How Docker's Support for Kubernetes Will Impact Developers – The New Stack - <AUTHOR> https://thenewstack.io/dockers-support-kubernetes-impacts-developers/ <comment><USER2> Heh? The Docker company line seems to be that Swarm has been and will continue to be faster-evolving than Kubernetes. That feels really disconnected from reality. For one, the ground-up rethink of Swarm that happened last year felt mostly like an attempted to rebase Swarm on more Kubernetes-like ideas. Further, the specific example given in the podcast seems to be factually incorrect: The Docker guy says that secrets are an example of something that was added to Swarm first and then later added to Kubernetes. However, Kubernetes had support for secrets in its 1.0 release all the way back in 2015, while Swarm just added secret support in February.

<comment><USER3> > _The Docker company line seems to be that Swarm has been and will continue > to be faster-evolving than Kubernetes_

Not exactly. Kubernetes has a much larger development community than Swarm, and therefore its overall development throughput is of course higher. At the same time, Swarm is narrowly focused on a single use case: integration with the Docker platform. This narrowed scope allows for more rapid development cycles. When a Docker customer asks for a feature, it can be implemented in Swarm, integrated into Docker, packaged and released, more rapidly than the corresponding feature in Kubernetes - not because Swarm developers are smarter, but because they have a narrower problem space to worry about.

This focus and rapid development loop makes Swarm extremely useful to Docker and its users, even as it embraces Kubernetes and integrates it into the platform. It also benefits the Kubernetes community: they get an incubator for new ideas and designs which they can then generalize and adapt for their own uses. Again - this is a natural result of focus, not a sign that one project has better ideas than the other.

Examples of this "incubator pattern" include: Windows support; secrets implementation; user experience for node promotion/lifecycle.</comment></comment>


Managers to Millennials: Job Interview No Time to Text - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/100684583

<comment><USER2> _The trend reflects a generation of Millennials—ranging in age from 18 to 34—who grew up texting and using smartphones and social media_

This is somewhat tangential, but I think grouping this entire generation together and attributing their behavior to social networks, texting, and/or the Internet doesn't make any sense. 34 year olds likely weren't able to join Facebook until their late twenties and 18 year olds likely don't even remember a world without widespread Internet use. Those experiences are wildly different and will therefore affect people in wildly different ways.

<comment><USER3> Indeed it doesn't, and the whole basis of this story is very anecdotal and shaky. But that's just it -- it's a _story_ , not a factual report about what's actually happening in the world. A disturbing amount of journalism is storytelling, and the facts are just the raw material from which the story is crafted.

In this case, the story is a retread of a tired old classic: "Kids these days are doing some pretty crazy stuff!"

<comment><USER4> New article idea:

Millennials to journalists: anecdotes are not accurate representations of large groups of people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> UK-AL I agree answering using the phone in interview is wrong. You should be polite in a interview.

However I have noticed any quirk can put you out of a job. Stutter? Slightly eccentric? Aspergers?

Its seems you are under a lot peer pressure to conform to a set standard and not deviate. Then companies wonder why they can not innovate. Fact is a lot of brilliant individuals(leaders, technically brilliant) are a little 'odd' sometimes. Sometimes brilliance is the other side of the eccentricity coin.

<comment><USER5> I see this opinion often on HN. Perhaps it is because a lot of us are somewhat socially awkward developers at heart.

The truth is that eccentric geniuses aren't all that hirable, despite their genius. After all, Steve Jobs got fired. If you can't be relied upon to turn in results, you're a potential liability. It might be better to hire someone with less genius and more predictability.

That's not to say that there are no jobs out there for eccentric geniuses- maybe they just have to be in charge (see Steve Jobs again), or just work by themselves. But I don't think we can argue with hiring managers who don't take on a risk. The distribution of responsibilities means they wouldn't get any of the credit if the employee turned out to be fantastic anyway.

<comment><USER6> Technically, Jobs resigned from Apple rather than having been fired.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Apple_Computer>

<comment> UK-AL I think "resigned" has to be in speech marks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Where's the FUD about recent college grads in the 1960's interviewing for jobs with full, unkempt beards, and making allusions to radical politics?

<comment><USER8> Or how about the story of the crazy cat lady that is 45 and doing the same thing as the crazy cat lady that is 25?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > "Newly minted college graduates soon entering the job market could be facing > another hurdle besides high unemployment and a sluggish economy. Hiring > managers say many perform poorly—sometimes even bizarrely—in job > interviews."

First paragraph immediately stuck out. How is this a hurdle for new graduates? The fact that other graduates perform poorly means a given graduate will have an easier time than otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm surprised to hear that that this is a trend, even though my anecdotal experience seems to confirm most of what the article says. Ex: one recent candidate flat-out refused to do the simple coding problem with which I presented her (determine if a given number is prime). Other times new grads try to treat me as a "bro" or "buddy" instead of potential coworker or manager.

All together strange, although these behaviors make it easier to determine a person's team fit in the organization.

<comment><USER11> Yes, I have the same experiences with recent grads and even people moving from first job to second. Their casualness, lackadaisical attitude, and general "go with the flow, man" attitude towards the job and the employee hierarchy just makes it very easy to say, "Next!" I've hired enough of those casual employees in years past to learn that it's not worth it to do it again. Can they be good employees? Absolutely - they are all smart, capable, and have the ability to perform. However, what I've found is that they consistently either try to use humor to downplay whatever problem is found (thus trying to diminish the problem, not their behavior), or they just nod, say "Yes, sir. Won't happen again.", and keep on doing the same things. That sort of attitude works fine in many large companies all over the world but, in a small company, it's a lot harder to get away with. I don't have time to train you on how to be a human - that's what your 16+ years of school was for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I imagine Paul Davidson, author, to be a frustrated father to 1-3 young 20-somethings who are not able to get a job right now, and Paul felt that he had the perfect angle for a fresh story... Nothing like writing about your own life experiences!

<comment><USER12> I wonder if our perspective on the job market is tinted by the fact that (I suspect) the overwhelming majority of graduates on HN are alumni of Ivy League or other top schools.

<comment><USER11> I think that, 4-5 years ago, perhaps a large percentage of people would have fit that bill but even then it was not likely to be anywhere close to a majority. Today though this is sort of the sophisticated man's Reddit and thus your suspicion is probably off by an order of magnitude.

<comment><USER12> I think the voting at <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5628769> has slowed down now and we can safely conclude that it is still a majority (albeit not as strong as it was in the first few years of HN)

<comment><USER11> A bit higher percentage than I expected but such polls are often dependent upon participation of those who log in during the poll's time frame. Still though, far below a majority (as I write this) - the "Top 20" voting is 24.6% as of 5:30AM after 681 votes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> tl;dr: Some people do weird things in interviews. Some people are aged 18 to 34 years. This article examines the intersection of these groups, cherry picking a few examples to suggest it's somehow endemic.

I'd expect this from BuzzFeed, not CNBC...

<comment><USER14> Clearly you aren't familiar the quality of the stuff CNBC publishes then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What a load of garbage. Nothing like cherry picking a few underprepared individuals to generalize millions of their cohorts.

<comment><USER16> "The interview is still a traditional environment." --Jaime Fall, vice president of the HR Policy Association. As quoted in the article.

Something about his use of the word traditional sets me off. Oh well, they made a "jobipedia," whatever that is. If it helps graduates get past the often capricious nature of HR drones then I won't complain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "The interview is still a traditional environment." is the line that irked me, and it only applies if you are trying to work for a traditional company

<comment><USER18> Agreed. Another line that irked me: "They don't realize (the interview) is a sales event."

I don't think it is. You're interviewing me and I'm interviewing you. You're potentially getting my time and my soul. That's not just for sale - we need to see whether it's a good fit. If we can't even move past your desire to see me put on an act in the interview room, maybe it's not a good fit.

However, things like answering cell phones are valid concerns. That's blatantly rude.

<comment><USER16> >things like answering cell phones are valid concerns. That's blatantly rude.

Yeah, but not unique to millenials.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They didn't have high school jobs with any amount the frequency of the people before them. There weren't jobs to have as the adults had them all.

</comment><comment><USER20> If texting during interviews doesn't affect future job performance, then interviewers shouldn't disqualify applicants on that basis. The same goes for dressing wrong and so forth. Of course, in the typical scenario there's a large stack of decent applications, so the employer has the freedom to make these dealbreakers and still employ well-performing people.

<comment><USER21> If you're unable to give someone your full attention for such an important occasion, why on earth would an interviewer expect you to perform well at any task. Ridiculous.

<comment><USER20> The problem with recruiting and the interview process is that very little hard data on _anything_. People just guesstimate everything. If we assume that young people are about as good as old people (when they were as young and experienced), then the most plausible expalantion is that there has simply been a change on social convention.

Some young people apparently have learned the social etiquette that it can be okay to text during discourse without it being rude. Social etiquette evolves and there's a clash of values. If the interviewer was as young as the interviewee, maybe there wouldn't be any problems with the texting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _Human resource professionals say they've seen recent college grads text or take calls in interviews, dress inappropriately, use slang or overly casual language, and exhibit other oddball behavior._

If only we could convince the human resource professionals that earth is doomed and there was an effort underway to recolonize another planet.

</comment><comment><USER23> Let's examine this.

Suppose in ten, twenty years from now, all us old fogies are retired or dead.

Who are left? The Millennials.

Imagine you're a Millennial hiring manager. You're interviewing someone. The interviewee texts in the middle of that. Would you feel offended? Maybe.

Or maybe you are also texting your colleagues and HR during the interview.[1]

This is assuming that something like Google Glasses is not more ubiquitous. That is to say, Buckminster Fuller's notion of ephemeralization (tech gets smaller and smaller until it becomes invisible and everywhere). That is, non- localized communication technologies becomes invisible and everywhere.

This is also assuming that our current hiring practices are still relavent.

There's an excellent Wired magazine articles about the kids born after 1993: <http://www.wired.com/magazine/2013/04/genwired/>

Something to think about if you're looking to stay relavent in tech.

[1] Caveat: I set aside time daily for mindfulness meditation. For me, texting during the interview isn't so much as rude or inappropriate as much as you're scattering your attention to multiple places, so you are not as effective. On the other hand, if the people you are texting are _helping_ you with the interview, then more attention is on the interview than any one single person can muster.

<comment><USER24> Good points, Hosh.

From that wired article "But none before has felt as free to call bullshit on conventional wisdom" Bingo - I had a conversation the other day with someone explaining an interaction I had with a 'non-connected' neighbor and how that neighbor only knows what they've learned from those people immediately around them and what TV tells them. And that there is a divide between them and those who are connected. All I can think when talking to them is 'bullshit' since the facts are readily available.*

* I suspect this is a good thing but I also think there will be a partial boomerang with those who have access to 'all the collective knowledge of the world' looking for true 'wisdom of the elders' for lack of a better way to state it. Especially those looking to cut through the noise and all the fucking notifications.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, the internet isn't the end-all, be-all. We're trading one mode for another, and at least for the moment, people who are connected have some material advantages.

Probably the big thing is learning how to be with just you yourself. To be fair, this wasn't any more popular in the pre-Internet days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Awesome for me.

</comment><comment><USER26> The younger generation is coddled and entitled; surely this is the End of Times (again).

</comment><comment><USER27> i knew better than to read the comments on that article. i knew better, and i did it anyway.</comment>


Parallel DBMSs faster than MapReduce - <AUTHOR> http://database.cs.brown.edu/sigmod09/

<comment><USER2> They are different beasts really. It'd be hard to implement something complex, like the PageRank algorithm, in SQL. On the other hand, MapReduce is not designed for tasks such as "SELECT * FROM table WHERE field > 5", which is one of the benchmarks the paper uses.

Also, parallel DBMSs don't handle failure well. Ask any of the MapReduce developers at Google and they'll tell you failure handling is the hardest part of the problem.

With all that said, I'd be very interested to see a comparison between Vertica, DBMS-X and MySQL, running in sharded or MySQL Cluster mode.

PS The paper is coauthored by Microsoft.

<comment><USER3> _Also, parallel DBMSs don't handle failure well._

It depends on the type of failure. You can simply skip offline partitions, for example.

 _PS The paper is coauthored by Microsoft._

Microsoft were doing shared-nothing clustering on SQL Server LONG before MySQL types had even coined the word sharding to mean the same thing...

<comment><USER2> __Microsoft were doing shared-nothing clustering on SQL Server LONG before MySQL types had even coined the word sharding to mean the same thing... __

Microsoft are heavily invested in SQL Server, so they are biased against MapReduce.

<comment><USER3> _Microsoft are heavily invested in SQL Server, so they are biased against MapReduce._

Microsoft is a huge company and parts of it a biased in favour of things like this (e.g. the bits working on F#)

<comment><USER4> The paper was co-authored by David DeWitt, not Microsoft. DeWitt is a well- known database researcher from Wisconsin. And Microsoft, despite their awful history of business practices, pours tons of funding into really good quality research (via MSR).

I'm not saying people aren't biased by their associations -- certainly, the traditional DBMS community feels like they have to defend their research & products against new techniques like MapReduce.. but if you're going to criticize the paper, criticize it because you found flaws in its contents, not because of the organization listed beneath an author.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Did no one else notice that this paper was authored by the C-Store guys, the ones that went on to create and found Vertica (specifically Stonebraker)? They have an intense bias against map/reduce, as could be expected.

As well, one important fact that people seem to have missed is that they admit that m/r was better at loading the tuning the data, a task which in its regular name (ETL) dominates most data warehousing workloads.

Finally, please note the price tags on the solutions advocated by this paper. They are _far_ out of the reach of any startup founders reading this paper. I looked at them at both Commerce360 and Invite Media and they were just nowhere near reasonable enough for us to replace our existing Hadoop infrastructure with.

</comment><comment><USER6> The paper is written to sell Vertica, which is quickly becoming less appealing given the rise of open source parallel DBs like HBase and Hypertable.

Hadoop is built for high throughput not low latency. If you read the paper, Hadoop runs circle around Vertica etc for data loading.

It's entirely possible to build a low latency map-reduce implementation.

<comment><USER7> _Hadoop is built for high throughput not low latency._

That said, the parallel DBs still beat Hadoop at throughput for almost all of the queries, just not the data loading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Keep in mind that the article itself admits that the loading the data into an RDBMS took _much longer_ than loading into onto a Hadoop cluster.

That's what the main crux is: if your data isn't relational to start with (e.g. messages in a message queue, being written to files in HDFS), you're better of with Map/Reduce. If your data is relational to start with, you're better off doing traditional OLAP on an RDBMs cluster.

When I worked for a start-up ad network, we couldn't afford the latency/contention implications of writing to a database each time we served an ad. Initially, we moved the model to "log impressions to text files, rsync text files over, run a cron job to enter them into an RDBMS". Problem is, that processing the data (on a single node) was taking so long the data would no longer by meaningful by the time it would be in RDMBS (and OLAP queries would finish running).

I thought of "how can I ensure that a specific machine only processes a specific log file, or a specific section of a log file" -- but then I realized that's what the map part of map/reduce is. In the end I've setup a Hadoop cluster, which made both "soft real time" (hourly/bi-hourly) data processing and long term queries (running on multiple month, multi-terrabyte datasets) much faster and easier.

Theoretically, yes: RDBMS is the most efficient way to run complex analytics queries. Practically, we have to handle such issues as asynchronicity, contention, ease of scalability and getting the data into a relational format (which itself is something that could be done using Hadoop: one of the tasks we used it for was transforms all sorts of text data -- crawled webpages, log files -- into CSV data that could be loaded onto the OLAP/OLTP clusters with "LOAD DATA INFILE").

<comment><USER7> _if your data isn't relational to start with (e.g. messages in a message queue, being written to files in HDFS), you're better of with Map/Reduce_

If you query the data once and then throw it away, then certainly load performance is a critical issue. If you load the data once and then query it many times, load performance is far less important -- trading a longer load time for much better query performance would be a good idea. So it depends on the workload as much as the format the data happens to start in.

<comment><USER8> I think Hadoop and M/R seem to be best for:

"Take the data, transform it into another form _ONCE_ , query the transformed using a low latency scheme many times".

(E.g. building a web index or in my case, building per ad/per user/per publisher key/value pairs for ad targeting).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another issue:

CAP Theorem: Consistency, Availability and (network) Partition Tolerance: pick two.

RDBMS are excellent at providing consistency and availability with low latency. Yet imagine building a massive parallel web map/crawling infrastructure on top of an RDMBS -- particularly with multiple datacenters and high latency links between these datacenters: it may be feasible for an enterprise/intranet crawler, but not for something at the scale of Yahoo or Google search (both of which build up their _datasets/indices_ using map/reduce and then distribute these indices to search nodes for low latency querying via more traditional approaches).

</comment><comment><USER9> The conclusion is a pretty good summary, if you don't want to read the whole lot.

A big thing that's missing from Parallel DBMSs is fault tolerance, which the paper cops to (but also diminishes):

"MR is able to recover from faults in the middle of query execution in a way most parallel database systems cannot. ... If a MR system needs 1,000 nodes to match the performance of a 100 node parallel database system, it is ten times more likely that a node will fail while a query is executing. That said, better tolerance to failures is a capability that any database user would appreciate."

Also: "Although we were not surprised by the relative performance advantages provided by the two parallel database systems, we were impressed by how easy Hadoop was to set up and use in comparison to the databases."

</comment><comment><USER10> Previous HN discussions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=562324>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=562732>

</comment><comment><USER11> Speed isn't necessarily the primary advantage that MapReduce provides; it's more about shifting the burden of scaling backend process from the programmer to the infrastructure.

That said (caveat: I don't have a lot of real world MapReduce experience), in my line of work, I do a lot of analysis at less than web scale (there's still a lot of business value there too, folks!), and just the thought of writing a bunch of MapReduce jobs just to achieve the analytical capabilities in vanilla SQL alone is not a pleasant one.

If people have experience in getting around this, I'd love to hear about it.

<comment><USER3> _it's more about shifting the burden of scaling backend process from the programmer to the infrastructure_

Ermm, that's exactly what parallel query does. Most programmers never even see the query plan. And you mean, from the programmer to the DBA ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The empirical evidence Google provides gives a strong argument that map reduce can perform pretty well ' Results 1 - 10 of about 1,990,000,000 ... (0.13 seconds) ' I would say it really comes down to preference, the data set, and how you plan to handle scaling/development.

<comment><USER13> I doubt they're running each search as a mapreduce job. Your search is probably making use of indexes and such generated by mapreduce jobs though.

I think you've got it spot on with your last sentence though.</comment></comment>


Running Linux on the QPD Pocket 7: The Return of the Hacker Netbook - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tomac/qpd-pocket-7-the-return-of-the-hacker-netbook-fe9be1b02ebf <comment><USER2> Wow, I've been pondering gutting a Toshiba Libretto and putting a Raspberry Pi inside so I can have a modern(ish) hardware in that form factor. I am so the target market for this!</comment>


Code and Graphics: C++ (Core) Coding Guidelines - <AUTHOR> http://www.bfilipek.com/2016/06/c-core-coding-guidelines.html <comment><USER2> Direct link to guidelines: [https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines...](https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines#main)

Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10239962](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10239962)</comment>


Mathematics: Why the brain sees maths as beauty - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26151062

<comment><USER3> I gave a talk just a couple of days ago on the beauty of Python code[0] - <USER2> talk hasn't been transcripted yet. In it I gave an example of how we've been conditioned by evolution to see clever things as beautiful[1][2].

I gave this scenario in the talk: imagine you were a paleolithic craftsman making handaxes. Now, you have a competitor making them handaxes too. We'll assume you make a better hand axe - sharper, cleaner lines and more wedge- shaped than the competitors. This leads to a higher "usefulness" than your competitor's handaxe.

You consistently make better handaxes than your competitor. You get better mates than your competitor. You have a higher probability of spreading your genes. Your "good" handaxes has become a proxy signal for your skill in making handaxes, which itself is a signal of your intelligence.

Over time, if the population uses only the "goodness" of the handaxe as a deciding factor in deciding mating partners, the population needs to be able to discern "good" handaxes from "bad" handaxes. As the lines get smoother, we become more and more tuned towards this standard of "beauty", and we put more and more reverence towards the makers of such items of beauty.

In short, humans see math as beautiful because it is a signa for intelligence, which is a deciding factor of fitness in our evolution. Indeed, our evolution seem to value intelligence over strength anyway.

Now, all the above is personal deduction of course. But I believe if we do go on and figure out the evolution of the medial orbito-frontal cortex of the brain, we'd see it's tied to intelligence.

[0]: [https://speakerdeck.com/chewxy/beautiful- python](https://speakerdeck.com/chewxy/beautiful-python) \- not very useful slides without the talk. The 4 criteria can also be translated to: usefulness, simplicity, averageness (I used the example: if the man on the street can read your python code and understand it, you did a good job), cleverness

[1]: The Art Instinct by Dennis Dutton

[2]: [http://www.ted.com/talks/denis_dutton_a_darwinian_theory_of_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/denis_dutton_a_darwinian_theory_of_beauty)

<comment><USER4> An alternative view is that, if you make good handaxes, you'll have more money (or patronage), meaning your children have more resources and advantages. You may increase your attractiveness to mates (who value their children's welfare).

Beauty may be to do with simplicity. Simpler ways of seeing things (while retaining accuracy) are more likely to also be correct for situations not yet encountered - have better predictive powe, are better theories. Valuing those has a survival advantage. Simpler theories are also easier to learn, to use, to remember etc.

It's very fundamental: our eyes, when confused by a scene at first, will resolve it to the simplest interpretation.

I think this covers many instances of beauty (e.g. symmetry, neatness, non- arbitrariness, and even the simpler lines that emerge from averages), but it doesn't cover all.

For example, the sworling of ocean waves, the complexity of clouds, of a forest. It is possible that these are in fact "simple", to the theories we have in our minds; just not simple for an intellectual understanding. And of course, fractal patterns _are_ indeed simple, in the sense that they are generated by a very simple process. So, perhaps we somehow intuitively grasp the simplicity of clouds, waves, trees. (Or maybe we just like nature.)

<comment><USER5> >So, perhaps we somehow intuitively grasp the simplicity of clouds, waves, trees. (Or maybe we just like nature.)

We did evolve in nature, so it makes sense that our brains would have naturally occurring patterns somewhat hardwired.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ezequiel-garzon Here [1] is the study, and here [2] the 60 equations that were rated. I feel the brain scans themselves are more interesting than the scores assigned to the equations by the participants. Still, I would have omitted the equation descriptions, as I feel it could create a bias, and would have placed the great contender, Euler's identity, in a position other than 1.

[1] [http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00...](http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00068/abstract)

[2] [http://journal.frontiersin.org/Article/DownloadFile/390079/o...](http://journal.frontiersin.org/Article/DownloadFile/390079/octet- stream/Data%20Sheet%201.PDF/16)

<comment><USER6> Thx for [2]. It's full of good stuff!

As far as beauty is concerned, I find it difficult compare these equations because they are at very different levels of abstraction. Sometimes vars are numbers, sometimes functions, sometimes groups, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article explained that brain scans show that when people say particular math is beautiful and particular math is not beautiful, the same parts of the brain are activating in the same way as when people distinguish between beautiful art and not beautiful art.

That just indicates that people who say something in math is beautiful are having the same feeling as someone who describes some art as beautiful. They are not feeling something different and just using the same word for it.

This is very interesting, but the title of the article led me to believe they were going to tell me WHY this is so. I didn't see that in there.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not trying to be a troll or argumentative, but personally I think it's all ugly and lifeless. Which is interesting because this article says that there's some biological link to people perceiving beauty.

I think all math is some little tool and all code is also some other little tool - some of it hairy, some of it less hairy. But I consider none of it "beautiful".

I think the entire notion is preposterous. I'm totally misanthropic to the whole notion.

Does that make me strange?

<comment><USER9> Either: you are not a born mathematician or were not trained enough. Math is like music, but unlike music you need to grok quite a bit to get to the beautiful parts.

<comment><USER8> Relative to most, I've done a lot of math. I have an entire bookshelf dedicated to it, subscribed to journals for a number of years. I worked in cryptography for a while.

The only things I ever think are "why is this presented in such a convoluted manner" or "Why is this so poorly written".

The idea of "beautiful" is so remarkably far removed from the situation --- it would be as if people said they found it sexually arousing.

To me, there is no possible connection.

<comment><USER9> > I've done a lot of math... I worked in cryptography for a while.

Weirldy, that could be the reason. Doing something beautiful (art, math, etc) for $ usually ends up corrupting it for the person. I did not mean any offense.

Source: Psychology research I am lazy to link and myself.

<comment><USER8> I'm not living a romantic loss-of-beauty through corrupting money narrative though.

It was not beautiful when I was 5, 15, or 25. I found it a useful tool and that interested me, but aesthetics? no - never.

Sorry to crash the party

<comment><USER9> I am not doubting your account. I also know there are genuine asexuals.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A lot depends on typography and convention as well. For example, Maxwell's equations in raw form are HUGE. It's only after you compress them by inventing short hand for div and grade, they can be fit on T-Shirt. Even then integral forms does not feel as elegant. Similarly the field equations for General Relativity in "raw" form huge and ugly (involving 4X4 matrix). It's only after you shorten them using tensor notation they start feeling elegant.

I'm not sure we have analog for this in art world. However the technique in this article is interesting because you can extend it to other domains. How about finding out which algorithms are "beautiful"? I think the most beautiful algorithm ever invented is binary search.

</comment><comment><USER10> Some math is so elegant that many understandably think it beautiful. To assess yourself, perhaps consider the area of the triangle [1, page 4], explained at a stroke -- not a formula in sight. If any math is beautiful, that is.

What is less appreciated is that such elegance is not limited to math. Many (all?) fields in science and engineering and technology are striving for a similar moment of clarity.

[1] A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart, [http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsL...](http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> > _this beauty of maths was missing from schools and yet amazing things could > be shown with even primary school mathematical ability_

This.

Most people think that math is about arithmetic and memorization, which couldn't be further from the truth. But can you blame them since the only math teaching they received as kids was about arithmetic and memorization?

It would be interesting how much science will move forward if we had one generation of kids who grow up learning about the more "beautiful" aspects of math and end up interested in it...

<comment><USER11> This essay really drove that point home for me:

[http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsL...](http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really tried hard to enjoy mathematics...but I never got to the point of ever seeing it as beautiful. I've seen some code or algorithms I thought were beautiful from time to time.

I love art, prose, music...I can frisson, mostly to music, but sometimes to other mediums. I tend to think visually, finding it easier to put a sequence of pictures together to describe what I want to say rather than words. People comment to me that my replies in email are frequently just a link to a relevant picture.

Strangely, I don't enjoy most poetry or music that requires listening to the lyrics to enjoy (songs with lots of humorous lyrics almost always fall flat with me). I did fine with Mathematics in school, studied hard, good grades, but it never really "sung" to me. I never enjoyed it beyond the natural joy one gets when developing a skill. But I guess I never really got to the point where it was speaking to me so I could reach this kind of enjoyment.

I can sit there are appreciate certain cool things. Euler's given in the article provokes some fascination...but beyond being a lucky coincidence it doesn't really stir anything in me.

This kind of makes me sad.

<comment><USER13> If you're a visual thinker, you may have better luck with geometrical theorems and proofs (such as for pythogoras theorem or fractals or topology).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Geometry and mechanics are beautiful to me, but even many mechanics problems are more elegantly using the methods taught in physics over those taught in maths (mechanics), simply because you if you use the right derivatives or logarithms to start with (e.g. energy instead of speed, decibels instead of absolute power) then you often avoid having to touch calculus, logarithms etc entirely.

The beauty in maths for me has always been in finding ways to use it only to the extent that it makes unintuitive problems more intuitive. Math for maths sake isn't intrinsically beautiful, because for most of us it's more like having all the cheat codes to a game when the levels are too hard than figuring out how to play.

</comment><comment><USER15> Mathematical beauty is not only for pleasure, according to the great quantum theorist Dirac, who taught us that we should let mathematical beauty guide us in our discovery of new physical laws.

This is how Dirac was able to predict the existence of anti-particles before they were discovered experimentally, and his philosophy about mathematical beauty is a cornerstone of modern theoretical physics.

</comment><comment><USER16> I never forget the moment when my math teacher revealed e^pi*i+1=0 after dealing with complex numbers. It was beautiful.

<comment><USER5> I think I am unique in being one of the only people whose first reaction to seeing that equation was to think that it was a mistake (in fact, my first reaction to seeing it is still to think it is a mistake, even knowing that it is not). To me, it feels like the plus sign should be a minus sign, to give the (incorrect) equation `e^pi * i-1=0`. Years after I saw the equation, when I learned how it actually made sense to talk about complex exponents, I realized that the problem is that pi is a stupid constant, but that is another discussion. Returning to the `e^pi * i+1=0` point, I still don't get why people find that beautiful before they have any sense of what taking a complex exponent means (in terms of how to naturally extend the definition of exponent, obviously the geometric result essentially follows from this result).

More to the point, that equation is just a special case of Euler's formula, `e^xi=cos(x) + i * sin(x)`, which is what contains the real beautiful insight.

EDIT: fixed * formatting

<comment><USER17> The part of it that people find cool is probably e, i, and pi being related, when at first you wouldn't think they had anything to do with each other, before knowing any of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love analytic/holomorphic functions, they're so smooth and beautiful.

<comment><USER19> The more I studied holomorphic functions, the more I felt that the real numbers were fundamentally _incomplete_ without the imaginary numbers to accompany them. In just the reals, there are tons of ways for functions to misbehave and become irritating to manage, and there's no real rhyme or reason to explain it. In the complex numbers, the 'true' structure of a function is revealed: well-behaved functions are well-behaved everywhere and in all respects, and if a function misbehaves it's clear where and how.

<comment><USER20> Some people use similar reasoning to "explain" why quantum mechanics uses complex numbers.

[http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html](http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html)

(scroll down to "Real vs. Complex Numbers", about 2/3rds of the way through the page)

<comment><USER21> Awesome, I was about to go dig up the link but you saved me the trouble. I found some relevant discussion on stackexchange, but I haven't digested it thoroughly enough to have an opinion yet.

[http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32422/qm- without-...](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32422/qm-without- complex-numbers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My brain certainly does not see "maths" as beauty. It sees it as a spelling mistake and it hears it as an awkward jumble of sounds that have no business being together.

</comment><comment><USER23> I feel like the same test could be easily performed with code on programmers. I'd love to see which common bits from a C or JavaScript program will evoke a sense of beauty.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've got the same thing with code, not with music or anything else.

Thats why i really like to refractor something, i guess

</comment><comment><USER25> What if your brain sees it but you don't see it?</comment>


How to get paid iOS 10/11 apps for free without jailbreak iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.howtoshout.com/download-paid-ios-apps-apple-devices-free/ <comment><USER2> How to install Malware for free!</comment>


Why BitcoinStore is going to bring an end to a Decade of PayPal - <AUTHOR> http://coinabul.tumblr.com/post/44164174080/why-bitcoinstore-is-going-to-bring-an-end-to-a-decade

<comment><USER2> Why would a major, established business like Amazon want to deal with Bitcoin? Transaction times of 10 minutes? Questions about how to pay their taxes (yes, believe it or not, a business as enormous as Amazon is not going to fail to pay taxes) and what taxes should be paid on BTC transactions are probably enough to keep them away. Amazon issues lines of credit to their customers, and only a fool would issue a line of credit in a currency that has built-in deflation.

I think it is more likely that Congress will dismantle the military industrial complex.

<comment><USER3> Generally you can accept transactions with zero confirmations without a huge issue. For someone like Amazon the small loss you might make from a couple of double-spends is outweighed by the almost instantaneous transaction.

In an ideal circumstance, you'd average five minutes for a confirmation anyway. Blocks are usually generated every 10 minutes or so.

<comment><USER2> I think you are underestimating the number of double-spend attacks that a business like Amazon would face if they never waited for confirmation. Amazon has plenty of problems with fraud right now; this would just be another way for people to commit fraud. It is not just the losses, either; Amazon could reverse transactions once the double spending is detecting, but they have to worry about their reputation. The last thing they need is to be known as the website for people trying to cheat.

Also, "ideal circumstances" do not happen in the real world. IF you want to convince Amazon to adopt Bitcoin, you need to impress them with _typical_ and _realistic_ circumstances.

<comment><USER3> Given that double spends are reasonably expensive, you could just use zero confirmations for anything under 25BTC and the standard six confirmations for the rest. If you double spent a transaction under 25BTC, you would have been better off just mining a block yourself.

I'm sure anyone spending more than $750 on amazon is probably happy enough waiting for two or more confirmations.

<comment><USER2> "I'm sure anyone spending more than $750 on amazon is probably happy enough waiting for two or more confirmations."

Maybe, but if I can do it without waiting by just sticking with credit cards, why wouldn't I?

"Given that double spends are reasonably expensive"

I see this being tossed around quite a bit. I am not entirely sure where this idea came from. Can you _prove_ it, the way that ECDSA (on which Bitcoin is based) can be proved secure as a signature system? When I hear this sort of statement, it sounds a lot like, "Nobody has published any way to double spend cheaply, and I cannot think of one; therefore it must be an expensive thing to do!"

I do not mean to be insulting with that, I really would like to know why people think double spending attacks are _necessarily_ expensive. On top of that, how do we know that a double spending attack would be _more_ expensive than the payoff -- especially when you are dealing with a complex marketplace, where a double spending attack may be just one component of a larger scheme. Maybe the point will just be to deny another person the ability to buy something, by double-spending until the merchant is sold out of the item, or as shills in an auction to try to inflate the price (should Amazon revive its auctions system).

This reminds me of the sort of argument I had with Hushmail users back before the infamous DEA incident. Your secret key is sitting there, on their servers; they could read your mail if they wanted to or if someone had a gun to their head. People said it couldn't happen, that the key would only be in RAM for a split second, that using their Java applet solved the problem, etc. Then the DEA turned up in court with a mountain of decrypted email from Hushmail (and then, as if the entire world just wanted to aggravate me, people starting saying that PGP had security problems). Cryptography tends to be black-and- white when it comes to security: you are either secure, or you are not secure, and there is rarely anything in-between (with multiparty computation, that might be changing; people are now talking about the "covert model" and "one- bit leakage" notions of security, which are in that middle area).

<comment><USER4> _Maybe, but if I can do it without waiting by just sticking with credit cards, why wouldn't I?_

How can you? If a credit card transaction can be charged back, it effectively never clears (or doesn't clear as long as the chargeback is possible, if there's a time limit on chargeback). So in any situation where you would be willing to take a possibly chargeback-able, you should be willing to take an unconfirmed bitcoin.

 _"Nobody has published any way to double spend cheaply, and I cannot think of one; therefore it must be an expensive thing to do!"_

The fact that nobody published a cheap way to double spend is strong evidence that it's difficult and expensive to double spend.

Also it doesn't really matter if there is some obscure method to cheaply double spend, since because of its obscurity it would only affect a small number of transactions (and presumably once it is used it will be detected and made public, at which point it can be fixed).

<comment><USER2> "The fact that nobody published a cheap way to double spend is strong evidence that it's difficult and expensive to double spend."

Nonsense. Bitcoin is only a few years old. It is not nearly well-studied enough to claim that there is any good evidence that double spending is costly. Keep in mind that in the first few years of RSA, people thought that 128 bit public keys would be sufficient for centuries. Bitcoin has not received anything close to the attention RSA received from the research community, or even that attention given newer ciphers like AES.

"Also it doesn't really matter if there is some obscure method to cheaply double spend"

That is kind of like saying, "It does not really matter if there is some obscure method to crack RSA quickly."

"since because of its obscurity it would only affect a small number of transactions (and presumably once it is used it will be detected and made public, at which point it can be fixed)."

Or it might turn out that there is no fix and that the attack would work no matter what you did to Bitcoin. Maybe not confirming transactions is an inherently insecure way to do business. It is equally possible that cheap double spending attacks are impossible due to some property of Bitcoin. Right now there is no clear answer; you just have to shrug and hope for the best if you neglect to wait for confirmations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is bitcoin the one "true" alternative? If payment services like Balanced and Stripe solve most of the problems of PayPal (frozen accounts, pleasant APIs, etc) then why are they less worthy alternatives?

<comment><AUTHOR> I feel like there are more problems at PayPal than just frozen accounts. The inherent issues I have with PayPal is a: they're a middleman and bump up prices. and b: they facilitate chargebacks which lead to an ever increase amount of fraud.

More fraud equals more cost. As the conventional alternatives continue to grow they'll face more and more fraud. Bitcoin has no chargeback fraud. It never will.

<comment><USER6> Bitcoin fluctuates wildly in value. Bitcoin takes quite a while for a transaction to happen, and there are waits and fees involved in exchanging money from USD and back to USD. Bitcoin doesn't allow chargebacks, an important consumer protection mechanism, therefore helping to perpetuate fraud.

No one wants to buy anything with bitcon, and no one wants to go through the trouble of selling anything with bitcoin.

<comment><USER7> _"No one wants to buy anything with bitcon, and no one wants to go through the trouble of selling anything with bitcoin."_

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

\- There are at the very least 5k+ merchants selling products & services for bitcoins - a small fraction of them is listed on <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade> \- and this is increasing every day

\- BitPay alone signed up 1500 businesses accepting Bitcoin: [http://finance.sfgate.com/hearst.sfgate/news/read/23400142/w...](http://finance.sfgate.com/hearst.sfgate/news/read/23400142/when_your_paypal)

You are not a Bitcoin user and have no idea how successful it is, that is fine, but do not spread lies. Obviously you have no idea how quickly the number of buyers and sellers using Bitcoin is rising...

<comment><USER6> Every business I hear about that starts accepting bitcoin does so through a third party exchanger - so companies are still getting paid in USD. That doesn't count as a bitcoin accepting company.

<comment><USER4> Can I pay with bitcoin? Yes. Then it is a bitcoin accepting company. I don't care if they use someone else for the infrastructure and sell the bitcoins immediately.

<comment><USER6> That's called going through a re-seller. Of course, they also make sure to get a cut.

Still just about anyone not doing business below the table is going to prefer USD, or some other state-backed currency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Until the value of Bitcoin is more stable and technology illiterate people start to use it, there is no way that something like this can replace PayPal.

<comment><USER9> It's not the price stability, which is still a serious concern, but the fact that you're talking about a system designed by crypto-anarchists.

There is no way Bitcoin will _ever_ displace Paypal without serious, fundamental changes.

<comment><USER10> It's funny you should mention that, since Paypal was also founded by crypto- anarchists.

<comment><USER9> Paypal is also an entity with a head office, where the people involved in creating it are widely known. Although you might disagree with their policies or ethics, at least they're a legitimate concern.

Bitcoin was created by "some guy" that, if anybody knows them, nobody's talking. Illegal, underground money lenders are more above-board than this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another favorite geek service that touted as the end of something that regular folks use. Do folks around her realize yet that we're not regular folks and our interest, desires and accommodations are often not connected at all with those of the average non-geek person?

<comment><USER12> I'm pretty sure average non-geek persons will receive with open arms a currency that can't be manipulated by the government, among other benefits, once they are sure it's safe and not a scam, like some people even here in HN sometimes suggest.

<comment><USER13> So, geeks and Birchers? :p

<comment><USER12> What do you mean by "bircher"? I found this: <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bircher>

<comment><USER13> Not at all. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society> , the Ron Paul fans, and anyone else against the Fed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It seems to me that the beauty (and probably the downfall) of bitcoin is that it is equivalent to cash. If you're careful, you can use it anonymously. No charge-backs - just like cash.

You need to use the same care with bitcoin as we used to use with cash. Credit cards are far more forgiving, thanks mainly to the charge-back mechanism (which incidentally is a US thing - in most countries it is un-heard of).

My biggest fear for bitcoin is that governments will kill it, because they have no control over it. They've been delighted to see cash fading away, but I predict that if bitcoin ever does get traction with the general public, we'll see a deluge of "bitcoin is the currency of the terrorists and child- molesters" propaganda which will make copyright scaremongering seem quaint.

</comment><comment><USER15> Not a single mention of fraud prevention, AKA why no-one else has successfully challenged PayPal to date.

Buyers can perform fraud. Sellers can perform fraud. Sometimes they're the same person. None of this is easy. But articles like this pretend it is.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you want to know why PayPal has been around for a decade with no competitors, you should read this:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5295236>

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. They've stacked the deck against any startup. I recall that one startup in California, facecash or something, that couldn't get licensing even though they're entirely qualified.

That's the beautiful thing about Bitcoin, it isn't just any startup, it's an open source project. If one exchange can't get a banking license, another one will. Everyone can use it and no one can shut it down at a centralized location.

<comment><USER16> I run FaceCash. I would advise talking to a lawyer. (I am not a lawyer.)

I would also advise, to anyone who can make it, going to Sacramento on March 11:

<http://abnk.assembly.ca.gov/hearings>

<comment><AUTHOR> I've talked with lawyers! I don't advise running an exchange anywhere near the United States. (But yes, I'm not a lawyer either.)

If I didn't have jury duty I would be there. I hope you can shed some light on these guys. Can I expect another post with updates? :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Federated Learning - epsilon-greedy https://florian.github.io/federated-learning/ <comment> ur-whale TL;DR :

Compute the gradient of the error on the user's device and ship that to a server-side centralized model to update its weights.

It's a very cool idea that has a lot of interesting applications (among which: learning large statistical user behaviors without "spying" on them).

However, there is an unspoken claim that the gradient update doesn't carry enough information about the user data to reconstruct any of it server-side.

I'm still waiting to see a formal proof of that, and my gut says, if the servers sees enough gradient updates from a given user, it's likely possible to rebuild the original data.

<comment> marten-de-vries > However, there is an unspoken claim that the gradient update doesn't carry > enough information about the user data to reconstruct any of it server-side.

This was a concern for me as well, but the 'Privacy' section of the post addresses this. In short, the algorithm is adapted such that the influence of a single user on the model is limited, and noise is added. I'm not knowledgable enough on differential privacy to know if that covers all possible privacy attacks, but it looks like a good start.

Personally, I'm now more worried about adversaries trying to mess up the model. How many clients need to submit fake updates for the training process to never converge? If it's 50% that's probably fine, but I'm afraid a much smaller amount of users could derail the process already.

<comment><AUTHOR> VERY interesting questions! Unfortunatly I can't answer the questions, since I don't know enough about them.

To make the literature search easier: Your second cocern is called "poisioning attacks" and is one of the problems "adversarial machine learning" is concerned with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> What do people think of OpenMined related to "Federated Learning" ?

[https://www.openmined.org/](https://www.openmined.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool idea! I see the iOS keyboard already do this to an extent. I often type words in my native language in English. I see that over time it learns these and predicts a bit better when I need to type it again. Of course, if it collected a larger corpus from many such users, allowing us to tag this as, say a corpus of Kannada words, I can see a cool application of this kind of learning

</comment><comment><USER4> Has anybody tried applying this to a blockchain by having the PoW be improvements to models in previous blocks or something? This seems like such an obvious idea (especially with all the hype around blockchain nowadays) that either this exists or I'm missing something crucial about the technique.

<comment><USER5> definitely has been done before.</comment></comment>


Breaking Mimblewimble's Privacy Model - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/breaking-mimblewimble-privacy-model-84bcd67bfe52 <comment><AUTHOR> "Mimblewimble's privacy is fundamentally flawed. Using only $60/week of AWS spend, I was able to uncover the exact addresses of senders and recipients for 96% Grin transactions in real time. The problem is inherent to Mimblewimble, and I don't believe there's a way to fix it. This means Mimblewimble should no longer be considered a viable alternative to Zcash or Monero when it comes to privacy."</comment>


If you care about OSS and Community - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/NuGet/NuGetGallery/pull/4437 <comment><USER2> why not just use community driven services like libraries.io or versioneye.com?</comment>


Syncthing: Open Source Dropbox and BitTorrent Sync Replacement - <AUTHOR> http://syncthing.net/ <comment><USER2> Can we please please please make it a standard that synchronization tools spell out how they handle conflicts on the front page.

Bittorrent Sync just overwrites files based on last mod time (terrible option). What does this do? Does it support backups? Versioning?

<comment><USER3> Newest change wins. More detail: [https://github.com/calmh/syncthing/issues/61#issue-27202590](https://github.com/calmh/syncthing/issues/61#issue-27202590)

<comment><USER4> Specifically, this is not dependent on last mod time, but instead a "version" field in each file's metadata that is incremented every time a file changes. I'm not really sure how that's going to help with concurrent (or conflicting) edits though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since we're listing alternatives here: I setup SeaFile ([http://seafile.com/](http://seafile.com/)) a couple of months ago and I'm loving it so far. Mainly because it has client-side encryption and allows a single client to sync with different servers and selectively choose which 'libraries' (basically directories that are under sync) to use. Typical usecase is having a personal server for personal files and another one at the office for work-related stuff.

<comment><USER6> I like seafile too, but after doing some of my own review of the source ([https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/350](https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/350)) I'm not willing to trust it on the open internet.

For now I run seafile inside a private network behind a vpn. But I'd rather find an alternative with a better security story. Something from a team that can justify their cryptographic constructs in detail.

<comment><USER7> git-annex avoid all except (2), by simply encrypting each file using GnuPG, and applying an HMACSHA1 to the filenames.

[http://git-annex.branchable.com/encryption/](http://git- annex.branchable.com/encryption/)

<comment><USER8> SHA1?

<comment><USER7> It's configurable.

 _The default MAC algorithm to be applied on the filenames is HMACSHA1. A stronger one, for instance HMACSHA512, one can be chosen upon creation of the special remote with the option mac=HMACSHA512. The available MAC algorithms are HMACSHA1, HMACSHA224, HMACSHA256, HMACSHA384, and HMACSHA512._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Has anyone else taken a look at Ori ([http://ori.scs.stanford.edu](http://ori.scs.stanford.edu)):

> Ori is a distributed file system built for offline operation and empowers > the user with control over synchronization operations and conflict > resolution. We provide history through light weight snapshots and allow > users to verify the history has not been tampered with. Through the use of > replication instances can be resilient and recover damaged data from other > nodes.

It seems well thought out, and competitive with many of the other approaches mentioned here. It uses Merkle trees (as does Git) that encompasses the file system structure and full history.

<comment><USER10> Academic software usually for publication. After paper accepted, unless they could publish another paper using same software/concept/idea, this software will dis-continued.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Replacement" is too strong a word here. P2P sync requires at least 2 peers to be online at once. For the simple case of syncing your work and home computers or sharing with coworkers that is not always a reliable assumption.

It's only a replacement for a centralized service like Dropbox if you have an always-connected peer (a de facto central server).

<comment><USER12> I don't understand why you're being downvoted because you make a valid point. It has no iOS or Android client, no cloud storage (unless you buy your own), no versioning and sync conflict behaviour is very different. Ergo, it's not a replacement.

<comment><USER13> > no cloud storage (unless you buy your own)

That's kind of the whole point, isn't it? It's clearly meant to be a Dropbox replacement not for everybody, but for those who consider the lack of mandatory cloud storage a feature. So yeah, technically more a replacement for BitTorrent Sync than Dropbox, but not everybody knows about that.

Missing features can be added. Mobile clients by third party devs will surely crop up if/when this thing gets traction. The protocol is open, after all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of my favorite open source tools of this kind is unison. It works great. I set it up to go and I don't even notice it is there. It is quick, seems to have been around for a while and is packaged for most Linux distros. It has a GUI but you don't need it.

[http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/)

<comment><USER15> Unison is a under-appreciated gem of file synchronization. The author also published several papers on the subject: [http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/papers/index.shtml#File%2...](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/papers/index.shtml#File%20Synchronization)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can't really seem to find this information in the documentation.

Does this support delta/block-level sync for large files (e.g.: does mounting a 100 GB truecrypt container, modifying a file inside the container and unmounting it cause the entire 100 GB container to be uploaded)?

Does it utilize the native OS platform APIs for detecting file modification (e.g. inotify on linux) as opposed to scanning/polling large directories looking for modified date changes?

<comment><USER3> Protocol information is linked from the homepage: [https://github.com/calmh/syncthing/blob/master/protocol/PROT...](https://github.com/calmh/syncthing/blob/master/protocol/PROTOCOL.md)

> Does this support delta/block-level sync for large files

Yes.

> Does it utilize the native OS platform APIs for detecting file modification

It uses polling.

Edit: inotify issue is here: [https://github.com/calmh/syncthing/issues/9](https://github.com/calmh/syncthing/issues/9) (the author seems to want to implement this feature once go has a decent cross-platform file watching library)

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the quick response. I just got through reading PROTOCOL.md and was about to update my post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fancy being interviewed for [http://redecentralize.org/](http://redecentralize.org/) ?

If so, email me firstname.lastname@example.com! (I couldn't see an email or contact form for you on the syncthing site)

<comment><AUTHOR> You can find an email at the authors GitHub profile[0].

[https://github.com/calmh](https://github.com/calmh)

<comment><USER17> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I use [http://owncloud.org](http://owncloud.org) and am quite happy. But also happy for more competition :-)

<comment><USER19> No matter how much I tried, I always had crappy experience using OwnCloud (-> very slow to recognize new files and sync them across other computers). I tried it maybe 4-5 times in total, last time just couple of weeks ago.

Does it work fast for you? Do you use desktop client or primarily web GUI?

<comment><USER20> I tried it too, but ended up replacing it with something else. It was slow as a pig, was unable to handle datasync with failures and timeouts on any reasonable amount of files (a 2000 file user) and constantly made my CPU fan hit max.

My server was a Core i7 with 12GBs of RAM, SSD backing and a more or less dedicated NAS. I tried with both SQLite and MySQL backing. MySQL was better, but still unacceptable. If that's not enough to run it for a _single user_ , I can't imagine what it's like trying to deploy it for a full family, even less an organization.

I love the _idea_ behind owncloud, and I admit touting it myself in my own "honeymoon phase", but in hindsight I have no problem admitting that the execution is just too poor.

<comment><USER19> Same experience. I tried it on DO droplets (1, 2, 4 and then 16GB of RAM to see if I'm nuts), computer I'm working on (16GB RAM) and from a RPi (that was for fun though). Every single time it was painfully slow.

It took it about 1h to sync a folder with about 100 files, under 30MB total across 4 computers. Not to mention that minor modifications appeared only after 15 minutes (small text files).

BTSync worked great, but I wouldn't trust it with something sensitive.

What did you end up using?

<comment><USER20> > What did you end up using?

Long story short, I went from an "all cloud" (Google + Dropbox) setup to a "all mine, no NSA" setup. Now I've decided that counter zealotry doesn't have that much for it, and I'll try to balance privacy with best of breed services, without trying to end up with all my eggs in one basket. Not doing that ensures I keep interop and portability in mind.

My end-result is calendar via Google (only solution I can get collaboration and invites working properly), files via Dropbox, mail with Fastmail (much better than Gmail) and contacts via Baikal on my own hosted server.

Fastmail is adding support for calendering and contacts via CalDAV and CardDAV, but I've yet to fully investigate that.

It's a moving target for me, but currently it's been stable for a few months, and I'm mostly happy.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Git-Annex is a great existing option (made by joeyhess). [https://git- annex.branchable.com/](https://git-annex.branchable.com/)

<comment><USER22> Can you explain to me why and how I would use git-annex for real time sync? From what I understand of it, it works well for backups and for managing media files, but I don't understand how it handles the use case of making two directories on two computers pretend to be one.

<comment><USER23> git-annex assistant, by the same author, builds automatic synchronization on top of git-annex: [https://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/](https://git- annex.branchable.com/assistant/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> One thing I've never gotten about these "syncing" apps...

Lets say I install this software on my phone, my desktop, and my work computer. I have 100+ GB free on my work computer and my home desktop, but I only have 16GB on my phone. If I add 20GB worth of movies to my sync folder, its going to fill up my phone.

<comment><USER25> Dropbox has "selective sync", so individual PC's can choose to only sync a subset of folders from your account. Also, phones running Dropbox don't actually "sync" anything to the phone. You can choose to download individual files, or stream them straight from the Dropbox app, but it doesn't offer you any way to keep files on the phone up to date with whats in the "cloud".

<comment><USER26> I use dropsync on my phone. I have set up rules to sync screenshots to a different folder from photos, and periodically it will check a folder on dropbox and sync files from it to phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I just setup Sparkleshare ([http://sparkleshare.org/](http://sparkleshare.org/)) this weekend. I wanted something which wasn't Dropbox, and preferably open-source, and while Sparkleshare has a slightly clunky pair mechanism, it works beautifully.

Syncthing looks similar, and LAN sync'ing is a killer feature for those of us in offices with poor bandwidth.

<comment><USER28> Dropbox actually have a "Sync over LAN" checkbox. It just never seem to been implemented/enabled.

I actually just dropped Dropbox for btsync the other week and are very happy, it's iOS app even serves other clients with files over LAN.

Btsync however uses quite crappy crypto and is closed source etc etc.

Syncthing mentions they use TLS encryption, hopefully i can roll my own 8k keys.

I tried Sparkleshare last year aswell, but my experience was mixed. Also it relies on quite a different architecture (git) than a "versioning bittorrent protocol".

Looking forward to evaluating syncthing when time permits.

<comment><USER29> Isn't it always enabled by default?!

The last few times I've set up a new machine locally I've used Dropbox to pull over stuff. It usually moves at 40-50 MB/s (megabytes) which is certainly using my gigabit LAN.

<comment><USER28> According to [1], "LAN sync" only works when file has already been uploaded to the dropbox servers.

If this is accurate, then I guess this is the issue i have noticed.

1: [https://superuser.com/questions/663600/set-dropbox-to- only-u...](https://superuser.com/questions/663600/set-dropbox-to-only-use-lan- sync-dont-allow-web-sync)

UPDATE:

Confirmed by [2], that Dropbox LAN sync indeed only works once the file reached their servers.

"Well, when you add a file to your computer's Dropbox, the file is then synced with Dropbox servers. Dropbox will then initiate the syncing process as soon as it determines a change has been made to the file. All linked computers and shared folders will then download any new version of the file. With LAN syncing, Dropbox will look for the new file on your Local Area Network first, bypassing the need to download the file from Dropbox servers, thus speeding up the syncing process considerably."

2: [https://www.dropbox.com/help/137/en](https://www.dropbox.com/help/137/en)

<comment><USER3> For anyone wondering, Dropbox changed this a while back. The requirement to sync to Dropbox first was added at that point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've been using Syncthing for some months now and it's working well for my use case of keeping laptop/desktop and home server files in sync. I had one occasion when I lost everything as I'd brought up syncthing on my server without the "sync" directory mounted. It happily deleted all files from my synced laptop as a result. That's now fixed, but it was a buttock clenching moment. Yay backups, and a third machine (desktop) which was suspended and thus out of sync, so still had my data.

Upstream developer is very friendly and attentive & seems happy to discuss new features and use cases.

</comment><comment><USER31> It appears HN readers are terrible at self-organizing. Threads for articles like this should include by default a top level node for:

      "Here's the alternative I use"

      "Important question about the technology"

      "Pertinent question about the article"

<comment> dj-wonk How can we organize after threads have already been started?

<comment><USER32> Do I smell a niche for time travel startups? Disrupt the Big Time monopoly!

<comment> dj-wonk Well, I can't be sure, but I think colloborative technology for rearranging threads on-the-fly might be slightly less complicated than monopoly-busting or time-travel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> That looks like a promising project in a space which definitely needs improvement. Owncloud and Sparkleshare are okay, but they are far from perfect, and there is large room for improvement.

</comment><comment><USER34> A better title would be "Syncthing, an open source Dropbox replacement written in Go".

But seriously, it seems promising.

</comment><comment><USER35> How good is this at traversing firewalls? AFAIK, Dropbox will do some manner of HTTP trickery to allow syncing when behind overly-restrictive firewalls (so it just goes out the usually-provided web proxy), but the documentation here references forwarding ports + UPNP, so I'm guessing that doesn't apply here?

</comment><comment><USER36> "Each node scans for changes every sixty seconds". There isn't any portable way to get notfications about file changes instead of polling? I know about jnotify in Java but well it's in java.

<comment><USER7> I don't think there is. Joey Hess ended up having to support inotify, kqueue, hfsevents and ReadDirectoryChangesW for his git-annex assistant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have large media files, multiple TBs.

I deal with a constant stream of these and want to have a distributed network - connected via the inet - that allows me to sync the drives in all locations.

i.e. I would like to setup a server in my home office, one in my co-founder's home office and another in my editor's home office.

Whenever my editor runs off a few hundred GB of data to a specific folder or to their drive, I would love for that to be auto-synced to both my server and that of my co-founder.

Will Syncthing allow me to do this easily and will it be appropriate for an application like that?

<comment><USER3> It will do what you describe, but since you are handling large files you should know that Syncthing currently doesn't do dedupe, so if you rename or move a file, or have multiple copies of it, it will sync the whole file again. Changes within a file that don't move are handled efficiently.

<comment><USER37> If I am not mistaken, you can't do dedupes on media files, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This looks very promising. But the documentation is not good. I have not managed to find a "1 minute" friendly overview of how it works. I mean, what data gets sent how where and why.

<comment><USER3> > But the documentation is not good.

The linked website is aimed at end-users.

Try the protocol docs: [https://github.com/calmh/syncthing/blob/master/protocol/PROT...](https://github.com/calmh/syncthing/blob/master/protocol/PROTOCOL.md)

<comment><USER38> On, I meant end-user friendly documentation. Like ushi said, it is probably too early for that. Thanks!

<comment><USER3> You could try the discourse site: [http://discourse.syncthing.net/category/documentation](http://discourse.syncthing.net/category/documentation)

<comment><USER38> I did, it drowned me in other things. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Here is the original from a year or so ago:

[https://raymii.org/s/articles/Set_up_your_own_truly_secure_e...](https://raymii.org/s/articles/Set_up_your_own_truly_secure_encrypted_shared_storage_aka_Dropbox_clone.html)

"Then all current commercial services drop off, including SpiderOak, Bittorrent Sync and git-annex. This resulted in a clever combination of EncFS and dvcs-autosync. Because, in this day and age, you cannot trust any "cloud" provider with your unencrypted data."

<comment><USER7> The author was uninformed, though. git-annex has supported encryption for special remotes (including your own rsync.net) since the early beginning (the wiki page[1] has been there since 2011). And it's certainly open source.

[1] [http://git-annex.branchable.com/encryption/](http://git- annex.branchable.com/encryption/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> A few months ago I looked into using Syncthing for my decentralized browser, Syncnet[0]. At that time it did not seem ready for primetime. Does anyone have a good feel for its maturity as of late? For example, is there an API? Syncthing looks very promising and I would love to integrate Syncnet with it.

[0]: [http://jack.minardi.org/software/syncnet-a-decentralized- web...](http://jack.minardi.org/software/syncnet-a-decentralized-web-browser/)

<comment><USER41> Syncnet looks great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Alternative would be AeroFS ([https://aerofs.com/](https://aerofs.com/)) which also does P2P file sync.

<comment><USER43> Kind of a pig for resources though

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I am very happy with the timemachine backup on my mac, but I have been looking for a good offsite backup solution so that I can trade storage with my family in case something happens to my house. This might finally be the right option. BT Sync seemed ok, but was more than I wanted my parents to try and setup.

<comment><USER45> Try CrashPlan:

[http://www.code42.com/crashplan/](http://www.code42.com/crashplan/)

It's free for peer-to-peer backup and is designed to do exactly what you want.

<comment><USER46> Their cloud storage for backups is really cheap if you have a lot to back up and want them to handle your off-site too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Let's hope this becomes what it is promising and reliefs me of dropbox and the likes... ;)

<comment><USER48> I'm curious, what are your complaints about Dropbox? Security, UI, UX, features?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Does this need to use the web gui? I tried setting this up on a digital ocean server and it spawns off a webserver on 8080 that I can't reach from my machine. Is there a "headless" mode for client-less servers? Thanks

<comment><USER50> You can edit ~/.config/syncthing/config.xml and restart.

<comment><USER49> This helped me ( though I'm sure the ssh tunnel would've worked, I couldn't get it running right) -- I changed the web address to my ip:port, and could then log in, add my host, and then change it back to headless or localhost. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I would also like to point out [https://www.syncany.org/](https://www.syncany.org/)

Syncany can work with any backend (like AWS S3) and is encrypted.

It is more of a dropbox replacement while sycnthing is a btsync replacement.

</comment><comment><USER52> That's great news, have been looking for a OSS sync app for quite some time.

</comment><comment><USER53> What's wrong with BitTorrent Sync? The fact that it's a company?

<comment><USER54> It's closed-source; we can't fix things like the crappy crypto (shared key), and can't spot backdoors or see what it's actually doing without a lot of effort.

</comment></comment><comment> grey-area This project's aims seem very similar to the earlier camilstore project, also written in go:

[https://camlistore.org](https://camlistore.org)

Anyone know how it compares?

</comment><comment><USER55> Does somebody fund projects like this? Or is it just that the people in charge of them understand something about UI and marketing? Seems like a nice trend, if so.

<comment><USER56> I've wondered this too. Perhaps they charge extra for more features or get money consulting?

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Since I installed Bittorrent Sync, my need for such software stopped as it works really well and provides all I need from it.

I couldn't understand quite advantages and why would I replace BTSync, which BTW, works really well already and does all this nice things. Plus works on my Phone and Ipad and Nexus.

To clarify one thing, I have home server which obviously hosts BTSync repos with ample space. Ability to fine-grained share parts of it is invaluable.

</comment><comment><USER58> So this may be as good a thread as any to ask for assistance:

My small business is looking for a combined file collaboration / file backup service that doesn't cost an excessive amount of money (we're a non-profit on a budget). Is there a good service for this? For example, Dropbox is mainly for sharing files, whereas Carbonite is mostly for backing up your computer. Is there a solution for both?

<comment><USER59> SpiderOak does both. Their interface is, IMO, not nearly as good as Dropbox (I've never used carbonite), but it does check both boxes (backup and sharing/sync).

<comment><USER58> Yeah but SpiderOak is $5/user/MONTH, so with 30 employees we're looking at $1800/year which is just crazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> We love to through around the words "alternative" and " replacement" it is neither until it is as easy to use/deploy as X for the average Joe. You know 90% of people out there who would't be able to out the words 'git', 'deploy' and 'heroku' in the right order as their eyes glaze over in confusion.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm looking for a replacement for Dropbox, but it seems that none support direct links, like in Dropbox's public folder (example: [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/38901452/fox2.jpg](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/38901452/fox2.jpg) ) Is there one?

<comment><USER62> The reason is because most of the options; owncloud, btsync, seafile and syncthing dosn't upload to a unknown company server. It only shares the files between your devices. Its a huge pluss when you think about security. The downside is that a device have to be online to share or update the files.

I use BTSync and to avoid the problem i just upload the files to my server and display them under a subdomain. [http://pub.volpe.pw/pub/fox_gl.jpg](http://pub.volpe.pw/pub/fox_gl.jpg)

BtSync also offers a phone client, so to mimc the way Dropbox uploads pictures to dropbox was rather simple. I backed up a gallery on my phone and synced it to my server and symlinked it under the pub dir, as BTSync dosn't follow symlinks.

<comment><USER61> I don't mind uploading them under a subdomain or such, but I really like how easily I can get a public link from Dropbox. How hard was it to set up?

<comment><USER62> Once i had setup the subdomain it wasnt hard at all really. I only had a problem where nginx couldnt serve the files from my home dir (i preffer to have the syncing folder there), but it was solved quickly with google and SO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> This looks very promising. And it's written in Go! The only major feature I think it's missing is file versioning.

I am curious, though: what do people use to get their files remotely? And what's the cheapest solution for hosting your own central server? Would a simple AWS instance work fine?

<comment><USER62> I server them to myself using _h5ai (stylized HTTP index) and nginx, displaying a portion of my files.

I'd also take a look at digitalocean for a VPS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I really like the idea but one thing is stopping me: portability to iOS and Android devices, and mobile apps that work with Dropbox. Dropbox has a first- mover advantage.

This is mostly a problem for people like me who use both Android and iOS devices so alternatives need to support both platforms.

</comment><comment><USER65> Yet another sync app is Pyd.io The Web UI is super neat, and you can choose between various backends for storage. Pyd.io offers its own sync app which I found to be horribly slow. I'd suggest to use Pyd.io as a frontend and BtSync/Seafile/Syncthing as a backend.

</comment><comment><USER66> Unrelated, is one of the best open source project landing pages I've ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER67> Have you checked Hive2Hive? Something similar but not yet there. [https://github.com/Hive2Hive/Hive2Hive](https://github.com/Hive2Hive/Hive2Hive)

<comment><USER68> In contrast to Syncthing, Hive2Hive is more a library, providing an API for any kind of program that requires file synchronization. Another major difference is that Hive2Hive is written in Java and not in Go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Is there any mobile support?

I use Dropbox pretty frequently to share stuff between mobile devices and desktops. If Syncthing can't do that it isn't as useful.

<comment><USER70> As soon as someone makes a Dropbox alternative that has no servers, has selective-sync to my iPhone, and is compatible with Keepass to store the database, then I'm there. I'd happily pay for it, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I don't see a Solaris build on the download page but it's listed next to the download button on the home page, am I just missing something?

</comment><comment><USER72> This looks incredibly interesting, and I would very much like to move from Dropbox to something open source. Thanks, will definitely play with it.

</comment><comment><USER73> another alternative: [http://www.filement.com/](http://www.filement.com/) I don't use it but friends do and are pretty happy with it. From their home page:

\- Combine devices and cloud services into a single interface. \- Transfer data between computers, smartphones, tablets and clouds. \- Manage and use data directly on the device or cloud it is stored.

</comment><comment><USER74> ++ this effort. I'm looking forward to replacing my current BitTorrent Sync (btsync) setup with Syncthing.

</comment><comment><USER75> I would like to see something like this that does not place trust on the server hosting the files.

<comment><USER76> seafile lets you have encrypted directories.

<comment><USER3> [https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/350](https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/350)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Is there a paper / doc explaining, how the synchronisation works in detail?

</comment><comment><USER78> Can we get a "Bitcoin meets Dropbox meets Airbnb" already? Thks :)

</comment><comment><USER79> I would of liked the name "synctank" better. :)

</comment><comment><USER80> Cool, I always like it when things are open source!

</comment><comment><USER81> So its basically pirating, but its saves across all platforms?

<comment><USER82> Not really</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Weblog written in Backbone? - <AUTHOR>

I would like to write a blog in backbone and perhaps using Nodejs or Express on the backend.<p>What would be the right of going about this? like for the models I would need for backbone and things like that? has anyone written an app or blog in Backbone? this will be my first time. <comment><USER2> [https://github.com/trantorLiu/Node-Backbone-Require- Example-...](https://github.com/trantorLiu/Node-Backbone-Require-Example-Blog)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks this is what I was looking for.</comment></comment>


Diabetes drug 'significantly reverses memory loss' in mice with Alzheimer's - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006899317304596?via%3Dihub <comment><USER2> This would be great news if we have not cured mice many times before of Alzheimer's. Unfortunatly all the drugs that have worked in mice failed when tested in humans.

It appears that the mouse model is a very poor model for the human form of the disease. I would go so far as to say it is worse than useless and actively leads us astray.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if we had similar success with curing Alzheimer (or cancer for that matter) in humans if experimenting on humans were possible.

<comment><USER4> Experimenting on humans is possible; that's what clinical trials are for

<comment><USER3> But you can't try a couple of drugs and then dissect the humans to see how the plaque in their brain looks like. Genetically engineering humans to develop Alzheimer more quickly is also generally frowned upon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recall reading an article saying that doctors were nearly ready to begin calling Alzheimer's disease Type III diabetes. This result would lend credence to that notion.

<comment><USER6> I predict that in 5-10 years the evidence will be overwhelming that sugar/carbohydrates for some subset of the population are essentially poison. Cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's - I think we will start to see more and more mainstream connections of all three with carbohydrate intake.

<comment><USER7> Unless you're talking about an extremely small subset of the population, like 5% or less, I think that would be a pretty bad prediction. Whole fruits, vegetables, legumes, leafy greens are all recommended by virtually all doctors and official dietary guidelines. And each of those are all high in carbohydrates.

<comment><USER8> Leafy greens have a high percentage of their calories in carbohydrates, but they are not high in carbohydrates (they are recommended because they have a high ratio of valuable vitamins, etc., to calories, and recommended for weight loss because they have very low calorie density. They are typically recommended even on specifically low-carb diets.)

<comment><USER9> Also important to note the different between carbs and net carbs. Leafy greens are high in fiber, which is a carb, but you need to subtract that value from the total carbs per serving to get to a net carb count (i.e. total carbs your body can actually turn into energy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> stupid question, but how do they got the mice with alzheimer's?

<comment><USER11> You buy mice that are likely to develop it, for example at [https://www.jax.org/mouse-search](https://www.jax.org/mouse-search) (I notice they offer a service to use CRISPR to design a mouse strain for you, too)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Alzheimer's is from the environment

<comment><USER13> There are also quite a few genes that are tied to increased odds of Alzheimer's.</comment></comment>


Smart Skin: Electronics That Stick and Stretch Like a Temporary Tattoo - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110811142809.htm

<comment><USER2> See also:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2875797>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2875883>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2876232>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2876722></comment>


PS4 vs Xbox One – a Usability Review - <AUTHOR> http://blog.usabilla.com/ps4-vs-xbox-one-usability-review-part-1/

<comment><USER2> Just a guess regarding the users who clicked the XBOX's profile information tile, that might be experience: my XBOX 360 shows the game currently in the tray there. Here's an image: [http://gametipcenter.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/01/home-scr...](http://gametipcenter.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/01/home-screen.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> The article doesn't seem to take voice control into account. My first week with the Xbox I struggled to find apps but after I got used to navigating with the Kinnect the UI made a lot more sense.</comment>


Better to quit grad school or spend extra year to get MS? - <AUTHOR>

I was enrolled in a Physics Phd program but took a leave of absence from the program and have been approved to re-enter the grad program starting in the Fall 2014 semester (I could've tried transferring to other grad programs, but they wouldn't accept me until Fall 2015 and I would have to pay out-of-state tuition for them. However, I'm still funded for this program).
I would say I still have interest in Physics, but definitely don't want a phd. I just want to get into industry asap. I want to look for work as an engineer, statistician, data analyst or something like that afterwards. But I've been advised to return to the program since MS degrees look good and if I dropped out without the MS, I would have a fairly large gap in my resume (and I have already have plenty of gaps in it)
Because this program usually awards phD's and not MS's, I'm not quite sure what to do and how to plan out my coursework. I spoke to a couple of student reps in the program and they suggested I email the director of the program or just email many labs since it may be difficult to find placement as I just want to get the MS. Also, I may have to work as a volunteer and TA for the first semester instead of working as an RA.
What I'm most concerned about is that the director may find it suspicious and have the other professors subject me to additional scrutiny for re-entering the program only to plan to leave with an MS instead of the PhD.
Am I over-worrying about this? Or should I tell the professors I'm emailing directly that I plan to just pursue an MS instead of the PhD, or just bring it up later? <comment><USER3> I would strongly advise that you complete the full Phd program if you possess the aptitude to do so... If you really want to work in industry as a physicist, a Phd will serve you very well. It's good to remember that completion of the Phd or MS shows stamina more than it shows knowledge - <USER2> employers look for the proof of stamina during resume review. So not completing the program shows lack of follow through. If you do not plan on completing the program, I would strongly advise you to get 'going' on something else that shows you have the stamina and work ethic that employers look for in new hire employees or contractors.

As a side note, I have a BSEE. Although, I did things a bit backward. I started a family first, and then discovered that a salary without a degree is much lower than with one regardless of the skills you may possess. It was a huge struggle to complete the degree later in life, even though it really wasn't much later... and completing a MS program was out of the question - even though I certainly possess the ability.

</comment><comment><USER4> Your ultimate value in the market will be your personal brand, represented in your work experience, skill-set, and to a minor extent-- academic credentials.

If you have funding to complete the MS, get it done now. As for managing myopic professors, remember you're the economic buyer in this relationship. Your calculus is based on launching your career soon as possible.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm trying to make the same decision you are. The thinking goes that yes, at least a MS is something for the two years you will have spent there and you can demand a higher salary with a MS over a BS.

W.r.t. being suspicious, who cares? Tell them outright your plans, and if they have any sense of decency, they will support you anyway.

</comment><comment><USER6> I had this day I was laying down under a dogwood tree and planning to tell my PhD adviser I was going to quit.

The next day he told me I had funding for just one year so I had to get my PhD in one year. I thought about it, a year didn't seem so long, so I toughed it out.</comment>


Legality of Bitcoins by country - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_Bitcoins_by_country <comment><USER2> Is bitcoin a viable currency anymore, it seems like a fad still.</comment>


Show HN: Xcode 8 Source Code Extension to Generate Swift Initializers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Bouke/SwiftInitializerGenerator <comment><USER2> This is very cool. For anyone who is not familiar with Swift, whatever property variable you declare (unless it's an optional) needs to be initialized in a constructor before the code can even compile.

With structs you get a default constructor that will take care of this for you, however when you define a class you need to take care of this yourself.

Because of this you can find yourself writing a lot of boilerplate code, setting variables in initializers. Having this process automated is something that Xcode has been lacking for sometime. (that and auto generating protocol methods when a class implements it)

struct sample: [http://imgur.com/a/wm5MO](http://imgur.com/a/wm5MO)

class sample: [http://imgur.com/a/CpWlk](http://imgur.com/a/CpWlk)

gist:

[https://gist.github.com/kingreza/edd1b449ee3e34c4a9588e678af...](https://gist.github.com/kingreza/edd1b449ee3e34c4a9588e678af6d2c6)

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought apple was going to allow to put theses on the Mac App Store.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. It's correct that apps like this can be put in the App Store. However I've not chosen to do so because my developer license is not active at the moment. Though I do feel like the installation is quite cumbersome at the moment.</comment></comment>