Visualize javascript events on a page - <AUTHOR>

I use it sometimes to check out easter eggs on a web page or debugging other people's javascript code :)
In chrome (probably works in other browsers to), bookmark this:
javascript:(function(){if(typeof VisualEvent!='undefined'){if(document.getElementById('Event_display')){VisualEvent.fnClose();}else{VisualEvent.fnInit();}}else{var n=document.createElement('script');n.setAttribute('language','JavaScript');n.setAttribute('src','http://www.sprymedia.co.uk/design/event/media/js/event-loader.js');document.body.appendChild(n);}})();;
When you're on the page, click on the bookmark and everything is visualized.
Here is a screenshot of Google.com after visualizing it : http://imgur.com/tEDvSmm <comment><AUTHOR> I should note, it doesn't work with ssl

And clickable link here: [http://imgur.com/tEDvSmm](http://imgur.com/tEDvSmm)</comment>


How can you program if you're blind? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-program-if-youre-blind

<comment><USER2> None of the answers were about the questions I had about how to program when you're blind. While the tools they use are interesting. I'm more concerned with how you would browse the code.

Say you wanted to find a method, how do you scroll in a large file to locate it? I guess deft use of find & go to definition helps out here.

How do you locate a line of code in a large function? Do you have to listen for the screen reader to read the contents of an entire screen's worth of code? Or do you rely on previous knowledge of the code and remember where it was?

How do you deal with debugging / fixing errors. I imagine the screen reader trying to parse the output of a template error being a nightmare.

<comment><USER3> This is certainly one of the harder aspects of programming blind - particularly tackling a large, unfamiliar, codebase. In the case of a new project, I build up a mental map of how the program works - and memorise the conceptual organisation. With an existing codebase go-to-definition is invaluable, and stepping through in a debugger is just as useful for a blind person as for anyone - you get to see the lines in the order of execution.

This does influence my personal coding style - I always have the entry point at the top, which makes use of meaningful named methods - so it looks like the table of contents of a book. Next come the second level methods - and so forth, until the small auxiliary methods are way at the bottom. This lets me read it top-to-bottom, like a story. Much of this is just good coding practice - but, for example, I find it really frustrating to read code where functions must be defined before they are used - this results in details first, outline last - which makes it hard to build up that mental model (remember, I'm listening to the code line by line - no spinning the mousewheel).

Finally, I'm going to use this comment to express my dislike for underlines (yes, I'm looking at you, Ruby). Every underline adds three syllables to my audio stream - whereas screen readers read cammalCaseCode as separate words.

Feel to ping me @SaqibS on Twitter.

<comment><USER4> It seems unfortunate that you can't configure screen readers to say "_" as "under" or some such thing. Also, I think it would be very useful if punctuation was pronounced in a different voice or tone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was developing a Liferay portal for a client which needed (in my idea) complete accessibility. I used my iPad to move in the page and was a big experience, most of my initial design was not tested over visual appearance but semantic accessibility.

If you own an iOS device do activate VoiceOver and try to surf YOUR applications (and more important, your WEB applications). Even better, let someone else do it for you.

You'll discover how hard and difficult can be to READ a page not designed to be read but scanned with eyes.

Please, do it. Blind people have the same right to access your content and features.

<comment><USER6> They have "a right to access your content"? Is there a law specifying this? What are the penalties for breaking the law?

<comment><USER7> I see what you're getting at, but I think you're being a bit douchey about it.

Of course blind people do not have a "right" to access his content. Neither does anyone else. There is no law anywhere that says "X person or group has an inalienable right to view Google". That doesn't mean we shouldn't be considerate of disabilities.

ADD: He says blind people have "the same right" and not "a right", the implication here being that they have "the same right" as any sighted person.

<comment><USER8> Not a reply to azelfrath, sorry. chadmalik, if by chance you see this, your posts have been getting auto-killed since the "Why vertical farms are a crock" discussion.

For those without showdead on, here's the comment, which I thought was worth reprinting:

"I'd like to add another way of thinking of it. Several years ago I was part of a group working on a project that was composed of people from various companies. One of the attendees was blind. It became clear VERY quickly that our blind friend was light years above everyone else technically and in terms of thinking about process. He'd sit there, listen to people go back and forth on this or that issue, then come in with an incredibly intelligent and appropriate solution, time after time. He was using an audio browser to go over the project materials when we weren't working. If you don't make your services accessible to the blind, YOU might be the one missing the benefit of this type of person's input."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was part of the team that rebuilt Narrator (the built in screen reader for Windows) for Vista. A few days after we had a minimal version running I tried to use it with Visual Studio to make a small change with the monitor turned off. For me it was next to impossible.

<comment><USER10> Don't feel too bad. I'm an experienced screen reader user, and even I find it almost impossible to do anything with narrator. Well, to be honest, I've only tried the one from XP. Hopefully the newer versions are better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._V._Raman> <http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/>

</comment><comment><USER12> I have a coworker who is blind that gave a presentation a couple months ago about creating accessible websites. This isn't really about how to code; instead it is more about how to make websites accessible. He has a couple demos of using JAWS.

[http://blog.nerdery.com/2012/01/developing-accessible- websit...](http://blog.nerdery.com/2012/01/developing-accessible-websites- league-of-front-end-developers/)

Also, I recognize the irony of a video presentation about browsing the web blind.

</comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know a service that will review your website for accessibility?

I don't have a budget to pay them, but I'd be willing to put in reasonable recommendations.

I do already use alt attributes and label tags on everything.

<comment><USER10> Ping me on Twitter and I can take a quick look. @cannona

<comment><USER13> The site is not public yet, but I'll save your message for when it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm reminded of an interesting story from a great podcast (99% invisible) about a blind architect.

[http://podbean.99percentinvisible.org/2010/11/19/99-invisibl...](http://podbean.99percentinvisible.org/2010/11/19/99-invisible-10-99-sound- and-feel/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Just this morning my little brother pocked me in the eye, and my first thought was about how I wouldn't be able to program any more if he pocked it all the way out... Glad to know that there is still a way for blind people who have the passion and work ethic to continue coding

<comment><USER16> Me too. I used to think that being blind is a death sentence for programmer career.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting. This post has inspired me to actually improve the usability of my sites. Anyone have any good guides? Strangers for Dinner and edgeyo are pretty much text-driven, but what about CSS layout etc? Will screenreaders parse those?

<comment><USER10> For the most part, CSS is ignored by screen readers. However, it can of course make a huge difference for people who are browsing your site with screen magnification or who have color blindness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I imagine it would be hard for a blind programmer to program using Python, Coffeescript and other language where white space plays important part. Can anyone give more insight about this?

<comment><USER10> Python is one of my favorite languages to program in, but the white space thing was an issue for a while. Fortunately, I found an editor that will work well with my screen reader and will tell me what level of indenting I'm at, so it's now just a mild annoyance. However, when browsing on the web or elsewhere outside my editor, I do find myself occasionally counting spaces if it's not obvious from the context what indentation level a particular line is at.

<comment><USER16> Can you elaborate on the tools you use? What IDE and screen reader do you use? Also, what tool do you use to type code with? Braille keyboard? I really interested to learn about what kind of setup that works best for blind developer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's truly amazing people are doing this, very inspirational.

</comment><comment><USER19> I am curious about what blind programmers consider to be aesthetically appealing code.

<comment><USER10> As a blind developer, I don't think my opinions on what makes nice code differ wildly from my coworkers, with the exception of indenting, equal-sign alignment, and other such white space issues. Those are the sorts of things I only do because I have to. They rarely provide me any benefit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Incredible read made all my problems vanish away.

</comment><comment><USER21> Anyone know how people without hands can program?

<comment><USER22> I'd try a chordic keyboard used by toes or foot positions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Here's a reddit thread with that same question, about three years later

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ke5ao/how_can_y...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ke5ao/how_can_you_program_if_youre_blind/)</comment>


Ask HN: Weather Forecasts with Confidence Interval? - <AUTHOR> Does anyone know a source (on the web, most probably) of local weather forecasts for the USA that includes confidence intervals or some other indication of uncertainty around the numbers reported, such as the forecasted temperature?<p>I'm not finding one using search engines so far.... <comment><USER2> There is a "probability forecast" at yr.no, check this out: [http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Oslo/Oslo/Oslo/long.html](http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Oslo/Oslo/Oslo/long.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's for Norway only, though, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not quite the same, but weather.us has a view showing the results of different forecasting models: [https://weather.us/forecast/5419384-denver/xltrend](https://weather.us/forecast/5419384-denver/xltrend)</comment>


Google's Inbox app is shutting down in March 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/12/17848500/google-inbox-shut-down-sunset-snooze-email-march-2019 <comment><USER2> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17971516](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17971516)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is why I dont use Google products. They get a life of ~18 months and then they are sent to the farm up north.

<comment><USER4> While there was some UI/UX benefits to Inbox, it seemed mostly to be an experiment.

> In April of this year, Google released a complete redesign of Gmail that > incorporated nearly all of the key features of Inbox

Still, it was nice to see some internal competition and Inbox was pretty well done.

<comment> m-p-3 They forgot to incorporate the cleanliness of Inbox and the auto-consolidation of emails into a big summary for those traveling (flight number and hours delays, etc).

I'm gonna miss it, it was really easy to deal with emails as tasks and achieve inbox-zero.</comment></comment></comment>


Flying car prototype ready by end of 2017, says Airbus CEO - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/16/flying-car-prototype-ready-by-end-of-2017-says-airbus-ceo/ <comment><USER2> To misappropriate what Stephan Zweig is said to have said about Brazil:

Flying cars are the transport of the future, and always will be.

Nitpicks:

1\. Ready for a demo flight, maybe. To get it in production takes ages in aviation: The amphibious ICON (iCon?) A5 was first flown in 2008, the first production aircraft was out in 2014, but customers have not yet received any actual deliveries [1].

2\. Flying cars? Very few of these new concept aircraft are actually _cars_ , i.e. designed for extended time on the road. (Exception maybe the Terrafugia Transition: first flown in 2009, deliveries expected "between 2015 and 2016" according to Wikipedia [2].).

Not sure what's a good name for these new ones, maybe VSVA (very small VTOL aircraft) or EPA (electric personal aircraft) or something.

Ehang [3] and Volocopter [4] are testing multicopters ("drones") already, for 1 and 2 pax, respectively. Personally, I don't like the low rotors of the Ehang - looks like a recipe for disaster to me. Lilium looks interesting, too [5]. I hope some of them materialise soon at reasonable prices -- though we might need some more breakthroughs in battery technology.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICON_A5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICON_A5)

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

[3] [http://www.ehang.com/ehang184](http://www.ehang.com/ehang184)

[4] [http://www.volocopter.com/index.php/en/](http://www.volocopter.com/index.php/en/)

[5] [http://lilium-aviation.com/](http://lilium-aviation.com/)</comment>


Ask YC: Anyone at WWDC this year? - <AUTHOR>

Anyone going to be at WWDC this year? We should plan a small meet and/or get some beers afterwards. <comment><USER2> It'd sure be nice if someone from HN decided to live-blog it (hint hint nudge nudge).

<comment><USER3> Apart from the keynote, everything else at WWDC (except the parties throughout the week) is under NDA. If you attend WWDC, you implicitly agree to be held under that NDA.

This also means no pictures or videos of the sessions, so I don't know how thorough of job someone could do live-blogging the conference.

<comment><USER2> Ahhh, I didn't realize all the talks were covered under NDA. Thanks for crushing my dreams.

(Seriously though, thanks for letting me know why I haven't noticed much in the way of substantial coverage.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm going. I'll be happy to meet up with any other HN denizens for beer/coffee/chat/whatever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Email me? We'll have to create a thread closer to WWDC to get to the front page and advertise again.</comment></comment>


screencast suggestions? - <AUTHOR>

I'm launching an app soon and think a screencast would be very useful for users.  I'm looked at demogirl.com but our users are going to be middle aged men using the service for business purposes...molly's peppy voice probably isn't a good fit.  any other good services out there?  or any good free software to do this myself?  preferably for a mac? <comment><USER2> I recently used <http://www.shinywhitebox.com/home/home.html> for this very purpose. I did a very simple demo of our application with me talking, merely for the purpose of showing a remote colleague what we were doing. Worked great.

If you go here: <http://seankelly.tv/videos/tools-of-the-trade/> you'll see a great post about some good tools. This fellow created a nice cast of different web development frameworks that's become a must-see on the web. Might even post it here as a separate item for folks.

<comment><USER3> I second IShowU. Just do a fe test runs before really recording it. Check your audio levels and watch your final output size.</comment></comment>


EMWCon Spring 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/EMWCon_Spring_2020 <comment><USER2> The Enterprise MediaWiki Conferences are a great way to learn best practices about Knowledge Management within organizations. If you have a wiki within your company/organization or think you should, you'll meet a lot of passionate developers, administrators, and users. This one has the added bonus of getting a tour of NASA as well.</comment>


Show HN: Anonymously talk to co-workers - <AUTHOR> http://www.offgarden.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I built an anonymous message board for talking to your coworkers and classmates.

Basically you sign up with your work email or school email to join your work/school group and post things anonymously.

I built Offgarden because I had a lot of moments at work where I wanted to suggest or ask things but was too shy to (or was afraid of being judged, or didn't want to be confrontational with anyone). You can learn more here: [http://offgarden.com/about](http://offgarden.com/about) Would love your feedback!</comment>


Programming is not math, huh? (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://j2kun.svbtle.com/programming-is-not-math-huh <comment><USER2> Jeremy Kun makes some very valid counter-arguments to Sarah Mei's claims, but I was intrigued by one incongruity: Mei claimed (without any supporting arguments) that learning to program was like learning a _new_ language, while in his rebuttal, Kun compares learning both programming and mathematics to learning language (in general). I wonder if there there are not significant differences between learning language (i.e. your first language) and learning a subsequent language.

FWIW, I don't think learning to program is like learning a new language, and I don't think learning to program is like learning a new programming language either. I do think that if you have a good command of rational thinking and the precise and accurate communication of ideas, learning to program is easily within your grasp.

</comment><comment><USER3> Despite twenty years of software engineering I am nowhere near mathematician enough to engage with the author on this topic, however this ...

>> In programming you have a compiler/interpreter that just dictates how an ambiguity resolves.

... strikes me as wrong. It's like saying that mathematical symbolism dictates the resolution of ambiguities because it states what '+' means. Syntax in programming languages is like operators in mathematics. They are simple, well- defined concepts. The ambiguities arise in the problem domain being described, not in the symbols used for the description, something the author goes on to acknowledge explicitly with regard to math.</comment>


Features removed or planned for replacement starting with Windows 10 1803 - <AUTHOR> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/planning/windows-10-1803-removed-features <comment><USER2> As a Win user, this might prepare me for future changes.</comment>


It's still possible we all live inside a hologram - <AUTHOR> https://qubitsnews.com/2015/09/06/its-still-possible-we-all-live-inside-a-hologram/ <comment><USER2> I see this regularly lately; why does it matter? What ever the answer is will not improve life as we know it.</comment>


SequoiaDB open source now,a new document-oriented NoSQL Database - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SequoiaDB/SequoiaDB

<comment><AUTHOR> benchmark recently also performed a comparison of the following three NoSQL systems:

* Apache Cassandra * MongoDB * SequoiaDB

The test specifically focused on the in-memory performance of the three systems. The detailed result can be found in [bankmark-20141213-WP- NoSQLBenchmark]: [http://www.bankmark.de/wp- content/uploads/2014/12/bankmark-2...](http://www.bankmark.de/wp- content/uploads/2014/12/bankmark-20141213-WP-NoSQLBenchmark.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> cool</comment>


Facebook Instant Articles: A Slippery Slope - <AUTHOR> http://marketingland.com/facebook-instant-articles-slippery-slope-for-google-128596

<comment><USER2> FB's Instant Articles are very disturbing to me.

The reason is that it is of vital importance to any business that has a website, to have live human visitors to their own website. Not so they can click ads, but so that the visitors will provide organic links.

If the NYT publishes an article about Strawberry Jam on FB, and the WSJ publishes an article about peanut butter on FB, I might link to a FB friend's sandwich recipe. That will result in an incremental boost to FB's prosperity.

If instead the NYT publishes that article on its own website, I might link to an article on the nytimes.com website. That will boost NYT's prosperity an increment, but not Facebook's.

It is for this same reason that I will never publish a Mac OS X app on the App Store. To self-publish an iOS App requires that the user jailbreak their device. I see both sides of the argument but on the whole I am not inclined to publish iOS Apps in the App Store either.

Consider that after many years of pressure, Apple is finally permitting the developers to have analytics on their own apps.

What they are not permitting, is for developers to publish iOS apps on their own websites. Just now it occurred to me, if Apple really has some good reason to insist on controlling what apps may be installed on iDevices, why not just supply a signature on the app installer - the .apk IIRC - then send the app installer back to the developer?

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't this sound like they're attempting to take traffic (and revenue) away from other publishers? If you can read the articles on Facebook, why would you want to go to a different website to read the same thing (obviously loyal users won't leave)... Just seems like Facebook is trying to become a news organization vs a social network.</comment>


Great Pacific garbage patch - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch

<comment><USER2> I've been reading about this for a few years... Never seen a pic of the garbage patch... Given all the cheap digital photography equipment around, it does make me wonder.</comment>


Mojocast #3: Authentication, Helpers, and Plugins with Perl's Mojo web framework - <AUTHOR> http://mojocasts.com/e3

<comment><USER2> Excellent screencast, got to understand helpers and 'under' a bit more :) Nice job with the organic way that example was refactored from loud code with lots of duplication all the way to using a Mojolicious::Plugin from the CPAN.

</comment><comment><USER3> Love the new HTML5 video player, big step forward quality wise.

</comment><comment><USER4> Very good, the quality I've come to expect!</comment>


Ask HN: Blue Light Glasses? - <AUTHOR> Yay or nay? Do they work? Discuss! <comment><USER2> Wearing some right now. They definitely work.</comment>


Spek – A Specification Framework - <AUTHOR> http://jetbrains.github.io/spek <comment><USER2> > _Tests are specifications_

No, they're not. Unless you're OK with the system working for only exactly the test cases you specify (which, btw, is trivially implementable as a look-up table of the test cases!), tests _do not_ specify a system.

EDIT: Importantly, tests have no means of distinguishing for a missing test case whether that case's behavior should be _inferred_ or is _actually unspecified_.

See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_notation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_notation) for an example of an actual serious specification language.

<comment><USER3> There's nothing that says any non trivial specification in any language is either complete or correct.

Tests _can be_ used as a _kind of_ specification.

<comment><USER4> > nothing that says any non trivial specification in any language is either > complete or correct.

Absolutely correct. In fact the larger the specification the more likely that the specification has a bug.

> Tests _can be_ used as a _kind of_ specification.

Also true. But, frequently in program verification (proving a program does what it is specified to do) specifications are not tests.

Why are specification not written as tests? It comes down to the program verification technique which is used. There are several categories:

\- Testing. "Optimistically Inaccurate" It can't find all problems but all problems it finds are real problems (assuming of course the test is correct). The downside is you may give an OK to a bad program, the upside is when you find a problem it is a real problem.

\- Dataflow Analysis. "Pessimistically Inaccurate" It can prove fairly general properties about a program. However, it cannot prove all properties and may not be able to prove a property which is true. For example say you where proving a program did not have a SQL injection. Dataflow analysis would OK only programs it could prove the absence of a SQL injections (as per the specification you give it! (there may be a SQL injection your spec doesn't cover)). However, there may be programs which are free of SQL injections but Dataflow Analysis is unable to prove it.

\- Model Checking. "Pessimistically Inaccurate, Simplified Properties" In model checking you move the program by mapping it into a new domain such as a finite state automaton. You do the mapping in such a way that properties proved about the model must hold in the actual program. Unfortunately, you can only check simplified properties and there is still some pessimistic inaccuracy (although it is reduced from dataflow analysis since the domain is easier to prove properties on).

\- Syntax Analysis. "Simplified Properties" Eg. Grammar Checking. You can only prove properties that can be found by a parser. You can write checks which have false positives. Eg. the check may fail but the program is fine.

Type Checking is another method way as is Theorem Proving. I am sure there are even more methods beyond the ones I listed here.

The point is except in the case of testing, the specifications are not given as tests. Each verification technique requires its own formal specification language. However, there are some systems where you can specify a program in a general language which can then be compiled to the verification system you actually use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An interesting alternative to this is Spock [1], a specification framework for Java and Groovy with a nice Groovy DSL. Check out the new reference documentation [2] or try out some specifications using the web console [3].

It has a great syntax for data driven and interaction based syntax.

Data driven example:

      class Math extends Specification {
        def "maximum of two numbers"(int a, int b, int c) {
            expect:
            Math.max(a, b) == c

            where:
            a | b | c
            1 | 3 | 3
            7 | 4 | 4
            0 | 0 | 0
        }
      }

[1] [https://code.google.com/p/spock/](https://code.google.com/p/spock/)

[2] [http://docs.spockframework.org/en/latest/](http://docs.spockframework.org/en/latest/)

[3] [http://meetspock.appspot.com/](http://meetspock.appspot.com/)

<comment><USER6> > It has a great syntax for data driven and interaction based syntax.

With DSL's in groovy it always looks like the provided syntax is trying to code around Groovy's syntactic limitations, e.g. having to use the bar | in the example

        a | b | c
        1 | 3 | 3
        7 | 4 | 4

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is this odd trend amongst testing framework developers to make their frameworks more verbose, as if this somehow delivers value. Spek seems to be in this tradition. Almost every other area of programming aims towards getting as much work done with as a little verbiage as possible. Why do testing framework people feel that programs should read like written prose? This idea has failed a great many times over the years.

The ScalaCheck [0] library is actually innovating in the domain of testing. It's derived from QuickCheck, a Haskell library, and I believe an Erlang derivative is making $$s as a commercial product.

[0]: [https://github.com/rickynils/scalacheck](https://github.com/rickynils/scalacheck)

<comment><USER8> There's this idea that tests can be written by non-programmers (QA, business SMEs, etc.) which may be the motivator for this. Just a guess.

I used a framework called FitNesse which was awful but which was built around this idea that tests could all be specified in spreadsheets and managed by non-technical folks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd hope not. I think developers should write tests. And I think things like BDD is more about communication than anything else.

The difference is however in using a language that is ubiquitous and understood by all parties, leaving ambiguity out. It is about contrasting what you've understood in terms of the requirement with what is expressed in the code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Name and functionality inspired by Spec# [0] ... just a bit? Sample Spec# code:

      int ISqrt(int x)
        requires 0 <= x;
        ensures result*result <= x && x < (result+1)*(result+1);
      {
        int r = 0;
        while ((r+1)*(r+1) <= x)
          invariant r*r <= x;
        {
          r++;
        }
        return r;
      }

[0] [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/specsharp/](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/specsharp/)

<comment><USER10> Different thing. Spec# is about embedding specs in your code. Spek appears to be a Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) framework ala RSpec.

[http://rspec.info/](http://rspec.info/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Building tooling like this seems a no-brainer as far as language uptake is concerned.

Testing libraries offer a low friction, low risk way to introduce new JVM based languages to an existing project.

Scalatest was certainly Scala's "foot in the door" for the last project where we managed to sell the switch from Java to Scala.

On a related note: I would really like to see an in depth comparison between Scala and Kotlin. The two seem idealogically and syntactically similar.

</comment><comment><USER12> This seems to be influenced by MSpec [0] which is a really elegant framework. I'm not sure if I like having to use Kotlin, though.

[0] [https://github.com/machine/machine.specifications](https://github.com/machine/machine.specifications)

</comment><comment><USER13> I am not sure if something like Jasmine or Chai exists in the JVM world but this seems pretty similar. You can do much the same thing with BDD-style describe() and it() specs.

</comment><comment><USER14> FYI: "spek" is Dutch for "bacon" — [http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spek](http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spek).

<comment><USER15> That's pretty close to this:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrolean_Speck](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrolean_Speck)

Which is delicious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Funny but Python code is more readable than their DSL !

</comment><comment><USER17> There's already a perfectly good language for creating specifications: English.

<comment><USER18> Disagree, there's a lot of ambiguity in English that makes for bad specifications.

Example: take even the word "tomorrow". Does tomorrow mean at midnight tonight, or tomorrow morning? Does it mean 24 hours from _now_ , or does it mean a far future time? Does "tomorrow" include weekends or holidays? In what timezone is this happening?

The Beach Boy's song: "Will you love me tomorrow?": Is that asking if the singers love will still have the same feelings about them tomorrow (less than 24 hours from now), or is the singer asking if their love will still adore them many years from now, (when they're 64, for example, to pick another oldey).

Which is of course why civilians think developers are pedantic, and of course we are, because to implement specifications on Turning machines we need to answer these slightly outrageous questions. "Turn on the sprinkling system tomorrow" is a trivial specification for a human, but not so for computers.

Tomorrow is just the example that comes to mind, there are thousands of other words whose meanings are vague. This is why creating specifications for computers, from "civilian English" is hard.

<comment><USER17> The fact that some people use the language in a vague or unspecific manner does not invalidate English's suitability as a language for writing specs.

I doubt I've ever used "tomorrow" in a spec. I'd use "next business day" or "T+1" (with the calendar defined).

In my experience, writing a spec is an iterative process, where the developers review a draft of the spec and make comments, ask questions, point out ambiguity, etc., which provides the feedback for the next version off the spec. That process loops until everyone is happy, at which point the spec (or, at least, a portion of it) is finalised and the developers start work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Seems to be very similar to Scalatest. What's not a bad sign.

</comment><comment><USER20> It funnily looks like scalatest (FunSpec, ShouldMatchers, etc.).</comment>


Ask HN: How could we solve the problem of domain squatters? - <AUTHOR> Because domain names are cheap (which is good since most people can afford them) some people often register hundreds and thousands of domains and just keep there in the hope they will earn a lot from selling them. Of course most don't get sold and nobody uses them.<p>Should ICANN intervene here? It doesn't SEEM fair and I think there should be some restrictions to prevent this. <comment><USER2> This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I don't really see this as a "problem" just as I don't see my inability to afford my dream home or car as unfair. Unless someone can convince me otherwise, I'm not aware of the domain market being "fixed" in any unscrupulous way. Squatters take risks to buy up many domains (most of which will never sell) and hope to profit off a few. The prices of the domains will be whatever the market bears. Perhaps the only real problem I can think of is that the market is very opaque, in a way that prevents liquidity. It's such an arduous process to find out what a squatted domain actually costs, that most people don't even bother. So a solution might be a better and more global domain name market.

</comment><comment><USER3>
      People asking questions, lost in confusion
      Well, I tell them there's no problem, only solutions
        - John Lennon

The other solutions proposed here work at the wrong level. The approach taken by I2P[1] does away with the concept of globally squattable names[2], leaving public keys as the global identifiers and letting individuals define local nicknames or delegate to trusted lists.

[1] [https://geti2p.net/en/docs/naming](https://geti2p.net/en/docs/naming)

[2] Even [http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko) is susceptible to squatting by those who can invest (or rent) computing power.

PS: I had a chance recently to talk with a "DNSquatter": the doorman at a building I frequent. Poor guy bought _tens of thousands_ of domain names, years ago, with money he had available for investment, and asked me for advice on how to cash out his investment. It seems to me that he's the victim of a _chumpatron_ [3], rather than the scammer himself; although his actions do help keep the scam alive. I advised him to consider the money lost.

[3] [http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1446](http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1446)

<comment><USER4> Agreed, and my approach so far for naming is this:

[https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/web-o...](https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/web- of-trust-dns/)

One of the advantages of it is that it can be used to mimic the DNS/SSL model or any other PKI just by imposing the right priority calculation rules, so you at least don't lose any capabilities with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe it's not a problem. Squatters have to pay ongoing registration fees to maintain their stock so that puts a cap on registering of every possible domain. You could even see them as providing a service by keeping desirable domains available for people who really really want them instead of first- come-first-served which is quite a ridiculous way of allocating resources.

<comment><AUTHOR> The registration fees are very low and they're a yearly fee which doesn't make that a big burden.

>"keeping desirable domains available"

Eh, they're more like keeping the domains and selling them to the highest bidder. You're defining the "really really want" here as the entity with the biggest pocket. Domains cost so little for a reason, so everyone can afford them but obviously some people abuse this and it's why we need more oversight. IMO of course.

<comment><USER6> > Domains cost so little for a reason, so everyone can afford them

This is exactly right. Squatters are taking away from the people what the original designers of the system intended. If they had intended that only those with lots of money had short-length domain names, then they would have made them expensive from the start -- or made the price a function of the character-length.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The first thing I thought of was some rule saying that you have to be 'using' the domain within, say, 2 years or it gets pulled from you.

But then the problem is, do we want someone policing what the definition of 'using' a domain is? Hell no.

I think that unfortunately the way it's going is that you basically use a different TLD, but even now it's beneficial to have the .com if you can (especially among non-developer audiences who aren't used to .ly, .io, etc etc). 'Just go to whatever.io' to your grandma isn't as obvious as 'Just go to whatever.com'.

</comment><comment><USER8> With the advent of so many new TLDs, I'm of the opinion that this isn't even that big of a problem anymore. Your 1st pick is being squatted? Just pick another TLD.

<comment><USER6> To an extent this is true, but if domains get too cheap, the problem could resurface.

<comment><USER9> The effect of the new TLDs will be that domain names will stop being relevant. They are not that relevant even now, most people use Google rather than typing in a domain name, but ".com" is still present in people's memories. When more companies start using non-com domain names, the problem will just go away. It will create another mess, but that's a different problem.

<comment><USER10> > When more companies start using non-com domain names, the problem will just > go away.

Ehh, I mean, will this ever actually happen? While .co and .io domains are popular in startups, consumers, especially non-technical ones, I think will prevent a move away from .com from happening.

<comment><USER11> As long as [Your name] results in your website on Google - the average user doesn't care if it ends in .ninja, .pizza, .io, or .com because they are never _entering_ that information. They type in some amount of "Google" and search [Your Company Name] into Google. That's the _average_ user.

Users who are advanced enough to even understand URL's will likely remember [X site is .org and Y site is .tokyo] or they'll bookmark the site if they find themselves forgetting often.

Even as a highly technically proficient user - I find myself using a keyword to search google for a domain name of a company if I am interested in finding their website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Two approaches come to mind: (1) Require strict identity for domain registration, and then limit the number per person to something like 3, except where a special permit is held. (2) Make it illegal, where a heavy fine would be imposed for squatting. Naturally there would need to be a grace period post-registration before a domain were considered in squat-mode. Six months could be suitable.

Furthermore, there could be an added regulation that no two domains could serve essentially the same data for more than a certain transition period, such as three months. Not only are such duplicates bad for spiders, but there is no essential reason why they need to exist. With redirects and load balancers, a site could easily be switched over from one domain to another in a relatively short time.

One of the fundamental rules of this world is that if something _can_ be abused, it _will_ be abused. And unlike infractions that are obvious and hurt a person's social reputation, domain registration is so hidden that a person can squat left and right without social repercussions. Hence, the only solution is regulation -- either technical, or legal.

<comment><USER12> > limit the number per person to something like 3, except where a special > permit is held.

Organizations are people too, or corporations end up getting special permits? Either one leads to trouble and groups that buy up to maximums since they want to use all their entitlements.

> no two domains could serve essentially the same data for more than a certain > transition period

So now we all need different VPN gateway and email system homepages? Who is to say domains exists for HTTP? They are unique names for many protocols.

The main problem is the ability to sell them for value. Make that hard. For example, make parties prove it is a legal inheritance or court victory that requires a transfer otherwise push it into the pool where others can try to buy it faster and deny the old registrar involvement until it falls out of the next valid ownership chain.

<comment><USER6> Email logins are an interesting exception, at least for those whose domains exist purely for vanity. For non-email logins, sub-domains could be used instead.

I agree that targeting the selling aspect is another approach to consider, although I imagine there are some big hurdles there as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The easiest solution is to raise the price so it's no longer a viable business to squat domains. Right now you can buy 1,000 domains for $10k a year, and you just need to a handful of those to be worth something to the right person, and you break even.

Raise the price of a .com to $100 per year. This remains a minimal cost to any profitable business, and it's cheap enough for new startups to buy a domain for a year or two while attempting a new business.

If you can't afford it, well, you have countless other domain extensions you can choose from at a cheaper rate.

I'd much rather pay $100 per year for a .com that I want, instead of having a domain squatter asking $2k, and then having to settle for my fourth or fifth choice that's actually available to register.

<comment><USER14> I'd argue that the median price paid to a squatter is less than the present value of $100/year for the life of the domain ownership minus the present value of $10/year for the life of the domain ownership. So your proposal, while shutting out squatters, would cost typical legitimate domain owners more money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A "squatter", by definition, is "someone who settles on property without right or title". So who is the legal registered owner of a domain name property squatting from?

Domain names are like the username you used to post the question. Your 'first mover advantage' secured the name. The next person can't claim your 'squatting' on that user name, or all the other usernames that you 'own', because now they want it.

</comment><comment><USER16> You can't squat trademarks. You can use trademark claims to get domain names from people who aren't using them legitimately, including trying to sell them.

We could make domain name registration work the same as trademark registration, or people just need to get used to registering trademarks and then using the trademark claim process.

Disclaimer: I haven't tried this. I'm afraid trademark claims might only be honored for big companies, not for the little guys.

<comment><USER17> This isn't hugely effective.

Trademarks are industry/product/service specific. So just because someone else owns "Example's Flower Shop" doesn't mean you cannot use "Example's Bakery" since there is no reasonable expectation that a consumer could confuse the two (i.e. your bakery doesn't benefit from their Flower Shop's brand). So if you owned Example.com as the baking company, it is unlikely that the flower shop could take it from you even if they own a legitimate trademark.

Another note is that trademarks protect TRADE. If you own a registered trademark's domain but use the domain to host your collection of cat photos it is unlikely the company could take that from you (although they can force you to give it up by costing you thousands of dollars in lawyer fees for their frivolous suits, which companies have definitely done in the past).

All I am saying is, it isn't cut and dry. Trademarks aren't a magic bullet.

PS - But like all things, the party with the most money/influence almost always wins regardless of right/wrong, lawful/lawless. They can cost you tens of thousands of dollars even if you're completely right and on the right side of the law.

<comment><USER16> The ideas is to use it against outright squatters, not against other businesses that have the same name. You're right that it doesn't help with personal sites.

The "Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy"[1] seems pretty clear-cut against squatters. See section 4a and 4b. "Bad faith" includes "primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to the complainant who is the owner of the trademark or service mark or to a competitor of that complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of your documented out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name." Basically a definition of squatting.

[1] [https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/policy-2012-02-25-en](https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/policy-2012-02-25-en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Domain names can only be rented from the domain authority. They can never be sold, just released back to the authority when finished with.

<comment><USER19> That's not that different from how it is right now. You never really "buy" a domain from someone, you just give them money to convince them to release the domain

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Capitalism at its finest. Is it fair that people buy up parcels of acres of real estate for practically nothing in hopes that it will one day become developed and be able to sell it for millions? One could also argue the same about art. Is it fair that people buy art for a few hundred bucks and sell it for XX?

<comment><USER6> To my understanding, the purpose of capitalism is to enable those who work the hardest to in turn have the most resources brought their way. In other words, more work equals more pay. If you want to bring true idealism into the picture, then is capitalism not intended so that a person is compensated for the value that they create for society?

The problem with squatting is that it _doesn 't create value_. It may create scarcity, but that's not inherent value. For example, diamonds are scarce in the market, but they don't have an inherent value anywhere near their price. When you work producing software, you are bringing something of value into existence that _didn 't exist before_. When you work long day on the railroad, you are organising matter in a way that helps society to function. When you squat on real estate, you are sitting on something waiting for _society_ to create value in the surrounding areas. _Society_ is creating the value that the land eventually sells for -- _not_ the person squatting. When the squatter sells that property, they are deriving the ends from other people's work. This is akin to counterfeiting money: Sure it has value in the market, but the person counterfeiting didn't create that value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> in the old fashioned world of physical domain squatting - i.e. land speculation - ramping up land taxes (as some percentage of the current valuation of the land) is one way to discourage this kind of thing.

perhaps not the best way, but certainly a way to go about it.

</comment><comment><USER22> ICANN is profiting from squatters far more than from your average domain owner. It's not in their best interests to intervene.

Squatting is a real problem, though. The cost of holding a domain until someone pays you stupid money for it is just far too low.

</comment><comment><USER23> perhaps the problem can be avoided with an alternative approach. maybe a decentralized design that determines a name by algorithm rather than decree, walk the users social graph, let people rename the world in a way that is fixed to their perspective regardless of device.

<comment><USER4> Basically this;

[https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/web-o...](https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/web- of-trust-dns/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What if all names were auctioned instead of sold at fixed prices?

<comment><USER25> If the auctions aren't periodic, what's the point?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Assess property taxes on domain names.

<comment><USER6> I see what you did there, but you really should have elaborated on the _why_ so that others would understand. To state it myself, a domain would increase in value as that domain became more desirable -- regardless of whether before or after registration. This way, a desirable domain would be difficult to squat by someone not actually using the domain for real business purposes. As I suggested earlier, a shorter name could cost more since it has inherent desirability. The tricky thing is finding a good algorithm for calculating desirability, particularly over time. This approach, of course, is not the best for non-profit and personal domains.</comment></comment>


Mark Zuckerberg isn't Mark Zuckerberg - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/08/mark-zuckerberg-isnt-mark-zuckerberg.html

<comment><USER2> Nice little anecdote. It's really annoying when people say "you'll never be the next Mark Zuckerberg." Sure, it's unlikely, but there's not some cosmic force stopping you from doing so. It's all about your starting position, your motivation, and your willingness to succeed.</comment>


Why Filter Bubbles are Good - <AUTHOR> http://maxcho.com/2011/05/critique-of-parisers-filter-bubbles/

<comment><USER2> The author misses a crucial point in Google results: they are tailored for _you_ , so it's not about finding a contrasting point of view, rather it's about finding different related areas. For people searching for 'Our lord Christ', some might mainly find texts praising Jesus while others may find texts critisizing Christianity.

It's never about showing something _else_ than what you searched for.</comment>


Baidu forks Android to introduce its own mobile OS for China - <AUTHOR> http://www.penn-olson.com/2011/09/02/baidu-yi-mobile-os/

<comment><USER2> And the Apache license means that we definitely won't get to look at the source code and any Chinese built in backdoors / trojans / other expected "goodness". Or should I give them the benefit of the doubt? I think that boat has sailed.

<comment><USER3> Do you really think there aren't backdoors in US made phones?

<comment><USER2> I think I can trust more the CyanogenMod that I'm running on my HTC phone than anything coming from a Chinese closed-source firm.

<comment><USER4> I don't want to spoil your day, but do you realize that you have no idea, what runs on the broadband core of your HTC (Samsung, Motorola, whatever) phone? That's the core that boots first and then loads SPL on your application processor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this much different from what MIUI (Xiao Mi) did with their android ROM, they replaced a lot of the default android services as well? They're also releasing an android phone soon [1]

Any distrust of chinese technology aside, I'm actually really looking forward to what this OS will be like. imo MIUI is the most usable android ROM around, and it's much more stable than cyanogen. It proved to me that Chinese startups are capable of producing really awesome products.

iPhone currently has the biggest smart phone market share in China by far, this looks like the beginnings of Android taking over China like it did the rest of the english world.

<comment><USER6> I reckon it's not fair to compare Xiao Mi with Baidu, baidu is an evil company with evil history, they sort the search results based on how much clients would like to pay, similar with AdSense, but the ad supported results are blended with normal search results without indication. A year back they even publish fake medicines in search results.

This is one of the story: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/08/16/baidu- slid...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/08/16/baidu-slides-after- china-tv-finds-ads-for-fake-meds/)

Baidu no longer a startup company, they control the search engine market in china, ordinary people don't have the concept of search engine, baidu it is...

<comment><USER7> I don't think that evil at all. I think people use that word way to fast. Killing people is evil. Lieing is evil. As long as they are open about it, which they seem to be, I think it's perfectly okay. Maybe if someone is willing to pay, that's often even a better indication of relevance then some random metric on links.

I also think there was also a study about Google, which found that many people can not tell apart ads and normal results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And now it sounds like Baidu will be partnering with Dell to make tablets and mobile handsets.

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/06/us-dell-baidu- idUS...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/06/us-dell-baidu- idUSTRE7850C820110906)

</comment><comment><USER9> It's my understanding this is really hurting android in China.

Well, hurting is the wrong word. Android phones are selling great but no central market and no standard OS means Chinese app devs are finding it really hard make any popular apps because they have to target effectively different OSes and multiple markets ( > 20 IIRC)

That means Chinese users aren't getting many apps. Might as well be a 2006 smart phone. I suppose a few versions and markets will eventually dominate so maybe it's just growing pains.

<comment><USER10> Are you sure?. It's just I've read so many people who desperately _wanted_ this to be a problem for Android, usually with little to no evidence (or understanding of open source). Often this was reflected in dubious claims that Android's suprising sales surge was largely the OMS fork on low-end phones for developing nations and that real people weren't actually buying high-end HTC, Samsung or Motorola handsets. Actual figures show this to be wishful thinking on their part.

Even if you accept that it is hurting Android, you have to compare it to the alternative, which is a rival pushing an OS that isn't 99% the same as yours. If anything Google (as a web company) is probably giddy about a fragmented smartphone market that is united (even across to Bada and iPhone) by webkit- based browsers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure if "forks" is the right word, aren't they just another OEM adding their own skin ala HTC sense or Motoblur?

<comment><USER12> Well, the details are lacking a bit, but at the very least they're going a bit further than most other OEMs by stripping out all of the Google goodness (and I presume the Android Marketplace) and replacing with their own (and thus avoiding the google licensing fees... and avoiding using a competitor's main product).

<comment><AUTHOR> I think they even are replacing the Maps service not just Google Search. Just to mention this explicitly.

<comment><USER5> The maps app is blocked/isn't available in China, so it makes sense to replace it here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's Baidu's official website for the OS. <http://yi.baidu.com/>

</comment><comment><USER13> Hasn't this been going on for about 12 months?

Android has been blocked for a long time in China, and everything came from some fork. Maybe this is a new fork?

<comment><USER5> I'm in China now and see Android phones on sale. A lot of google services are blocked, youtube, plus, the maps app, and others, but Android is alive and well.

<comment><USER13> developer.android.com was blocked in China.

That didn't stop companies making the phones and installing the OS (through a third party or with special permission, or most likely through a proxy). There was some fork in Chinese, which could be accessed.

Also, I think the App store was blocked, and a Chinese App store set up instead.

<comment><USER5> When was this? I'm able to visit developer.android.com fine here...even go to my android market publisher profile to publish apps.

<comment><USER13> There's google groups posts about this dating from 24 months ago.

Also, python.org/downloads was also blocked (but not the rest of python.org). If you go to python.org now, there's a page labeled "Downloads" in Chinese for Chinese downloads which is _not_ blocked. I guess it's easier to create a mirror than lobby to get a page removed from the banned list. It's weird though.

I think there was some Chinese version of android.com, but I don't know how close to the original it was.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Earth just experienced its hottest-ever October - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/earth-just-experienced-its-hottest-october-ever/ <comment><USER2> Headline: Earth just experienced its hottest-ever October

Report:

>0.69°C warmer than the average October from 1981-2010, making it by a narrow margin the warmest October in this data record;

>an insignificant 0.01°C warmer than October 2015, the second warmest October;

>0.09°C warmer than October 2017, the third warmest October.

I don't want to be a "climate change denier" or whatever, but what if 1980 was hotter? It sound like things are largely in line with the last 5 years. The report is (probably) good data collection, but this kind of reporting by CBS doesn't seem useful -- other than to mislead.

<comment><USER3> I do not think that it is dialogically interesting to critique the reporting when the subject matter is clearly what is in scope here. As with any new reporting if you have interest in a broader context or more details after consuming a story you should, you know, check it out. I'm fuzzy on what your expectation would be... a comprehensive telling of an enormously large scale of data in a mainstream press story? The story is that it was the hottest-ever October. The reason for the telling is that October 2019 just came to a close.

But, to do as you ought to have done rather than type and copy and paste this story in the comments, I googled: global temperature data for last 100 years. The first response is from NOAA which has reasonably accurate temp data since 1880. [https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/global/time- series/globe/land_...](https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/global/time- series/globe/land_ocean/all/10/1900-2019)

October 2019 data is not yet added, but it does already indicate that September 2019 was the hottest on record, and that the top of a sorted list of hottest months ever recorded features very few months not in the 21st century. It's interesting. Poke around.

Also, friend, .69 degrees C more in the global temperature average is not, not at all, a narrow margin. Variations exist in these global averages for sure, and they are often naturally occurring and they can be bigger than that but .69 is not small. Check it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Standard conservative responses:

\--The globe is not getting warmer

\--We don't know if the globe is getting warmer or not

\--We do know the globe is getting warmer, but we don't know why

\--We do know the globe is getting warmer, but it has a different cause than human activities

\--We do know the globe is getting warmer, and it is in part due to human activities, but any action to counter this would be more harmful than letting it get warmer.

\--We do know the globe is getting warmer and action needs to be taken, but it should all be voluntary actions by private enterprises, and no new governmental regulations.

And let us not forget: increased atmospheric co2 is beneficial because it increases agricultural production.

Have I missed any?

</comment><comment><USER5> Still freezing my balls off here at 20c</comment>


Ask HN: Any advice for scraping LinkedIn at 10k profiles a day? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking to scrape about 10K profiles a day for a project I'm working on.
Don't need fake accounts or anything. Just the stuff publicly accessible when not logged in.
Does anybody have experience with this? How many proxies? Residential/Datacenter? Any tips? <comment><USER2> so far I've only been able to do something similar with proxycrawl, any other thing I tried, even with proxies I got blocked in less than 5 minutes...

</comment><comment><USER3> Why don't you ask LI? They may have tools.

If you don't have their permssion then you are likely running up against various 'compuster misuse' and 'privacy' laws, never mind being rude by eating their resources.

<comment><AUTHOR> Look up HiQ vs Linkedin

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You are going to be blocked if you try to do that wihout going through any officialy supported, and probably paid, API</comment>


Interview: Thomas Voß of Mir - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxvoice.com/interview-thomas-vos-of-mir/ <comment><USER2> Jonathan Blow posted this on Twitter: "I kind of don't understand what's the big deal with these 'modern' "display servers" like Wayland / Mir / etc. it ought to be kind of simple actually, because we now have all this experience with drawing graphics and we know how it should go. So I wonder if it's just being made more complicated than it really needs to be, the same way GUI libraries always are. GUI libraries are generally terrible, but this is self- perpetuating as people making new GUI libs absorb bad assumptions from the old ones. There's an interview up with a Mir developer who mentions Mir is structured as communication via a protocol over sockets. And, like, I have literally NO IDEA why you would build a window system like that in 2014. It makes no sense to me at all. (But if you do decide that's how things should go, things become a lot more complicated, so that's at least part of the problem.)

A major reason computers are so unreliable and un-fun to use is because software is now a massive pile of overcomplication. When it comes to a core thing like a window system, that many programs will interface with, simplicity should be a high design priority. Because every bit of complication that goes into the window system propagates. EVERY SINGLE PROGRAM becomes more complicated. Every piece of software becomes harder to develop. The toll in man-years becomes HUGE very quickly. Yet for some reason people don't learn. I think there is some Stockholm Syndrome happening: programmers can't even imagine how much more they would get done if the underlying systems were as simple, reasonable and solid as they should be."

I'm curious about HN's opinion on this.

<comment><USER3> Yes, it uses sockets. How else would you do it?

I mean, it's a _server_. It's a singleton process, which many other processes much communicate with. What other widely supported ICP technique do you think is better for this job, and would make it simpler to develop against?

<comment><USER4> Maybe he thinks shared memory would be simpler?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The headline here is attention grabbing, but this is actually a very solid interview with an expert developer talking about the pitfalls of protocol and API development, and the issues both technical and political of such a huge change of something like a Display Server.

It was good perspective, and I look forward to seeing where both Mir and Wayland end up.

<comment><USER6> What about changing to the original: "Interview: Thomas Voß of Mir" or maybe "Interview: Thomas Voß of Mir (Wayland competitor)"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know if it's the same for everybody, but this page is loading really slowly for me. Here's the Google cache version if you're having trouble: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ouh2mtF...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ouh2mtFQHvIJ:www.linuxvoice.com/interview- thomas-vos-of-mir/+&cd=1&hl=fr&ct=clnk&gl=fr)

</comment><comment><USER8> _> at the heart of convergence lies the fact that you want to scale across different form factors_

I have this feeling one day we'll look back at this and laugh. "Do you remember when they all tried to shove the same interface on all devices? What were they _thinking_?!"

<comment><USER9> I don't think this is that silly. For example, tiling window managers scale extremely well all the way from a small netbook with 8 or 9 inches to multiple 27 or 30 inch monitors.

<comment><USER10> The problem isn't so much the 8 to 80 inch gap. We've solved that problem. The problem is the 8 to 1 inch gap. Tilling window managers start to fail on smart phone/tablet size screens.

<comment><USER11> Phones and tablets just run all windows full screen, each on their own workspace. A few let you split the screen in half and run one app each. Sounds like a tiling window manager to me.

A few apps -- on Android anyway -- have a floating mode, where they occupy some space over other apps, always on top. This is another thing tiling window managers do.

<comment><USER12> Indeed. In fact, that's one of the reasons I switched to Windows Phone 8: It was the closest I could get to the linux+dwm environment where I do most of my computing. Why would anyone want a desktop metaphor on a phone, complete with tiny icons and illegible drop-shadowed text?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Quite frankly I don't care who arrives first, as long as we get there.

<comment><USER14> I always found the backlash against this project somewhat baffling. The display server problem goes back a long ways. We've had a couple of distinct groups of opinions: a) people who think X is just fine b) people who think replacing X is a worthy task, and who've started to explore the topic in earnest.

What we've been lacking was c) people who can articulate a pressingly urgent use case where a new display server is on the critical path, AND have the resources to code it up. Canonical is, as far as I know, the first in that category.

I agree with the supposition that, IF Wayland/Westland represented a suitable head start on meeting the goals that Canonical has with Mir, that Canonical would do well to invest its resources there. Outside of Canonical, there has been a lot of debate as to whether the "Wayland/Westland is the right direction for Canonical" supposition is true.

At the end, I tend to give more weight Canonical's opinion in this matter. They are, after all, urgently developing a project in which a new display server is on the critical path. The risk in foregoing the head start offered by Wayland/Westland is primarily on them.

From the vantage point of this casual observer, Mir has lit a fire for the Wayland/Westland project. That's great! If unifying against a common threat is what pushes the project along at a faster rate, that's okay. But I still tend to think that Canonical is going to win this race by virtue of them having something to strive for on the other side of building a display server.

<comment><USER15> Sure, but that's "the resources of Canonical" (more like a small amount of Canonical's already relatively meagre development resources, on a project that is not exactly a crucial enabler or breadwinner) vs. practically everyone else in the Open Source industry and community.

<comment><USER14> In my experience, "practically everyone else in the Open Source industry and community" only means the developers are N > 0\. I like to believe that N -> Infinity, but I think very many projects N -> 0.

There are few open source projects where even one or two talented, dedicated, full-time developers would not represent a substantial increase in labor. There was just an article posted a day or two ago talking about how people would be surprised if they knew how small some teams at Apple really were.

This isn't to disparage F/OSS development. I still believe in the development model more than others. I just think we need to be realistic about project resources. Open source isn't magic in this regard.

<comment><USER15> Unscientific, but:

      mir$ bzr log --include-merged | grep committer: | sed 's#.*<##' | sort -u | wc -l
      59

vs.

      wayland$ git log --format='%aN' | sort -u | wc -l
      105

(And there's some messiness in the bzr output that inflates the mir figure somewhat.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I bet that within 10 years none of these two will be relevant, yet X11 still be hanging around.

<comment><USER17> X11 will always be around as a client running under a more modern display software. Kind of like how we're still running VT100 terminals on top a graphical UI with mouse, sound and 3D graphics capabilities. Mac OS X has been running X11 applications like that for more than a decade now. It works just fine. [http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/](http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/)

<comment><USER16> That's true, although it doesn't mean that Mir or Wayland will necessarily stick as Mac OS window system did. It's a way too fast morphing landscape, even for a 10-year long project. Mac is a relatively stable platform based on a carefully curated ecosystem with predictable future, etc. Linux is not.

BTW, I really like your X11-VT100 analogy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> From the article it doesn't really sound like Wayland or Mir will be relevant. It's far more likely everyone will skip the the display/surface/compositer go straight down to EGL and GL.

<comment><USER19> If all you're doing is running one thing, and that one thing is in total control of the screen and the input devices, sure, but once more than one application needs to access them all at the same time, you need some kind of mediator, and that's what the display server is for.

<comment><USER18> That makes sense from a system architecture perspective but will application developer need to write in that language or can they just write in EGL and GL?

<comment><USER20> There is no Wayland drawing language, and presumably no Mir drawing language. However, there's no OpenGL 'createWindow' function.

To create a new window and draw something in it, you would need both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Looks like they have lost their www DNS record.

> linuxvoice.com Server: 18.104.22.168 Address: 184.108.40.206#53

Non-authoritative answer: Name: linuxvoice.com Address: 18.104.22.168 Name: linuxvoice.com Address: 220.127.116.11 > www.linuxvoice.com Server: 188.8.131.52 Address: 220.127.116.11#53

Non-authoritative answer: __* Can 't find www.linuxvoice.com: No answer

<comment><USER22> Basically what happened is that we changed our wordpress theme, and it turns out that the new one puts a bit more pressure on our server than the old one. We used to be able to handle a top spot on hacker news, but this time our server died on us.

We decided to switch to cloudflare to mitigate some of the load. This requires changing DNS settings, and it seems that for some people, there's been a gap when they haven't been able to access the page. This is of course a little unfortunate. However, it does mean that other people can actually access the page rather than just getting stuck loading.

It's all a bit hectic here at the moment. It's possible there's some other problems that I haven't yet fully discovered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> A "mine is bigger than yours" headline. I hope both are here to stay with an Xming-like implementation of Xorg (even for Haiku-OS).

</comment><comment><USER24> The link appears broken for me. Is there a way to report that?

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't really want to use wayland or mir. I'd rather keep using the current perfectly fine software.

<comment><USER26> This isn't relevant to users, it's relevant to developers. Getting rid of X11 is important, and if you don't know why it's not relevant to you.

<comment><USER27> It's a big mistake to think that way. If you can't come up with a compelling reason for users to upgrade, it's a lot harder to get the install base large enough where developers can confidently switch over.

<comment><USER28> Users will switch over when their distro starts using it by default, the same as they would for a new version of the kernel , a new init system or any other lower level software.

The fact is that the design of X is archaic and not well designed for the needs of the modern era. The benefit to end users is that rich multimedia software becomes much easier to develop for Linux so they get more of it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


VIM Plugin Completion Using VimAwesome API - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/junegunn/5dff641d68d20ba309ce

<comment><USER2> that's awesome</comment>


Show HN: Commento: Lightweight, open source, tracking-free alternative to Disqus - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/adtac/commento <comment><USER2> You should have put up a demo site where users can try out the comment engine. Requiring the installation on a user's laptop/desktop is just too much friction, not to mention mobile users who don't have the luxury of running go scripts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoa, this blew up! Here's a working demo that I just hacked together: [https://adtac.github.io/commento/comment.html](https://adtac.github.io/commento/comment.html)

Edit: sorry, I had to purge the comment list because of an update. From now on, your comment will only be alive for 30 minutes. It'll be deleted after that. This is, of course, only for the demo.

<comment><USER3> Nice, that demo loaded pretty fast even with _a lot_ of comments :)

<comment><AUTHOR> And I'm only using now.sh's free tier for the backend.

<comment><USER4> I was going to comment on the slightly laggy edit box. This might explain that?

I am on FireFox 53.0 on a decent Windows 10 laptop.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is because there are over 7000 comments right now. Clearing it. Try again, it should be snappy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Related discussion: _Replacing Disqus with GitHub Comments_ | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14170041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14170041)

Recommended alternatives to Commento (Golang):

· [https://posativ.org/isso/](https://posativ.org/isso/) (Python)

· [https://github.com/jimpick/lambda- comments](https://github.com/jimpick/lambda-comments) (Node.js, AWS)

Github-based alternatives:

· [https://staticman.net](https://staticman.net) for Github comments

· Github Issues for comments ( [http://donw.io/post/github- comments/](http://donw.io/post/github-comments/) )

> > [https://github.com/shurcooL/issuesapp](https://github.com/shurcooL/issuesapp)

> [http://ebarnouflant.com/posts/4-turn-your-github-issues- > into...](http://ebarnouflant.com/posts/4-turn-your-github-issues-into-blog- > posts)

· Github Wiki for blogging: [https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/GitHub%27s-wiki- mak...](https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/GitHub%27s-wiki-makes-a- pretty-decent-blogging-platform)

· remove comments and use Pull Requests and Issues for substantive discussion

Other options:

· Reddit, Facebook, Discourse for comments

· Privacy via Disqus comments on demand when pressing a button

· Google Wave via Sandstorm

<comment><USER6> Also my toy-project:

[https://github.com/skx/e-comments/](https://github.com/skx/e-comments/)

Demo:

[https://tweaked.io/guide/demo/](https://tweaked.io/guide/demo/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Solid framework, supported by Tim Berners-Lee, is looking for an app like this to be built to add to its list of Wishlist apps.

[https://github.com/solid/solid-apps#general- wishlist](https://github.com/solid/solid-apps#general-wishlist)

<comment><USER8> >supported by Tim Berners-Lee

An endorsement from Mr Berners-Lee means little, having caved on the DRM issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Half the value of Disqus is that it hosts the server API for you. Any viable alternative to disqus or other commenting engine needs to provide hosting too. Otherwise, it's not useful out of the box for static websites and blogs using shared hosting. The challenge is integrating comments without the ability to control the dynamic server backend.

<comment><USER10> The other half value of Disqus is to provide comments to static sites. Back in the days, most sites used dynamic content, and had comments as part of the CMS system they used. Today, lots of sites have no back-end database, and unfortunately, lots of such sites use Disqus simply for convenience. Convenience that hurt the sites, and their visitors (slow load time, unacceptable tracking & spying). Any alternative should be welcomed.

If the sites that use Disqus today were willing to pay for an alternative, I would personally offer hosting of such, with fast load times and no tracking. However, I don't believe such willingness exists, and people are getting conditioned to accept sluggish load times and tracking. Too bad. Self hosted Open Source solutions are the second best alternative - management gets the illusion that the thing is free, and you actually get fast load times and no tracking.

<comment><USER11> For static sites, a service that takes comments and pushes them to the source repo for the site (or an extra comment-only repo for security and build- performance) could also be interesting.

<comment><USER12> On the one hand, it could be nice to have it all in a repository or two.

On the other hand, a repo history is normally immutable (with force pushes on rare occasions), and comment spam is way to common. Do you really a repo with all the usual link spam in its commit history? In case of public hosting it may trigger some spam filtering automation and block the repo/account. While perfectly possible, I'm not sure a DVCS repository is a well-matching concept for storage here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I disabled comments on my blog a while ago. Private comments? Email me. Public comments? Write a blog post in response, I'll link to it at the bottom of my article. Improves the quality of the dialogue significantly.

<comment><USER14> twitter is also another nice option.

<comment><USER13> Would prefer Mastodon/GNUSocial over that.

<comment><USER15> Mastodon really is good, it's fun to use and the fact that you can connect with people on other instances is great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm bootstrapping an alternative to Disqus called Remarkbox ([https://www.remarkbox.com](https://www.remarkbox.com))

Are you planning on also offering a paid hosted version?

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't really thought about that. I dunno, would people pay for this? What's a right monthly price for something like that? $3/month? $5/month?

Edit: I know that if I create a SaaS out of this, you'll have me as a direct competition. But can I know more about how you got yours running, what the range the net revenue is in (like, is it over $100/month? Over $1000?)?

<comment><USER17> I wouldn't say a flat-rate is exactly correct. Some sites receive tens of thousands of comments on a single article. Others, 5 or 10. The overhead on the service is more likely a better determinant, such as bandwidth and performance requirements for hosting. If SiteA uses 95% of your traffic and SiteB uses 5%, and your overall costs are 200 FakeUnits, you ought to be charging in respect to usage. Starting it at a price that wouldn't impact you negatively would be a good idea, and making it scalable would be even best. I'm moreover just throwing out ideas and thoughts though, I'm no VC or business expert myself, just someone who hosts servers for fun.

Disqus is also paid or supported by ads: [https://disqus.com/pricing/](https://disqus.com/pricing/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd been thinking about doing something like this with AWS API Gateway, Lambda and DynamoDB. Chalice ([https://github.com/awslabs/chalice](https://github.com/awslabs/chalice)) should make it relatively simple to make and deploy...

<comment><USER19> Something like this? [https://github.com/jimpick/lambda- comments](https://github.com/jimpick/lambda-comments)

<comment><USER18> Exactly. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This looks nice! I'd also perhaps add very crude deleting functionality; perhaps a way to delete comments via CLI by a unique identifier that is shown on the top right of every comment. Just so that spam posts can be dealt with, without needing a full-blown account system.

</comment><comment><USER21> I used Disqus previously, but eventually dropped it because I didn't really have a need for comments and all they entailed. Having a comment system means having to ultimately setup a way to combat bots and spammers, and probably having to do some moderation (depending on the subject). Linking to whatever discussion happens on Hacker News and Reddit is usually good enough. I think that's what pingbacks were supposed to be for?

</comment><comment><USER22> Nice, but how it deals with multiple concurrent writes? I see you are using transactions but, as far as I know, sqlite3 supports database-level locking, so one writing instance, unless using ATTACH and separating tables into multiple files, to enable a sort of table-level locking.

Are you considering to add support to other databases?

<comment><AUTHOR> >but how it deals with multiple concurrent writes?

I'm afraid I'm not very familiar with how go-sqlite3 handles that. I just started learning golang a month ago, so it's all quite new to me.

Maybe someone else will have a better answer.

>Are you considering to add support to other databases?

At the moment, no. Comments aren't exactly big data ;)

Just curious - which databases would you like to see and why (what do they offer over sqlite)?

<comment><USER23> Single insert per transaction is slow with sqlite, but slow is sort of relative. It would be probably be 10 to 80 inserts per second or so, a little faster if you turn off synchronous writes in sqlite.

I would guess most use cases for this relatively simple comment software wouldn't be expecting that many comments anyway.

An agnostic data layer should probably go on your list, but I imagine other stuff would be higher on the list...like a captcha. Spam will likely be the top issue long before performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This looks really nice and clean.

I'd been using Juvia a lot over the year's, built by the people at Phusion. It's worked really well, but seems to be unmaintained now.

The killer feature needed in any project like this is spam filtering, which Juvia accomplished by just integrating with Akismet, which works mostly, but not completely.

</comment><comment><USER25> Add in indieweb functionality to the codebase, such as microformats stuff, and I think this could really catch on. See [https://indieweb.org/comments#How_to_markup](https://indieweb.org/comments#How_to_markup)

<comment><USER26> I have literally never heard of IndieWeb. Is this something important I should have heard of?

<comment><USER27> I've been hearing murmurs about it for a while now, I think it's a great idea but thus far it's lacked sufficient business buy-in to gain traction.

<comment><USER28> Just read and it IMO doesn't seem to need business buy-in, just people who want to have their own domain, write stuff and post it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Please use a locally hosted js in your example code. rawgit does not even have a privacy policy.

<comment><USER30> There's a PR open for it: [https://github.com/adtac/commento/pull/3](https://github.com/adtac/commento/pull/3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm getting a 404 on [https://cdn.rawgit.com/adtac/commento/0.0.2/vendor/commento....](https://cdn.rawgit.com/adtac/commento/0.0.2/vendor/commento.min.css)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Does it include a CAPTCHA? Comment sections seem very susceptible to spam from experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't at the moment. But someone filed and issue for this and someone else has already begun work on this!

I <3 open source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Very nice! Small suggestion for nested comments: If you indent just the left side and not on the right side, there would be a lot more space for these comments, while still retaining the look of a thread hierarchy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, opened [https://github.com/adtac/commento/issues/21](https://github.com/adtac/commento/issues/21)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> How do you prevent comments flood ? Imagine someone write a script calling your server with valid headers, what will happens ? Serious question I asked myself a month ago on a similar project I tried to put on.

<comment><AUTHOR> At the moment, there's no way. However, Captcha has been suggested. Annoying, but it'll work.

<comment><USER35> The new no Captcha Recaptcha should help [https://security.googleblog.com/2014/12/are-you-robot- introd...](https://security.googleblog.com/2014/12/are-you-robot-introducing- no-captcha.html)

<comment><USER36> And let google track you instead?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What's the best way to import existing comment data from Disqus into Commento?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no way atm. Can we export all Disqus comments into JSON? If so, I can probably write a script to convert that into a sequence of SQL statements and generate a `sqlite3.db` file. And if you place that in the root directory, all your comments will appear properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm curious how why you need to initialize a local server? Does that run inside the browser?

<comment><AUTHOR> The `init_commento("[http://0.0.0.0:8080")`](http://0.0.0.0:8080"\)`) in the README is an example. You can host your own instance of Commento and just point to that.</comment></comment>


Submittable (YC S12) on Flavorpill's Coolest Lit Mag Innovations of the Year - <AUTHOR> http://www.flavorwire.com/358559/the-years-coolest-literary-magazine-innovations/view-all

<comment><USER2> Congrats. You are a great example of a YC startup and an angel network fund working together to get you $200K.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great job submittable - awesome team & great execution!</comment>


The prototype that was banned from Halfbrick (2013) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9WMNuyjm4w <comment><USER2> We played a game of Neptune's Pride, and had a similiar result, with a few differences. Neptune's Pride is played over 24 hours, and most actions (attacking/moving ships) require a great deal of time. It's also completely deterministic.

Highlights include: \- People covertly supplying weapons technology to the people fighting their allies to prolong the conflict, so that they would be weaker when they had to betray them. There was a lot of dealings at the coffee machine regarding trading technology. \- A cold war standoff between myself and our lead frontend dev. I'd setup an ambush by setting up ships on a star out of his radar range, but close enough that I would be able to reinforce the juicy target I had setup for him. The only catch was that I only had an hour to move the reinforcements once he began his attack, so I had to constantly watch the game. We had a Game Of Thrones finale event that I was going to attend, but he skipped. Knowing I would be distracted, he launched the attack 15 minutes after the scheduled start of watching the finale. Luckily I checked the game on my phone in the middle, saw the incoming attack and was able to defend successfully.

This kicked off people checking the game as the last thing they did before they went to bed, and the first thing they did in the morning. A few of us even set alarms so we could launch surprise attacks.

We definitely had a similar sort of breakdown of relations. There were accusations of screen-cheating (if you can call looking at a map of everything in your empire on a 27" monitor in the middle of an open-office screen- cheating). One game even collapsed into anarchy when one of the players dropped out rather then attack one of her coworkers.

Either way, it was a ton of fun. Definitely wasn't great for productivity though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems very similar to the classic board game Diplomacy[0], which had similar, though not as drastic results, when we played it at work, though we played 1 move every 3 days, so it had a much smaller impact on productivity since there's only so much strategising you can do over a single move, and you only got new concrete information every 3 days.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_\(game\))

<comment><USER4> I was thinking of Diplomacy/Machiavelli too. Machiavelli nearly ruined some Christmasses, but I still want to get it out and play it again...

<comment><USER5> Diplomacy is mentioned by an audience member briefly during the Q/A session at the end of the video, near the ~49 minutes mark.

<comment><USER4> Yep. That saved me from having to do it, which would have been awkward at this point.

I think the major difference between the two is that in Diplomacy/Machiavelli you can't give your armies to someone else the way you could give your actions to someone else in the tank tactics prototype. That prevents the chaining, but wow, it still makes for a fun family gathering when you "accidentally" move to the wrong place and your "enemy" and your "ally" wipe each other out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not entirely sure I agree with their overarching philosophy that games should never "make you feel upset at times". Obviously it should leave you with an overall good feeling, which is something I think is attested to by it's popularity (unless their is a reward mechanism I'm missing here).

And while the fact that this was played in an office context was addressed, I think they under attributed it's affect. I think there are two major problems that are addressed by moving this into a general public, MMO context:

(1) Productivity Loss I mean, this can almost entirely be addressed to the context. The game exists only at work, and so you can only play it when you are supposed to be working.

(2) Negative Effects of Friend/Work relationships I expect from people I've nurtured friendships and work relationships a certain amount of respect and loyalty. From a faceless internet foe, I expect nothing.

I find the coddling attitude slightly frustrating, and I think that if video games are to be considered art, they need to be able to hurt us if they ever want to be able to lift us up. Art is a proxy for life experience, and in my opinion, good art leaves you changed.

Obviously, it's bad if it leaves you with crippling depression or paranoia, but certainly some level of sadness and anxiety is critical for it to have any meaning.

One thing, however, that I do think is important is knowing what you're getting yourself into. If I feel I'm in a certain head space where being deceived or betrayed in any context would result in me feeling particularly shitty, then I wouldn't want to play Diplomacy any more than I would want to watch Lynch's Eraserhead. In that respect, I feel like artists are a little responsible to represent the experiences that are commonly felt in the consumption of their art.

<comment><USER7> It depends entirely on what kind of game you are making. There is clearly a market and demand for simple, fun, positive experiences. But there is also a massive market for games exactly like LoL and DotA and CS:GO, where a major part of the experience is failing, losing, feeling horrible about it, and then trying to do better next time. There is an urge for game designers to try to mitigate negative experiences, but in doing so, they make the game. You can't have the feeling of a competative game that ends in a crushing victory without the feeling of crushing defeat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is an hour long, but whoa, is this presentation excellent, illuminating, frightening, and absolutely compelling.

Can't help but draw analogies to politics and many other things.

Great post.

<comment><USER9> Yes, really interesting video - I watched the whole thing (and it was good), but I think the first 20-odd minutes are the best for HN... makes me want to try this at my work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, I'm impressed lol. They went through some serious measures to gain an advantage. Such a simple concept and it has the power to turn friends into enemies. Reminds me of back when I use to play Mario Kart battle mode with friends, let's just say there was screaming and possible throwing of controllers lol.

</comment><comment><USER11> Don't we see a lot of similar behavior on mmos like Eve Online ? I agree with the other commenters that the game may not have all its detrimental effect if it came to market.</comment>


Ten Steps Ahead - What Separates Successful Business Visionaries - <AUTHOR> http://www.productivitybits.com/book-review-ten-steps-ahead-what-separates-successful-business-visionaries-from-the-rest-of-us <comment><AUTHOR> This is a short, good read. A part of the book is spent on the personal, face- to-face conversation between the author and Steve Jobs</comment>


China pneumonic plague death toll rises, 100000 people town sealed off - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8182734.stm

<comment><AUTHOR> Article/story box:

      * Bubonic plague is spread by flea bites or contact with infected animals
      * Pneumonic plague, caused by the same bacterium, can spread between humans [directly, without flea/animal]
      * Pneumonic plague, affecting the lungs, can kill within 24 hours
      * Almost all cases curable if diagnosed in time

</comment><comment><USER2> 10+k, not 100k</comment>


Notepad++ has been banned in China - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/Notepad_plus/status/1294991670245818369 <comment> non-entity Not shocked tbh. The author has had their fair share of political controversies, from the site being hacked by Islamic extremist groups, to attracting criticism for his comments on official social media accounts back during the 2016 election.</comment>


Mars discovery: Organic molecules found by NASA rover - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/science/2018/06/07/massive-mars-discovery-organic-molecules-fundamental-to-our-search-for-life-found-by-nasa-rover.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258492](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258492)

220+ points</comment>


Want Promotes Discovery Of Products Near By - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/want/id485427327?mt=8

<comment><USER2> Looks cool. I like the wannttt.com site design as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.</comment></comment>


Detecting Cheaters - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/detecting_cheat_2.html

<comment><USER2> One confounding variable might be that strange, arbitrary rules cause too much cognitive dissonance (distracting, tangential thoughts) for the test subjects to apply their reasoning skills effectively. When the the rule is more like something one would find in the real world, people would be free to concentrate on the reasoning.

We therefore need to think of a 'real life' rules that's equivalent but does not involve cheating... like

        If you became a lawyer, you went to law school.

        If you didn't go to law school, you're not a lawyer.

        Test:

        [Is a lawyer] [Is a doctor] [Went to medical school] [Went to law school]

Actually, looking at it, there seems to be something counter-intuitive about the phrasing anyway. We usually would clarify by saying something like 'all lawyers started in law school, but not all law students managed to become practicing lawyers.' All calls to the subclass were dispatched from the parent, but the parent could have dispatched the call to a different subclass as it is polymorphic.

<comment><USER3> That's why there were experiments with different wording of the problems. All of the logical setups and solutions are identical (when expressed in abstract P/Q, true/false), but some problem domains (took a plane) is a lot more difficult for average people to comprehend than others (ate the vegetables).

This is not in the article (I'm just familiar with the exercise), but people are also much better at dealing with logic when the questions are about legal drinking age.

<comment><USER2> Well would that not go against the findings then? - legal drinking age is not related to cheating or evolved habits to combat cheating. It would seem that the rule being _sensible_ is more important than it being about _cheating._</comment></comment></comment>