Two Charts - <AUTHOR> http://avc.com/2015/06/two-charts/

<comment><USER2> A good data analysis lesson here: Make sure to use multiple Y axes if you are compared line graphs like this.

It is much easier to see the differences at the top of the scale than at the bottom of the scale, but that doesn't mean the shapes of the lines aren't similar if scaled properly. In fact somebody in the comments has made a version with the Y axes normalized, and the shape of the graphs are all pretty much the same, completely contradicting the conclusion the author makes (or if not, the author didn't provide enough clarity on the point he was trying to make).

Classic example of "not challenging your own data" [1]. A tough skill to learn when doing data analysis, because it isn't fun spending a lot of time and effort to try to prove yourself wrong.

1: [http://danbirken.com/statistics/2013/11/19/ways-to-make- fake...](http://danbirken.com/statistics/2013/11/19/ways-to-make-fake-data- look-meaningful.html)

<comment><USER3> The comment is here if you're curious about this (as I was):

[http://avc.com/2015/06/two- charts/#comment-2108986922](http://avc.com/2015/06/two- charts/#comment-2108986922)

Direct link to the comparison chart:

[http://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/2217/5785/o...](http://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/2217/5785/original.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Public markets are rational

Are they? If markets were rational and efficient, you wouldn't have stocks trading below their asset value. There is nothing rational _at all_ about having $1B on the books that you could acquire for the company in a fire sale, and then trading as though you only have $500M. This is the basis for how value investing works and how people like Ben Graham and one of his students you may have heard of (Warren Buffett) have made billions of dollars off of this assumption. Fred's a great private/venture investor, but he's not a credible source on macroeconomic theory.

<comment><USER5> Given how blatently obvious this "irrationality" is, either a lot of people with enough money to do something about that are being really stupid and missing the huge blinking FREE MONEY sign even though it seems their primary purpose in life is to search for free money, _or_ you're not fully accounting for all the costs involved in extracting the putatively free money, and in fact the market is trying to tell you it's not as easy as it looks.

<comment><USER6> This is just begging the question. "If the market weren't rational, all these highly rational rich people would take advantage of it, therefore the market must be rational."

<comment><USER5> Just because the market is "irrational" does not mean that _your diagnosis of the irrationality is correct_. It is not a binary thing. There's an infinity of ways to be irrational, and most of them are incomprehensible... not the sort of "oh my gosh I can't believe how stupid that is" sort of incomprehensible, either, but _literally_ incomprehensible.

The manner in which the market is being irrational, distributed across millions of actors, many of them greatly more informed than you or I, is all but certainly a rapidly-shifting irrationality, a bubbling froth that changes before you stand a chance of identifying it and taking advantage of it.

Market irrationality probably does _not_ look like a sign hanging out the door saying FREE MONEY, stable for months and years at a time, that mysteriously people are just too stupid to walk up and take. If people aren't claiming their free money, there's probably a reason you don't know about.

(A lot of people desperately need the market to be "irrational" so they can justify putting central authorities over it. But it's really a crazy argument... "the market consisting of millions of entities with all sorts of differing needs and information moving at the speed of electronic data transfer is sometimes "irrational", even if we can't demonstrate that we've correctly identified the "irrationality" by simply profiting from it directly. So let's fix that by putting an entity in charge of it that has a vanishing fraction of the computational power, tiny fractions of a percent of the information, moves at the speed of Congressional deliberation, and has its own independent incentives that do not necessarily align with any participant in the market." The F1 racers are moving too fast, let's send that sloth out to catch them and make them slow down. Surely that will fix racing for everybody.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think Fred missed lots of things here:

1\. Series A is heating more in percentages: [https://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/2217/5785/...](https://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/2217/5785/original.jpg?w=600&h) but all series seems to be following a similar trend, so nothing special to note.

2\. > Public markets are rational.

I thought Public markets are emotional? The same chart that he is putting (the Nasdaq) with the year 2000 bubble shows pretty much how un-rational the public market is.

Maybe he means adjustable on the long term?

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how much of the growth in valuations in the early rounds (given birken/df07's comments) is explained by the "Seed is the new Series A" phenomenon[1].

It's very challenging to make sense of all this. You can say "Series A valuations are higher" but does that mean higher valuations per revenue (or whatever metric), or just that the terminology has changed, or one of several other possibilities?

[1] [http://www.k9ventures.com/blog/2015/06/05/the-seeds-have- cha...](http://www.k9ventures.com/blog/2015/06/05/the-seeds-have-changed-an- epilogue-to-the-new-venture-landscape/)

</comment><comment><USER9> _Public markets are rational. Tech stock performance has been strong but is driven by strong revenue growth and good business fundamentals generally speaking._

I agree completely. That right there is worthy of an article. Fitbit went public two weeks ago and has a PE ratio of only 25 right now, and that is after a 30% pop in price. If this were the 90's it would have gone public with a PE of 300 or some crazy high number. Despite the high prices, markets are much more sober. I'm rationally optimistic.

<comment><USER10> We should consider the fact that Fitbit is a hardware company. I say this, because if you look at the recent software IPOs (say Box, Hortonworks, etc.), they have inifite PEs because they are unprofitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Low interest rates -> search for yield by institutions -> increase of flow of funds into riskier assets (PE / VC / junk bonds / developing nation sovereign debt) -> "cheap money" for later stage funding.

This contrasts sharply with 1980's VC where capital was much more scarce and thus VCs were able to command more equity for less money put at stake.

</comment><comment><USER11> From the first chart, data is only aggregated yearly, Median Series C funding only spiked for _1 year_ (2014). That's not enough to establish a trend, and it's misleading when you compare to the Stock market chart which shows the data trending more continuously.

<comment><USER12> It also only shows 9 years of data - omitting the first tech bubble. That would be very interesting to see included.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah. a very curious omission, hmmm....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This discrepancy could be driven by the private equity brand craze. Firms buy into the Uber's, Airbnb's and Slack's at irrational prices just to say the are 'investors' when raising the next pool of money.

</comment><comment><USER14> Log scale would help quite a bit here, looks like everything is just up in the same-ish ratio.</comment>


Nvidia: How Our Deep Learning Tech Taught a Car to Drive - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/05/06/self-driving-cars-3/ <comment><USER2> Well done.

Now. How about fixing your Linux video drivers?</comment>


Decentralization Will Create a Better Sharing Economy - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/decentralization-will-create-a-better-sharing-economy-1e84e0c36301 <comment><USER2> Another claim of how blockchain will make things change.

Yet there is not a single worthwhile use case.</comment>


Artificial intelligence program that learns like a child - <AUTHOR> http://www.gizmag.com/artificial-intelligence-program-imitates-child-cognitive-development/33972/

<comment><USER2> This sounds interesting. Is there any technical or in-depth information available? The idea itself doesn't strike me as new.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've seen a documentary on tv that deals with this topic. Its called "Extant".</comment>


Google demands Microsoft removes YouTube Windows Phone app, cites lack of ads - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4334030/google-demands-microsoft-remove-youtube-windows-phone-app <comment><AUTHOR> Latest in a long saga.

From a post from Microsoft in 2011:

First, in 2006 Google acquired YouTube—and since then it has put in place a growing number of technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it for their search results. Without proper access to YouTube, Bing and other search engines cannot stand with Google on an equal footing in returning search results with links to YouTube videos and that, of course, drives more users away from competitors and to Google.

Second, in 2010 and again more recently, Google blocked Microsoft's new Windows Phones from operating properly with YouTube. Google has enabled its own Android phones to access YouTube so that users can search for video categories, find favorites, see ratings, and so forth in the rich user interfaces offered by those phones. It's done the same thing for the iPhones offered by Apple, which doesn't offer a competing search service.

Unfortunately, Google has refused to allow Microsoft's new Windows Phones to access this YouTube metadata in the same way that Android phones and iPhones do. As a result, Microsoft's YouTube "app" on Windows Phones is basically just a browser displaying YouTube's mobile Web site, without the rich functionality offered on competing phones. Microsoft is ready to release a high quality YouTube app for Windows Phone. We just need permission to access YouTube in the way that other phones already do, permission Google has refused to provide.

[http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2011/03/30/adding- our-voice-to-concerns-about-search-in-europe.aspx)</comment>


Network latency as data storage - <AUTHOR>

Any transmission channel with a delay between the time a packet leaves the sender and reaches the receiver, is effectively storing the information contained in the packet during the time of travel.
So one could store information in that packet, in such a way that it does not need to be stored in the end nodes of the network.
Has anyone looked at this in theory (or in practice)? <comment><USER2> I've heard this idea discussed a number of times over the years. It usually comes up after about 4 or 5 pints :)

There are a number of reasons why it's impractical though. A given packet tends to only store about 1000bytes of actual data. It would take a lot of packets to store any useful amount of data.

Secondly, packets have TTL (time to live) encoded, where the TTL is decremented at each router hop. This is mostly to prevent routing loops (where two routers, or a group of routers, all don't know how to route a given packet so they get stuck in a sort of networking infinite loop).

So, for this to really work, you'd have to only need to store very small amounts of data (and I could think of certain applications where you might want something like an encryption key to live "in the ether"), and you'd have to modify your routers to either not decrement the TTL's for these packets, or you'd have to make the PC set obscenely huge TTL's.

Then on top of that, data stored "in the wire" would also decrease overall network performance by increasing congestion (if you're constantly routing 500MB of stored data around, those packets are taking up network resources).

</comment><comment><USER3> Michal Zalewski discusses "Parasitic Storage" in his book "Silence on the wire" ([http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kOQ9m38q_t8C&lpg=PP1&...](http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kOQ9m38q_t8C&lpg=PP1&ots=jIu3Fa7pdZ&dq=michal%20zalewski%20silence%20on%20the%20wire&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false)).

It's actually a pretty good read for interesting stuff that you don't often think about.

</comment><comment><USER4> Reminded me of: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory></comment>


A Rare Opportunity To Explore Venture Capital - <AUTHOR> http://blog.semilshah.com/2013/02/11/a-rare-opportunity-to-explore-venture-capital/

<comment><USER2> Great opportunity, but only apply if you already have _real_ startup experience, are extroverted and have 3,000+ followers on Twitter.

Direct link to the job listing: <https://angel.co/freestyle- capital#recruiting></comment>


Java 11 GA Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk11-downloads-5066655.html <comment><USER2> Wow. There's a big change in the JDK 11 terms of use.

        License Rights and Restrictions
        ...
        Further, You may not:
        -    use the Programs for any data processing or any
             commercial, production, or internal business purposes
             other than developing, testing, prototyping, and
             demonstrating your Application;

That clause is absent from the JDK 8 terms of use.

(Edit: fixed formatting)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the Oracle JDK builds are only for licensed customers in production from now on. The OpenJDK derivatives are now the preferred way to run a JVM in production without a license from Oracle.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OpenJDK download link: [http://jdk.java.net/11/](http://jdk.java.net/11/)

Features: [http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk/11/](http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk/11/)</comment>


Inline PHP-FPM Server Running on Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/davidcoallier/node-php

<comment><USER2> Finally we have someone driving some innovation in the PHP space, and all people do is bitch and moan about it saying it won't work or it's not a good idea. That's the whole point of doing explorations... To find out if it's really viable or not. If this was related to Ruby/Rails, Python or Haskell, people would be cheering you on like you were in the Olympics.

Keep pressing on, David - there are a lot of people in the PHP community who could benefit from something like this. I wish you and Orchestra the best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think something more like this [1]* built in server proposal would be nicer, with less dependencies.

Yes, people always bitch about how easy it is to just set up Apache, but they fail to realize the departmentalization of apps is great for development. Currently in my dev environment I have a virtual host for every app/site/lib. It is rare that most PHP devs even do that. Far too often they just do FTP straight to the production server. This would curtail that.

      $ cd your/app
      $ php -s

That said, I think the recent trend of lightweight servers for PHP is awesome. I think any additions to PHP that introduce real professional practices to the PHP community is a great thing. In the past few years we have seen the wider adoption of Unit tests, better frameworks, and _somewhat_ better packaging.

PHP devs always complain about how people rag on PHP, but it's because the professional programmers that actually know what they are doing don't spread their knowledge to amateur programmers - which leads to more crappy PHP code. Just like any other language embracing _and evangelizing_ good standards will better the community as a whole.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281724> (source link is down at the moment)

</comment><comment><USER4> Any possible benefits of doing this with node.js rather than just the normal nginx setup? Maybe if you're just running a simple node.js app but need to include one single-file php script? I guess that would be useful.

Interesting concept. I like projects like this.

It's also refreshing to see an article on HN mentioning PHP without it being something negative.

<comment><USER5> Being able to pop into terminal, create a directory and a PHP file, then run node-php to get a test server running in this new setup is an efficient way to try code out. If the built-in PHP web server were standard this would be less useful.

<comment><USER4> But you'd probably be quicker to get nginx up and running - so I was wondering if there were any benefits _beyond_ a nginx/php-fpm setup

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very interesting.

One question: Could this in any way (at some time in the future, clearly not yet) provide a mechanism for PHP's lack of threads? I don't mean actual threads, but perhaps exploiting node.js's callback mechanism to sync the running of multiple simultaneous triggered PHP scripts.

</comment><comment><USER7> One other way might be to use phpjs.org, albeit a less complete version of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> PHPJS emulates PHP but can't run PHP scripts :)

<comment><USER8> Node.js neither. It merely passes the request to PHP-FPM. Neat hack but I fail to take it seriously. I don't see the benefit. Maybe I missed something.

<comment><USER9> Node.js is low-level enough to do some protocol things fast enough PHP can't. I can imagine building a load balancer or proxy to PHP. Yes, it's probably not the best solution, but it could be done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's a little video to show how it works :) <http://www.screenr.com/aJ3>

</comment><comment><USER10> Ugh, the last thing we need is to turn open source people into Windows Weenies.

Honestly, I like ASP.NET. If you're selective about what features you use, you're working with a language that's like Java, but a lot nicer, and a much better standard library. If you spent a few years coding web apps in say PHP or Ruby and you understand how real frameworks work and what's good about 'shared nothing', you'll do OK.

However, like all Microsoft products, ASP.NET is full of traps. Things that you might think would be good because they came from a giant company, but that will just screw you up and waste your time.

One of the most dangerous things that comes in Visual Studio is a phony web server that starts when you hit the F5 button when you start a web app. The phony web server is enough like IIS that you might think that your app will work on IIS when it's done, but in reality, it probably won't quite work -- and it can sometimes take days or weeks to fill the gap from "almost works" to "really works"

I try to tell people that they should just install IIS (easy) and figure out how to make the app run on real IIS from the very beginning because somebody's going to have to do that work sooner or later.

<comment><USER11> How does _any of that_ relate to the link that was posted?

<comment><USER12> He is comparing running ASP.NET through the test server in Visual Studio rather than working out how to setup IIS to running something like this instead of working out nginx or apache.

<comment><USER11> Yes, I know what he was talking about, just not how it relates to running a PHP-FPM server on Node.js. What was posted has absolutely nothing to do with ASP.NET and he's spouting off about how it's "full or traps" and how the development server that comes with the studio should be avoided.

If you want to bash ASP.NET for no reason do it on your blog.

<comment><USER10> I'm saying that a phoney PHP web server for Unix is just as bad as phoney ASP.NET server on Windows.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Elon Musk Receives Product Suggestion on Twitter, Implements It 6 Days Later - <AUTHOR> https://officechai.com/news/elon-musk-receives-product-suggestion-twitter-tesla-implements-6-days-later/?sthash.LnpmjTXV.WpKm8Iy7.mjjo#sthash.LnpmjTXV.Aq4R8I08.dpbs <comment><USER2> It seems more likely that this is an example of Elon Musk doing a good job of PR - interacting with a popular social media influencer (Loic has 129k followers) to drive forward his plan. I would be surprised if this was not something that was already in the works.

<comment><USER3> This is also not a feature that requires much or any engineering effort and can be greenlit and rolled out in an afternoon.

So it's very may be that whilst it was some issue that has been known once it gets picked up by a C level exec not to mention a CEO it's not uncommon for simple things to get fixed really quickly.

Everyone experienced it with some silly thing like a CEO overhearing some one complaining about a laptop or a coffee machine and the next day there is a new one.

This is management 101 do small things that look like you are attentive to your employee and customers that provide QOL improvements but have very little to no real cost attached to them.

This is the breakfast in bed or friday flowers equivilent of management.

<comment><USER4> >>> This is also not a feature that requires much or any engineering effort and can be greenlit and rolled out in an afternoon.

Not so sure. In my experience, anything to do with billing has the potential to extend schedules.

<comment><USER3> Billing rules are often quite easy to modify, any billing system has time and activity tracking even if your customers don't pay for it, it is still tracked just the cost for every time unit for that specific activity/resource is set to zero.

I can tell you with near 100% certainty that Tesla is tracking for active (charging) and non-activate (not charging) parking at their charge stations, changing the non-active SKU to a billable one doesn't require any major changes in their billing system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This was the top complaint on the owner forums for months, both on official boards (forums.tesla.com) and independent communities (teslamotorsclub.com)

<comment><USER6> He probably just had an alarm set for the next incoming tweet with the right keywords, so that he could "respond within minutes". Then have some journalist write about it. Good PR!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That tweet doesn't prove that the change was implemented in 6 days. It could easily have been started way earlier.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. Also more of a policy change than a "product suggestion". But that would be a boring headline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _Elon Musk didn't end up starting diverse startups like Paypal, Tesla and > SpaceX by not being proactive_

He didn't start 2 of 3 of those companies.

Regarding the actual content, I've wondered about what this problem will look like in the short run. I've done plenty of road-tripping around Canada, and on holiday weekends gas stations are often lined up. How will this work with so many electric vehicles on the road when "refueling" takes so much longer with current technology?

<comment><USER10> You're still thinking like a gas car owner, thinking about needing charging stations like the ones Tesla has set up. Those will be a part of it, sure. But by the time EVs reach anything like ubiquity there will be charging available in the parking lots of restaurants and rest stops. Tons of them. Because they are cheap to install and attract customers at very little cost.

Note that you don't have to be standing by your EV when it charges. My LEAF can be plugged in and when it's done it will automatically stop charging and unlock the handle so someone else can take it and charge with it in an adjacent spot.

Note also that while with gas cars you have to fuel up at a station, with EVs everyone leaves home with a full charge. That means if you are driving less than the capacity of your vehicle in a day you have no need for any charging stations outside your home (which is the case for us all but a handful of days a year.)

<comment><USER11> > it will automatically stop charging and unlock the handle so someone else > can take it and charge with it in an adjacent spot.

Is there any concern about a random stranger detaching the unlocked handle from your car? Is anything fragile in there? Does your exposed charge connector present a vulnerability of some kind?

<comment><USER10> Nope. It is no more delicate than say the headlights or something. Or the fuel door and cap on a gas car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interested to see whether this actually makes an impact. A Tesla is a relatively expensive automobile in the US. It seems like Tesla owners can likely afford $30 for a couple hours of parking depending on the circumstances. For instance, parking for events in Tennessee can range from $5 - $20 based on the size of the event. Assuming a 21.89% difference in dollar value, its effectiveness may be surprising.

[http://taxfoundation.org/blog/real-value-100-each- state-2016](http://taxfoundation.org/blog/real-value-100-each-state-2016)

Edit: spelling

</comment><comment><USER13> Note that @loic is verified, which is probably why Elon saw his tweet at all.

<comment><USER14> Personal anecdotes are good for very specific use cases, like this: I've tweeted at Elon before and he replied. I'm not verified.

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/752196881871040512](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/752196881871040512)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was hoping for a more 2016 solution than "we'll charge you" like just driving the cars out of the spot if it's up there for any longer.

 _that_ would be impressive.

</comment><comment><USER16> Probably in the works for a while?

</comment><comment><USER17> Damn that was pretty boss, moneyyyyy flowing in (or not to free up those spots)</comment>


App basics for Firefox OS – a screencast series to get you started - codepo8-hn https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/03/app-basics-for-firefox-os-a-screencast-series-to-get-you-started/ <comment><AUTHOR> FirefoxOS launched itself on a platform of third world tech-gap closing. At Payward, we are looking at leveraging digital currencies and mobile devices. I am often based in the third world (well, not really: the Yunnan corner of China's a special case). I got excited. Unfortunately, after buying two FirefoxOS devices (ZTE Open and Alcatel OneTouch), spending days over weeks on the IRC channel idling, and submitting many issues ... most prominently this one [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=945047](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=945047) ... I am basically giving up.

 _I can 't get a hold of anyone who cares_, and right now basic workflow like flashing device is impossible. Coming from a background including embedded Linux device development and very globally prominent mobile projects, this is extremely disappointing, since if it's not working for me it's not working for many others.

My advice to FirefoX OS project is have someone _actually handle resolving issues for people who want to develop against your platform_. Make them _your customers_. _Don 't ignore them_.

<comment><USER2> There is another bug related to the bug you filed, where WiFi APIs are being suggested that privileged applications can use. Would you mind giving us some feedback there?

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=934292](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=934292)

If we did something like that, would that be enough or would you also need something like mDNS to do device and application discovery?

Not promising anything concrete here, but we need to know use cases and importance before things end up on a roadmap or planning.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. I will write a detailed response there from a slightly different angle. Nice to see a reply at all after months of waiting!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Making a FirefoxOS app is ridiculously easy if you have experience making websites. It's very similar to making a chrome extension.

</comment><comment><USER4> Really looking forward to the rest of the screencasts.</comment>


How to Make a Pseudo-3D Game for Android - <AUTHOR> http://labs.prx.org/2012/03/13/a-graphical-pseudo-3d-environment-in-an-android-app/

<comment><USER2> tl:dr AndEngine

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you read the article? AndEngine is for 2D graphics alone. You need to hijack some low level AndEngine code to get it to behave in a 3D way by grabbing its OpenGL camera and manipulating it.

<comment><USER2> Soo, AndEngine plus 19 lines of code. I don't mean for my tl:dr to be negative. I fully plan on using this in the future.</comment></comment></comment>


2018 Developer Skills Report - <AUTHOR> https://research.hackerrank.com/developer-skills/2018/ <comment><USER2> Really interesting article! As a long time developer and hiring manager both, this survey reflects what I have seen in the market place as well.

I found it really interesting that problem-solving is rated so high, yet many interviews and screening is still focused on skills. Hopefully sites like HackerRank and other online assessment tools can improve our process.

</comment><comment><USER3> My take away. React has moved ahead of Angular in demand and thought it was interesting that Go scored higher than other languages in interest.

<comment><USER3> When I say demand mean largest gap between know and needed. It appears in the survey that Angular overall in more demand still.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Plus Reasons Not To Use Google+ - <AUTHOR>

List of reasons why you're not using Google+. I state the first reason and the preface every other reason with "Plus" Please add to the list by prefacing your reason with Plus because it's an cumulative list<p>1. " I already have 3 social network accounts" 2. "Plus none of my friends are on it" 3. "Plus I don't care if Google succeeds in social." 4. "Plus I keep getting pointless notifications" <comment><USER2> Are we allowed to discuss?

I don't really have anything to add to the list since I like G+ But perhaps I can add why your reasons didn't apply to me - if anyone should care. I don't intend to argue - mind you, just offering a compare and contrast, since this is entirely an issue of personal preference.

1) Happened not to be a facebook user - and have a twitter that I don't actually use.

2) A couple of my friends joined but most of em aren't engaging - but actually that's not my chief enjoyment. It's allowed me to discover/follow a whole bunch of really interesting people - and the vibe seems to be that most folk don't mind you following them - and will often follow you back. It's like twitter in that respect - but because it allows longer posts, it allows me to better find interesting posts. Because of twitter truncation and url obfuscation - I could never tell if a link might be worth clicking - and so generally never bothered.

3) I don't care either. But I must admit I wouldn't mind seeing facebook at least humbled a little. I just hope Google's success doesn't give it a super- monopoly.

4) I agree there needs to be improvement in this space. I want to be able to configure my stream to default include only the circles I dig the most. Lots of people have said this though - so I don't doubt that it is in the pipeline.</comment>


Turbo Vision port to the GNU compiler (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://tvision.sourceforge.net/ <comment><USER2> I just had an extended discussion on IRC the other day regarding Turbo Vision and console applications.

I had a short project of my own I wanted to do to replace a webapp I depend on, where the core is no more than 5 tables with a simple CRUD and a report. Using any web stack for this is absurd, dbase or a console app would be perfect as I prefer to work over ssh.

Imagine my dismay when I found there are virtually no options for making console applications with any modern tools. Even the ncurses wrappers are ignored or missing (ie: Python).

While the topic is hot, can anyone recommend an OSS or commercial application you can still use on Linux to make fast small console apps without dropping to C and Ncurses?

<comment><USER3> This is a good use case for Tcl/Tk. Tcl scripting gives you database access with a pretty modern-ish language, and Tk is a basic but decent (and totally cross-platform) GUI scripting toolkit.

<comment><USER2> TUI != GUI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This library was awesome for a time. I had used Turbo Pascal in the early 90's and had really liked the text gui.

When this port came out, I made my own "CUA" text mode editor on linux (really just a streamlined feature cut from setedit) and it worked fantastically for years. So much better than nano and other lame unix attempts at simple editors. Anyone who had been exposed to the DOS editor would pick it up immediately.

The problem was the library was only briefly packaged up, and early on it fell out of whatever distro I had at the time and was never picked up again.

It's a shame because that editor would have been awesome for beginners, though it had quite a few power features, such as syntax highlighting etc from setedit/rhide.

</comment><comment><USER5> Glorious pictures here:

[http://www.sigala.it/sergio/tvision/images.html](http://www.sigala.it/sergio/tvision/images.html)

<comment><USER6> That's a different port (From the original article at the head of the thread, Sergio Sigala's port [0]-- which you link to the screenshots of -- is a different port targeting fewer platforms and with a 100% compatibility target, while the one in the article targeted more platforms, and compromised compatibility for security/usability improvements.)

Both ports seem to be inactive (the current version of Sigala's per its page is the same 0.8 that was the latest version at the time of the 2009 post of the original article), but there seems to be at least one more-recently-active fork of Sigala's port on Github. [1]

[0] [http://www.sigala.it/sergio/tvision/index.html](http://www.sigala.it/sergio/tvision/index.html)

[1] [https://github.com/benwbooth/tvision](https://github.com/benwbooth/tvision)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It can still be useful. I work more and more on the console, remoting from the laptop to the work desktop. I love midnight-commander, mcview, and use (heh) tig (actually a git pager) for normal pager (instead of more, less, etc.). Along with emacs/vi/zile/mg/whatever is there. Won't mind a terminal mode debugger with some menus in there, that reflects what Turbo Pascal Debugger was (loved it back in the days)

</comment><comment><USER8> I practically learned OOP making an application in Turbo Pascal using the Turbo Vision library. I even bought the Pascal source code for Turbo Vision ($200 IIRC) Primarily to find a bug where when you pressed a pull down menu item, and there was a button on the window below the menu item, the mouse event for the menu item also triggered the button below. It turned out there was a patch downloadable from a Borland BBS, but boy it was learning digging through the source and finding and fixing that one inlined assembler opcode which was wrong. Dissecting the patch one could see that it contained a workaround, not a direct fix of the bug. Today there's a lot of open source to learn from. Not at all common at that time.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have fond memories of using rhide. I wish they make a comeback as a modern TUI ide.

</comment><comment><USER10> Turbo Vision was a library of forms and controls for Borland Turbo Languages. You didn't need Windows to make an easy to use program. It ran in DOS.

I can see this being useful for GNU/Linux programs that run in the shell.

<comment><USER11> On the shell, we have Curses. How is Turbo Vision different?

<comment><USER10> [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.linux.develo...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.linux.development.apps/TqYFtps_vac)

Turbo Vision gives text based menus and text based controls to make an easier to use program in the terminal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> All I remember from Turbo Vision is the insane amount of brackets that were used in the demos for building a GUI/TUI control hierarchy.

I'll take the Turbo Technojock Toolkit any day over TV if I get sent back in a time warp.

</comment><comment><USER13> ...and now just VCL port to GCC please!

</comment><comment><USER14> Is this project dead?

<comment><USER4> Yes, only waiting to be resurrected.</comment></comment>


Beyond jsonb: a generalized, unstructured data type for Postgres - <AUTHOR> https://www.ongres.com/blog/a_generalized_unstructured_data_type_for_postgres/ <comment><USER2> I always thought they should have done a hstore2 which was hierarchical and supported all of PostgreSQL datatypes which then could have supported json on top of that.

Json is so limiting without dates and binary types among others, I'm glad jsonb is there but it could have been so much more.

One day we will all agree on hierarchical data model that supports a good set of datatypes, one can hope at least.

</comment><comment><USER3> What we do for binary in JSON, is store it out-of-band. In the DB that would be a dedicated table, on the wire it's MIME.</comment>


Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures - <AUTHOR> http://xlinux.nist.gov/dads// <comment><USER2> There's insane amounts of great stuff hidden in the various nooks and crannies of the NIST website. Some of my other favorites:

Engineering Statistics Handbook <http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/index.htm>

Digital Library of Mathematical Functions <http://dlmf.nist.gov/>

The Quantum Algorithm Zoo <http://math.nist.gov/quantum/zoo/>

<comment><USER3> Agreed on the Engineering Statistics Handbook, especially Section 5 on Process Improvement, which contains a decent (and free) treatment of Design of Experiments. A lot of the earlier sections are ok but not as sharply interesting, but their DoE stuff is quite good.

<comment><USER4> I was just reading this section yesterday!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Haha, there is a definition of Marlena:

Definition: A wonderful wife. Every man should have such an incredible wife. We got married in 1976, too, and life's only gotten better.

<http://xlinux.nist.gov/dads//HTML/marlena.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> a two-minute css-pivot to make homepage a little easier on the eyes.

<http://www.csspivot.com/az9fT>

<comment><USER7> This is awesome. Finally a solution for all those white on black blogs.

<comment><USER8> I disagree. Browser side user-css files are the solution to this 'problem' (honestly, my main gripe is low contrast, mainly the gray on white that is the last fashion these days)

opera is the only one that got it right. easy to write the css in a way it works for most sites, and a very convenient way to turn it on/off. too bad opera is ridden with bugs since 8.5 and so i gave up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This dictionary looks like it's the index of The Algorithm Design Manual by Skiena: [http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steve- Skiena/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steve- Skiena/dp/0387948600)

<comment><USER10> I was thinking the same thing. The catalog of algorithms at the end of the book is indispensable.

This site does seem to cover a much broader range of algorithms though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So, how many of these algorithms do you think are covered by litigatable software patents?

</comment><comment><USER12> Nothing for Rete? _Come on_.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_algorithm>

</comment><comment><USER13> "Don't use this to cheat" - how quaint. There was once a time when there was an economics of scarcity in information...

</comment><comment><USER14> If you're interested in glossaries of this type, there's a great one (with pictures!) in the back of The Algorithm Design Manual by Steven Skiena.

[http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steven- Skiena/...](http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steven- Skiena/dp/1849967202/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1304116197&sr=8-1)

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting, Would be great if there were some sort of tag/taglike system for the properties/usages.</comment>


'Elon Musk is not the future' - <AUTHOR> https://jacobinmag.com/2018/02/elon-musk-hyperloop-public-transit-tech <comment><USER2> Elon Musk is not the future. He is trying to make things better for the future. He can sell Falcon rockets to anyone who wants to put things into space.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've watched 10 mins - quite interesting - mostly clips of people talking</comment>


Rose Gold iPhone 6S Shows Up Early at Customer's House - <AUTHOR> http://9to5mac.com/2015/09/21/iphone-6s-arrives-early/ <comment><USER2> mine still shows up as today

[http://imgur.com/SaZI97f](http://imgur.com/SaZI97f)

(rose gold 16gb t-mobile)</comment>


Ask HN: Why Jailbreak my iPad2? - <AUTHOR>

I have always thought I would be against jailbreaking my iOS devices. I have friends that have done it but they dont seem to have any real reasoning or take advantage of anything spectacular. One of them simply jail broke his iPad so he could password protect his apps (i.e prompt for a password on app launch...)
Then I got to thinking. What are the real benefits?
I code in C/C++ and standard web stuff. Could one then load gcc some how?
Are there better network tools like nmap, wireshark, etc, etc
Can anyone explain some true advantages to a developer/hacker/someone who always needs to help someone out in a pinch and would rather not carry a MacBook around all the time? <comment><USER2> Reason #1 to root and jailbreak anything: If you can't open it then you don't really own it. You have to make things yours or companies will continue to lease you their products for outrageous sums of money. So do it for justice.

Plus all the freaking SSH clients in the app store cost money. I've never seen a platform with such an inverted price vs. value scheme. All of the amazing new innovative software that I would be more than willing to pay for such as Aweditorium and Flipboard is free but all of the stuff I would consider basic utilities like SSH/IM/IRC clients are $2-$5 and definitely not so special as to deserve that price tag. There's a distinct lack of free (as in speech) software on iOS unless you jailbreak.</comment>


Put faces to names: Yearbook of some web innovators - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/multimedia/2008/03/gallery_etech?slide=1

<comment><USER2> i have a crush on merci grace and saul griffith is an effing genius.

dan albrightton is the ex-cofounder of iilwy</comment>


Downtime - <AUTHOR> http://staff.tumblr.com/post/2127872280/downtime

<comment><USER2> Contrast this with DHH's response to today's Campfire outage: <http://twitter.com/#!/dhh>

Not only is 37signals refunding everyone for the month, DHH is replying to pretty much everyone personally to tell them so.

<comment><USER3> Tumblr has 1.5 million daily users. I think it might make more sense for them to write an apologetic blog post and reiterate how they're focussing on not letting this happen again :)

<comment><USER4> Also, it's free.

<comment><USER5> All Tumblr users received a full refund for not just a single month but an entire year!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how much of the incident and poor handling of the response is due to losing their particularly good CTO (Marco) a few months ago. I would be a bit concerned if I were a tumblr user or investor.

Experience with LiveJournal, Friendster, Twitter, etc. has been that problems don't just magically fix themselves; absent someone with enough vision to figure out potential problems and actually solve them in technology and business process, you're kind of fucked. In the case of Twitter, they had enough money to buy some excellent talent. In the case of LJ, Brad stepped up as an amazing hacker (with limited financial resources, and really one of the first to solve the problem). In the case of Friendster, bad executive leadership (CEO/board being ineffectual, VP Eng being a tool) killed them.

<comment><USER7> As a longtime Tumblr user, I can tell you serious performance/ frequent down blips/ bugs/ issues have been there for a long time, way before Marco left. I'm not saying they're his fault (he seems awesome), just that they don't correlate with his departure.

<comment><USER6> Maybe part of the problem is that NYC doesn't have as many people familiar with running high volume consumer web apps at scale?

They have banking people (who use a largely entirely different technology stack, budget, and way of working), and people who have worked for smaller companies, but they don't have a huge number of veterans of large consumer webapps. Google's NYC office probably is more of a sink than a source for ops talent, and there isn't a large presence of declining big giants to strip for engineers like there is in Silicon Valley.

Do people move from SF/SV to NYC to work for established companies? I could see this if you had personal reasons for wanting to move (being from NYC and going back, or just wanting to go there), but it doesn't seem like a compelling option otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> People who don't use Tumblr will interpret this blog post differently from people who use Tumblr all the time. If you use + love Tumblr (as I do <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1973546>) you're really less disappointed in this specific 24 hour failure (these things happen), and more disappointed about what's not being talked about. This would have been a great time to start opening up about some specific chronic issues, including communication style that is more close-lipped than Apple.

Still rooting for Tumblr like crazy, but bummed out :(

<comment><USER8> I guess I don't grok the value added by Tumblr. What exactly do they offer that offers a better value proposition than Wordpress or Posterous?

<comment><USER9> Wordpress and Posterous are designed by geeks. Tumblr is designed by a nongeek.

First off, Tumblr is not primarily a blog. It's what we call a "tumblelog", which is a stupid word; I like to call it "vomit" or "spew". The fact that it's the sleekest blog platform out there is secondary to its larger function as a spewing platform.

Blogs are for creating. Spew is for recycling, for breaking things down into small teeny pieces, for streams and streams of things which are essentially meaningless but contribute to a larger whole. Now, not all blogs are strictly bloglike either; the Linked List format is somewhat in between the two, though Linked Lists are usually more disciplined in nature. Another way to draw the distinction is to say that blogs are for _building_ things, while tumblelogs are for _shaping_ them. Or you could call blogs classical music and tumblelogs jazz. One is looser, more freeform, more about the movement than about the individual notes. The other is about the finished product, or about realizing a vision.

A defining characteristic of a true geek is that he builds. Doesn't matter what he builds; what matters is that he appreciates structures. So when we look at a blogging platform, our needs traditionally tend to be focused on constructing more elaborate things. They also tend to be relatively solitary in nature. (Wordpress is; I never had a friend that used Posterous and so I don't know how they handle following things.)

I like slagging on Posterous because I'm still bothered that they get compared to Tumblr when they're really entirely different. Tumblr's breakthrough was its deconstruction of the blog format. You could post an image without a title. You could post a quote without something to frame it. You could post ANYTHING without a datestamp, or a "posted by" attribute, because nobody cares about them, they just care about the flow of content. Posterous has lines of datestamping, and they don't handle title-less posts. They're all about traditional title-body posting. They're all about "blogs", about these elaborate constructions. They aren't broken down like Tumblr.

Tumblr's a fucking awesome engine because it removes everything bloggy about blogs. It's designed for a steady vomitstream of thoughts and ideas. Not your thoughts or ideas. Anybody's. And it strips away everything we associate with blogs, and with everything it strips away it becomes sleeker, lither, more powerful. No comments means no conversations other than reblogs — and reblogs are great because first off, they let you improvise off anybody else's stream, and second off, they make it IMPOSSIBLE to participate without being a "primary creater" with a flow that other people are following, versus blog comments where every commenter is attached to one site at a time.

That means it attracts people who don't build things. People who just want to push out content without worrying about being judged for value. But they want to push it out, because it is a creative and cathartic act just to release these ideas out into the world, or to change their flow. Lower barrier to entry, more ability to interact meaningfully. You can participate without any skill but still find that people are interested in you.

Now, I use Tumblr primarily as a building tool. I find that its theming system makes it very easy for me to design custom interfaces for complex publishing sites, and yet still push through the entire site as a streaming feed to any Tumblr user who wants it. And it's used by lots of serious designers who appreciate its versatility. But I'm an edge user. Every HN user here who uses Tumblr is an edge users. The real users don't post here, because they're not out to build things, they're out to just express themselves loudly and with fury.

<comment><USER10> Your explanation can also be reflected on this comment from the post: _We've nearly quadrupled our engineering team this month alone_

Without more information, this can either make people trust more tumbler in the future (we went from 3 to 12 engineers) or less (we went from 200 to 800). I'd worry in the later case, because it might show that Tumblr is not aware of Brook's law (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law>), which is always unreassuring for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >We've nearly quadrupled our engineering team this month alone...

How do you create and keep a good culture when you're growing that fast? Anyone have experience with this sort of scenario?

<comment><USER12> Adding more people to a software project often has the effect of making it take longer, at least for mid to near term milestones. Quadrupling sounds like the adage of pouring gasoline on a fire.

<comment><USER13> I'm surprised that this has so many upvotes. Are you all _net_ this simplistic?

<comment><USER14> It's probably that the upvoters all read the Mythical Man-Month.

<comment><USER12> Yes, my comment is a clear rip off of MMM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Todo:

Move the blog/status site outside your network (linode.com)

Work on a process to try and follow if you have another outage.

       - One person to handle communication (blog post / respond to users)

Work on a faster way to recover from such a failure. Maybe have a read only version you can switch to "maintenance mode" ?

Done:

Probably the biggest outage you'll face.

20+ outages don't usually happen.

Learning from it. . .

<comment><USER6> eBay had some really long outages, and multiple. I'd say a site which has had one 20h outage is way more likely to have similarly long outages in the future -- it demonstrates that neither the technical nor procedural measures are there to prevent them.

Of course, once you have enough 20h outages, you dont have to worry about the problem anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I understand they were busy, but only two or three updates about progress during the entire ordeal (on Twitter) seemed a little low to me. Their "we'll be back shortly" page also didn't link to their Twitter page either, so for many people it was just a black hole for updates about when a surprising large chunk of the web would return.

<comment><USER17> I've been around when chunks or a large web site went down. Everyone is scrambling to fix it. While we know communication is worth taking time and effect, it is also difficult when you're focused on a singular task. You do get blinders.

Thats not to say its a good excuse, and you certainly lern from it - but it is understandable.

<comment><USER18> Everyone learns quickly after a major outage (they happen) that they need to have a game plan moving forward for communicating to users and customers. I hope tumblr took note of this lesson.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Doesn't actually explain what happened, or why a database cluster outage means more than a read-only situation.

I understand this is aimed at all users, but I'm still disapointed.

<comment><USER20> Don't be, their engineers have better things to patch up at the moment than write a detailed post. They will, hopefully, though like foursquare did with their mongodb outage - [http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/1265191137/foursquare- mongod...](http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/1265191137/foursquare-mongodb- outage-post-mortem)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The postmortem is pretty weak and us, geeks, would have loved to see more detail. Tumblr would have gotten some good karma with a detailed explanation. Well, unless this is all made up just to look impressive and the real reason was something else like human error that wiped the production DB. But even in that case honesty would have paid off - remember GitHub's recent DB wipe and their excellent explanation?

On a side note - anyone know what DB they are using? The cynic in me is thinking "Hey, another MongoDB + FourSquare 'success' story of webscale awesomeness."

<comment><USER22> Agreed. I'd like to see more detail. C.f. facebook's recent post-mortem ([http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/more- deta...](http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/more-details-on- todays-outage/431441338919)). Lots of detail. When a downtime blog post is so vague like Tumblr's was, my first instinct is that there's something they are deliberately not telling about what went wrong. Or maybe they haven't figured out exactly why it went down yet. I hope a more detailed postmortem is coming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Pretty weak compared to other post-mortems.

</comment><comment><USER24> They should have a better ongoing communication method than Twitter in the event of downtime. I'd suggest getting a separate hosting account with a reliable third party, and planning on running something that looks like (but isn't) a normal tumblog, but is instead something very reliable, like editing an html file on a web server that everyone on the team has shell access to.

</comment><comment><USER25> This points to the necessity of a data storage solution which doesn't involve waiting for hours upon hours for the caches to warm in order for your service to be reliable.

</comment><comment><USER26> My favorite opinion on the handling of this event is, by far, this one:

<http://twitter.com/b6n/status/11877355945463808>

</comment><comment><USER27> technical details?</comment>


Protective Rain Hat - <AUTHOR> http://protectiverainhat.com/ <comment><USER2> > "THE PROTECTIVE RAIN HAT HAS FLEXIBILITY AND STANDS UP TO MOTHER NATURE"

[http://protectiverainhat.com/index.html](http://protectiverainhat.com/index.html)

> CAUTION: PLEASE DO NOT WEAR THE PROTECTIVE RAIN HAT IN HAIL STORMS. IT IS > NOT HARD AND WILL NOT PROTECT YOUR HEAD.

[http://protectiverainhat.com/order.html](http://protectiverainhat.com/order.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the apex of website design.

(Heck, it's the most memorable site I've seen today.)

And I can't help but think this looks like some weird cult. Will anyone put $41 down to see what we're getting in for?

<comment><USER4> It is a sublime example of the good old-fashioned "motherfucking website" of 20-odd years ago. [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

I would buy one, but I live in California, where I cynically expect it never to rain again.

<comment><USER5> It's more like an example of what happened when people started deciding a motherfucking website wasn't good enough.

It doesn't have parallax scrolling or underscore.js or whatever it is the young people are digging in 2015, but it does have an entry tunnel, a disgusting colourscheme and an ineptly embedded soundtrack.

Edit: That said, if you want to find out about Protective Rain Hats and maybe buy one, this website probably provides an above average user experience for a 2015 website. Loads fast, tells you what you need to know, probably works (well enough) on anything.

<comment><USER6> You are amazingly right. For all of the horrible things it is doing it does function pretty well.

On the biz side this might be a solution in search of a problem. I would go and ask my mailman (in person with the product, not show him the website) if such a product would be useful. If he/she said no (probably with some good reason) then it would be dead. Out in the rain or out in the desert/sun all day were my first two thoughts.

<comment><USER7> In China, I see custodians/tradesmen/anyone whose job is primarily outdoors wearing hats like this [1] in concert with a plastic poncho all the time. Seems to work quite well.

1\. [http://www.amazon.com/Loftus-SW-0014-Umbrella- Hat/dp/B0006GK...](http://www.amazon.com/Loftus-SW-0014-Umbrella- Hat/dp/B0006GK724)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sigh... How is this even remotely relevant to HN? It seems inevitable that all upvote-base forums will eventually converge on /r/mildlyinteresting

</comment><comment><USER2> And here's the patent, which has expired due to unpaid fees...

[http://www.google.com/patents/US6341380](http://www.google.com/patents/US6341380)

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks like they originally had a see-through version...

[https://web.archive.org/web/20070225104557/http://www.protec...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070225104557/http://www.protectiverainhat.com/pictures.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> I seriously wonder why there are no pictures with human models.

<comment><USER10> The pictures page is downright creepy

<comment><USER11> I feel like I just got put on a list for browsing fetish websites

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Product design by Devo: na na na na, crack that whip.

</comment><comment><USER13> > which has a dome-like configuration and an interior surface that receives > the human head

I love that it has an interior surface that will receive my human head.

<comment><USER14> Yay for not having to use my non-human heads.

/totallyNormalHuman

/totallyNotAnAlienObserver

<comment><USER15> Do you get chastised by your homeworld when you walk up to the line like that?

<comment><USER14> Sure, but what are they gonna do from 23 parsecs? Smurgle at me? I can totally cranch the hempigwarls and they'll never twiggle.

Spa, fon, wankers! I mean, pseudocysts! [wriggles eschaton]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> ...or in other words, a hat.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd be really interested by a good rain hat : something that protects my glasses from rain (the one to invent really efficient anti-rain / fog glasses will be rich) and that dampen the noise of the rain when it falls on the hat.

It should not look like an alien spaceship though and I should be able to buy it on a website that was not made with Frontpage 97 ;-)

<comment><USER5> > I should be able to buy it on a website that was not made with Frontpage 97

Would you boycott a useful product because of the aesthetics of its website (which is actually relatively accessible and functional)?

<comment><USER17> It's not about the aesthetics but about security : a Frontpage 97 looking website screams noobs or fraud, I don't want to give them my credit cart info in either case.

In fact nowadays noobs and frauds are doing better than that, it's probably just a joke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Instantly made me think of this quote from Eurotrip:

Jamie: It's a traveler's money belt. Frommer's says if you have one of these, no-one can rob you of anything.

Scott: Except your dignity.

</comment><comment><USER19> this appears to be somewhere between timecube and bronner soap</comment>


Geeks vs. 9-5'ers - <AUTHOR> http://osnews.com/permalink?295748#comment_295748

<comment><USER2> I think if anything, its more of a scale. On one side you have people who do it purely as a career, and on the other side you have people who do it purely out of passion, but I think for a lot people it's a mixed bag. I love learning about these amazing machines, but I can't say I'm always salivating to code after a long day of work.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bah. I've met a few good 9-to-5 linux administrators. One of the defining traits of an exceptional admin is their ability to stabilize their environment by automation and rigorous attention to detail when they are working.

That doesn't mean they don't have to work crazy hours once in a while, it just means that they care enough to know that part of their job is to create a high quality environment.

<comment><USER4> he's not saying that you can't work a 9-5 as a linux admin, he's saying that you can't work a 9-5 job as a linux admin if you don't know what you're doing. Your lack of knowledge would quickly be exposed, whereas Windows systems/networks will allow itself to be set up completely wrong and still at least function to some extent.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A virtual machine made with Google Sheets formulas (no script) - <AUTHOR> In a popular post today[1] the title claims "VM in Google Sheets", but it's actually in Google Script, which is basically Javascript and not an interesting technical accomplishment (definitely a useful educational tool, though).
Disappointed, I set out to fix it. Voila!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1g3-FZBnkDuLqFYOmk457...
A Brainfk interpreter in pure Google Sheets formulas. The hard part was parentheses matching, so I think other VMs would be even easier.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14701460 <comment><USER3> Wow this is cool and you did this really fast!

So you did kind of a functional style where each row represents an instruction being run with a full copy of the state of the VM at that point in time. Then each subsequent row is based on the state of the previous one. Am I reading that right? (I'm not familiar with Brainf __k)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Had to store state somewhere, spreadsheets find "one row per thing" to be most natural, and in my case the "thing" I'm working with is state, so one row per state transition it is.

The more interesting hackery is in the parenthesis parser...

<comment><USER3> Yeah I don't follow the parenthesis parser. Plan to do a write-up of some kind on how it works?

<comment><AUTHOR> The basic algorithm is "parentheses counting": walk the string starting from an opening bracket, counting +1 per `[` and -1 per `]`; when you reach 0 you're at the matching closing bracket.

First, lets split the code to one char per row:

        =MID($A$1,D3,1)

(D3,D4,... are simply 1,2,3,...)

Now, lets parse `[` as 1, `]` as -1, anything else as 0:

        =IF(E3="[",1,if(E3="]",-1,0))

Now, we will need one column per character in the code, where in the i'th column the first row is the i'th character's value and each row we go down accumulates the value of the next character.

        =G2+OFFSET($F2,G$1,0)
        =G3+OFFSET($F3,G$1,0)
        ...

(Column F is the 1,0,-1s. Row 1 is 0,1,2,3..., this time horizontally, which we use to translate horizontal motion into vertical motion)

Now for the i'th row of the "] match" column, lets find the index of the first 0 in the i'th column, and add `i-1` to get an index from the beginning of the code instead of from the opening bracket:

        =MATCH(0,offset($G$3,0,D3-1,18,1),0)+D3-1
        =MATCH(0,offset($G$3,0,D4-1,18,1),0)+D4-1
        ...

And all that's left is reverse-search this table to find the matching opening brackets to every closing bracket, and while we're at it lets clean up all irrelevant rows to the empty string:

        =IF(F3=1,C3,IF(F3=-1,MATCH(D3,$B$3:$B$20,0),""))

(D3 is the index of the closing bracket, $B$3:$B$20 is interestingly the column we're currently in - Sheets does not complain as long as there is no _actual_ circular referencing going on)

Voila! Column B now contains for every bracket its matching bracket's index in the code, and for anything else, "".

<comment><USER4> Oh, that's pretty clever. Thanks for the explanation!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is very cool as well.

A comment about how you have presented this - not everything has to be an interesting technical accomplishment.

Creating beginners is a much harder skill and topic than most realize.

Making topics easy to approach and learn is often much harder than learning the technical topic.

Impressive how quickly you whipped this up

<comment><AUTHOR> My previous startup was about teaching programming to beginners with computer games, so I definitely have an appreciation for that. I made sure to point out that I still consider Brian's accomplishment very impressive.

It's just that I clicked hoping for one thing and found another, so I felt a need to show that the second one is also doable :-)

Also, it took me more than I expected. I had to go through a couple of wrong approaches and some confusion until I figured out bracket matching, and also had a bug or two that took a while to debug in the interpreter table. These things aren't hard to make! Try it sometime :-)

<comment><USER5> Neat to hear you're in the edtech space as well - I am as well at present.

Would love to learn and chat a bit more about your previous startup (I see you have posted below and will reply there).

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure! I emailed you. Or we can discuss it publicly here :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you still don't get some part of what's going on after copying it and playing with it a bit (A1 is the code, A2 is the input, you can find an explanation of BF and a simple Python implementation in my linked slides), try reading my discussion with briansteffens, who is also the guy who wrote the Apps Script implementation that inspired this.

</comment><comment><USER6> See also: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8) (On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is why I come to HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wait, did you use to work for Codecademy? Can we chat a while? As a former competitor, I am really curious why you did some stuff this way and not that, and would really like to be able to recommend you to all the people asking me how to learn programming now that I don't actively teach anymore.

<comment><USER8> This probably wasn't why he came to HN..

<comment><USER9> Lol, truestory

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It helps to visualize the machine activity if you use conditional formatting to show the cursor location:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZJECuw6GXA_wEMnfe2Oj...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZJECuw6GXA_wEMnfe2OjOD0taVQTU0rTKY8PvfHQAtU/edit?usp=sharing)

</comment><comment><USER11> Next step is emulating a more fulfilling instruction set using formulas only?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure what you mean by "more fulfilling", but I don't think any new techniques would be required. I encourage you to try! Maybe build a Forth? That would be extremely cool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You made my day. Though an explanation would help understanding it. For the commonfolk like me.

<comment><USER13> Brainfuck is a stack-based language with only 6-8? syntactic elements for manipulating the stack. + increments the current stack element, - <USER2> it. > increases the stack pointer and < decreases it. [ and ] have to with conditional jumping I believe. And it is common to convert the elements in the stack to ascii characters to display a result.

So if you go to the orange section of the sheet you see where the program state is displayed. Each row represents the state of the program at that point. The "Out" column is the stack represented as ASCII characters. The "Cursor" column is the stack pointer. The "IP" column is the instruction pointer (which instruction you're currently looking at). The "Instruction" column is the instruction being done at that point in time. The "Cells" column is the stack displayed from left to right.

I may be a little off but that is the general idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> You got it basically right, a few small corrections:

Replace the word "stack" with "memory buffer" or "tape" everywhere. "Out" represents STDOUT, there is the "." command for printing (and "," for reading from STDIN).

Thanks!

<comment><USER13> Ah. I thought "." must be printing (as it's something similar to that in Forth [guess it's ".s" though not "."]), but I was confused by the comma because I didn't understand how you'd be reading from stdin here. Actually I'm still confused. What are you reading in?

<comment><USER14> `.` in Forth is to pop a number and print it, `.s` is to print the whole stack non-destructively

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Welcome back to 1985</comment>


Sharing a secret key amongst a group of people - <AUTHOR> http://fermatslibrary.com/s/how-to-share-a-secret <comment><USER2> I read about this algorithm when playing with Hashicorp's vault. Very elegant solution to a problem.

[1] [https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/concepts/seal.html](https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/concepts/seal.html)</comment>


My first photowalk with the Lytro lightfield camera - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/111091089527727420853/posts/Q94B8k9xZXN

<comment><USER2> This is always a good thing to have in your review:

 _Unfortunately Eric didn't let me share the actual images online, since this is still a pre-production unit and doesn't have the final software or viewer yet_

This is a sad trend in the hardware industry; millions of dollars spent developing cool hardware, all to be ruined by not paying competent software developers. This has plagued Sony for ages and it's just kind of sad. (The justification is always, "our intellectual property is too valuable". Well guess what, it's not very valuable if the product you build with it is unusable.)

I'm also reacting to the fact that I will never be able to buy one of these, since there will never be Linux-based tools. Why is it so hard to spend a day setting an Ubuntu VM and a quick Makefile? I don't use Windows but can target software for it. Why is returning the favor so difficult?

<comment><USER3> In the video they state that the software is currently OS X only, there isn't even a Windows version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I keep thinking these are a gimmick, and then I go through the recent photos I've taken and find lots of sets of shots where I'm trying to capture a close and far subject at different focus settings -- one in focus, the other out, then switch...hoping I find the one I like better later...so there's definite appeal here.

I'm not totally sold on this as 1st gen tech, but it's definitely something to watch as the technology matures.

Downside: I'm not as interested in the print aspects of the photos I take, I haven't looked at a physical photo in about 5 years, but I am interested in the longevity of the shots. Having to rely on a special format and viewer makes me want to stay away till it becomes at least a defacto standard if not a proper open standard available as a default in every OS I'd reasonably want to use -- just like jpg, gif, png, bmp are today.

<comment><USER5> Oh you just found out how to emulate the Lytro, take one shot focussed close and one at infinity. Because of the wide depth of field it has, those two shots should be enough if you take them at f11 or so. Possibly the most pointless photographic invention ever.

<comment><USER4> It's a little different, but not so much that I entirely disagree with you. If I have two subjects, one close and one far, I'll take two shots, with the focal plane on one, then the other. It's a different effect than shooting at infinity. It appears the Lytro essentially just lets you move the focal plane backwards and forwards, but you still essentially end up with one composition. It saves you from taking the two shots, but you can still only look at one plane at a time, and you need a proprietary format and viewer to do so.

<comment><USER5> But "far" for most small frame cameras or at any smallesh aperture is infinity as far as focus is concerned, or just use the hyperfocal distance. It is only close shots where you need to focus, and even then it is not as much as people think.

I have an old 1930s folding medium format camera that has two focus settings, people and landscape (and two apertures, sunny and cloudy) and it works fine...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Well, if you just want the ultimately sharpest photo, this isn't a camera > for you (it won't do 22 megapixel photos like my Canon 5D MKII will, and the > images are generally good enough for on-screen use but if you want to blow > them up to wall sized images, this isn't a camera for you).

> If you like having a huge choice of lenses, this isn't a camera for you.

> If you want to shoot action sports, this isn't a camera for you.

> If you want to see through the viewfinder to choose your own focus point, > this isn't a camera for you.

> If you want the best low-light performance, then this isn't a camera for > you.

Sounds like a great camera for actual photographers.

1) Megapixels != sharp photos. In terms of visual perception, contrast == sharpness. Soft edges means lack of sharpness. What's the leading cause of soft edges, you ask? Poor focus. Yes, some sensors and lenses produce sharper images than others, but in the vast majority of the cases, the photographer blaming the camera for soft images is actually to blame for poor focus or aperture selection. Choosing a large aperture causes tight DoF. I've shot with plenty of beginner photographers who went out and spent a fortune on fast glass with large apertures (f2.8 or lower), but fail to understand just how tight the focal plane will be when shooting at that large of an f-stop. The Lytro will be great for the type of photographer that wants to capture a scene or subject without worrying about focus. This will result in a lot sharper photos than rushed, out of focus shots.

2) Lenses are a means to an end. Want to shoot photos of birds? You need a very long lens. Want to shoot sports from the sidelines? You need a fast, moderately long lens. For the types of photos that most of us take, you don't need a lot of lenses. You just don't. Many of the greatest photographers ever to snap a shutter used tiny range finder cameras with a single, prime lens. The equipment is not the photo.

3) If you want to shoot action sports, get out your pocket book. It's that simple.

4) Not having used a Lytro, I'm not sure what he means here. As I understand it, you look at a Lytro like you would a telescope. A small screen on the back shows your composition. Since you can change focus later, I'm not sure why you'd need to choose a focal point.

5) Same rules apply here as they do for action sports. Having said that, advances in noise reduction algorithms have produced some pretty amazing results in the last few years, as have advances in sensor technology. I have no doubt that the first gen Lytro won't be a strong performer in low-light performance. This is a consequence of it's sensor design. Everything in life is a trade-off though. If your goal is to produce great photos, you won't mind a little noise. If your goal is to produce some kind of pixel-circle-jerk, 22 MP, xerographic copy of the scene, then by all means, go buy a Canon 5D ($2,500), an EF 50 f/1.4 prime ($350) [don't waste your money on the f/1.2], and a decent Manfrotto tripod ($150). For about $3,000, you'll have equipment that can capture photos as sharp as you could ever wish for.

I find the Lytro intriguing because it allows a photographer to snap the photo before all the decisions are made. This is a good thing. Great photos only present themselves for a moment. Focus is probably the hardest part of capturing these moments.

With today's software, a photo that is under/over exposed can be pushed about a full-stop in either direction without ruining the photo. When it comes to focus, there's absolutely nothing that can be done (until Lytro came along). The Lytro is a tool unlike any other, and I believe it will allow an average photographer to salvage photos that they might otherwise have to trash. By the numbers, this will produce more good photographs.</comment>


IOS Tutorial: Connect to Foursquare using OAuth - <AUTHOR> http://ios-blog.com/tutorials/ios-connect-to-foursquare-using-oauth/

<comment><USER2> This is super useful. Oauth isn't my favorite thing to work with, and I'm new to iOS. This helped on both ends.</comment>


Consumer science (a.k.a. home economics) as a college major - <AUTHOR> https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2018/08/04/bring-back-home-economics-class-kids-lack-basic-life-skills <comment><USER2> > _That 's why we need to bring back the old home economics class. Call it > "Skills for Life" and make it mandatory in high schools. Teach basic > economics along with budgeting, comparison shopping, basic cooking skills > and time management._

Some Jupyter notebooks for these topics that work with [https://mybinder.org](https://mybinder.org) could be super helpful. A self- paced edX course could also be a great intro to teaching oneself though online learning.

* Personal Finance (budgets, interest, growth, inflation, retirement)

* Food Science (nutrition, meal planning for n people, food prep safety, how long certain things can safely be left out on the counter)

* Productivity Skills (GTD, context switching overhead, calendar, email labels, memo app / shared task lists)

<comment><USER2> There were FACS (Family and Consumer Studies/Sciences) courses in our middle and high school curricula. Nutrition, cooking, sewing; family planning, carry a digital baby for awhile

Home economics [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_economics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_economics)

* Family planning

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

> * _Personal Finance (budgets, interest, growth, inflation, retirement)_

Personal Finance [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_finance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_finance)

Khan Academy > College, careers, and more > Personal finance [https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more/personal- fi...](https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more/personal-finance)

"CS 007: Personal Finance For Engineers" [https://cs007.blog](https://cs007.blog)

[https://reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki](https://reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki)

> * _Food Science (nutrition, meal planning for n people, food prep safety, > how long certain things can safely be left out on the counter)_

Food Science [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_science](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_science)

Dietary management [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_management)

Nutrition Education: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrition_Education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrition_Education)

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

Healthy Eating Plate [https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy- eating-...](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating- plate/)

How to make salads, smoothies, sandwiches

How to compost and avoid unnecessary packaging

* School, College, Testing, "How Children Learn"

GED, SAT, ACT, MCAT, LSAT, GRE, GMAT, ASVAB

Defending a Thesis, Bar Exam, Boards

Khan Academy > College, careers, and more [https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers- more](https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more)

Educational Testing [https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/educational- testing](https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/educational-testing)

529 Plans (can be used for qualifying educational expenses for any person) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/529_plan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/529_plan)

Middle School "Glimpse" project: Past, Present, Future. Present, Future: plan your 4-year highschool course plan, pick 3 careers, pick 3 colleges (and how much they cost)

High school literature: write a narrative essay for college admissions

* Health and Medicine

How to add emergency contact and health information to your phone, carseat (ICE: In Case of Emergency)

How to get health insurance ( [https://healthcare.gov/](https://healthcare.gov/) )

"What's your blood type?" (?!)

Khan Academy > Science > Health and Medicine [https://www.khanacademy.org/science/health-and- medicine](https://www.khanacademy.org/science/health-and-medicine)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My congresswoman (and senatorial candidate) majored in home economics.</comment>


Show HN: My first game Hexiled is #1 free word game in UK App Store - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hexiled/id881274996?ls=1&mt=8&at=11lJEM

<comment><AUTHOR> Back at the start of April, a friend and I started building our first ever game - a word game called Hexiled for iOS. Quentin's "regular" work is building transit apps and I run a two-man web development business.

We soft launched about a week ago and got a little bump from Apple yesterday. The game is free and ad-supported but with an IAP to remove the ads and get a few bonus features.

I woke up this morning and we're #1 in the UK for free word games, #2 in Australia and #4 in the US. There are hundreds of new games being started every minute. It's been a pretty exciting process so far.

I'll be online for a while if anyone has questions. We have a series of blog posts in progress about the experience too - more on that later.

<comment><USER2> Congrats on the release. Will check the game out.

Curious, what type of numbers you were seeing (downloads and play counts) before getting a bump from Apple?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pre-bump was mostly pushed through Twitter and a few friends sharing it socially. I wasn't unhappy with the numbers considering it was a soft launch by fresh developers but knew we needed to hit review sites and more to get traction.

After that first week, our paid upgrades were around 8-10% of installs - family, friends, clients, etc.

We tripled our first week's install figure within the first hour or so after Apple put us in the Best New Games list of 100+ countries. Currently relying on Analytics' figures as iTunes' numbers lag, but it looks like about 2% are using the IAP to upgrade.

We're currently seeing 2-3 games started every second though obviously the figure rises and falls depending on time of day in major markets.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. It's good to compare vs our pay-to-play app. We've been getting consistent downloads and plays and broke into the top 50/100s in some countries over the past week.

Hoping for an Apple bump as well.

<comment><USER3> I'm interested to see what effect having gameplay videos in the App Store come iOS 8 has. I suspect good pay-to-play games will see an overall boost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congratulations. Looking forward to the blog posts too. What was the learning curve like starting work on a game with your respective backgrounds?

Not to add to the learning curve but if you have any plans for an Android version I'd be interested in one! I love word games but have no iDevices.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I've been programming iOS for about 5 years and Android for about 3, so the learning curve has primarily been with learning SpriteKit and general game concepts.

Getting used to a lot of custom drawing, animations, juicing, and trying to choreograph various scene transitions (and trying to time data processing and scene loading to work seamlessly).

One of the toughest things (that I'm still gradually improving on) is reducing glitches (drops in frame rate, for instance) during game play. Mainly an issue only on older devices (iPad 2, iPhone 4, 4S)

Definitely interested in making an Android version, but everything would need to be rewritten due to it being written in SpriteKit. A lot of resources can be reused though so it would take far less time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why did you decide to use SpriteKit rather than a cross-platform framework which would've made it easier to target both iOS and Android?</comment>