Apple exploring cars, medical devices to reignite growth - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Apple-exploring-cars-medical-devices-to-reignite-5239850.php <comment><USER2> I don't think Tesla has anything to gain from Apple. The last thing Elon wants is useless execs butting heads with him on critical design decisions. Tesla is a product company, and any interference with the product will kill them instantly.

Furthermore, Tesla's entire software ecosystem is already mature, so there'd be no gain from Apple on that front.

All that's left is cash, which they can get from Wall St. or any other investor on the planet right now.

<comment><USER3> Tesla could learn a lot from Apple. The touchscreen UI is extremely dated. It reminds me of Windows Media Player.

[http://i.imgur.com/Gsqslrd.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/Gsqslrd.jpg)

[http://i.imgur.com/3ZfHi1b.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/3ZfHi1b.jpg)

<comment><USER4> And windows media player worked fine until it had competitors. Realistically, while Tesla's UI might be awful, it's better than a lot of them and moreover, not a major point of competition: few people buy cars for the UI.

Dealing with the additional organization overhead doesn't seem to offer much of a gain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady I'm most interested in the medical stuff Apple is reportedly pursuing with the iWatch. The M7 in the iPhone is the one thing holding me back from a Nexus 5. I use the Runkeeper app and it can track my activities automatically now and is quite accurate (e.g. I set it to record any walk/run longer than 15 mins). I also use the Moves app to track my steps throughout the day. It's quite accurate and with the M7 I haven't noticed any battery drain. If Apple can add sensors to measure several more data points that I can improve upon over time (as I have been trying to do with steps taken daily) it could impact my health quite significantly.

<comment><USER5> That's consumer health, not medical. Medical is a _very_ different type of thing. You can slap 'not for medical applications' on lots of things to deflect liability, but that's just the same market as Fitbit and whatever.

No one with an insulin pump cares about whether Apple made it, and the requirements of important medical devices scale in a way which blows branding and even UI out of consideration.

<comment><USER6> Type 1 Diabetics have been asking for an insulin pump "as simple as the iPhone" for _years_. I would know, I've worked on insulin pump designs.

Branding certainly is not important, but UI is incredibly important in a number of medical devices, insulin pumps among them. Back in the early 00's a startup company won significant share in a few short years against the behemoth near-monopolist in the market by differentiating only on UI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Buying Tesla at its current insane valuation would be a huge mistake for Apple and completely out of character for them. They didn't get their cash pile by being stupid with money. Following Google and others into the narrative of "acquisitions = innovation" is short sighted and will be seen as stupid once the current cycle is over.

<comment><USER8> Fortunately there's no chance of Apple buying Tesla.

<comment><USER9> Google could though. They have a ~400 billion dollar market cap, compared to TSLA's 24 billion. You don't even need to buy them outright; just buy a controlling interest.

<comment><USER10> If the articles I've read are to be believed, Apple has at least $150B in cash just lying around. Tesla wouldn't be a huge chunk of that if they were so inclined.

<comment><USER11> Most of that $150B is sitting in overseas tax havens. Just repatriating it to buy Tesla would cost them a bundle.

<comment><USER12> Would it need to be repatriated to Apple Inc? Say for arguments sake Apple Sales International in Ireland (or any global subsidiary company) has enough cash on its books to buy Tesla. ASI is a separate legal entity from Apple Inc, albeit owned by it. Couldn't ASI de jure buy and control Tesla and Apple Inc de facto control it by virtue of controlling ASI? What counts as repatriation? I'm not sure, but it's very interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would have thought that the meeting with Musk would have been about Tesla's plans for battery production (with _partners_ ) more than anything else:

[http://electrek.co/2014/01/15/elon-musk-confirms-tesla- gigaf...](http://electrek.co/2014/01/15/elon-musk-confirms-tesla-gigafactory- battery-plant-to-be-built-in-us-with-partners-announcement-next-month/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Anyone else on mobile have the site menu obscuring the right side of the page?

</comment><comment><USER15> They missed the chance to get a good deal on Tesla. It's too late Apple. Move on.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why buy Tesla and screw up the current iPhone / Siri integration strategy?

</comment><comment><USER17> iTravel and iFeelGood :D

</comment><comment><USER18> I'll give my money to Apple for a couple of 60" TVs and a pair of iWatches, iTags are the future.

So there, shut up and take my $5k.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any video conferencing software that has a question queue? - <AUTHOR> I work on a fully remote team at a company with a large remote contingency.  We use hangouts a lot at work and were lamenting it's lack of plugin/extension support.  We'd like to add a way to queue questions so that everyone has a chance to participate in the conversation.  I'm curious any one knows of any video conferencing software that supports some sort of question queue and/or a way to create plugins. <comment><USER2> Have you considered using the chat feature for asking questions? Then you could just work your way down the chat log.

</comment><comment><USER3> What do you mean by queueing questions? They are not publicly visible until someone releases them? They come one by one to the host? They get to some staging area, visible, but others can chime in? Or something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> The questions themselves don't have to be visible, just a list of who's next when asking a question or making a comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It'd be pretty easy to build a slack bot for that, and slack has decent videoconferencing tools.</comment>


Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video] - <AUTHOR> http://ontwik.com/rails/oreilly-oscon-java-2011-raffi-krikorian-twitter-from-ruby-on-rails-to-the-jvm/

<comment><USER3> I was recently in a quandary over the choice of technology. I started RoR and I really like it. However I was concerned about long term implications of that choice. The thing that I am taking from this talk is that I shouldn't worry about that, right now. If and when I need to scale, I will have enough resources to make a better choice. Resources that I don't have right now.

<comment><USER4> Shopify is still 100% ROR and we serve hundreds of millions of requests. You will be fine :-)

It's a competitive advantage for us, we move faster then the rest of the market.

<comment><USER5> I'm actually really glad to hear it. Though, I wonder about the "rails doesn't scale" mantra, is that really more for active record? In your experience is active record the biggest out of the box bottleneck?

<comment><USER6> The "rails doesn't scale" mantra was discredited 5 years ago, when people realised that it scales exactly the same way as PHP. Remember, scalability != performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing that wasn't touched was JRuby[1], on their site they state high performance and real threading as advantages.

If twitter has (some of) the best ruby developer (mentioned somewhere at the end of the video), why have they neglected JRuby? Why is it no option? For legacy code with native extensions this makes sense. But is jruby slower, more memory hungry on the JVM then scala or clojure? I always though that JRuby was one of the more performant languages on the JVM?

Apart from that it was an interesting talk.

[1]: <http://www.jruby.org/>

<comment><USER8> JRuby is fast for a Ruby implementation, but it's still far, far slower than Scala or Java itself.

[http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=jruby&lang2=scala)

<comment><USER9> I do get that a dynamic language like Ruby will always be slower than a language like Java, which has primitives and where many things, including static method calls, are solved at compile time.

But citing the Alioth.Debian benchmarks? Really?

Dude, take a look at the source-code of those benchmarks sometimes -- they are completely useless ;)

<comment><USER10> If you want a fast dynamic language, take a look at Lua. It's surprisingly fast, especially LuaJIT, and pretty straight forward (almost boring really). The main downside is that there isn't the breadth of community around it.

<comment><USER11> Lua's threading is just as broken as Python or Ruby. Maybe even more so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Direct YouTube link: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohHdZXnsNi8>

<comment><USER13> OP is an ontwik posting bot. Thanks.

<comment><USER14> Surprised no other person brought this up.

<comment><USER12> Ontwik clearly provides some sort of service, if only to dredge up YouTube videos that we've otherwise missed.. but I can't help but feel there's a "better way" for these videos to be discovered than a site that just embeds and adds no editorial context.

<comment><USER13> Of course there is: one can post a link to the YouTube to HN with a title that describes the content. No separate website necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If any of this stuff sounds interesting to you, we're hiring for all sorts of positions: <http://twitter.com/jobs>

</comment><comment><USER16> Part of the problem is that any typical Web Application framework is ill suited to building a full real time system like Twitter.

I doubt their story would have been much rosier if had they gone with Spring MVC, Hibernate, and Oracle from the start.

The minute you start moving away from CRUD based application design and moving into SOA, you're already signing up for a significant rewrite, even if you stick with the same platform.

</comment><comment><USER17> No one will ever be in the position of handling so much real-time data as Twitter is. The rest of us can just get on with it and stop trying to pre-empt situations that will probably never happen to us.

<comment><USER18> Many companies in financial sector handle similar workloads. I know a couple of HFT shops, they're all java.

<comment><USER17> For sure, I was meaning from the perspective of a startup. There's obviously existing industries where real-time data is big, but they don't tend to be web fronted serving hundreds of millions of users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Many people seem to refer only the scalability (performance, that is) side of the argument but only few who actually pointed out the developer's productivity of choosing Scala and Java for Twitter situation.

<http://www.infoq.com/articles/twitter-java-use>

<comment><USER20> Agreed. You can achieve very high productivity if you use Scala and Java properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> With the release of Java 7 (invokedynamic) the performance of these dynamic languages (like ruby and python) may become much less of a factor (JRuby and Jython). At least that's what the JRuby folks imply: [http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2011/jruby-1-6-released- now-w...](http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2011/jruby-1-6-released-now-what/)

Punch Line from Link:

"There's a very real chance that invokedynamic could improve JRuby performance many times, putting us on par with our statically-typed brothers like Java and Scala. And that means you can write Ruby code without fear. Awesome."

<comment><USER22> Right on! I was going to make the same comment until I saw yours. Charles Nutter has been very enthusiastic about invokedynamic based speed improvements - can't wait.

A little off topic: as a consultant it seems like the demand for Clojure was been tremendous: Clojure is a nice language and very performant. It will be really interesting to see how much large speed improvements in JRuby will cut into Java's, Clojure's and Scala's developer market-share.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I noticed that every time Twitter acquired a company, they also accrued a new language:

* Summize brought Scala

* BackType brought Clojure

Has anyone noticed that pattern elsewhere?

<comment><USER24> Twitter started looking at Scala before the Summize acquisition. Also, to my knowledge, Scala was not being used at Summize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think most people misunderstand the point made by Raffi...yes, JVM has awesome performance, but never try to solve performance issue up front by sacrificing the agility offered by RoR. Not everyone is building Twitter, you don't even know whether you will hit the point where the VM is blocking your way. If you blame all the performance issue to the VM level, you are simply doing it wrong...In 90% of the cases, MRI is fast enough and meet your requirement (GitHub, Groupon, Living Social and many others are using RoR BTW). Twitter is very pragmatic at this respect, they have tried all the means to scale the app on RoR before they move to the JVM. Never ever try to solve a requirement that doesn't even exist in your own app...

<comment><USER25> The point is you probably never need that performance gain on the VM level (YAGNI) at all. Things are changing very fast in software development, your project could die or fail long before you really think about performance optimization on the VM level. But when you start a project and think that my project will fail because I use Rails and Rails doesn't scale, you are doing it all wrong! What you really need is a tool that helps you iterate faster. Rails falls into this category. And that's the productivity gain that I am thinking when starting a company.

As a pragmatic approach, a half century of software engineering says that you should write the code first and worry about making it faster only if it is too slow. Donald Knuth is right: Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Don't merely let the VM performance metric blind you to this fundamental truth. If you are chasing for a performing language, Java/Scala is not your ultimate solution, C/C++ is, even Erlang.

I actually don't see a problem with "performance" emerging as the requirement in the Ruby world sooner than others, say Java/Scala, because this "sooner" is very contextual and depends a lot on the implementation. To give you more info, GitHub is on RoR since it started, and till now they haven't hit the so- called "Rails does not scale" point ( <http://teachmetocode.com/podca..>. ). So are many other projects. Besides, think about Twitter, they only recently try to port everything to the JVM, after Rails has served them a couple years. All these facts tell you, this "sooner" may never happen to your own app, and most importantly, Rails can scale, although it may not scale as well as others! But once you hit the point where Rails, or Ruby in general, doesn't meet your performance requirement (assuming you are lucky enough to build another Twitter), do what Twitter suggests you to do in the video. Is that too late? Not at all. Because by then, you have the resources to do whatever you want, even inventing a VM that is more performing than JVM.

To summarize, the Ruby VM was fast yesterday, is still fast today, and will be faster tomorrow. In 90% of the cases, it's just fast enough. Do I need the performance gain by switching to JVM? Don't know yet. It'd be better to let the market drive you. Does Rails provide the agility I want to start a project? 100% hell yeah!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm still not getting the futz they're making over their "scale".

So your inbound load is 7000 tweets/sec or roughly 250 MBit/s (assuming 4k per tweet). Then you fan that out to (assuming) 20 append-only mailboxes on average.

Perhaps my assumptions are far off, but I'm only arriving at a couple GBit/s here and a low two digit number of terabytes/storage per year.

This sounds like "a couple racks" to me, not like "a couple datacenters".

<comment><USER27> Here is an old presentation from a year ago.

<http://www.slideshare.net/nkallen/q-con-3770885>

Now, at the time they were doing peak 2000 tweet/s. The fan-out was 1.2M deliveries a second... So if we go with the current 600:1 ratio at 7000/s, that's about 4.2M/s. I actually know it's much higher now since I work there but other things to consider is we have a large data warehouse, search, API, pipelines to external parties for the firehose, logging at terabytes an hour, in-house metric collection doing 3M writes/s, etc.

<http://www.scribd.com/doc/59830692/Cassandra-at-Twitter>

It add's up very fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> very interesting talk. I was surprised that there was no mention of using a lower level language i.e. c or c++ in order to maximize cpu/ram utilization. while JVM is a clear winner over ROR it does add some overhead. I guess it is a sweet spot between performance and code manageability.

</comment><comment><USER29> Any thoughts solving scaling issues with node.js..

<comment><USER30> Until node gets some type of bind-fork-accept mechanism (built in) to utilize more than one cpu in a native and simple fashion (cluster/multi-node are close), I feel it will not gain the same level of traction that java has.

People also have opinions about java(scala/clojure) vs javascript from a language preference standpoint. I think it is too early to tell what impact this will have.

However, many developers I know seem to have a strong distaste for Java, the JVM, and the ecosystem around both. I think several of those folks would look to node, erlang, or possibly even golang (if it gets faster) simply to avoid using java.

<comment><USER19> I noticed that the people who have a strong distaste for Java are largely application-developers. In most cases, these developers usually just work with the available libraries or APIs to build a website backed by database (some of them are consultants that build similar apps over and over again).

Back-end developers seem to (maybe?) prefer to use Java.

<comment><USER30> I don't know if my anecdotal evidence bears this out, but I admit that it is just that...anecdotal.

People are still using C and C++ to write low level code. Databases, package managers, games, etc. Then there are the 'application developers' as you named them, writing http service endpoints, web apps, and the like.

It seems java still owns the colossal corporate stacks. I hear things like "it is easier to hire" and "java is faster/better for extreme large scale". If you think about all the languages and tools available, only the first makes much sense.

* C/C++/D is faster than java.

* statically compiled code is easier to deploy.

* Erlang is arguably more scalable than java.

* Haskel/Ada is 'safer' than java.

* I think several languages are more fun to write in than java. Ruby, python, golang, coffeescript, etc, etc.

So java may not be the _best_ language for large scale, but maybe _one of the best_ or _good enough_? When combined with the first point of ease of hiring, I can certainly see why large companies are attracted to it. If your language of choice lends itself to your workers being more easily replaceable, then as a company that is probably better/safer.

Other than that, I can't see why someone would prefer to use java. I don't work in/at/for huge companies though.

I admit that my own personal 'java bias' is based on dated interactions with java. Whenever I hear 'java' I think: good performance (vm), eats memory like candy, painful ecosystem of xml files and outdated/abandoned random libraries. I have tried dabbling in scala, and while I enjoyed the language to a fair extent, I still found myself wrestling with the JVM and the ecosystem (library version incompatibilities, obscure compiler errors, namespace wrangling, etc).

<comment><USER19> My opinions are anecdotal at best as well and that's the reality of software development. There's no research that can state that X is better than Y whether it is programming languages, methodologies, architectures, patterns, etc.

I don't deny the reality that people are still writing C/C++ code in the field of embedded devices, games, something that requires fast performance with a very low memory usage. On the other hand, there are a few NoSQL solutions built using Java: HBase, Neo4J, Cassandra.

In some cases, JVM Hotspot optimizes code on-par with C/C++. I don't know much about D performance. If the speed improvement is not night-and-day for projects other than being mentioned above, and if writing readable code is much better in Java, I'm not sure if we should compare C/C++ vs Java. On the other hand, many people seem to come out and say that Ruby is _very_ slow. Is it heaven-and-earth slow?

There are advantages and disadvantages of compiled vs dynamic code when it comes to deployment. It all depends on the tools and ecosystem too sometime.

How is Erlang more scalable than Java? In what area? horizontal vs vertical scaling? developer's productivity (or team performance) scale? performance? speed? Erlang seems to excel in a niche area (in a positive speaking).

What about Haskell/Ada, how are they safer than Java? Do they have better type-systems? handles NULL better than Java? Bulletproof from developers? detect more bugs?

Keep in mind that Java ecosystems have grown and matured a lot since 2004. The tools and libraries are staggering. Most of your concerns are no longer relevant except "eats memory like candy" in most Java desktop apps. Having said that, have you heard about Java ME? that thing runs in mobile devices albeit a different distribution of JVM.

Outdated/abandoned random libraries seem to happen in our neighboring ecosystems: Ruby (and Rails).

I have to admit that sometime other languages are more "fun" to dabble with. I use Python and Ruby. I like Python because I don't have to argue when it comes to code-style. Pythonic (PEP-8) or GTFO. It's not that I hate innovation or artistic coders, it's just that I'm a discipline person. Best practices in most cases, pragmatics when needed, hacks when the world ends tomorrow.

Companies chose Java for varieties of reasons and yes, one of them is the available pool of talents. I'm sure we all have heard the old phrase "enterprise developers". Some of them are bad, while others are quite sharp when it comes to the typical enterprise stack. Some of them can design systems/libraries quite well. Spring Framework comes to mind. Google Guice, Google Guava, Android are next (yep, crazybob used to do EJB and enterprise Java stuff yet he's one of the sharpest Java dude I've known).

I noticed that some of the well-run enterprise systems do have a better infrastructure planning thus forcing people involved around it to know better when it comes to certain technology choices. I'm sure there are web startups out there that just keep on hacking PHP code and use MySQL without having plans for backups, recoveries, etc.

Of course these are anecdotal experiences of mine.

<comment><USER30>
        > On the other hand, many people seem to come out and say that Ruby is _very_ slow.
        > Is it heaven-and-earth slow?

Comparatively, I would say yes. Granted, most of the time it won't matter because you are waiting on IO (disk/network), but if you are doing cpu intensive work, it is slow and you probably need to drop down to C or offload that work to another service.

        > How is Erlang more scalable than Java? In what area? horizontal vs vertical scaling?
        > developer's productivity (or team performance) scale? performance? speed? Erlang seems
        > to excel in a niche area (in a positive speaking).

My guess would be in single server scalability. Erlang's write-once variables and actor model, combined with a good VM ("green processes") make it very single-server-scalable (verticle). It also has good built in node-to-node communication mechanisms (horizontal). Performance is probably slower than Java though. And I imagine the developer pool is much more limited than that of Java.

        > What about Haskell/Ada, how are they safer than Java?
        > Do they have better type-systems? handles NULL better than Java?
        > Bulletproof from developers? detect more bugs?

I meant safer in the type-safety sense, yes. There are also classes of static analysis tools for both. Granted, my knowledge of these languages is quite limited.

I certainly see your points (especially about liking the code hygiene of python), and agree that Java is not going anywhere soon. I guess I don't understand why a startup, or individual developer, would choose Java over other languages, even other languages on the JVM, for new projects.

Thanks for the good discussion. :)

<comment><USER19> Java ecosystem has a lot of static analysis tools that can integrate to almost all popular IDEs and Continuous Integration systems. Findbugs, PMD, JDepend, Sonar (recommend to check Sonar).

Checkstyle is another tool that I use since I'm kind of the annoying dude when it comes to code-style. (Have you seen GWT API code? it's like written by one person as opposed to a few developers with different perceptions of "readable" code. I like that kind of thing).

There are a few reasons why startup/individual dev would choose Java:

1) Previous experience in Java

2) Java fits better for the type of problems to solve (intensive computational that requires Hadoop like infrastructure)

3) Emotionally attached to static/compiled language with nice IDE so that one can navigate the source code easily whether the code base is large or small (sometime not all decisions are rational and I'm okay with that because developing software requires more than technical skill; it also requires passion).

4) Marketing (if you're targeting the enterprises). Zimbra, Jive Software, Compiere, Alfresco, Day software, Liferay, Salesforce used to be startups.

Java ecosystem seems to learn and grow in a much better speed thanks to the following actors:

\- Rails (Spring Roo, Spring MVC, JPA 2.0, and possibly MVC framework from the upcoming JEE releases)

\- C# (Java 7 new features, Java 8 closures/lambda. Yes, Lisp does this first, but I think C# forces Java to implement closures more than any of its competitors).

\- REST/JSON/WS (Check out the latest JAX-RS, supports REST, JSON, XML, Atom- Feed, and JAX-WS)

\- I/P/SaaS + Cloud Computing (Targeted for Java EE7, deployment, infrastructure to support multi-tenant, etc).

NB: Just so that I don't sound like a Java fan-boy, I use Java by day but I use and help to promote and organize Python community overseas (of course by not comparing Python vs Java :)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Anyone pondering their technology stack should watch this video. It doesn't matter what you initially employ as a technology/framework/server to get your app up and running, but if you need to scale the JVM is were it's at. I say that as a Rubyist.

<comment><USER32> I was surprised when I got some pushback on this concept at a local Django meetup last week. A lot of people believe that Python & Ruby-type languages are the backend languages of the future.

<comment><USER8> To be fair, you're very unlikely to ever have to solve the kinds of scaling problems Twitter has had to solve. You'll get your app off the ground faster with Python or Ruby.

<comment><USER31> You will get your app of the ground faster, but you're selling yourself short if you're a technology-based company thinking that you'll never have scaling problems. Competing against Twitter or any other social-based app you'll probably never encounter that level of scale, but any financial application will need to be both fast and handle the complexities that only the JVM can address.

Like he states at the end of the video, when describing the 7000+ tpm during the WWC:

"...we do things like Forex spikes upon our standard baseline growth. So right now the JVM is really the only mechanism that we can build upon that gives us the flexibility to do something like that."

<comment><USER15> I'm pretty sure he said "4x" rather than "Forex".

<comment><USER31> Good catch, and make sense given the context. My mind is stuck in HFT mode and constantly has me worried.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> is there any good site that would explain when to use what technology - <USER2>

when you need many concurrent users then dont use ROR but use JVM or C++ or Scala instead,

if you need to build a fast prototype build on ROR or PHP etc.

</comment><comment><USER34> An ignoramous question: Aren't there faster languages than Java?

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm pretty sure the project I'm working on will be the next Twitter, and this video's making me second guess staying with RoR.</comment>


Any good ntlk alternatives for python? - <AUTHOR>

I recall reading here about a researcher who released an ntlk alternative for python. That was about a month ago, but I can't seem to find the name of the module now, do any of you guys remember it? <comment><USER2> If you have any questions about SpaCy, let me know :)

[https://honnibal.github.io/spaCy/](https://honnibal.github.io/spaCy/)

A few things are a bit disorganised at the moment.

In particular, the documentation and the install stuff are rougher than I'd like, and I haven't gotten the license and payment process so smooth yet.

That said, it's disorganised because the response has been very good. It seems certain I'll be able to keep working on this full time.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's the one. Thanks a lot. I will give it a test drive for some work I do at my company. If it's a good fit we'll be more than happy to pay for a commercial licence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Add a ASK HN tag for better response

</comment><comment><USER4> How about NodeBox Linguistics? [https://www.nodebox.net/code/index.php/Linguistics](https://www.nodebox.net/code/index.php/Linguistics)

It still bundles NLTK with a few other NLP libraries.

</comment><comment><USER5> you are thinking of SpaCy.

[https://honnibal.github.io/spaCy/](https://honnibal.github.io/spaCy/)

</comment><comment><USER6> i wonder if you mean SpaCy, which was on HN a little less than two months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8942783](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8942783)

i followed this thread and then installed SpaCy and ran the examples; really nice work in my opinion.

<comment><AUTHOR> yep, that's the one. Thanks for the response</comment></comment>


Ask HN: My friend accused me of bad design and ripping off Reddit - <AUTHOR> Six months ago I started working on a side project to build a todo app. Over time I ended up going in a completely different direction and created zipcode based social platform. I have couple of things I wanted to complain to the world about in my area, 1 was how terrible the intersection of 14 Mile and Crooks is (ever run a red light making a left turn?), 2 how did Hall road and Mound road become so bad in their own ways. (If you're form Detroit area you'd know what I'm on about). Yea I got a few things I want to talk about in my area and I want others to have ability to join a local discussion.
I've been regularly sharing my progress with some close friends, and today I got the harshest criticism to date: My UI sucks, I ripped off reddit. But I really believe in reddit design of a post and tree style comments, it's a system that works and I'm just using it in my project. So overall feedback breakdown is 10% positive 70% neutral 20% negative. Most of the feedback is related to UI, so I'll leave some screenshots below.
I'm not good with UI design and I can't even justify buying fontawsome pro icon pack at this time. Yes, my choices of icons are dull at best and I understand that.
I was primarily focusing on functionality over looks, and making sure the UI is not tied up with business logic so it can be swapped later for better UI.
Is my current design so bad I should pull the plug on releasing until I come up with better UI? I was ready to release in about a week, not sure what to do now.
Login screen: https://i.imgur.com/P1zF3Mc.png Front page: https://i.imgur.com/31Q8RfQ.png New post: https://i.imgur.com/TMCoSHR.png Specific zip: https://i.imgur.com/pdRUo8y.png Comments: https://i.imgur.com/3eemeZZ.png
Sorry I can't post a link at this time I know you all would rather look at a live site instead of screenshots. <comment><USER2> The posts do look like an exact copy of Reddit down to font color and weight.

Your design has plenty of odd spacings (or lack of them). I'd spend more time adjusting sizings, margins, and paddings.

I don't know about your audience. This may or may not be a problem for them. Personally - yes, looks sketchy and less than an MVP. But again, if you're testing with people you control or can influence this might be ok.</comment>


Show HN: Graphing tool to figure out which EC2 configuration is cheapest for you - <AUTHOR> http://whichinstance.com/

<comment><USER2> Certainly interesting. It looks like a 1 year medium is a good bet if you're unsure how long you'll need the instance but it's probably more than 6 months.</comment>


Resources to become more familiar with CS aspects of programming, optimization - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to keep my career moving more towards working with bigger applications that are highly scalable. I'm considering a move back to the SF Bay Area (aka Silicon Valley), where I'm originally from but have not really worked as a developer professionally other than freelance type of projects when I was just starting out and from what I have discerned, they are big on knowing data structures really well, Big O, good algorithm knowledge, etc. So far, I've honed my skills with smaller companies that probably aren't scaling to the degree that companies I may want to work for there are and therefore the bar has been lower for me so far.
For example, at my current company, its not uncommon to find code where method calls are made within a loop to where the data its retrieving never changes (so its being called n number of times when it only needs to be called 1 time), so obviously the bar's pretty low and I have a feeling that doing something like that in a larger application would be pretty damaging (just kind of going off on a tangent here but basically the bar is pretty low where I am not so I'm not really being pushed to learn a lot about optimization). Anyways, am wondering if anyone has any recommendations for good resources (books would be good) on learning some of the things I may have missed / glossed over so far in my career to better prepare myself to be the type of developer that a company in Silicon Valley would want working on their server-side code.
From what I understand topics like optimizing algorithms and Big O notation are big interview topics (and topics beyond the interview obviously, when doing the actual work). I'd like to find a book, for example, that is thorough enough to where I learn all the basics but not too hard to dive into and keep things interesting.  Any advice is appreciated <comment><USER2> I would recommend taking free online CS courses from good universities; Stanford has couple of good intro classes for CS. Anycase, I would recommend focusing on Algorithms, Data Structures and Parallel Computing. <http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, yeah I am taking some classes but they are a bit more basic than the ones you suggested, I didn't know they had free online classes from Stanford, wow thats actually really cool, I will check into it</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the right way to start learning ML and AI? - <AUTHOR> How can one start learning ml, ai the right way?<p>I've had people tell me that most of the people working in the industry are not putting in sufficient effort to master the field. So, if an individual is motivated enough to learn and become good at this field and he/she is ready to spend the next 10 to 20 years in this. What would be an ideal roadmap to start learning? <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998352](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998352) is two years old but points to specific (e)books and online courses.</comment>


Trump administration has plan to scrap 'startup visa' rule - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Trump-administration-has-plan-to-scrap-startup-11236692.php <comment><USER2> From the article:

"To qualify for the rule, entrepreneurs would have to meet high standards. A foreigner must demonstrate that he or she will contribute to economic growth or job creation and show that a reputable investor has put at least $250,000 into the company. Under this rule, they can stay in the U.S. for 30 months, with the possibility of a 30-month extension. They cannot apply for a green card during this period."

This sounds like a pretty lame visa. How are you supposed to build a startup if you only have 30 months to do so? Why would investors risk $250k if the founder may be deported in 30 months? What happens after the extension period?

I'm 100% in favor of increasing all immigration to the USA, but this visa doesn't sound like a good option at all. Is the USA really so appealing that talented entrepreneurs will jump through this many hoops to start their company here?

<comment><USER3> I only wondered why US will not open up to the countries, that are known for being safe, with well educated and easy to integrate citizens. US is opening its borders to rich countries instead of opening to safe bets to grab some tech talent.

There are numerous countries that fit this profile. The majority of Central/Eastern Europe, few Asian and South American countries, even with Africa having some. Instead, they expect for people from developed countries go through the nightmare of getting a visa, being screened and then live in places like Cali where cost of living is ridiculous. US could easily give out 1 Mil easy-to-get visas with easy-to-get transition program to a green card that would bump their economy, instead, they are creating walls everywhere.

<comment><USER4> It is quite a puzzle. I have spent some time thinking about it however the only solution I reach seems conspiratorial.

To me, it seems obvious that every financially successful (through merit or otherwise) and well educated person you can draw into your country, the better. If such a person makes your country home, the likely-hood of them contributing to the economy is high.

Despite this, emigrating to the US from Western Europe is extremely arduous. Either you are transferred via a multinational facing high competition for the place or you enter the lottery alongside others who won't necessarily contribute as much as you are able to.

The incentive for a nation such as the US seems perfectly apparent from the outside. Grab the best and brightest from countries with excellent education and similar cultural backgrounds in exchange for citizenship. When there is so much demand, why not? Seems to only be a win.

I cannot help but think that western nations have entered some sort of pact (as many SV companies did) in regards to non poaching. Each country wants to keep their best, so some agreement (formal or otherwise) is reached to prevent mass exodus to one.

<comment><USER5> It is a mystery. I don't think it's some grand thought-out non-poaching agreement, though. I think you have to break it down to domestic politics.

The left wants to maximize multiculturalism. This has become a sort of fundamental value to that tribe (rather than a means to an end), and their fundamental anti-value is racism/xenophobia/intolerance of anyone not white- Christian. So that tribe will resist any hint of an attempt to selectively immigrating people from culturally or racially similar countries, because such immigration actually threatens to reduce multiculturalism, which to them is a fundamentally evil thing. So they'd call it racist.

In addition, even just choosing people for wealth or intelligence or English skills, you'd end up with a big cultural/racial skew towards white people (compared to the world population), so the left would call it racist for the same reasons.

Those on the right might be happy with such immigration, but it's too difficult of an argument to make and it's too easy for the left to call them racists if they suggest anything like it. So as a proxy, they tend to argue for reducing all immigration.

I must be missing a lot of the details but I think it's some sort of political compromise/deadlock like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was invited last year in a round table discussion on this new rule. The original responses for the rule were mixed as there are plenty of nuances. Specifically, the main concern is the rule would lead to investors demanding founders to first acquire this type of status before they were able to get funded, causing a Chicken and Egg problem.

The original proposal of the rule required 375k of funding from US only accredited investors, and there are also requirements for the startup founders to maintain a certain threshold of ownership while being able to hire a lot of American employees in short period of time. I don't remember the specific number requirement/head counts but it was definitely enough to pressurize the company to expand in size quickly, while many tech startups do not necessarily need to hire dozens of employees in a 1-3 year period, not to mention they all had to be US citizens. 1-3 years would also be a stretch for most startup to figure out a concrete plan of growth in order to quality for an extension. And what if the founders want to bootstrap themselves?

Ultimately this rule still doesn't show any concrete pathway of residency or visa guarantees after 6 years. And because it is not a visa, it will take time to educate immigration officers and TSAs as well as creating a reasonable structure to allow founders to travel outside US legally as well. Historically there is a huge delay of understanding OPT, STEM and O1 visas in plenty of US embassies.

To make things even more complicated, it is not USCIS's interest to be a judge to tell which company would qualify for this rule, and they would need to form a group of trusted committees to check case by case if a company and their founders/co-founders qualify for this rule. I also heard that founder's spouses would be able to travel to US too.

</comment><comment><USER7> I asked this very question on HN in November 2016: will the "startup visa" survive? Commenters thought that Trump wouldn't interfere with it:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12931943](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12931943)

This is a solid reminder that the Trump administration is showing itself to be mostly concerned with undoing anything that Obama did, rather than working for anyone's benefit. You can't apply logic to predict the actions of these people.

<comment><USER8> I'm not an American but as an outsider it's so odd to see the anti-Obama stance this government is taking. Look at the US economy coming out of 2008. From my perspective it's done quite well. Unemployment has gone from 10% to 4%, GDP has climbed. S&P and US stocks in general have done exceptionally well. It seems like whatever Obama did was working. Do the Republicans think they can do better? Why not just ride their coat tails to glory?

<comment><USER9> You have the assumption that economic growth is what they want. Trump has a mandate to punish the rich/middle class people so the poor people can feel relatively better about themselves. Startup visas can do nothing to help the poor rural unemployed. They'll probably be happier with a weaker dollar and thus more primary/secondary industry job opportunities. They certainly don't care about unicorns.

This is a big population of severely disadvantaged people who gain nothing from GDP growth. They do matter.

<comment><USER10> Most Trump voters were not working class though:

[https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/16/93450/](https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/16/93450/)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey- cage/wp/2017/06/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey- cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not- working-class/?utm_term=.228b90d9ef31)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Vancouver, anyone?

I live in Seattle and I'm about ready to drive two hours north for my next startup. To hire the Russian programmers I'm already working with, or the folks on Kaggle I'd love to hire. The US has a completely broken scheme for visas.

<comment><USER12> That's just trading one problem for another. Vancouver has a very serious affordability problem. Not only are you going to be paying a lot more for office and living space, you're going to have far fewer opportunities for funding.

<comment><USER13> I wonder if there is an arbitrage opportunity: invest in real estate and office space north of Seattle and south of Vancouver, just over the border.

Those who can go back and forth and take meetings on both sides. People are within commuting distance of these large metro areas.

<comment><USER12> Real estate on the Washington side of the border is insanely cheaper. As soon as you cross the border, prices skyrocket and just keep going up until you hit downtown Vancouver.

Seriously, our affordability problem is pretty much at crisis levels. People who argue that we should increase density aren't wrong, but we're already building towers as fast as we can. And the majority of those suffer from substandard, shoddy construction. We call it 'leaky condo syndrome'. And even those are selling for $750k+ for under 500sqft.

<comment><USER11> Vancouver is a wonderful city so I can really understand why you want to keep everyone from finding out :)

But go see San Francisco if you want to understand an affordability crisis. Vancouver is reasonable in comparison.

<comment><USER12> Yes, the cost of living in San Francisco is about twice that of Vancouver. But salaries in Vancouver less than half that of San Francisco, so affordability is worse overall.

Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE a stronger tech sector here (especially as a developer). We desperately need an industry other than real estate and film. But I just don't see how that can happen without a fundamental shift that just isn't happening anytime soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Unfortunately, the immigration policies of most countries in the world are one huge stupid joke. Why so much obsession about the country where people were born into? It wasn't their choice at all. It just doesn't matter.

The only questions you should be asking are "are they decent people? Are they willing to integrate? Will they contribute to our economy? Will they make us problems?" And none of these questions you can answer by reading the name of the country on their passport.

<comment><USER15> >Why so much obsession about the country where people were born into? It wasn't their choice at all. It just doesn't matter.

Because nationality _does_ matter. The oft-repeated meme that we're all the same doesn't hold to even superficial scrutiny.

Nationality is not arbitrary in the sense that it's a crystallization of centuries of cultural values. People's place of birth predicts their attitudes about a vast number of political and social subjects. This includes, for instance, how they feel about such subjects as:

\- democracy

\- freedom of religion

\- minority & women's rights

\- the belief (or not) that certain races are superior to others

\- etc...

(Apologies for the multiple edits. It took me a few tries to express myself clearly.)

<comment><USER16> Nationality and Country of birth, are two different things.

If Elon Musk was born in India or China, and when he was 1 yr old he moved back to South Africa, and rest of his life remained unchanged from what has been, then he'd not be granted a permanent residency as easily and may have just become a US Citizen in the last two years. Can you imagine what loss it would be to the US if Musk had to wait so long to become a US Citizen?

Likewise, if a China-born French citizen were to apply for employment based permanent residency in the US, the green card backlogs would be too onerous for one to succeed as an entrepreneur.

Also, place of birth limits currently is used purely for limiting the number of immigrants born in a country gaining Permanent Residency in the US. So, a person born in a country like India (world largest democracy, with freedom of religion, minority and women's rights and equality in races etc) has to be in a much longer queue to get Permanent Residency than a person who is born in say Sudan or Iran or Pakistan or any of the other Islamic nations where there's no legit democracy or freedom of religion or minority rights.

Hope this helps in understanding the earlier comment in context.

<comment><USER15> >Nationality and Country of birth, are two different things.

For the purposes of this discussion, it's largely a distinction without a difference.

I don't oppose immigration in principle, but the rather extreme view that _any_ amount of immigration, from _any_ place, to _any_ place is necessarily a Good Thing is founded on some very strange assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Are they going to scrap the EB-5 visa too? Doesn't it basically sell citizenship for real estate?

<comment><USER18> "Invest $500,000 and immigrate to the United States." \- Kushner Companies.

[In a Beijing ballroom, Kushner family pushes $500,000 'investor visa' to wealthy Chinese] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-a-beijing- ballroom-k...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-a-beijing-ballroom- kushner-family-flogs-500000-investor-visa-to-wealthy- chinese/2017/05/06/cf711e53-eb49-4f9a-8dea-3cd836fcf287_story.html)

<comment><USER19> Actually people with $500k are hardly considered wealthy in Beijing. A typical 100 m^2 flat within 4th ring road worth well over $1M. EB5 seems so easy here...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a wild speculation, but is it possible that the Trump administration believes startups to be bad for the Rust Belt working class and other similar demographic they say they represent? For example, greater efficiency and automation could reduce employment of semi skilled people.

In the long run, this line of policies would of course lead to technological slow down and give a big opening for other countries to take the lead in a crucial determiner of economic successes.

Other possible theses may be that they favor the 'native whites' to have control as Steve Bannon used to mention or try to undo the legacies of Obama.

</comment><comment><USER21> Then lets be blatant and straightforward then.

"If you're rich and willing to spend, we want you. If you're average or poor, fuck you."

<comment><USER22> Yes we want capital and brains to flow in but your comment isn't fair. The US has a history of settling refugees here. We also have a purposefully porous southern border and have normalized illegal immigrants.

<comment><USER23> The current government seems to vehemently oppose the idea of normalizing illegal immigrants.

<comment><USER22> It seems that way. However if we really wanted to deny border crossing we would. It just isn't really a priority. The issue gets a lot of air time but do you think if it really was a national priority it would be so easy to cross?

When I was a kid we used to cross the river into Mexico to go eat (on hunting trips near the border). We'd pay a guy to row us across and then back. It was a well known thing. People from both sides used it to go back and forth all the time.

Guess what, now that guy in a row boat is an official US border patrol checkpoint. LOL

The border is a big joke.

<comment><USER23> >if we really wanted to deny border crossing we would. It just isn't really a priority.

I doubt it. If you really wanted to deny border crossing, you'd have to allocate so much money to ICE that it would upend the federdal spending budget. It isn't feasible easily. That would make the current administration look stupider that it already is.

<comment><USER24> Hyperbole

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sorry for a stupid question but I have to ask. Why everyone is so desperate to start a company and locate it physically in the US? Is it just because of VC money? Wouldn't any safe place with good laws and easy immigration policy do? I don't take seriously Blockchain projects (and consider most of them blatant scam) and they are relatively small now. But longterm can this model solve the part about VC money?

<comment><USER26> I'd wager it's the pre-existing culture of Silicon Valley that attracts startups. Kind of like a tech Mecca, it's got a magnetic pull based on "if you want to succeed you need to be based here". With VCs etc operating out of there it does actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As to the blockchain and ICO model, the problem is the current lack of regulation, leaving the burden of research to the buyer. I expect this will change relatively soon (places like New York, India and Singapore are already trying to introduce legislation regarding this) and then we might see more of an uptick, but you still need to get people out of the almost 40 year old mindset now that "Silicon Valley is where startups have to be to make it big".

Not an easy task I'd say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> A practical question:

How easy or challenging is it to stay in Toronto or Vancouver and run a US- registered startup there, if you need to collaborate with others in either SF Bay area or Boston/NYC? (In-person meetings might not need to be frequent; geting together once a month could be sufficient.)

I am an entrepreneur from Asia working to build a fundamental technology and was planning to set up a company and live in the Bay area. After studying diligently about various options, Canada could in fact be a better place to settle in with a proper startup visa and much fewer hoops to jump through, however the attraction of US tech ecosystem is powerful.

(Note: I earned a Masters degree with a thesis on AI/ML from a major US research university and have traveled to, attended conferences, and lived in the Bay area for several months per year over the last three years.)

The major reasons for SF Bay area dominance include:

1) access to top people, many if not most were/are foreign students, who attend UC Berkeley and Stanford,

2) ecosystems of global tech talents recruited by major tech powerhouses like Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.,

3) deep expertise and risk-taking attitude of Bay area VCs and angel investors, and

4) ease of access to vast US consumer and enterprise markets.

For 3) would major VCs or angel investors invest in a startup with offices about 1.5 to 2.5 hours away by plane? (The founders would need to travel to see them sometimes; but do they require in-person supervision/updates more than say once a month?)

For 4) I assume if the company is US-registered, it shouldn't have a problem in principle, is that true?

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm surprised no other country has decided to go ahead and create an equally as open and safe environment for entrepreneurs to start companies. My understanding (which, I'll admit, is only based on my own observations) is that the vast majority of people outside the western sphere still regard the US through what's projected in hollywood movies and aren't really in touch with the reality of what life is in modern america (I'm a EU citizen myself but have quite a few US based/American friends).

Essentially, the way I see it is : The US still has an edge in technology and are able to attract top talent from overseas because they still benefit from cultural hegemony and their image worldwide. What happens when the dream evaporates is still a mystery to me. For example, how will the situation evolve once chinese / russian / indian universities catch up with institutions like stanford / MIT etc and enough investors from these countries decide to pour money into local startups ?

<comment><USER28> Incorrect. UK has Tier 1 - Entrepreneur Visa where you can remain and run a company for 5 years. After 5 years, you can apply for extension for another 5 years or apply for settlement.

<comment><USER29> Yeah but the UK is not exactly an investment/entrepneur-friendly economy any more. Brexit, at the rate it's going, will be either a hard Brexit or a chaotic one, and without a soft Brexit (i.e. access to the European market) all a potential investor has is the British market.

Also, UK does not have a constitution and civil rights (e.g. right to privacy, to unrestricted, unfiltered Internet access) are being torn down further each day... so if I were an investor, no way I'd set foot in this country, much less invest in it.

<comment><USER28> Even before, there was no digital single market for services. The previous single market was only for manufactured goods. So that didn't affect startups in UK to be successful. We can expect the same after Brexit. Right to Privacy is being eroded also in US with the new FTC rulings. So that is not a valid disadvantage. Considering the recent events, Brexit if it ever happens, will be a Soft Brexit as the UK Govt doesn't anymore have the required mandate or support for a Hard Brexit that wrecks the economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> We should put boats off the coast of San Francisco like we talked about a few years ago.

<comment><USER31> Mass + New York + Canada + Seattle + Oregon + Cali will form the nation of America 2.0. Open borders to all US citizens.

The rest of the US can mine coal, frack, or whatever they want to do. They think that's where the jobs are.

Doesn't matter to us. We'll just speed up the electric, self-driving, car revolution with China and continue working on climate change rules and a global economy with Europe.

<comment><USER32> Who do you think actually puts the food you eat on the table? Will you eat your self-driving cars?

<comment><USER33> California actually: [http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2013/07/california_grows_all_of_our_fruits_and_vegetables_what_would_we_eat_without.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> 'Startup visa' is one term for it, 'buy-a-visa' is another.

I'm not sure that it's necessarily a bad idea; someone with vision and money may be able to contribute a lot to the economy. But handing them a visa for cash and a couple of years of supplying jobs feels very transactional. It says, "you can come here as long as you earn lots of money," not, "you can come here as long as you contribute lots to the economy."

<comment><USER35> There's a similar visa in South Korea, the D-8 visa, which requires you to invest 50M Won (roughly 50,000 USD), either in some business or to open another business, and some people have gotten frustrated that some have just invested for the visa and never done anything further as the government doesn't track beyond the initial investment. In this, and in the US case, the government should track to make sure it's not being abused by people who just have a lot of money and want to live in the country.

<comment><USER36> "people who just have a lot of money and want to live in the country"

What exactly is big problem with this?

Not speaking about becoming tax-resident of Monaco or similar, but your example or an EU country where you can open LLC and set up your own business and sort out residency paperwork in couple of years, for about that sum (5-figure USD/EUR) at the end benefits to the country budget and society.

Speaking from personal experience, and let me tell you we make sure we perform 100% of what government expects from us and pay everything that's due.

Also, in case of IT and startups, I feel it creates "cleaner" work environment and more positive and prospective work force than some other businesses (real- estate, natural resources, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If US doesn't want startup entrepreneurs there are plenty of other countries that have specialized visas to promote entrepreneurs and talent.

For example, UK has "Tier 1 - Entrepreneur Visa" where you can remain and run a company for 5 years. After 5 years, you can apply for extension for another 5 years or apply for settlement.

There is also UK "Tier 1 - Exceptional Talent" visa where you can apply to remain and work in UK without requiring any sponsorship from companies unlike H1B visa in US which requires company sponsorship.

<comment><USER37> UK is, arguably, even more immigrant unfriendly. One of the main reasons for Brexit was to limit immigration and immigrants' rights. And nobody knows where UK gonna be in few years time, after Brexit procedures are completed..

<comment><USER28> Untrue. People living in rural areas (outside major UK cities such as London) are against low-skilled immigrants coming from majorly east european countries (Poland and Romania). Do not confuse it with high-skilled immigration which the Tier 1 visas mentioned above are concerned. Immigrants are welcomed in major UK cities such as London where a vast majority voted to "Remain" in Brexit referendum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> maze-le I think this might actually be a chance for the european tech industry. More people will stay here (in europe) + come here to pursue a career in the tech industry. What is needed additionally is a network of investors and vc-people to realize great ideas.

</comment><comment><USER38> Awesome! They are welcome in the EU, and where the talent is, the investors will follow.

</comment><comment><USER39> Good idea. A lot of corrupt Indian politicians have been sending their progeny to USA with this visa. It has nothing to do with startups but it is putting up visa for sale.

There is nothing wrong in putting visa for sale, but please do not insult many of us who are giving prime of our careers to startups while jumping through complex maze of US visa system.

</comment><comment><USER40> Shit, I am locking myself in my room to study to get a job in silicon valley, what now?

</comment><comment><USER41> Why not Boise? We have population of refugees here looking for an opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER42> Huh, that might be one of the few things I agree with Trump about.

</comment><comment><USER43> Who is supposed to benefit from this? I'm confused.

</comment><comment><USER20> A major reason for US prosperity and world-class science and technologies is the immigration of best minds from all over the world.

Within 12-20 years, China's real GDP will overtake the US, assuming that China's GDP grows at an annual rate 2.5+% faster than the US for the period. This is quite plausible given that the current per capita income of China is only 1/7 of the US and its major focus on R&D. Even now, many of the best Chinese graduates from US universities are returning to China to pursue better opportunities there.

China is spending $409 billion (PPP) on R&D, the second highest in the world after the US and ahead of the EU. This amounts to 2.1% of GDP and very high for their stage of economic development [1]. Their goal, from a variety of sources, is to overtake the US as world's no. 1 and reclaim their historical place.

If you look at PISA, China and the rest of East Asia, together with Singapore, consistently perform at or near the top in math and science, and quite well at reading. Even the best performing US state, Massachusetts, is significantly below those in Math and Science [2].

Relatedly, China is catching up to the US in AI. [3] Most groundbreaking research is still conducted in the Western hemisphere, but East Asia is getting there despite much later starts. Also, many top researchers in Western labs are from East Asia, who may later decide to move back once the circumstances change.

Given the above factors, and only one-fourth the population (330 vs 1390 million), if/when the US cannot take advantage of best minds from these and other countries, would it be able to maintain the technological lead for long?

If the answer is no, how about the military and diplomatic dominance, which almost always follows economic and technological leads?

A possibility: If a larger portion of the GOP wakes up to the above, possibly within the next 10 years, they will start to actively recruit high-skilled immigrants, perhaps with some sort of point-based system as in Canada and Australia. Whether it would be too late or not remains to be seen.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_research_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_research_and_development_spending)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment)

[3] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/technology/china-us-ai- ar...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/technology/china-us-ai-artificial- intelligence.html)

</comment><comment><USER44> Here is the detailed comment by "Immigration Voice" on why the rule is bad for everyone except special interest:

"...The new immigrant entrepreneur parole program will create a yet another class of immigrants, albeit minority partners and working resources in the start-up entity, who will be beholden and entirely dependent on the hand- picked venture capital firms to maintain their status in United States in the parole period and beyond as immigrant entrepreneur will have no clear pathway to permanent residency. The proposed rule does not present a clear and fair system in which immigrants will have the same rights as U.S. workers or U.S. entrepreneurs in the marketplace. Therefore, the immigrant entrepreneur will have no leverage to negotiate the terms of the contract and relationship with and they will be susceptible to exploitation in a novel way as proposed in this regulation. Even if a path to U.S. permanent residency is proposed, it will in all likelihood, be at the expense of the current backlog of employment based immigrants in the permanent residency process.

In essence, the new immigrant would pay (in the form of hefty investment in the firm) for his or her travels to the United States only to remain in bondage relationship to the hand-picked VC firm. If this is not a definition of indentured servitude, then what is? Worse yet, the paroled immigrant has no defined wage requirement as a worker in the firm and has very lenient "income threshold" (400 percent of Federal Poverty Level for family size - irrespective of the prevailing wages of the entrepreneur's job functions) as outlined in the proposed rule. It is well known that such system only increases the demand for new immigrants because of their lower leverage and bargaining power in such relationships, while the American workers and entrepreneurs are discriminated against in the talent ecosystem.

In justifying the rule, DHS presents "significant public benefit" such as entrepreneurship and job creation by immigrant founders. This reference to various studies is grossly misleading in that DHS uses contributions of immigrant founders without crediting the fact that most of these immigrant founders had gained sufficient certainty in their immigration process by obtaining a Green Card prior to making a significant investment in the companies they founded.

The H-1B and L-1B programs were also created under the pretext of "job creation and innovation in the United States" and 25 years after the inception of these programs, the American high-skilled workforce consists of an estimated 1.5 million high-skilled law-abiding immigrants who are captive to their employers and cannot start their businesses and create jobs. This is clearly detrimental to the prospects of our fellow American workers who compete against the captive workforce of skilled immigrants who are favored by bad employers for their lack of job mobility.

For the purpose of bringing in more immigrants from outside, DHS uses the disguise of "significant public benefit" only to pile up fresh immigrants in the Green Card backlogs in which the new immigrants have fewer rights (as will clearly be the case with the proposed class of Entrepreneur parolees). It is ironic that DHS did not use the same "significant public benefit" arguments for providing rights such as job mobility and ability to start their own companies by high skilled immigrants, who already have approved immigrant petitions (I-140), understand the business environment in US, have great ideas (and hold patents in many cases) and have investments to start their businesses. But somehow DHS and Administration is very selective in applying the same "significant public benefit" argument for NOT letting people with approved immigrant petitions to start their companies. This clearly raises doubts as to whether any economic argument by the DHS in the rule making process is trustworthy. The proposed regulation ensures that there will be absolutely zero "significant public benefit". Instead, the proposed regulation is only designed for "significant benefit of hand-picked Venture Capitalists"...."

Complete comment: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwdh5aYDQTwIbGVkR2Z6LV9FVTA...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwdh5aYDQTwIbGVkR2Z6LV9FVTA/view)

<comment><USER16> Thanks for posting this! I too have many of these reservations about the new rule. Totally agree with that comment by Immigration Voice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Earning a lot of money is a pretty damn good proxy for contributing to society. At the very least these people pay some taxes instead of being a drain on society.

<comment><USER46> What, exactly, do landlords contribute to society? Their assets ARE their value. Frankly, my landlord could die and the only people who would care would be the banks.

All money means is that you convinced someone else to give you money at some point in life.

<comment><USER47> >What, exactly, do landlords contribute to society?

Efficient allocation of resources to property development. Although that's just a technical distinction, you can get rid of it by separating out the improved vs unimproved value of land (the former is much less problematic than the latter).

>All money means is that you convinced someone else to give you money at some point in life.

Presumably, the convincing is because giving you money is better than the alternatives.

<comment><USER46> So—this means the value of a landlord is directly proportional to the minimization of their profits.

Unfortunately, that's also more than you can expect from humans who know they can charge more and find tenants.

<comment><USER47> Yeah, that's how capital markets work in general. If you can charge more and still find a tenant, you're replacing low-value land use with higher-value land use. This is particularly true in commercial real estate. Though that's kind of a side issue to my original point: the excess profits attracts and incentivizes similar investment, which increases the cost of investment, which lowers profit down to the general waterline of the economy.

<comment><USER46> If anything, this has convinced me that public transit and other public services should be funded entirely with property tax.

<comment><USER47> Georgism brings up some really fantastic points along this line.

If you want to be technically pedantic, exclude the value of improvements on the property. You don't really want to tax the act of replacing an empty lot with a $10MM factory. You do want to tax the right to use land within the catchment of the various services the state provides. Land isn't produced, so you can't disincentivize producing it.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> God forbid that Americans want to hire and grow American talent, right guys? I mean that's just awful.

<comment><USER49> I'm find it surprising that some Americans don't think their country is big enough or their economy is strong enough to support both local entrepreneurs _and_ foreign entrepreneurs who want to build businesses in the USA. You don't have to choose - you can have both.

<comment><USER48> I don't think people have a problem with foreign entrepreneurs who want to build businesses here. They have a problem with them not hiring the people who actually live here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> You lost me at "Trump administration has plan".</comment>


Apple TV for Torrent Streaming in JS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SamyPesse/tv.js

<comment><USER2> I also thought this was for Apple TV. Even though it isn't, it's theoretically possible to write apps that you control through your Apple TV by taking over one of the existing apps that you don't use. MLB is one of a few good candidates. Many of Apple TV's "apps" are actually javascript apps, though unfortunately they aren't just running a WebView.

When you load the MLB app, it requests javascript and assets from mlb.com and operates on some sort of XML document rather than an HTML DOM. At my office we use 3rd-gen Apple TVs for AirPlay presentations, and I did some experiments with making a custom app that showed a rotating list of clients. We used a Raspberry Pi that functioned as both webserver and DNS, then pointed the Apple TVs' DNS at the Pi to reroute all requests going to mlb.com.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious as to how this works - did you happen to write anything up about that endeavor? There are endless applications to writing web apps for an Apple TV.

(In addition, the second generation Apple TV can be jailbroken and the relevant software reverse engineered if there is anything unclear in what you discovered thus far)

<comment><USER4> I don't know if he had written anything up, but PlexConnect ([https://github.com/iBaa/PlexConnect](https://github.com/iBaa/PlexConnect)) uses a similar process to serve Plex up to the AppleTV via the Trailers app.

<comment><USER3> Sweet, thanks! I used Apple Configurator to configure a proxy on my Apple TV, and am taking apart the apps that are grabbed over HTTP. Cool stuff!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi there, I'm one of the two creators of TV.js

It's nice to see it get some love on HN, given that we just hacked it together from "scratch" yesterday.

I just wanted to clarify a few things briefly, this application is not intended to run on an Apple TV, it's meant to run on Desktops, Laptops and Raspberry PIs.

There's obviously a lot of room for improvement but as of now it works well, but the install process is relatively tedious (ok for developers, not so for others).

The application uses node-webkit to run as an App, we will possibly distribute bundled versions of this in the future.

And for those who may be asking, this is not our Startup, it's just a nice hack, we put together during our own personal Hackathon :)

<comment><USER6> If you have any control over that web page you need to get those over-sized PNGs resized and re-encoded to jpgs. They are 2MB each, they could be about 100KB and do just as good a job at being scaled-down thumbnails. You are burning bandwidth - 8MB just to load the page.

<comment><USER5> I just resized them there now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The title appears to be a bit misleading. This isn't a mod for Apple TV, unfortunately, and requires other hardware.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, although you can install it on other smart TV's

<comment><USER8> I think it is wise to clarify that by smart tv you mean an HTPC or media center, not the actual Smart TV system as used by the likes of Samsung and LG as this is not a Smart TV app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does it support seeking? That was one of the more painful parts to implement when I wrote [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6006334](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6006334)

Downloading from a cloud service provider is more consistent and will probably provide a better experience for most people. But the use case is a bit different: The site linked above is not designed to search or widely share files but only to play them from cloud storage.

</comment><comment><USER10> What does this have to do with Apple TV?

<comment><USER11> Its a similar use case. Could of been titled "Roku for Torrent Streaming in JS". As an unhappy apple TV owner, I was disappointed.

<comment><USER12> Unhappy Apple TV owner? That's not possib...oh wait. Count me in.

Do you notice that streaming _anything_ over in-home sharing is just plain broken? I've got everything in the house talking on 802.11n but trying to play a movie off the Mac just...takes....forever...to buffer?

<comment><USER13> I switched from an Apple TV gen 2 and even the hackability with firecore didn't make up for all the issues I had. I knew within 5 minutes of using my Roku 3 that I had made the right decision (plus I sold the atv on ebay for a hefty markup so it actually paid to make the mistake).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Which JS Torrent library did you have used to download torrent?

<comment><USER15> Looks like peerflix: [https://github.com/AaronO/peerflix](https://github.com/AaronO/peerflix)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Now if only it could download subtitles from subscene...

</comment><comment><USER14> Is there a way to download a torrent and stream it a video instantanely in Javascript?

</comment><comment><USER17> Torrent streaming is nothing new, but this is a great implementation.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is it possible to configure this to stream through my proxy server?

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if sharefest.me can play in this game :)

</comment><comment><USER20> amazing work! it would be even better if we could stream tv shows :)

</comment><comment><USER21> great project & good implementation. very nice!

</comment><comment><USER22> "Disclaimer

There are obvious legal issues, with downloading copyrighted material you do not have a license for. We do not endorse such use cases and bare no responsability for the use people make of it."

ah ah ah ... well you are not doing anythin illegal i guess but :

\- studios could take down your repo since you used copyrighted material ( movie posters ).You should change them ( us CC movies like blender short movies ).

\- you are using Apple brand and associating it with an illegal activity ,they could sue you for that.

I love the idea of using the phone as a remote control , that's really smart ! i'm going to steal that idea for sure !

But could it work online ? i mean if the website is not on a localhost ?

<comment><USER23> Phone as remote control is great - OP might want to think about QR-code as a quick method of inputting the URL. I believe this is how YouTube remote control works.

A further improvement might be to use OPs internet-connected server to proxy the commands so the phone doesn't have to be connected to the same WiFi network, though I accept this is a very limited use-case and incurs some cost.

EDIT: Also - good work, OP!</comment></comment>


Slimy, yet satisfying - <AUTHOR> http://shmichael.com/2010/03/b2e-business-to-enterprise/ <comment><USER2> >Famous examples are Google (search, mail)

Google doesn't charge users for search and mail, they charge companies to show advertisements to users. Wouldn't that make them B2B?

<comment><AUTHOR> So any ad-based company is b2b? I don't think so. In nature of service, number of users, any aspect actually, they are b2c. You just charge them for their attention instead of money, and the cost is fractional.

<comment><USER2> Google's customers aren't the users. Google's customers are the advertisers. The users are the product being sold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What a misleading title. I was all hopped up and ready to read about the nutritional benefits of various insects and why we should eat more beetles and grasshoppers :(

</comment><comment><USER4> What do you find so awful about ASP.net?

<comment><USER5> He probably doesn't know anything about .Net Framework in the first place.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've worked in .NET for 3 years.

ASP.NET is extremely heavyweight, late to implement asynchronous calls, hardly as agile as web platforms such as RoR.

<comment><USER4> I think you need to look further into what ASP.NET actually is! Web Forms is all that you describe (and its often worse). Check out the MVC framework, which replaces the web forms aspect with an MVC one.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been out of the loop for the last year and a half. If you reference me to a succinct overview of what I'm missing, I'll definitely read it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A talk on Ruby internals - Patrick Farley - <AUTHOR> http://mwrc2008.confreaks.com/11farley.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Though the video is about an year and a half old, its quite useful and interesting. Good learning!</comment>


Steam Punk remakes Power Grid With Compressed Air - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/danielle-fong/

<comment><USER2> The innovation, as described by the article:

* power can be stored in tanks of compressed air

* compressing air makes it heat up

* heat dissipation from the hot compressed air reduces storage efficiency

* the solution here is to mix water with the air

* the water stores a great deal of heat, reducing the temperature of the compressed air without reducing the amount of heat stored

* lowering the temperature of the compressed air reduces the heat dissipation, increasing storage efficiency

It's a pretty slick solution. The heat capacity of water is so enormous--I've often been frustrated by it when I'm waiting for water to boil. But here they're turning it around and using it as a tool. It's a very elegant problem/solution fit.

<comment><AUTHOR> And all that without some fancy CO2 storage, new chemicals and all that. It gives the whole ACME Instant "enter something redicolous" just add water approach a whole new spin!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A common theme with a lot of stories about great innovators like this is that they had excellent parents who made decisions to put their children ahead of social convention or the "default".

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems pretty cool, but can someone explain the advantages over a battery? Also why is there so little light in the article photos?

<comment><USER5> I promise the LightSail offices (a former chocolate factory) are much more well lit than the article makes out. However, the editors thought it would be more dramatic -- and steam punkish. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Weel lit or not, damn nice office space you have. I'm jealous. Ah, and before I forget: All the best for the future, i'm convinced you're up to something. Really hope it works commercialy. And damn impressive to go to college aged 12 and drop out of grad-school aged 22! :-)

<comment><USER5> Thanks. Dropped out at 19 actually though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of grad school????? No I'll get myself a hole to hide.... :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool tech, but the article's clumsy attempt to link it to a fashion movement only takes away.</comment>


Isotope - An exquisite jQuery plugin for magical layouts - <AUTHOR> http://isotope.metafizzy.co/ <comment><USER2> Isotope is fairly nice, but it is still missing fluid width on the layout elements. In other words, although it does respond fairly well to horizontal resizing of the browser, it still doesn't do a good job of dynamically adjusting the width of elements horizontally while at the same time stacking them vertically.

I made some custom modifications on the original jQuery masonry plugin to get the effect I needed for my upcoming web app. You can preview it at <http://test.bookflavor.com> (This is an in-development sneak preview so don't expect everything to work perfectly, but you will be able to preview my personal modification of the jQuery masonry plugin.)

<comment><USER3> This site looks great. Seriously, well done.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. I'm glad you like it. I have been feeling quite depressed of late, and a little demotivated about the site, so your positive feedback means a lot to me, and boosts me to get back to work and finish those last few features that are needed.

<comment><USER4> _> a little demotivated about the site_

Don't be! It is both bloody lovely and likely very useful. The magic combo :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 4:28 video of desandro showing it off about a month ago <http://screenr.com/vIt>

Glad to see it finally out!

Direct links to demos:

<http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/basic.html>

<http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/sorting.html>

<http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/images.html>

<http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/filtering.html>

<http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/relayout.html>

<http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/infinite-scroll.html>

<http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/adding-items.html>

<http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/layout-modes.html>

<http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/elements-partial.html>

<http://isotope.metafizzy.co/demos/elements-complete.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> I hate to make such a banal comment, but when I see things like this I cannot wait to redesign my website and use this ultra-cool technologies. After programming for 25 years I am grateful to this plugin and the developer(s) for the excitement that playing with the demo just gave me. Buried under all those years of coding standards this rekindled some of the feelings from the kid in me that would eagerly look forward to the next issue of E.T.I. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronics_Today_International...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronics_Today_International\]E.T.I).

<comment><USER7> This seems like a neat plugin, but I don't understand all the mega excitement.

What am I missing, why is this so earth shattering (read the other comments in this thread)? What is justifying people saying $37 is a "frictionless" price?

What are you planning to do that makes you so excited by this?

<comment><USER4> I think its a combination of the obvious usefulness of this code, combined with the impeccable execution and presentation, combined with its effective employment of bleeding edge technologies. It's basically a "perfect storm" of frontend library awesomeness.

<comment><USER7> I honestly can't tell if you are being serious or not. If you are: expand on "obvious usefulness."

If you aren't, congrats on telling a joke on HN and still getting upvoted.

<comment><USER4> Erm... for sorting and filtering data in a way that implicitly describes the transformations in the presented dataset caused by said sorting/filtering through the animation effects. Information density++

I honestly see this as obvious. I'm not trying to be funny. And I can't work out if you don't think this is obvious, or you don't agree that this would be useful.

Just imagine it on an ecommerce page: [http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=shoes&hl=en&show=...](http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=shoes&hl=en&show=li&lnk=showgrid)

Also imagine using it to fine tune an optimisation problem: you adjust a series of sliders that define the relative priorities you place on certain properties of the items in the dataset, it then does a weighted sort. You can see directly how the changes on the sliders affect the ranking of the items.

If you didn't have the animation it would not be easy to see which items had risen and which fallen. You would have to compare your memory of the order before the change with what you're looking at. This is cognitively very difficult, and it would lead to you toggling the value back and forth endlessly and comparing the order.

Basically any stat or inventory interface in a game would benefit from this. Or any interface where the task is solving an optimisation problem really.

Not _all_ whizzy effects are gimmicks to be sneered at from the terminal. Don't throw the UX baby out with the eye candy bathwater.

EDIT: Another example - when toggling between different properties to sort the dataset by, the amount and speed of the animation describes the correlation of the two properties, _without requiring you to parse any text._ Animation is just another way to impart information that doesn't require reading, alongside color, size, and other spatial/physical properties.

<comment><USER8> I see the argument but honestly, I'm not buying it. It's a valiant attempt to portray this information (a differential) through animation, but it's too noisy and chaotic, particularly when more than a few of the items need to reposition themselves. It looks nice but at least from the demos on that page I don't feel like it's really helping increase the information density of the data being presented.

At the end of the day, I think it's polish that for almost all cases the user will be better served if the animation were to be turned off since it is a waste of time. It is very cool though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you go back to the homepage, he's offering the plugin for commercial use for $37. I like this idea of monetizing the use of plugins, especially ones so well-built. (He's also offering direct support for $17, another interesting idea.)

<comment><USER10> $37 is a joke. I just purchased it b̶e̶f̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶l̶i̶z̶e̶s̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶r̶g̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶o̶r̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶m̶a̶g̶n̶i̶t̶u̶d̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ to support further development of this gem.

<comment><USER9> I'm not really commenting on the price chosen, but the choice to charge for it. I've also created a jQuery plugin or two. I released it for free and now spend a reasonable amount of time answering questions about support, implementation, etc.

For some reason in my mind I had always assumed that open source type things have to be done for free: the building, the support, etc. Seeing someone doing something others helps put that in perspective.

Or, in short: I wish I was smarter about it and more business-savvy.

<comment><USER11> > Or, in short: I wish I was smarter about it and more business-savvy.

Here is a non-solicited biz-savy tip: Tell us the names of your plugins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> very cool. for those interested, a similar plugin is jquery quicksand <http://razorjack.net/quicksand>

</comment><comment><USER4> Very nice! It's a more up to date version of <http://razorjack.net/quicksand/>

<comment> Deal-Tracker Also very helpful. This one seems to have some different features regarding hiding/showing elements. Great stuff!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> From the creator of jQuery Masonry.

</comment><comment><USER13> The buttons on the site are broken. The click events are all waiting for page load which is taking 20 seconds due to an unrelated request timeout for a javascript resource from a different domain. Probably some sort of analytics.

Same thing has been caused by ads on pastie.org lately <http://pastie.org/1538368>

Register your click events BEFORE page load, kiddies.

Especially if you have blocking embedded links to resources that are not in your control.

</comment><comment><USER14> Beautiful. The individual demos are also very impressive. The only thing I didn't really get was the variable sizes option, where the sizes seemed kind of arbitrary (for example on the elements demo, I expected it to be proportional to something, such as the abundance of the element).

Small note, on Chrome (d10) the option highlights on the Elements Complete demo are broken. Buttons still work but the highlight doesn't update correctly.

</comment><comment><USER15> Very interesting library, I'd like to suggest another similar alternative : Rhizosphere, <http://site.rhizospherejs.com> (demos at <http://www.rhizospherejs.com> ).

Compared with Isotope, I think it has some extra features, but also is still missing something.

</comment><comment><USER16> Fantastic. With stuff like this I can see web-app interfaces surpassing (Mac) desktop applications. You might argue they already have, visually, but here the responsiveness is particularly impressive while the complexity is ramped up a bit.

</comment><comment><USER17> Very interesting library. I see some interesting use cases for photos and media browsing. It would be interesting to hear some other suggested use cases where this plugin can be applied over existing solutions.

</comment><comment><USER18> This looks interesting. I've been using his masonry plugin for quite a while now and its worked out very well. Excited to see that masonry appears to hook into isotope as well.

</comment><comment><USER19> How does it run on lower spec computers or devices like iPad? I'm just wondering where the line should be drawn when considering the website performance/user experience.

<comment><USER16> Works fine on iPad. In fact the graphics in the demos make me think this would be perfect for recreating the Star Trek 'tablets'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice. I did something very similar, as an experiment, even before jQuery Masonry, but never released it. I should've known better.

</comment><comment><USER21> I love the ring of "An exquisite..."

</comment><comment><USER22> Pretty nice plugin. The transitions look a bit choppy on Firefox 3.6. Very smooth on Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER23> Looks awesome, trying to find something where i can use that.

</comment><comment><USER24> Very very cool and I even have something to use it on!

</comment><comment><USER25> Dave DeSandro is a web development genius.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is Sridhar

</comment><comment><USER10> Brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER27> really cool. Developing web apps is becoming like a no-brainer. Who builds for desktop when you can create the same responsiveness in a web app.

</comment><comment><USER28> I love how it works with the page zoom.</comment>


Heartbleed vulnerability tester - <AUTHOR> http://filippo.io/Heartbleed

<comment><USER2> Duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7550741](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7550741), which is _still on the frontpage_.</comment>


DataRank (YC S13) Helps Brands Uncover Valuable Business Insights - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2013/07/29/datarank/

<comment><USER2> Does DataRank use any kind of machine learning techniques or is it purely a hand coded heuristic algorithm?

<comment><USER3> It's a hand-coded heuristic algorithm with machine learning! =)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Startup Scriptures (feedback welcome) - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupscriptures.com I started Startup Scriptures as a side project to aggregate great content for people on the entrepreneurship journey. Is this useful? Can it turn into a business? <comment><USER2> I liked the idea. Looks like a great hack into startup knowledge. I would think about adding some sort of crowdsourcing of link adding, to tap into user-generated content, but for an MVP it is great.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a great idea, very useful. I don't see how you could have a business model, though. Think about adding other features as well, such as reviews.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's on our roadmap. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool stuff you've got going on. Why don't you create one specific for coding content?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I've done it. Codingscriptures.com Will be online in a couple of days!</comment></comment>