so if you want to address the contextual nature of his comment then maybe do that instead of scandalizing yourself in pity for the silent nongeneralizers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Some reasons why this is becoming so:

Labor laws make it difficult for people in lower income tiers to climb up the income ladder. It's difficult for people who are working less than fulltime jobs to work more hours because of the "40hr = benefits" laws, so instead folks have to work multiple jobs which adds transportation costs and scheduling complexities. The preponderance of regulations and complex taxes has made it more difficult to start many types of companies as an individual, putting them out of reach of folks who don't have significant savings and existing income.

Public education is no longer as much of a guarantor of basic literacy as it once was, so college education is increasingly becoming a necessary credential for many office work, knowledge work, and "professional" jobs, putting those out of the reach of many low income folks who are put off by taking on so much student loan debt or can't afford to support themselves and put themselves through college at the same time.

Similarly, anti-blue-collar sentiment has grown, devaluing such jobs culturally and discouraging people from pursuing such positions, even though many are well paying and can serve as spring boards to even higher paying jobs (e.g. self-employment). Moreover, the reduction in vocational training, shop classes, and so forth in public schooling has pushed a lot of those jobs even farther away from the average American adult.

The War on Drugs: which impacts lower income, blue-collar, and non-white people more. If you get caught with weed as a sub-urban white teen you'll face different consequences than if you're an inner-city black teen.

Some of these trends will hopefully turn around, especially with the help of the internet in terms of education, crowd funding, and so forth, but it's still going to be a pretty difficult problem for some time.

</comment><comment><USER25> > scholar-gentry

We prefer to be called "Eloi-American".

<comment><USER26> Of course, we're still just the shoe-shine boys of the ruling elite.

<comment><USER27> No room for false humility here.

The upper middle class are collaborators, taking part in the oppression of the working class in exchange for being lifted above it. The mercenaries of class warfare.

<comment><USER11> This is the very essence of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine. At first I was repulsed to get involved, but exactly ignoring things is is how they escalate. What kind of oppression do you imply an educated person invariably is guilty of? How about the other way around - what an uneducated "oppressed" person is entitled to have and hasn't? What could you do if you'd be in the leading circle for the lower class given the economic circumstances of our current time? These are just some elementary questions that I think deserve answers before pointing fingers and doing the hanging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am no sociologist, but I think it would be rather safe to say that to it is going to take a lot for this to change. We've clearly adapted to the divide between the mega-rich and the "middle" class, so I am not sure it is a matter of survival so much as a matter of principle.

I think it would take a lot of people collectively thinking and acting differently than we do now. I am just one person, but it is my goal to live my life with the intent of turning this situation around. I believe the spirit of entrepreneurship, which is generally well-supported on HN, is a piece of this - designing and building the next generation of companies who choose to conduct business in ways that support (rather than exploit) the middle class. Hence, I am an entrepreneur.

<comment><USER29> The progressive left would solve this problem with increased taxation on the rich, which would ostensibly be used to fund more social programs for the poor. Take from the Belmonts, give to the Fishtowners. Raise the minimum wage, increase regulation, enforce stricter laws that encourage equity for all. Perhaps some form of guaranteed income.

The libertarians would solve this problem by eliminating barriers to success. Lessen business owner regulatory burdens, eliminate federal income taxes, eliminate the minimum wage, and impose as few hurdles as possible to whomever wants to hang their own shingle and provide a service.

I'm not sure what the Republicans would want, really, or at least not specifically enough to enunciate it here on their behalf, but let's say it's somewhere in the middle.

If you're able to succeed as an entrepreneur enough to be able to have some degree of influence on the problem, then you'd be a spokesperson for either the democrats or the libertarians. By your success, you'll be advocating the possibility of one to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, hang their own shingle, and become financially stable in the process, but by having attained that success, you would similarly be the target of progressive taxation, and would now be a sympathetic Belmont, from whom riches will be collected and distributed to Fishtown.

<comment><USER30> Basic income or a negative income tax actually generally seem to be _libertarian_ ideas, suggested as a way to radically simplify the welfare system and limit how much discretion the government had over whom and how much to pay. They are also usually coupled with eliminating the minimum wage since everyone is already guaranteed an income.

My understanding is that liberals prefer welfare programs with significantly more oversight and targeting. They want fine control over who gets the money and how they can spend it, promoting specific causes like education or environmentalism.

<comment><USER31> NIT and basic income are "libertarian" ideas only in that they could eliminate other welfare instruments. This would not happen in practice.

Pure libertarianism not considered with pandering to socialists would not propose a nit or basic income.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I like this post. How do we solve this as a society? Sometimes I wonder when the earth will reach it's maximum number of human inhabitants. Will there me a meritocratic system for reproduction? What factors will/can be taken into account?

<comment><USER33> When the Earth reaches peak human occupancy, it's likely nobody will feel the need to do _anything_ about it. Whatever reproduction rate we're at at equilibrium will then be perceived as completely normal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Interesting post. I pretty much agree on all points and don't see solutions either.

It's not always so easy to peg down where we're at though. I grew up with a Fishtown income and family life but got the Belmont education. I've been wedged in between both groups my whole life and don't really feel a belonging to either. I know very well how both live.

There are a lot of problems; class divide is rapidly getting worse. It looks like this is something that a lot of people are worried about too, so some large change in either direction might be on the horizon. I'd like to hope that change is the right one, but I can't.

</comment><comment><USER35> If he thinks the split is bad now, he'd have loved the 1830's!

<comment><USER36> Or ancient Rome or Persia.

Which is beside the point -- the point being that modern society was supposed (for most of the 20th century) to be moving AWAY from all that, not back to Dickensian times or worse.

<comment><USER35> Given that worldwide equality is falling each year, I'd say that all is well.

Also I'd note that the "educated sophisticates" are a far higher proportion of population today than before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> OP's picture of our economic reality is overly simplistic.

The Urban Archipaelogo[0] is the new era of politics, not this false stratification/dichotomy of proletariat, bourgeoise, and archetypes in between, which cannot explain network effects.

        Class is a spectrum condition/disorder of society.

Or to put it another way:

        Poverty is a disease of economies.

[0]: [http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=19813](http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=19813)

<comment><USER38> I saw that article as well and almost posted it. Very interesting cross thoughts between the Stranger article and the Noah Smith article. Everyone agrees that there is this is happening but no one seems to know what to do about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The scholar-gentry are false elites who have no idea how disconnected from reality they are.

Source: former one, fall from grace, mostly by choice.</comment>


Would you benefit from having a mobile app to tour historic sites? - <AUTHOR> Greetings,
I have a passion for local history and road trips that I combined to create Heritage Trek. This project is a product of my frustration in not finding one online source of information and tools to plan and conduct comprehensive tours of historic sites. This includes not only the high-profile sites but the lost and/or obscure sites in local communities, off the beaten path. Inevitably, conversations with locals (during our road trips) highlighted the history we were missing. This project integrates local knowledge into mobile apps facilitating self-drive tours of historic sites. I believe our project value is creating unique heritage touring experiences and increasing historical awareness to promote site preservation and travel through communities to enhance local economies.
Please have a look at my Heritage Trek project page (http://heritage-trek.launchrock.com/)to learn more.  Sign up and answer our questionnaire and get a free, one-year subscription!
Thanks!
Mike Rainer <comment><USER2> You should have made this a show HN and linked the post directly to the site.</comment>


HTTP/1.1 just got a major update - <AUTHOR> http://evertpot.com/http-11-updated/ <comment><USER2> Why is it not called HTTP/1.2? Or, how will clients (or servers) tell the difference between a peer implementing RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1 old version) and RFC 723x (HTTP/1.1 new version)?

Could it be that there is so much software hardcoded to look for "HTTP/1.1" that a "HTTP/1.2" string would break them all?

<comment><USER3> Because it does not really change the protocol. It clarifies details and implements spec fixes (e.g. matches the spec better to actual real-world use).

<comment><USER2> Can you send a 308 permanent redirect to existing software and get the expected behavior?

<comment><USER4> Try it out: [http://webdbg.com/test/308/](http://webdbg.com/test/308/)

I get failures in Chrome and IE. Firefox passes if I click OK in a funny dialog.

<comment><USER5> > Firefox passes if I click OK in a funny dialog.

308 preserves the HTTP verb[1], and the form on that page uses POST. POST is not idempotent[2], which means using it more than once with the same parameters may not yield the same output. For example, POSTing this comment form twice would _append_ to the resource _twice_ ; as opposed to GETing twice which just returns the resource unmodified both times.

Firefox correctly (under the old RFC for a 301 redirect[3]) asks for confirmation before automatically repeating a request that is not guaranteed to be safe to repeat. Some implementations will instead convert the request into a GET, which is why 308 was needed in the first place.

[1]: [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7238#section-3](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7238#section-3)

[2]: [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-9.1.2](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-9.1.2)

[3]: [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-10.3.2](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-10.3.2)

Edit: links

<comment><USER6> No, idempotency doesn't matter because the action is not applied when a 3xx is returned. Proof: permanent 3xx replies are cacheable.

The reason confirmation is asked is because the user might not wish to apply the action to the new URI. (Codified as "safety" in the new 1.1.)

Sources: your links and [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-4.2.1](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-4.2.1)

<comment><USER5> Responses to POST requests are only cacheable when they include explicit freshness information[1], which is not the case with the linked test page.

[1]: [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-4.3.3](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-4.3.3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great writeup. One issue...

       It's now suggested to use the about:blank uri in the
       Referer header when no referer exists, to distinguish
       between "there was no referrer" and "I don't want to
       send a referrer".

For the sake of privacy would it not be better if there was no such distinction. Basically now any privacy conscious services need to add 'about:blank' as the referrer when users do not want to have their behaviour categorised and fingerprinted?

<comment><USER8> If a user doesn't want to send the referrer when there is no referrer, no referrer should be sent. This then allows sites to distinguish between direct traffic from users that don't block referrers and traffic with blocked referrers. I wouldn't expect this to be a significant concern, because the volume of actual direct traffic is not very large.

<comment><USER9> > This then allows sites to distinguish between direct traffic from users that > don't block referrers and traffic with blocked referrers

Any example of benefits for servers to distinguish direct traffic vs. blocked referrers?

<comment><USER10> When analyzing traffic sources for your site, you could use this to remove noise created by privacy conscious users. For example, if you wish to evaluate the efficiency of a magazine add, today you can't distinguish between ad conversions and privacy conscious users.

It'll take a while for clients to be compliant, if they'll ever be, though.

<comment><USER9> > if you wish to evaluate the efficiency of a magazine ad

Sorry I still don't get it. No referrer or about:blank are both "noise" in such case, I still don't see how the distinction is useful to the server to evaluate efficiency of a particular ad.

<comment><USER11> "about:blank" usually means "was opened from an external program, such as an IM client".

"No referrer" means "A referrer may have existed, but inclusion of that information was explicitly declined as a part of the request".

Both are useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> And I _just_ finished implementing 2616 in a toy server of mine. Sigh. C'est la vie.

I'm glad this new spec apparently resolves a lot of ambiguities. I _hated_ reading 2616 and some specs it depended on (email, URI, etc).

<comment><USER13> Is your toy server open source? I would love to see the source.

<comment><USER14> Are you lacking OSS HTTP/1.1 servers to study? There are tons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't think splitting it up like that is such a good idea; now, instead of searching through one file, I have to remember that there are several and look through them all, just for _one_ conceptual protocol. (TCP has a similar issue, although most of it is still in 793.)

As for the extra verbosity, I'm not sure what to think; while some things may be specified more precisely, standards should also attempt to be concise and to-the-point. Some of the sentences in the new RFCs seem almost parenthetical (e.g. look at the description of GET.)

<comment><USER3> OTOH, that means I don't have to dive through the minutiae of response message format when I'm just looking for the basic header stuff. All the important concerns (core, caching, conditional requests, auth and forwarding) get their own RFC and are thus easier to skim and search through. Although 308 and Range (and Prefer) _also_ getting their RFCs is a bit weird. Likewise, syntax and routing get RFC 3270 so if you're implementing a client or server the reading experience should be much tighter,

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Finally, the spec is crystal clear that message bodies on GET requests are not illegal.

<comment><USER6> Pardon my ignorance but how are GET payloads useful? Does that not violate REST principles?

<comment><USER17> Elasticsearch: it accepts JSON bodies in GET requests to define the parameters of a search. These can get quite large so it's preferable to encoding everything in the query string. The operation is read-only, so an argument can be made that a GET makes more sense than a POST.

That said, I POST my search params to Elasticsearch anyways.

<comment><USER8> Aren't message bodies on GET supposed not to impact the returned result at all?

<comment><USER6> Yes: [http://stackoverflow.com/a/983458](http://stackoverflow.com/a/983458)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Forwarded and a permanent re-direct are nice changes. This is a welcome change.

It will likely be awhile before widespread adoption, but to see a standard move forward in such a seemingly small, but considerable way is great.

Kudos to those involved. I can't imagine it was an easy feat.

</comment><comment><USER19> The clarifications are very welcome but I wish it included embedded unit-less progress information on chunk encoding without having to rely on a side channel [0] (shameless plug, but any progress — ha ha — on this front would be fine)

[0]: [https://github.com/lloeki/http-chunked- progress/blob/master/...](https://github.com/lloeki/http-chunked- progress/blob/master/draft-lnageleisen-http-chunked-progress-00)

</comment><comment><USER20> The thing I'm most surprised by is the change in the default cacheability of 404 responses from uncacheable to cacheable. Though I guess since defaulting to cacheable doesn't mean that responses must be cached, so you can still be compliant with RFC7231 by never caching 404s.

RFC2616:

[http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13...](http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13.4)

"A response received with [a status code other than 200, 203, 206, 300, 301 or 410] MUST NOT be returned in a reply to a subsequent request unless there are cache-control directives or another header(s) that explicitly allow it."

RFC7231:

[http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-6.5.4](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-6.5.4)

"A 404 response is cacheable by default"

</comment><comment><USER21> As someone new to HTTP, what would be the most pragmatic way to read through this RFCs in the context of building web applications or HTTP APIs but not to the level of wanting to implement a http server or http client? for example: order of reading, what can be avoided, what is not widely use or implemented, the basics of the protocol, etc...

<comment><USER22> HTTP methods, status codes, and headers are all you need to understand for developing at the level of HTTP APIs.

<comment><USER3> The problem being that it's been spread all over the specs.

The essentials would be:

* 7231 which covers core methods, statuses and basic headers. It looks like the spec authors have also added security considerations sections

* 7232 is probably a good read as it covers conditional requests (304 and 412 statuses)

* 7234 covers caching and cache controls, don't skip it. Even if you don't want your response to be cached, you need to know how caching works, which actors are involved and how to disable it

* 7238 is the 308 redirection, understanding it and the background for its introduction is a good idea _and_ will help with understanding other redirection statuses (301, 302 and 307)

"Various others" would be

* 7233 is Range requests, can probably be skipped unless you have big media payloads. On one hand it's underused, on the other hand it has limited general applicability

* 7235 is Authentication, can be useful for API (the user experience being terrible for browsers) but can probably be skipped unless absolutely necessary

* 7239 is forwarding, to understand what happens when your HTTP endpoint is behind a proxy. Although I'd guess proxies don't implement it yet the ideas already existed as non-standard extensions and reading this is a good idea for "real-world" concerns. Not completely necessary, but useful

* 7240 is the Prefer header. It's a fairly recent and quite advanced addition, probably useful but not utterly necessary

You can ignore

* 7230 is about req/resp format. The only interesting parts are the URI and Host parts which your HTTP library probably handles for you

* 7236 complements 7235 with auth scheme registration for standard auth types. Only read it if you've read 7235

* 7237 is a registry of additional (wrt 7231) methods, mostly from WebDAV

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder what Googlebot will make of this. There is a lot of debate already amongst search engine developers on which type of redirect to use.

<comment><AUTHOR> A crawler like that should typically only do GET requests. The 308 is really mainly useful for HTTP clients doing for example a PUT or POST request on some url, and the server wants the client to repeat that exact request on for example a different server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> RFC7238 is still marked as experimental.

</comment><comment><USER25> I am still happily speaking HTTP/1.0 [1] :)

[1] [http://mr.gy/software/httpd0/](http://mr.gy/software/httpd0/)</comment>


Panera's Utopic Pay-What-You-Want Restaurant Dream Is Dead - <AUTHOR> https://www.eater.com/2019/2/5/18212499/panera-cares-closing-pay-what-you-can-restaurant <comment><USER2> In Glebe a small district in Sydney, Australia, there is a shop called "Lentils as Anything" and it operates under the "pay what you can" scheme. It is highly successful, and that's because their branding, signage, store layout, and all is on point and clearly indicative of what it is. There's no cashier, just a big metal box with a hole in the top for donations, and the staff are all volunteer. Making a non-profit model out of a business that looks like a normal over-the-counter coffee place was the first egregious error in this plan by big P. It needs to look completely different. Why? because it is completely different in principle.

<comment><USER3> This interests me. As for Panera Cares' marketing, I live in the United States and had no idea these ever existed anywhere. That seems strange.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Probably an unpopular opinion, but IMO Panera is ridiculously overhyped

I paid something like $12 for a salad and a piece of bread. The salad didn't look all the fresh and the bread was stale. I had to tell them my bread was stale and ask them for another piece of bread. They handed me another piece of bread without even apologizing.</comment>


Machine learning, information theory, and tail bounds - <AUTHOR> https://guille.site/ml-information-bounds.html <comment><AUTHOR> Author here! Would love to hear any thoughts or ideas you may have (for either this post, or future posts)!</comment>


Plans for Redis 3.2 - <AUTHOR> http://antirez.com/news/89 <comment><USER2> It's almost scary to see how productive, focused and well versed Salvatore Sanfilippo is.

Most of the developers on my team struggle to build simple CRUD web apps, wasting long hours complaining about how wrong the Domain models is or how why this things is not in that place.

<comment><USER3> The simplistic low-level nature of redis probably helps avoid fatigue. Many of the data structures implemented are well defined in their purpose, it's more a matter of implementation & optimization. The same is not true for higher-level projects, such as CRUD apps, where project structure and project goals can often be vague and are likely to change during the course of the project.

This isn't to take away from Salvatore, who is obviously talented and seems to have a knack for researching and implementing the data structures in an efficient manner.

<comment><USER4> I don't agree with this comment at all.

Low-level high-perf programs are extremely demanding and require a good deal of care and persistence.

"The simplistic low-level nature of redis probably helps avoid fatigue."

Yea I'm going to bet you never wrote anything where microseconds or L1 cache misses mattered.

<comment><USER3> I didn't say it was easy. redis is full of reinventing the wheel in the name of improved performance. This is something developers often do, but are often told it's pointless, just use built-ins.

Salvatore has found a niche where he can see these optimized implementations to their end. I would imagine there is a certain level of satisfaction that comes from thoroughly researching a topic, implementing it as best you can, and deploying it to the public you're popular with. It probably helps having firm control of the project with less red tape.

It's like a comparison between a craft woodworker and someone who would like to play around with the concepts, but doesn't have the tools, time or know how, or they're told there is no point in building your own furniture from scratch, so they are instead building Ikea furniture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Scalable bloom filters! [1] Drop size configuration and just have a maximum false positive rate. FWIW I built one by wrapping Guava's, you can take an existing bloom filter implementation and wrap auto-scaling around them.

[1] [http://gsd.di.uminho.pt/members/cbm/ps/dbloom.pdf](http://gsd.di.uminho.pt/members/cbm/ps/dbloom.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> Native rotating bloom filters, fantastic! Sort of thing I've had to do myself more than once - great efficient way to be able to ask "Have I seen this recently?".

</comment><comment><USER7> Has Salvatore ever considered forking redis into a legal entity and providing official commercial support? I'm willing to bet alot of startups and enterprises don't use redis because of the lack of this.

<comment><USER8> According to the Redis support page, Pivotal sponsors Redis and they provide commercial support services for it.

Although, to be honest, the page linked from the Redis site ([http://www.pivotal.io/big-data/redis](http://www.pivotal.io/big-data/redis)) doesn't seem to have much to say on the matter. Looks like an ad for their cloud platform, and I wouldn't have guessed they offer support for Redis itself.

<comment><USER9> Ah yes, our brochureware site is too vague for my tastes, but Pivotal-the- company is mostly pitched at F500s, not engineers per se.

At the coalface, Pivotal also includes Pivotal Labs (for whom I work and from which the larger company took its name), which includes people who've done a lot of production Redis work.

And we can always ask Salvatore for a tip if we get stuck.

Similarly, I have access to Hadoop, Gemfire, Greenplum, Cloud Foundry, RabbitMQ or Spring devs for help. Being inside the same tent is nifty.

<comment><USER10> > "brochureware site" <\- don't be too hard on yourselves, there's plenty of > goodness there too :)

Besides Pivotal's commercial support for Redis (which, from what I've heard, is superb) there are also at least two hardcore Redis community members who're providing professional support for Redis deployments - for more details, contact Michel Martens and Damian Janowski.

Redis Labs, my employer, is also heavily into Redis (duh) so naturally we give support for our product line that consists of a Redis on-prem solution and a cloud service.

<comment><USER9> Our designers, no lie, are awesome. But we are definitely writing copy aimed at the C-suite right now, on the developer front it's a bit scantier but improving.

I see you guys have a service offering on PWS. Nifty.

<comment><USER10> I know how that goes - with our RLEC we're taking the same approach. PWS is amazing, arguably the easiest to work and integrate with for us :)

As for goodness @ the Pivotal site, this is one of my favorite - dying to see it grow: [https://support.pivotal.io/hc/en- us/categories/200308268-Ope...](https://support.pivotal.io/hc/en- us/categories/200308268-Open-Source-Redis-Knowledge-Base)

<comment><USER9> Feel free to draft stuff and send it in. The guy you want to talk to is Dan Mikusa, who writes the majority of our KB articles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Aphyr has a great post about Redis:

[https://aphyr.com/posts/283-call-me-maybe- redis](https://aphyr.com/posts/283-call-me-maybe-redis)

Recommends using it on a single server or if distributed as a cache or for data that can tolerate write losses.

<comment><USER12> That post was a bit before the new redis clustering in 3.0 ([http://antirez.com/news/79](http://antirez.com/news/79) \-- Redis cluster, no longer vaporware). Wonder if anything has changed.

<comment><USER13> Aside from the fact that Aphyr showed basic replication to be flawed, as far as I know Cluster isn't even designed to be consistent across partitions.

The announcement page you linked to doesn't let me copy any text on iOS, but he's basically saying that if you get a partition and resolve it, the merge algorithm used is prone to data loss.

I don't know if Redis Cluster has improved since.</comment></comment></comment>


The Unix System: Making Computers Easier to Use (1982) [video] - <AUTHOR> http://techchannel.att.com/play-video.cfm/2014/1/27/ATT-Archives-The-UNIX-System-Making-Computers-Easier-to-Use#.VDvlphuyFfA.hackernews <comment><USER2> I'm currently reading The Design of the UNIX Operating System [0], so this is super interesting for me to watch. I love how he creates a spellchecking program live, while being filmed.

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Design-UNIX-Operating- System/dp/01...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Design-UNIX-Operating- System/dp/0132017997/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Something that occurred to me when I first saw this video is the number of women featured, I can't say with certainty if I've seen a recent major tech demo video from a large company feature as many.

<comment><USER4> This was right around the peak of CS degrees awarded to women: 37% in 1984.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for mentioning this - there's a perception that CS and tech has always been male dominated, but there were plenty of women programmers in the 80's and the field has become even more male-dominated since. It's really annoying that one of the primary qualifications for tech CEO's is apparently 'be a tall man, ideally white but Asian is OK too'

"In the United States, the number of women represented in undergraduate computer science education and the white-collar information technology workforce peaked in the mid-1980s, and has declined ever since"

-[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing)

<comment><USER6> There was, in fact, a point in time when programming was 100% dominated by women.

<comment><USER5> Indeed! At one point a "computer" was a person, and this was also a field where women were relatively well represented (when compared to other fields during the same time periods).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I owned an AT&T 3b2/400 multi user system in 1985 running Unix System V. Came with a bound set of loose leaf manuals (might have been about 10 of them iirc). [1]

I learned pretty much everything I needed from those manuals.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLwd32muHwM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLwd32muHwM)

[1] Had about 12 Wyse 30 terminals hooked up to it as well as a Courier 2400 model to be able to dial into it.

<comment><USER8> It's weird having never used a real terminal, because while I understand what it means that Unix is a multi-user system (and have obviously used terminal emulator programs as well as ssh-ing into servers, etc), the notion of a big physical box with arrays of dedicated ports that physical terminals plug in to is really alien.

<comment><USER7> It was really cool and fun even though a simple green terminal screen. I had one in front of me and one in back of me. The one in back was typically logged in as root. (Was an office with a lock and a small enough place that I didn't have to worry about anyone knowing what that was..) Hard drive was 70mb with 4mb of memory. And a tape drive for backup. (System was perhaps 30k in 80's dollars iirc approx etc.)

That said right now I'm staring at 3 Thunderbolt displays hooked up to a Mac Pro with over 25 terminal windows going. All in different colors. (Well actually not different colors for all of them).

But using even the simple green screen was really cool. Definitely got a buzz using that system.

I remember the first test to show that it was "multi user". I put two of the terminals next to each other, hit return at the same time, and ran two things at concurrently. (Might have been ls -Rlt / or something like that.)

<comment><USER9> >Might have been ls -Rlt / or something like that.

Ha, I used to do that sometimes, to make long-running disk I/O happen so that I could check something or the other that needed the I/O happening. Redirecting a process's output to /dev/null and putting it in the background with & can also be useful for many things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My favorite thing about unix is its philosophy of writing programs that "do one thing and do it well"

<comment><USER11> I like that too, I just wish UNIX IPC pipes had more metadata than throwing raw strings at one another and hoping the receiving process understands.

I know people are going to roll their eyes at this, but Powershell's IPC constructs are a step forward. Everything inherits from Object which has the following prototype:

         public class Object
         {
         		public Object();
         		public string ToString();
         		public bool Equals(object obj);
         		public static bool Equals(object objA, object objB);
         		public static bool ReferenceEquals(object objA, object objB);
         		public int GetHashCode();
         		public extern Type GetType();
         }

So if you want to just do strings you still can (string will inherit from type object, and must implement toString()).

However if you want to do a List<Object> you still can, and better still the receiving process can use GetType() which has to be implemented, and then have a few different workflows to handle the type (e.g. List, string, et al).

UNIX was created in 1969(!) so nobody can blame them for designing it the way they did. However if you were creating UNIX today you'd definitely want to look at OOP and inheritance as a core pillar.

See this post for this topic: [http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/magazine/2007.07.powershe...](http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/magazine/2007.07.powershell.aspx)

<comment><USER12> I can write *nix command-line utilities with ease in any language that I please. Can the same be said for powershell utilities? My understanding is that you are pretty much restricted to using CLR languages.

If we are accepting that sort of languae lock-in, I'd rather get something like scsh off the ground.

<comment><USER13> That is not language lock-in, it is ABI lock-in, and that is exactly the same with Unix pipes.

You can complain that the increase in ABI complexity isn't worth the extra features, but I don't think it is fair to complain about increased ABI complexity, period.

<comment><USER12> > _" Reading/writing to/from files is a _FAR lower bar than linking with the > CRL."*

If I want to write a unix utility in C, or Java, or C#, or Lua, or Racket, or postscript, or brainfuck..., I _can_. Not just in an academic sense, but in a _" it is actually reasonable and trivial to do so"_ sense. The list of programming language implementations that cannot read/write to/from files _(knowledge of the concept of "pipes" is unnecessary, the user's shell opens those)_ is vanishingly small.

For the average developer who just wants to _use_ Powershell/bash/whatever, it is absolutely language lock-in.

<comment><USER14> It is a common misconception that Powershell is CLR only.

You can also make use of any COM, DCOM, or plain dynamic library in the shell.

There are also text formatters for interoperability with older scripts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> rtmpdump -r rtmp://cp262207.edgefcs.net:80/ondemand/mp4:techchannel/11316/videos/AA13001_UNIX_Making_Computers_Easier.mp4 -o unix-01.flv

</comment><comment><USER15> Thanks! I'm a little scared that things haven't change a lot

<comment><USER16> Rob Pike is hilariously bitter on that point.

<comment> s-phi-nl Can you give an example? That sounds interesting.

<comment><USER17> [http://slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pike- responds...](http://slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pike- responds?nobeta=1)

See the 10th question.

Also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8380288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8380288)

<comment><USER18> He seemed to have said: "I worked entirely on Plan 9, which I still believe does a pretty good job of solving those fundamental problems."

I would like to hear what exactly was done better in Plan 9 in regards to IPC. If I recall correctly Plan 9 is open source now - is there more development going on now or is it stalled?

<comment><USER19> There are forks which are undergoing active development like 9front, although I don't think anything from Bell Labs is still coming with respect to plan 9.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There's a wonderfully entertaining moment around the 16 minute mark when Lorinda Cherry demoes a talking calculator with pipelines. Not satisfied with it saying "five" after evaluating 8-3, she commands it to raise 2 to the hundredth power, providing ample time to finish her coffee.

<comment><USER21> oh man, I wonder if that talk program was used by Kraftwerk for their great "Numbers" single, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YPiCeLwh5o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YPiCeLwh5o) ? The two audio sources sound similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Try convincing an old VMS hand that Unix is easier to use. VMS's command interface is aimed at system administrators who haven't had enough coffee and are prone to making mistakes. Unix is notoriously intolerant of mistakes -- so nuch so that one fat-fingered keystroke can cause Bad Things to happen.

</comment><comment><USER21> Lorinda Cherry et al's references to "pipelining" and "unix stream processing" reminds me of the language used to describe Gulp.js and node in general.

</comment><comment><USER23> Wonderful video. There are a few more intersting ones on that website (AT&T's archives).

Thanks for posting this.

</comment><comment><USER24> Surprised they managed to get Pink Floyd to do the music.

</comment><comment><USER25> What shell are they using in these demos?

</comment><comment><USER26> OG Greybeards omg so hot

</comment><comment><USER27> I wish they had patented truly novel ideas like pipes, hierarchical file systems and "everything is a file" and then licensed it so that anyone releasing software under an open source license can use them and not others.

That would have put an end to others like Microsoft, Apple etc from taking all these innovations and then further "innovate" with 'phones with rounded edges' or 'performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data', patent them and extort money out of free software. Not that there was any way they could have known that.

<comment><USER28> I wouldn't say Microsoft or Apple stole these concepts. Patents are horrible. Those proprietary systems would exist anyway, but without patents, the users of them can also benefit from these ideas.

Are you aware that Apple's OS X is actually based on the original UNIX source code? There's nothing proprietary about that.

<comment><USER29> That isn't really true. OS X is based on BSD, which is not "the original UNIX." The original Unix was closed source and was actually quite proprietary.

<comment><USER28> BSD is derived from the original UNIX. There is probably code in OS X that ran on PDP-11s once.

<comment><USER30> None of the original code is left, though. Mac OS X is based on (for the Unixy bits) FreeBSD and NetBSD, which are based on 4.4BSD-Lite, which was BSD with all the AT&T-derived parts chopped off.

See Wikipedia: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution#4.4BSD_and_descendants)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Chipotle f*cked up their brand... and how to save it - <AUTHOR> http://followingtherules.com/is-chipotle-destroying-their-brand/

<comment><USER2> While I haven't observed directly everything you bring up I think you make very good points.

It's funny, when I started reading this I immediately thought "They are doing just fine and their rewards program is quite nice" Then I realized I was thinking of Qdoba. I have completely stopped visting Chipotle because even if the food is not as high quality at Qdoba (Something you suggest Chipotle is slipping on) their customer service is leaps and bounds better.

I went out to eat with my Mom when she was in town last, we went to Qdoba and I swiped my rewards card. It turns out I had a free burrito and so it was used (Yes, I am aware you can turn on a "stockpiling" mode via the website that doesn't auto-spend your rewards points but I usually don't need or want it on). I tweeted about it jokingly, something along the lines of "Damn, it would be when my Mom was paying that I would get a free burrito" and I included a @qdoba in the message. Not 5 min later I got a reply back on twitter asking for me to DM my rewards card number to their main twitter account so they could credit me a free burrito.

They did nothing wrong on their end and I got a free burrito, by all counts (even mine) there was nothing they needed to do to "make this right" it was already right. I'm not saying Chipotle wouldn't have done the same thing but it's just something Qdoba did do that won them my loyalty.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha that's exactly right!</comment></comment>


10 Python One-liners To Impress Your Friends - <AUTHOR> http://codeblog.dhananjaynene.com/2011/06/10-python-one-liners-to-impress-your-friends/

<comment><USER2> I find it weird that the author writes about one-liners in python without knowing about list comprehensions

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Also in his comment he said list comprehension can replace reduce...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 10 Python one-liners to piss off your colleagues by ignoring the Zen.

Seriously though, _some_ of these are ridiculously unreadable so think twice before using any for anything more than theory.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yet the most useful oneliner is missing:

        python -m SimpleHTTPServer

<comment><USER6> And

        python3 -m http.server

<comment><USER2> That could actually be the best incentive yet to make me install python3 right now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Number 5 should read (not that it matters): print map(lambda x: "Happy Birthday " + ("to you" if x != 2 else "dear Name"),range(4))

In general, I was expecting more. I was hoping for some slightly more obscure examples, though I guess the point is that many common problems are 1 liners in Python.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why is number 1 better than just:

        [x*2 for x in range(1, 11)]

<comment><USER9> I felt the same about number 3.

      [x in tweet.split() for x in wordlist]

Seems better to me than

      map(lambda x: x in tweet.split(),wordlist)

Although the natural thing for me to do would be

      [x for x in wordlist if x in tweet]

Which both generates a list of words instead of booleans(['scala', 'sbt'] instead of [True, False, False, False, False]) and also matches the 'sbt' in tweet.

<comment><USER10> or just:

        set(tweet.split()) & set(wordlist)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _sigh_ ... when will people learn ... one-liners are not good. Especially when they lead to bugs. For example #4 in the list. If you that didn't jump out to you as a bug. You are a fucking idiot and shouldn't be writing production code.

<comment><USER12> For reference, a correct #4 would read:

      with open("one_liners.py") as f: print f.readlines()

In CPython, a file handle is closed immediately the file goes out of scope, because it's reference-counted. In Jython (and I believe IronPython too), with lazier garbage collection, the filehandle would stay open until it was gc'd. I have no idea about PyPy's behaviour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> No Brainfuck interpreter?

<http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ynaamad/misc/bf.htm>

</comment><comment><USER14> "Error establishing a database connection"

Very funny...

Dumb indian script kiddies... sigh

<comment><USER15> thats racist

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> These seem ridiculously mundane.</comment>


SubtlePatterns.com has been hijacked. - <AUTHOR> http://subtlepatterns.com.s151819.gridserver.com/ <comment><USER2> You can also download the patterns from their github repo: <https://github.com/subtlepatterns/SubtlePatterns>

Edit: And here is their famous photoshop .pat file containing all the patterns: [https://github.com/subtlepatterns/SubtlePatterns/blob/master...](https://github.com/subtlepatterns/SubtlePatterns/blob/master/SubtlePatterns.pat.zip)

</comment><comment><USER3> It doesn't look like it expired, it just looks like someone stole it from his account. I think more appropriately the person should be called a domain thief

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a domain squatter. He's not getting it back without a ton of money, and if we're naive enough to kickstarter, then everyone's domain will get steal- squatted for the rest of time.

Sadly, the current nature of domain protection law means either one has to scare the squatter (doesn't work,) find a squatter with a heart of gold (doesn't exist,) or get a new domain. :(

<comment><USER5> maybe, just maybe, people should renew their domains if they want to keep them? and if the domain was stolen calling the thief a "squatter" is inaccurate. A squatter is someone that obtains domains legitimately.

<comment><USER6> In general use, a squatter is just somebody who holds a domain they don't intend to use. How they came by it is incidental.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone know how the domain was hijacked? If it wasn't an expiration issue, I'd like to know how to protect myself from this. Did they login to his DNS account?

<comment><USER8> I would like to know this as well. Considering the registrar itself is pretty secure maybe he had some kind of keylogger on his computer, and they logged into his account?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> You can see the domain in it's current state here: <http://www.subtlepatterns.com>

There's a facebook post from the official subtlepatterns.com facebook page acknowledging the hijacking here: [https://www.facebook.com/subtlepatterns/posts/44043519600741...](https://www.facebook.com/subtlepatterns/posts/440435196007418)

<comment><USER9> Currently, the owner name is shown as some one from Amsterdam. <http://who.is/domain_archive-com/subtlepatterns.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Boooo! This site is a well-organized, wonderful resource. Here's hoping it can get back to normal soon.

</comment><comment><USER11> Speaking from experience, getting a domain back after it has been hijacked is very costly and timely, and ends up being cheaper just to buy the domain back from the hijacker. It's stupid, but unless you have a contact with a registrar that understands what happened and is willing to work hard for you to get your domain back, you are stuck. I hope I'm wrong, and best of luck getting everything back to normal!

</comment><comment><USER12> I think it's more a case of "I forgot to renew the domain and someone jumped in and re-registered it" rather than "My site has been hijacked"

This has happened in the past: <http://www.out-law.com/page-4049>

<comment><USER13> The whois shows that it previously expired in April 2012. I thought most registrations were for 1 year increments, so this would be a strange time for a expiration.

<comment><USER14> There's a fairly long grace period after initial expiration when a domain is expired but can't be re-registered. It allows for the original owner to get it back (for a larger fee) before it's sniped by the next person.

<comment><USER15> 45 days. So that doesn't explain it either.

[http://www.icann.org/en/resources/registrars/accreditation/e...](http://www.icann.org/en/resources/registrars/accreditation/eddp)

<comment><USER14> Hmm, not as long as I thought then!

Skulduggery Afoot!

<comment><USER16> Nothing requires the new owner to immediately change DNS...

<comment><USER17> The update date was 9/17, which presumably reflects the date of transfer. So this just happened today.

<comment><USER16> Well, _an_ update was today. Perhaps another transfer? We don't quite have all the facts.

<comment><USER17> Their twitter says it was on auto-renew, and their domain is through the same company as their hosting. If their autorenew didn't go through, their hosting probably wouldn't either, so it's hard to believe that their host would have let them skate by for five months without payment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Don't f'ing pay those bastards. I realize that it's cheaper to pay them than fight them. I would love love to see you raise money online and fight them instead. I would buy into this cause in a heartbeat.

</comment><comment><USER19> Geez. I just used SP like yesterday ! Hope it gets ok soon !

</comment><comment><USER20> Good luck resolving this issue. I wonder what it would take to completely prevent this kind of stuff from happening.

</comment><comment><USER21> What happened?

</comment><comment><USER22> subtlepatterns 1st page is coming nice but shows all patterns other than Subtle on page 2.

</comment><comment><USER23> I leased my car for 3 years then I didn't renew it and they sent multiple notifications to my last contact address and finally repossessed the car a few months after I stopped making payments.

Now some car squatter has hijacked it and has my car on a parking lot. They're not even driving it!!! Why is this even legal!??!

<comment><USER17> Check the site's twitter and the whois. The domain didn't expire. It was on autorenew and, in any case, has an April expiration, so that explanation makes no sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well this is unfortunate. Hope it gets fixed soon as it is a great resource.

</comment><comment><USER25> Gah, that's a shame; I use SP quite regularly.

</comment><comment><USER26> Get well soon www.subtlepatterns.com</comment>


Ask HN: Are academic degrees the last refuge of a scoundrel? - <AUTHOR> I've worked in the Software industry for 10+ years and I've seen all types of Engineers.  It seems to me that the more someone boasts about their school or major, the more the person is full of crap.  Has anyone else had the same experience? <comment><USER2> YES. The key to your observation is the boasting. A competent person gets on with getting the job done. They let their results speak for their aptitude. People who boast tend to have self-esteem (and often productivity) issues.

In my experience a competent person with an academic degree has an edge over a competent person without one. But that depends a lot upon the organisation, the projects, etc. Unfortunately some managers are impressed by boasters.</comment>


Fail: Cr48 tracker - <AUTHOR>

Addicted gamer is no longer providing tracking numbers for Cr-48 shipments. http://addicted-gamer.com/cr48-tracker/ <comment><USER2> Probably UPS got pissed about them slamming the API or maybe it exposed people to theft since everyone could find out where they were going?</comment>


Columbus, OH ranks top for being tech startup-ready - <AUTHOR> https://www.intelligentcommunity.org/index.php?src=news&submenu=News&srctype=detail&category=Press%20Coverage%202013&refno=813 <comment><AUTHOR> Someone in a forum I frequent just made me aware of all this, so I thought I'd share it here.

Columbus, OH has 7th best economy in the US: [http://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2012/09/10/columbus...](http://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2012/09/10/columbus- economy-ranked-7th-in-us.html)

Columbus, OH Tech Incubator: <http://www.techcolumbus.org/>

Looks like a nice place to start up...</comment>


Twelve Tips to Master Programming Faster - <AUTHOR> http://www.breckyunits.com/twelve-tips-to-master-programming-faster <comment><USER2> >The saying that it takes 10,000 hours to master something may or may not be true but is indisputably popular (which is often an attribute of true ideas).

The 10,000 hours comes from empirical research on expertise, spearheaded by Anders Ericsson - [http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=anders+e...](http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=anders+ericsson+expertise&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8)</comment>


Push-pull Functional Reactive Programming (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://conal.net/papers/push-pull-frp/

<comment><USER2> This is one of my favorite papers by Conal Elliott. It demonstrates his core technique of "denotational design via typeclass morphisms"[0] while solving some relatively tough problems around the _meaning_ of FRP as it relates to its efficient implementation.

[0] [http://conal.net/papers/type-class- morphisms](http://conal.net/papers/type-class-morphisms)</comment>


Pixar's leaders want to make their creative powerhouse outlast them - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/16377010?story_id=16377010

<comment><USER2> Article is a little shallow. Great video by Catmull to Stanford business school on it: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc> (54 minutes)

And here's an article by him: [http://hbr.org/2008/09/how-pixar-fosters- collective-creativi...](http://hbr.org/2008/09/how-pixar-fosters-collective- creativity/ar/1)

e.g. _Toy Story 2_ was an impetus to creating the present review system; the reason for saying 5 good things is just to make the people feel better about the criticisms: the last thing you want to do after years of exhausting work is point out what sucked. Catmull is the main guy driving these standards; Lasseter is busy being a creative;

BTW: I thought I'd discerned a hidden pattern of pixar having the writer voice the primary mentor role - Brad Bird voiced Edna Mode in _The Incredibles_ ; Andrew Stanton voiced Crush in _Finding Nemo_ \- but... Brad Bird didn't voice Gusteau in _Ratatouille_

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this will become Google's problem, too (though they seem to have the sort of culture described in the article).

<comment><USER4> Google? What about Apple?</comment></comment>


Child well-being in rich countries ranked by country - chestnut-tree http://www.unicef-irc.org/Report-Card-11/

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting that Germany is the only large country in the top 10.

I also love the way you that clicking on the map maintains a direct link to the _drilldown_ navigation and statistics without the page even being refreshed.

For example, this allows you to see why the UK is dragged down so much by its Education compared to Germany:

1\. NEET rate - number of children not in education, employment, or training is very high in UK.

2\. Further education - " _The further education enrolment rate exceeds 80% in all of the more populous developed countries except the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is the only developed country in which the further education participation rate falls below 75%; this may be the result of an emphasis on academic qualifications combined with a diverse system of vocational qualifications which have not yet succeeded in achieving either 'parity of esteem' or an established value in employment markets._ "</comment>


Windows 8 and APIC timer (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsdesktop/en-US/5d075378-a45f-433b-a3f7-73f974ec962f/windows-8-and-apic-timer?forum=wdk <comment><USER2> What are you trying to point out with this thread? Its from 2012, contains almost no technical information, and doesn't seem to show anyone behaving well OR badly.

<comment><USER3> Maybe because (IMHO) high precision timers (interrupts or events) on Windows are still an imprecise mess.

It's quite painful in kernel mode to rely on a timer that ticks once per 16.5 ms or so. See KeSetTimerEx: [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/hardware/ff...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/hardware/ff553292\(v=vs.85\).aspx).

You can of course change timer tick frequency to, say, 1 ms, but that increases power consumption. And 1 ms is still pretty imprecise.

Windows 8 had some improvements, but timer still has jitter somewhere from the requested value up to next system tick.

Same of course applies to user mode, of course there's even more jitter.

<comment><AUTHOR> In this case, CPU-Z want to measure the current CPU frequency using the APIC timer.</comment></comment></comment>


Effectiveness of Talk Therapy Is Overstated, a Study Says - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/health/study-finds-psychotherapys-effectiveness-for-depression-overstated.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0 <comment><USER3> The problem I have with this kind of research are the intrinsic ambiguities regarding "depression" and its treatment. Depression is notably heterogeneous in its characteristics and origins. Even when careful diagnosis declares two people to have the same illness, it can't be assumed their conditions are actually identical.

Furthermore, we know drug treatments can affect recipients unpredictably, depending on physiological factors. Similarly, psychotherapies, which are harder to administer in a consistent way, are subject to even greater variability in delivery and effect vs. medications.

The bottom line is estimating the real-world effectiveness of any therapy is at best hazardous, and the results of research (or meta-analysis of studies) are likely only tangentially applicable to individual treatment situations.

From many years on the front lines, I'm convinced depression and other disorders _can_ be effectively treated and suffering reduced. What's important to remember is treatment is as much art as science, it can't be bottled or reduced to formulas. Outcome mileage varies, but it's largely dependent on the quality of the treatment team, the power of the partnership between patient and practitioner can't be overemphasized.

</comment><comment><USER4> The original article title doesn't seem to be accurate. Should be "Effectiveness of Talk Therapy _On Depression_ Is Overstated, a Study Says".

</comment><comment><USER5> Not surprised. Though really just deciding to do something about depression can often be enough to be helpful. Simply feeling like there's a path out of it can give you the strength to keep your life together and maintain ordinary levels of self-care (keeping your home clean, going to work regularly, keeping to a sleep schedule, engaging in activities, and so on).

</comment><comment><USER6> Hmm...I read about the lack of effectiveness of psychotherapy roughly 20 years ago in DER SPIEGEL. Within a set time period, around 10% of patients receiving psychotherapy got better. Of course, within the same period 10% of patients receiving no treatment also got better :-)

<comment><USER7> There being no effect at all is a ridiculous statement. Sure, it doesn't work for many people, but it worked for me. So if it works for some people, which I prove it does, then it has to inhibit recovery in others in order to have no net effect. I don't buy that at all.

<comment><USER8> Therapy absolutely has an effect.

That effect, however, happens to be about equivalent to placebo.

<comment><USER9> This is wrong and you do many people a disservice who might read this and think it doesn't work. I don't know where you're getting this and the article in no way supports your stance. From the article:

 _Engaging in a course of well-tested psychotherapy, according to the new analysis, gives them an added 20 percent chance of achieving an even more satisfying improvement, or lasting recovery._

An _added_ 20 percent chance.

Don't forget they're already saying that talking therapy is only 25% _less effective_ than originally thought. They are still saying that talking therapy is effective! And at no point do they compare it to placebo.

The very article we're talking about:

1) Disagrees with your extremist stance

2) Never mentions it nearing placebo level

3) You probably didn't read it as you didn't address it

CBT, for example, is known to be particularly effective when dealing with anxiety as well as dealing with secondary symptoms and making people's lives better. It has an effect WAY above placebo.

So why did you say this? Are you actively attempting to make people's lives worse by putting them off therapy?

Also from the article:

 _for those who do well or fully recover, "psychotherapy, particularly cognitive behavior therapy, seems to be most effective in cutting the risk for a relapse long-term," Dr. Hollon [one of the co-authors] said._

<comment><USER8> _They are still saying that talking therapy is effective!_

The most generous interpretation of figures in this article is that NNTT for depression and therapy is 5. Meaning one out of every five people treated by therapy will show _some_ improvement due to effects of therapy itself.

We can certainly call this _effective_ in that there is an effect for some people who try therapy. But not for 80% of them.

Therapy is a 10 billion dollar/year industry in the United States, with its practitioners often charging desperately unhappy people high rates (beyond what most of us lucky software devs make), with no advantage to show for their various methodologies beyond what one gets from talking to an untrained stranger.

Financially successful yet largely bogus businesses and industries are never going to put themselves out of business and have little impetus to change the status quo.

Awareness of the current poor options for mental health treatment is important. However uncomfortable or against an established narrative of "help is out there' it is to address these realities, it will be easier to marshall efforts to finding real mental health solutions if we aren't pretending the current paradigms are working when the numbers show otherwise.

<comment><USER9> Nowhere did it say only 20% are helped. It says 20% more effective with other treatments. Either you're not reading or you're not comprehending.

I'm sorry therapy didn't work for you or you didn't want to try it, but I'm not sure what your agenda is.

You seem to have some weird axe to grind about people making money. I'm not sure what else I can say as you seem to want to believe the whole thing's a big rip-off. Like where does the claim that untrained listeners are as good as trained ones come from?

<comment><USER8> Making money is fantastic. Making money from desperate people with pseudoscience is bad.

 _20% more effective with other treatments._

Not what the article says. (It is most unclearly worded.) You have a 20% greater chance of improvement with therapy above _talking to a doctor_ (Note there no pharmaceutical course of action mentioned) not "with other treatment".

My comparison of therapy to untrained listeners is not drawn from the article. There have been several studies done on this. Link to the one of first on google:

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.469...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.469.4634&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

<comment><USER9> Paraprofessionals are still trained. If that were about medicine that paper would be saying 'can we use a nurse instead of a doctor', not 'can we use anyone instead of a doctor'.

Is that what you're angry about?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> These threads always fucking suck on HN.

 _Before_ you comment I would urge you to go find some reporting by the NYTimes of something you know a lot about - your favoured programming language or a company you work for, and see how well their reporting matches your understanding of the topic.

Here's the stuff that newspaper articles usually fail to mention in reports on therapy / drug studies

1) The definition of major depression has broadened and now includes a much greater range of people. The effect size of treatment is normally greater for people with more severe symptoms, although the relapse rate is also usually higher.

2) The way trials are run has changed, and many trials are not very good. One of the causes of this is odd regulation.

3) People seem to say that pills for psychiatric use are no better than placebo (not true) but that pills for physical health (eg hypertension) are better than placebo (true) but those people should also look at the effect size, which is often similar for both types of meds.

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20241/abstrac...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20241/abstract)

Anti-depressants vs placebo: [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20241/epdf](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20241/epdf)

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20263/epdf](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20263/epdf)

Pragmatic randomized controlled trial of long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy for treatment-resistant depression: the Tavistock Adult Depression Study (TADS) [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20267/abstrac...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20267/abstract)

etc.

<comment><USER11> Psychologists and pharmaceutical companies don't have any sort of inside knowledge of how statistics work.

> Before you comment I would urge you to go find some reporting by the NYTimes > of something you know a lot about - your favoured programming language or a > company you work for, and see how well their reporting matches your > understanding of the topic.

This is an argument against all reporting by the NYT, based on a hypothetical shared feeling. This may be an obvious thing to say, but the reporting of many newspapers (including the NYT) about things that I know more than most about has often been right, and sometimes been wrong. They have sometimes been right in a frustrating way (I felt like they missed a deeper point), or wrong in an incompetent way. I'm saying this not because it is interesting, but because it is boring. Making an argument that since everyone who has some expertise has at some time felt like a story was wrong, therefore this story is wrong - <USER2> noise, not signal. The NYT is not making the case, it's showcasing the arguments of experts who share a particular opinion.

I'm struggling to figure out how your list speaks to their arguments in any way. 1) and 3) seem like question begging, to a non-psychologist, and I don't know what 2) is an argument for, against, or about. What does effect size matter if the effect over placebo may not even exist?

This is more like reading an article about some issue in real estate when you, and/or many of your friends and family partially make their living from that issue.

<comment><USER10> The submitted article talks about therapy not being as effective as we used to think.

My links explain why newer studies find less evidence of benefit, and whether that's a problem.

These threads are always full of people saying "I didn't read the paper; I didn't read all of the article; but I disagree because my aunt once ..." It'd be nice if people downvoted contrarian anecdote, but they tend not to.

<comment><USER12> I guess I'm just waiting for a headline that says "Study finding effectiveness of talk therapy is overstated overstated their findings".

Now there's a headline that would make me read the article.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: SECAPPS InfoSec Tools For Developers - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone, We are pivoting our product and before we dive I would like to get some feedback from the community.
We are building a set of apps which developers can use to debug and test web apps for security vulnerabilities. The key difference between these tools and others is that ours run on top of your browser which means that:
* require just a browser
* always updated
* no need to setup proxy settings or open up your environment to 3rd-party servers * you can test local apps as well as remote apps
* not locked to specific apps
* embeddable - you can link them to your own portals, status pages, ticketing systems, etc.
We think this service will appeal to developers who are inclined to do some security testing for their teams without wasting too much time because the tools are just a click away and they do not require too much attention or to keep up with the latest trends in security.
The tools are offered for free so you can use them without logging in or sign up. We are thinking to charge a license fee which not only make the apps more useful (access to some private services and storage) but also make them compatible for commercial use.
The current set of tools are available here:
https://market.secapps.com/
I would love to get your feedback.
I am also interested to ask the following specific questions:
* Would you find a service like this useful?
* Would you find the tools more useful than existing tools because we use web is a platform?
* How often do you think you are going to use tools like this, once a day, once a week, once a month?
* Would you pay for the service and how much if we make it available today, i.e. if you say yes and we drop in a link for payment in the comments - will you actually pay for it?
* If you cannot be bothered what do you do for security testing - what other tools or services are you using?
I am looking forward to read your comments. <comment><USER2> There are only a few tools listed here, with short text-only descriptions. Based on those descriptions, I can tell that most of these tools are of no interest to me.

I don't see any tutorials, videos, examples, or use cases outlined here.

I like the style of the website and how clean it looks.

However, I'm left wanting to be convinced that there is anything here beyond a very short shell script that calls out to a few tools like nmap, and nothing more.

Please feel free to provide convincing evidence that there is something worthwhile on this page. I do honestly want to like it.

<comment><USER2> As far as the tools I like to use for security testing, you could start with the list from Sectools.org.

Put a significant number of them in a web-based service wrapper, and I might be convinced to use that as my first stop on the road to more complete testing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wrapping existing tools is not a problem but you are getting nothing more than a wrapper. Hell, you can even run a web-based terminal and stick them in your own DO host for $5 a month. However, a lot of the security tools are side- projects so do not expect them to work all the time.

Distributions like Kali make it a lot easier but even then getting started may be hard and besides you need to run them either on your own box or a server and convince other people to use them too if you are to share the burden of doing security tests.

The secapps tools are designed to be a click away - always available with no installation or additional fiddling. Naturally we started with web tools but we are currently expanding into other areas too and in the future we have some cool ideas how to bring some powerful capabilities at your fingertips.

But yes, down the line, we would like to offer a hosted access of open source tools too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a re-post of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14058725](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14058725) after it was mentioned that I should probably convert this into a Show HN submission.</comment>


Bring back alt.NET - <AUTHOR> http://www.dylanbeattie.net/2017/02/bring-back-altnet-but-why.html <comment><USER3> I was part of alt.net years ago, and it died for a variety of reasons but one of the primary ones was that many influential members of it were taken in by the lure of the Microsoft MVP program and the consulting prestige that it offered. This slowly lead to the underlying message of ALT.NET becoming undermined and co-opted it until it was just another part of the MS/.NET marketing machine and many of us simply lost interest.

One of ALT.NET's flagship events was the yearly unconference that was held, ironically, at Microsoft's main campus in Redmond. For the most part it was a truly inspiring event and inspired me and few others in Vancouver to try to do something similar locally. However, we decided that making an event and organization like this language, framework, or ecosystem specific was unnecessarily limiting, so we decided to call it the [Polyglot UnConference]([http://www.polyglotconf.com/](http://www.polyglotconf.com/))

We've been running this quietly for a number of years now. Many of the original ALT.NET people from the Seattle area regularly attend and we are always at capacity. We also use the organization we created to help organize and sponsor other events as well like CascadiaJS, Erlang Factory Lite and Devops Days.

 _On that note, we would be love to help other groups and localities copy this model and to help grow it._

Bringing ALT.NET back would be a mistake precisely because by definition of being .NET oriented it limits the kind of thinking, discussions and people who can or want to be involved. ALT.NET inspired a lot of new thinking in the .NET community but ironically it also inspired many of them (myself included) to walk away from .NET and explore more open ecosystems. If anyone really wants to rekindle what ALT.NET inspired then I highly suggest they endeavour to carry the movement forward by taking new steps. Don't retrace the old steps of ALT.NET for nostalgia's sake.

<comment><USER4> I'd love to see some of the ALT.NET passion come back around the .Net core space... but it feels like you can't attend a meeting/presentation that isn't also tethered to Azure demos. I mean, I actually like/appreciate what Azure offers, but it was the feeling that every MS presentation was a sales demo for Azure that drove me away from attending the local presentations several years ago.

ScottGu presents in the Phoenix area with a few others once a year, and I always really enjoyed it. I don't recall what year it was (2012 I think) that pretty much every demo was an Azure demo, that I just stopped going to them, and the local user groups as well.

I'm genuinely interested in .Net core... I _love_ VS Code... but I'm not interested in an Azure sales demo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> From what I remember ALT.NET was pretty much a movement that was against Microsoft anti or ignorant OSS policies of the time.

For instance NuGet was Microsoft's project which completely ignored the fact that OpenWrap (an OSS project) had existed and was gaining momentum. But then NuGet came along and obviously the Microsoft loud speaker basically killed OpenWrap over night. That is just one example - but there are dozens of others.

ALT.NET was also about the social aspect, such as Twitter, meetups and non- Microsoft-owned .NET conferences.

I don't see the need for any kind of similar movement right now. Microsoft is firing on all cylinders and I believe it will only get stronger, wiser and bolder now.

It isn't long now before the .NET CLR will replace the JVM as the open source standard on which enterprise apps are built (and more) - watch this space!

<comment><USER6> I think ALT.NET was one of the drivers for this change within Microsoft. Without it or something else like it, we may see the old MS patterns creep back slowly. I think it is good to have alternatives to a lot of the prescriptive MS frameworks and "best practices" \- and I say this as a career MS, .NET developer.

<comment><USER7> I'm not so sure. The leadership at Microsoft nowadays is quite different compared with back then. I do think the need for (something like) ALT.NET perhaps isn't there in the way it was back in 2007-09 because the software development, and particularly the web development, landscape has changed so much over the past 10 years.

<comment><USER8> One of the reasons we're keen to do this - or at least to try it! - is that both the industry and Microsoft have changed enormously in the last ten years. There's a much richer range of platforms available, and there's all sorts of new protocols and patterns we can use to integrate those platforms - and with stuff like containerization and serverless cloud functions, there's all kinds of interesting ways to use .NET and .NET Core as part of a larger heterogenous application stack.

It will also be interesting - in the widest possible sense of the word - <USER2> see how the interactions between altnet and 2017-era Microsoft play out as compared to the 2007-era Microsoft. As the saying goes, watch this space :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> ALT.NET died because a huge number of the people who were involved have left the .NET ecosystem entirely, mostly to Ruby and node.js. (For example, I wrote Ninject, which was a fairly popular OSS .NET project in its day, but I haven't written a line of C# in years.)

Ironically, now that Microsoft is much friendlier to OSS, there are dramatically fewer people interested in working on open source .NET. Don't get me wrong, it's great to see Microsoft doing this stuff. It's just about 7 years too late.

For open source .NET to regain its relevancy, it would require a unique OSS project or framework to be built on .NET and gather meaningful mindshare. To my knowledge, that hasn't happened in years.

<comment><USER10> I agree on the "about 7 years too late". But you're leaving out an important new development that is making .Net relevant again, namely that the three major cloud computing companies are supporting C# for their "serverless" cloud computing.

<comment><USER11> How does support for some function services translate to "making .Net relevant again"? In all of the talk I've seen regarding recent changes of .Net Core/Standard, serveless has never come up. Most people are not in the .Net space because of what it can do without the frameworks they are use to using if they re-write their code.

<comment><USER10> Because there is an audience, and I think that it is growing, for "serverless" server-side platforms feeding SPAs. Apps that outgrow Firebase have somewhere to go with AWS Lambda and Azure Functions.

>Most people are not in the .Net space because of what it can do without the frameworks they are use to using if they re-write their code.

The clearly there's a lot of growth potential in .Net once those people find out what it can do without all that "framework" baggage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So is alt.NET a series of meetups? Conferences? Is there a call to action for .NET developers to try to get this type of thing going in their hometowns?

Where do we go from here?

I'm interested in being part of a .NET/open source movement. I think that's awesome.

<comment><USER13> Way back when I used to do .NET, alt.NET was also an umbrella for alternative frameworks like Castle, data mappers, etc. It would be great to see a resurgence of non-MS frameworks.

Don't get me wrong the MS prescribed frameworks are great. I just prefer SQL over LINQ, lightweight HTTP muxes and middleware as found in node.js or Go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's funny, but I also started out using JScript for my ASP pages. The only thing that was alien was dealing with COM Enumerables (Active Record results, etc). I was also into the Alt.Net space pretty early on. I used Castle Monorail (iirc that was the name) for a few things, and was genuinely happy to see ASP.Net MVC come from MS as a prescribed solution.

Of course, I would often bypass certain behavior as I didn't like the way some parts work, specifically I'd override the user/token behavior, allowing me to both stow a few more things in the encrypted token, as well as be able to use ARR to relay to other things (node, java) using the same user cookie (encrypted token).

The following is in response to a comment directly on TFA regarding the "mess" that was WebForms... What it really came out of was the pain in the shear number of differences in JS between the browsers at the time... in 1997-2000 there were radical changes. People complain today about the missing pieces in JS between browsers/engines, but it's NOTHING like the pain of dramatically different DOM implementations... Layer/Frame NN/IE... and if you had to support Netscape 4.x when IE5-6 were just released, OMG that was a nightmare.

I'm a big fan of JS, and love what it's become today (fatigue from webpack, babel, etc and all), but at that point in time, it was truly painful. IE6 getting well over 90% market share was a bit of a mixed blessing as all the old cruft of the v4 browsers had passed, and the newer DOM started to take hold with Mozilla and IE. JQuery wasn't around until 2006, and prototype (the library) had quite a few issues itself.

People were begging for a server-side solution to all the client-side problems. That's how we got WebForms, and frankly by the time ASP.Net MVC came out the landscape had changed dramatically for the better.

I think a lot of developers today either don't remember, or came in after the pain of client side development in the mid-late 90's. It really wasn't the JS language (though prior to nn4/ie4 it was kind of bad). People didn't update their browsers, and corporate standards held things far longer. I was working in a job that required Netscape Navigator 4.08 support when IE6 was released, and IIRC NN8 was in beta. I had to do some interactive charting and stack diagrams and had to support both newer and older interfaces. To say it was painful would be an understatement. I'll take what we have today with the node/npm space every time over what it was like prior to 2003. Although we've now had jQuery over a decade, and node/npm for over 6-8 years, there were some bad old days before.

<comment><USER14> > JQuery wasn't around until 1996

In fact it wasn't around until 2006!

<comment><USER4> corrected, thanks.. lol.. I know it's been a decade now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe it has had its day. It influenced the mindset of the masses and is now mainstream. There is no alt anymore. Even Microsoft ships software that leverages newtonsoft.json</comment>


Ask HN:  Handling an unscrupulous recruiter - <AUTHOR>

A contingency recruiting with him I do not have a relationship is openly advertising tech positions at my company.  I've dealt with this company before and have seen them doing other shady things in the past.  Based on what I know, I have a low level of confidence that simply asking them to stop promoting my jobs will do much.<p>Have any of you dealt with a similar situation?  How's you handle it? <comment><USER2> Have your lawyer send them a letter, certified mail. Nothing will convey your displeasure more effectively.</comment>


Crunkies – Espresso Cookies Recipe - <AUTHOR> https://americacoffeeco.com/blogs/recipes/crunkies-espresso-infused-cookies-recipe <comment><USER2> In the instructions, they forgot to tell you when to add the espresso powder. But usual cookie procedure is to mix all the dry ingredients together, then add to the blended wet, then add chips and nuts.

Medalgia d'Oro works well for baking too.

<comment><USER3> Some popular recipes call for creaming the sugar first and then adding the rest of the dry ingredients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Man you gotta add some flaky salt to the top of those.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is this an ad post? Sure feels like one.

<comment><USER6> Yes, an ad for their brand of espresso powder, which is the final ingredient.

I can't stand websites like this which have constant fake pop-ups saying "Someone just bought our product!"</comment></comment>


Comet ISON: Faded Glory - <AUTHOR> http://soho.esac.esa.int/hotshots/index.html/

<comment><USER2> >>There are only 2 hours, 3 minutes and 50 seconds until perihelion of Comet ISON<<

Look at that max speed. Reaching 0.1 percent of speed of light. [http://www.cometison2013.co.uk/perihelion-and- distance/](http://www.cometison2013.co.uk/perihelion-and-distance/)

I hope it doesn't disintegrate.

<comment><USER2> Experts say it's gone :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Also a live Hangout via Youtube right now:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q03I1B_yrPg&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q03I1B_yrPg&feature=youtu.be)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Further videos and commentary available at

[http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011400/a011422/index.h...](http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011400/a011422/index.html)

[http://www.nasa.gov/ison/#.UpdWJ42GnEI](http://www.nasa.gov/ison/#.UpdWJ42GnEI)

</comment><comment><USER4> Worst. Comet of the Century. Ever.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is it possible that the trails have burned off rapidly and we can't see the head?

</comment><comment><USER6> Did somebody say JSON?!

Oh, sorry... Never mind...</comment>