Sixth DNA base discovered? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150504101254.htm <comment><USER3> "In the early 80s, to these four "classic" bases of DNA was added a fifth: the methyl-cytosine (mC) derived from cytosine."

How come any biology course or book I've ever seen, whether high-school or top-university level, only teaches about four bases?

<comment><USER4> Methylation and other base modifications (there are 20+ last I checked) are taught in upper-level biology courses. I guess the people who write biology texts consider this advanced material.

<comment><USER5> I don't understand why you wouldn't set that sort of thing out at the basic level, even if it were accompanied with 'we understand ACGT quite well, the others are pretty mysterious and we're not sure if they matter as much.'

Seems a bit like teaching English by focusing only on spelling but omitting any mention of punctuation or grammar for the first few years. Of course we don't try to teach that all at once, but even very simple books use things like capital letters, commas, and periods so that kids get used to seeing them early on.

<comment><USER6> Because it's just not very important at that point. If you covered all the exceptions and special cases in biology, Bio 101 would never end. It'd be kind of like teaching string theory at the same time as F=M*A.

<comment><USER5> I strongly disagree. You don't have to go into detail about them, but knowing the fact of their existence is fundamental. If you think there are only 4 bases and then later find out that there are others, the first reaction t that is to feel short-changed about your previous education and stupid about all the new stuff you have to absorb. If you are told there's 4 bases that seem to deliver 99.9% of the action and another 20 or so which hardly get a look in, then you have a basic overview of the field.

 _It 'd be kind of like teaching string theory at the same time as F=M_A.*

So what? 'All matter is made up of very tiny things called _atoms_. There are 118 different types of atoms that that we know about, which have many interesting and surprising characteristics. Many atoms can be combined with each other to form _molecules_. All atoms seem to be made out of different combinations of _subatomic particles_ , which are the very smallest things we have managed to measure, but which we only partially understand. Some scientists think subatomic particles are made out of even tinier structures called _strings_ , but nobody has managed to prove that one way or the other.'

You don't have to give a big long-winded explanation, but there's nothing wrong with sketching out in very general terms where the frontiers of our scientific knowledge lie. Likewise you don't have to teach small children comparative linguistics, but it's a good thing to make them aware early on that there are many different languages that originate in different countries. Not talking about the existence of things when trying to introduce a field really stifles curiosity, by obscuring the fact that that there are many interesting avenues of inquiry that have yet to be explored.

<comment><USER7> You do realize that your summary is equally wrong, yes?

There are indeed 118 recognized _elements_ , but there are many more "types of atoms", only some of which are due to differences in proton count. There are also isotopes; tritium is a form type of hydrogen that is radioactive, and several times heavier than normal (1H) hydrogen.

Then there are charged atoms, including more esoteric forms where an inner shell electrons are removed instead of an outer.

And there are excited nuclei, like the metastable isotope technetium-99m. While chemically very similar to 99Tc, it emits gamma rays that make it a useful medical radiotracer.

That is, atoms differ not only because of the 'different combinations of subatomic particles', but also because of the specific energy states involved.

FWIW, there are the exotic atoms, like positronium (an electron-positron atom) and muonic atoms (where one of the electrons is replaced by a muon). These are still different combinations of subatomic particles.

Also, "smallest things we have managed to measure" becomes a meaningless phrase. Under current physics, an electron has no radius. It's a point particle, and no one is talking about strings which are smaller than a point. Instead, string theory proposes that the zero-dimensional point should be replaced by a one-dimensional string, or higher-dimensional branes. These should count as being _larger_ objects than the current model for how electrons work.

We have oodles and boodles of frontiers to our scientific knowledge. No class can touch on every case. We have to give approximations and limited cases, as otherwise the result will be overwhelming.

For example, in geography class we ask students to identify the US on a map. We usually mean the 48 continental states plus Hawaii and Alaska. But the US also includes Puerto Rico, Guam, and other territories, including Kingman Reef and Bajo Nuevo Bank. Teachers have to figure out if it's more important for students to know that only the US considers Bajo Nuevo Bank to be part of the US[1], or if the students should instead learn more details about DNA, or string theory.

([1] While it could be an interesting segue into the International Court of Justice, Guano Act, the War of the Pacific, phosphate strip mining of Nauru, the Haber-Bosch process, and gas warfare in WWI, these are students who can't yet identify the lower 48 on the world map!)

<comment><USER5> Yes, you should totally apply the standards for a textbook to an example of sketching scientific concepts that I composed in the space of 3 minutes. There's no middle ground between mentioning the most basic things and throwing in everything including the kitchen sink. I am a very bad person and I feel bad about it.

<comment><USER7> Yes, just like you should totally believe that your teachers are short- changing you by not summarizing perfectly the details they decided to not cover. And believing that you could remember all the details should they have done so.

Don't you feel horrible for never having been taught that contested unorganized, unincorporated United States territories like Bajo Nuevo Bank exist?

Your life must be upside down by first learning that the correct name for 'Brontosaurus' is 'Apatosaurus' and then to learn recently that it's now considered a valid genus of sauropod distinct from Apatosaurus.

You meant your example as a demonstration of how it's possible to teach string theory at the same time as F=MA. Otherwise, why did you even spend three minutes at the task? My response was to show that it isn't easy. If a teacher trips up over even a single point - eg, to explain that an atom is made of electrons, protons, and nucleus - then a future version of you will complain and say you were shortchanged, because there are atoms which are NOT made of those subatomic particles.

But few primary or secondary school teachers will know about these special cases, and for the vast majority of people it's useless information.

<comment><USER5> _You meant your example as a demonstration of how it 's possible to teach string theory at the same time as F=MA._

No I didn't. I think one should take a lot of time breaking down the details of F=MA and showing why it works and so forth. But I also think it's OK to allude to the existence of string theory early on when you're trying to establish the scope of what physics is about and why you might want to study it, even though it would probably take 10 years for someone to go from hearing about its existence to studying it directly.

Meanwhile, I'm grateful to have had some science teaches that were willing to identify some frontier areas of science by name, while admitting that they were beyond their own understanding (eg QM), and also so spend a bit (not too much) of class time letting us spitball ideas on things like time travel or anti-gravity in order to engage the subject imaginatively as well as meeting the specific curricular requirements.

<comment><USER7> If "No, I didn't" then what was your purpose in writing that example?

In any case, you wrote "If you think there are only 4 bases and then later find out that there are others, the first reaction t that is to feel short- changed about your previous education and stupid about all the new stuff you have to absorb."

Either you will feel short-changed about all of the other things the teachers didn't tell you - did they tell you that atoms were made of electrons and a nucleus without mentioning exotic atoms? Did they tell you that noble gases don't chemically react with other molecules without mentioning things like xenon hexafluoride? Did they tell you that the pH goes from 0 to 14? Did they teach you that "the key to healthy eating is to enjoy a variety of nutritious foods from each of the 5 food groups" but not mention that a meat and fish diet is another way to eat healthy? Did they teach you that thrown objects (without wind resistance) fall in a parabola, without explaining that it's actually an approximation to an ellipse, which is an approximation to general relativity? Did they teach you that velocities add without explaining that it's an approximation only valid for low velocities? Did they teach you that DNA is right-handed when it forms a double helix, without telling you about Z-DNA? Did you learn that different parts of the tongue have different taste receptors when that's not actually true? Did they teach you that black holes absorb everything and neglect to mention Hawking radiation? Did they teach you that microwave ovens work by being tuned to the resonant frequency of water? Or that there is an physical correlation between left-brain/right-brain and creativity/analytical tasks?

If so, then by your definition your teachers short-changed you, and you no doubt feel pretty stupid right now.

If not, then your education was exceptional. [http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ed083p1465](http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ed083p1465), for example, is a paper from the Journal of Chemical Education titled "Negative pH Does Exist". It says:

> The misconception that pH lies between 0 and 14 has been perpetuated in > popular-science books (1–3), textbooks (4–8), revision guides (9), and > reference books (10–16).

I find it unlikely to the point of laughability that your elementary grade math class mentioned that you can ignore relativistic affects when adding the speed of an airline passenger to the ground speed of the plane to compute the ground speed of the passenger. When you finally learned about special relativity, you might have felt like quite a fool for having previously only been taught about Newtonian mechanics.

<comment><USER5> I explained my purpose in the second and third sentences. I really can't be bothered continuing this conversation as you seem more interested in scoring points with snarky remarks than in exploring ways to make science more interesting in school.

<comment><USER7> You did not explain your purpose in spending 3 minutes to write a short and incorrect explanation of string theory. You described how you think in a school environment it is "OK to allude to the existence of string theory." I think it's reasonable to infer that you meant that explanation as an example of how a teacher might allude to string theory.

Regarding snarky comments, my goal was to reply to the snark present in "I am a very bad person and I feel bad about it." Since I do not believe that you feel that way about yourself. If you actually do feel bad about it, then I sincerely retract the tone of my response, and apologize for my poor interpretation.

Regarding "make science more interesting in school", that seems to be a shift in conversation. My comment was in regards to feeling "short-changed about your previous education and stupid about all the new stuff you have to absorb".

In the context of making "science more interesting in school" you wrote:

> Not talking about the existence of things when trying to introduce a field > really stifles curiosity, by obscuring the fact that that there are many > interesting avenues of inquiry that have yet to be explored.

This is incomplete. Many of the things we have brought up, from DNA methylation to obscure reef geography, are well explored. Your comment imply that only the globally unexplored is interesting to students, which simply isn't true. The issue is that it is not reasonable for all teachers to know all of the details about these topics, and be able to summarize them, in such a way that no student will ever feel that they have been slighted for being misinformed about a detail.

A great way to make science more interesting in school is to not cover all of the details and only hit the highlights. This coveys the main idea which is that these fields are comprehensible.

If instead teachers spend much of their time qualifying their statements, then most students will be overwhelmed with information. "Will this be on the test?" "No." "So why do we need to know it?" "Because it's good for you."

Call this the "Now eat your vegetables." or "It builds character" approach to teaching. I honestly do not believe this will make science more interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The comments illustrate why ScienceDaily is not a good source for submissions to Hacker News. This has been discussed by many of us many times before here.[1]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649650](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649650)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8737181](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8737181)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is very interesting, given that ScienceDaily reported the discovery of the seventh and eighth bases in 2011! Did they forget how to count, or do they just republish press releases without any understanding of the subject matter or actual journalism?

Source: [http://sandwalk.blogspot.ie/2011/07/stop-press-scientists- di...](http://sandwalk.blogspot.ie/2011/07/stop-press-scientists-discover-7th- and.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> I am always highly skeptical of Science Daily articles - this one sounds like it was written by someone without further background knowledge than what was given in a press release. Or, worse, this person far overstated what the cited researchers claim

I think the 'layperson' summary of this article should be that the authors may have found an unappreciated mechanism for gene expression [1-3; 3 articles were published simultaneously].

As you may have heard, your genome comprises four 'letters', called the DNA bases. Collections of these bases called genes encode proteins, molecular structures that perform myriad functions. Indeed, everything that you can see on a living organism is either protein or was created by a protein.

Genes have specific functions that are often limited in both time and space - the protein encoded by a gene may only be needed in the embryonic pancreas, for example. In the field of epigenetics, researchers try to understand the causes of this tight control of gene activity, among other things.

The addition of methyl groups to DNA bases is a long appreciated way to control gene activity - see ref. 4, which is an excellent, freely available cell biology text. The DNA base cytosine is often modified to yield methyl- cytosine, a methylated base with a well established role in the regulation of gene expression; methyl-cytosine tends to mark genome areas with lower probabilities of gene expression.

The authors find that methyl-adenine seems to play a role opposite to methyl- cytosine, surprisingly. While the existence of methyl-adenine was known in bacteria, its function in gene expression in more complicated organisms was not known. Refs 1-3 don't show a causative role for methyl-adenine in increasing gene expression but the correlations the authors report are likely to be followed up.

In summary, the story behind this article is pretty exciting and could indeed expand our understanding of epigenetics, cell biology and perhaps more.

One should remain _extremely_ skeptical of anything in Science Daily - <USER2> go to the source.

[1] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867415...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867415004274)

[2] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867415...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867415004353)

[3] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867415...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867415004225)

[4] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26854/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26854/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if the other two bases can be methylated? Though given they are paired to bases that can be methylated...

Also, I hadn't heard of methylation being called another base. More of a modifier/marker on the base.

<comment><USER12> Yes! Bacteria primarily methylate Adenine. [0] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2754416/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2754416/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pet peeve: headlines phrased as questions.

"Possible Sixth DNA Base Identified", as just one example, would have been a phenomenally better headline that doesn't automatically invoke Betteridge's law.

<comment><USER14> I guess question mark is enough.</comment></comment>


The Snakes and Ladders Game of Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/04/ooshma-garg-female-founders-video/ <comment><USER2> > _I had to solve this problem another way. I posted an ad on Craigslist see > if any chef would make me a home cooked meal for $8 a plate. I got 70 > responses in 24 hours. I thought "Wow! There are so many people in the Bay > Area that are proud of their food and want to earn a living from it."_

I wonder how many thought less "I am proud of my food and want to make a living from it", but rather, "I have a stove and a cast iron pan, I'm no more likely to fuck this up than anyone else, and I need that $8 so I can eat something this weekend."

<comment><USER3> Also, "Since they are asking for such a low price, they probably aren't looking for quality"

<comment><USER4> Also "Well actually I'm cooking [x] for 3 people already, making enough for 4 in exchange for that covering a good chunk of my ingredients is an excellent deal"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ooshma spoke about developing vision and having perseverance, a reminder that's often-needed especially for those of us actually the position of steering a startup. she spoke about finding product-market fit after years of trying. she spoke about the trials and tribulations of raising funding and how that isn't always a positive step forward. these seem to be common themes for many (most?) startups, and it was genuinely heartening for me to hear her story.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looked into gobble which this article is about... $13.95 for each meal minimal 4 meal order??? I see limited revenue growth long term for them at those prices. The person that can afford that can also order take out any time they wish; or run into whole foods and buy a ready to cook meal for 30% cheaper.

<comment><USER2> I've used one of these types of services - I think they're for people who want to cook, but have more money than time. They don't want to spend time shopping, or planning meals - but they still want to use their kitchen and the fancy knives and cookware they bought.

It's sort of like a lego kit for your kitchen. You buy a box that comes with instructions and you assemble your Ahoy Matey Pirate Ship™. Compare to just buying a bucket of random lego blocks, or buying a pre-built ship-in-a-bottle.

There's definitely a target audience there, I just dunno how big it is, and it's probably limited to large cities.

<comment><USER7> Yea you have that right. And if they can convince a large percentage of these people to use them, they will (hopefully) slowly start heading down-market where I'll be waiting for them ;).</comment></comment></comment>


The new chrome is awful - <AUTHOR> The urls are so small in the address bar.. anyone else agree <comment><USER2> Not sure, this is to the advantage of page space, also you can see more characters of a URL.

I can no longer find the menu button though :)</comment>


TakeThisLollipop - really clever/creepy use of the Facebook API - <AUTHOR> http://www.takethislollipop.com/ <comment><USER2> Looks like it's connected with the ad agency Evolution Bureau ("EVB") (clients: [1]), the same people who did the Office Depot-braded "Elf Yourself" sensation [2].

Why do I think it's EVB? This is the only other site on the same IP as manipulation.com, and manipulation.com is registered clearly to EVB. The agency's creative work is consistent with this project too.

[1] <http://evb.com/work/> [2] <http://elf.evb-archive.com/>

<comment><USER3> It's at least the same director as Elf Yourself, according to the actor in it ([https://twitter.com/#!/billoberstjr/status/12611132567074816...](https://twitter.com/#!/billoberstjr/status/126111325670748160)).

<comment><USER4> Same guy from <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAihDAJX8Ow> ?

EDIT: Yup: [http://www.fearnet.com/news/b23933_mastodon_premiere_twisted...](http://www.fearnet.com/news/b23933_mastodon_premiere_twisted_horror- themed.html?utm_source=fearnet&utm_medium=rssfeeds&utm_campaign=rss_imdb)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny, my hosts file seems to interrupt the flow of this prank slightly.

We'll see how my s.o. reacts to it, but on my machine it does absolutely nothing.

In case you're wondering what is in my hosts file:

      127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
      127.0.0.1 facebook.com
      127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.net
      127.0.0.1 facebook.net
      127.0.0.1 fbcdn.net
      127.0.0.1 www.fbcdn.net
      0.0.0.0 badge.facebook.com
      0.0.0.0 blog.facebook.com
      0.0.0.0 en-gb.facebook.com
      0.0.0.0 developers.facebook.com
      0.0.0.0 touch.facebook.com
      0.0.0.0 de-de.facebook.com
      0.0.0.0 stories.facebook.com
      0.0.0.0 it-it.facebook.com
      0.0.0.0 hu-hu.facebook.com
      0.0.0.0 peace.facebook.com
      0.0.0.0 et-ee.facebook.com
      0.0.0.0 az-az.facebook.com
      0.0.0.0 0.facebook.com
      0.0.0.0 apps.facebook.com

A nice side-effect of this seems to be that the web has become a lot more responsive. No more 'like' buttons popping up all over the place.

edit: regarding my s.o. it's been an interesting morning, this app seems to have opened her eyes to facebook in a different way. No more apps.

<comment><USER6> You can achieve a similar thing with the ghostery extension.

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

<comment><USER7> Wow cool thanks for the link. Just installed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I saw a Second City improve last winter, and one of the better sketches exploited Facebook similarly, albeit in a more lighthearted and humorous way.

Prior to the performance they would find an audience member's Facebook page using their credit card or mailing address (presumably), and write a sketch based on the details extracted from his or her page.

They incorporated the lucky patron's inevitable reaction into the sketch under the pretense of reprimanding him for disrupting the show. After letting him squirm a bit under the spotlight, the punchline was projecting his Facebook page on the screen across the stage.

</comment><comment><USER9> Care to explain for those without Facebook accounts?

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. So basically someone made a very high quality video of a creepy dude in a dark room creeping on Facebook and getting really mad. Then (with some special effects they used) they make it look like (almost perfectly) the guy is viewing your profile page, looking through your photos, and creeping on your friends. Then he maps your last known location on Google Maps, looks right at you, and drives over to your house.

It's eerily realistic.

Disclaimer: not my project, found it on the web.

<comment><USER10> not to mention that, in the car, he has a print out of your profile picture, and a screwdriver (or is it a box cutter) in his hand as he exits the car.

<comment><USER11> I'm betting its a lollipop in his hand. The video doesn't make it clear but the ending title screen shows a lollipop taped to something so I feel like that was a hint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For me, this was rendered hilarious by some of the images people have tagged me in on Facebook that don't actually have me in them. Seeing the serial killer erotically stroke a picture of a T-Pain coffee mug is rather amusing.

That being said, is there any way I can be sure besides the disclaimer that this isn't actually saving/using my personal data outside of the video? I guess that's part of the point, that I really can't, though.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't have facebook. Anyone mind writing a tldr?

<comment><USER14> It's a facebook app. It asks your permission to access pretty much everything on your profile and when you finally accept it cuts to a fullscreen, high production video of an incredibly creepy actor on a computer in a really dingy room. It then cuts to the computer screen and shows the creepy guy scrolling through your profile page in a very realistic manner as well as clicking through some of your photo's and friends. The guy looks more and more irritated and angry and he goes and looks up your location on google maps (with mixed results, mine was relatively close).

It then cuts to him driving with a picture of your profile pic stuck to his dashboard, the whole time you get the feeling this guy is tracking you down with the intention of hurting you.

Really creepy and incredibly well done and surprisingly not obvious in terms of what they are promoting.

<comment><USER15> What __are __they promoting?

<comment><USER14> No idea to tell you the truth. This is probably one of those 'build the hype, keep people guessing' campaigns and eventually it will all come out.

There really was nothing in the clip that indicated any form of a product or brand. It could be a movie teaser or a teaser for a TV show and if it is, I for one will watch it.

<comment><USER5> Whatever it was they should have anticipated the popularity a bit better, they seem to be down/very slow for hours now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This actually just freezes for me/nothing happens after I click "Connect with Facebook". Chromium 12.0.742.112 (90304) Ubuntu 10.10.

<comment><USER17> I had the same. I looked at it in chrome inspector and it turned out the reason was that I didn't allow the 2nd set of access rights, because it said it was optitional.

<comment><USER18> I didn't allow them and it still worked for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why would anyone authorize Facebook access for a random site like this? No privacy policy, no about page, no terms. You have no idea what they're actually doing with your data.

<comment><USER20> Maybe that's the point of it - most people won't think twice about authorizing, but might realise what they've opted into once they see it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> That was amazing. You know its a joke.. but the production value is so high your can't help but be really creeped out by it. I have removed every app which I have signed up to from accessing my Facebook account. I have also bolted my front door.

 _shivers_

<comment><USER22> I know, it's effing creepy.

I wasn't planning on sleeping tonight anyway!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I gave the guy all those details and pics while authorizing the app!

There's no way too see those things without being my friend.

<comment><USER24> There's at least _one_ other way... make a creepy viral lollipop site, get it on the front page of hacker news, et al.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> One interesting thing about how this was designed, it for some reason doesn't get your location from your facebook profile. It uses your IP address, which led to hilarious results because while my facebook rightly says where I am, I was using a SOCKS proxy to access this in a different city and when it showed him looking at a map it showed the route to my SOCKS proxy instead of me. I guess I'm safe and the crazy guy won't kill me :)

<comment><USER26> Not by IP, FWIW. I'm in Mountain View but the guy seemed to want to find me in Reykjavik, Iceland, where I'm from. (I moved to the Bay Area a month ago, but haven't update my FB)

<comment><USER27> This guy over here [1] claims the video tracked his last foursquare check-in. I'm guessing the location algorithm tries to find a best guess of where you might be — hence the inconsistent results.

[1] [http://www.jenders.com/2011/10/18/take-this-lollipop-and- the...](http://www.jenders.com/2011/10/18/take-this-lollipop-and-the- importance-of-facebook-privacy/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if it would be possible to for the app to send you an sms (or even call you!) with some creepy "I'm outside, baby" message at the end of the movie.

<comment><USER14> Very clever but I imagine it would be cost prohibiting given the amount of people that will try the app out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> That was very, very well done.

How did they do video compositing on top of an embedded browser window in Flash?

Perhaps they pre-rendered the webpages server-side using WebKit or some such and sent a screenshot to Flash....

<comment><USER30> Flash has the capability of incorporating dynamic content in flash-driven movies. See how to do it (easy example), here:

UPDATE: better link here: [http://flashexplained.com/actionscript/loading- external-jpgs...](http://flashexplained.com/actionscript/loading-external- jpgs-into-your-main-swf-movie/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> My guess is that this is an advertisement for LCD monitors... the guy went crazy because he's still using a CRT... poor fella.

</comment><comment><USER32> Revoked access to tons of applications.

<comment><USER33> Likewise, found about 30 that I had allowed access to - no idea when I did half of them! All gone now!

<comment><USER32> Same here. And when I was at it I looked at Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is a genius idea. I'm sure it will go viral and everyone (including their mother) will give this site a test drive.

I can only assume that it is designed to do one thing - data mine.

<comment><USER35> It has the power to post on your wall as well.

Removed the app before they pull that one....

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's nice that you can disallow the permissions granularly, for example, I didn't mind it accessing all my data, but posting AS me on facebook? No. Disabled. Happy days.

</comment><comment><USER37> This could be exactly what I need to finally get my wife off Facebook....

</comment><comment><USER38> The production value is very high. FB Open Graph Protocol meta tag found in source:

      <meta property="og:type" content="tv_show"/>

Perhaps it's a viral media stunt to promo a new TV show.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure that it is, but now that you mention it I feel like this could actually be a REALLY effective viral media stunt for a new TV Show/Movie...

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Here's a similar thing from summer 2010. You and your friends inserted into a horror movie trailer.

<http://www2.lost-in-val-sinestra.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> It looks like this was made by Jason Zada (<https://twitter.com/#!/jasonzada>) according to a tweet by the actor ([https://twitter.com/#!/billoberstjr/status/12614080094496358...](https://twitter.com/#!/billoberstjr/status/126140800944963586)).

</comment><comment><USER40> If you don't want sites like this to view your stuff, please also set the privacy setting for applications your _friends_ use to a better one. Or else you would be _next_.

P.S. Since you connect to that application by yourself, that is pretty clear that they can read your friends list, your feed and post as you.

</comment><comment><USER41> What exactly happens after the one hour on the end? Can't afford to wait right now

<comment><AUTHOR> he knocks on your door

<comment><USER36> Yeah, good luck to him finding "X5, Cardiff".

There isn't an "X5" postcode here, nor is it anywhere near where I was last time I did a location based update. The inaccurate google map thing is what made me lul.

<comment><USER42> I /do/ share location with Facebook, but I sent the guy off looking for " , (null)". I doubt he'll get there soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There was something similar with "Notruf Deutschland": <http://www.notruf- deutschland.com/teaser/>

They had a similar "approach" :)

Still, very nicely done!

</comment><comment><USER44> Oooh! Well played. I really want the candy, but I know they're going to do something bad with the information they take from me... I'm still tempted.

Ok, so I did it and now I'm never sleeping again.

</comment><comment><USER45> Brilliant.. could help people think more clearly. Another play on these issues, <http://youropenbook.org>

</comment><comment><USER46> Would seem like the viral success has overloaded the site... I can't get it to play any longer, and it worked an hour ago.

</comment><comment><USER47> What happens when the countdown gets to zero?

<comment><USER48> I tested this out for you. It just stops at 00:00:00 and nothing happens at all!

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Google street view would have been a nice addition too, depending on the accuracy of the geo lookup.

</comment><comment><USER50> Quality is fantastic, I too am curious as to how they are generating the pages into the movie.

</comment><comment><USER51> It killed the mood when he searched for ,(null) in Google Maps, but otherwise pretty freaky.

</comment><comment><USER52> I don't think I get it... when I let a facebook app access my facebook, it can... access my facebook and look at my pictures? anyone can look at my pictures, anyways. i'm missing something here

<comment><USER53> I seriously hope you're not serious.

1) Of course, you _can_ allow everyone to see your pictures. That's not necessary though and one of the (many) privacy concerns this site seems to focus on. If you share your pictures, you share a HUGE amount of data. Ignore the passed out/joking stuff, you might tell me a lot about your place (expensive stuff in the background? pictures that show a street name?) and your habits (always going to his parents on weekends. currently on vacation). This is, in theory, very easily exploitable, for someone with a criminal mind and the balls to pull of a stunt.

2) Regarding Facebook apps: Well, don't allow those to access your data? You saw what this app did (and automatically, without a human involved). It can exploit the date your coughing up every day in ways that you probably didn't think about before.

Bottom line: If you're the 'share with everything and play any FB game' type this might not shock you, but others might wake up and stop being very careless with their own private data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> A little video that gives you the feeling of this, without the personalization:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xBA0mpWuuo>

</comment><comment><USER55> Amazingly well done... Now, I'm going to cry myself to sleep.

<comment><USER56> In the same position. Had the new Walking Dead season playing on the TV in the background. Great, great combination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> That is impressively creepy. Wow. Anyone know the background?

<comment><USER58> He is seriously pissed off that you are advocating the use of Emacs over vim in some Facebook group.

<comment><USER59> haha, good one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> My 64bit flash player 11 on Linux crashes right away!

</comment><comment><USER61> Doesn't work for me? Do I not have enough info?

</comment><comment><USER62> Hilarious that the content & domain name could lend this to being classified, in some filters, as a "shock site" ;)

</comment><comment><USER63> Mobile Safari: "You need at least Flash Player 10 to view this page."

Apple saves the day again!

</comment><comment><USER64> Keeps cutting out part way through, but VERY well done.

</comment><comment><USER65> Geoffrey Grosenbach is next. Oops

</comment><comment><USER66> crashes flash

</comment><comment><USER67> This is a pretty disruptive use of the Facebook API. Personalized entertainment content, I love it!

</comment><comment><USER59> Good luck finding me in the middle of the Indian Ocean dork</comment>


Demiurge Technology – Deep Learning 2.0 for Mobile Robots - <AUTHOR> http://www.demiurge.technology/ <comment><AUTHOR> From an article describing their technology:

> Deep Learning 2.0 with redesigned neurons has the potential of realizing > true intelligence as it is optimal for spatiotemporal pattern recognition > and action selection, and it is developed from a rebuilt foundation of > mathematics, physics, neuroscience and computer science. Deep Learning 2.0 > in this context refers to the general physical mechanism of sensory > information processing in biological neural networks.</comment>


Pentagon offers $150,000 bounty for hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/01/pentagon-offers-150000-bounty-for-hackers.html?__source=facebook%7Cother%7Cstatus%7C040116%7C5PM%7Cpentagon-bounty <comment><USER2> Oh, the irony. To participate, you must, per the announcement, "agree to comply with all applicable federal, state, and local laws". Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

</comment><comment><USER3> Must have US SIN, work permit, and agree to undergo a criminal background check to receive the bounty.</comment>


The Bhopal Industrial Disaster Is Still Unfolding - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/the-worlds-worst-industrial-disaster-is-still-unfolding/560726/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> So basically a chemical factory got in financial trouble, causing severe mismanagement, which caused at least 5000 deaths and much more people with health problems

What worries me: this seems like the kind of factory you find on every medium size city's industrial zone. Quite a lot of them have really nasty chemicals. If you're not working there, you have no idea about how good or bad safety is inside. With governemental checks diminishing all over the world, how many more bhopals are on the edge of happening?

<comment><USER3> I think this story is a stark reminder of the existence of environmental externalities. Just curious, what country are you in?

In the US we have state agencies to address this, such as OSHA for worker safety, DEC and EPA (for now?) for environmental standards, research, and monitoring, federal super-fund to insure/internalize cost of abandoned site clean up, etc. Not perfect, but better then what's described in TFA.</comment></comment>


PyCon aftermath: Can we simply establish the Red/Yellow card system?  - <AUTHOR> http://singlevoice.net/redyellow-card-project/

<comment><AUTHOR> These cards have been distributed at least at Defcon for a few years, and they worked pretty good afaik. I think it should help preventing stuff like that.

<comment><USER2> How would use of those cards have changed anything?

Let's make this between you and me. You make a joke about how "dalke"s are just mixed up "dalek"s. I turn around and give you a yellow card. Message received, you apologize, and the system worked, right?

Next, in remembrance of the Thals, I make an black velvet painting of you, with the title "jagermo is a dalek lover", and display it at the poster session. You see it and give me a yellow card. I get the message, realize I shouldn't have done what I did, apologize, and I take it down.

That captures the essence of what happened, right? Or rather, the essence of what you would like to happen. The card system worked, end of story?

But of course, many people saw the painting, some took pictures of it, and a few of them learned from me what happen. The story spreads beyond the control of any card system, and the ancient antagonisms of Skaros rise again.

And _that_ can't be solved via cards any more than it can be solved with +1/-1s or thumbs-up/-down on various social media sites.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the cards are basically just a stand in for a decent discussion, right? In the PyCon case, she could have turned around, handed over a card, the guys would have gotten the message and maybe would have had a discussion afterwards. And by the way, who wouldn't love daleks? They reign supreme!

<comment><USER2> I understand your optimism, which is why my example included your scenario as a subset.

Think of it in this metaphorical way. The initial sparks between you, a dalek lover, and me are eventually extinguished by discussion. But because it took place in a public forum, some of the sparks landed in nearby tinder, which reignited the fire that destroyed our beloved Skaros. Our personal fire extinguishers are not enough to put out that blaze.

Or, in a non-metaphorial way, I give you the yellow card. We discuss it and come to a mutually agreeable and even pleasant understanding. I then write in my blog about how successful the yellow card system was. Others don't think it was justifiable for me to give you a yellow card, since daleks are supreme, and retaliate. The chain reaction of reprisals start, and poof! Back to the 1000 year war.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


MicroConf – The World's Most Popular Conference for Non-VC Startups - <AUTHOR> https://microconf.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Technically, the title of the web page is: "The World's Most Popular Conference for Independent Startups", but I felt that this didn't highlight the non-VC, non-Institutional Investor, non-Institutional Capital aspect, plus, "Independent" can be interpreted in many contexts...

If I have violated HN's rules about posting the original title in its original form, then I profusely apologize, in advance!</comment>


St. Petersburg paradox - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Petersburg_Paradox

<comment><USER2> When reading "Thinking, Fast and Slow" one of the things that struck me was that if you use the reference point for gains and losses as the point you end up at then you would have a pretty good model. For example if you have a hundred and lose 20 your loss is 20/80 but if you win 20 your gain is 20/120 [1]. The formulas is x/(x+worth)

I set up a python fiddle to mess about with this: [http://pythonfiddle.com/st- petersburgh-paradox](http://pythonfiddle.com/st-petersburgh-paradox)

One of the interesting things I found was that there is a power law for how much you would be willing to play the game. There are two ways to run the figures.

One is to never update your worth which produces (1,2.31)(2,5.80)(3,9.38)(4,12.78)(5,16.10)(6,19.43) - where (1,2.31) is an original worth of 10^1 and an expected value of 2.31.

The second is to update your worth after each winning bet: (1,1.94)(2,5.00)(3,8.48)(4,11.80)(5,15.11)(6,18.43)

In both instances a 10x increase in worth increase the expected value about 3.3-3.5. This may explain after you factor in the enjoyment of playing that it is rational for poorer people to play the lottery.

[1] One thing I didn't like about Prospect Theory is the steep curve for a loss this does not explain why people are so ready to buy insurance. If you use the above model if you could lose 90% of your value then -90/(-90+100) gives -9 and if you have to pay 1% then -1/(-1+100) gives -1/99 so you would do that for a 1/891 chance</comment>


Ask YC: Finding a Website Designer - <AUTHOR>

I searched for a thread like this to no avail, so forgive me if this has already been posted, but considering the incredible importance of site design, I was wondering how one could go about finding a partner for a startup.  As a little background: I'm at Carnegie Mellon, which has great CS and fine arts programs, but I don't actually know where to find these types...do they tend to hang out on sites like HN?  Are they usually more artsy or computery (not to stereotype)?  Are there as many entrepreneurial types amongst them, as there are with CS majors?  I'm worried because it's the one major aspect of a startup that I've yet to find someone capable of covering who's interested...any advice/recommendations?<p>Also, if anybody who's primary focus is design is interested, we're looking, email me if you want to know more.  We're in the Pittsburgh area, but don't require that you be.  College students are encouraged, since we decided not to pursue funding for the time being, and thus aren't offering salaries. <comment><USER2> There are quite a few designers on here and they're probably more the "computery" type since this site doesn't appeal much to design snobs. I'd guess they are fairly entrepreneurial too. Feel free to ping me (firstname.lastname@example.com), I'm an entrepreneurial, unsnobbish designer and I can hold my own in Rails.

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

You're one of the few other people on here from Pittsburgh! email me if you want to meet for food/drink sometime.

<comment><USER4> Hah. That's an oddly specific match for our dilemma. Have you ever used it?

I am at the same juncture now.

<comment><USER3> There are many talented designers on there. I asked for a bid for logos a while ago and got 15 bids that were up and down the line for quality. I just don't know how many designers on there are willing to work for equity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The designers that I know don't hang out online. And many of the designers I know have trouble with basic business practices (invoicing). I'm partnered with one who is actually probably better at business than me, and easily much better at marketing, but they are hard to come by. I would check both the design school at pitt and CM (and art institute of Pittsburgh) and also the marketing school, for someone with design skills (or aspirations, depending on your need for great design, and your willingness to pay)

</comment><comment><USER6> Krop.com seems to be the new hangout for talented creatives looking for work. Don't waste your time with craigslist, most of those designers are terrible (or worse).

<comment><USER7> generally, people you find on online forums are going to be bad. the difference is, if you find a designer in estonia on odesk, you'll pay 50 bucks for bad design. if you get a san fran designer from craigslist, you'll pay hundreds for a bad design.

go with people you know, or people friends refer you to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of my favorite hangouts back in my purely design days was <http://www.DesignersTalk.com>

</comment><comment><USER9> Hiring a Star Web Designer:

<http://ourdoings.com/2008-02-12>

</comment><comment><USER10> CMU has an HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) program. Have you tried looking around that department?</comment>


Ruby 2.2.0 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2014/12/25/ruby-2-2-0-released/ <comment><USER2> To the people who maintain the tools and platforms around these large version updates - thank you. rvm, ruby-build, homebrew, heroku - you're all truly generous for having everything ready for us almost immediately (on Christmas morning no less).

You're all wonderful- merry Christmas! <3

<comment><USER3> Well, I wouldn't say that Heroku does that out of generosity, but their free tier is pure gold.

<comment><USER2> They certainly didn't have to get the support for 2.2.0 out on Christmas morning, but they (actually, Terence) did.

[https://twitter.com/hone02/status/548131759762968576](https://twitter.com/hone02/status/548131759762968576)

Although with Matz an employee I'm sure they were well ahead of the curve. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great work to the ruby team, the improvements in Ruby's performance since 2.x have been very impressive to say the least. Well done and Merry Christmas to everyone that worked hard on this release.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, by upgrading Ruby from 1.9.3 to 2.1.2 we cut the time spent running our specs in half for our Rails project.

<comment><USER6> I just popped off a branch of my production Rails 4.1.8 app (Can't quite do 4.2 yet), and upgraded it 2 Ruby 2.2. I ran 271 spec against it 5 times before the upgrade and 16 times after. I should have done more before :(

For 2.1.5

AVG: 18.02

MEDIAN: 18.11

MIN: 16.26

MAX: 19.6

For 2.2

AVG: 18.162~

MEDIAN: 15.23

MIN: 14.44 <\- nice

MAX: 47.03 <\- first run, wut?

It looks better, but I haven't profiled the app on Passenger yet to see how well it plays with the whole app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Guys, I made a very simple pull request regarding auto proxy detection on the standard library of ruby, but it still open after a little while. Someone here have some directions on how to contribute correctly to the project?

<comment><USER8> I contributed a small patch earlier this month, but used their bug tracker to submit patch, turn around time was ~24 hours I think. See bugs.ruby- lang.org/issues/10551

So I think all of their patches need to go through the bug tracker.

<comment><USER7> Thank you! Just submitted it at [https://bugs.ruby- lang.org/issues/10652](https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/10652)

Hope it helps!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ruby seems to continuously move forward. Great to see that they manage to keep this project alive without a python 2vs3 disaster.

<comment><USER10> Sure, but be aware that if Ruby ever decides to fix the situation with its Strings types/encoding, you'll get the exact same "disaster". At least in the python world this change is now mostly in the past.

<comment><USER11> What situation is that, out of interest?

As of Ruby 1.9, there's a pretty sensible solution to this in the language, and I haven't had any encoding problems in some time. I appreciate I might have missed something though!

<comment><USER10> (I'll try to keep this short, since I feel this is quite offtopic, if we want to discuss this further I suppose we could find a better venue... maybe even email?)

I assume that with "Ruby 1.9 solution", you refer to the fact that Ruby source code is by default evaluated as UTF-8, right?

That's definitely a good thing, but with Python3 that wasn't the only change brought into the language.

I said "if Ruby ever decides to fix", because the need for a change is not obvious and not universally accepted: it's basically the same issue as automatic type coercion (aka weak/strong typing) and early (or late) raise/throw/handling of exception.

Basically: In Python2 and Ruby you have one or two String types (runtime types, in this discussion I only care about them), with the Ruby Strings tagged with the encoding internally used. In python the types are just "anything goes" (binary strings, the old Python2 string) and unicode (the actual internal encoding is an implementation detail).

The problem (if you agree that it is one) is that you can easily mix-and-match them, and everything will work fine only as long as the operation makes sense. When it won't anymore you'll get an exception.

This is a problem when you don't completely control the type/encoding of your input (e.g. if you have an HTTP request and your string depends on the type/charset specified in the Content-Type).

A dumb example of what could happen:

        a = "Ё".force_encoding "ISO-8859-5"
        a2 = "®".force_encoding "ISO-8859-1"
        # a + a2 will fail with Encoding::CompatibilityError

A similar thing can happen in Python2. While Python3 will reject the same operation as soon as the types get in contact with each other (still at runtime, but it'll be like doing `1+"1"` in Python or Ruby: you'll spot it right away).

I wrote a quite lengthy blog post about this change in Python3, but I haven't translated it in English yet, if there's some interest I could try to do it a bit sooner.

Anyhow, I don't want to create a flame or anything like that. I just wanted to explain why the Python3 choice has been made, and why a destructive change might have had its merit. While I prefer the Python3's approach, and I'm definitely not a Ruby developer, I still appreciate these updates to Ruby: for example I actually touched first hand the internal encoding-handling code of Ruby (Rubinius) some time ago with a friend of mine: [http://git.io/7kM4Gw](http://git.io/7kM4Gw) and I can benefit from the new GC code in new rubies, which makes metasploit 4 times faster to load.

<comment><USER12> Actually, the "ruby 1.9" solution is having Strings tagged with encoding at all -- prior to ruby 1.9 they were not, they were just bytes.

This was a pretty major change, I think I'd call it a 'destructive' change, it was indeed a big pain upgrading apps from ruby 1.8 to 1.9, and character encoding was the major issue generally.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying about python 2 vs 3, or what you think needs to be changed in ruby. If I understand right, you're saying that it ought to be guaranteed to raise if you try to concatenate strings with different encoding.

Instead, at present, for encodings that are ascii-compatible (which is most encodings), ruby will will let you concatenate if both strings (or just the argument and not necessarily the receiver? I forget) are entirely composed of ascii-compatible chars, otherwise it will raise.

I think you're probably (although I'm not 100% confident) right that it would be better to 'fail fast' and always raise, requiring explici treatments of encodings, instead of depending on the nature of the arguments (which may have come from I/O), which makes bugs less predictable. There continues to be a lot of confusion about how char encodings work in rubyland, and it's possible a simpler model would be less confusing (although I suspect char encoding issues are confusing to some extent no matter what, by their nature).

In general, even as it is, I find dealing with char encodings more sane in ruby (1.9+) than any other language I've worked in (but I haven't worked in python).

If ruby ever decides to make things even more strict, I don't think it'll actually be as disruptive as the 1.8 to 1.9 transition. For anyone who ever deals with not-entirely-ascii text (and who doesn't?), they basically already had to deal with the issue. Ruby was trying to make the transition easier on the developer to make some circumstances where it would let you get away with being sloppy with encodings -- I'm not sure if it succeeded in making it any easier, the transition was pretty challenging anyway, and "fail fast" might actually have been easier, I think I agree if that's what you're saying.

I don't know enough about python to have an answer, but I continue to be curious about what differences resulted in the entire ruby community pretty much coming along on the ruby 1.8 to 1.9 jump (and subsequent less disruptive jumps), while the python community seems to have had more of a disjoint. I don't know if it was helped by ruby's attempt to make the encoding switch less painful with it's current behavior. Or if it's as simple as the 100-ton gorilla of Rails being able to make the community follow in ruby-land.

<comment><USER13> Excuse my density here, but why not just force all strings to be UTF8 and call it a day? Anything in another encoding would need to get converted. What am I missing that Ruby and Python need these complicated problems but other platforms don't have these issues?

<comment><USER14> Han unification is the primary reason not to force utf8, especially in a language that has strong roots in Japan. (Sorry to be short, I'm on a smartphone. Googling should provide sufficient answers)

<comment><USER15> Han unification is one problem; another problem is that not all encodings can be round-tripped losslessly through Unicode. Shift-JIS, for example, has multiple separate characters that convert into the same character in Unicode, and therefore cannot be converted back into their original form reliably.

<comment><USER15> Citation: [http://support.microsoft.com/kb/170559](http://support.microsoft.com/kb/170559)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For rvm users, remember to run

      rvm get stable

before trying to

      rvm install ruby-2.2.0

You might end up getting preview1 unexpectedly.

</comment><comment><USER17> Great work. Thanks for the Christmas gift.

btw: anyone else thinks Rails was mentioned too much in the release note?

<comment><USER18> Rails was mentioned once, unless I missed something.

<comment><USER17> Paragraph 3 and paragraph 4

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting: vfork support.

Vfork in most older systems is like fork except it doesn't deeply duplicate all process state immediately (file handles, memory, such), so it can be faster if all the app wants to do is fork/exec. (We had to implement both fork and vfork in minix 2.x in uni.^)

But according to SO, most OSes implement fork lazily, so there's not much point in using it when fork will be just as fast without any change.

If there were a slowly-performing platform that has a specific performance issue identified by profiling as caused by fork, then mature optimization could follow. Otherwise, it seems like adding LoC without a clear goal.

The Symbol GC sounds good. Maybe this will imply code can associated with classes and modules can be GCed and required anew once all objects are freed (live upgrade apps without restarts).

^ The first thing I did to the Minix codebase was set keyboard repeat rate to the fastest possible values. Everyone else seemed content to waste their life waiting for their editor and debugger to move at a snail's pace. Of course, no else had x86 asm / pc hw io experience.

<comment><USER20> Copy-on-write fork is much faster than copying everything, but there is still some overhead setting up the copy-on-write state and dealing with the first writes afterwards, I think in cases where you have large amounts of memory vfork can still be useful.

<comment><USER19> The point isn't to prematurely optimize for edge-cases, but to tackle real, "hair-on-fire" performance bottlenecks head-on. If that means asking large- scale users to run profiling and getting stats of what's using tons of memory, slowing things down, duplicating work or wasting IOPS, go for it. If it's a dubious return/ effort at the expense of complexity, it might not be worth the investment.

For example, 'FooBarWidget @ Passenger 5 "Raptor" is a well-crafted, thoughtful achievement in terms of app servers.

2.2 Symbol GC also sounds great. I'm just not convinced there is enough innovation to make Ruby an order-of-magnitude faster, use less memory / return memory back to the system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not compatible with Rails 3.2.x, for those still on that version. (And possibly will never be, as 3.2.x only receives security updates now.)

<comment><USER22> What is the nature of the incompatibility?

<comment><USER21> One change is that test/unit is now no longer part of the standard library, which Rails requires. The workaround is simple, "test-unit" must be added to the Gemfile.

A less easily fixed change is that the following syntax no longer works the same as it did in previous versions of Ruby:

        def foo(bar = bar)

The recommended fix is the following: (I believe)

        def foo(bar = bar())

Rails uses this syntax occasionally. It's simple to change, but the Rails team refuses to merge in the fixes because it's not a security issue.

<comment><USER22> Wow that's too bad.

Do you know if the Rails team would approve a patch that was submitted?

Also, the change of the meaning of the right bar in your example above seems significant. Do you happen to know of any context for that change?

<comment><USER23> In case you weren't aware: [https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/18160](https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/18160)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's a bit weird that symbols are garbage collected. I wouldn't think it could delete them without making the same symbols unequal some of the time.

<comment><USER25> They are only garbage collected if they were introduced at runtime and there is no reference to them anymore. (detailed explanations can be found in the presentation linked in the announcement)

This allows you to symbolize external hash keys without fear of a DOS attack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have problem installing on ubuntu 12.04 : [https://gist.github.com/paneq/fee5477fb7ab1ede0104](https://gist.github.com/paneq/fee5477fb7ab1ede0104) . Did any of you experienced that as well?

<comment><USER27> Yes, and on 14.04 as well. Try installing the libffi-dev package.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anyone know how Ruby 2.2 works with Rails on Heroku (with unicorn)? When I switched from 2.0 to 2.1, it caused all sorts of memory problems so I had to switch back.

<comment><USER29> I gave Ruby 2.2 a try with Rails 4.2 and the same memory problems that plagued Ruby 2.1 also occurred. I am switching back to Ruby 2.0. Rails 5 will require Ruby 2.2 and higher so I hope someone will find a way to fix this.

<comment><USER28> Thanks for your answer (here and on SO). I guess I'll wait it out...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The download URL should be HTTPS, but at least they informed the digests.

</comment><comment><USER31> nice! Hope that version 3 will add jit :)</comment>


Show HN: https://Miwiti.com deployable side projects - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I have set up this service to help people, HN people :) start side projects.
The idea is that whenever we start a new project we need to:
- Register a domain - Setup email - Setup cloud flare - Setup google analytics - Create a deployment pipeline - Deploy somewhere - Configure DNS to support all this
Whenever I do this I spend at least 3-4 hours doing this on a project that might not go live and where I would much rather be hacking on something rather than waiting for cloud flare to find the nameserver changes!
So you pay a one time small fee plus the cost of the domain and we set all this up for you so you can check your code in and have it deploy.
To get started it is pretty manual but will automate it completely in time once I know what the top 2 or 3 deployment scenarios are.
Any feedback is great fully received :)
HTTPS://Miwiti.com "A bootstrapper for side projects"
Ed <comment><USER2> How will you setup the deployment pipeline?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey :)

It depends on your deployment options.

If for example it is .net code to azure websites then probably vsts is a good option.

If you want to deploy code to an aws vm then I'll setup a Jenkins instance for you.

When you sign up I'll go through the options and figure out what is best for your particular use case.

In time I will offer a few options you can choose from.

Ed

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://Miwiti.com](https://Miwiti.com) \- clickable link</comment>


Tropicana Line's Sales Plunge 20% Post-Rebranding - <AUTHOR> http://adage.com/article?article_id=135735 <comment><USER2> I found myself not getting this at Safeway since it looked a lot like something Safeway would design for its "generic product".

<comment><USER3> Exact same reaction I had. I thought it was Safeway's house-brand as well.

Sadly having a big image of an orange and very clear indication of what type of OJ it is (pulp free, lotsa pulp) are pretty much what I look for. Guess I'm a simpleton when it comes to buying juice.

Just read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and it has an interesting chapter on product packaging and branding. Definitely some cautionary tales in that book wrt to marketing/packaging debacles of this sort...</comment></comment>


Tearing Apart Google's TPU 3.0 AI Coprocessor - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/05/10/tearing-apart-googles-tpu-3-0-ai-coprocessor/ <comment><USER2> The TPU 2 was about half the cost of using Nvidia for same work.

[https://medium.com/@8fee9a760280/c2bbb6a51e5e](https://medium.com/@8fee9a760280/c2bbb6a51e5e)

Be interesting how much further ahead Google is now with the 3.

But most impressive is able to offer Wavenet at a competitive cost to the old technique for TTS used by everyone else.

16k through a NN in real time is just hard to believe possible. Nvidia has their work cut out for them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Their version of fp16 (bfloat as they call it) is very interesting. 7 bits of mantissa is only about 2 decimals of precision!

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a very interesting read. I wonder if Google has an in-house fabrication facility for all of its TPU's.

<comment><USER5> They don't; they probably use TSMC.</comment></comment>


The Human Cost of the Ghost Economy - <AUTHOR> https://longreads.com/2017/12/13/the-human-cost-of-the-ghost-economy/amp/?__twitter_impression=true <comment><USER2> Its possible to push the majority of people so hard that you reach a social breaking point, suddenly things can go from seeming to be normal to a sudden social collapse. I lived through this during the LA Riots. The LA Riots were about a lot more than just Rodney King. The video of the King beating was the one incident that was like the straw breaking the camel's back, after suffering through massive social upheaval and loss of income for the majority of working people in LA through the 80s, the CIA using their assets to dump crack cocaine into poor neighborhoods, after 12 years of Reagan and Bush life had gotten so bad in LA for the majority of people that one video was all it wound up taking to instigate a sudden social collapse where every block in LA was going up in flames where guns were going off everywhere and the police fled the city in fear and let it nearly burn to the ground for 2 weeks before the national guard showed up. That's sudden social collapse nobody saw the 92 riots coming but in the aggregate it wasn't hard to predict if you were paying attention to statistics on the impact of Reagomics and crack on LA.

<comment><USER3> This. 100%. And that build up is happening again. This time, it's happening to white people (gasp!) [disclosure: I'm one of them]. What will happen in 10+ years when all those people with College debt are still working at Starbucks (or worse) and have 1) no hope of paying back their loans, and 2) have no prospects for saving for retirement? I would expect that a significant number of Americans will start mobilizing in some way. You can only push people so far.

<comment><USER4> In the US people can change the government peacefully with a vote. But that process only gives them two choices that largely represent no one but corporate interests. I hope at some point the US adopts a better voting system.

<comment><USER5> No real change has ever happened in America without blood being spilled.

* Labor unions had state militias called on them and thousands were massacred at the hands of private security agencies during the Mine Wars

* Women had to die in the Triangle massacre before safety became a concern.

* Martin Luther King along with tons of other black people needed to die just to be considered humans.

* Vietnam required the Kent State Massacre.

* How many children and civilians have we had die needlessly at the hands of the police? You can't get a jury to convict them.

The American government has never represented the people. It will take nothing less than large amounts violence to change the country if history is any indicator of the future.

<comment><USER6> What was the Triangle massacre? I can't find much about it.

<comment><USER7> I'm guessing he's referring to the Traigle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Basically the management locked the women working at the factory in because they thought they would sneak out instead of working. So when a fire broke out the women couldn't escape.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >Its possible to push the majority of people so hard that you reach a social breaking point, suddenly things can go from seeming to be normal to a sudden social collapse.

People learned from that. Unfortunately they learned the wrong thing: a massive militarization of society and a politics of fear date from this period. My gf's kid just had "active shooter prep" at school -- prepping for an almost nonexistent threat, while ignoring things that actually kill kids, like choking or traffic). So now we see things like what happened in Fergeson: massive numbers of police with military gear, simply amping up the experience.

I think what may be different now is that the middle classes are getting fucked as well. You have to belong to rebel. Revolutions (despite the rhetoric) never start from below; they inevitably are either elites against elites, or upper middle classes against elites. The yeoman farmer with a rifle has never been the base of any rebellion.

And the elites have prepared: legitimate protest is to be met with massive show of force.

</comment><comment><USER9> This really feels like another world. Here is a confession, I have stopped believing people need to be informed, to be made aware.

I think most of us, adults know exactly what is happening, the consequences of capitalism, the reality of our societies, the reality of poverty, the reality of a large number of people struggling, suffering, sad, desperate, unhappy.

We have a sophisticated mental model to deal with it, we pretend it doesn't exist, untill you are absolutely forced to confront it, at which point you may signal, posture, be shocked, but life goes on. Our systems fundamentally and deeply reward unethical behavior and greed, and humans are survivors, we survive.

<comment><USER10> People have a profound disagreement over the meaning of 'capitalism' so I don't think it's a useful term.

The fact is that poverty has been dropping markedly over the years due to the free market and 'capitalism'.

We tend to see crises because they're short term and fail to see the benefits because they happen over generations.

I suspect what is really happening here is that the USA (and similar countries) are getting closer in gdp/capita to other rising countries.

[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in- extre...](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extreme- poverty-absolute)

<comment><USER11> 'during' not necessarily 'due to'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Undercover reporting on temporary workers, with a focus on legal violations and enforcement, rather than helplessness: [http://projects.thestar.com/temp- employment-agencies/](http://projects.thestar.com/temp-employment-agencies/)

Largest improvement in labor protections for "precarious workers" in two decades, but still no liability for injuries to temp workers: [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thestar.com/amp/news/gta/20...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thestar.com/amp/news/gta/2017/11/22/sweeping- updates-to-workplace-protections-become-law.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Adding on top of that that 95% of all jobs created in the US since 2008 are temp jobs and you begin to see the true cost.

<comment><USER14> Source?

<comment><USER13> [https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/most-jobs- created-...](https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/most-jobs- created-2005-are-temporary-or-unsteady-n693631)

[https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs- created...](https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created- since-2005-are-temporary/)

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-23/top-white-house- eco...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-23/top-white-house-economist- admits-94-all-new-jobs-under-obama-were-part-time)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Time to close the 'contractor' loophole?

lol j/k, the man would never let that happen

(alternatively, completely separate out benefits from wages by law, or whatever other changes that would make it not always the correct business move to hire as few people as possible)

<comment><USER16> it's not that temp jobs are bad. It's more that they really aren't designed to be someone's sole source of income. The issue is the lack of real jobs created by the internet/tech boom; we need more retail chains and less amazon.

<comment><USER17> Jobs aren't designed to do anything except fulfill the employer's needs at minimal cost. We need to stop waiting around for employers to start looking out for their employees' interests and start forcing them to.

<comment><USER18> I wonder how fast you'd get blacklisted if you mumbled something about unionising whilst on one of these jobs. Maybe outside union organisers could start turning up; they'd probably get roughed up by security and ultimately arrested, but the cycle has to go through that phase again before it reaches the next phase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> While I have done my share of this kind of work when I was young, this is still horrible. I remember Richard Linklater's book _Generation X_ had a couple of rules I still live by.

1\. Don't eat yourself

2\. Don't eat other people

If we could live by these two rules, there would be no Ghost Economy.

<comment><USER20> Could you explain that better?

I'm not into cannibalism, not a Survivor Type either [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_Type](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_Type)

Or is it sexual?

<comment> the-dude I read it as burning out is eating yourself. Working too much regardless of the income, regardless of burnout or not is eating yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I spent much of the summer after my senior year of high school working temp jobs, earning minimum wage. This was the early 90s in Northeast Ohio. There was a lot of light manufacturing and I mostly worked in factories in Twinsburg. One job I even shrink wrapped Sun OpenWindows manuals. It was clear to me then that the factories required the temp agency to fill out the workforce, especially for the less desirable jobs like stacking boxes on pallettes at the end of a manufacturing line.

One day I was sent to a medical equipment warehouse. Another worker and I were assigned to untangle a pile of hospital beds easily 12 feet high. We were supposed to climb on it and free each frame. The bedsprings were snagged on each other and the pile was unstable. I called the temp agency, said the job was too dangerous and walked out. I wanted the money but I was lucky enough that I didn't need it.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is a really great read. I wrote about my experiences with this and although I don't go as deeply into detail, and although I wasn't as low as these ghosts she talks about, I did see and feel some terrible things.

I'll never forget the feeling of being treated as a resource over a person.

[http://russell.ballestrini.net/how-to-work-from-home-the- roa...](http://russell.ballestrini.net/how-to-work-from-home-the-road-to- remote-chapter-1/)

</comment><comment><USER23> A Toronto Star reporter went undercover for over a month to expose the abuse temp workers suffer. The article was published this year. I recommend that you read it for more concrete examples of the shadiness temp agencies get away with.

[http://projects.thestar.com/temp-employment- agencies/](http://projects.thestar.com/temp-employment-agencies/)

</comment><comment><USER24> This article's final words, say it all.

<comment><USER25> @fithisux is referring to:

"This feature has been supported by the journalism nonprofit Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Melissa Chadburn is a fellow for Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Her essay, "The Throwaways," received notable mention in Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux."

<comment><USER26> Or possibly the final words of the article proper:

> Meanwhile, gazing down upon the snowglobe of our disparity was The > Corporation. A man in a suit, getting wealthier, plumper, more powerful, a > rapacious beast delivering the shocks.

<comment><USER10> Yeah that prose is a bit purple and dramatic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wish every entitled brat that is born with a free ticket to Harvard and a potential career in congress would have to live this life first..

</comment><comment><USER28> Welcome to the horrors of capitalism.</comment>


We'll Develop Your Idea Into an Android App in 24 Hours - <AUTHOR> http://www.ideophone.in/develop-your-idea-into-an-android-app-in-24-hours/

<comment><AUTHOR> Co-founder here. We got really, really good at building pretty decent apps in a hackathon timeframe. That's what we're offering - nothing more or less.

I'm going to offer a freebie for HN users - the top reply to this comment which is a project we can take on and build, we'll do for free.

<comment><USER2> I'd love an app frontend for [http://pizzacodes.com](http://pizzacodes.com). This would basically consist of two unique pages / views:

1\. A location search 'view'.

2\. A Location view that would show a list of coupons for that given store.

Both of these views would use an api that I create to return the nearby stores / content.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, you're on. Let's connect over email? Mine's email@example.com .

<comment><USER2> Excellent, can't wait to get started! I'll send you an email tonight to connect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> $250 for a full day of both devs and designers, plus some kind of product manager to work through the idea? Can't say it's not cheap. I have my doubts you'll end up with anything impressive though. Would be nice for someone to give it a try and post the results.

EDIT: To clarify, I have doubts because it is cheap. Generally a team which can build good mobile apps would have no need to try and get work for $250 a day when there are companies who would pay them 5x or 10x that - so the low price creates a feeling that the work must be low quality even if its not. You guys might be underpricing severely here...

<comment><AUTHOR> We're based in Bangalore. I'm a product manager with 6 yrs' experience in the valley building salesforce.com's first social products & Digital Chocolate's first social games. My co-founders have worked at Yahoo, InMobi & TAT. We're offering short timeframes and low prices because we can afford to (being in India), and have no patience for negotiating rates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So it looks like they are really cherry-picking the most interesting / easy work. The 20% (time) of the 80 / 20 rule.

"We will only take on short, well-scoped projects at the idea & sketch stage. The project size restrictions will also help you focus and scope out a truly minimal product."

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess we're looking for well-scoped projects that are within what we are able to execute. We're a team of 4, and we can get quite a lot done, including UX and backend instead of just an app. What you get is 4 specialists who will focus on your project for a short amount of time, and what they think they're capable of executing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A friend of mine approached this team with an app idea he had. They discussed the scope and these guys did give an estimate of 3 days.

Then, bizarrely enough, they said they wouldn't be able to work on the product because they 'don't have a working android tablet'. Very strange response/excuse indeed.

This is certainly a clever way for them to advertise what they have on offer on HN - but there seems to be a difference in the way they are advertising their services and the way they are responding to proposals.

Would like to hear from people that ended up working with them.

Edit: my friend was also asked by these guys if he as any 'friends in bangalore than can lend them an android tablet'... I'm not sure what to make of that!

</comment><comment><USER6> Sigh, my boss is going to wonder why I need a few weeks to develop stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll be honest about the things we probably can't do. Games, for one. Enterprise apps that need access to private APIs are another. I could probably go on, but you get the drift. We're on the same page as landing page creators and other lean startup tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting. Wondering about the scope they're talking about. How many views? Local persistence? Communication with a remote API?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't want to narrow down scope to very discrete things. We're a tight-knit team, and we've built many things in a 24hr timeframe. We regularly win practically every hackathon in Bangalore. So odds are, we'll often find a way to do things.

That said, we're probably not the best suited for projects were prior context is important, such as integrating with an existing private API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I assume the code is passed over once completed, so this is a good service if just to get an app off the ground...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we deliver code & assets once the product is completed. You have exactly the right idea - we help get the product off the ground, and create quick MVPs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> are there any samples of client work you've done? really interested to see. thanks.

if you can share the app names in public that is..

<comment><AUTHOR> We can share the ones that we have developed ourselves: ([https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Ideophone&hl...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Ideophone&hl=en)) 1\. One Touch SOS & variants (we have some country specific variants with local police/security integrations). 2\. Suruk: a user-configurable tuktuk/taxi meter, to double check that you're not being cheated. Some versions with adequate usage also give crowdsourced estimates of average distance between points. 3\. Kopa is a whitelabel Ride sharing app targeted at events 4\. DroidJuice plots and graphs your battery usage online (without draining your battery itself), and lets you send automatic "low battery" messages to a predefined receiver list or FB.</comment></comment>


Facebook Buys LiveRail (video ad network) - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2014/07/02/facebook-acquires-liverail/

<comment><USER2> I wonder how much it costs... My guess, 2-3x Youtube.</comment>


Heim – A real-time community platform - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/euphoria-io/heim <comment><USER2> I kind of like the idea of threaded chatting. Is there any other chat program that uses this idea?

<comment><USER3> It has the same problem every other threaded system has: notification of updates. How do you know what's changed and what hasn't? At least with linear chat you can draw a line on the screen and everything below it is new. Slashdot wasn't bad in that it greyed out everything you'd already seen and only show you the new messages, but even then you had to scroll all the way up and down the page to see what's new. If you could tag threads to follow...

WOAH. I just found the hidden side pane that organizes all conversations by date, the most recent changes at the top. You click on it and it shows you the whole thread. Then you click on 'new pane' and it opens just that thread in a new window!!

Well done, gentlemen. Well done.

<comment><USER4> Designer/frontend dev here -- thank you! Helping users understand what is going on in the tree has been a core challenge. However, exposing too much right away is very overwhelming, especially to people who are unaccustomed similar chat interfaces. I've been learning a lot about how to get the UX for this right from user feedback, but there's much more to explore. If you are interested in chatting about this problem, feel free to ping me in &heim. :)

One amusing anecdote. We very recently rolled out two bits of functionality: auto-collapsing long threads, and defaulting to replying to your own thread you started. Many of the people who jumped in and started spamming today didn't realize they were confined to their own collapsed threads. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I get a message saying it's not ready for Hacker News yet, so I can't even see what's going on :-(

<comment><USER5> ...not anymore. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been a user on the site for a few months now. There's a lot you can imagine would be difficult with threaded chat, but in practice it works pretty well, to the point that I generally miss having the ability to reply to a specific message on other chat platforms.

<comment><USER7> Seems interesting - is the site invite-only for now? Care to invite your ol' pal fit2rule from HN? :)

<comment><USER6> Some of the rooms are private, but you're welcome to check out [https://euphoria.io/room/heim/](https://euphoria.io/room/heim/) (the dev chat) and [https://euphoria.io/room/welcome/](https://euphoria.io/room/welcome/) (where most newcomers end up.) There's also an xkcd chat, which was very active for a while, but I'm not sure what it's like now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is like IRC and FB posts fused together. I love it. In traditional IRC you have many topics intertwined - very distracting / waste of time if you only care about a single topic and don't have time to sift through everything typed. Slack very much suffers from that same problem - you care about something important - and there's all that noise.

With the introduction of threaded conversations you could collapse and ignore threads you don't care about and drill into the details of the things you want/need.

Love it! Congrats Max and team!

</comment><comment><USER9> I like that you can host it yourself. I'ld like to guide my company away from email+phone but it is a long way to go. And in Europe there are still a lot of concerns if you can't host something in your own environment.

I don't see any FOSS / paid modern solutions similar to slack, flowdock, scrollback, .. ready to be hosted in your environment. HipChat seems to be the only solution with a standalone server available. There are some open source competitors but they are far from production-ready. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER10> Have you checked out Let's Chat? [http://sdelements.github.io/lets- chat/](http://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://euphoria.io/room/dev/](https://euphoria.io/room/dev/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks like the IRC on my other monitor..

<comment><USER13> There's a trend of seemingly reinventing IRC and just putting it into the browser with a "hip" UI as of late.

<comment><USER14> By "reinventing IRC" you mean "making any kind of chat software"?

<comment> vezzy-fnord Making any kind of chat software without compelling improvements over IRC. Familiarity itself doesn't count.

<comment><USER15> Threaded replies does seem nice to have, but not nice enough that I'd be willing to give up on the other features of IRC.

One thing that'd be nice to have with IRC is if there were a cheap host somewhere that easily let people run their own weechat instance; too many of the people I talk with keep disconnecting because they don't have / can't be bothered with having their own server with a bouncer. (There's stuff like [http://blinkenshell.org/wiki/Start](http://blinkenshell.org/wiki/Start) but I was thinking something that one can recommend to complete newbies.)

\-----

What else would be nice to have in IRC?

<comment><USER3> The interesting thing about IRC is that it can be modified to suit any individual's taste. But, that takes time and expertise. That guarantees IRC will stay within a niche audience of people technical enough to bend it to their will. What I'm liking about these new chat systems is it has some of the best features of IRC made available to all users with an interface they can understand and use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I see a picture of a cat, a bad drawing of an orange and a not-handsome guy. Only that.

</comment><comment><USER17> But does it federate? (Honest question, did not see a documentation for that)

<comment><USER18> It should be trivial to federate it via Matrix.org if they felt the urge :)

<comment><USER9> How does Matrix compare to xmpp? I do not see a lot of differences (however, xmpp is kind of mature)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks like a more confusing version of IRC.

</comment><comment><USER20> amazing stuff, pushing React to its limit! flat chats will never be the same again!</comment>