Congratulations Graduate – Why I Will Never Hire You - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/markrotoole/congratulations-graduate-eleven-reasons-why-i-will-never-hire-you <comment><USER2> I don't disagree with _all_ of the advice in this, but the incredibly self- entitled tone it takes is absolutely disgusting to me. Every slide it's like he's sneering down at you (the candidate), demanding you bow down before him, tell him all the right lies [1], and devote your life and every fiber of your person to pleasing him in just the right ways during and after the interview.

Candidates are real people with emotions and a right to dignity. Some of them are going to rock, some are going to be meh, and some will be terrible, but they all deserve a much greater degree of respect than this asshole is giving them. Interviewing, and advice for interviews should be about giving the candidate every opportunity to impress you, not tearing them down and demanding they prove their worth to you.

The saddest part is that due to today's job market for most people, people are probably clamoring to work for this guy. Explains why he seems to feel like a god.

[1]: Seriously dude, fucking _no one_ has wanted to work at your shitty-ass PR and marketing firm their entire lives.

<comment><USER3> I really love this scene from The West Wing where Charlie is interviewing for a job at the White House:

SAM Charlie, are you gonna come to work early, stay late, do your job efficiently and discretely?

CHARLIE As I was saying to Mr. Lyman--

SAM Thank you. What more do you need to know?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can only imagine the author of this must work for a marketing agency, because degrading people for ceremonious reasons (like looking away when shaking hands or writing a thank you note) is quite common at such places.

While I'm not a new grad, nor will I ever be one, I can appreciate that dealing with a swarm of new graduate applications can probably be tiring. But guess what? You're hiring and you've chosen to go to that pool of talent. You're better off keeping your mouth shut than offering up a bunch of condescending "tips."

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it's a PR agency.

<comment><USER6> That makes sense. I'm pretty sure having/claiming social media expertise is irrelevant to most, if not all, programer candidates.

<comment><USER7> In my (limited) experience, any company that is so obsessed with social tends to be filled with idiots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reasons I Will Never Hire Your Company To Do PR:

1) I can make ugly Powerpoint presentations full of bad clipart myself. Thanks, though.

</comment><comment><USER8> A lot of this is really good advice, but I don't like the presumed self- aggrandizing attitude behind it. Even if it is affected, it's snotty.

 _Most_ recent college graduates are scared, anything we can do to make the world a less scary place for them is a classy move, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER9> So, two thoughts:

1) this is the kind of slideshow that works effectively online and without vocals. All the words are on the slideshow in the first place.

2) So many of those slides were unnecessarily hard to read, and it would have been much better as a regular article with a bulleted list. Those font choices and that trendy style would seem more at home animated in a kinetic typography setting.

</comment><comment><USER10> Obnoxious design aside, I do think this is mostly good advice and that fact is something everyone should find worrying.

A lot of the qualities listed are nice to have, but are probably unrelated to what a candidate will actually be doing. Some of the things in this list might even prioritize bad candidates. "Convince me you've wanted to work here your whole life?" Unless you're Apple or Google, no one has wanted to work at your company for even a few months and most of them probably hadn't even heard of you until stumbling across your website or job board posting. What you are asking is for candidates to lie to you. Is that really what makes a good employee? I doubt it.

I think practices like these are way so many companies are filled to the brim with incompetent designers and engineers. If, for example, you're looking to hire a software developer you should be way more concerned with the kind of code they write than with the quality of their handshake. Both are nice to have but only one is vital.

As a semi-recent graduate who has slightly more recently become employed, my advice to new grads out there is to take the advice in this presentation, it's pretty accurate. My advice to the person who made this slideshow along with any other hiring managers who are currently nodding their heads in agreement: Unless you're hiring car salesmen you need to seriously re-evaluate your practices because you are terrible at your job.

<comment><USER5> "What you are asking is for candidates to lie to you. Is that really what makes a good employee? I doubt it."

This is a PR firm, so yeah, that's probably exactly what they're looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Make it relevant, concise, and focused.

Like this bloated, scattered, impossible to read slideshow?

<comment><USER12> 84 pages to cover 11 points, insane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Whoever did the graphics on this crappy presentation out to be fired right now, and some bright young person hired off the street to replace them.

</comment><comment><USER14> One of the nice things about hiring for any software development team that develops open source projects is that you can often find great hires amongst the community of developers who are already contributing code and fixes and such to your projects. This way you already know the candidate is passionate about the work and thus don't need or expect them to lie to you about "wanting to work there their whole life".

This got me thinking...why don't more companies do this? if you run a design or PR firm surely there are some internal experimental/lab projects you could open up for outside contributors to join in with. I know that many companies already do this. But I'm wondering whether this sort of software-world inspired collaboration could be made more prevalent.

</comment><comment><USER15> I didn't know a thank you card after an interview was considered a mandatory thing. Is that true?

<comment><USER2> I personally find it slightly awkward/annoying. Wouldn't hold it against someone, but would prefer they didn't send it.

<comment><USER15> Despite people's advice to the contrary I tend to agree. I doubt I will ever send a thank you note unless it is somehow warranted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Smug bullshit like this that focuses on things that truly aren't important is killing our economy. I'd rather take someone smart who has "broken" some or even all of these rules than someone who knows how to follow these rules and couldn't complete a simple task. These are, after all, recent college graduates. Yes, it's terrible that they don't have the interview experience that they've never had a chance to accrue. Give me a fucking break. No wonder our economy has turned to shit.

</comment><comment><USER17> >> [I won't hire you because] You don't have a LinkedIn.

I don't think we would get along.

<comment><USER18> Indeed. Thank goodness I am not in a situation where I have to worry about nonsense like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> One piece of feedback unrelated to the content, visually red text on a white background is very difficult for some people to read..</comment>


Jedberg leaves reddit - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/tb/i29yk <comment><USER2> IMHO, this is a major, major loss for reddit. Jedberg, I know you read HN -- you were a _hugely_ important part of that community; any time there was about to be a user revolt, it seemed like a red-lettered Jedberg would pop up in the thread to calm everybody down.

I don't think you were technically a community manager (were you?) but you did a damn good job at it anyway.

<comment><USER3> Thank you. That really means a lot to me.

<comment><USER2> Good, man. You deserve every word of praise that you get, especially for keeping that site running with the team you had (5, was it? And you were the only SA?).

Good luck at whatever it is that you decide to do :)

<comment><USER3> Thank you. That's very kind of you.

The most dire time was right after raldi left, when I had just two tech people, a programmer and a sysadmin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> He was employee number one and I think the last remaining link to the founding team (not sure). I've got a lot of respect for him, especially after meeting him in person when I toured the office earlier this year. His commute was over 2 hours each day, and he had to deal with all the scaling issues with amazon almost single-handedly, not to mention the Saturday nights that were devoted to keeping the site up.

I wish you the best, dude. Hopefully you'll join hipmunk! :-)

<comment><USER3> First I have to clarify that nothing I did was single handed. I couldn't possibly have done what I did without the support of the awesomeness that was the rest of team reddit.

As for hipmunk, I think they already have too much talent, since they have the rest of reddit. :)

<comment><USER4> You should come swing by the foursquare offices sometime if your bored, I'll get you a fresh pack of bacon if you give me a heads up :)

<comment><USER3> Everything up to the bacon sounded good. :) I think you sent me an email, I'll hit you up there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The biggest question I have is: why are so many people leaving Reddit?

Over the past few months, the site has grown continuously yet the people that have been the driving force of the site seem to be leaving just as the site is hitting its peak. What has changed?

<comment><USER6> I think Jedberg is leaving because he values his marriage over reddit. He kinda hints at that in his blog post.

<comment><USER7> He has one of the most difficult, stressful jobs scaling one of the most heavily trafficked sites in the world.

And I'm sure the bitching and moaning whenever there's downtime doesn't help.

<comment><USER8> Under-funded, over-loaded, filled with hyper-critical users and entire armies of abusers. Sounds like a great job!

Anyone who's stuck that out for years is a hero.

<comment><USER3> Someone sent me a cape once, but it didn't fit.

To be honest, none of those things by themselves really bothered me. But I supposed the sum total of it always dragged on my subconscience.

<comment><USER9> >Someone sent me a cape once, but it didn't fit.

How does a cape not fit??

<comment><USER3> The thing that goes around the neck was too small. :) It was a kids cape.

<comment><USER9> Cheers jedberg. For the fish and all that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What are the odds he ends up at Hipmunk?

It's not mentioned at all in the post, but it seems like a lot of ex-reddit employees end up there.

<comment><USER11> He confirms he isn't in the thread:

> Not leaving to work at Hipmunk? Breaking tradition eh?

> Jedberg: Nah, they're full up on awesomeness already.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/i29yk/all_good_things/...](http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/i29yk/all_good_things/c20anqk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is something sounding very wrong about that: the work of a sysadmin that is of value for a big site should never reach the point to be so stressful that you have to wake up on alerts too many times.

It may happen 4 or 5 days every year maybe, if it is worse than that then there is something wrong. It is not impossible that jedberg is actually leaving because that kind of condition is not good in the long time. But here the problem is, a better employer would fix the root cause instead of letting good people go.

I'm saying that as I think this happens in many places actually, and is a huge mistake. A lot of work and traffic should never turn into a nightmare for a few guys.

<comment><USER13> That's a good point, why can't responses be automated to alerts? I wonder what critical parts he needs to fix.

<comment><USER14> They did automate most of it. They need to get off EBS, as there are simply too many issues with it that have a negative effect on performance and stability. Doing that, however, is a bit of a task.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A guy with so much knowledge about running such a huge site probably has hundreds of job offers. Best of luck Jedberg, wish you all the best!

<comment><USER16> Reddit has quite a few stability/uptime problems. Probably not his fault, but a scary prospect nonetheless.

EDIT: Did I get downvoted by someone who thinks Reddit is stable? It clearly isn't and anyone who thinks otherwise is dreaming. I guess I'll stop going against the HN hivemind just to keep my account in good standing. This place feels more like Reddit every day.

<comment><USER17> > This place feels more like Reddit every day.

That's why I downmodded you.

<comment><USER18> Didn't you prove him right ...?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow, I just watched him give a presentation on reddit architecture at Velocity yesterday. Shame to see him go.

<comment><USER3> And let me tell you how awkward that was knowing that I was going to post this today! And not being able to say anything.

<comment><USER20> Were you able to make arrangements with the team to make the transition easier? Do they know the ropes as well as you?

Was there much camaraderie among the team members? It seemed that way.

Did you have to agree to/sign anything from Conde Nast to proceed with your resignation?

I wish you the best of luck and I hope you succeed both personally and in future ventures.

<comment><USER3> We all got along very well and I'm confident that they will be able to handle it. Also, I'm not dropping off the face of the planet -- they can still ask me questions. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> From someone that spent years sysadmining very high traffic systems: Well done sir. Well done.

Been using Reddit since launch. Somewhat nervous that the new people running Reddit will get overrun by the corporate overlords now that they see the "hockey stick" traffic charts.

I can see some bean counter doing the math:

      Slap 4 teeth whitening ads on every page
      = 4 ad impressions
      * 1.2 billion page views
      = 4.8 billion ad impressions
      * $0.30 - $0.50 eCPM
      = $17 - $28 million/year.

<comment><USER2> I've said it before, so I apologize for repeating myself, but it shocks me (shocks!) that reddit doesn't append affiliate IDs to all of the outbound links to amazon that are generated.

I've probably made well over $100 in purchases just in the last few months via links I've seen on reddit. ("Can you recommend a good book on welding/bicycles/iOS dev/etc.")

Hopefully they don't do what you're suggesting, because I think if they did, the users would leave almost immediately (and probably flood HN).

<comment><USER22> One of the problems with Reddit is that the vast majority of users are anti- ads and anti-corporation making any form of commercialism (even if it means more employees or a better site) nearly impossible.

<comment><USER14> And yet tons of them shell out $4 a month for Gold, so it's clearly not impossible to monetize.

<comment><USER22> I still don't think it's enough though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> While I'm not nearly so famous as he is, and the job wasn't either, I know how he feels... I had the same routine as him. Check things all day from the time you wake until you go to sleep, and when you do sleep, fear that you'll be woken up by a problem.

And I know what a relief it was when it was gone. It really does feel like a weight has been lifted from your shoulders.

</comment><comment><USER24> 4 years, I wonder if his shares just fully vested and he's been waiting for it.

<comment> brown9-2 I might be mistaken but Conde Nast is a privately owned company.

<comment><USER25> You can still have a vesting period for shares in a private company. 4 years is a normal amount of time to be fully vested.

<comment><USER26> Private company shares are usually illiquid, or have their liquidity controlled by the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> i actually got a little teary-eyed about this. i know i'll "see him around" as much as anyone can in communities like these but it really is sad.

</comment><comment><USER28> What would you like to do now Jedberg?

</comment><comment><USER29> Jedber will be missed.</comment>


Ask HN: I want to charge $50 for some service. Should I set the price to $4X.XX? - <AUTHOR> Some context - purely electronic one-time (with potentially returning customers) transaction for pretty common type of website/informational services <comment><USER2> Go to a fast food restaurant and look at the prices. They'll probably end in .99 because the owners are competing (at least partially) on price.

Now go to a fancy restaurant and look at the prices. They'll probably end in .00 because the owners don't want to look like they're competing on price.

What kind of brand are you trying to build?

<comment><USER3> Also fancy restaurants:

      Soup du jour 8
      Pork belly 24
      Cheese selection 12

(One is left to assume it's a price, in your local currency...)

<comment><USER4> Go somewhere fancy enough and there's not even a price on the menu...

<comment><USER5> Go somewhere even fancier and there is no menu...

<comment><USER6> ...buffet?

<comment><USER7> For example, at Sukiyabashi Jiro you get whatever the chef has prepared for the menu that today. Part of this is practical, the fish that will be used is usually purchased that very morning, and part of it is the quality of the restaurant. This isn't unique to Japan's concept of "choose to leave it to the chef" (omakase).

[0] [https://www.sushi-jiro.jp/dining-at-jiro/](https://www.sushi- jiro.jp/dining-at-jiro/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sales taxes and other costs are going to get you to $50.01 somewhere, sometime. So, you need to be mindful the mythical exact-dollar-units price probably won't exist for many purchasors (think forex)

That said, $49.99 is .. its just evil. Its playing on psychology of numbers. and $49.95 is even eviler.

<comment><AUTHOR> > That said, $49.99 is .. its just evil. Its playing on psychology of numbers. > and $49.95 is even eviler.

Everyone seem to agree on this, but is it, well.. really so? Does it have real benefits out of the veg souk? Or even worse, if people see it as evil.. I can lose customers instead..?

<comment><USER4> > Or even worse, if people see it as evil.. I can lose customers instead..?

In my experience, customers leaving over $.01 or $.05 are customers not worth having.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes. The price "seems better" even if it's a penny less.

When I was 8 or 10 I worked on my grandparent's farm. We grew hydroponic tomatoes. We sold them in ~1 lb bundles for $4 a piece. One day we switched to $3.99. It was a noticeable difference in how quickly we sold them. Folks perceive a lesser price as better value, even if it's in the smallest increment possible.

If it works on tomatoes, it'll work on anything.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=psychology+of+selling+at+.99...](https://www.google.com/search?q=psychology+of+selling+at+.99&oq=psychology+of+selling+at+.99&aqs=chrome..69i57.6448j1j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

</comment><comment><USER9> For online info products and SaaS subscriptions go with a price of:

$49

(no cents)

$49 gets more signups than $50, I don't have a source handy but I've seen it in multiple articles and have tested it with SaaS apps I develop/maintain.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why not A/B test it?

<comment><USER11> Because if any of the A group discuss with the B group your going to get confused people that think you're price discriminating

<comment><USER10> Are they really going to complain about the $.01 or $.10 or $1 price difference? And even if they do can't you just give them the lowest price?

<comment><USER11> It doesn't matter if they would complain, I just said they'd be confused. Why add a potential sticking point? It sounds like OP is trying to sell a new product, playing pricing games at these early stages is a big distraction. Someone up thread said charge $49 without cents -- go with that and get on with making the product better.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Least Liked Programming Languages - <AUTHOR> https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-least-liked-programming-languages/ <comment><USER2> I found this funny:

> Ruby more disliked than Java? What's going on? I've had some fun programming > in Ruby; it is, for the most part, a "do what I meant, not what I said" > language, and 15 years ago, that promise made lots of programmers fall in > love.

Yes, and now someone else have to maintain your fun code! The problem of maintaining "do what I meant, not what I said"-code is that after a while it becomes "does what some guy (who is long gone) meant at one time."

</comment><comment><USER3> Expected to see Q here.</comment>


Apple warns AltConf: Do not show the WWDC keynote stream in your Viewing Room - <AUTHOR> http://altconf.pr.co/103476-altconf-streaming-of-wwdc-content-cancelled

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple wants you watch the WWDC keynote stream on your computer[1]... so does it make any difference that I watch the keynote at home, in a cafe or at AltConf with other Mac/iOS developers? What a bunch of control freaks at Apple.

[1] [http://www.apple.com/live/](http://www.apple.com/live/)

Live streaming video requires Safari 6.0.5 or later on OS X v10.8.5 or later; Safari on iOS 6.0 or later. Streaming via Apple TV requires second- or third- generation Apple TV with software 6.2 or later.

<comment><USER2> _" so does it make any difference that I watch the keynote at home, in a cafe or at AltConf with other Mac/iOS developers?"_

Yes. Try playing any other major sport or media event that is available as a live stream (or even broadcast radio or CDs) in a public setting, and you will get similar messages from lawyers. If they find out that you did after the event, chances are they will include a steep bill.

A difference between this and many such major events is that Apple doesn't appear to want to license the stream for public viewing to anybody. I don't think that makes a difference w.r.t. your question.

<comment><USER3> Well, sport events for instance actually live of that revenue; the streaming of the event is a major part of the reason they actually exist. Apple on the other hand wants devs to code on their platforms and further they want people to buy their stuff. If you are in a room with like minded people watching WWDC (or Google I/O) or ... in my experience there will be some people saying 'oh that's cool, going to try that' which might bring on some 'converts' or at least more open mindedness. What this does is make people, especially thinkers like a lot of people here, angry and saying 'fuck Apple'. Very different from sports events and (most) media events?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess less people will "benefit" from their "innovative" ideas.</comment>


Revealed: British councils used Ripa to secretly spy on public - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/25/british-councils-used-investigatory-powers-ripa-to-secretly-spy-on-public <comment><USER2> > Critics of the spying legislation say the government said it would only be > used when absolutely necessary to protect British people from extreme > threats.

All these councils used to this kind of spying before RIPA. The purpose of a lot of RIPA is to bring that under some kind of regulatory control. And, as this article says, when councils continued to use RIPA for minor nuisance the law was changed.

> The local authority also detailed the use of Ripa following complaint about > the accumulation of rubbish in a rear garden, claiming the perpetrator was a > "serial fly tipper". The council deployed a "covert camera" in the upstairs, > bedroom window of another property, which gathered evidence of what was > happening.

The reason we know about this intrusive surveillance is because under RIPA:

[http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/part/II](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/part/II)

An authorised person has to give authority for the surveillance; they can only do so in some situations; a record has to be kept.

The UK has more CCTV than anywhere else in the world. It's entirely right that they should be brought under some kind of control.

I agree that people saying stuff like this...

> The deputy leader of the London borough of Bromley said he believed the > legislation was far too restrictive, arguing that the victims of crime > understood that filming evidence that could aid prosecutions was a "minor > infringement of the perpetrators so called civil liberties".

...don't help my case, and it's really concerning to me that he's not giving due weight to the serious interference with people's human right to privacy.

If this article is trying to suggest that the new IPA is concerning, well, I agree, it is very worrying, but the article isn't persuasive because RIPA law changed when the government saw it being abused.</comment>


"Introduction to Linux" course will be free and online this summer - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/2400-introduction-to-linux-course-will-be-free-and-online-this-summer/

<comment><USER2> While I appreciate the intent behind this move, I'm curious who are the people who were paying $2400 (that's a serious amount of money) for what appears to be an introductory course that imparts no work skills (it's usually easier to convince people to pay for courses when they feel it will have a positive impact on their careers or resumes)?

[https://www.edx.org/course/linuxfoundationx/linuxfoundationx...](https://www.edx.org/course/linuxfoundationx/linuxfoundationx- lfs101x-introduction-1621)

> This course explores the various tools and techniques commonly used by Linux > programmers, system administrators and end users to achieve their day-to-day > work in a Linux environment. It is designed for experienced computer users > who have limited or no previous exposure to Linux.

> Upon completion of this training you should have a good working knowledge of > Linux, from both a graphical and command line perspective, allowing you to > easily navigate through any of the three major Linux distributions.

<comment><USER3> Probably companies paying for their employees' training... Expensive if you ask me, but when you have 500 employees who need to learn some Linux basics, you can't just tell them to learn it themselves at home (and organizing their own training would be expensive).

<comment><USER4> That is 1 million dollars!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great! I've always been self-taught with Linux, so I'm sure I do a number of things in a suboptimal way, and this seems like a great way to clear some of those bad habits away.

</comment><comment><USER6> More information about the "Introduction to Linux" course here: [http://training.linuxfoundation.org/linux-courses/system- adm...](http://training.linuxfoundation.org/linux-courses/system- administration-training/introduction-to-linux)

This page has a list of the covered topics: [http://training.linuxfoundation.org/linux- courses/introducti...](http://training.linuxfoundation.org/linux- courses/introduction-to-linux/outline)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm already signed up to this. I'm hoping it'll go beyond what I picked up messing around with Capistrano and AWS. I've enjoyed other courses on the edX platform.

My problem is that there don't seem to be any resources available for learning sysadmin with web development and VPSs specifically in mind. After getting through a book on Unix sysadmin, I learnt about more than I need without really feeling confident about the topics that are relevant to hosting a webapp securely/reliably.

</comment><comment><USER8> This definitely interest me. I've used Linux for hobby projects for ages now (I remember messing around with slackware and fighting to get sound and my winmodem working), but I've never seriously learnt how to really use it.

I've been thinking about starting my own Linux From Scratch project, but I don't know how much of a learning experience that would be. Has anyone here got any experience with LFS?

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I went through it years ago. It was very helpful. Makes you realize just how much of the non-kernel aspect of the Linux world depends on open source. Most of LFS is about downloading the source code of non-kernel programs, and then learning to build them.

It's not necessarily optimized to make you productive as a user or system admin. But it's a systematic journey through building the OS and tools, and therefore it makes you aware of what's available and gives you a glimpse of what's under the hood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What are "the three major Linux distributions"?

<comment><USER11> Ubuntu, Redhat, and CentOS?

<comment><USER12> Ubuntu, Redhat/Centos, and SUSE

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [http://tuxradar.com/content/take-linux-filesystem- tour/](http://tuxradar.com/content/take-linux-filesystem-tour/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm taking a 4 day long Linux foundation course starting on Monday called "Linux performance tuning". Looks like it is going to be interesting.</comment>


Show HN: My HN – filter recent top Hacker News by your favorite topics - <AUTHOR> https://hn.okphp.com/?k=postgres,python,hiring,aws,mac <comment><USER2> Great idea. How does keyword matching work (substring)?

Also can I just put in only keywords to filter out?

      ?k=-css,-js

<comment><AUTHOR> No. It's simple matching. And only [0-9a-z] and spaces allowed.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are you reading? - <AUTHOR>

1 past, 1 current, 1 planned. <comment><USER2> Past: The Dog Stars by Peter Heller, Current: River of Gods by Ian McDonald, Planned: Delivered from Distraction by Edward Hallowell

</comment><comment><USER3> Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, The Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound

</comment><comment><USER4> Elantris by Brandon Sanderson, Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb, Shadow Chaser by Alexey Pehov

</comment><comment><USER5> Masters of Doom

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson 11/10 Enemies Abroad by Luke Bencie ~2/10 An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison ?/10</comment>


How far can you overhang blocks? - <AUTHOR> http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/may32013/index.html

<comment><USER2> It works! <http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=52197>

Well, I didn't use the numbers from the article, rather I just balanced the tower top-to-bottom, which after a quick look is what's happening in the article. With some tolerance of course, these bricks aren't very straight.

<comment><USER3> That's why everyone needs to own a set of well made wooden blocks at some point in their life! Blocks let you naturally pick up some really great physics and maths through play, without having to know any algebra.

<comment><USER4> It's pretty cool to do it with yard sticks. The only problem was that the ones I was using were pretty warped, so they were hard to balance. I'm pretty sure I still got the top one to be all the way over "the void" once.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem of finding the maximum overhang has been recently solved. The resulting construction is more complex than the one described in this article.

<http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/~pw/papers/maxover.pdf>

<comment><USER6> It is also less interesting as they balance out the overhang by extending bricks in other direction.

<comment><USER7> Why does it make it less interesting? Overall they achieve more overhang for the same number of bricks than the other construction, n^(1/3) instead of log(n).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a great example of an _ancient_ architectural design element: corbelling. Structurally, as long as you follow the 1/3 rule these creations are safe, IE you shouldn't extend the centre of mass beyond 1/3 of the width of the tower/wall. The principle shown here is similar to what's been long used, where a stretcher would be corbelled 1/3 of its width, and then a header would be corbelled 1/3 of its width, then a second header would be corbelled at 1/3 of its width, this would get an overhang of approximately 2/3 the width of the initial wall (assuming the width of the wall is thickened to provide a cantilever effect.

Architecture solved a lot of these by mixing corbelling and jettying. Corbelling permits you to gain ~2/3 of your wall width in overhang when done optimally. So with a 1' thick wall, you can gain 8" of overhang, which admittedly in house construction isn't much. The interesting thing here, is when you put a jetty on it (which relies on the cantilever principle) you've extended the cantilever distance you can get without compromising the structural strength, why is this interesting? Well your original 8" overhang on a masonry wall might have gained you a 1'6" total extra length on your upper level. Now if your longest available lumber is ~24' long. You safely gain a jetty of 1/6th the lumber length, meaning 4'. In combination, you just gained ~9'6" of length and width to your upper level. So with a 40' x 40' main floor, 1600sqft, and with a 49'6" x 49'6" second floor, you get 2450sqft second floor. With your initial brick corbelling you would only get an extra 120sqft.

This is the main reason tudor style housing, with masonry main floors and timber second exploded in popularity in their era. Masonry was expensive, timber was cheap. However, timber was especially prone to rot and insect damage within the height range of rising damp. Tudor style allowed the best of timber construction (jettying) with the stability and longevity of masonry.

</comment><comment><USER9> I had this as a question on a freshman physics problem set. A few of us were skeptical, but we tried it and it works:

<http://ugcs.caltech.edu/~ohazi/cd_tower.jpg>

<comment><USER10> Aren't CD cases slightly heavier on one side? There's a pivot mechanism on one side and not the other; the CD isn't placed at the exact center of the case; and the paper insert (as well as any staples it contains) can also affect the balance. So you might be able to extend the tower a few millimeters more than what mathematical algorithms allow, by aligning the heavier side toward the desk.

<comment><USER9> Sure, but this is physics, so we can stick with our spherical cows and other first order approximations without losing too much sleep... :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if this pringles loop I saw on the weekend is related? [https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8256/8624389266_10d1156614_z....](https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8256/8624389266_10d1156614_z.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER12> > Whatever the make-up of the tower below, if it is stable, we can always > place the top brick so that it extends half way into the void.

I don't understand the meaning of this statement. If a brick extending halfway into the void is stable, and we can place a brick extending halfway into the void on any stable brick, then we can create an infinitely overhanging tower by placing an infinite series of bricks each of which extends halfway over the void relative to the tower beneath it.

Clearly this is not the case. What does 'stable' mean (precisely) in the above quote?

<comment><USER13> Think of it the other way around.

The top brick can be placed so that its centre of mass is positioned over the edge of the brick below. This two block system is stable.

The two block system can be placed on a third block so that the centre of mass _of the two blocks_ is positioned over the edge of the third block. This three block system is then stable.

From there, it's turtles all the way down

<comment><USER14> But the extension mechanism has nothing to do with placing the _top_ brick. It seems like a mistake in the writeup.

<comment><USER15> Correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It is an old problem. I think it's in the classic "Concrete Mathematics" by Graham, Knuth, Patashnik but I doubt it's the original source.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I had it in my undergrad intro to mechanics textbook. Still a great problem!

<comment><USER18> I think it was in Halliday and Resnick. I remember doing it in my high school physics class. We used the 3rd edition of that book, which was from 1979.

<comment><USER19> I've found it in both the second edition and the seventh, both asking for just the 4-block case.

<comment><USER18> Nice research!

Then that means my memory is wrong. Fallible is the mind. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I proved this in my college calc class - my proof was the shortest (one page) and it won me the textbooks for differential equations.

<comment><USER21> It's actually a really easy bit of reasoning once you've got the "hang" of it. (sorry, bad pun.)

Let the blocks have length 2 and look at the problem backwards: the topmost book's furthest-from-the-ledge edge is x=0, then x increases as we go towards the ledge. For the case of one block, the center of mass is clearly now at x=1 and that is the farthest away the ledge can be. We will have a function ledge(n) detailing the farthest the ledge can be as the number of books increases.

The recursive rule is that when we place another book, the edge of the book must be where the ledge was -- any further and the books above must topple; any less far and the ledge is not the furthest out it could possibly be. So we just proved that the greedy algorithm is correct. ;-) The greedy algorithm then says that we lay out book n + 1 to have a center of mass at ledge(n) + 1, while the above n books had a center of mass at ledge(n). The combined center of mass is therefore:

        ledge(n + 1) = [n * ledge(n) + 1 * (ledge(n) + 1)] / (n + 1)
                     = ledge(n) + 1/(n + 1)

This recurrence relation from 1 generates the harmonic series, and so ledge(n) = H_n.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The site displays a list of the least number of blocks needed to achieve an integral multiple "overhangs" (ie. Floor (x) > y, where y is an integer). What the site doesn't mention is that after the first iteration, the harmonic series will _never_ be an integer again.

<comment><USER23> Proof: consider the sum S = 1/1 + 1/2 + ... + 1/n. Suppose 2^k is the biggest power of 2 that's <= n. Then one of the terms in S is 1/2^k, and there is nothing else with a multiple of 2^k in the denominator. So when you clear denominators, there'll be exactly one term (that one) with an odd numerator, so the whole thing is (odd number) / (multiple of 2^k) and therefore not an integer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you don't have any real blocks, try Algodoo (www.algodoo.com). A fun (phun) physics program that is now free.

</comment><comment><USER25> like the pun at the end _How hungover can you get?_

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe it's my pseudo-math background talking, but I find them relying heavily on a concept of center mass to be a cheating. They basically make very convenient assumptions about the CM that, while intuitive, still need a proof of correctness.

<comment><USER26> Center of mass is directly related to the centroid or first moment of area if you would like to look into it more. It is based on integration of a product which is why simple summation of the product for a discrete element is also valid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I remember doing the maths for this at uni. Then going in to the library to see if it worked in practice. I don't know what the librarians did when they saw the pile of carefully stacked books on the floor, but we had fun!

</comment><comment><USER28> Isn't this why the arc is so important in structural engineering?

</comment><comment><USER29> Takes me back to an interview questions two decades ago!

</comment><comment><USER30> No rule regarding a counterbalance?

<comment><USER31> Rule #2: Only one block per level.

<comment><USER32> I m actually quite curious to see how far can you go without Rule #2

<comment><AUTHOR> Take a look at this paper. <http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/~pw/papers/maxover.pdf>

It's about 6(n^(1/3)) compared to (1/2)(log n) in the article.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dabblers and Blowhards (2005) - <AUTHOR> https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm <comment><USER2> I hadn't read Paul Graham's article until I saw this, so I read that first before diving into this analysis of it.

It feels like he missed the whole point of what Paul Graham was trying to say... like yes obviously painter move globs of color around and software engineers write instructions to a box of electricity, but that's not the high level point Paul Graham was going for. Also the part about the women was super cringy, it felt dated, weird, and unrelated.

I think from a high level painters and software developers are in fact alike. Just like how engineers have objective constraints to work with when producing a solution to something, the message that artists are trying to convey in their work is equally constrained in certain situations.

For example, in depiction of photorealism, minute details like glints of light in an eyeball can make or break a painting. Artists like Johannes Vermeer were even renown for utilizing tools to depict the physical phenomenon of light in their work, by using a camera obscura.

There are many other examples of physical phenomena artists have attempted to reproduce in their work over many art periods that are comparable to the objective constraints engineers have to work with, which I wont discuss in this comment, but even in abstract and expressionist work, a parallel can be drawn to engineering.

When artists create abstract work they take a risk and sometimes their work is misunderstood, mocked, or just ignored... much like many frameworks, libraries, languages, and software projects created over the years that attempted to push the limits of what we think we know about programming and software development.

The author of this post missed the high level point quite badly.

<comment><USER3> 'Carpenter' is a far more suitable comparison because almost zero of software is written 'for abstract reasons'. Software is almost always written for practical reasons.

Real carpentry involves an immense amount of detail, nuance, and a number of micro-skills you'd never imagine just to do mundane things.

It also keeps the analogy that a lot of people think they can be carpenters because they 'can build a deck'. But even building a deck, well, can be quite hard and require bits of skill that can take years to develop. A lot of people think they can write software as well. Though it's possible to hack things together quickly, it takes years of focus to 'get good'.

I suggest that nobody in the educated class wants to compare themselves to what people often consider 'blue collar workers' whereas the comparison to 'artists' evokes a more supposedly distinguished aspiration.

Having known enough 'master tradesman' frankly I have more respect for them than most artists I know. That said, I'm not sure where in the quality range the artists I know sit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No respect. Love the contrarian takedown in 2005, but were it not for this gem of a story below, I would have said the same thing about this guy and has writing. It's pretty good. Not PG good. But good enough.

[https://idlewords.com/2004/05/attacked_by_thugs.htm](https://idlewords.com/2004/05/attacked_by_thugs.htm)

</comment><comment><USER5> The barely contained boiling jealousy this author has for Paul Graham makes is really difficult for me to read this without immediately dismissing it.

<comment><USER6> Funnily, with over a decade of hindsight and experience, the author comes off as a much more accomplished and sincere writer than Graham. Sure, he's shitposting before 2008, but I'm going to credit that, and say that he's ahead of the trend.</comment></comment>


Creating a PHP extension in Rust - <AUTHOR> http://jaredonline.svbtle.com/creating-a-php-extension-in-rust <comment><USER2> So who is deallocating the returned string in confirm_hello_from_rust_compiled? Looks like you lost a fair bit of the safety checking in the Rust to C transition, if you didn't even have to mark the whole function unsafe.

<comment><USER3> That's not how unsafe works. Marking a function as unsafe is more or less solely a decision of the developer (though foreign functions are implicitly unsafe), and an unsafe block does not taint the enclosing function or it wouldn't be possible to build safe interface from unsafe building blocks, making the whole thing serve a completely different purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've also toyed with a similar idea. I'm not a huge fan of writing anything "significant" in PHP but it does make html templating convenient. I would rather write the bulk of my code in a language like C++ or Rust, and then pass off to PHP to do the html (or json or xml) view.

<comment><USER5> I used to think PHP was good for templating, but then I learned about code- less templating engines like Jinja, and I'll never go back.

When you use a templating engine, you can change the backend entirely without messing with the template. You can also compile/optimize the display of data in the template more easily.

Some awesome person has made a Jinja2 lib that comes with Rust bindings, which looks cool (though I haven't tried it yet): [https://github.com/jroweboy/jinja2-c](https://github.com/jroweboy/jinja2-c)

<comment><USER6> > When you use a templating engine, you can change the backend entirely > without messing with the template. You can also compile/optimize the display > of data in the template more easily.

To be fair, all that you can do with a templating engine you can do "natively" as well. You _can_ for example have code-less templates in PHP if you are disciplined enough to keep it that way. The only thing template engines do is enforce not being able to shoot yourself in the feet, but it's not an absolute must if you know what you are doing.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, should have clarified "code-less". I definitely don't like logic in templates (although React is making me re-think that as a strict policy). But I actually meant _code_ as in _any_ code. A line in PHP might be this:

        <a href="<?php echo $some_url ?>">Some link

So that "echo" is the code. And the same thing in Jinja is this:

        Some link

In Jinja, it's _only_ HTML + the names of variables (which I guess you could call "data"). I can now take that line and use it with any language that supports Jinja-style syntax (PHP, Node, Python, etc.) It's also not unlikely that a designer will know it.

Also, sometimes when you use PHP, you have to sacrifice correctness or speed for readability. You don't have that problem when you're running templates that were compiled to PHP, rather than hand-written PHP.

Finally, template inheritance is absolutely _amazing_. Can't live without it now.

<comment><USER6> For the record, your first example can be written in this manner with short tags on:

        <a href="<?=$some_url?>">Some link

Which is effectively pretty close to a templating pseudo-syntax.

<comment><USER5> That's a perfect example of a bad practice that's done for readability in PHP templating.

Short tags are off by default in PHP (and have been for years), so you're losing some portability when you use them in your code. If, for example, someone reinstalls your PHP package and overwrites your config (which is very easy to do), your app suddenly breaks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice job!</comment>


Microsoft to announce potential iPad killer on Monday - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/on-monday-microsoft-will-maybe-announce-a-tablet/

<comment><USER2> "You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."

iPad Killer? If that does't qualify as "gratuitous editorial spin" I don't know what does. Even if Microsoft does come out with a tablet on monday it will not be an iPad killer at all. Apple has cornered the market on tablets and I know of a fact that it would be impossible for Microsoft to even get close to the iPad in terms of functionality let alone price.

So once again: No Microsoft will not announce a "potential iPad killer". Ars Technica didn't call it an iPad killer for the exact reasons I mentioned above and because they would be the laughing stock of the tech news world if they did.</comment>


Humble Bundle starts accepting Bitcoins - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/humble/status/332589676705746944 <comment><USER2> The Humble Bundle Bitcoin FAQ might be worth checking out: [http://support.humblebundle.com/customer/portal/articles/113...](http://support.humblebundle.com/customer/portal/articles/1139817-bitcoin- faq)

Seems mostly addressed at existing Bitcoin users with a very short two- sentence intro to let people have a sense of what Bitcoin is, which sounds like a good approach to me.</comment>


Announcing TypeScript 0.8.1 with Source level debugging - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/typescript/archive/2012/11/15/announcing-typescript-0-8-1.aspx

<comment><USER2> I ported a project to TypeScript last week, and was very impressed with the language. I had rejected it out of hand in favor of coffeescript, but didn't realize how modern and expressive a type system they had created. Bug-catching gains were immediate, and while it took a little bit to get comfortable with its ins and outs, I'm excited about coding everything in JS again.

<comment><USER3> 100% agree. As much as I love CoffeeScript, the intellisense and type hinting is an invaluable aid to our team. TypeScript is the answer to team collaboration on large projects. There's no more guessing what the arguments are, whether an argument is an object or string. Source maps is icing on the cake.

<comment><USER4> I would be absolutely delighted if type hinting made its way into CoffeeScript somehow.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, my dream is a Typescript + Coffeescript dialect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just did a presentation on TypeScript last night and the biggest pushback was debugging in JavaScript. I told them source maps where coming, I had no idea it would be so soon though. Maybe next month we can have generics!

</comment><comment><USER6> This is huge! If there's one thing I miss about developing on the .NET stack is the fantastic usage of breakpoints. It saves a lot of time.

Having to use "print_r", or "console.log" is a pain in the ass.

<comment><USER7> Chrome's web debugger has break points. You can also place the word " debugger " in your code and chrome will break at the debugger.

<comment><USER8> No GP but, personally I don't feel it's as good as the VS debugger. Unless I am missing something you still have to type into the console to get the value of things you want instead of just hovering over things, or bringing up quick watch in visual studio.

Also I'd imagine (haven't used it yet!) if you change the source in visual studio while debugging it would save to a file, while I cannot do that in chrome. I think I've heard it's possible in chrome, but never really seen how.

<comment><USER9> Chrome's debugger is darned near a full dev environment at this point, it's just not documented all that well and a lot of the best stuff has only been added recently. You can even edit the files, run the edited code, and save the changes locally.

You know what's _really_ good about the Chrome debugger? It's free and it's on every computer that runs Chrome. Visual Studio is neither of those. I really wish they built VS functionality into the IE debugger.

As far as showing variables, one trick I use a lot is to set a conditional breakpoint where the code to execute is `console.log(stuff), false` so that it just logs stuff but doesn't ever stop. That's also handy for "fixing" variable values without stopping.

<comment><USER10> Does it have conditional breakpoints and tracing breakpoints? I find the latter mostly entirely eliminate the need to sprinkle printf-equivalents to follow complex flows. For full disclosure I work on VS, but not the debugger or in Javascript, and I really don't know about Chrome's dev tools, but having seen some people's approaches to debugging JS, it feels like it is in a relatively primitive state from what I am used to in other languages.

<comment><USER9> Yes and yes.

<comment><USER10> I see conditional breakpoints, where are the tracing variety?

EDIT: Oh, I see, from your comment you are just leveraging the conditional breakpoint to ad-hoc them. That works but is a bit uglier than truly supported tracing breakpoints, and wouldn't appear to offer things like dumping the callstack to the output window or only triggering the print out only when specific conditions are met (i.e. a conditional tracing breakpoint). I suppose you could ad-hoc that as well by surrounding the print code with an if(<condition>) { print stuff }, <condition>. Works, hacky, but works I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there any concise typescript reference around? The playground doesn't showcase that much features. The language specification while extensive is not that great as a cheatsheet.

<comment><USER2> I read the language spec and skipped everything but the code samples. It wasn't too bad, but yeah, not a cheatsheet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hmm, which other languages/compilers do support source maps right now? CoffeeScript, HaXe, now TypeScript, anything else?

<comment><USER13> Google's Closure Compiler</comment></comment>


Is it considered bad to post your new web app here? - <AUTHOR>

Or is it considered to be a good place for feedback? <comment><USER2> See all the "Show HN" posts. As long as you actually have something to show, and not just a landing page.

</comment><comment><USER3> People do it quite often. Just prepend the title with "Show HN"

Examples: [http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3Asho...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3Ashow+hn)

</comment><comment><USER4> With a Show HN title and some openness to feedback+questions you should be fine. I think as long as you don't treat it as free advertising no one will complain.</comment>


2 Futures Can Explain Time's Mysterious Past - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2-futures-can-explain-time-s-mysterious-past/

<comment><USER2> If this turns out to be true it would mean we live in a "logical" universe rather than a "causal" one which would be very surprising. That is a universe that strictly follows causation from one state to the next, vs a universe with no "starting state" and where any state in time can depend on both states in the "future" and "past" with cyclical relationships.

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/fok/causal_universes/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/fok/causal_universes/)

>Our own universe does not appear to have Time-Turners, and does appear to have strictly local causality in which each variable can be computed strictly forward-in-time.

>And I don't know why that's the case; but it's a likely-looking hint for anyone wondering what sort of universes can be real in the first place.

>The collection of hypothetical mathematical thingies that can be described logically (in terms of relational rules with consistent solutions) looks vastly larger than the collection of causal universes with locally determined, acyclically ordered events. Most mathematical objects aren't like that. When you say, "We live in a causal universe", a universe that can be computed in- order using local and directional rules of determination, you're vastly narrowing down the possibilities relative to all of Math-space.

>So it's rather suggestive that we find ourselves in a causal universe rather than a logical universe...</comment>


You're Not Managing a Team of Software Engineers, You're Managing Writers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/coaching-notes/youre-not-managing-a-team-of-software-engineers-you-re-managing-a-team-of-writers-b263d3a10cc7 <comment><USER2> No youre managing a team of software engineers, one skill they have is writing.

The product isnt the text. The product is the entire system designed to keep the text alive, functional, reasonably error free all in a relatively unpredictable environment.

We definitely need to keep considering how other professions manage the unpredictable nature of their work so we can learn. Im just not sure this narrative suits that goal.

<comment><USER3> The uncomfortable fact is other professions treat their employees like cogs (hiring booms then mass layoffs), or their customers like crap (ever wait an hour for your set time appointment at the doctor?). The determining factor is really the price of the professional.

Software development is in a real interesting situation as its transitioning from a low status job to a high status one. As this progresses you'll see more and more "the customer is always wrong" style blog posts. They are already pretty common already.

<comment><USER4> I would liken any status in software to superstardom in sports. If you're in demand for exactly the right thing, all the doors open. But if your real calling is something with no extant "pro league", you are viewed as a hobbyist without relevant skills.

Knowing 6502 assembly was a pretty sweet skillset, back in the day.

<comment><USER5> This is not my experience of the tech industry?

I'm not sure I've had any job in the last twenty years where I met all the listed requirements.

My impression is that employers want some skill that it's sometimes possible to puzzle together from (but is rarely directly stated in any reasonable way) on the requirements list, then they want you to pass a poorly done faux IQ test.

Then there's a bunch of social stuff, which I don't really understand well enough to treat as anything but random noise. I mean, I can see that it's there and that it's not random, but I can't really see how to change it to my advantage.

Hiring is hard, and nobody, as far as I can tell, is any good at it. But being too specific about what skills they want is not a problem I've personally seen. (Not in the last 20 years in silicon valley, anyhow)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Niven 's First Law of Writing: Writers who write for other writers should write letters._ \- Larry Niven, science fiction author (1989)

 _The writer is that person who, embarking upon her task, does not know what to do._ \- Donald Barthelme

 _Summary of advice from writers: Advice from writers is useful, and not only about naming. Writers have been at it for centuries; programming is merely decades old. Also, their advice is better written. And funnier._ \- Peter Hilton

... via [http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

</comment><comment><USER7> Publisher(9am): Time for the morning scrum...

Author: Yesterday I worked on a few paragraphs where the antagonist was just about ready to reveal to the protagonist his knowledge of the protagonist's long lost brother. But I'm blocked on the historical research about Vietnam POW camps. Hopefully, if my research assistant can run that down soon I can move that paragraph from the unblocked column back to in progress. In the mean time I'm pulling in the foot chase scene "story" but at this time I think both these "stories" will carry over to next sprint.

Publisher: Hmmm, that's going to negatively affect your velocity.

</comment><comment><USER8> Managers shouldn't be writing code or architecting at all. A manager's job is to manage people or a product. If it's people, she should be completely focused on unblocking the engineers and keeping them out of meetings. If it's the product, she should be completely focused on gathering the requirements and constraints and communicating with the customer and getting estimates from the engineers.

The architecture and implementation is a hidden detail for a manager. Either the team lead, architect, or team as a whole should design and move on the code.

<comment><USER9> The problem is the architecture is intertwined with the product is intertwined with the people. Believing that these things can easily be broken apart is an illusion. It's how product believes one thing and engineers believe another, resulting in quick hacks, missed deadlines, and a mediocre product, if it's released at all. Meanwhile the manager is a "people person".

Teams need leadership, not three leaders. Dev managers should be able to understand the architecture, and the product, and the team. Product advises on the direction. Tech leads argue for the implementation. But the dev manager needs to bring these things together and provide direction. Otherwise all three people will just point fingers when the results suck—diffusion of responsibility. Teams need leaders and leaders need to be accountable for results.

<comment><USER8> > Believing that these things can easily be broken apart is an illusion.

It works really well were I work. It's led to an extremely bottom up culture were engineers want to stay forever, because they feel like management isn't getting in their way or compromising technical decisions.

> Teams need leadership, not three leaders.

I'm not advocating for shared responsibility. What I'm advocating for is separating responsibility such that each person knows exactly what they are expected to deliver. The manager is expected to help his team perform and be happy. The TPM is responsible for delivering the product the users want. The tech team is responsibility for delivering a product as quickly as possible that is maintainable and bug free and meets the requirements set by the TPM.

In your model, managers argue with the tech team, which causes people on the tech team to quit or become frustrated because the managers can't understand all of the details and still fulfill all their managerial duties.

> It's how product believes one thing and engineers believe another

The role of the TPM is to make sure the tech team is building what the user wants. the TPM should be synchronizing with the user and the tech team, making sure this doesn't happen. It's their responsibility.

> Teams need leaders and leaders need to be accountable for results.

Agreed, teams need leaders who are focused on doing one thing, and one thing well. They should not be backseat architecting or leading the technical direction, unless they are the tech lead.

<comment><USER10> I'm sure it works well in terms of making the engineers happy because it sounds like the inmates are running the asylum. You're right that managers should be dictating the what and not the how, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't understand the "how" their report has chosen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I prefer to think of them as carpenters.

Every carpentry job requires solving a lot of problems every day, and using a variety of skills.

But carpenters don't think of themselves as divas or creatives.

In most cases, it's not nearly so romantic.

There are objectives, roadmaps, client needs: it's just a job. Put on your hard hat, get your morning coffee and do it.

<comment><USER7> I agree with everything you say but what bugs the living hell out of me is this profession's infatuation the new shiny. That along with the almost universal absence of any objective evidence that the new shiny will positively effect the project's bottom line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I do wonder how a TV show runner of some experience would handle a software production. There are a lot of moving parts that are not unlike what they deal with.

<comment><USER13> There is no technical debt in TV production. That alone changes many things. You don't need to care how you arrived at the result or how "maintainable" it is.

<comment><USER14> Plot debt? I could actually see that describing some shows...

<comment><USER15> The Stargate SG-1 writers regretted the "3 shots from a zat-gun disintegrates" thing, and had zat guns only ever hit stuff twice for the rest of the show after they realized the mistake they'd made.

The problem was introduced to solve a plot issue in one episode - they needed a way for the team to get rid of the bodies they were leaving behind on a spaceship in one episode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article is a great example of the biggest problem with software development management: they often fundamentally do not understand what software engineering entails.

You can tell that he has caught on to a few aspects in terms of requiring editing and creativity and not being able to plan everything ahead. But really he doesn't understand the full extent of what programming involves. If he did he would definitely not carry the writer metaphor so far.

A writer's output is natural language. Natural languages and programming languages are extremely different things. Prose does not have strong and brittle constraints on syntax and semantics that computer code does. Prose does not create real systems with many moving parts that must align and synchronize precisely.

If you could get a creative writer to sit down and just design a new type of spacecraft engine by using his creative powers like a science fiction exercise, then the metaphor would work. But engineers have to make systems that are completely detailed, exacting, follow the laws of physics and harness them in intricate ways. Software engineers are often essentially doing research on new systems or new ways to combine systems.

If at all possible, get an experienced programmer to act as a manager for programmers. A programmer would not describe it as simply writing.

<comment><USER17> Software developers cannot sit down and design a new type of spacecraft engine.

<comment><USER18> That metaphor seemed like it was trying to show equivalent complexity, not that the jobs were interchangeable.

Engineers on a spacecraft needing to know that at a certain temperature a material contracts which changes the friction coefficient it has and increases the heat generated until two moving parts melt, seems to have the same equivalence as knowing that at a certain rate of incoming messages your cache technology starts hitting a race condition where messages are double sent and now the downstream work is duplicated but not able to be correlated.

All of this is different from ambiguous wording in natural language, where the ambiguity might even be the intent.

<comment><USER19> Thermal contraction would typically not change a particular part/material's coefficient of friction but rather would potentially decreasing acting normal force. Friction is reduced because contact decreases not because some material characteristic changes.

Pedantic maybe, but it does reiterate the point that a software dev couldn't design a spacecraft.

<comment><USER18> I think you may be missing the point. I was trying to give an example of complexity, not trying to prove that a software engineer could casually walk up and design a spaceship.

The OP's point was that both types of engineering are of similar complexity when contrasted to writing in a natural language

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think it's a fine analogy. But the author doesn't go far enough. My thoughts here: [https://blog.alexrohde.com/archives/432](https://blog.alexrohde.com/archives/432)

</comment><comment><USER21> I have found that a lot of the skills to do with writing effectively, professionally and reliably also apply to writing (and maintaining) software. It's not to say they're the same discipline, but they're closer than - say - electronics engineering.

But then a lot of disciplines are also assisted by having more writing skills as well.

</comment><comment><USER22> You should not manage anything unless you yourself did that job successfully for 10 years.

<comment><USER23> Best not build anything that didn't exist ten years ago then.

<comment><USER24> Think of it as: "Don't manage software engineers unless you were a software engineer for X years"</comment></comment></comment>


A Speculation on DNS DDOS [video] - <AUTHOR> https://ripe73.ripe.net/archives/video/1536/ <comment><USER2> Interesting idea, but then you are essentially forcing everyone to go through their upstream provider or Google's DNS servers, since when DDOS attacks occur, smaller networks won't be in your 8000 resolver whitelist.

Part of me thinks this is just the author building another wall, since now the DDOS will just attack ISP DNS servers instead, and worse yet quite a few of those compromised IoT devices are on those same ISPs networks, providing even better connectivity & potential throughput compared to congested peering.

Perhaps we should be taking a different path, instead of letting Qualcomm, Broadcom and ilk continue to build massive out of tree branches of the Linux kernel and never mainline their changes, thus preventing effective long term support for said hardware, we should seek to force them to properly mainline their code so when the vendors using their chips drop support, all these vulnerable IoT devices aren't permanently sitting there vulnerable.

Otherwise, the future is bleak for your smart toaster. Its likely gonna join a botnet sooner or later, just a matter of time ultimately.

<comment><USER3> > Otherwise, the future is bleak for your smart toaster

Well, no. Smart toaster is going to be just fine. And that's the core of the problem here. Much like it is the case with polluting diesel cars, owners are reasonable happy with their purchase and simply unaware of any problem (until/unless product is recalled). And even being aware, there is very little incentive for owners to address the issue of their property subtly contributing to harming somebody else.

And same again with much-needed BCP-38. It adds very, very little value to the ISP who implements it, so many never bother to. Yet less-then-universal roll- out of BCP-38 hurts Internet as a whole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The idea Geoff presents, of whitelisting the source addresses of the 8000 or so most frequently used recursive nameservers, and giving them priority service, is a good one, and should help. However, something like 20% of the Internet can still spoof source addresses. That 20% can spoof whitelisted DNS server source addresses, so end up in the priority queue.

An interesting question is how many of the bots in these IOT-based botnets are behind home NATs - if it's most of them, then even if their ISP allows spoofing, the IOT device won't be able to spoof. However, it does make it all the more important as IPv6 rolls out that BCP 38 is enforced.

</comment><comment><USER5> The idea given in the talk is simple: keep a whitelist of known recursive name servers who have behaved well in the past. Serve requests coming from these known good IPs with a high priority. Serve all other requests with a lower priority.

<comment><USER6> Actually, he gives _two_ ideas, the second being that all resolvers should use "NSEC aggressive caching" for DNSSEC signed zones, so compromised devices can't go around the whitelist from the first idea by using DNS resolvers as proxies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> After a few minutes, the video embedded in that page stops, stating "html5: Video not properly encoded".

Direct link to the video: [https://ripe73.ripe.net/archive/video/Geoff_Huston- A_Specula...](https://ripe73.ripe.net/archive/video/Geoff_Huston- A_Speculation_on_DNS_DDOS-20161028-112925.mp4")

<comment><USER6> That link is broken; fixed link: [https://ripe73.ripe.net/archive/video/Geoff_Huston- A_Specula...](https://ripe73.ripe.net/archive/video/Geoff_Huston- A_Speculation_on_DNS_DDOS-20161028-112925.mp4)</comment></comment>


Yahoo's Last Move at Growing a Media Empire: A New Sports Magazine - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1716788/new-sports-magazine-is-yahoos-latest-stab-at-growing-a-media-empire <comment><USER2> If only Y! could do something really well. They keep adding "stuff" which is just making that less likely from ever happening.</comment>


Html2canvas - Webpages Screenshots with JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/screenshots.html <comment><USER2> basically, it is a browser rendering engine written in JS and output to canvas. It is a browser implementation in JS at some extent.

This is truly inspiring.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome! There are some really things you could use this for. I have done something similar here: <https://github.com/bgrins/DrawWindow>

I'm interested to look through the source and see how this was implemented. There are many things that are really tricky to handle using the computedStyle way of rendering HTML. Just to name a few:

* Form elements

* Dotted, dashed, rounded borders

* Gradients

* Text with word-wrap: break-word applied (for some reason measuring each character does not work properly here).

* CSS Outlines can be tricky, though I have gotten that to work pretty well in my implementation using getClientRects().

* Overflows / scrolls with fixed width or height divs (and nested ones)

* Iframes

For basic text and images (such as <http://bgrins.github.com/DrawWindow/tests/basic.html>) it holds up pretty well.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's on GitHub btw

<https://github.com/niklasvh/html2canvas>

</comment><comment><USER4> I noticed that Google+ allowed something similar when sending bug reports. Do they use a similar method?

<comment><USER5> Looking at the supported browsers on <http://www.google.com/tools/feedback/intl/en/index.html> and some of the clearer bugs in their screenshots (enlarge the picture, check out for example text-underlining and compare with FF/Chrome), combined with what ElliottZ mentioned in this Twitter message <https://twitter.com/#!/ElliottZ/status/89520809147772929>, I could with quite high certainty say that they have a _very_ similar approach to doing this. Having worked with this for some time already, I can see why they for example have not supported Opera, although the problem (presumably the reason they don't) can easily be fixed with wrapping text in temporary nodes for example. One major advantage they have, which works for their favor is that they use the script on pages they control, where as my approach is trying to get this working on any page, regardless of who created it with as bad CSS/HTML as they did. If you aren't gonna be using z-index positioning, no letter-spacing, no CSS3 properties, no HTML5 form elements etc. it can be very easy to make matching screenshot to the page.

For IE<9 the Flash option won't have to be the only option either, a server could be rendering the elements gathered from the users browser (in other words a canvas proxy for the canvas renderer).

In terms of my script, the aim is to try and get the compatibility down to FF3, IE6 (with non-canvas support through flashcanvas or server canvas), Opera (haven't looked much yet how old version would be able to support it), and Chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://url2png.com/dom2png/>

I threw together a hybrid of client side DOM and url2png's distributed webpage rendering farm. This proof of concept should be enough to kickstart a team needing this functionality _today_. Best of both worlds in my (biased) opinion.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm using the latest Chrome. No image preview is showing up.

<comment><USER8> Looks like <http://html2canvas.appspot.com> is over quota.

<comment><USER5> Yep, didn't think the proxy would be getting +100k requests within 24 hours. Guess we need to wait for tomorrow :(

<comment><USER8> Mind telling us how the proxy works or putting up some source code(couldn't find the proxy source on github)? I am also lazy and didn't read the whole script source, i bet it could be recreated with some effort. uft :D

<comment><USER5> copy of the proxy source available at <https://github.com/niklasvh/html2canvas-proxy> now

<comment><USER8> Officially watching it :D

I'm working on a browsers addon to help with remote support, mostly my mom. Thought about VNC or the like, but that's a bit of an over kill when I can just run JS in the browser.

This works great in letting me see wth she is talking about when some website is broken. This is my play ground for it, bragcollege.com. If you want to log in and play around let me know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is great.

Is the size of the image adjustable? I'm developing an online text editor and this would be a great tool to display some kind of "page preview".

</comment><comment><USER10> If perfected, this has the potential to make a whole lot of people's lives easier -- including mine.

<comment><USER11> It seems like Google has perfected it (Send Feedback), but isn't sharing. :(

<comment><USER12> That's done on the server

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4912092/using- html5-canva...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4912092/using-html5-canvas- javascript-to-take-screenshots)

<comment><USER13> Seems like it's not. In the same thread, a googler mentions it's done completely client side.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4912092/using- html5-canva...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4912092/using-html5-canvas- javascript-to-take-screenshots/6654253#6654253)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> paraschopra mentioned PhantomJS for doing the same thing at couple of days ago <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2758438>

<comment><USER15> PhantomJS is great, although there are some bugs in the WebKit embedded inside QT because it's a bit old, it has the advantage of supporting flash plugins and it can do screen caps. I'm using it for a project now.

<comment><USER16> can you share your code for doing the screencaps? there are a few posts about it online but would love more detail on the setup.

<comment><USER15> It's a one liner. Once a page is loaded into the browser:

page.render(path_to_output);

I think it can save in PDF, GIF and PNG formats (it checks the extension on the filename to determine format)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is load balancing essential, and where? - <AUTHOR> Hi all,
I'm slowly but surely finishing up my weekend(s) project. I'm beginning to think about deployment. I know that most sites utilize some sort of load balancing at various parts of their tech stack. I'm wondering how this is performed most correctly. I've never taken a project this far, and therefor have never had to think about this until now.
What parts of the data flow do most people use load balancing at? How would you load balance your database and web server? I figure these are two that take most of the load.
When I say load balancing, I'm not really talking about all of the techniques that can be used such as serving up static content from a single web server and dynamic content front another, or caching database queries - I'm already doing that. I'm talking about actually balancing incoming user requests and processing load across a cluster of machines.
I know, for example, that mongodb handles its own load balancing with its sharding and "mongos" client.
I guess my main question or point of confusion here is this: when I think of load balancing, I think of a single host name taking incoming requests and balancing them across a selection of "worker" servers. Is this still considered the current way of balancing certain things? And if so, what things would this need to be applied to in the Web world?
Thank you <comment><USER3> Here is my tip for you. Sign up for a hosted solution with a well known framework (ie. Rails). They will take care of all the server configuration issues so you can just focus on your application.

Heroku does this for free and scales up with you.

Engine Yard starts at $85.14/mo.

Google App Engine also does this for free and scales up with you.

</comment><comment><USER4> For the webapp load balancing we do (which admittedly isn't very much; we're an ISP and aren't _overly_ concerned with how quickly our homepage loads :p), we just use a DNS round-robin across a bunch of servers. We keep a short TTL so if a server dies, there's at most 5 minutes of downtime.

A better solution would be proxying, but we haven't had the need to step up to that: stick an nginx in front, put _n_ backends behind it, and it'll distribute load across them as it sees fit. Of course, for reliability, you then need to drop a DNS round-robin on a couple of nginxes, so the whole thing repeats itself :).

But yeah, that's just for the frontend. For the backend databases, you'll want to look at replication and doing writes to one and reads from another, etc. We haven't had the need to do that, luckily :).

<comment><USER5> >we're an ISP and aren't overly concerned with how quickly our homepage loads

Is this sarcasm?

<comment><USER4> Not at all. The priority has and will always be making sure customers can get to _other_ webpages quickly; we're not of a scale where the load on our own sales/account management pages exceeds the needs of 2-3 boxes (with a couple of redundant virtuals ready to fire up). That they feel fast to the CEO, without a defined metric for "fast", is about the only criteria.

<comment><USER5> That's a great priority, and I applaud it. On the other hand, I'd have extreme apprehension of subscribing to any ISP with a webpage that loaded slowly - <USER2> would make me very concerned about their competence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Depends on your situation. Dual load balancers serving a virtual IP allows one to fail while still maintaining connectivity. Behind that, you might run a pool of machines doing static files (or use a CDN where they handle much of the redundancy for you) and machines that run your app along with machines that handle your datastore. Design your application's architecture so that you can pull off pieces to enable easier scaling.

</comment><comment><USER7> I typically deploy on slicehost, so I setup a 256meg slice [$20/mo] and put nginx [<http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpUpstreamModule>] on it to split the traffic. This configuration can handle enough traffic that if traffic became an issue, I would be making enough money to move the application to a dedicated environment.

</comment><comment><USER8> I you're using rails, just start out with heroku. If you're using Django, try djangy. It's way easier to let the pros do that stuff and just worry about how your app works.

</comment><comment><USER9> nginx, and pound are two widely used web load balancers. You should be able to find plenty of blog posts and write-ups with sample configs for setting those two up.

For databases, at least with MySQL, you should setup a master -> slave(s) setup to send reads to slaves and writes to master. If you have many slaves, you can configure your DB classes to randomly select DB servers, or you can setup a TCP load balancer using something like HAProxy to load balance the slaves.

</comment><comment><USER10> Honestly, if you are just starting out I would not worry too much about it. Concentrate on getting a lot of users first, them worry about scale.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've used both LVS (Linux Virtual Server) and haproxy, both on linux.

LVS (managed with the ipvsadm command) runs in kernel mode and mainly just routes packets, and perhaps does DNATing (depending on how you configure it). I've had the most luck with using the NATing option, I think the direct routing are a little bit harder to set up from a network topology standpoint, the NATing option is more, uh, "obvious". The drawback is that your topology has to be setup so that your LVS load balancer is also the default gateway. LVS is protocol agnostic, it's a layer 4 load balancer. In this setup, you'll need to run SSL on your webservers. You'll configure LVS with something like keepalived, which is a userspace program to do healthchecks and manage the kernel interface to LVS. There are others, but I'm only familiar with keepalived.

haproxy is a user-space program. It can be both a plain TCP load balancer but also can do Layer 7 load balancing of HTTP based on header matching and whatever ACLs you want to write. haproxy doesn't support SSL out of the box, you need to use something like stunnel in front of it. Of course, you can configure all SSL traffic and just use TCP load balancing, but then you can't do layer 7 load balancing (because haproxy can't see into the request) which is one of haproxy's strengths. Of course, since it is userspace, your web server will see your load balancer's IP as the source of the request. There is an apache module, rpaf (I think), that honors X-Forwarded-For headers that can be inserted by haproxy. I think something similar exists for nginx and lighttpd. You need a patched version of stunnel to have it insert X-Forwarded- For headers if you want to wrap haproxy in stunnel.

Right now, I'm preferring haproxy because the setup can be much more customized. It's also easier to firewall haproxy, since it's application level. Getting iptables and LVS to work well together is possible but can be confusing if you use NAT mode because of where LVS integrates into the IP stack in relation to where iptables integrates. haproxy has many more options to deal with timeouts and healthchecks than keepalived.

But if you're just finishing up a weekend project, load balancing may be a premature optimization right now. The thing to keep in mind is that you want to make sure your program will work with load balancing so it's easier to transition to it when the time comes. Things like not assuming there is only one node services all requests -- common problem with PHP and the default PHP session handler is that it writes its sessions to the local file system. If future requests come in and go to a different web server, it won't see the session. This often manifests itself as having to continuously login. You'll need some way to share session data between web servers (or store everything in (encrypted) cookies. This problem is in no way limited to PHP, however.

<comment><USER7> [http://allurcode.com/2010/03/16/php-session-handling-with- me...](http://allurcode.com/2010/03/16/php-session-handling-with-memcache/) I have memcache PHP sessions deployed on a site that at its peak was seeing 4.5MM page views daily. It works flawlessly.</comment></comment>


How Many Times Should You Tweet Your Blog Post? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/06/17/how-many-times-should-you-tweet-a-blog-post/ <comment><USER2> Constantly, like a 140-character vuvuzela.

</comment><comment><USER3> _If you're not logged in for a few hours and stuff passes through the pipes then it's gone._

This is why I only follow enough people to fill up my the front page of my feed once every day or so. I understand that some people use twitter in a different way, and follow hundreds of people, but I could never be one of them; of course this also means I've had to unfollow a bunch of people who tweet more than a few times a day.

<comment><USER4> only enough to fill up the front page once per day? 20 tweets/day is pretty low throughput for a following list of any size at all...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 0\. It's like calling someone to see if they got your email. If they read your blog, they read it. If they don't, write something more interesting. If you're so infrequent that you need to tweet when you blog then find something else to do.

tweet, blog... I feel dirty.</comment>


India warns of $15M fine for maps it doesn't like - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/06/cartographers-beware-india-warns-of-15-million-fine-for-maps-it-doesnt-like/ <comment><AUTHOR> This pointed me to another story about reconciling the jagged boundary and 160+ Indian/Bangladesh enclaves along that border. The story notes: "The area contained the only third-order enclave in the entire world. It was literally an enclave surrounded by an enclave surrounded by an enclave surrounded by another state." Cool maps in the article: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/06...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/06/the- victims-of-the-worlds-weirdest-border-dispute-vote-for-the-first-time/)</comment>


GifLine – Include GIFs in your email using a "command line" in the email's body - <AUTHOR> http://zehfernandes.github.io/gifline/

<comment><AUTHOR> GifLine is the fastest way to put GIFs in your emails. Install the chrome extension and write in any place of the gmail compose box the command line "::gif me thegifyouneed" and done!

What you thoughts about the idea of command lines in textareas in the web?

</comment><comment><USER2> Woah! I didn't know all my e-mails could use some gifs until now hahaha... Good job</comment>


Scientists on Arctic Expedition Choose Ice Floe That'll Be Home for a Year - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/climate/mosaic-arctic-expedition.html <comment><USER2> For a similar approach during the 'golden age' of polar exploration, read the fascinating "Farthest North" by Fritjof Nansen.

My review of it including Gutenberg links for their free edition: [http://paperstack.com/post/2018/10/24/a-review-of- farthest-n...](http://paperstack.com/post/2018/10/24/a-review-of-farthest- north/)</comment>


Show HN: Client-side Connect Four AI with Web Workers, AngularJS, Firebase - <AUTHOR> http://jsbin.com/exIjAQO/17

<comment><USER2> This is awesome! If you'd like, you should share this with the Firebase + AngularJS Google Group: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/firebase- angular](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/firebase-angular)

-Sara (Firebase Community Manager)

</comment><comment><USER3> Usability enhancement suggestion: When hovering, show the column the mouse is on. And if user clicks on anywhere on the board, put the new play mark on that column.

</comment><comment><USER4> Pretty awesome! AI is pretty good.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! One way to beat it is to play on mobile.</comment></comment>


Fukushima: Your Days of Eating Pacific Ocean Fish Are Over - <AUTHOR> http://www.trueactivist.com/fukushima-your-days-of-eating-pacific-ocean-fish-are-over/

<comment><USER2> 450 tons of water is a drop compared to the vast amount of water in the pacific, so feel free to keep on eating fish.

As a sidenote: I've recently seen an increase in people submitting overhyped/scaremongering/dodgy as hell posts like OP's, hopefully the mods step in at some point.

<comment><USER3> 450 tons of water _every day_ , for somewhere around 2 years? Is that still a drop?

<comment><USER4> A quick calculation on Wolfram Alpha shows that it would be 292,000,000 L Which would fill 116 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, I can totally visualize that arbitrary number of Olympic pools now!

<comment><USER2> Wikipedia says:

>The volume of the Atlantic with its adjacent seas is 354,700,000 cubic kilometers

1 cubic kilometer is 1 000 000 000 000 liters, so 354,700,000 cubic kilometers is 354,700,000,000,000,000,000 l.

1 ton of water is 907 l water, and Fukushima leaks 450 tons a day, that's 408,150 l.

Divided and multiplied by 100 that's 1.3*10^(-13)%.

Keep in mind, as I said above, that this water itself is a dilution of radioactivity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/fukushima.asp](http://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/fukushima.asp)

</comment><comment><USER7> Japan is obviously responsible to making their local disaster to world-wide disaster.</comment>


Breitbart's Milo Yiannopoulos asks Twitter to release his data - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/27/breitbarts-milo-yiannopoulos-asks-twitter-to-release-his-data-in-bid-to-have-suspension-lifted/ <comment><USER2> Good. Whether you think milo is a dangerous troll, the leader of a movement, or something in between, Twitter needs to comply with whatever laws they are subject to.</comment>


SpaceX: Eutelsat/ABS Mission Hosted Webcast - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLNmtUEvI5A <comment><USER2> As for the first stage:

"Following stage separation, the first stage of Falcon 9 will attempt an experimental landing on the "Of Course I Still Love You" droneship. As with other GTO missions, the first-stage will be subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating, making a successful landing difficult."

Mission Press Kit : [http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/spacex_eutelsat_abs...](http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/spacex_eutelsat_abs_press_kit.pdf)

EDIT: Sounds like they lost the first stage, still not very clear on the details.

EDIT2: Confirmed loss of first stage by Elon Musk.

"Ascent phase & satellites look good, but booster rocket had a RUD on droneship"

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/743096769001578498](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/743096769001578498)

<comment><USER3> Did the "experimental landing" work this time?

<comment><USER4> Feed died.

I hope the next-gen of communications satellites improves the broadband-over- satellite situation.

If only there was a company in this day and age that is launching satellites often and at lower cost. :)

<comment><USER5> Apparently the broadband out there is great. The issue isn't lack of satellites or speed.

The issue is that when you have a Merlin 1D (or 3) firing directly at a mobile platform, it's going to shake violently. And when you have sensitive equipment on that platform shaking, you're going to have a satellite misalignment and signal cut outs while the lock is reacquired.

Considering this is a pretty unique scenario (I would imagine 99% of satellite internet connections don't have rockets landing on them), I doubt it's a high priority to resolve somehow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another successful satellite launch and more experimental data (aka they have a new failure mode for landing things). It is really awesome that they can be collecting the expertise to land the first stage "for free"[1] like this and every failure has improved the lander in some key way.

I can't wait to see the reconstructed footage of this event. From what we got initially it seemed a bit off to the left of screen and generating a lot of smoke.

[1] I realize it costs them time and money to operate the barge and recover the stages, but the cost of building those stages and launching them is covered by the launch contract so this work has extremely low marginal cost for rocket research.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As usual, the reddit /r/spacex launch thread is a useful resource: [https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/4o5u6r/rspacex_eute...](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/4o5u6r/rspacex_eutelsat_117w_b_abs2a_official_launch/)

</comment><comment><USER7> If you are wondering, the video feed from the barge got cut off during the landing, but it didn't appear that it was very good. Lot of smoke. But I'm no pro. For now, we (the viewers) don't know if the landing was OK or KO.

<comment><USER3> No telemetry from the landing stage? Or views from the nearby boats (how close is the nearest boat anyway?)

<comment><USER7> Well, they (the people at spacex) probably have everything, but I don't have access to this information :) Just watching the webcast, nothing indicated if the landing was ok or not. The people presenting the cast didn't know either.

<comment><USER8> They have just said that they got lots of good data. Even though the landing failed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's the bit where they "landed": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLNmtUEvI5A&t=36m18s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLNmtUEvI5A&t=36m18s)

Looks to me like they may have stuck the "landing" but it was hard, broke something and the vehicle was on fire. Listen to the crowd and I think you can hear when the RUD went down.

</comment><comment><USER10> It was announced on the webcast that they lost the Falcon 9. Second stage is still looking good, on a good GTO orbit after the second burn.

</comment><comment><USER11> Am I the only one who thought the landings are already starting to be boring? Smoke, rocket is there, cheers from the engineers...I remember Musk expected a few months ago to be able to save 10-20% of the Stage 1 this year (while the ratio increasing over time). But I guess they already can achieve 70-80% success rate, which is a cost saving that is already enough to kill competition.

<comment><USER12> When 70-80% are _reflown_ , that might be true. So far there has not been any cost savings whatsoever...

<comment><USER13> Yeah, this is the critical part. We still don't know what kind of reliability to expect from the used stages, and we don't know how much it's going to cost.

<comment><USER11> Right now it is, but as they built the rocket, they are able to repair it and save money for sure. From what Elon said, landing was the tougher part. He was much more sure about being able to relaunch some of the stage 1s (except 1) than about being able to land (which took a lot of effort)</comment></comment></comment></comment>