Hackers Stole Secrets of U.S. Government Workers' Sex Lives - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/24/hackers-stole-secrets-of-u-s-government-workers-sex-lives.html

<comment><USER2> "U.S. Government Stole Secrets of U.S. Government Workers' Sex Lives"

Public understanding needs to shift to condemning those who collect and aggregate such data. Once it's aggregated, the question isn't _if_ but _when_ it will be copied wholesale.

<comment><USER3> Came here to say the same thing. Why is the government collecting secrets of its workers' sex lives? Why is it being stored? All data is subject to theft. The bigger question is why it was collected and stored in the first place. The government is responsible here.

<comment><USER4> So they'd have blackmail material to use against potential leakers or defectors. They certainly did in the Edward Snowden case (remember the whole "girl is a stripper" thing that was meant to damage him but backfired?).

<comment><USER5> These are investigations for clearances. They ensure that the candidate doesn't have anything that can be exploited by a foreign government. The article mentioned this. Before you get a clearance you'll have to go through a _very thorough_ background check. In the case of top secret information they'll dig into your entire life and even give you what's called a "full lifestyle polygraph", meaning no topic is off limits.

<comment><USER4> I was more answering their second question: "Why is it being stored?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Asked specifically what information the hackers had obtained, Seymour told > lawmakers that she preferred to answer later in a "classified session."

Does anyone get the sense that often times "classified" is just a cover for "embarrassing?" Essentially information they know their political opponents have, but really wish to conceal from the American public?

The whole American intelligence machine is (and related, like secret courts) is very creepy. Definitely starting to wonder if the whole thing can be kept under any kind of control with the levels of indirection.

Congressional oversight is a nice theory, but when the people who do the overseeing are either former spooks or in the pockets of monied corporate interests who sell kit to the spooks, you really have to question how powerful oversight is in this case (and if negative reports will too be "classified").

</comment><comment><USER6> In case anyone was wondering the SF86 form that many people apparently had to fill out is available here: [http://www.gsa.gov/portal/forms/download/116390](http://www.gsa.gov/portal/forms/download/116390)

It's the single biggest form I have ever seen. Storing this information along side "information about workers' sexual partners, drug and alcohol abuse, debts, gambling compulsions, marital troubles, and any criminal activity." seems insane. The arrogance required to think this is a good idea blows my mind.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is the consequence of the NSA/CIA/etc preference for an insecure internet. They'd rather keep there offensive edge as opposed to contributing to a secure web that improves everyones defense. Perfect security is impossible, but things could be a lot better. This might not have happened if the US intelligence system were dedicated to making the internet a more secure platform.

</comment><comment><USER8> doesn't government workers have all the intimate details of every U.S. citizen?</comment>


Developing in Stockfighter with No Trading Experience - <AUTHOR> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/10/30/developing-in-stockfighter-with-no-trading-experience/ <comment><USER2> I have the utmost respect for Patrick and the team - and just read the same thing via mail.

But - as someone that _loved_ Microcorruption and followed StarFighter from day one, stalking the people on Twitter as to not miss the launch: That's not for me.

The game right now - as this article, this mail shows - requires you to learn about finance systems before you even start playing the game. It's a game where the rule book is - from this pov - too long and already uninteresting.

Good luck, I'll sit this one out and would love to see a future expansion in different directions. Or another Microcorruption, Stripe CTF etc.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. I'm the opposite. I was sorta curious, so I started reading Flash Boys. It became immediately obvious that A: the author is fucking clueless, and B: I didn't know enough about how this system worked. The book called "Dark Pools" was a bit better (mainly as a light history of electronic trading). "Flash Boys: Not So Fast" was really fun, mainly because it systematically trashes the author of Flash Boys.

It was interesting enough that I've picked up a few books on market microstructure, that really get into the details. It's fascinating, not just technically, but from a standpoint of looking at humans. It's odd to see how such strange systems persisted for so long (like Patrick mentions in this post, the crazy 1/8th spreads that were gamed). Or in "Dark Pools", they discuss how some of these traders would call up Nasdaq wondering why a certain trade did or didn't work how it did. And they'd find out all sorts of strange rules. Which makes me wonder, wtf? Are Nasdaq's rules hidden? Or were people doing this as a living just too lazy to read the specs? [1] I can only guess how much easy money there was to be made 20 years ago.

I'm so looking forward to Stockfighter, enough that I started looking at FIX and OUCH (OUCH looks far faster since there's ~no silly parsing - just copy into a struct) just in case that's what they offered. It's too late for me to actually work in finance (far smarter people with more experience in math and compsci), but playing the game is still an option. (I've actually been thinking of how we might run some fake exchanges, federated, as a game.)

Anyways, I guess to each his own. But I'm guessing I'm not the only one that will find this scenario intriguing.

1: Even basic stuff, like market orders, are weird. Who the hell would ever submit an order that's literally saying "Sell at any price, including $0"? (Well I suppose now it's "current price minus circuit breaker limits".) Or "buy at any price up to $MAX"? Sure, most of the time it works out fine, but if you can't be bothered to come up with a limit, perhaps you shouldn't be buying or selling?

<comment><USER4> FWIW: I used to work at the predecessor to Virtu Financial with Peter Kovac, who wrote an excellent counter argument book to flash boys.

[http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Insiders-Perspective- High-F...](http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Insiders-Perspective-High- Frequency-ebook/dp/B00P0QI2M2)

He's one of the most honest and intelligent people I've ever had the pleasure to work with in my entire career. He was at Madison Tyler while I was there roughly 4 years until the Virtu merger (at which point many of us left).

<comment><USER5> Here's a lengthy critique of the Kovac book alleging it misreads Lewis's point:

[http://www.amazon.com/review/R28Y8AI4PIPYZ2/ref=cm_cr_dp_tit...](http://www.amazon.com/review/R28Y8AI4PIPYZ2/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00P0QI2M2&channel=detail- glance&nodeID=133140011&store=digital-text)

"Kovac misfires by supposing the "front-running" condemned in "Flash Boys" refers to a particular kind of abuse, and not surprisingly it's the kind he plans to refute. In common usage there are at least two meanings to the term. One common meaning is as shorthand for "front-running demand," which is what happens when someone tries to figure out whether your mutual fund or your pension fund is buying or selling stock, realizes that it will change supply- and-demand dynamics for the stock, affecting the price, and front-runs that demand to profit.

Imagine if someone made a reasonable guess you needed milk, raced ahead of you to the only store in town to buy up all the milk before you got there, and then offered to sell you milk at a higher price than the store sold it to him; this is one example of front-running demand, just as described in "Flash Boys." (It's also called "trading ahead.") Another common meaning is "front- running a customer order," a type of insider trading, where a stock broker believes his own customer's order will change supply-and-demand and tries to profit from that; this is what Kovac apparently intends to refute, and it has nothing at all to do with "Flash Boys.""

<comment><USER6> This is a review written by someone who, by their own (repeated) admission, hasn't read past the introduction of the book; further, the premise of the review is that Kovac doesn't know what he's talking about vis a vis trading, which is something we know to be false.

<comment><USER4> Correct. Peter Kovac wrote the entire realtime risk and clearing system that is now live at Virtu (formerly California Applied Trading Science which split into EWT and Madison Tyler, which became Virtu. This is all public knowledge if you dig deep enough). Again, the source is I worked with him for several years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > These days the markets are decimalized — stocks trade in increments of a > penny. (They are not allowed to trade in increments smaller than a penny, by > federal regulation. This is unfortunate, because "the minimum spread is 0.01 > dollars" is not any more rational than "the minimum spread is 0.125 dollars" > — if someone is willing to provide liquidity for cheaper, we should > encourage that.)

This is not true, at least in the US. HFT has made sub-penny trades a pretty common thing. Quotes are displayed in pennies, but using limit orders you frequently see sub penny trades for highly liquid tickers (AAPL for example).

[http://blogs.reuters.com/ben-walsh/2013/11/18/do-stocks- real...](http://blogs.reuters.com/ben-walsh/2013/11/18/do-stocks-really-trade- for-fractions-of-a-penny-sort-of/)

</comment><comment><USER8>
      > "A level is simply a price. Why not call it a price?
      > I have a sneaking suspicion Wall Street invented many of
      > these words to give customers the impression "This is
      > all really, really difficult — pay us money and the
      > complexity goes away.")"

Its called a level because an order book has many different orders at different prices and quantities. If you funge all the quantites at the same price together you create a 'level', say 1100 shs of VODAFONE @ 107.5 . The next 'level' may then be 17 shares of VODAFONE @ 108 followed by 5 shares @ 110

\--

Another term for 'Level' is a trade term for what 'level' of market data you are paying for.

Level 1 Market Data corresponds to trade and price data... Price, bid, ask, trade price, trade quantity

Level 2 Market Data corresponds to when you want to know much more about what is happening on the exchange. You want to know how many orders are on each book and at what price/qty.

This is also commonly referred to as 'Depth of Book'

Dark Pools do not send out Level 2 data, while primrary exchanges do ( LSE, NYSE )

<comment><USER3> Any suggestions on what to read to get up on these details? I've started "Trading and Exchanges", "Algorithmic Trading and DMA", and "Market Microstructure in Practise". Does that sound like a good path?

<comment><USER9> For US equities, nanex research articles ([http://www.nanex.net/NxResearch/ResearchPage/0/?sort_val=dat...](http://www.nanex.net/NxResearch/ResearchPage/0/?sort_val=date)) provide good insight into various aspects.

I haven't read any of the books you've mentioned. But, "Market Microstructure in Practise" seems more relevant.

By the way, the overall trading landscape has changed rapidly over the past few years and the pace of change continues to increase.

<comment><USER10> Nanex is overhyped gibberish.

<comment><USER9> You could be right (or wrong). But, if the point is to understand the market microstructure and dynamics (rather than endorse their philosophy), in my humble opinion, these articles do a good job there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _The stock market is incredibly liquid: for any stock listed on an exchange, you can buy almost any quantity and sell almost any quantity, at any time the market is in session._

I think that sentence would make most professional equities traders chuckle. I mean, it's true-ish for some of the big etfs and some of the highest volume individual companies, but there are 8k+ listed symbols in the US and you can't just go buying and selling "almost any quantity" of most of them. Nobody really trades that way. Trading in size typically involves chopping a large order into smaller orders that get managed by a trader or really a trader's execution algorithm.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, should have said "relative to the expectations of a normal human." Shopping a block trade is, I think, level two?

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure what exactly you mean by block (in terms of size), but let's say you have a stock and the average number of shares at the inside (best) price is X. If you are trying to trade 10X shares, you aren't just going to aggressively trade through multiple price levels all at once to get the trade done, and if you just place an order for 10X shares into the book you will find that the price starts moving away from your order price pretty quickly. For a high volume ETF like SPY, X can be thousands of shares, but for low volume mid/small caps it may be only a few hundred shares, which is not something I'd consider "incredibly liquid."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As someone who wrote the whole tech stack of a hedge fund, this looks really interesting. The summary looks pretty good, though I've only skimmed it.

There's a lot of stuff in there for future games. Network stuff, low level memory stuff, backoffice, a million FIX engines to write against, optimal execution, distributed computing.

How long would a game take? And what other languages would you support?

<comment><USER14> > And what other languages would you support?

It seems like it's utterly language agnostic. Patrick has said a few times that you could play entirely through curl if you really wanted to, or play manually through the trading interface. I'm planning on using this as a first "real[ish]" project for Haskell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd much rather use something like Stockfighter, but built around experimentation; one that has no competition, and no recruiters looking over your shoulder, scrutinizing your work.

I tried to build one-- and quickly found myself far out of my league. I wish this article had been around back when I was trying to write it!

<plug shame="1">If anyone's interested, it's up on Github at [https://github.com/Efruit/marqit](https://github.com/Efruit/marqit) .</plug>

I might take another swing at it if I can get through this article in one piece.

<comment><USER6> The non-competitive open-ended Stockfighter you're looking for is called Stockfighter. :)

We will have way, way, way too many people noodling around with this to scrutinize everyone's work. The linkage between the CTF and our recruiting work will be largely automated, and entirely opt-in: nobody that works for us is going to notice you until some automated thingy asks if you're on the market, and you tell the automated thingy "yeah, I'm interested in being recruited".

The _overwhelming majority_ of people noodling with our CTFs, including most of the "best" players, will not be job candidates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Correction to Patrick: we do support FIX in ch1, but you have to write AVR assembly to use it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Fantastic read, and a great introduction to the subject matter. Kudos!

I'm also really enjoying the position taken on OSS here:

      > I'd personally be very disappointed in an engineer who, in 2015, defaulted
      > to scratchbuilding their own clients for every API they consumed.
      > Starfighter loves OSS and the OSS culture. Go nuts.

Perfect.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't fully understand what's the main purpose of this "game" (edit: regarding recruiting)?

1\. Is it just useful for getting noted by some companies and get invited to interviews? So basically it is equivalent of sending them CV and/or contacting relevant persons.

2\. Is it supposed to replace the tech interviews (which suck) completely? In this case, yes, I can see the value of allocating significant time for these games.

<comment><USER6> I don't fully understand the purpose either. People just seem to love playing CTF-style programming games, and we happen to really enjoy making them.

It is OK if they are not your cup of tea.

<comment><USER17> I meant with regard to recruiting, which is what your (new) company is about (again, if I understand correctly :)).

<comment><USER6> I literally lack the ability to form coherent sentences about our business that don't somehow involve how to render a graph of AVR basic blocks in a React web app, is how little we're thinking about how the game interacts with recruiting right now.

We are going to get the CTF right, and then work from there to a sustainable recruiting business. We should have done it the other way around, but we didn't. :)

<comment><USER18> the idea is sound, however this is bungling together as requirements good at programming + good at markets

I'm just wondering if and why those kind of people really need a jig :D

<comment><USER19> Instead of "good at markets", I interpreted it as "good at understanding complex systems". I never assumed the companies they would contact would be entirely financially based, I think the idea is that if someone can figure this out the should essentially be vetted (after a good in-person meeting) as a good candidate for almost any project you want to throw at them.

To me, the stock-market aspect of this seems entirely because it's a large, complex, distributed system that's not entirely theoretical (i.e. has been real-world tested), can be modeled accurately enough in the game, and is complex enough to provide for some real challenging problems. There are likely quite a few candidates that could have been used instead of the stock market, but the stock market might be the _ideal_ one in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I agree 1000% that the best way to learn something is to start with a problem that interests you, and dive into it. The opposite way, where you start with a technology that sounds interesting and new, and learn it for the sake of knowing it never worked for me.

<comment><USER21> I wish I could trade with you; I love learning stuff but it's not so much about using it practically, as it is that I just want to understand it.

Unfortunately, for most stuff, at some point you simply must have a problem to solve to progress further, and that's where I get derailed. I have a hard time getting excited about the real-life problems, so I end up getting stuck in the beginning stages of new pursuits. I'll read textbooks, I'll memorize syntax, but I'm never drawn to getting my hands dirty.

What I like about this sort of games is that they provide targeted problems for people who aren't naturally drawn to this stuff in practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just had the realization that Starfighter believes there's a huge market for the sort of talent matching they want to do in finance. Why else would they pick this topic?

<comment><USER12> We're actually not terribly interested in finance qua finance. We're interested in finance qua "it allows us to do _anything_ in engineering in a fiction-consistent way, plugging into _anything_ else."

Networks. Compiler theory. Language design. Web APIs. Caching layers. Core algorithms. Packet switch microcontrollers. FPGAs. CRUD apps. Big Data. Anti- abuse tooling. Application security. Machine learning. Any topic you possibly want to throw an engineer at, an investment bank is already throwing a team of engineers at.

Our Chapter 1 release includes levels which have you jailbreak multiple chips (AVR microcontrollers) on a custom handheld device given to minimally trusted gophers to own up a stock exchange through their REST API. And that _isn 't even a theoretical attack_.

Additional factors which tipped the scales include "finance has a default goal function which is really easy to understand", "some subsets of financial work are surprisingly easy to model" (like a stock exchange is), and "finance has narrative choices which allow us to excite people without getting typecast as A Video Game For People Who Played Dungeons and Dragons In High School" (which is, for a variety of reasons, important to the team, including to me, the ex- DM).

Other strong contenders for our first game were "Like Dwarf Fortress but with code" (harder to build than a stock exchange; includes the word "dwarf") and "a nuclear power plant" (slight problem: we know nothing about nuclear power plants).

<comment><USER23> _Any topic you possibly want to throw an engineer at, an investment bank is already throwing a team of engineers at._

This comment makes me feel that I must live in an alternate universe of software engineering. I've spent 99% of my career working on things that would be of no interest to an investment bank: GUIs, graphics, video, audio, GPU rendering, mobile platforms, CAD, content creation tools...

(It's not the first time I've had this feeling. At one point years ago, when I had been doing professional programming for maybe 3 years, a friend and colleague asked me a question about databases. I had to confess that I had never worked on software that interfaced with one; that all my work exclusively dealt with local files and network streams. He almost wouldn't believe it.)

<comment><USER12> _I 've spent 99% of my career working on things that would be of no interest to an investment bank:_

One of the many interesting conversations I've had over the last few months is with a guy who leads a team of X00 developers out of one bank's 1X,000 developers, which does minimally GUIs, graphics, GPUs (for rendering and simulation), mobile platforms, and content creation tools. His #1 problem right now is that you are representative of many, many developers who don't know that his sort of group exists. I think he'd describe his job as "We're the thin edge of the wedge hitting the really _hard_ problems so that our customers in the bank can focus development on the really _valuable_ problems."

(I don't know if I'm cleared to talk about them until contract negotiation wraps. Sorry, not trying to be coy here. Take it on faith that many of the big guys run shops which have those needs and more besides.)

<comment><USER23> Huh, that's interesting. I certainly wouldn't have guessed that.

Now that I think about it, I have no idea what investment banks are really like as work environments. The caricature in my mind is a rigid hierarchy populated by career-minded sycophants who judge people based on the college they attended; bosses that would be played by Alec Baldwin in fiction; software stacks sold by Oracle salesmen on golf courses; senior architects who manage via UML drawings; workdays that extend to 9pm just because; and for a touch of fun, brokers who throw half-eaten lobsters at each other on Friday nights.

In all, the kind of place that would have absolutely no interest in hiring me and where I would never imagine working... Maybe my prejudices would need a reality check.

<comment><USER24> I think you're describing investment bankers circa 1995.

Tech in investment banks is full of, well, developers. I'm currently working on stuff that has X0,000 cores, X00 GPUs (compute though not rendering), web UI, large data aggregation and visualisation (around 1bn data points moving in near real time). I don't do fpga work but I sit near some chaps that do.

In fairness, I haven't done any CAD or audio at a bank. However, I did design sonar absorbing materials prior to working in finance and there's a surprising amount of similarity in the engineering I did then and the statistical sims we do now.

Oh, and lobster night is Tuesday night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Markets are truly fascinating. However much you think you know, you don't know as much as you could. The whole idea of Stockfigher really resonated with my experience over the last year and a half. Markets are incredibly complex.

Around the time a large contract ended in Hong Kong, I was at a web development conference for new programmers getting out of a bootcamp-style program (8 weeks, program or die). They put me on a panel and asked me about what it was like to be a freelance web dev.

At one point, a guy raises his hand and starts asking about equity deals. He asks what it would take to get someone like me to work on a startup with him, no cash. Now, the market's rough for that sort of thing if you want experience. I told this guy that he would just "have to find some bozo who believed in the idea so much, he'd be willing to give up salary in exchange for massive risk. Who's going to do that?" We laughed a bit and moved on.

Well, I ate my hat: I'm that bozo. I was impressed with his knowledge, so I joined up with him and another expert he wrangled. The two of them had an impressive amount of cumulative experience not only in trading, but in writing financial systems. We filled in each others' knowledge gaps perfectly. They took the lead on the backend systems and I did the rest.

Cue months of finance training, seemingly endless numbers of commits (over 5000 between just the frontend and API alone, and that's only half the system), and we quickly pushed out our first beta of BitMEX. It's our take on a derivatives exchange with a much more finance-slanted perspective than our peers. We did months of paper trading and went live November of last year (we're almost to our first birthday!). In that time, we've explored many of the very hard problems in finance (margin trading is incredibly complex), and many more in UX (in short: finance is hard, making it simple for users is even harder). And now we're trading nearly $10M/day and growing.

What's so great about today is that there are so many markets out there you can play on, and so much code to learn from. If you try Stockfighter, I commend you. I'd like to offer our simulation to the community - we run it at [https://testnet.bitmex.com](https://testnet.bitmex.com), and a really simple market making bot at [https://github.com/BitMEX/market- maker](https://github.com/BitMEX/market-maker). In about 20 minutes you can be up and running market making on our Testnet and trying out your strategies.

Yeah, it's not the most complex bot out there (and we forked it from an old MtGox bot). It pretty much does the minimum possible to quote both sides of a market. But it's a great building block for more complex strategies, and it has all the parts you need, including Websocket hookups. Come grab me on Freenode #bitmex-testnet if you want help with it.

I hope some of you give Stockfighter or our Testnet a try. Finance is a rabbit hole, but it's worth learning about.

(tl;dr: Moved to Hong Kong, met some finance pros, wrote a ton of code, and now am CTO of BitMEX, one of the top Bitcoin exchanges by volume. We have a simulation market, it's worth trying out)

<comment><USER26> I skimmed this, but it sounds interesting. Might I recommend a blog post shared as a link instead of a TLDR comment buried on someone else's story?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I know next to nothing about stock markets, but reading 'patio11's description made me think about two things:

\- Doesn't this ask/bid matching sound very, very much like barter?

\- If so, for the times when the market isn't liquid, couldn't they introduce... money? You know, to abstract over barter.

(I know I'm asking idiot questions here, but I'd really appreciate someone ELI5 my idiocy here.)

<comment><USER28> Well that is what they are doing, say you want to sell you stock in apple because the new iPhone is crap. Well Apple doesn't pay dividends (i think Microsoft is the only tech stock that does) so the only way anybody wants to buy is if they think the stock will go up in the future, so you need to find somebody who wants Apple stock more than they want the money. Well what if you can't find somebody right now? That is where the makers come in and buy the stock for a short while, hoping that they are then able to sell it shortly to somebody else for a profit.

I think what is confusing you is that a grocery have one price for an item and very rarely sold out, whereas as a stockmarket is more like a market: you are dealing with multiple sellers and not guaranteed to be able to find what you want and the price may depend on where you get it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I saw this email today - sounds like some cool play to me. There are both trading problems as well as lower level challenges. Seems like there is something for everyone. The idea that hits home is that it presents problems which you may not know about in domains and technology areas that are not ones that you work in so you get to flex yourself a bit in new ways.

</comment><comment><USER30> bugfix - the sample order:

      {
      "symbol": "BAR",
      "venue": "FOOEX",
      "direction": "buy",
      "qty": 20,
      "price":  5100,
      "type": "limit",
      "account" : "OGB12345", // your trading account (game gives you this)
      }

should read "qty": 100 to jive with the response ("originalQty": 100, 80 filled, etc).

</comment><comment><USER31> A fun programming challenge is building an open source platform or some other software that scratches your own itches-- it's being a creator.

Solving arbitrary puzzles someone else has set in front of you, in order to get a job, is not a fun programming challenge.

It's one engineer saying "I bet I can come up with something this guy won't be able to do" and clueless companies and HR thinking they can "evaluate" programmers by "how well" they do on these quizzes.

They will miss out on the best programmers because the best ones value their time enough to create new things-- not solve "challenges".

Challenges are attempts to make you fail. They are not about learning about the person.

If you have self respect, you will use Straighter as a filter to exclude companies that are not worth working for (because if they use Starfighter, you can guarantee their working environment is not conducive to a career where you look forward to going to work every day.)

Starfighter should pivot into education. Then this work would be useful. Right now it's corrosive to programming as a profession.

<comment><USER32> Here's a thought: If you're playing Stockfighter simply because you want a job, you probably aren't the target audience for the game.

By that I mean, they have two different target audiences: companies who want to hire people, and separately, developers that want to play their game. When there is an overlap of those two groups where they can make a job connection, then great.

I don't think the goal of this is to make it so that anyone who wants a new job plays Stockfighter.

<comment><USER6> Yes, this is exactly what we're doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Patrick: If the REST URL has FOOEX and BAR, why is that info repeated in the JSON body?

<comment><USER12> It's optional -- if you don't put them in, we do. The canonical representations of any order has them in, otherwise you have no clue what is going on.

<comment><USER3> So why bother with putting them in the URL? Why not just have /submit and put the details in the body where they belong?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Contact me, I know a lot about what you're trying to do.

</comment><comment><USER34> did you mean "model web developer" instead of "modal web developer" ?

<comment><USER6> Modal as in the statistical mode.</comment></comment>


Analyzing Google's List of the Top 1000 Web Sites - <AUTHOR> http://r-chart.blogspot.com/2010/06/analyzing-1000-most-visited-sites.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Just posted this - was interested to hear from the hacker community if they see analyzing this data is valuable or if they prefer other means of ascertaining the top sites (Alexa, etc)</comment>


Uzbl: Lightweight webkit browser following the Unix philosophy - <AUTHOR> http://uzbl.org/ <comment><USER2> I think people are missing the point here. So yes, the webkit portion is large and complicated, but the idea here is that you can use whatever you want to script together the ui pieces and keyboard commands etc. That is really useful if, for example, you want to use your WM's tabbing of windows, rather than have the tabs built into the browser itself (or not use tabs at all and use different desktops entirely). The point is that with some of these minimal linux systems (mostly Arch+awesome/xmonad/dwm etc), you can integrate the browser itself better because uzbl is designed to be accessed in the smallest atomic unit a browser can actually be.

</comment><comment><USER3> Browsers are the antithesis of the "unix philosophy". They do everything from cryptography to typography to networking to accelerated graphics. And its still not enough for people.

(I don't need to mention that just because you put a thin layer on top of a monstrous browser library that does all of the above, that doesn't make the scope of your program limited, right?)

<comment><USER4> But they _need_ to. All of those functions are necessary to interact with a world more sophisticated than that of 7-bit ACSII.

<comment><USER5> Well, an alternative, perhaps a better, world would be one where those things were provided by common high quality libraries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Been using uzbl on Arch for a few months now. Great little browser!

The biggest _selling point_ for me was the keyboard-centric control. I use a keyboard-centric window manager and I use vim for code editing, so everything I do on my Linux install is with the keyboard and uzbl makes web browsing keyboard based too.

<comment><USER7> I have to say, of all the browsers I tried, Opera's keyboard control was the best. I tried Uzbl for a bit, but I can't say it was very easy to navigate links with its keyboard controls.

<comment><USER8> What does opera use for link navigation? I just see link step/cycling in the opera documentation [1]. Is there a better paradigm than link hitting [2]? Opera always seems to have impressive hidden tricks.

[1] <http://www.opera.com/browser/tutorials/nomouse/> [2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgAWfqwzxck#t=9m15s>

<comment><USER7> Hum, I didn't discover link hinting in my very short stint with Uzbl, but I might say I prefer Opera's mode: Pressing shift and the arrow keys allows you to navigate links visually, i.e. as they appear on the page. Since this scrolls the page too (to the next link), this is faster when you have to scroll around to find the links.

It might not be faster than hitting one key per link, but it's more intuitive than the link-cycling all the other browsers do. Give it a shot, you might like it.

<comment><USER6> _I didn't discover link hinting in my very short stint with Uzbl_

Oh.. I figured that link hinting is _the_ way of navigating links in uzbl, so if you did not discover that (the cheat sheet lists it!) then you really missed out. As for page scrolling, hjkl does that just fine IMHO (actually, I use AltGr+u/j/k/l because hjkl is not convenient on my keyboard layout).

<comment><USER7> I'll give it another shot, I basically just installed it and played around a bit with it, I didn't give it an extensive look...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's no such thing as a "lightweight webkit browser". Just because you delegate all the hard stuff to a library, you're not "lightweight".

<comment><USER10> It means the UI isn't implemented in JavaScript or maybe that it doesn't support extensions. It's kind of a useless word to describe software.

Fun drinking game: drink every time you see a github project, ruby gem, or Linux package labeled "lightweight."

<comment><USER11> I would say it is a very well-defined word which means "the type of thing that I am implementing is typically very large and complicated, and I don't yet understand why".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Unix philsophy works great, because it allows you to pipe data from one program to another, and thus build something that you want from primitives.

Now I wonder, how can a Unixified browser combine with other shell programs in a meaningful way?

Without having tried it, I'd expect all of the controll stuff (actual browsing experience, ad blocker, bookmarker) to be written specifically for this browser. Is that correct?

<comment><USER13> Based on my experience with other software I suspect what will happen (if this catches on enough) is: The early versions will work well when piped together in more or less the intended way (admitly missing the point of the UNIX philosphy). People will start hacking together other ways of combining the pieces with each other and third party programs, and find certain combinations impossible. Based on these use cases, the program will be modified and/or new programs will be added to aid in the compatibility that was lacking or overly difficult. Eventually, new combinations will stop being difficult and people will marvel at how someone figured out how to integrate all the pieces so smoothly and/or marvel at how it was ever thought to be difficult.

Of course, if this project does not get the traction it needs from people willing to contribute (either to the code, with 3rd party scripts/programs, blogposts, ETC), then we will be stuck with programs that do not work well with other programs and turn into Windows. (In fairness to MS, powershell looks like a promising attempt to get a modern UNIX philosophy ecosystem going.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, as a emacs user, I think the "conkeror" browser is better : it's entirely based on firefox, but uses javascript as its extension languge. Just like Emacs, kernel + extension , instead of lightweight or 'unix philosophy'

<comment><USER15> It uses JavaScript as extension language, just like… Firefox? Impressive!

I'm always annoyed when people don't realize that Firefox is basically Emacs: the actual engine is called XULRunner and has a renderer called Gecko and supports stuff like sockets. Firefox is on top of it, implemented basically in JavaScript and the UIs are described by the XUL format which can be compared to GTK+'s Glade-files, Qt's UI-files or XAML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I came across <http://pwmt.org/projects/jumanji/> today and thought it was similar to uzbl. I noticed there's not an easy way to install it short of compiling it your self on Ubuntu though. Not a big deal, really, just not something I'll attempt today.

</comment><comment><USER17> I really like Uzbl, but I noticed that after a couple of "tabs" it gets really slow unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER18> Couldn't get this to run on OSX despite installing it through macports. Would love to use it as well on Windows as Chrome keeps getting more and more bloated</comment>


Bringing Down a Copycat Site - <AUTHOR> http://www.xequte.com/fraud/ <comment><USER2> I found the below comment on the 2004 slashdot discussion. IMO this is the best way to handle this - thought it would add value to discussion on HN (edit - formatting):

 _"1. Immediately(!) purchase the stolen software, using a Mastercard or Visa. The resulting download is evidence, and the purchase itself will be used later. Make every effort to identify who (URL, domain name, contact info, company name, etc.) is actually processing this credit card transaction (hint: it's usually not the kid in Pakistan).

2\. Notify the contact info of the domain of the infringement. Use a DMCA- compliant notification.

3\. Notify the next upstream ISP of that domain of same.

4\. Notify the domain's registrar. Some have TOS which forbid illegal activity.

5\. Is the bad guy still up? Then start notifying the credit card processor that they have participated in a sale of stolen goods. Use a letter that calmly documents the date of purchase, how you identified the download as a stolen copy of your software, etc.

6\. When your credit card bill arrives, follow the instructions on the back of the bill to contest that purchase. Inform the credit card company of everything that's happened, including dates and times and copies of correspondence

7\. Join the ASP [asp-shareware.org]. It's a chance to notify fellow software producers that their software is being ripped off along with yours (and increase the pressure on a particular pirate site). It's also a way of supporting an organization that works to support your right to make a living selling software.

The linchpin in this effort is credit card processing. I don't care if you live on a small island that you rule yourself, if you take Mastercard/Visa transactions, you rely on American companies and American law. These giant companies grant smaller companies the right to parcel out merchant accounts, and they can cause non-trivial financial pain for merchant accounts that generate too many complaints for them.

The wheels of the law can take much time to grind to a conclusion, and not always in your favor. Visa/Mastercard can issue a $20,000 fine in a much shorter time, and they don't have to consult a jury.

In the Wild West of Internet fraud that involves money flow, Mastercard/Visa is judge, jury, and executioner. Most victims simply don't know enough to bring their case to them, or the amount of fraud would be dropping."_ [http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=134264&cid=1121...](http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=134264&cid=11211953)

<comment><USER3> I read that and initially thought the same. But in one of his emails the guy asks for a trade of "cards"; I think he's meaning card details.

I would hesitate to give him active credit card details.... almost certainly they would go on file ready to sell to someone.

(though for the period of time it would take to sort this out your probably ok - I would cancel it straight after though)

<comment><USER4> Lots of places do "one shot" credit cards now. Numbers which can be used once, or with a small prepay balance and then discarded. This would seem like an ideal use of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They should have used the DMCA. You don't go to the registrar, you go to the host.

You can takedown nearly any site hosted in the USA within a few hours these days (even with content you don't actually own, if you don't mind being counter-noticed or even sued).

<comment><USER6> If you RTFA, you will notice that the site was hosted in the great country of Pakistan.

<comment><USER3> check the link to /. at the bottom; in the end it turns out the host was based in the US

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like it's sometimes fair to judge people based on their spelling.

</comment><comment><USER8> It adds a somewhat funny touch that the guy actually responded, and also what he had to say. Sounded like a 15-year old.

Still very annoying and nice to read that Nigel managed to get the site down.

Also nice to see that the software is still being developed, more than 5 years later :)

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately, it did sound like typical grown person there -- by mid-asian standards.

<comment><USER10> Not sure why he's being downvoted. As an avid gamer, I can verify that most foreigners who speak English don't care enough to try to write properly. I'm not bashing, I'm just saying, from my observed experience, that is the case.

For example, I once bought virtual money for an online game called Ragnarok Online. The sellers I interacted with appeared to be from China, and they all spoke pretty much like the guy in the article. These were probably adults, since they had accounts to receive (real-life) money transferred to them. And this is just one example over many years of gaming.

So based on experience, I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that he was in fact at least 20-30 years old.

Does any of this matter? Nope. I'm just trying to work up the motivation to implement a particularly annoying feature, so I'm chilling here talking about randomness. :)

<comment><USER9> Well I was not referring to a lack of proper English grammar. I was thinking about a specific mindset which could be summarized as: "Everybody's cheating around and I will try my little not-so-smart cheats on you too. That's how everybody behaves so don't tell me it's a problem". And this is (sadly) mid- Asian standard. Especially when you get there physically.

<comment><USER10> Wow, really? I had no idea that attitude carried over to real life. I mean, I could make the observation that most Asians seemed to behave that way online in a game, but I didn't realize that they mostly behaved like that in real life too.

Of course this is all just hearsay...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What about getting a default judgment? This could be annoying if the fraudster ever wants to visit the US or work here under an H1-B, etc.

(Don't know if that is possible or not, but if it is, I would be satisfied with that. Google de-lists the site, and the fraudster has an open warrant for credit card fraud if he leaves his home country.)

</comment><comment><USER12> Anyone know of any online tools to find those copycat sites? I know there's www.copyscape.com, but is there something similar for graphics/logos?

<comment><USER13> www.tineye.com lets you search for images online based on one you provide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a great story. However, I hate how the fraudster didn't do any jail time.

<comment><USER15> Welcome to the international community. Just be happy he didn't get elected or promoted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> i give it a week before the copy cat site adds the software back.

<comment><USER17> I guess the article is from year 2004?

<comment><USER16> so it is...still anyone smart enough to try to fake a response from a host...would at least try to wait a little bit before putting the software back up, after the other person stops looking.</comment></comment></comment>


Clojure 2015 Year in Review - <AUTHOR> http://stuartsierra.com/2015/12/31/clojure-2015-year-in-review <comment><USER2> This year, Clojure cemented itself as my favorite programming language, and I felt glad to be able to use it daily for my work, as it does take so much effort off the developer for little things, allowing one to concentrate more on big things.

However, it was also the year I learned that, while Clojure, as a dynamic typed language running on a VM, is the best of that class of languages, static system languages are still irreplaceable for so many other things. This was the year I realized that one language does not fit all, and that it is okay to have more than one favorite language. (And in my case, it is Clojure and C++ that I am now using equally, and with equal enjoyment, and for entirely different reasons).

<comment><USER3> Clojure is one of the most addictive languages I've ever worked in. I can see why so many people pick it up as something to build hobby projects with, it's just so damn fun to write.

<comment><USER4> I'd love to dive into it more but the startup time for Lein just absolutely kills me.

10s to build, 15s for REPL. This is on a laptop that handles VS2015, Rust and many other languages fine.

<comment><USER3> Ideally, you wouldn't be restarting the process all that often. I'll typically be REPL'd in for quite a few hours at a time as I'm developing (only reason for restarts is usually pulling in new dependencies, or if your state gets out of whack; which is something that doesn't happen all that often after adopting Stuart's "reloaded" workflow based on component)

<comment><USER5> Stuart Sierra's Component: [https://github.com/stuartsierra/component](https://github.com/stuartsierra/component)

and his 'reloaded' workflow: [http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2013/06/04/clojure- workflow-r...](http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2013/06/04/clojure-workflow- reloaded)

I haven't looked into them but the lein startup time kills me too. I love Clojure but I am looking at alternatives like Racket because of this.

<comment><USER3> People seriously switch languages based on the time it takes their dev environment to boot up?

<comment><USER5> I can't speak for other people, but I guess being a person and considering switching from Clojure because the development workflow has a long feedback cycle that the answer to your question is a yes?

I have Ring reloading code for me as it changes, however if there is a syntax error or exception in a thread, code doesn't get reloaded and strangeness ensues, requiring me to kill the jvm instance and start it up again. Stuart Sierra talks about this problem in his reloaded workflow, and how it's still a problem for him, but he at least now has a faster way of refreshing his app instances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some days I wish I hadn't completely scrapped and deleted my Mac-only Clojure- only native IDE. It was fricken cool, even if it wasn't Emacs. I think that thing had promise. Welp.

<comment><USER7> Isn't it this: [https://github.com/vijaykiran/Leviathan](https://github.com/vijaykiran/Leviathan) ? I briefly played with code, but never got time to hack on it.

<comment><USER6> Oh wait, you didn't find it, you're the one who forked it! I should pay closer attention to usernames heh. Thanks so much for forking it and holding onto it for this long. Out of curiosity, if you did have the time, what kind of things would you have hacked into it?

<comment><USER7> One primary thing I was interested in "visual-structural editing" at least presenting the program as a nice "pipeline" of functions.

I've been a fan of (disappearing) Cocoa-built IDEs ([http://lists.apple.com/archives/java- dev/2007/Aug/msg00025.h...](http://lists.apple.com/archives/java- dev/2007/Aug/msg00025.html) was another one)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Olympus to Exit Camera Business After 84 Years - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/olympus-to-exit-camera-business-after-84-years-11592996861 <comment><USER2> this is sad, but could see it coming, which camera company will be next?</comment>


Ouya tops $8.5 million as Kickstarter campaign comes to a close - <AUTHOR> http://www.joystiq.com/2012/08/09/ouya-kickstarter-end/

<comment><USER2> While everyone seems to be commenting on the impact this will have on hardware manufacturers, I'm more excited about the impact this will have on the big software distributors. I would love to see a disruption to the likes of EA.

The console video gaming world has become, mostly, stagnant; full of sequels upon sequels. Current games are chocked full of DRM for overplayed, non- innovative titles. The market has become less about making great games that people love, and more about making executives money. It's terribly depressing and is directly responsible for me stopping my, over 25 year, love of gaming.

I, along with others, have doubts about the platform. However, I would absolutely love to see it affect some change in what the video gaming market has mostly become. I would love to see more independent developers making lots of money and pumping out cool, fun to play, games on a system that is accessible beyond the PC.

<comment><USER3> EA and Activision are the heroes gamers deserve.

Honestly, when your target audience are people so devoted to a frivolous activity that they willing buy devices with no other purpose than to consume carefully curated content, it becomes hard to see them as anything other than a paycheck.

<comment><USER4> I suppose we should throw out our TV's while were at it

<comment><USER5> Not a bad idea imo. Just get a big PC screen:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Android is giving me hope for the future of general purpose computing.

With the nexus 7 finally bringing a non-sucky open tablet to market, and Ouya proving that users and developers want open (Or at the very least that open products have a chance in the market.), I'm feeling more comfortable with a technology landscape full of tablets, smartphones and purpose specific devices like gaming consoles.

<comment><USER7> Well, Android IS the long awaited "Year of Linux on the desktop", only it's not on the desktop, because the desktop is no longer the center of the consumer digital world.

I'm also happy that an open-source based operating system is becoming the mainstream. It's an exciting time to be a developer or an entrepreneur :) (these technologies becoming mainstream enable so many things, I don't know where to start!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 47126 Ouya

7755 Ouya + Controller

2500 Ouya + 2 Controllers

826 Ouya Dev Kits

By April 2013. Good luck guys~

It's interesting to note some figures; if you assume $50 US per ouya that's $2,910,350 or 33% of the collected costs to make the hardware; double that to a guess of $100 per unit and you looking at ~68% of the collected Kickstarter.

Realistically the hardware is probably relatively cheap to manufacture in bulk, and it'll probably end up towards the $50 rather than $100 mark, especially if they decide not to upgrade to newly released hardware.

Just interesting numbers.

<comment><USER9> >47126 Ouya

>7755 Ouya + Controller

I thought that sounded odd. All have a controller, the second is 'limited edition brown'.

As for costs.. i am guessing they will probably make an order for 100k? (They have the cash, plenty of time for more pre-orders, and surely expect to sell some after launch, and they are tiny so easy to store). At those quantities my guess for a cost breakdown; SOC; $15, nand $3, wireless radios $6, case $5, power $4, controller $10, battery $2. So i think $50 is realistic, they will need FCC certification etc. Keep in mind they are (planning) making them for almost 9 months out, tegra 4 will no doubt be out, nand prices will be lower, tiny case, low power, cheap looking controller (sorry).

<comment><USER10> Limited edition brown... Microsoft already tried that with a consumer electronics device. And that's all anyone remembers of that line of hardware. I gotta wonder, why brown?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really hope this silences the naysayers. The negativity around here has gotten out of hand lately. I personally want this project to succeed.

<comment><USER12> The "naysayers" as you say, bring up a lot of valid points that have nothing to do with the OUYA's ability to raise kickstarter money so this will probably not silence anyone.

If anything, the money raised only proves the fact that over 60k people jumped in on the bandwagon of a non-existent console with no controller design that plans to ship in an almost unrealisable timeframe.

I want people that try bold things to succeed as much as the next guy but my (and others') concerns about the OUYA are far more elaborated than their ability to raise money.

<comment><USER13> Even if this fails (I don't expect it to but of course it could), I'm willing to throw some money at serious research into what's so hard about making tiny $99 consoles, and how to address those problems in the next project.

<comment><USER14> "I'm willing to throw some money at serious research into what's so hard about making tiny $99 consoles"

Generally, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale>

<comment><USER15> Could you clarify? Do you mean that it's harder to make these things smaller? Because that's not what "Economies of scale" refers to.

Even if you are trying to make a point about the long run average cost of console production, I still don't see the direct connection and I'd like to know what you're getting at.

<comment><USER13> Xbox 360s were sold at a loss until years after launch. (MS made their money on license sales from games.) At a production run of a few tens of thousands, the Ouya is not much better off than a full-custom hardware build, and it's difficult to make such a box for ~$100.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> $8,580,682 (from 63,277 backers) - keep perspective guys. 60k - That's like one week of sales of one of the consoles in Japan only. And those aren't even pushed units numbers. Not to mention amount of money that rolls in the likes of EA titles. It's all nice and all, but nowhere near disruptive word.

<comment><USER17> Woah, let them actually make the thing and bring it to market before you write them off. It's grossly unfair to compare their fundraising efforts to the total sales of established console games... At this point, anyway.

<comment><USER18> Why is it unfair? They (despite claims that, honestly, just don't make a lot of sense) want to be treated seriously. This is treating them seriously. Their platform, which by the way is not a "quick port" from Android if you care about user experience, has a tiny user base compared either to consoles or phones.

I'd like to see them do well, but I'm personally not going to treat it as something special until they show that it is. So far it sounds like a shovel- ware conduit to the TV and that gets people nothing.

<comment><USER19> > Their platform [...] has a tiny user base

A platform. That does not even exist yet. Has a tiny user base.

We have a genius here.

<comment><USER18> That it hasn't yet released doesn't mean we don't know what we're looking at in terms of a market. 60,000 committed users is a _spectacularly tiny_ user base.

I'd bet money (and am in fact betting my own time, which isn't entirely dissimilar) that the userbase of modern Android devices--say, from as far back as the Nexus One phone to the current Nexus 7 tablet--is so much bigger that if even one in twenty users care about games it's a more viable market.

<comment><USER20> 60,000 pre-orders for a completely unknown company months before launch is not small. Usually they sell more once the thing is actually in stores, and they already have the best kind of marketing they can get, hype and people putting dollars into it before a physical product exists.

Yes, the big console makers sell that many every week, but they are not a big console maker, so they don't need lots of numbers to sustain themselves, that's what growth is for, and they are showing better indications of it then Nintendo or Sony when they first got on the market, assuming they actually deliver the product they will see more. and their price point puts them in closer competition to a PS2 or Roku.

<comment><USER18> For them, the hardware order isn't small, no. _However_ , they're pricing it so low that they're almost certainly making very little money per-unit, so they're hoping to make money on their app store.

To make money on their app store, they need games.

Not many developers are going to write games for a platform with around 1/16th of the user base of your average front-line Android phone. (Please don't say "it's an easy port"; it's not and the Ouya people's claim that it is is _fucking dishonest_.)

A few companies have committed to bringing their products to the Ouya. I am interested in seeing how many of them follow through. Of those who follow through, I am interested in how many just push shovelware because doing a real port to a platform with 60,000 guaranteed users, many of which are probably going to be hacking the shit out of the thing (and making software security a non-starter), is not economically viable for most people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What we can take away from this, and i hope the major console makers do this as well is, that many people (especially developers of course) want a more open and friendly console market. This basically embodies what the rumours wanted Valve to do with their own pc-based console.

<comment><USER22> Not that many people, only 60,000. This is nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Very impressive! If I were Google, I'd buy the company immediately. With Google's backing, they could go into production with more speed, maybe even using the Nexus Q's USA-based manufacturer. I think once they've release the first Ouya, Google should start working on putting in more Google TV and Nexus Q features.

<comment><USER24> That's exactly what I don't want to see. Yet another device tied in to Google. For me, all the promise of the Ouya is in doing things independently, not tied to the mission of a corporate behemoth.

If corporate behemoths want in, they can do the same thing as everyone else and write SN app for it.

<comment><USER23> I understand what you're saying, but I don't think Google would do much of anything to tie the Ouya to its 'corporate behemoth' mission. Besides, I believe that Google's immense power could improve Ouya's standing by backing it thoroughly.

<comment><USER24> They would, 100% absolutely try and make it the new Google TV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Some people are concerned about the hardware, whether or not the specs will start to get outdated when the product finally ships (Q1/Q2 2013).

Another point is the openness, it being so open for not only software hacks but also hardware hacks, will it also produce a lot of cheaters in online multiplayer games?

I pledged, and personally, I can't wait to get my hands on it! I think the media player capabilities and Android compatibility will make the product succeed anyhow. Certainly, the campaign (904% of Kickstarter goal) already has.

</comment><comment><USER26> Kickstarter Ouya: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind- of-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video- game-console)

</comment><comment><USER27> While I backed this project and think its sorely needed to allow software developers access to the console platforms, I think the design of the controller was rather disappointing. I figured if they were going to create a new hardware platform it would have a more revolutionary form factor.

The controller hasn't changed since the mid-1980s. Almost all the game console makers make the same damned controllers with exception to the Wii there's been almost no innovation.

It's about time to rethink the standard controller design. I'm not talking about game-specific controllers, like the gun or joystick. I think there needs to be something more attached to actual human body movements.

I know this project was about an open game console, but I think this creates the opportunity for innovation in hardware accessories (i.e. the controller). I think we could do a lot better than the same old formula:

Up+Down+Left+Right A+B+X+Y R1+R2+L1+L2 Select+Start (ALL BUTTONS)

<comment><USER28> When you're doing a project like this, you want less, not more risk.

Changing controller design would be a foolhardy adding of risk. Something very familiar is a great choice for it

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Hmmm...I think this probably will make it to completion, but not on their aggressive timeline. Prove me wrong Ouya!

Also, not sure how many Ouya-specific games will make it out, but it should be great for emulation and media streaming.

<comment><USER30> The nice thing about OUYA being based on Android, is that developers can either make a game for "Android" and then just tweak it to run well on OUYA and with the controller, or they can make a game "specifically" for OUYA, and then just port it to all Android devices. So either way they can get access to a huge user base for the same game, regardless of how big OUYA's base is.

Google could've had this advantage as well with Google TV, but they never cared about making Google TV a console, or better yet, a "console platform". Too bad. I'm hoping OUYA succeeds, although I still can't get myself to buy one unless it has a 2013-worthy mobile chip inside.

<comment><USER18> With respect: if you think it's as simple as just "tweaking" to go from a ten- foot viewing distance with a controller to a touchscreen at no more than thirty inches, you have a crippling lack of perspective on games.

This "just port to our completely different model out games, no big deal bro" messaging is actually what the Ouya people have themselves said and it's a major reason I'm convinced they're not competent or want cheap, bad games. If they bothered to study what has come before,they would have looked at the difficulty of a good port from the 360 to WP7 via DNA. But either they didn't our they did and want is to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Oh--and they want to release for April 2013 and have zero developer documentation. Reminds me why these guys are seen as being on the up and up?

<comment><USER31> Because people are desperate for this to be realistic, the same way people pumped money into Diaspora, even though it was backed by a team that's never shipped product before, that all just recently left college.

I want Ouya to succeed, but I just don't see how it can happen. They are extremely aggressive both on schedule and pricing, and more than that, the team has no experience shipping consumer electronics - and hardware manufacturing is a _huge, huge_ expertise in and of itself.

So you have a very, very inexperienced team trying to ship a consumer electronics device faster _and_ cheaper than pretty much any other experienced manufacturer who have been doing this for decades.

I'm not sure if most backers realize _quite_ how big of a leap this is.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure the people behind Ouya are as inexperienced as the ones behind Diaspora. At least they somehow got Yves Behar to help with the industrial design.

<comment><USER18> Perhaps not _as_ inexperienced, but Ouya is also a much harder project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> So what would happen if they simply walked away with the money? Or put a million or so into a show of good-faith effort and walked away with the rest? Is there any recourse for the backers?

</comment><comment><USER33> I am really excited about Ouya. It has the potential to become a game changing (pun intended) product. I hope they can live up to all the buzz they have generated.

<comment><USER19> I hope that even if they fail this will be one of those failures that expands our collective knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if the Oculus Rift will be compatible with it. I'm really excited to see where indie developers go with these two devices.

</comment><comment><USER35> So, how the hardware specs on this thing compare to the consoles? Is this PS2, PS3 or better levels of performance?

</comment><comment><USER36> This kind of money is clearly a message the world needs a product like this. Hopefully existing players (Sony, M$) will think about it a bit. I hate the fact that my PS3 is still considered the latest generation of consoles and is now more than 5 years old.

<comment><USER12> I personally stop reading anything whenever I read "M$". Like, I literally did not read the last half of your post.

<comment><USER37> ha! Just realised I did the same thing unconsciously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> all i hope is that they can use tegra 4.

</comment><comment><USER30> It seems you can still pre-order from their official website: <http://www.ouya.tv></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone have experience with FireHost? - <AUTHOR>

(aside from admiring their gorgeous site?)
I came across this company and am curious to know if any HN folks have experience with them. In particular, I'd be interested in qualified opinions of their security claims.
http://www.firehost.com/ <comment><USER2> Wow.. They are expensive. $100/mo for shared hosting? I could get a VPS or a dedicated box and secure it myself for that much</comment>


After Oranges: Following John McPhee to Florida - <AUTHOR> http://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/1233-after-oranges <comment><USER2> I went to the article hopefully expecting to read something new by McPhee (after all, he's only 86) only to be disappointed that it's an excerpt of a prior work. Even so, just about anything written by him is worth reading and re-reading.

<comment><USER3> It's not an excerpt, it's a new article (by someone else) that is partially about McPhee.</comment></comment>


Penguins ignore police, return to sushi shop - <AUTHOR> https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/394443/penguins-ignore-police-return-to-sushi-shop <comment><USER2> Best sushi ever, said the little rebel</comment>


Twins learn of teen brother's death on Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10449545-71.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20 <comment><USER2> Were there ever newspaper articles with similar headlines, replacing "Facebook" for "telephone" or "telegraph"?</comment>


Movable Type vs Wordpress? - <AUTHOR>

I've been contemplating for a while now moving my blog from Tumblr to my own hosted solution. I've been doing some research on both Wordpress and Movable Type, and they both look like excellent solutions.
What I can't seem to come to a conclusion though is the pros/cons weighed out in detail for both platforms. I'm pretty familiar with their history, but haven't used them in depth.
Can anyone recommend one or the other and state some convincing arguments as to why I may want to choose one of the other? Thanks so much. <comment><USER2> While I've never used Movable Type, I feel confident recommending WordPress hands-down. It works great, is amazingly flexible, and has a marvelous community. Themes, extensions, tutorials, and more all make WordPress one of the best platforms to work with.

Plus, if you've gotten used to the variety of post types in Tumblr, there are quite a few good Tumblr-style microblog themes for WordPress from Woothemes and others. They might ease the transition and keep your blog working more like you're used to. You might even be able to tweak a WordPress microblog theme to look like your existing Tumblr theme...

Finally, with the changes going on at Six Apart right now, it's hard to say what the future will hold for Movable Type. Could get better, could get worse, but right now it's in limbo of sorts. WordPress.org (and Automattic) are doing great, and I can't imagine that changing anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wordpress might be the better solution. It is easier to learn and has a larger user community.

Besides that Six Apart (the company behind Movable Type) has been acquired. Although they state that they will be supporting the bloggingplatforms in the future, the new company is aimed at advertising. Is the Movable Type will get the attention it deserves, can be questioned.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow thanks everyone for the great feedback. It sounds like Wordpress is probably going to be the safer more well supported option. Really appreciate the thoughtful comments.

<comment><USER2> Sounds like a good move :) If you need to learn more about WordPress and want to tweak it as you need, I highly recommend the ebook Digging into WordPress. I recently reviewed it on Techinch.com if you're interested. Feel free to give us a shout out if you need more help!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> WordPress in a heartbeat. More developer support, it's free and you can self- host.

Mark

</comment><comment><USER5> from a tech dodo's point of view, i go for wordpress. i find movable type too cluttered.</comment>


On Oscar Wilde and Plagiarism - <AUTHOR> http://publicdomainreview.org/2016/01/13/on-oscar-wilde-and-plagiarism/ <comment><USER2> Monty Python did a bit about this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxXW6tfl2Y0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxXW6tfl2Y0).

</comment><comment><USER3> There's also a (pretty great) song by The Smiths related to this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwv23yz_OrI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwv23yz_OrI)

The lyrics are meant to be ironic since they condemn plagiarism while praising Wilde and consciously containing bits of plagiarism itself. Morrissey, the lyricist and vocalist, was well known for plagiarizing and even ripped some lines off of Oscar Wilde in a few songs.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Good artists copy; great artists steal"

[http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists- steal/](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/)</comment>


Pentagon: A Human Will Always Decide When a Robot Kills You - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/human-robot-kill/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=twitterclickthru <comment><USER2> > Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter signed

Shouldn't something this important be implemented at a higher level?

I'd think there ought to be a new Geneva convention about the rules of robot warfare. Get all the countries capable of making deadly robots to agree on what kinds of tactics are okay and the chain of command/responsibility issue addressed by this memo.

Of course there's no guarantee that all countries will sign it, or that those that do will keep to their promises, or that it will regulate terrorists.

I do approve of the move; it's definitely a step in the right direction. It's better than having no rules on the issue, or rules saying that software _should_ have the power to make those decisions.

But the government should be taking a stronger stance on the issue.

<comment><USER3> Many are now calling for this level of international law:

[http://theglobeandmail.com/news/world/ban-urged-on-killer- ro...](http://theglobeandmail.com/news/world/ban-urged-on-killer- robots/article5456209/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One possibility that the article seems to ignore is that in the future, robots may be explicitly programmed to follow laws of war and rules of engagement. There's already been some research into this [1], and some people argue that autonomous robots could eventually be better than humans at following international law in combat. It does seem like a stretch given the present state of AI, but in the future there might be treaties that specify the algorithms that autonomous systems have to implement if they're going to be deployed to combat situations.

[1] [http://www.cc.gatech.edu/ai/robot-lab/online- publications/fo...](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/ai/robot-lab/online- publications/formalizationv35.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> Where does the battlefield stop when drones allow soldiers to be remote?

If a drone pilot on active duty works and lives in a civilian population, are those civilians being used as human shields? How does that sit with the Geneva Convention? Is a US based pilot, who goes home of a night, counted to be on the front-line and unwittingly using their family as human shields?

I'd think the use of drones extends the bounds of the battlefield, making drone pilots fair game. Probably a moot point when fighting a adversary with limited range, but it might be quite important in a more equal contest.

</comment><comment><USER6> A human may call the kill order, but that order is based upon information the robots/computer/machine gives them.

How many people have died from bad code, thats more worrying.

<comment><USER7> Is there any evidence that the information provided by any technology for a drone attack has been inaccurate because of a bug or bad code?

It's not like the government is using machine learning to categorize likely terrorists and then blowing them up in their homes.

<comment><USER8> 1\. is there any evidence supporting the existence of a bug free system?

2\. you're probably over-simplifying the actual process in which we algorithmically identify and eliminate terror threats. which i'd bet for all intents and purposes is just as scary.

my point here is that you, like you identified of your parent's post, are operating under quite a few assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't that nice. This isn't the most concerning aspect about the use of drones though. The concerning part is the extension of the definition of "battlefield".

Currently the definition of what is a battlefield is little different than "wherever we decide to put a drone". However, this leaves a lot to be desired from a rules-of-war and civil liberties perspective. The thought that merely visiting some city in the developing world and hanging around with the wrong folks could result in you dying in a battlefield via remote drone attack is more than a little disturbing, especially when compared against all of the normal heuristics a sensible human with good-intentions would typically use to avoid being involved in a war and especially being killed in battle.

Certainly there are risks and downsides to operating under rules-of-war which are too limiting or too strict but the solution is not to throw everything out and create effectively unlimited power with almost no safeguards, limitations, or accountability. And that is the road we seem to be heading down. As history has shown, power without accountability and limitations is never a good idea and will inevitably lead to intentional abuse.

<comment><USER10> > hanging around with the wrong folks could result in you dying in a > battlefield via remote drone attack is more than a little disturbing

Being a minor (16 years old) and a US citizen (born in Denver) won't protect you from "having the wrong father", as Abdulrahman_al-Aulaqi can tell you[1].

It's not reassuring at all to me to know that a human, rather than a robot, is making the decision, as long as I don't know (or trust) the criteria that that human is using.

[1] (Except he can't, because he was assassinated last year, far from any "battlefield" - or even any country that the US is at war with, for that matter.)

<comment><USER11> "and a US citizen (born in Denver) "

I've never understood the emphasis on this point.

You're either for or against drone attacks on presumed terrorists, I can't understand how US citizenship plays any role in it. If his father was involved in terrorism and you think drone strikes are OK, why would you have extra sympathy for him because he's a US citizen?

I don't think the US citizen aspect is worth mentioning, in fact I think it just makes people who are against drones seem a little unhinged. By the way I am against the use of drones (on Americans or otherwise).

<comment><USER10> > If his father was involved in terrorism and you think drone strikes are OK, > why would you have extra sympathy for him because he's a US citizen?

As of April 2010, the _open, stated_ objective of the CIA was to kill Aulaqi's father (and others on President Obama's "hit list") and, if and _only if_ he could not be killed, to arrest him, charge him formally, and bring him to trial.

In other words, "if we can kill him, we don't have to prove he was actually guilty."

I don't support the drone strikes against non-US citizens, but the idea that a single executive can issue capital punishment on a US citizen[1] without a trial is downright unnerving. Imagine if police officers wielded that same level of power - it's no different.

[1] The US Constitution does not provide the same levels of protection to non- Citizens, which is why drone-strikes on foreigners is still disgusting but not as terrifying (from the perspective of a US citizen).

<comment><USER12>
      >[1] The US Constitution does not provide the same levels of
      > protection to non-Citizens, which is why drone-strikes on
      > foreigners is still disgusting but not as terrifying (from
      > the perspective of a US citizen).

I hear this asserted frequently but it is simply not the case. There are a very few places where the citizenship requirement is explicitly stated (e.g. voting or holding public office), but generically the US Constitution refers to "persons" not citizens.

For a scholarly article on this topic, see: [http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...](http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1302&context=facpub)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe we should just stop killing each other.

<comment><USER14> Preposterous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Humans make mistakes. We should really put that kind of decision making in the hands of an artificial intelligence.

<comment><USER16> it's gonna happen anyway whether the pentagon says something or not. not that i understand why anyone cares what the pentagon says.

<comment><USER15> I was saying that tongue in cheek, but yeah, it will happen.

At some point the brainiacs in the war department will realize that you can never find enough soldiers to police everyone -- if they haven't already realized this. The only way to solve that is make a machine more efficient than people.

Our ally on the inside, potentially, are soldiers like the general in Wargames played by Barry Corbin, who don't trust the machine over a human soldier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not entirely sure I believe this. Yes, for predators and such drones it makes sense. But the military already has weapons like the sea whiz that seek, aim, and fire all on their own[1]. No human pulling the trigger or picking out targets. Granted, the Sea Whiz is anti-missile. But it's only a matter of time until it becomes self aware and targets whatever it wants....

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_whiz>

edit: that gun looks fantastic: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAw82h-IhdQ&feature=fvwre...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAw82h-IhdQ&feature=fvwrel)

</comment><comment><USER18> What happens if a foreign power decides to unleash 1000 armed mini-drones in NYC as revenge?

How exactly will the US stop them?

All that TSA money could have been used to research that problem.

Are we going to have drone dogfights? Because the next step is to remove the need for human operators for most automation like evasion, so frequency jamming is out. I guess EMI pulse is the only way but they can be shielded too.

<comment><USER19> > What happens if a foreign power decides to unleash 1000 armed mini-drones in > NYC as revenge?

at that point, it'd be all out open war. The only reason the US can do these operations in foreign lands is that no other country could really retaliate (and survive).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Unless you happen to be standing too close to someone a human decides to kill with a drone, of course.

</comment><comment><USER21> Wow, that will make it feel much better if they off you, how warm and fuzzy. They should make a hallmark card "Seasons Greetings, if you get taken out, you can count on us to ensure that a human being will decide when a robot kills you. Sincerely, The Pentagon."

</comment><comment><USER22> Coincidental that on the same day there is an HN frontpage story about Google Spanner database.

TL;DR humans are too slow

...think this ends well for slow humans?

</comment><comment><USER23> well, this has been not true for a long time now.

Mines.

Anti-personnel, anti-tank, whatever. Those are killing automata, some very simple, some quite smart - not that easy to kill a tank with high probability.

so, yeah, there will be next gen mines, combine a rifle with some sensors and a field of fire. voila, a stand off weapon covering your flank, nothing comes through this alley for a while.

</comment><comment><USER24> And Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.

</comment><comment><USER25> Until a robot decides not to listen...

<comment><USER26> You don't need AI to make the assertion literally false. the pentagon isn't giving up on the concept of "collateral damage".

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Impose a law and someone will break it.

</comment><comment><USER28> "And that's our promise to you, here at the Pentagon."</comment>


IOS source code for Wolfenstein 3D & Doom classic - <AUTHOR> http://www.bethblog.com/index.php/2011/09/08/ios-updates-source-code-for-wolfenstein-3d-classic-platinum-doom-classic/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure if the source was available before. But if so, I'm wondering if anyone has compared it to the original source to see what was changed? Anything interesting? Anything major?

<comment><USER3> yes, id software is notorious for open sourcing all their games a while after release.

John Carmack took a few months break from Rage development to work on these (at least on Wolfenstein, not sure about Doom) [1], so there will definitely be substantial differences to adapt to iOS, like - I'm guessing - OpenGL-ES code and touch controls.

here's a write-up from Carmack about his Wolfenstein iPhone development adventures: [http://www.idsoftware.com/wolfenstein3dclassic/wolfdevelopme...](http://www.idsoftware.com/wolfenstein3dclassic/wolfdevelopment.htm)

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28>

<comment><USER4> Great little detail:"Wolfenstein was originally written in Borland C and TASM for DOS, but I had open sourced the code long ago, and there were several projects that had updated the original code to work on OpenGL and modern operating systems. "

Everyone benefits from Open Source, even the original creators.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> DOOM doesn't compile, seems to be missing some files.

<comment><USER6> They released the source code only which means no graphics or game data. I tried to download and compile immediately as well.

<comment><USER5> darn, I thought it was all the assets too.

<comment><USER7> usually easy enough to find, by digging around in the old disk box at the back of your computer cupboard ;)

<comment><USER8> The various Dooms are also on Steam - I bought them again just to have easier access to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> why is there an agewall?

<comment><USER10> Everything on Bethsoft's blog (and most (all?) of their site) is behind an agewall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is actually old news if you read Fabien's code review pages. He has had links to the ios source on there for a while.

</comment><comment><USER12> idkfa iddqd it's frightening that that's _still_ saved deep in my brain and rapidly available.

<comment><USER13> Don't forget idspispopd for noclip (Doom 1). I must have typed those cheats a thousand times. If you tried using Doom cheats in Heretic you'd get the opposite effect. idkfa would strip you of all weapons and iddqd would kill you. Great addition to the game!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Y U NO GITHUB?</comment>


#1 Feature Your Next Web App Needs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@alexyakunin/features-of-the-future-web-apps-part-1-e32cf4e4e4f4 <comment><AUTHOR> What's the biggest difference between the modern and the future web apps? To answer this question, let's ask the opposite one first: what's the most rudimentary UX feature used by almost any web app today? I nominate this button: ...</comment>


Learn X in Y minutes – Tcl - <AUTHOR> http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/tcl/ <comment><USER2> I haven't scrolled through more than a third and suddenly I have this strange feeling of wanting to write an IRC bot.

Jokes aside, TCL was for a long time my goto language for anything quick and dirty. As a result, I don't mind TCL at all. I still use Tk quite often. It might not look pretty, but it works and more crossplatform than other ui toolkits.

<comment><USER3> Tk has come a long way since the 8.5 release. Tk now looks native. See [http://www.tkdocs.com/tutorial/index.html](http://www.tkdocs.com/tutorial/index.html) for an excellent tutorial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was hoping for a listbox with options for X and a slider controlling the value for Y :)

<comment><USER5> That's Tk. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tcl is awesome.

<comment><USER7> can you elaborate? I always wonder if I should learn it, how it would make me think in new ways and how I would use it. Tcl looks strange and that makes it very interesting for me so how do you use it and why do you use Tcl for it?

<comment><USER8> It offers the syntactic freedom of Lisp/Scheme without the parentheses.

<comment><USER9> The top level of parenthesis-es is left out, the other levels replaced by brackets :). But joking aside, I greatly enjoy both Lisp and Tcl as languages.

<comment><USER10> A huge, seriously annoying problem with TCL is lack of deterministic cleanup for resources. If you don't manually close a filehandle, for example, it will leak. Doing this sort of bookkeeping in 2015 is infuriating.

<comment><USER11>
      proc with {file as name block} {
        uplevel 1 [list set $name $file]
        uplevel 1 [list eval $block]
        uplevel 1 [list close $file]
      }

      with [open foo.txt w] as file {
        puts $file "Hello, World!"
      }

I'm sure it's possible to do it in a cleaner way without [set], but my Tcl is a bit rusty.

<comment><USER10> Still leaks on an exception. That's also an annoying construct to be forced to use.

<comment><USER12> You could easily wrap the middle uplevel in a catch block to handle exceptions, and this sort of "with" construct is pretty common in a lot of very popular languages today.

While it would be nice if this were baked into the language, it's pretty astonishing how extensible Tcl is without even having to touch the realm of C extensions.

<comment><USER13> I think this precisely one of Tcl's strengths. Few other languages apart from Lisp and Tcl lets you write your own control flow syntax from within the language (and at runtime).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seems like an article ripe for pull-requests.

I've already sent one on a minor formatting issue, but about one third into that article, the formatting goes permanently haywire.

Weird how no one has noticed until now?

<comment><USER15> It looks like the syntax highlighter treated a * as the end of a comment, causing a " in the comment to be treated as the start of a string. That causes everything that isn't a string to be highlighted as one, and vice versa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've just started at a place that uses a lot of Tcl for embedded scripting and customisation, and I've never used it before so this was very handy.

That said, the document needs work - the syntax highlighting got very confused at some point, and a bunch of the lines are much longer than the width of the document, and don't wrap.

Tcl looks like a nice little language that makes it really easy to write really horrible code. Probably with some discipline you could keep it tidy and comprehensible though.

</comment><comment><USER17> Tk is great but Tcl itself... it's interesting but the difficulty in creating real data structures (as opposed to just strings) makes me start reaching for Scheme again...

<comment><USER13> Tcl was never meant for that, the Ousterhout way would be to extend Tcl with the data structure written in C. Now Lua has knocked Tcl crown of "designed from scratch with embedding in mind" but at that time Tcl was indeed quite unique and one of the easiest to embed. This in a backhanded way inspired Guile: scheme intended to be embedded and/or extended.

Talking about Guile, lots of fun things happening there lately. wiki.tcl.tk is a lot of fun too.

<comment><USER18> > at that time Tcl was indeed quite unique and one of the easiest to embed

Could you please explain why some languages are better at being "embedded and/or extended"? Why would Guile be simpler to embed than Ruby?

<comment><USER19> The Tcl shell itself (tclsh, which is many people's only interface with Tcl) is just a REPL that uses libtcl. The Tcl library is written in C, and built to be easy-to-use and powerful. Tcl also has an incredibly stable API/ABI which allows for a "stubs mechanism"[0] which is quite a nice, powerful facility that allows for seamless fixes to your Tcl-dependant work.

[0] [http://www.tcl.tk/doc/howto/stubs.html](http://www.tcl.tk/doc/howto/stubs.html)

<comment><USER13> Great points. Something I feel that Tcl really got right and Python did not is handling concurrency. The Tcl way is to run the different interpreters in different threads and communicate between them by message passing _but without the need for serialization - deserialization_. They had this from the very beginning.

<comment><USER19> Yes. For multithreaded code, instead of deciding where/how to put interpreter locks (like Python's infamous GIL (global interpreter lock)) to manage low- level sanity wrt sharing data, Tcl punted and lets each interpreter run unfettered.

This is called apartment model [0] threading.

[0] [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/aa261361(v=vs.60).a...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/aa261361\(v=vs.60\).aspx) (this is a Microsoft VB article, with nothing to do about Tcl specifically, but does nicely explain the apartment threading model)

Edit: s/let's/lets/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Before I say more: The "Tk" part of Tcl/Tk is the one redeeming quality about Tcl. Tk gives you awesome bang-for-the-buck when it comes to building a UI.

That said, Tcl is the worst parody of a programming language since the invention of BASIC and Brainfuck. All you need to know about it is two words: Stay away.

<comment><USER21> I think you're being overdramatic, but since you didn't explain _why_ you think Tcl is "the worst parody of a language since BASIC and Brainfuck", I can't really evaluate that. I can name lots of things about Tcl that are actually very pleasant, including the robust libraries, the homoiconic syntax, the ease of extending the language, the quickness that newbies can pick it up, and the performance (which is roughly on par with CPython, Perl and the like). What things have you hit that resulted in such an amazingly strong negative response?

<comment><USER20> The fact that there are no data types but only strings. The necessity to navigate dynamic scoping with `upvar` & siblings. The load of having to simulate locality of reference with fancy array indexes. It may be nice for simple string-crunching scripts but a complex application is living hell. You wouldn't use /bin/sh for that, either.

<comment><USER22> Sounds like you haven't used Tcl since the early 1990's, you may want to check your facts. Tcl has had boolean, integer, floating point, list, dictionary, and other data types besides strings since 1997. The fact that Tcl will convert all of these values into strings when asked is immensely useful. Likewise, Tcl has had object oriented extensions since the early 1990's, and as of the last few years has OO built into the core, so you can easily build your data structures to suit.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A VC: The Treadpad - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/12/the-treadpad.html <comment><USER2> Except now you cant access the buttons underneath it easily! Bad interface!

Why not just make a nice mounting bracket so you get a better angle for a visual, and don't disrupt the hardware interface to your treadmill?</comment>


4 Radio Transmissions That Nobody Can Explain - <AUTHOR> http://historybuff.com/4-terrifying-radio-transmissions-that-nobody-can-explain-PK35qEmMqlBz <comment><USER2> BBC radio programme about numbers stations: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvr6o7fBcTY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvr6o7fBcTY)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is awesome!</comment></comment>


8 Sneaky, Clever, and Downright Dirty Ways To Quit Your Job - <AUTHOR> http://mindpetals.com/blog/2007/04/8-sneaky-clever-and-downright-dirty-ways-to-quit-your-job/ <comment><USER2> I'm really not sure why anyone would want to do this.

I'm sure the article is intended to be taken tongue-in-cheek, but if so, the humor may get lost on the audience..

I've left several jobs before, and I can certainly agree that there are good reasons and bad reasons.

When I left a job to go back to school, companies were very understanding- Generally they supported me, and wished me well in my academics.

At one job I had been with for several years, my immediate manager left, and the feel of the department went with him. While I liked the work the company was doing, I felt like we were floundering- I explained that I was loyal to my boss, we talked about it, and an understanding was had.

I think the key, like so many things, is communication.

Firmly explain that you're leaving, but that you want to make the transition as easy as possible.

Spent time documenting everything you do, to help provide transition documents for your replacement(s).

Finally, after leaving, stay in contact with any people from your previous job you got along with- These people will be ideal contacts later in life.

-Colin

(Granted that everything I'm suggesting is common-sense, but I've been surprised how many people seemingly insisted on leaving on bad terms...)

</comment><comment><USER3> Burning bridges is always a bad idea unless you're certain you can get more benefit from burning that bridge than from keeping it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I took it as being tongue-in-cheek, I would never use any of these techniques.</comment>


Climate change expert sentenced to 32 months for fraud, says lying was a 'rush' - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/climate-change-expert-sentenced-32-months-fraud-says-lying-was-f2D11768995 <comment><AUTHOR> 'The EPA's highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change was sentenced to 32 months in federal prison Wednesday for lying to his bosses and saying he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job.'

<comment><USER2> So the lying had nothing to do with climate change but NBC "news" decided it was a good idea to link the two in readers minds anyway?

<comment><USER3> You think this says nothing for his credibility overall? His title was _Senior Policy Advisor_ and reported directly to the Assistant Administrator.

His wife is Nancy Kete, another former EPA employee and currently a managing director of the Rockefeller Foundation. They spend a lot in grants regarding "climate change"[1].

[1] [http://www.insidephilanthropy.com/fundraising-for-climate- ch...](http://www.insidephilanthropy.com/fundraising-for-climate- change/rockefeller-foundation-grants-for-climate-change.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Venture Capital Returns - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/venture-capital-returns.html

<comment><USER2> Great insight. I was under impression VCs make a lot more (at least those 20 or so that 'matter' - and this seems to be data on the top ones. It means that all of them not in the top 20 are probably losing money or just balancing near zero. A far cry from 'sharks of capitalism' image they carry.</comment>