Be a JavaScript Rockstar (jQuery site redesign) - <AUTHOR> http://jquery.com/# <comment><USER2> I've been touring the world lately, doing huge amounts of drugs, destroying hotel rooms, having sex with random hordes of hot women, and making giant piles of money. Given that lifestyle description, I think it's pretty obvious what I do for a living, but in case you're still wondering: I'm a JavaScript Rockstar. And yes, I use jQuery.

Excuse me, I have to go have more sex.

<comment><USER3> I just drink Rockstar(tm) energy drink. And wonder why the fuck my JS doesn't work on IE 6.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dude, it's just a javascript library. And a pretty damn good one.

I think you guys might be a little too uptight..

<comment><USER5> Try telling that to clients!

> And a pretty damn good one.

And thats why I want to use it, and would hate to use say, prototype, just because the clients thought Jquery was immature.

<comment><USER6> > [I] would hate to use say, prototype

Haha? Joke, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How absolutely ghastly. I'm not sure which I hate more: the copy, the style or the illustration.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, this is what I wish it looked like: <http://img397.imageshack.us/my.php?image=testscreenna8.jpg>

<comment><USER9> It does look like that doesn't it? What am I missing?

<comment><USER8> Well, for about a day it looked like the screenshot here:

[http://ajaxian.com/archives/jquerycom-redesigned-with-a- rock...](http://ajaxian.com/archives/jquerycom-redesigned-with-a-rock-star)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Shockingly disgusting... I'm incredibly embarrassed, imagine trying to convince your boss that you should be using jQuery.

<comment><USER4> With a list of "who's using jQuery" that includes Google, Bank of America, Dell, CBS, NBC, Netflix.. your boss might not be the sharpest tool in the shed if "be a javascript rock star" bothers them..

<comment><USER11> What does that _actually_ mean, tho'? That they're running mission-critical apps on it? Or that some third party ad agency they subcontracted something to happened to use it on one project? Or something in between?

I'm always suspicious of client rosters like that because in a big enough company, pretty much _everything_ is being used in one way or another, even if it's only for someone's pet project. It doesn't mean a thing.

<comment><USER12> It's not hard to find out, go to the app, click view source and search for a jquery import. I just checked dell.com and they are using it on the front page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If the jQuery people, who produce this great framework at no cost AND under an open source licence, want to put flashing yellow polka dots in a marquee tag on their site, then that's fine with me.

If this disturbs you so much, then you have two options: don't use it or fork it. They won't loose a penny by you doing so.

</comment><comment><USER14> I had to check the URL to make sure it didn't end in /thisisajoke. I guess if you got rid of the illustration banner it wouldn't be that bad. Whose idea was it to use My Chemical Romance to market jQuery?

</comment><comment><USER15> The worst part is the docs, they've become significantly less readable, and the content doesn't start until much farther down the page.

<comment><USER8> They seem just as readable to me color/font-wise, but the width of the content definitely bothers me.

I realize there is a maximum width the human eye can easily read, but the docs seem much narrower than before, and over half my browser window is wasted with empty space to the left and right.

As for the design itself, I enjoy project sites with a familiar style, but this looks like something out of a commercial for Fruit Roll-ups or something. Very appealing to a 10-year-old I'm sure, but kind of garish.

Oh well, at least jQuery itself is still great. That's all that really matters anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh, the melodrama.

Well, I love it. Sure, the "rock star" thing is a little edgy and not to everyone's taste, but with the comments here, you'd think the design were truly bad. It's not.

It's worthwhile to distinguish between designs that are not to your aesthetic and designs that are poorly executed.

<comment><USER17> It's not edgy, it's already old and stale.

<comment><USER18> "It's not edgy, it's already old and stale."

Thank you. "Rock star" and "guru" make me think of the clueless IT recruiter who's looking for people with JAVA and PERL skills or 10 years of Rails.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The problem I find with illustrations of that size and in that position on the page is that I have to scroll down before I get to anything meaningful. By the time I've reached any content the website has already frustrated me as a browser.

</comment><comment><USER20> Against most opinions I love it.

Why do code/opensource/... sites had such a serious designs?. I think JQuery site design is great, it will take a while to get used to it but surely others will follow.

(In any case, what we have to really care is about the library itself)

<comment><USER21> I also loved. I didn't expect it would have such bad reception.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The site re-design makes jQuery look more complete, like an actual product that is ready to be used and I think that's what they were aiming for.

The rockstar thing, kind of lame but I'm sure you guys can live. (Especailly with the links to Google, IBM, etc right under it)

<comment><USER23> I agree, it looks more like an actual product, more polished and professional. People need to lighten up a little bit. Rock Star aside, I think the site looks pretty nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm shocked. Really. It's breathtakingly awful. And as I asked in the Scribd thread below, why, oh why, would you put resources into creating this abomination rather than into improving and expanding the framework itself?

edit: On second look, it would be dramatically improved if the "rock star" conceit were replaced with something more professional.

</comment><comment><USER25> Rockstars and Ninjas need to die.

<comment><USER26> 1 for 2

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nice. This whole "Rock star" thing looks to be here only to generate a lot of buzz. I bet they will change it in a week.

<comment><USER27> I should have said "in a few hours", lol.

[http://jquery.com/blog/2008/08/29/death-to-javascript- rock-s...](http://jquery.com/blog/2008/08/29/death-to-javascript-rock-stars/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This was the alternative: <http://flickr.com/photos/psauerbeck/2809426844/sizes/o/>

</comment><comment><USER29> Love the design, the rockstar toon is badass. Certainly doesn't tie in with the geeky/professional stereotype designs these frameworks are subjected to, but fuck it, who says the site needs to look square.

Too bad their 'documentation page' is wrecked on IE7. They could also improve on the page load times.

</comment><comment><USER7> They seem to have removed the banner.

</comment><comment><USER30> on the front page, press up up down down left right left right b a nice

</comment><comment><USER31> I've been learning Prototype, just because I'm working on code that already uses it.

Anyone have a Cliff's notes of the key differences between jQuery and Prototype?

</comment><comment><USER32> I think jquery site now looks different from all other javascript frameworks...If I was a new comer, I would immediately prefer jquery over other frameworks

<comment><USER10> Because the site looks different?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> As long as the library is solid, the docs are complete and the tutorials and demos are great, it doesn't really matter what the site looks like.

</comment><comment><USER34> I love to play with JS and greasemonkey, and etc.. but sometimes it seems it's an underrated language

</comment><comment><USER18> But I don't want to be a rock star.

I want to be a postrock star.

</comment><comment><USER35> questionable design aside, i'm just happy the documentation is back up and loading quickly. without that, i don't know if i'd ever be able to achieve javascript rockstardom.

</comment><comment><USER36> Dignity is deadly.

</comment><comment><USER37> i prefer ninja, but then u won't see anything</comment>


StyleGAN2 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan2 <comment><USER2> I set up this super simple 'Which Face Is Real?' ([http://www.whichfaceisreal.com/](http://www.whichfaceisreal.com/)) style challenge. Click the row to show the answers. You might need to zoom out.

[https://veedrac.github.io/stylegan2-real-or- fake/game.html](https://veedrac.github.io/stylegan2-real-or-fake/game.html)

There's a harder version as well, where the image is zoomed in.

[https://veedrac.github.io/stylegan2-real-or- fake/game_croppe...](https://veedrac.github.io/stylegan2-real-or- fake/game_cropped.html?x)

I get 100% reliably with the first link (game.html), and got 4/5 on the cropped version (game_cropped.html) so far.

<comment><USER3> On your site I can consistently get 100% by looking at the backgrounds since they generate in somewhat inorganic patterns.

<comment><USER4> Also after watching the video from the StyleGAN2 team [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f_gbKW6FUUHKkUxciJ_lQx29mCq...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f_gbKW6FUUHKkUxciJ_lQx29mCq_fSBy/view) now I know that original StyleGAN, images from which are apparently used for this "game", produces faces with a "water droplet" and phase artifacts, so I was able to spot few fakes just by looking for those things.

<comment><USER2> Only whichfaceisreal.com uses the original StyleGAN. The github.io links use StyleGAN2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Only watched the video, but one of the interesting things is the potential method to tell a generated image from a real one: namely, if you take a generated image, it's possible to find parameters which will generate exactly the same image. But if you take a real image, it's generally _not_ possible to get exactly the same image, but only a similar one.

The exact point in the video:

[https://youtu.be/c-NJtV9Jvp0?t=208](https://youtu.be/c-NJtV9Jvp0?t=208)

<comment><USER5> Also, looks like [https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/](https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/) has been updated to use the new generator.

<comment><USER6> Phew I looked at three and they all had toothy smiles where the teeth grew out out of the lips and one had a floating tooth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The demo in the official video is mind blowing. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-NJtV9Jvp0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-NJtV9Jvp0) I wonder when we will see full movies unrecognizable from real ones made from deep learning.

<comment><USER8> Insane the part where they get multiple angles from the same generated face

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The part of the video showing the location bias in phase artifacts (straight teeth on angled faces) is really interesting and very clear in retrospect if you look at StyleGAN v1 outputs.

Their "new method for finding the latent code that reproduces a given image" is really interesting and I'm curious to see if it plays a role in the new $1 million Kaggle DeepFakes Detection competition.

It feels like we're almost out of the uncanny valley. It's interesting to place this in context and think about where this technology will be a few years from now - see this Tweet by Ian Goodfellow on 4.5 years of GAN progress for face generation: [https://twitter.com/goodfellow_ian/status/108497359623614464...](https://twitter.com/goodfellow_ian/status/1084973596236144640?lang=en)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm surprised to see Nvidia hosting[1] the pre-trained networks on google drive which has already been blocked for going over the quota:

> Google Drive download quota exceeded -- please try again later

1\. [https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan2#using-pre-trained- networ...](https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan2#using-pre-trained-networks)

</comment><comment><USER11> A bit off-topic - the license [0] is interesting. IIUC, if anyone who is using this code decides to sue NVidia, the grants are revoked, and they can sue back for copyright infringement?

Also, interesting that even with such "short" licences there are trivial mistakes in it (section 2.2 is missing, though it is referenced from 3.4 and 3.6 - I wonder what it was...)

[0] [https://nvlabs.github.io/stylegan2/license.html](https://nvlabs.github.io/stylegan2/license.html)

<comment><USER12> Patent grants.

Its a butchered Amazon Software License: [https://aws.amazon.com/asl/](https://aws.amazon.com/asl/)

<comment><USER13> I've never understood why it's allowed to give up "suing rights" in contracts. It is in the interest of the public that any law infringement gets investigated and the infringers punished.

In principle a lawsuit is just asking a neutral party to judge whether there indeed was a law breaking where I suspect there was one. Ideally, this is not a inherently hostile action that should be met with any negative consequences.

I know criminal and civil law are different beasts, but still the situation is analogous to renting out a room to someone in exchange for them promising not to report me to the police if I beat them up, else I can kick them out without notice.

It should be an inalienable right of anyone to report/sue for any wrongdoing against them. It should not be conditional on losing some (any) beneficial things.

"I agree I will not sue you even if I later find out that you did something illegal against me" should not be legal to be in a contract.

<comment><USER14> Giving up such rights is often accompanied by alternative ways of arbitrating disagreement. That's reasonable, as it avoids 50% of the cost (lawyers) in such cases.

<comment><USER13> I dream of a world where I can present my complaints in plain English and have it considered by a court, without having to pay a fortune to lawyers.

It's somehow an accepted state of affairs that even if you're in the right, you need some cunning lawyers who will twist words in the right way and build a strong narrative of why you are right, otherwise tough luck.

Justice should not be up for purchase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Imagine when these faces start talking, tracking objects with their eyes with a perfectly synthesized voice all, generated in real time.

</comment><comment><USER16> Of course we'll hit a wall at some point, but when this repo dropped the other night and I saw the rotating faces in the video, it made me realize that in the future, VR experiences might be generated with nets rather than modeled with traditional CG.

</comment><comment><USER17> Any good resources for using GANs to generate synthetic tabular data?

</comment><comment><USER18> ctfu at the car images. I made a twitter bot to tweet them out with fake make/model names [https://twitter.com/bustletonauto](https://twitter.com/bustletonauto)

</comment><comment><USER19> urgh, custom CUDA ops now.

Original StyleGAN worked on AMD cards, this won't without porting those.

):

</comment><comment><USER20> It makes me feel ill to see computers doing things like this. Aidungeon was difficult to stomach as well. GANs were invented on a whim by a single person. Nobody thought it would work when applied to this kind of problem. It came out of nowhere. Pretty soon someone will try something on a higher order task and it's going to work. We are opening Pandora's box and I'm not sure that we should do that.

<comment><USER21> okay, i'll be the one to stick my neck out ...

i read a few of the AI Dungeon transcripts. i think it's worthless. you type in a command, like you would with an actual infocom-style adventure game, and it spits out a bunch of flowery language and gobbledygook, the likes of which you can get in abundance from any self-help guru. there is no state, no way to win, no way to lose. to compare it to actual adventure games is ludicrous.

likewise, i have yet to see anything having to do with StyleGAN photo manipulation that goes very far beyond the level of a parlor trick.

this stuff is going to appeal to the same people who love cryptocurrencies, and will have about the same level of real-world effect.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anybody else quitting Facebook over privacy concerns? - <AUTHOR> It just doesn't seem like Zuckerberg is going to let up until all of our personal info, connections, interests, etc. are being sold to the highest bidder. So today, I quit. It's really not that bad. Just 2 clicks, and then 14 days without a login attempt. http://bit.ly/chsPFo I'm curious if anybody else on HN has quit and why. <comment><USER2> I was one of Facebook's earlier adopters, back when it was still restricted to a handful of universities. I found it to be a useful tool for getting to know classmates. Then the feature creep started and it turned into a product that I have no use for, so I left. I never at any point gave a damn what their privacy policy was, because it would never have crossed my mind to post something there if I didn't want it to be public.

<comment><USER3> The problem with Facebook was never what you posted about yourself. The more nefarious thing was that _other people_ , in theory your friends but more like people you know for whatever reason, could post information that was linked directly to your tangibly real identity.

In the era of the freeform Wall this was pretty silly stuff, but by the time it expanded to picture tagging and the news feed it started to get quite a bit out of your control. You could opt out of some of these things, but doing so generally made you seem a little asocial.

The real diabolical thing about Facebook was that it combined general social anxiety with on-by-default feature rollouts to coerce its userbase into feeding more and more personal info to the datamine. Expect it to only get worse as the userbase grows to epic proportions... they are sitting on a Scientology-scale vault containing the personal details of people's lives.

<comment><USER2> I forget whether picture tagging came along before or after I left, though I know I've seen the feature. It was probably some time in the grey area between when I stopped using it regularly and when I actually deactivated my account. Anyway, I see your point about how you could easily get creeped out about Facebook making it so easy to datamine that stuff. It doesn't bother me personally because I just take the McNealyesque view that any information that I don't make a deliberate effort to control access to is already public. But that's just because I'm a security guy and my brain is correspondingly warped; I make no claim that this mindset is normal or even healthy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm deleting my account after I relay to all the friends I want to keep in touch with where else they can reach me at. Its a personal decision and never before have I been so personally offended by any one company's vision of what the internet should be. I disagree with the notion of a "social by default" web so much that I can no longer entertain being part of Facebook.

There's an educational component to this recent bit of news as well. People by and large don't care enough to really cause the critical mass exodus that would make Facebook backtrack on these announcements. I think this may largely be because people don't know anything about the origins of the internet or even how it works on a basic level. It makes me think that knowing these things should be taught in schools in some capacity. I would assert that if people knew more about the internet then they could form more of an opinion when a company tries to hijack it it and change the paradigm.

No one company can or should ever be allowed to change what the "default" of the web is.

<comment><USER5> You have every right to pull out of Facebook if you disagree with what they're doing, but thinking it has to conform to what your vision of what the web's "basic paradigm" is is just silly. Blogging and commenting changed things before this social stuff took it further. The web is always changing.

Saying people need to learn about the origins of the web before they can use it is arrogant and I don't see how it could affect how anyone views what's happening with this Facebook stuff.

Regardless though, "social by default" is rhetoric. When you launch a site Facebook isn't going to be able to hijack it and start inserting social features without your permission.

In general, I think the concerns are overblown. Facebook is basically the Twitter that my family uses, and that's why I use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes.

Facebook has progressively and consistently been trying to "slip under the radar" with privacy time and time again. This is not a one time thing, it's a habit and a consistent assault on users. They've never suggested they've ever "gotten" privacy and their flawed assumption that just because i'm on a social network means I want to share everything with everyone is pretty asinine.

I've spent a long time messing with privacy settings and groups and i've never really gotten the results that I wanted. Social networks badly need to start getting the clue that people don't want to give up control over their information. All Facebook needed to do was look at the stories of people who got fired or never hired based on what was on their Facebook to learn this lesson, but they've proven they don't want to do it.

Facebook has gone way off the rails and continues to go off the rails. One wonders whether anyone there is possessed of clue.

</comment><comment><USER7> Er, nope. This doesn't concern or phase me in the least. Assuming I don't say/do anything stupid on Facebook, can someone explain to me why I should be worried about this? I just don't get the outrage. I'm happy to have the entire world know everything I post on Facebook.

<comment><USER8> I may be out of the prime facebook demographic by several years but even I understand the significance of this for a huge number of facebook users. A lot of people view facebook as something in the same genre of livejournal or blogger, a tool that allows you to keep in touch with friends but that is nevertheless still fairly public and limited. However, a huge number of people have taken facebook far more into their private lives. They use it as a replacement for email, for example. These people's entire digital lives are in facebook. Every sordid detail of their personal relationships. Every little bit of letting off steam about coworkers and bosses. Every piece of personal information from their home address and phone number to the sex toys they bought last week. For these people facebook's privacy settings are critically important.

To put yourself in their shoes imagine if your email provider or phone company made an announcement that they were making a change to their privacy settings. If you thought that there was a serious chance of your email, text messages, or phone conversations accidentally becoming public because you failed to tick the right checkbox somewhere you might demonstrate just the slightest bit of consternation at that prospect.

For myself I've been lucky since I hardly use facebook, and then only grudgingly (more out of a hatred for the UI than anything else), but for many of it's heaviest users facebook does not appear to be operating in, let alone even considering, their best interests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I tainted my Facebook data and bailed long ago. Facebook just ain't right. ([http://www.freeinfidel.com/2007/12/08/taint-the-data-how- to-...](http://www.freeinfidel.com/2007/12/08/taint-the-data-how-to-quit- facebook-the-evil-way/))

Trusting Facebook with the ability to track you across the entire Internet is like trusting a Wall Street investment bank with your money.

In both cases, they're the G, you're the mark, no matter how sweet the sales pitch. They wouldn't be selling you if the deal wasn't better for them.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thinking about it. I don't want to have to manage my privacy setting every time FB decides that this small component of the app will be exposed to non friends on these sites. It starts becoming something you worry about and is a huge turn off. 2006 member

</comment><comment><USER11> Privacy concerns where the reason why I never joined Facebook in the first place. But still they do know me. As some people typed my email address into it, to request my friendship...

I am part of one social network that is more about professional relationships. As I got many contracts through this network, I am a happy paying customer and the benefits outweight the privacy problems.

Joining a social network that is mostly about private stuff is a no go for me. I just do not see a benefit in putting that kind of information into other peoples hands. I do not want my future customers to know that I am friend with 'Beer-Bong-Bob'. But as I just turned 30, I will listen to PG-13 and keep my mouth shut now. :)

</comment><comment><USER12> Can't you just disable it? Maybe I'm missing something though. [http://www.simplehelp.net/2010/04/22/how-to-reclaim-your- pri...](http://www.simplehelp.net/2010/04/22/how-to-reclaim-your-privacy-by- disabling-facebooks-open-graph/)

I mainly use Facebook to keep updated on family and close friends, and don't use anything besides status updates and some photos/videos. I don't see myself changing how I use it based on these latest changes.

Like Google, Facebook and privacy all depend on _how_ you use it, not the tool itself. Also, like anything other 3rd party app, I don't rely on it and would be happy to walk away from it at any point if need be. I currently doing that with Google search using duck duck go.

<comment><AUTHOR> My big beef is that it becomes a hassle to have to go in and opt-out every time Zuckerberg decides to opt me in to some new information-sharing service that I don't want to be a part of. So yes, you can disable it, but the trend seems to be to make it a convoluted process to disable these things, followed by new "features" in a few months that force me to jump through a few more hoops. It's just become more of a headache than it's worth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nope. I saw this coming on day one and never joined.

How else could you have expected Facebook to make money?

</comment><comment><USER14> The individual in a tribe of hunter-gatherers has a very different concept of privacy. In his/her world everyone pretty much knows everyone else's 'business'.

The whole concept of privacy is relatively new to humanity. This doesn't mean its not important. Its actually an emergent property of a scaled civilization.

Its an unavoidable situation there but, of course, in that case 'everyone' is a fairly small number.

The Internet is revolutionizing privacy and proximity for the FIRST time since the rise of organized agriculture.

This isn't going to be an easy transition and will require revisions in law, credit-creation and finance, governance and especially cultural norms.

I don't know how it will turn out but I suspect it will be a deal 'maker or breaker' for humanity's future development and the role and rights of the individual.

It's a true evolutionary landscape and its design whether arising by accident or intent will determine the nature of our future evolution.

How would hunter-gatherers run the world? (pssst... They Do!) [http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-would- hunte...](http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-would-hunter- gatherers-run-world.html)

The Problem in Scaling Altruism: Where's the Intelligent Life? [http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2010/04/problem-in- scal...](http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2010/04/problem-in-scaling- altruism-wheres.html)

On Social Energy, Enterprise & Expanding the Technology of Money [http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2010/01/on-social- energ...](http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2010/01/on-social-energy- enterprise-expanding.html)

Unhindered Speech and Association must be maintained as inherent qualities of this developing landscape. And the information inherent in this speech and association, if it is to have ownership at all...

Must be owned by the Commons!

The Individually-controlled / Commons-dedicated Account, I believe is an essential element necessary as part of this transition.

But I'm an anthropologist and not a computer whiz just trying to understand this new landscape and provide a suggestion or two...

<comment><USER15> Someone else (in some other similar thread that I've forgotten) pointed out the similarity to "the olden days" when everybody knew everybody else's business.

To which the reply was: Yeah, but you knew exactly _who_ knew your business. This new brand of everybody-knows-everybody's-business is entirely different because it's asymmetrical: everybody knows everything about me but I don't know shit about "them", who they are, where they are, how many of them there are, etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anybody else never join Facebook over privacy concerns?

<comment><USER17> I never have despite frequent requests, and not all automatically generated (at least by conventional criteria). I'm beginning to worry about whether people get that not joining Facebook could be a conscious choice rather than a mere oversight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A lot of people seem to share the same opinion about quitting Facebook but are hesitant because there aren't many better alternatives. Does this mean there's a market for a secure, more private social network? Maybe one where everything is completely private, unless you decide to make it public to other members.

If people want/need something like that it sounds like a fun weekend (or two) project.

<comment> loup-vaillant If you want an alternative that will never disrespect privacy, you will need to make it distributed. This is because the only way to control your data is to lock it up on your machine, or encrypt it.

I wonder if there are standards (protocols) related to distributed "social network".

<comment><USER19> <http://www.foaf-project.org/> is one of the main standards. <http://code.google.com/p/xoperator/> is a bit weird, but I think has some of the right ideas of the distributed SN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I joined Facebook this year for a class in Facebook app development. I never really wanted to join the network - like some of the posters here, I saw something like this coming and told myself it wasn't worth the investment to join Facebook.

After four months of using it, I've come to several conclusions.

1) Facebook is a huge timesuck. Time I used to spend reading on the Internet, or programming I now spent watching stupid videos on Facebook itself. What Facebook needs is a noprocras feature (but even then - the content isn't worth the time).

2) Related to point 1: I began to think that what Facebook really does is to use my need for connection to keep me returning to the site. And I didn't like that. It felt as if ... well it feels as if they're trying to use my friends for their benefit.

3) Superficial communication != valuable communication. There is no centralized discussion on FB, and your profile page tends to be this highly decentralized echo chamber. How many people, if ever, argue against your (bad) ideas on your very own profile page?

4) Privacy has always been and will always be an issue on a social site this big. It's too easy to mess things up.

And so, after four months: I'm quitting.

</comment><comment><USER21> Slightly half-considering it for the first time ever.

</comment><comment><USER22> I tried to quit last year and then my wife started an argument with me, rationalizing that people would think she's single if I quit. I'm still on Facebook, it's still completely useless, and and I still want to quit. However I need some ammo if I'm going to approach this subject with her again.

<comment><USER23> Let her create a fake husband account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I stopped using Facebook because it's useless. If I want to talk to my friends, I just msg them on IRC. Why bother with ads and "identity verification"!?

<comment><USER25> This is mildly sensationalist. Useless to you != useless to others. As an aside, I doubt most of my non-engineering friends know what IRC is (ignoring that IRC and facebook are two completely different platforms with different use cases).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Nah, I made a concious decision to open up my Facebook account "publicly" about 18 months ago. So in my mind it is just like my public facing blog (with a handy added address book).

Once you have it in your mind like that it is easy to remember not to post private stuff in there.

<comment><USER27> I also thought of doing that but I don't know if it's a good idea. Because it's not just up to you to not post private stuff. What about the private stuff your friends post about you on your wall?

On the other hand, limiting my profile also has only limited privacy benefits because my friends and family don't understand and can't be bothered to tweak fifty different checkboxes to get their privacy settings right. So anything I say or do on their Facebook pages is out in the open.

I'm wondering if it's even worth thinking about so much. Ugh.

<comment><USER26> About the only thing I do really limit is the privacy of things friends post on my wall etc.

In terms of other stuff they do (controlled by their privacy settings) I think you just have to be aware of what's going on. I've de-tagged a few photo's etc.

<comment><USER27> Oh I remember de-tagging photos once. It made me laugh when I realised Facebook was making me do _work_ and there was no end to this chore!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm definitely tempted to quit. I don't like the way Facebook is going for sure, nor do I like the idea of one company, a foreign one at that (I'm Canadian), having so much control and power over my digital identity. Though I fear I may be too addicted to quit.

</comment><comment><USER29> I was on facebook for a while. One day, I realized I was publicly linked to my boss, my colleague, all my x's and everyone I went to high school with. The next day, I deleted my account. I was never particularly interested in it in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER30> I signed once, I checked the settings and had a quick glance but didn't add people. After that I canceled my account and whit recent developments I think I will never again make a FB account.

If something like XMPP was made for social networking it would be awesome and if data portability was added it would be even better.

<will probably never happen>

Lots of independent social networks that are compatible with each other so that you only have to be a member of one but can still interact with everyone you wish to and can easily switch to another network.

<will probably never happen>

This open source project might be (or not) a good start.

<http://elgg.org/>

<comment><USER31> I'd go win might not. Last time I checked elgg does not scale well and the code is really REALLY awful as in not optimized and not conducive to customization. It is kind of a toy IMO

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've always viewed Facebook as a self-updating address book. I never got into all the other crap it offered and I loathed at their app platform when it was released years ago.

</comment><comment><USER33> I put my account in the delete queue a few days ago. I shouldn't have to keep an eye on HN and Valley blogs to find out that they've tweaked privacy settings _again_ and more of my information is "public."

Getting out is a whole lot easier than I thought. I had as friends on Facebook a lot of former high school and university classmates, as well as coworkers from prior jobs. Part of me was worried I'd lose touch with them, but then it dawned on me that the extent of our interactions was mashing "like" buttons on each other's posts -- for example, if one of them were in town, I probably wouldn't bother to catch up with them for a beer.

The people I actually care about, well, I can email, call them, or even tap them on the shoulder and say "Hey." Having to do that also makes me think twice about what I'm sending, and to only share with people the things that actually matter. Facebook's "news feed" makes it way too easy to share things that probably should be left unsaid.

And man, my productivity has skyrocketed since I don't feel compelled every hour to check my Facebook feed. The last couple days I've gotten lots more work done thanks to cutting out this huge distraction.

</comment><comment><USER34> Not deleted account, nor planning to. Just clicking logout button does it. Now, I just login once every 2 days to interact, also saves time.

</comment><comment><USER35> I quit Facebook late last year. I have no patience for the games they are playing.

Sadly, this seems to be the way of Web 2.0 sites: build an audience and ruin it by trying to make money with it. I've seen it with Myspace, Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, and Facebook. I really like Tumblr but I would bet that the same thing happening with them at some point in the future.

</comment><comment> loup-vaillant Not sure this counts, but I quit _Gmail_ over privacy concerns. My mail and my web site are currently hosted on a remote virtual machine on which I am root. But this is not enough. I eventually plan to use a _real_ personal server, one that will be locked behind _my_ walls.

Of course, I won't ever use Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'd like to, but everyone I know (almost literally) uses it. The feed really is a great feature. If I could get everyone I know to move over to Buzz or anything else with The Feed that isn't evil, that would be nice, but it's not going to happen. Facebook owns me.

</comment><comment><USER34> Shutting down FB account might be a solution to privacy issues, which can be easily solved by starting to use FB from something like TweetDeck. That's not big of a deal.

But, the mere fact that people are feeling "friction" from shutting accounts leads to a more profound problem here - portability of personal data on the cloud. For a 'social' web to happen in reality and for 'everything to move on cloud' to happen anywhere out of Web 2.0 conferences, this feature is required.

You can't shift 'everything on cloud' when 'everything' is tied to one privately held entity. This goes for every 'social' services provider out there. If I can change my cellphone provider, why not my social network provider?

</comment><comment><USER37> I want to quit but then where and how else can I keep in touch with the contacts on FB?

<comment><USER38> I found.. you don't. But that's not such a bad thing, because if you're associating with people who you wouldn't otherwise keep in touch with except for some stupid Web site, are they people worth keeping around?

<comment><USER37> I am not associating. Many of these are contacts from my school, college, internships. No all of them are on lickedin or such websites. It seems FB is ubiquitous....

You have a point though. Some of them ARE stupid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I quit around one and half years ago. I wasn't really drawing any value out of it.

</comment><comment><USER40> I started using it as soon as it was opened to high schools. I deleted my account around a year ago. I quit because of privacy concerns but also because it was a time sink, at it had really lost it's focus.

</comment><comment><USER41> I am. I'm done. Tried suicidemachine.org but that service seems to be spotty. Did not work twice and now apparently I don't have slots.

Will have to do it manually.. But I am going to do it.

</comment><comment><USER42> Yes, I really am. The only use I will miss if being able to contact a targeted group of people when I make my _own_ ads. Which is a sick reason to not want to leave.

But I feel as though my rights as a user of their service have been violated not just this time, but many more (the frequent privacy policy changes, Beacon, now Connect etc etc.)

It's bullshit.

(Plus keeping in touch with people is easier on Facebook, I suppose. And it's a sort of asynchronous chat toy as well, which is fun.)

</comment><comment><USER43> It is not what you post, it is what they post about you.

A friend of mine decided to give facebook a try and he was received with a warm welcome of "Bring the cocaine, snuffy is here finally!"

Closer to home, a cousin went to a bachelorette party and posted pictures of her and everybody doing their stuff, you know, sucking fake cocks and stuff. Totally inappropriate for the world to know, but they thought that was just funny.

See? you can't control what they post about you.

</comment><comment><USER44> I deleted my Facebook account yesterday. I quit Google search 2 years ago. With Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Github and Bing, I don't miss Google search much.

<comment><USER45> Since you dumped google, I'm curious if you've tried/have an opinion on DuckDuckGo?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I canceled my account this morning. I never had any information on there that I wanted to be completely private but I don't like where Facebook is going.

</comment><comment><USER47> I just went back into my profile and deleted all of my personal/bio info, and made sure my settings were as tight as I could make them.

Two older acquaintances were still able to find me, so success.

I should also point out that I use it mostly to keep up on family reunions, and classmates, etc. and frequent the site maybe twice a month?

And I have always considered it public, so I have posted accordingly. And chided my "friends" to do the same.

</comment><comment><USER48> Do you know what was the name of this project which lets you, with a firefox extension, post your facebook messages using PGP or something similar ? I can't find it again, still there was some buzz about that some months ago..

edit : this software was aimed at creating short life messages. After some time the data was deleted from the net.. It was using some P2P technology

</comment><comment><USER49> I just spent 30 minutes going through all my privacy settings and switching everything to "Friends only". It was time consuming, and given the number of config pages, I'm sure I've missed stuff. And there's still stuff visible on my profile.

I'm just so pleased I signed up with an alias. Only my actual friends know it's me.

</comment><comment><USER50> Nope. I've been a member since 2004, when they opened it up to my school just before my freshman year. I just keep in mind that Facebook isn't private and I can't rely on anything I put on it to be private. But even under the stipulation that everything I put on Facebook is public, it's useful to me.

</comment><comment><USER51> It wasn't a privacy concern for me. It was boredom. FB slowly became boring. I joined around the time when the poke was invented and FB was something new. Every time i logged in, i'd find something interesting to do. Doesn't feel like that anymore. It feels stale. There's no app for that.

</comment><comment><USER52> Thinking about it.

I think Facebook has peaked. It's bloated, ripe, and everything that can be extracted from it is being extracted.

(I may be wrong, and this is only a local maxima. That's also a disturbing thought.)

<comment><USER53> as much as I wish that were true, it seems like fb is still growing at a ridiculous rate (at least from what zuckerberg mentioned at f8)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link to delete your account. Deleting is different from deactivating; deactivating keeps all your data there. Deletion is _supposedly_ permanent. <http://bit.ly/chsPFo>

<comment><USER54> Real URL: [http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_ac...](http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Privacy is dead, and I (and most people) have very little to hide. What I do have to hide can be under pseudonyms.

Besides, I think Fb is doing a reasonable job allowing people to control their privacy settings. Most people don't mind being out in the sunlight.

<comment><USER56> There are a few issues with the "I have very little to hide" attitude. One problem is that the information you provide may not be what you want to hide, but the information that could be inferred from it may be problematic for you.

For instance, what if some financial institution computes a credit score based on the profiles of the people you are connected with and makes you pay more for a loan because you have some friends with a bad credit rating?

What if health insurance providers sift through your data to find out about your lifestyle and adjust rates accordingly?

What if a potential employer or their HR service provider computes some kind of loyalty/reliability/risk score based on lifestyle data you provide?

What if none of that is possible based on your current facebook data but when facebook gets acquired in the future their datasets are combined with other data about you?

All of the conclusions drawn from such analyses may be completely wrong. But they are nonetheless information about you and they may have an effect on your life. Was that the kind of information you were thinking of when you said "I have very little to hide"?

<comment><USER55> I don't see how you would have an expectation of that data being private when you put it on facebook. The whole point of facebook is to publish your identity, and you are a fool if you think somehow what you post to your friends will never get around.

And how does what happens to your data after an acquisition have anything to do with their current privacy policies? If that's you worry, there is nothing they could do - it's your choice to put data there.

<comment> loup-vaillant He wasn't talking about Facebook at all. He merely questioned the "I have little to hide" line of thinking. Also, if you sincerely think that privacy is dead, I suggest you see this video: [http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2010/feb/01/freedom- clou...](http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2010/feb/01/freedom-cloud- software-freedom-privacy-and-securit/) Pay particular attention to the points you may disagree with, and why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I'm not going to quit, I'm connected to my family on there. I just don't post stuff there, except for some family pictures and videos, which I can do from iPhoto. I post everything to my tumblr blog which reposts it on Facebook and Twitter so I never have to log in to FB unless someone comments. Also I work on apps that I integrate into Facebook so I'll use it for that.

</comment><comment> PG-13 I'd like to know the ages of the people "quitting" Facebook and how much you actually used it in the first place. Most of Hacker News is too old to actually use Facebook the way young people use it. You're just there so you can feel as though you're in tune with tech trends or whatever. You have never really used Facebook, which is why almost all the comments on here about Facebook are so bad. You sound like old people screaming at kids to get off the yard. If you were a real Facebook user (hundreds of photos documenting years of your life), you wouldn't be able to just quit like that over something like this. I seriously don't understand why anybody over 30 even bothers to write things about Facebook, something that isn't meant for them, and something they clearly don't understand.

Old wantrepreneurs on here are so bitter about Facebook's success. I remember someone giving career advice actually recommending Google over Facebook. You have to be completely out of touch to even think such a thing. Google is yesterday's news. They are a bloated company filled with talentless individuals, people who would kill for the chance to have the skills necessary to work for Facebook, but their brains just aren't good enough

If you're over 30, please stop posting your "opinion" on Facebook. Your opinion on Facebook is about as insightful as an 80-yr-old's opinion about the internet. Instead, you guys should be begging the real users of Facebook, i.e. people who actually understand social media, to explain these things to you so that one day, with significant effort and training, you might be able to understand it.

<comment><USER58> Don't worry about being downvoted with a throwaway account. The people downvoting are most likely over 30, paranoid as fuck, and have no hand in creating today's internet. These are the same people that gave me -4 for saying "Yahoo is a rotting carcass on the landscape of the web". I get a kick out of these people, and offending them, because they are _sooooo_ out of touch.

<comment> loup-vaillant Be careful with sarcasm, this is often taken literally. (You _are_ being sarcastic, right?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> In the internet only Facebook can quit you. All your data are belong to Zuck.</comment>


Show HN: I run a weekly newsletter for open source and linux sysadmins - <AUTHOR> https://www.cronweekly.com/ <comment><USER2> An archive, RSS feed, and the pages are simple. I skimmed through last four issues, and their content looks quite sensible. Nicely done, good work.</comment>


Large Scale Distributed Deep Learning on Hadoop Clusters - <AUTHOR> http://yahoohadoop.tumblr.com/post/129872361846/large-scale-distributed-deep-learning-on-hadoop <comment><USER2> Both this and Twitter Engineering's recent post[1] on HDFS make me wonder whether HDFS is something a team would reach for in 2015.

I'm starting to read into the technologies in this area (i.e., I have not used much of the Hadoop stack yet), and I haven't found a fundamental reason why one would not base their batch processing on S3 (or your object store of choice). Existing software appears to make assumptions about the storage medium being a local hard drive.

Much of the challenge of HDFS appears to be around scaling the NameNode, and provisioning capacity. S3 dispenses with these issues, and the only cost appears to be throughput.

If software like Spark was modified to have a much more native approach to S3, could HDFS be dispensed with entirely?

[1] [https://blog.twitter.com/2015/hadoop-filesystem-at- twitter](https://blog.twitter.com/2015/hadoop-filesystem-at-twitter)

<comment><USER3> Traditionally, using HDFS solved the data locality problem. Networks have gotten MUCH faster, though.

<comment><USER4> At every bigger company, teams wind up shipping a 128MB jar assembly to their 128MB data block, annihilating any locality gains.</comment></comment></comment>


Avoiding Walled Gardens on the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000898.html <comment><USER2> This just in, the blog people reject social networking. What, a website where you talk to your friends, not an audience? Madness!

Now, the vast majority of people who only wanted a blog to keep their friends and family updated on their life are a different story. They've all hit Facebook by now, or should have.

You know what I'm saying -- we're talking two different lifestyles here. "Well-known blogger" can be accurately used in a newspaper, but "famously prolific Facebook user" is still a phrase that could only come straight from The Onion.</comment>


Show HN: Hex – Art from files - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sacert/Hex <comment><USER2> Neat! I have a similar project for your code [https://commits.io](https://commits.io)

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a very similar concept and looks great in a frame. Glad to see others enjoy the same type of art ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> very cool</comment>


Pwd alias hell - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/hrj/2efd3f8f9b465e01fe09

<comment><USER2> This is purely the cause of the shell having a builtin pwd command that displays a path that is consistent with the argument to the "cd" command that was typed to enter the directory, not the actual path you're in. The shell does this to provide a consistent view for the user when following symlinks.

You can always type /bin/pwd to avoid this and you'll always get the correct path.

<comment><AUTHOR> > You can always type /bin/pwd to avoid this and you'll always get the correct > path.

Yes, but it affects other programs as well. See the `cat myFile` example in the gist.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What solution do you use for Rails3 & MongoDB hosting? - <AUTHOR>

I'm in the middle of writing a new app with Ruby 1.9.2, Rails 3, and MongoDB and am looking for some good hosting options. From what I've read, Mongo likes / needs a minimum of two servers for durability, so something in the cloud sounds like it might be the best option.<p>What do you guys use? <comment><USER2> Heroku with the mongohq add on. I don't have anything running with that combo yet, but that is the target environment fir the app I'm currently working on. Hoping to get it up in the next few days.</comment>


Text to speech software - how it really works? - <AUTHOR> http://download.searchforsoft.com/Audio-Multimedia/Speech/Verbose-Text-to-Speech-Software-79195.htm Verbose text to speech software limitations. <comment><USER2> Input text is first normalised, separated into syllables, detecting its stress, and converted into a sequence of phonemes:

<http://atrilla.net/data/files/micnlp09.pdf>

Then, a waveform generator creates the audible sounds based on this phoneme transcription (this latter part frequently differentiates the essential TTS synthesis technology: formant-based, concatenative, Hidden Markov Model-based, hybrid approaches, etc).</comment>


Things in Haskell which don't exist elsewhere at all - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1k3fq7/what_are_some_killer_libraries_and_frameworks/cbldpgy <comment><USER2> I've read most of LYAH, and I have no problem understanding mathematical concepts, but man, Haskell people truely don't know how to convey this "awesomeness" they keep talking about.

1\. Where do you use automatic differentiation? I've done machine learning, signal processing, etc., but never even heard of it until now. Why should I care? Your pitch should include that (especially when the wikipedia article doesn't really provide _real_ use cases).

2\. What's special about lenses? I tried reading [http://www.haskellforall.com/2013/05/program-imperatively- us...](http://www.haskellforall.com/2013/05/program-imperatively-using- haskell.html) but there's no summary of what this is about, and from the first paragraphs it seems like a Haskell workaround for setters and immutability. Again, I feel like the community is not pitching these things correctly. People like me start reading, don't understand the point of it all, and give up.

And I can go on... What is the target audience of these features (or Haskell itself)? Is it people like me, or is it more hardware validation engineers, automatic proof system developers, database people?

EDIT: If anyone is interested, edwardkmett has replied to me in [http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1k3fq7/what_are_som...](http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1k3fq7/what_are_some_killer_libraries_and_frameworks/cbm1ic6)

<comment><USER3> Lenses begin with getting and setting. Since Haskell is immutable, setting is a little different—it's a method of quickly generating a mutation function for a type. Lenses keep getting and setting bound together as a first-class value which creates the idea of it being a value representing a "focus" on a particular field in a complex, nested value.

Then you can compose these lenses together and retain these properties. You can also pick lenses which operate with different multiplicities from 0 to infinity. Finally, you can use their seemless connection to object isomorphisms to create a very general interface for working with various kinds of "similar" objects in Haskell.

At the end of the day you can write a first-class lens which represents getting and setting over a set of parameterized Map keys deeply inside of a stateful computation, mapping over anything that looks like a string, and viewing/modifying it as decoded JSON.

       obj . ix "aKey" . each . _Object . ix "3" . _Number .~ 4

might modify a record in a type like this

       IsString s => SomeState { obj :: Map s s }

where the string values of the Map have a JSON schema like

       {"1" ..., "2" ..., "3": <aNumber> }

<comment><USER4> But you haven't presented anything that is _special_ about lenses. For example, your lens expression would be trivially translated to this Python:

        for o in obj["aKey"]: o["3"] = 4

The OP:s point was that lenses seem like a workaround for Haskell's lack of mutable state.

EDIT: What I'm meaning is that to show lenses unique benefits, you would have to come up with an example in which the code is more succinct than the equivalent code implemented without lenses _in another language_.

<comment><USER3> But, that isn't anything resembling a faithful translation. It's non-first class, non compositional, only a "setter", lacks a decent error handling code (I didn't mention that, but it's built into "mistargeted" lenses) and depends upon parsing the JSON in some other step.

Lenses let you think of a JSON-encoded string as an actual JSON string without ever explicitly doing the decoding due to their close connection to Isomorphisms and "partial Isomorphisms" (called, non-standardly, Prisms here).

Furthermore, lenses don't really have anything to do with mutable state—they just happened to form a convenient wrapper for using the State monad, but that's really a coincidence.

Succinctness is difficult to grasp. It'd be a good exercise that I'm not going to try in an HN comment to even translate the entirety of the concept embedded in that one line into, say, Python. It would start to feel like an XPath implementation.

(Edit: Also, as usual, the whole typesafe thing. That Python fragment can lead to runtime errors. The Haskell one never does—using it inappropriately is simply impossible.)

<comment><USER4> Still, you haven't shown why anyone should be impressed by Haskell's lenses. It's like you do not understand that isomorphisms and first-classness is totally irrelevant to me and most programmers unless it leads to better code.

Here is a challenge for you or anyone else who loves lenses:

Take a small snippet of real source code you or anyone else has written and uses lenses and post it here. I'll then translate it into Python that has the equivalent effect. If the translation is impossible or is less pretty than the Haskell original, I'll award you $1000 internet points.

<comment><USER3> Let's say you've serialized a tree structure of versioned data as JSON. Branches are arrays and leaves are objects.

        data OTree = Obj Object | Node (Data.Vector.Vector OTree)

        instance FromJSON OTree where
          parseJSON (Array as) = Node <$> traverse parseJSON as
          parseJSON (Object o) = return (Obj o)
          parseJSON _          = fail "OTrees are objects and arrays"

        instance ToJSON OTree where
          toJSON (Node as) = Array (fmap toJSON as)
          toJSON (Obj o)   = Object o

Now _some_ of these objects have keyed "version"s which are arrays of semantic versioning numbers. Write a function which decodes and re-encodes a new tree with each of these semantic versioning numbers incremented at the patch level. If the version isn't in that format, just ignore it.

In Haskell you'd want to write a generic traversal over the objects of the tree useful whenever you want even access to the contained elements.

        eachObj :: Traversal' OTree Object
        eachObj inj (Obj  o ) = Obj <$> inj o
        eachObj inj (Node as) = Node <$> traverse (eachObj inj) as

And then here's the finale, the actual lens code specific to the task.

        upgrade = _JSON . eachObj . ix "version" . _Array . ix 2 . _Number +~ 1

<comment><USER4> That's a contrived example and not "real source code." Furthermore you are leaving so many symbols undefined that it is hard to see what is going on. Where does 'traverse' come from? Nevertheless, here is how you would do it in python: [https://gist.github.com/bjourne/6219037](https://gist.github.com/bjourne/6219037)

<comment><USER3> It's extracted, not contrived. Updating nested attributes on a tree of objects as a nice one-liner. The most contrived bits were that I didn't use the built in tree type so I had to define more stuff explicitly.

Traverse comes from Data.Traverable but is exported with lens as lens can be seen as a generalization of traverse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The best thing that exists in Haskell and nowhere else I've found isn't a library at all:

It's the experience of grubbing around in unfamiliar libraries (in my case a database lib and a visualization lib), not knowing much Haskell and struggling to get the damn thing to compile. The _very first_ time I got the types to line up, the program ran and I had my timeseries graph from the database.

This is a magical, life changing experience.

Any other language I've used would have been many iterations of, "this is null", "you passed a string where it was supposed to be a list of strings" (looking at you python)! Now that I know it's possible, I much prefer to do my thinking up front, and know that there's a compiler out there that's got my back :-)

<comment><USER6> I used to think this too, but realised that it is not quantitatively different to me whether I spend the time getting something to compile, or spend the time getting it to execute correctly.

I tend to prefer dynamic typing these days as a lot of what I do feels easier to achieve when I can throw something together to test ideas without thinking about types, and then refine the idea based on actually using a cobbled together prototype, and I feel static typing often got in the way of that.

Especially coupled with Smalltalk style runtime inspection / modification on error (e.g. for Ruby I use "pry" which lets me drop into a shell anywhere in the program and modify or inspect state and then continue execution).

<comment><USER3> I think it's a genuine weakness of static types that they inhibit prototyping when you first begin. HM type systems tend to be liberal and powerful enough that once you learn them well they're easier to prototype in—but that comes with time.

In particular, type-driven-development is wonderful. You can write light, compiler-checked specifications of code you haven't bothered to write yet and see if your logic all typechecks even without implementation. I can run through lots of ideas that way very quickly since the only thing I have to produce is the high-level type skeleton of my program.

Then I just go through and implement it all.

It's a lot like test driven development except that your executable tests are much more lightweight and carry a strong sense of the logic of your program. If your tests don't hang together, you'll find out eventually. If your types don't hang together, your compiler tells you immediately.

<comment><USER7> This is a really interesting comment. It would be worth turning into a longer post with examples.

<comment><USER3> Put it in my queue. I'll post it here when I get around to writing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The entirety of that thread has some very interesting discussion ([http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1k3fq7/what_are_som...](http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1k3fq7/what_are_some_killer_libraries_and_frameworks/))

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow, that's awesome! Makes me really want to learn Haskell, something I have been putting off for far too long.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can write libraries in COBOL and then proceed to claim "these libraries only exist in COBOL, therefore COBOL is better than other languages", which is to me exactly what this post reads like.

<comment><USER10> That's pretty ungenerous of you. There are factual differences between languages, and Ed's list is full of illuminating examples. You've wandered into a conversation on /r/haskell between Haskell users about why they like Haskell. It's insane to expect them to be less excited or biased.

<comment><USER9> I'm not complaining about /r/haskell posters making pro-Haskell posts. I'm guilty of similar things.

I'm just not sure what it's doing on the HN front page, and I find the contents of the post lacking in terms of convincing outsiders into a favourable opinion on the language.

There's nothing wrong with such a comment on /r/haskell, but I think it's out of place here. I realize the fact that it is voted up to the front page proves that many people think otherwise, but when I last checked, people were allowed to voice contrary opinions on the Internet.

<comment><USER11> I haven't seen anyone trying to prevent you from voicing a contrary opinion, only people politely trying to explain to you that they feel you are missing an essential point of understanding. (OK, _I_ was a bit snarky, but it was on point)

<comment><USER9> You're right, I was a bit overreacting with the opinion bit, and slightly thick-headed in accepting the arguments of some of the other posters.

<comment><USER11> We've all been there. No one who looks at Haskell comes away unchanged. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I played with reflection in Ruby for a short time and found it really fascinating, until I realized everything got pathologically slow quite quickly - especially if you add one reflection effect on another.

All this stuff sounds cool. Is it fast and scalable?

<comment><USER10> The two things aren't especially commensurate. A lot of the fun of Haskell is type-level stuff, which is resolved by the compiler at compile-time. There are no direct run-time artifacts. Moreover, several of the things Ed talks about have to do with concurrency, which isn't even something you can do with Ruby. Speculative execution and STM both enable real multicore concurrent processing. Even if it did perform as badly as Ruby, without the GIL and with real concurrency it's in a better position. Adding complexity in the type level does have one major performance effect though, which is on compile time. Does it count as fast and scalable if the compile time reaches into the minutes? In terms of compilation time, Ruby will always beat Haskell, because it doesn't have any. This is a meaningful difference when you're trying to iterate rapidly on your webapp, but most of the web frameworks for Haskell separate out templating to help with this problem.

Most people eventually complain that high-performance Haskell doesn't resemble the Haskell we're taught to program. This is less and less true as things like iteratee-based I/O and really advanced libraries like bytestring and text displace older facilities, but it is still something to think about. Haskell tends to perform well by sacrificing lots of memory. This is why you see discussion about "space leaks" rather than "memory leaks" and whatnot. There are a lot of ways to address the problems that come up, but you need to have a strong handle on the way Haskell works before you can accurately diagnose and treat the problem. This is a significant barrier to using Haskell in production. It doesn't take long to acquire the expertise to throw Ruby into production. The road with Haskell is a bit longer and a bit more taxing, because it's so very foreign.

<comment><USER6> > several of the things Ed talks about have to do with concurrency, which > isn't even something you can do with Ruby.

Concurrency has always been possible to do with Ruby just fine. There's just been a limit on system level _threads_ until 1.9 (and there still is a limitation in terms of the interpreter lock). There's on the other hand nothing that has ever stopped us from multi-process concurrency, including using shared memory (though with the caveat that Ruby won't let us put Ruby objects there).

<comment><USER13> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6198068](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6198068)

Haskell allows you to run "green" or userspace threads in the millions, similar to what erlang and scala (akka) provide (and F#), with dispatcher designed to run i nthose numbers. So it's something like Celluloid, but I don't know how many people have used celluloid in production, in haskell the runtime's been well documented (Simon Marlow's oreilly book) and tested in heavily loaded systems.

<comment><USER14> Do note that the changes described in the paper to allow green threads in the millions won't hit GHC until version 7.8.1 is released.

<comment><USER15> You can use millions of threads in versions <7.8.1 as well, they'll just run a lot slower if they're all actively doing IO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are plenty of automatic differentiation libraries out there for C++, python, Matlab etc. Not sure how you spin that as a unique feature of Haskell.

<comment><USER3> The Haskell type system allows for avoidance of the perturbation problem (combining mismatched infinitesimals is a type error) for one.</comment></comment>


AT&T and Verizon want to manage your identity across websites and apps - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/09/att-and-verizon-want-to-manage-your-identity-across-websites-and-apps/ <comment><USER2> Meanwhile, the W3C is working on an open standard for simple public key authentication to websites: [https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/](https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/)

I'd much rather authenticate to websites with a key stored in my phone's secure element than I would with an auth service provided by my carrier.

<comment><USER3> Why can't this be done today? Back when startssl was a thing and giving out free ssl certs, they didn't have you authenticate with a username/password, they generated a cert that was stored in your browser and used that to authenticate you.

<comment><USER2> It can be done today, but the browser UX around X.509 client cert auth is poor, and especially setting up your browser to use hardware tokens is more than could be expected of a nontechnical user.

I don't know for sure why they decided to do something new rather than improving the UX of client certs, but what they came up with for Webauthn seems to work with pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The headline could have been rewritten as:

"Four companies that nobody trusts want to manage your identity across websites and apps."

Seriously from the T mobile data breaches affecting millions[1], to Verizon's injecting of X-UIDH headers[2], to AT&Ts work with the NSA[3] to the selling of location data by all four mentioned in the article, there is absolutely nothing trusty-worth about any of these companies. It's like cognitive dissonance. Maybe they could include credit monitoring by the 3 completely untrustworthy credit reporting agencies and the service would be feature complete in its' absurdity.

[1] [https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/10/01/t-mobile- brea...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/10/01/t-mobile-breach-may- have-exposed-15-million-records/73171066/)

[2] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x- uidh](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh)

[3] [https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy- hub...](https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hubs/)

<comment><USER5> I still trust T-Mobile more than the other two, despite the breach. AT&T and Verizon are NSA toadies. Maybe I'm näive but it doesn't seem like T-Mobile is so much in bed with the fed. NSA surveillance is a constant breach, no?

<comment><USER4> I don't think that T-Mobile turns over any less data though:

[https://www.cnet.com/news/t-mobiles-transparency-report- reve...](https://www.cnet.com/news/t-mobiles-transparency-report- reveals-352000-customer-data-requests/)

At any rate the bar seems pretty low in that group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I the only one who's terrified of giving control of my authentication to a carrier? They have had so many absurd security breaches. Not to mention it's so easy to walk into any store and get a SIM card for someone else's account with nothing more than a phone number. They rarely check your id.

</comment><comment><USER7> Resurrect the original promise of OpenID! I want this capability, but I definitely don't want it controlled by big companies, and poor stewards of consumer best interests at that.

</comment><comment><USER8> You mean like Google do already? See also this discussion from earlier in the week about automatically logging in to Gmail when you start chrome. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942252](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942252)

</comment><comment><USER9> For reference, this is an implementation of GSMA's Mobile Connect[1]

[1][https://www.gsma.com/identity/mobile- connect](https://www.gsma.com/identity/mobile-connect)

</comment><comment><USER10> So, yet another SSO options, but implemented by companies that are infamous for poorly-implemented software, screwing customers for a few more cents, and security breaches?

</comment><comment><USER3> seriously, why don't we he have a fido/u2f supporting simcard and phones that can expose it? what are the downsides? phone being hacked?</comment>


Ask HN: Can we add an "Outline" link for paywalls? - <AUTHOR> Since many online newspapers are putting up a paywall, or straight up blocking visitors from EU, I think it's time to consider adding or changing the "web" link that we see here in the comment page.
I know that it's used to search on Google for the same article with the intent to bypass the paywall, but time after time it failed me.
I'd personally love to see an "Outline" link which automatically redirects to the uncluttered version of an article using outline.com, which provides a great service. Or otherwise, a Chrome extension that recreate that just for HN.
At the moment I'm using a javascript bookmark, but whenever I visit the WSJ, it has the "GDPR-EU" wall that breaks the URL, so I can't use the bookmark to jump to the Outlined version.
Disclaimer: not affiliated with anyone, just an annoyed EU member. <comment><USER2> From [https://www.outline.com/dmca.html](https://www.outline.com/dmca.html):

> _If someone else might own the copyright to it, don 't submit it. Outline is > for reading pages that:_

> _1\. you own the rights to,_

> _2\. is in the public domain,_

> _3\. constitutes fair use, or_

> _4\. you have consent of the copyright holder._

> _If we find you repeatedly submitting copyrighted content, we will block you > from using our service._

As awesome as Outline is, I think HN automatically creating Outline links would eventually become problematic...

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd say it constitutes as fair use, as it's a modified version, and not just a copy of the original page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How about changing your javascript bookmarklet to do 'if on news.ycombinator.com, use the url of the first a.storylink'. That way it can be done from the comments page.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like to use this feature but constantly forgot its name, it was only until i had stumbled upon it in a furiously mal-termed google search that i once again found it and drilled its hyperlink into my brain.

i think that commenters have been pretty good about identifying paywalls and commenting with a link that outlines the doc to provide a succinct representation of the article

also anyone who is not familiar with the way outline works is you just type outline.com/<your-full-[http://-link-here>](http://-link-here>) and it generates an outline of the doc.

this is more than just useful for paywall articles i use it all the time to get rid of ads and other annoying stuff when i just want to "read" an article.

</comment><comment><USER5> Email the admins: email@example.com

<comment><USER6> Training us to do that is exactly how they maintain their control over the community. And it is about control. We're not allowed to ask for or say anything about HN on HN.

I used to feel how you feel, but after examining the reasons why it's like this, it's probably better to get in the habit of asking for things on HN itself. Not only was it like that in the old days, but pg even started an explicit feature requests thread where people could vote on feature priority.

I don't think something like voting is useful, to be clear. I'm saying that talking publicly about HN is step one in maintaining our own sense of identity as a community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You should try the existing Outline chrome extension. After you install it, whenever you go to a paywalled site, all you have to do is click the Outline button in your menubar/taskbar and it takes you to the Outline link for that article.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is outline.com entirely legal? Do we have a guarantee similar services will be available if outline.com goes down? Otherwise, de-GDPRizing and depaywallizing functionality is much needed in adblockers, or even a standalone extension.

Any kind of accept-before-read prompt should die a fiery death. They are making life impossible for those of us who browse in anonymous/incongito mode by default. If it's published via HTTP, it's mine to consume the way I choose and simply reading it has no legal implications on my part.

<comment><USER9> > If it's published via HTTP, it's mine to consume the way I choose and simply > reading it has no legal implications on my part.

I don't understand the connection between HTTP and entitlement. Can you explain why you feel that one implies the other?

<comment><USER8> It's the same type of entitlement that makes me free to listen to anything spoken in a public space. We can debate what is the public space in this case, is it a publicly discoverable or password protected URL etc. - case in which is not really "published", i.e made public. If it's legal for me to download it on my machine, then I should be able to read it and disregard any prompt (or setup my agent to so), it's clearly a non-binding contract.

<comment><USER9> Outline's servers are not a public space. The idea that discoverability by protocol implies ownership or a grant of license seems faulty.

With respect to Outline's terms, I'm not a lawyer, so I can't speak to whether they're necessarily legally binding. My _guess_ , based on how they're presented, would be 'no'.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure you fully understood the problem or that we are speaking about the same thing. Outline.com is a paywall bypass service that republishes original material found on sites like the New York Times. I expect this service to be illegal, I said so myself in the first post. Outline's terms are irrelevant here, they are the ones clearly breaking NYT's terms.

That being said, I went on a tangent and expressed a _political preference_ that any "Click to continue reading and sell your soul" prompt should be non- binding and functionality to bypass them should be added to browsers via extensions.

New York Times servers are not a public space but the Internet is widely recognized as such. A published article trying to force a legal contract as a result of simply downloading and viewing the text, on my private computer, via a public space, should be no more binding than email disclaimers. Again, this is a political position, not legal advice.

<comment><USER9> Sorry if I misunderstood. There's certainly a lot of room for discussion and debate about what terms are binding/enforceable and what aren't. Terms of service and automatic user consent are pretty legally wishy-washy concepts in general.

I understand the argument you're making, but I think it's not all that dissimilar to the argument a person might make about software piracy: that anything discoverable on the Internet becomes, essentially, fair game because it inevitably touches your private device. From a technical perspective, the argument's correct. From a moral/political perspective, I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between the two.

<comment><USER8> The software analogy is an interesting one. It is generally accepted that software, when ran on a computer, embodies a device or service that is fundamentally different from the same data simply displayed in an editor as computer code. Click-through EULAs are widely recognized and enforced by courts, quite the opposite of email disclaimers.

So in a sense, you do have the right to download any computer code you find on the internet, if legally published by it's author. You can print it out and study it's behavior and the author has no way to restrict that since they themselves published the information. But you typically cannot run it or modify it outside the license terms.

The distinction hinges on the interpretation we give to the data, and I guess that opens a fatal flaw in my argument: while a HTML version of the article constitutes a document that can be downloaded and read regardless of any disclaimers attached, a binary blob that must be run to deobfuscate the text is in effect a program. And since the hallmark of computers is their ability for general programming, it's quite easy for publishers to force you to run a program and accept it's licensing terms before providing the information you seek.

<comment><USER9> The technical and legal sides to this discussion are interesting, but I think they're really secondary to the moral side.

I think we can both pretty easily agree that paywalls suck. They're a short- term solution to a problem whose long-term solution isn't clear, and they're probably only marginally useful at that. I also think we can agree that the web is a interesting mix of a kind of quasi-public space and privately-owned space, and that means that discussions about what's 'fair' to access and what isn't are a bit nuanced.

Ultimately, though, regardless of the nature of the content — whether it's text, or images, or code — if a publisher pays to produce content and pays to host that content, does that publisher not have some right to control access to that content? The protocols we use to access it are open, and we pay to access at least some of the interconnects responsible for ultimately delivering it to our browsers, but that alone doesn't confer any access rights. HN, for example, could ban any IP address with which your account's been associated, at the server/proxy level, at any time, and without subverting that you'd have no real recourse.

Generally I feel that the existence of piracy suggests that there are merely under-served customers, and I think that applies here also. Publishers should be coming up with better ways to let users pay for content and try to add real value to that. _However_ , being denied access to the Times and so on does not make your life impossible, or even particularly difficult.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Founders - interviews with some of the world's finest entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.founders.cc/ <comment><USER3> I'm afraid this will be massively downvoted but self-censorship is wrong!

So I've heard of Gumroad (probably only from HN) but it didn't leave a big impression. I misconstrued sidebar.io (probably due to their generic .io domain) as having the distinction of breaking numerous websites of late (until I manually permitted their javascript) but then realised actually they were some kind of random design linksite - not the culprit in question - <USER2> weren't even having that impression.

Perhaps I'm missing something but if the systems created by these people are supposed to be a contribution to anything greater than the founders' own pockets then I am missing it. I don't mean to downplay the work these people have put in to whatever it is they built, or the success of raising some money, but honestly: is this something to emulate? Silly-Valley 2013: a sad state of affairs.

Still a good idea for a book, and probably full of interesting tales.

<comment><USER4> "is this something to emulate?"

Regardless of whether it is worth emulating, clearly many people want to achieve some sort of financial success (i imagine the "entrepreneurs" in the ebook made some money already), and this book caters to that crowd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looking at the list it appears all you have to be to be an "entrepreneur" or a "founder" is release some code you wrote, create you own domain (ending in .io usually it appears) and have it be moderately popular.

Looks like I'm an entrepreneur and all this time I haven't been calling myself that ad nauseam like everyone on here. All those years wasted. sigh.

</comment><comment><USER6> These guys have some big names on this interview thing apparently. I cant wait for it to drop, should be really cool.</comment>


Introduction to Swift Intermediate Language [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH-qIKOoKgA <comment><USER2> Happy to answer any questions if there are any - the slides are based on [https://speakerdeck.com/alblue/open-source-swift-2-under- the...](https://speakerdeck.com/alblue/open-source-swift-2-under-the-hood).

The other Meetups at Swift London (if you're in the London area) are listed at [https://www.meetup.com/swiftlondon/](https://www.meetup.com/swiftlondon/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice, I was hoping you'd show up. Did you do any perf testing with SIL? Can it get to C speed?

<comment><USER2> Performance wasn't the aim of this presentation so it wasn't what I was focussed on. But it's instructive to play around with functions to see what's generated under the covers. For adding two numbers together, for example, it can boil down to just a few x86 instructions. Since it compiles down to IL/IR there is a lot of common optimisations from the LLVM/Clang tool chains that are inherited for free. I would expect to see the performance improve over time too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone here have any experience with using SIL? I'm particularly interested in what speedups I'm looking at if I go the SIL route. My use case is using this in internalRenderBlock and if it's possible to use SIL instead of the weird Swift -> ObjC -> C++ dance that Apple uses in their AUHost example

[https://developer.apple.com/library/content/samplecode/Audio...](https://developer.apple.com/library/content/samplecode/AudioUnitV3Example/Introduction/Intro.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> To be noted: this was from May 13, 2016 and discusses Swift 2.x

Swift 3 was released September 13, 2016.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think that the SIL has changed that dramatically. Or am I wrong?

<comment><USER2> The principles are still the same; some of the APIs that are called have been renamed or had argument types changed but the SIL is mainly unchanged.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please subscribe my youtube channel [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZpB9h3PwNE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZpB9h3PwNE)</comment>


Traditional media groups hope to benefit as brands pull ads from YouTube - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/019e1608-0d88-11e7-a88c-50ba212dce4d <comment><USER2> google cache [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UIIYWl...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UIIYWliuo9QJ:https://www.ft.com/content/019e1608-0d88-11e7-a88c-50ba212dce4d+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=nl)</comment>


To Write Better Code, Read Virginia Woolf (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/opinion/sunday/to-write-software-read-novels.html <comment><USER2> It's a bit odd that the author justifies a liberal arts education by focusing on two liberal arts majors (music and philosophy) who shone as software developers _based on their skills at abstraction_. I do not think this is something that the humanities in general teaches better than computer science (or, better yet, math).</comment>


A Note to Our Adult Content Creators – Patreon - <AUTHOR> https://patreonhq.com/a-note-to-our-adult-content-creators-abef831380e3 <comment><USER2> "Most of all, I hope you understand that nothing has changed except our stance on four areas of content: bestiality, incest, sexual depiction of minors, and suggestive sexual violence."

"We have never allowed pornography or sexual services on Patreon"

What?

Either they are anti porn and adult content creators wouldn't use the service anyway, or they are pro porn and changed things that would affect some legal adult content creators (i.e. suggestive sexual violence)</comment>