Can Real-Time strategy come back from the brink of death? – PC Gamer - <AUTHOR> https://www.pcgamer.com/can-real-time-strategy-come-back-from-the-brink-of-death/ <comment><USER2> RTS games tend to be more skill based and thus less accessible for new players. For games that strive to have large audiences, it's important for games to have a significant level of chance so that worse players can still sometimes win, the absence of this chance makes it so that new players will be losing most of their games for a significant amount of time until they become proficient. This is in contrast to DOTA or League of Legends, where a poor players will occasionally get carried by their team.

I suspect that a compounding factor is that traditional base-building RTS games are hard to make work with microtransactions. RTS games tend to be very carefully balanced, and mechanisms to secure an advantage by paying would alienate any serious RTS player. This makes it so that cosmetic-only microtransactions are the only viable option. The reality is that microtransactions that confer advantages sell much better. Even games like Path of Exile and League of Legends that purport to not be pay-to-win do allow players to gain an advantage through paying (more rune pages for LoL, inventory tabs for PoE), but this would destroy a traditional base-building RTS. Company of Heroes 2 being a prime example, better commanders and hard- advantages being available for purchase was a deal breaker for many gamers. Who knows when the next patch will shift the meta and now you have to shell out another $15 to stay competitive.

The reality is, RTS games never really were the stuff of AAA studios. Budgets for these titles reflected their more niche audience. Resounding successes like Warcraft 3 and Age of Empires were the exception rather than the norm. Publishers are aware that the addressable audience is limited, and so budgets are limited as a result. The RTS genre is still strong, but has become more the realm of indie and mid-market studies. The Total War series is the only one I'd really describe as AAA, and that's a mix of turn based and real time.

<comment><USER3> I had this idea for an RTS to make it more accessible, only allow one action per second (and you can manage a queue of actions). That way it plays more turn-based and strategic. Maybe 60 APM would still be too high and 30 APM would be better. To make it distinct from a faster paced tactics-genre game I think you would likely want smart AI that can micromanage for you and the idea is that you are giving them more high level commands like be aggressive, defensive, and maybe a sub-task like either patrol or aquire materials when not suspecting combat. I think that this would be more akin to playing like a General than current RTS, which is more playing like an all-knowing micromanaging god. Maybe I'll try it out after my next game.</comment></comment>


Chrome will bring about the ICT revolution in schools - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/spannermans-edublog/2011/05/chrome-will-bring-about-the-ict-revolution-in-schools/index.htm <comment><USER2> _Finally with the instant-on Chrome-book the domain-logon palaver looks like the anachronistic time goblin it is.

With auto-saving, no more losing of USB sticks, no more 12 min network bootups, the ability to share files and fewer confusing features most of the hassle of ICT in schools is eliminated._

Oh of course, a student waiting a few seconds to logon to a server is clearly wasting too much of their time, and IT departments are just going to _love_ the loss of control over the devices they currently have.

"auto-saving" and "no more losing USB sticks" in the cotext of Google Docs, means a complete lack of control over the backup of said documents, and inability to work on said documents offline.

 _No software licences, no maintenance technicians (no viruses no, disk quotas, no application/file servers, no software images)._

Because the web apps that a netbook uses, are mythical beasts that have no licensing or maintenance requirements, and store data down gumdrop lane, because they're powered by the good thoughts of Google users, not physical servers?

<comment><USER3> Google is a lot better at maintenance than any school sysadmin will ever be. And they've got the infrastructure for it, too.

As for working offline, the offline-capable version of Mail, Calendar and Docs is coming soon. <http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/11/offline-gmail/>

<comment><USER2> _Google is a lot better at maintenance than any school sysadmin will ever be._

Not necessarily. Even Premium (i.e. PAID) Google Apps users have had issues with feedback/error resolution with things like missing/corrupted docs, and there is nothing more they can do. When I worked in the IT Dept. of a Tertiary education institute, it was not unheard of for students/staff to contact the department manager if they were not satisfied, or even write to the Minister for the Education Department.

If they did the same thing under a Google/Netbook setup, there is nothing to say the IT department (which will _STILL_ be required, they will just have their hands tied behind their back in terms of what they can do) could do _ANYTHING_ about the problem.

<comment><USER3> And when things went missing or corrupted at the IT Dept, did you have a better success rate than Google at recovering the items?

Did you have a lower corruption/loss rate?

Google is huge, and a few problems are going to happen... And they'll be blown out of proportion. Without actual numbers to show the reliability, your guess is as good as mine about how reliable it is.

The fact that you can't get in touch with a Google engineer and hold them personally responsible doesn't mean anything. The document is just as lost either way.

<comment><USER2> _And when things went missing or corrupted at the IT Dept, did you have a better success rate than Google at recovering the items?_

Well we could tell the person, right then and there that we are working on it, so they know their problem is being looked at, and we knew the details of our backup schedule, because we controlled it.

Hell, for a simple "i deleted this by accident" problem, we could often retrieve it with a rightclick before the disk was purged, and if it was already purged or the document corrupted, we just went to the tape backups.

Can you tell me what Google's backup plan is? Do they even have backups for the stuff in Google Docs/Gmail? Are those backups available to free users? How long are old backups kept? What is the response time for a file retrieval request?

* The fact that you can't get in touch with a Google engineer and hold them personally responsible doesn't mean anything*

it's not about holding an engineer personally responsible, it's about transparency of the service. if you ask a (decent) IT department about their backup schedule, they will probably tell you, happily, when files are backed up and how long for, and how long it takes to retrieve them and how often they're checked for consistency.

<comment><USER3> With Google, I don't have to care how often they are backed up, or when. If a file is missing or corrupt, they deal with it automatically. I don't have to notify them.

And if a file is unrecoverable, there's no point in contacting them.

It appears the only thing gained by having a local IT Dept is being able to un-delete things you accidentally deleted. In this day and age, I solve that by just not deleting things. Google solves it by having a 'trash can' concept where you can undelete it yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To what degree does chromeOS and google docs contribute to the google intelligence/profiling that they do on every user for ad targeting? Does the educational program opt out of it? Over a few years time would google be developing a full profile of the student including what classes they took when, and perhaps even how well they're doing through reading level analysis etc? Is that kind of thing something we really want to push on our children?</comment>


When does moderation become censorship? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.disqus.com/when-does-moderation-become-censorship <comment><USER2> Basically never, at least on the internet? No one owes anyone else a soapbox. My space, my rules. There's nothing stopping anyone from rolling up a site and saying whatever they want to say, but there's absolutely no reason I have to give space on my site, no matter what my site is, for anyone else's viewpoint.

<comment><USER3> You are contradicting yourself, and did not even answer the question. What you should have said was "as the site owner and moderator, whenever I damn well please". But instead you said it never happens.

I have almost zero sites I login to for a reason. I would think that as soon as a website becomes embroiled in taking a political viewpoint to the extreme of not allowing the opposite side to speak is when censorship comes into play. If we are talking individual attacks obviously that would and should fall into the moderation category.

<comment><USER4> I think what trowawee meant is that they never equate deleting comments (or whatever) with censorship. It sounds like you do. This is a semantic conflict re: what "censorship" means, precisely.

Personally, I think that deleting someone's comments is censorship, but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing. Censorship gets a bad rap, but purging certain viewpoints from a certain venue is not inherently evil or negative. For example, Hacker News does it with the shadowbanning system. I don't mind because dang is a thoughtful moderator.

<comment><USER2> Also censorship has a specific denotation, i.e. that is is performed by an agent of the state, and specific connotations, i.e. that the censored is unable to express themselves in other ways (among other connotations). A private citizen deleting your comment on a webpage they own and administrate matches neither the denotation nor connotations of "censorship", except in the broadest theoretical reading. And that reading that would appear to prohibit any maintenance of comment sections whatsoever.

<comment><USER5> > Also censorship has a specific denotation, i.e. that is is performed by an > agent of the state

This is not correct; TV networks have censors that operate internally. The government doesn't operate television censors; it is limited to punishing the networks after the fact.

> A private citizen deleting your comment on a webpage they own and > administrate matches neither the denotation nor connotations of > "censorship", except in the broadest theoretical reading. And that reading > that would appear to prohibit any maintenance of comment sections > whatsoever.

This is a confused argument; you seem to be proceeding from the premise that censorship is bad, and therefore a phenomenon which is not bad can't be censorship. And then that if it was censorship it somehow wouldn't be allowed. (Observe that the definition of "censorship" cannot in itself prohibit or mandate anything.)

It's much more productive to agree on a definition of a term, and then argue over whether any particular example is good, bad, or a mixture of both, than to agree that a term must be good, and then argue over whether certain things are metaphysically able to fit under that term.

<comment><USER2> 1\. When a television employee is censoring according to the rules of the state, they are operating as an agent of the state.

2\. No, I'm not. I'm preceding from a definition of censorship as "the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts." Getting into "the dictionary say..." arguments is mostly boring, but most of the definitions do include some element of official imprimatur. Someone removing comments from their personal site fails to meet that official element.

<comment><USER5> Media censors take the rules of the state into account, but they are primarily concerned with pressure groups, not the state. They are most definitely not state agents; that would violate the constitution.

The publisher of a website removing comments from it meets the same soft officialness standard as a newspaper declining to run articles on a particular topic, or a television network refusing to air episodes in which someone disagrees with the group but doesn't end up suffering for it (not an invented example, by the way -- that was a real element of a code governing children's cartoons).

<comment><USER2> The majority of censors are working to prevent state censure; they are primarily concerned with the state. The primary work they do is removing profanities and indecent images at the behest of the state.

<comment><USER6> "The primary work they do is removing profanities and indecent images at the behest of the state."

I'm sure that's the primary function of the Chinese government's _Central Propaganda Department_.

Censorship is when someone or some organisation who has power over you, control your ability to access information.

From the government regulating the content internet users can access deleting content contrary to the government's goals, to administrators of personal websites deleting comments by people espousing views, considered disagreeable by the owner of said website.

<comment><USER2> Except the government's power to censor you goes way farther than somebody on a private site deleting your comment. You're saying popguns and artillery exist in a continuous spectrum, and I'm saying they're completely different categories and should thus be treated differently.

<comment><USER6> The diameter of star R136a1 goes so much farther than a typical Red Dwarf. They might be different categories of stars, but they're both stars nonetheless.[1]

I'd say a personal website eliminating disagreeable views from comments is actual censorship, even if it's ability to silence views is a few magnitude orders smaller than state censorship.

If state censorship is an artillery, personal censorship is at least a zip gun, and it can injure someone.[2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R136a1#/media/File:The_sizes_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R136a1#/media/File:The_sizes_of_stars.jpg)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_firearm#/media/File...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_firearm#/media/File:A_Crude_Indian_Homemade_%22Gun%22.jpg)

<comment><USER2> Who can it injure? The state can actually legally prevent you from saying something ("That is slander/libel") at the threat of punishment. I can just prevent you from saying that on my website. I can delete your comment on trowaweeritesgud.com, but I can't stop you from saying whatever ("Kumquats are a better fruit than mangos!") in the comments here, or on NPR, or from rolling up your own site and saying it there. These aren't just (massive) differences in scale, they're also massive differences in effectiveness of the injunction. That's what moves it into its own category.

<comment><USER6> You can't stop comments in NPR, and China can't stop people accessing information in a foreign country, bringing it back to China and providing it in person in a secret room either. They are massively different in scale, but that is not a reason to put them in different categories (same as with stars, there are massive differences between them in scale, but stars nonetheless)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My idea of moderation is:

1\. Outline rules for a community, make them clear and understandable

2\. Enforce those, and only those, rules.

3\. If something objectionable happens, and the rules don't cover them but you think they should, then change the rules to how you see fit.

4\. Handle the fallout of the rules changing.

Steps 3 and 4 are where things mostly fall apart in communities. Personally, any time something happens which leads me to change rules for something, it's reactive and is the voice of the majority of people (not the loudest, the majority). Most people are happy that way.

Disagreement is never a rule I'd have. I'd only make sure that people either have the tools to self-censor what they don't want to see, or tell them they might be happier going elsewhere.

<comment><USER8> > _Outline rules ... clear and understandable_

There are many discussions about rules being either clear or understandable, but usually not both.

> _Enforce..._

Oh. We "just" enforce it? You sure this mechanism will be both clear and understandable, _and_ be enforced as intended?

> _change the rules_

Change the rules, in reaction to specific instances, while keeping them clear and understandable? This is why they're usually neither both clear and understandable and enforceable.

> _Steps 3 and 4 are where things mostly fall apart in communities._

There is no community where this idea of moderation could hold true.

<comment><USER7> Really? It seems as though that is how most online communities try to follow this logic.

I fully get that 'clear' and 'understandable' are very subjective, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've seen so many moral-handwringers try to justify silencing people by trotting out that XKCD comic as though they were "the community" that Cueball weirdly stopped feeling like a positive hacker character for me - half the time I encounter him now it's as some apologist for "I know best" assholery. The "Moral Majority" all over again.

In my experience it's hardly ever been the community showing someone the door, it's always a corporation getting cold feet over potential controversy, or some narrow-minded zealot abusing their janitorial moderator powers.

Last time this happened it was the community that overwhelmingly wanted to show the zealot the door (a vote happened while the mod was away), but they couldn't - they were nice normal people and not the kind of weasels who dedicate hours of janitorial work for the chance of having veto power over others in an internet forum.

Moderation and censorship can be separated - readers can be given the option to circumvent the moderation when/if they choose, or they can have the option to "unsubscribe" from the actions of moderators they disagree with. To create genuine public spaces we are going to have to find a way that doesn't assume uncorruptible integrity of moderators (the role attracts weasels). Private websites can certainly behave however they want, but they are currently standing in for our public spaces - and presenting themselves as such, which means we have none.

<comment><USER10>
      ...or they can have the option to "unsubscribe"
      from the actions of moderators they disagree with

This is a really interesting idea. Another would be to make moderation opt-in, e.g. you select the curated filters you want to apply to forum X based on their reputation for fairness and pleasantness. These might in fact be the personal filter settings of upstanding members, or a vote between a few such members.

Anyway, thanks for the yummy food for thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Moderation vs censorship reminds me of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by- whiskey#Canonical_exampl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by- whiskey#Canonical_example)

</comment><comment><USER8> A moderator --is-- a censor.

<comment><USER4> Yes. Agreed. They're different terms for the same thing, with different cultural connotations.

<comment><USER5> Basically what I came to say. daurnimator said it better, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If Disqus would simply design their software so it allows users to filter/block whichever users they don't want to see no one would need to be censored or moderated. All the trolls, paid or not, would vanish from a user's view and it would be up to the user whose messages they see. Problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER13> Moderation: the action of making something less extreme, intense, or violent

Censorship: the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts

Moderation is censorship.

To say otherwise is to make a distinction without a difference.

Rephrase your question to have meaning. Perhaps "When is censorship justifiable?"

</comment><comment><USER14> Moderation is always censorship. But censorship isn't always problematic. Government censorship, or censorship by an entity that has effectively the same kind of broad control over media of communication is problematic.

</comment><comment><USER15> As others have noted, moderation _is_ censorship, at least by action. Neither however fall under the _legal_ protections of free speech, which don't apply.

The first question is: what is a given community for, and how should it accomplish those goals? Individual moderation, collaborative filtering, individual killfiles, expert ratings systems, etc., are all tools toward these ends. They're non-trivial.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content_rating_moderation_and_ranking_systems/)

 _Community behavior is very strongly dependent on BOTH scale AND founder cohorts._

A group with one person (blog, winking in the dark) is different from one with two, or a small set of people engaged in discussion (say 3-30), or a larger group discussing common topics (say 30-100), etc. Part of this can be thought of as a _cost function_ in which the _positive_ contribution of members falls with scale, while the _cost_ of each additional participant is rather more constant. Eventually, adding more participants makes the experience worse for all.

It's _really_ difficult for any one conversation to have more than a few key participants. Two and a moderator, or perhaps 5-6 participants _who know each other well and get along_.

If you're trying to arrive at some truth or understanding, it's really difficult not to have a truth-based moderation criterion.

Individual killfiles are somewhat useful, except that the killfilee tends to see a great many one-sided discussions (others interacting with those they've filtered). Unless the system blots out _both_ sides, this accomplishes little.

I've started looking more at discussion tools which foster both smaller and larger groups. "Warrens" and "plazas". The idea of creating persistent communities well below Dunbar's number (say 50-300 people) and promoting up material from those has some appeal (you'd also want to allow for lateral movement of individuals). A small set of tiers would easily accomodate the entire global population. (And yes, there's a social network set up on this basis though the name escapes me.)

A huge problem with allowing noisy participants is that they draw the oxygen out of the room, and tend to _very_ strongly discourage high-quality particpants. There's a curiously persistent asymmetry between an individual's proclivity to participate in a group discussion and the interest in others in their doing so. Good designs balance this mismatch.

</comment><comment><USER16> It becomes censorship when a moderator removes a comment or discussion based purely on personal beliefs and disagreements.

Moderation should be about removing the trolls, not what it has become, which is censorship.

It feels like many people personally enjoy moderating down disagreements because they don't get any actual power in their own lives.

It's one of the reasons I stay away from most online discussions these days: because nobody can be open and honest. It really makes me wonder if this is the reason why secret groups like the masons were created. Back in those days, instead of getting moderating down, you were killed or attacked.

<comment><USER17> "Moderation should be about removing the trolls"

True, but some argue that those who support Trump, or who are against gender identity equality, are trolls.

<comment><USER18> That's the problem in a nutshell. About 95% of the people out there think the definition of "troll" is "someone who disagrees with me", and I don't see how you ever really get away from a subjective determination.

<comment><USER2> Because it's a fundamentally subjective evaluation. There is no way to objectively define "trolling".

<comment><USER19> > There is no way to objectively define "trolling".

Oh it's been very objectively defined. _Knowing_ when someone is trolling, or when they legitimately believe what they're saying is the problem.

<comment><USER2> So...it's defined, but it's impossible to know whether it's happening unless the person specifically tells you they're trolling? That sorta seems like a flawed definition.

<comment><USER19> Can you define lying? Has lying been defined? Check your dictionary.

Knowing what a lie is is not the same as knowing when someone is lying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> And Hacker News deletes it, <sigh>

<comment><USER8> Epic

Edit: I don't think this item has been deleted, it apparently was flagged and has been "moderated" automatically without human intervention?

<comment><USER9> Sounds plausible - abusing the flag/report system seems to be common with groups who like to act as self-appointed censors.

How did you tell the difference? (or suspect the difference)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> ... immediately.

<comment><USER21> A user-driven upvote/downvote system is a form of decentralized moderation. Do you also believe that if a post is being downvoted, it's censorship? Do you believe that upvotes are a tool of censorship?

They can be, of course. Censorship is not just deletions/removal. You can censor something by hiding it, drowning it out, discrediting the author, etc.

Now keep all that in mind before giving a one-word response to a very complex question.

<comment><USER8> The article uses moderation in a sense apart from an upvote/downvote system. Your argument is premised on a upvote/downvote system being moderation. _How_ exactly does it moderate? If it merely reorders and doesn't remove, then this is not moderation in the context at hand.

Therefore your argument is invalid. (Your argument is really just orthogonal, premised on different assumptions.)

<comment><USER21> The point I was trying to make was that you can't just say "immediately" and get away with it. And upvotes/downvote don't necessarily have to merely reorder. On many websites, large counts of downvote automatically hide and sometimes delete the post in question.

<comment><USER20> Sorry about the delay in responding ...

I don't consider upvotes/downvotes by themselves to be moderation or censorship. That's just non-verbal communication.

However, when an upvote or downvote system hides a post or promotes a post, then it's censorship, because promoting a post necessarily hides some other post.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Taboola ($157mm VC funding) partners with malware; Akamai and Amazon complicit - <AUTHOR> I'm at my moms house for Mother's Day weekend and cleaned her computer after she told me she was getting a lot of popups. One of the frequent popups was for a site called suchhappy.com which looks like a BuzzFeed/viral content site. You can check out suchhappy.com and see that Taboola partners with them and has big ads showing at the top on the homepage and all over the place when you click into an article.
To see posts about suchhappy.com being malware, look at the below links. After following the instructions I was finally able to get rid of it.
* http://www.fix-exeerror.com/how-do-i-remove-suchhappy-com-step-by-step-removal-guide/
* http://www.malwareremovalvideo.com/fixed-how-can-i-stop-the-suchhappy-com-pop-up-removal-tips/
* http://computervirusremovalfixer.blogspot.com/2015/04/stop-suchhappycom-pop-up-guide-to.html
* http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/574578/suchhappy-redirect-virus-and-getprivate-shopper-7-pro-x64-firefox/
* http://helpremovepopups.com/get-rid-of-suchhappy-com-virus-permanently/
When will VC funded companies stop using malware to grow? How can we, as investors, entrepreneurs, and techies, place pressure on these advertising companies to stop supporting malware? Akamai and Amazon are complicit because they are the CDN on a bunch of the links on the page. Additionally, there are companies called "UDM Serve" and "RevContent" with ads on the page.
What can we do? <comment><USER2> The ad ecosystem is a lot more complicated than you know.

It is not often trivial for suchhappy.com to know who is driving traffic to them (they do source traffic, but how would you tell if it's malware or user initiated? there are piles of legitimate looking fronts out there), let alone people whose ads end up on suchhappy.com (who, for similar reasons may not even know where there ads actually ran).

</comment><comment><USER3> >Akamai and Amazon are complicit because they are the CDN on a bunch of the links on the page.

Yeah, and google is an accomplice to thepiratebay for having links to them on their search results.

CDNs do not review what content is served from their servers. Send them a complaint and they will, maybe.

</comment><comment><USER4> don't let your mom install toolbars? teach end users how to read and understand dialog boxes instead of blindly clicking "OK!" ?</comment>


Robot sorting system helps Chinese company sort 200,000 packages a day - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QndP_PCRSw&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> What's the advantage over just scanning them and having a conveyor belt system channel it to the right spot?

<comment><USER3> I think it's flexibility and less fixed infrastructure. You don't have to build a conveyor belt system to cover a rectangular area. You just need holes and navigation grid for the robot swarm, and charging docks -- essentially trading hardware complexity for software complexity.

<comment><USER4> You still have to build tons of vertical slots and a ton of floor space for all of those slots. Also I feel that this thing will start getting a exponential congestion problem.

The layout from the video:

oox ooo ooo

Which means that you need 9 grids for every one slot. Further, and this is where a proof would be needed, you'd have the following robot placements:

roxrox rRRrRR rrrrRR roxrox rRRrRR rrrrRR

One robot can move in this case but I'm not sure this is optimal. At this density I'm betting that you get into exponential moves to move all the way from 0,0 to 6,6.

If you were more like roxrox orooro rorror roxrox orooro rorror

you could more likely keep channels of movement.

This is similar to a chip routing problem. So that's why you go vertical planes as well. But you still get limited throughput.

I may have the math wrong (I haven't done it)

EDIT: Ugh, no pre tags, take the ror ooo and line them up vertially on the breaks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is a person putting the parcels on the robots.

<comment><AUTHOR> I suspect for now the package has to be placed facing up so an OCR of some type can scan the address and instruct the robot to a particular shoot to drop the package. I would expect that eventually the whole process is automated where the package will drop onto the robot without human intervention.</comment></comment>


Friends who show up on the lefthand toolbar of your Facebook account - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know what algorithms facebook uses to include them on the left-hand toolbar of your facebook page? I've noticed that some friends show up far more often than others (who almost never show up). And while the ones I've had the most interaction with show up the most, there are always others who I hardly interact with but who nonetheless show up more frequently than others. I actually sort of suspect that it either has to do with (a) how often they interact with your "social core", or other group of people you interact the most with, or (b) gasp how often they actually read your profile [or how often you read their profile].
Might be interesting to try to reverse-engineer this. <comment><USER3> Interesting - I had the same thought not too long ago. I talked with a friend, and it turned out that a lot of the same friends that show up on my profile when I am looking at it show up for him when he views my profile.

As to (a) and (b), the friends that showed up seemed pretty random - <USER2> interact regularly with less than half of them. It's definitely not random, but I'm not sure how it's determined. It would be interesting to track it over time (as friendships are added, removed, and changed).

</comment><comment><USER4> Are you talking about the friends on chat feature? I was under the impression that it's just a list of your friends who are on facebook at that time and signed in to facebook chat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh no, I'm not. I'm actually talking about the left section in this image:

[http://shegeeks.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/New- Facebook-...](http://shegeeks.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/New-Facebook- Profile-1.png)

<comment><USER4> Ah, ok. That makes a lot more sense.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Get your startup now - <AUTHOR> http://getstartupnow.com/

<comment><USER2> Who are you? Why should I have any confidence that you're going to help move my project forward? What does being a geek/tutor have to do with starting a business? Why would I think that 1 session per month costing $69/month is enough to give me the knowledge, tools and support I need to do one of the hardest things in the world? Assuming I'm not technical, what the hell is PHP or Scala or Erlang and why would I want to learn it? etc. etc. etc.

<comment><USER2> To be clear, that first question is the most important. You're talking about business. Business is almost always about relationships. You're asking me to consider having a relationship with you, but there is absolutely nothing on your landing page that makes me feel like you are credible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Slightly changed the page. We will not charge until the first session is completed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> #2 in your easy 3 step process has a typo.

More importantly, the whole page gives off a spammy feeling. As others pointed out, who are you and why would i pay you almost a hundred bucks? What areas of expertise do you have?

The very top of page states your disdain for erlang - what if it was the absolutely most perfect fit for the startup i want to create? :)

edit: more thoughts

<comment><USER4> There is a weird phenomenon going on now that relates to design. i agree that the page is super simple looking and agree that this is a turnoff for most people. But for some reason people now think that design is even more important than the service. In my opinion, it's the "judging a book by it's cover phenomenon". I wonder how many people would say that the design of Hacker News is too simple?

<comment><USER5> People are visual creatures, so yeah... design matters

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Airpair does something similar but you have expert programmers that are already vetted. How do you check the skills of the developer giving the programming advice?</comment>


Are There Things Which We Should Not Know? (1998) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/TEth/TEthLekk.htm <comment><USER2> I don't follow the first example about jury deliberation. Isn't the criticism in that case about the method which might harm the behavior of the jury and not about the knowledge gained? I guess that the point is that it renders research impossible if there is no available method but this does not seem to support the argument that the topic of research is possibly immoral.

<comment><AUTHOR> The author isn't claiming that the topic of research is immoral. W.r.t. the jury example, she writes that "the topic is interesting, morally unobjectionable methods are available and some practical profits are reasonably expected." She is arguing that methods such a those that involve recordings are not themselves the cause of harm because problems only begin when there is a knowing agent at the terminus of the method of observation used. No violation of secrecy occurs if the recordings are never watched. Yes, the method is incomprehensible without the end, but we can still distinguish the means from the end and it is the end that violates the condition of secrecy, not this method of data collection itself.

Of course, concealing the presence of recording devices may prevent the jury from finding out about the violation of secrecy, but the violation happens nonetheless as a matter of objective fact and this could itself constitute a breach of ethics. Furthermore, news of the violation could or even would eventually get out (esp. if results are published) and affect future jurors. However, in her example, the author assumes that consent has been secured which naturally entails that the jurors know about the violation of secrecy.</comment></comment>


Website Structure Cheat Sheet - <AUTHOR> http://www.edicy.com/blog/website-structure-cheat-sheet

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason why so many websites are left behind (or even worse, never made) is always the same. People don't know what to write there, how to lay it all out. On the basic level most of the websites are very similar. So I created a basic guide to get a website started.</comment>


Kickshitter - <AUTHOR> https://om.co/2019/09/06/kickshitter/ <comment><USER2> Dear Om, Nice article, but please don't use the word "proverbial" in two consecutive sentences unless your article is about proverbs. Or even then. It's distracting as the proverbial bull in the proverbial china shop.</comment>


Data layout affects memory performance - <AUTHOR> https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/04/02/how-data-layout-affects-memory-performance/ <comment><USER2> Getting rid of padding bytes would be great were it not for the number of processor families that _require_ multi-byte types to be aligned in some way. Even processors that don't require alignment tend to perform better with alignment.

I'm not saying that we can't work around alignment issues _and_ get rid of padding bytes, but it's not a simple "oh just do this" as the article seems to imply.</comment>


Elixir v0.15.0 released - <AUTHOR> http://elixir-lang.org/blog/2014/08/07/elixir-v0-15-0-released/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the last minor branch before Elixir v1.0.0. I'm quite excited about Elixir, Erlang is a good candidate to compete with NodeJS for web persistent connections (WebSockets, ServerSideEvents...)

</comment><comment><USER2> Would really love to see this take off!</comment>


The Batman Killer – a prescription for murder? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/aurora_shooting <comment><USER2> Giving mass murderers like this high-profile articles discussing their motivations, describing the details (closeups of the guns, the bit about booby trapping the house), portraying them as some anti-hero is EXACTLY what they want, and will only serve to nudge more people who are disturbed and have access to guns to do the same. Media will claim that it's not their responsibility to decide what's published. But they're essentially saying "if you kill enough people, we will probably give you a platform and talk about your message"

<comment><USER3> See also: subsequent terrorist actions after high profile incidents; suicide sprees after high profile incidents; etc.

Whilst I don't particularly want a shackled press, it would be nice if they did a little more reflection on what they're publishing.

(See also: "but her emails")

<comment><USER2> Yeh it's hard - law restricting what they publish is absolutely not the way to go, but a bit more responsibility from editors would be good. It will never happen though, especially as some organisations are desperate for the extra eyeballs and the advertising $ they bring. Which makes it weird that the BBC wrote this ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The comments here are pretty much geared towards not giving the attacker publicity, but even ignoring the fact that having a conversation is better than blindly letting emotion guide you, the part about anti-depressants was quite a significant point, and I feel as though it was somewhat shadowed.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a nice rebuttal: [https://inews.co.uk/essentials/culture/television/last- night...](https://inews.co.uk/essentials/culture/television/last-nights- panorama-antidepressants-propaganda-not-journalism/amp/)

The BBC's sensationalist reporting will cause harm.

Suicide is the leading cause of death for everyone under 35 and men under the age of 49 (in the UK) and untreated depression is an obvious significant risk.

This kind of pill shaming will cause people to avoid seeking help and to stop taking meds, both of which cause considerably more harm than the _single_ case of murder linked to AD meds.

Indeed, in the UK rates of SSRI prescription have increased dramatically (probably being overprescribed) while rates of violent crime have been falling.

The BBC editorial guidelines about harm.have pretty clearly been breached with this programme and the adverts for it, and a bunch of people in England are pushing the BBC to issue corrections and retractions.

</comment><comment><USER6> As someone who loves the BBC and 99% of their output, this programme was utterly awful. There were numerous factual inaccuracies and many groups including the Royal Society of Psychiatrists came out to condemn the documentary. This sort of sensationalist nonsense belongs on commercial TV, not the BBC.

Please submit a complaint to the BBC trust if you're minded to do so: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/contact_us/making_a_complaint....](http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/contact_us/making_a_complaint.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> This from the 1996 Port Arthur mass shooting wikipedia.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_(Australi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_\(Australia\))

 _Bryant 's motivation for the massacre remains a closely guarded secret,[24][25] known only to his lawyer, who is bound not to reveal confidences without his client's consent. The lawyer later released a book outlining that Bryant was motivated largely by the media reports of the then- recent Dunblane school massacre. From the moment he was captured, he continually wanted to know how many people he had killed and seemed impressed by the number._

But also the killer plead guilty to 35 murders and there was apparently no trial.

 _At least two variants of a conspiracy theory about the massacre have been promoted.[33] Interviewed in 2006, Tony Rundle, Premier of Tasmania from 1996 to 1998, admitted that, because there was no trial, the evidence made public was possibly insufficient to support that Bryant had been the gunman: "At the time, the view was that a trial could do no good for the victims and their families. Now I think maybe that wasn't the case. If all the evidence was heard, then maybe it would have provided some closure and stopped the proliferation of conspiracy theories that sprang up over the years."[34]_

</comment><comment><USER8> There has been a connection with anti depressants and mass killings almost since columbine.

<comment><USER5> There hasn't.

There has been a clear link between the US's deranged gun laws and mass murder and mass shootings.

The dishonesty of the gun lobby is shameful.

<comment><USER3> There's a connection -- but whether it's a valid, proven, causal connection is another matter.

<comment><USER5> The BBC documentary programme _Panorama_ is clearly unambiguously saying that SSRIs cause violence.

They've been widely criticised for that, because it's fucking idiotic.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Slack-Native TODOs Right in Your Home Tab - <AUTHOR> https://www.thetodobot.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, HN!

Slack has recently released its Home Tab ([https://api.slack.com/surfaces/tabs](https://api.slack.com/surfaces/tabs)). Basically, it's a dedicated page within the Slack app where your bot can build a pretty advanced UI (way beyond basic messages).

While implementing the Home Tab for our main product, I realized that - Hey! This could be a perfect place for all my TODOs to live. I'm part of Apple, Google and a bit of Linux ecosystems and there aren't too many apps that I use consistently across the board. Slack is one of them and I often just DM myself to store a quick note or TODO that I can later view somewhere else. Why can't there be a bot for that?

Said - Done! I and the team hacked together the ToDoBot in 3 days and published it in the Slack store for everyone to use for free. Please check it out and let me know what you think!

</comment><comment><USER2> Seems pretty slick. I am going to give it a try. My work life revolves around slack reminders, todoist, and trying to use vim-orgmode but this looks worth a try, thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, shmoogy!</comment></comment>


Quibi is the anti-TikTok (that's a bad thing) - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/09/quibi-vs-tiktok/ <comment><USER2> If anyone knows what the young people are into now it's Meg Whitman ex-CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I personally am shocked Quibi failed.

</comment><comment><USER3> > that's a bad thing

Thank goodness I don't have to decide how to feel about this myself.

<comment><USER4> At least they're up front with their conclusion.</comment></comment>


Colloquium: A Century of Noether's Theorem - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.01989 <comment><USER2> Emmy Noether was also recently the subject of In Our Time, a fantastic BBC roundtable discussion program. She seems to have had a remarkable skill for invariants and finding symmetries in complex math, perhaps even some kind of intuition that allowed her to make incredible leaps in different academic areas around the topic. She played a crucial part in helping Einstein and Hilbert lay the groundwork for the theory of general relativity, as well as making significant advances in abstract algebra. The scope of her contributions is only recently starting to be truly appreciated and I would highly recommend listening to the show.

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00025bw](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00025bw)

</comment><comment><USER3> Emmy Noether's story is an interesting perspective on the sociology of the scientific establishment a hundred years ago. But (in case the reader doesn't appreciate the importance of the ideas) it's also worth focusing on what is a fantastic and profound result regarding symmetries and how they make problem- solving easy (in a very concrete operational sense). The ideas are so deep that they're not only applicable when there are exact symmetries, but degrade gracefully to also give approximate answers when symmetries are approximate.

</comment><comment><USER4> A bit off topic, but anyone know what the symmetries for Conservation of Gravity and Conservation of Magnetic charge are?

i.e. gravity can not be created or destroyed, it can only be moved (works just like Conservation of Charge).

And a Magnetic monopole can not be created unless you create both sides at the same time.

<comment> semi-extrinsic I don't understand what you mean by conservation of gravity. Do you mean conservation of mass? There is literally nothing else than mass and some universal constants that determine the gravitational force.

As for "no magnetic monopoles" \- this one isn't actually a law, there's nothing in any of our physical theories that says you cannot have magnetic monopoles, it's just that experimentally nobody's ever found one (and we've looked pretty hard).

It's important to note about magnetic monopoles that the magnets we know are _not_ made up of magnetic monopoles, they are made up of magnetic dipoles. No matter how small pieces you break a magnet into, even going down towards atom- sized bits, the pieces still have a north and a south pole.

<comment><USER5> Isn't divB=0 one of Maxwell's equations? That seems to be "one of our physical theories" claiming the impossibility of magnetic monopoles.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Ah, but this is indeed just us saying "hey, we don't see any monopoles anywhere, so let's simplify the equations to divB=0". The "full" equations have a divB={stuff that's perfectly symmetric to divE RHS}, and also a modified curlE term to make the "full" set of equations completely symmetric for electricity and magnetism. You can see these equations at

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

<comment><USER5> Interesting! I guess I've never learned much physics more recent than 1904.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Technology Review: Startups Aim to Reinvent Local Advertising - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/business/24825/?ref=rss <comment><USER2> How do these ad companies that target small businesses scale their business model? Will it involve having a large telemarketing or on the ground sales force?</comment>


Why Major Cryptocurrency Investors Are Betting Heavily Against Ethereum - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2018/07/25/why-major-cryptocurrency-investors-are-betting-heavily-against-ethereum/ <comment><USER2> Summary: Because it currently only supports 15 txns/second total and offchain scaling solutions are estimated to be 2 years out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Everyone was worried about bitcoin scaling a year ago... Yet right now the network isn't even near capacity and fees are pretty much zero.

<comment><USER2> Just because usage is down from peak doesn't mean that scaling isn't a problem. Bitcoin does support slightly more txns/sec than it did a year ago due to more widespread adoption of SegWit.

Lightning network also has orders of magnitude more usage than it did a year ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To make more money?</comment>


Result of good lobbying? German government wants to privatize the autobahn - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.daserste.de%2Finformation%2Fwirtschaft-boerse%2Fplusminus%2Fautobahnen-privat-100.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is really nonsense from the economic perspective: The German government can finance its infrastructure (among others) basically at zero costs due to low interest rates. Nevertheless, it wants to privatize the Autobahn (to be correct, major parts of it) in Germany. It seems that good lobbying is here at work. Private investors do not earn currently any interest rates on their capital. So some smart guys think they can get the German Autobahn, raise the price for its use and get so a good return on their capital.</comment>


Titan: From a Single Server to a Highly Available Cluster - <AUTHOR> http://thinkaurelius.com/2013/03/30/titan-server-from-a-single-server-to-a-highly-available-cluster/

<comment><USER2> Interesting post. It'd also be interesting to see how Titan compares to Twitter's FlockDB.</comment>


Bracha v Felleisen "Types for an Untyped World" (2015) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBmIQIZPaHY <comment><AUTHOR> Some highlights:

Q: "Do you hate static types" GB: "No" MF: "No"

GB: "Types are useful for: 1\. Doc for human 2\. Doc for machine 3\. Making things faster … 4\. Correctness"

This was experience from the Strongtalk project, which implemented a fast, typed Smalltalk. Strongtalk was purchased by Sun and the tech. was the basis for Java's Hotspot. They actually _expected_ the correctness factor to be much higher, but in practice the static type system only helped to find one or two minor bugs in largely unused code-paths in the libraries. I also find it interesting that "making things faster" is on the list, because the mantra from that part of the discipline has always been that static types do not help for performance, because the JIT will fix it all.

MF: "Research on Types and Soundness _smothers_ research on programming languages"

Clarifying, says something along the lines that you have to figure out more powerful/better language mechanisms first, then later start thinking about how to type them properly.

<comment><USER2> They're so right about that. As a frontend dev, I don't care about that extra 1-2% of bugs that, say, ownership types could catch if it kills my productivity by having to annotate everything.

However, if I can figure out what a method actually returns and click through to it in the IDE, that's the real gain from types for me. Type analysis has to be fast to be able to do that.

My impression of research in academia is that it's disproportionately focused on even stronger types that are even harder to compute. Not everyone builds spaceships.

<comment><USER3> Just going to point out here that you are conflating Javascript problems with dynamic language problems. Try Clojure, a well designed dynamic language, and you'll find you are a lot more productive with it than any statically typed language.

Indeed over the weekend I was able to design and build a GUI DSL, layout system, model-view databinding, command event system, and serialisation/deserialisation logic for a side project of mine. This sort of stuff would have taken weeks of effort in a static language.

<comment><USER4> Clojure is a fine language, and I wrote it professionally for a few years.

However, I don't see why this would be true:

> This sort of stuff would have taken weeks of effort in a static language.

I've also written plenty of things in typed languages, and in many ways they can be faster to develop in than dynamic languages. Of course, you do need to change the way you program a bit to really take advantage of types.

I think the main advantage Clojure has over most typed languages is macros, but there is work being done to rectify even that.

<comment><USER3> I used to think this, until I used Clojure. I'm surprised you used it professionally and have that mindset, I write far less code in Clojure and get far more done. The productivity gains are amazing, especially when I can just upload new code on the fly as the program is running.

<comment><USER4> Part of the issue is maintenance. Coming back to code you haven't worked on in a while can require more time to load back into your head than a typed language. And speaking from experience [1], refactoring in a typed language also tends to go more smoothly.

> I'm surprised you used it professionally and have that mindset

I used to have your mindset when I first started working with Clojure :)

Keep in mind that not all typed languages are created equal. Clojure is still much better than Java. But I find I'm quite productive with OCaml, due in large part to the simple but powerful type system, plus the fantastic module system. OCaml does have some drawbacks compared to Clojure, but they're not related to static typing. The main disadvantages are the macro system (even the new extension point stuff is cumbersome compared to a proper macro system) and the smaller library ecosystem.

[1] I've done a lot of refactoring in Clojure, and while it wasn't terrible, types can help a lot.

[Edit] To be clear, I do think Clojure has a lot going for it, but I don't think any of it's advantages are due to being dynamically typed, and there's no reason a statically typed language can't have the same benefits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it's tragic how easily dismissed ML/Miranda-evolved languages are considered _a priori_ bad.

What is more interesting about a sound type system is what category theory enables. Proven composition, sound abstractions, etc. I'm not a huge fan of category theory but it undeniably useful. In practice this means we get very rich, provable composition.

It's quite liberating how far good, reasonable constraints can take you.

<comment><USER6>
       it's tragic

Fortunately, this is a minority opinion in programming language research today. Bracha/Felleisen have lost this fight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Dart could have been such a great language if it was statically typed but Bracha's obsession with dynamic types ruined that effort.

<comment><USER2> They pivoted a lot in that direction. Dart's strong mode is statically typed and sound and all that, except that you can say "dynamic" if you really need to.

<comment><USER7> Yes, so they realized that statically typed languages are superior years after creating the language, which is something we've learned and known for more than ten years.

Retrofitting a type system into a dynamically typed language has never been done successfully and it's unlikely Dart will invalidate that claim.

It's really a pity, Dart could have been a game changer.

<comment><USER8> I don't think they had any such "realization" about a superiority of static typing, especially as research indicates that there are tradeoffs between dynamic and static typing, not that there is superiority of one or the other model. Both Bracha and Felleisen tend to fall in the soft [1] or gradual [2] typing camp, after all. See, for example, Bracha's paper on pluggable type systems [3].

As for retrofitting a type system into a dynamically typed language, Dart had gradual typing from the beginning (with types being checked at runtime), so it's an entirely different beast from (say) Ruby or Python.

[1] [http://wiki.c2.com/?SoftTyping](http://wiki.c2.com/?SoftTyping)

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

[3] [http://bracha.org/pluggableTypesPosition.pdf](http://bracha.org/pluggableTypesPosition.pdf)

<comment><USER7> > especially as research indicates that there are tradeoffs between dynamic > and static typing

Not really.

How come there are plenty of dynamically typed languages that are migrating toward optionally static typing but never the other way around?

Even Bracha himself, a very strong advocate of dynamically typed languages, has felt the need to work on Strongtalk and then later, to have Dart support optional static types.

Today, we have very good type inference engines and there is really no reason to ever want to use a dynamically typed language. This is the trend, this is the present and the future.

Javascript is going to be around for a while for legacy reasons but in a few years, we'll look back at dynamically typed languages with a fond "Yeah, it was a good idea at the time but we know better now" look.

<comment><USER8> > Not really.

Can you provide support for this claim? Existing research [1] seems to indicate that it isn't clear-cut at all.

> Today, we have very good type inference engines and there is really no > reason to ever want to use a dynamically typed language.

Type inference has its shares of issues once you're dealing with non-local type inference, subtype polymorphism or parametric polymorphism.

[1] [https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/](https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/)

<comment><USER4> > Type inference has its shares of issues once you're dealing with non-local > type inference, subtype polymorphism or parametric polymorphism.

Just wanted to point out that actually, type inference works quite well with parametric polymorphism, like in ML. Even non-local type inference can work fine given other constraints, also like in ML.

<comment><USER8> 1\. Only for unconstrained parametric polymorphism. For constrained parametric polymorphism, ML requires functors (don't get me wrong, I think ML functors are brilliant, but they do require you to be rather explicit about your typing).

2\. I wouldn't say that it's without problems even for unconstrained parametric polymorphism. Consider the value restriction [1] and the fact that if you add subtyping to the mix (as in OCaml), you're getting some really non- trivial issues (as Scala found out the hard way).

[1] [http://mlton.org/ValueRestriction](http://mlton.org/ValueRestriction)

<comment><USER4> Yes, subtyping makes everything more complicated. I think there was a paper about type inference for subtyping posted on HN a while back, but I don't remember much about it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Suggest software to setup virtual classroom in India - <AUTHOR>

I am putting down the requirement and please suggest the best hardware software you think might help us . (It can b paid as well as expensive)
1. A teacher will give lecture to students in a remote classroom. The classroom will have one projector screen.
2. Students will make presentations before the class one by one and the the Prof. at remote location should be able to see both the students talking as well as his slides.
3. The setup (at both ends) should not be "fixed" It should be movable easily. (With the same ease as it would take us to move a desktop PC).
I liked WebX but it does not support voice interactions as yet. <comment><USER2> Skype and a computer with a camera?

Seems like it fits all your requirements.</comment>


Sous Vide startup Anova gets acquired by Electrolux - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/06/anova-electrolux/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> Ultimately this is the outcome for all new cooking appliances. Breville bought PolyScience (the godfather of all sous vide devices) a few years back. Temperature-controlled cooking may never be as widespread as the microwave oven, but it has a decent shot at being as popular as the food processor or the large-form-factor toaster oven.

<comment><USER3> I've always wondered, why don't regular $30-50 rice/slow cookers have better temp controls.. cost would be minimal

<comment><USER4> I looked into building such a unit. The problem problem with that style machine (like the sous vide supreme) is the heating element. It's a flexible mat. Getting it at a sufficiently high watt density, to keep it from taking forever to preheat and totally sucking wind when you add a big hunk of cold meat, is expensive. In that industry your build cost generally needs to be about 25% of retail, so an extra $20 for your heating mat means $80 more at the store.

It's also less accurate temperature control because the thermocouple isn't submersed. It's a strip on the outside of a metal pan.

Rice cookers and crock pots don't have to heat up nearly as much water (which has a high specific heat capacity) as a sous vide machine big enough to handle a slab of ribs.

<comment><USER5> The Kenwood cooking chef is IMHO the (expensive) example on how to get this right. Inductive heating, very precise and even heat distribution. And goes up to 140°C. Thermomix stops at 120°C. But for me it is too pricey.

I am thinking of hacking the Kenwood kcook and add better temerature control to it, though :-) With an ESP8266 - boom. DIY connected kitchen device!

<comment><USER2> I don't understand these devices. If I already have a circulator (and an oven and a range), why would I want one of these?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nitpick - Anova isn't exactly a startup. The original Anova Scientific [[https://www.waterbaths.com](https://www.waterbaths.com)] is a lab equipment manufacturer specializing in controlled-temperature water baths. When they realised that chefs were willing to spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on their baths for cooking purposes, they made a classic pivot and span off Anova Culinary to make smaller, cheaper products for home kitchen use. The Kickstarter was as far as I understand as much to gauge market size as to raise capital.

</comment><comment><USER7> For the space constrained, the Joule is a good bit smaller.

[https://anovaculinary.com/anova-precision- cooker/specificati...](https://anovaculinary.com/anova-precision- cooker/specifications/)

[https://www.chefsteps.com/joule/specs](https://www.chefsteps.com/joule/specs)

<comment><USER8> The nice thing about the Anova is that you don't have to use your phone to set it.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, it's annoying, but the Joule fits so much better into the drawer. It also has a much lower minimum water line, and slightly higher heat output, and as a result, it can heat up small portions to temperature _really_ quickly.

(We had an Anova, replaced it with a Joule and gave the Anova away)

<comment><USER10> Better for travel, too.

I took my Anova with me to a rented condo in Hawaii, it's nice to be able to make quality food with minimal effort. Joule would be even easier to justify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Happy for them! The Anova product is great and they iterated on it properly. Unlike a lot of other Kickstarters I've backed...

</comment><comment><USER12> Anova is great, but I still prefer the Chef Steps Joule given the option of either/or.

<comment><USER13> Anova has much higher power output especially on the larger (Wifi+BT) model which both speeds up the heating by quite a bit and allows you to cook large volumes.

Anova is also much easier to clean than the Joule, it comes apart so easily and you just dry it out, I have one for over a year and no signs of scaling on the heating element because of that. The joule on the other hand can't be easily clean you can unscrew the bottom but then you need to use a brush and the heating element isn't fully exposed.

I have them both, and tbh I use the Anova considerably more, it's built better, it's built smarter, and the fact that I don't need to use a phone is a huge plus.

Sure the phone is great for the first week if you never used sous vide before (I cooked Sous Vide on an induction cooker with very coarse temp control and use a thermometer to know when I should turn it off and on for nearly 2 years before getting a proper setup) but once you know the temp it just becomes a hassle.

<comment><USER14> >Anova has much higher power output especially on the larger (Wifi+BT) model

Joule has 1100 watts and the Anova (Wifi + BT) is 900 watts. So not sure what you mean by Anova having more power.

[https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/shopping/joule-vs-anova- sous...](https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/shopping/joule-vs-anova-sous-vide- comparison/)

I agree with you on the ease of cleaning. I also have both and the Anova seems to be a bit easier to clean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> IIRC, the Anova cooking was originally one guy at the lab devices company that saw the Nomiku or Polyscience and said, "we can do that" and started basically doing this as a side business.

I hope he got a bonus at least.

<comment><USER16> Do you have a source for that?

<comment><USER17> I don't have a source handy but the guy was present on a ton of food forums at the time, gathering feedback and responding to inquiries. He was pretty open that this was a one man side project at the time. I still own one of the V1 Anovas and sent him some UI feedback (including uncovering a bug where the calibration was done backwards on an early batch of machines).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Good news for Anova - I am a very happy user of their device. I hope this is going to bring sous vide finally into all kitchen stores, especially over here in Europe its still very unknown. Sous vide has changed my meat cooking entirely.

</comment><comment><USER19> Just out of curiousity, why is it named after ANOVA?

<comment><USER17> Anova Scientific was a long standing scientific water bath maker that spun off a wildly successful culinary arm ([https://www.waterbaths.com/about.html](https://www.waterbaths.com/about.html)).

<comment><USER19> Ha, that's neat! Kind of like Nalgene?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good for Anova but this acquisition doesn't make much sense to me. Unlike most culinary methods, there's no better and worse sous vide, all sous vide machines produce the exact identical quality outcome. There's some minor differentiation when it comes to size, noise, apps etc. but they turn out to be not super important in practice.

As Sous Vide becomes more popular, all of the existing players are going to get murdered by cheap, Chinese generics and there's no real room for profit in the market. The devices are incredibly simple and easy to manufacture and there's no defensive moat around any of the technology.

There's the possibility of Anova branching out from SV into other related devices but it's unclear where it could head to justify the acquisition amount. They can either choose to pursue devices that are even more niche than SV (combi ovens, vacuum sealers, chamber vacuums, centrifuges, rotovaps) in the hopes that they become increasingly mainstream or they can go after more popular devices (microwaves, dishwashers, toaster ovens, blenders etc.) which are incredibly competitive fields filled with tough incumbents. Neither seems like an incredibly compelling choice or one I would stake an acquisition on.

I'm glad the team has gotten this far and has been instrumental in pushing SV more into the mainstream but I don't see many bright prospects for their future.

<comment><USER20> Never underestimate the power of marketing and branding in creating profit over generic competitors. See blenders: Ninja, Vitamix.

<comment><USER21> Or: Thermomix, can be yours for the low, low price of 1199 €. Widely successful product.

Also, apparently Anova stuff is "connected in a meaningful way" \- sounds familiar?

<comment><USER17> All the current SV companies can see the writing on the wall and hope that they can avoid commodification via their proprietary app. Except that the problem is that Sous Vide is the ultimate open platform since each recipe only consists of two numbers, a temperature and a time.

The apps aren't super useful in the first place and, even if they were, there's no meaningful way for the apps to provide lockin since you can never restrict a recipe to a single device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Getting nothing but a blank page on iOS.

<comment><USER22> Whoops, wrong topic.

<comment> the-dude You can delete

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I know, but it's only in the first hour or two.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Getting started with Android development using Groovy 2.4 and Android Studio - <AUTHOR> http://hosain.net/2015/02/07/getting-started-with-android-development-using-groovy-2.4-and-android-studio.html

<comment><USER2> You listed some benefits of using Groovy over Java (i.e. closure, dynamic typing, and collections syntax making code shorter, and metaclassing) but you haven't shown any benefits of Groovy over other languages for Android, e.g. Scala, which already have those benefits.</comment>


Ask HN: Feedback and beta test my startup, SocialBlaze - <AUTHOR>

Hi Guys,
I've been working on a new product for the past couple of months. It's a web app that allows companies to fully manage their social media presence, marketing campaigns, and market research. Basically, I thought there was a pain in doing social media marketing for companies and I tried to solve it.
It's a "swiss army knife" for social media marketing.
The app is called: SocialBlaze ( http://www.socialblazeapp.com - not a lot of info there yet cause we're in private beta). We've have a couple of small businesses beta testing it; but I'd like to get some more beta testers and feedback on the idea.
A quick summary of the main features you'll see (so you can get a sense of what it does, and if you'd like to beta test) - Unified dashboard to manage all your social media
- You can do brand/keyword monitoring on all the major social media sites (blogs, twitter, flickr, youtube) (with sentiment analysis and change-over-time charts)
- Run promotions, polls on facebook and twitter
- Twitter client for business (assign tweets for followup, schedule tweets, and other little things that make it easier to use twitter for business purposes.)
- Manage facebook pages
- Manage, make blog posts
- There's analytics for everything and a dashboard showing you what's the most popular (e.g. what tweet has the most clicks, retweets, what blog post has the most views)
- Multiple workspaces/projects and users (with user permissions)
- We're also working on a scheduler where you can plan out various stages of your social media campaign and schedule things in advance
I'm wondering what you guys think of the idea and if it would be useful for your startup/company? If you're interested I'd also like to get some beta testers (free during beta, significant discount when we launch). If you're interested please fill out this form: http://8it.us/n5m
Do you guys have any suggestions/advice/feedback on the service as I've described it? I'm interested to hear what industries you think this app will be the most useful for?
Thanks! And Happy New Year! <comment><USER2> Clickable - <http://www.socialblazeapp.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> I've signed up for postling, which offers some similar features, but it hasn't really "wowed" me yet. Your service sounds a little more ambitious in some ways... and it hits a particular pain point of mine (managing Facebook pages). I filled out your form, but forgot to explicitly express interest in being a beta tester... please count me in.

</comment><comment><USER4> Any reason why you guys haven't secured the socialblaze.com url?

</comment><comment><USER5> minor nitpick - you probably want to change the HTML title to something other than "Home Page"

<comment><AUTHOR> Done - thanks. I didn't notice that since this is only the splash page while we're in private beta.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> less text on the landing page!</comment>


Tinder's Move to Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/tinders-move-to-kubernetes-cda2a6372f44 <comment><USER2> Nice, I liked the 1000 nodes! Claps and nice to hear working well at this scale.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you use a language other than Java for an Android app? - <AUTHOR>

As part of my CS degree, one of my courses involves developing an Android application that helps new students choose their courses and generally familiarize themselves with the university. This is sponsored by Google.
It's recommended we use Java with the Eclipse IDE. I'm not a big Java fan, I know it's solid but I find development time slow.
However can I realistically use ruby or html5/css/javascript or anything a bit more interesting (which may also make me stand out)?
I have seen phonegap, appcelerator and ruboto but I don't know if they are stable enough or there is enough tutorials/documentation to risk my course on. <comment><USER2> You can use the Android Scripting Environment[1] which supports Python, Perl, Ruby, Lua, JavaScript, Tcl and things you've probably never heard of before. Their FAQ says you can build APKs too.

There is a Clojure port for Android[2], and I hear you can compile Scala programs as well[3].

If you're a CS student, you may find Scala interesting (it's a bit similar to Haskell).

Of course, straying from the well trodden path will give you more freedom but you'll get scratched along the way. Which is probably a good thing.

[1]: <http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/>

[2]: <http://github.com/remvee/clojure>

[3]: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/476111/scala- programming-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/476111/scala-programming- for-android)

</comment><comment><USER3> JRuby sounds risky on Harmony. The people behind it focus on J2EE and Rails.

The Eclipse Android plugin is solid and comes with a user interface builder. Not the best tool in the world, much worse than Microsoft Blend but on par with Samsung Bada for Eclipse. Eclipse really is a fantastic IDE.

Remember that multitouch is the big feature and that all helper API´s are Java. This might bite you in the ass later in the project if you go the "interesting" route.</comment>


99% of Those Who Died from Virus Had Other Illness, Italy Says - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says <comment><USER2> "Other illness" is extremely vague. Apparently having had a high blood pressure reading counts. What about sore knees? Migraines?

Edit: if you scroll down, you find info that is actually meaningful: a chart showing deaths by age. What this shows is that 90+% of people over 60 have had a doctors visit that turned up an issue.

<comment><USER3> It says in the article:

"More than 75% had high blood pressure, about 35% had diabetes and a third suffered from heart disease"

Which makes sense considering most of them were older people

<comment><USER4> Heart disease is undiagnosed diabetes

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZoQiDaWnuE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZoQiDaWnuE)

<comment><USER5> That seems highly improbable to me. Can you give some data to back your assertion?

[Edit: I see you added a Youtube video, with no further information. No, I'm not going to go watch a no-further-information-given Youtube video to find out if your claim has a scientific basis, or if you're a quack. If it's real, it ought to be in text somewhere, with data.]

<comment><USER4> Diabetes mellitus is highly prevalent amongst patients with heart failure, especially those with heart failure and preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), and patients with the two conditions have a higher risk of mortality compared with patients without diabetes or heart failure.[1–3] Diabetic patients have an increased risk of developing heart failure because of the abnormal cardiac handling of glucose and free fatty acids (FFAs), and because of the effect of the metabolic derangements of diabetes on the cardiovascular system.

A wealth of epidemiological evidence demonstrates that diabetes mellitus is independently associated with the risk of developing heart failure, with the risk increasing by more than twofold in men and by more than fivefold in women.[1–3,6]

Both population studies and clinical trials have demonstrated that diabetes mellitus significantly increases the risk of recurrent hospitalisations for heart failure and the duration of hospital stay in patients with heart failure, and it is associated with a significantly higher mortality compared with those without diabetes.[11]

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5494155/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5494155/)

Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death in women. Both obesity and diabetes mellitus are important independent risk factors for the development of cardiovascular disease. Obesity is the leading risk factor for type 2 diabetes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that 32% of white and 53% of black women are obese.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3066828/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3066828/)

<comment><USER6> > diabetes mellitus significantly increases the risk of recurrent > hospitalisations for heart failure

I hadn't heard this - good to know!

However, the studies you cited do not seem to support your earlier statement:

> Heart disease is undiagnosed diabetes

Perhaps a qualification would fit better: deaths from heart disease may have been caused by undiagnosed diabetes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think headlines like these are extremely detrimental to the global fight of this virus.

Whether or not you're at risk (age, health problems, etc), you are a vehicle for transporting the virus and so while there is no need for "panic", it's both respectful and pragmatic to distance so that the virus can be contained.

<comment><USER8> Why? Shouldn't the truth be known? Wouldn't it be wise to know actual stats vs/ trying to hide the truth in order to propagate undue panic? Then discuss it, and options, as how to move forward with correct information vs/ guesses and/or rumors?

It's sad that this report was downvoted on a site (HN) that is supposed to be so analytical.

<comment><USER9> In a perfect world where everyone reacts rationally sure. However, the actual reaction to this information is that individuals deem themselves not a risk and go about their daily lives. Unfortunately they are endangering everyone who is at risk in the process.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, there's _so_ much complexity here that a simple number could lead someone to miss.

So, 99% of those who died had another illness. Almost everyone has illnesses, so what kinds are we talking about?

A patient surviving doesn't mean the patient didn't need intensive medical care.

So you survived, are there any long-term symptoms you'll have to learn to live with?

I've also heard that (at least in some contexts) a "mild" case of COVID-19 is defined as _one that didn 't need breathing assistance._ That's not the colloquial definition of "mild."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> About 90% of the general population have "other" illnesses.

<comment><USER12> A third of the US population suffers from high blood pressure [1]. More than 100 million U.S. adults are now living with diabetes or prediabetes [2]. About 15 million Americans have cancer of some sort [3]. About 10 million people are immunocompromised or immunosuppressed [4]. So, you're not wrong! The high risk factor cohort is enormous, and the more risk factors you have, the higher your risk of death is (based on data coming out of Italy). A lot of folks are going to die from ailments they had and knew about, or ailments they had but didn't know about.

[1] [https://www.cdc.gov/bloodpressure/facts.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/bloodpressure/facts.htm)

[2] [https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p0718-diabetes- repor...](https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p0718-diabetes-report.html)

[3] [https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html](https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html)

[4] [https://www.google.com/search?q=americans+immunocompromised](https://www.google.com/search?q=americans+immunocompromised)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most people dying from AIDS die from other illnesses. If something new pulls the bodily systems down across the board by viral replication, dying cells and lack of oxygen there will always be a place that is a weak spot which gives.

<comment><USER14> With AIDS attacking the immune system, this is an patently bad example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Multiple reports now mention this "high blood pressure" criteria. What this means more exactly? Elevated (above 120/80) also counts as high?

<comment><USER16> I haven't been able to find a good description, but I suspect it means there is a known history of high bp (which indeed is usually defined as you wrote)

However, there is confounding issue of bp medicine - there was a lancer article about ibuprofen and some kinds of bp medicine causing increased ACE2 expression, which is suspected to increase susceptibility to sarscov2 and worsen covid symptoms.

So, it could be that the blood pressure isn't actually the risk factor, but treatments for it. Will take time to tell

<comment><USER17> The official position of the european cardiology association is that claims that BP medicine can increase suceptibility and worsen symptoms is basically FUD: [https://www.escardio.org/Councils/Council-on- Hypertension-(C...](https://www.escardio.org/Councils/Council-on- Hypertension-\(CHT\)/News/position-statement-of-the-esc-council-on- hypertension-on-ace-inhibitors-and-ang)

It is strongly suggested to keep taking your BP medication.

A bonus also lies in that link: there is evidence from studies in animals suggesting that these medications might be rather protective against serious lung complications in patients with COVID-19 infection, but to date there is no data in humans.

The mechanism of protective action is explained by this comment on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22505537](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22505537)

While the theory of ACE inhibitors/blockers making covid-19 worse is basically based upon the presumption that due to inhibition/blocking of angiotensin receptors, the body upregulates by creating more ACE receptors, to which the virus can bind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This doesn't mean that many of those who were younger and without pre-existing illnesses weren't in a serious condition and in danger of dying, just that, with the help of intensive care, they were able to survive.

If and when heath services become completely overwhelmed and there are no longer enough hospital bed/ventilators/doctors and nurses to provide the assistance they need, then we'll likely see a lot of younger and otherwise healthy people start to die as well.

<comment><USER19> It's that the opposite of what they are saying. In a situation where you just described when the system in italy was very openly overwhelmed young people not only didn't die there's very little evidence they got sick, to begin with

<comment><USER20> Was this due to triage where resources were focused on younger people with complications as the medical professionals felt that it was a better use of limited resources?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Same as with influenza.</comment>