Yandex Islands - <AUTHOR> http://beta.yandex.com/ <comment><USER3> A few thoughts on the game theory involved here:

So in the past Google distinguished itself by optimizing for their users to spend as little time as possible on their website -- as opposed to all the big portals of the time trying to keep you within their sandbox.

This trait made them a lasting household name out of the many competitors of the time. Now they are increasingly trying to go the other way and keep you in their goggly sandbox as much as possible. Yandex is taking this new approach even farther. Up and coming websites are compelled to create such wizards and whatever microformats the leading sources of search engine traffic ask of them - this is rewarded by totally standing out in the search results and doing an endrun around established players who would normally get clicked through to.

However.. its easy to extrapolate what will happen. The most useful and profitable of these integrations over time will emerge, as the search engines have all of the data to make that analysis. Then they get simply swapped out for their googly/yandaxy/bing offering.. the users are none the wiser, they have been accustomed to this interface and don't really care if its some website or google providing the wizard. The portal approach wins, the web returns to the dark ages. A new nimble search engine emerges optimized towards sending their users on and away from their property as quickly as possible..

/Here endeth this though exercise. I hope I've made my point.

<comment><USER4> I wonder how long before/whether a major player will simply decides google et al freeloading off their hard-produced data and displaying it in search results makes being listed a net loss and goes for a social-only model of traffic sourcing with a block-all robots.txt Between Google pulling out prices and reviews & Google News auto-generating summaries and snippets of on-the- ground reporters it feels like a matter of time. Maybe a halfway house would be starting to de-index hot news/exclusives for the first few hours.

<comment><USER5> For content sites this is indeed a problem, but for somebody actually _selling or providing a service_ over the web this isn't too bad.

After all it doesn't matter if the purchases come from your website or from Yandex Islands, as long as they come.

<comment><USER6> I think many people forget that companies don't have a website for the sake of having a website. They have a website for the sake of increasing sales/revenues and profits. As long as it meets that business objective, companies usually don't care how that's achieved.

<comment><USER7> If Google provides the UI, you don't have to pay any graphics designer anymore for your service website. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really liked the approach of Kartoo: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartoo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartoo) . Unfortunately, due its infrastructure and flash front end it was not sufficiently fast to beat Goolge: but it often could narrow ambiguous queries faster. For example it was better when searching for compiler errors as you could visually select the applicable context.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think the idea that websites can change their search result, make it interactive even, is quite good.

But I'm not really able to come up with many examples where this actually improves the user experience. Searching for something like VLC and being presented with a download button (and maybe a language/platform selection) right away, that's neat.

But booking a flight in a search result? Seems too important/expensive for such little screen real estate.

<comment><USER10> what if instead of linking to functions (islands) via forms, they end up implementing those functions, themselves? search engines will end up being more app platforms..

<comment><USER9> I thought that's exactly what Yandes Islands are about. Are they just forms? That'd be boring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Found Easter Egg! If you click on the image at the very end of the image (the one with Christopher Columbus), it'll flip over to reveal what seems to be signatures of devs working on Yandex (or probably just Islands).

<comment> robert-boehnke This may be a reference to the Macintosh 128K, which had its casing's inside signed by the developers [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 1\. How did this hit the top posts? 2\. The website is very marketing and confusing. 3\. What is Yandex, that is what I want to know the first few seconds when I view their website. It looks as if I am buying a no-man island somewhere.

<comment><USER13> how can you not be aware of Yandex?

<comment><USER14> Why would anyone _be_ aware of Yandex unless they live in Russia? Even here, I mostly use Google.

<comment><USER15> I'm personally aware of Yandex because they have one of the most aggressive search crawlers on the entire internet, judging from our Apache logs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Korea's biggest search engine(www.naver.com) is basically like this. they created a walled garden that gives you practically everything. These portal type sites disincentivize individual sites from creating contents, because the search engine directs the traffic into their own services(Q&A, blog, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER17> It looks like Yandex intentions is similar to what JavaScript did to browsers.

Initially browsers could just ask for a static content. Later some interactivity was added and sites changed from beeing a [content] entity to a [content, on-action] entity.

Here we also have: initially sites were static for search engine, but now there is an interactivity support, which should split monolith entity of site.

<comment><USER11> Most search engines (and Yandex too I assume), crawl the _static_ web. So if you have a web page whose content is auto-generated using Javscript, it likely won't be indexed by many search engines. Google has been working on this for a while, but it's definitely a very hard problem (tm) to solve (and computationally expensive too).

<comment><USER17> It's not exactly about parsing JS output: JS output is something which is dedicated for user of webpage.

Ilands interface of site is something dedicated to search engine from the origin and helps to create a new layer between search engine and site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm having trouble understanding how this is different than Google Search/Images/Maps/Places/News/Etc.

<comment> guard-of-terra Basically you can, as an owner of a website, define a "wizard" that will be shown on the search engine results page which users can interact with - <USER2> just a dumb link to your website.

And the visual nicety too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It seems very much like a "widgets" idea, which for me, really sucks. You can't book a flight at search result inside a tiny window, it's stupid.

It's great for something like Wolphram Alpha for math answers, currency conversion, weather etc, but not more. Widgets.

<comment><USER20> You are jumping to conclusions about limitations of the service. As far as I can see there's no requirement that the process is completed "inside a tiny window". For the flight, you could have it show date selectors and select where to fly to and from, and bring the user straight to a list of flights on the normal website, for example, rather than make them complete the whole thing in a little box.

So yes, widgets, though you seem to underestimate the utility of widgets. There are plenty of travel agencies with widgets for the first booking/search step on third party sites.

How would that suck compared to just getting a text snippet and have to click through to a separate web site to even start the search process?

<comment><USER19> > As far as I can see there's no requirement that the process is completed > "inside a tiny window"

Sure. I was referring to initial input form only. It's limited. Both, in space it can use (I hope Yandex won't let those widgets be huge), and in interactivity, like drawing complex HTML right away, without pressing "submit" (both, Yandex and Google would agree that it's a nice feature :) ((I saw that there are a lot of features, like interactivity are possible, but it's still not good old HTML+JS))

> So yes, widgets, though you seem to underestimate the utility of widgets. > There are plenty of travel agencies with widgets for the first > booking/search step on third party sites.

Well, you're absolutely right in this statement. For some reason, I'd be rather annoyed by these forms, and wouldn't trust them (same reasons: limited functionality and UI space).

Of course, let's all see how Yandex proves I'm wrong and they came up with great know-how!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This doesn't seem all that different from what Google is doing with Google Now, except Yandex doesn't actually know when my flight is, so it can't serve up the card UI (or island UI) proactively, but has to rely on a search term.

The appointment booking thing got me a bit puzzled though - this requires pretty deep integration with whatever practice management software the doctor is using. The only workaround I can think of, is that they are relying on their Yandex Calendar service to power it. If so, not the best experience for vendors, and potentially a problem for consumers, as the two systems can be grossly out of sync.

Service booking in general is not as simply as it sounds - as a consumer, you have no idea if your appointment should be for 10 mins, 2 hours, something in between. Typically, a sort of inference is required on the part of the system to figure it out, usually, by asking person booking the appointment some questions. Such mappings are very tedious and industry/locale specific.

</comment><comment><USER22> Looks interesting, so I tried the search at [http://yandex.com](http://yandex.com). I tried a few searches. Eventually I got:

[http://i.imgur.com/Q7C0rRd.png](http://i.imgur.com/Q7C0rRd.png)

This is not a good user experience. You immediately assume I'm doing something bad / wrong because I did about 4 searches within 20 seconds?

So I read [http://i.imgur.com/NITisTs.png](http://i.imgur.com/NITisTs.png)

\- There are no other users on my network. \- I made 4 search requests inside of 20 seconds. \- I have no plugins that are performing search requests on my behalf. \- I'm fairly certain my computer is not infected with a virus (I'm on OS X, and even have ClamXav running).

<comment><USER23> Google does that too for unusual (yet correct) requests. Try googling this:

        he is "100000000..900000000" years old

<comment><USER24> It looks like that happens because the system that expands ranges into multiple queries is in front of the system that detects and blocks rapid clustered queries, so the query you entered looks is an _enormous_ flood of queries in a very short time by the time it reeaches the abuse detection system.

Given the effect it would seem to have on load to execute queries of that magnitude, its not entirely unreasonable behavior although it would be better UX if the error returned distinguished the problem more clearly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Seems like it's similar to Google's Knowledge Graph. Very nice. Well done Yandex.

<comment><USER26> The Columbus example looks that way, but I think the big new item is that you're able to add your own forms to search results (as a site, not as a user).

[http://interactive-answers.webmaster.yandex.com](http://interactive- answers.webmaster.yandex.com)

</comment></comment><comment> a-nikolaev This feature looks a lot like DuckDuckGo Instant Answer. I think, there is no reason to be very paranoid about it. Googly sandbox is a completely different thing. Yandex does not really lock you to their apps and services, and (hopefully) does not collect your private info, they only give you a quick way to interact with other web sites.

</comment><comment><USER27> Not rendering correctly for Firefox 21.0 (Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu Canonical 1.0). Am I the only one facing this issue?

</comment><comment><USER28> I think this so called island is just like what Baidu just have done. Baidu's Aladdin project has provided a lot of service in the search result,such as flight,train when you input two places. I don't think this Islands could do something different.I didn't see anything new in their video,neither.

</comment><comment><USER29> And only available in certain countries. Why? I'd like to give it a shot without hunting down a Turkish proxy.

<comment> guard-of-terra I guess it's either live on [http://yandex.com](http://yandex.com) or will be soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> That was one hell of a dramatic video. When the visual interface guy walks in I thought he'd be packing.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen come out of a search engine. The potential is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER32> For those of you who also missed it on the first pass, the "Islander" circle (under the "Islands" header) is clickable.

</comment><comment><USER33> Yandex is traditionally playing catch up with Google copying their ideas. This time - it is Knowledge Graph.

<comment><USER34> It's not Knowledge Graph, from a comment below: "The Columbus example looks that way, but I think the big new item is that you're able to add your own forms to search results (as a site, not as a user). [http://interactive- answers.webmaster.yandex.com&quot](http://interactive- answers.webmaster.yandex.com&quot);

<comment><USER34> Sorry here is the right link: [http://interactive- answers.webmaster.yandex.com](http://interactive-answers.webmaster.yandex.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't understand what they're trying to accomplish.

</comment><comment><USER36> 15 seconds on the page and i have no idea what it's for

</comment><comment><USER37> That video was rather pretentious.

</comment><comment><USER38> I think a lot of people (myself included) are craving something different in the search space. From Altavista right up until now, search hasn't really changed much over the years. Refined and improved for sure, but not changed.

It's like we're all stuck in the same paradigm - the same way of thinking.

I'm excited about Yandex and it looks promising, but the landing page needs a copywriter _badly._

<comment><USER39> > It's like we're all stuck in the same paradigm - the same way of thinking.

I would like a search engine that brings back some of the serendipity to searching. A search engine that doesn't help you find a specific piece of information, but that helps you explore the domain by getting you to places where information is shared.

I remember when you could search for something, and the hits would be relevant and free of SEO. There'd be some results from .edu tlds, and some autodidact would have a nice page crammed full of information, and useful links.

<comment><USER40> You may enjoy [http://millionshort.com](http://millionshort.com) then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I want in island. Literally.

</comment><comment><USER42> I expected this thread to have been hijacked by complaints of a video of exclusively white men and "No man is an island" in massive letters.

Anyway, this looks pretty interesting but the main takeaway from this for me is how disadvantaged non-English media are, i.e. I found it very difficult to pay attention to the subtitles for very long, eventually losing interest completely. At least when they're in English I can tab over and passively listen while I get on with whatever I'm doing. I'm sure Yandex doesn't care as presumably all of their customers are Russian, but it raises the issue that these kinds of videos are indulgent at the best of times, and the information conveyed per time is very poor, the main reason I find conference talks hard going too.

<comment><USER43> The majority of stimulation we receive is just waste of time by your philosophy.

You're right about one thing though, my American (and British, Australians, Anglo Canadians among others from the same language group) friends are lazy as hell to read subtitles generally, the majority never ever getting interest of learning another language since almost anyone learns some English, which really puzzles me.

<comment><USER42> I'm not a bad Spanish speaker, also have been trying to learn Mandarin. Native English speakers are used to hearing things aloud, because everything we consume is in English. If English is not your native tongue it's understandable that you would be more used to reading subtitles, having perhaps grown up watching subtitled Hollywood films for example.

The brain optimises itself to tasks it performs most often, so understand that reading subtitles for an extended period of time would be more mental effort to someone not used to doing that than it is for you. I think you're ignorant for equating that with laziness.

> The majority of stimulation we receive is just waste of time by your > philosophy.

Yep. I'm wasting my time jamming along to a Joe Satriani CD on my guitar right now. _Totally_ wasting my life.

<comment><USER43> Maybe ignorance yes, the fact is I do not share their experience, I only watched dubbed stuff in either Hebrew or Portuguese until my early teens although I learned Yiddish first. It was from mainly 2000 to 2002 that I learned to read subtitles and after that I never needed it anymore unless in a language that I don't know.

Good to know you're not in that second group.

I not a fan of Satriani but keep rocking.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any 7-figure-year solopreneurs? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Is your question if they exist?

[https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/034-mike-carson-of- park...](https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/034-mike-carson-of-park-io) claims 125k/month

Apart from the minecraft founder I'm most amazed by [http://www.businessinsider.com/how-markus-frind- bootstrapped...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-markus-frind-bootstrapped- plentyoffish-and-sold-it-for-575-million-2015-7) For years he ran the website alone on a single (big) server, claimed working on it an hour or two per day and earning $10k/day in Adsense. [http://www.workhappy.net/2009/01/remember- markus-frind-the-a...](http://www.workhappy.net/2009/01/remember-markus-frind- the-adsense-millionaire.html)</comment>


The Cop at the End of the World - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewmcmillen/the-constable-of-birdsville#.iexMRlj2Kj <comment><USER2> A little meta:

We live in the future; a town I've never heard of in the middle of Australia, and 30 seconds later I can see a map of it, view aerial photography, and read about its history and its surroundings. I've been reading about the Simpson desert and other geography of the area.

My little group's lunch conversation earlier in the week started with "How much would you pay, in 1985, to have the iPhone in your pocket with similar network access to that period's knowledge?" Opinions varied; intrinsic knowledge is interesting, but a lot of the interesting stuff involves access to people. It might be little more than a novelty.

But it's easy to forget how fast and accessible things are today. When I was 10 my parents bought our family an encyclopedia, a significant amount of money for knowledge that was of high quality, and readily accessible by walking across our living room, but years out of date. For anything better you had to drive across town to the library, when it was open, and hit the stacks.

I'm not sure that fast-and-vast is always compelling (the downside? you chase trivia and entertainment a lot, probably). But if I'd had StackOverflow in 1985 . . .

</comment><comment><USER3> The Australian Geographic had many pictures of the Simpson Desert and the Birdsville Track. The pictures show a stark, raw beauty.

One day I'm going to have go there, given I live in this country!</comment>


A New World's Extraordinary Orbit Points to Planet Nine - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-worlds-extraordinary-orbit-points-to-planet-nine-20180515/ <comment><USER2> It occurs to me that, in the early 21st century, astronomy has once again become the hot area in physics, whereas particle physics was for the last part of the 20th century. Not that it's necessarily a contest, but I read of a lot more exciting new discoveries from the physics of the very large, in recent years, than from the physics of the very small.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps the astrophysicists are getting on the data bandwagon, going back through collected data and applying the latest techniques on them. Are there any papers on this not behind paywalls?

<comment><USER4> I think you're being downvoted, i would say mistakenly, because that's not the case. What's happening in astronomy is that huge amounts of new high-quality data are becoming available.

This particular bit of Planet Nine business fell out of the Dark Energy Survey [1]:

 _The collaboration built and is using an extremely sensitive 570-Megapixel digital camera, DECam, mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, high in the Chilean Andes, to carry out the project._

 _Over five years (2013-2018), the DES collaboration is using 525 nights of observation to carry out a deep, wide-area survey to record information from 300 million galaxies that are billions of light-years from Earth._

Other big surveys recently include Kepler, looking for exoplanets since 2009 and only now running out of fuel [2], and Gaia, which for the last five years has been mapping over a a billion (!) stars across the galaxy [3] [4].

And in a few years, we should get the James Webb telescope going up. Exciting times!

[1] [https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/the-des- project/overview/](https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/the-des-project/overview/)

[2] [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/nasa-s-kepler- spacecraft-n...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/nasa-s-kepler-spacecraft- nearing-the-end-as-fuel-runs-low)

[3] [http://sci.esa.int/gaia/28890-objectives/](http://sci.esa.int/gaia/28890-objectives/)

[4] [https://gizmodo.com/tomorrows-star-map-release-could- revolut...](https://gizmodo.com/tomorrows-star-map-release-could- revolutionize-our-unde-1825503300)

<comment><USER5> Astronomy has gotten much better at promoting itself than it did in the past. Hubble helped; painting up all those pale objects in gorgeous colors, for example. (For shame!)

Most advances in modern physics are about invisible objects. Most people? given a choice between seeing the fireworks, or seeing an equation explaining how they work?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Planet Nine_

I enjoyed the recent Science Friday episode that featured two New Horizons mission scientists, who were quite critical of IAU's goofy decision to demote Pluto.

<comment><USER7> > ... IAU's _goofy_ decision to demote Pluto

I see what you did there.

<comment><USER6> Ha! I won't blame anyone who doesn't believe me, but that was genuinely unintended. I had typed something more strident, but dialed it back without rereading the whole passage. "Goofy" is a versatile word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is Planet X not Planet IX and they want our women! Get your tropes right. :-)

Does anyone know off hand the limit for reflected light from the Sun in terms of detection? Assuming a rockie planet is 'cold' and has a diameter 'd', at what distance is its magnitude so low that it is only detectable by star occlusion rather than reflected sunlight.

<comment><USER9> Not an astronomer, but let's try going by Wikipedia: Neptune has apparent magnitude of about 8. If you displaced it to twice as far, it'd become 16 times as dim (twice the distance, squared). The scale of apparent magnitude is a factor of 2.512 per step, so that'd be a change of about 3, to magnitude 11. The biggest ground-based telescopes can go up to around 24-26, if you dedicate significant observing time. So (26-8)/3=6 doublings: they could detect Neptune at 64 times as far out as it is, if they knew where to look. That's ~1900 AU.

But of course Neptune is bigger and likely more reflective than the target. I guess you could expect a brightness about one more magnitude lower. A quick skim of [https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.05438](https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.05438) (the paper proposing the new planet) is difficult for me, but one concrete number they mention as a possibility is 700 AU. So, apparently, that'd be within reach of a ground-based telescope but it'd have to be a darned big state-of-the-art one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I get why Pluto had to be demoted to minor league status.

But they should at least have retired the number. Pluto will _always_ be Planet Nine.

</comment><comment><USER11> How did they detect 2015 BP519? On the diagram, it looks like the proposed Planet 9 is 10% farther than the detected object, but is 10x Earth size compared to the size of a Kupier belt object.

It seems like detecting the smaller inject would be the harder task yet Planet 9 remains undetected.

<comment><USER12> Imagine finding a penny on the sidewalk. Happens all the time right? Now imagine I asked you to go out and find a half-dollar on the sidewalk, but not just any one, a specific one. But don't worry, you don't have to look everywhere, it's almost certainly in one of the US states on the East Coast.

That's the difference here. We don't spend all our time scanning the entire sky down to the dimness level that Planet 9 could be spotted, we simply do not have the resources. Our telescopes give a soda straw view, so we miss a lot of what's going on, most of it in fact. If someone knew already where Planet 9 was in the sky we could point our telescopes there over a few days and confirm it. But we don't, we only know a general area in the sky that it could be, and actually detecting it will require dozens of observations from some of the largest telescopes on Earth.

On the other hand, we have detected lots of other objects in the Solar System that would be more difficult than Planet 9 to detect if we had to look for just them, but there are lots of those, and we find them easily by accident as we perform other observations or through surveys. Just as if we decided to go looking for lost change on sidewalks we could find a great many coins, but if we were tasked with finding a specific coin somewhere on the East Coast it would take a tremendous effort (or tremendous luck) to find it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm pretty sure there is some reason I'm missing, but I really don't understand why its really difficult to find a planet in the Solar system (or at the edge) while we are hearing lot of news them finding exo/non-exo planets at the distant galaxies? Why are these planets so elusive to our so advanced eyes/lenses in our orbits?

<comment><USER14> I understand the reason is that we only detect distant planets indirectly, by looking at the behaviors of the stars they block. With planets in the outer solar system I guess they're too small (angle-wise) to be blocking anything we can easily examine.

<comment><USER15> The reason that's difficult to do with planets in our own solar system is because we are also orbiting the same star. Detecting exo-planets transiting their host star is possible because we aren't orbiting that star. We could never observe this planet transiting the Sun because it never passes in between the Earth and the Sun. And if it did, we probably would be quite aware of it already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Something I've never understood: Why is our known solar-system on a flat plane? Why don't the planets all have different orbital axis? Is there a body (or bodies) out there exerting a force on the planets to keep them all in the same plane?

<comment><USER17> There is a brief explanation here:

[http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/57-our-solar- syste...](http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/57-our-solar- system/planets-and-dwarf-planets/orbits/242-why-do-all-the-planets-orbit-in- the-same-plane-intermediate)

<comment><USER16> Thx! Perfect succinct explanation, including 'so why is the disc of dust flat' question that immediately followed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nibiru exists! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_cataclysm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_cataclysm)

</comment><comment><USER19> Nobody can convince me that Pluto is not planet 9.

<comment><USER20> Ceres was also reasonably considered a planet, until evidence was discovered that showed it was just one of many similar bodies.

Including Pluto in a classification with the 8 major planets, but not including Eris, is simply not a useful way to describe the bodies in the solar system.

Personally, I use the word "planet" for anything even vaguely planet-like, but there's no logical way to count "planets", under any definition of the word, that leads to Pluto being the 9th.

<comment><USER12> The first four detected asteroids, in fact. They were all discovered in a 6 year period during the early 19th century. And all were labelled planets.

That's how things sat for years, decades even. And then in a span of 5 years in the late 1840s the next 6 asteroids were discovered. By the end of the 1850s they were up to 57 asteroids, in the 1860s they found more than 50 more, in the 1870s they found over a hundred more than that. It had become rapidly apparent that Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta weren't just little quirky oddball planets, they were merely members of a much larger population of other bodies (that would come to be known as asteroids) separate from the planets.

The situation is identical with Pluto, the only difference being that Pluto was alone in its new classification of "little quirky oddball planet" in the 20th century for about 80 years. But now it has become apparent that Pluto isn't a weird little planet, it's a member of a different family of objects (Trans-Neptunians, of which Triton was probably also a member before being captured by Neptune).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >perhaps as large as a dwarf planet

Seriously? Dwarf planets aren't classified on size. I would expect Quanta to know better than to publish such rubbish.

<comment><USER22> One of the criteria is that it has sufficient mass to reach hydrostatic equilibrium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I appreciate the "great theory predicts new data" proposition, but the chronology seems off.

 _In early 2016, two planetary scientists declared that a ghost planet is hiding in the depths of the solar system, well beyond the orbit of Pluto.... Batygin and Brown made a case for Planet Nine's existence based on the peculiar orbits of a handful of distant worlds known as Kuiper belt objects._

Later in TFA we learn:

 _The Dark Energy Survey first detected evidence for the new object in late 2014. Gerdes and his colleagues have spent the years since then tracking its orbit and trying to understand its origins._

So the data were "new" in 2014. I suppose the various grad students and lab assistants on Gerdes's team could all sign affidavits to the effect that they didn't directly or indirectly inform these two famous researchers in their field of this data, despite the fact that they routinely attend the same conferences and otherwise correspond about these exact issues. Still, it seems a bit sneaky for TFA to raise this point and not attempt to fill in this significant hole in the narrative.

<comment><USER12> This is commonplace in astronomy, a lot of discoveries come about from analyzing old data. You are putting a bizarre tom clancy spin on this for no reason whatsoever.

<comment><USER6> IANAAstronomer, but _Quanta_ seems to be written for the general public. I'm not saying that any of the researchers have done anything wrong, merely that TFA needs to do a little more work to support this prediction story.

<comment><USER23> You seem to have an enormously strong prior in favor of conspiratorial fraud by astronomers...

<comment><USER6> I could understand this response to my first post, since 'InclinedPlane had largely the same reaction. I had thought the post to which you've responded would have clarified the matter? Do you not believe me when I type "I'm not saying that any of the researchers have done anything wrong"?

<comment><USER23> Consider this as honest feedback on your writing: the way your first post is written heavily implies that something malicious and conspiratorial is going on, in such a way that is not defused by saying "I'm not saying something fishy is going on".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask: What free fonts can I use in my app for in app purchase? - <AUTHOR>

I'm an ios developer and created an app which allows the user to add different texts and reposition them.
I would like to provide my users with a premium feature which is a font pack. I'm looking for a few free fonts that I could embed in my app and require payment for them.
What kind of license am I looking for? Do you know of any such fonts?
Thank you <comment><USER2> I'd be very careful — plenty of "free" fonts come with a license that doesn't permit you to resell the font. And what's scary is that sometimes the font is distributed without the license so you could get sued if you "just assume".

My advice is to find a few type designers and ask them if they would would license their typeface to be on the safe side. Either you want to offer a flat fee, or a fee plus a cut of each sale.

<comment><AUTHOR> do you think fonts of these kinds are permitted ? SIL Open Font License (OFL) - [http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=...](http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=OFL)

<comment><USER2> [http://typophile.com/node/86358](http://typophile.com/node/86358)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I answered a similar question on Quora and we came to the same conclusions as @michaelpinto

[http://www.quora.com/Licensing/Can-I-use-a-font-that- states-...](http://www.quora.com/Licensing/Can-I-use-a-font-that-states-do- not-sell-directly-as-an-in-app-purchase-for-an-app)</comment>


It's Not About the Syntax – Why Language Doesn't Matter - <AUTHOR> https://spin.atomicobject.com/2015/07/15/language-doesnt-matter/

<comment><USER2> This title is misleading. Here's the article in a single sentence (from the end):

"Don't just be a C++ programmer, a Lisp programmer, or a Ruby programmer. Be a good programmer."

I agree that language shouldn't matter for your employment prospects. But it matters a LOT for how "good" your code is. Code is written once and read many times, and some languages are incredibly hard to read and understand.</comment>


A look at password managers - <AUTHOR> https://anarc.at/blog/2017-02-22-password-managers/ <comment><USER2> I'm surprised 1Password isn't on here. A very popular, well reviewed, and secure app. I highly recommend it over all the options listed in the article.</comment>


Show HN: Update (added free data): Directory of 400 startup grants and gov loans - <AUTHOR> After getting a lot of feedback on my project FinanceLinx.com, which helps startups and growing businesses with finding grants and government backed loans, I've decided to make some of the information public. If you go to the site now, there's an option to request a sample of the financing data.<p>Please let me know how I can improve this, any constructive feedback is welcome! <comment><USER2> You're probably not getting a lot of feedback because you can't see anything without giving your email.

Anyways, if you're in the EU you could build a sizeable business helping people to get funds. Can easily charge a few k $ per application.

And btw just looking at the country counts it's pretty obvious the data is very incomplete, probably better off focusing on a particular geography.</comment>


Worker fired for disabling GPS app that tracked her 24 hours a day - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/worker-fired-for-disabling-gps-app-that-tracked-her-24-hours-a-day/

<comment><USER2> This is obviously a bullshit policy on the company's part, but I'm curious why she didn't simply leave her work phone at work. They can't track you if you're not carrying their tracker, and why would you want to have your work phone outside work hours in the first place?

<comment><USER3> I, for instance, am on call and required to have my work phone on my person 24 hours a day unless I'm on vacation with a pre-arranged backup.

<comment><USER2> Oh god, that's terrible. I had no idea that was a thing. How is that legal? I can imagine why a 24/7 tracker app would be a significant problem in such a case.

<comment><USER3> Are you not from the US? Being "on call" is pretty common in certain professions. Doctors, for instance. A lot of vital IT workers are on call all the time. If a server goes down in prod, who are they going to call?

<comment><USER4> Not only that, but if you're an "exempt" employee in the U.S. (as most IT workers are), you don't have to be paid any extra money for being on call 24 hours a day.

However, the woman in the article was a sales executive, not an IT worker. If the company had to be able to reach her in rare emergencies, they could call her on her personal phone if her company phone was turned off.

 _" If a server goes down in prod, who are they going to call?"_

In the good old days, before companies got cheap, they used to hire three shifts of operations staff who worked 8 hours each.

<comment><USER3> While I don't disagree with you on the perceived unfairness of a lack of overtime, it could be argued that my base salary is higher than it would be if I were only available 8 hours a day before OT kicked in. Not saying I agree with the statement, but it's an argument to have for sure. I certainly make much more at this job than I did at any job where I got overtime, mainly because the kind of jobs where you aren't exempt are usually low skill/low pay.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Case study: Getting 60FPS using Chrome devtools - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.wingify.com/posts/getting-60fps-using-devtools/

<comment><USER2> This is something more web developers [or rather designers?] should focus on. It's 2013. We have so much processing power and yet some pages feel incredibly jerky and sluggish.

While we can blame the DOM and it's layouts recalculations there are many websites that are super responsive. I'm no web developer but if you take the weaknesses of the DOM into account it can't be that hard to keep a website reactive and smooth.</comment>


Loudness war - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

<comment><USER2> Been there, haha.

When I made music with a friend and we were mastering the stuff we recorded, we always ended up with a too high loudness, but it really felt like the "quality" was getting better when doing this. Only when we listened to the stuff at home again in comparsion to professional mixed music, we recognized our false assumptions.</comment>


IPG – YC Interview Simulator - <AUTHOR> http://jamescun.github.io/iPG/

<comment><USER2> This was fun to jump through - if I didn't immediately 'feel' the answer after reading the question, I wrote it down because clearly that's a problem issue for me/my product.

</comment><comment><USER3> pretty useful</comment>


Websites may soon design themselves, for now they'll critique what you've done - <AUTHOR> http://hartli.com/facts?site=http://lifehacker.com

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not super obvious yet, but you can keep crawling around sites based on emotions by clicking on them at the top (for LifeHacker, it's accepting and optimistic).</comment>


If SHTF are you prepared? - <AUTHOR> https://garybasin.com/if-shtf-are-you-prepared/ <comment><USER2> There has yet to be a mechanism for how and why shit hits the fan. If someone can propose a non-handwavy path to it, then I'll start to prepare.

But also, I've planted a garden, I've started getting to know my neighbors, I'm looking at buying land. All the preppers I know emphasize that it's the community that's gonna make or break how it all turns out, not one guy hoarding bullets and AKs

<comment><USER3> Fact is, you can't eat bullets or guns. Growing a garden and preserving food are not only valuable skills, but also good for you in so many other ways.

<comment><USER4> In the absence of police protection, how do people plan to prevent their gardens from being pilfered? Seems to me that both sets of skills are needed.

<comment><USER2> I have a hard time believing that the only thing that's keeping people from stealing shit is that there's a cop with a gun somewhere down the line.

Is that the case for you? Or anyone else you know?

If you know how to garden, help other people garden. That way your neighborhood will have enough food and might even be able to help out others that need it.

<comment><USER4> > " _I have a hard time believing that the only thing that 's keeping people > from stealing shit is that there's a cop with a gun somewhere down the > line._"

How many news articles about porch pirates have there been? That's just the tip of the iceberg; I certainly have had a number of things stolen just outside my home over the years.

<comment><USER2> Porch pirates are capitalizing on the fact that people order shit off the internet that costs a lot of money, that the goods will be replaced if they're stolen, and that people are not at their houses most of the time.

In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, you really think you're gonna be spending a lot of time at the office, getting things drone delivered to your house?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook's Metric Manipulations Misled Businesses Using Their Video Platform - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1183209875859333120 <comment><USER2> Yet another example of the risks of relinquishing control.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project you'd like to sell for under $1MM? - <AUTHOR> I have a low-touch software-as-a-service side project making $60k/ARR that I would be interested in selling for a good price. It has a good growth rate and I don't think the usual valuation of 2-3x annual revenue would be a fair offer since it is not even a year old and I have done little marketing to get it to where it is at today.
Any one else in a similar boat? I am thinking of making a website which one can use to sell vetted, profitable side projects if there are others like me.
Or, perhaps one such website already exists?
All I have found thus far are websites for selling side projects that typically have near-zero revenue and/or are very low quality. <comment><USER2> You many be interested to read an old post of patio11 [https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_s...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_software_business) (HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11347006](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11347006) | 439 points | on Mar 23, 2016 | 84 comments)

</comment><comment><USER3> Never used it but some people have referenced it to me a few times when they approached me about buying their site/service, [https://flippa.com](https://flippa.com). I have no knowledge of anything about it or whatnot, other than having looked at a few listings in the past.

If you are seriously wanting to sell it, I'm always looking for these types of services that can be purchased at a reasonable cost and grown. You can find my email in my profile. I usually stay in certain domains, so can't say whether I'd be of serious interest till I know some more. If I am not interested however, I might be able to point you to someone else who is.</comment>


Being Isaac Newton: Computer Derives Natural Laws From Raw Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090402143457.htm

<comment><USER2> $15 for 24h access to the article on the Science website... It's just not right, but since I'm interested I'll have to pony up. I guess outrageous pricing like that is supposed to drive people to the $99/year subscription.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, the article worked for me without having to pay.

Use google translate if you have to: [http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&...](http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&js=n&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedaily.com%2Freleases%2F2009%2F04%2F090402143457.htm&sl=zh- CN&tl=en)

<comment><USER4> I think Luc meant the article on _Science_ (not the BS review on _Science Daily_ ): <http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/324/5923/81>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google "bacon cmu scientific discovery".

<comment><USER2> Here's the Amazon link: [http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Discovery- Computational-Exp...](http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Discovery- Computational-Explorations-Processes/dp/0262620529/)

Looks interesting, thanks (from 1987 though).</comment></comment>


Rust, slang of programming languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.scriptol.com/programming/rust.php

<comment><USER2> And this doesn't even speak of the syntax used to express ownerships and lifetimes:

[http://rustbyexample.com/examples/move/README.html](http://rustbyexample.com/examples/move/README.html) [http://rustbyexample.com/examples/borrow/README.html](http://rustbyexample.com/examples/borrow/README.html) [http://rustbyexample.com/examples/lifetime/README.html](http://rustbyexample.com/examples/lifetime/README.html)

        fn author<'a>(&'a self) -> &'a str {

<comment><USER3> Of course not, there are obvious reasons for all of Rust's differences with C and C++ and the author didn't speak of those either.</comment></comment>


Kano's next learn-to-code kit is a build-it-yourself laptop - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/26/kanos-next-learn-to-code-kit-is-a-build-it-yourself-laptop/ <comment><USER2> Awesome.

I wish that these wouldn't just use a Raspberry Pi, though. If you just give people a Magic Computer Board to slot into a few other bits of plastic and peripherals, how much will they really learn about the hardware?

What about a kit that you solder up yourself? Not the actual components, but at least some headers or leads to physically separate the different logical pieces of the machine. The core logic board with all those annoying BGA components could be a single board, but the peripherals might be broken out into headers designed for different module boards to plug in.

The USB adapter boards or hub board connect HERE, the audio amp board connects HERE, the microSD card/M.2 SSD storage board goes HERE, the Power supply board plugs in HERE, etc.

And then you open-source a modular 3D-printable case that users can design in a web interface, snapping slots sized for different plugs/modules in different places on a shell, choosing where the screen/hinges/keyboard/trackpad/board should sit. Link to an affiliate-linked online printer for convenience, and stock a few default configurations.

<comment><USER3> This kit is targeted for younger kids. A soldering iron presents a real risk for injury, and most parents will probably not want to buy something like that for their kids.

If parents wanted to extend this kit to include soldering, they could just as easily buy an additional Pi HAT kit from Adafruit...

<comment><USER4> Oh come on, soldering is fairly safe - the worst thing you can realistically get is a small burn. Compare that to say, cycling or skying (which is something many parents let their 10 year olds do).

<comment><USER5> > the worst thing you can realistically get is a small burn.

Never had your soldering iron roll off the bench and then tried to catch it, hmm? Inevitably, you catch the wrong end...

/but you only do so once... //wearing shorts during the episode can make it double the fun!

<comment><USER2> Dunno about you, but I stopped wearing shorts while soldering after the first time a large-ish ball sputtered off onto my knee.

It can make cool-looking stains on pants, but it's hard to get off cleanly without tearing the fabric.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This makes me so nostalgic. In my mind, this is a spiritual successor to the Vic-20/Commodore 64 type computers. Meant to be programmed out of the box, with an environment that is reasonable for a motivated individual to learn and hack on.

</comment><comment><USER7> My son had both the CPU kit and the screen kit. Whenever a friend comes over, he proudly displays the computer he built himself. He is a god to them. Then he goes to use his macbook. In any case, this is a great, cost efficient introduction. We eventually built a monster desktop for "work".

I will definitely get this for him next summer.

<comment><USER8> how old is your son? if he's around 6 year-old, he's a god to me! :)

<comment><USER9> Same experience: my 4yo built a rainbow-colored case for a Pi2 B, cabled in monitor and keyboard and mouse and power, and knows it's the computer she built. Following Goerzen's advice, she gets a text login—so three years later, she knows about startx, apt, and finds alpine about as usable as iPad Mail.app. When the computer was disassembled for a move, we had a great conversation about how to put it back together, what was working where, and how USB ports defy physics and have three sides, one of which is invisible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love my raspberry pi, but to "learn-to-code" I would rather buy an Acer Aspire 1 [1], which is cheaper than this kit, has much better performance and a very nice flat design. With the remaining money I would buy a raspberry zero that the kid can ssh to, embed in robot/contraptions, etc.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Acer-Celeron-Storage- Windows-A114-31-...](https://www.amazon.com/Acer-Celeron-Storage- Windows-A114-31-C4HH/dp/B0746NCNSG/ref=sr_1_8?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1506447561&sr=1-8&keywords=laptop&refinements=p_36%3A-25000)

</comment><comment><USER11> Somehow, I feel like I should have something more profound to say here.

I have been considering getting one of their kits for my children to build and learn.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you have a Pi already and a kid I recommend an install of the os. They have really done a great job, learn the command line as part a game etc.

[http://developers.kano.me/downloads/](http://developers.kano.me/downloads/)

</comment><comment><USER13> What would you guys think of a school that allowed kids to use their cell phones if they first passed a 'build-it-yourself' course with something like this?

<comment><USER14> Passing a course doesn't mean the kids magically have a legitimate reason to use a cell phone during class.</comment></comment>


Amazon Alexa Skill to Enable - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B079WJ666F?ie=UTF8&ref-suffix=ss_rw <comment><AUTHOR> It'd mean the world to me if y'all enabled this skill. Thank you!</comment>


Coding Challenge for MI5 - <AUTHOR> https://www.mi5.gov.uk/careers/opportunities/coding-challenge <comment><USER2> 1\. Open PNG in text editor, see comment:

        As I read, numbers I see. 'Twould be a shame not to
        count this art among the great texts of our time

2\. Threshold so some of the pixels are black and others are white. Save as ASCII PBM.

3\. Strip the PBM header lines and remove newlines so that it's just 0's and 1's.

4\. Now feed it through this program:

        #include <stdio.h>
        main() {
          int c, l=0, n=1;
          while(EOF != (c=getchar())) {
            if(c == l) n++;
            else {
              putchar(n);
              n=1;
            }
            l = c;
          }
          putchar('\n');
          return 0;
        }

Output is the following:

        43-6F-6E-67-72-61-74-75-6C-61-74-69-6F-6E-73-2C-20-79-6F-75-20-73-6F-
        6C-76-65-64-20-74-68-65-20-70-75-7A-7A-6C-65-21-20-57-68-79-20-64-6F-
        6E-92-74-20-79-6F-75-20-61-70-70-6C-79-20-74-6F-20-6A-6F-69-6E-20-6F-
        75-72-20-74-65-61-6D-3F-20-6D-69-35-2E-67-6F-76-2E-75-6B-2F-63-61-72-
        65-65-72-73-20

5\. This smells like ASCII, let's decode it with tr -d - | xxd -p -r

> Congratulations, you solved the puzzle! Why dont you apply to join our team? > mi5.gov.uk/careers

From: [https://archive.rebeccablacktech.com/g/thread/52888920#p5289...](https://archive.rebeccablacktech.com/g/thread/52888920#p52892083)

<comment><USER3> Huh. So who benefits from you posting the solution here?

<comment><USER4> It's not like its a particularly complex puzzle. If you don't want spoilers, don't read it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A few minutes fun diversion.

A bit of guess work and trial and error, and I have the following bash one- liner:

pngtopnm puzzle.png | pnmtoplainpnm | tail -n +4 | sed -e 's/232 3 138/A/g' -e 's/58 185 229/B/g' | tr -d ' \n' | sed -e 's/AB/A\nB/g' -e 's/BA/B\nA/g' | awk '/.*/ { printf "%x", length(); }' | xxd -r -p | sed -e 's/-//g' | xxd -r -p

I'm not sure the "sed -e 's/AB/A\nB/g'" bit is optimal, but it was the first thing I thought of...

...and I definitely have a tendency to use sed when I should be using tr.

</comment><comment><USER6> OK, so, the obvious "congratulations" messages aside, what's _really_ in that file?

Example: Take the PNG, convert it to another lossless format. Then convert that lossless format back to PNG.

Different file size, right? OK, the comment accounts for about 120 bytes.. but what about the rest? Why is it that much bigger?

"As I read, numbers I see. 'Twould be a great shame not to count this art among the great texts of our time" \- count this art among the great texts... it's a one time pad, isn't it.

<comment><USER4> The alpha channel?

Edit: You're right though. Using imagemagick to clone it like so:

       convert puzzle.png puzzle2.png

results in an image that's at least 40% smaller. It might just be better compression, but there might be another layer of steganography going on.

<comment><USER5> I unpacked the chunks and there doesn't look to be much more (or it's subtle).

The IDAT chunk (which makes up most of the file) is DEFLATE-d but uses full color (rather than palettized color, which would have saved lots of space, and might be how you'd get 40% compression). It also doesn't use any row filtering.

I checked incase something was hidden in the DEFLATE encoding itself (e.g. using sub-optimal block encoding selection) but this round-trips exactly, so I don't think it can be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm always of the opinion that these tests are not necessarily to find someone that can solve the puzzle, it's to find those that can solve it and aren't egotistical enough to brag that they solved it online.

</comment><comment><USER8> I did HEX > ASCII > BASE64 Decode... Got this.

\---

ш 4ʄF ꇢʝ 0'nÁGۊ㩌挨ﻲn偃Y픤 맀㫍zHvB塁ڟङ돒ٱ噭ۻm큔員踥;U35̆^ې5躂FTѥ憆∻bI1隤7糃1sÄàbrXÒ5㨄gP肂2똑jgQ7凮轋DnظƁए4o̤拢۪`z툃䇤 1喉鴌桘 xO挎EệhʍϢU뵥f摗䪦驭y秺f¬y靭欅鞞뭡ʮꆫ婨zƛ뫶

\---

With some editing out of characters...

Yan Lei who suffer㫍Qie ې Da Cheng ruin Fenghun rope䇤throat Fengchui O destroyed ʍϢU 摗Yu秺 䰢Ren Ju scabbard 뭡 Lun 뫶

\---

Not sure if I'm on to something but was interesting seeing the Chinese characters.

<comment><USER8> I think there is maybe a couple more steps to it but interesting to see what you guys come up with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The count-the-pixels thing is too obvious, and doesn't explain why this is a compressed png that's almost twice the size of what you get when you decompress it.

"'Twould be a shame not to count this art among the great texts of our time" makes me think part of the file is a one-time pad against part of some famous book (based on the phrasing, and the Britishness of MI5, probably some 19th century British literary author, maybe Dickens or Austen). Assuming that's the case, the solution would be:

1\. Figure out which 'text' they're referring to, or get the text of as many books as possible;

2\. Take the chunk of the file between the PNG headers and the Comment;

3\. XOR that chunk against the corpus with a sliding window;

4\. Score each sample based on number of english words found in the output, keeping the top 10 as you go (or do some map/reduce crap because this would take a while);

5\. Read the top outputs and see if anything makes sense.

This would also explain why the file is a bit longer than you'd think it should be based on its visual contents.

If anyone wants to try it, this might be a good start:

* [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/37](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/37)

* [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/68](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/68)

<comment><USER10> It does seem too obvious, and the comment seems to be pointing somewhere else like you say.

What do you mean about the compressed size?

There are no hidden chunks in the file, and the image data chunk when inflated is 60147 bytes, vs 1270 compressed.

<comment><USER9> I ran `convert -compress None puzzle.png` and the output was ~800 bytes. Clearly that's optimizing the image too, but basically the image seems wastefully large, and that makes me suspicious there's something going on there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a coding challenge for them. Sadly, it's a really easy one that they missed on so far: Do a better-than-random shuffle so the did-you-know questions lower down on that page don't repeat so often.

</comment><comment><USER12> Code-golf anyone? Here's my bash one-liner:

        pngtopnm puzzle.png | xxd -s14 -p -c3 | uniq -c | awk '{printf "%c", $1}' | xxd -r -p

Explanation:

       pngtopnm converts the image to an uncompressed bytestream format (pnm)
       xxd converts the bytes to hex representation
          -s14 skips the pnm header
          -p gives plain hex output
          -c groups by 3 byte values (RGB pixel values)
       uniq -c counts the run length encoding of the hex triplets
       awk / printf %c converts the RLE count to an ascii value
       xxd -r reverses the hex dump to the final encoded message

</comment><comment><USER13> Thought they'd make this challenge more challenging but I reckon anyone who does solve this is pretty smart and worth hiring for them. Remember its government so they aren't getting or even looking for the best of the best... they don't pay enough for the best.

<comment><USER4> Yes. It would appear that their main criteria are actually mental stability and reliability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "As I read, numbers I see. 'Twould be a shame not to count this art among the great texts of our time"

Only took about 5 seconds to find.

<comment><USER15> That's the comment at the end of the file, but is this even the challenge? Because it take takes less than 5 seconds to find it, i think this is a hint not the solution.

EDIT: Use gimp to save it as ASCII portable bitmap ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netpbm_format](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netpbm_format)), strip the headers and all the junk and you get a message that links to mi5.gov.uk/careers.

<comment><USER16> Somehow I doubt that's the solution either, you can get to that same link by just using the Careers menu item.

I would think/hope it's a bit more complicated than that.

Looking at the challenge one of the things that has me wondering is why do they repeat the same text twice, but with different font sizes. This suggests some kind of fraction that is somehow relevant to get further in the puzzle.

<comment><USER15> It's but read the edit, the solution isn't much more complicated than that either :) this is very basic steganography.

<comment><USER16> I did, my comment is about the edit. It feels that there should be more to it than that. I would at least expect the result to point to something you can't get at by just browsing around.

Perhaps I'm just hoping for more than there is to it :).

<comment><USER15> Well the full message is

"436F6E67726174756C6174696F6E732C20796F7520736F6C766564207468652070757A7A6C65212057687920646F6E927420796F75206170706C7920746F206A6F696E206F7572207465616D3F206D69352E676F762E756B2F6361726565727320"

"Congratulations, you solved the puzzle! Why don�t you apply to join our team? mi5.gov.uk/careers "

So i doubt there is much more to it ;)

<comment><USER6> I got that far too. I don't believe it - there has to be more to it than that. There'll be something else in that file that's better hidden, for sure, and I'm pretty sure it won't be plain ASCII and hex. :)

<comment><USER10> I'm a bit disappointed there aren't any hidden chunks that take advantage of the PNG format :-(

Uncompressed it's just a binary message of 2 pixel colours, so unless that comment at the end is pointing somewhere else then it's not got much depth...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am very surprised by the amount of spoilers here. You ruined my fun

</comment><comment><USER18> Clearly the horizontal span lengths , between each fixed height step, encode a useful sequence.

Numbers. Or an offset sequence. If it's a simple cipher recovery should be quick.

Somehow this whole thing reminds me of Egyptian fractions

How long will hn take to solve if we work together

Okay what if rearranging the red strips so their edges are flush encodes a transposition. Key for the cipher.

I'm betting hn will solve when post is 49 minutes old

<comment><USER19> Close enough... 43 minutes

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Iterate over the personal information of 5000 citizens using a for loop and violate their rights by calling the violateHumanRights() function which takes a single parameter which is the personal identification number attribute of the citizen.</comment>


GNOME project picks JavaScript as "first class" dev language - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/05/gnome_standardises_on_javascript/ <comment><USER2> I think they (GNOME) would like to 'lure' more web-centered developers to their platform so that's why they chose JS.

But there's a fault in their thinking IMHO. Web guys are web guys for one reason: They sincerely believe web is the future and better than native desktop software. (For some values of better.)

And then there's the other big group: The native desktop devs who don't think JavaScript is a good choice for a native platform as there's already a big eco system of C/C++ code supporting this platform and why make the extra work of creating JS bindings? (I'm one of these guys - though I don't develop for GNOME.)

So all the GNOME guys do with this decision is to alienate their existing developer base while not really attracting any new devs to their platform.

Personally I think Vala was/is a perfect language for their platform. It's sad they they gave up on that.

<comment><USER3> > Web guys are web guys for one reason: They sincerely believe web is the > future and better than native desktop software.

That's probably only a very small, but very vocal group of developers; those that seem to spend more of their time on writing about their work and their unique insights into how software development should be done (all inferred from their petty front-end dabbling) than actually doing something productive. The vast majority of web developers is developing for the web out of necessity, not because of some grandiose spiritual self-delusion.

I do of course agree with your view that this move will neither attract new developers nor keep existing developers happy.

<comment><USER4> > The vast majority of web developers is developing for the web out of > necessity.

I wouldn't call it _necessity_. I, for one, like the openness of the web, how it allows me to deploy software to all my users at the same time, the customization, etc. I don't believe it's the holy grail, but it's hardly out of necessity that I develop for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While that is the title of theregister's piece, it is not true. The bindings of no other language are being removed, the GNOME project has just decided what answer they should give to the question "What should I write my new app in", and to try to get one language's documentation up to really high standards.

<comment><USER6> Yea, the title is misleading, as down there in the article they clearly say that JavaScript will just be given priority, and work on other languages will continue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know if i really like that approach. I'd much rather prefer Python or even C/C++. There are already so many desktop bindings for Python, why going through the hazzle to support all this in javascript? The documentation will be poor, many libraries will be missing, the learning curve will be high in the beginning. My guess is that the Gnome team wants to take advantage of the amount of Javascript capable developers. But seriously, will many of those website/html/css/js developers write a desktop app where the overall community spirit is to replace apps with websites?

<comment><USER8> You are probably not aware of the GObject Introspection mechanism that is available for quite some time now. Any compliant GObject-based library can be used by any language that supports GI through an intermediate representation of the classes, interfaces etc. So, you don't need to write any bindings, neither for Python, JS, Java, Go or whatever.

<comment><USER7> Question is if there is a GObject based library for everything a developer likes to do?

<comment><USER9> Give me a list of everything that a developer likes to do, and I'll try to answer this.

<comment><USER7> Ok, let me put it this way:

What do you estimate is bigger? The amount of plain C libraries or the amount of GObject based libraries? Where would you put the amount of available perl/python/ruby modules?

(The amount of C libraries not in GObject is my answer to your question ;) )

<comment><USER9> Your question confuses me. What exactly do you believe GObject does?

<comment><USER7> Out of my head and with no experience in it i'd think it's a library/framework to give plain C libraries more object oriented features, a type system and overall the base for most or all Gnome libraries. Probably comparable to Qt in that it probably has its own String implementation or container implementations. Much like Qt but procedural. Is that far off?

<comment><USER10> It does that, but that's not the important point. The fun part comes with the GIR files, that abstractly describe the classes, functions, members, constants and what have you in XML. Which means your language bindings are inflated from that description. That minimizes the effort to build and manage bindings for libraries developed on top of GObject.

<comment><USER7> Well, i don't question that flexibility, i have high regards of Gnome and run it for years now. I am not developer of Gnome, so i actually couldn't care less, apart from concerns of how the development of gnome turns out in a few years. Will JS in Gnome take off? Will there be more or less new developers?

What i question is the quality of documentation and the amount of 3rd party libraries (partly based on what i have seen from vala and in comparison to the whole C/C++ ecosystem and the amount and quality of 3rd party libraries for python, which i surely know more of then of GJS and GObject). No doubt it will be a massive amount of work to sort of replicate the efforts already put into the existing projects. Does the Gnome development have those resources? It will have to rely on other developers to join and work on that, for sure. It's sort of a chicken/egg problem. Why would i choose to write my Gnome app in Javascript when i have many well tested and well documented alternatives?

In the end, most interesting would be the point of view and experience of a vala contributor or even a Mono developer.

I don't doubt that glib, gobject and everything starting with G is nice ;)

But, again, how does it compare to the superset that is the C eco system or to a "direct competitor" that is python/ruby/perl/mono/whatever, _especially_ when it comes to desktop apps. Just take a look at how much is written for the Linux desktop in perl/python/mono/ruby and how good it actually works.

What is wrong with C/C++/python/ruby/mono/perl that it REALLY REALLY REALLY is beneficial to go down another road?

P.S.: Yes, i get that it is still (and will always be) possible to write apps in those languages. It's most important what the primary and recommended way is, though.

<comment><USER10> I can't really comment on that, I'm in the Perl 5 category myself :) My first assumption is they're trying to get some of the JavaScript crowd to do Gnome application development by connecting the communities. In this case, by actively working on the bindings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know what happened to Vala[1] and why it was not picked ? It seems to have a huge amount of traction[2] and generates compiled code (which seems to me as performant than Javascript)

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vala_%28programming_language%29> [2] [https://live.gnome.org/Vala/Documentation#Projects_Developed...](https://live.gnome.org/Vala/Documentation#Projects_Developed_in_Vala)

<comment><USER12> Mostly because Vala is a GNOME-only language with no external support or buy- in. It'd be rather insular of GNOME to say "if you want to write apps, then learn our new, GNOME-only language."

<comment><USER11> Vala is modeled after C#, which probably is (empirically) the most popular desktop app development language.

genuinely curious : In general, do we see a lot of desktop app developers coming from the web world on Linux ? I'm pretty sure that is not the case in the Windows world. In fact, more often than not I have seen die hard fanatics ("interpreted languages sucks for desktop apps!!" vs "C++ sucks") on both sides unwilling to cross over.

<comment><USER13> "the most popular desktop app development language" on MS Windows only, where GNOME doesn't run

<comment><USER11> its the most popular desktop app dev language period - by sheer numbers. I see these people as the target market for Linux, especially with the closed marketplace of Windows 8 RT.

I am not sure these developers would come onboard with knowledge of javascript - so the biggest advantage (ubiquity) is nullified.

I am not sure which developers is Gnome targeting by choosing javascript. At this point in the evolution of OSes, its all about the app marketplace.

<comment><USER14> Linux has always had an app marketplace, it just wasn't called a "marketplace" (when everything is free, the marketplace/store analogy isn't appropriate). At least in Debian and derivatives, everything is a one-click install since '98.

How JavaScript fits in this picture, however, is still beyond me.

<comment><USER11> an app marketplace is not simply about package managers. Its about an ecosystem that allows developers to develop high quality apps. Additionally its about payment systems, etc - but tgats not relevant fof this discussion.

I'm finding it hard to believe that you can woo quality desktop app developers using javascript.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I totally agree about JS.

Otherwise, I'd call the Free Software Movement a pretty neat ecosystem :P I'm sure at least some people will agree :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's an OK choice. I'd rather they picked Dart instead. Dart has a better OO support and a cleaned up core language. But it's early days for Dart still.

Dart has a VM by the same folks who created the JavaScript V8 Engine and they say that they expect Dart to be faster than JavaScript in a number of ways. Part because Dart's code is less dynamic than JavaScript's. Part because loading Dart files could use a pre-parsed file.

You can work on documenting Dart code by adding types to the APIs as it's optionally typed. Dart on the browser gets translated into JavaScript for deployment making the issue of not having a Dart VM everywhere less important.

One of the niceties of Dart is that before deploying, code gets reduced by removing unused code with a tree-shaking algorithm based on Dart's less dynamic features.

      class Dart extends JavaScript {
        var points;
        Dart(this.points = 10);
      }

That's a sample Dart class with default constructor parameter.

</comment><comment><USER16> Further info: <http://treitter.livejournal.com/14871.html>

In fact I recommend reading the comments.

EDIT: ah, I didn't notice the reg linked to the blog post (I got distracted by the _inaccurate_ title). Well, that's the source anyway and my recommendation stands.

Kudos to Travis Reitter for replying to the comments.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't think I've seen a more inaccurate headline stay on HN for so long.

JS isn't the sole app dev language and it won't ever be. It's the language they chose to prioritize resources for tooling, documentation, and evangelizing of the platform to new developers.

A better, more thoughtful explanation is at the developer's blog, which I hope the OP link is replaced with: <http://treitter.livejournal.com/14871.html>

</comment><comment><USER18> Well, it's an answer to the paradox of choice.

Also, JavaScript is not a bad language for UI development at all. It certainly has its warts, but I liked it more than the other frameworks I've done UIs in: Java Swing, Perl/Python Tk or Haskell WX.

Admittedly, I really liked the FRP logic part with Haskell, but actually using wxWidgets was pretty poor. Also, JavaScript has some very compelling FRP libraries itself which could probably be adapted to work on Gnome.

<comment><USER19> Well,I wish we had ES4 instead, which would have been even better but thanks to Microsoft,Yahoo and Mozilla betrayal this will never happen.

The irony is when Microsoft comes up with Typescript because they now think javascript is not good enough.

Eventually Javascript will look like Python.

<comment><USER14> ...and Microsoft already had WPF... Isn't everything else VERY primitive compared to it? Why would they go back to an inferior technology? Adoption issue?

<comment><USER19> Microsoft had JScript.NET even before C#, so this was purely a political move not a technical one.

At that time , investing on javascript would not have made Windows sell more.

Now Javascript is seen as a way for MS to get more apps on their RT plateform thus sell more Windows licenses.

However , i dont believe MS javascript move is a long term one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Back in 2005 at Bloomberg we decided to move all Terminal app development to server-side JS, using a homegrown system built on top of a custom GObject (GObjectIntrospection didn't exist at the time, so we made our own) and SpiderMonkey. IIRC, GNOME was starting to experiment with JS around the same time. JS isn't for everyone, but it certainly makes app development faster than writing apps in C/C++.

</comment><comment><USER21> What is the most sophisticated GNOME app written in JavaScript thus far? Honest question.

<comment><USER22> Large parts of GNOME Shell are written in GJS using GIR hooks to LibMutter and Clutter.

<comment><USER23> Given that GNOME Shell is one of the most criticized and outright hated pieces of open source software, it isn't a very comforting example.

<comment> adam-a Most criticism centres on the design, not the technical aspects, I think it's fair to say. It's an example of a fairly large, complex, and smooth application written in Javascript for the Gnome platform.

I am looking forward to more apps using JS to see how well it all works in practice though. More docs and support will help this I hope.

<comment><USER24> I think that the language is not necessarily so disconnected from the design as you say. Language influences thought, and can thus have a large effect on how people solve problems (ex. When's the last time you used a lightweight, snappy feeling Java app?). If Javascript leads people to designs like the GNOME shell, I'd much rather it be kept out of GNOME's toolkit.

<comment><USER23> Very true.

I think it's also important to consider not only how JavaScript may influence developers while they create software, but also what its voluntary use says about the developers' experience, knowledge and judgment.

It's one thing to use JavaScript when you're doing client-side web development, where it's basically the only option, even if it's dressed up as CoffeeScript or TypeScript. But it makes absolutely no sense to voluntarily use it when C, C++, Python and even C# and Vala are available. Doing so would be a significant show of very bad judgment, in my opinion.

If you need performance or power, using C or C++ makes perfect sense. If minimizing development time and effort is important, then Python will work extremely well. Vala and C# generally fix somewhere in between. So there's absolutely no place or need for JavaScript, which is inferior in every respect. No intelligent developer should ever feel the need to choose it when developing GNOME applications, given the much superior alternatives. Anyone who does want to use it probably shouldn't be contributing to a project like GNOME in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Doing some work in Mono/C# and it rocks. That would make a way better choice than JavaScript.

<comment><USER26> It's been a long time since I looked into GNOME dev but that _was_ the main choice for the last 10 years or so, wasn't it?

<comment><USER27> no, it wasn't - mostly because of political bullcrap coming from the "I'm purer than thou" crowd. obviously, the biased perception that gnome was using C# exclusively was also due to the same crowd.

this also led to the C#/mono platform lagging behind, so that these days writing gnome apps in C# means using deprecated libraries, which is unfortunate.

<comment><USER26> Ah right, maybe that's where I got the impression. I used to follow Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza's work in the early/mid 2000s and picked up a 'C# is the future of GNOME' vibe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> That is a misrepresentation. They are just going to recommend JavaScript if people ask which to use and focus on supporting that. Not forcing people to drop other languages.

My question is, what about people that like JavaScript derivatives like CoffeeScript or LiveScript?

<comment><USER29> I guess they just compile them to JS as they would for the web. On github I have seen a few gnome3 mods written in coffeescript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> >>> Today, Reitter says that question has "about 8 different personal- preference answers". That's not helpful because "... it drives people away from our platform. Having to potentially evaluate several different languages and their stacks gives potential developers a lot of unneeded extra work."

That makes absolutely no sense. You aren't going to evaluate GNOME as a C developer and thinking about whether or not you're going to use the Python bindings--you're going to use the C bindings. This is just garbage.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm using gnome shell and I love it. I moved to it from awesomewm, so that gives you an idea of the type of user that I am. They made some bold moves on UX, and I was surprised I was agreeing with them. There's a tiling wm extension, shellshape, that has advantages over awesome (!). I'm happy with the move. This is just to say that gnome is not targeting grandmas and teenager with their redesign. If you were used to gnome 2 desktop (which I hated) give 3 a serious try.

</comment><comment><USER32> Sole?

> "We will continue to write documentation for other languages"

I think you mean 'primary'. Everyone who loves C or Python or whatever will continue to be able to use C or Python or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm sorry, but the intuition-less "practical" decisions of GNOME of late only make me think this now:

Q: What do GNOME developers really want? A: Who cares?

<comment><USER9> If you were a comedian, I'd heckle.

<comment><USER33> I'd understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't understand why all the hate. Javascript is the fastest growing language right now and there is no sign of slowing down. My question is why would they pick another language over this one?

<comment><USER35> Javascript became the language of the web because it was there, and people adapted. While it may be secured in the web, I think it's a mistake to pick such a, for lack of a better term, horrible language for programming on the desktop.

As a language, javascript feels less complete when compared to other languages (like python). The weak-typing is especially bad, leading to inconsistent results. More time/effort is then required to write a good application, which I think is unacceptable.

<comment><USER29> Javascript has the advantage that most of the millions of web devs out there have used it or a language that compiles to it at some point.

By comparison python is a relatively niche language.

It also has the advantage of allowing web devs to port their web code over easily to a desktop app.

<comment><USER23> It's best to keep those kind of developers isolated to the web, and away from important, widely-used software projects like GNOME. I think a lot of the problems with GNOME 3 were due to web developers and designers getting involved, bringing in some dumb philosophies, and making decisions that were quite terrible.

Things were much better when it was C programmers doing the bulk of GNOME's design and implementation.

<comment><USER29> A lot of web developers are working on things that are more widely used than gnome.

This seems roughly equivalent to saying "This platform should only have applications written by neckbeards for neckbeards"

I think if this brings programmers who would not traditionally target Linux desktop to target gnome that is a good thing. if their apps suck it should be straightforward to avoid them.

<comment><USER35> I do agree that unix/linux was full applications written by neckbeards for neckbeards at one point. The push to have applications that are more usable is good. The problem is they have taken this too far, and the programs and DEs that are being created now are truly annoying to use, and harder to learn for anyone.

I think the biggest problem is that everything is being written for "The N00b". I don't think anyone has a very clear picture of who this person actually is, so they cut back functionality and UI elements to try to make it more friendly for this person. What you end up with is a DE like Gnome Shell, that is significantly different to what many people are used to, and takes longer to learn how to use. I also think many developers wouldn't actually use some of their applications, which leads to many more problems. There was a talk at an Australian linux conference recently where a speaker told the story of how he had tried to use evolution, but came across many bugs. After talking to the developers, he found that none of them used/tested the features he was using, so these kind of bugs can popup without soneone fixing them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Fitting that the article should end with the "best tool for the job" defense. This argument seems to be used almost monotonically to justify poor language and design choices.

This move is bad for the GNOME project as it has the potential to knock the quality of new GNOME apps down to the quality of the average web app. They're robbing themselves of the benefits of native development and, due to their GNOME-specific APIs, not even getting portability in return.

</comment><comment><USER36> And thus the road to irrelevancy begins....

</comment><comment><USER37> This is absolutely laughable. If you make an API, you make it language agnostic.

I can understand if they are _recommending_ it, but I'm not sure lowering the barrier to entry so low that you're going to have an absolute tonne of horrendously written, likely insecure apps, is all that good.

<comment><USER38> The GNOME APIs are language agnostic. They're a fantastic example of language agnotism. Anything written with the Glib library or libraries that have Glib bindings for them, can be accessed from any language that is GObjectIntrospection-able: currently this is Javascript and Python, but there might be more.

>> lowering the barrier to entry so low that you're going to have an absolute tonne of horrendously written, likely insecure apps, is all that good.

I disagree. One of the most common questions about opensource projects is "where do I start contributing?", and the FOSS community admits that the initial contribution barrier is high.

Horrendously written apps I can live with: I just won't use them. Regarding insecurity, I'd much rather an insecure desktop app than an insecure web app (that might be accessible to the world).

<comment> shawn-butler RE: bindings other than javascript/python [0]. I have used the Go binding.

[0] <https://live.gnome.org/GObjectIntrospection/Users>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Problem: too much choices. Solution: let's introduce one more choice, and a crappy one while at that.

</comment><comment><USER40> They say Javascript is good because it's self-contained with no core library, which is fair enough.

I'm curious what engine they've decided on using though. As far as I can see, that has not been mentioned. Anyone got any intel?

<comment> adam-a Spidermonkey I think. <https://live.gnome.org/Gjs>

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I thought when you were making a desktop application for linux distros it wasn't supposed to only work on one DM. Why would you have to specifically think about gnome when you're making one?

<comment><USER42> If you're writing an app that uses GNOME libraries you'll probably be thinking about those libraries quite a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd like to see LibreOffice rewritten entirely in JavaScript.

<comment><USER38> Hard to tell, but I'm guessing this is sarcasm.

This would definitely be possible. When GNOME say "Javascript", they actually mean Javascript + GObjectIntrospection + any C libraries that are written with Glib or libraries that have Glib bindings for them.

Javascript will end up calling C code.

<comment><USER9> Not at all. I'm quite serious. I'm actually interested to see if this could be done.

But this is very interesting :-) Can you point to any documentation?

 _Edit:_ the issue with porting LibreOffice to Javascript is the sheer _size_ of the codebase. I don't suppose anyone has a block diagram anywhere of OpenOffice/LibreOffice that divides it into modules?

I mean, how do you tackle such a massive codebase? It looks like Michael Meeks has a good idea about this, but the biggest problem with the codebase is that there isn't any high level, quality documentation that shows how it works.

Also... and this is probably just me, but I can't even find the entry-point to the code. That's always been my issue with these apps, but that just shows my exceeding lack of ability in C++ coding I suspect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Oh man! I just learned Guile!</comment>


A new venture firm called BlueYard - <AUTHOR> http://www.berlinvc.com/2016/01/04/a-new-venture-firm-called-blueyard/ <comment><USER2> Nice. We created a VC fund but only fund people we know so if your reading this blog post and I didn't send it to you personally ignore it. Thanks for reading. To me it's not news unless you've innovated past the "rich people giving their friends money to start businesses" business model.</comment>


Show HN: Particle Clicker – new release - <AUTHOR> http://cern.ch/particle-clicker

<comment><USER2> This is great! I spent a fair amount of time on Cookie clicker so I can see myself getting addicted to this. I love the graphical interface. I am a bit unsure about what reputation does however - just affecting funding?</comment>


Gwene is an RSS (and Atom, etc) to Usenet News (i. e., NNTP) gateway - <AUTHOR> http://gwene.org/about.php

<comment><USER2> Wow, this is something I wished for since the creation of RSS.

Somehow, the RSS design failed to provide features that were already there in NNTP, like differential updates and message/reply (post/comment) threading...

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is a little video I made showing how to use Gnus in Emacs to read RSS via Gwene: <http://vimeo.com/asjo/rss-in-emacs>

<comment><USER4> Any reason to use this over the builtin `nnrss` backend?

<comment><USER3> Only that nntp is more mature than nnrss in Gnus, in my experience.

I only had nnrss working well when I used an external script to fetch the feeds via cron (there is an example in the documentation).

When Lars created Gwene, I switched to use that instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great. If you sign up for new feeds they will be available almost immediately. I'm using Gwene with mutt as my newsreader.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> At least for now, this is my replacement for Google Reader. I've set up Emacs Gnus, subscribed to the half-dozen or so blogs that I care about, and now I read in the comfort Emacs.

</comment><comment><USER6> This would be cool with an alt.rss-feed.DOMAIN-COM translator... could even be used as a backend for an up and coming web-rss platform.</comment>


15 Bitcoin Predictions for 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/G5SEtEZ.jpg

<comment><USER2> I believe that Bitcoin has just gone through a trough of disillusionment in 2014 [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/Gar...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/Gartner_Hype_Cycle.svg/2000px- Gartner_Hype_Cycle.svg.png)

From here on we will start to see the benefits of Bitcoin and specific use cases takehold

<comment><USER3> Name three, that aren't illicit goods and money laundering. (As I note in my other comment, it doesn't actually work out cheaper for remittances in real life.) So far, I've found nothing it actually does better than conventional systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some good predictions which paint a bullish 2015 for bitcoin believers. My money's on 2015 being a year which an industry-wide shakedown will occur. Weak players as we've started seeing in the mining industry are going to fall by the wayside to create a much stronger ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER3> * There will continue to be nothing that Bitcoin does better than existing systems, apart from money laundering and purchasing illicit goods.

* No, not remittance. The expensive bit of Western Union is in fact that last mile. [http://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/2ne03g/the_buttcoi...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/2ne03g/the_buttcoin_remittance_challenge/)

* It will remain difficult to turn your Bitcoins into conventional currency (which is the only reason there's such a spread between exchanges).

* It will get even harder to turn your conventional currency into Bitcoins, as any exchange not being run by blatant crooks puts you through the anti-money-laundering mill.

* The protocol problems will continue not to be fixed, unless Mircea Popescu can be convinced to go along with the Bitcoin Foundation. No 20-meg blocks for you!

* 99% of current hash power came online in 2014; this will be very price-sensitive, and much will go offline as the price drops, _maybe_ coming back next hash adjustment.

* Miners will continue to sell their coins immediately to cover costs: we are near equilibrium, where the cost of mining 1 BTC approaches 1 BTC.

* Transaction irreversibility will remain Bitcoin's sticking point, as speculators who are insufficiently computer-savvy keep getting burnt.

* More exchanges will get hacked and/or just take everyone's money.

* Everyone who bought in the last year and held is a bagholder. Their claims and speculation will get increasingly frenzied. Ask for numbers supporting _all_ claims, particularly the ones in this infographic.

* The bagholders and gambling addicts will continue to be taken by obvious scams, _e.g._ the two Ponzi scheme sites in just the last month.

* Altcoins will continue to be _even scammier_ than the Bitcoin ecosphere, boggled as I was to realise this.

* The price is presently being held up by speculation and wishful thinking. No new reason will come along.

<comment><USER3> In miners: whoops, there goes CoinTerra! [http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin- mining-firm-cointerra-files-...](http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-firm- cointerra-files-chapter-7-bankruptcy/) That's chapter 7, by the way, not chapter 11 - they don't think they even have a business any more, they're cutting it up for scrap.

Oh yes, and another point for the above list:

* Nobody wants smart contracts. They know that the plot of _Dr. Strangelove_ is literally an unstoppable smart contract going wrong. Real companies want to retain the option of lawyering out of a stupid deal. The only people who would want smart contracts are businesses looking to screw over their customers even more than "mandatory arbitration" clauses do. This is about as appealing to customers as no chargebacks, for the same reason.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: For new web developer, Java Spring, Ruby on Rails, or something else? - <AUTHOR>

So I wanted to finally take action on some of my ideas and build the website for one of them. I decided to use Heroku since I've heard great things about it. I like how it handles all of the server management and allows me to just code. Being an experienced Java guy, I decided to build from their Spring sample app. Unfortunately, this was pretty tricky. Having never used Spring, I started searching online for tutorials. Most of them are either outdated or are too confusing. Despite that, I was able to hack up a little something, but at this point, I'm not sure if I should keep going with Spring. I know some Ruby, and can definitely brush up on it if Rails is the way to go, but I've heard many people complain about performance and scalability on Rails.<p>So my question is this: Should I continue with Spring, or switch to RoR or some other web framework? <comment> why-el Unless you think you will face scale issues comparable to those of Twitter or Github, I am not sure whats stopping you from using Rails. In fact, the amount of information about how to scale Rails (The latest I have read is from the guys at Goodfil.ms) makes your task ahead almost trivial.

Having said all this, I worked professionally with Spring and I do personal stuff with Rails, and Rails is a lot more fun.

</comment><comment><USER2> You don't really specify what you want to achieve -- a "website" can be many things. If you know a little Ruby and like working with it, I don't see why you wouldn't go with RoR.

If you want to stay a little closer to Java, you might want to check out Grails:

      http://www.grails.org/
      https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/grails

If you're actually just writing a website, not a web app (however that distinction is made these days), something like Ruby and Sinatra might be a better fit:

      http://www.sinatrarb.com/
      https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rack

And if you want something completely different, you might have a look at web2py (on Heroku you would have to deploy that as a python wsgi app).

And while I think Heroku looks fantastic, I'm personally leaning towards <http://appfog.com/> for the projects I plan to be toying with "in the cloud" -- I feel their pricing model (especially their "free" tier) makes more sense. But you should of course choose what is a good fit for your needs.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're really comfortable with Java, and you want to get something out of the door, it may not be the best choice to switch languages (as would be the case for rails). If you already know ruby, then go rails by all means.

Instead, you might consider a of Java-rooted option:

The play framework is pretty slick (<http://www.playframework.org>). The APIs are fairly light and easy to pick up, and the templating system is rather powerful. The documentation is solid, and it's not like you'll need to spend hours in tutorials to get started Play does both Java and Scala, and works fine with either. I'd actually recommend you stick to Play 1.x, as the 2.x docs and stuff aren't as mature and are much more targeted to Scala developers.

Oh, and heroku loves play. <https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/play>

</comment><comment><USER4> I was a Java guy too just prior to going into web development and coincidentally I too encountered the same problem as you did.

I tried Django and quite a few Java frameworks but ultimately settled on using node.js because I found it to be the lowest point of entry by far.

</comment><comment><USER5> Have a look at Play! and Scala: <http://www.jamesward.com/category/play- framework/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Spring and Java EE will make you hate life and those who participate in it. Java alone is a great language, and I've heard great things about Wicket, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wicket> . I personally like GWT but no one seems to use it and even less seem to use it professionally.

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://tapestry.1045711.n5.nabble.com/Re-hosting- td5032356.h...](http://tapestry.1045711.n5.nabble.com/Re-hosting- td5032356.html#a5474859)

[http://tapestry.1045711.n5.nabble.com/Retreieving- specific-b...](http://tapestry.1045711.n5.nabble.com/Retreieving-specific- blog-td5716268.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> I too have exactly the same situtation. I haven't decided, but moving towards RoR. Comparing to node.js RoR is kind of stable to me. In node.js, still there are lot of changes and it hasn't hit 1.0. I am planning to go with client heavy using Angular.js and backend with RoR. I am also starting with mobile first.

</comment><comment><USER9> Despite the hate that this comment is sure to ensue: Why not node.js?

<comment><AUTHOR> I know very little Javascript, and from my attempts to code a bit of it, I wasn't too pleased. Maybe I just didn't understand it very well, and that put me off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Since you're starting out I recommend something that is newer than Spring but still old enough to have plenty of documentation online. Rails would be suitable.</comment>