How to start up a Boeing 737 [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.loopinsight.com/2013/09/21/how-to-start-up-a-boeing-737/ <comment><USER2> As someone who has designed avionics for experimental aircraft and rockets, one of the satisfying highlights, like the salty sticky bits as you mop up the plate of a roast, is designing and building the switch panels.

Just as web-UI design can be an all-consuming obsession to get it 'just-so', you can loose yourself in comparisons between rotary switches - finding one with just the right torque and a satisfying positive click, locking toggle switches, the colour of the panels and the colour of the filled engravings to get the readability good in both direct sunlight and dim red-lit cabins, the pride you take in wiring looms that no other humans will likely ever see. It's of course not all fun and games, people's lives will depend on the quality of that wiring loom, and the spark from an unsealed toggle switch in the oxygen- rich cabin is what caused the Apollo 1 fire ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1) ).

So videos like this are quite a source of design inspiration!

Relatedly: if you wonder what goes into making nice panels and wiring looms, have a flick through this: [http://www.rbracing- rsr.com/wiring_ecu.html](http://www.rbracing-rsr.com/wiring_ecu.html) it's motorsport but it's basically the same story for aircraft.

<comment><USER3> surely the people who maintain, build, and upgrade the aircraft will see your wiring...?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There was a good thread on the /r/flying subreddit discussing this procedure yesterday. Specifically, poster /u/veritasiness outlined the entire procedure step by step [1] which I'll cut and paste here:

      0:02 ground power turned on. The plane is basically "plugged in" to an outlet. This
           turns on the electric systems from that power source.
      0:03 cabin / utilities on
      0:05 voice recorder check
      0:06 turning on (aligning) IRS
      0:10 Fire checks (Bell, loop, fault)
      0:12 Extinguisher checks (3 bottles)
      0:13 Cargo extinguisher checks
      0:15 Oxygen mask check (demand only / emergency)
      0:20 Audio Selector Panel setup. Buttons on the top are the options for transmitting.
           Knobs on second row are options for listening.
      0:30 FMS setup (also part of aligning IRS Navs)
      0:34 Manual route entry. Left side are the airways (roads) and right side are the
           fixes (intersections)
      0:40 Arrival Setup. Left side are the STandard ARivals. (STARS) Right side are the
           actual runways approaches.
      0:44 Fuel pumps on.
      0:45 engine driven and electric hydraulic pumps on. Note: several operators leave
           the A side off for push back because nose wheel steering is commanded by
           A-Side hydraulics. There is also a bypass on the gear as an alternative to
           shutting off the A-Side.
      0:48 overspeed warning test. (clacker is what goes off if you overspeed the plane
           and is an indication of a good check)
      0:50 window heat on (1 for each window)
      0:52 AC setup
      0:54 setting cruise altitude on the pressurization panel
      0:55 setting landing altitude
      0:58 Flight director on. ("MA" is master. It's the copilot's leg to fly)
      1:01 Autobrake to RTO (Rejected Take Off)
      1:06 cockpit light check
      1:10 transponder to 2 (It's the copilot's leg)
      1:19 GPWS check
      1:30 Hyd pumps off (see above)
      1:31 AC packs off
      1:33 beacon on
      1:35 pilot cooling fan #2
      1:58 ignition switches to ground (starts the engine turning)
      2:02 fuel switch on (introduces fuel to the engine). Also how you shut the engine
           down.
      2:06 N2 rotation - speed at which the engine is turning. Fuel is typically
           introduced at 25% N2. Too early / slow and you might get a hung start.
           Or a hot start.

[1] [http://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/1mrw7g/how_to_start_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/1mrw7g/how_to_start_up_a_boeing_737_fascinating/ccc6cjf)

</comment><comment><USER5> Private pilot here (who's also ridden in some full-scale airliner flight sims). A lot of the procedures in the video are going through checklists to test the various instruments and systems, both normal and emergency ones, as well as entering the route in the flight computer (used by the autopilot). This is what real pilots on real flights have to do.

If you just want to start the engines, taxi, and take off for a joyride (completely violating company/FAA policy), the steps are quite a bit less although still involved, depending on how old the aircraft is and the level of automation it has. This video seems to show a 737-800 or later, which is pretty new and most likely has a system that with one or two buttons handles the bleed air/ignition/fuel sequence of starting a turbine.

<comment><USER6> How long do the checklists normally take for airliners? I was actually surprised how short this was.

<comment><USER7> It would take a long time, the first few times you did it. Do it a few times per day with a second pilot reading and checking the items to you.

<comment><USER8> Not to mention the walk around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's a 10:55 video going through the process of starting up a A-10 in the DCS A-10 simulator, with the guy actually explaining what each step does unlike OP.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9xWYLlhFwg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9xWYLlhFwg)

<comment><USER10> I wish there was a global YouTube switch to filter out all flightsim videos. I don't know how many times I've search for xxx landing at yyy only to find some PC flightsim with annoying music in the background.

<comment> iso-8859-1 You can't have that, categorization is way too complicated for YouTube. YouTube is for everyone, not just nerds!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Direct youtube link: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae20L78imO4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae20L78imO4)

</comment><comment><USER12> This video is like explaining how to write software by pointing a video camera at a programmer's keyboard.

<comment><USER13> No doubt... Crazy complicated. Still a great video.

<comment><USER8> I'm still wondering how the camera which seems to be held in his hand and then it shows him using two hands to do one check, and it looks like it's in front of his face not held by someone else off to the side; Google Glass?

edit: I'm seeing things it was just one hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This seems like a good video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZofY286FyQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZofY286FyQ)

<comment><USER10> Warning, flightsim video

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well.....what could possibly go wrong there? There have been several air disasters over the years that resulted from a failure to flip the right switch or check certain settings, either in-flight or pre-flight. A Greek crash where the pilot forgot to flip the auto-pressurization switch, killing most on board before the crash itself, comes to mind. This video leaves little wonder why these things happen.

Having spent 18 years trying to design software and websites to be idiot- proof, to me it looks like they could seriously use some human-friendly UI and procedure design. When the stakes are as high as they are during a packed commercial flight, it would seem to me that maximum possible simplicity would be the goal. Perhaps a "flight checklist wizard". It is possible to enable the granular control that pilots need without making them _this_ complex.

<comment><USER16> I was also thinking about this. Even if the controls and procedures remain completely unchanged, it should be possible to issue warnings when things were done wrong. In fact I'd be surprised if this wasn't at least partially implemented already.

<comment> bulte-rs Next to some planes having electronicaketen checklists; some "older planes" have a somewhat simpler form of digital checks. For example: the 737-800 has a take-off configuration warning (a Horn) When the thrust levers are advanced without having set a proper flap setting for take-off.

(Unfortunately: this Horn is the same Horn as the cabin altitude warning Horn, having a big part in the mentioned greek airline incident)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Cool vid, but calling that a 'start up' is a little misleading. There's much more going on there than starting the engines. Modern turbine engines are pretty automated and don't require much more than the push of a button (starter) and flip of a lever (fuel) to start.

<comment><USER7> >Modern turbine engines are pretty automated and don't require much more than the push of a button

FADEC notwithstanding, there are easily a half dozen different ways to start the engines even in normal circumstances, depending upon what ground services are available, ex: Ground cart vs APU, crossbleed air, electric vs air(aircraft dependent).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why aren't all these switches hooked to a computer which could run the whole procedure?

<comment><USER19> Some of the steps look like they're checking that various warning lights and systems work correctly, which needs a human in the loop. I guess there are other bits which require human decisions - e.g. you can't start the engines without visually checking that no-one is standing near them. Finally, any automation is another possible system that could fail, so it needs more examination and testing.

<comment><USER20> Well, I mean, you could if they integrated sensors into the engine cowling to detect the presence of a foreign object greater than size X within X meters of the engine.

Baby steps. Another 5-10 years, and flight will be entirely a tech issue. Example: Airbus A380 fly by wire.

<comment><USER21> What's special about the A380 FBW? I think you're optimistic with that 5-10 years.

<comment><USER20> [http://www.airbus.com/innovation/proven-concepts/in- design/f...](http://www.airbus.com/innovation/proven-concepts/in-design/fly- by-wire/)

"Incorporating fly-by-wire controls on the A320 allowed Airbus to tailor the aircraft's computer flight control laws – adapting them to the pilots' side- stick controllers that replaced previous-generation control yokes – while also introducing flight envelope protection. As a result, flight safety was greatly increased and the crew's workload was reduced."

Now, that's a lot of marketing fluff, but aircraft manufacturers continue to abstract away flight workload. Navigation relies heavily on GPS, and once the FAA's NextGen ATC system is fully implemented (ADS-B, etc), you'll see victor airways give way to direct routing. Point, click, navigation done. Flight separation can be automated as well with ADS-B. Aircraft can already perform fully automated landings using autoland at Class III ILS runways (which will make way for cheaper, more precise Local Area Augmentation System, which is just a fancy DGPS/RTK precision positioning system for airports).

I used the A380 as an example, but the same could be said for Boeing's Dreamliner. Tech moves slower in aircraft because of FAA regulations and conservative views (its lives we're talking about of course), but its getting there.

I would be surprised if you didn't have fully automated flights (take off, cruise, landing) in 5-10 years using the same guts from UAVs. You'll still have a pilot onboard, but their workload will be minimal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm curious about something though, the author "golfcharlie232" has a great youtube channel [1] with lots of cool videos, but this one is copied off youtube into its own little player. So basically its taking ad revenue away from this guy (I presume he keeps the ad revenue).

What is up with that?

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=golfcharlie232&o...](http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=golfcharlie232&oq=golfcharlie232&gs_l=youtube.3..0.340.3646.0.38126.96.36.199.220.127.116.11.1232.3j9.12.0...0.0...1ac.1.11.youtube.-xnxr53HDoM)

</comment><comment><USER23> There are a bunch of similar YouTube videos made by the Baltic Aviation Academy.

I'm mostly impressed with how simple things are, given the number of components involved. Seems to be a fine line between "banks of idiot lights" and flying an airliner with a zillion gauges and dials. There's a crapload of stuff you need to know about electrical systems, hydraulics, backup systems and self-diagnostics . . . not to mention actually flying the crate.

</comment><comment><USER24> A couple of people have hinted at the question, but I'll ask outright in case someone can answer: How quickly could you just start everything up sans checklist in an emergency? I thought I saw a couple of switches which actually started the engines, but I assume that at least some of the preparatory steps are required.

</comment><comment><USER25> If you want to try this at home I highly recommend the Level-D 767 add on for MS Flight Simulator. Has all the panels correctly functional and you can follow the real checklists from airliners.

</comment><comment><USER26> Starting my DA20 is much less involved and you get to shout "clear the prop" which is satisfying. :)

</comment><comment><USER27> I imagine there's some reason for the different switch: toggles, buttons, etc.

<comment> bulte-rs All comes down to UX. Simple example: the switches for the lights are oriented to turning them on is the same as pushing them forward (I.e. The direction the lights point in).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder how much of that is actually necessary nowadays.

<comment><USER29> All of it. The pilot is going through a checklist. The checklist is not going to have unnecessary steps in it. When pilots don't follow the checklist sometimes they die, so they are pretty religious about following the checklist.

That is a pretty new 737 (someone speculated 737-800). Note the flat panel primary displays (color LCDs), that is the tip-off that this is pretty new.

P.S. There is a small piece of me in the FMS.

<comment> bulte-rs Out of interest: which part of the fms did you build? And thanks: I lovend working with it.

<comment><USER29> I wrote a lot of the "Dual FMS" BootROM and also the cross-FMS data link communications handling (TCP/IP originally over a high baud rate async serial channel). Most of my code is deeply embedded.

<comment> bulte-rs Awesome!!! Never knew it actually operates over TCP/IP, I always assumed some custom protocol/ARINC interop between the two units. Can you perhaps elaborate in some way on the dev environment When working on "stuff like that"? :)

<comment><USER29> New systems (not the 737 FMS) use ARINC-664[1] - UDP/TCP/IP/ethernet with all the good parts disallowed. :-) The original Dual FMS predates ARINC-664.

The original Dual FMS was a Motorola 68040 (the predecessor FMS was the TI TMS9900 architecture implemented in bit-slice processors(!), later an ASIC, because the TI 9900 was a bust. The original code was Fortran, with the Dual FMS it was ported to Ada.

The development environments back in the late 1980s, early 1990s was custom hardware and in circuit emulators (ICEs). The ICE plugged into the processor socket and emulated the processor but with breakpoints and trace. The 68040 was about the end of the line where this worked (the head of the 68040 ICE was pretty large. There were no "eval" boards to develop code on... we wrote code and waited for the hardware guys to get the first article built. When the hardware guys got done with the initial checkout on the first article, we got the system and started making the code work.

Once we got the hardware, software development was a lot like now: start with basic functionality, cross your fingers, burn and learn. With the ICE, "burning" was faster because you substituted ICE RAM for the target flash and the trace of the ICE was a lot more useful than today's JTAG-based debuggers - you could see _everything_ for the last 1K-4K instructions, including the actual states of the pins of the processor.

The development lab had real equipment (e.g. the Control Display Units (CDUs)) and a lot of simulated I/O. The simulated I/O was driven by a flight simulator running on a Dec MicroVAX. The flight simulator simulated the flight characteristics of the 737, responding to the commands given by the FMS. Since I was mostly low-level, I didn't do much with the flight simulators, but I could enter flight plans (typically "company routes" which are pre-canned airports, runways, and waypoints) and go through all the motions of flying. The simulator could speed up time to save time waiting for things to happen. IIRC, 4x real time was about as fast as you could go because the systems would go wonky.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avionics_Full- Duplex_Switched_E...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avionics_Full- Duplex_Switched_Ethernet)

<comment> bulte-rs You sir, completely made my day! Both of my nerd personalities envy you :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> worst. user interface. ever.

<comment><USER31> How would you improve it?

<comment><USER32> lock->power connect->start.</comment></comment></comment>


YC Winter Application Notification - <AUTHOR>

So, we are getting close to the deadline for YC choosing the groups for this winters session.
Does anybody know if they e-mail both the `chosen` ones and also the groups that were not picked all on the 29th? Do they ever make phone calls?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> We'll email everyone on Oct 29.</comment>


MongoDB Interactive Geospatial Tutorial - <AUTHOR> http://mongly.com/geo/index

<comment><USER2> A few feature requests...

1\. Provide buttons somewhere to increase and decrease the speed. The keyboard shortcuts don't seem to work for me (OS X, Dvorak keyboard layout).

2\. Even better, ditch speed entirely and let me click "next" to see ALL of the lines of text up to the next bit where I'm expected to interact.

3\. Don't make me guess how to do things! I'm lazy and in a hurry.

Maybe this just isn't the right style of learning for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I made it so you can click the speed icon in the top right to change the speed. Still not 100% happy with that.

I'll look at #2.

Based on the original tutorial, the feedback was positive with respect to making people think about the answers. help always tells you exactly what to type to move on though.

<comment><USER3> I _do_ enjoy guessing how to do things; I find it a great way to learn. Thanks so much for creating this -- it's given me a great head start.

<comment><USER4> I logged into the comments to say the same. I'm absolutely loving the game like tutorial. "Just type stuff till it works" it's fun, you can't really mess stuff up.

My feature requests would include: a) a hint system. if I don't get it three times I'd like to be able to give up. I know it's open for abuse, but I'm a grown man and understand that I'm only cheating myself. end of the day I still want to learn it.

b) a link from each concept to the reference documentation of the function I've just used. So when I've finally used [ __* $near spoilers redacted __*] let me see the actual documentation for $near if that's possible I guess. I'm not sure how complete the Mongo docs are. My reasoning being that I'd like to see the rest of the ways I can use the command.

Short answer: I love the tutorial & thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool! Working on a project that uses this a lot and this would've been very helpful two months ago. The geospatial indexing page in the Mongo docs is very helpful too.

One thing you leave out is the $nearSphere and related commands which can be used since MongoDB 1.7 or so to create better radiuses. It makes searching just that little more precise. There is one twist for it that had me stuck for a bit: the radius is in radians when using those commands.

Other than that: MongoDB makes it very very easy to create a location based mobile service. Throw in some node.js and some JSON, and you're set.

<comment><USER6> If you haven't seen it already, a quick Google hack for computing the radians to input into MongoDB:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=50+km+%2F+radius+of+earth> <http://www.google.com/search?q=50+miles+%2F+radius+of+earth>

<comment><USER5> Yes, my code is just range/6418 or so. It just produces unexpectedly slow results when you don't realize :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> <http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Geospatial+Indexing>

I've been doing Geospatial queries lately. It's pretty fast when going through 280k+ city coordinates at ~1-20 ms (Can't go lower than ms though) to find cities near [0, 0], [100.752, 120.236], etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> Very well made, I have learned a lot while using it!

</comment><comment><USER9> Very nice, this is an awesome way to get introduced to a (for me) new technology, I didn't have any experience with geospatial work before so this is a great way to visualize it.

Now I'm thinking of ways to use this!

</comment><comment><USER10> How do I proceed after "Go ahead and look at the collection"? In FF 3.6 it stops delivering messages after that one, and I don't see any way to advance.

In IE8 it gets a JavaScript error a few lines earlier, and stops advancing.

Am I missing something obvious in the ui?

<comment><USER11> You enter a command in the box. If you don't know the command to enter, enter help.

<comment><USER10> Very cool, looking forward to working through all the lessons later. I was doing too many things at once and let the notice about help scroll by.

It might be worth keeping on the screen at all times. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Personally, my biggest hurdle is that every time the tutorial introduces a new concept, my brain was expecting to just modify the existing query with the new concept, while the tutorial actually wants me to create an entirely new query each time.

<comment><USER13> I love that about the tutorial. One of the few tutorials where I actually have to think.

<comment><USER12> Yes, it would just be nice for it to be a little more upfront/explicit that it wants a new query, instead of using the same wording from before, but with subtle number changes that my mind glosses over...

<comment><USER13> I kind of disagree. I remember things much better when I screw up doing them. The fact that it isn't immediately evident what exactly is wrong with my query means I have to go back and read, and figure it out. Much like debugging. I know your trouble isn't with the concepts, but I honestly think that the extra step of saying, 'why isn't this working' will make the concepts stick around much longer than they would otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm stuck at lesson 6. After typing 'db.treasures.find({location: {$near: [0, 0]}, {type: "gold"})' the loading indicator stays and I get the javascript error "Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'x' of undefined" (Chrome 11).

<comment><AUTHOR> you can type help to get help...or lesson(7); to skip to the next lesson.

the correct command is db.treasures.find({location: {$near: [0, 0]}, type: "gold"}).limit(5);

you have an extra { infront of "type"...making it invalid json.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This would be a great recruiting tool.

Once a user finishes, provide a list of open jobs for shops that use MongoDB.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm going to have to try this after work today because I've been thinking about doing something with geoNoSql.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm curious what did you use to write it ? node?

<comment><AUTHOR> The core engine is based on a little web-based mongodb admin tool I wrote in RoR (<https://github.com/karlseguin/Mongo-Web-Admin>). The tutorials are just modified versions, and some javascript that drives the lesson.</comment></comment>


Cambridge Geek Day - <AUTHOR> http://cambridgegeekday.com Cambridge Geek Day is a full-day, one-track web conference based in the beautiful British city of Cambridge. Join us on November 21st for inspiring talks, a great atmosphere and fantastic networking opportunities - you'll love it! <comment><USER2> I note that the images on the conference site are of King's College or Trinity College, whereas the conference is being held at Churchill College:

<http://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/>

Churchill was founded in 1960, not in the 1300's or 1400's, and the architecture is completely different. The conference site gives a completely misleading image of the venue.</comment>


WeWork Pulls IPO Filing - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/30/wework-says-it-will-file-request-to-withdraw-its-ipo-prospectus-after-roadshow-management-turmoil.html <comment><USER2> This would have been news worthy if they had NOT postponed! Probably the best move for the company while they (most likely) restructure into what they actually are, a real estate company.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seemed pretty inevitable. IPO is all about market confidence and that was simply not there regardless of how much the ibank and SB try to prop it up</comment>


Symmetry of graphs - <AUTHOR>

Please help me prove that if a graph is symmetric with respect to the x-axis and to the y-axis,then it is symmetric with respect to the origin. I tried to post this in math stack exchange and it gives me an error "your question does not meet our quality standards" even though i was descriptive and i have seen this error many times. <comment><USER2> If you ask other people to do your homework for you, you'll never learn. Go back to math.stackexhange, and provide the solution up to the point where you're stuck, and specifically identify what's causing you trouble.

</comment><comment><USER3> Draw a circle.

<comment><AUTHOR> i think i found the solution [http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/59526/symmetry- with-...](http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/59526/symmetry-with-respect- to-the-x-axis-and-the-y-axis)</comment></comment>


You don't need a CS degree to become a web developer. Here's why. - <AUTHOR> http://www.anyonecanlearntocode.com/2012/08/22/debunking-myth-2-do-you-need-a-computer-science-degree-to-become-a-web-developer/

<comment><USER2> This will lead to long debate. As for developer job: I have seen (many) incompetent CS graduate. I have also seen genius self taught developers. As for research job, it requires strong CS foundation.</comment>


Seeking partner for side project - <AUTHOR> Hey HN! I launched flipmeme.com a couple of years ago. It's a fun side project which really helped my learn Django and Python. I haven't touched it in a while, but it's recently getting a lot of traffic (120k uniques per month). I'm not really good at design but I know that there is some potential here. Would anybody be interested in teaming up and taking this to the next level? <comment><USER2> If you're serious about a project, please get in touch with me. I lack experience but I'm obsessive in my habits concerning research. I'm a fast learner, I'm persistent, highly motivated and I've already started developing a brand concerning Cyber Security, Program/Web Development and Research analysis. I look forward to hearing from you.

<comment><USER3> Not to be rude but I'd encourage you not to use that name on HN especially if you are going to be seeking jobs.

I don't think it is against any rules but HN is a bit more professional- oriented than Reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like your site. I was looking fore something like this. faved now!!

side note: is this something that you can monetize by displaying ads? or ads companies won't let you display their ads since it is not your content? with 120k users that usually lurk on this kind of site for a while, it seems like a good way to get some ad money from it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! It's very hard to monetize this at this point. The traffic is too low. I would rather focus on growing it first before I start to think about monetization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would love to find a FE web guy. And soon a growth/marketing hacker (we have a small 4-digit budget set aside for this)

This is a bingo-style/slot-machine/fantasy-sport type app.

We are currently using an online excel table as an MVP!!!

I can offer some help with js or by adding endpoints on the backend.

This is not an open source - we are very revenue and growth driven...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much. Do you have a MVP that is on the web that we can see?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey Emilio, It looks fun! I'm a python dev who likes to scale stuff.. Lets see what we can do with this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, can you contact me via emilioolivares (at) flipmeme.com. Look forward to chatting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd be into this. I'm a design guy and I too have a side project I built years ago which almost became the basis of a tv game show. I need a backend person. Contact me and maybe we can work on some things.

<comment><USER5> Hmm.. this sounds just just what I need

I am doing a bingo-style/slot-machine/fantasy-sport type app.

(Doing all the backend stuff. Using an online excel table as an MVP!!! ;( )

Interested in talking ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there anywhere good for floating open-source project ideas? I have ideas, but sometimes I:

a) could do with brainstorm for a good design

b) know of already similar projects, or better approaches

c) know of people wanting to collaborate

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm a masters student studying software engineering and into memes too. Contact me on email@example.com. I can help on any aspect of the technology stack.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm the CTO of www.collaborizm.com it helps you find collaborators for your projects, would love to have your side project on there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, very nice site. Thank you yes, what do I need to do to apply?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would be interested in helping out as well. What are your goals for the project? Contact me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please contact me via emilioolivares (at) flipmeme.com. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> On a different topic, out of curiosity what algorithm do you use to generate unique links.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello Joe, I'm actually just using the names of the images off of Imgur. There is a discussion on reddit of how this is done, you can find it here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/2yv4kq/al...](https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/2yv4kq/algorithm_theory_how_are_links_for_imgur_and/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Let's do it! Designer here</comment>


Show HN: A bookmarklet to make pages readable - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/schollz/readable <comment><USER2> These were a dime a dozen a few years ago, all the ones I bookmarked eventually stopped working, now I just suffer through it. I've considered downloading firefox just for this feature, but it's just not worth the hassle of finding all my extensions and apps again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I switched to Firefox for the same reason. I wanted to use Chrome though, so I made the bookmarklet to optionally use the Mozilla readability software as its backend. You can host everything this bookmarklet needs on a local machine, so hopefully it won't be one the services that eventually stops working...</comment></comment>


Mozilla responds to Firefox user backlash over Pocket integration - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2015/06/09/mozilla-responds-to-firefox-user-backlash-over-pocket-integration/ <comment><USER2> I personally believe that Pocket does not belong within the core framework of the browser.

However, I think the feature would probably have been much more acceptable to many users had Mozilla simply held off on integrating Pocket until they added the ability to select other read-it-later services (including open source self-hosted options like wallabag [1]) as well.

[1] [https://www.wallabag.org/](https://www.wallabag.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have mixed feelings about it. No doubt, Pocket has become an almost indispensable tool for me. It would be nice if there were a way to do this fully open source, but an "Internet Save" button requires a back-end. How else can such functionality be provided?

(P.S. Sure wish Pocket supported PDFs.)</comment>


Econophysicist Predicts Date of Chinese Stock Market Collapse (Next Week) - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23839/

<comment><USER2> I predict the Shanghai Composite Index will NOT burst between the 17th and 27th July. If my prediction is correct I will happily predict lottery numbers for anyone who asks.

<comment><USER3> I predict there is a 50% chance you are either right or wrong.

<comment><USER4> I predict there is a 100% chance that he is either right or wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Such kind of predictions have a funny impact. Imagine if people start believing the prediction 100%, they would start selling out or short the market. And those actions collectively would result in a crash.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps that's what he intends... Maybe the reason he isn't giving the reason he is predicting the collapse is because the reason is to see what effect his prediction has on the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article says economics (well, graphs of stock prices) are scale free. Is this true? Seems hard to prove, can anyone point to any research?

<comment><USER8> I have some books on complex networks and some on computational finance, it's common knowledge that such graphs are scale invariant (and not hard to show, because you just measure relations of ups and downs and volatility a.s.o.and see that they are independent from the absolute numbers on the graph scale). Many people like the works of Benoit Mandelbrot on fractals in finance. Google these keywords.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you recommend any?

<comment><USER9> [http://www.amazon.com/Mis-behavior-Markets-Benoit- Mandelbrot...](http://www.amazon.com/Mis-behavior-Markets-Benoit- Mandelbrot/dp/0465043550)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Econophysicist?

Does he study the supply and demand for pendula and inclined planes?

<comment><USER11> Econophysicists, roughly speaking, model economic systems using techniques from statistical mechanics; not nearly as silly an idea as it might seem at first blush.

<comment><USER10> a) 'twas a joke, sir. :)

and b) the _idea_ may not be silly but the name sure is. By this nomenclature, all current economists should more properly be called "Econostatisticians" or "Econopsychologists" (to quote Charlie Munger speaking about the silliness of the term "Behavioral Economics": "If economics isn't behavioral, then what the hell _is_ it?!?")

No offense meant, of course. I just think it's a bit humorous. He's an economist who uses methods from physics, that's all - no need to make up a new name for it (let alone a name that sounds even dopier than the previous name).

<comment><USER11> Yeah, sorry about missing the intent of the joke :) I'm cynical enough to think people'll just take pot-shots at scientists playing outside their perceived core expertises just on principle. Not that I'm a scientist turned startupper or anything.

Anyway, it's a pretentious name, but I think it's a bit like "systems biology" (biology done by physicists). If physicists do it, they like inventing a new name.

Of course, there's masses of that kind of thing, and I guess I'm a bit more sensitive to it than most; the research I did when I was still a researcher could have been called quantum chemistry, solid state physics, materials science, or what it was _actually_ called (theoretical mineralogy) and still have been the same damn thing! (Predicting how glass works.)

<comment><AUTHOR> _"systems biology" (biology done by physicists). If physicists do it, they like inventing a new name._

Or biophysics, nanobiology, "human dynamics", etc... sexy names make for sexy media attention (and grants).

<joke> Also, we like to think of it not as "X done by physicists" but rather "X done _right_ " </joke>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's a total solar eclipse over China on the 22nd, exactly midway between the forecast dates. Quite a coincidence, if that's what it is.

In any event the prediction is NOT for the market to tank within the quoted timeframe ... rather that the market will PEAK between 7/17 and 7/27. This would be followed by a period of weakness possibly leading to a crash. If the experience of the USA in 1929 and 1987 is any guide, you would look for a crash low 55 days later (9/15) or possibly 89 days later (10/19).

Then again, maybe not.</comment>


Snip Notes: OCR Powered Notes App with Latex Flavored Markdown - <AUTHOR> https://mathpix.com/blog/snip-notes-beta <comment><USER2> Looks great. I'm not the target audience, but feature 5 caught my attention

>We will soon be releasing an open source library for users to generate HTML from Latex Flavored Markdown

For some reason, the app reminded me about enhancing scanned copy of hand- written notes and I managed to search it online [1] I couldn't remember where I had saved it in my bookmarks, after finding it online, I found the HN entry as well [2]

[1] [https://mzucker.github.io/2016/09/20/noteshrink.html](https://mzucker.github.io/2016/09/20/noteshrink.html)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16567275](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16567275)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why are you blocking disposable email addresses?</comment>


Bill Gates Deletes Facebook account - <AUTHOR> http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article778162.ece

<comment><USER2> Looks like you _can_ delete your account if you have sufficient connections.

<comment><USER3> I'd be surprised if he really deleted it and didn't just do the "suspend" option Facebook has.</comment></comment>


Space Is Noisy - <AUTHOR> http://www.karenaragon.com/space

<comment><USER2> No explanation of how those noises are generated?

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't hear anything?</comment>


Ask HN: Does storing CC data in the session violate PCI compliance? - <AUTHOR>

In our app we wish to show an order confirmation screen between taking the customer's credit card data and processing the transaction. To achieve this, the app would need to store the customer's credit card information in the session while we present the interstitial confirmation screen. This would be the only time card data is ever stored by the app.
My question is whether this "counts" as storing card data, in regards to PCI compliance. My instinct is that it would, but I have seen similar payment flows on big-name retailers' websites. As storing CVV2 information is never allowed regardless of the level of PCI compliance, I don't know how they can do this while remaining compliant.
So my question is threefold:
1) In regards to PCI compliance, is there a distinction between short term and long term storage?
2) Is there another way to temporarily store sensitive data which is preferable to the session and adheres to the PCI guidelines?
3) Does this require PCI Level 1 compliance?
I've put a fair amount of time into Googling this and haven't found a clear answer. As so many of us on HN sell products of some kind online, surely someone here has dealt with this issue before.
Thanks for any advice you can provide. If I find a definitive answer, I will be sure to update this thread. <comment><USER2> Storing CC data _anywhere_ is a huge nono. You use it at the moment you pass it on to your IPSP. No temp files, no database records, no session keys none of that.

Read the terms and conditions of your merchant account.

Edit: I'm very serious about this, CC companies periodically check the active merchant accounts and will ruthlessly block you if they see you violate these rules.

If you do recurring billing this can sting you in an extremely bad way, to lose a few days of income is bad, to have to rebuild your member base from the ground up is orders of magnitude worse.

The reasons are simple if there is any indication you store CC data in between pageviews you are literally asking to be hacked. The very best way to handle these issues is to use an IPSP that serves up your final payment page, that way even the form is not on your machine (and so not subject to having a nice little javascript payload embedded in it at some point by some joker that hacks your site).

Unless you are planning on being an IPSP you should not attempt to either receive or store CC info.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks jacquesm. I'm somewhat familiar with PCI standards, and your answer is what I suspected. However, it doesn't totally answer my question, because confirmation screens are quite common. Even meeting PCI Level 1 compliance, and thus being allowed to store the acct #, cardholder name, and expiration date, its still not kosher to store the CVV2 number or track data, so how are others pulling this off?

I know some gateways will run cards without the CVV2 #, but the fees are usually higher. Is the answer then that order confirmation screens and sending CVV2 data are mutually exclusive to all merchants, regardless of their bankroll?

Edit: _Unless you are planning on being an IPSP you should not attempt to either receive or store CC info._

This seems a bit extreme. Are you saying no one should build any sort of on- site payment processing into their own site?

We build a lot of e-commerce sites for clients, and our standard MO has been to send the data to the gateway immediately and never store it. With SSL and PCI Level 4 compliance, this hasn't been a problem. In this particular case, a desire for a confirmation page was voiced and we at first sought to examine whether or not this would require Level 1 compliance. Upon digging deeper, I'm now of the opinion that its not possible, even with Level 1 compliance, yet I see this in the wild all the time. What gives?

<comment><USER3> One thing you can try is to submit the credit card information as an Authorization Only transaction first. Most gateways will respond with a transaction id that you could then resubmit after confirmation from the user as a Prior Authorization and Capture transaction that would complete the transaction. Authorization Only transactions and their transaction ids expire after a set period of time if they're not submitted for capture (e.g., 30 days for authorize.net).

You won't ever have to store actual credit card information in this scenario (just transaction information) and you can freely show the the last 4 digits of credit used.

That's one solution I can think of, but if you can dig up a PCI compliant method to actually store the data, please share.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a really good idea Andy, and the gateway we're using in this particular case is primarily designed for restaurants (MercuryPay) so this would be commonplace for them.

I wonder though if its a faux pas to run the card at all without confirming first. I would be fairly upset if a merchant authorized my card (resulting in a hold) and I didn't complete the purchase, but if the authorization is for a short enough time I think this would be OK.

Also, a key function of the confirmation page is to minimize the number of invalid requests sent to the gateway, as too many bad requests can cause them to raise the rates.

I'm starting to think there is no PCI compliant way to store a CVV2 for any period of time whatsoever, but I'm also incredulous that so many brand name merchants would so wantonly violate the policy. Perhaps with enough volume and Level 1 compliance the gateway will make an exception.

<comment><USER2> The customer should not normally see any started but not completed transactions, but there have been cases where this data did become visible leading to lots of confusion.

Confusion = Chargebacks.

So you have to make really sure that there is no way the fact that you did that gets back to the customer.

Are you doing your own scrubbing ? Or do you purchase a scrubbing service from the gateway provider ?

The gateway is not the one that decides if you can store CVV2, the card companies make that decision. The rules for that are available, it's a fairly strict standard though.

Encrypted harddrives, all kinds of physical security.

I'm guessing that that is the reason why you see big name merchants do this, but hardly any little ones.

I know of one company that actually set up an IPSP just for that purpose. They now make more money on that part of their business than on the original business...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've heard of companies having an internal policy: if in memory (in their data center's control) PCI sensitive data was allowed.

In some cases (memory mapped files) it could persist to disk, so either encryption, or a Compensating Control Document was created (limiting access to the filesystem).

</comment><comment><USER5> Use Javascript to change the caption of the submit button from "OK" to "Confirm" the first time it is pressed and then submit the form on the second press. That way, the data doesn't reach your server until the user has confirmed the purchase.

</comment><comment><USER6> The order confirmation screen only needs to display the last 4 digits. They know the rest. If any of the other digits were entered incorrectly, you'll both find out soon enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but the question is how do you keep track of the real information between the page views? The obvious answer would be session variables, but this still means the data would be stored briefly in the server's memory.</comment></comment>


Chrome Gets Improves Memory Performance, But Firefox Leads - <AUTHOR> http://www.conceivablytech.com/9892/products/chrome-gets-improves-memory-performance-but-firefox-leads

<comment><USER2> These test results are all crap. The author obviously didn't run the test multiple times. Do that and you'll get wildly different results.

For example...

* Firefox 11 Nightly: 142, 419, 433, 447

* Firefox 8: 160, 897, 121, 793

* Chrome dev: 110, 87, 69, 111

* Opera was consistently ~90

(none of these are scientific, just quick runs with other tabs open on a computer that's doing other stuff too)

A single run is not an effective way to compare these things. Anybody writing articles about JS benchmarks should know that by now.</comment>


Collabora gives initial demo of LibreOffice in the browser [video] - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+Libreoffice-from-collabora/posts/J1vWyQoq6vX <comment><AUTHOR> This is really the best video I've found of Collabora's tiled browser rendering of LibreOffice via their Cloud offering.

Edit: more info on tiling can be found here:

[http://docs.libreoffice.org/libreofficekit/html/annotated.ht...](http://docs.libreoffice.org/libreofficekit/html/annotated.html)

Info on the tile server can be found here:

[https://conference.libreoffice.org/assets/Conference/Aarhus/...](https://conference.libreoffice.org/assets/Conference/Aarhus/Slides/TorLillqvist.pdf)

<comment><USER2> so their ui is not drawn on the client side with javascript, but rendered on the server side and served to the client as image tiles?

interesting!

<comment><USER3> > interesting!

You spelled VNC wrong. :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thakns for sharing this. If you are interested in python bindings for libreofficekit there's pylokit: [https://github.com/xrmx/pylokit](https://github.com/xrmx/pylokit)</comment>


How 'DevOps' is Killing the Developer (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://jeffknupp.com/blog/2014/04/15/how-devops-is-killing-the-developer/ <comment><USER3> I've never met a developer that could setup a MPLS circuit or OSPF over an IPSEC tunnel. The author says that developers can do these things, but I highly doubt it. Let alone be proficient enough to do it in JunOS and IOS. Network operations should not be lumped in with devops.

<comment><USER4> > The author says that developers can do these things, but I highly doubt it.

Being able to do something from memory is something we only care about in high school. Take me, for example: did my router support L2TP termination? No. Did DD-WRT support it out of the box? No. What a developer can do is cobble together information in order to find a working solution. So would I, as a non-Dev-Ops be able to set up MPLS over IPSEC, having never done it before? Yes: I have Google and I have a brain between my ears.

<comment><USER5> As a sysadmin in a prior life, I see this as the equivalent of a non-developer (for instance, a sysadmin) asking can I create a site scraper using google, curl/sed/awk/..bash, copy/paste and a little bit of of brain between my ears ? Yes. As a developer you know there is a lot my subtlety to programming than that.

I think what @scurvy was driving at is there is a lot more subtlety to network ops than developers would be willing to acknowledge.

<comment><USER3> Yes, indeed that was my point. While the two examples I gave were easy to Google and get a "functional" setup going, there are enough things there to blow up in your face if you just go with the StackOverflow/ServerFault answers. You're going to run IPSEC, which DH group are you going to use? What cipher? How often are you going to rekey? Should rekeying be based on bytes, time, or both? Your Juniper box is connecting to a Linux tunnel server. What should your inner and outer identities be? I haven't even come to OSPF yet...

While just an example, it shows that our professions all have subtlety and nuance to deal with. You gain the ability to handle this through experience, not Google. Throwing a "full stack" developer against every problem is definitely not the solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The trend OP doesn't like is primarily because 'full stack' responsibilities, DBAs, release coordinators, etc. is probably the easiest it's ever been, so you might as well have developers throw in some extra hours to do it. I've worked at a fortune 500 that used a Ruby gem called "lol_dba"... you can spin up environments and deploys trivially with PAASs, or at the least use various automation tools, scripts, and cookbooks for provisioning machines, running deploys, CI, etc.

OP seems to think "full stack" developers no longer devote time to writing code... "This is why we see so many developers that can't pass FizzBuzz"... but really it just doesn't take us long to do the non developer stuff because it's just easy these days, maybe he's not aware of the tools people use.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting read, but I wish it wasn't so inflammatory.

> "...release coordinators and the like are at the bottom of the totem pole. > Why is it arranged like this? Because each role can do the job of all roles > below it if necessary."

I find this to be belittling those who choose to work on a different part of the stack than the author. It seems to suggest there is an innate incompetence that keeps release engineers from functioning as "developers". That couldn't be further from the truth.

Release Engineering @ Mozilla: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j0NDGJVROI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j0NDGJVROI)

<comment><USER8> Release Engineer here too.

FUNNY STORY: we make the developers act as release coordinators, because it distracts us from the work of improving the release process by replacing it with automated software systems.

The top of his hierarchy should be PMs/executive team; betrayed by his own developer ego…

<comment><USER9> It's a hierarchy of skills. PM and exec skills are almost entirely orthogonal to tech skills. Putting them in this hierarchy makes zero sense as a result.

<comment><USER10> Because understanding the business's and customers' needs is somehow "beneath" developers in skill or status?

Sounds like some people need to try the "less technical" parts of the stack like requirements gathering to appreciate their roles.

<comment><USER11> "Orthogonal" means independent from, not inferior to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I always like the band analogy: The guitarists / developers always think they can play the bass guitar, because it's basically the same, just with less strings.

Yet, they don't get that it's all about groove, rhythm and dependability and are just way too unrelaxed and attention seeking for doing it right.

I'll take a grumpy BOFH that wires together my AWS regions in his sleep and doesn't make costly mistakes - because he measures twice and cuts once - <USER2> some kid trying DevOps any day :)

<comment><USER13> I remember once haranguing a group of Java developers to use the log4j's RollingFileAppender. No matter what arguments I used and despite many nods and promises, on live systems they just kept on using the default FileAppender like there's no tomorrow, despite it being a relatively trivial config change to switch to the RollingFileAppender.

Only the sysadmins "got it" because they were the ones that got to feel the pain of cleaning up a NAS filled up by log files.

<comment><USER14> To my mind the whole point of DevOps is to make the developers "get it" by making them feel the pain when they get things wrong. Developers make decisions about the system every day, so it pays for them to understand how it is maintained and operated.

<comment><USER15> My impression is that devops instead has turned into a means for getting sysadmins out of the way so developers can use the latest shiny in production...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am an "Infrastructure Engineer" by job title, but really I am a jack of all trades. Many people working in small business need to wear many hats.

You can be deep on a single area (specialist) or be spread out (generalist). Larger businesses want specialists, small business want generalists.

Personally I am a generalist. I deal with security, servers, routers, switches, applications, laptops, Operating Systems, Backup, Databases, etc. I write code in python, java and starting to get better with go. Its a handful and I am always juggling things, but I also think that broad knowledge helps things. I understand TCP/IP because I wrote a TCP/IP stack. I feel I have a better understanding of the complex systems as I have a non trivial understanding of each part.

Its a very different working situation, but it has its advantages and I dread ever going back to a large corporate because of it. It isn't as efficient compared to having a team of specialists, where everyone can spend 100% on their speciality, but on the other hand, you can often do things with surprisingly small teams.

<comment><USER17> I share your opinion. In agile teams, it is important to do things that work. If a team owns a stack sucessfully, there is no need to change that. But if the environment changes (e.g. growth), the team may decide to split / specialise in order to ensure that the business goal is not in danger. There is no silver bullet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yarg!

 _Teams_ do DevOps. It isn't supposed to be an excuse to make developers do everything. It's supposed to combine operations and development _on the same team._

This is just like the perversion of agility in development by "Agile."

This, too, shall pass.

<comment><USER19> I recently was part of a team that properly practiced DevOps and as soon as it started working we had a reorg and it was broken apart.

If the premise of the article is "Developer time is precious, don't make them do grunt work" the I would counter with "Developer momentum is precious, don't let developers get blocked by operations/QA/release."

On our team, we had Ops and QA. But I needed something done and they were already working on something then I could have a quick 15 minute chat after standup about the Puppet change I needed to make and then go do it myself. An hour later I'm done, the change is deployed and I'm moving on to the next task. Now, without an embedded Ops resource on the team, I have to file a ticket and pray someone picks it up within a few days.

<comment><USER10> The way to not get "blocked by QA" is to have automated tests and QA people who can write them as well as dream up scenarios to break your toys. They are also able to do code reviews in your stack as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One coworker posted this a while back and I just dismissed it as someone afraid of something that they can't handle.

While I understand the point.. I'm also a dev and I love "DevOps". Aren't we all doing this because we love problem solving? How is this not just another problem to tackle? I love having to figure how to automate mundane tasks (again.. this is just code.. not much different than we write elsewhere) to make sure I don't have to manage any systems manually.

/rant

<comment><USER21> It's actually a complex debate. We as developers naturally gravitate to a role like this because it's in our nature to believe that we can solve all the tech related problems. And all other problems, we believe can be solved with tech and therefore we believe we can solve everything. Ok. That's an exaggeration but there's quite a large shred of reality in that statement. Being fullstack/devops/<insert fancy term> satisfies that craving to jump on to new problems that we developers have.

And that CAN be a problem. It isn't necessarily always a problem. But think about it. How many of us prefer jumping up to try working on a brand new project. Shiny stuff everywhere. And then everything gets abandoned at the grind and polish stage. The enthusiasm is gone. We crave the next new problem that we can use as an excuse for jumping away from the grind we are in. I think what the author is trying to get across is that this new "devops" culture is creating a large number of developers who don't have deep knowledge of anything. Ask a developer (myself included) to evaluate a set of JS frameworks for a particular project which has somewhat specific requirements. Behind most answers (this is based on observation, myself included again) the primary argument will be the developer's preference; not an objective breakdown of what is most suited for the task. We might not see too much of this on HN (I think. I see a lot of intelligent debates here which I learn from all the time) but on a larger scale developers are becoming half baked.

And that's basically the other side of what you pointed out. Problem solving, learning new things is a lot of fun (discovering and configuring vagrant and docker for the first time was incredibly fun). But it possible that the full stack role is churning out people with broad but just somewhat in depth knowledge. Tough call. Question is, is somewhat deep deep enough for most everything?

<comment><USER20> I can agree with that.

Though on the other end of things.. I have a friend that is very into how some languages are optimized for various tasks and he'll mention to me that X language does something with their loops for speed, etc.

I don't have that same low level knowledge of the languages (not as low-level at least; I have some) but at the end of the day X language is slower than those that I prefer for the type of work we do (APIs mostly) so I don't care that X language does all these things internally.. and I don't need to know because it doesn't matter to us (nor our employer) in the end.

So my--hate to use a buzz phrase here but it's appropriate--'get shit done' style tends to work for me and our company because evaluating tools comes down to "does a framework or tool accomplish what we need without too much overhead".

Is this the type of _deep_ knowledge you were talking about?

<comment><USER21> Yep. The question was, is the "I can analyze and tell you if I can use this tool to get work done" knowledge deep enough for most work? Or is it essential that if you are a front end dev to at least have an in depth knowledge to analyze, explain, and predict where a JS framework will shine over another and where it's pitfalls will lie. Knowing those pitfalls is also important because someday, it will bite. I remember not knowing about the pitfalls of python and default parameters being permanently set if given or passed a mutable argument. That bit me hard. I really don't know where the line lies honestly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you're a developer working on a service your primary objective is service delivery. It's really, really difficult to do that without understanding (intimately) all the components in play from top to bottom.

<comment><USER23> _It 's really, really difficult to do that without understanding (intimately) all the components in play from top to bottom._

I disagree. If a component is essentially a black box, where I know the inputs and I can test to check I get the expected output in known conditions, then that's enough. It has to be, otherwise there wouldn't be any way to use a middleware, or a third-party API, or anything too complex for one person to understand.

There are lots of software businesses where _no one_ fully understands the internals of the product. That's fine. So long as there are people who expertly understand the part they're responsible for, and the APIs are well documented, everything will work great.

The problem with devops is that it gives people the impression that everyone can be responsible for everything, with everyone on the team having a hand in the design, the code, the testing, the deployment, etc. For a sufficiently complex product that is just not possible. At some point it gets too big, and people have to start accepting that they can't do it all, _and that they 'll have to trust their colleagues to get things right._

<comment><USER24> This works great when it works great. Black boxes everywhere. But then you run into some issue, like, I dunno, your monitoring service is telling clients the site is going down, even though you can't find any evidence of this.

If you know how to go deeper then you run a packet capture and start seeing that, whatdya know, your top-3 IaaS provider's network is shit and is often dropping packets, so those timeouts are actually occurring, though not on anything you control. Now you're able to try to setup a repro, then open a ticket with enough details to get something done. Versus opening a ticket along the lines of "Hi Top-3 IaaS provider. Some monitoring service says our site doesn't always respond, but I'm sure it's not me. Please fix your network, thanks."

Not knowing how things work at a deeper level leads to experienced teams working on high-profile sites to come up with stuff like: "We have 2 domains in use, but need to go SSL only. We only have a certificate for one domain. So please implement a DNS-level redirect from domain A to domain B to avoid browser SSL errors."

Or an experienced dev insisting that a major vendor is shipping invalid binaries because the runtime says so. And insists they aren't metadata-only libs, but isn't comfortable opening up the binaries to verify and thus spends a day trying to figure things out another way.

Being able to get to a baseline of what's working is a fundamental step in troubleshooting. Just like you would always ask a home user to make sure stuff is plugged in, verifying lower-levels of the stack are correctly operating should be a common step - it's unfortunate how common it is that something else _is_ broken under the level you're working at.

<comment><USER23> You're confusing 'needs a deep knowledge of how components work' with 'needs a deep of knowledge debugging'. A suitably senior developer should definitely be able to deduce where a problem is most likely to be happening, and figure out a way to test it.

In the case you're alluding to, it'd be much more useful to know general information about why any monitoring service might think any IaaS provider is not responding, and have the skills to test that. Knowing details about the components you're using (eg AWS and Pingdom) is _much_ less useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25>
       There are two recent trends I really hate:
       DevOps and the notion of the "full-stack" developer

I have to question the wisdom of bunching these two together. One is about freeing the developer as much as possible from peripheral duties so he can concentrate on his primary responsibility - design and development. The other, at least to me, is more about avoiding systems composed of modules that don't fit together properly, rather than getting more work done for less money.

<comment><USER26> Not sure about the DevOps, you are talking like if operations guy would start doing some dev stuff.

But our company goes the other way, they make Devs do Ops stuff and QA stuff (and bussiness analytic stuff also). I really hate this.

<comment><USER10> Why hate that? The work is part of what is necessary to deliver software. It's like saying you want to be a general contractor on you own house but don't want to have architected plans, framers, or a final inspection.

<comment><USER26> I don't want to be jack of all trades, I really don't have QA mindset and I don't like software testing as a black box, I prefer unit testing. All of developers on my team hate when they have to do QA stuff. It is like being hired to do plumbing, but being forced to do gardening :) It is all on the same property but completly different tasks and skillsets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The article seems all over the place. For example I think the conclusion

"""This is why we see so many developers that can't pass FizzBuzz: they never really had to write any code."""

Doesn't really follow from the previous parts. DevOps is not the reason for this nor is the full stack developer trend.

The author also seems to start from an implied base premise that developers wouldn't do devops/fullstack if they had a choice. I disagree with that. Many developers are very interested in understanding the implications of their code better (more DBA skills help a ton for example) and quite a few _gasp_ actually enjoy devops or understanding the entire product from start to finish at least on some level (full stack).

The benefits of DevOps also seem to be completely ignored. It's precisely the fact that common development best practices are integrated with sysadmin, dba etc. knowhow which makes it useful. It's not just "let the dev be a sysadmin in a pinch". It's systematically improve things by automating them (following development best practices instead of the hacked together bash script approach).

DevOps and fullstack dev are conflated throughout the entire article in a strange way which makes it kind of hard to argue.

</comment><comment><USER28> Devops may be a lame buzzword, but most interesting problems cross traditional boundaries. As a dev becomes more senior and wants to become more valuable, they'll take it upon themselves to learn more about the other domains they interact with. The next step is they'll start trying to take on these cross domain problems that become apparent at this point. What I've seen is that when devs stick to straight coding, the products they work on tend to be less successful and their careers tend to be less than they should be.

</comment><comment><USER29> To spoof J L parker, I was "once a developer". Have played many roles since (PM,strategy consultant, VP, p&l owner,...).

DevOp makes sense to me for building complex solutions..but, for different reasons than discussed here.

Consider this: a small team (usually 3-7 members) of "jack of all trades" is proven across industries where the team has to deliver a complex solutions under a very aggressive timeline ,requiring multiple skills. Two examples from my personal experiences: Strategy consulting - eg @ McKinsey (work includes interviewing executives, presentation, excel, data entry, hypotheses development and verification....) investment banking eg @ Goldman Sachs (work includes industry analysis, financial analysis, scenarios, presentation, excel, data entry, ...)

"Jack of all trade" model in terms of DevOps works because:

1) goal for the team w/ "full-stack" skills is to have a reliably working software solution 2) communication and management overhead increase significantly as the team size grows 3) complex solutions need different "amount" of various skills at different point in solution cycle 4) adding/ removing team members comes w/ significant cost to alignment

</comment><comment><USER30> Personally, I love DevOps. I've played on both sides of the fence. More ops than dev, I'll admit.

The way I view DevOps is that you have end-to-end guarantees about software delivery. A lot of this draws from personal experience, so YMMV.

Story:

I was working in an organization where engineering had built a custom solution with their own database to a problem. It was using their own DB system, with the JVM, etc.. I was oncall for said service, because their DB kept getting into a poor state. My only real recourse to a page was (a) escalate to the devs (b) restart the service. I ended up furiously rewriting the service in Erlang over a weekend, and ended up getting told that my replacement was too complicated, and the previous one worked okay, because we could just restart it.

Take-aways: Without feeling the pressure, and side-effects from being woken up, and having to respond to on-call incidents for a service, it makes people put more value on the development time than operational time, although a service is very likely to be in operational time much longer than development time.

I have two other stories, but it'll take some time to write, and it's getting late, so I'll type it up only if someone is interested. Just so I remember - the tale of LD_PRELOAD and HDFS, as well as the networks and root access.

1\. I think that ops staff should provide shared services to services organizations (hosting, deployment, etc..) when N services need the shared service (when N>2, depending on how many resources are available in your org).

2\. I also think that ops staff should be able to "consult" on projects, as members of those teams during development. This is going to mean that those engineers are probably going to need to do some more development! Or, alternatively, the project team needs to be able to backpedal on some decisions if those ops consultants come in later on the project.

3\. I think dev folks need to have end-to-end responsibility, including oncall, AARs, and on-call remediation. They need to take feedback from ops folks and act upon it, just as they would if product told them to do something.</comment>


Project Tox: The Crypto IM & Video Conferencing Program - <AUTHOR>

A group of people begun work on a program that is a free alternative to Skype; but with some crypto added. It uses DHT instead of central servers, and we're looking for help.
It's on GitHub: https://github.com/irungentoo/ProjectTox-Core
Help is much needed, and welcome. <comment><USER2> Did you guys think about how to prevent man-in-the-middle, Eclipse, Sybil and Identity attacks against your DHT? These kind of attacks don't matter much in bittorrent's kademlia-style dht since it is not necessary to be able to reach every peer. After all it doesn't matter which peer sends you the slice, with the root hash you can verify the validity of every slice.

But for a Skype replacement it is important to be able to reach every peer even if a large amount of peers are malicious (which is a plausible scenario since it doesn't cost much to create an id and there are certainly some people that want to prevent a system like this ;)). (Note: Hole Punching is not always possible so you also need a relay functionality)

But for example: Who prevents me from just creating a lot of Id's that are (in the xor metric) next to Alice and isolate her in the DHT? Since there is no mutual authentication and blocking a given IP is not always a good idea (relaying) how do you prevent user-add-spamming attacks.

How do you want to implement a safe look up service on top of a DHT and prevent ending up with 200 Alices (how can a user know which one is the right Alice). Requiring a user to type in a 32 byte key to add a friend may be ok for people like us but not for the casual user.

I didn't look at your code, but is your DHT superpeered like the Skype DHT was before they moved to their own servers? Otherwise you could get serious problems with churn and Kademlia has shown to have more problems with churn than other DHT designs anyway.

There are some good papers about these types attacks and appropriate preventions. Some propose to work with social graphs to detect malicious nodes, others try to limit the attack feasibility by requiring a proof of work for every DHT operation but that's still an active research topic and not really settled. So doing a project like this without at least one central instance and being considered attack resistant is not really feasible imho.

The easiest way to make your DHT attack resistant is to build one central ca server that creates the user certificates and each node checks if the cert is valid before communicating with another node. Users would only have to connect to the ca once, in order to get a cert, afterwards they can participate in the DHT without contacting any central instance.

If you create a system like that you should think a few weeks about the general design before writing any code. Especially when it comes to crypto, there are a lot of pitfalls. It's best to first write a complete technical report or paper, get it reviewed from some people, and then write the code.

Anyway there is a big need for an easy to use, secure and open source communication system. But it must be easy to use for everybody (even my grandma). Convenience is the main point why normal people don't use crypto yet. 'Why Jonny can't encrypt' is a nice paper about this topic.

But please continue your work, privacy is an important topic! :)

</comment><comment><USER3> If anyone was wondering, "why not just use Ekiga or something similar?" the point of this is to be peer-to-peer. This caused a lot of confusion at first.

</comment><comment><USER4> Best of luck to you. This a very ambitious and brave project.</comment>


Show HN: Site with information about stocks - <AUTHOR> https://heroes-of-markets.com <comment><USER2> Hey this is actually something I've been looking for! It's simple and fast without the extra stuff you often find on sites proving the same stock search functionality. I also like the ability so explore by country. What are you using as the data source? Would it be possible to bring figures such as P/e to the site as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello. That's a point to make data easy to read. Datasource is [https://www.worldtradingdata.com](https://www.worldtradingdata.com)

About P/E it could be great, but that requires to find datasource of financial reports. But, I think I know where I can get it.</comment></comment>


Top Scores: Video Game Music - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/top_scores_video_game_music <comment><USER2> I found this article nigh impossible to get through with it's weird scrolling and transitions. I had to give up.

I listen to Video Game music while I work. Mostly via rainwave.cc [0] or OCRemix Albums [1]. It's pretty much the only non-vocal music I can tolerate for longer periods of time that don't bore me, but help me maintain focus and block out externalities.

The Final Fantasy soundtracks and their similar epic AAA games from most notably Square Enix (Xenogears, Chrono Cross/Trigger, Kingdom Hearts) as well as Nintendo (Zelda, Mario) are often heralded as some of the best. But, I find the 3 Donkey Kong Country and earlier Sonic music (the 3 Sonic Genesis titles up through Sonic Adventure and the anniversary collection) to be my absolute favorites.

There are also tons of excellent albums and chip tune on Band Camp. Way too many to list.

[0] [https://rainwave.cc](https://rainwave.cc)

[1] [http://ocremix.org/albums/](http://ocremix.org/albums/)

<comment> atom-morgan Donkey Kong does have some of the best music I've heard in video games.

If you haven't seen these rock covers on YouTube, you might enjoy them: [https://www.youtube.com/user/BurningIdolmusic/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/BurningIdolmusic/videos)

<comment><USER3> Those are really good!

Have you heard PPF's or SmoothMcGroove's DK covers (or really any of their VG music covers)? PPF tries to exactly reproduce every channel in the original MIDIs with real instruments (and often jerry rigged contraptions), smooth mcgroove does all the channels acapella. Pretty amazing variety.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a pretty good article, but I'm not fond of this recent trend to try to make articles into "experiences" that do all sorts of weird things with scrolling. They always end up being messed up in a bunch of ways if I scroll down using the spacebar instead of my mouse.

At least Reader Mode works on this one.

<comment><USER5> Reader view in Firefox has always worked flawlessly for me with BBC articles, including these "funky" ones. It's a godsend.

Is there a reader view/mode in Chrome, or is it only supported via extensions?

<comment><USER4> There was a recent one about soy sauce that it couldn't save me from: [http://www.bbc.com/travel/gallery/20190225-a-750-year-old- ja...](http://www.bbc.com/travel/gallery/20190225-a-750-year-old-japanese- secret)

<comment><USER5> Oof, yeah, that one's something else entirely. I don't tend to mind these newer formats, but I'll admit I'm not a fan of that one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I grew up with a C64 and a big part of the charm, for me, was the sound chip and the noises/music it made. I can understand why that chip has such a cult following.

Back then, when we had nowhere near the fidelity in graphics that we have today, these basic sound chips were used to add a lot of character to those early games.

Today you have high profile composers like Hans Zimmer doing work for video games and everything in a AAA title is generally very well produced, but I still find myself firing up some of the oldies every now and then. Nostalgia, I guess.

<comment><USER7> People still make music using C64, NES, GameBoy, etc. Some pretty decent stuff out there if look around. For anyone else interested see [https://chipmusic.org](https://chipmusic.org) which is a forum for posting and talking about chiptune-related things, or [http://www.8bitpeoples.com](http://www.8bitpeoples.com) a label run by chiptune artists most of which I believe can be downloaded for free at 192.

<comment><USER8> Woah, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think many PC strategy games has excellent music: Age Of Empires, Home World, Sins of the Solar Empire, Total War and Civilization over its many iterations. I do find the music from these games have a different texture than music from other games.

For example: This song based upon the Epitaph of Siekelos, which plays if you play the Greeks in civ 5: [https://youtu.be/YEKRE2uamyg](https://youtu.be/YEKRE2uamyg)

I think Civ 5 music was recorded with a real orchestra.

Even sometimes poetry; From Silent Hunter 4; [https://youtu.be/8FrTuZxpD0k](https://youtu.be/8FrTuZxpD0k)

<comment><USER10> I particularly like the Medieval Total War soundtrack by Jeff van Dyck. I still remember many of the songs, very haunting, just so well done, the intensity of the music going along with what happened on the battlefield, with small elements like environmental sounds for various seasons...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWhbVYre9uk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWhbVYre9uk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are there any AAA games that use voice-stealing for their music?

Old games would drop voices-- like the melody or rhythm track-- when there were lots of sprites on screen.

I think it would be great if a Hans Zimmer score cross-faded to an arrangement with just low brass or something when the action starts to ramp up.

<comment><USER12> In Nier: Automata there is a hacking mini-game which you do in the middle of character action combat. When you enter the mini-game, full orchestral track is replaced with a chiptune version.

Devil May Cry 5 does the opposite where vocals and instruments get added as you reach higher Style ranks.

<comment><USER11> Ha, that must be pretty neat to hear the chiptune version.

I've heard plenty of examples like what you mention with Devil May Cry. In fact, back in the day Strider for Sega Genesis had a grand reunion of themes in the final level that foreshadowed the sequence of fighting each boss from the previous levels.

Just seems like the voice-stealing technique[1] could be really a really effective way to add emphasis to a big, climactic moment in a game with an orchestral soundtrack. I suppose the risk is that if it's not done artfully the player will just interpret it as jank and call the game devs ugly names. :(

[1] Now that I think about it, maybe "voice stealing" isn't the correct term for this. With voice-stealing one starts with a static number of voices. Then when the synth player tries to add an additional voice the system typically drops the oldest sustained note (or even the oldest one that isn't the bass or percussion track to get fancy about it). Thus the system "steals" from a voice that had a note which already got its attack/decay time. But in those old NES games an entire melody or accompaniment voice gets dropped to accommodate the extra sprites.

So voice stealing retains the same static number of voices to "imply" a greater number of voices. What I remember from those NES games was a reduction in the total number of voices to keep the game from freezing.

Edit: clarification

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> David Wise and his Donkey Kong Country tracks are really something else as far as ambient music goes.

<comment><USER14> Yes! Particularly the Underwater-Level-Tracks.

<comment><USER15> So, I discovered this the other day: apparently, there's a guy on YouTube who's reconstructing the DKC tracks using the original synthesizer and music instruction data ripped from the game. [It sounds really good!]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5rAjOjTGtc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5rAjOjTGtc))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you like video game music, I can't recommend the excellent "Les Démons du Midi" [1] podcast.

Yes, the brief commentary between tracks is in French — but music still is front and center.

[1]: [https://www.geekzone.fr/tag/les-demons-du- midi/](https://www.geekzone.fr/tag/les-demons-du-midi/)

</comment><comment> apt-get One quite well-known playlist in certain circles is the Vidya Intarweb Playlist [0], along with its Mellow Out subcategory [1].

[0] [http://vip.aersia.net/](http://vip.aersia.net/)

[1] [http://vip.aersia.net/mellow/](http://vip.aersia.net/mellow/)

</comment><comment><USER17> For an article about music, it seems oddly... lacking in samples.

<comment><USER18> It had a lot of "Content not available from your location."...

<comment><USER19> Not the globally interconnected world we had hoped for music.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I enjoy listening to Indie-Game-Soundtracks, especially while working. Artists like Austin Wintory (Monaco, Larry), C418 (Minecraft), Jim Guthrie (Sword & Sworcery) and Disasterpeace (Fez). I made a Spotify-Playlist with those, and numerous other indie-tracks. [1]

[1] [https://open.spotify.com/user/115694390/playlist/6nfksYi3hJx...](https://open.spotify.com/user/115694390/playlist/6nfksYi3hJxwrifGqoOsT0?si=6hDeSYpEQQ2hPuT3NM9utA)

<comment><USER20> Guthrie's recent-ish soundtrack for the game Below is great, in case you haven't heard it yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very interesting article about how music has to adapt for mediums like video games, where the player input impacts sequencing and pacing.

That said, I think classifying this as "secret manipulation" is clickbaity on the part of the poster. The fact that the music influences the player isn't really a secret, any more than the fact that the visuals / controls influence the player.

<comment><USER22> In Final Fantasy XV they had boss battles fade directly into cutscenes. The music would need to be able to transition from any part of the boss track to the specific cutscene climax seamlessly.

Also they had music which was instrumented according to different moods and would seamlessly transition between them (e.g. Fast and slow chocobo theme)

The author of the internal tool to help the design team did a talk at GDC:

[https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023971/Epic-AND- Interactive-M...](https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023971/Epic-AND-Interactive- Music-in)

<comment><USER23> That sounds a lot like iMuse, first used in Monkey Island 2 (1991):

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It hasn't been mentioned yet but another great game with great music is Shadow of the Colossus!

<comment><USER25> Yes, absolutely stellar soundtrack. It stands on its own even without the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> C&C Red Alert... pretty awesomely matched to the game

<comment><USER27> Perhaps I can interest you in this live performance of Command & Conquer songs by the original composer? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJClbTrY0VE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJClbTrY0VE)

<comment><USER26> Yes, yes you can! Fantastic, thanks for the link... I will definitely be adding to the view count.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> GTA Vice City, bbc

</comment><comment><USER29> I would throw out SSX tricky for its game logic integration, the first two xenoblade games for just being great at capturing the expanse of it all, breath of the wild for having the guts to go ultra minimalist, and the first few silent hill games for its ambient industrial sound (and a few standout tracks that were simply pretty or cool normal songs).

Broadly speaking though, games are pretty conservative in their soundtracks. I think most are forgettable.

</comment><comment><USER30> How can you write an article about video game music and not mention Jeremy Soule!?

He has composed soundtracks for over 60 games and over a dozen other works during his career. He is best known for his work in The Elder Scrolls and Guild Wars series, and several other top-selling titles such as Total Annihilation, Neverwinter Nights, Dungeon Siege, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Harry Potter.

</comment><comment><USER31> Best video game soundtracks, I feel: Persona 3/4/5, Nier Automata, Jet Set Radio Future, Katamari Damacy, Final Fantasy Tactics / Radiant Silvergun (same composer, very similar). I listen to several others but I keep coming back to these.

Really surprised Nier didn't get a mention, as they do some cool experimental stuff with it.

<comment><USER19> To pile on: LA Noire, Deus Ex (whole series), Red Strings Club, Minecraft's full release album by C148, Myst/Obduction (thanks Robyn Miller), pre- emptively Star Citizen (what has been released already is excellent)

But also, so many indie games. We are in a golden age for game soundtracks.

<comment><USER32> +1 for deus ex, also a shoutout to System Shock soundtrack. And let's not forget the godlike Morrowind theme, Halo 1 intro and so many others i cant remember right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Tough layout on mobile, but very cool piece. Love the bits about the nuance involved when the music was bound by technical limitations.

It's been a few years, but I went to several of the early Video Games Live concerts and liked seeing this music celebrated.

</comment><comment><USER34> I will never ever forget the Michael Giacchino scores in the original Call of Duty campaign.

<comment><USER35> Actually I think the best is Hans Zimmer's music in Modern Warfare 2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> In different categories, Wing Commander 1 had an excellent soundtrack (and even better on the Amiga) and several years later Total Annihilation with its superb epic soundtrack never seen before in a rts.

</comment><comment><USER36> Harry Gregson Williams's work on Metal Gear Solid 2 can reliably give me goosebumps. It even works on people who have no idea it's from a game.

<comment><USER25> Metal Gear Solid 1 had a better soundtrack imo. Harry Gregson William's score feels forced, pompous and too close to Hollywood style of music and it kind of lowers the overall impression I got from MGS2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's been over 30 years and I can still hear the M.U.L.E. theme, so I guess it did the job of video game score very well.

</comment><comment><USER38> Super Metroid > everything else.

</comment><comment><USER8> To me, this topic recalled me of [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENVIoR2f-Qg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENVIoR2f-Qg) (Ghost'N Goblins), also: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFXYXRDV_hg&list=PL- vD6rIjXr...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFXYXRDV_hg&list=PL- vD6rIjXrcLAcpdx6h4sJIe4V9TeMVEz&index=4)

The soundtrack of OlliOlli: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NgIruZo7Bg&list=PLzlvNJXL3o...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NgIruZo7Bg&list=PLzlvNJXL3od3rrCixNXMSD6QKfMgqEjrS&index=2). I didn't listened atm the one from OlliOlli2: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA2XhIy78_I&list=RDhpLdTcBso...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA2XhIy78_I&list=RDhpLdTcBsoK4&index=6)

Jet Set Radio: [https://youtu.be/RGA4PilHdr0?list=RDhpLdTcBsoK4&t=1032](https://youtu.be/RGA4PilHdr0?list=RDhpLdTcBsoK4&t=1032)

Mark McMorris Infinite Air: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jTc2Rw7XCU&list=PLBNLMIUVFQ...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jTc2Rw7XCU&list=PLBNLMIUVFQk32QmCU6wktcM0NxsXTsN2r) (whose contains also: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P09rxVaQAM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P09rxVaQAM))

Last but not least, GTA London 1969: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KVZEJUqCYY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KVZEJUqCYY) [https://youtu.be/Bz3b-P1jrBo](https://youtu.be/Bz3b-P1jrBo) (and GTA 1961): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe_yDYGyFa4&list=PLffQpMcmLc...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe_yDYGyFa4&list=PLffQpMcmLcI8ht83nvNXZ8_JnNJmcx40-)

Sectret ponchos: [https://secretponchos.bandcamp.com/album/secret-ponchos- orig...](https://secretponchos.bandcamp.com/album/secret-ponchos-original- soundtrack)

The Flame in the Flood: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQTPAb2Np3g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQTPAb2Np3g)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k92Bgqz- p_8&app=desktop](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k92Bgqz-p_8&app=desktop) :)

Whells of Aurelia: [https://santaragione.bandcamp.com/album/wheels-of-aurelia- or...](https://santaragione.bandcamp.com/album/wheels-of-aurelia-original- soundtrack)

The Fikle Hands of Fate: [https://youtu.be/qT9-oFyYNos?t=457](https://youtu.be/qT9-oFyYNos?t=457) Cyborg Seppuku: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnERHTvalhY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnERHTvalhY)</comment>


Ask HN: Productivity tools for windows 8? - <AUTHOR>

What are the must have productivity tools for Windows or Window 8? <comment><USER2> Windows 8.1 has an inbuilt Alarms app which includes countdown timers that you can use for keeping track of time in general (Pomodoro technique etc;). Here's how it looks like : [http://i.imgur.com/cz0tg6Z.png](http://i.imgur.com/cz0tg6Z.png)

Non-Windows 8 specific : Eclipse has a full-screen plugin that I use to be free from distraction when working with code.

There's an Autohotkey script for making any window full-screen + borderless, too. It's great for focusing on one task :

[http://www.autohotkey.com/board/topic/78903-yabt-yet- another...](http://www.autohotkey.com/board/topic/78903-yabt-yet-another- borderless-window-toggle/)

Autohotkey can automate various other things like having keyboard shortcuts for Volume levels, opening applications, turning off Caps Lock, etc;

</comment><comment><USER3> I use console2 (make sure you grab the 64-bit version) + an autohotkey script to provide a "quake-like" console drop down... in which I use...

Powershell is extremely awesome; it's basically a c# console.

and...

Chocolatey and/or OneGet, Boxstarter, and myget.

Notepad++ <i>and</i> Notepad2. I use both, notepad++ for complex replacement tasks, notepad2 as my simple editor.

Puretext which strips formatting from text when pasting.

nimbletext.

See: [http://mbrownnyc.wordpress.com/misc/my- toolchain/](http://mbrownnyc.wordpress.com/misc/my-toolchain/)

Not sure if this is what you mean by "productivity tools," but these things greatly increase my productivity and reduce the time it takes for me to complete tasks.

<comment><USER4> conemu provides the drop down natively too :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For me, it's a superior multiboot arrangement so I can choose other Windows or Linux versions painlessly without hesitation to take advantage of inherent productivity differences whenever I want.

</comment><comment><USER4> preme, listary, cmder/conemu. that's a good start.</comment>


The Lego Story [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdDU_BBJW9Y <comment><AUTHOR> Lots of pivots. Lots of places where they could have given up.</comment>


Escher Waterfall Machine Solved - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/18/is-this-how-the-esch.html

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately the assertion that "liquid never touches B" is false (see a surge in the flow at 1:06 that does reach it). Therefore I don't reckon the break can be where they assume it to be.</comment>


A C# REPL in Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://www.pluralsight.com/community/blogs/craig/archive/2008/11/19/a-c-repl-in-clojure.aspx <comment><USER2> He uses C# as a synonym for .net which is misleading. With F# it's way easier to get a proper .net REPL which is a great feature.

<comment><USER3> PowerShell is a pretty cool REPL, and so is IronPython. There are quite a few options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I enjoyed this because I wasn't aware that Clojure could run on .NET (IKVM or otherwise). Thanks!

<comment><USER5> Well, it used to be that Clojure targeted both .Net and the JVM. Now it just targets the JVM.

So... it can only run on .Net if it thinks it's talking to the JVM.

Does that make sense?

<comment><USER6> Scala was the same. Its now really JVM only - but IKVM does an amazing job in running things on .net if you need to (last I tried, which was quite a few years ago, the ikvm slowdown was single digit percentage, very impressive, over "native" .net code).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is pretty cool, but mostly because I'd never heard of IKVM.Net before (<http://www.ikvm.net/>).</comment>


Disastrous Implications of New Apple Patent for Blocking Cellphone Video - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/06/view-the-story-disastrous-impl.html <comment><USER2> FUD. You don't know if or when or how this would ever be implemented, and wild-ass claims about what _could_ happen given any number of dubious preconditions don't get more plausible just by making them scarier. Are iPhones and YouTube so crucial to democracy that you get a free pass to make shit up? Fuck no.

Selectively describing parts of an obscure patent application (20110128384) filed years ago (2009) and whipping it into a frothy story about how the sky is falling is lazy and sloppy journalism. If you want a find a _real_ threat to democracy, start there.

</comment><comment><USER3> And how long before police deploy such blockers routinely during operation?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1999171>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1047495>

</comment><comment><USER4> Pretty funny that a tech company is patenting a way to cripple their products. Probably a 'fuck off, stop whining, here's your protection' parent to quiet down the movie studios.

</comment><comment><USER5> And how long before someone makes a TV-B-Gone-style device?

<http://www.tvbgone.com/cfe_tvbg_main.php>

</comment><comment><USER6> Storify? What's the value add for this tool? (Tim already has the Radar blog site, is / has been a Google Buzz user, is on Twitter, etc. I enjoy his commentary, but I'm starting to get multiple site fatigue.)

I guess I'll have to enable JS if I want to know. Or, lethargy may win...</comment>