How Do You Buy the Magna Carta? (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2013/12/11/so-how-do-you-buy-the-magna-carta-billionaire-david-rubenstein-explains <comment><USER2> > How Do You Buy The Magna Carta?

Just like any other precious arts and documents, at an auction. Title does not fit the article well.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems strange and wrong to me that the document be housed in America and not in England.

<comment><USER4> There are multiple copies of the Magna Carta, I've seen one in Lincoln Castle.

But yeah it does seem weird, as some of it is still law. I don't know the technicalities, but if you have a law, but no written record of the law or of it being agreed, is it still law?

<comment><USER5> There is a written record of it .. it's just not an "original".

(For those who want to read the statutes "with the patches applied", as it were, Blackstones have done the work: [https://global.oup.com/academic/content/series/b/blackstones...](https://global.oup.com/academic/content/series/b/blackstones- statute-series-blsb/?type=listing&lang=en&cc=gb) ; I remember there was something like one sentence of Magna Carta still in effect, but I can't remember which!)

<comment><USER4> "it's just not an "original"."

So how does that work. If we sign a contract and I lose mine, it doesn't cease to be binding, but good luck trying to convince a court of it's contents.

Is it the same here? Could someone turn up with the 'true' Magna Carta and rewrite the law? Or does it exist as a kind of fossil in other laws?

<comment><USER5> Objects with text on them aren't magic; we have no shortage of records of what it says.

It's very rare that contract disputes involve a serious disagreement over what the contents of a written contract were. Litigants submit their version under penalty of perjury. Mostly questions involve either verbal contracts or questions of whether additional material (specs, advertising copy) is part of the contract.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: PossibleEmail – Ruby gem to find someone's email address - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/the4dpatrick/possible-email

<comment><USER2> Does this still work since the Rapportive plugin was shut down a couple weeks ago?

Edit: why the downvotes? The Rapportive plugin was shut down and this gem uses it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup it still works. I just tested it as a sanity check.

<comment><USER2> Awesome. I was in the process of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is not the first post I've seen about this sort of email mining, and certainly see its value (though I've seen some pretty distasteful "look and my business hack! blogposts in the past of the subject).

I wonder at what point this will become so rampant that some sort of pushback happens. If there is pushback, I wonder in what form it will happen and what recourse people have.

Regardless, thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER4> This is very close to the Python Rapportive API library I have out on github: [http://github.com/jordan-wright/rapportive](http://github.com/jordan- wright/rapportive).

<comment><USER5> Does it still work? I'd be surprised if they shut down the official plugin but kept the API running for the benefit of unlicensed clients.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes still working

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It looks like you're missing the middle initial, which a lot of businesses use and also easy to permutate through only 26 letters.

</comment><comment><USER7> Love the concept! I will be using this for sure.</comment>


Souper: A Synthesizing Superoptimizer - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.04422 <comment><USER2> Here is the source code:

[https://github.com/google/souper](https://github.com/google/souper)

The paper mentions that Souper links against LLVM 3.9, but a recent commit on GitHub states that dependencies have been bumped to LLVM 5.0, the most recent version.

<comment><USER3> The Souper source has been available and Regehr has posted on his Embedded in Academia blog several times about Souper.

[https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1192](https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1192)

[https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1252](https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1252)

But then a paper is a whole nuther thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just by reading the HN title I was 90% sure this had to be John Regehr. The man's a monster!

</comment><comment><USER5> The abstract is not very clear, if you ask me. I would have expected at least an indication of the usefulness of this optimizer in terms of resulting speed, or an indication of how far we are from using this technique in production settings.

<comment><USER6> _If we can automatically derive compiler optimizations, we might be able to sidestep some of the substantial engineering challenges involved in creating and maintaining a high-quality compiler_

I think it's clear, but you may have assumed it's about something it's not? It's about saving effort in writing an optimizing compiler. Have you ever looked at how many and how big LLVM's optimization passes are?

The automatically derived passes may not result in code that's as fast as the hand-written passes. I assume they would have mentioned that if it were the case. But they take less effort to develop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Score one for me misreading titles again. I was looking forward to finding out what a Soup Optimizer could do for me. Sounds life-changing.</comment>


Understand HTTP3 in 5 Minutes - <AUTHOR> https://www.jesuisundev.com/en/understand-http3-in-5-minutes <comment><USER2> Reading about QUIC (the basis of HTTP3) a little more, it looks like it is attempting to replace TCP entirely. It does this by making the reasonable assumption that all connections should be secure (via TLS), and so it merges layer 7 TLS protocol down and integrates it at the transport layer. It also has its own flow-control and reliability mechanisms, like TCP. If QUIC "wins", I don't see an obvious use for TCP.

<comment><USER3> TCP remains for cases where speed is required so TLS is skipped.

Instead of application layers, I'd assume evolution on transport layers, so next to plaintext TCP there would be less reliable faster transport protocol, secure but slower transport protocol and possibly others.

Similarly, is UDP a zero cost layer? If not, one could perhaps get more speed from working directly with IP.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why can't the UK Gov petition site scale to use? - <AUTHOR> So throughout the day, there has been a huge rush on the petition to stop UK exiting the EU, and we've seen a lot of gateway 503 errors (the default nginx page), and "down for maintenance" pages - and I was wondering if anyone could shed any light as to how it has been so hard for them to cope with scaling...
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/241584
Article about the crashes:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-petition-revoke-article-50-theresa-may-deal-extension-a8832851.html
Traffic has been about 2000 users / minute I believe, and users each get sent an email, and then have to click a confirmation link - and you can see the current number of signatories so I guess they are probably looking at more like 4 - 5000 users peak across a minute so hundreds of thousands an hour roughly.
They also have JSON api that various people are querying `curl https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/241584/count.json`
What I really want to know is, why could they not just "turn up the juice"? <comment><USER2> I struggle to say why not. I just checked and it's hosted on AWS Ireland which should have the capacity to deal with any level of traffic.

I noticed that dig-ing it returns two IP addresses, indicating an elastic/application load balancer is in use as opposed to a CDN. That means every request is being served off their own instances so that's not great.

A CDN would certainly help; you can serve all paths from the CDN cache with a 1s TTL except the pages where you post to the signature page.

But why could they not add more instances to the pool? Possibly the data or cache layer was overwhelmed; I'm sure the application layer can scale just fine.

And why didn't they design it right in the first place? This level of interest isn't normally seen so they probably never did any load testing scenarios of this type. They do have their own development team but I'm not sure what sort of budget they have.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That all sounds about right. I suspect it's true that they could have done better but I guess they were just taken off guard.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Updates from the team themselves:

[https://twitter.com/HoCpetitions/status/1108666678718681088](https://twitter.com/HoCpetitions/status/1108666678718681088)</comment>


"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" - <AUTHOR> http://capitalismmagazine.com/2002/08/franciscos-money-speech/

<comment><USER2> This isn't an article, this is just copy-paste from Ayn Rand.

And at that, it's copy-paste of a character in one of her objectivist-utopian fanfics beating up a strawman based on a misquote of 1 Timothy 6:

> But godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into > the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food > and clothing, with these we will be content. But those who desire to be rich > fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires > that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For _the love_ of money is _a_ > root of _all kinds of evils_. It is through this craving that some have > wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs. > > (1 > Timothy 6:6-10 ESV)

The subject in view there is one of Christian priorities and contentment; for a Christian, faithful service to God must be held of much greater value than wealth, and therefore contentment with what God provides is an essential characteristic of a devout Christian.

It's not "EVERY EVIL ON EARTH COMES FROM MONEY"; indeed, the idea is far afield of Christianity. In the view of Christianity, every evil on earth comes from the sinful heart of man, whether or not money is even involved.

Rather, the actual statement -- the one Rand misquoted to distort into an easier strawman to fight -- is that a wholesale devotion to procurement of wealth is itself a wrong that leads to many other wrongs.

The really interesting thing, I think, is to see how the _actual_ quote and its context _does_ apply to Rand's strictly-utilitarian view of others.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ayn Rand? Really? There's a reason her "objectivism" isn't discussed in philosophy courses. It's nonsense conservative rhetoric that has nothing to do with the academic discipline. John Oliver summed it up nicely: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8m8cQI4DgM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8m8cQI4DgM)

<comment><USER4> _There 's a reason her "objectivism" isn't discussed in philosophy courses_

Actually, this isn't true. In the fall of 2010, I took a philosophy course (at the University of Wisconsin - Madison) for which we had to read _Anthem_ and _The Fountainhead_.

...

 _conservative rhetoric_

Also, I don't think you have a good grasp of Rand's ideas if you think she was a _conservative._

Rand was an atheist and pro-choice:

[http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/god.html](http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/god.html)

[http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/abortion.html](http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/abortion.html)

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry you had to go through that. Those are "superficial" social issues compared to the deep underlying ideas she had: an obsession with limited government and unfettered capitalism, individual selfishness and a conscious denial of empathy for minority and underprivileged classes.

Her overt claim to cut through "contradiction" was itself directly contradicted by the cult of personality that arose around her. She was defensive and lashed out many times when people questioned her results and was just in general a sloppy thinker. She built her "philosophical" edifice to support her personal political ideology which is simple, deluded and inexcusable libertarianism at heart.

<comment><USER4> I don't agree with a single thing you've asserted.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size? - <AUTHOR> https://inessential.com/2020/03/27/the_ios_and_mac_markets_are_the_same_siz <comment><USER2> Apple fan/dev here: he's an old school Mac influencer who got famous for writing the first popular Mac RSS client, and blind to the effects his particular narrative would have on those numbers - it's the same 30,000 people who are hip to Mac blog culture, not independent discovery on two separate platforms

<comment><USER3> The Venn diagram of people who use BBedit and NetNewswire is roughly a circle.

<comment><USER4> What am I missing about BBEdit? I've tried to get into it a few times and it just seems archaic and weird and less capable vs even my emacs setup, let alone something like Visual Studio Code these days.

<comment><USER5> I'm a fan of vim, BBEdit, and Visual Studio Code, but "less capable than emacs" describes just about every text editor.

While I'm using VSCode a lot more these days, I still like BBEdit a lot. It's a Mac-native programmer's text editor that manages to remain performant on large files.

I think part of the problem is that in order to make a good programmer's text editor, you need a large community of people who're able and willing to make good plugins for it, and any text editor with a userbase smaller than "half of all linux nerds" isn't going to have enough engineer hours put into all its per-language tooling. Visual Studio Code manages to attract enough developer attention to get people to work on compatible language servers and whatnot, but the granddaddy of all Mac text editors can't attract that much attention.

Plus, I get a _lot_ of mileage out of multiple cursors. Way more than I'd have expected ten years ago.

<comment><USER6> > Visual Studio Code manages to attract enough developer attention to get > people to work on compatible language servers

Not to nitpick an otherwise good argument, but the _whole point_ behind LSP and language servers are that they are completely editor-agnostic.

A language server which enables great functionality in VSCode should be able to provide the same for other editors too.

<comment><USER4> I know what you mean but VSCode tends to have the benchmark front-end implementation for any given language server in my experience. Not how it should be, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Yes, the iOS app has more downloads, and it got there in only a few weeks. > But if the iOS market were so much larger than the Mac market, you'd have > expected this to happen within a day or two of launch day.

Based on what logic? Everything about this article feels like it's based on vague and incorrect assumptions.

<comment><USER8> I feel like being on Hacker News sometimes warps the context of a personal blog post.

If I put out a tweet that said "Huh, my app got about the same number of downloads on iOS and Mac, I think the market's about the same for certain types of apps" would you say my tweet is full of vagaries and incorrect assumptions?

<comment><USER9> _sometimes warps the context of a personal blog post_

That's true but those blog posts end up making poor HN posts. This one is very short, contains a little bit of data and would not have been hn-noticed other than for the deliberately provocative title which then becomes the central topic of the HN discussion. People familiar with the author/blog don't have any trouble recognizing their chain is being playfully tugged; on HN it's just a bombastic one-liner sitting on the front page, demanding rebuttal.

A lot of tweets that are perfectly fine tweets make bad HN posts for similar reasons.

<comment><USER10> I've had my personal blog be linked on HN without my knowledge and the comments damn near made me stop writing altogether. Everyone assumed I wrote the post for them to read it, when in reality I just wrote it for myself and someone else submitted it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't know about that... I think the only conclusion you could draw from this might be that the market for iOS and Mac _RSS readers_ are almost the same size. You might even be able to stretch it to say they are the _same_ market.

<comment><USER12> I wouldn't even draw that conclusion. NetNewsWire is very old school with an old fan base, and outside its existing fan base I don't think it's particularly relevant today (sorry). I doubt a user new to RSS or new to RSS reader on Apple platforms today would land on NNW.

(I'm a longtime Reeder user.)

<comment><USER4> The new NNW is a total rewrite which started off as a different app.

<comment><USER8> Kinda. The original NetNewsWire was made by the same guy behind the current NetNewsWire. It's just that there was a period in between where NetNewsWire was owned and developed by someone else.

<comment><USER13> Same guy. 100% different project. He required the NetNewsWire name well after the start of this new open source RSS reader.

<comment><USER8> If it does the same thing and has the same name and creator, is it really a different project? Many software releases are actually complete rewrites under the hood.

The only reason what became Net News Wire 5 originally had a different name is because NNW was owned by BlackPixel at that point.

<comment><USER4> >If it does the same thing and has the same name and creator, is it really a different project?

Yes? I don't even understand how this is a question.

>The only reason what became Net News Wire 5 originally had a different name is because NNW was owned by BlackPixel at that point.

From the post announcing the new name ([https://inessential.com/2018/08/31/netnewswire_comes_home](https://inessential.com/2018/08/31/netnewswire_comes_home)):

>You probably know that I've been working on a free and open source reader named Evergreen. Evergreen 1.0 will be renamed NetNewsWire 5.0 — in other words, I've been working on NetNewsWire 5.0 all this time without knowing it!

There's no evidence there is supposed to be continuity between the projects other than the name changing. You can say it's old school but the entire thing is written in Swift to modern UI standards. Not sure what more you could ask for.

<comment><USER8> > Yes? I don't even understand how this is a question.

Well that's where we philosophically disagree I guess. To me, version 10 of Mac OS is still the continuation of version 9 of Mac OS, even though they're fundamentally different systems under the hood.

<comment><USER4> >To me, version 10 of Mac OS is still the continuation of version 9 of Mac OS, even though they're fundamentally different systems under the hood.

Sure, and it carries over certain parts and leaves out others. Substantially similar? I'll buy that. Arguably the same thing, ontologically? I think that's a lot harder to prove, which is what the OP I replied to was saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> RSS readers are a very specialized market. Around me, only techies and nerds have heard of it. Mobile Natives haven't and are using FB/I/Twitter instead (sad !). So this boils down to th enerd market on iOS and MacOS is the same size. I'd go one step furter: it's probably not only the same _size_ , but, simply, the exact same.

</comment><comment><USER8> > And, given that Mac apps are less complex to write than iOS apps these days, > a Mac app could be more profitable than an iOS app.

And you can charge more for a Mac app.

</comment><comment><USER15> > _given that Mac apps are less complex to write than iOS apps these days_

Do you agree HN?

<comment><USER16> I write both: iOS during the day and macOS at night. iOS is significantly less buggy and has less legacy baggage than macOS. iOS has some features that macOS doesn't, so there is more to learn. I spend a _lot_ less time working around platform brokenness on iOS than on macOS. macOS lets you do a lot more than iOS in ways that are unmaintainable (e.g., private APIs), which helps you create accidental complexity for yourself.

Both platforms have a long tail of little-known behaviors (such as accessibility features) that make it hard to create well behaved applications. But iOS mostly just works (once you know which features are toxic and avoid them), while macOS's brokenness has completely metastasized.

<comment><USER17> I'm curious which features you would advise a dev to avoid in iOS, because their problems, i.e. toxicity. I'm getting more into iOS programming and it would be great to know some pitfalls on the roadmap.

<comment><USER16> Anything added after iOS 6 is the cheeky answer, but it's not totally wrong either. Auto layout is incredibly hard to debug; it's great when it works right, though, fwiw. The audio APIs are a garbage fire (equally on both platforms, at least!) Mapkit has a lot of sharp edges if you try to do anything more than Apple envisioned, which is true of a lot of iOS and macOS APIs. View controller transitions are a mess, but they may have fixed the bugs by now—I've stayed away since being traumatized by them five years back. The Metal shader compiler is an absolute shit show of bugs on the Mac, but is better on iOS. Core Bluetooth has caused me pain (just doesn't work sometimes). Stringly types objective c-isms like KVO. In app purchases are a mess (I'm told, haven't used it myself). CoreData might look like a good idea but you will live to regret it if it's an important part of your app. UITableView is really powerful but also gets complex fast, with legacy baggage showing up when you try to get fancy (like auto layout and dynamic row height). The security API is hard to use correctly, also on both platforms.

Mostly though Xcode is the worst piece of software I've ever used, besides Wind River's IDE and Windows ME.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The way I understand it is that you can reach roughly the same amount of users on both marketplaces, which goes to show just how horrible discoverability is on the iOS store.

</comment><comment><USER19> >News reading is probably more of an iOS thing than a Mac thing in general

I think that is where the assumption gone wrong. News Reading /= RSS. I mostly consume Social Media on my Mobile. Or easy to read, digest, bite-size information. Easily hoping on and off in the timeline. My RSS feed is none of that, for me it tends to require more focus and longer time to digest. Hence I never do any RSS reading on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER20> Markets for RSS app developers^

</comment><comment><USER21> Any iOS app has a ton of competition within its category for a many-times larger audience. Any macOS app has very little competition for a tiny audience. 36k downloads can mean that you've captured a larger audience on one platform than the other, and that seems more reasonable than the conclusion that the audience sizes are the same.

</comment><comment><USER22> Discoverability is horrible on the iOS App Store. I have looked for a good RSS reader on there in the past and only been served shovelware.

I found out about NNW from DF the other day. Even after using and installing it, it is nowhere to be seen when I search for RSS.

Apples broken App Store system surfaces cheap crappy apps. Apple wants users to make impulse purchases so they can skim 30% off the top. It's a bad experience and is doing tremendous long term damage. Steve Jobs would be pissed.

<comment><USER23> > Steve Jobs would be pissed

Discoverability on the App Store has _always_ been horrible.

That, and App Store performance (search, page load, etc) are high on the list of things that baffle me most about Apple.

These are not hard problems to fix. There is no incentive to not fix them. Customers are suffering. FTFAS.

<comment><USER24> > There is no incentive to not fix them.

I think there is an incentive not to. If you buy Apple hardware, you are stuck with these stores. They know you will complain but ultimately comply and accept.

<comment><USER25> That makes no sense. Wouldn't Apple want you to download as many apps / spend as much money on new shiny things as possible?

I think it's just incompetence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> You gotta control here for variables, hon.

</comment><comment><USER14> Actually, when Apple launched the Airbuds, I computed that it was very likely the AirBuds would generate more profit for Apple than Mac hardware.

IIRC assuming 70% profit on the Airbuds and 30% on the Mac (because lots more R&D, lots more support, lots more warranty, lots more dev...), a 30% attach rate made the Airbuds more profitable.

<comment><USER27> # Air Bud

* Budget $3 million

* Box office $27,771,629

# Air Bud: Golden Receiver

* Budget $11 million

* Box office $10,224,116

Air Bud: World Pup, Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch and Air Bud: Spikes Back are direct-to-DVD movies, so we don't know about their box office performance, sadly.</comment></comment>


You don't need (db) transactions - <AUTHOR> http://www.sage42.org/2016/04/01/you-dont-need-transactions/ <comment><USER2> Yes, you really do need transactions.

\- 5-6% slower is a small price to pay for correctness. You should be able to "get back" that 5-6% somewhere else.

\- This is an exceptionally simple example. What if there are multiple updates, conditionally executed?

\- What if your cleanup code fails?

\- What if you have a more complex example and your correspondingly more complex cleanup code fails?

\- What if your cleanup code for failed cleanup code fails?

\- How are you going to write more complex code, with multiple updates conditionally executed, if concurrent activity is changing some of the data you are relying on while you are working on it? In other words, if you bothered to write invariants, they might not hold, even if your code, running in isolation, maintains those invariants.

\- Are you giving up on triggers? Triggers may generate updates that aren't even visible in your code. How are you going to back those out?

<comment><USER3> This article was just an April Fool's, relax :)

<comment><USER2> OK, he got me. He just sounds too much like people who say similar things on days other than April 1.</comment></comment></comment>


Have I embarrassed my supervisors by solving a problem a PhD student couldn't? - <AUTHOR> http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/66820/have-i-embarassed-my-supervisors-by-solving-a-problem-that-a-phd-student-in-my-g <comment><USER2> This highlights a weird quirk of the academic model. It shouldn't matter who solved the problem; as long as the problem is solved.

Since everything is individual reputation based, you can effectively 'steal' someone's research. I'm all for a meritocracy, but this is pretty weird.

OTOH, understanding the politics and what's going on in general as an undergrad is very confusing and stressful. Who knows what the reality of the situation is?

<comment><USER3> I'd disagree that it doesn't matter who solved the problem: there are real- world implications across the board. I agree the _most_ important thing is that knowledge is advanced, but to relegate the "solver" as an unimportant fiction seems disingenuous.</comment></comment>


Luvit – Asynchronous I/O for Lua - <AUTHOR> http://luvit.io <comment><USER2> Once you have this callback-based approach at a relatively stable level, it would be interesting to then take advantage of Lua's coroutines. IMHO Lua has one of the best implementations of coroutines in recent languages, and adding libuv to that mixture could be dangerous (in a good way).

<comment><USER3> I also agree this is a very powerful approach. If you'd like to see it in action already you should check out [OpenResty](<http://openresty.org/>). It's a platform for doing Lua directly on top of nginx. Each request can run Lua from within a coroutine, and and you can issue nginx subrequests which block Lua code but don't block the sever. See [ngx.location.capture](<http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpLuaModule#ngx.location.capture>) and [ngx.location.capture_multi]([http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpLuaModule#ngx.location.capture_mul...](http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpLuaModule#ngx.location.capture_multi)) for issuing multiple in parallel.

nginx's subrequests can do just about anything with the right modules, from database queries to HTTP requests. Effectively turning nginx into your event loop. It's a very interesting idea.

I've just started using it, but I'm excited to make something with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am one of the maintainers of luvit. There is a meetup in SF on December 6th about it if you are in the area[1].

Also, I wrote a blog post about luvit after a talk I gave at Open Source Bridge which might be helpful in providing some context[2].

[1]: <http://www.meetup.com/lua-devs/events/89091842/>

[2]: <http://ifup.org/2012/07/03/luvit-nodes-ziggy-stardust/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Keep up the good work philips! Thanks for the links!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the "node.js' awesome architecture" is referring primarily to its event- oriented/asynchronous architecture, Tcl has an incredibly robust event- oriented mechanism[1][2] for those interested in playing with it. Looking forward to seeing what shakes out in this arena. Culturally, Tcl has been heavily event-oriented[3] for a long time, so it'll be interesting to see what others chose to do with it.

[1] <http://www.beedub.com/book/2nd/event.doc.html>

[2] <http://wiki.tcl.tk/489>

[3] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=399670>

edit: footnotes

<comment><USER5> Some people also suggested I remind that Tcl has coroutines[1] and a very solid threading model as well[2].

[1] <http://wiki.tcl.tk/21446>

[2] <http://wiki.tcl.tk/1235>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> With Lua JIT being one of the fastest dynamic language implementations and having none of the 'ugly parts' of Javascript, the project sure sounds promising. Less than one-tenth of Node's memory usage makes it even better.

</comment><comment><USER7> Lua seems to be a bit of a sleeping giant in web development so it will be interesting to see what becomes of this. Momentum is vital, this is something node.js has in spades which is resulting in a very polished and robust product, great ecosystem and wide adoption. That will be the hardest thing for luvit to replicate. Good luck!

<comment><USER8> Probably you'll see even more in the coming months. With Redis support and even nginx. This could be huge!

And the language looks nice!.

<comment><USER9> I am expecting some momentum too once Nginx and Redis Lua support both grow together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One thing to keep in mind, this is not the Lua most people are familiar with. Yes the language is the same, but the module system is completely different to be more like Node's. I was disappointed when I first tried it but I understand the reasons.

</comment><comment><USER11> The question here is if luvit is 2-4 times faster then node.js with "hello world" because it implements much less functionality then node.js?

<comment><USER12> This is besides the point. Judging platforms using trivial benchmarks is utterly useless.

Also, I think they shouldn't have made it the third sentence anyone reads about their project.

<comment><USER11> Yes and i was seeing the first comment to emerge here that went "uh yeah, lua is sooo fast and lean, the software will be soo fast as well" which may just be not true at all :P

<comment><USER4> The speed claim should probably be replaced with memory numbers. We are using luvit on a project because it uses much less memory than node.js and yet allows the team to use a familiar programming model.

Right now our project weighs in at about 4.5 MB RSS with statically linked in openssl. :)

<comment><USER9> Comparatively how much memory was Node.js using?

<comment><USER4> 28MB - 35MB depending on the GC cycle IIRC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> <https://github.com/richardhundt/luv> <https://github.com/connectFree/lev>

</comment><comment><USER14> We're using Node.js as an example of something good?

Did we collectively forget everything known about concurrency once web apps got big or something?

This is embarrassing. I should switch to embedded or something.

<comment><USER15> Agreed - the Lua community should really focus on coroutines instead, since it actually has them, unlike Javascript. Coroutines are way easier to debug than callbacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "In initial benchmarking with a hello world server, this is between 2 and 4 times faster than node.js." <\- Is this true? Does this mean the interpreter is faster than V8?

<comment><USER17> Yes, LuaJIT is faster than V8.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How does Luvit compare to Zed Shaw's Tir [1] framework? They both seem to have the same goal.

[1] <http://tir.mongrel2.org/>

</comment><comment><USER19> personally i was surprised node.js wasn't node.lua in the first place

<comment><USER20> Apparenly Ryan Dahl considered Lua, but he rejected it because "Lua is less ideal but a lovely language - I did not like that it already had a lot of libraries written with blocking code. No matter what I did, someone was going to load an existing blocking Lua library in and ruin it."[1]

[1] [http://bostinno.com/2011/01/31/node-js- interview-4-questions...](http://bostinno.com/2011/01/31/node-js- interview-4-questions-with-creator-ryan-dahl/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> node.js has an awesome architecture?

I was hoping the "about" would, if not go into depth, at least explain wtf they thought the awesome parts are? No such luck.

<comment><USER2> <conjecture> the biggest unique part of node.js's architecture seems to be libuv, which is an abstraction and portability layer for event-driven I/O: <https://github.com/joyent/libuv>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> And luanode? <https://github.com/ignacio/LuaNode>

</comment><comment><USER23> Very interesting project.

Is there any list of what all parts of node.js have been implemented till now?

<comment><USER4> You can dig through the tests to get a sense of what has been implemented. TLS, HTTP server/client, filesystem bindings, dns, etc are all working.

I have been trying to figure out what to use for docs and it seems that some markdown files and jekyll are what most recent projects have settled on: redis, yeoman.io and node.js.</comment></comment>


How to implement your own Google Plus Feed - <AUTHOR> http://www.eqiqe.com/2011/07/05/feed.html

<comment><USER2> Is there an RSS Feed for Google + Stream?

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I know, no.</comment></comment>


Pogue bends over backwards to fight in support of Apple - <AUTHOR> http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/professional-video-editors-weigh-in-on-final-cut-pro-x/

<comment><USER3> Actually, I think he provides a pretty awesome rosetta stone for those upgrading. It's not perfect, as he acknowledges, but it sure helps a lot of people who make the transition.

<comment><USER4> Yeah! This is great journalism and what blogging is all about.

On the one hand, you have a bunch of upset film editors complaining about the upgrade with their laundry list of complaints. Unlike every other journalist in the industry, who just report the list, Pogue actually studies each and every complaint and reports on whether it's actually valid or not--from a technically adept position--and concludes that he understands why people are upset but that a lot of their claims are debunkable.

<comment><AUTHOR> _and concludes that he understands why people are upset but that a lot of their claims are debunkable._

I'd argue that he does something far different. He spins the claims. In some cases, as noted in the comments, he seems to react to the wrong issue or provides solutions that aren't adequate.

It's just odd that as a reporter my first inclination wouldn't be to diminish the outrage of professional editors, but rather to fully understand them.

He took tweets and composed a list. But it doesn't appear that he actually said, "OK, let me follow-up with people at Sony and NBC and understand these issues and write a post detailing the issues and getting a detailed response from Apple". It appears he took the tweets and worked on trying to debunk OR downplay the issues. To me this is advocacy. Which I might expect from John Gruber (although honestly, I can't find a post of his even with this much effort in advocacy) but not from a journalist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> And read the comments too. If Pogue was an employee of Apple I'd be proud of him for fighting so hard. As a journalist at the NYTimes, its kind of embarrassing for him and the Times.

<comment><USER5> I really don't understand this sentiment. Pogue has access to insider information that he's sharing with interested readers. People _want_ to know the answer to these questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> His final words on the subject (from the next blog post):

"Having read through hundreds of comments from professionals, both civil and uncivil, I'm now convinced: Final Cut Pro X may indeed be ready for the future. But for professional video editors, it's not yet ready for the present."

</comment><comment><USER7> Priceless: "The information here comes from consultation with Final Cut Pro X's product managers at Apple."

</comment><comment><USER8> This guy really doesn't understand what all the noise about FCPX is and what film and broadcast practices are. In that regard, I really do not understand why he wrote that article at all. It's as if I wrote an article on organic chemistry since I once read about it on wikipedia. I wrote about what FCPX vs FCP means to me here: <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2695610>

<comment><USER9> I don't understand why all these professionals are upset with Apple about FCP X. Do Not Upgrade(R). Stay on FCP 7.

Your linked post seems much more down-to-earth and level-headed than the complaints I keep seeing everywhere. If all these professionals would hold off purchasing the new version (and I suppose they will with all the negative feedback from those who have already purchased), then Apple will feel the repercussions in lack of sales.

<comment><USER8> _I don't understand why all these professionals are upset with Apple about FCP X._

i think it's a combination of two things. First, obvious lack of pro features we need - even the basic ones. Second, Apple/FCP development/release cycles were known to be really slow and lacking in feature compared to competing products. This amplified the lackluster release that is FCPX IMO, since - <USER2> presume - lots of FCP guys felt let down by Apple, expectations were high, delivery was below low.

 _Do Not Upgrade(R). Stay on FCP 7._

On the other hand, people will stay on FCP7, of course. But, if you've read my post you'll remember that productions are budgeted and organized well in advance, and people are buying/will soon buy new pipelines for future products. Apple is not selling FCP7/Studio anymore, so people immediately start looking in other directions - even if they don't jump the ship right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I honestly can't fathom what the problem with FCP X is. If there really are things missing, stick with FCP7 and keep an eye on FCPX updates. And if FCPX has everything you need, upgrade.

I've got a few years video editing experience under my belt (less and less in these days unfortunately). I'm not amateur, nor would I be comfortable calling myself a professional, but from where I'm sat, FCPX looks like a huge step forward. I'm willing to be a guinea pig for a little while if it's for genuine, radical progress.

</comment><comment><USER11> From my perspective it seems like Apple dropped FCP and is using the iMovie codebase. I don't think it is a matter of dropping Ancient technology more one of cutting production costs.

And the "Apple plans to have [that feature] in a future version" is a long standing practice... in a future version they will implement it, and then in a later version they will get it fixed so it is usable, etc.

From experience, I'd wait till FCP X.2 or something... when they actually get stuff complete and working.

</comment><comment><USER12> >recognize that there's no obligation to switch from the old program yet,

This is the whole takeaway of the article. As an iOS dev who still has Xcode 3.X for some clients, I am thinking "wtf are these _professionals_ DOING swapping to a newly refreshed apple software product. Use the old one until the new one is better!"

</comment><comment><USER13> I thought blatant editorializing in the title was frowned upon here.</comment>


Ask HN: The Primers on different subjects - <AUTHOR>

While studying Computer Science I've collected a set of different primer CS books. SICP is however considered to be <i>the</i> book among CS students (I agree with that). But as a curious guy who enjoy to be stimulated intellectually - I would love to know the primers/classics in the following subjects:<p>- Architecture - Philosophy
- Psychology - Medicine - Physics <comment><USER2> There was a metafilter thread a while back that asked a similar question. Here's a summary of the books listed (with a link to the original thread):

<http://www.septivium.com/b/2009/05/07/mefi/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Ironically, I have a Ph.D. in Physics, so I will have trouble recommending a decent primer. ;)

You can't go wrong with Feynman's stuff. But his _Lectures_ really are notorious for being the books that physics grad student _wish_ were the standard primers, rather than books that are known to be easy for beginners to learn from. On the other hand, if you're gonna get lost, getting lost with Feynman is always more fun.

I've had good luck so far with the Very Short Introduction series -- specifically, the one on quantum mechanics didn't offend me too much, which says a lot. (Once you've actually learned a bit of real quantum mechanics the popular treatments will tend to drive you to drink.)

[http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Theory-Short-Introduction- Intr...](http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Theory-Short-Introduction- Introductions/dp/0192802526)

If you're looking for intellectual stimulation I wouldn't go toward medicine, per se. For practical medical skills I've been thinking of dabbling in first aid and EMS classes, but for intellectual stuff what you really want is biology and chemistry. I think it's been long enough since I last plugged _Molecular Biology Made Simple and Fun_ on HN, so let me recommend it again:

[http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Made-Simple- Third/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Made-Simple- Third/dp/1889899070/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258927191&sr=1-1)

It's corny but the science is solid, and it is so much lighter, more readable, and cheaper than _The Molecular Biology of the Cell_ , which is a classic text and a book that I still intend to read someday, by god, whenever I have something like three entire months of spare time and a very solidly designed reading desk. [1]

Incidentally, have you looked at the online courses you can get for free these days? The other day on MIT Open Courseware I found an intro biology course taught by none other than Bob Weinberg and Eric Lander:

[http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Biology/7-012Fall-2004/CourseHome/...](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Biology/7-012Fall-2004/CourseHome/index.htm)

It's a bit tricky to listen to in the car, or even to watch, as the slides for this particular class are hard to see and some of the topics are necessarily visual. But, still, these guys are star professors for a reason.

\---

[1] Or when the Kindle version comes out. MBoC is a book designed for that big Kindle. If I tried to read the print version in bed I'd probably crush myself to death.

<comment><USER4> The Feynman lectures on physics is great:

<http://www.feynmanlectures.info/>

A really enjoyable read is Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman. It chronicles some of the interesting bits of his life and he led a very interesting life at that. (Worked on the bomb, Did a lot of his research in strip clubs, Lockpicking the file cabinets where they held the top secret info on the bomb just to show them that the security was poor, etc...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For philosophy, I recommend _A History of Western Philosophy_ by W. T. Jones. It's a good overview, providing both extensive quotes from primary sources and good summary/analysis of the material.

A little less sure for physics, but The Feynman Lectures are classics.

<comment><USER6> Another vote for The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Probably the closest thing to "the" textbook on physics out there.

<comment><USER7> The Feynman lectures are notorious for being very popular among readers who already understand the physics, but difficult for those learning the physics for the first time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> With regards to physics in particular (my specialty), I think it's important to understand what part of physics you want to learn, and in what depth.

If you want a good, basic introduction to mechanics and E&M, I would point you towards Serway. The problem is that Serway is a _very_ basic book, and not really written like physicists think.

A step up from Serway is The Mechanical Universe.

The best intro physics book on E&M for physicists is Purcell.

The Feynman Lectures are great, but you have to be willing to devote serious time and effort to studying them. Especially if you're new to physics, and thinking like a physicist.

If you want another step up past the Feynman lectures, and you're willing to devote a serious amount of time to it, the Landau and Lifshitz series is incredible, though very advanced. If you can make it through all of those, you're among a rare group indeed.

</comment><comment><USER9> Perhaps Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond would be a good book to pick up.

Although it doesn't directly apply to any of the subjects you listed, I think that knowing a bit about world history is a good way to make connections in the philosophies of different areas.

<comment> barry-cotter Don't. Read the _10,000 Year Explosion_ instead[1]. Criticism of Diamond [2].

[1]<http://the10000yearexplosion.com/> [2]<http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/03/ggs>

<comment><USER10> Actually, read both. The contradiction shows how history isn't some dead thing set in stone, but a field created by people with ever-changing (often clashing and very ideological) interpretations of the past, alternating with attempts to tie those elaborate interpretations to the evidence available. (And sometimes, new evidence shakes it up...)

_The Past is a Foreign Country_ by David Lowenthal is a decent book about how historians interpret and rediscover the past. Really, though - read quite a bit, read primary documents, read attempts to synthesize them, and try to draw your own conclusions. I'm not sure I'd recommend any book in particular. (Also, history is often the most interesting when you get really specific. I'm particularly geeked about the history of medicine, but that's me.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For architecture I found 'A History of Architecture' by Bannister Fletcher to be a good start, but my copy is very old (1943 edition) - so try elsewhere if you want to include modernism from the outset. I'm told it's a classic.

<comment><USER12> Re Architecture - Herman Hertzberger's Lessons for Students in Architecture teaches you how to see/think as an architect does. Was the most important book I read in arch. school. It's a very personal, and generous, tour through the buildings that have been most influential to him; he points out specific moments and moves in these buildings. It's brass tacks. [http://www.amazon.com/Herman-Hertzberger-Lessons-Students- Ar...](http://www.amazon.com/Herman-Hertzberger-Lessons-Students- Architecture/dp/9064505624/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258941304&sr=1-1)

And another vote for Pattern Language. Take it out of the library just to see how the thing is written, won't take long to see why software folk cite it.

great post morphir, thanks -

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The Timeless Way of Building (and A Pattern Language) by Christopher Alexander is a great architecture book that was influential in computer science. Interdisciplinary books like this are a great way to connect the dots.

<comment><USER14> "How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built" by Stewart Brand. I've given away at least five as gifts.</comment></comment>


'Blockchain' is meaningless - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/7/17091766/blockchain-bitcoin-ethereum-cryptocurrency-meaning <comment><USER2> Cryptocurrency, welcome to AI's long nightmare.

AI has forever had buzzword-complaint terms. Consider "Agent", which describes a very specific thing (namely autonomy), but that didn't stop everyone and their dog outside the field from calling their software a "database agent" or a "compiler agent" or whatnot, equating "agent" with "program". Indeed there's an entire non-AI _field_ called "Agent Based Modeling" \-- of which I am a participant -- which completely misunderstands the term. So AI gave up and switched to "Intelligent Agent", which was unfortunately an even _more_ buzzword-compliant word. Now we started seeing "intelligent graphics agent" or "intelligent login page agent". Finally in the late '90s AI moved to "Autonomous Agent", a word straight from the Department of Redundancy Department. But it worked! Nobody outside of AI seems to use it: my theory is that most people don't really know exactly what autonomous means.

<comment><USER3> I mean... "crypto" !!! Can you imagine what cryptographers had to witness every day for a couple of years now, while the term was increasingly skewing towards a completely misleading meaning?

<comment><USER4> It's like if people involved in:

\- ATMs

\- eCommerce

\- Foreign intelligence and signals

or any other similar field where crypto is essential started calling themselves 'crypto'. Yes, these field use crypto, but no, they're not crypto. Just like cryptocurrencies aren't crypto.

This is crytpo: [https://cr.yp.to](https://cr.yp.to)

This is crypto: [https://crypto.stackexchange.com/](https://crypto.stackexchange.com/).

Things that use crypto are not crypto.

<comment><USER5> The meaning of words change when the rest of humanity takes it for their own. Claiming "crypto are not crypto" will just leave you behind as the guy with his fist in the air cursing the world.

Nuclear. Hacker. Patriot. Rubber. The audience matters. Besides, I doubt that any cryptanalyst would mind writing out cryptography any more than they'd mind writing out TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256.

<comment><USER4> I'm stating crypto is cryptography. There's not multiple cryptographies as far as I'm aware so 'crypto are' doesn't make sense.

And yes, words change over time, but in that case I can just refer to (all) cryptocurrency as 'Bitcoin' since that's the common definition. In fact it's far more popular to refer to cryptocurrency as Bitcoin than it is to call that 'crypto'. Short version: this one isn't settled yet.

How did nuclear, patriot and rubber change?

<comment><USER5> Nuclear was a branch of physics, then became a weapon, then became a US senate procedural change "going nuclear". Patriot was an anti-government rebel, then a pro-government supporter, then a missile, then an act to boost government and corporate controls within digital content, and sometimes an American football player. Rubber was a tree, then a commodity, then a condom. "A rubber".

<comment><USER4> Nuclear still means to do with nuclear energy: it being used as a simile doesn't change that meaning.

'patriot' means someone who stands for what is perceived to be American values. A missile being named after it doesn't change that.

Rubber is more interesting and perhaps a better comparison 'are you wearing a rubber?' during sex or 'when the rubber hits the road' in a speech, or 'do you have a rubber' during an exam.

So lets let's say someone says they 'specialise in rubber': it seems reasonable to believe they mean the material: they don't mean condoms or tyres or erasers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The blockchain hype is crazy.

My favorite truism that I see people spouting is that Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies are) is worthless, but blockchain is a huge innovation.

Little do these people understand that the true innovation is Bitcoin's proof of work as a consensus mechanism with the economic incentive of mining. Most of these "blockchains" are just distributed databases, which are not trustless, decentralized etc.

<comment><USER7> Yeah it's really weird to me because while you can do cool things with blockchains, on their own they're just a data structure. Without a trustless, decentralized, and permissionless consensus model it's basically just a big git repo. The blockcahin data structure, a tree of blocks of state changes, is not at all a recent innovation. And not something that would typically get hyped by the average non-programming related media.

<comment><USER8> When people use the term blockchain they don't just mean a chain of state changes, they mean one that is backed by the sort of decentralized consensus model you described. The nomenclature isn't ideal, but the convenience of having one word to describe a somewhat complex topic wins out.

I mean even the Wikipedia article on blockchain treats it this way [1], mentioning the consensus model in the initial blurb, and asserting that Satoshi invented the blockchain.

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

<comment><USER7> "Distributed ledger" [1] is a far better term for here IMO. If there's quibbling about "distributed" or "decentralized" then just change those terms as appropriate for the system under discussion.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> git has been using a blockchain for the last 12 years, since long before Bitcoin:

Each commit includes the hash of its parent commit. These commits form a chain. Changing the contents of any past commit would break the chain. Each user of the repository keeps a copy of the blockchain on their PC, and they can fetch new "blocks" from any other peer with `git fetch` or `git pull`. The consensus model is based on human review of the underlying code; humans get to decide whether to include a block in their version of the repository.

<comment><USER8> Common usage of the term blockchain implies a trustless, distributed consensus model. Even the Wikipedia article on blockchain references this in it's opening blurb, and asserts that Satoshi invented the blockchain [1]. Google trends also shows that the term practically didn't exist prior to widespread recognition of Bitcoin (even if you adjust the window to hide the recent spike, it was virtually unused) [2].

It's not the best nomenclature in the world, but that's just what it has come to mean.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain) [2] [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=blockcha...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=blockchain)

<comment><USER9> > trustless, distributed consensus model

Still sounds like git to me. The main difference is that Bitcoin's consensus model is fully automated, whereas git's relies on humans making decisions on which commits to include in their copy of the repo. (Though I suppose "trust" can indeed be one factor humans use when making such a decision.)

<comment><USER10> > The main difference is that Bitcoin's consensus model is fully automated

Except when it isn't. For example, the DAO "hack" resulted in humans overriding the automation to roll back history to bail out certain "investors". Or all the bitcoin forks. Or the fact that bitcoin mining is largely done by about three mining groups in China.

So Bitcoin is "trustless", but really believing in bitcoin involves every bit as much trust (or dare I say, faith) as any other thing in your life does.

> Though I suppose "trust" can indeed be one factor humans use when making > such a decision.

Watching the bitcoin/blockchain hype-train has shown to me that humans require trust to thrive. To thrive you need to trust that you have a stable government, that you eat breakfast cereal doesn't contain lead, that you can walk past 99.99999% of people without getting stabbed.

Take away trust and suddenly the world get massively more expensive. Transaction costs go through the roof. You have to personally inspect every aspect of your breakfast cereal maker and all their vendors (eg: the folks that made the fertilizer used to grow the grain (don't want toxic chemicals), the hygiene of the employees operating the production line (don't want piss in your cereal),etc ). If you don't rigorously verify everything, you'll get fucked and die. In bitcoin this happens all the time - you can't trust _anything_ in bitcoin--you can't trust your wallet maker, the printer used to print a paper wallet, the exchange you use, the software you use, the OS you run on, you can't trust any of it. Any break in the system _will_ result in total loss of your bitcoin (and then you'll be called a moron by other bagholders because you didn't follow all 231 "simple" steps required to secure bitcoin)...

In short, society can't exist without trust. Bitcoin and the blockchain are attempts to remove the need to trust each other. The result is a cumbersome, non-scalable, deliberately inefficient design that _still_ requires human trust to function. Which is why I personally think they are worthless technology in search of a problem. Every problem they try to solve still requires human trust, which renders their use pointless... Might as well just use git. It is far more efficient, can handle vastly more data, and doesn't require more electricity than many countries use in order to operate.

<comment><USER11> This is sort of a strawman. No one is saying that trust should be removed from society in general. Bitcoin proponents think it's desirable to have a way to store and transfer money without having to trust a single party. Anyone who has had Paypal freeze their funds or had a customer request a chargeback after receiving service could tell you why that might be desirable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not meaningless. Saying Blockchain is meaningless is like saying the web is meaningless or the internet is meaningless. Just because you either don't understand it or you feel it's too broad does not make it meaningless.

Blockchain is a distributed ledger that guarantees consensus without any central party. It has many other properties, like making the transactions public in most cases, and many other important things that are different from centralized databases and non public databases we have been using for the last 30 years.

<comment><USER4> I don't know why you're being downvoted. That seems a reasonable definition of blockchain, in much the same way one could give a reasonable definition of an array as a sequence of items.

The article's premise that 'The term blockchain is misused and frequently misunderstood' (which is true) means 'Blockchain is meaningless' doesn't hold water and this is very typical for a Vox technology article.

<comment><USER13> I think gp's definition is still too broad. Consensus is not an inherent property of blockchains, for example. You can make blockchains without any consensus at all, or with some central authority prescribing reality. A blockchain is simply a kind of data structure, like a linked list or a hash map or an array.

<comment><USER14> Exactly. Is "blockchain" just the data structure, or is it the data structure + the protocol for communication + the software to validate it?

Another example might be bit torrent. I personally wouldn't classify bit torrent as just the data structure. I would say its the data structure, the protocol and the end clients. However if someone used these technologies to create a different format and a different protocol, I wouldn't think of it as bit torrent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _In general, if the transactions are gathered together in blocks, and it is blocks that are secured on the chain using cryptography, and it is designed to be tamper-resistant and produce immutable records, the system qualifies as a blockchain_

That works for me.

<comment><USER7> "designed to be tamper-resistant and produce immutable records" is really the only thing important here as far as most people are concerned. The part about chaining blocks of data together is an implementation detail that may or may not last long term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Blockchain" means a 394% surge in your stock price:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-27/what-s- in...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-27/what-s-in-a-name-u- k-stock-surges-394-on-blockchain-rebrand)

<comment><USER17> It also potentially means trouble with the SEC:

[https://www.investopedia.com/news/sec-may-crack-down- firms-u...](https://www.investopedia.com/news/sec-may-crack-down-firms-using- blockchain-name/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Blockchain" has come to designate a very well defined concept: any technical and financial construction designed for speculative investment in unregulated securities out of reach of traditional authorities, usually having a very shady, deflationary or ponzi-like economic structure and strong money laundry potential.

There is nothing fundamentally novel in distributed databases or their application in finance, we knew how to build "blockchains" since the 70`s. Satoshi's proof of work chains were the first anonymous implementation and that's what started the "crypto revolution".

<comment><USER19> I am of the same conclusion, however, the dreaded blockchain has those that are true believers. They will cite the Estonia example and they will cite Wikileaks and how that show was able to be kept on the road thanks to Bitcoin payments that were provided when Visa and their ilk in 'fiat land' decided to take their payment methods away. They will cite a land registry in some poor African country and tell you how good it is that their evil government cannot take the 'peasants' land away.

If that is not enough to suppress your questioning of blockchain they will also roll out the commerce examples, e.g. the Walmart supply chain or whatever it is.

You will be told about some of these '541t coins' (as you call them) in venerated ways, as if the goals of their founders put the efforts of everyone from Mother Theresa to Elon Musk in the shade as far as noble ambition for humanity is concerned.

It is like they are trying to fool ninety percent of you for ninety percent of the time.

Maybe you work in some computing discipline that is tediously dull compared to the parsnip science that is blockchain. Perhaps you are a small cog in supply chain management or maybe you are at the cutting edge of some new 3D printing technology that is revolutionising something important, e.g. dentistry. Up until now you have felt that you may have been pleasing your clients and delivering value not just to your company but to the wider world. You think deeply about any conceivable way that blockchain technology could revolutionise things for you. Or maybe do what you are doing already but better because of the magic blockchain.

Even though you know your sector inside and out and your industry pretty well, your mind draws a blank. This is despite your code being used in many different parts of business applications. Your only conclusion is that there is no use whatsoever for blockchain in what you do.

The blockchain bore who has not spent 'a career' doing some useful industry thing will be able to declare that you are just not getting it. Clearly your mind is just too limited, you are old in the head and unable to grasp what blockchain is about, how it works and how it is going to change everything. If you can't even see one use with all that stuff you know and work with then clearly you have not understood what blockchain is all about.

By now you have also had time to think about the examples of blockchain use presented by the blockchain bore. With Wikileaks it was all a scam, it conveniently kicked off the Arab Spring, confirmed a few things we knew already, led to the Assange sideshow but lead to little change.

Plus how much does it really cost to host a few web pages? £200000 a year in hosting fees? What fools they were to sell their bitcoinz!

So what remains?

As you say, gambling on unregulated securities. Paying for illegal things online is the second use for the dreaded blockchain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The world "blockchain" is not really meaningless. Originally, a blockchain was a cryptographically chained chain of blocks in a proof of work system. It is still used that way, but it is also repurposed by other marketing schemes of many cryptocurrencies.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think we all agree it's some for of "secure" ledger. Otherwise yea, it's not a super well defined term. Regardless it's obviously over hyped and buzzed. Git for example could be called a blockchain if you really wanted to.

</comment><comment><USER22> > The term has become so widespread that it's quickly losing meaning.

I mean, that's how language works, right? Words mean things at certain points of time and then over time those things sometimes change and new words appear to better distinguish between the new things. Or words get contextualized within a specific industry and take on different meanings depending on your perspective.

Such an evolution does not mean a word is "meaningless" it just indicates you'll have to provide more context in order to communicate your idea, which, again, is how language works.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Blockchain" is a data structure, a pretty well defined one. The buzzword is basically a synonym for "distributed (, decentralized?) system." Buzzwords arr usually annoying and misused. Object-Oriented Programming as practiced isn't really what was intended by the term. Memes with cat pictures are only vaguely a subset of Dawkins' memes. "The Cloud," ugh, let's not even.

</comment><comment><USER24> The killer app of blockchain is people trading coins in and out speculating on altcoins [https://www.coingecko.com/en](https://www.coingecko.com/en)

</comment><comment><USER25> Well, at least less meaningless than the widely used word "Economy" representing our financial system of waste, where consumers have to keep buying stuff to keep the system intact.

</comment><comment><USER26> While the general gist is true, so far you could separate the buzzword uses from the non-buzzword uses pretty well by checking whether or not they use an article before the word "blockchain". Though this bit then kind of worries me:

> _Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies have entered the mainstream > discourse, but they've also been joined by a concept that is widely > circulated, but poorly understood: "the blockchain" or just "blockchain."_

I fear they are learning...

<comment><USER27> I honestly can't tell from context whether the article is a sign of understanding. To be blunt, I'm not sure I can tell for people who talk about "(the) (I/i)nternet" either, and I met some of those who invented it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anyone remember newsweek title "Internet? bah" around 1995?

<comment><USER29> The internet is a communication platform that allows to send messages and share files from millions/billions of machines in a global network. A simple definition that explains it's capabilities, something blockchain lacks.

<comment><USER28> a blockchain is an immutable ledger that keeps transactions transparent and untampered. can be used for all money transactions and also for asset ownership and log transparency by governents.

It is very simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Well, not meaningless ... it can mean whatever you want, and it will not be strictly wrong.

<comment><USER31> I think that is the point in the article; it is used in many different ways so simply saying you're using the blockchain doesn't have much meaning and yet people look at it as a sign of a forward facing company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's interesting that an article that provides at least 6 different meanings for it says that it's meaningless.

<comment><USER33> Journalists suck

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> With all due respect, that's crap. Blockchain means exactly what Satoshi Nakamoto defined it to mean in his seminal paper.

<comment><USER35> "Means exactly"... to whom?

<comment><USER36> Coinbeards!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's about as meaningless as the word "communism". Tough to come up with a definition for that, but I still know what it "means".

I guess you just have to read a bunch of different sources to get the full picture of what a blockchain is. It's kind of hard to communicate abstract ideas, so you need a variety of sources to paint the picture in your head.

<comment><USER6> I think communism is pretty well defined, in its ultimate form its the abolition of private property. This is in strict opposition to capitalism.</comment></comment>


Is Server Monitoring Dead? - <AUTHOR> http://fixate.io/tech/server-monitoring-dead/

<comment> digital-rubber Getting a few errors, you probably are aware of due to HN traffic. But the error makes me wonder,

thirstyaffiliates-stats/thirstyaffiliates-stats.php

who are these thirsty affiliates you try to include?

<comment><USER2> Doesn't load.

For sure Server Monitoring _is_ dead. At least for OP.</comment></comment>


Save your side project, a recap - <AUTHOR> http://blog.assembly.com/save-your-side-project-a-recap/

<comment><USER2> This looks strangely familiar... Plugging the same site twice by linking to a blog entry about it the second time around?</comment>


Pikacode: Git and mercurial hosting (and more) - <AUTHOR> https://pikacode.com/blog/1-14-free-days-discount

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, competition is good in this market. We are trying to create easy to use software. Github and bitbucket are both awesome products and Pikacode wants to provide similar service but with different implementation such as Scrum features and team work.

</comment><comment><USER2> While a bit of competition is always good, why pick this over github or bitbucket?

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you watched too much Pokemon

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Feel free to leave your feedback :)</comment>


Ask HN: I'm going to a Uni preview day - what can I talk about? - <AUTHOR>

I'm going for a university open-day tomorrow, I'm applying to do CS, and although I'm not being asked for a formal interview I am trying to think of a few topics to chat about.<p>I've looked through some news sites, compsci.reddit and a few others but nothing's really struck out at me. I do have a web-application I'm developing on the side that I'm prepared to show them if I can slip that into conversation but what are your suggestions for topical stories? <comment><USER2> _"... I'm going for a university open-day tomorrow, I'm applying to do CS, and although I'm not being asked for a formal interview I am trying to think of a few topics to chat about ..."_

Q. Do you:

\- do you use linux here?

\- teach C, lisp or Scheme? ~ [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html)

\- have any electives I can do in entrepreneurship, learning to write or economics? ~ <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html></comment>


Show HN: My Node.js two weekend project. Color palettes from Flickr images. - <AUTHOR> http://colorapi.com <comment><USER2> This is "minimum viable" done perfectly. Well done.

Personally, I'll use this for color schemes.

Check out <http://colorapi.com/#!q/plumb%20tree> , <http://colorapi.com/#!q/iceland> , <http://colorapi.com/#!q/alps> , <http://colorapi.com/#!q/rainforest> .

<comment><USER3> Wow Plumb Tree in particular got some amazing palettes back.

Been playing with random keywords. Beer came back with some amusing pictures but no color combinations I really liked.

<comment><USER4> Beer geek here, that's search term issues. If you're wanting traditional "beer colors" but not colors from logos and parties, try "malted barley" for an average yellow-orange beer color gamut, and "chinook hops" (a specific variety) for the greens you might expect.

<comment><USER3> MUCH better results, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really nice -- much easier for a photographer like me to use that Kuler or the alternatives.

I have a question though: is it cool to use "All Rights Reserved" images on Flickr for something like this? Clicking through some of the photos shows that they're marked as "All Rights Reserved".

I'm asking because I made the decision to not use those on <http://viewfinder.io/> based on the fact that I'm not a lawyer and prefer to err on the side of caution.

However, if it's not a legal problem to use copyrighted photos I could have much more data to play with, so I'm curious.

<comment><USER6> This is fair use, so the author's copyright wishes are not applicable. The copyright info applies to republication in full, not use in meta-analyses.

<comment><USER5> Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but doesn't embedding the photo in the colorapi.com page count as "republication in full"?

<comment><USER6> No more so than embedding it in a Google Images search.

What it comes down to is: has anyone filed a DMCA claim yet?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great work. I did something like this and had it generate a sample website: a head, a content area, some tabbed navigation, a logo, and some headline colors.

I essentially quantized the image that was uploaded (I didnt use flickr) into 5 or 6 of the most obvious colours, then applied a little bit of math to determine which colours would work well together as well as adjusting the lightness (up/down) to help contrast.

It worked out okay. Maybe I should upload it? Your take on the flickr version is much, much cleaner than mine. Mine was a quick and dirty hack but was done as a learning experience.

Here's a screenshot using the UPS logo as an uploaded image: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3731176/auto-ups-logo.jpg>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some background on the application [http://www.bermi.org/announcing-colorapi- search-for-colors-i...](http://www.bermi.org/announcing-colorapi-search-for- colors-inspiration-on-flickr-photos)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is gorgeous. Woud love to read how you built it.

<comment><USER9> agreed

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does the image processing happen in a child process in node? I'm curious how your code does the heavy CPU without blocking node's main thread.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes image processing happens in a child process.

Right now I'm using GraphicsMagic resource limiting flag -limit for preventing it from taking down all the resources.

<comment><USER11> Would what you're doing right now be possible using canvas on the client side?

On second thought, that might make things much more complicated / slow, you'd have to write something that allowed clients to send back processed results to speed things up for future searches by other users.

I wonder if there's any desire for something like <http://maprejuice.com/>, but easily applicable to any processing task that needs to happen in realtime * , as mentioned in the previous paragraph.

* But also support cached results.

PS If/when your no.de server crashes, do you have to push again to get it to restart? I was having this problem the other day — it's annoying to have to add a space to a file, commit and push just to restart the server.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure this can be done using Canvas. I might give it a try as a learning exercise in the future. Thanks for the suggestion :)

Didn't know MapRejuice, looks promising.

Regarding no.de, I have the same issues you describe. I'm looking forward moving to a larger SmartMachine where I can deploy using capistrano.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have a couple of issues with the design.

1) <http://i.imgur.com/uzsiH.png> \- overlapping text/controls on the homepage. Tried it in a few browsers. Width issue?

2) On the swatch pages, I'd make the controls just a little less translucent. Right now they're a little hard to see, though I grant that when you're used to the layout it becomes much less of an issue.

Other than those two minor points it's very nice website & I hope to use it in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you Michael for the feedback.

So far I've just tried it on FF, Chrome and Safari on Mac. Cross browsing is on my list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very well executed. My only question is whether you have any definite ideas for monetizing it, or just a project for learning and fun. Either way, awesome job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

This project is just for learning and fun. No ideas yet for monetizing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Small suggestion: when viewing one picture and its color scheme, put the "Hex RGB HSL HSV" text next to the radio buttons inside <label for="the_radio_button_id"> tags. This will provide a bigger hit-box for each choice by making the text and the radio buttons, not just the radio buttons, switch the color representation mode.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is there anyway that you can specify a particular image, by entering the url of the image, for example?

</comment><comment><USER16> Genuine question (if anyone knows): This isnt a mockery or complaint, i'm only an amateur DSLR photographer, but how does one actually take advantage of these color palettes. I mean, what can they actually do for me?

<comment><USER17> I think they are only useful to a designer which wants to extract color schemes from pictures he enjoys.

A guy here told us the other day that he did this "manually" with pictures he liked, for creating palettes for his projects.

<comment><USER16> I dont know if you use lightroom at all, but if say i want to create a preset filter, could this data be useful for that?

I often see photographs that have had color processing work done in Photoshop but can never quite seem to match them. I wonder if there is some way in which this would help(?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Never used Lightroom, but the presets on <http://goo.gl/wQ0PV> seem to be formatted in json.

Seems like this presets can be created easily from a list of colors.

Interesting application.

<comment><USER16> Interesting. I'll have to explore this further. Thanks for the heads-up

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very nice site. I've used colr.org in the past, which does basically the same thing. I have to say, though, the UI on colorapi.com is much better. Good job! This site is bookmarked for use on my next web design project.

One feature request: the ability to upload images directly to colorapi.com.

Uploading images directly would allow designers to build a color palette to match a corporate logo, use the same color palettes as movies (by uploading images from <http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/> ), etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> this is really great, well done. Finding some interesting colours from surprising keywords. <http://colorapi.com/#!q/chipotle> , <http://colorapi.com/#!q/lapland> (for some reason showing a quite nice scheme taken from a lego church), <http://colorapi.com/#!q/athens>

I've been playing around with node.js as well, lately. It really is very nice for trying new ideas.

</comment><comment><USER20> Interesting idea, but I'm guessing the UI is severely broken on Firefox/Windows: all I'm seeing after a search is a long band of colours scrolling across a tiny part of my screen, with no apparent way to see what RGB values they are, which photo(s) they came from, or any of the other interesting-sounding things mentioned by other posters here. What _should_ it look like?

<comment><USER21> I'm using FF on Win. I think you need to key in a search term at the top, and press enter, to see what others are seeing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's so beautiful!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It would be really nice if I could middle-click "details" to open palettes in new tabs, or favorite palettes to come back to or even compare in a grid view later.

I'm also really confused about the swatch download. It tries to download as "default," and even if I change the file type to aco, I can't load it as a swatch in Photoshop.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll add favorite colors support in the future.

What browser/OS where you using when you had the download issue?

<comment><USER23> Opera 10.11 on Windows 7 x64.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A nice, gorgeous app. Definitely added to my collection. Interesting to see these different color schemes.

There's one particular thing which I liked was that, it stores previous search results. I wasn't expecting it in first place, But liked to see previous search results.

One more thing, will there be any API access to this service.

</comment><comment><USER25> That's really nice, Bermi. Good job. So what resources did you find useful for learning to best use node.js?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

I learnt Node.js mostly by looking at projects on github, reading Node.js API <http://nodejs.org/docs/v0.4.2/api/> and following these two great resources <http://howtonode.org/> and <http://blog.nodejitsu.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Any chance you could switch the rgb value to something we can easily copy/paste in CSS? rgb(128, 128, 128)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion. I just changed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Stunningly brilliant. Develop a widget that other companies can put on their sites, and charge for it.

</comment><comment><USER27> It looks great. I like how the settings controls are mostly invisible until the mouses over.

Here are some ideas for additional features:

1) Let a user load their favorites from Flickr and show the palette for each.

2) Create a bookmarklet than can be run on Flickr photo page to bring up the colorapi.com page for that photo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions this is something it will certainly work on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is honestly really cool. This reminds me of the Adobe Ideas iphone app that lets you import photos to get a color swatch (but still doesnt let you export them!!). I'm curious what you're using to host your app?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. The app is hosted on <http://no.de> Its a Solaris server with just 128RAM and 5GB HD

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It would be cool if it had an API, like the picture url and palette in JSON.

<comment><USER30> I was expecting to see an API too, with the name being colorapi and all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is absolutely brilliant. The interface is very intuitive. Was node.js instrumental in making this work, or did you just want an excuse to learn it? (ie. rather than use a different server language)

<comment><AUTHOR> Event driven development was instrumental. Back in 2007 I coded a similar project in PHP and had to take the app offline because it was painfully slow for end users.

I'm sure you can do something similar in any language by using something like RabbitMQ.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Sorry if someone already asked this, but could you release the source code for this project if it was just a learning experience for you? We could all learn from this and would appreciate it.

</comment><comment><USER33> A great product.

I've been doing web design since 1997 and this is one of the most useful online tools for colour inspiration I've seen.

Your naming structure for the downloadable swatches is a nice touch.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is a great tool to get colour scheme ideas from using 'real life' colour combinations. Well done!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Sweet - this is definitely getting bookmarked to use at work :) Very refreshing interface and flow.

</comment><comment><USER36> Just typed in Brazil and loved the colors (and photos) returned. Thanks Bermi.

</comment><comment><USER37> I am officially switching from kuler to colorapi!

</comment><comment><USER38> sample searches always help

</comment><comment><USER39> Very, very well executed idea, with one exception: hashbang URLs. Really? Reaallly?</comment>


Germany to ban some iPhone sales following Qualcomm patent case ruling - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/20/qualcomm-reportedly-wins-injunction-against-apple-in-munich.html <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, this is the same story as [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18728952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18728952) .</comment>


Law.UC.EDU Hacked: Watch the Force Awakens Online Post - <AUTHOR> http://law.uc.edu/star-wars-force-awakens-online-imdb <comment><AUTHOR> Had to post this, because of the IRONY -- UC School of Law linking to illegal Pirated Movies.

<comment><USER2> You should update it with the proper year. "December 1, 2018 3:20pm"</comment></comment>


Algorithms Can Tell Bosses How Employees Are Feeling - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/the-algorithms-that-tell-bosses-how-employees-feel/502064/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> _Sentiment-analysis software can help companies figure out what's bothering workers—or what they're excited about._

You don't need an algorithm to tell how the worker in those cramped cubes are feeling. You can already tell the must be miserable.</comment>