Show HN: Improve Your Writing – Grammar and Writing for Creators - <AUTHOR> https://grammarandwritingforcreators.com

<comment><USER2> The first bullet point reads "Learn all the important elementary to advanced rules and errors."

How many of you had to re-read it at least once, or rescan mid-sentence, to understand?

I won't even discuss the second bullet point: "Write skilfully, and write powerful and eloquent blog posts, books, and more."

It's quite disturbing to see this language in a guide that is all about grammar, writing, and the importance of being well-understood.

Or am I just a grump old man?

<comment><USER3> I agree the first sentence is a bit awkward (I would suggest something like "Learn all the important rules and errors, from elementary to advanced"), but what's wrong with the second example?

<comment><USER4> The rhythm is all messed up. Not eloquent at all.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps we should take a moment and remember that Grammar can be fun (or so they tried to convince us between Saturday morning cartoons) ([http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NkuuZEey_bs](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NkuuZEey_bs))

<comment><USER4> Writing can be fun, grammar is just one constraint we leverage during writing, and easily bent to meet primeval rhythm requirements. Writing is like composing music, it is written conversation that flows as if you were talking through the paper, with additional constraints to match the medium.

The best way to become good at writing is to do it a lot and receive lots of critique. Style and grammar guides aren't very useful.

<comment><USER6> The best example of this that we're all likely to know is "Think Different" vs "Think Differently".

> The best way to become good at writing is to do it a lot and receive lots of > critique.

Don't forget to read a lot! (and from a diverse set of writers too!)

<comment><USER4> If we are talking about technical blog style writing, only a few people write well at all, even out of those that have actual readers; in academic writing, it is even more depressing. Better to develop a critical eye that can recognize good and bad writing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I dislike things like this. There are _tons_ of FREE, valuable resources online about grammar and writing.

Why pay for this book? There is no reason. There isn't anything special about writing for "creators" \-- and if there is, this author hasn't shown capability. Just look at the bullet points. They all end with a semi-colon. While that can be grammatically correct, there are many accepted versions here and a semi-colon won't do anything but simply confuse most users.

Follow best practices from the big players' splash pages. This book looks unworthy of a reading even if it was free.

<comment><USER8> You mean...'even if it WERE free.'

<comment><USER9> Better: 'even were it free'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am the author, and I will try to address some of the comments:

1\. First, if you buy and read the book, your writing will definitely improve. You will write better than you ever have. I am confident you will. Those tiny grammar books on amazon.com wouldn't help much because many don't cover the crucial topics for writing well. I read nearly all of them.

2\. Language is instinctual, so arguing about grammatical rules is pointless. Take this passage from my book: "I agree with Steven Pinker, as he describes in his book "The Language Instinct," that humans have an instinct to learn and use language, and some nonstandard grammars and dialects perceived to be unsophisticated and ungrammatical (Appalachian English Vernacular and Black English Vernacular, for example) do, in fact, follow sophisticated grammatical rules.

I will not hurl even a pebble of criticism to anyone who uses English grammar to his or her own inclination. Instead, this book helps people who want to improve their Standard American English and Standard British English grammar. By "standard," I mean the form used in academia, mainstream businesses and books, and formal and informal writing aimed at the general public or educated readers.

3\. For the first bullet, I combined two similar bullets into one, hence the possible oddity. I constructed it for brevity, not for eloquence. No need to niggle over a bullet; it's a peccadillo. Incidentally, I wrote an entire chapter on how to write eloquent prose.

4\. Ztratar, I presume you would agree that books are not useless. While anyone can probably learn anything online, books are still usually more organized and better researched than disparate articles and blog posts spread across hundreds of websites. In fact, to my knowledge, about half of the content in my book cannot be found online. I have devised some new grammatical constructions and techniques for writing skillfully.

5\. Icambron, you should definitely read my book. You will learn a lot. For example, you will learn that all those things you pointed out are actually grammar myths (aka superstitions). I have an entire section on myths that many people believe are legitimate rules of grammar. Many such myths abound even in schools, including college. You should read the following article, a section from my book; you may find some of the cool sentence constructions quite different from the prosaic and formulaic constructions taught in schools: [https://grammarandwritingforcreators.com/Creative_Powerful_W...](https://grammarandwritingforcreators.com/Creative_Powerful_Ways_to_Start_Sentences.pdf)

5\. Seanmcdirmid, I wrote an entire section on the rhythm and euphony of sentences, another topic rarely found in grammar books. You can read this new figure of speech that I have devised (unrelated to rhythm, but all the examples employ rhythm): [https://grammarandwritingforcreators.com/Conceal_Reveal_Arti...](https://grammarandwritingforcreators.com/Conceal_Reveal_Article_FINAL.pdf)

<comment><USER10> I read through you new figure of speech, and I don't see why you class it as a figure of speech. Wikipedia defines a figure of speech as "A figure of speech is the use of a word or a phrase, which transcends its literal interpretation. It can be a special repetition, arrangement or omission of words with literal meaning, or a phrase with a specialized meaning not based on the literal meaning of the words in it, as in idiom, metaphor, simile, hyperbole, personification, or synecdoche." From what I read in your explanation of your idea, you've just creates a phrase with a literal meaning. Would you care to explain further why you regard it as a figure of speech?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> By the way, Richard is also the guy behind JavaScript Is Sexy ([http://javascriptissexy.com/](http://javascriptissexy.com/)), a great blog about JavaScript (I always recommend his "How To Learn JavaScript Properly" post: [http://javascriptissexy.com/how-to-learn-javascript- properly...](http://javascriptissexy.com/how-to-learn-javascript-properly/) )

</comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps you are indeed a "grump" old man, as both those cited sentences are grammatical.

<comment><USER9> Many awkward sentences are grammatical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This book was written by one of my favorite programmer bloggers. His blog javascriptissexy.com is sincerly a consistant reference for me. Don't knock it until you've read it.</comment>


The Banker Who Gambled Everything and Brought EVE's Greatest Empire to Its Knees - <AUTHOR> https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/04/21/eve-online-world-war-bee-mittani/ <comment><USER2> Damn, this makes me miss playing eve.</comment>


Show HN: Tokei 12 – A fast and accurate code analysis tool - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/tokei/releases/tag/v12.0.0 <comment><USER2> It can all be done in one line :P

<comment><USER3> I guess you mean `wc`, but this tool does some parsing for different formats and I would expect it to give you a more accurate word count that way. However, reading "code analysis tool" I was expecting something else.

There is a screenshot of shorts in that page: scroll down a bit in that page to "New look".

Reading a bit more carefully now, it does have some neat features, like counting the number of code blocks (grouped by programming language) in Markdown file sets: "Tokei will now detect any code blocks marked with specified source language and count each as their respective languages or as Markdown if not present or not found. Now you can easily see how many code examples are included in your documentation."</comment></comment>


Ed Logg's plan form for Atari Asteroids - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/jpdysonplay/status/846373739671498753 <comment><USER2> While researching for a book I learned that _Asteroids_ was inspired by three different games: _Spacewar!_ (the seminal PDP-1 video game), _Computer Space_ (Atari's derivative of Spacewar) and _Space Invaders_.

The control scheme comes directly from _Spacewar_ ; even the hyperspace button works the same way. _Space Invaders_ inspired the "clear the level" aspect of the game. Nishikado cites _Breakout_ as the inspiration for this aspect of _Space Invaders_. (Shooting games until that point usually didn't have levels to clear, you just ran up your score until the game ended.)

There's an old archived post with more trivia and design docs here: [https://web.archive.org/web/20141222010537/http://www.edge-o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20141222010537/http://www.edge- online.com/features/making-asteroids/) (might be display errors, maybe ad- block-detector caused)

<comment><USER3> Spacewar! was one of my absolute favourites back in the day. My business partner at the time and I wasted many an hour side by side on the keyboard on an IBM PC/XT trying to outdo each other.

I wonder if there is a browser version, or iOS version around these days?? Would love to revisit it for nostalgic reasons.

<comment><USER4> The thing that gets me about Spacewar is how gorgeous it looked compared to games released even much much later. The CRT effects and vector graphics really lift that game to a whole other level that pixel rendering and sprites could never match (and this is coming from someone who loves the pixel art of retro games).

As much I sometimes grown when I hear people talking about CRT emulation of classic computers and games consoles, if there was any game that would benefit from CRT emulation it would be Spacewar!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Asteroids is kinda interesting because its a vector based game. (the beam is moved around the screen, turned on and off rapidly to draw the game screen). The vector graphics made the game looks so crisp and clean. Slower beam movement make brighter lines, which is clever.

I recently stumbled across a youtube video where someone takes a modern laser projector and recreates asteroids using it. A little long, but kinda interesting.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkHjG759ABY&t=774s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkHjG759ABY&t=774s)

<comment><USER6> The definitive guide to how the Atari vector system worked was written by Jed Margolin (ex-Atari engineer). It's amazingly detailed but incredibly easy to read:

[http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm](http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm)

The secret is very precise (and expensive) DACs. The vector generator actually did all the hard work in Asteroids. The main CPU (a 1.5 MHz 6502) just created vector lists for the AVG to draw.

<comment><USER5> Long and very technical. Wow. Really interesting stuff, especially the game specific stuff at the end.

6502 sounds like the Apple // processor.

Thanks.

<comment><USER6> 6502 was indeed the Apple ][ CPU.

Also: Commodore PET/VIC20/64/128, BBC Micro, Nintendo NES, Atari 2600/5200, and Atari 400/800 home computers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love that somebody had to go to a print shop and ask for "Video Game Plan Forms".

Probably the most awe-inspiring thing to me about most great 20th century engineering (and other) accomplishments is that, except in a very few fields (and then rather late) they basically took place without the aid of computerized communication, research, and organizational tools. It seems so daunting to, for example, fight a globe-spanning war on two fronts involving dozens of allied nations and millions of men and women, without even the aid of a spreadsheet.

<comment><USER8> They certainly had spreadsheets. Except they were called worksheets, and computer was a job description rather than a machine :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some detailed analysis of the Asteroids hardware/software:

[http://computerarcheology.com/Arcade/Asteroids/](http://computerarcheology.com/Arcade/Asteroids/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Is that really a design document that was created before developing the game, or is it a summary that was created after a development prototype was mostly complete?

<comment><USER2> I'm guessing after some prototype work had been done. I've seen another version of the doc with a back page describing the saucers, which weren't fleshed out until later in the process.

Another account describes the game as a "creative exercise" that turned into an actual product (this wasn't uncommon!): [http://www.rawbw.com/~delman/pdf/making_of_Asteroids.pdf](http://www.rawbw.com/~delman/pdf/making_of_Asteroids.pdf)

<comment><USER11> The tweet that Gamasutra is quoting has both pages: [https://twitter.com/jpdysonplay/status/846373739671498753](https://twitter.com/jpdysonplay/status/846373739671498753) It looks like they only reproduced (or read) the first one for their article.

In any case, it's a fascinating sign of the times. Today the _completed_ game would be considered a "creative exercise"\--a skilled programmer could probably finish it in a day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Next time I'm back home in Rochester, I will visit Strong to see that document.

</comment><comment><USER13> Url changed from [http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/294648/Check_out_the_hand...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/294648/Check_out_the_handwritten_game_design_doc_for_Asteroids.php), which points to this.</comment>


Biology needs a Grothendieck (or at least a Hilbert) - <AUTHOR> http://thebench.mit.edu/?p=155 <comment><USER2> I came to biology from physics over a decade ago thinking that theory would matter. But modern biology is not waiting for a Grothendieck. We are not wanting for a deep theoretical view to reinterpret our data with. We are wanting for cheap, high quality data about cells and organisms in the first place.

Those of you who have not done biology can't realize how primitive things still are. A CS analogy is that we're trying to reverse engineer a non- deterministic alien architecture from the future via a remote debugger over a noisy line that has no error correction and runs at a fraction of a millibaud, where every peek or poke costs hundreds to thousands of dollars. With the advent of high-throughput sequencing we just figured out how to get noisy ROM/RAM dumps (genotype), but still have precious little ability to quickly interact with the biological systems under study (phenotype). Biology is much more like hacking and reverse engineering than it is like physics or mathematics.

A working exploit is worth much more than general pontification. The transformative events in biology these days are the clever hacks that enable whole new classes of fast experiments to be done: quick homologous recombination induced by CRISPR, optical interrogation of neural systems using light-sensitive ion channels, the development of adeno-associated viruses for rapid introduction of genetic material, etc. In the coming decades the combination of such clever hacks with cheaper automation and sensors will hopefully bring a flood of new data that will make a predictive, quantitative science of biology possible.

With cheap and plentiful data, perhaps clever minds might discover general quantitative principles that we can't see yet. But the data is what's lacking, not cleverness.

<comment><USER3> While I absolutely agree with the need for cheaper way to obtain data, I don't think this is the major problem we're going to face.

We now have ways of obtaining mountains of data (RNA-chIP comes to mind, but high-speed sequencing is a big one as well), but we don't know how to process it. We end up with thousands of candidate proteins, but then someone has to go through them one by one. Things are incredibly primitive. The huge pain point coming up is our ability to process information, which is very limited. How do you deal with machine generating TBs of data/day ?

I think what's lacking is a culture of automation. Physicists do it, chemists do it, but biologists still do everything "by hand", and not only is that imprecise, is also slow and costly. We also need better ways of obtaining information about other's work. When there are 1000 paper a year published on your subject, how do you filter ? How do you even find the time to read papers in other subjects, which could be interesting in their methods, or just for general intuition and knowledge ?

What we need is good algorithms, able to replace curate our sources of information well, and machines able to do the bulk-processing now needed in biology. Some things are coming up (I'm co-founding a start-up to do exactly this), but it should have happened 10 years ago.

<comment><USER4> We have ways of obtaining mountains of sequencing data that represents only a single dimension of an unknown system. While, it is a step in the right direction, this data by itself is still lacking. It's like trying to model the trajectory of a bouncing ball with extremely high resolution X coordinates, but horrible Y and Z coordinate data.

I've been working with sequencing data for the past 5 years. The problem really isn't with how to interpret the data, it is that the data itself sucks because it's extremely myopic.

And yes, there are people who are trying to analyze the various *-seq methods holistically. But I haven't really seen anything substantial coming out of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In what sense is Charles Darwin not that person for biology? (I looked up the author of the short essay post submitted here, and it appears that his career has been devoted to nonbiological technology. I wonder what analogies from mathematics and electronics he is using to think about biology, perhaps without having looked at what the theoreticians of biology have had to explain in biological data?)

<comment><USER6> Darwin is that person since he discovered the only universal principle in biology. There is no more universal biological concepts to discover since evolution by natural selection makes universal properties impossible.

<comment><USER7> Of course not, the fact that all known living things have DNA or RNA (and that this translates to proteins) is another universal biological concept for example.

Another is that the live is carbon based

Concepts like ecosystem or the nature of predation are also universal.

<comment><USER6> These things are not universals. Let's take the fact that all living things have DNA or RNA. We know that the first living thing did not have DNA and RNA. The only reason that it is believed that all living things have DNA/RNA is that this is how we look for new life - we say that something is alive if it has RNA/DNA. For example, if some of the early life that did not use RNA/DNA was still around we would not know since we would not recognise it as life.

<comment><USER7> A chemical reaction is not a life form, by definition. You can found sodium or gold atoms in a lot of life forms playing essential roles to keep this things alive for some more time; but if you dissolve salt in water you are not killing some salt people.

There is not a single exception known until today by the human race so, do not lie to yourself, those concepts are absolutely universal (right now).

Moreover if any slime or rock was really a early life form we should be able to recognised as that, since many years ago, for sure. A gold necklace that will create more gold or gain mass with time would not have gone unnoticed, neither a limestone rock growing and taking the form of the drawer that contains it.

Finally, an early form of life that did not use RNA/DNA in earth will be contaminated with RNA/DNA of its parasites or symbionts after a few thousands of years. The ecology predict this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm wondering why the "at least a Hilbert" is thrown in there. His name doesn't appear anywhere else in the article, and the wording suggests that Hilbert is some sort of poor-man's Grothendieck, which is an association I'm failing to make.

<comment><USER9> Hilbert wanted to establish mathematics on a firm foundation because a number of paradoxes suggested that the current foundations was faulty (Russell's paradox being one, there are others that I can't remember as well).

Basically Hilbert wanted to find a list of axioms from which all of mathematics could be derived and then prove that these axioms were consistent, i.e., that you can't create two contradicting statements from them.

But then Gödel showed with his incompleteness theorems that this wasn't possible.

So I guess the author was suggesting that biology have a firm, axiomatic basis?

<comment><USER10> The reference to Grothendieck and Hilbert don't seem to be about establishing something like an 'axiomatic basis', but about having a leader who can organize a platform of modernization in the field. They both lead programs. That's about as far as the thinking goes on that one, I suspect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Biology is based on complex interactions among proteins and genetic material. There is no way to construct generalities about such systems that bypass careful observation of their inner workings. Just look at how long it took to discover DNA after the discovery of heritable traits. You can't hand wave your way around knowing how these molecules are assembled and transcribed.

Mathematics is an invented tool that can be arbitrarily defined to suit a problem space. There will never be a Grothendieck of biology because the mechanisms of life aren't so neat and ordered that they can reduced to first principles.

<comment><USER12> > There will never be a Grothendieck of biology because the mechanisms of life > aren't so neat and ordered that they can reduced to first principles.

Let us simulate the universe and let that simulation be the ruleset for the first principles.

Not saying it's going to be neat and ordered, but on the other hand, the idea of it surely is. Whether or not it is ever feasible (or even theoretically possible) to do so doesn't take away from the merits of the _idea_ , I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Such a person in biology is impossible. Biology does not have any underlying common principles other than evolution by natural selection.

<comment><USER13> Actually it does, and that principle is called chemistry.

<comment><USER14> And feedback loops. Actually feedback loops are arguably more important for living organisms than DNA because life could conceivably store its 'blueprints' in some other fashion but in order to survive in changing environments through adaptations, it's crucial that there be feedback loops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What gets me about this is that a single misplaced bomb during WW2 would have stopped these discoveries, and he would have just been another casualty statistic. It makes you think about what advances other misplaced (or well placed) bombs have prevented.

</comment><comment><USER16> Original author here - I just discovered this thread. Thanks so much for all the comments!

Some context behind why I wrote this post: as a researcher and technologist in biology, I've realized that it's unclear to me what the real questions are; that this lack of clarity is not due to my immaturity; and the field seems dangerously aimless.

>99% of the time, work is justified (and finished) with some application to health and medicine, with little regard for theory building or true understanding of a system. Bringing up this point usually solicits two responses: 1) we don't have enough data yet 2) there's little use for theory in biology. I hope I can give more in depth responses where I see these themes in other comments, but I'll generalize my thoughts here.

First, how do we judge what questions are worth asking and researching, vs trivial details? How do we even know whether we understand whether a question has been adequately answered? The current state of research to me often seems like John Searle's Chinese Room: we just generate a huge dictionary of perturbation-responses and call this "understanding". This might be effective to find drug targets, but is it real understanding? It might be the first step, but it seems to me that we're swimming in plenty of data already and it's worth it to step back and try to figure out what what it is we are actually trying to do. I'm comfortable with the fact that answers to our questions might be a long ways off, but it's scary that no one seems to care that we don't even know what the questions are.

Second, I'd argue biology has historically been very theoretical. We developed a whole quantitative theory of genetics (Fisher, Wright, Haldane, ...) before we had identified what a gene actually was. Hell, it was still debated what matter even looked like at that the microscale (where we knew genes must exist)! In the advent of molecular biology, Watson, Crick, Brenner, Gamow, Delbruck, et al, predicted through (some) experiments but mostly reasoning and conjecture much of what was later found to be true about transcription/translation. There are countless other examples of where theory has driven the study of the origin of life, molecular biology, ecology, et cetera. Only recently, when health science started to dominate biological research, did biology become less theoretical and more focused on individual instances of problems.

tl;dr - What's most scary is that we don't even know what the foundational questions are anymore for modern biology, and no one seems to even care. Rather than focusing on clearly stated foundations, the field is guided by the latest trends in glamour journals, which tend to obfuscate questions rather than answer them.

</comment><comment><USER17> I nominate Eric Lander.

<comment><USER17> Gee, Lander was first a mathematician.

His lectures on biology at MIT are on YouTube and are a lot of fun. He's really charging ahead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Missing the trees for the forest. We already have exactly what the article is calling for in biology, and it is called chemistry.

<comment><USER13> I sympathize with the sentiment, but biology is not a _simple_ reduction to chemistry (although chemical principles do undergird it, and it is useful to describe biology in terms of chemistry as often as possible)

Nonetheless it is appalling how little chemistry biologists know. We were having a dna shearing issue in our lab, and I once asked, "what is the chemical mechanism of shearing" and no one could provide a convincing mechanism, which meant their solutions to the problem were not much better than shamanism.

It's even worse with the faddish worship of interdisciplinary-ism... Basically chemical biology (versus the more classical field of biochemistry, which is deep) is littered with dilettantes who were neither good enough to do straight chemistry nor deeply knowledgeable about biology.

If there will be a grothendieck or a Hilbert in biology, that person will almost certainly have to have some amount real chemistry training, and also deep chemistry knowledge. Probably training in information theory is important too.

In my view, physics is the study of the universe focused through the lens on energetic state functions, with a reductionist bent, chemistry is the study of the universe focused mostly on the diversity of matter with a passing nod to path dependence, and biology is the study of self-organizing information propagation with a strong acknowldgement of path dependence.

<comment><USER16> Totally agreed - I might steal your last paragraph there!

Chemistry is "the details" of biology, but it tells us next to nothing about what we actually care about, probably what you called "self-organizing information propagation" .

I think good definition for life shouldn't include any dependence on the chemistry used to manifest it. Agreed?

<comment><USER13> yeah, it is just a broad stroke characterization of the feels of each field. Some types of particle physicists would be probably be reclassified as chemists under my scheme, which they would bristle at, although in all honesty they are inheritors of a long line of tradition that goes through the indisputably chemist lavoisier, berzelius, and curie - more than they are newton or maxwell, planck, or einstein.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A modified version of the PHP Interpreter for European developers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/OlivierBarbier/php-src <comment><USER2> This is going to totally appeal to all the Europian patriots (in that parallel universe)

The single char variables would look like: €A €B €C €D €E €F €G €H €I €J €K €L €M €N €O €P €Q €R €S €T €U €V €W €X €Y €Z of which €U is totally the coolest.

Keep up the good work!</comment>


Long Bets - <AUTHOR> http://www.longbets.org/bets <comment><USER2> I wondered why this is legal and my doubts were resolved in the FAQ.

"Having the winnings become philanthropic gifts solves the legal problem and also introduces an appropriate element of service and generosity to the whole process."

</comment><comment><USER3> I think my favourite is "Large Hadron Collider will destroy Earth."

Stakes: $1,000

I think the reality might be a little higher than that ;)

<comment><USER3> I'm also impressed by the specific details of what counts and doesn't count as Earth being destroyed:

"Teleporting Earth to another location or alternate universe where it is still able to support life is specifically excluded."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The best thing there is Ted Danson winning a bet on the Red Socks.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wanted to place a long bet about 10 years ago that Lance Armstrong would be exposed for using performance-enhancing drugs. It was after reading a New Yorker article on cycling that made it pretty clear that cheating was the rule. Even though evidence has emerged since then that he did cheat, I suspect I may have lost the bet based on the deadline.

I noticed the Ted Danson bet at that time (he hadn't won it yet!) and was amused.

</comment><comment><USER6> Danny Hillis wins on bet length: "The universe will eventually stop expanding." No deadline on this one.

</comment><comment><USER7> Now all we need is a futures market on each of these, and we'll start to see progress.</comment>


Let 'localhost' be localhost - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-west-let-localhost-be-localhost-06 <comment><USER2> This is somewhat related to google buying the .dev gTLD.

I get that .dev is kinda short and sweet but if it's for local dev why bother with a suffix at all? Or use the project name. Instead of foobar.dev, use local.foobar or heck use localdomain or your company/personal domain as the suffix.</comment>


New matebook x pro. A "macbook" with a proper keyboard - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/29/17396818/huawei-matebook-x-pro-laptop-review-specs-price <comment><USER2> The 3:2 aspect ratio display is the killer feature, in my opinion. Would like a non-touch option though.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, i dont need touch screen on linux</comment></comment>


270 million Facebook shares about to be set free - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/15/technology/facebook-lockup/index.html?iid=HP_MPM

<comment><USER2> At first I thought you meant Facebook "shares", as in the social plugin.</comment>


What was the first computer you bought, what were some of your favorite games? - <AUTHOR> http://sqlservercode.blogspot.com/2016/11/what-was-first-computer-you-bought-what.html?spref=tw <comment><USER2> The first computer I bought was a FLEX 6809 kit with a basic and a pascal compiler. My favorite game was the pascal compiler. Yeah, back in that time, if you wanted a game, you had to program it yourself!</comment>


Ideas for geek weddings - <AUTHOR> http://discovermagazine.com/galleries/2014/sept/geeky-wedding

<comment><USER2> It's interesting how the ideas displayed here for the most part avoid what I've seen many geek-identity marketing pushes do, i.e. treating it as predominantly an identity built around consumption (Which shows do you watch and collect memorabilia about, what IP do you catalog and spend money on, which conventions do you throw money at for signed items, etc)

I don't know that each of these are for everybody, but then again, that's (at least, in my opinion) not the point here. The waveform rings, for example, are _very_ personal. I like it.</comment>


Weft - Air Traffic Control for Cargo - <AUTHOR> http://weft.io/

<comment><USER2> if you're not ready to sell now, why have a "buy now" button?

<comment><USER3> Were you going to actually buy it? If not why'd you click the "buy now" button?</comment></comment>


Open Your Mouth, Loose Money: PR and the Magic of Restraint - <AUTHOR> http://carsonkahn.com/articles/PR-money-and-the-magic-of-restraint

<comment><USER2> "lose"</comment>


The Top 20 Ways to Come Up With Amazing Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://www.skelliewag.org/the-top-20-ways-to-come-up-with-amazing-ideas-157.htm <comment><USER2> Gee, Thanks Sherlock...</comment>


Vast deposits of lithium could change the global politics of battery production - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/will-supervolcanoes-help-power-our-future-180964635/?no-ist <comment><USER2> Sadly lithium still isn't scarce enough to make it uneconomic to produce a perfectly good rechargeable battery and sell it as single-use [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5korWqCcsHE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5korWqCcsHE)

I can tell you where you're going to be able to find those vast lithium deposits soon - landfill sites.

<comment><USER3> In all the towns I've lived in, it's illegal to put fluorescent bulbs and lithium batteries in the trash. They're supposed to be disposed of as hazardous waste.

<comment><USER4> It's not like they can really inspect the contents of your bin before the machinery dumps it all into the truck. You'd have to do something really dumb to get caught. Those rules really depend on most people not being dicks about it.

<comment><USER5> Most garbage collection in Australia has a camera to inspect bin contents and catch people abusing the recycling system.

It's been in place for a decade now.

[https://www.news-mail.com.au/news/waste-truck-watching- you-g...](https://www.news-mail.com.au/news/waste-truck-watching-you-garbage- council-removal/577961/)

<comment><USER4> That's interesting. The non-recyclable waste is normally packaged up into black bags here in the UK and it's often pretty noxious. They're not gonna slice them open so a camera can have a look, so people can put almost anything in them so long as it fits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One thing that concerns me is, I don't think there was any mention of the sensitivity of the sites listed in the article. For example, the article casually listed the Yellowstone caldera.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Lithium-rich sites were significant sites to a significant number of people.

<comment><USER7> There are plenty of very large calderas that are unpopular and already host to mining operations. Much of the west coast is stuff like this. McDermitt Caldera contains over 3 million tons of lithium, for instance: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDermitt_Caldera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDermitt_Caldera)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hard rock lithium -pegmatites- were actually the _majority_ of global lithium until recently. They were/are primarily used in ceramics. Brine-produced lithium has one fewer step to convert to lithium in batteries, but the cost is absolutely marginal. These pegmatites are common worldwide, unlike brine deposits.

Brines are mined somewhat like fracking- a borehole is drilled and water (without fracturing compounds) is injected and then pumped out into large evaporating pools, leaving behind lithium-containing salts. It's extraordinarily cheap because it's dead simple to purify and doesn't even involve actual mining. However these sites are uncommon (though there are still several in the US, and worldwide- they are not limited to South America) and since you're limited to land area, evaporation speed and water supply, this is a limited and slow process. And the water use can be a real problem- brines often exist in places with limited water supplies as the water washes the lithium away over long timescales. Still, the evaporation pools often support life for a time, and flamingos like them. It would be much better to not waste the water though.

Hectorite is the main focus of this article. It requires a couple more steps (limestone roast and acid leach) to extract and costs ~$2/lb[1] (NB that was in 1987) compared to current carbonate prices of $2.5-$3.5. I wouldn't say it's nonviable because it probably helps to put a ceiling on the long-term price of lithium, however high lithium content in these clays is .35-.65% compared to 6%+ in pegmatites. I'm not sure it will ever be relevant. Also note that although "acid wash" sounds bad, it doesn't have to be. The acids get reused.

The bottom line is that lithium is highly available. It contributes very little (<5%) to the cost of a battery, so huge disruptions (4x price increases in the last lithium shortage) have very little impact on the price of batteries as long as availability is not affected.

The biggest price factor in most batteries is cobalt- it's very expensive and makes up many times more of a battery's mass than lithium. Currently most of it comes from two countries in Africa. The DRC is one of the few places in the world where cobalt can be found on its own. Despite this it's almost always found with nickel, which is produced in huge quantities. For the moment the cobalt supply for batteries will remain stable solely because of the recovery of nickel prices- this has caused a half dozen or so mines to open/reopen in the US. There was a strong fear that cobalt would put a brutal penalty on the price of lithium batteries during the nickel price crash, and eventually that might still be the case. It's also worth noting that there are many alternate chemistries that don't use cobalt, but the best ones do. It's possible that a new chemistry (such as li-metal/foil batteries) may change that, but unlikely.

Finally, graphite is the last supply threat. Battery graphite is about a 40/60 synthetic/natural blend- both types have advantages and disadvantages, so they are used together. High quality spheroidal graphite is hard to find, but the synthetic stuff is nearly as cheap so it's unlikely it'll be a problem. I don't know much about the specifics but I think it comes down to a lack of searching, ie it's easier to sell high quality graphite as anthracite coal than to worry about selling to battery producers.

[1]: [http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/techreports/PDF/USBM-691.pd...](http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/techreports/PDF/USBM-691.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> The problem isn't lack of lithium. It's a lack of cobalt.

<comment><USER7> There's no lack of cobalt, it's only the most constrained supply. There's no problem with abundance as long as mines are opened.

Secondary problems of increased cobalt demand: the price of nickel will probably crash again, as they are found together except for in a few countries.

<comment><USER9> How is cheap nickel a "problem"?

<comment><USER10> It'll hurt the nickel industry!

Seriously, though, like any commodity, dumping lots of excess nickel on the market could force mines to shut down if they can't weather the temporary explosion from a temporary demand spike in cobalt due to this lithium concept. Then when the explosion stopped, cobalt mining slowed down, you'd coast on excess reserves for a while.

When those reserves run out, suddenly you need nickel but the mines haven't been profitable for a decade, it takes time to restart surveying activity, procure specialized equipment, find/train employees...you can't turn it back on like a switch. But you can almost turn it off like a switch with new tech that obsoletes an industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> TL;DR - in addition to the usual spots at the bottom of drainage basins, lithium also exists in pegmatite and hectorite deposits. But there's currently no commercially-viable process for extracting it. Headline is kind of hype-y.

<comment><USER7> > But there's currently no commercially-viable process for extracting it.

No, that's just hype. Hard rock lithium -pegmatites- were actually the _majority_ of global lithium until recently. They were/are primarily used in ceramics. Brine-produced lithium has one fewer step to convert to lithium in batteries, but the cost is absolutely marginal. It's plenty easy and commercially viable to produce batteries from pegmatite lithium.

Hectorite is specifically what she was talking about as nonviable, which appears to be broadly correct. It requires a couple more steps to extract and costs ~$2/lb[1] compared to current carbonate prices of $2.5-$3.5. So I wouldn't say it's nonviable because it probably helps to put a ceiling on the long-term price of lithium. However high lithium content in these clays is .35-.65% compared to 6%+ in pegmatites. I'm not sure it will ever be relevant.

[1]: [http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/techreports/PDF/USBM-691.pd...](http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/techreports/PDF/USBM-691.pdf)</comment></comment>


Adimab Investors Happy with No-Exit Strategy (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2013/07/26/adimab-investors-happy-with-no-exit-strategy/

<comment><AUTHOR> > Investors in Adimab LLC, which makes platform technology for antibody drug > discovery, may never see a traditional exit from the company–and they > couldn't be happier about it.

I haven't seen this sort of practice in the software tech scene. Are there any software companies funded in this way, or is it restricted to industries which are traditionally allowed to be slower moving?

<comment><USER2> I'm amused by how "an exit" is frame as "traditional" when it's such a recent and still such a rare strategy among new (and not just startup) businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There are financial instruments which allow you to sell a dividend stream outright.</comment>


Sigil – A free, open-source, multi-platform eBook editor - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil <comment><USER2> I prefer markdown -> pandoc -> epub. That way I can use whatever editor I like, _and_ I'm not stuck editing HTML by hand.

</comment><comment><USER3> I m really frustrated that I can't find a single screenshot of your application. Nothing on Github or the official website.

<comment><USER4> I took a screenshot: [https://i.imgur.com/tdCGcqS.png](https://i.imgur.com/tdCGcqS.png)

I've used it in the past, and it is quite decent.

<comment><USER5> What are the puzzle pieces at the top for?

Reminds me of a similar looking UI contraption I saw recently: [https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/1704/images/921/92...](https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/1704/images/921/921-1548064715-683451220.jpeg) (the multicolored database icons at the top)

<comment><USER4> Quickly-running plugins. I haven't used them, but it seems like a important aspect of the editor. Here's the plugin preferences window: [https://i.imgur.com/HAtJ5ej.png](https://i.imgur.com/HAtJ5ej.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I haven't played much with any of this stuff, but one thing that I'm curious about is what is the advantage of having a container format like this, rather than just having a single giant HTML file (with embedded CSS & data: uri images)?

For editing this would be ridiculous, but for transport and presentation it seems much more compact and useful. It is easy to target as an output format for a variety of tools, without understanding a bunch of quirks of the format. It would be easier to render, since the application has to make all the decisions about where to place content and support reflowing anyway.

<comment><USER5> An .epub is already what you describe; it's a .zip of .xhtml, images, and supporting files you edit directly seen in the sidepanel: [https://i.imgur.com/tdCGcqS.png](https://i.imgur.com/tdCGcqS.png)

An ebook editor just entails helping you edit those .xhtml files in a slightly more domain specific way, generating a few extra files (like table of contents), and producing the distributable zip.

Though I may have misunderstood which "container format" you were referring to.

<comment><USER6> No, what I'm describing is a single .html (or .xhtml file, if you like), compressed and sent on its way. Editing it as a series of xhtml, css, img, and manifest files makes perfect sense -- it allows a human to craft a book using the level of tooling that makes the most sense for them (from a word document to raw html to markdown to more sophisticated tools) but all of those tools can then retarget to a monolith that is easy to define and consume.

<comment><USER5> One big file is hard to handle. Ereaders choke on them just like the browser does.

<comment><USER6> They do; probably xhtml/XML is not really an ideal format because it isn't easily linearalizable, but if ereaders are using a reduced set of the functionality, then they can probably safely assume that they can just split the file at a <p> or <mpb:chapter> tag without loss of fidelity, and just consider that all style-related content needs to occur in <head>.

My comment below has some remarks on pagination and reflowing that mean that a reflowable HTML file capable of being rendered by an ereader is likely subject to certain restrictions on the content to make it work. There would probably have to be a one-time indexing job (noting paragraph and chapter breaks to allow random-ish access into the file) but I think that's not crazy even for a very large document.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's the best eBook reader? I'm getting fed up with Amazon, and I'd like to have some kind of clone of the Kindle. Key thing is SaaS -- I'd like my reading positions, notes, etc. to sync between machines and available through a web interface.

Glad to pay a modest amount for hosting on AWS or similar, if I'm in control of my data. Not so glad to do another corporate lock-in.

<comment><USER8> Thorium Reader is an absolute pleasure to use. Open-source and regularly updated.

[https://www.edrlab.org/software/thorium- reader/](https://www.edrlab.org/software/thorium-reader/) [https://github.com/edrlab/thorium-reader](https://github.com/edrlab/thorium- reader)

<comment><USER9> Is it more than just an ePub reader? You really feel it's justified to spin-up an electorn app (!!!) to read an ePub? I use Emacs' nov.el or Foliate which are not only low on resources but also instantaneous to open files.

<comment><USER10> I have a bad news for you, recently I was interested in how could I write a good QML/Kirigami based ebook reader and looked at all the existing Linux epub reader and each one was using a webview for the epub rendering. But they usually try to integrate better with the rest of the app and your DE so you just don't see it.

EDIT: the only epub reader I know that doesn't use a webview is Okular and the rendering using QTextDocument basic html support is horrible.

<comment><USER11> Koreader and coolreader both based on crengine and dont use webview. Koreader devs forked crengine and now seem to be in the process of merging back. [https://github.com/koreader/koreader](https://github.com/koreader/koreader) [https://github.com/buggins/coolreader](https://github.com/buggins/coolreader)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's the value of your tool over using asciidoc tools [https://github.com/asciidoctor](https://github.com/asciidoctor) ?

<comment><USER4> It's WYSIWYG, and I can edit existing EPUB files, which is always nifty.

<comment><USER13> Is it, though? [https://i.imgur.com/tdCGcqS.png](https://i.imgur.com/tdCGcqS.png) Doesn't look like WYSIWYG to me.

<comment><USER14> The WYSIWYG view/editor has been removed: [https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=4020780&pos...](https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=4020780&postcount=2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wonderful. It even supports dark mode. If you want to try and install it under macOS, simply type:

      $ brew cask install sigil

If you don't have homebrew installed, go to [http://brew.sh](http://brew.sh)

</comment><comment><USER16> Sigil has been around for a while. I used it a few years ago to typeset a sci- fi novel I published through Amazon KDP. Unfortunately it was not as easy for me to use as Apple Pages, which supports saving to ebook directly.

</comment><comment><USER12> what is the value of your tool over AsciiDoctor ([https://github.com/asciidoctor](https://github.com/asciidoctor)) ?

<comment><USER17> Is John Romero informed?</comment></comment>


The Model 01: A better keyboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.keyboard.io/

<comment><USER2> needs an integrated pointing device</comment>


Survey on traffic prediction in smart cities - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1574119217306521?dgcid=coauthor <comment><USER2> Would be interested to see how crypto currencies relate to this. Ive heard iota are big into integration with smart cities.</comment>


Delete old branches in Git - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@asitdhal/delete-old-branches-in-git-ab1ec5049dd9 <comment><USER2> I believe GitHub has option to automatically delete branches after successful pull request merge</comment>


Inside the World's Largest Walnut Forest - <AUTHOR> http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2017/inside-the-worlds-largest-walnut-forest/ <comment><USER2> I know someone who grows and sells walnuts. They have their own trees, then hire seasonal workers to crack them and extract the meat, package them and sell in bulk to Western Europe. A truck full of shelled and packaged walnuts can be worth $100k+. But those prices have been going down in recently.

Also if you get a chance, try green walnuts. They ones that are still in their green soft outer hulls. Have no idea where you'd find them in US. But they are pretty delicious - a completely different taste than the dried ones, I think somewhat similar to avocado. The juice from the green outer hulls will also stain anything they touch, including hands. Takes a few days to get it out, but given the taste, it's worth it.

<comment><USER3> My parents have two giant black walnut trees in their front yard in Norval, a sleepy town outside of Toronto. I used to have to pick up hundreds or thousands of these staining green balls of yuck. First couple years you go through the trouble of eating a few, but they're harder to extract than normal walnuts plus I was a kid and didn't appreciate it like I would at thirty-two.

One day I was out in yard after these bugger balls had started to fall and a Jamaican accented guy in his 50s drives up our one way street. He stops the car and asks if we're doing anything with the nuts. I say "we might eat 5 a year, if you want 'em you can have 'em, but try to get them before my mum yells at me" and that was it.

Twice a fall he drives up loads up his little car with walnuts and brings them back to his Jamaican themed natural foods store where he and his wife clean them and sell them.

What I love about this story is just how anti-internet it is. There was no web crawler looking for excess nuts, no search engines, no cold emails or fake users 'til you make it, just a dude driving around and a kid in a yard.

And a natural foods store that really lives up to its name.

<comment><USER4> Awesome!

It would be "more Internet" if you took the chance and linked to the store (or at least named it), giving folks in the area a chance to discover something new and perhaps earn the man running the store a few extra dollars.

I know I would make an effort to go if I heard a similar local story. It's more fun when there's some kind of connection.

<comment><USER3> Haha, I would have if I could remember anything about the store. I don't even remember the name of the nearby town that its in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was thinking that the lack of undergrowth below the trees must be artificial, but then on the Wikipedia page about walnuts I saw:

"[The trees] secrete chemicals into the soil to prevent competing vegetation from growing."

<comment><USER6> Walnuts are hell on other plant life. I have a couple black walnut trees on the edge of my lawn, and I have had to experiment a bunch to see what vegetables I can actually get to grow in my garden...

<comment><USER7> Did you find any that would grow in that environment?

<comment><USER6> Most greens (spinach, kale, swiss chard, beets) seem to do pretty ok. Green and pole beans do quite well. Broccoli did alright, at least the plants, though I had a pack of baby rabbits that savaged it when it was small, and it never headed up after that.

Very mediocre results with my tomatoes and cucumbers this year, but it was very, very dry.

Oh, and zucchini. But you can almost plant zucchini on asphalt and it would find a way to produce bushels of the stuff...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Walnuts were one of the first foods certified by the American Heart Association as being heart healthy. Walnuts are especially high in omega-3 fatty acids.

</comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for posting this, that whole site is new to me and it's pretty incredible.

<comment><USER10> Same thought for me. Very cool site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > For former ranger Tarikov, the preservation of the ancient forest is the > key. "If I had a million dollars, I would make a wall around the forest with > checkpoints, great rangers with good salaries, and really encourage the > wildlife to return," he said.

they really get value for their money there. in Los Angeles a million dollars would not cover the pension for a single retired police officer.

</comment><comment><USER12> Got a couple of reclaimed pieces waiting until inspiration strikes. Can confirm: beautiful wood.

<comment><USER13> Note these are not black walnut trees as found in the US. Of course walnut wood is beautiful too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Walnut is a dense and surpassingly beautiful hardwood. Makes great electric guitar bodies.

</comment><comment><USER15> Someone should do a study on the health effects of the people living there. Curious if the walnuts give them super health.

<comment><USER7> What makes you think they would get "super health"?

<comment><USER15> Walnuts are superfood. Rich in omega 3s.

<comment><USER16> Why do I have a feeling that "superfood" is a marketing scam?

<comment><USER17> I would assume anything being "sold" to you is a lie, until proven otherwise.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Terrorists Mock Bids to End Use of Social Media - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/technology/terrorists-mock-bids-to-end-use-of-social-media.html <comment><USER2> I'm surprised there aren't more reports of honey-pot use, particularly with how easily it is to derive a behavioral patterns of terrorist propagandists.

Such honey-pots would no doubt catch false-positives but it is a known effective means of reconnaissance and sabotage, considering how aggressively and thoroughly they are connected to social media.

Recently Isil issued a warning to all social media propagandists to be safe and vigilant in their online activities (eg: do not use personally identifiable information, use VPNs or Tor, etc), so it stands to reason that their online network and social network is under active attack.

The article cites honey-pot use as one of the reasons that Isil continues to have a persistent online presence, but is it really that prevalent?

There are so many things we can do to combat their online war campaign that doesn't involve poking tech firms to open up encryption or open up private access channels for law enforcement, and honestly I think the various governments aren't being forthcoming or cooperative in their online adversarial campaigns. One could even say they're being obstructionist or obtuse, with one-sided demands rather than a progressive partnership.

Where are our NSA pundits? Are they too busy with economic espionage against their patrons' opponents? Does the MSM really have nothing further to add other than "tech firms are lazy"?

<comment><USER3> The purposes of getting tech firms to open up encryption or private access channels is not for fighting the online shenanigans of alleged terrorists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "But as the 335 versions of the pro-Islamic State Twitter account demonstrate, technology companies are dealing with a tenacious adversary."

\- Really? Tenacious Adversary? Because they create new accounts once old ones are closed?

<comment><USER5> Not as tenacious as the bod who is now manually creating @TurMedia336 to @TurMedia99999999.

But, one might have thought that Titter would have blocked creation of these accounts already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Resolve means depriving jihadists of virtual territory, just as we work to deprive them of actual territory,"

The problem with that line of reasoning is that we good people are poised to lose some of our "virtual territory" i.e. freedoms too as a collateral damage in this fight.

</comment><comment><USER7> At this point, the NYT is just a mouthpiece for the executive branch. They've been pushing a ridiculous anti-encryption, anti-privacy agenda since Glenn Greenwald.

<comment><USER8> I'm apparently a little out of the loop on this - can you point me to some examples?

<comment><USER7> I was generally thinking about the things Glenn Greenwald describes in his book, [No Place to Hide]([http://www.amazon.com/No-Place-Hide-Snowden- Surveillance-ebo...](http://www.amazon.com/No-Place-Hide-Snowden-Surveillance- ebook/dp/B00E0CZX0G)). For example, even though Greenwald is a respect journalist and regular contributor to the Guardian, when the Snowden scandal first broke, the NYT insisted on referring to him only as a 'blogger.' They also published a lot of op-eds bashing Greenwald's work as dangerous and non- journalistic.

Sorry, I don't have any better links or sources right now. I'm on mobile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm fine with cracking down on ISIS propaganda as long as we also crack down on the propaganda of hawks in the West. ISIS is bad, no question there. But the US invasion of Iraq has caused more deaths than the fighting with ISIS. We need to stop pretending that these actions are different. Killing people is killing people even if it's done by militaries at the orders of men in suits.

<comment><USER10> It's debatable. Do you stand aside and look the other way and say, that's their lot in the world, or do you do something.

It's not an was call. If you do nothing people die. If you try to do something people will die. The idea is to pave a better path to the future.

To be sure, going into Iraq was a fools errand, but it's more difficult to make the call about lets say strife in Africa, or the Caucasus, etc.

Or even today, do we say, forget Syria. Seal it up, let them sort things out and condemn a whole country's population to great suffering?

<comment><USER9> > It's debatable. Do you stand aside and look the other way and say, that's > their lot in the world, or do you do something.

> It's not an was call. If you do nothing people die. If you try to do > something people will die. The idea is to pave a better path to the future.

This was the propaganda used to excuse invading Iraq, but it's incredibly naive to believe it.

> Or even today, do we say, forget Syria. Seal it up, let them sort things out > and condemn a whole country's population to great suffering?

That's _exactly_ what we'd be doing if they weren't sitting in the way of fossil fuel transportation routes.

It's ridiculous to claim that we're doing this to reduce the suffering of people in Syria. The US has supplied Israel with bombs that have been used to kill Syrian civilians for more than half a century, yet suddenly we care about the suffering of Syrians now? Yeah, right.

<comment><USER10> So are you saying countries should retreat from Syria and let things fall where they may, or are you saying we should get more involved?

Of course countries act selfishly. It's crazy to think otherwise. Everyone will act selfishly. Europe the ME, etc. want stability in Syria selfishly, but coincidentally it's a good thing.

<comment><USER9> > So are you saying countries should retreat from Syria and let things fall > where they may, or are you saying we should get more involved?

I'm saying that our current involvement in Syria is worse than not being involved, and talking about Syria as if "helping" is even an option our leaders are considering is naive, and buying into the propaganda.

I can see a number of ways we could be involved positively in Syria, but we're not, and we're not going to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> > "When Twitter says, 'We can't do this,' I don't believe that," said Hany > Farid, chairman of the computer science department at Dartmouth College ... > "There's no fundamental technology or engineering limitation," he said. > "This is a business or policy decision. Unless the companies have decided > that they just can't be bothered."

Can anyone comment whether this is true or not? It seems rather trivial to create new accounts and post data. Is it just whack-a-mole or is there something more sophisticated that goes on?

<comment><USER5> There can always be some checking that happens as part of creating a new account.

Remember that to be effective, the follower needs to be able to find the new account when the old one is closed. They will do this by searching for an obvious keyword (in this case TurMedia or IslamicState), so checking the username against a block list of known terms previously used by terrorists should catch it.

For example, FB has a real names policy - try opening a FB account with a stupid name and see what happens - its not that hard.

<comment><USER11> A "real names policy" is not appropriate to every situation, since it is inherently hostile to users. Some have even criticized its use at FB.

<comment><USER5> I agree, but the point I was trying to make (perhaps unclearly), was that the username can be checked against a list of blocked patterns at account creation time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why scramble to shut them down? Isn't this a valuable source of information? Wouldn't we want to know what they are saying, who is engaging with them, etc.? Why push them further underground?

Hell, why not just make a social network JUST for terrorists with no threat of shutting anybody down and then just tap into that info?

<comment><USER13> Because propaganda actually works. We're not trying to push down the actual terrorists; we're trying to win information war waged inside the minds of potential future terrorists.

You would think that people aren't that stupid. I would think that too. But after witnessing the whole country (Russia) going down the rabbit hole of paranoid madness with just a couple of years of propaganda, I don't think that anymore.

<comment><USER14> And clearly the best way to win the information war against an adversary who says we've traded away our values for comfort, riches, and decadence is to throw away the First Amendment because "propaganda works."

Keep in mind, we're not just talking about accounts used by actual terrorists to coordinate actual attacks. We're talking about "pro-ISIS" Twitter accounts.

How will we decide who is pro-ISIS? I propose a system of hearings, with the most important ones conducted by a senate committee. The most important question at these hearings will be "are you now or have ever been a sympathizer with Islamic State." If they "fail" the hearing we could put them in some kind of database used by employers and government hiring agents and so forth. A sort of blacklist, if you will.

And anyone on the blacklist doesn't get to use corporate media platforms. It's not a First Amendment violation, you see, because it's VOLUNTARY. Just ask these guys: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist)

<comment><USER12> Twitter deciding that they don't want ISIS supporters using their application violates nobody's 1st Amendment rights.

<comment><USER14> Right right, just like the Hollywood blacklist didn't violate anyone's First Amendment rights. (You could have at least read to the end of my comment, lol)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The best solution would be to build a public platform for Twitter-like communication.

This would give people the same free speech protections they have on public streets and town squares, which they don't have when using private platforms like Instagram or Facebook.

It would also give law enforcement the ability to do their jobs.

We have a public postal service, why not a public social media platform?

Wouldn't it be great if this public platform had a completely open API, without the restrictions that Twitter puts in place to artificially limit access in order to create demand?

Remember the good old days when 3rd party developers basically built everything good about Twitter?

<comment><USER16> I am not trying to attack you personally. Please don't take this the wrong way. I just want to understand... why would a recruiter for a militant (likely illegal) organization use a government-owned public platform?

The only possible reason for a recruiter to join is if there are potential recruits there. With USPS, a recruiter would have the ability to send mail to John Doe or current resident. There is some kind of targeting available as well. But that is besides the point. The main problem is how do we get everyone to be on this new public platform?

I think if we can get enough people to sign up for this public platform, it could be feasible. There are still privacy implications of such a public utility though. When you connect to the service, it can keep track of at least your device ID (trivial with apps) and your IP address. Assuming everyone is on this service, the service could reliably track who you are with at what times.

I understand that there already exist "shadow" profiles for me on various networks . However, I do not like the idea of an online identity that is connected to my real, legal identity. what if someone else gets a hold of my account while I am away for a few days and starts posting pro Sinn Féin propaganda on it? Will I get flagged for terrorism? How do we know handle all these false positives? I'll go ahead and create a straw man here that is ridiculous: how about we require people to prick their finger and submit their blood sample when they start using a new computer or when they have been inactive for ten minutes?

<comment><USER15> You've answered your own question. Terrorist organizations wouldn't use a public platform just like how they don't currently have recruitment booths in Times Square.

If there are privacy implications those would be handled by legislature and judicial oversight like the rest of our public infrastructure.

I don't see why a public platform for social media would need any sort of real life identify verification.

Instead of having a private company decide who gets to say what, we have public representatives handle the curation. The FCC has been regulating TV and radio for many decades and as far as I can tell it is still relatively easy to criticize the government over public airwaves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The author keeps slipping in references to encryption but I don't really see the connection. Clearly it has little to do with terrorists broadcasting messages intended to be read by everyone on social media.

</comment><comment><USER18> Don't delete their accounts, shadowban them.</comment>


Complete C# Unity Developer Course – Learn to Code by Making Games - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@topitguys/complete-c-unity-developer-course-learn-to-code-by-making-games-c51af17476c7 <comment><USER2> (ad for a Udemy course, shrouded by a URL shortener)</comment>


Show HN: System to manage ad-hoc SQL queries within small organizations - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/LogicSoftInd/LSQ

<comment><USER2> Nice. But isn't that more of an app rather than system?</comment>


Google discloses Windows vulnerability just 10 days after reporting it to MSFT - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/31/google-discloses-actively-exploited-windows-vulnerability-just-10-days-after-reporting-it-to-microsoft/ <comment><USER2> It's an actively exploited critical vulnerability that allows sandbox bypasses (Chrome, etc).

[https://security.googleblog.com/2016/10/disclosing- vulnerabi...](https://security.googleblog.com/2016/10/disclosing- vulnerabilities-to-protect.html)

I would certainly hope it doesn't take Microsoft 3 months to fix it.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. If it's already out in the wild, being used, it's critical. venturebeat/microsoft have no idea what they are complaining about. users are already at risc and the vendor has to publish at least some sort of advice.

The explanation of this policy is [https://security.googleblog.com/2013/05/disclosure- timeline-...](https://security.googleblog.com/2013/05/disclosure-timeline-for- vulnerabilities.html)

I believe Microsoft should have recommended a short term recommendation to mitigate this risk until a patch is available. Such as "Don't connect to the internet...", but instead they recommended to use Windows 10, which does not help at all. Windows 10 is actively exploited this way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the notion in the article that it's the same or even worse this time because the exploit already is found to be exploited in the wild kind of strange. Isn't it far worse to disclose an unknown 0-day publicly then disclosing something that gets exploited already anyway?

<comment><USER5> That depends. Some vulnerabilities aren't easy or worth the hassle to exploit. If this one is being exploited by someone already, you're letting attackers know that it's worth the effort, and handing them the manual as well.

<comment><USER6> If someone is exploiting it then you _know_ the manual is already out there. How far it has been disseminated is unknown, but arguably it's better to assume it's being disseminated. Otherwise anybody could argue that "not enough" attackers know about an exploit as justification for criticizing disclosure.</comment></comment></comment>


Startups aren't just for boys: why girls should consider careers in tech - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/code-like-a-girl/the-startup-industry-isnt-just-for-boys-why-girls-should-consider-careers-in-tech-7aba1acd12eb#.pd3clouoi <comment><USER2> Money.

That is the only reason you should consider a career in tech.</comment>


Wikipedia of Interview Questions - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@2f6b2d39fef7/2d68bde64e05 <comment><USER2> Don't these companies make you sign a non-disclosure agreement to keep their question pool as secret as possible? Doesn't contributing to this violate whatever NDA you sign?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have compiled these questions from resources on the internet only and nothing more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A link directly to the interview questions: [https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions](https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview-Questions)

</comment><comment><USER4> Unfortunately, most of the content in the repository is empty files:

\- Twitter _(empty)_

\- Box _(empty)_

\- Google _(empty)_

\- Microsoft _(empty)_

\- Intuit _(empty)_

\- Samsung _(empty)_

\- Groupon _(empty)_

\- Netflix _(empty)_

\- Walmart Labs _(empty)_

\- Facebook _(empty)_

\- Palantir _(empty)_

\- Flipkart _(empty)_

\- Ola Cabs _(empty)_

\- LinkedIn _(empty)_

The only ones with content are these _(providing direct links for quick review)_ :

\- Amazon — [https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/maste...](https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/master/Amazon)

\- Expedia — [https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/maste...](https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/master/Expedia)

\- Grab — [https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/maste...](https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/master/Grab)

\- MobiKwik — [https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/maste...](https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/master/MobiKwik)

\- NEC Technologies — [https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/maste...](https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/master/NEC%20Technologies)

\- PayPal — [https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/maste...](https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/master/PayPal)

\- Samsung — [https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/maste...](https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/master/Samsung)

\- Uber — [https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/maste...](https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/master/Uber)

\- Yatra.com — [https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/maste...](https://github.com/rishabh115/Interview- Questions/tree/master/Yatra.com)</comment>


Empathy among students in engineering programmes - <AUTHOR> http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03043797.2012.708720?journalCode=ceee20& <comment><USER2> There is a key fault common to every 'scientific' study done in this area - and there is an immense number of these studies done every year.

The correct headline should be as follows: "Engineering students do not view themselves as caring as medical students do." Key point being that these are not studies done on 'action', but rather on 'cheap speech'. I can claim to be the most empathetic person alive, but will happily walk out the room and flip off a beggar asking for change while still believing I am empathetic as I may subconsciously not recognize the act.

This is a huge problem with these kind of studies, and imho, these studies are fairly worthless. If you want to test this kind of thing, pretend to be a beggar outside each faculty and see which students actually help the most rather than say they will help the most.

<comment><USER3> The headline was something like "Engineers have no empathy and are cold and dead inside" and linked to a sensational article on theregister. Now the title is more moderate and it links to the scientific paper instead. What happened?

<comment><USER4> This is the same paper that was linked in the article, so I think it's all good. Here is the link to The Register for curious (and lazy): [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/21/engineers_cold_and_d...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/21/engineers_cold_and_dead_inside/)

<comment><USER5> And for those who appreciate tongue-in-cheek mockery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Somewhere in the icy depths of the pit I have for a soul, a cruel and callous feeling of detached amusement was conjured forth by the not at all hyperbolic writing I just read. I enjoyed the image of the zombie hordes of engineers spreading our deathly chill over these lands.

<comment><USER7> Stop being creative! You'll give us all a bad name...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Breaking news: people in a job about caring for people, care more for people than people in a job not about caring for people. Film at 11.

<comment><USER8> A more interesting comparison if you're going to use medicine, IMO, is how it's the exact opposite for surgeons compared to doctors. If you believe The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success by Kevin Dutton (which is the basis of this HuffPo article):

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-barker/which- professions-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-barker/which-professions- have-the-most-psychopaths_b_2084246.html)

It makes sense because doctors require a high level of empathy whereas surgeons need to be better under pressure, be able to hold longer focus, etc. which are qualities of psychopaths.

<comment><USER9> How much of that can we ascribe to turnover though?

Is it people who _go into_ surgery care less? Or only people who care less can _handle_ a career in surgery, where you typically have no bond to the patient, see many more people die (potentially due your own limitations or outright mistakes) and even when they live, you may see them for a follow-up exam or two, but not really ever again?

There seems to be huge down-sides for an empathic surgeon and very little emotional up-side.

<comment><USER10> Bang. This guy hit all the points I was going to make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "The computing students, once gender effects had been eliminated, actually came out basically the same as medical and caring types: they had turned out to be normal, warm, caring human beings. It was in fact the physics-based classical engineers who were dead inside."

They also missed a key tidbit from the original news release. [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130117084854.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130117084854.htm)

The computing students (who were found to be as empathetic as others once controlling for gender) were taught using problem-based learning techniques - i.e., working in teams on real-world problems and projects. The other group was taught using traditional methods (lecture, rote memorization).

"For computer engineering students, the differences were largely eliminated. The researchers have a theory about why: the computer engineering students are taught with PBL, problem-based learning, which is not the case for the applied physics students. Chato Rasoal believes this can influence the degree of empathy."

Engineering (and math and science) professors need to improve how they teach. Here are 3 simple, research-backed tips for doing so: 1) incorporate everyday examples in your teaching, 2) use tools and techniques to improve student spatial visualizations skills, and 3) talk with and interact with your students (out of class and online): <http://www.engageengineering.org/>

</comment><comment><USER12> For any other Americans who were wondering what bicycle stunts might have to do with this research:

> Noun. trick cyclist (plural trick cyclists) 1\. (UK, slang) A psychiatrist

My ability to detect British humor through text must be pretty poor, because it took several re-reads and a Googling of "trick cyclist" to finally notice the sarcasm/satire.

<comment><USER13> "ability to detect British humor"

That would make an excellent browser plugin.

<comment><USER14> Most likely it would route all process requests through a single queue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some people burn on the outside just enough to keep those around them warm. Some burn deep on the inside to heat the boilers that turn the turbines in their minds that move the world.

<comment><USER15> The two aren't mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER14> Those are the ones we call "genius" in the classical definition of the term (as opposed to raw intellectual power). So, yes some people have both (or develop) the inner fire and the outer charisma to match.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wait everyone isn't cold and dead inside ? I thought I was just normal.

<comment><USER17> It's perfectly normal. As is an insatiable hunger for brains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm pretty sure I'm 36.6 C and very much alive, thank you very much.

I don't appreciate the "Engineers are ice cold" rhetoric. I can't tell if its satirizing the research or if they are just link baiting but this article seems to portray all engineers as terrible people.

<comment><USER19> > or if they are just link baiting

The register is pretty awful rag and full of stupid annoying link-baity trash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is plain wrong. I am sure that in my friends' minds I am a caring and compassionate person. In return I try to do my best preserving them in my basement.

</comment><comment><USER21> Does the register think it's the onion??

<comment><USER22> Eh, once in a while it's nice to see them raise their quality of reporting.

<comment><USER23> It's not much of a baseline to rise up from though...

<comment><USER22> Baby steps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Same old story: judging people by stereotypes isn't such a great idea but remains tempting due to potential savings in cycles.

</comment><comment><USER17> It'd be interesting to study left-wing vs right-wing politicians. Are they all cold/calculating or warm/gooey inside? And how about tribalism? Do people (especially little kids) feel more empathy for people who look the same as they do?

<comment><USER25> I'd be interested in such serious research too, but so far everything I've ever seen on the topic has pretty clearly been "research", emphasized scare quotes, with predetermined results that just happen to precisely flatter the preconceived notions of the researchers, and I don't trust the results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This explains /everrrything/ about hardware engineers :-)

</comment><comment><USER27> It would have been more interesting if it was something like this: "A study carried out by psychology researchers find that Engineers were sent by the machines from the future to build robots and make entire human race their slaves"

</comment><comment><USER28> I'd be curious to see these questions. Somehow I suspect the engineers chose options that were 'coldly calculating' and lead to better end results - frankly, I'd prefer that in more doctors.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm a computer engineer and I'm as cold as the hardware I support.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm a mechanical-electrical-software engineer. I can practically feel the two forces at war inside of me. I also studied optics, I wonder if that gives me some special insight?

<comment><USER31> Mechatronic? Or do you have three degrees?

<comment><USER30> No, just an ME degree from Stuttgart but I focussed on controls and optics. I worked in machine vision for years and gradually drifted into software and firmware engineering with a lot of EE mixed in. I'm at HP now and they don't car what your degree is in.

<comment><USER31> Sounds like an interesting career! I'm working as a software engineer on a rail automation project at the moment, finishing my BEng in Mechatronics in mid 2013. May I ask what you work on at HP?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Here's the original scientific paper:

[http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03043797.2012.70...](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03043797.2012.708720)

Sadly.

</comment><comment><USER33> Bullshit, if anything it should be the opposite, a surgeon that tends to get too emmotionally attached to their patients won't last long.

<comment><USER34> Plus surgeons deal with death on a more frequent basis than almost anyone else, if anything they're more likely to become numb to this, therefore becoming less emotional. Maybe this article is referring people who are still studying/in medical school whose goal it is to one day help people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Who cares what they think? Their importance, and the importance of most people, is an insignificant factor in the equation of life.

</comment><comment><USER36> "Social Science" at its best. Too cold ?

</comment><comment><USER37> > using a "well-established questionnaire"

Self-reported "data" is useless.

</comment><comment><USER38> I hit a paywall asking me 33 €.</comment>


Map of all the submarine cables worldwide - <AUTHOR> https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ <comment><USER2> Wonder why one or two from US to Ireland take a longer route than needed? Big curve close to Ireland</comment>


Finding bugs in Tarsnap - <AUTHOR> http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/finding-bugs-in-tarsnap

<comment><USER2> _In LibreSSL, we went big hammer and clear all the bignums, regardless of sensitivity. And so it was that when I bumped into Colin at BSDCan 2014 two weeks later, failure to clear secret bignums from memory was fresh in my mind._

I bumped into Ted again three weeks ago at BSDCan 2015 and he must have had memory leaks on his mind, because the day after the conference ended he sent me an email pointing out a memory leak in Tarsnap. (Harmless, since it's in a we're-about-to-exit error path, but worth $10 anyway.)

<comment><USER3> Aren't free()'s senseless before code exits?

<comment><USER2> Yes, if you know that the process is going to exit. In this case, the missing free is in a function which is about a dozen calls down in the stack, and I know that it's harmless _right now_ because I've looked at the code and verified that an error there will always result in tarsnap exiting; but if I don't fix this now it's quite possible that in the future I'll have code which uses that function but can tolerate it failing.

<comment><USER3> I think I understand. Function, which could be used independently should free all used resources.

If a function is very project-specific and has no purpose to being used independently it may be worth considering declaring it static, right?

<comment><USER2> "static" is a different concept -- that marks a function as not being used from outside of that compilation unit (aka .c file). This particular function was used from outside of that file, but was unlikely to be reused in a different project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So does anyone know of a good list of "worst practices" when coding in C? Basically usage that results in undefined behavior which can come back to bite you when run on another architecture?

For example, doing a strcpy(dest, dest + 1) will work in most cases, but if done on 64-bit Linux with a CPU that has sse4 optimizations, you will get random corruption on certain string lengths. (The C standard says that the behavior in this case is undefined). I'd like to see a list of items such as this to watch out for when auditing code.

<comment><USER5> If I recall correctly the source and destination of strcpy _cannot_ overlap. If they do it's an undefined behaviour.

<comment><USER4> Yes, you are definitely correct, that is what the standard specifies. However, many programmers assume that if the source string points to a higher memory location than the destination string, then it is ok (i.e., they want to shift a string of X bytes to the left by some amount). And they've gotten away with it for many years, because most strcpy() functions are implemented very simply (they copy one byte at a time). The problem is when 15 year old code is run on a newer platform that has an SSE4 optimized implementation of strcpy -- then they find out what is meant by "undefined behavior".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I was working for OpenERP, I thought it was surely possible for a user of one database to access other databases (when OpenERP run in multi-tenant mode, which was the case of the official OpenERP SaaS offer) by poking around the connection pool. And indeed in less than an hour I found a way to connect to any database. The fact that you can quickly find bugs when you have an idea of what you can look for is quite scary.

<comment><USER7> Well, that's really interesting for all of us who work with multi-tenant webapp.

Maybe you took some notes.

Could you share some more info if you are free to disclose how you poked with the connection pool. I haven't look at OpenERP sources, but I think the database in use is PostgreSQL.

> "for a user of one database to access other database"

Were OpenERP using a database for each tenant or 1 database with multiple schemas ? In case it was the former case, were all databases accessed with the same credentials ? Which connection pool was it ? Pgpool / Pgbouncer ? Where was the vulnerability, code, db, pool, config setup ?

Sorry for all this questions, I'm indeed very interested and involved in this topic.

<comment><USER6> I reported it a long time ago and it was eventually fixed a few months later. The bug report is on Launchpad but I don't know if they opened it to the public. Here is a similar issue filled on GitHub (they moved there from Launchpad and they're now called Odoo): [https://github.com/odoo/odoo/issues/7243](https://github.com/odoo/odoo/issues/7243)

OpenERP, at least back then, was using a single PostgreSQL cluster for a given OpenERP server. Each tenant has its own PostgreSQL database. In multiple places, OpenERP offers the administrator role of a tenant to customize OpenERP with Python code. Basically you can inject Python code for execution, and it is run in the same processes used for every tenant. OpenERP tries to limit what the Python expressions can do.

The idea of what I did was, starting from the objects I had access to, to find a way to get a database cursor to another database than mine.

The connection pool in OpenERP is custom and part of the Python code base.

To get the cursor, I poked at some object, took its class and reinstanciated (this is all straightforward to do in Python) it with the name of another database (listing other databases was another longstanding issue of OpenERP).

<comment><USER7> Thank you.

So I imagine, given their specifications, they had to give each tenant its own full PG database. I understand they have strong business logics but it does not seem very efficient. Salesforce is known to use a single oracle instance for all its tenants and I don't think their business logics is less demanding.

Giving an administrator or elevated role to the tenant connection looks like a really bad idea from the start, especially if the tenant instance is not sandboxed in a container or virtual server.

But this things are hard and a small mistake can have big consequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the better ways to find bugs in other software is to first encounter them in your own. (Even if the bugs, as mentioned in this article, aren't actually severe.)

In particular, I remember, while writing an ASN.1 library, commenting to a friend that "most ASN.1 implementations are probably full of dangerous bugs" (since mine certainly was), and about a year or two later all those ASN.1-related vulnerabilities came out.

I guess that in general, bugs appear in patterns that recur again and again in independent code, as people try to solve the same problems with the same tools and make the same assumptions.

</comment><comment><USER9> > tarsnap had a signal handler that was reading from a constant array. So > what, how could this matter? The standard says thou shalt not.

An references to the standard (I assume he is referring to POSIX) where this is disallowed?

<comment><USER10> I believe this is in reference to the following quote: [http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/V2...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/V2_chap02.html#tag_15_04_03)

The relevant quote is:

        the behavior is undefined if the signal handler refers to any object
        other than errno with static storage duration other than by assigning
        a value to an object declared as volatile sig_atomic_t, or if the
        signal handler calls any function defined in this standard other than
        one of the functions listed in the following table.</comment></comment>


Microsoft open-sources Kinect code samples - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/11/microsoft-open-sources-kinect-code/

<comment><USER2> Flagged as incorrect. VentureBeat apparently can't tell the difference between Kinect's code and API examples. This needs to be deleted or the title changed to "Microsoft Releases Open Source Kinect Interfacing Sample Code"

</comment><comment><USER3> Since when does releasing code samples count as open-sourcing a codebase? You cant even look at the samples without downloading Visual Studio.

<comment><USER4> Are you sure? I can see the samples under "Source Code".

[http://kinectforwindows.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset...](http://kinectforwindows.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/861462899ae7)

<comment><USER5> And as mentioned in the blog post, it's significant that you don't have to download Visual Studio to look at the samples.

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/k4wdev/archive/2013/03/06/easy- acces...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/k4wdev/archive/2013/03/06/easy-access-to- kinect-for-windows-sample-code.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These are simply code samples to use the Kinect SDK, not any code to interact with the hardware, right?

<comment><USER7> Based on the blog post linked in the article [1], yes: these are code samples.

[1] [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/k4wdev/archive/2013/03/06/easy- acces...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/k4wdev/archive/2013/03/06/easy-access-to- kinect-for-windows-sample-code.aspx)

<comment><USER5> And yes, they allow you to interact with the hardware, through the API.

<comment><USER7> I think the parent to my comment was asking whether this code allowed low- level hardware access, not API-mediated access. IIRC, the Linux Kinect driver (libfreenect [1]) provides that kind of access.

[1] <https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "aka "Not GitHub." Baby steps, baby steps!"

Whatever was actually released, how about people realise that Github isn't the be all and end all of open source code distribution.

<comment><USER8> Wow, when you copy and paste from venturebeat.com a link to the content is automatically appended to the copied content.

<comment><USER9> In case you were curious about how they do it: <http://i.po.st/static/script/post-copypaste.js></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Summaries of the best books, broken down into 5-min daily emails/texts - <AUTHOR> https://bookcelerator.com/services/summary <comment><USER2> Small tips for a growing startup:

1\. Don't worry too much about monetization. You want more fans, less $$$ signs.

2\. Don't force people to give their emails unless absolutely necessary.

I basically closed the page without looking in to anything else. If you are diligent about finding market fit and collecting data to calculate conversion rate of your experiment, above should explain your findings.

<comment><USER3> I disagree with first .. making money is absolutely necessary. Please dont fall into this advice to make no money and increase expenditure by catering needs of more and more people.

<comment><AUTHOR> So true the philosophy that you can give things away free or generate near 0 revenue are unrealistic. If a business/service can not pay for itself then it requires debt(VC for example) which leads to dilution and in many cases the same result, a failed business/service. If you can make something the market will buy and the revenue sustain and grow the business/service then you have a real business/service otherwise it's just an artificial reality. It's so harmful the belief that you can make a business that is not profitable from the beginning and achieve success. You are already doomed to failure with this thinking. Learned this the hard way from several businesses and ideas in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Somewhat interested at first, then looked for a sample precis and found the free trial by e-mail ... a stopper. One, online 5-minute segment might help to sell that idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks we are working on a free trial with login, appreciate the comment!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's cool but it doesn't look like it's worth paying for in my opinion as a lot of people make these sort of book reviews free online on Reddit.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow! Cool idea!

But it's too expensive, $20 a year and I'd have signed up, but not 100.

Would love a sci-fi version too, personally I'd pay more for that, and if you had the option of getting the PDF. Also doesn't have to be daily, every 3-4 days would be better.

Anyway, awesome product guys, love the idea

<comment><USER7> I just emailed them an empty email. Dont really know what will happen ...Im not a book reader really but can definetely see myself as paying if the content seems worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm interested in the service but it's too expensive to consider. If the quality was high I'd sub at $50/yr.

I'd also suggest having a podcast form of the service where the summaries are read outloud as an upsell option.

Best of luck with it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I am interested and sent a message, but have not heard or received anything back. I would possibly even pay, if it was a high quality.

<comment><AUTHOR> You should have received something by now. If not please email firstname.lastname@example.com.</comment></comment>