How We Earned $10,120 in 30 Days by Sending Horse Poop to People - <AUTHOR> http://www.shitexpress.com/blog/how-we-earned-10120-usd-in-30-days-by-sending-horse-poop-to-people-amazing-kickstart-of-a-marketing-experiment <comment><USER2> As an aside, I worked as a money broker during the 80's. When the market was quiet it was quite common to 'trade' other items. I remember my boss receiving delivery of 5,000 dildos, 15,000 cream eggs etc. The most expensive item I personally traded was a bucket of rhino poo @ about £2500. A few beers and £50 secured delivery from a keeper at London Zoo. The tube ride was however a bit awkward.

</comment><comment><USER3> You definitely uncovered genuine niche market. Does it scale? I.e. do you offer franchising opportunities for horse farms?

<comment><USER4> Maybe extend the offer to other kinds of poop? There was a man which had some experiences with this niche: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist's_Shit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist's_Shit)

<comment><USER3> That is expensive sh#t

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand - why would someone order this? shock value? curiosity? annoying others (sending it to friends etc)?

</comment><comment><USER6> "Shit start-ups do."

</comment><comment><USER7> Is your product organic, glutton free, kosher, and Eco/fair trade/fair wages friendly?

My partner and I are interested in purchasing large quantities for a successful niche German adult video venture we founded, but wouldn't want to degrade our performers by using anything less than premium feces.

Thank you.</comment>


Not Pacman (Pacman meets physics) - <AUTHOR> http://stabyourself.net/notpacman/

<comment><USER2> The way Pacman should have been developed from the start.</comment>


Firefox 3.6 Released - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-release/ <comment><USER2> I remember when I used to get excited when a new version of firefox came out, but now I just don't care. The performance is abysmal and frustrating. I am on mac and even though chrome doesn't have an official release yet and no plugins, I have already switched 100% to it. I do hope that we will eventually see competition between the browsers again, but at this state, I don't see that much coming out from mozilla.

<comment><USER3> My main browser on the Mac is now Chromium 35449 (very stable, and extensions work on it).

Firefox has become what is was created to fight (at least on the Mac). Sad..

<comment><USER4> "Firefox has become what is was created to fight"

I don't believe Mozilla has become a monopoly abuser ;-)

<comment><USER5> Ff was created as the lightweight alternative to the mozilla browser (i.e. The thing that was also branded as Netscape)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> After using Chrome for 6-8 weeks, I can't go back. Firefox has so many things going for it (history, extensions, compatibility, etc, etc).. but I can't handle the slowness. The JavaScript performance deficit is bad enough, but the outrageous startup time puts it over the top. I'll keep it around for occasional compatibility testing, but it's no longer the go-to browser.

<comment><USER7> Startup time is MUCH improved in Firefox 3.6. Chrome still feels slightly quicker, but we're talking on the order of 100s of milliseconds. For something that I do once a day, at most, the difference is negligible.

<comment><USER6> It does seem to be improved, but on my system (new-ish MBP running OS X), Chrome and Safari startup is nearly instantaneous, and Firefox still lags. I don't know how it compares on Windows.

Still.. bravo to the Firefox team for making a big improvement in this department. My ire is now refocused on the (lack of) JavaScript performance. :-)

<comment><USER7> Do you have a lot of plugins installed? I tested on a 6-month-old MacBook Pro 13", on both OS X and Win7, and Firefox starts up pretty much instantly (less than 500msecs). Agreed, Chrome and Safari seem marginally faster, but I don't close my browser very often, so it really doesn't matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish Firefox would adopt the single location/search field.

<comment><USER9> Firefox lets you customize that. Here's what I do:

1) First, get rid of the search box. Go to View, then Toolbars, then Customize. That will pop up a box with all of the possible wigits you can select. Click on the search box in the upper right portion of your Firefox window and drag it into that box.

2) Now with the search box gone, the next step is to make the location bar act as one. To do this, type "about: config" into the location bar. Then select "keyword.url" and enter "[http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q="](http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q="). Now whatever you type into the location bar that's not a URL will do a Google search. You have to exit and re-start Firefox for this to take effect.

<comment><USER10> furthermore, with the search box gone, apple-k (or ctrl-k or wahtever) will automatically load google search. (whereas before it would focus on the search box)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The slowness eventually drove me to chrome. And so far, not looking back...

<comment><USER12> It strikes me as a bit disingenuous to criticize the performance of a browser while openly admitting that you haven't tried it.

I've been an avid Safari user for years, but switched back to Firefox at 3.6b5. The performance improvements they've made are incredible, and with the GrApple theme applied, it looks just like Safari. Plus, I get back some sorely-missed keyboard shortcuts, Firebug's awesome profiling support, and the "snappiness" that I'm used to in Safari.

But until you've actually tried the latest release (genuinely - not 10 minutes working from a disk image), please consider refraining from commenting. An aspect of the software you used to hate might have been improved.

<comment><USER11> You are right, I should have tried it before. Now I did. It's still so slow as to make me wonder how I ever put up with it.

No Idea what's up with the "hate" terminology. The only browser that can even invoke strong feelings in me would be IE. My comment was simply my spontaneous reaction to the headline, no reason to get all hot & bothered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My javascript performance comparison between Firefox 3.6 and Chrome and Safari

[http://www.manu-j.com/blog/firefox-3-6-vs-chrome-vs- safari-j...](http://www.manu-j.com/blog/firefox-3-6-vs-chrome-vs-safari- javascript-performance/432/)

<comment><USER14> You really should use a test that focuses both on pure JavaScript and also DOM/JavaScript interaction. The fact that Chrome processes JavaScript faster doesn't necessarily mean that Firefox is slower in a real application that interacts with the DOM (although it may be, I'm not sure).

Edit: See <http://dromaeo.com/>

<comment><USER13> Sunspider and V8 are standard javascript benchmarks. I have found that the test results compare favourably to real world usage. For example Google wave is sluggish on firefox while chrome has no problems with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was suffering horrible hangs will some sites updated, notably Facebook.

On upgrading Firefox to 3.6 I had to edit the install.rdf of the "It's all text" extension to allow it to work. I noticed a comment on the Mozilla add- ons site saying that this extension could be the cause of the slowdowns.

Anyway (with the hacked install.rdf) "It's all text" still works in Firefox 3.6 and my slow-downs have gone.

Happy! I didn't want to swap to Chrome without "It's all text", noscript and adblock plus.

<comment><USER16> Hi! I'm working on making It's All Text! work with Firefox 3.6. If you have troubles (such as right clicking on gumdrops) then turning on "Remove all bugs" actually does what it says, for a change. o_O

I looked at doing a chrome version of "It's all text!" but chrome doesn't have a way to launch an external application short of creating an NSPlugin. Which I'm not sure I want to have to support across all the chrome platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Would it be possible for sites to impose a persona onto visitors, like <http://www.getpersonas.com/> does when you mouseover certain areas?

</comment><comment><USER18> It's disappointing that Firefox 3.6 only supports Ogg for their <video> tag, especially since Youtube and Vimeo have started beta testing their html5 players.</comment>


Security vulnerabilities found in China's nationwide installed filter software - <AUTHOR> http://www.cse.umich.edu/~jhalderm/pub/gd/

<comment><USER2> James Fallows argued pretty persuasively that these sorts of things aren't actually relevant to the Chinese government's ability to accomplish effective censorship in his article about the Great Firewall: <http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall>

_What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won't bother. Most Chinese people, like most Americans, are interested mainly in their own country. All around them is more information about China and things Chinese than they could possibly take in. The newsstands are bulging with papers and countless glossy magazines. The bookstores are big, well stocked, and full of patrons, and so are the public libraries. Video stores, with pirated versions of anything. Lots of TV channels. And of course the Internet, where sites in Chinese and about China constantly proliferate. When this much is available inside the Great Firewall, why go to the expense and bother, or incur the possible risk, of trying to look outside?_

The same points arguably hold for the Green Dam.

Edit: I guess I missed the point of the advisory (see comment below). I assumed they were discussing methods of circumventing the system, but after a second (more careful) reading, that's obviously not the biggest concern.

It's really a crappy situation: mandated software that's this broken. Either join a botnet or potentially raise the government's suspicions by uninstalling the software.

<comment><USER3> The point is that the censorship software is mandated in every sold PC in China. If it is so vulnerable and user's machine so eaisly to be taken control of, considering China's population, thounds and thounds PCs may be turned into hacking proxies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The legal consequences of this (in China) are frightening. Imagine a malicious site that uses this vulnerability to download child porn onto the target computer, and then reports the user to The Authorities. Many lives could easily be ruined, as I imagine China does not provide many rights for the accused. (This will probably get you into trouble in the US, too, which is why I make sure all my filesystems are encrypted.)

<comment><USER2> _This will probably get you into trouble in the US, too, which is why I make sure all my filesystems are encrypted._

That's exactly what happened to this guy and he got off: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9970660-7.html>

I don't doubt that there's a sizable chance of getting convicted anyway, but I really hope it's not "probable".

<comment><USER4> The encryption ensures that you avoid charges in the first place.

My imagined dialogue: "We're here to seize your hard drive to see if you are doing anything illegal." "OK." "Damn, it's encrypted, tell us your password." "I refuse to testify against myself." "Uh, you have to." "I forgot the password." "Fuck."

The fishing expedition then ends fairly quickly. (If you really are distributing child porn, though, they will probably get you some other way. This is exactly how the system should work.)

(You might want to have a "honeypot" that can be activated with a certain password so that you don't even have to claim you forgot the password. This could be helpful for avoiding "contempt of court". IMHO, this should not be necessary, but I Am Not The Supreme Court.)

<comment><USER2> Slightly off topic, but I'm curious: what sort of encryption set-up/software do you use? Does it affect access times in any noticeable way?

<comment><USER4> I use LUKS, and it doesn't appear to affect performance much. During heavy disk activity, the crypto threads do use some CPU, but it is not noticeably slow, even on my eeepc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This poses some pretty interesting questions.

1\. Is it mandatory to install such filter software on Linux boxes also? 2\. How do they handle the case where the filter software is chroot'ed in a jail, so that the individual is complying with the letter of the law by installing and running the software, but managing to avoid the ill-effects?

I'm not speaking about censorship etc., just plain curious.

</comment><comment><USER6> Will be fascinating on how China's government responds to this. With any luck these findings will postpone this terrible idea... Or at least get some competent(security focused) people writing this application.</comment>


Continuous Integration in the Cloud, Part II: Jenkins - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jelastic.com/2012/07/25/continuous-integration-in-the-cloud-part-ii-jenkins/

<comment><USER2> I am having to build a monitor/webapp that is called by Jenkins, the monitor then triggers a restore of images cloud server, which when it completes pings back to the moniotr which then retriggers the nex Jenkins job

I have a terrible suspicion I have missed something in the Jenkins manual - anyone have any ideas?</comment>


Cultural Competence vs Core Competence - <AUTHOR> http://avichal.com/2012/04/04/cultural-competence/

<comment><USER2> How well does this lens of core/cultural competence work when focused on Nokia with Windows Phone?

<comment><USER3> Well, Nokia's cultural competance is making mobile communication devices on a radio network. (They are still doing this well in Asia/Africa). But the mobile is now a PC.

Microsoft's cultural competance according to the OP is helping businesses make more efficient use of PCs under their control. But mobiles are now consumer items out of control of businesses.

So it does not bode well.

But it does indicate Nokia / winphone should go after RIMs lunch and not chase Apple, so I think the framework for analysis suggested is pretty useful.

<comment><USER2> _But it does indicate Nokia / winphone should go after RIMs lunch and not chase Apple, so I think the framework for analysis suggested is pretty useful._

Nice one! And the fact that Microsoft already has Skype is interesting in this context as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great post. Makes me want to bring these concepts to my CEOand work out our core and cultural competencies.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice post. Thanks for sharing.</comment>


2011 3D Printing Predictions - <AUTHOR> http://blog.makerbot.com/2010/12/31/2011-3d-printing-predictions/ <comment><USER3> I'm surprised homebrew 3d scanning via kinect (and modded kinects that work at smaller scales) wasn't in there.

</comment><comment><USER4> How did MakerBot get started? Did they commercialize based on RepRap?

<comment><USER5> We got started making repraps but decided to move away from the focus of self replication and start our own thing with the focus of bringing 3D printing to the masses by making a printer that's cheap, uses as many off the shelf parts as possible, and that we could produce with tools we had. We had a lasercutter at NYCResistor and I sat in front of that thing for weeks making the first few hundred MakerBots. We still strive to make our stuff compatible with RepRap machines so that folks who don't want to build the whole thing from scratch can get an extruder or electronics from us and hack it into their built from scratch machine.

<comment><USER6> Why is there a 7 week lead time?

<comment><USER5> Because parts took longer to get to us than expected and we're catching up on the backlog of preorders. It may end up being faster than 7 weeks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 3D printers are going to do for physical products what frameworks did for web apps. Personally, I'm super excited because it's going to chop my product development time into pieces.

<comment><USER8> Really? What do you use a 3D printer for? Last time I checked they were still imprecise to the point of being useless for real world jobs. What printer/material do you use?

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't say it's useless but they aren't primetime. You just can't get the tolerances you need out of them yet. The real world is all about tolerances and non mechanical engineers always forget this. We actually adjust our files for the 3D printer to get the tolerances closer. In the end, the speed, material cost, tolerances and finish won't make these printers ready for the real world in 2011. Sorry guys. And yes I do own a very nice Stratasys 3D printer and have access to an Exojet too.

<comment><USER10> Tolerance gets less important as you move into the consumer market - <USER2> finish is far more important.

Sure, snap-fits need to be pretty tight to work well, but do you really think people will care if their earrings are 0.05" out of round?

The main issue now is really materials and processing cost - it's expensive to get the materials because they're engineered to work with a machine, and there are still things like finish quality, color, etc. that need to improve, but there are tons are good products that can get around these constraints.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> desktop 3D printers are near the top of my list of geek toys/tools I want to get in the next year or so. i just can't justify them yet financially because I don't have any real need to do home prototyping of a physical product. but the moment I do it'll be like, "here comes a tax deduction!"

</comment><comment><USER12> Any predictions on how long until a 3D printer can print a 3D printer?

<comment><USER5> Webca did it this year! <http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3285>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a pretty interesting list, mostly because I think they took what seemed like a 'normal' guess, and stretched it a bit.

All of this happening would be pretty awesome, though.</comment>


Ask HN: Will Apple sub fees apply to in app payments? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on an app that will allow users to charge fees for the services they provide to each other. Is Apple likely to want a cut of this type of transaction also? I'm assuming that it will. <comment><USER2> Apple already charges 30% on in-app purchases</comment>


Why Kubernetes is important for highload projects in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://evrone.com/kubernetes <comment><AUTHOR> Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system that is designed to help you build a scalable infrastructure using high load approaches on a weak server. In this article, we'll show you why Kubernetes is worth using in 2020.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Do you agree with our opinion?</comment>


Ask HN: What to do about healthcare when working on a startup? - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently living off my savings.
What are my options as far as getting a high value healthcare plan?
To be clear I have no income as of now, not sure how that affects government subsidies. <comment><USER2> Have you checked [https://www.healthcare.gov/](https://www.healthcare.gov/) (or [http://www.coveredca.com/](http://www.coveredca.com/) if you're in CA)? If you're living off your savings and have little or no income, your monthly premium should be heavily subsidized.

<comment><USER3> Do this. Much of what the ACA is intended to do (we can debate its effect another day) is address low-income scenarios. Also, consider COBRA (and related state programs) as an intermediate step if available and necessary[1]. Dont' get a part-time job just for insurance...that's a distraction which will sap your energy and focus.

[1] [http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/faqs/faq-consumer- cobra.html](http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/faqs/faq-consumer-cobra.html)

<comment><USER4> Is it ethical to take a government subsidy intended for low- or no-income Americans if you have the savings to start a startup, and presumably the thought capital to be able to work for a real salary if it doesn't work out?

<comment><USER5> Yes. What do you think you paid taxes for while you were building those savings?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would love to see some kind of streamlined startup system. You apply, pay a nominal fee, if accepted--you're then set up with a corporation, standard offering documents, digital captable, vested founders agreements. The government offers HC for companies with less than $1.5m funding and lifts all of the legal overhead associated with employment/compliance issues--at least for a short period of time. Starting a startup is hard, you give up a lot of your life, opportunity cost, take on a lot of risk, mess with your health, and then you have to deal with all of the legal and admin costs--it's a tax on innovation.

</comment><comment><USER7> Just buy health care. Since you have no income you qualify for subsidies under ACA/Obamacare (but even without those subsidies the plans available are much better than the ones before the law passed).

The ACA is one of the most entrepreneur-friendly laws passed in my lifetime. Big businesses don't like it because health care is one way to retain employees, and so the lobbyists screwed it up a bit for medium businesses. But while starting, it's a lifeline.

COBRA from your previous employer is probably more expensive.

</comment><comment><USER8> It sounds like it's not viable at this moment, but later down the line you could use a PEO (professional employment organization) for your startup. This would give you health insurance in addition to a bunch of other benefits and services.

Professional organizations (like IEEE) offer insurance plans. Another possibility are shopping clubs like Costco. I haven't used either, but include them as possibilities in case you weren't aware.

</comment><comment><USER9> I had a health insurance expert tell me with a straight face that she recommends getting a part time job at Starbucks to her clients. Apparently they give great health benefits to part time employees.

<comment><AUTHOR> Believe it or not I actually considered that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You may want to consider a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP), which generally offer lower monthly premiums for a higher deductible. This reduces your monthly cost but should something happen, would require more paid out of pocket before insurance contributes. The main benefit is a safety net in case something serious happens.

Additionally, with an HDHP you may be eligible for a Health Savings Account (HSA), which are tax advantaged savings for medical coverage, reducing your cost of care.

If you're interested in HSA's I have blogged on their benefits[1] and wrote a web app to track your HSA spending[2].

[1] [http://www.hsaedge.com/](http://www.hsaedge.com/) [2] [http://www.trackhsa.com](http://www.trackhsa.com)

<comment><USER11> Absolutely consider an HDHP. I did a ton of analysis on how much I paid in premiums versus how much was actually paid out on my insurance plan, and I discovered that in a typical year on my old "gold" plan, I paid out twice as much in premiums as the insurance company paid on my behalf. To put this in real terms, I paid $12k in premiums and I needed $6k in care. My HDHP premium is more like $1.5k, and although the idea is that I pay for everything out of pocket, I've been surprised at the amount of stuff that's been covered as "preventative". And the out-of-pocket maximum is capped on the HDHP to barely more than the amount I paid in premiums on the "gold" plan. I encourage you to run the numbers. It's really eye-opening.

<comment><USER12> It's interesting to see different people have such different experiences. For me, my wife and I both have chronic health issues, in her case more serious ones, and so HDHP makes no sense for us. I can see how for people without those issues it can make a lot of sense if you use your insurance less for chronic treatment and more for preventative care and, as you said, a safety net. On the plus side, you can generally switch from HDHP to a low deductible plan at the next plan year start date should your situation change (as ours did).

<comment><USER11> Yeah, that makes sense. The way it works out for me, even a year with astronomical healthcare costs is only going to cost me a couple thousand more because of the HDHP, and I saved nearly $8k last year due to the extremely low premiums, even after considering the out-of-pocket healthcare costs for my whole family. The way I look at it, that $8k has already paid for 2-3 hypothetical worst-case years sometime in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Go without? What's the worst that can happen? You go bankrupt? Surely you've accepted that possibility already, if you're living on savings, and knowing that most startups fail.

<comment><USER14> This is horrible horrible horrible advice that may or may not have been facetious.

The main reason, in my experience, for having health insurance is that you DO NOT receive the same standard of care with it, even in emergencies.

I discovered this when I accidentally cut one of my digits nearly off, and had no health insurance. I did not receive the same standard of emergency care, even though I had the money to pay. I was scheduled for repair surgery over a week after the injury and literally needed to show the money before any procedures to save the digit because it was considered "elective" to do more than just stop the bleeding.

So if you do not have the money to pay, you might be astonished at what procedures are considered "elective" or "non-emergency."

Forget bankruptcy, insurance coverage influences quality of care, and access to care, regardless of what popular conception is.

<comment><USER15> Can't upvote your comment enough. A lot of Americans have this (utterly incorrect) idea that emergency room care is free and equal for everybody. That's only (somewhat) true when it comes to _preventing you from dying right now in this hospital_.

As a college student, I was studying abroad and came back on vacation. A buddy crashed our car and I went face-first through the window. I went to the nearby Alta Bates hospital in Berkeley. Maybe it was the privileged white vibe I exuded, but I was immediately attended to by three different nurses, who cleaned up the wounds and told me all about the stitches I was going to get, and how Dr. So-and-so (forget the name) was so good and he would be with me soon. Meanwhile, after stopping the bleeding, they asked me to fill out some paperwork.

After I filled it out (listing "None" as my insurer) I never saw Dr. So-and-so or even any of the nurses again. I got five packaged alcohol wet-napkins and was sent on my way. I have a bunch of permanent scar tissue inside my mouth as a result.

Still, in my case, I thought the experience was worth it to me personally as a learning experience.

But I am old enough now to know lots of people in the USA who have gone up against cancer. Some with good insurance, some with typical insurance, and some with none. The people with no insurance didn't get anywhere near the level of care that the others did.

If you are unlucky enough to contract a serious and dangerous disease, following am6110's advice above will probably increase your chances of suffering and dying prematurely, or even avoidably.</comment></comment></comment>


Hands-on Techniques To Avoid Hiring Wantrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://infochachkie.com/hands-on-techniques-to-avoid-hiring-wantrepreneurs/

<comment><USER2> Asking questions unrelated to the duties of the job is pretty lame. Focus on a person's accomplishments and ability to do the job. Until you put someone to work, you won't know what they ate really capable of anyway.

<comment><USER3> I totally disagree. "Accomplishments" are what you rely on when hiring someone for a big company. When hiring entrepreneurs, their resumes are often misleading / worthless.

See this article for a more complete discussion of this thought: <http://infochachkie.com/hiring/>

<comment><USER2> Accomplishments totally matter. Being able to show some work you've done is huge. How can anyone argue with success?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: which internship to take? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a university student (in Australia) and my uni runs an internships program with local IT companies. I've got two offers and am having trouble deciding between them.
One company is a large multinational. They have a corporate culture; uniforms for all, monthly compulsory drinks & awards sessions, conferences, etc. They couldn't tell me which team I'd be in (so could only say I'd use java or .net). Team sizes are 6-8 and there's about 80 people all up.
Company two is government funded but relatively independent. About 30 people, office space looks relaxed and colorful. Had a definite job description. One of my uni friends works part time there. Pay is a few thousand less than company 1 and they didn't mention and similar perks.
Both jobs are full time.
At this point I really can't decide which way to go. This is my first internship so any advice is appreciated. Cheers! <comment><USER3> At this early stage in your career 'd say you should maximize exposure rather than try to optimize for some trait of the company (relaxed, colorful company, etc.), so I'd say go with the first one. Maybe your internship won't be as fun as teh otehr one but (i) it'll be a resume buster, (ii) you may want use them to jump over to another country later, and (iii) you'll meet more people.

Getting older, you'll find that you'll find yourself inadvertently switching from breadth first to depth first search for happiness/fulfillment in life, so better cast the net wide while you're young.

</comment><comment><USER4> In what seems like an eternity ago I had a similar decision to make - <USER2> between a very large (100k+ employees; non-IT focus) organisation and what today would probably have been called a startup (~10 people across 2 continents; IT product development & sales)

I chose (your) option 1, partly because I figured they were a good company to have on my cv whatever the outcome, and partly because they offered a few k more a year. Frankly I think you should try to ignore the money aspect, but when a few k is a sizeable percentage of your total salary, I know this is difficult to do.

10+ years later I've lived in 3 countries, flown business a lot more often then I would probably have paid for myself, and enjoyed the sort of perks you seem to like the look of in option 1. I've done some interesting technology based work along the way, but I've also done a lot of administrativa.

In my case, it was important that the organisation kept trading for the duration of my year's internship, or I wouldn't have recieved the course credit. If this is applicable to you, it is something to consider in your choice. Remember both organisations (their Australian office at least) could have risks in this regard.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> From my own personal experience, I would avoid the first offer. I'd say there's more chance that everything you'll learn at the first place will be how _not_ to do things. It is actually a great way to learn, but it's also very draining.

</comment><comment><USER6> At this point in your career path, I would say that both offer an experience from which you will be able to judge the kind of environment more suitable for you.

[When I was in Company One kind of place, I didn't learn much.]

</comment><comment><USER7> Company two. I don't understand why you hesitate. Is it the pay?

</comment><comment><USER8> You said you want to go to 2, so go to 2.</comment>


AIDungeon, a deep learning generated text adventure (browser playable) - <AUTHOR> http://aidungeon.io <comment><USER2> I just jumped down a pit full of men's panties while wearing a maid's outfit. Not sure where exactly this is going, but nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks haha! It's sometimes incoherent, but it's fun!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> AI Dungeon is an AI generated text adventure that uses deep learning to create each adventure. It uses OpenAI's new GPT-2 model, which has 117 million parameters, to generate each story block and possible action. I started making it as a hackathon project and decided to make it a web app so people can have fun with it. Let me know what you think.

<comment><USER3> Keep going! Has potential ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


What is the best Linux distro for web dev? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> To me web dev is all about customizing your work environment. Having said that, I recommend Arch Linux, because of its simplicity and high degree of customization. Starting and stopping daemons, i.e. MySQL, Mongo, Redis, etc is very straight forward. The Arch repositories, including AUR have every possible development tool you can think of, so you won't have to compile anything from source.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ubuntu LTS variants allow the creation of 'PPA' repos of your own, so you can use apt-get for your own software.

You upload a source file & it makes a package out of it for you.

<https://help.launchpad.net/Packaging/PPA>

<comment><USER4> You can pretty much make a package for any distro on the planet to be installed using the default package manager. This isn't unique to Ubuntu LTS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The best distro for web dev is the one that most closely matches your production server.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks! I'll look into these.</comment>


UC Berkeley boosts Latino admissions by 40% in one year - <AUTHOR> https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/07/16/uc-berkeleys-push-for-more-diversity-shows-in-its-newly-admitted-class/ <comment><USER2> Since the press release didn't bother to, lets compare UC Berkeley's (UCB) admissions [1] to California's demographics (CAL) for 2018 [2], to see how much work on diversity they have left to do:

                        UCB %    CAL %   UCB/CAL
      Black              5.04     5.51   0.92
      American Indian    0.44     0.35   1.27
      Latino            28.93    39.29   0.74
      Pacific Islander   0.18     0.36   0.49
      Asian             42.43    14.52   2.92
      White             18.53    36.64   0.51

That's odd. The press release doesn't mention them doing anything about correcting the under-representation of white students, despite them being tied with Pacific Islanders for most under-represented. In fact, they're not even counted as an under-represented group (URG) in their tables [1].

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

[1] [https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic- plannin...](https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic- planning/content-analysis/ug-admissions/ug-pages/admissions.html)

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

<comment><USER3> I suppose that might due to ideology, similar to how the 2nd and 3rd wave of feminism see things differently.

Do you want to ensure a fair future by enforcing equal treatment now? Or do you want to rectify past wrongs by temporarily discriminating in the opposite direction?

If the current student body was 90% white, then you'd need a very low white admission rate to get it down to 36% like the CA average.

<comment><USER4> It depends who you ask your questions. If it's a poor white guy with family who came here from Albania, maybe he shouldn't care about "past wrongs"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Affirmative action in California is banned by Proposition 209, which passed in 1996.

Its great they are making an effort to boost diversity, but I don't see how a single year jump this large was accomplished without implementing affirmative action.

The UC system already has an ongoing lawsuit over affirmative action in their admission practices, it's a bit scary that they are now so blatantly violating state law.

<comment><USER6> Based on the article, this was done mainly through targeted outreach. Are you saying it constitutes affirmative action for a university to direct its outreach efforts toward one part of the state versus another? Note that average SAT, ACT, and GPA were unchanged from last year, so academic standards were not compromised one iota.

<comment><USER5> The UC system has a common application and students rarely apply to only one school. The impacts of any outreach effort should be seen across the entire UC system and not just Berkeley. Based on the data for the entire UC system, you can see that is not the case [https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research- academic-plannin...](https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic- planning/_files/factsheets/2020/fall-2020-admission-table-2-1.pdf)

What has changed though is that UCB has a new admissions dean.

<comment><USER6> > The impacts of any outreach effort should be seen across the entire UC > system and not just Berkeley.

You say this as if I'm just supposed to accept it, but I don't believe it. UCB, along with UCLA, are the top tier of the UC system. I don't think it's a big stretch to think that someone who might be applying to UCB wouldn't be applying to UCSD.

I'm not coming straight out and saying you're wrong here, but I am saying this is a statement that needs supporting.

<comment><USER7> Anecdotally, I applied to only 2 UCs: Berkeley and UCSD. Several of my friends that applied to (and some of whom who attended) Berkeley and UCLA also applied to UCSD, UCSC, or UCSB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> At the expense of how many Asian admissions?

<comment><USER9> On average wealthy Indian and Chinese have more experience and education than white students.

Based on population numbers alone, the top US colleges would be solely dominated by this group.

Are American universities for wealthy international students from Asia only or US citizens?

If citizens only, your statement is a non-issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are enough competitive Asian-American US citizens for the the statement to not be a non-issue.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Discover HaxeFlixel - <AUTHOR> http://discover-haxeflixel.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here, this is a book I've been writing in the past few months about my favourite game-making framework of yet - a port of the excellent flixel framework for Haxe.

I used it to make [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.leongame.p...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.leongame.polaritron) and found the development process very rewarding.

HaxeFlixel 4.0.0 came out just a few weeks ago and it's a massive update with lots of improvements - great time to start making games if you ever wanted to experiment with this field.

</comment><comment><USER2> Instabuy. Looks great just flipping through it, can't wait to read it.

This is great, now I have something to recommend to people when they ask me, "how can i learn to maek game?"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I've used Game Maker and Unity in the past, but with HaxeFlixel something just clicked. The fact that it's open source and free to use as well is really the cherry on the cake.</comment></comment>


The search for slogans - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wakoopa.com/archives/the-search-for-slogans <comment><USER2> Some of those are pretty good. I'd say a slogan (one-liner tag, really) just needs to quickly justify your company's existence. Making it snazzy and memorable wouldn't hurt either, but there are probably more important details you could worry about.</comment>


Show HN: Setup Secure CoreOS Cluster with Terraform - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RichardKnop/coreos-cluster <comment><AUTHOR> An example of how to provision a CoreOS cluster on AWS using Terraform. This example sets up a VPC, private and public networks, NAT server, an RDS database, a CoreOS cluster and a private Docker registry and properly configures tight security groups.

The cluster is configured via cloud-config user data and runs etcd2.service and fleet.service. All peer and client traffic is encrypted using self signed certificates.

A private Docker registry is also created at registry.local and Docker nodes are properly configured to use it.

I have also deployed an example API from here: [https://github.com/RichardKnop/example- api](https://github.com/RichardKnop/example-api)

All secrets are protected with Ansible Vault.</comment>


A fast and fully-featured autocomplete library - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.github.io/typeahead.js/

<comment><AUTHOR> Features Displays suggestions to end-users as they type Shows top suggestion as a hint (i.e. background text) Works with hardcoded data as well as remote data Rate-limits network requests to lighten the load Allows for suggestions to be drawn from multiple datasets Supports customized templates for suggestions Plays nice with RTL languages and input method editors</comment>


Ask HN: Building a Computer in Jesus's Time - <AUTHOR> I keep thinking about if I suddenly went back in time, how hard would it be to make a computer?<p>Could I at least make a vacuum tube? <comment><USER2> Perhaps not exactly what you have in mind, but there is the Antikythera mechanism [0][1], the first known analog computer, dating back to about 100-200 BCE which exhibits gear-work that one doesn't see for another 1500 years or so. The device calculates the phases of the moon and the motion of the known planets and more for any date over a 76 year cycle. It takes into account the retrograde motion of Mars, can calculate the dates of eclipses, etc. There are videos on YouTube showing how it is supposed to have worked, e.g. [2].

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

[1] [https://www.age-of-the- sage.org/archaeology/antikythera_mech...](https://www.age-of-the- sage.org/archaeology/antikythera_mechanism.html)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE)

</comment><comment><USER3> Given limited technology and the desire for something electric and programmable I think your best bet would be a relay computer. Konrad Zuse built the Z1 entirely out of hand-cut sheet metal strips in his parents' living room:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_%28computer%29?wprov=sfla1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_%28computer%29?wprov=sfla1)

That said, you would need lots of flexible ferrous metal and a source of electricity, probably large voltaic piles. And you would need to find a way to produce and insulate large amounts of wire.

<comment> java-man one could build logic gates with ropes (and elephants).

[0] [https://www.jstor.org/stable/24989059?seq=1](https://www.jstor.org/stable/24989059?seq=1)

[1] [https://www.i-programmer.info/news/112-theory/7370-pulleys-a...](https://www.i-programmer.info/news/112-theory/7370-pulleys- as-logic-gates.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well... Wikipedia, in the article on glassblowing, says that the earliest example came from Jerusalem, dated from 37 to 4 BC.

Making the metal parts was well within their power. At least the shapes, though maybe not the alloys that we would use. Getting that shape inside the blown glass might be harder, given the tech of the day.

Getting a vacuum in it might be the hardest step. In fact, I don't know that it was possible at all, given the tech they had available. The first vacuum pump was in 1654.

</comment><comment> java-man If you suddenly went back in time, you would be floating in vaccum of space millions of miles away from Earth, so the answer is probably no.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are several appropriate times in history when the necessary details were aligned for rapid (<200 year) progress from basic manual labor industry to advanced manufacturing. I assume that a mechanical pre-computer like Babbage's difference engine, rather than a fully reprogrammable electrical system, is acceptable.

Certainly within the history of China, India, and various African, Greek, and Middle Eastern cultures, complex mechanical devices with sequencers and even primitive logic gates were being implemented. See, for example [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_al- Jazari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_al-Jazari) as well as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_dynasty#Alchemy,_gas_cyli...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_dynasty#Alchemy,_gas_cylinders,_and_air_conditioning) as examples where societies combined the necessary wealth, stability, education, social and religious culture to build very impressive mechanical devices.

I'm going to assume also that you have The Knowledge ([https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DMCV5YS](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DMCV5YS)) all the way up to basic electronics.

At that point you would have everything required to gather people and money and time to build a relay- or vacuum-tube based computer. I recommend reading the early sections of The Idea Factory [https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory- Great-American-Innovatio...](https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great- American-Innovation/dp/0143122797) describing what the early Bell Labs was like. Many modern innovations came from itinerant scientists who interned at Bell Labs, learned to make vacuum tubes by hand (IE, blowing air precisely into molten glass, and sealing the various electronics in place) and then left to found companies that utilized tubes (for example, Beckman went through this process and used the acquired knowledge to build a vacuum-tube based amplifier which was critical to the modern pH meter).

Now, a few challenges. Since you're just dropping back into a society that hasn't undergone an industrial revolution, you don't have a bunch of useful cross-supporting things like a healthy industry that makes high quality alloy steel for you, or optics companies which design and sell sophisticated lens assemblies for high quality telescopes to debug your work, or electronics companies pumping out millions of standard resistors with tight variances, etc. Without those, many steps that would be trivial would instead take extended time. Also, the absence of a statistical quality culture (see Deming) and the fact that most components will be built by hand by artisans means that your computer will not be very reliable (producing incorrect results, or breaking often).

On top of that, you'll probably face skepticism because your early computers won't be able to do anything useful compared to skilled humans. You would probably do best by finding a local military leader and convincing them you could help with ballistics calculations...</comment>


Poor Man's Email? - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/03/04/poorMansEmail.html

<comment><USER2> His speculation on Google 160 character limit is curious. Twitter made it 140 to allow for usernames and the colon prefix. There is a real reason for it, not a sacred "140 characters is arbitrary and magical" feeling Twitter is holding on to.

[http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was- born...](http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born/)

Since 160 characters is/was the common limit to SMS -- which I think carriers themselves define, it feels like the author is missing a pretty key element in Twitter's implementation. The reserved 20 characters _is for_ metadata. I don't know the SMS protocol at all, but I suspect if Twitter could have dropped metadata into a header or somesuch, they would have.

<comment><USER3> Yes, the idea that there is any extra room in the SMS protocol for metadata that Twitter is somehow missing is completely retarded.

(Source: I spent 2 years building SMS-based applications for a mobile content company. I can format my SMS in binary, and trust me, there's no space in there.)

<comment><USER4> Most people don't use Twitter over SMS any more.

<comment><USER5> I never got that unless you followed about 4 people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _But one thing I never thought of Twitter as was Poor Man's Email, which is how Google CEO Eric Schmidt described it to analysts yesterday._ ...

 _I couldn't imagine two things being more different, Twitter and email._

 _1\. Twitter is primarily one-to-many, where email is primarily one-to-one._

 _2\. Twitter is by default public, where email is by default private._

So why would Schmidt equate them, if they are so different?

This is the interesting question raised by the post. I'm not sure how to answer it; but my guess is that the answer is unlikely to be found by thinking about the details of the SMS protocol.

<comment><USER7> Here's my best stab at it, from the perspective of a guy who saw the internet in its infancy (not myself):

Email was the first great asynchronous digital mass communication tool built on the store-and-forward idea. Twitter (or SMS'd tweets, really) is another, much more limited form of the same technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Funny, I've been calling it a poor man's IRC from the start. I'll still take good mailing lists over Twitter any day, though.

<comment><USER9> At least a decent mail/news client will track and aggregate all of your unread messages for easy consumption to keep up with the topics. Explicit threading in mail/news is just icing on the cake to make conversations so much easier to stay on top of.

Twitter is the smoke signals of internet communication by comparison.

<comment><USER8> Twitter also happens to be 95% noise. At least if someone is rambling in a mailing list, I know they're rambling on-topic. The tweet that made me stop opening my Twitter client entirely? "Just saw dog poop in the street."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think Google will try to create a Twitter clone but in the same fashion as Youtube, will end up discontinuing it and buying out Twitter.

I believe it's almost like a hazing ritual or proving ground. Twitter has enormous potential to integrate Google's Adsense (or more recently, FriendSense) or become another distributive voice for their products.

The question though is, does Twitter want to be bought? Is Google too big now to let Twitter remain truly innovative (I know the catch to this argument is that Twitter has not been very innovative at all actually)?

I have a feeling some big things will be rolling out the door. The founders have been smart enough to let the user base define the product, and I certainly believe that when the time is right, Twitter will be a killer.

Hopefully they don't wait too long though.

<comment><USER11> >I think Google will try to create a Twitter clone but in the same fashion as Youtube, will end up discontinuing it and buying out Twitter.

They already did this: Jaiku

<http://www.jaiku.com/>

What's the point of trying to buy out Twitter when you've already bought out a Twitter-clone.

<comment><USER12> Jaiku is a great twitter clone and can be improved much more to dethrone it.

But the first thing they need to do is change that stupid name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am surprised that Windows 7 doesn't have an inbuilt Twitter competitor (or does it?). With ICQ, lots of companies managed to grab a share, with Twitter nobody even seems to be trying. Weird.</comment>


Still More About The Death Of Aaron Swartz - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/aaron-swartz-case-011713 <comment><USER2> I think this article speaks to why the case is getting so much attention. Lets presume for the sake of argument the trial didn't contribute to the suicide in the slightest. But it did cause us to look at the case, and you can't just un- see the fact that maybe you're not entirely comfortable with the way justice is being carried out in your name.

We tend to trust in our legal system, one way or another. Even if that way is by ignoring it and assuming everything will sort itself out. Events like Aaron's suicide put it on your radar in a way that makes some of the public sit up and reexamine whether or not the power we have entrusted in others, to carry out our buisness, is being exercised as we would like it to be.

Something smells like bullshit about the case, and just because a prosecutor with political ambition can issue a cover-your-ass statement isn't entirely comforting when faced with the convoluted web that extends beyond her to the entire nature of justice in the country.

Welcome to being a citizen in a democracy, please stay engaged beyond this single case.

edited: speeling

<comment><USER3> As much as my personal beliefs align with Aaron's and I am saddened by his passing, I think people are being more than a little disingenuous in their references to the charges he was facing.

I'd understand the indignation if we were talking about an actual sentence, but these were just charges. The maximum possible sentence for those charges might be dizzying, but realistically, Aaeron was never going to be handed the maximum.

<comment><USER4> I experienced "just charges" a few months ago after just getting steady employment a week prior. A cop in a suburban community was bored to shit and decided to run tags on the borrowed car which I was driving which wasnt registered with the state ($38 fee) which he proceed to tow about half a mile (cost $176) and charge me a days worth of work to appear in court to pay $100 in court costs to have the charges dismissed. Totally innocent. Charges are not free.

<comment><USER5> Cops will often pursue petty things in hopes of discovering something more serious to charge you with. By impounding your car, they are clear to search it without your consent.

This happened to me a few years ago in Maryland. As a new resident, I didn't realize I needed to fill out a form called FR-19. My registration was flagged, and an Anne Arundel cop pulled me over one evening.

As luck would have it, my insurance paperwork was a few months out of date. Strike two. I was given several charges adding up to a year in jail, my car was towed, and I walked home.

After buying new license plates to replace the ones he took, I picked my car up from the lot ($250+). Everything inside was strewn haphazardly; even the ash trays were turned up. You know what they were looking for.

The good news? A few months later, the court dropped all charges when they realized I had insurance the whole time. No harm done!

<comment><USER4> Right. The whole registration revocation was in their system with the car I was driving was because of an insurance lapse on the owner's part that was already taken care of, but either hadn't registered in their bullshit system yet or had and he just saw fit to fuck with me. Either way, too much power is entrusted to these people; from the federal to municipal, gov't is rife with grade A stupidity and abusiveness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't particularly think there's much to be gained by going against the hivemind on all of this, but I also don't "blame" the prosecutors for Aaron's death. Aaron killed himself. Suicide and depression are tricky things, and not one single person currently living knows what the full story is. If that's enough to get me labeled as "usually reasonable" as well, then so be it.

<comment><USER7> When you say things like "we don't know the full story" or "suicide is tricky", you aren't taking a reasonable middle-of-the-road position you're effectively endorsing the status quo. By refusing to pick a side when there is a disagreement or struggle between groups of unequal strength you still pick a side: you side with the stronger group. When people are bullied, be it in the schoolyard on by the government, the power difference is immense. That means by default the bully will win. It's just that simple.

We don't have all the information. In life you never have the information you need to make perfect decisions. But we can ask ourselves if we're OK with the status quo, and if not, try to change it.

To reduce the whole affair to simply "Aaron killed himself." is crude and far from reasonable.

<comment><USER8> _By refusing to pick a side when there is a disagreement or struggle between groups of unequal strength you still pick a side: you side with the stronger group._

"Blame" is an interesting concept though. In almost any complicated scenario, there is plenty of "blame" to be spread around and you can reasonably argue that multiple different entities are to "blame" for $WHATEVER.

To use a somewhat tangential example... when Ron Paul talked a lot about "blowback" vis-a-vis US policy in the Middle East a few years ago, people said "Ron Paul is blaming America for 9/11". Well, yes... and no. What Ron was saying, in essence, is that there is culpability in multiple places, which is a more nuanced position than "America is good, terrorists are bad, Team America, Fuck Yeah!" OR "We were responsible for 9/11".

So with that in mind... I don't exactly "blame" the prosecutors for Aaron's suicide either. But that doesn't mean I don't think they hold _some_ degree of responsibility, and it doesn't mean I support the status quo, or that I don't want changes made in the law, the sentencing guidelines and the behaviour of prosecutors.

IOW, it's not necessarily the case that either "side" bears 100% of the responsibility for what happened.

<comment><USER9> Basically my thought is that blame is not zero sum. Assigning some blame from one party should not in any way be taken to mean another party is not less to blame. Multiple parties could each be (for lack of better terminology) "100% to blame".

<comment><USER10> Mathematics isn't failing here. You're mixing contexts. If you look at it from the perspective of the victim, it's less than 100% of the blame. If you look at it from the perspective of a single perpetrator, they're 100% to blame because the other perpetrator doesn't absolve them of any of the blame. If you try to add the 100% of each perpetrator in isolation together, you're making an error.

<comment><USER9> My point isn't that mathematics is failing somehow, but rather that blame or responsibility is something that cannot be summed. Trying to do so is like trying to add up happiness and sadness. Ethics, and the underlying human emotion, don't have a system of arithmetic that we are aware of.

<comment><USER10> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A focus on the prosecutor helps distract attention from the question of whether and how Swartz was mistreated by being made a (somewhat artificial) "tech celebrity" at a very young age only to become a kind of semi-outcast in some tech circles just a few years later.

<comment><USER12> Bingo. I've been trying not to say petty things out of respect for recently departed people and his family, with whom I sympathize for this terrible, terrible thing.

But the radical loss of perspective here is just jarring, and the case is big enough now that it's hard to refrain from trying to put things into perspective. I am aware of the full history, having been a programmer with significant open-source and other contributions through the 90s and early 2000s. Aaron is being totally misremembered.

Of those who knew of him before his death - and he was not a "celebrity" or "famous" or considered "brilliant" or a "genius" by technologists - most knew him as a blogger. He was actually a very good writer, even from a young age. He wrote with clarity and purpose, and he had many interests. His technical output was not major. To pull a random name out of a hat, his contributions were less than someone like Craig McClanahan and far less than someone like Brian Behlendorf. Basically, Aaron got a chance with Y Combinator, which he parlayed into a merger with Reddit's parent company, mostly through personal connections. Aaron didn't get end up getting along with Alexis or Steve, who considered him immature, dramatic, and unreliable. Reddit was shortly rewritten entirely, and web.py was too buggy to make any further contribution to Reddit. Aaron was fired from Reddit's acquirer because he didn't bother doing anything after the payout. He then floated around, wrote a few minor libraries and some more interesting blog posts, and then became a very good activist worthy of deeper respect on that front. He wasn't actually a tech celebrity before his death. He didn't "invent RSS." He didn't singlehandedly "defeat SOPA." His work on RSS 1.0, a version of RSS that was never significant itself, was mostly of interest to the semantic-web people, who have themselves have never made much of an impact, although the work is interesting to some.

I didn't know Aaron personally, but I do think his volatile relationships with others and his desire to be famous within this community were a source of extreme anxiety for him, though probably more so in the past than recently. But his professional life was, perhaps understandably, extremely frustrating for reasons that had nothing to do with his criminal case.

That's not an attack. Most people don't make major technical contributions. But I wish people would see this case for what it is - a volatile activist who pulled a stunt that spiraled out of control.

<comment><USER13> I've read many of your comments and am glad you've been posting them. They're well-written and well-reasoned, and I hope you stick around in the future and continue to speak your mind with the freedom that your current format seems to be providing. The combination of legal and technical expertise is valuable and rare.

That being said, your comments seem to me to pooh-pooh the impact of what the prosecutors/system did in this case as (a) standard practice and (b) not that big a deal. Most people here (well, I anyway) did not know much about this and, having learned it, feel that it _is_ a big deal. This makes me wonder whether your senses have been dulled by taking too much of that standard practice for granted. Maybe the people here to whom this is new and disturbing are not the only ones experiencing "radical loss of perspective".

It's straightforward to explain why Aaron's story has had such an impact on this and similar communities: he is easy for many of us to identify with, so the shock has a personal effect. This isn't hypocritical, it's human nature: one takes in this kind of information through the emotional medium of a story one can identify with. There's no contradiction between that and learning that a great many less-advantaged people get treated far more abusively still – quite the opposite.

Setting aside the obviously dumb comments as a cost of doing business on a public forum such as this, I am also pretty sure that people here are not nearly as naive about Aaron's personal history as your critique and the GP's suggest. Taste enters into this.

<comment><USER14> Taste cuts both ways though. I'm seriously concerned about how younger people in the community might respond to the hagiography. I'm afraid that some might come to believe that the CFAA isn't a real law so there's no problem with breaking it or that suicide is the best way for activists to enact real change.

<comment><USER13> That there's "no problem with breaking" the CFAA is the last conclusion anyone will draw from this tragedy.

<comment><USER14> I see a lot of people writing about how they change their MAC address all the time so what did Aaron do that was so wrong?

Granick writes in a well-read post about how Swartz didn't really break any laws -- everyone on MIT's network was legally entitled to download JSTOR as fast as they wanted to and apparently MIT had no right to keep anyone off its network.

There's a pervasive social norm that says 'if you can use tech to get something, then doing so is legal'; lots of people find the CFAA normatively absurd, in the same way that we might find a law against eating asparagus on sundays absurd. You see that in all the defenses that start from the premise that not only is Swartz innocent but that there's no conceivable crime he could have committed.

<comment><USER15> > apparently MIT had no right to keep anyone off its network.

What? How could some institution not have a right to keep somebody else off its own network? That makes no sense at all. Don't forget both JSTOR and MIT (after JSTOR contacted them) tried to block Swartz's massive downloads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One sad aspect of this event, that I see rarely mentioned, is that Swartz knowingly taunted the legal system to test its response, which he sadly was inadquately patient in using to his own advantage. Had he really intended to make a lasting point, perhaps he'd have more effectively done so by risking prosecution, refusing to spend any money on legal fees, as he was obviously eloquent himself. The public awareness of a trial's outcome may have been as extreme and intense as that of his unfortunate choice. Importantly, the world wouldn't have lost him so early, and, importantly, he would have been a wonderful voice in explaining the flaws in the process through its completion.

<comment><USER17> Thank you for this very insightful comment. Food for thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I appreciate this article because this is someone outside the tech milieu bandbox that basically comes to the exact same conclusions as the tech insiders about prosecutorial blindness and overreach.

</comment><comment><USER19> I really have no stance on this (in that I don't side with Aaron or the prosecutors in the case), because I don't have all the facts. Some of you may say that that is a stance, but I just don't see it that way. I am aware, however, that what I'm about to say may be considered controversial given the nature of how this case is being reported--and how it's being responded to.

Whenever we have shootings like the one in Newtown, we talk about gun control and mental health care. There is always that talk about mental health care. But when someone commits suicide, regardless of cause, those same mental health advocates are nowhere to be found. Why?

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of people who have it worse than Aaron Swartz did, but they don't go killing themselves. Some people lose their spouses and children in house fires, along with all of their belongings. They spiral into depression, lose their jobs, go back to living with friends or family, see nothing but bleak prospects and they ultimately pull out of it. Others lose their fortunes and things they've spent their lives working for, a few of them do commit suicide, like the ones after the 2008 financial collapse, but some don't. There are people who commit crimes and know they face stiff prison sentences, like life sentences or death penalties, but they don't kill themselves.

I could go on and on about how much worse it is for people in third-world countries, for those who don't know where their food and clean water are going to come from day in and day out. I could go on about the people who are brutally bullied, day in and day out.

Many of these people, some in arguably worse condition than Aaron Swartz was in prior to his death, don't kill themselves. So when we're faced with a case like Swartz's, why are we so quick to find someone to blame?

Yes, prosecutors were overreaching and giving him hell, but they didn't kill him. He killed himself. Hell, there are people who are currently serving long or life sentences in prison who are innocent of the crimes brought against them, but they're fighting and hoping from within their cells. Many of them are not committing suicide.

All I'm trying to say is it takes a lot more than a prison sentence, 6 months or 50 years, to get most people to kill themselves. And yet hardly anyone is talking about mental health care.

<comment><USER20> Excellent points.

"So when we're faced with a case like Swartz's, why are we so quick to find someone to blame?"

Let me answer that for you by quoting Rahm Emanuel:

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

<comment><USER19> I've never heard that quote before, and as sad as it is, it's a pretty damn good one. Honestly, prior to his suicide, I didn't really know much about Aaron Swartz, and I certainly had no idea that the U.S. prosecuted this harshly for what seems like a mild/minor crime.

<comment><USER21> Understand that "never let a crisis go to waste" was also the mindset that allowed the Bush administration to pivot from 9/11 response to invading Iraq-- despite a complete lack of connection between the two.

My point is that while crisis creates opportunity, it does not justify all responses. It does not exempt us from the need to soberly and (as much as possible) objectively consider the merits of what people propose to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's relieving to read pieces like this. That last paragraph was spot on. The top comments got me laughing at "Those poor old bosses need all the help they can get".

</comment><comment><USER23> So what happens next time one of Ortiz's targets decides to die, rather than face trial?</comment>


This World of Ours (2014) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thisworldofours.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> This is the article with the famous "Mossad" quotation.</comment>


Did I really go to Harvard if I got my degree taking online classes? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/did-i-really-go-to-harvard-if-i-got-my-degree-taking-online-classes/279644/http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/did-i-really-go-to-harvard-if-i-got-my-degree-taking-online-classes/279644/

<comment><USER2> Title link didn't work for me, try this one [http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/did- i-r...](http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/did-i-really-go- to-harvard-if-i-got-my-degree-taking-online-classes/279644/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I am not sure what happened there. Thanks.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should you commit package-lock.json? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN,
We are trying to decide if we should commit package-lock to version control for our JavaScript project.
It is generally considered a good practice to commit package-lock to version control to avoid breaking anything due to the dependency updates and thus we have been committing it till now.
However, we are facing some problems. Everytime we run `npm install`, package-lock is overwritten whenever a new version is detected from `^` in package.json. This causes a lot of merge conflicts which are impractical to merge in the long run.
We were thinking of freezing the dependency versions in `package.json` itself and update them only when we really need to update them. In this way, we do not need to maintain package-lock. But this does not let us auto update the deps with incremental bug fixes that are released in the minor versions.
What do you people think? <comment><USER2> For an application, yes, commit the lock file. TL:DR; use "npm ci", not "npm i".

This has several benefits; a) You know if a test fails, you broke something. Not a bug caused by dep shift. b) Your team is using same versions of deps during dev (reduces "works on my computer" moments) c) Your builds are more reproducible. You can be more confident that you can exactly build say, last month's version of the app and have it work the same way it did back then.

Re: the noise problem, recommend using "npm ci" as the default and "npm i" only where you're planning to update deps. This is less work than "freezing" stuff in package.json and also addresses the problem of transitive deps (the deps if your deps, which you would not really want to put in package.json anyway).

Use npm audit to detect stuff that _needs_ updating and treat periodic dep updates as a janitorial task. When you do updates, make a PR with just the dep updates (plus any changes needed for them to work) and make sure all the tests pass. You can mostly automate this.

As a side note, the docs explicitly call out that the file is intended to be committed: [https://docs.npmjs.com/files/package- lock.json](https://docs.npmjs.com/files/package-lock.json)

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you looked at yarn? From my experience yarn does not change its lock file unless you explicitly change your dependencies.</comment>


Metafilter And The Russian Sex Slaves That Never Were - <AUTHOR> http://www.miconian.com/2010/05/23/metafilter-and-the-russian-sex-slaves-that-never-were/ <comment><USER2> Just for the record; I have a couple of friends in New York who also went to the club after I showed them the thread (of their own volition).

Their report is pretty similar to this guys; except to conclude it is very much a place to pick up girls for sex as well. One of them is of slavic origin, can speak Russian and was at one point offered a girl (he believes because he passed as Russian - the others were not offered at any point).

Once it was clear they were American and were not there after girls they were treated like it was a normal club.

They point out it wasn't particularly seedy; it was upmarket but definitely "gang" owned/affiliated (these are guys I know through work; one of them works on trafficking and prostitution in his professional capacity, so it's a reasonably expert opinion).

Their conclusion: that the girls were on the edge of one of the lighter "trafficking" scams, where girls voluntarily go over for short spell with the promise of work (and often the "nudge wink" suggestion that they could skip immigration and stay longer if they stay below the radar). What usually happens is they either get the job promised them, or it "falls through" (like in this case) and they get given a waitress job for the visa period at a club like this. All above board.

Then when the visa is almost up it is suggested very strongly that if they wanted to stay they probably could, but not in a normal (legal) job...

(note: this is all second hand information. I trust my friends experience but as with anything over the internet.. treat it as unconfirmed :))

<comment><USER3> Probably the most balanced and rational sounding explanation I've seen yet. The problem is, it's not very exciting, so everyone ignores it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While it's always good to critically examine information, Bingo, the author of the linked post, repeatedly adopted a combative, hyperbolic tone that only served to further derail the conversation, rather than restore moderation and critical thought. After finding few sympathizers in the Metafilter threads, he moved his critiques off-site and onto his own blog.

That's all well and good, but it's worth knowing that his perception of the events represents an extreme minority amongst the site's regular readership. Suffice to say, both the NYPD and an employee of the State Department directly involved in human trafficking cases believed that the situation was sufficiently dubious to warrant intervening.

If you're looking for a more moderate summary of events, Newsweek had a fairly decent overview: [http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/the-human- condition/2010/05/21...](http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/the-human- condition/2010/05/21/exclusive-one-of-the-heroes-behind-the-metafilter-human- trafficking-rescue-speaks-out.html)

If you have the time, I'd highly recommend reading the original Ask Metafilter and Metatalk threads. Both were developing concurrently, so it's best to alternate reading a few posts in each. Just watch the timestamps to stay synchronized.

<comment><USER5> "Suffice to say, both the NYPD and an employee of the State Department directly involved in human trafficking cases believed that the situation was sufficiently dubious to warrant intervening."

Before or after it became A Thing?

If they were involved before anybody on MeFi heard about it, I'll accept that as evidence. If it occurred after, unfortunately it is completely plausible that these agencies decided they must be seen to Do Something (TM). I mean these "ifs" because I honestly don't know which is which, and am curious, because if it is established that they were interested first than that's pretty strong evidence.

<comment><USER6> Pollomacho is a MeFite who works at State in the human trafficking department. He was involved in the case as soon as he heard about it, and stated quite clearly that it was nice to be able to help somebody in this situation _before_ two or three months had passed. Bingo omits this entirely, because Bingo thought it would be cool to visit this club and come back and say how histrionic MeFites were being.

Now, from what Pollomacho said later, he talked to the girls and there was information he didn't feel free to share (personal in nature) that indicated very, very strongly to him that this was in fact a human trafficking case, and as he is not known to be a twit in other instances, I'm inclined to take him at his word.

<comment><USER5> Thank you. That is a compelling argument.

I, too, am not a big fan of vague "smart authorities of an unspecified nature are on it, shut up" assertions, so if you heard a note of skepticism in my original post, yes, it was there. But specific "this specific experienced authority with years of experience in this field was concerned and directly replied that it was a problem" can be compelling. I am particularly impressed by the fact this person fed back directly, and not through a press release.

<comment><USER6> Well, the fact that the specific experienced authority is a well-known poster on Metafilter (by which I mean, I already knew his name and associate it favorably with well-considered commentary) helped a lot. I'm not convinced the NYPD was really in control of the situation, for instance. Pollomacho, though, I trust. I had no idea he did this for a living. That was a pretty cool bonus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ugh this guy has developed a very selective reading of the thread in question and refusing to accept things told to him by the people actually involved because they couldn't "prove" what they were saying. At this point for this version of what happened to be true it would require active conspiracy on the part of all involved to keep it going. Knowing when to admit you were wrong and let go is truly a blessing.

<comment><USER8> The line between active conspiracy and everyone just going along with something because they're easily lead or prefer to believe something a certain way is probably thinner than you imagine.

Is The Bible a conspiracy? Is everyone in Christianity secretly in on it? Or are they just going along with it because they like the idea? I don't know about you, but I go for the free cookies & coffee after the service.

<comment><USER4> The situation, as presented, was sufficiently dubious as to warrant the attention of both the NYPD and the State Department. I'm willing to trust their judgment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Remind anyone of this?

> _Dear Reddit: Yesterday a user posted soliciting donations for a users wifes > cancer treatment. I (and others) claimed it was fake. I was wrong, she does > have cancer and now users are harassing the family._

[http://en.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/bup53/dear_reddit...](http://en.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/bup53/dear_reddit_yesterday_a_user_posted_soliciting/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Not about this article in particular, but at a meta-level, I want to give an up-vote to the media criticism, both postings and dissections in the comments on HN; of which, this post and the comments is a good example. Some may say it clutters-up the news postings and is off topic (and they have a point). It might be good if postings could be divided into three categories, "pure" HN, media, and other general.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd say that the narrative that the women knew what they were getting themselves into, given their behavior in the original story, does seem to make more sense to me. However, that doesn't make it any less commendable that they may have been given an at least temporary reprieve from the abuse of human trafficking and prostitution. What they choose to do with it is now their decision to make.

<comment><USER6> Oh, come on, they're like 18 years old and are going to the United States! They still think they're immortal, and even if they anticipate that there might be some sex involved, they think they'd be glamor stars.

Instead, they'd be crack junkies for a couple of years, and thrown out into the alley when they were used up, and there is _no way in hell_ that any 18-year-old - or 30-year-old - would "know what they were getting themselves into". If that were the case, this would never happen to anybody. That's the pernicious nature of human trafficking in the first place.

<comment><USER11> The post's author was implying that they may have grown up in an environment where they really did know what to expect, and I'd agree that it is a possibility, as uncomfortable as that may be to ponder. Who knows what these particular 18-year-olds were expecting; just because you may have been naive about the world's seedy underbelly at 18 doesn't mean everyone else must have been. It's easy for us to fall into a cultural narrative specific to our community, and believe that it must be the same for everyone else.

<comment><USER6> Sure, because _Russian_ chicks _always_ expect to be crack whores by the time they're 22. Right. They knew exactly what they were getting into, so you don't need to worry about it - they're only Russian, after all, where this sort of thing happens every day.

WiseWeasel, the post's author is wrong. My wife is Eastern European, and I can assure you that Russian 18-year-olds are just as stupid when it comes to life risk as anybody else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thank God there were no nazis, terrorists or pedophiles involved.

</comment><comment><USER13> This whole thing sort of reminds me of when all those Everquest (I think) players stood around online to form a virtual flag after September 11th...</comment>


Raspberry Pi - Upcoming board revision  - <AUTHOR> http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1929 <comment><USER2> The mounting holes alone make this new revision worth waiting for.

It's also nice to see the additional GPIO output which can be used either as an additional I2C bus or used for I2S (digital audio) output. The latter should be very useful for those who want to use the Raspberry Pi as a media center PC as it's trivial to convert I2S to S/PDIF or Toslink (optical).

Finally, I'm glad the GPIOs have been changed to expose the missing JTAG debug symbol. Having proper JTAG support makes low-level development far, far easier.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's such a shame that the guys at Raspberry Pi can't communicate very well.

This is fantastic news, but where's the picture? the schematic?

There's a massive thread on the future Camera Module. Once a day or so, someone says "Can we have an update please?". The response: "In Development." Snooze.

<comment><USER4> I think they are doing a very good job considering they have one full-time employee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The SMSC 1V8 power has been disconnected from the system supply."

I notice they don't talk about this much at all, or give credit to the person who figured the issue out (who I believe may have been banned from the official forums for talking about it). It turns out that the high temperatures some people were seeing on the LAN9512 chip weren't actually normal at all; they'd screwed up and connected the output of its internal 1.8V regulator, which wasn't meant to drive external circuitry, to the 1.8V rail. So on some boards (depending on tolerances) its internal regulator ended up providing the 1.8V supply for the entire board and overheating quite a bit.

<comment> X-Istence Do you have a source for this? Also is there something that owners of older boards can do (such as cutting the trace?) to make sure their boards don't overheat?

<comment><USER5> There's an entire thread about it on the Element 14 forums here: <http://www.element14.com/community/thread/19236>

Unfortunately, unlike some of the other modifications in newer board revisions, there's no easy fix for this for owners of older boards. The level to which boards are affected varies and it's not clear how many (if any, for that matter) have stability problems as a result.

Doesn't help that most people don't actually seem to report when their board doesn't work properly, in part because the moderators on the official forums are quite hostile to anyone mentioning problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did anyone ever get an original Raspberry Pi? All I've seen is pictures of it next to the words "out of stock".

<comment><USER7> Yes. I ordered one in late July from Element14. It arrived about 2 weeks later.

I currently have it connected to a webcam and running on solar power.

<comment><USER8> Do you have a description of your setup? It sounds interesting.

<comment><USER5> Bear in mind there apparently some nasty hardware limitations in the USB controller that tend to make USB webcams unreliable: [http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=1...](http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=12097)

I'm guessing that whyenot dodged them due to a combination of luck and not having any USB peripherals connected other than the webcam and Wifi adapter; the more USB devices, the more likely you are to run into a problem.

<comment><USER7> I've connected the camera, wifi, gps and a usb hard disk to the pi at the same time using a powered USB hub (Belkin I think?) and haven't had any problems. This was with mains power. But you're right, there are many people who have run into problems. Either I was lucky or I didn't notice them.

<comment><USER5> I think connecting a keyboard and mouse as well may significantly increase the odds of it failing, which is unfortunate given how the Foundation advertised it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Update from Allied: They are currently 10 weeks backlogged.</comment>


Google Ends Support for OG Pixel - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/rip-og-pixel-google-ends-support-after-just-three-years/ <comment><USER2> "Future-illegal" is the phrase for this, but it will take a country, years and hundreds of millions of dollars in legal action to compel Google to support their software. Google continues to monetize these users so obviously they are due support still. Worst of all they do this to Chromebooks too, general purpose laptops arbitrarily abandoned many years before industry standards. If they want to cut support for their devices the timeline should be very long, like Windows XP and the alternative should be a product recall.</comment>


QR Code Clock - <AUTHOR> http://qrclock.info/

<comment><USER2> That looks really cool, but for pure geekieness factor, you should be able to turn off the date/time display at the top, so that you have to scan it with a QR code reader to get the time. How are you generating the QR codes? Are you using the Google Charts API or something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the idea. Will look into that. As for creating the QR codes, its done with Google charts... So far, so good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Aw, I was expecting a QR Code that would be readable by both human and machine. Anyone want to try it?</comment>


Mathematics in various cultures - <AUTHOR> http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Indexes/HistoryTopics.html

<comment><USER2> Upvoted for St Andrews.</comment>