Ask HN: Advice on applying for jobs in the UK - <AUTHOR>

Short backstory: I am in US, trying to get to the UK.
I would like to get a working visa but need a job first (catch 22). I am a developer but don't feel like I have anything 'special' to offer.
I am not confident (even submitting this scares me a little) but I am capable.
When I see the jobs that I would apply for (there are many) I just don't know how I am supposed to approach them.
Has anybody emigrated?
Is it worthwhile applying to all the job ads?
How do you bring up the part about needing a visa?
Is there a specific set of companies that are more open to this?
If none of the above what should I bury myself with learning to become desirable?
Depending on the details I could answer them here but otherwise my email is in my profile for those who would like to reach out.
Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> I'm a Tech Recruitment Manager here in the UK and I deal with oversees applicants all the time. I'll address your questions individually.

 _When I see the jobs that I would apply for (there are many) I just don 't know how I am supposed to approach them._

Email the hiring manager directly with a short, personalised email. It needs to be immediately obvious that you're interested in a particular role and that you believe you meet the criteria but because of your nationality, you would require assistance with a visa. End the email with a direct question along the lines of "Is your company open to the idea of assisting me with a visa if I was deemed suitable for the role?"

 _Has anybody emigrated?_

This one is probably best answered by a US citizen who has relocated to the UK.

 _Is it worthwhile applying to all the job ads?_

Absolutely not. Most UK tech roles (more so in London) are inundated with applicants from all corners of the earth. You won't stand out or increase your chances. The same applies to recruitment companies. Most tech recruiters here in the UK are terrible and I would be amazed if any could appropriately assist you when it comes to visa issues.

 _How do you bring up the part about needing a visa?_

It will be immediately obvious based on your nationality. As mentioned above, ask the hiring manager directly if they can assist. Most of the larger companies have an allocation of sponsorship visas however they are limited and therefore quite precious.

 _Is there a specific set of companies that are more open to this?_

It's a bit of a minefield for UK based startups to hire US citizens but not impossible. Larger companies tend to have been through the process a number of times in the past and tend to have an allocation of sponsorship visas.

 _If none of the above what should I bury myself with learning to become desirable?_

Ruby is in massive demand in the UK. Most companies with large ruby teams have no choice but to look abroad for talent as there are infinitely more ruby jobs in the UK than there are ruby developers. iOS, Python and niche technologies tend to be in big demand also.

My email is in my profile. Send me your resume and I'll do my best to give you some more tailored advice.

<comment><USER3> Ruby jobs are pretty rare outside of the major cities. A search for Ruby jobs in Lancashire for example, does not highlight too many results; PHP is everywhere around here :/

<comment><USER2> Fair enough. I chose Ruby based on the fact that most immigrants tend to focus on the major cities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Firstly, you might want to post this during UK time for better responses.

I went in the other direction so don't have a great deal of help I can offer, other than asking if you've considered working for a company with dual presence and transferring to their UK office after working in the US for a while? I know of several people who've done this. The other Americans I knew working in the UK all got jobs there after attending university there.

</comment><comment><USER5> The current government is pretty hostile towards immigration. If you are not an EU citizen or married to one, your chances of getting a work visa from the US is slim. There are strict quotas and companies try to use theirs for top candidates.

You could improve your chances by being in the UK. I know a few people who got their jobs through connection they made when studying, despite needing visas.</comment>


Introducing the 'waves' Audio Synthesizer Written in Common Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://busfactor1.ca/kruhft <comment><USER2> You are very brave not to use named parameters creating things that could destroy your hearing!

Sounds really cool though :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Named parameters how? The building blocks are so simple (ramp, sine and envelope) that they stick in my head pretty easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am having trouble connecting. Maybe the internet's hug is too tight.</comment>


Workarounds - Leading Edge of Innovation (Don Norman's) - <AUTHOR> http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/workarounds_leading.html <comment><USER2> Why haven't I found this site before? He's written some great essays.

Has anyone read The Design of Everyday Things?? Worth reading?</comment>


BugHub Relaunches With Completely New UI - <AUTHOR> http://bughubapp.com/relaunch.html

<comment><USER2> _(This is not worthy of a bug report, so I just post it as a comment)_

1\. The 'gear' icon is misleading. It's an edit button, not a button to change application 'settings'.

2\. The text size is small. I understand that being delicate is part of this beautiful application's charm, and that it surely looks gorgeous on the new iPad's retina display, but I think you should have an option for a larger font size. Specially for the visually impaired, which otherwise I think can hardly use it.

3\. Maybe a 'search' functionality (as opposed to directly typing 'username/repo') for adding other people's issues?

That said, I must say that I'm more than impressed. This app is extremely polished, pretty and intuitive. I've just seen a handful of apps that are more polished (and they were made by multi-million dollar companies, not as a _learning experience_ ).

I 100% recommend it. Awesome job.

<comment><USER3> Thank you very much for the feedback and recommendation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here are some promo codes for you all.

NHRYW479JYJ9

KH336XLXNWMM

9M6XFTPNTXH6

E69FT9FWL7FH

KJH33773JJ49

Thanks everyone!

<comment><USER2> They're all used - to save others the trouble! I bought it nevertheless. It looks pretty and will come in handy I'm sure.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for buying the app and letting everyone know. I hope you like it!

Here are 5 more:

9FA79X34MNXN

3P6469F9976F

X37XAPRFP46A

J6P666K4JFAM

PW77MPRYYRYP

<comment><USER4> For anyone posting promo codes, this works very well for distributing them and avoiding having to check them all to see if any were unclaimed: <http://yaycodes.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why do people build nice GitHub bugtracker clients, where there is already a free GitHub Issues App, and us FogBugz users are stuck with crappy apps that do not work?

Many users of FogBugz are willing to pay decent money for a good iOS client. Much more than $1.99, I assure you.

<comment><USER3> I wrote BugHub mainly as a learning experience; it is my first iOS app. I also use GitHub issues myself, so I wanted to build something I could use.

I've had similar requests for Redmine too, and if the demand is great enough it's certainly something I would consider. But honestly, I've had more people ask for BugHub on the iPhone than a Redmine or FogBugz app... and GitHub has their own iPhone app.

For the moment, this is a learning experience for me and the little extra cash on the side is just a nice added bonus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bug #1: illegible text on the website. Browser: mobile Safari.

<comment><USER7> Looks fine to me on mobile Safari. Maybe he's already changed it?

<comment><USER8> No its just very low contrast text compared to its background.

Depending on how your screens contrast/backlight is, you may or may not be able to read the text.</comment></comment></comment>


Letter to the Patent Office From Professor Donald Knuth (1994) - <AUTHOR> http://www.pluto.it/files/meeting1999/atti/no-patents/brevetti/docs/knuth_letter_en.html <comment><USER3> >>"I am told that the courts are trying to make a distinction between mathematical algorithms and nonmathematical algorithms."

As Knuth implies, this is a fool's errand, and this is the reason why courts should not award any patents protecting an algorithm at all.

As a thought exercise, is "A website that advertises a series of random beers from a known collection of user preferred beers" mathematical?

No? Then, is a random shuffling algorithm mathematical based on a vector of inputs mathematical? No? How about the following code?

void sort(int *arr, int len) for (int i = 0; i < len; ++i) { r = rand % len; swap(arr + i, arr + r); }

Not mathematical? Then what about a function "s" described as s(x) = f(g(h(x))), where x is a vector, h multiplies the vector by the identity matrix, and g multiplies its input against the set of all possible matrices such that all elements are 1 or 0 and there can be at most 1 non-zero element for a given row and column, and f chooses a random input from its set and returns its multiplication against a vector of 1s?

These are, at their core, all algorithms, and they are all mathematical. The courts have already established that the "Internet of things" is not patentable, which is why the first example transfers to the second. This is admittedly a poor example, but for a better understanding read Knuth's "Fundamental Algorithms."

<comment><USER4> You and Knuth (and most others here) are operating under the same misunderstandings, the main one being a false equivalence between a patentable invention and the non-patentable underlying principles or elements that enable it. Let me just point to a previous comment that addresses this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7923894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7923894)

Applying that to your example, note that a patent on "random ads" would not preempt anyone else from using shuffling algorithms, and hence it is not the algorithm being patented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _' If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.' Mr. Gates worried that 'some large company will patent some obvious thing' and use the patent to 'take as much of our profits as they want.'_

Bill Gates in the early 90's [1]. Pretty similar line of thought, no? Unfortunately, now Bill Gates is a defender of Intellectual Ventures [2] and Microsoft extracts billions of dollars _every year_ from open source software by asserting "infringement" on such software patents that should've never been granted, and doing the very thing that Gates was condemning when Microsoft wasn't in the abuser's position.

[1] - [http://www.networkworld.com/article/2230877/microsoft- subnet...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2230877/microsoft- subnet/microsoft-was-against-software-patents-before-it-was-for-them.html)

[2] - [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/bill-gates- still-...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/bill-gates-still- helping-known-patent-trolls-obtain-more-patents/)

<comment><USER6> Patent trolling is the final stage of the evolution of a software or tech company, before dissolution or death-merger.

E.g., Sun, SCO, Wang.

<comment><USER7> Apple, Google, Facebook subsidiaries, Samsung, etc.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't consider those to be dead or dying.

Yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Prof. Knuth's point boils down to:

> To a computer scientist, this makes no sense, because every algorithm is as > mathematical as anything could be.

But there is no reason for definitions in the law to mirror precisely the definitions of computer science. After all, a patentable drug formula is, to a chemist, just a description of a chemical system under the laws of chemistry. A patentable mechanical invention is, to a physicist, just a description of a physical system under the laws of physics.

The law very often makes distinctions between things that cannot be distinguished by their fundamental nature, on the basis of external policy reasons. The difference between murder and self-defense cannot be described by fundamental differences in the physical mechanics of the two actions. Now, that is not to say that software should be patentable, but rather that "all algorithms are math" is an irrelevant reason for making software not patentable. It's an interesting philosophical and theoretical point (not to mention, obviously true), but has no relation to the purposes of patent law.

<comment><USER9> The more vague the laws we allow, the more prone they are to abuse. Also, it's not clear that there is _any_ meaningful distinction that can be drawn between types of algorithms. Any process which has numbers (or symbols, bits, data, etc.) as input and output is mathematical. The fact that all types of data are equivalent may only go back to Godel or so, but algorithms themselves have been known as mathematical since the very beginning.

> "all algorithms are math" is an irrelevant reason for making software not > patentable

Not so, the statutes themselves are a bit unclear, but they say that processes are patentable but math is not. Unfortunately, the courts have not fully realized the fact that algorithms are mathematical processes nor are they overly clear about what is and is not math, as they have clever lawyers crafting arguments that go against what mathematicians have considered as math for millennia.

al-Khwārizmī may be responsible for the world algorithm, but they've been used by mathematicians since at least Euclid in ~300 BC.

<comment><USER8> Your mistake is assuming that the criterion for distinguishing between unpatentable math and patentable algorithms must come from within the domain of computer science. There is no reason that has to be the case. The distinguishing criterion can be wholly external, rooted in policy concerns.

<comment><USER10> Laws can be made in any way they like. The argument is not in how laws can be made, but in whether they are any good. This is an argument about quality and usefulness of law. As Knuth puts it, "Man-made laws can be significantly helpful but not when they contradict fundamental truths.".

You are right that the method for deciding on what parts of math are subject to patent can be wholly external to maths and not pay any attention to mathematics whatsoever, however what Knuth is saying, and I would tend to agree with him, is that this would be folly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Excellent example of the lawyer's defense patent. I'm often in discussion with engineers from other fields taking patents as some holy grail. I now have some ammo to show that patents are not a generalized solution.

I do have one remark, Knuth refers to algorithms as fundamental building blocks, but as every programmer knows - we like to abstract upon abstractions making solutions higher level, so when does something stop being a building block and where does something start to be a patentable product.

<comment><USER12> It doesn't. It's building blocks all the way up. That's why I don't think that software should be patentable.

<comment><USER13> I agree with you, but what about copyrightable? I don't think that "swipe gestures with 3 fingers in a diagonal motion" should be patentable. But I don't think blatant ripoffs of entire applications should be protected or encouraged either.

<comment><USER14> If you copy the code, the specific artwork or the resulting binary, you're copying the expression, which is covered by copyright. If you copy the specific ornamental design, you may violate a design patent, if one was registered. If you copy the name or logo, or create one that is confusing, you may violate trademark law, if one was registered.

Software patents don't protect someone against blatant rip-offs of their product, those other laws do that. They merely prevent good ideas from disseminating quickly. The software patent system acts in exact opposition to its stated aim: encouraging innovation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It occurs to me that the fight over software patents is all about marketing, which is (mostly) about money. After all, if you produce a unique piece of software, you have "first mover" advantage; the only way someone can eat your lunch is if they a) copy you and b) market it better than you.

The two major ways you can be out-marketed are a) adding your product as a feature to a much larger, already successful product, and b) spending more money on marketing, adoption, and general product/market fit. (There is the possibility that you just get lucky on virality, like what happened with Flappy Birds, but that's extremely unlikely).

"The little guy" is helped tremendously by patents, because he now has tremendous leverage against against a company that does one of these two things with his idea. They are forced to license the invention.

This, in turn, falls apart when the invention is "obvious" or in some way "inevitable". This hurts both the big guy and the little guy - <USER2> arguably, it hurts the little guy even more than the possibility of theft, since the little guy is not spending his days reading patents.

</comment><comment><USER16> > If software patents had been commonplace in 1980, I would not have been able > to create such a system, nor would I probably have ever thought of doing it, > nor can I imagine anyone else doing so.

I don't understand this. How would patents have prevented him thinking about it ? I don't understand this logic.

I totally agree that software patents are abusive and most of the time not useful to society, but why say it would prevent people from inventing stuff ?

Even if someone steals your invention, if it's a real breakthrough it will be used, don't you think ?

<comment><USER17> >How would patents have prevented him thinking about it ? I don't understand this logic.

It would mean he would need a license for every building block of an algorithm. It would have meant early (and vital) algorithm research bogged down by lawyers and lawsuits. You can't release a free implementation without a license and so the free software ecosystem may not have appeared at all (and we wouldn't even realize what we lost). Lastly, Knuth is a mathematician and he could have chosen any number of specialties; early lawyerization of algorithm research may have denied us all his input in the field.

Current software giants benefited greatly from free ideas and copied mercilessly off each other. Even now the tendency is to have broad and inclusive cross-licensing, leaving mostly young companies in the firing line. The things that never get built probably dwarf any measurable damage caused by patent litigation.

<comment><USER16> yeah so it's more a business practice problem than anything else...

also I don't understand why patent trolls are not patenting gzip, sorting algorithms or any other kind of technology.

I think the patent office use experts to approve a patent, so why are there such stupid patents ? Can't they just void them ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know if he received a reply?

</comment><comment><USER19> Patent officers give no damn to Knuth! ...

</comment><comment><USER20> We changed the url from [http://progfree.org/Patents/knuth-to- pto.txt](http://progfree.org/Patents/knuth-to-pto.txt), which doesn't mention the date.

</comment><comment><USER21> Knuth wrote: soon USA will lose domonant positions. His prediction was wrong, which leads me to think that his oppinion about software patents was highly theoretical assuming how it would be if..., because he truly believes that... Such arguments are emotionally driven.

</comment><comment><USER22> With all respect to Knuth, if you really inspect his arguments and assertions they are quite weak or have turned out unfounded.

* emigration? No. U.S.A still has smart minds immigrating

* stifle innovation? No. Innovation still happens, progress is being made

* mathematical/non-mathematical and numerical/non-numerical distinction - Not clearly elaborated

* Limp analogy to to previous edicts (designating PI as 3 and Earth as flat) are category errors

\---

We now see that the end result of the current patent set up is that it allows those with questionable morals and/or deep pockets to extract rent from the stuff of thought rather than land or housing as was the traditional way.

Is this right or wrong? Only if rent-seeking is right or wrong. The patent system is working exactly as it should be.

Note: I actually think that some algorithms which are of significant invention/discovery could/should be patented (I mean, why not?) but what happens is that many many many stupid algorithms get patented and also large corporations can defend turf by sewing patents in virtual land that they have traversed. Because the systems surrounding patents is equally broken, patents are broken. The original idea to reward inventors for ideas is still valid. We throw the baby out with the bath-water if we do not acknowledge this.

What say you? :)

<comment><USER23> > Is this right or wrong? Only if rent-seeking is right or wrong.

Wait, what? _Rent-seeking is wrong._ Please let me know if there is anything else you need clarified.

<comment><USER24> while i agree with the fact that rent seeking is wrong, you should present an argument as to why it is wrong, instead of just a condescending statement of the fact.

<comment><USER23> There is no actual dispute about the wrongness of rent-seeking, the only people who might think otherwise are either misanthropic Machiavellian jackasses who are themselves wrong or people who don't know what rent-seeking is. It's like saying "that's only wrong if corruption is wrong." Well no kidding corruption is wrong, does anybody actually want to dispute that or are you just asking for a link to the collected works of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Checklist of functionality for a basic SaaS app - <AUTHOR>

I want to offer a subscription using stripe on my rails site. What are some basic things that I'd want users to be able to do. (stupid question, I know, I just want to make sure I don't miss anything critical when handling people's money)
So far I have thought of
* Secure connection (SSL) * Sign up for service * Cancel service * Modify subscription tier * Dispute charge? (Should I handle this, or does stripe do it?) * View historical charges (Same here, does stripe do something for this or should I handle it?) * Modify Payment Details (eg: CC expired, need to update to new one)
tl;dr: what's considered feature complete for basic Software as a Service subscription via Stripe? <comment><USER2> <https://github.com/RailsApps/rails-stripe-membership-saas>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the tip!</comment></comment>


Github needs a new button - <AUTHOR> http://joelg236.github.io/2013/08/04/github-needs-a-new-button <comment><USER2> GitHub already made this easier, but I feel like they just aren't pushing it in front of everyone early enough. They added support for the CONTRIBUTING/CONTRIBUTING.md file[1], but it is only displayed when opening up an issue or pull request. I think all they would really need to do is advertise projects which have a properly set up file while _browsing_ , similar to how README files are already displayed. If a person wants to contribute, telling them how to contribute only after opening up an issue/PR is a bit late, no?

[1] [https://github.com/blog/1184-contributing- guidelines](https://github.com/blog/1184-contributing-guidelines)

<comment><USER3> It seems like contriubtion guidelines aren't necessarily what the author is pushing. AFIK, this wouldn't help new developers get up to speed with the code base.

<comment><USER4> Well it would if owners set up their readme / contrib pages with a good overview of

\- "getting started as a developer"

\- "this is how this works"

\- "new developers should start reading here, browse here, and ignore this until later"

style info. I think this is what the AP was bringing up. And it is what was being discussed in the blog post. Lowering the barrier to entry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing I've found is that there is a lot of independence on GitHub. My immediate assumption if I see a project public project on GitHub is that the owner is saying "I'm ready and willing to accept help." The challenge of not knowing where to start is something different.

A lot of projects can be complicated (D3.js comes to mind). If you don't have a really good grasp on a few very key disciplines in math then honestly, before you contribute to D3, you should brush up on that. The system is self regulating in a sense where you have to know enough about the subject to contribute.

Maybe, there should be a section that people add to their README.md that explain what you need to know before you start digging into a project along with a project goal. I know that for my project[1], I want to create an authoritative .gitignore database, but I'm not really clear on that being my goal nor am I clear on where to add your new files. All of the contributors to my repo have figured it out though without me really telling them anything.

[1] - [https://github.com/joeblau/gitignore.io](https://github.com/joeblau/gitignore.io)

<comment><USER6> > All of the contributors to my repo have figured it out though without me > really telling them anything.

It is also true that everyone who didn't figure it out, did not contribute. This is a much bigger problem. Not specific to your project, more of an issue at large, but saying that '100% of people who contributed figured out how to contribute' isn't a grate benchmark for success.

<comment><USER5> It's not a benchmark for success and I'm going to make a change tomorrow to my repo that lets other know what they can do to contribute. What I don't think is good is people that don't understand what's going on making pull requests when they don't see the vision of the project. So far I have not gotten any of those which tells me that everyone who is making pull requests understands what the point of gitignore.io is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://openhatch.org/](http://openhatch.org/) tries to solve exactly this problem: they're working to bring in more people into OSS, so they pay special attention to make it easy for new programmers (or even non-programmers) to find a good match and start contributing.

On top of just using the site, you could also chat with them about the problem in general - they're very open and friendly.

</comment><comment><USER8> Check out [https://waffle.io/](https://waffle.io/)

Gives people who come to your repo a good idea of the progress of various issues, I've found it to be somewhat useful

<comment><USER9> That actually looks pretty promising - the biggest thing that I've seen that drives usage on GitHub is README badges.

It sounds silly, right? Just a badge? But look at Travis, Code Climate, Gemnasium, etc. You see those badges on a project and eventually you start adding them to your own projects and they spread across a site filled with highly qualified leads (developers for your developer-centric service).

The first code review tool to make a badge and get a handful of Ruby projects to use it is going to really take off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Check out: [http://www.codetriage.com/](http://www.codetriage.com/)

<comment><USER11> "A waffle is like a pancake with a syrup trap." \- Mitch Hedburg

Props to them for the Hedburg quote. Was listening to that CD of his stand up (although, those jokes were for the CD, and maybe he'd done it elsewhere as well) just the other day.

The site and concept look pretty cool too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So github is turning into the old Source forge then? There was a page on there years ago where projects could advertise who are they looking for. I found a couple of projects that needed packagers this way and learned more about maintenance. I think it's a really good idea.

<comment><USER13> I believe the page you are referring to is sf.net/people.

<comment><USER12> Yes, that's it :) It's not linked from anywhere anymore, is it?

<comment><USER13> I don't know, wrote it from memory that's all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> GitHub could probably suggest projects automatically based on recent activity. ie find projects which have a good flow of recent activity and have accepted external pull requests, but aren't intimidatingly large.

</comment><comment><USER15> A few projects now have a "good as a first PR" tag for issues... This is great for helping people get started.

<comment><USER16> Really? I don't think I've seen that before, but that sounds perfect for me. Do you have any advice on how to find such issues?

<comment><USER17> Some projects that have gone through the GSoC process have triaged bugs/features like this. I'm trying to remember them now - blame Monday.

[http://fedoraproject.org/join-fedora](http://fedoraproject.org/join-fedora) is pretty much the best "How to Contribute" example I've seen.

<comment><USER16> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Funny how this is on the front page today ;) just yesterday I wrote a post about how it would be a good idea to quantify the importance of open issues, to encourage contributions. Check it out here: [http://dennybritz.com/blog/2013/08/04/github-api-issue- analy...](http://dennybritz.com/blog/2013/08/04/github-api-issue-analysis/)

If someone wants to work on this together just shoot me a message!

</comment><comment><USER19> The biggest gap is documentation.

If you have a strong grasp of the project, you already understand pull requests. The best thing newbies can do is expand and clarify the docs.

<comment><USER20> that's not really a solution to the problem of "I need things done in my app", or the contributors question of "what needs doing here?".

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I strongly disagree. If you're a new developer looking to work on something, anything, completely indiscriminately then you're probably not ready to work on anything. The time required to contribute even on minimal issues is not insignificant. It requires learning at the very least what the project is, does, and moreover should do.

I think the phase of "what should I work on?" is a fledging phase of developer development that one quickly overcomes and then becomes burdened by the vast opportunities that exist. I think erecting a sign/button/webpage that says, WORK ON $THIS, will do nothing to help it because the would-be contributor may have no interest in the project. Also, it may inhibit the formation of their taste. One must develop enough of an interest in and taste for software that they want to change some aspect of it; that's when an opportunity to contribute something valuable presents itself: "This would be better if..."

</comment><comment><USER22> 24 Pull Requests[0] was launched during Christmastime, and was a great resource for finding projects in need and posting my own. I only wish it were available year-round. Anyone want to pick up the torch here?

[0] [http://24pullrequests.com/](http://24pullrequests.com/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Personally I'd be more able to help out with a lot of projects from a documentation / training / support POV, github isnt really designed for that kind of thing, but it would be awesome if there was some kind of profile page where people could contribute to FAQs, How Tos, etc

</comment><comment><USER24> I've found that the best way to contribute to most open source projects is to try to use them, and then fix whatever shortcomings become obvious. This only works for things that are fairly new, and have obvious problems, but those can be a lot of fun.

<comment><USER21> This! You must become a user before you can become a contributor. Then the vacuous "What project can I contribute to?" question becomes more intelligible, "What software should I use?" That depends. What do you want to do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is a fantastic idea. There are some projects I'd like to help with, but issues that crop up often require way more in depth knowledge. Other areas I can't help but feel I'd need the authors permission to really mess with a section. Am I allowed to clean this up?

Saying to the repo owner "I'm ready to work, met something out to me" would be great!

</comment><comment><USER5> I just came across this. It looks like they have guidlines for contributing, but they are only acttivated when you open a pull request. [https://github.com/blog/1184-contributing- guidelines](https://github.com/blog/1184-contributing-guidelines)

</comment><comment><USER26> Solving pain points is a good place to start.

I've been using Ninja IDE and going to start contributing to it.

</comment><comment><USER27> No one "wants" to contribute. They just contribute. :)</comment>


UK universities 'face online threat' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-21670959

<comment><USER2> Bureaucracy is the real threat to universities not online competition. University's need to maintain a solid reputation, but faking the reputation game has become so common that most University's are ridiculously inefficient.

Consider, Why would you care if your English professor published anything? With that said, a lot of waste seems really important to the people designing budgets so they have issues dealing with leaner institutions.

<comment><USER3> I'd want a professor who has some experience in the broad subject area beyond simply teaching it. Whether that is industry experience or publishing papers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how much this will happen? It seems that qualifications from cheaper institutions are always valued lower than those from more prestigious and expensive ones. I doubt that this is entirely due to the more prestigious universities having harder course content.

In the UK there seems to be a strong correlation between how valuable a degree from an institution is perceived and how many "posh people" attend a particular institution.

I've often wondered how often "we want somebody with a degree" actually means "We want somebody from a particular social class". The labour government's answer to this was the ensure that more young people got a university education from across that social spectrum but this doesn't seem to be reflected in the employment figures of young people.

<comment><USER4> the "value" of a degree from a certain university in Britain correlates almost entirely with the difficulty of gaining entry to that institution. "Posh people" tend to do much better on average academically than the rest of the population, so it is hardly surprising that they are found in such large numbers in Britain's top universities.

<comment><USER3> So at that point the degree is really a proxy for A level results. I would wager that A level results correlate more strongly with social class than degree results once you factor in mature students etc. Though I have no idea if that is true.

I imagine that pure online universities will have low or non existent entry requirements. So will be interesting to see how their value is perceived.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good. Having gone to a very well regarded university in the UK in my time, the attitude of a lot of the academics regarding teaching undergraduates was not just poor but offensively so, and the institutional complacency was staggering. At the same time, there was a relatively small but exceptionally hard-working and dedicated set who clearly worked hard on their presentation for lectures etc. and who clearly made a real effort to support the undergrads.

Today, undergraduates pay thousands of pounds per year for the "privilege" of that kind of education, and the UK hasn't developed the culture of some other countries that have always had expensive education systems in terms of employers recognising the debts students have taken on and paying compensation accordingly. Indeed, with something like half of young people now being pushed into a higher education system that used to train perhaps the top 5-10% academically of the year group, a lot of kids are graduating and finding their degree still won't stop them literally stacking shelves or making telesales calls for a living.

If someone can take advantage of modern technologies so that all people at that stage in their education could benefit from the kind of hard-working and gifted teachers I mentioned, at a fraction of the cost, and without putting up with the arrogant, patronising or simply lazy attitudes of probably the majority of academics who wind up teaching them, then the kind of university that can only offer the latter deserves to die, while the services that provide a better education and the good people behind them deserve to flourish.</comment>


HN Feature Request: Individual users RSS feeds - <AUTHOR>

Are there any plans to offer per user RSS feeds on Hacker News? There are a handful of users who's submissions I consistently enjoy and would like to be able to be notified of these without having to check back or doing screen scrapping. <comment><USER2> <http://www.ycfeeds.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats great, but doesnt seem to face feeds for submissions unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _Shameless plug_

Have a look at Feedity (<http://feedity.com>) for creating custom RSS feeds from virtually ANY webpage.</comment>


Interactive scientific computing: Goldilocks languages - <AUTHOR> http://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/189377.html <comment><USER2> > PHP initially implemented its loops by fseek() in the source code.

real #wtf

ps: ltu discussion [http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4990](http://lambda- the-ultimate.org/node/4990)

<comment><USER3> That looks like someone took the 'everything is a file' unix mantra a little bit too far.

<comment><USER2> hyper late bound lazy streamed os cached interpreter pattern

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> i have never gotten a good answer to why lush [[http://lush.sourceforge.net/](http://lush.sourceforge.net/)] failed to be a succesful goldilocks language in this space. the only real flaw i saw in it was the lack of lexical scoping; other than that it looked like a great solution to the same problems julia is addressing.

</comment><comment><USER5> I love the history here. I know many CS programs offer a programming languages course, but I really think that should be mandatory.

</comment><comment><USER6> Julia is an awesome language (and about time too!).

For those of looking for a more lispy tool, checkout the version of Matlisp I'm writing: [https://github.com/enupten/matlisp/wiki](https://github.com/enupten/matlisp/wiki)

</comment><comment><USER7> It's a real shame that Julia doesn't have a well defined syntax, especially given that the parser is written in the author's own non-standard lisp dialect.

<comment><USER8> Femtolisp is a very small, fast Scheme implementation – and Scheme is the most thoroughly standardized dialect of Lisp there is. The fact that Julia's parser is implemented in flisp also completely irrelevant to the user – you can for all purposes just consider it a C program that implements a custom parser for Julia. It's true that there isn't a formal grammar specification of Julia's grammar, but I'm not sure what that would be especially useful for.

<comment><USER7> But Femtolisp isn't Scheme, it's a _non-standard_ Scheme with its own custom built-ins. It's quite impossible to run a Femtolisp program using a Scheme interpreter without modification.

Formal grammars are enormously useful, I almost always refer to them at some point when learning a language. It's an important part of being in an ecosystem larger than oneself. I'd question how a language without a well defined grammar has well defined semantics as the OP claims.

How many languages have you learned the syntax of by reading the source code of its parser? How about when the parser is implemented on a language you've never used?

<comment><USER8> Learning a programming language by looking at the formal grammar is like learning a spoken language just by reading a grammar textbook. No one actually does that. Learning a language by reading the parser is even more ridiculous. That's like learning a spoken language by dissecting the brain of a native speaker. The way people actually learn languages – both programming and natural – is by seeing examples, reading explanations, and by trying things out.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What Are Your FOSS Philanthropy Hypotheticals? - <AUTHOR>

I thought it might be nice to have a thread for discussion of hypothetical interventions that HN readers would make into FOSS style projects as a way to frame where people think current platforms are headed and what they think are the obstacles. The scenario is: you get put in charge of 50 million dollars to invest into FOSS over the next couple of years. What infrastructure would you invest in with the purpose of making cool technology feasible/arrive sooner and disrupting markets?
My scenario for changing the web, video production, 3D printers, games and the smart grid:
30 million for developers to unite the following into one seamless package and lobby for its inclusion into downloads of firefox/chrome/opera/safari by default (as well as being a downloadable .js for IE):
* http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/ (the others would be translated into the finished language)
* http://jquery.com/
* http://nodejs.org/
* http://processingjs.org/
* http://www.highcharts.com/ (or similar with fully open licence)
Hopefully it could also be integrated into Gnome 3's javascript work and Google's Chrome OS work. Along with an opensource ogg vorbis for sound and an open source generated flash mp3 sound object the aim would be to totally replace current javascript and flash, kill silverlight, and make single client/server language development possible for those that want it. An extremely powerful "batteries included, but swappable" system on the client side (minus load times for most browsers) in addition to making node.js or sinatra-like development incredibly easy on the server side (with the potential to run micro-servers from a tab in your browser, the direction that the newest Opera technology has been heading).
The main benefit is most of the parts are already there and it could be realized very rapidly with a lot of backwards compatibility and leave IE as the "sluggish browser" getting more people to switch (or MS to implement). The main flaw would be video, but the HTML5 video tag has been discussed endlessly on HN. Lobbying could include some effort toward including ogg in more browsers and patent reform but I think 3/4 of major non-IE browsers having native theora and all having access to OS-level proprietary libraries at the same time will leave only end users to sue as NGO/community sites will just stream vorbis/theora - not ideal, but workable and better than now.
15 million on Blender 3D development split equally into three areas. Make the video editor a first-class part of the application to accelerate the opening of the pro vodcast/amateur film and documentary markets. This basically gets pro-level production down to a $800 PC and one of the new generation of digital cams (from a $150 HD up to a few thousand for a good DSLR with seperate sound recording). Second, make sure Blender is on the bleeding edge of integration with the emerging 3D printer market so that the potential there is fully realized rather than locked in (i.e. it becomes the default app for this with a good community). Third, give money to the open source game engine to promote its use in the gaming market and integration with the rest of the app (why an open source engine hasn't "done a Linux" to the underlying game infrastructure is an interesting question I think).
5 million toward an internationally certified open source electricity management hardware platform that can be manufactured by any company in the developing world for their own use and for sale to the developed world. I.e. the hardware that manages battery charge/grid interface/and is hooked up to solar and wind. A village in a developing country might have one, a guy with solar panels on his roof in a developed country might have one. Different units would be manufactured in the developing world (the design is open) and it would help economic development and accelerate the smart grid by pushing forward open standards for such devices.
Others I'd look hard at: reprap, open source cell tower hardware, opencores and arduino. <comment><USER2> Emacs in Scheme. I really, really hate dynamic scoping.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the formatting snafu.

edit: mostly fixed.</comment>


How the web was born: WWW turns 25 - <AUTHOR> http://www.recaply.com/how-the-web-was-born-www-turns-25.html

<comment><USER2> The first time I saw the web was in a command line browser and I thought meh. Then I watched Netscape go public a couple years later. No more meh. Revolutions often start with meh and wind up with billionaires.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it OK to ask how a company is funded during an interview? - <AUTHOR>

Medium-sized start-up, a few years old.  Is it okay, when interviewing for a developer slot, to ask how the company is funded (whether they're bootstrapped or have raised VC)? <comment><USER3> Absolutely - the only people who won't ask such questions are first-timers who are just in love with the idea of working for a startup (for whichever reason). Ask. And don't let them snowball you with the whole, "We'll give you x shares" bit either. "x shares" is meaningless unless you know how many shares the company has outstanding.

</comment><comment><USER4> I ask as much as I can about the financial situation of a company. At worst they can decline to talk about something. At best you get a much better idea of what's going on. In any case it probably leaves a good impression - <USER2> you understand it's a business and want to know about how it functions.

</comment><comment><USER5> They might even volunteer it before you ask. When I interviewed at Mahalo, there was a big timeline painted on the wall. There was a big red "X" about 18 months out that read "We're funded through this date." That was in 2007, and we know how that worked out.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes. If they're a few years old, they should be used to being asked this question by prospective hires -- some developers won't join until a startup is VC-funded (and some others want a bigger stake and won't join if it's already VC-funded).</comment>


Show HN: 3mail – email newsletter - <AUTHOR> http://3mail.carrd.co <comment><USER2> I can hardly read the stuff below the button ([http://i.imgur.com/D5tS8LT.png](http://i.imgur.com/D5tS8LT.png))

Also you should add examples of emails sent.

</comment><comment><USER3> Could you please be more specific on what we can expect when we do sign up?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Bilters. Sure, I'll update the website with more details.</comment></comment>


Arch Grants International Startup Business Competition - <AUTHOR> http://archgrants.org/2013/

<comment><USER2> We were psyched to have Arnoldo move to St. Louis from Costa Rica for the grant (& would love to see many more international entrepreneurs apply -- we helped Arnoldo w/ his visa and will help future entrepreneurs requiring visas).

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not just the grant funding. It's also a bundle of services and visibility for more contacts to build your business and more funding.

</comment><comment><USER4> I highly recommend arch grants. who couldn't use no strings attached money. it could really get your startup off the ground.

</comment><comment><USER5> The Arch Grants competition is now open and closes on Jan 1.

What kind of startup do YOU have, readers?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My startup won the grant during the 2012 cycle. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

</comment><comment><USER6> $50,000 and no equity. I've never seen anyone else host a competition like this.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the good time to move out of AWS? - <AUTHOR> we are nearing 10k/month in aws billing. Barring S3 & RDS - we are not using any other major AWS platform service.
RDS is a mjor cost for us at this point. I fully understand that this can be too less information for you to give any suggestions, but I will be glad to see if there are any decision frameworks to look at moving out to own infra & also importantly what could be other alternatives that we can look at to reduce costs (like digital ocean)?
I have seen dropbox do this. But I understand they do it as a much larger scale. Would be keen to know if any one in our shooting range has done anything to reduce this cost. <comment><USER2> IMHO the missing information is how much revenue you are generating with that 10k expense. If you are generating 100k+ / month revenue, then 10% of that for storage is just the cost of doing business.

If you have to hire somebody at 100k p.a. to manage your bare-metal based infrastructure, then, again, it doesn't make good business sense. And there always are costs and lots of debugging in switching as well.

Although there are technical considerations in switching, I would be inclined to understand such decisions from a business point of view. Of course, I'm assuming that you are not flush with cash, otherwise you wouldn't be concerned with your burn rate.

<comment><USER3> Revenue is irrelevant.

They need a database server/cluster. Aws provide one, other places can host one cheaper.

Less money spent is less money spent regardless of your revenue.

Also, this strawman of "you can't save money outside aws, you need someone to manage your racks" is beyond ridiculous.

If virtual machines work for you in aws, they'll work for you elsewhere, and there are fucking thousands of companies who will rent you virtual machines for a fraction of what aws charges.

Ok, so yes you need someone to look after those servers. So? Are you seriously suggesting it's wise to use AWS provided infrastructure without someone to look after it?

Anyone who says "aws means we don't need ops" has no fucking clue what they're talking about.

<comment><USER4> What are these places with cheaper aws-rds ?

<comment><USER3> RDS is a database service. I said you can host a database cluster of your own at other providers for less money, not that other places have a literal RDS clone.

<comment><USER5> You'll have to know how to setup and maintain your own database infrastructure, though, right? I'm not an infrastructure engineer, but patching, security, OS updates, database software updates, being able to quickly redeploy in case of failure, redundancy, etc.

I've read horror stories about the poor engineers at AWS who are on call and have to detail with physical pagers paging them at various hours of the night. Systems fail, dependencies fail, shit happens... So now you will need to hire some small team to do these things for you.

I'm not saying you never need to be concerned with any of these things if you're on Azure or AWS.

I am saying that you need to factor in these components into your costs.

Infrastructure management might not be a core competency at my company. That's why I pay some premium but hand it off to the Azures and AWS's of the world.

Is hosting your own database cluster at some other company for a smaller monthly fee actually saving you money each month? What are the other costs to your business from making the move?

The answer _could_ be yes, it's cheaper and makes 100% business sense. All I'm saying is these questions have to be asked, investigated and concluded. Arguing on one side or another without going through these steps is shortsighted.

<comment><USER3> Unless you're running something particularly esoteric (which means you _aren 't_ used RDS anyway), software updates will come from either your distro's packages if you use them, or the vendors packages (e.g. mysql, percona, mariadb, whichever flavour of postgres, etc). So updates are straightforward, regular maintenance, not that different from any other Linux server. Who maintains the servers that your app/site runs on?

Security is basic OS security, and then DB specific security, which is IMO easier to deal with than AWS security.

Your infrastructure setup should be repeatable, regardless of whether you use AWS or a bunch of old laptops in a closet. This can be anything from shell scripts to your own custom apt repo and private packages - so if you need to 'redeploy' because you don't have a HA failover (I dunno, maybe you like to live dangerously?) you re-run the setup process on a new cluster, and import the last backup you have.

Sure, for some organisations AWS may be the best case scenario, but I've yet to see one where it actually is. More likely, is organisations that somehow believe AWS means "I dont need ops" because a developer with zero ops capabilities/experience clicks some 'create instance' buttons, and follows a web tutorial on 'how to run your site on AWS'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you are spending 10k a month basically on a datastore don't you think you could use a managed hosting service like Softlayer (IBM), Internap, Rackspace ... there's also some smaller mom and pop datacenters that will image a server for you with x or y.

You can chop that 10k into 2k a month for 2 large boxes on Internap (10gig uplink, 128gigs of ram, 16tb sata with 480gb ssd and this isn't the actual price it's actually about 250 less than 1k, no guarantee you can get the same price)

There is a setup cost both from the managed hosting provider and from whatever you provide to install the datastore and configure replication and backups.

Its easily worth it but there's work involved if you up to it it's not going to break you. It will make you stronger.

</comment><comment><USER7> The most important question is how AWS costs scales in relation to number of users. Specifically, here are the questions that I would ask:

(1) What is the range of variable cost per user? Can you pass variable costs onto users? For example, if one of your power users is consuming 500gb of space in your DB, are they paying for the 500gb of space, or are they paying the same as your customers using 0gb of space?

(2) How do storage/cloud requirements change with an additional 1 user, 100 users, 1000 users?

(3) Is your monthly revenue per user greater than your monthly cloud cost per user?

(4) If you gained 100k users tomorrow, would you go out of business this month?

(5) Do your costs scale linearly with number of users?

(6) Are your capacity requirements generally static and predictable on an immediate (daily, weekly) basis? Or do you have large spikes in traffic?

Generally speaking, the advantage of the cloud is elasticity; you provision capacity on demand only as you need it. If you are running instances 24/7, you are almost definitely losing money. The first cost saving measure I would look into is moving core, basic infrastructure onto dedicated or colocated servers.

By "core infrastructure," I mean the predictable capacity that you always need. Keep that in one place with a low fixed cost. Any extra capacity you need, use the cloud.

</comment><comment><USER8> If your needs are not complicated than S3 and RDS, then the following questions come into play..

1\. Can I afford to run my own DB and Object storage with acceptable service levels? Do I have the necessary skills in house? 2\. Is this cost relatively long-term or very short time? If long, renting space for your own servers at co lo datacenter might be well worth it. If you're not sure about your business, it might be wise to stay put with AWS.

I think it is a conscious decision based on your future plans and business goals. There is no direct answer to such infrastructure planning.

</comment><comment><USER9> Dropbox did this because their core business is data storage so it makes sense to in-house data storage.

There's some simple things you can do, like reservations, that can cut 30-40% off your bill.

In most places I've worked, even if we dropped our aws costs down to zero, it wouldn't materially affect the business. Developers were generally the bigger expense, so having one take say a month to research and migrate instead of building a feature.. usually building features won because there's no cap on the upside. Cost savings were generally only done if they were quick wins.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't believe there to be an ideal cut-off point, as the value of the trade- offs are largely situational.

Questions you should ask:

\- How does the monthly rate change as we grow? (i.e. Do you have an architecture that doesn't scale well?) Maybe what you have is fine as you will grow into it. Maybe your cost growth will out-pace your revenue/user growth. This one is really important to understand.

\- How optimal is my current RDS/S3 setup? Are you using instance types above your needs? Are you retaining more data than you need? (i.e. Are you simply over paying?)

\- How optimal is my application's usage of AWS? (i.e. Are you using indiscriminately?)

\- How severely is the growth of my business impeded by the loss of $2k-$10k/month? Where else could it be applied to grow the business? (i.e. Is thinking about this the best use of your time, or is it just the most glaring, easy thing? Remember that saving on monthly expenses doesn't get you customers or grow your revenue.)

\- What hidden costs might there be from switching away from the status quo? In addition to the monthly costs, what will the development/operational costs be? Are you making trade offs in your availability or your ability to quickly recover from technical issues by switching?

</comment><comment><USER11> There are other costs associated with moving out of RDS. You may spend less on your hosting/storage but you will likely be spending more time on maintenance. You'll now be in charge of executing snapshots and making sure they work.

If you have someone on hand that has the time and is willing to be on call for managing the DB that's great and it's probably worth it. But if you have to hire someone or have to move someone of of other work to take care of the DB it may not be worth it. And if you can't hire someone and don't have someone with experience in managing a prod DB it could be a risky move.

Speaking of moving, the move itself can be risky. It can be tricky to move data like this depending on whether or not you can take some downtime, how much downtime, what your data access patterns are, if you can easily dual write and how long it will take to transfer the data are some things to think about. The cost of the move itself in dev time and testing costs (you will probably want to make sure this works before doing it for real, which means starting up copies of your DB in both AWS and your new provider) might blow away any savings you might make for some time.

It also depends on the DB tech you are using. Some are more reliable than others and require very little attention.

I don't know enough about your situation to give you definite advice but those are the things I would consider before moving. There are a lot of non-direct costs associated with something like this so it's best to think through everything. Some other things to consider are dev familiarity (they used one tool now they need to learn another), monitoring and observalbility (you didn't mention using cloudwatch but it's there), security and upgrades/updates.

Good luck with whatever you decide on.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm currently moving a client's RDS into a linode hosted percona cluster, and we expect to pay no more, but gain flexibility (and reduce latency/wan sql trafffic but that's not a normal case), and they're nowhere near what you're paying.

For RDS specifically it might be worth reaching out to Percona to get advice/consultation about what a replacement solution might look like (not affiliated in any way)

</comment><comment><USER12> We also spend upward of 200K per month on Google Cloud. And recently, we moved some pieces to AWS and OVH. We only move things there is it's gonna save us more than 50% of the cost. (including maintenance etc....)

</comment><comment><USER13> Bare servers. You should divide that by 10. Don't waste your time with another custom platform to learn.</comment>


Build a Dumbarton Rail Tunnel - <AUTHOR> http://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/2019/03/build-dumbarton-rail-tunnel.html <comment><USER2> You have to drill down into the tiny About link at bottom right to find that this is not an official Caltrain site at all:

"I do not work in the rail transport industry. I have no relationship with the CHSRA or any of its engineering consultants, whether personal, professional or financial."</comment>


Ask HN: How to return to the old gmail? - <AUTHOR> The new gmail is too slow and ugly. I don't want to get used to it just now, nor anytime soon as I need to work.
Anyway to get back to the old gmail interface?
Under the gear I don't have the button to return to the old gmail.
thanks <comment><USER2> The old Gmail is dead. Slow and ugly are the future. If you want something clean and fast, you're going to have to switch to something else. That's the magic of SaaS.

I've noticed the "return to the old interface" option is gone too, but it was never likely to be a permanent option, and I'm not surprised it was removed.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/](https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/)

=>

[https://mail.google.com/mail/h/0/](https://mail.google.com/mail/h/0/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Works, but goes to the html one, which is way too bad for me as well haha

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Google has transitioned Gmail accounts to the updated version that it released last spring, and is now removing the option to go back to the "classic Gmail." (The stripped-down HTML view is still available for some browsers but lacks many features)."

Source: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/technology/personaltech/g...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/technology/personaltech/go- back-to-old-gmail.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> If you or your organization uses Google Apps, then for now you aren't yet forced to switch. At least that's been my experience. I'm not sure whether the rollout just hasn't made it to my domain yet, or an actual setting is controlling it.</comment>


Harvard, MIT sue govt over order revoking visas for foreign students - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-07-harvard-mit-sue-trump-govt.html <comment><USER2> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769558](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769558)

<comment><USER3> Comments moved thither.</comment></comment>


Canada Post is resetting passwords for online accounts - <AUTHOR> https://www.canadapost.ca/cpc/en/our-company/news-and-media/corporate-news/closures-and-service-interruptions-details.page?article=2019/10/16/canada_post_is_reset&cattype=announcements&cat=updates <comment><AUTHOR> I recieved the following email from "Canada Post" <donotreply- email@example.com>

      Canada Post password reset for online accounts (ref. OCT 2019)

      Canada Post is resetting passwords for all online customer accounts, starting on October 16, 2019.

      There has not been a cyberattack or breach of the Canada Post network but we are investigating a report that some customer information may have been compromised in 2017.

      We have been able to determine that login and password credentials stolen in external privacy breaches unrelated to Canada Post were used to access individual Canada Post accounts. This is possible when users reuse their credentials on several websites for convenience or to avoid having to remember different passwords.

      Based on our investigation, we do not believe your information has been compromised, but we are requiring that you reset your password.

      What you need to do

      * Create a stronger password (with both small and capital letters, a number and a special character such as !, # or %) for your Canada Post account.

      * To change your password, click the button at the bottom of this email. Enter your user name to start the process of resetting your password with the new requirements.

      * Alternatively, you can visit canadapost.ca, click "Sign in" the top right-hand corner of the homepage and then select "Forgot Password."

      * If you use the Canada Post or epost mobile app, please sign out and log back in once you have reset your password at canadapost.ca.

      While this is not a breach of the Canada Post network, we understand our obligation to our customers and all Canadians to keep their information safe. We will be reviewing our policies and procedures to determine how we can continue to improve the security of our online platforms.

      If you have any questions, please call our Customer Care team at 1-877-376-1212. Please use reference number OCT 2019 to help us direct your call.

      Thank you.

I really wish that they would not send out an email with a link to all account holders to have their passwords reset. They just gave the phishers an easy win. I wonder how many accounts will be compromised after this blunder? An email informing people to go to the home page and select "Forgot Password", but without providing any link would have been a better choice.

dustfinger.</comment>


Dizzying Ride May Be Ending for Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/business/dealbook/dizzying-ride-may-be-ending-for-start-ups.html <comment><USER2> Whether the point being made is correct or not, the article cites just a few prominent examples (such as Snapchat, Dropbox, Square) and makes a bit of a leap that their circumstances extend to the broader technology market.

That said, the article does include hedges, such as "But those companies are very different from Snapchat, making comparisons difficult if not impossible."</comment>


SensibleSideButtons – side navigation for third-party mice in macOS - <AUTHOR> https://sensible-side-buttons.archagon.net <comment><USER2> I am a big fan of rectangle[0] for bringing windows style windows management to macOS. Gives you a set of shortcuts you can use to put windows where you want them on the screen. It is crazy to me that this is not standard on macs.

0\. [https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle](https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle)

<comment><USER3> I've been using BetterSnapTool for years: [https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/bettersnaptool/id417375580](https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/bettersnaptool/id417375580)

It's super cheap, and on top of the regular shortcuts, you can create custom shortcuts with their own specific positions, and it saves them per screen. I currently have a dozen of custom shortcuts, which is super handy for an ultrawide 38 inch screen.

<comment><USER4> FWIW, most (all?) of BetterSnapTool's functionality is included with BetterTouchTool. BTT is an amazing utility... worth every penny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Through Apples settings you can, with no extra software, rebind them to Mission Control All Apps and App Windows.

I personally find this more useful for quickly changing Windows and moving then between spaces.

<comment><USER6> I don't know why, but I have a Logitech G MX518, and this doesn't work all the time. I assign Mouse Button M4 to activate mission control, but for some reason it doesn't do anything when I click it. I tried assigning M5, still nothing. It used to work normally, pre-Mojave. Any idea what's going on?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've switched to Mac around 1 year ago and I was disappointed to see that additional mouse keys were not supported out of the box. I've been using SensibleSideButtons ever since.

<comment><USER8> This is from the same company that thinks that a one-button mouse is a really good idea.

<comment><USER9> At the time it was quite sensible. Many in the target audience were computer illiterate or beginners. The context menu is not discoverable and is counter intuitive to the point and touch metaphor. In addition, most of the right mouse button actions can be replaced by a two click alternative. Finally, the modifier keys can be used for power users.

<comment><USER10> This seems to conflict with the long-standing reputation that Macs were for designers.

<comment><USER11> Graphical designers vs UI designers...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting! I had to deal with a related problem several times — I often want this from my Logitech mouse:

> _I discovered that the side buttons emitted standard M4 and M5 commands just > as they did in Windows_

But there's no way of setting that up in Logitech's 'Control Center'; 'middle click' is as fancy as that gets. If I'm lucky, I can use Control Center to set up a custom configuration for the specific application in question and make mouse buttons emulate keyboard events, then map those hotkeys to the desired actions within the application. But if the program doesn't allow custom hotkeys for triggering something that's meant to be done with extra mouse buttons, I'm pretty much out of luck.

You don't even get the standard mouse button events when you don't install Control Center at all — then the extra buttons (on my particular older model; no idea about current Logitech products) do nothing at all :(

So the funny thing is: I'd need a 'sensible side buttons' hack that does the exact opposite of this one.

<comment><USER13> I can recommend Steermouse[0]. It gave me control over the upper buttons on my Kensington Slimblade

<comment><USER14> +1 for Steermouse — I find it to be the perfect midway point between something basic like Sensible, and something highly complex like USB overdrive.

<comment><USER15> Steermouse has high CPU usage (up to 5%) when moving the mouse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ironically, iPadOS now has better built-in support for multiple mouse buttons than macOS: [https://aws13-customer-care-assets.s3-us- west-2.amazonaws.co...](https://aws13-customer-care-assets.s3-us- west-2.amazonaws.com/CC%20Graphics/AssistiveTouch%20Devices/Mouse14.jpg)

</comment><comment> torb-xyz I really like the idea, but personally I got better results simply binding back and forward buttons to keyboard macros for 'ctrl -' and 'ctrl shift -' using Logitech's G-Hub software.

The shortcuts 'ctrl -' and 'ctrl shift -' are the default for 'go back' and 'go forward' being supported even in many apps (including that don't support the gestures), and since they are keyboard shortcuts you can usually add support for them in apps by rebinding the shortcuts for back and forward (or anything else you want to bind in that particular software).

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm still using ControllerMate for keyboard, mouse, and general USB-device control on the Mac but to my extreme disappointment it seems to be a dead project at this point. While its GUI is arguably a touch funky, it's always been an incredibly powerful and unique tool able to do both rebinding and extremely complex macros with customized controls for any application. I'm glad there are other tools continuing to be developed to help fill some tiny holes but it's a shame it couldn't be kept up, or if fully abandoned open sourced.

<comment><USER15> I love ControllerMate, but I think Catalina is first macos it doesn't support. It was the first program I found which allowed me to edit mouse acceleration with a custom curve. I made the Mac mouse feel the same as a Window mouse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> MacOS generally is the best laptop OS and the worst desktop OS.

Half baked mouse support, awful windows management with incongruent fullscreen functionality, half baked multi monitor integration, terrible thermals/performance, and the removal of anti-aliased text made MacOS a generally poor desktop experience for me.

Some of these problems can be ameliorated by third party apps, but I get the impression the desktop experience (and maybe more generally MacOS) has not been a concern at Cupertino for some time.

<comment><USER19> > _MacOS generally is the best laptop OS and the worst desktop OS._

I'm afraid I don't understand the premise, given that the experience is the same.

<comment><USER20> I was always a 'laptop only' guy at work, but since COVID I've used my (multi thousand dollar) MBP as a desktop primarily.

The number of random apps that I have to install because of odd quirks that don't work like I'd want/expect. The most egregious IMO is no support for mouse4/5 as back/forward (seriously, it's 2020.... every mouse has some form of theses unless explicitly designed not to), but it goes past that. The first two months of using my mac as a desktop, about weekly I would run into the case that something wouldn't work as expected, I'd google it, and find a stackexchange post where someone is like "yeah that behavior is intentional, no way to change it, by the way I wrote this little open source tool to fix this."

My mac sits on my desk, but faces opposite of me because I want to be able to charge it in the right port, not the left. Left port seems to make my kernel_task go crazy. Two monitors (using an HP workstation thunderbolt dock) seem to make the fans go nuts as well.

Maybe I need a desktop form of Apple hardware, but lol $5999.

Luckily the OS is somewhat extensible, but I fully agree that the desktop experience feels half baked at best. Easily the worst out of Windows, OSX, and Ubuntu (defaults).

<comment><USER21> Another big annoyance: you can't turn on natural scrolling for trackpads but have it off for the mouse. The two separate settings are inexplicably linked.

<comment><USER22> Sadly, another open-source-tool-bandaid is the solution. Karabiner-Elements can define per-device settings for scroll direction. Overkill (considering all of its feature set), but works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As a Mac user who has not fully bought into their ecosystem this is an important productivity tool for me. Also I find it sad how such basics are missing from OSX.

<comment><USER24> Yeah. Nowadays it feels like macOS is designed mostly for touchpads.

<comment><USER25> Maybe it is a war on the cursor.

<comment><USER24> iPadOS just got one though. I think they're just pushing gestures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My main gripe since buying a MBP last year is the sheer amount of third party applications I need to install in order to restore basic functionality.

I guess most users never discover these limitations but between this, the absence of window snapping (and associated key shortcuts), and the terrible external monitor support it's hard not to regret the move when I stare at my (admittedly very pretty) laptop.

I get that most reviewers aren't really heavy users, and seem to think (like Apple) that a "pro" user is someone who works exclusively in photo and video editing, but I need to get my work done.

It's really disheartening that they don't seem to understand these types of problems.

But hey, at least they're giving us Escape keys back.

<comment> GuB-42 Serious question, why are you using a Mac? Are you developing for Apple products?

Because indeed, most people I see using macs professionally tend to be artists (photo and video editors but also musicians, designers, architects,...). But from my experience tech workers and engineers are more likely to use PCs unless there is some special need (ex: iOS dev).

Edit: Downvoted, as expected. But it is not a troll. I recognize that MacBook pros have really nice features, like a second to none trackpad, nice screen, nice SSD,... Plus it looks good and it "just works". Artists like it a lot and I understand them. But for tech and engineering work, ThinkPads seem to be preferred. They are robust laptops with great keyboards and better connectivity. If computing power is required, powerful desktops and workstation class laptops tend to be used. Finally, for office work, Macs are often considered too expensive.

<comment><USER27> I've been an IT consultant for many years. I have been using MacBooks since around 2009. After an initial bumpy migration to macOS (OS X back then) after at least 10 years of using Linux (mostly Debian) exclusively, I never looked back.

It mostly just works and I can focus on writing my applications and operating my systems. I get a nice UNIX-like ecosystem on the metal and almost everything I need to write code I can get on Homebrew.

It runs Docker for those times when I want actual Linux locally, although I've been using that less and less since I can build and run my containers on the cloud.

I haven't counted but I suspect more than half of my IT colleagues use Macs, and almost everyone else uses Linux. Windows is the exception, where the only people crazy enough to inflict that upon themselves tend to be .NET/C#/F#/Microsoft-oriented devs.

macOS is the most hassle-free experience you can get. I say that whilst keeping a very close eye on Linux development since I'd like to break away from Apple eventually. Unfortunately no Linux distro comes even close to Macs in terms of simplicity and reliability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Check out steermouse.jp. Solves the same problem. Been using it for many years. Replaced crappy Razer software on my Mac.

<comment><USER29> There's also [https://mousefix.org](https://mousefix.org) which has the extra bonus in that it tries to solve the smooth scrolling problem that can occur when using a mouse on a mac.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> For folks looking for more complex options than Back and Forward events, USBOverdrive serves that need, but requires a kext. (It also fixes an issue with older Razer mice not having working mouseover support on macOS due to, iirc, their invalid M16 signaling.)

<comment><USER31> I've always had horrible experience purchasing things like this in that they never stay working for long, are poorly supported when new versions of the OS come out, or are just broken by default. How long have you been using it? How are system upgrades? Is it reliable? Not trying to be an ass, it's just every time I've tried shit like this in the past on someone's recommendation it's been a fucking waste.

<comment><USER30> I only use it because it has a driver fix for my broken-as-designed mouse, and I don't do complicated expert-user things to my Mac, so I honestly can't say whether it'll work for you or not. I assume they have a trial and such, but it's been a while since I looked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Had to switch to MBP last year due to work and have been using SensibleSideButtons from the first day.

I am missing an "always on top" application to pin windows to the top layer - like there is in most Linux distros. Anyone knows a little app that provides this function?

</comment><comment><USER33> Huh, I use a Logitech M720 and never really thought about using the side buttons until now. I did a little experiment, and BetterTouchTool does support the side buttons as triggers. I guess it's the start of a deep rabbit hole for me...

<comment><USER34> I recommend page up and page down. It's quicker than using the scroll wheel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm fairly certain the side buttons can be programmed using Karabiner Elements[1]. If so Karabiner Elements has a lot more options.

[1]: [https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/docs/help/how- to/mouse-b...](https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/docs/help/how-to/mouse- button/)

<comment><USER36> Did you actually read the article? It is about why a simple remapping is not sufficient or at least has some caveats.

<comment><USER35> I'll admit I could not and still can't get the videos to load so I'm not 100% sure of the behavior this has. Karabiner Elements has complex modifications I'll sit done at my Mac later and check for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is some pretty nice detective work. I need to check if my M720 does the same as the MX.

<comment><USER38> Another Logitech M720 user here. I had to uninstall Logitech's Options app on Mac because I found (via opensnoop) that it was capturing Cmd-Alt-Shift-A and Cmd-Alt-Shift-S (which I was already using with Moom). I couldn't find out why Options was capturing these shortcuts; I asked Logitech on Twitter but they never responded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> > SensibleSideButtons lives in your menu bar.

No! This looked so useful, but there's so much crap in the menubar now. A pref pane would be better.

<comment><USER15> There is an option you can click so it doesn't show up in menu bar.</comment></comment>


Connections: an alternative view of change [documentary] - <AUTHOR> http://youtube.com/view_play_list?p=422338074061C0E0

<comment><USER2> When I was a kid, this was my favorite documentary of all time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had been wanting to see this for years until it recently popped up on youtube. Now I finally have seen it, it pretty much is my favorite documentary of all time.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> An interdisciplinary history of science, innovation, invention and economics.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_>(TV_series)#

<comment><USER2> Those bastards actually have parentheses in their urls? Argh. Will fix.

<comment><USER3> No, I don't think they do. I think they use %HH encoding.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29></comment></comment></comment>


Uber isn't sure if it can remain viable without building self-driving cars - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-questions-future-of-being-a-viable-business-without-self-driving-cars-2017-4 <comment><USER2> The issue is that building autonomous (not driver needed at all) is way more difficult than building self-driving cars which is pretty difficult by itself.</comment>


Vectorized processing for Apache Arrow - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dremio/gandiva <comment><AUTHOR> There is another component called Apache Arrow Flight, a new way for applications to interact with Arrow. Now that there is an established way for representing data between systems, Flight is an RPC protocol for exchanging that data between systems much more efficiently. You can think of this as a much faster alternative to ODBC/JDBC for in-memory analytics.

<comment><USER2> Arrow Flight is still being developed and may be while before it drops to real user code. See ARROW-249. Indeed having a open standard runtime memory format for tabular / columnar data sets is key to improved performance

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> No mention anywhere of how it was ensured that the benchmark measurements were taken after the code had been compiled by the JIT (specifically, C2 on HotSpot)... seriously?

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd like to use it, could you guys add a license to this thing?

</comment><comment><USER5> The technology behind this (and Apache Arrow in general!) are really cool.

The HN submission title is much more clickbait than the actual content deserves. Any algorithmic improvement (in terms of big-O runtime complexity) can be scaled up to 100x by making the data set large enough.

<comment><USER6> This is cool! Maybe a different perspective:

\-- Numbers are a red herring to me: HPC libs plugged onto the columnar data should destroy LLVM-generated code, including SIMD (not sure if being done yet). HPC libs should cover the typical alg shapes anyways (e.g., everything in the article), and GPU code should generally beat whatever is here anyways. For a fun time, look into SIMD polyhedral vs skeleton & manual GPU codes..

The numbers here we really care about are expression compile time - will a system respond quickly to an analyst or adaptive system generating code. Is it < 10ms overhead, < 100ms, < 1s, < 5s, ...?

\-- All about the UDFs: So why do we care? A big problem w/ the algorithm template libs is they stink at accepting friendly user-defined expressions (UDFs). Fast systems are increasingly adopting LLVM to solve this. Speaking of SIMD.. MapD does exactly this: columnar SQL expressions -- LLVM --> CUDA. Our team has been thinking about how to do stuff like js/python/pandas UDFs -> CUDA, and pragmatically, most roads came down to this (vs say Numba's internals). So Gandiva providing a modular bit here is quite cool, esp. for the growing Arrow community!

\-- For framework devs: Likewise, there are some cool choices here like code caching. Users shouldn't directly interact with this, but framework devs will. We've eaten cycles here for similar projects, and most Gandiva consumer would have to as well if it wasn't here too. So just as Apache Calcite is easing dev of a lot of similar systems, it's cool to see the team is not just doing the modular system, but seemingly, doing it well!</comment></comment>


India retaliates against US, removes security outside US embassy - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/12/17/india-retaliates-against-us-over-arrest-diplomat/

<comment><AUTHOR> Outside US embassy in New Delhi, the police have placed barricades and blocked the road permanently to provide additional layer of security to US consulate. Additionally, the area outside US consulate is guarded by Delhi police 24x7.

This is a courtesy extended by India to US unilaterally; US does not extend the same courtesy to Indian consulate nor does India extended the same courtesy to any other country's embassy.

</comment><comment><USER2> 'If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities.. it is the United States' \--Mandela in 2003

[http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/nelson- mandela-i...](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/nelson-mandela-iraq- israel_b_4396638.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is plain stupid. Seems like some politician trying to flex his/her power to gain votes.

I don't understand why Indian govt thinks Khobragade should receive any sort of special treatment. She was arrested and prosecuted just like a regular person. THere shouldn't be any double standards.

<comment><USER4> What if that happened to American diplomat in India? What US would do? Cry wolf for sure.

<comment><AUTHOR> US would unleash it's army of drones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While she did lie probably. They should have submitted an arrest warrant to her and told her to come in. If she didn't then arrest her. No need to strip search either. This isn't some diplomat accused or rape or murder.

</comment><comment><USER6> Strip searched? What are they afraid she is hiding another housekeeper under her dress?</comment>


Deringing in DCT via overshoot and clipping - <AUTHOR> https://pornel.net/deringing/ <comment><USER2> Unfortunately both the article and the code suffer from a crucial misunderstanding of JPEG -- the 8x8 blocks do actually undergo a 2-dimensional DCT. Zig-zag scanning down to 1D comes later, after quantization, and is applied to the quantized DCT coefficients in order to maximize runs of zero for the benefit of RLE.

The code and the article assume that the scan is applied earlier, to the spatial data, in preparation for a 1D DCT and as a consequence mistakenly performs all of its operations in scan order. In reality, a 1D DCT of zigzag- scanned samples differs dramatically from a zigzag scan of 2D frequency coefficients.

The technique still works to an extent as it's still processing edges (only diagonally), creating a similar effect in some cases to the desired one, but likely less effective than a row-column or other 2D approach which models the actual transform and the intended behavior outlined in the blog post.

Surprisingly this code was accepted into mozjpeg nearly a year ago and remains as in the blog post.

<comment><USER3> _Surprisingly this code was accepted into mozjpeg nearly a year ago and remains as in the blog post._

Why not? The examples seem to work and show improvements. Anyone is welcome to submit an improved version if they like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another thing that can produce out-of-gamut colors in JPEG is chroma subsampling. [http://www.glennchan.info/articles/technical/chroma/chroma1....](http://www.glennchan.info/articles/technical/chroma/chroma1.htm) has a good overview.

Clipping is required by JFIF, so you can't implement spilling in the decoder by default, even if you assume the source was 0-255 RGB. So implementing this in the encoder like the article does is best. but I have mixed feelings about it since it's most helpful for images that shouldn't be saved as JPEG at all.

<comment><USER5> There are a lot of photographic jpegs that have black and white text too. Perhaps a caption. Perhaps a road sign in the scene. Reducing block noise seems better than saving such images as bajillion byte pngs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The fundamental problem here is that the Nyquist frequency of displays is well below the human visual limit. Furthermore, the display doesn't even attempt to reconstruct a band-limited signal like an audio DAC would: it simply maps samples to pixels. This direct mapping lets you render images with much higher frequency components than you'd otherwise be able to, but as soon as you _do_ limit the bandwidth of the signal (like the DCT is doing here) you get ringing.

Of course, this ringing is totally natural, and if the display operated "properly" from a signal processing perspective (like an audio DAC), you'd see it everywhere: a single-pixel line would be below the band limit!

To really solve the problem, you have to stop treating pixels as samples, since they're not displayed that way. Instead, you should upsample the image to a higher resolution using a kernel which matches how a display renders pixels, perform your signal processing on this higher-resolution image, then downsample using the same kernel.</comment>


Power company kills nuclear plant, plans $6B in solar, battery investment - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/08/florida-power-company-exchanging-nuclear-plans-for-solar-plans-cutting-rates/ <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: I used to offer consulting services to energy (including nuclear) industry consultancies.

This is significant. Duke was bullish and leading resurgence efforts on nuclear for many, many decades, even through the decline of the past 30+ years.

The main risks of nuclear plants are raising billions, site selection (NIMBYs), certification ($), licensing ($) and insurance ($). If you can't do all five, it's not worth it when solar and wind are safer and faster to ROI. Solar especially, given massive projects which drive down unit costs further as production processes and technological competition increases.</comment>


Red Hat becomes the first open source company to amass a billion dollars - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zenoss.com/2012/03/why-billion-dollar-red-hat-and-openstack-need-to-dance/ <comment><USER2> That seems to make them 1/69th the size of Microsoft by revenue but 1/270 the size by profits. Notice that Red Hat's profits are about 1/10 of income but MS' profits are about 1/2 of income. Shows the incentive to get monopoly.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedHat> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft>

<comment><USER3> Well, it shows the incentive to run a product company. Even with a monopoly on consulting you're not going to have great profit margins.

That said, it really pisses me off that you were down voted like you were. There seems to be a rash of that on HN now. You were contributing to the conversation and backing up your argument with numbers. Right or wrong, that doesn't deserve a drive by dismissal.

The voting buttons mean "More or less of this content on HN", not "I agree or disagree". If you disagree, post a reply. You might teach the OP something, or might even learn that you're wrong, as I have plenty of times on HN.

Edit: I've turned this into an Ask HN thread here, since I think it would be helpful to have a discussion about this:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3760275>

<comment><USER4> Actually, pg has stated that the downvote arrows mean the latter.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171>

<comment><USER5> Paul is wrong on this, though. We as the community should override that.

<comment><USER6> Let's be fair, people up-vote the stuff they like/agree with whether it contributes a lot or little. Symmetrical actions in UI should do symmetrical things, how hard is to grasp it? Something I like/agree—up-vote. Something I disagree—down-vote. If you want different behavior then remove down-vote button. There is "flag" if one thinks comment is inappropriate.

<comment><USER7> > Let's be fair, people up-vote the stuff they like/agree with whether it > contributes a lot or little.

But they shouldn't do this _either_. Personally, I try to downvote--or at least not upvote--comments which I agree with but which add nothing to the discussion. (I'm sure I'm far from consistent, of course.)

I mean, the functional use of votes is to organize the comments page. It just makes zero sense to organize the page based on the average opinion of the community rather than constructiveness/usefulness of the comments.

PG is wrong here.

<comment><USER8> I'm totally with you on this.

At the very least, if someone down-votes they should reply as to _why_ they disagree. There a great sense of loss when you say something factual and relevant and get down-voted without explanation.

When I've brought these issues up in the past, the conversation usually resolves with "don't worry about karma." And, I don't, but it does change the _community_ , and about that I worry.

Basically, the community will turn into whatever is rewarded. If you reward hive-mindedness, that's what you'll get. If you reward interesting discourse, _that's_ what you'll get.

<comment><USER9> I'd like to see anonymous upvotes, but when you downvote you have to leave a comment or it says 'downvoted by UserName' (maybe only for negative-karma comments).

It turns a downvote from 'I disagree' to 'I disagree and everybody else you should too'. You have to be willing to risk your own karma to take away somebody else's.

For instance the way HN works now afaik, somebody could post 'me too' comments to get enough karma to downvote, then turn around, downvote all posts supporting some idea they dislike, and there would be no way for other posters to correct this or know it was happening.

<comment><USER7> > For instance the way HN works now afaik, somebody could post 'me too' > comments to get enough karma to downvote, then turn around, downvote all > posts supporting some idea they dislike, and there would be no way for other > posters to correct this or know it was happening.

FYI, I think that this is supposed to be automatically detected and nullified by the website software, although I can't speak to the details.

<comment><USER9> So you have a group of trolls that all upvote each other's comments. Unless the system also penalizes upvotes then they get disproportionally too much karma. And if the system does penalize upvotes then somebody that always posts really great posts gets too little visibility because his upvotes look trollish (ie maybe they come from the few people that really recognize an expert in a small domain). It seems that an automated system is always going to promote mediocrity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm glad Red Hat is enjoying this kind of success. We need open source code everywhere possible, and we all benefit from businesses running on secure, open source servers. At the same time, Red Hat has remained respectable, even when other open source companies manage to alienate the open source community with otherwise great software ( _cough_ Oracle _cough_ ).

</comment><comment><USER11> congrats for them,for proving you _can_ make successful business out of open source and continue contributing to oss :).

<comment><USER12> They kind of proved this from the day one. Interesting documentary on this topic is Revolution OS[1]. It is kind of biased and now very outdated but it is still worth watching. If you haven't seen it and you are interested in early history of OSS I recommend it.

1\. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0308808/>

<comment><USER11> cool,thanks.I'm not aware this documentary.Will watch it soon :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 1) "Error establishing a database connection"

2) Ars had a great article about this one month ago [http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/02/how-red-hat- kil...](http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/02/how-red-hat-killed-its- core-productand-became-a-billion-dollar-business.ars)

</comment><comment><USER14> Glad Red Hat is doing well. CentOS is great for production servers.

</comment><comment><USER15> Site seems to be down. Link to Google web cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AweoOZb...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AweoOZbvjKkJ:blog.zenoss.com/2012/03/why- billion-dollar-red-hat-and-openstack-need-to-dance/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER16> Thanks for that link. Did not know the blog went down last night until this morning. Had not planned on an enormous traffic spike like that :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Open source sucks as a business. This took way too long. We like to think it works but... it kind of doesn't.

Not knocking open source. Just saying the Kumbaya business plan didn't really work out.

<comment><USER18> I suppose it depends how you define a successful bushiness plan. In my book, if a company can create a business that employs a few thousand people, turns a healthy profit and does all that while remaining true to the ideals of open source, it's a pretty successful business plan.

<comment><USER17> I agree with you, I just mean... as big as Redhat is, it is a shockingly small company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> First thing I thought when clicking the link: "No, that's the wrong hat!"

</comment><comment><USER20> You know what's cool?

<comment><USER21> Not bringing out that quote and instead contributing something informative to the discussion, that's what would be cool.</comment></comment>