Apple just updated without asking and locked my iPhone - <AUTHOR>

Just minutes ago, my iPhone 5 just updated itself without asking, and it got locked with an "Activation Error: This device is not registered as part of the iPhone developer Program.". I was still using the ios7 beta 3, and it is/was registered. Why and how the hell is apple doing shit like this without any prompt? <comment><USER2> It's always been the case that iOS _betas_ expire and that you need to always install the latest version.

<comment><USER3> And the betas prompt you to update. But after the last beta (which was the 7.0 GM), update checks within Settings and within iTunes said "you're up to date". Never was there any hint that there was a problem. Furthermore, the cryptic errors hiding the inability of updating to "stock" firmware, requiring a recovery mode restore (despite the last beta being the GM) makes it much more frustrating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did you read the beta TOS? I'm not an iOS developer, but I'll bet you a dollar there's some vague language in there that allows this. Not defending Apple (well, not too much), but I doubt they updated your stuff illegally. Which also answers your other question - if the device had WiFi or any other sort of data access, you probably gave it permission to do updates over the air when accepting the TOS. Or, maybe it was timebombed, as most commercial beta software is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even if I overlook the auto-update part, the phone is still locked, and I don't seem to me able to restore it in iTunes. Hopefully DFU + restore will work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >> be dev >> does not know that it expires. >> face palm.png >> DFU the phone

</comment><comment><USER6> This same thing happened to me - I searched Twitter to find a few having the same problem, but not enough for it to be everyone. It makes sense for it to be linked to the developer program for iOS 7 betas, as I'm on one too.

</comment><comment><USER3> My iphone 4s was running the iOS7 betas. The last update was the GM beta and it never asked to update again (apparently 7.0.2 has been out)?

I was listening to a podcast and the audio was still playing when it locked my screen and demanded activation. Trying to activate, it says "can't connect to servers". Connected to itunes, it says "this software is out of date...". Backup, sync, and restore both give "cannot connect to iphone" messages. I'm currently downloading the 7.0.2 firmware on a 1mbit connection (3 hours to go!) and hoping a DFU boot and alt+restore will work.

Last time I run my podcasts on a device that can disable itself.

Edit: Twitter complaints here:

[https://twitter.com/search?q=iphone%20activation&src=typd&f=...](https://twitter.com/search?q=iphone%20activation&src=typd&f=realtime)

Judging by the amount, I don't think it's a few devs having this problem.

Edit2: Booting to DFU or Recovery mode seems to let you start the restore process. Clicking on restore didn't give the same "can't connect to iphone" error, but oddly said it was going to download 6.1.3 for me. Good sign that alt+restore will work.

<comment><USER7> Same problems. Please report back if the update was successful.

<comment><USER3> EDIT: People are the bigger disccusion thread ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6502756](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6502756)) are saying that it's possible to update without deleting/restore by downloading the ipsw and alt+click the "check for updates button".

\--- Original: \--- Booting to recovery mode ([http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1808](http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1808)) and clicking restore will download the 7.0.2 firmware (no need to alt+restore), wipe the phone, and update to 7.0.2

I was getting offered 6.1.3 and not 7.0.2 because my itunes wasn't updated to 11.1+.

Before booting to recovery mode, copy over your camera roll with image capture/aperture/iphoto just in case your latest backup (iCloud or iTunes) isn't up to date.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> iOS 7 beta 3 expired August 29. It should not be surprising that continuing to run a beta version long after it's supposed to stop working will lead to things breaking.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, interesting to note how this post went from the front page & top of the ask page, to nowhere to be found instantly.

</comment><comment><USER9> I upvoted, because I find it funny and the blame is on us, because we don't complain about mad enough.

Apple just goes along with this, like with many other "technical errors", do you sincerly believe that it's technical error that they collect data of every move you do and sync it with itunes, or that they accept nothing but credit cards, or that they update your phone without asking, or even remove an app that you bought? I could find references to each of these claims, but it's not worth it, because you decide.

But don't get me wrong, as much as I was amused by this, I'm that much sorry for you too on the other side. Because you dear Hackerfriend are getting treated like shit [1] by Apple so much that even cartoons start joking about it. The bad thing is that you can't do much about it other than buying into the other "do not evil" Android phone.

––

[1] [http://www.southparkstudios.com/full- episodes/s15e01-humance...](http://www.southparkstudios.com/full- episodes/s15e01-humancentipad)

<comment><USER10> I'd have thought HN was above this sort of childishness. What a shame.

<comment><USER4> Downvote and move on. Conspiracy theorists gonna conspire...</comment></comment></comment>


Fretsi Social Knowledge Platform for the Future(Fretsi.com) - ahmed-sharkasy

Fretsi is gathering in one place courses, books, videos, events and news that match your interests.
It is the best place to gain knowledge daily without checking multiple websites or look through your RSS feed.
It also help you build a profile that express your skills and knowledge <comment><AUTHOR> Fretsi reflects my skills only by worth or spread any article, video, course, event and book that i got a value from. I Love fretsi :)</comment>


The cities of 2100 - <AUTHOR> http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/globalization/the-cities-of-2100 <comment><USER2> This is an example of projecting current trends and projecting them far into the future. Those of you who remember Popular Mechanics from the 50's can recall flying cars, nuclear energy too cheap to meter, atomic powered planes, domed cities on the moon, etc. Sure, the urbanization trend will continue for a decade or two. But if you project some trends we already know about: an information based economy, ubiquitous very high speed internet, and robotics, the need for super-megalopolises is less apparent. My SO and I live in a town of 7K with a nearby city of 50K, and LA and SF are 4 hours away. If high speed intercity rail became as common as pre-1940's passenger rail, we would be half an hour from fast transit to anywhere. I dont see a need to live with 20M other folks.

<comment><USER3> These trends, projected far into the future, evoke points of conversation along the lines of "The Singularity" which as been a recent hot topic here on HN.

You touch on a great notion that for some trends, projection makes relative sense (especially in IT). Trends like population seem a little less sound to me; these could be easily interrupted by so many destructive factors (disease, politics, genocides...) that it seems somewhat senseless to plot.

I could be wrong though, and the population trends could be more stable than anything.

<comment><USER2> Predictions of population growth have confounded nearly everyone back to Malthus. The interesting trend is that the middle class seem to reproduce at a rate too low to sustain the population. Japan and Italy below the rate to sustain their populations. By 2100 the global population will probably be heading downward from a peak a few decades earlier.

No one really wants to throw a global cataclysm into the stew: nuclear war, pandemic, Yellowstone eruption, asteroid strike.

I remember reading predictions from a hundred years ago. (No, I'm not that old.) It missed all the mini-singularities, even the ones that had been already invented, like the automobile and the telephone.</comment></comment></comment>


Neutron Drive now supports publishing a site in Google Drive - <AUTHOR> https://neutron-drive.appspot.com/edit

<comment><USER2> Awesome! Time to drop kick Dropbox.</comment>


Developing Time-Oriented Database Applications in SQL (2000) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/rts/tdbbook.pdf <comment><USER2> I think it'd be great if databases had a "back in time" feature, ability to view the data in the form how it looked like in the past. Instead you have to always develop it again and again in the schemas - very often keeping complete history is desired. Storage is generally no more an issue in 2015, especially if compression is applied.

Even if you keep full query logs, getting to the state the database was 10th of February 2014 05:34:23 UTC is rather inconvenient and slow.

You wouldn't need bitemporal schemas either with a feature like this.

Another pet peeve in relational databases is a no-compromise hierarchy (and graph) storage. You can usually get fast reads or fast inserts, but there always seems to be a compromise.

<comment><USER3> Oracle flashback ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Flashback](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Flashback)) pretty much does this.

<comment><USER4> I believe you mean Oracle Total Recall ([http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/Oracle_Total_Recall](http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/Oracle_Total_Recall)).</comment></comment></comment>


Zeroing in on Decarbonization - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2020/zeroing-decarbonization-nestor-sepulveda-0115 <comment><USER3> I'm not sure this really advances what we know; the "100% intermittent renewables + storage" strategy does get asymptotically more expensive as you move towards 100%. So the referenced article points out that a blend of dispatchable gas+capture and "advanced" nuclear can produce a cheaper overall result.

But! Nuclear takes ages to build, advanced nuclear even longer, and gas+capture is deployed almost nowhere because there's no negative carbon pricing for it.

So perhaps they are viable in the long term. For 2020? Countries need to be accelerating their wind and solar rollouts and using them to push carbon- emitting sources down the dispatch order as far as possible.

The UK is surprisingly far ahead on this, having eliminated coal for most of the year and running a gas/nuclear/wind mix currently at 30% wind.

<comment><USER4> Ontario, Canada is even further ahead, having eliminated coal completed by 2014. They botched much of it, with setting up bad contracts, which led to a lot of wasted taxpayer dollars. Even still, it shows it's possible and the outcome was fantastic. Complete elimination of smog days and far lower incidence of asthma cases.

<comment><USER5> They also export clean power to US markets at the border. We thank them!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > In work published last year in the journal Joule, Sepulveda and his co- > authors made a powerful case for using a mix of renewable and "firm" > electricity sources, such as nuclear energy, as the least costly, and most > likely, route to a low- or no-carbon grid.

> Recognizing that "absolutes exist in people's minds, but not in reality," > Sepulveda sought to develop a tool that might yield an optimal solution to > the decarbonization question.

The second part, I think, is very important to keep in mind when discussing whether or not to use nuclear to help solve the climate crisis. I'm not a big fan of nuclear, but if deploying huge amounts of it is what it takes to get us to zero carbon emissions by 2050, I'm for it. Yes, nuclear has its risks, and it's not renewable, but I think it would be worth pursuing as a stepping stone to get us to net-zero emissions sooner, while we figure out how to power the entire world via truly renewable energy. IMO, the potential risks of failing to address climate change rapidly enough are _much_ larger than the risks of wide-spread nuclear power.

<comment><USER7> Nuclear is renewable through uranium seawater extraction: [https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514](https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514)

<comment><USER8> The uranium in seawater is same as uranium in the ground, not renewable.

<comment><USER7> Uranium in seawater is available in much larger quantities. We would not consume the amount of uranium over the next billion years even if we used nuclear for all of humanity's energy demands [1]. It is renewable in all but the most literal sense.

Uranium in seawater is the same as the hydrogen in the sun: it's not renewable. The hydrogen in the sun will eventually be fused to such an extent that no further energy will be released. There is no such thing as a renewable energy source because the laws of thermodynamics dictate that there is a finite amount of usable energy in the universe.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium- seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/#34309e4a159a)

<comment><USER6> While I agree with you that it's virtually impossible for humans to use up the uranium in sea water at our current energy consumption rate, I think it's worth thinking about that if we had "unlimited" energy, we might use orders of magnitude more of it than we currently do.

That being said, for that to be an issue, we'd have to increase our energy consumption at least 1000x, and if we get to the point of using that much energy, it seems likely we'll also have advanced technologically to such an extent that we'll figure out another solution. It's just an interesting exercise to consider how what seems impossible today, might be totally routine in 10/100/1000 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm in favor of an 80/20 policy. 80% renewables, 20% nuclear.

The thing is, we're already at 20% nuclear. So the "debate" over it is largely a distraction/delay-tactic.

<comment><USER10> But that doesn't work. If you go 80% renewable, there will be long periods where 100% of demand is being satisfied by the renewables (because they are so variable). This makes the economics of nuclear just horrible, as it needs to be selling its power at a good price most of the time to make ends meet. Nuclear and high penetration renewables just don't mix well.

<comment><USER11> You still need storage when you go 80% renewable, so any extra production by renewables can be used to generate hydrogen or charge batteries or something so that the nuclear plants can still sell their energy. It's not like they don't get any subsidies today, there is no reason why they shouldn't get any in the future.

It's just a question of what is cheaper or faster to achieve. I don't know enough details to say either way.

<comment><USER12> I don't think here are available storage solution for renewables and even if there was it would need to be a solution scalable without a risk of running out of resources to make the batteries. Renewables are great but they work on the shoulders of nuclear/coal which need to pick up the load when there is no sun/wind. Renewables feel like paying more for getting less with different but not necessarily less pollution issues.

<comment><USER13> Storage doesn't have to mean batteries. I'd have thought approaches like pumped hydro [1] could scale pretty well. I vaguely recall a similar story from a couple of years back that basically involved lifting giant concrete blocks.

[1] [http://www.british-hydro.org/pumped-storage/](http://www.british- hydro.org/pumped-storage/)

<comment><USER12> If those solutions were viable at scale then countries like germany or england using lot of renewables and coal (gas or gb) would have been using them already.

<comment><USER10> They'd only be using them now if they cost less than gas + current carbon taxes.

The question is: at what level of carbon taxes would nuclear displace gas, vs. what level would renewables + storage displace gas. In the US, CO2 taxes would have to exceed $300/ton for new nuclear to displace gas CC baseload, and for intermittent applications the needed tax would be far higher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wish we did less modelling and more shutting down coal plants in favor of basically anything else.

<comment><USER5> Not snarky: when was the last time you called your utility to tell them you demand renewables? Or your state (for renewable mandates) and federal (national policy) Congressional reps? Protest at a coal plant?

Wishing is cheap, action pays the bills. I do all of the above. And there are signs of progress. The federal gov approved one of the largest PV plants in the US for California. Nevada is prepping for a 1.2GW PV facility with 600MW of storage.

Utility won't switch off fossil fuels? Get rooftop solar and capture every damn incentive you can, or convince your local government to form a coop or muni utility to source clean power with a PPA at scale.

<comment><USER14> When did anyone called a large company to ask them to operate differently ? and succeeded into being heard ?

<comment><USER15> "Hi regulated utility, I'd like to pay more for a premium product that your government overseers will have no problem with your providing." :)

Less jokingly, actions like contacting a company (especially as a customer or as a potential customer) is more effective then you think- companies want to keep their customers happy and it's pretty well assumed that one customer complaining means many more (probably thousands) thinking the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here is the referenced article if anyone is interested: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/kj3ny5wk93bxj44/Sepulveda%20et%20a...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/kj3ny5wk93bxj44/Sepulveda%20et%20al%20-%20Firm%20low- carbon%20resources%20-%20Joule%202018%20with%20SI.pdf?dl=0)

</comment><comment><USER17> It's not enough to reach zero on carbon emission. There is way too much in the air already that we need to get out of it and somehow bind it to the (sub)surface of our planet to keep it out. And we need to find a way to do that on scale and in an economical viable way or it will never happen.

</comment><comment><USER18> I saw 3 interesting diagrams on Wikipedia that basically tell a big part of the story.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions) * [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(nominal\)_per_capita) * [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population)

Turns out that the 3 countries who make up for the biggest share in greenhouse emissions are:

* China * The United States * India

Moreover, this graph (a) tells you that the U.S. has the highest C02 emissions per capita whereas India has the lowest CO2 emissions per capita in 2017. Way lower then many developed countries such as the EU28. A Chinese individual have emitted less then a German or South-Korean citizen in 2017.

(1) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions#/media/File:Total_CO2_emissions_by_country_in_2017_vs_per_capita_emissions_\(top_40_countries\).svg)

The bigger story is in the 3rd graph: population per country as part of global population:

* China: 18.1% * India: 17.5% * U.S.: 4.24%

Every other country below the top-8 only constitutes less then 2% of the global population.

Now, you can draw a few quick conclusions from that.

The total energy consumption in China is far less driven by individual consumption, but is more a factor of the total population. Lots of small consumers drive consumption towards a heck of a big number. Coal is the obvious answer as far as the Chinese are concerned because it provides a cost efficient way of scaling energy production to cater to 18.1% of the World's population.

Moreover, China isn't a particular rich country if you simplify things and use GDP per capita as a metric. Most of the people are relatively poor by Western standards, so their footprint in terms of how they live and consume isn't anywhere near what it is in Europe or North America.

You'd see the exact same dynamic at play in India.

As far as China and India are concerned, they will keep preferring coal unless clean solutions that could cater to the same vast demands become equally or more cost effective and scalable such that they can easily replace coal.

Then there's the U.S. with only 4.24% of the world's population, it manages to end up in the top-3 of most polluting countries, right after China and before India. Moreover, an American seems to have emitted twice the amount of CO2 as a Chinese person did in 2017. And finally, Americans are part of the top 10 richest individuals in the world if you look at GDP per capita.

Here you're looking at a different problem: individual consumption rather then total population. Whereas China and India can't readily reduce energy consumption because of their large population, the U.S. can easily reduce it's huge dependency on energy if individual consumption can be radically reduced.

The big hurdle here is that the biggest consumers of energy are those that fear they will have the most to lose: quality of life through existing conveniences and affordances that they feel will go away because they aren't sustainable. At this point, the whole debate often turns emotional and ends up in yak shaving or bike shedding.

The only other pathway for the U.S is similar to China and India: find a cost effective clean source of energy that can easily replace fossil fuels such as coal.

I would put this moral conundrum in front of you: If drastically cutting back emissions through a better management of personal consumption is clearly within your power and can be achieved today; then why refrain from doing so and passing on the responsibility to energy producers?

This doesn't just apply to the U.S. but to any country with significant CO2 emissions per capita, but it needs to be pointed out that countries with a small fraction of the global population with a high CO2 emission number per capita are those that can and will have the biggest impact on the problem, which contrasts seriously with countries in the opposite situation.

Of course, I understand that my whole expose ignores many, many other complexities that affect the balances such as global emission trade, global transportation and global trade (import/export).

My main point was to demonstrate why seemingly irrational decisions elsewhere in the world - such as investing in even more coal-based power plants - <USER2> driven by very different regional economics; and that battle cries such as "reduce carbon dependency" are blanket statements you can't impose everywhere in the world without adjusting it's meaning to the local or regional context.</comment>


Algorithms: it's got what hopeless romantics crave - <AUTHOR> http://jtame.com/2013/05/12/algorithms-its-got-what-hopeless-romantics-crave/

<comment><USER2> I think the use of these heuristics doesn't necessarily contribute to the success of these matches. Essentially, you get people who don't really believe they can be "matched," and instead use these sites as a way to meet new people. Then you have the people who desperately want to believe they work and work to make that "match" work out. Adding words like "algorithms" and "science" behind this process is nice as a virtual ice breaker (i.e. "Hey, you like Game of Thrones too? That's awesome.") but essentially, the people who end up in a relationship are the ones who can already see themselves being with whoever they're matched up with.

That isn't to say that any of this is bad. And these sites do a pretty great job at that ice breaker, but I think it's the anonymity that is really key here. Starting off with a small bit of information, and eventually learning more and more about a potential match. Let the social identity act as a means of verifying real people, I guess, but don't expose that. Let users do that for you. And in turn, it might make people find more interesting matches - people they like talking to before maybe even seeing them. Just some thoughts off the top of my head.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone actually believe that online dating algorithms reliably predict relationship success? I've always seen it as merely a weak signal of compatibility, and I imagined other dating site users saw it the same way.

It seems lots of people who don't use dating sites are under the impression that everything is "automated". It's not like you entrust your entire relationship to the algorithm, only dating the person with the highest match %. Rather you look at a ton of profiles, many with a high match %, but some with a low match %, and message the ones you like the look/sound of. From that point we're back to the old monkey-brain dating algorithms that have been around since the paleolithic. (But fair play to OKCupid, they have a decent idea of my tastes - the people with whom I share the highest match % seem consistently interesting).

Adding "identity" seems to be the exact opposite of what every dating site user wants. Women would probably like more safety features, but I don't think anyone wants a "log in with Facebook" button.</comment>


Reserve the 418 status code - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-nottingham-thanks-larry-00.html <comment><USER2> I actually use the 418 code in a simple API we use for IOT devices. I wrote a small program that runs on Raspberry Pis that checks a HTTP endpoint and turns power on and off to a room depending on whether the room is booked out. I wanted a status code on the API that could only possibly be generated on purpose, so if it receives a 418 response it knows to turn off the power; any other response, failure etc turns the power on (so we don't have a room out of use if it breaks).

Also it's fun :)

<comment><USER3> I was hoping for a minute that the IOT device was a connected teapot...

<comment><USER4> I solved this with a WeMo plug, which gives me an app and alexa control. Used for electric hair iron of wife, and coffee pot as backup plan with timeout setting, and also saving us driving back home for the "did you unplug the iron" moments.

Both appliances actually have their own auto-off, but I like redundancy.

<comment><USER5> But does it respond to HTCPCP?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why is 418 the particular target? Just because of RFC2324?

> IANA should also typographically distinguish "Unassigned" and "Reserved" in > the registry descriptions, to prevent confusion.

This I can get onboard with. Honestly, I've never seen a 418 easter egg, but I'd think it would be an HTTP spec violation if it didn't at least conform to the higher level 4xx definition (Client Error) :)

<comment><USER7> An example of an existing easter egg (for reference): [https://www.google.com/teapot](https://www.google.com/teapot)

<comment><USER8> Is there a scenario where people end up there?

<comment><USER9> Yes, ^this^ one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Many API developers misuse/overload HTTP status codes when they should actually be using application specific status codes delivered via a wrapper to the response.

Any time an API returns a correct response the HTTP response code should be 2xx. Many developers use 4xx status codes to indicate things like data validation errors or other things that are not part of the HTTP transport.

HTTP is the transport layer, and any application specific scenarios are best handled with a custom error namespace that can be returned within any 2xx HTTP response.

Generally speaking, if the HTTP layer is returning 5xx you have a server problem and client code should not know anything about that or do anything but retry. If the HTTP layer is returning 4xx then the client is likely poorly designed or misconfigured.

But for typical client operation, when there is no server error or client design/configuration error, HTTP responses should be 2xx or 3xx and any additional detail should be handled in an application-specific way, not by overloading the meaning of HTTP response codes, which are for transport- related concerns only.

<comment><USER11>
        Many developers use 4xx status codes to indicate things
        like data validation errors or other things that are not
        part of the HTTP transport.

You mean like a form validation error? Surely an invalid request is a bad request. No?

<comment><USER10> > Surely an invalid request is a bad request.

Invalid to whom? Should a form submitted with a username that already exists in the system get a 500 response code? What's the server error?

<comment><USER12> I'd go with 409 Conflict, but I'd also accept 400 Bad Request

Incidentally, the RFC for 409 makes it quite clear that this touches the application layer:

> Conflicts are most likely to occur in response to a PUT request. For > example, if versioning were being used and the representation being PUT > included changes to a resource that conflict with those made by an earlier > (third-party) request, the origin server might use a 409 response to > indicate that it can't complete the request. In this case, the response > representation would likely contain information useful for merging the > differences based on the revision history.

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-6.5.8](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-6.5.8)

In any case, getting pedantic about what's "an error" and using 200 OK for everything that didn't fail at the transport layer is a super frustrating experience regardless of whether or not it's semantically correct. Please don't do that to consumers of your API.

<comment><USER10> Versioning a resource, per WebDAV is a very specific application.

> using 200 OK for everything that didn't fail at the transport layer is a > super frustrating experience regardless of whether or not it's semantically > correct

The semantics of my application's protocol do not necessarily mirror the semantics of HTTP, nor are the descriptive statuses semantically similar, since most HTTP statuses are simply about transport (even though a few touch on the "application" of URIs as resources).

<comment><USER12> There's no mention of WebDAV in that RFC.

Would it kill you to send back a 400 status code upon an error? Having to check for { isError: true } or something similar is obnoxious. I don't see the value gain of responding 200 OK when the operation was not successful.

<comment><USER10> > when the operation was not successful.

Well, do you care about all the successful and unsuccessful aspects of TCP that underlie the connection? No, you just care that it was successful, allowing the HTTP request. Assuming that is successful, then your API "operation" can occur and return its result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We can never fix the "Referer" header, and we have accepted it! So, why not accept 418 for what it is ? Let it at-least complete its 20th year.

HTTP/1.1 418 I'm a Teapot

</comment><comment><USER14> Yeah, I'm sorry, but now we need to standardize BREW HTTP verb.

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324)

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm somewhat interested in spec writing and legal matters. It seem to me, that this rfc is overly verbose given the change it proposes. And (I think, correct me if I'm wrong) rfc:s are generally supposed to be as short as possible.

For example, "IANA should also typographically distinguish "Unassigned" and "Reserved" in the registry descriptions, to prevent confusion." seem like a good idea but is an unrelated matter.

</comment><comment><USER16> Of course nowadays it actually _could_ be a teapot.

<comment><USER17> Underrated comment right here</comment></comment>


Firebase hosting has been down for more than 2 hours now - <AUTHOR> https://status.firebase.google.com/incident/Hosting/18002?test <comment><AUTHOR> 4 hours now 0_0</comment>


Executive Assistant to the CEO – Application Due March 27th - <AUTHOR> https://jobs.lever.co/unreasonablegroup/3fd33c31-da24-4184-802b-48be1b4d82b2 <comment><AUTHOR> "Unreasonable" is the word! I thought this was a farce, but apparently it is not. I imagine the job description will go away after the deadline, but it's so long, I'm reluctant to paste the entire text here. Here's a copy in pastebin: [http://pastebin.com/QbNdHs4x](http://pastebin.com/QbNdHs4x)

Company: [https://unreasonablegroup.com/](https://unreasonablegroup.com/)

GYSHIDO: [http://gyshido.com/](http://gyshido.com/)</comment>


What Go Might Be Like With Generics - <AUTHOR> http://play.golang.org/p/SL7mMdtDiM

<comment><USER2> Is the only argument that Go users can come up with against generics is that they don't like the syntax? The pretentious nature of the Go community really puts me off from the language, especially when combined with some of the pretentious designs of Go itself.

<comment><USER3> No, the argument is that it's unclear how to fit it into the language.

Typically, generics are implemented using either code generation (causing code bloat) or type erasure (which requires boxing the type). They're not satisfied with either.

<comment><USER4> The "code generation = code bloat" argument really fails when you consider that the code generated for a generic function is code that _would be written by hand_ in the absence of generics.

Compare:

        map f [1, 2, 3]
        map g [1.0, 2.0, 3.0]

Versus:

        integer_map f [1, 2, 3]
        double_map  g [1.0, 2.0, 3.0]

In _both_ cases, you wind up with specialized versions of map (one for Integers and one for Doubles). The benefit of the generic version is that the programmer must only implement map once, and the compiler handles specializing it for various types. Without generics, the programmer has to write the specialized version for every type he needs the function for. This creates more tedium for the programmer, and does _not_ reduce bloat in any way.

 _Caveat lector_ : Though my examples above are written in Haskell, I don't have enough knowledge of GHC internals to know whether it performs specialization this way. Nonetheless, it could be a reasonable approach for Go.

<comment><USER5> It seems like you disagree with Russ Cox.[1] Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with compilers to reconcile the disagreement. Any thoughts?

[1] - [http://research.swtch.com/generic](http://research.swtch.com/generic)

<comment><USER4> In this regard, C++ templates suffer from two problems. First, C++ templates are far more general than just generic types (in fact, they're Turing complete). Second, and the cause of lots of redundancy, is that C++ has no module system. C++ has no module system, and instead relies on the linker to provide functionality that could reasonably be provided at compile time given a sufficient module system. I'd say that generics in Go could avoid both of these problems: first by being _just_ generics, and second by leveraging the module system.

Yes, generics will increase compile times. I seriously doubt it will increase compile times by an integer multiple, and most people probably won't even notice.

I'm not entirely sure what's going on that is causing the instruction cache to be underutilized, but it seems to me that the only way to avoid it is to also avoid abstraction in general. As usual, there's a tradeoff between performance and maintainability -- that's nothing new. Pick the appropriate abstractions for your use case.

Russ Cox is wrong in this case because his sample consists of one language: C++. Go is not C++, so it's a mistake to assume it will suffer from the same problems.

To get an idea of how generics could be reasonably implemented, take the Clay programming language as an example: [http://claylabs.com/clay/](http://claylabs.com/clay/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> is this trying to solve a particular problem or just pandering to the "... but generics!" crowd of trolls?

because it doesn't look like it's solving anything, it feels positively ugly, and there's no way we'll every shut those people up no matter how hard we try. there's no generics solution that will do that.

thankfully go's authors don't usually favour the internet's opinion on these matters, or we'd be dealing with something even uglier now.

<comment><USER7> People who want generics, to solve real problems, in Go are _trolls_?

Gosh that word has lost all meaning at this point.

<comment><USER6> <T>. they know who they are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Eventually those who need static typing and parametric polymorphism will switch to Haskell anyway, where both are done in a much better way, both syntactically and implementation wise.

</comment><comment><USER9> It is undeniable that generics are a quite demanded feature for golang.

We'll see how the language evolves, but I can't see them coming for a "long" time.

<comment><USER10> I fully support language specialization -- that is kinda the point, it all ends up bits in the end. Rust is a completely different animal than Go yet I think both are awesome!

The idea that all languages have to cater to all people is silly. Generics are ALWAYS a trade-off. None is hard for developers, C++ style is terrible for compile (tons of code-gen, macro crap, duplication, de-duplication stages), and Java style (box-box-box-box) is slow at runtime.

The misunderstanding that generics are free and there lack of inclusion was an oversight rather than a choice is misguided. The Go team aren't fresh faced neophytes, they move with purpose.

Additionally -- if you want lots of features, there are LOTS of ways great languages for you! Leave the small, crazy cadre of people who don't mind C, think Lua is awesome and think Go is great to their (own) devices, we will be OK.

<comment><USER11> you're awesome! you totally get the idea, people if the language does not fit your needs move on!!!! I mean seriously making all the fuss about generics even though that Go is being used in major projects (Cloudflare, UK.gov) yet we see more people arguing that is not right.

I'm glad Rob Pike and Co. don't give a rats a __about such opinions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have been writing Go daily at work for about a year and a half. It is now my primary language, and my default choice for any new projects, the way Python used to be. Before that, I come from a background in functional programming (and still find functional programming to be my favorite paradigm).

It seems to me that there are two disjoint sets of people: those who write Go regularly, and those who complain about generics in Go.

Of course, you can interpret this either way you wish!

1) Perhaps those latter people would like Go despite its lack of generics if they only bothered to get familiar with idiomatic Go.

2) Perhaps the lack of generics is precisely what prevents them from writing Go on a daily basis.

But as someone who actually does write Go on a daily basis, and has for a year and a half, I can honestly say that I've only ever missed them a handful of times. And I say this as a functional programmer who is used to being able to call "map" everywhere.

In fact, if I had to prioritize the things that I wish I could change about Go, generics would not be in the top three - not even in the top five[0]. They're just really something that I don't miss anymore.

[0] I could tell you what they are, but that'd be making it too easy - give Go a shot, long enough to realize you really don't need generics as much as you think you do, and then you'll probably have a good idea of the good, bad, and ugly when it comes to Go.

<comment><USER13> I've written several non-trivial Go programs, the most recent of which was a server that solved substitution ciphers (for use in subtitle OCR).

I tried to write nice idiomatic Go code. And I'm usually pretty good at adapting my brain to strange languages—I've positively enjoyed Haskell, constraint programming in Mozart, distributed functional programming in Elixir, and quite a few other strange things. (To be fair, I never did get comfortable in Prolog.)

And try as I might, every time I write a couple thousand lines of Go, I walk away in frustration. I love so much about the language, but my actual code keeps disappearing under the weight of error handlers, and stupid little iteration/transformation functions that I have to write over and over again thanks to the lack of generics. (Sometimes I get lucky, and an interface fits well.)

This means that every time I wander down a wrong path (and it's possible to wander down quite a few when messing with OCR algorithms), I end up having to tear up more code than I'd like. It's not fun.

Every time I say this, Go programmers say something like, _give Go a shot, long enough to realize you really don 't need generics as much as you think you do._ But after three serious attempts, it's clear that the programs in my head were never meant to be implemented in Go. Which is too bad: It's a nice language in so many ways.

<comment><USER10> I have OCR in production live written in pure Go. It does OCR on small specific portions of images to get keywords out to be put into a DB (1B+ page scans). We use tesseract for full page scans (when needed, when our OCR fails). But Go was so easy to write, and so fast to get live for small page partials that we wrote it in a few weeks (idea to live, just implementing well known algorithms) to avoid having to deal with tesseract overhead in the average case.

I am curious about specifically where you got bound up -- and how we managed to via ignorance or blind luck avoid these rough patches. Additionally, I am not 100% sure I understand why you refactor cycle is so brutal. That generally is one of the things I enjoy about Go, lightspeed refactor / dev / test cycles.

Good thing no one is asking you to use Go, Haskell is always around (and Elixir, I guess... I am too used to Erlang syntax, Elixir feels like an ill fitting glove) and we need lots of great languages -- and they SHOULD feel different and some shouldn't be a great fit for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> <T>errible to my eyes.

</comment><comment><USER15> tl;dr: <T>

<comment><USER16> How about this instead? [http://play.golang.org/p/hED7faR0q_](http://play.golang.org/p/hED7faR0q_)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I use generics every day in typescript. I'm waiting to use go until it has them.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm more interested in what Go might be like without whiners.</comment>


An Aging Boy Band Calls It Quits, but Japan Can't Let Go - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/20/world/asia/japan-smap-breakup.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=image&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <comment><USER2> People reading this should probably know about Arashi. SMAP is big time but Arashi is REALLY entrenched in Japanese media. They have their own game show, which is quite fun to watch, they appear in TV and films frequently. They are in many ways better, songs more catchy. Every member of SMAP is talented in some way but they aren't all good singers despite their popularity in music and culture. In fact, Japan is interesting in it's almost a kind of known joke that some member's of SMAP singing and dancing kind of sucks. Every band usually has a weak link on board but it never really matters. People are drawn to the frenzy, the popularity and enjoy sharing the enthusiasm for what it is.

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought SMAP had a young version, ready to graduate into the real SMAP as the core members slowly got too old, so that the brand could live on, similarly to how Morning Musume are still around as a brand, though none of the original cast is present.

<comment><USER4> Morning Musume was always about churning through members:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_Musume#/media/File:MMa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_Musume#/media/File:MMataglanceEng.jpg)

We always joke at work that the interns get younger every year. They don't, we all get older. But with MoMusu, they really do get younger every year.

I always wondered about the business model. As a high school student, I didn't have money to buy albums or go to concerts. As an adult, I do. But I'm not going to go see a group of 12-year-olds perform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like SMAP. They are good guys that bring a happy atmosphere to every event where they happen to show up.

My tribute to SMAP: a GIMP job of a picture I found on the net:

[http://www.kylheku.com/~kaz/smap-2.png](http://www.kylheku.com/~kaz/smap-2.png)

Enjoy.

<comment><USER6> That is really a nice picture. If you don't mind my asking - How did you do that in GIMP? I'm a newbie in GIMP and would like to know. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _"If we let them go and disband, it means Japan is finished."_

Why does this happen?

 _Many of their most ardent fans are women who grew up with them._

This can't be the only reason. Why do people have such a hard time letting go?

<comment><USER8> The quote in the article is hyperbole. It's not unlike fans of *NSYNC or whatever other boy band you might know--there are super fans who indulge in the drama. Also, television personalities in Japan begin to feel like part of the family, as the bangumi format encourages a sense of hanging out together on a regular basis. SMAP is very much a part of the family, so to speak.</comment></comment>


Web Search Using Small Cores: A paper on Microsoft Bing Architecture - <AUTHOR> http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/09/27/WebSearchUsingSmallCores.aspx

<comment><USER2> Interesting stuff. Does anyone know easy way to see the instructions-per-cycle on a running (linux) server?

Or is it necessary to instrument each application with hires timers and count instructions between the timer points?

<comment><USER3> I don't know about Linux, but on FreeBSD you can use pmcstat to instrument a running process; see pmc(3) and pmcstat(8).

Linux probably has something similar.

        kldload: can't load hwpmc: Exec format error

Meh, need a custom kernel from the look of it, HWPMC_HOOKS isn't in GENERIC :(

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the pointers.

Looks like the linux/ubuntu equivalent may be 'pfmon', also not enabled in the stock kernel.

I think this is the relevant project page: <http://perfmon2.sourceforge.net/man/pfm_get_cycle_event.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> it's a paper on using Atom cores instead of more beefy ones.

The researchers just choose to use Bing for their test data instead of mysql or something else... and their point was that bing was more cpu intensive, so the results would be more solid.</comment>


Show HN: DeepNamer – An AI-Powered Domain Name Generator - <AUTHOR> https://deepnamer.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> DeepNamer is an AI-powered domain name generator and deep brainstorm platform that can help you find a catchy and creative domain name for your business for free. DeepNamer is built based on a deep sequence-to-sequence (i.e., keywords- to-domain) architecture, which utilizes the most recent natural language processing algorithms such as dynamic recurrent neural networks.

<comment><USER2> Cool product. Did you find deepnamer.com using deepnamer?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes exactly, it was one of the points we said YES we have a product we can rely on. TBH it was not easy to choose since the product suggesting name and our name need to be really good or special but when we narrow down the results for us, we went with this that was generated by our AI.

here is the few more that came to our short list all generated by our AI:

\- neunamer.com \- Newnamer.com \- Genamist.com \- DeepoName.com \- Deepucer.com \- Deeperator.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I tried it like I tried all the other similar name generator that I have cross the path with. That's the firs time that I find the proposal really good. Good job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the comment, let us know if you have any feedback or comments.</comment></comment>


The Mouse That Called Home - <AUTHOR> http://www.58bits.com/blog/2013/08/11/mouse-called-home

<comment><USER2> A quote from the piece: "If I bought a fridge, would the manufacturer force me to register my product before turning on the compressor? Or if I bought a car - would the carmaker force me to hand over my personal details before allowing me to start the engine?"

The answer of course, is "yes", if we do nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> agreed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Surprised if the feature is that wanted (I would be turning it off if it was on by default, to be honest), that no one has written a third party tool to do it.

<comment><USER4> I use KeyRemap4Macbook to control the Razer functions on my Mac. I refuse to install their crapware/spyware.

[https://pqrs.org/macosx/keyremap4macbook/](https://pqrs.org/macosx/keyremap4macbook/)</comment></comment>


What exactly is an entrepreneur? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2014/02/our-schumpeter-columnist

<comment><USER2> This is so true: Countries with a lot of small companies are often stagnant. You don't want your company to stay small. You want it to dominate the market by getting big and overthrowing all the competitors. Yes, the strongest survive.</comment>


The Internet Economy - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cdixon/the-internet-economy-fc43f3eff58a <comment><USER3> I've been reading "Darknet" via Kindle and it has this idea of "autonomous companies" that do high frequency trading, shuffle around money, and eventually even start "replacing" people by email and video chat.

As we have more and more of these systems tied together - usually via APIs - <USER2> think it's getting more more likely where things can "just work" transparently.

If I need gas for the car, it can go get it, billing to my account on file. If I need diapers for the kid, the system detects that, orders them automatically, delivers them automatically, etc. There are few humans involved anywhere.

It's a fascinating and has society-shaking implications.

<comment><USER4> I agree that will be a start. But knowing that you need more diapers isn't particularly revolutionary - just order the same ones, we are almost there - just have to connect the cabinet to Amazon dash.

What will blow my mind is when we have computers that can take an idea - "shit, I just had a kid, I need diapers" \- and successfully mimic my purchase criteria and find the diapers that I would've found in my own research process. It wouldn't need me to define my purchase criteria - it would already know me well enough to successfully predict in most cases.

At some point we'll have mind readers. Be careful of thinking you want a jelly donut - Postmastes is already on the way.

<comment><USER5> > At some point we'll have mind readers. Be careful of thinking you want a > jelly donut - Postmastes is already on the way.

For years, Target has been trying to find likely pregnant women based on shopping patterns. There's a strange anecdote where a daughter received pregnancy-related ads and it turned out she was actually pregnant! NYT article discussing this: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping- habits.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping- habits.html?_r=0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ambient Intelligence is the phrase a lot of people are searching for when talking about this stuff. There's also a bunch of stuff about Second-order Cybernetics and Adaptive and Collaborative Multi-Agent Systems people should seek out and read.

I've co-opted some terms and am now speaking of this as Second-order IoT. Where previously we were concerned about our personal networks and systems, this next wave will be concerned about how these systems work together and enlist one another to carry out some task or contract autonomously. Chaining these contracts is where the cool stuff comes in. Observing and influencing these systems and letting them create efficient networks on our behalf is the reason we should be building this.

Agents are what people are talking about when discussing bots, and agents are basically the AI program that can conscript if not completely become part of the operating service on a device. Like little plug 'n play souls that carry along information about you and what you need within some context.

For instance, when you step out of your autonomous vehicle, it can use a service (Playa) to look up physical interfaces offering recharging. It will be able to negotiate and transact a recharge on your behalf, then contract itself out to an uber-like service while you sleep to help pay for itself.

I'm building the infrastructure/platform to support all of this, giving rise to a fully autonomous global logistics and supply chain -- I call it Playa ([http://getplaya.com/](http://getplaya.com/)) It's at first an open service exchange (marketplace) for autonomous intelligent agents to learn from us, and act on our behalf with other services and agents (both digital and physical). - If Artificial General Intelligence is the ruler, then Playa is its throne.

Here is the project site [http://getplaya.com/](http://getplaya.com/) and here is our Baqqer site if anyone wants to sign up and follow our progress: [https://baqqer.com/projects/playa](https://baqqer.com/projects/playa)

We've also started a meet-up group in San Francisco if you want to learn more: [http://www.meetup.com/sfaiml/](http://www.meetup.com/sfaiml/)

If you're interested in building this vision of the future, please reach out. I'm happy to grab a coffee in San Francisco and chat more about the current state as well as long term social and political implications of this if you'd like.

<comment><USER7> The next step would be doing these interactions - service registration, search, negotiation, usage, payments, certification etc. without a trusted, centralized intermediary. Have a look at the [https://ethereum.org](https://ethereum.org) project to see how this could work out. If these kind of distributed systems for messaging, data distribution and storage as well as consensus scale, intelligent agents will be able to interact with services and each other faster, efficiently and more secure than before.

<comment><USER6> I definitely think ethereum is a cool project. Unfortunately, I'll be a contrarian and say I don't think the answer is a completely distributed system. I think there is a few mixed options, but the totality must collapse to a central authority at some point.

<comment><USER7> I'm not a maximalist either. Distributed networks are always less efficient than hierarchical systems at specific tasks. Some projects, such as the Bitcoin lightning network or Ethereums' Raiden therefore try to build faster payment or state networks on top of the distributed systems with them as point of last resolve in case of conflicts of cooperation or availability. Doing the inverse of this might also lead to interesting results.

<comment><USER6> What are you working on now? Care to reach out and chat? I'd like to pick your brain about some things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Google of course needs a vibrant web for its search engine to remain useful

So why did they build Android on top of Java then? Wouldn't it have been much smarter to build Android on top of Javascript+HTML where suitable, possibly extending the standards where needed?

All these "apps" nowadays represent a move away from the web.

<comment><USER9> I don't think cpu were ready back then. Sure you had that blackberry thing using the equivalent of the modern embedded webview but you couldn't do much heavy lifting with it.

Also many standard didn't exist. Maybe today, with webgl and asm.js and web workers It's viable, but in the days native access was the only way to provide a smooth experience. See: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg- our-biggest...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest- mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5/)

<comment><USER8> Good points, but I think that Facebook's problems might have been more about integration than about performance.

<comment><USER9> Found the technical writeup [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public- coremob/2012Sep/0...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public- coremob/2012Sep/0021.html)

Two main issues back then were scrolling perrformance and memory constraints.

We're working at image heavy microsites at lookcast and I can confirm memory issues and composition performances are still constraining what we can do on devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> norea-armozel I find this sort of stuff creepy since it's always built with the concept of giving you the idea to buy something even if you didn't really want it. It's nothing like Futurama brain slug but it's still just as disturbing. It's probably why I'm always unsubscribing from email advertisements from various companies I tend to buy things from (since I'm not a regular customer for anything but utilities, rent, and groceries). I want my choices of consumption to be driven more by necessity than just some slick ad or product placement. Hell, I didn't own a smart phone until just last year. How's that for weird?

</comment><comment><USER10> > The hope is that this will not only create compelling user experiences, but > also unlock access to the tens of billions of ad dollars that are currently > spent on TV.

This is simply not gonna happen. I used to think that as well -- until I did a stint working with one of the biggest sellers of TV ad inventory.

It's a completely different game. TV ads are bought and sold in enormous, packaged deals. There's very, very little transparency in the TV advertising game. Everyone on both sides knows Nielsen ratings are total crap with very little bearing on reality, but they trust each other even less, so Nielsen it is. All anyone knows is that TV is great for brand advertising, and you can get a rough estimate of how many eyeballs saw your ad on a given night. With brand advertising, all you care about is the number of brand impressions you make on your target consumer in a given month to keep the brand value fresh in their mind (i.e. "Ford trucks are Built Ford Tough").

TV ads are sold based on personal relationships between reps at advertisers and publishers. That's it. The ad rates you can get for ads sold through traditional TV sales channels are 30-40% higher than digital ads on a per- impression basis. The reason for that? The buyers are more senior, have larger budgets, and less accountability.

That TV ad money is literally just disappearing as audiences scatter to various media platforms -- these older, more senior ad executives don't understand digital so it's left to the younger guys who have a much larger culture of accountability and measuring by the metrics. The Internet has created so many opportunities for advertising and so much transparency around pricing for those ads that nobody can justify TV-like rates for digital ad impressions.

Think of the things that advertise on TV: they're nearly all high-value goods or services that need to establish a brand reputation. They can (and do) do that online for a lot less per impression, and they don't need to run an equivalent dollar amount of impressions because the online publishing space has created so much inventory they can't even sell it all (creating so-called "remnant" inventory filled programmatically by algorithms at rock-bottom CPMs). But only the "premium" publishers (i.e. anyone with a non-advertising revenue stream like New York Times) can afford to limit their inventory in such a way as to demand higher CPMs: everyone else is in a race to the bottom just to survive.

But it's gotten to a point where ad rates are so low that for premium publishers able to succeed with a subscription model, they may not even be a material amount of money. See: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, etc. In 5 or 10 years, we may get to a point where all "premium" video services are delivered through a subscription model without advertising. That TV money has to go elsewhere, but it's likely to be spent on non-digital forms of advertising (e.g. outdoor/billboards, corporate sponsorships, product placement, etc.)

tldr: Online will never see the type of ad money that TV generated because the balance of power has shifted from the publishers to the advertisers. The next generation of ad buyers will be much more savvy, and the digital publishers have created far too much ad inventory. There's a tragedy of the commons situation with publishers that will continue to drive down CPMs while inventory increases, because if they don't then they will die. Because of low ad rates, it's not really worth it for premium video publishers to compromise their user experience by subjecting their paying customers to advertising -- thus driving the ad money from the big brands out of premium video content and on to other, non-digital forms of brand advertising.

<comment><USER11> Watch "Detroit Muscle", "Truck Tech", etc. on TV. Those are shows that show you how to hack your car. The sponsors of the shows provide the tools and parts that the mechanics use. It is advertising, but in a way that people want to see. It's a very organic form of product placement.

<comment><USER12> yep, entirely an ad. I was once their customer (2006ish), and paid about $1000 per minute. Was not worth it. Would not do again the way that it was done. Counterintuitively, I think I would have been better off to spend more and dominate the focus on the show.

In this light I think just producing my own content for Youtube is the smarter strategy. I have to acquire new skills, but who doesn't when they run a business?

<comment><USER10> > In this light I think just producing my own content for Youtube is the > smarter strategy. I have to acquire new skills, but who doesn't when they > run a business?

This is the route it's going. Larger brands will hire professionals and celebrity hosts, but smaller guys can get in on the game as well (i.e. the "Will it Blend" videos).

Sure, you'll probably have to do some ad spend to get some eyeballs to your videos, but it won't cost anywhere near what TV advertising does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> And where is the room for a sixth empire? Is Uber trying to claw in from the physical logistics side of the loop?

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd just like to note that Aggregation Theory totally explains this: [https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation- theory/](https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/)

</comment><comment><USER15> More shit we don't need, but faster and cheaper. If that's progress then we're in trouble.</comment>


A History of the London Tube Maps - <AUTHOR> http://homepage.ntlworld.com/clivebillson/tube/tube.html <comment><USER2> Shades of Tufte and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The outstanding change between 1932 and 1933 was the discarding of the irrelevant exact layout of the lines, and using instead the simplest possible topological layout. By no longer showing the physical distances between stations, or the exact weaving in and out of the lines, Harry Beck's layout is the basis of most modern underground railway maps.

For the time it was an astonishing leap of representation, regarded with great suspicion.

Before: [http://homepage.ntlworld.com/clivebillson/tube/tube.html#193...](http://homepage.ntlworld.com/clivebillson/tube/tube.html#1932)

After: [http://homepage.ntlworld.com/clivebillson/tube/tube.html#193...](http://homepage.ntlworld.com/clivebillson/tube/tube.html#1933)

<comment><USER3> As much as I love the qualities of the new map, the old one DOES convey useful extra information, especially now we've become sufficiently acquainted with the modern one. I would like to see an updated old-style map, it would be a nice (retrograde) evolution.

<comment><USER2> The "SnapMap" of London shows the actual routes of the lines and the locations of the stations on a simplistic, but accurate enough, map of London. I use mine all the time.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the tip, not quite what I had in mind but looks pretty useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why are the links the same color as the text and not even underlined? What if all the tubes had the same color on his map?</comment>


Your Warming World: Climate change where you live 1894 – 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://warmingworld.newscientistapps.com/ <comment><USER2> [http://www.google.com/finance?q=INDEXDJX:.DJI](http://www.google.com/finance?q=INDEXDJX:.DJI)

Look at the Dow Jones index. If you look at it today, it looks like a dramatic drop. If you look at it in the span of several years, that drop looks somewhat trivial.

Same thing goes for climate change. Go back 1 billion years, and you will find that the earth has warmed and cooled far more dramatically than in the last 100 years. I'm not denying anthropogenic global warming, I'm just saying that correlation does not necessarily equal causation.

(And for the record, I'm not pushing one political agenda or the other, I'm just trying to look at a given data set rationally).

Edit: either way, I encourage the pursuit of clean energy and reusable resources.

<comment><USER3> Okay? Why even bring this up unless trying to cast a disparaging light onto global warming? You are, in fact, denying human caused global warming in your last comment, "I'm just saying that correlation does not equal causation." Every time I see this argument it's usually the first statement in the 'human's aren't really causing global warming, so we shouldn't try to fix it' circle-jerk.

What is the worst thing that happens if we try to address global warming, human caused or not? We get to keep the beneficial conditions that we've had since the beginning of humanity as we know it? Our children get to inherit a functioning and healthy planet? Society can continue on the way it has for many, many generations without plague or famine?

Stop it.

<comment><USER4> It's horrible how climate change is now a religion not a science.

"Deniers and believers".

<comment><USER5> I'm a little confused about the anti-GMO folks who believe in climate change since the science argument applies to both but they only believe it in one case.

// I'm in the only way to stop current energy generation techniques is to invent something cheaper than gas and coal. Anything else won't stop the upcoming economies (e.g. China) from using gas and coal no matter how they pollute.

<comment><USER6> Some people don't resort to pseudoscience when making arguments againsts GMOs.

<comment><USER5> I find most people resort to pseudoscience and ignorance of the history of what they are currently eating when speaking against GMOs.

<comment><USER6> Your comment is both ignorant and false.

<comment><USER5> Same response to all those global warming deniers - the studies and science show GMOs are not harmful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This doesn't seem to have a lot of granularity in color around the 0 mark. Above 0 we have a warm color, below 0 we have a cold color. Would it paint a more informative picture to give +/-(relevant fraction) a distinct color?

</comment><comment><USER8> My city wasn't founded until 1934, how does NASA have stats from 1894?

<comment><USER9> Stop questioning, start panicking. If you want to make a difference start recycling, buy some solar panels, and think about how amazing it is to be poor in exchange for saving the planet.

If more people gave 10% of their income we can stave off the apocalypse, end of humanity, rapture, end times, whatever you want to call it. The rich will never inherit the kingdom of Mother Earth.

<comment><USER4> If you recycle anything except metal you are making the problem worse not better.

Solar panels are a poor choice, they help somewhat but they are far too expensive for what they provide.

If you actually want to make a difference then agitate for more nuclear power. There is absolutely nothing else that will help.

<comment><USER6> I frigging hate this "nuclear power is the answer to everything" meme that gets repeated on HN.

Nuclear power requires a huge amount of fossil fuels in its life cycle. From building the plant to mining the uranium then decommissioning it. All energy extensive.

[http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/04/nuclear-is-not-a- low-...](http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/04/nuclear-is-not-a-low-carbon- source-of-energy.html)

[http://mediamatters.org/mobile/research/2013/11/07/myths- and...](http://mediamatters.org/mobile/research/2013/11/07/myths-and-facts- about-nuclear-power/196793)

Right now nuclear compares to other renewables

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparisons_of_life- cycle_green...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparisons_of_life- cycle_greenhouse_gas_emissions)

however it is though if it is widely adopted, uranium will become more energy intensive to mine uranium and convert it to fuel.

<comment><USER4> > Nuclear power requires a huge amount of fossil fuels in its life cycle. From > building the plant to mining the uranium then decommissioning it. All energy > extensive.

And renewables are MUCH worse. You don't need much uranium to make energy, but you need a TON of metal to capture wind or sun energy.

> however it is though if it is widely adopted, uranium will become more > energy intensive to mine uranium and convert it to fuel.

And again, renewables are worse in that regard. They do well now only because they aren't used a lot.

But use them a lot and the price (due to rarity) will go up, meaning the resources needed will go up.

There is no perfect energy source. It's just a matter of relative harm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very informative, and scary.

I'm pretty sure there should be an OSM attribution on this map.

[https://www.mapbox.com/help/attribution/](https://www.mapbox.com/help/attribution/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I haven't realized how anti science HN is. Scary.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think that global warming is a positive phenomenon and we should try to accelerate it. Most people would prefer a to live in slightly warmer climate than they do now.

<comment><USER13> It doesn't work like that. It is not a nice, evenly spread warm breeze. It is rising oceans and extreme weather.

Don't think of it as an increase in warmth, think of it as increased pressure in a closed system.

<comment><USER12> > and extreme weather

Sounds like fun to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's cold and snowing outside, and the 'climate change' alarmists are still going and going and going.

I was assuming that the climate change scam would go away with today's headlines, but maybe it will be like the Loch Ness monster -- forever some people still think it might be real.

<comment><USER15> so if i point out that it's really #@#!@# hot all over Australia at the moment, you'll concede that it's true? FFS the weather responds to the energy balance, it's not a nice +2 deg added to everyone's location.

<comment><USER14> Good! Now we agree: Anecdotal evidence is junk! I mentioned the snow as a parody, giving back in kind to a lot of such evidence from the global warming alarmists, e.g., their pictures of polar bears, remarks on Arctic sea ice in the summers (blown around in unpredictable ways by winds and currents), snows on Mt. Kilimanjaro, video clips of glaciers calving, etc.

"Energy balance"? Sure, but that's close to just a tautology. The 'rub' is working effectively with the collection of all the fine details that determine energy balance.

For how to predict the weather 50 years from now, when we can't predict it five days from now, is a bit much to swallow.

Actually, the global warming alarmists are no closer to good science and have nothing better than the Lock Ness Monster devotees.

Maybe 50 years from now the temperature of the earth will be higher, lower, or just the same as now, and no one knows the answer, no matter what within the realm of reason we assume about CO2, methane, water vapor, sun spots, volcanoes, ocean currents, snow cover, deforestation, etc. E.g., the IPCC's Ramaswamy's 'radiative forcing' fills a much need gap in the literature and would be illuminating if ignited.

There has been a big crowd of global warming alarmists: Some see global warming as not a problem but a way to talk the public into other things that they like such as 'renewable' energy. Some are using global warming alarms as a way to raise money, get government funding, sell books, do venture capital deals, get attention, get a professorship, etc. Some people want to get some new taxes they can use for whatever. Some want to 'stick it' to the oil companies or whomever would get hurt by attempts to respond to global warming. Some people want subsidies for high speed trains, wind farms, solar panels, biofuels, high 'feed in tariffs', etc. The list of reasons some people find to go alone with the alarms is endless and with next to nothing actually to do with science. So, the whole thing is looking like, say, the people who stand to make money off the Lock Ness Monster. That was my main point -- global warming alarms will continue for much the same reason as the Lock Ness Monster.</comment></comment></comment>


Tor Exit Nodes in Libraries – Pilot - <AUTHOR> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-exit-nodes-libraries-pilot-phase-one <comment><USER2> If you think the Tor project is working on an important problem, consider running a relay. It's inexpensive, easy to administer, no hassle (if not an exit) and I think the scale is such that a couple thousand additional relays would make a noticeable difference to the network.

You can even have it AWS where it will get automatic updates with almost no effort: [https://cloud.torproject.org/](https://cloud.torproject.org/)

If you want to run it on OS X: [https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/6567/how-do-i- manual...](https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/6567/how-do-i-manually- setup-a-relay-on-os-x)

I think it's pretty cool that you can help enable people to safely bypass censorship/surveillance from across the world.

<comment><USER3> > no hassle (if not an exit)

Not 100% true, your server's IP will be banned along side the IPs of exit nodes. It seems a lot of blacklists don't bother to make the distinction.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/2abne1/hulu_blocked_af...](https://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/2abne1/hulu_blocked_after_setting_up_tor_nonexit_relay/)

[https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/doc/ListOf...](https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/doc/ListOfServicesBlockingTor)

<comment><USER2> Good point - I did notice this with Hulu, but haven't seen it elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you know a librarian who might be interested in participating in the future, consider encouraging him or her to fill out this questionnaire:

[https://libraryfreedomproject.org/questionnaire/](https://libraryfreedomproject.org/questionnaire/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how many DMCA requests they will get and if the administrative overhead with it will kill the Pilot.

<comment><USER6> From [http://www.ala.org/advocacy/copyright/dmca/guidance](http://www.ala.org/advocacy/copyright/dmca/guidance):

Section 404 of the DMCA updates section 108 of the Copyright Act to allow libraries and archives to take advantage of digital technologies when engaging in specified preservation activities. The amendment to subsection 108(a)(3) is intended to ease the burden on libraries and archives of the current law's requirement that a notice of copyright be included on copies that are reproduced under section 108. Under this amendment, such notice would be required only where the particular copy that is reproduced by the library or archive itself bears a notice. The amendment to subsection 108(b) permits a library or archive to make up to three copies or phonorecords, rather than just one, for purposes of preservation and security or for deposit for research use in another library or archives, and permits such copies or phonorecords to be made in digital as well as analog formats. The amendment provides that any such copy in a digital format must not be otherwise distributed in that format and must not be available to the public outside the premises of the library or archives.

<comment><USER5> That isn't immunity to frivolous DMCA notices or the ability to ignore DMCA notices.

By serving as an exit node, they are able to take it off premises.

> _The amendment provides that any such copy in a digital format must not be > otherwise distributed in that format and must not be available to the public > outside the premises of the library or archives._

<comment><USER7> Yeah, that's a specific example they point out in the guidelines.

But there's another section that also applies to higher ed institutions which remits all damages and criminal charges if they prove they had no knowledge of it (actively) going on. That's the provision they'll probably hide under.

 _edit: I should clarify, most DMCA complaints are from third parties who get paid from the settlements. Eliminating the financial incentive to pursue legal action pretty much eliminates the threat of prosecution._

<comment><USER5> Does that exemption hold true the second or third time they get hit with a legal notice about the same issue and their Tor exit node?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://pando.com/2014/07/16/tor-spooks/](https://pando.com/2014/07/16/tor- spooks/)

      In 2006, Tor research was funded was through a no-bid
      federal contract awarded to Dingledine's consulting
      company, Moria Labs. And starting in 2007, the Pentagon
      cash came directly through the Tor Project itself —
      thanks to the fact that Team Tor finally left EFF and
      registered its own independent 501(c)(3) non-profit.

      How dependent was — and is — Tor on support from
      federal government agencies like the Pentagon?

      In 2007, it appears that all of Tor's funding came from
      the federal government via two grants. A quarter million
      came from the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB), a
      CIA spinoff that now operates under the Broadcasting Board
      of Governors. IBB runs Voice of America and Radio Marti, a
      propaganda outfit aimed at subverting Cuba's communist
      regime. The CIA supposedly cut IBB financing in the 1970s
      after its ties to Cold War propaganda arms like Radio Free
      Europe were exposed.

      The second chunk of cash — just under $100,000 — came
      from Internews, an NGO aimed at funding and training
      dissident and activists abroad. Tor's subsequent tax
      filings show that grants from Internews were in fact
      conduits for "pass through" grants from the US State
      Department.

<comment><USER9> [https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors.html.en)

The NSA fully-funded and wrote SELinux, too. So what?

<comment><USER10> I am naive on this topic.

Sincere question: don't these facts call the utility of SELinux and Tor into question?

If the answer is "because math", well... I don't speak math. Being illerate in this manner, I must depend on the reputations of the parties involved (and the reputations of the parties that report who was involved!).

So... Can a person who does not trust the NSA trust products they paid for?

<comment><USER11> You can definitely trust the sensational value in finding out that any project advocating freedom and data security would be exploited by a government.

That's what I do, it's not perfect but I love reading source code and figuring out how things work so I know others, much smarter than me, love that too.

The public cases of the US government going after Tor, for example, have all read like external attacks on the protocol design flaws to build a larger case.

I would be more suspicious over placing exit nodes in libraries because I assume they're state owned in the US. Don't know since I'm not from there though. I just think it's sort of ironic because the attacks that have been performed all required possession of exit nodes.

<comment><USER12> > I would be more suspicious over placing exit nodes in libraries...

Librarians are more often rabidly pro-privacy and pro-anonymity than not. They're often _very_ well read, well educated, and know their history.

> I just think it's sort of ironic because the attacks that have been > performed all required possession of exit nodes.

Unless you have information that I do not (if you do, please link to it) control of a single exit node gives you no more power than your ISP already has over you. What attacks were you thinking of? Keep in mind that Tor explicitly does not protect against:

* An adversary that can listen to the communication between a large number of nodes in the Tor network and targeted Tor users. (Similarly, Tor cannot protect against a malicious adversary who controls a very large number (1/3? 51%? I can't remember) of the nodes in the Tor network.)

* Tampering with or recording of the data that leaves or is returned by a Tor exit node. (Again, this is an attack that _anyone_ between you and your communication partner can launch, whether you're using Tor or not.)

<comment><USER11> >Librarians are more often rabidly pro-privacy and pro-anonymity than not. They're often very well read, well educated, and know their history.

Few librarians are involved in network operations at the library though. I'm just speaking from my experience here in Sweden but that stuff is usually handled by a local IT department or out sourced to a company.

So the danger would be in having a federal oversight on network operations of libraries. I do not believe we have that in Sweden at least. Probably the US government allow libraries to manage themselves on that front too.

>Unless you have information that I do not (if you do, please link to it) control of a single exit node gives you no more power than your ISP already has over you. What attacks were you thinking of? Keep in mind that Tor explicitly does not protect against:

Exit nodes, as in plural.

So hypothetically if the federal government did manage network operations for libraries in the US, and the Tor network was successful in onboarding many libraries in this project, that could mean massive control of Tor exit nodes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mavo: An HTML-based language for creating many kinds of web applications - <AUTHOR> http://lea.verou.me/2017/05/introducing-mavo-create-web-apps-entirely-by-writing-html/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14354911](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14354911)

Official website : [http://mavo.io/](http://mavo.io/)

<comment><USER3> …and the associated GitHub:

[https://github.com/mavoweb/mavo](https://github.com/mavoweb/mavo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Plug for a somewhat different take on "attribute-driven" development: [https://github.com/QuickenLoans/Behaviors.js](https://github.com/QuickenLoans/Behaviors.js)

No centralized framework. Everything is decomposed into "behaviors" that have no direct dependencies. Attributes are used for configuration _and_ storing the running "state" of all libraries. Liberal use of CSS selectors as a kind of query language to remove the need for tree-traversal code.

The interesting thing about this approach is that it enables libraries/behaviors to interact and effectively "compose" at run-time without any direct code dependencies. It has some similarities to the idea of agent- oriented programming, which I think is a powerful idea worth a deeper look.

Of course, this is more of a proof-of-concept than a complete set of libraries needed for a complex website. However, I find this "behavioral" approach very enjoyable to use, because it makes development very immediate and incremental. Add an attribute, observe that it works, add another attribute, observe that it works, etc.

You also get progressive enhancement "by default".

</comment><comment><USER5> Nowhere does it say this is a project intended to be used by non-technical people. Yet both times this got posted here everyone assumes it is. Am I missing something? In the Smashing Magazine blog post, it clearly states:

>Make a website that non-technical folks (clients? family members?) can edit right in the browser

I think the author is well aware that your average Joe is not gonna pump out web apps only "because it's just HTML". Saying that Mavo is simple to use can be misleading in this context. Simple compared to what? As developers, behaviour-enriched HTML seems simple to us because we have frontend stacks as an anchor for comparison. In almost all cases, average Joe won't even know about the structure of HTML documents, nor will he have a GitHub account to authorize against.

I think if you take Mavo for what it markets itself as, namely a "new, approachable way to create Web applications", it is great work.

</comment><comment><USER6> That's absolutely awesome and probably goes well with [http://intercoolerjs.org/](http://intercoolerjs.org/) as it's doing the same, only for AJAX requests.

<comment><USER7> _> tfw I don't have to shill my own library in this thread_

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> HTML is a simple "programming language", but my experience is that when non- programmers see anything that even resembles "code" they throw their arms up and scream "UNACCEPTABLE!".

I love the concept though. It kind of reminds me of Excel. It's really hard to tell if "the users" will like it or not, you have to test it on them. But I think "the users" will want some sort of GUI/WYSIWYG.

<comment><USER9> Note that as is mentioned on the website, this has indeed been tested on users, and the results of the study have gone through rigorous peer review and published at a top tier academic conference on HCI. And yes, the audience is programming novices who do know HTML and CSS. For now. Since Mavo is a language, one can easily imagine an integration with a visual editor, to make it accessible to the average Joe.

<comment><USER10> lea, since you're here...

i'm creating a mavo project right now and i wanna use a simple textarea as a mavo field. (tinymce makes me feel a little icky inside.) but i didn't see anything in the documentation about how i would do that. can i? if so, how?

edit: oh hey. i just acted like it would work, tried it out, and bingo! hey, that makes me happy...

<comment><USER9> Glad you figured it out! Btw if TinyMCE makes you icky, you may like the Markdown plugin: [https://plugins.mavo.io/plugin/markdown](https://plugins.mavo.io/plugin/markdown)

<comment><USER10> light-markup is definitely the way to go, yes.

except markdown also makes me feel a bit icky -- too many inconsistencies in the various flavors.

markdown's redeeming value is that it's "popular".

which is also why it's so frightening now, since it desperately needs to be replaced. (it cannot be improved, because xkcd 927.)

speaking of "popular", that's how you describe the showdown converter that your plug-in uses.

one reason it's popular is because it was fast -- the fastest converter, at one time, it claimed.

note the past-tense "was"...

because that time has now passed.

other converters, also coded in javascript (the other big reason showdown got popular) are now much faster and far more powerful.

without getting into all the surrounding drama, i'd recommend that you use markdown-it instead: it's blazingly fast, and has much functionality.

> [https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it](https://github.com/markdown- > it/markdown-it)

(functionality is now a better differentiator of the worth of a markdown converter than speed.)

mavo's choice of converter is more consequential than it might appear at the first glance because follow-on effects of differential functionalities will surely impact the success of a mavo project, as will the inconsistencies that will bite users.

all this aside, mavo is a fascinating little tool. :+)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is really impressive. It combines a lot of good ideas for making collaboration easier for non-technical users (Github auth, live editing). I see some negative comments about HTML but I see this being a great solution for marketing sites with basic interactions.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wouldn't call this for "non-programmers", but I have lots of customers who can handle HTML and some basic server code, but who find Angular a bit of a leap. They want a way to crank out modern web-based forms-on-data apps with little ceremony. Will definitely keep an eye on this.

</comment><comment><USER13> It should be noted that this is a tool intended for non-programmers (think: people who can use spreadsheets), not for (pro) developers.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't get the JSX vs. HTML argument. The whole point is that non-technical people can use this to create websites that work well enough, and it'd be simple (comparatively) to build a WYSIWIG on this.

</comment><comment><USER15> Hey, this is truly awesome. Lowers the threshold for people to start creating web apps.

I created a quick 'Hello world' tutorial on Mavo here btw, hope you like it:

[https://scrimba.com/casts/cEZ3TE](https://scrimba.com/casts/cEZ3TE)

</comment><comment><USER16> The only thing I do not like about it is the math functionality is quiet limited.

[https://mavo.io/docs/mavoscript/#math- functions](https://mavo.io/docs/mavoscript/#math-functions)

You would have to nest functions to get proper order of operations. Using function names instead of actual symbols. Seems like it would be easier to do something like math(a+b/2) and have it know that whatever was inside that function is math to be parsed.

I might be nitpicking.

<comment><USER9> Not sure where you got this from. Operators are supported as normal and are listed there too.

<comment><USER16> I honestly couldn't gather from the documentation that it did support operands. My apologies if I was wrong, I will be re-reading it and slower this time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looking at the official website it seems very similar to Angular. Could somebody explain the differences?

<comment><USER12> I think the gist is the person creating the app would not write any javascript at all. Just the markup and reference the mavo js/css. In Angular and any other framework, you would typically write a JS component and HTML or other format template that eventually renders to HTML. There could be pros and cons to each approach, but I can see a niche for something like this where there isn't a need/desire to do anything besides _just HTML_

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Introducing: spam

</comment><comment><USER19> shame, that's the part i dislike the most

<comment><USER20> why?

<comment><USER21> After working with JSX, HTML/templating just feels like a step backwards.

Web pages these days are far less about the template and far more about the logic and interactions involved.

Subsequently building up from HTML the way pages used to be built and then embedding code doesn't really line up with the way modern web apps are developed.

While it may have a niche in front-end design, for the kind of work I do at least it comes off as though the platform "allows" devs to build web apps entirely written in CSS.

<comment><USER22> > Subsequently building up from HTML the way pages used to be built and then > embedding code doesn't really line up with the way modern web apps are > developed.

Unfortunately the data doesn't agree with you. JSX, react and all that jazz is not used by 99.99% of the web. And NEVER will be! In fact react/vuejs/front- end frameworks are fancy only these days, the majority of web developers don't even use preprocessors for CSS or a templating engine like HAML/Markdown to begin with [1].

There's a reason why writing HTML has been kept simple. And forgiving.

[1] [https://blog.codepen.io/2013/04/08/statistics-on- preprocesso...](https://blog.codepen.io/2013/04/08/statistics-on-preprocessor- usage/)

Edits: Downvoted because it doesn't fit your narrative? Lame.

<comment><USER21> > the way modern web apps are developed.

I suppose that could have been worded differently, I meant it in the context of the original person mentioning HTML is their least favorite part of web design.

For your 0.01% of us who use all that jazz HTML-first design feels like a step backwards and especially trying to inject application logic comes off as a ham-handed method of design when compared with a logic-first design that spits out and manages the UI (HTML/CSS).

I'm not sure what CSS preprocessors has to do with that, but I'm also confused - what is your opinion of Mavo?

<comment><USER22> > I'm not sure what CSS preprocessors has to do with that…

That even simpler step-ups like preprocessors with lower learning curves have not been adopted by the majority. Simplicity and lazy has a very high bar for any sort of competing tech.

I agree with you that technical simplicity of HTML-first would feel a step backward because you have already climbed over the fence and accepted the issues of over-engineering that come with React/JSX/Webpack and 1000 other components.

This of course doesn't mean HTML-first approach would be replaced anytime soon. Even with likes of Facebook betting their entire ass behind it.

On Mavo: Not tried it yet, but I do see a promise in it. Also, coming from Lea Verou makes it all the more compelling.

<comment><USER21> It's true, there is a steep learning curve. I'm not sure that's a good comparison though, for example I don't use CSSPS but it has nothing to do with the learning curve.

So for comparison, how do the majority of people design sites? Say you're making a HN or Twitter clone, what is the process from cradle to production to get the site up and running?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Question about rewriting my app in NodeJS - <AUTHOR>

I've been developing a "pinterest style" app (for lack of a clearer explanation) in Rails recently. I've been focused on learning Rails (I'm a PHP developer) the past few years. There is a ton of talk about Rails and MVC altogether being eventually phased out for stacks like Node and Backbone, etc. While I doubt the Rails/MVC style will be gone anytime soon, I want to future-proof my career. I don't want to stick with PHP forever, I just don't get the same joy anymore that I used to when I write code in it.
What should I look into learning in NodeJS/Backbone to rewrite my "pinterest style" Rails app. I'm probably still going to release the Rails version just because I feel comfortable with the code I've written and the Node/Backbone rewrite is mainly for learning the technology.
Are there specific Node paradigms/patterns/modules that I should look into for a site like this? <comment><USER2> If you want to learn Node, go ahead write in Node, there's not much you can lose.

If not:

Is it realtime? Does it need the speed? Is scaling important?

If not to all of them, don't rewrite.

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason I'd like to rewrite for now is the fact that what I'm building in Rails is a "typical" app that I work on. So by rewriting this in Node (after finishing the real app, and not releasing the Node version) I'm learning the Node flow to the "typical" apps I'd be working on. If that makes sense.

<comment><USER3> Are you a freelance/contractor? Are you looking to add to your skill set in general? Do you know Javascript at all? If you answer yes to one or more of those, I'd say it can't hurt to learn Node.js.</comment></comment></comment>


Introducing the AWS Instance Scheduler - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/02/introducing-the-aws-instance-scheduler/ <comment> rob-olmos Interesting idea to use CloudWatch on a Lambda function. I believe the equivalent for Google Cloud would be using Stackdriver's uptime check on a Cloud Function?</comment>


Facebook Sells Data to Advertisers - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/facebook-data-privacy-advertising.html <comment><USER2> > _Facebook 's claiming that it is not selling user data is like a bar's > giving away a free martini with every $12 bag of peanuts and then claiming > that it's not selling drinks. Rich user data is Facebook's most prized > possession, and the company sure isn't throwing it in for free._

A decent analogy to make it easier to understand what Facebook is doing.</comment>