iOS Supporting IPv6-Only Networks - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=05042016a <comment><USER2> People commenting here need to work on their reading comprehension. Apple is not dropping support for IPv4. They are simply requiring that all apps _also_ support IPv6. The headline is confusing because of "only." But it's way different than if it read "iOS supporting only IPv6" as some comments seem to be implying. The change is that when a network is IPv6 only, apps must function properly, whereas previously Apple tolerated apps that only worked on IPv4. A better headline might be "Apple bans apps that only support IPv4." (*Edited, guess it's not so easy to write the headline. :) )

<comment><USER3> That's incorrect. Check out figure 10-3 here: [http://j.mp/1NkSBaF](http://j.mp/1NkSBaF)

If your App does not support IPv6 on the official rollout then you will no longer have network connectivity. If you use native platform functions you're fine. If you use unix/bsd sockets, you're in trouble.

From the backend perspective however, IPv4 will be allowed... for now. Basically what happens is the client is expected to send an IPv6 packet to the phone carrier which then will translate it to IPv4 if needed. Since many big cloud providers (like Amazon) still don't support a proper IPv6 solution this approach will likely be around for quite some time.

<comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, why would anyone use Unix or BSD sockets on iOS if Apple provides way better APIs?

<comment><USER5> Maybe familiarity? Porting existing UNIX code to iOS (seems like that'd be pretty rare)?

<comment><USER4> Hmm, good point. I guess that most of the apps that use BSD/Unix sockets are libraries then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In some sense it is nice to see a push for progress on IPv6. And yet, it is also _painfully_ clear that these networks are not ready, even for the big sites like Google.

For instance, there are Google machines that are apparently IPv6 only. Over the last several _months_ I have had major issues reaching Google domains like Google.com, YouTube, etc. from my home Internet. It will either work seamlessly, or hang seemingly forever when trying to look up one of the URLs (which is oh so fun when I am trying to search Google frequently). It only hangs for Google domains.

I dug up a forum post that was over a YEAR old where people finally figured out that all of this crap was due to _IPv6_! They were literally turning off IPv6 entirely on their Macs in order to make Google searches work again. The symptom is a trace-route stumbling on the way to 1e100.net (one of Google's backbone domains). Sadly, I can imagine people screaming at their ISPs over stuff like this.

I haven't gone as far as to kill all of my IPv6 connections but I do have to turn off WiFi and turn it back on to force some kind of a network reset whenever this shit starts happening on my MacBook. Even then, the problem will eventually return, and is pretty much guaranteed to return by closing the lid and coming back later (how foolish of me to expect the Internet to be useful when I open the lid?). Networking on the Mac is a mess, to say the least. Even if this isn't entirely Apple's fault, it is entirely their problem for having poor fault-tolerance. For instance, if I were them the first thing I'd do is write a script to turn off the WiFi and turn it back on in case of a problem, since that seems to solve 90% of issues all by itself.

<comment><USER7> Anecdotes are anecdotes, IPv6 from Mac to Google has been stable for months here :-/

Apple's happy eyeballs are specifically designed to counteract the present but terrible IPv6 problem. It's difficult to tell if yours is IPv6 or just apples notoriously unreliable wifi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The negative thing about this is that they don't use a XLAT464 resolver. With DNS64, they break DNSSEC. Android has an built-in XLAT464 resolver since version 4.1 IIRC. So a carrier can't choose for this as long as there is a vendor (Apple) that don't support it.

T-Mobile in the USA is currently using such a network, which is the best transition method in my opinion.

<comment> X-Istence DNSSEC would only matter to the end client (the iPhone in this case) if it actually verified DNSSEC responses on the client, but it doesn't.

So unless your application contains a full DNS resolver that can walk the roots itself, you are relying on the DNS server from your provider to provide you with DNSSEC validated results. In this case the provider can simply return results without any of the DNSSEC results and things will be more than happy to continue on.

XLAT464 is not some sort of panacea, and requires a bunch of extra software running on the device to properly function. NAT64 with DNS64 means you ignore all of that, and only the provider has to know that translation is happening, from a device perspective it looks like it is running on top of a IPv6 only network with all endpoints only being IPv6. It's simpler, and maybe just the push providers need to roll out IPv6 more aggressively.

<comment><USER4> > DNSSEC would only matter to the end client (the iPhone in this case) if it > actually verified DNSSEC responses on the client, but it doesn't.

If you tunnel the DNS resposes over a TLS connection, then it would be secure. This has been specified in an RFC recently.

And about XLAT464: Apple could've just added that to iOS, instead of this. Google did the same a few years ago. If all the vendors would apply the same transition mechanism, that would make it a lot more easier for carries to deploy IPv6.

<comment><USER8> >If all the vendors would apply the same transition mechanism, that would make it a lot more easier for carries to deploy IPv6.

The nice thing about NAT64/DNS64 is that there is no support for anything beyond IPv6 required on the client - it's entirely handled by the network, and is completely transparent / invisible to the endpoints.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How do people plan to test their apps continue to work when this change goes out?

I guess running the phone on an IPV6 only network and confirming it works would be all it takes?

I'm sure there are things I'm missing, what are others doing?

<comment> X-Istence Apple includes the ability to easily set up an IPv6 only hotspot. Using NAT64 and DNS64.

[https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Networ...](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/NetworkingInternetWeb/Conceptual/NetworkingOverview/UnderstandingandPreparingfortheIPv6Transition/UnderstandingandPreparingfortheIPv6Transition.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40010220-CH213-SW16)

<comment><USER10> The only small caveat that should go along with that: that there is no native IPv6 connection to the Internet, i.e. it is an IPv6-only hotspot with an IPv4-only uplink to the Internet.

So, while the basic behaviour should be fine, it's best to set up a full- fledged IPv6-only access network, to ensure you can test the usage of the native IPv6 by the app as well, and verify there are no unexpected issues. (If the app talks to the resources that are IPv6-enabled, that is).

<comment><USER8> NAT64/DNS64 is completely invisible to the endpoint - there is zero differentiation between how a client talks to a native IPv6 resource and an IPv4 resource. All of the translation is handled by the network/DNS, so if your app works with your device configured with only a v6 IP address while supported by a NAT64/DNS64 network, you're good to go.

<comment><USER10> Try FTP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does this mean all backends that an app communicates with need to be accessible over IPv6?

<comment><USER12> Recent Android on T-mobile US uses IPv6-only transport. T-mobile's DNS servers are only asked by these devices to translate hostnames to IPv6 addresses. If they can't find an IPv6 address, they will look up the IPv4 address for a hostname, and pack it into the bottom 32 bits of an IPv6 address that routes to a IPv6-to-IPv4 NAT device at T-Mobile.

This is called DNS64/NAT64 and has some small performance penalty. Making content directly accessible by IPv6 removes the penalty.

<comment><USER8> > This is called DNS64/NAT64 and has some small performance penalty.

While there may be some implementations that have a small performance penalty, certainly not all of them do. The NAT can be done in FPGA or ASIC, and there's not any difficult work being done to translate the DNS response.

* I've been installing NAT64 networks for several years

<comment> X-Istence The performance penalty is that now my packets travel:

Phone -> T-Mobile -> NAT -> T-Mobile -> Internet -> My hosting provider

Whereas with IPv6:

Phone -> T-Mobile -> Internet -> My hosting provider

That NAT is an extra step, and will add a small amount of latency.

<comment><USER13> The NAT, if set up right, would not cause the packets to take a different route.

Changing the packet format requires nanoseconds, no more than normal packet processing.

It's possible to set up anything wrong, but there's nothing about this technology that would introduce latency when done correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Until AWS, Azure and GC support native IPv6 there won't be many apps that can use this.

<comment><AUTHOR> AWS ELBs are reachable over IPv6 [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/Devel...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/DeveloperGuide/elb- internet-facing-load-balancers.html#internet-facing-ip-addresses)

<comment><USER15> Not when using VPC, which almost any modern AWS deployment is.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, though ClassicLink is an option. Launch ELB in EC2 classic and add instances in VPC over classlink.

<comment><USER16> New accounts (as of 2013-12-04) don't even support classic.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using- vpc...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-vpc.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Misleading title. Crucial bit from TFA: "Starting June 1, 2016 all apps submitted to the App Store must support IPv6-only networking."

</comment><comment><USER18> They have postponed a little bit the deadline, I think it was originally set for September 2015. I saw they added some features in getaddrinfo() in iOS 9.2 and OS X 10.11.something, so they were probably postponing to make sure developers had all the right tools for the different situations.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's not like I'm a fan of Apple, but this is bold bold move.

See you all on the bright side of the Internet.

<comment><USER20> Could you expand on that? It seems to me that it's just them saying "we want people to start migrating," it doesn't actually push anyone off IPv4, and in most cases (assuming you're using DNS resolution instead of direct IP addresses), this is all under the hood changes that will "just work" for consumers of their SDK.

<comment><USER19> I will expand. In the world of billions of devices online we are stuck to hacks and magic over IPv4, when there is a simple IPv6 working already. All because of uneducated and lazy IT personnel not doing their job.

Nowadays IT personnel is more inclined to create monsters of a fudge, than use some tech which was not "invented" in last 5 minutes.

And I'm glad that Apple says "enough with this crap" and makes App Developers think about portability.

App devs really don't need to do much more than put their APIs behind a DNS with AAAA which works and use a hosting/cloud/caching/distribution provider which is not stuck in 80s networks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can someone change title to "iOS apps supporting ..."

</comment><comment><USER22> I've been using NAT64 at home for a few years now. Most apps out there handle IPv6-only just fine, with steam and videogames being the exception.

A few older android phones had some issues, and I believe not MS product has ever worked (but these were all guests, so I didn't really bother much).

I'm amazed that this requirement is coming so late to iOS, seeing how (supposedly), apple tends so much to the quality of their apps.

</comment><comment><USER23> Does this impact the reachabilityForLocalWiFi method in apple's Reachability sample, which appears to use an IPV4 address internally:

// IN_LINKLOCALNETNUM is defined in <netinet/in.h> as 169.254.0.0.

localWifiAddress.sin_addr.s_addr = htonl(IN_LINKLOCALNETNUM);

<comment><USER10> I've found there is a related StackOverflow question, so I have answered in detail there: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31938536/reachability- and...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31938536/reachability-and-ipv6)

Short answer: Just Try The Connection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> For those confused on how to add IPv6 support:

Assuming no hosting issues, when you find out your IPv6 address, simply add it as a AAAA record in your DNS entry like you would for an A record.

</comment><comment><USER25> Dies this mean that once the deadline approaches all apps that are no longer maintained will be removed? Even if they work fine (minus IPv6 support)?

<comment><USER26> Unlikely, Apple doesn't generally remove applications from the store.

<comment><USER27> They will run into it when they submit an update however.

<comment><USER26> GP specially mentioned unmaintained applications (e.g. old games and the like)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Are any providers running iPhones on ipv6 only? It seems like they will avoid turning it on until the very latest as it doesn't support 464xlat.

<comment><USER29> T-Mobile already runs an IPv6 only network in the US for most (all?) LTE APNs.

<comment><USER30> Verizon also is pretty high up there in IPv6 deployment

<comment><USER31> They're doing dual stack, not ipv6-only with nat64/dns64.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Does anyone knows what this means for NSURLConnection APIs? Will code using that API have to be replaced with NSURLSession?

</comment><comment><USER33> Is there a way to share DNS64/NAT64 when the internet is on the mac's wifi, if you use usb or bluetooth to connect the iphone?

<comment><USER8> SImply follow the instructions, but swap the "Share Internet From" interface and "To Computer Using" interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Fantastic. Finally seeing a bit of a push. Incidentally, Australian IPv6 usage jumped from 2% to 4% just this month.

</comment><comment><USER35> I would be glad if apple products supported any network without all the constant disconnects and link level problems. Especially shocking as the BSD underlying stack is robust, it is all the Cupertino crap on top, the "helper" daemons that are to blame!

</comment><comment><USER36> Apple breaking the world, one update at a time.

<comment><USER37> They are trying to fix something that was known to be broken more than 30 years ago.

<comment><USER36> What are they trying to fix? Apple is deleting content that is not associated with content in iTunes. They think it an accurate delete but are 100% wrong and have no DR or backup plan for this.... It would be simple enough for them to use a shazzam like algorithm to verify what they are deleting matches what is in iTunes and if not leave it.

I might be misunderstanding what you are stating though?</comment></comment></comment>


In 20 Years, We're All Going To Realize This Apple Ad Is Nuts - <AUTHOR> http://m.fastcodesign.com/1673020/in-20-years-we-re-all-going-to-realize-this-apple-ad-is-nuts

<comment><USER2> this guy should buzz off. he used the word crazy pretty loosely. says he sees it too but is really just lost on the wall</comment>


The Smartest Man is Bullish on Europe - <AUTHOR> http://blackstone.com/news-views/market-commentary/blog-detail/byrons-market-commentary/2013/06/10/the-smartest-man-is-bullish-on-europe

<comment><USER2> Big ol' ASP.NET error staring me in the face when I try and visit the page

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that, looks like a raw single quote in the URL was being stripped out on it's way in.

I've posted up fresh version with a URL-encoded quote and that seems happy now.</comment></comment>


Strive for Technical Debt - <AUTHOR> https://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2016/08/18/strive-for-technical-debt/ <comment><USER2> In the case that technical debt is an analogy to real world financial debt the analogy causes me to ask - how many people have been financially successful without ever taking on debt?</comment>


Cosmologist claims Universe may not be expanding - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/cosmologist-claims-universe-may-not-be-expanding-1.13379

<comment><USER2> The article contradicts itself...

 _The idea may be plausible, but it comes with a big problem: it can 't be tested. Mass is what's known as a dimensional quantity, and can be measured only relative to something else. For instance, every mass on Earth is ultimately determined relative to a kilogram standard that sits in a vault on the outskirts of Paris, at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures. If the mass of everything — including the official kilogramme — has been growing proportionally over time, there could be no way to find out._

The way to measure the increase in weight is actually described in the article itself: observe a shift in absorption/emission spectra.

Of course, such a shift may be infinitesimally small and undetectable over short timespans. However, this is precisely the sort of theory (like all the neutrino theories, for example) for which you set up a very long-term experiment.

The experiment is simple: measure the absorption spectrum of hydrogen in space with an extreme level of accuracy and a bajillion measurements (that's the scientific term). Record that for posterity. In 10 years (the equivalent of observing something 10 light-years away), repeat the measurement. Keep doing this until you either observe a shift or have made a measurement that based on observations of the real world (i.e. galaxies drifting away).

The experiment might take 100, 1000 or even 10'000 years, but eventually we'd have an answer!

UPDATE: Heh. isomorphic points out that this is actually not feasible given that it's impossible to make these measurements accurately without relying on mass being constant... So much for this. _retracts_

<comment><USER3> How do we measure frequency (or time) precisely if the emission spectra are changing?

<comment><USER2> We'd need to calibrate against some kind of effect that is more heavily influenced by forces other than mass. You're right actually, that might be a lot more tricky than it seems on the surface. If we're left with the Weak and Strong forces to play with, that makes experimental design pretty difficult (and perhaps impossible).

Hmm...

<comment><USER4> If the two really are indistinguishable experimentally, then might we say that the expansion of space and the changes in mass are just two different ways of describing the same phenomena?

<comment><USER5> It's very clear that there is a difference. What is not clear is if we can observe that difference in a human timeframe (thousands of years or less).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I became extremely fascinated by null cosmology, which explains red shift as the result of light losing energy to [background] radiation as it travels. That [background] radiation becomes essential in the cosmological cycle involving the endless birth and death of galaxies via black holes.

While the theory seems to be collecting dust, I've not found anything to fully discredit it.

[http://www.nullphysics.com/pages_cosmology.php](http://www.nullphysics.com/pages_cosmology.php)

Update: I'm writing from my iPhone and haven't looked into this in a while. When I said radiation I was referring to low energy cosmic microwave background, which is easily scattered. Read the FAQ if you have questions. I do not claim to fully represent the theory in the above paragraph.

<comment><USER7> > _red shift as the result of light losing energy to radiation as it travels_

Yet another incarnation of the old so-called "tired light" idea. Just google it. Or start here:

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

You run very quickly into all sorts of problems once you assume light gets "tired" as it travels.

> _While the theory seems to be collecting dust, I 've not found anything to > fully discredit it._

Start here:

[http://hep.ucsb.edu/people/bmonreal/Null_Physics_Review.html](http://hep.ucsb.edu/people/bmonreal/Null_Physics_Review.html)

> _I 've not found anything_

Odd, since a simple google search for "null physics" returns several strong rebuttals on literally the first page. Maybe you haven't actually looked?

EDIT: Oh boy, this "null physics" thing shows all the signs of crackpot "science". The author working on it "for decades". Studies physics, but becomes "disenchanted" and switches to engineering. Is a "visiting scientist" at a "university" nobody has heard about. His theory is not published in journals because journals "help the establishment". Compares himself with Ben Franklin, Bill Gates, and Faraday. The only thing he's published is this book; no articles, no nothing. On and on and on. There are literally hundreds of woo peddlers out there like this guy, and all of them are made in the exact same image.

[http://www.ourundiscovereduniverse.com/pages_author.php](http://www.ourundiscovereduniverse.com/pages_author.php)

That page lit up the pseudo-science detector, firing up another alarm at each and every sentence. The only thing amazing about this guy is how well he fits the stereotype. It's surreal.

Brilliant quote from a link I posted above:

 _Much crackpot literature gives the impression of an old grudge being played out: "I learned quantum mechanics from some book that made me feel dumb; thinking up Quantum Aethro-Gyromechanics on my own made me feel smart." The sad thing is, this illustrates a sort of can-do spirit that's admirable in fields other than science. Stubbornly defying a swimming coach ("You'll never be an Olympian, kid") or editor ("Your manuscript 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone' does not meet our needs at this time") or venture capitalist ("Forget it, Mr. Fred Smith, there is no market for nationwide express delivery"), turns out to actually work sometimes; the people who pull this off are praised as heros. But science isn't like that. Whereas coaches, editors, and entrepreneurs have to rely on (fallible, human) gut instinct for many of their evaluations, science relies on explicit, rigorous go/no-go tests. I think that the dissonance between the value of stick-to-it-iveness in entrepreneurship, versus the value of mathematical rigor in science, is the root cause of a lot of physics crackpottery._

<comment><USER8> Honest question: how you do you prevent your pseudo-science detector from succumbing to confirmation bias? I'm willing to wager that if you gathered up every single so-called crackpot on the planet and looked at their ideas in 50 years, there's at least a single person that will have turned out to be right.

Love the quote, by the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found this a rather good explanation (well written article). My favorite para is in the closer:

"Others say that Wetterich's interpretation could help to keep cosmologists from becoming entrenched in one way of thinking."

I like this attitude. Science is about playing with hypotheses and trying out new ideas. The most important thing for me is for my viewpoint to be zipped around and turned on its head - just for fun. I think it makes the mind more nimble.

Also, could a physicsy person elaborate a bit more on why we can't test increasing mass? Is it in the same class as 'we can't actually measure the increasing distance in the cosmic expansion, because locally, nothing is expanding'?

Thanks

<comment><USER10> Mass is relative, measured by a standard object of arbitrary mass to which we've given a value. What we consider a "kilogram" is determined by one specific object sitting in a vault somewhere, and if that object were to be halved or doubled without us realizing it, then the official value of the kilogram would be similarly halved or doubled.

Since we determine the mass of things by comparing them against that object, if everything in the universe changes mass in precisely the same way at precisely the same rate then we would have no way of knowing. All we can do is compare them with each other, and relative to each other the masses would remain the same.

<comment><USER11> What about astronomical objects that are distorted by gravitational lensing? Even if the mass of everything is increasing, couldn't we still note any otherwise-anomalous universal change in the presentation of many such systems?

<comment><USER12> This seems to make assumptions about a relationship between mass and gravity that may or may not hold as "mass changes" in this way, but it's certainly something to look at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The research here is based on the interesting premise that "the masses of electrons and protons were smaller" in the early universe, leading to different emission spectra that we have thus far interpreted as an expanding universe. I have not read the original research article in detail, but it is my impression that all masses would have to scale at the same rate in order to avoid changes in fundamental physical behaviors. (This seems consistent with the article's premise that the effect comes from some sort of field redefinition in the Lagrangian.)

As a particle physicist, I see this as highly unlikely. The first big obstacle that I see for such a theory to overcome is that electrons and protons get their mass from entirely different sources. As far as we know, electrons are fundamental particles: their mass is a fundamental parameter of the theory (presumably encoded as the electron coupling to the Higgs boson). But although protons are composed of three fundamental particles (two up quarks and a down quark), the quarks' fundamental masses are only a tiny fraction of the total proton mass. Instead, the vast majority of a proton's mass results from complicated non-linear QCD (strong nuclear force) self-interactions that draw on both the fundamental masses and things like the QCD interaction strength. We've had some success at simulating those QCD interactions in recent years, but there's no known way of just reading off the proton mass from a fundamental equation.

So for the idea behind this proposal to work, it seems to me that both the fundamental particle masses and these complicated QCD effective masses would have to scale _completely_ in parallel. I'm not at all clear on whether a field redefinition (as proposed here) would work that way. Maybe it would be more natural than it seems, but that's my first big concern with the proposal.

</comment><comment><USER14> Neat idea. If/when the paper gets published I hope I stumble upon it.

One thing that I don't get with the hypothesis is how it deals with conservation of energy. Its well understood that mass is a form of energy, so if atoms were to simply grow in mass, then that would either require some other energy source, or violate conservation of energy. Obviously, this is a huge an obvious problem that should preclude this hypothesis from serious consideration. The fact that this does not do so suggests to me that this issue is somehow resolved within the theory.

<comment><USER15> Consider yourself stumbled. The paper is here: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.6878/](http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.6878/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is it possible to difereciate between a expanding universe due to the big bang?, or an expanding universe due to this part of universe coming out of a more compressed stream (like coming out of a 3d venturi tube). I don't know if that makes sense. And if red shifted light is not red due to the expansion, but due to some kind interaction with dark matter?. I suppose this questions are dumb, and surely they have been discarded and replyied lotsof times, but never found that info. Does any body know a place were this kind of thinks are explained?

<comment><USER17> I would say not really! The real problem isn't the effect can't be replicated it is that replacing cosmological expansion with something else requires the something else to exactly mimic all the other things we can observe about the universe.

Dark matter is a great example. Due to gravitational lensing this can mimic directly the redshift we can observe. But then you have to explain how all this dark matter is distributed(not to mention created) in a way that doesn't mimic cosmic expansion in one part of the sky but everywhere at once.

I found the teaching company course on cosmology(from what I saw of it) to be absolutely fantastic as a general introduction: [http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.asp...](http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=1830)

<comment><USER16> Thank you very interesting, I´ll check it. Some times I get the feeling that somehow in cosmology there is some kind of advanced modern day epicycle squeme that is giving correct predictions but is not really what is out there. I just love to follow the advances in cosmology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not sure I understand how this effect actually works. Cosmological redshift isn't due to galaxies moving away from us but the expansion of the universe occurring underneath light as it travels in an expanding universe. So replacing velocity with mass increases doesn't actually work as far as I can tell because the mechanisms aren't equivalent. You actually need some physical mechanism that produces this mass increase over time that happens to be exactly the same as that observed by cosmological redshift.

<comment><USER18> Are you sure about that? There is blueshift and redshift as you move towards or away from light sources.

While the speed of light doesn't ever change no matter your reference frame, the frequency/wavelength indeed does.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure we disagree. Cosmological redshift doesn't rule out additional changes in observed frequency that compound due to the ones we observe by the expansion of the universe. Hubble originally explained his observed redshifts in other galaxies entirely due to the doppler effect but changed his mind when he observed a correlation between the distance of a receding galaxy and its redshift. If the doppler effect could explain cosmological redshift then galaxies would seem to have to 'know' how far they were from the observer!

If you go back and see the original 46 galaxies that hubble plotted by comparing observed redshift to the distance hubble had observed you can see considerable 'scatter' in the observations. This scatter is due to the Doppler effect.

The velocity distance relationship in hubble's law isn't due to the doppler effect but a model that relates recessional velocity to the general expansion of the universe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't like how similar the words "Cosmology" and "Cosmetology" are.

I was very confused upon first reading the title of this article.

<comment><USER20> My cosmetologist told me I was gaining mass too. She recommended a diet though - not further research.

<comment><USER21> Ah yes, I've also been to the "Girl, your ass is gettin big" symposium.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Say, you are deep inside a huge forest with your eyes closed all the time. Then, you blink once. Can you from the information received via that blink deduce if the forest is expanding or shrinking? Did it have a big bang or a small one? Just asking... On the other hand given the situation one needs to be extremely delusional and detached from any sense of reality to consider any bang fantasy seriously.

</comment><comment><USER23> A much simpler explanation that adds no new assumptions and shows that space itself need not be expanding to explain what we observe is at [http://finbot.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/expanding-space- obvia...](http://finbot.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/expanding-space-obviated/). It also solves the flatness problem, a major problem in cosmology.

<comment><USER17> That doesn't make sense at all. The whole point of cosmological expansion is to explain relations between redshift and distance. That is what was suggested to Hubble back in the 1920's when he plotted this relationship. If you don't hypothesize any global relationship between these two values then every galaxy just happens to have a larger velocity depending on distance. The link doesn't explain why this would happen.

I'm a little concerned about some of the other stated problems that the 'theory' tries to solve. For instance,

>>They believe that sufficiently large objects stretch or break apart, and proffer explanations as to why smaller objects, like galaxies, don't do likewise.

Spacetime isn't an object! I think gravity is a great explanation why galaxies don't break apart..

<comment><USER23> > The link doesn't explain why this would happen.

Physics doesn't answer _why_ on anything. Hubble's observations still apply. He didn't try to explain why the observational data is what it is.

> Spacetime isn't an object!

Where was the opposite claimed? I don't see it.

> I think gravity is a great explanation why galaxies don't break apart..

That's fine, but you still have a flatness problem that also needs an explanation. If you don't need your explanation (by obviating the expanding space paradigm) the flatness problem vanishes.

<comment><USER17> You can edit my response and change the 'why' to 'how.' Doesn't matter. The author still posits no mechanism for why the distribution that Hubble observed holds for every galaxy in the sky nor does he ever address this point _at all_. He doesn't say it isn't relevant or can be explained in a simpler way he just ignores the evidence.

So given a proposed explanation that explains observed phenomena the author claims _nothing at all_ except that it would be consistent (if you get rid of the observed phenomena) to not have the theory. That is a nonsensical argument that begs the question.

I.e. if gravity didn't exist apples would still be red Q.E.D. gravity is unnecessary

> Where was the opposite claimed? I don't see it.

He wants to say that because galaxies don't break apart but the universe does somehow there is an arbitrary limit on the size of objects that 'break apart.'(Do you think some other object other than the universe if being referred to here? What is breaking apart that is larger than galaxies and would remotely make sense here?)

This is rather strange because gravity(and the atomic forces) are far stronger than cosmological expansion so his 'point' doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER23> > The author still posits no mechanism for why the distribution that Hubble > observed holds for every galaxy in the sky nor does he ever address this > point at all.

Hubble found that the galaxies are moving apart from one another in the simplest possible way they could do that. (If they weren't moving apart from one another they'd be moving toward one another, or some mixture.) No further explanation is needed unless one thinks that movement violates some other tenet of physics, like the cosmological principle or Einstein's speed of light limit; in that case you need an additional explanation like the expanding space paradigm so you can save the other tenet(s).

Also note that the expanding space paradigm just shifts the why / how question to some other chapter of physics. What is the mechanism that expands space itself? Nobody has that answer.

> He wants to say that because galaxies don't break apart...

Not he/she, not the author. What you quoted was about what cosmologists generally accept today. Cosmologists generally accept that there is some limit on the size of objects that break apart due to space itself expanding. Below that limit, gravity and the atomic forces keep the object from breaking apart, they believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It seems to me that this should be able to be tested by checking whether the gravitational force between two objects of a given mass increases over time. If it does, then their mass has increased. If it doesn't, then their mass has not. (Of course, if the gravitational constant is correspondingly decreasing then this idea goes out the window.)</comment>


Ask HN: What are the biggest obstacles to vertical farms? - <AUTHOR> I have been following the development of vertical farms and hydroponics for a little while, since the popular "food computer" TED Talk a few years ago [1]. I have seen some adoption, with some companies supplying limited produce to market [2].<p>Progress seems to slow to me. Why isn't this more prevalent? Why aren't hydroponics in general more prolific? Why is this not feeding developing countries?<p>- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEx6K4P4GJc<p>- [2] https://boweryfarming.com/ <comment><USER2> The cost of providing lights (even using LEDs) is still not economically cheaper than the sun in most cases. If hydroponics is done in open it would be interesting to see if there are actually any advantages given that hydroponic farms will be near city where land is more expensive than where the farmlands are. Also pests again become a problem. There is a reason that most hydroponic companies are targeting micro-greens and other leafy vegetables as they are easy to grow and also most of the produce is edible so less waste of area and electricity.

In my experiments, I built multiple automated hydroponic setups and I have been able to grow only micro-greens and lettuce successfully and in a shorter cycle. All other experiments of growing strawberries and saffron failed.

<comment><USER3> FYI [https://en.agricool.co/](https://en.agricool.co/) are growing strawberries at scale in shipping containers but it took them a couple years of R&D.

<comment><USER4> Where can you buy them? I remember seeing their container in Paris two years ago and checking out their website. At that time it said they were trying to figure out how to distribute them. That's what their FAQ still say. I see no indication that their product really exists, let alone "at scale".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is very hard to commercially beat the Dutch greenhouses, which for decades have been the most efficient method of providing food both in summer and winter.

<comment><USER6> [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland- agriculture-sustainable-farming/) is an interesting read on their farming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The thing to compare vertical farms to is their horizontal greenhouse equivalents which are also closed systems with very high levels of control and yield per land area.

Once you do that, the balance is basically between the greater capital and power costs of vertical farms vs being closer to urban markets.

Transport is cheap so that never works out in favour of vertical.

Also, developing countries with low agricultural yields would adopt technologies like drip irrigation, better fertiliser and pesticide management before greenhouses and greenhouse before vertical farms.

</comment><comment><USER8> In addition to cost of lighting, I've found that the cost of hydroponic fertilizer is also too high, at least for small growers buying it premixed. I've successfully grown hydroponic tomatoes following standard guidelines, and found that the cost of the fertilizer is roughly equal to the value of the tomatoes harvested.

</comment><comment><USER9> Gravity is definitely the biggest obstacle to growing vertically, it takes a lot of capital to overcome gravity.

I'm on a small farm with some buildings but I have no desire to grow indoors, there is an abundance of soil and light outdoors, my customers buy the type of food grown outdoors, the environmental impact is probably always going to be less, and vertical growing is only suited for a small amount crops.

We can't feed people from vertical farms because they do not grow the types of food people eat the majority of, mostly cereal grains. Tomatoes, potatoes and larger vegetables are not viable so we're limited to salad greens, herbs, wheat grass ect.

</comment><comment><USER10> There was a really interesting link on a related subject a while back where they were using solar concentration to generate heat, power and desalination for use by the attached greenhouse. To me that's a much more impressive use of technology.

Edit: I think this was it [http://www.sundropfarms.com/sundrop- system/](http://www.sundropfarms.com/sundrop-system/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Surely a significant part of the problem is subsidies for entrenched, petroleum centric, industrial agriculture.

Subsidising already successful business as usual corporations has got to make improvements through external disruption extremely difficult.

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw)

</comment><comment><USER13> My take is that more complex cultures need a symbiotic relationship with bacteria, fungi and insects to thrive.

</comment><comment><USER14> We are a commercial agricultural producer using polyhouses in southern India; we have couple of playhouses so I am well aware of the nuances.

polyhouses and any other associated with these like vertical farm,hydrophonics etc are firstly suited for specific set of plants.

Not all plants and veggies can be grown , some plants cannot be grown inside polyhouses at all, i would say almost 70 % of veggies which are mass consumed can never be grown in polyhouses,hydrophonics etc.

Just think of all the veggies you had today or yesterday and you will easily understand these cannot be grown in polyhouses let alone hydrophonics.

there is no doubt significant increase in production, compared to outdoor farming. These are because of various factors. The main factors are we allow the plant to grow suitably thereby maximizing required production.

For example in a capsicum polyhouse, there are nets which help the plant to climb, and almost everything is supplied to the plant on more than required basis.

The capsicum plant is allowed minimal leaves so that max nutrition is allowed for the capsicum alone and not for the plant leaves etc. You can think of it it like a kid with a silver spoon, these plants get everything in return for capsisum and capsicum alone. ( who cares abt capsicum leaves BTW )

Secondly The price of capsicum is not determined by the buyer nor the producer , its determined by some trader who is totally unknown. This unknown person gets to decide on the price.

You the end customer nor the farmer has any say in determining the price. This is especially difficult when the output is perishable. The farmer has to sell it at whatever the price which is offered or else his produce will rot. When you grow a bumper crop its all the more difficult to find that many no of traders , transport etc. Selling 1 Ton itself is difficult enough, imagine the complexity when you have 10 tons from the same farm. You would need more resources to manage everything. The trader will never offer the same rate as he would have offered for 1 ton since he knows very well that you would never be able to sell 10 tons.

No country has the ways and means to distribute all the produce effectively across to its citizens.

The problems with polyhouses compound when other methods are introduced ( think hydrophonics,aerophonics,vertical farming etc), There is no economics involved in these.

Unless you do it as a passion. its never profitable to grow brocolli or lettuice in hydrophonics. The trader will never give you the right price if you have an huge quantity.

Its very easy to say brocolli sells for $X and we can do this and that and reduce it by $y in reality no one can control every aspect of the food chain.

Isreal does it becuase of its limited land availabilty , not with the case of India ,china and USA.

I am not sure if I had explained the whole correctly but Hydroponics + etc is only a hobby never commercially viable.

</comment><comment><USER15> > Why is this not feeding developing countries?

Because that is not the problem, the problem is neocolonialism/imperialism the highest stage of capitalism[1].

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Sta...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage_of_Capitalism)

<comment><AUTHOR> I can see how this is true of fast food, motor vehicles and electronics, not necessarily fresh produce. A South African winefarm can only make South African wine in South Africa. Coca-cola and Heineken can (and do) make their product the world over, wherever it is consumed.

If anything, vertical farming should be able to produce the consistent "big mac" equivalent of the tomato/lettuce/potato?

Am I incorrect in the sentiment of the capitalist argument here?

<comment><USER16> Amartya Sen's Nobel-prize-winning work on famine is probably the best read here. He points out that the problem is rarely lack of food, but lack of _claim on_ food. People end up unable to afford it, no matter how cheap it might be. "Solutions" which involve heavy capital investment and depend on imported items aren't going to make it cheaper.

It's even possible to end up with situations where food is destroyed because it cannot economically be sold, while people are also starving. This is not about food but about power.

<comment><AUTHOR> Started reading their essay. This is incredibly interesting, I was not aware of this.

<comment><USER16> Glad to be of service!

If you want another possibly transformational read, Hernando De Soto's _The Other Path_ has a lot of interesting things to say about rule of law and property rights.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Build One to Throw Away - <AUTHOR> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/08/22/Build-One-to-Throw-Away

<comment><USER2> You lost me when the first interesting link starts "<http://localhost/>"

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd say "Build One To Improve" instead of "Build One To Throw Away".

Software is infinitely malleable, so there's no need to start from scratch. You can morph your code from its present state to any desired state smoothly, keeping it working (and passing all its unit tests) the whole time.

"Throwing one away" usually also throws away lots of hard-won corner case fixes and QA testing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Write unit tests first, they are not just for bugs. They help a lot with scope and design. Then you might not have to build something just to throw it away.

<comment><USER5> To my mind, the main value of writing good units test isn't that it makes your implementation better at the beginning of a project. Rather, they make it possible to quickly iterate through alternative implementations and verify their correctness, or reject them if incorrect.

Regardless, Tim _does_ have a robust test suite for mod_atom -- the Atom Protocol Exerciser (APE), which he wrote long before starting work on his own implementation. It serves as a reference test client for any AtomPub service, which is rather more valuable IMHO than simple unit testing.</comment></comment>


Some time with Android watches - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.meetme.com/2014/08/some-time-with-android-watches/

<comment><USER2> Nice to have several viewpoints on the devices, though my opinion is probably biased.</comment>


Firefox Extension Development Tutorial - <AUTHOR> http://www.rietta.com/firefox/Tutorial/overview.html

<comment><USER2> this is way out of date.

However, this link is pretty up to date (3.5) <http://www.borngeek.com/firefox/>

and very detailed...

<comment><AUTHOR> great find -- thanks!</comment></comment>


A note on Euclid's Theorem - <AUTHOR> http://fermatslibrary.com/s/a-note-on-euclids-theorem-concerning-the-infinitude-of-the-primes <comment><USER2> I feel Euclid's Theorem has an enormous number of different proofs considering the importance of the Theorem.</comment>


Analysis of 50+ requests for my "Offer HN" conversion rate optimization help - <AUTHOR> http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/landing-page-optimization-tips-increases-sales-conversions/ <comment><USER2> This is the kind of summary that complements "Offer HN" posts so well. I totally missed your original thread, something I would have taken advantage of if I saw it. By the time I might have seen it, the service would be long gone. Even in that case where I missed the opportunity to get a custom assessment, here is a summary that I or thousands of future visitors can reach. The result is persistent value rather than a one off. I hope future "Offer HN" services do the same.

</comment><comment><USER3> Regarding the "your greatest enemy is the back button" quote-- the earliest citations on HN are <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1136272> and <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1136272>, attributing it to "one of the founders of BackType".

Personally, I think Patio11 put a nice twist on it here, though: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1686784>

<comment><AUTHOR> I personally thought PG made it but couldn't find a citation.

<comment><USER3> It could be, but I couldn't find it either.

Or, I should say, Google couldn't find it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cut text; reduce choices; only offer one CTA button.

It's fascinating how an Occam's Razor-type force pervades successful web design.

<comment><USER5> As always, _test_. I'm broadly supportive of this advice, but I know people who do long-form copy and see conversion rates slip when they switch to short form, and (while it isn't long-form) the BCC home page historically performs better with lots of text than with little.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, one example of those kinds of pages are the never ending sales pitch pages (e.g. selling parrot training). So, text _per se_ is not a bad thing on a page. But you have to provide proper flow and layout to generate interest and then seduce visitor to that prominent 'Add to Cart' button.

<comment><USER6> That was my initial impression too (what about SEO?). It's about balancing the text with the layout and clear calls to action.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is the original "Offer HN" thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842768>

</comment><comment><USER7> is the "too much text" really a problem? if too much text didn't work, none of those "buy my crappy ebook and make billions like me" sales pages would work.

regarding the designer, if you are just starting out and can't afford one...borrow concepts from your competitors. If you are selling shoes, borrow the design from zappos. Why? Because you know that they've optimized every single thing, since even .5% can cost them millions.

I'm pretty sure that quote is from pg.

And if you want to be a real jackass, you can add an exit pop to your site.

The call to action thing is very important. Most users are very uncertain, if you give them too many options, they'll get confused and won't do anything.

As far as social proof, yes I agree, but it's not that hard to fake the social proof. Nothing is stopping you from adding a Techcrunch image to your site. And if techcrunch bitches...just point them to that completely unrelated comment you made with a link to your site.

overall good post, since I find that pretty much every website will have one of those missing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes "too much text" may be a problem is if it unstructured. Also, if you don't have a designer you can buy one nice-looking template from <http://themeforest.net>

I would personally never "fake" social proof as (apart from ethical concerns) it may have legal liabilities which a startup cannot afford.

EDIT: Typo in link

<comment><USER8> I think that link should be <http://themeforest.net/> ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I always liked the Git website for these reasons. The headline states that Git is a "fast version control system". There is a an example of the commands to show how easy it is to get started. There's a list projects that use Git. And finally, there is a prominent download section.

<http://git-scm.com/>

</comment><comment><USER10> It's interesting that you chose to show Skype as a good home page. I happened to visit it today because I had to install Skype on a new computer. They make you jump through a lot of hoops to download the software and I actually pointed it out to a coworker.

Any thoughts on that?

</comment><comment><USER11> Great analysis, thank you for this.

One big question - what kind of social proof can a new site offer? Without being unethical, of course. Obviously, we have no customers yet, so we can't tout any huge customers or even media attention without flat-out lying.

<comment><AUTHOR> As I wrote in the blog post, if you are new you have to rely on ROI proof instead. You can perhaps cite a scientific study (in your area) or make up a reasonable theoretical model. Then say something like "78% companies who did A/B testing in 2010 increased their conversion by 50% or more"

So, you pitch the general concept of your startup when you are new (and don't have social proof). Later you pitch your actual product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Regarding the "Who's using" stuff. Maybe I'm not your typical person but I could care less about who is using your stuff. "Featured in the NYTimes..." oh yeah? So what.

Like I said, maybe I'm wrong but do you have numbers to back it up?

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments>

<comment><USER13> Another really good reference is Scientific Advertising ( <http://www.abenetis.com/encyclopedia-article-59.html> )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Which plugin are you using for that "More In" hover text? I have seen a lot of popular websites use it, and its actually quite neat.

<comment><USER15> Off topic here, but I find these rather obnoxious. They're almost like mystery meat navigation in that they're state isn't consistent. You have a disappearing navigation element, so a user might see it at one point, misunderstand what causes it to appear, and then not be able to find something on the page that they saw before.

On the other hand, they do grab the users attention, but I wonder what the ratio of successful clicks is to frustrated users.

Just my two cents, and pointing out that at least some users don't think they're neat.

<comment><USER16> A news site I read has them. I see it pop up while I'm reading an article, think one of the headlines sounds interesting but then can't find it when I've finished the original article and I'm ready to read something else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The website seems to be down, anybody got a cached copy?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, should be back up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Excellent, helpful, understandable - thankyou.</comment>


Apple pushes employees to return to work as Silicon Valley goes remote - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-return-to-work-plan-vs-google-microsoft-silicon-valley-2020-5 <comment><USER2> $5Bn is a lot to spend on a campus that nobody wants to come work at. On the other hand, plenty of space to hide from each others' germs!</comment>


Feedback for simple product idea - <AUTHOR>

My roommate Chris and I are big fans of Hacker News and we publish the BASES [Startup Digest]. The Digest is a weekly email update of the top tech and entrepreneurship events happening in the Valley and around the Bay area. Check out the latest digest (and our painfully simple website) at http://thestartupdigest.com. We have been brainstorming ideas to create more simple tools that would help startups succeed. Our latest one is for a "Competitive Digest" to offer alongside the events digest. I've included an outline of the Competitive Digest below. We would love to hear what you think!
Problem – Companies need to keep track of their competitors but don't have the time to do it effectively. It is important to do so because investors/customers will expect you to know what your competitors are offering and it will help you with both generating feature ideas and competitive benchmarking.
Our Product - The Competitive Digest will provide you with a weekly update on what your competitors have been up to, how you stack up against them in key metrics, and how you might acquire insight on what they will do next.
How it Works - The Digest is separated into three sections: Headlines, You vs. Them, and Competitive Content. View an example here: http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=92be899ef5a892c60b4a6cd97&id=9abcf51997&e=
The Headlines section features the most important things your competitors did last week (from articles, press releases, etc.)
The You vs. Them section provides you with competitive metrics to compare your website traffic, customer engagement, and media coverage.
The Competitive Content section provides you with links to both yours and your competitors' tweets and company blogs. It also links you to any job postings they have and shows you any LinkedIn connections you have to their current and past employees.
We now have some questions for you about this problem, the product, and the offering in general. Thanks for all your input and feedback in advance. If we generate a good response we will be sure to reward you with a first demo trial of the product at a steep discount :-)
Is tracking your competitors a problem for your company? If so, who is this specifically a problem for?
Would you be willing to spend money to solve this problem?
How much time (if any) does this person spend per week keeping track of your competitors?
What do you think overall about the product offering, and what features should the Competitive Digest have from Day 1?
What is the hardest part of tracking your competitors, and if you could change anything about that process what would it be?
Do you have a budget for this problem, and who would be the person in your company in charge of this?
If this product cost $100 a month would you buy and use it?
If this product does not seem interesting to you, do you know anyone who would want something like this?
Thanks again, Chris & Brendan <comment><USER2> I looked at this space a few years ago. It falls under the heading of "competitive intelligence" in most companies. Ultimately I decided not to pursue it, basically because I saw what rivalmap was doing and realized the opportunity wasn't as big as I thought it would be for a similar idea. (Not knocking them, they seem to be very sharp guys who are executing well and very focused on learning their market)

Most likely to make any real money at this you're going to have to market to non start-ups.

The most knowledgeable person on this topic is August Jackson, @8of12 on Twitter. He runs the competitive intelligence podcast. Plus he's a great guy.

Kevin Dewalt Feel free to email me at kevindewalt !( _\--[[AT]]--(_ &* kevindewalt dot com

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.competitious.com/>

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

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you want, you can reach us at:

chris [dot] mccann [at] bases [dot] stanford [dot] edu

or

brendan [at] thestartupdigest [dot] com

thanks!</comment>


New NSA chief vows more transparency for embattled agency - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/12/us-cyber-summit-nsa-rogers-idUSBREA4B0XU20140512

<comment><USER2> More PR about transparency, that is.</comment>


Missed Calls: Is the NSA lying about its failure to prevent 9/11? - <AUTHOR> http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/21/missed-calls-nsa-terrorism-osama-bin-laden-mihdhar/

<comment><USER2> [https://consortiumnews.com/2014/01/07/nsa-insiders-reveal- wh...](https://consortiumnews.com/2014/01/07/nsa-insiders-reveal-what-went- wrong/)

This may be the source (though the people involved have said as much in other essays and interviews).</comment>


Suggest HN: Stricter Char Limits on Who's Hiring? - <AUTHOR>

The Who's Hiring threads were great when they started because it was mainly limited to people on HN.  But now it's obvious word has gotten out and for people looking through the threads it becomes such a chore.  Companies are just copying and pasting their standard job descriptions which take up a full screen for each one.
For example, this comment I need to page down 4 times to get through it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8681941
Would it be possible to have even stricter character limits specifically for the Who's Hiring threads?  I think it would help make the postings more focused and geared towards HN rather than just blindly copying and pasting what they have posted elsewhere. <comment><USER2> That sounds like a good idea. What should the limit be?

<comment><USER3> The OP in this thread is 116 words and includes a link - I imagine 150 words would be plenty to get the point across for any job posting.

100 may be sufficient - the purpose isn't to replicate a job board advertisement, rather to give the headlines and enough information so the relevant people get in touch (or go read the longer piece elsewhere, if necessary).

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with this. It's enough for a small blurb about the companies, the technologies and link/email for more info.

If it's possible, it might even be better to limit by number of lines. The example I posted uses only 470 words but over 100 lines! I think around 15 lines should be plenty.

<comment><USER2> I think you guys are on to something good here. A reasonable constraint will make the job posts better by requiring a bit of creativity to keep within the limit. And there's no question it will make the thread more readable overall.

And yes, the limit should be on both newlines and total size. We'll try to have this ready for next month's whoishiring threads.

<comment><USER4> Also, if possible, restrict using characters like ----- just by themselves in a line to unnecessary add underlines etc for formatting. they don't add anything to the content anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm guilty of this and have edited down as much as possible with 6 positions that opened up.</comment>


Monitor the mood states of Hacker News in real time - <AUTHOR> http://www.themoodtool.com/hn <comment><USER3> It would be cool if the chart would link to a random sample comment for each sentiment, to see how accurate it is.

<comment><USER4> It's more like a real mood ring if there is no way to verify its accuracy.

<comment><USER5> Here is a graph depicting desire for accuracy on Hacker News then: [http://f.cl.ly/items/0f471x1F3Q063q0Z1e1Z/hn- graph.jpg](http://f.cl.ly/items/0f471x1F3Q063q0Z1e1Z/hn-graph.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What really pisses me off about this application is the apparent lack of anger on HN. Isn't anyone mad anymore? (but perhaps I'll see a spike now?)

<comment><USER6> That worked surprisingly fast!

On another note, I'm interested in knowing how "confusion" is gauged - <USER2> suspect it might be picking up those asking for clarification as well as those who are truly confused. There seems to be too much confusion for this crowd (unless it's only measuring me).

<comment><USER7> > There seems to be too much confusion

        I can't get no relief

        Businessmen, they drink my wine
        Plowmen dig my earth

        None of them along the line
        know what any of it is worth

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool - would you mind elaborating on the tools you used to analyze the sentiment? Any open source ones / is the source available for reuse? Would love to apply this to other areas.

<comment><AUTHOR> The tools are bespoke, and right now I don't plan on open sourcing them. I can't say what the future holds though, so watch this space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting. Do you have any more details about the used algorithms?

<comment><AUTHOR> Afraid I can't at this stage

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool tool! One thing I really hate about it (in an entirely exaggerated way) is how the stupid filters reset themselves every few seconds if you're in live mode.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeaaah.. me too... but MVP!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I find colors of the chart very confusing. IMO red should be anger and blue should be calm. Then according to mood adjust coloring from blue to red.

</comment><comment><USER12> What is the supposed meaning of the minus mood? Please explain the points: one, elation +0.25, another point: elation -0.67.

</comment><comment><USER13> Really nice tool, would be nice to be able to use the tool along with a Hashtag or a @username. Keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER14> Would be interesting to see if it is anything to do with what part of the world is posting at a certain time.

</comment><comment><USER15> Which library you used for drawing charts? Looks slick.

<comment><USER5> [http://nvd3.org/](http://nvd3.org/) \- Reusable charts for D3.js

[http://d3js.org/](http://d3js.org/) \- Data driven documents</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where can I get constructive criticism for my app/website? - <AUTHOR> ...besides Show HN. In the Show HN description, it states, that releases are not worth a 'Show HN' post. This creates some pressure, because you only get one shot with the HN community, so you're product better be free of major bugs. And sometimes, you just don't know anyone personally, who will be able to provide constructive criticism, since nobody is passionate enough neither from the technical, nor 'idea' side about your project.<p>Is there a solution on the web where you can provide your not-so production level solution, preferably anonymously, and get constructive feedback? <comment><USER2> How about a monthly HN "Criticize Me" post where people can show their current projects? Every top-level comment is a project and then the community can give feedback. That way you don't have the pressure of "Show HN" but can nonetheless benefit from the HN community.

</comment><comment><USER3> Rather than getting constructive feedback from the "internet", like you are asking, it would be much better to get constructive feedback from your actual potential users.

So rather than posting to Show HN, Reddit, or random internet friends, make a list of 10 people who you could consider potential users and email them asking for feedback. Then for any/all that respond, given them a small reward from iTunes, Amazon, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looking at the "Show HN" associated with your HN user name, one thing that pops out is that the post doesn't create much context for providing feedback. That is, there is nothing explaining what you are trying to achieve. Since I am clearly not in the target demographic, there's nothing for me really to evaluate the site against...I don't visit other street-fashion-rating websites or know why the woman on the beach is worth -422 for whatever it is that I'm picking.

It does something, but I don't know what let alone how well unless you tell me what it is supposed to do and why it is supposed to do it. I mean, I know there's a design vector under which I am simply not supposed to "get it," but I have no basis for evaluating it against a user story of someone who is supposed to "get it."

As others have said, the best feedback would be from people who are supposed to "get it". Absent that though, feedback requires an explanation...a blog or a comment or a link at the bottom of the page.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for digging deep. However, this question was not in relation to my previous Show HN post (damn internet :)).

Since you did bring it up, I like to think that I'm aware of the reason for it not getting any attention. Long version: I got fixated on engineering, while forgetting about the core UX.

Case in point:

1\. the score you mention begins with a node service scraping a random page from lookbook, which contains a list of photos and their 'hypes' (likes);

2\. then all the scores get normalized, where 1000 would be given to the highest hype score, all other being (hype*1000)/max_hype;

3\. finally the sign of the score is based on whether you correctly guessed that the looks hype is more ('Fashn') or less ('No Fashn') than the average, non-normalized hype for a given page, and the nominal value of it is the difference between the normalized average and a given photo's score.

I guess I didn't bother explaining this to the user, since the initial idea was to compare your taste to that of the lookbook community (read 'objectively fashionable'). However in approach above, the score for a photo is determined relative to the other photos on the page, but not other pages. Since relativity is unavoidable with the set logic, the user must be presented with a design that allows relative comparison. This, in turn, brakes the current minimalist design, which was one of the main features.

This Buridan's ass state is where I stopped development, and decided to show it as is. HN wasn't the first place, and all the feedback resolved around a broken (not well explained?) core mechanic. Meanwhile, the restless mind queued up a number of ingenious ideas, and, not being socially pressed for time nor resources, I decided to move on.

<comment><USER4> Everything on the damn internet is forever...fortunately it helps with discoverability.

Anyway, where I was going is that everything that is in your comment here provides context and most importantly is interesting to the people who are likely to read it:

      1. It's technical
      2. It's on HN

Making a website that gets feedback on a website review website is...well it's like those big books of 1000 new house plans. The plans are optimized for selling from a big book of house plans, not for the buyer's lot or lifestyle or around their love of amphibians and British motorcycles. And everyone has their own amphibians-and-british-motorcycles crush and there's no way to know it without talking to them.

So what I'm saying is that the hard part is figuring out what someone cares about. I mean even a website about designing websites around set logic and relativism has at least one person who cares...so does british-motorcycles- and-amphibians because I went to Junior High School with her.

The challenge is that it is a lot easier to find people, like me, to comment on a british-motorcycles-and-amphibians website than it is to build one that my friend will care about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Few starting suggestions below. Note that you should have a working example, but it doesn't need to be 'final' or 'perfect'. Don't be afraid to release to a select group of people early for feedback. That feedback will help further the development of the product or site.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design](https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/entrepreneur](https://www.reddit.com/r/entrepreneur)

<comment><USER6> Also, if you're using something specific (Node, Bootstrap, Rails, Meteor etc.) you could probably get some help from those communities' subreddits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You're right, getting unbiased, honest feedback is very difficult, but critical.

If you're looking for feedback from a marketing perspective, as in, how are my customers likely to respond to this, how likely are they to buy something, then we run a free weekly marketing clinic over at [http://paulmontreal.com](http://paulmontreal.com)

You can apply here [http://paulmontreal.com/apply](http://paulmontreal.com/apply)

</comment><comment><USER8> Shoot me an email, would love to help :)</comment>


Thinking Forth – A Language and Philosophy for Solving Problems (1984) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://1scyem2bunjw1ghzsf1cjwwn-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/thinking-forth-color.pdf <comment><USER2> One thing Forth is great at is signal processing. This was kind of a revelation to me when I tried Paul Batchlor's Sporth, a Forth-style language specialized in audio processing.

Nowadays audio synths and effects are most commonly represented as interactive spaghetti diagrams connecting basic DSP blocks together into directed graphs determining the signal flow. To make a good audio programming language, the question then becomes: is there a nice textual representation for this kind of graph? And Forth is a great answer to that question.

I had so much fun with Sporth that I ported it to the browser and made an online playground for it: [https://audiomasher.org/](https://audiomasher.org/) with some examples: [https://audiomasher.org/browse](https://audiomasher.org/browse) and a tutorial: [https://audiomasher.org/learn](https://audiomasher.org/learn)

<comment><USER3> Very, very cool!

Little bit of feedback: it only plays when the tab has focus - is that a browser thing, or something could theoretically be overridden?

EDIT: Opening the tab in a separate window keeps the sound running even when alt-tabbing away

EDIT2: The interactive cook book environment are missing a _previous_ and _next_ link at the top/end of each chapter, clicking back and finding which chapter is next is a little bit tedious.

<comment><USER4> " is that a browser thing"

Unfortunately and thanks to many misusing auto-playing ads - it is. Sounds can only start playing if the tab is the active one.

<comment><USER2> As you point out, sounds can only _start_ in foreground tabs, but the glitch here is that already-running audio is getting stopped when the user switches to another tab. So it's a bug in my code!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems primarily about program design with Forth being the example language. And looking at it, it seems like between this view of design versus object-oriented design books versus, I-don't-know, functional design ideas, the main difference is what _things_ are language-implemented versus what things exist conceptually but aren't directly supported/implemented by the language.

The thing about all this that I find interesting in describing these situations, design-theories are leveraging human language skills. The big thing is taking a customer's narrative of what they want to have accomplished and turning this into the exact, machine-implemented series of instruction. You are talking about a human-being using the language-facility to construct something exact. And well, I don't know if the structure of human-generated language for problem solving has been investigated that much by linguists but it would be interesting to see an investigation of this in relation to program design.

</comment><comment><USER6> Let's also add a link to Loeliger's Threaded Interpretive Languages... [https://archive.org/details/R.G.LoeligerThreadedInterpretive...](https://archive.org/details/R.G.LoeligerThreadedInterpretiveLanguagesTheirDesignAndImplementationByteBooks1981/page/n1)

<comment><USER7> Cannot thank you enough. Have been looking for an affordable copy for a long time.

<comment><USER6> Keep your eyes open, I paid less than $10 USD plus book rate shipping for my used, very good condition copy from a random seller on Amazon several years ago.

[https://isbn.nu/9780070383609](https://isbn.nu/9780070383609)

I have no idea why sellers are asking the prices they are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Forth is the language that taught me (among other things) that its possible to break problems into pieces that are too small to understand the whole.

I'm not sure really what to call this other than something along the lines of can't see the forest for the trees. Its the opposite of having functions so large it takes hours to figure out what they do. In this case you have words that you can't figure out what they do for days because the call graphs step across 300 different modules and 10k other words all of which are like "update-pie-with-apples" and comprise two other words "dup pie, apple-pie- update" or something.

<comment><USER9> My experience with FORTH was similar, although you've put into words the problems I found with FORTH better than I could.

The original article is by Leo Brodie. I bought his book _Starting FORTH_ (which is now available online[1]) shortly after reading a 1980 Byte Magazine article on FORTH.

It's not hard to implement FORTH. I found that R. G. Loeliger's book[2] _Threaded Interpretive Languages: Their Design and Implementation_ allowed me to easily build my own FORTH inspired system.

[1] [https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/](https://www.forth.com/starting- forth/)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages- Desig...](https://www.amazon.com/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-Design- Implementation/dp/007038360X)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My HP 28s calcultor from 1988 (still got it, still works excellently) is programmed in a stack based, Forth + Lisp inspired hybrid language, that was lightyears ahead of all the concepts, programming languages that I had seen back then (Basic, Pascal, C). It was stack based. I could put data onto the stack and get it from there if needed. It had an excellent REPL. It was working with all kinds of data structures: complex numbers, lists, arrays, matrices. Also, everything was an object. And code could generate code, just like in Lisp.

Only when I learned about Mathematica I found something more powerful in 1988.

<comment><USER10> What makes me sad is that the latest and most capable calculator from HP (the HP Prime) seems to use something like Pascal. After 30 years they come up with something like Pascal? Instead of what they had in 1988?

Back then they used a variant of Lisp: RPL (Reverse Polish Lisp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I loved Forth and Chuck Moore's 10x philosophy.

I went from Forth to Ruby, from a notorious write-only language to a language that's a joy to read & write.

I occasionally wonder about the possibility of a forth/ruby hybrid, stack- based interpreter/compiler with the readability of ruby.

Ruby's OO is based on message passing. A message-passing OO is something that could potentially be implemented elegantly in Forth.

<comment><USER12> This sounds really interesting (disclaimer: I love both these languages), but isn't a main advantage of Forth that it compiles to something that is really f __*ing fast, and wouldn't that hybrid potentially give that up?

<comment><USER13> The reason it's fast is brutal simplicity. But it's a spectrum, with dogmatic Forth close to one end; the more you can keep things simple, the more raw speed you get for free.

The approach I'm using in Snigl [0] is to start with Forth and add more elaborate features as optional/gradual layers. As long as you don't use variables and closures you get to enjoy more raw speed etc.

[0] [https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl](https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reading this book (in 1984 or so) was one of the formative moments for me. Especially the idea that as software developers we should strive for the simplest most elegant solution and we could iterate our designs to get there.

The cartoons are brilliant - I often think of the universal processor (p82) "word, food, data" when designing something that doesn't have a clear purpose.

</comment><comment><USER15> If you're interested in Forth, I created a WASM implementation some time ago: [https://github.com/stefano/wasm-forth](https://github.com/stefano/wasm-forth)

The main limitation is the interaction with the JS world, which is limited to textual I/O, but it's enough to run an interactive REPL.

</comment><comment><USER16> About the time of this book I transitioned from computer engineering and assembler programming into software engineering. I was lucky to stumble upon Thinking Forth. Swallowed it. Gave me invaluable insight. (Another important transition stepping stone was _Programming Languages - Design and Implementation_ by Terence Pratt.)

<comment><USER17> I tried to learn Fourth when I was a kid of about 14. There was an implementation for the TI-99/4A, which I had. But I never grokked it. I am guessing the manuals and other examples assumed knowledge I didn't have. Haven't gone back to it since.

<comment><USER18> Hmmm, the TI-99/4A. Any chance you made Mr. Bojangles dance? (I read that BASIC manual cover to cover)

<comment><USER19>
        100 CALL CHAR(96, "995A3C3C3C3C2221")
        110 CALL CHAR(97, "1899FF3C3C3C4484")

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's a shame Forth is so tricky to find. I learned Prolog and Lisp in school, but Forth was never even mentioned. It would make an excellent introduction to programming if you ask me.

Once I got my hands on a tutorial, I quickly realized it was the perfect foundation for the language [0] I've been designing in my mind.

[0] [https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl](https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl)

</comment><comment><USER20> From 2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9842557](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9842557)

From 2011: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3389286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3389286)

</comment><comment><USER21> I've never had a chance to play with Forth, but Starting Forth was one of the first good computer books I ever read.

[https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/](https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/)

</comment><comment><USER22> My first job after grad school was writing code for Harris Semiconductors' RTX-2000 processor (native Forth execution) as an apps engineer. Showing people how to morph the compiler, and toggle between assembly & Forth on the fly, blew people's minds. Good times.

</comment><comment><USER23> I read this book over and over when I was a kid.</comment>


My Minimalist Approach to Software Engineering - <AUTHOR> https://itnext.io/my-minimalist-approach-to-software-engineering-5bc743ecb295 <comment><USER2> Fwiw, lodash filter outperforms the native array prototype filter</comment>


Show HN: ML & data pipeline deployment for humans - <AUTHOR> https://www.omegaml.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here's how it works:

Straight from a Data Scientist's Jupyter Notebook (or batch job):

om.models.put(model_or_pipeline, 'sales-prediction') => http PUT /api/model/sales-prediction/predict

om.datasets.put(dataframe, 'sales-data') => http GET|PUT /api/dataset/sales- data/

Any data scientist can do this in seconds. Imagine what your whole team can achieve in a month.</comment>


Don't pay off Ryuk ransomware, warn infoseccers: Its creators borked decryptor - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/10/ryuk_decryptor_broken_latest_strain/ <comment><USER2> Perhaps we should release dirty ransomware that takes your money and doesn't unransom. Poison the well for ransom so everyone believes it's all a scam.

</comment><comment><USER3> Was this accidental or intentional? Russia has recently been distributing fake ransomware in Ukraine which is intended to cause economic damage rather that generate profit.

</comment><comment><USER4> It would be cool if somebody created some provably fair ransomware that used Bitcoin script or zero knowledge proofs or something. You pay the coins and are guaranteed the (correct) decryption key.

<comment><USER5> It would be cooler if someone cloned existing ransomware and took payment and never decrypted files. Then people would stop paying and stop encouraging it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems pretty easily-fixable, if it's just one byte.

<comment><USER7> Mmm maybe, but also:

"Victims who pay the ransoms are very likely to be funding the North Korean hereditary dictatorship, which actively practises all kinds of organised, deliberate barbarity"

So it's probably good to promulgate the idea that it doesn't even work - if no one pays the ransom, the ransomware will die. That's why it's in the creator's interest to make a working decryptor in the first place.

<comment><USER8> Well, the ransomware will continue spreading, if it operates autonomously, independent of whether the decryptor works. New ransomware might not be created however

<comment><USER9> I've heard that Ryuk is highly targeted, usually a manual secondary attack on enterprises that can afford a much higher ransom than normal. So it's probably not autonomous, and its reputation for unreliable decryption after payment should make victims less willing to pay.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Help Me Build a Better Google Health - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
I'm in the early stages of coding a simple medical/health tracker. The purpose of this project is really to both better my skills, and to offer a useful service. What'd I'd like to hear are some suggestions any of you may have as to what you'd like to see in a medical/health tracker, as well as frustrations you might've experienced using Google Health or other similar services. Anything from feature suggestions to criticisms of the idea in general are welcome.
I'm calling it Welloscope (http://www.wellosocope.com) and you can reach me at email@example.com if you'd like.
Thanks a lot. <comment><USER2> Privacy for the patient, convenience for the patient and medical providers, and access to anonymous data for medical researchers are all important and in many ways conflicting goals.

I think one aspect of a good solution is for identifiable patient data to be stored on a USB key or similar device. That way the patient must be present and must approve of all data access, and the patient can also access the data himself at any time. Some/most/all access could also involve an online service which stores non-private patient info and anonymized patient info.

The device could also be used to securely transmit data between providers. For example your doctor might put a cryptographically signed prescription on your key, which you take to the pharmacist to get filled. The doctor (or you) could also transmit the prescription electronically. When you get to the pharmacy, your key confirms that the prescription is for you.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think a big problem in this space is liability, as a medical provider you have legal protections that help defray some of the liability associated with breaches in data, and more importantly subpoena power from the feds. Any data a user gives to you has to be given freely by the patient, bypassing HIPAA, and thus making that data available to parties it would not otherwise be available to.

This is the real reason only the big guys like google and MS are really trying this out IMHO, because they've got a big checkbox to face the potential legal ramifications of this problem.

</comment><comment><USER4> You should try contacting people with regular health problems like people with obesity, diabetes, aids.

Another group that can provide you good ideas is high-performance athletes.

You definitely need something that is a device or is installed on a mobile so people can add information without having to move to a website.

On the website you could show progress, suggestions and recommendations based on the aggregated data.

<comment><USER5> good advice. you might also check some existing tracking apps in your area of interest.

we consulted with some Swiss marathon champion and diets specialists when worked on running and body tracking apps

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You should start reading up on HIPAA regulations if you will be hosting any of your users' private medical data.

This is one of the big reasons that only Google and Microsoft are dueling it out over PHR standards--they have major legislative and regulatory affairs departments and fleets of lawyers to make sure they are covered legally.

(disclaimer: I'm working on an app in this space)

</comment><comment><USER7> Unfortunately, there's nothing simple about modeling and analyzing useful medical data. This is a very hard problem to solve.

You might find your efforts better used in joining someone who's already made a lot of progress, like we have at PatientsLikeMe.

<http://www.patientslikeme.com/about/careers>

<comment><USER8> So this space is good enough for you to be in, but not good enough for new competitors to be in? Jeez.

<comment><USER7> If we both care about solving the same problems, I'm definitely happy to extend a hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're really serious about building a better Google Health, why not apply at Google and try to actually build a better Google Health?

</comment><comment><USER10> The largest problem with Google Health for many people is that their medical provider does not share data with Google so it is very difficult to get your data in. I think this would be difficult for a solo start up so you might look into providing easy ways for the user to create data, such as a mobile app like Instant Heart Rate.</comment>


Ask HN: Where can I find alternatives for open source libraries? - <AUTHOR>

Is there a place where I can paste for example the URL of a github projects and have it list related/alternative projects?  Maybe an aggregation of the awesome-<language> projects? <comment><USER2> I'm building a project currently to request for open source library ports from one language to other, and this feature is also available. Where you can input a Library, and it will list a similar libraries.

Though, thinking to spin it off as a separate app altogether. Anybody wanted to help?

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like an interesting idea to build. Shall watch this thread to see what the responses are</comment>