Why I Hate Your Web App - <AUTHOR> http://www.drawar.com/articles/why-i-hate-your-web-app/85/

<comment><USER2> "What Is It You Do Again?"

This one is always a big pet peeve of mine. Taglines need to describe what you do, not how awesome you are. I hate seeing ones like "Together. Create. Share." or whatever. I'd much prefer "Create slideshows with a group." or something similar.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've had this theory for a while that successful consumer-to-consumer webapps (Blogs, Forums, SNSes, etc.) are almost never well-engineered.

I came up with it on the cuff at a MetaFilter 10th anniversary party where Matt Haughey was mocking me back for having commented online about how shittily written his site was -- I realized that I probably wouldn't be standing there drinking his beer if he were a better programmer, the site just wouldn't have taken off when it did.

On the one hand you have both LiveJournal and Facebook as examples of big successful apps that were technically terrific very early -- everything else I can think of never got used.

On the other hand you have everything else: Frontier, Movable Type, Blogger, Wordpress, Twitter, PHPbb, vBulletin, Friendster, Myspace, MediaWiki, etc. -- all heaping piles of shit code, some of which had the grace to either be completely rewritten or abandoned en-masse for the next heaping pile.

It's extraordinarily difficult to execute well with users socially _and_ execute well on the engineering.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure about the others, but one of the interesting things is that wordpress grew out of b2. The code quality in b2 was about what you'd expect given wordpress' initial security reputation.

I find it particularly interesting because you'd expect OSS that will be picked up by others to have good code quality though. Add to that the fact that at the time your typical PHP user probably had more technical competence than most (webhosting, particularly supporting PHP was rarer then)

<comment><USER5> The problem with OSS is that you have to contend with some sort of a community. With WordPress you will open up the source code, throw up in your mouth a little, get the urge to patch things up and realize that your changes will never make it upstream. WordPress works. That's why it's so popular. It's easy to install, much easier to use than a lot of web publishing platforms out there and there are lots of "useful" plugins. Most of all, it's got the ubiquitous support: LAMP is the de facto standard for cheap hosting out there.

However, it does some things that keep me up at night. It stores serialized PHP arrays to define what users have access to (the MU branch). It strips away magic quotes based on runtime configuration, only to add them right back using a PHP loop. It does not use any form of output buffering. It's themes are PHP files that often times contain core business logic (somewhat of a PHP problem really, but still). WordPress is bad code and there is nothing anybody can do about it.

This of course is not true of all OSS projects: far from it. Just so happens that when a small community controls core development and the initial codebase is not great, which is the case with many early PHP projects, the outcome is that the code will stay bad.

<comment><USER6> OT: what would you recommend instead of WordPress? I will be migrating away from blogger soon, since they will stop supporting ftp uploading.

<comment><USER7> I would suggest using a static blog, like jekyll (<http://wiki.github.com/mojombo/jekyll/>) or, if you would like something more user-friendly, dotclear (<http://dotclear.org/> \- a blog engine quite popular in france but it never really took off anywhere else).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Low Latency Decision Loop for Bot Management - <AUTHOR> https://www.slideshare.net/DataDome2018/datadome-low-latency-decision-loop-for-bot-management-123385591?ref=https://datadome.co/flink-meetup/ <comment><USER2> Very interesting stuff for people who try to implement this stack and gets stuck along the way</comment>


Use this app to gain REAL social media followers through collaboration - coop-team https://www.coop-app.com <comment> coop-team One of the best ways to gain exposure and influence on social media is through collaboration. Finding the right people to work with is difficult. We are creating a platform to help you connect and begin a collaborative relationship.</comment>


Ask HN: Why are patent holders allowed to sue years after their patent was infringed upon? - <AUTHOR>

It's obvious that patent holders/trolls wait until their infringed-upon patent becomes profitable before they decide to sue the companies that made it profitable. Why is this allowed to happen? Shouldn't the patent holder be responsible for defending their patent as soon as they know that it is being violated? It seems we would have less problems with patent-trolling if the prize at the end of lawsuit wasn't so big. <comment><USER2> _Why is this allowed to happen?_

IANAL, but in general if you can show that a patent holder deliberately delayed enforcing their patent, any award of damages will be reduced under the clean hands doctrine.

That said, there are many cases where patent enforcement takes a long time for no fault of the patent holder. If the patent holder is an individual who doesn't have big pockets, it might take a few years before he is aware that his patent is being infringed; he might spend a year trying to get the infringing company to negotiate a licensing deal; he might spend a year trying to find a law firm willing to take the case on contingency; and that law firm might spend a year trying to negotiate and/or collecting evidence before actually launching a lawsuit. So even without any deliberate attempts to delay enforcement it's entirely possible for a patent to be infringed for five years or more before a lawsuit happens.</comment>


Ask HN: How to deal with spellcheck code reviews? - <AUTHOR> It's really hard writing code on my team. Some of the other devs get hung up on code style (naming things, formatting, and other important, but superficial things). These things literally don't matter to me, a name is a name that just becomes a reference in the computer and so long as it's readable and makes sense in context, I'm cool with it.
What usually happens though, is that no one actually reviews the architecture, finds edge cases, or actually thinks about what the code is doing or will do with invalid input. This means that when I review code, I'm having to duck and weave around comments about whether a variable name should be plural or not and point out logical issues with the code. This means I have to self-review my own code and find potential logical issues as well as deal with whether a variable name should be plural.
It's nice that the code is super readable with consistent naming though, until it breaks. For example, I had a review and had to rename all the files to plurals, because they decided, while I was sick, to use plurals. This was decided in a code review, btw, and not shared anywhere else. "I should have noticed all the other files in the directory were plural." But no one noticed the glaring bug that I myself nearly missed until I slept on it.
How can I get these members of my team to stop spellchecking and actually review the code?
Replace "plural" above with any favorite code style violation. <comment><USER2> Implement coding standards as check-in hooks. You won't be able to check in any code that doesn't meet the coding standards.

Once everyone does that, then the humans can focus on the actual meat of what the code is supposed to be doing.</comment>


The abc.xyz Source Links to hooli.xyz - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/jonmarkgo/37dcb5814eccba362f57 <comment><USER2> Is this a Sergey Brin easter egg? His old resume contained 'hidden' cheeky comments (as HTML comments, check the source):

[http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/resume.html](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/resume.html)

HN submission about Brin's resume with numerous comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9055516](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9055516)

</comment><comment><USER3> .

a.hidden-link{color:inherit;cursor:text;text-decoration:none}

a.hidden-link:hover{color:inherit;cursor:text;text-decoration:none}

</comment><comment><USER4> the twitter account is [https://twitter.com/SiliconHBO](https://twitter.com/SiliconHBO)

</comment><comment><USER5> Wonder who Bighetti is supposed to be making fun of.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why is one meta tag closed and the others open?

<comment><USER7> Simple: because both forms work, and HTML does what it thinks you want it to, and yada yada yada.

Less prescriptive languages (the "do what I mean, not what I say" variety) invite this sort of inconsistency of expression. If you like it, run with it (more power to you), but it's not for me. Sadly, XHTML and schema-validated markup seems to have lost the war. These days I just let my JavaScript code generate my markup for me and I don't worry about things like closing tags.

<comment><USER8> >These days I just let my JavaScript code generate my markup for me.

React?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to do a SaaS with client side encryption, yet a Web API? - <AUTHOR> I want to make an open source "Basket In" software (the concept from GTD) so I can quickly capture offline text, voice and pics on the go, then get them synced on all my devices to sort them out the next morning.
However, I don't want the server to know what I, or any user really, is capturing, so I will encrypt it on the client side.
The problem is, I also want to provide a Web API, so that people can write their own client for it.
The server, however, can only send encrypted data to new clients. How do I solve this problem? Do I just share the encryption key with each client, including 3rd party site? What if a user suddenly distrust a client? Do I need to encrypt again the whole content with a new key? <comment><USER2> I would say that your questions are valid, but not necessary to tackle in the short term. In fact, if you don't store the encryption key then the problem doesn't exist at all. It is up to the client library to implement the prescribed encryption algorithm and up to the user to provide the encryption key.

In the end, you are simply storing bits. How those bits are interpreted is up to the client. If a user distrusts a client then they can download, re-encrypt and upload the content.

Btw, I had the same idea for a hosted solution. My concern became that illegal content would be uploaded to my server and I quickly went away from this, but I do think it is an interesting idea.</comment>


Snapchat's Biggest Weakness - <AUTHOR> http://ryanhoover.me/post/38965149554/snapchats-biggest-weakness

<comment><USER2> Going on a whim, but I feel that mass perception is in Snapchat's favor here. The public doesn't explicitly trust Facebook with all of their stuff, despite putting just about everything online - but this is entirely different. The nature of the disappearing messages is inherently very private, something people don't associate Facebook with at all. I've got a little selection bias, but none of my friends with Snapchat have heard of Poke, let alone use it. It may not be here to stay forever, but I don't think FB can kill it itself. A third party with better design, maybe.

</comment><comment><USER3> 2 things: \- privacy and Facebook arent strong points for a lot of consumers. Especially younger people, which I would think (no evidence) would be the majority of users.

\- Facebook probably did this as more of a warning shot to other developers that they will clone their service as a matter of urgency if they make a offer and they dont sell. They may have learned from their Instagram purchase that it costs a lot once someone else has enough traction.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think you are completely missing the point of snapchat. Right now they do have network effect because there is no other way to anonymously send disposable pictures. Everything op is talking about would completely ruin the value of snapchat. You have to look at it more as a product like Kik, BBM or skype, which has none of those terrible features you suggested and look at it as a alternative communication platform.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, Snapchat has network effects which _does_ create a commitment effect; however, as Nir Eyal points out, network effects aren't enough ([http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/04/the-network-effect-isnt- goo...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/04/the-network-effect-isnt-good- enough/)). The rapid growth of Snapchat (without use of Facebook/Twitter integration) exemplify this. Users are willing and able to switch services much more easily today than ever before.

<comment><USER4> Everything is moving much faster than it once was.. so its very hard to say what does have commitment effect especially when it comes to social thats so much more incredibly fickle .. friendster, myspace, even facebook to an extent you see people using Path and other niche services. Utilities are the only thing that has any lasting commitment.

You keep on wanting to point out Nir Eyal as an example, while the mechanics he speaks are true and relevant, most example he uses is a piss poor example of a true commitment. Really Slashdot/metafilter/fark/Digg/ and Reddit is the true commitment or Quora - the struggling QA platform. Really taskrabbit and airbnb. Lets be serious none of these are good examples.

Like I said previously Snapchat is a communication utility that people commit like BBM or whatsapp or kik or skype or even aol messenger. When it comes to a communication platform, people will commit to a few of them. Snapchat will be fine because its anonymous and provides a very specific community and has first movers advantage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't buy it. Snapchat's advantage is that you have friends who use snapchat. Poke isn't catching on simply because nobody uses it; Snapchat is the fourth most downloaded free app on the App Store, whereas Poke is at 145. Any of the things suggested completely break the very concept of Snapchat as transient. It's like Facebook: the lockin isn't your data, it's the people. Poke is basically Google+.

<comment><USER4> if you think poke is google+ you aren't using google+ correctly</comment></comment>


Staves – A Container Image Builder Based on Gentoo Linux - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitalernachschub.de/blog/staves-a-container-image-builder-based-on-gentoo-linux/ <comment><AUTHOR> Would you like me to release the tool as FLOSS?</comment>


Show HN: Weekly Google Analytics summaries in your inbox - <AUTHOR> http://briefmetrics.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Everyone I speak with who uses GA almost never checks their stats, so I wrote a service to bring your stats to you. :) Happy to answer any questions!

I think my main target audience is small business owners with websites, or publishers who make money from their websites.

Some factoids:

\- Originally written in Go, but then I regretted doing a webapp in Go so I rewrote it in Python. Hosted on DigitalOcean with Docker (really loving Docker lately).

\- Launched my former startup SocialGrapple (also in the analytics space) while traveling abroad. Same deal with Briefmetrics. Currently in Prague. :)

\- I worked on Google Analytics for over a year, but this has nothing to do with what I worked on (closer to what SocialGrapple was, which was acqu(h)ired by Google).

<comment><USER2> This seems pretty interesting, are you seeing lots of traction? It seems like more in-depth analytics might be pretty useful for some segments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is there any way you get me a report that combines data from multiple analytics profiles?

I have a dozen sites with a dozen profiles (and I think that's the correct set up -- they are discrete) but a lot of the time I want to track aggregate traffic to all of them or see trends about what's popular across all of them. I have scripts I hacked together using the API... but it's really pretty hacky.

If you could get me reports (also real-time data views!) that lets me slice and dice across a bunch of GA profiles, I would gladly pay for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Aiming to release multiple site support in a few weeks.

I'm planning to stick to email for delivery though, so real-time won't really work. :/

<comment><USER3> I think the Real Time API is still limited access beta anyway.

Even without real time this could be really useful -- thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> I added a note to ping you as soon as the multi-site stuff is ready for testing. I'm probably going to start with individual reports per-site, and then add summary reports for multiple sites. If you have any requests for the kinds of data you'd like to see, I'd love to hear about it.

<comment><USER3> To start with, I'm really just looking for real basic stuff: What were the top 10 pages across all sites? What were the trends/graphs of traffic of all sites combined (maybe a stacked line graph so I can still see how each site contributed).

It'd be great to know which sites are having a particularly good or bad month based on historical data.

Shoot me an email if you want more, it's in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love this service. I've been beta testing it for a few weeks and Andrey has figured out just the right metrics to include in a very succinct manor. It's one of my favorite emails every week.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just tried it out and was pleasantly surprised by the email.</comment>


Ask HN: Who's using Yodlee? - <AUTHOR>

Hello!
I'm building a personal finance app and would like to know what other companies use Yodlee.com's SDK to provide customers access to their online banking data, except Mint and InDinero?
Are there any realistic alternatives for accessing this data? I believe that building screen scrapers from scratch is not a good one.
Thank you! <comment><USER2> Has anyone come across any opensource/community attempts to build a set of financial site scrapers? It seems like an area where such an approach might flourish.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like this idea a lot, but actually doing it would require a tremendous effort, considering all the different (and crappy) internet banking apps around the world. But sure, it could start with 1 bank, then add support for others in time.</comment></comment>


How much is 100 Percent of a Company with No Value Worth? - <AUTHOR> http://www.gobignetwork.com/wil/2007/8/9/how-much-is-100-percent-of-a-company-with-no-value-worth/10183/view.aspx <comment><USER2> The most guaranteed payout would be getting a job at a big company... So if we were betting on success of a company versus the stake you hold, would that be the way to go?</comment>


This Incredible Animation Was Made by Code That Could Fit on a Floppy - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/this-incredible-animation-was-made-by-code-that-could-f-1565294456

<comment><AUTHOR> 64k? ReallY?</comment>


The Feynman Lectures on Physics are free online - <AUTHOR> http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ <comment><USER2> One of Feynman's funniest lines, I thought, was during a talk where someone in the audience asked if we'd ever be able to develop an anti-gravity device. Feynman gestured at their chair and said something along the lines of "we already have, in fact you're sitting on one right now."

<comment><USER3> Funny. Except that sitting on a chair will not make you feel weightless. Also, we can't replace space stations and parabolic flights by chairs.

<comment><USER4> The chair provides an equal but opposite force to gravity, that could be interpreted as anti-gravity :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you haven't read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" yet, do yourself a favor and order it right now!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I should (sheepishly) say that I knew Vol. 1 and 2 were available but very recently discovered 3 was now also available. As it turns out, 3 was published a while ago, so while it was new to me, the full set being available was not, in fact, new to the world.

That said, hopefully it's all new to [some] other people!

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome!

In not totally unrelated news, I just finished reading Greg Egan's 'Orthogonal' trilogy (alien (as in _really_ alien, alternate-universe cosmology and physics) multi-generational epic). The Feynman-type diagrams in the last book helped make sense of the weird physics.

<comment><USER7> Sounds interesting, is the physics in the book mathematically sound/consistent? (and interesting, hopefully)

<comment><USER8> It is mathematically interesting and shows how physics behave if you change assumptions about the geometry of space-time.

Egan has copious documents on the physics of the Orthogonal universe at his website [ [http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html](http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html) ]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Several prior discussions: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=feynman%20lectures&dateRange=a...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=feynman%20lectures&dateRange=all)

</comment><comment><USER10> If I wrote "A must read for every physics student" then it felt more like duty. But actually it is fun to read the Feynman lectures because they are so inspiring. One of those rare books that are written so well that it becomes fun to study - even such abstract things like physics.

Few scientists have a talent to present abstract things as well as Feynman. Daniel Kahneman and Sigmund Freud, whose lectures are also a pleasure to read, come to mind.

I couldn't read the Feynman lectures for my courses though (we followed the Berkeley physics series), but when ever I want to refresh my mind or find a nice way to explain things to students, these are a swell reference.

I still prefer the printed version though because of its nice layout with images and drawings in the margins.

</comment><comment><USER11> You're welcome. :-)

</comment><comment><USER12> There's also a couple of interesting videos here: [http://www.feynmanphysicslectures.com/](http://www.feynmanphysicslectures.com/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Some of the text does not render correctly if you set your own browser fonts.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is this new or has it existed since some time?

<comment><USER15> According to [1] it has been available for free online since 2013. I bought the hardcover 3+1/2 volume box set at borders almost a decade ago.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Phys...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physics)</comment></comment>


A Computer Science Christmas - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/e8Lqb

<comment><USER2> Nice-- but a few more weeks, and you could have gotten Volume 4 included ([http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Programming- Volumes-1-4A-Boxe...](http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Programming- Volumes-1-4A-Boxed/dp/0321751043/))</comment>


My 'partner' won't let me release. I feel like a hostage. 3 mos and counting. - <AUTHOR>

Picked up a biz partner a few mos ago on craigslist. He was looking to make an iPad app. I agreed to a 30% stake... not sure why, in retrospect. He said he had lots of connections, and corporate relationships could be helpful in this app's market. I don't negotiate on my feet very well ;-)
I flew out to meet him in person. He had a very loose concept, so I drafted a concrete design while he gawked. I outlined a 3 week release target, he agreed to it, and I went to work hacking.
I completed a clean, high quality very-release-able app in 4 weeks, well exceeding the very basic features/specs I outlined for the 3-week-initial-release. He argues with me about inane points, I agree to some changes I know are bad ideas to appease him.
Cue to 3 mos later.
He still won't let me release, keeps promising he'll agree to a release if only I do X or Y - most X or Ys are very bad ideas, slimey, or even plain infeasible 'designs' that don't understand how to do a workable UI on a tiny touchscreen... you know the sort.
Also, he is driving me crazy, drags me through inane powerpoint slides and meetings, plays a lot of buzzword bingo, and hasn't contributed /anything/ to the company by my reckoning.
I quit my day job to work on this, but would have quit anyway. I know: I'm a fool. But its relevant because no-job means I'm also not wanting to lawyer up and spend the $. I'd just walk away if it came to that.
Clearly, this 'partnership' cannot continue, but I've sunk 3 mos into it, and produced a handsome iPad app, and even half an android version. I want to release them.
I feel like he is holding me hostage using my own work.
So the question: afaict I'm an independent contractor, and by most interpretations the sole author of the source code.
He's written me a few hundred dollar check for the flight (deal was: I travel, he pays), but I haven't signed (or verbally agreed) to assign copyright.
Should I just walk away? Or should I send him a message that I'm not doing this as a partnership anymore and I'm going to release on my own? Or something else???
I'd be happy to give him a copy of the source code too if he wants to continue it in his imo crazy direction.
thanks all. good to vent if nothing else. <comment><USER2> It seems to me you have a number of options here.

The simplest is to give him the source code, and walk away, and chalk the whole thing up as a learning experience. In the unlikely event he is able to make something happen with the product, you're entitled to 30% of the profit, but I wouldn't count on it. In this option, you do not keep a copy of the code for yourself, or do anything with it in the future.

Option #2 is to have a long, hard talk with him. Lay everything out on the table, as clearly as possible. Explain that you have developed a product that you think is ready to ship, and that you don't want to do any more work until it does ship. If he has a list of things he things are necessary to get in the product before the initial ship date, have him itemize the list in detail, and then discuss and agree (in writing) on each one.

Option #3 is to buy your "partner" out. Ask him to assign all rights to the product to you, in exchange for some consideration you both agree on (cash, or a share of the profits.) Needless to say, you need to get the agreement in writing this time.

Option #4 is to talk to a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer, but I would be absolutely shocked if you have any direct rights to the source code. I believe you'd be exposing yourself to potential legal action if you tried to release this code, or do anything else with it on your own. You really don't want to go down that road.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> You're right, if nothing else, I have learned a LOT about biz relationships through this.

I've always wondered why equity is traditionally hammered out in advance. You never know who's going to actually contribute work.

Instead it'd be cool to treat it like contract work, agree on each person's 'rate' in advance, log your hours, and then after a year / whatever 'vesting' period, the equity is allocated based on invested value. You could still have problems where somebody was incompetent but put in lots of hours, but it seems so much cleaner than cliffs / pre-allocated guesses as to contribution.

You should own the company based on what you contribute in reality, not what you thought you might contribute on day 0.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> hey michael, I really appreciate your response, its good to have feedback. #3 and #4 are too expensive for me right now.

I found this law article on copyright ownership of "computer programs" to be relevant: <https://calico.org/html/article_478.pdf>

"an independent contractor owns the copyright in any work he creates unless there is an express signed agreement that the work [is] for hire"

My reading of the article suggests that as long as I'm not classified as an employee, and haven't signed away copyright, I'm likely the sole author, and at worst a joint-author "entitled to modify, reproduce, or distribute copies of the work". The article also lists court precedents that suggest that specifying features and even supervising dev still leave the programmer with sole ownership.

I know I'm not going to get sound legal advice from HN but a chorus of IANAL _g_ Still, I'm curious if anyone has experienced similar situations and what they learned!

<comment><USER2> You're right, you're not going to get actionable legal advice on HN or from random articles you read on the Internet. The fact that the article cites precedents only helps you when you are spending more money than you likely have trying to defend yourself from a lawsuit that will likely come. Whether or not you prevail in the end is immaterial; the momentum (and lawyer's fees) you lose will not be worth it.

In other words: if you can't afford to talk to a lawyer now, you _really_ can't afford to try to hold on to the source code.

If it were me, I'd take a crack at trying to find an amicable (and written) solution with the guy; if that fails, I'd walk away and consider it an educational experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks michael, seems like the right plan ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, he knows they're update-able. I think its very low-cost to him to let/make me keep working without validating the basic app with users... its like building a house where one guy does all the work, and the other guy gets to decide when its done. The "decider" doesn't have much incentive to let the worker stop.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm sorry you're in this situation. I'm sure you've communicated to him that apps are up-date-able ... why wouldn't he be willing to at least get a "version one" out the door?</comment>


Neanderthal glue was a bigger deal than we thought - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/neanderthal-glue-was-a-bigger-deal-than-we-thought/ <comment><AUTHOR> _Making birch tar at all is a fairly complex process. It takes multiple steps, lots of planning, and detailed knowledge of the materials and the process. ... Making birch tar adhesive for tools was so routine that Neanderthals would do it even for a simple domestic tool like a small flake ... "The Neanderthal tar finds provide evidence of a complex technology so ingrained in their behavior that it was maintained at the limits of their ecological tolerance: glacial northwestern Europe."_</comment>


Help Us Make Our UI library open source - <AUTHOR>

Hi! We are looking for some help - maybe there are here people that are familiar with JS/jQuery/CSS and would like to help us open source our UI ? We would like to
make it as an jQuery plugin (we already have few elements of the UI done that way).
In return we offer eternal fame - as a startup we can not give much else.
You can see our UI in action here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYB34STU9FE our website: http://www.smartupz.com <comment><USER2> I don't think I get the question, do you need people to help you open source it or help you work on it?

If the latter, stick it on GitHub and submit it here. It looks nice from the video, so I'd imagine a few people would get on board.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea with the GitHub. But we could use someone that could help us prepare it GitHub ready. I though that during summer holidays there should be some people willing to be part of such interesting project :)</comment></comment>


ASK HN: How do you use Docker? - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to understand its advantages and when I think I can't find any useful real-world scenarios. So, I'd like to hear how do people use Docker? <comment><USER2> At [http://codeboard.io](http://codeboard.io) we use them to compile and execute the user-written programs.

I guess that's not the typical use of Docker because there are a number of security concerns. We do a number of things to mitigate those but isolation is not as good as with a full VM.

However, containers are so fast that we can create -> execute -> destroy containers for every single "compile" and "run" action.

Another big advantage, imho, is the Docker Remote API [1] which makes it very easy to integrate Docker in your app.

[1] [https://docs.docker.com/reference/api/docker_remote_api_v1.2...](https://docs.docker.com/reference/api/docker_remote_api_v1.20/)</comment>


Google, in Rare Stumble, Posts 23% Decline in Profit - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/28/technology/google-alphabet-earnings.html <comment><USER2> Following Google's [ad-blocking restrictions]([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430)), I switched from Chrome to Firefox and from Google Search to DuckDuckGo. It's been great so far, browsing in incognito mode by default. Gmail and Docs has been the hardest addiction to kick so far, but I've heard good things about Fastmail. More friends are following suit.

It may seem like we developers are in the minority, but the minority rule applies to us: tastemakers make the apps that run in your browser and you install Firefox on your parents' machines at thanksgiving.

Windows 10's forced-updates and telemetry are the main things preventing me from buying a Surface for my next machine. But I don't know how I'm going to get off my iPhone - the CPU is just too fast.

Remember, you are the market. You can vote with your eyeballs and your employment. Giving up salary is easier said than done, but no other profession has more opportunities to choose a moral employer.

<comment><USER3> > no other profession has more opportunities to choose a moral employer.

Interesting.

Curious how many people actually evaluate the morality of their prospective employers.

<comment><USER4> I do, to the extent that I won't work for a company that I believe is actively harming.

I've also chosen a salary cut for working for companies that I believe are actively helping.

Most of my IT friends think alike (which may be part of why we're friends ;-). For example a friend quit his job after realizing some things his work was enabling.

Purely anecdotal of course. But not nonexistent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Alphabet reported that its revenue rose 20 percent to $40.5 billion for the > third quarter, but that profit dropped to $7.07 billion. Profit ... was hurt > by rising costs for research and development and marketing, the company > said.

> Google is spending heavily to hire employees, invest in data centers and pay > for marketing of new products like its Pixel smartphones.

> Alphabet said it added about 6,500 employees in the quarter, for a total > work force of about 114,000 people.

> The company also said its tax rate doubled to 18 percent from 9 percent a > year ago.

<comment><USER6> > The company also said its tax rate doubled to 18 percent from 9 percent a > year ago.

The article should have expanded on this...why did their tax rate go up if R&D and CapEx increased?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps they should pay more attention to their core, I see their search product as lacking vision, dated and misaligned with the needs of the user.

<comment><USER8> Just recently all of the search projects seem to have gotten significantly worse. Image search has been crippled with removal of the size options. Web search seems like a parody or cheap imitation anymore, presenting even worse result than usual, and instead of being able to customize the search to fix that, you end up with Bing-like results giving you crap you explicitly tried to exclude.

Then there's all those silly, frivolous overly-rounded corners mucking up the GUI.

On the up side: I do look forward to competitors stepping forward to fill the space that Google used to fill. That is inevitable.

<comment><USER9> Duck keeps improving since I ditched GSearch. Duck feels more like the old Google, the one I used for almost 20 years, the authoritative search engine.

Now when I hit a GSearch SERP (when in Chrome for a moment testing something), it feels like spam, and I close it faster than a Pinterest tab.

<comment><USER10> I agree, but lately I've noticed that DDG's results have been trending in the same direction. Maybe I'm just imagining things? (To be clear, I still find it generally better than Google for day-to-day search.)

I long for the return of an Altavista-like "dumb" search engine with proper "hard" boolean support. My brain is hardwired to think that way and I strongly prefer it. I understand that this wouldn't be useful for everyone, but I don't care. How on earth does it make sense to have only one kind of search engine for all of humanity.

<comment><USER11> I could imagine that the future of search engines is more specialization in different topics. As the content in the web keeps growing it only makes sense to only "search in a specific corner".

Maybe it's a good time to be innovative here..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "after a sharp increase in spending for research and development"

<comment><USER13> It's important to understand that there's a difference between "R&D" as it lives in most people's minds here, and "R&D" as it presents in financial reporting. The former is associated with hiring PhD's and building labs. The latter is everything not covered by cost of sales. Different companies balance the buckets in different ways at different times. And there are many activities that fall under the latter that most would not associate with the former. Companies that make staples report R&D on their financials too. And companies that fund AI also do a lot of R&D that looks the R&D that goes into making staples.

<comment><USER14> So are we talking more A/B testing and less qubit development (or other moonshot projects)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wait, they spent extra $30 billions in a quarter for research, development and marketing?

"Alphabet reported that its revenue rose 20 percent to $40.5 billion for the third quarter, but that profit dropped to $7.07 billion. Profit, which missed Wall Street forecasts, was hurt by rising costs for research and development and marketing, the company said."

<comment><USER16> They have many other expenses outside R&D. Their profit dropped 23% according to article. They were never doing $37B in profit a quarter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> They also wrote off > $1bn in losses in Uber & Lyft investments - which I was surprised to hear that they were invested in both.

<comment><USER18> I believe Google Capital invested in Uber and then CapitalG invested in Lyft. So, still in the umbrella of Alphabet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> well they have had an amazing run since 2001 - and during that time, they have grown to be a huge enterprise comprising of all services under the Google brand plus others such as Youtube. Extending into OS, some hardware, etc.

Still, 23% is a big decline so lets see how they fare from now onwards.

</comment><comment><USER20> Guess cost cutting is coming to the research sector.

Too bad Google's research sector is actually pretty inspiring.

</comment><comment><USER21> So, what exactly did they spend the gap on? Must be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER22> And now we know the real reason for the quantum supremacy paper that wasn't...

</comment><comment><USER23> For the paywall: [https://beta.trimread.com/articles/311](https://beta.trimread.com/articles/311)

</comment><comment><USER24> Firefox is smooth as butter on Mac OS with their latest update. Add unlock origin with default settings and privacy badger. It's web the way it was intended to be!</comment>


Is Intel within ARM's reach? Pedestrian Detection shows the way - <AUTHOR> http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/systems-interface/4419918/Is-Intel-within-ARM-s-reach--Pedestrian-Detection-shows-the-way <comment><USER2> Sigh. Although some of this is Intel's own doing, "i3" is not a meaningful descriptor, especially when compared to "Cortex-A15" or "Cortex-A9". "Core i3" can refer to many, many generations of CPUs; this is not a nitpick, but a real complaint, because each of those CPUs have very different performance characteristics. Core i3 has been a Westmere (Nehalem tick); a Sandy Bridge; an Ivy Bridge (Sandy Bridge tick); and a Haswell. Saying "a 1.2GHz Core i3" is about as valuable, then, as saying "a Tegra" \-- which could be an ARM11 MPCore (Tegra 6xx); a Cortex-A9 without NEON (Tegra 2); a Cortex-A9 with NEON (Tegra 3); or a Cortex-A15 (Tegra 4).

So, on a micro-level, the comparison is not terribly valid. On a macro-level -- saying that the devices are within an order of magnitude -- the results are reasonable, but certainly not novel...

<comment><USER3> You are right that the i3 CPU(Core i3-530) we compared with is a little old generation. I tried to compare online Core i3-530 with Core i3-2105. The 2105 is SandyBridge and runs at a slightly higher clock 3.1 GHz(while the 530 runs at 2.93 according to CPU world).

According to cpu-world. The 2105 is 21% faster than the 530 for single threaded operations. If you account for the speed in clock this would mean only a boost of 14% improvement over the 530.

So its really not such a bad comparison.

In the meanwhile we will try run this on a newer CPU and let you know the results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So code fully optimized for ARM/Cortex-A15 is almost as fast as only partially optimized code on a 1.2 GHz i3? Well, good to know I guess.

<comment><USER5> Yes this is correct. But as you see the original un-optimized version was running at nearly same speed on both. Meaning the A15 and Core i3 performance are comparable, if run at the same clock. The general perception has been that the raw performance of the ARM CPUs(like A15 and A57) and Intel Sandybridge CPUs like the one inside like i3/i5 are not in the same ball-park . Most people believes they are leagues apart. Also one of the reasons why such comparisons havent been made before, much.The idea of the blog is to show that this is not completely true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Spoiler: no. 1265 ms vs 439 ms on their OpenCV benchmark.

(Then they play some what-if games by underlocking the i3 in imaginative ways and applying SIMD opts to only the ARM side)

<comment><USER7> This.

Assuming the compiler will generate good SSE code for the Intel CPU is a joke. If you write intrinsics for one arch, write it for both.

I'd bet money the Intel side could be made 2.5-3x faster with proper SSE intrinsics and maybe 5-6x faster with a Haswell i3 using AVX (SandyBridge doesn't have the cache bandwidth to fully utilise AVX properly).

<comment><USER5> The original OpenCV code already has intrinsics in many portions of the code. But enabling them results only in a 10% improvement.

We decided to report non-intrinsics version, because reporting the original OpenCV numbers with intrinsics as SSE optimized would be unfair to Intel. Apparently its not very well optimized.

My own guess is that if we add intrinsics for Intel to our own C code, it will boost by around 2x. We could have written a blog without reporting the Intel C optimized numbers, but that would have been unfair to Intel again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am getting tired of this whole dumb x86 vs. arm comparison bullshit. You cannot compare chips (read: chips not even talking about architecture here because it's not relevant) which are designed for complete different purposes (high performance big ooo workstation cpu vs. low power mobile chip). Please stop making those.

<comment><USER9> People always focus on the instruction set -- "ARM's fixed length instructions are easy to decode, so it will win in the long run" \-- ignoring how decoding is a tiny fraction of a CPU's silicon and power budget. Memory controllers, pipelining, and efficient superscalar instruction dispatch have far more effect, and Intel has a large lead on ARM in these areas.

<comment><USER3> "Memory controllers, pipelining, and efficient superscalar instruction dispatch have far more effect"

Memory controllers(atleast the SOC(chip) level ones) are normally developed by the silicon vendor - like Nvidia, Broadcomm, Qualcomm, Samsung, TI, Freescale etc. Not ARM. And these companies have been working on it for many years. They have had graphics, video acceleration, display, camera-interface IPs all integrated into one SOC for almost a decade now. Intel is infact relatively new to this kind of integration.

In anycase everything including memory controllers, pipelining and superscalar has already been taken into account in this benchmark.

What has been left out is higher clocks and hyperthreading. Two things that ARM doesnt have yet.

<comment><USER10> Something is wrong Ranjith, you have more "dead" posts, you probably triggered something like "too many posts for a new account."

Hallo admins, Ranjith is the author of the linked article!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Intel will be in a lot of trouble soon (within 2-3 years).

Forget the Core line chips. That's irrelevant. It will remain a cash cow for the next few years, but a rapidly shrinking cash cow nonetheless. They'll move upmarket with them, until there's nowhere to move to.

ARM chips' improvements over the next years will make them "good enough" for most people, and Intel's Core chips which cost 10x more (literally) will be very uncompetitive in that environment.

Their only solution is to fight with Atom, but so far no success there, and even if they succeed, it means their profits will lower dramatically, and they need to survive as a company with much lower revenue and profit, which means the "all-powerful Intel" of the past will be but a faint memory in the future.

<comment><USER8> If a company has enough resources (financial and know-how) to pull out the hammer when needed, it's probably Intel. They have the best people, the best manufacturing, the most experience etc. Just look how they evolved shitty Atom processors in something competitive (bail trail). Intel has a long breath. And once they made arm processors too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In addition to what zurn said, they also don't specify the exact Core i3 model number (it could be an older generation), the RAM speed, and if the data set fits in cache.

If RAM access is needed ARM machines usually fall behind quickly, since they usually have much lower RAM bandwidth.

<comment><USER5> The model number used for the evaluation is Core™ i3-530

<comment><USER13> That's a Westmere from Jan 2010. Westmere -> Sandy Bridge -> Ivy Bridge -> Haswell.

Comparing with something from 3.5 years and 3 generations ago is useful?

<comment><USER3> Copy pasting my reply once again.

You are right that the i3 CPU(Core i3-530) we compared with is a little old generation. I tried to compare online Core i3-530 with Core i3-2105. The 2105 is SandyBridge(couldnt find a direct comparison with an Ivy Bridge) and runs at a slightly higher clock 3.1 GHz(while the 530 runs at 2.93 according to CPU world).

According to cpu-world. The 2105 is 21% faster than the 530 for single threaded operations. If you account for the speed in clock this would mean only a boost of 14% improvement over the 530.

So its really not such a bad comparison.

In the meanwhile we will try run this on a newer CPU and let you know the results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You Cant Scale a Server/Desktop CPU two step down into Mobile Devices.

This is what Atom is all about, the higher power/performance x86 possible.

And You also cant scale a Mobile Devices up to a Server / Desktop Product.

That is what the ARMv8 Cortex A58 is all about, Low Power Desktop and Server Class.

So technically speaking both are marching towards each others end. Although Intel would lose out due to other factor such as business model.

</comment><comment><USER5> For those who are not convinced. Here is one more benchmark.

[http://www.inpai.com.cn/doc/hard/198143_8.htm](http://www.inpai.com.cn/doc/hard/198143_8.htm)

Page takes a while to load. Then scroll down to the benchmarks. Take a look at the single threaded Linpack benchmarks between firstname.lastname@example.com and firstname.lastname@example.com.</comment>


GM Gas-Electric Hybrid Car Ad From... 1969 - <AUTHOR> http://www.bangshift.com/blog/General-Motors-Hybrid-Car-from-1969.html

<comment><USER2> Even more remarkable, its generator was powered by a highly-efficient Stirling external-combustion engine.

It is worth noting, however, that this isn't a "hybrid" in the same way as the Prius or Insight. The drive train is much simpler and only connects the electric motor to the wheels.</comment>


Blogging's Bright Future - <AUTHOR> http://stratechery.com/2015/bloggings-bright-future/

<comment><USER2> " _It is absolutely true that the old Sullivan-style – tens of posts a day, mostly excerpts and links, with regular essays in immediate response to ongoing news – is mostly over._ "

I'm having trouble finding a concrete argument in the article about what, if private content creation is indeed dead, is actually left to blog about. According to the article, a large part of where blogging moved on to seems to be mere social link aggregation and propagation.

Meanwhile, we're reading this on a blog. In fact, here on HN, we're reading blog posts all the time. It seems to me we consume a lot of essays which, shockingly, have not in fact been written by media companies.

I think what's changed about blogging has nothing to do with all that. Instead, it's all largely down to the fact that we moved from automated content aggregation to a human-powered filter. The death of the RSS reader itself was probably in equal parts due to an unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio, context switching costs associated with using the app itself, and social media platforms swooping in as an all-in-one replacement. Google abandoning the platform might also have played a role, though it's difficult to discern cause and effect in this case. HN has replaced Google Reader for me, and I'm sure Twitter and Facebook have done the same for other people. But we're still consuming blog content at the end of the day.

<comment><USER3> I think you either 1) didn't read the whole article or 2) completely misread it. The point is the meat remains, even as all the excerpt and link stuff has mostly moved to Twitter.

<comment><USER2> _> The point is the meat remains, even as all the excerpt and link stuff has mostly moved to Twitter._

I thought I addressed that by saying:

" _According to the article, a large part of where blogging moved on to seems to be mere social link aggregation and propagation._ "

 _Update_ : I just realized you're the author of the article; I'm sorry you feel misrepresented, that wasn't my intention. I think my main problem is reconciling sensationalist statements like ' _blogs as streams of regular essays are mostly over_ ' with points that follow later on the basis of ' _the meaty content remains relevant_ '. You might argue that I put the emphasis on something other than what was intended; maybe the central claim was ' _link blogs are over_ ', but in that case there would be very little need to have that particular discussion at all.

<comment><USER3> That was my only point. Sullivan type 40 post a day blogs don't make much sense anymore, but the entire premise of my article is that blogs still matter and can still be a business.

Cheers

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a very interesting topic.

 _" Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium…"_

From my perspective, what was really interesting and novel about the "blogosphere(s)" was the dimension that I'll call _textual collaboration._

The ideal of the blog resonates with ideals like "civic engagement," "the public sphere," and other such somewhat high-minded stuff—in a way that seems rather neutered by those other media.

From that list, Medium and reddit seem closest. But when I use Medium, I feel like what I am doing is providing free content to a startup. I don't feel like I am just sharing text with friends and strangers.

On reddit, I do often feel like I am simply sharing words with others in a collaborative and open way, because there is less of a focus on the author as an individual "brand;" there are fewer swanky photos of Moleskines and espressos; there is more vivid discussion and real conversation.

Blogging, I think, was (and to some degree is) a balance act between public and private. Also a balance between publishing and drafting. A balance between permanence and ephemerality. A balance between monologue and dialogue. And so on.

From my perspective, given that I focus on "textual collaboration," it's quite interesting to look at, e.g., GitHub. Yes, people are mostly working on code together, but it's done in an interesting and quite fresh way.

Wikis, too. That never really took off, did it? Could it?

<comment><AUTHOR> good take!

in the balance of public and private, production and consumption, monologue and conversations...

how can we design for better signal-to-noise ratio? like a good sound engineer putting the right amount of compression and reverb to sit in the mix as intended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://twitter.com/hunterwalk/status/562278398513266689](https://twitter.com/hunterwalk/status/562278398513266689)

According to Hunter Walk, Stratechery has 2,000 subscribers. At $100 a pop, that's a $200K salary, not counting any consulting, paid speaking, etc. Blogging might not be the buzzword that it once was, but Ben's story shows there's still opportunity. The big difference now is that it's probably more of the lifestyle business variety rather than the previous world where people saw it at venture scale.</comment>


Microchip Technology to Buy Atmel for Nearly $3.6B - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/business/dealbook/microchip-technology-to-buy-atmel-for-nearly-3-6-billion.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> Well, this isn't a particularly insightful comment, but my feelings about this are "fark :[". The AVR definitely has something Nordic about it. I first learned C when programming an AVR Butterfly eval board to take photos like [0] using [1]. I've found the AVR architecture to be much cleaner than 8 or 16 bit PICs. Atmel, for the most part, embraced GPL and GCC. Microchip has tried to squirrel GCC optimization features away from being truly FOSS.

[0]: [https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/53/115619170_4445c593cd_o.jpg](https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/53/115619170_4445c593cd_o.jpg)

[1]: [https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/56/112758047_dc5b4bdc3b_o.jpg](https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/56/112758047_dc5b4bdc3b_o.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity, what does "something Nordic" refer to?

<comment><USER4> I interpreted it as:

Elegant, clean design (certainly compared to the old 8-bit PICs). Good taste. FOSS-friendly.

Microchip might be a Texan oilman in this comparison. Just keep pumping them PICs out don't listen to those commies with their 'GCC' and their 'lee-nux' \- sounds foreign and suspicious.

This is obviously a tongue-in-cheek characterisation but I think that's what the OP was getting at.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great... more consolidation of major competitors to fix market problems like great features and prices from competition. Just what we needed.

<comment><USER6> I believe some consolidation helps them reduce costs and improve efficiency. I guess every market consolidates into two to three big players eventually.

<comment><USER5> It's already at 2-3 big players. Further consolidation gets us closer to monopoly tactics. Let's just say tech consolidation is usually bad for the consumer. I see no reason that two, neck-to-neck competitors becoming one company will help us in long-term. We've benefited from those costs and product efficiency was great so far.

I'm sure _their_ costs and efficiency will improve. As usual. ;)

<comment><USER7> What is the 3rd player right now? AFAIK it's PIC or Atmel. I guess there are the various ARM boards but those tend to be more powerful than little 8 bit things.

<comment><USER8> ST Microelectronics has a line of microcontrollers that are (largely) compatible with the Atmel AVR instruction set.

<comment><USER9> Never heard of those. Do you have a link?

<comment><USER8> [http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/LN184...](http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/LN1847?sc=stm32nucleo)

They advertise Arduino compatibility, so I'm assuming that means compatibility with the AVR instruction set, but I could be wrong about that.

<comment><USER9> Thank you.

But that's just Arduino, i.e. high level compatibility. You have a setup() and a loop() and the same way to do I/O, but not the same underlying instruction set.

The chips on these guys are regular ARM cortex uCs.

They might be just barely fast enough to do real-time emulation of the AVR INSNs though ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I see a disconnect. Somebody knowledgeable, please comment.

here it goes :

Atmel had a deal with Dialog Semiconductor worth 4.6 Billion Dollars on September 15 already, refer [0] [1].

Microchip manage to break that deal with 137 Million dollar termination fee, but with a deal worth of 3.6 Billion Dollars.

That's 1 Billion dollars "less" deal worth agreed by Atmel to be sold.

Sounds unbelievable!

MCHP managed to do this by giving more cash for Atmel shareholders? (..and not to forget 137 M of termination fine.)

1 Billion dollar (which was imaginary) disappeared into thin air??

If it was not of real value, then how / why Dialog over valued it?

Whoever understands all this, please comment.

[0] : [http://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/content/dialog- semicondu...](http://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/content/dialog- semiconductor-acquire-atmel-46-billion) [1] : [http://fortune.com/2015/09/21/dialog-buying- atmel/](http://fortune.com/2015/09/21/dialog-buying-atmel/)

<comment><USER11> I think you kind of answered it yourself. Microchip probably offered a higher portion of the deal in cash and atmel shareholders find the cash to be worth more than dialog stock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This popped up earlier (w/ 20 comments as of now): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10939576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10939576)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is surprising news to me. An analog with the microprocessor market would be Intel buying AMD!

I love Microchip's application notes. My first controller was a PIC16F877A and apart from the architecture quirks (and mediocre C compiler support) it is a good processor for beginners. In that sense, this acquisition nicely complements MT's own strengths.

I'm still not sure how I feel about the monopolization of the uC though.

<comment><USER14> I tried both PIC and AVR when first getting into embedded development. I very quickly grew a strong distaste for the PIC instruction set (their docs were admittedly very nice).

AVR was just so clean by comparison. It's a sad day, microchip really needed a good competitor.

<comment><USER15> The whole swarm of cheap ARM micros that are now around or below the 1$ per chip, plus with free and sane C compiler ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> From my own experience, this might be a good time for Atmel employees to polish their resumes.

<comment><USER17> I know someone at Atmel, and many employees are only still there because of promised severance packages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a huge relief compared to the proposed acquisition by Dialog. Microchip is vastly more open. Crazily enough, You have to apply for a copy of a data sheet from Dialog instead of it being freely available on their website for everyone to download..

</comment><comment><USER19> I commented in the other thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10939576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10939576):

>People in this thread keep talking like this is the "death" of Atmel. I don't see it changing much other than being guided by Microchip management to meet higher profit margins. If you think that Atmel's compilers and IDE's are going to be dropped overnight in favor of MPLAB X and Microchip compilers, you are almost surely mistaken; there's a big gap between architectures so it would be a lot of work to get Microchip tools to support Atmel parts.

</comment><comment><USER20> Cool, maybe now it'll be possible to obtain Atmel chips in quantity without ridiculous lead times.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wounder if this will this bring the death of the original Arduino.

<comment><USER22> I suspect it won't - even if AVR started to disappear the Arduino guys have already got a handful of boards out using ARM Cortex M0 and Intel Curie chips. They're quite cleanly integrated with the same IDE and the boards are in roughly similar form factor, so from a dev's perspective if they moved to ARM/Curie completely it wouldn't be too tough I reckon. Not sure if there's any supply chain or manufacturing issues that could complicate things though.</comment></comment>


Chromium Blog: A Tale Of Two Pwnies (Part 2) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chromium.org/2012/06/tale-of-two-pwnies-part-2.html <comment><USER2> Is anyone else dismayed by the implicit view of these sorts of articles, that browsers should be complicated and full of all these insecure features?

It reminds me strongly of PDF and Acrobat. PDF is great for mailing around print-ready documents, which are more-or-less guaranteed to look the same for every viewer. Writing a PDF renderer is not easy, but it is straightforward, and there are multiple stable implementations without significant security problems.

Then Adobe comes along and they add forms, and 3D charts, or Javascript, or multimedia, and Acrobat grows from a document viewer into what is essentially a backdoor on every Windows computer.

A similar thing is happening with browsers. The core purpose of a web browser is the ability to render HTML+CSS into a human-readable document. Then browser vendors added forms and Javascript, so XSS was invented. They added persistent data storage, so looking at cat pictures can compromise my bank account. And now, Chrome+Firefox are /competing/ to see who can add more features, security be damned.

WebGL exposes your graphics drivers (never security-audited before) to the internet. <audio> and <video> expose multimedia codecs, which in the past have caused numerous security problems. Flash is, essentially, a cross-platform way to let arbitrary people run exploits on your machine.

When will it stop? When will browser vendors take a collective breath, look around, and realize the insanity they've been perpetrating?

<comment><USER3> > Is anyone else dismayed by the implicit view of these sorts of articles, > that browsers should be complicated and full of all these insecure features?

You're taking a position 100% against all additions to web browsers, it seems. And some people responding to you are taking the 100% opposite position. But there is a middle ground.

Browsers should include the _minimal_ amount of technology possible, and strike a compromise between number of features and security (because more features always means less security). What the right compromise is, is of course debatable.

But I don't want to just say "extremes are wrong, the right middle way is best" in a generic manner because that's always true. More specifically, Google is the browser vendor including the most nonstandard technologies these days, and therefore incurring the most risk. For example, NaCl, WebSQL, a large extension API (even including things like text to speech), a closed- source PDF reader, Adobe Flash, Chrome Web Store frontend, and apparently soon Dart. All those things add to the attack surface of Chrome, I would argue needlessly.

Of course other browsers are guilty of similar things, just to a lesser extent. At least Microsoft does not bundle Silverlight with IE (but it will apparently bundle Flash..).

<comment><USER2> I don't think my position is extreme. I'm not advocating for a removal of all browser features, merely removal of those which are unrelated to the browser's core purpose of document navigation and rendering.

If browser vendors spent less money on implementing audio synthesis or OpenGL, they could spend more on font rendering, SPDY, and standards compliance.

<comment><USER4> >I don't think my position is extreme. I'm not advocating for a removal of all browser features, merely removal of those which are unrelated to the browser's core purpose of document navigation and rendering.

The view that a browser's core purpose is document rendering and navigation was laughably out of date in 2000. It is simply an invalid opinion today. Users and developers can and do expect browsers to be fully-functional sandboxed runtimes that can host everything from mail clients, to mapping applications to games.

But if you want your browser to be nothing more than a document rendering engine, no one is forcing you to use Firefox. w3m and xxxterm, for example, both fulfill this role quite admirably.

<comment><USER2>
      > But if you want your browser to be nothing more than a
      > document rendering engine, no one is forcing you to use
      > Firefox. w3m and xxxterm, for example, both fulfill this
      > role quite admirably.

No they don't, not even close. Firefox and Chrome are years ahead of them in important features like CSS, fonts, and graphics.

<comment><USER5> w3m, yes. But xxxterm is basically webkit with vi keybindings, so I don't think Chrome can be all that many years ahead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Once again, there's two ways of reading this story. One way is from the attacker's perspective, baffling yourself as to how Glazunov could have found all these bugs and assembled them in the right order. The other is from the defender's perspective, gaining an appreciation for how well the security model is working that it takes an exploit this intricate to break it.

Either way, you're doing something right when your documentation of a security vulnerability in your product actually serves to market the security of that product. The Chrome security team is doing a lot of stuff right.

<comment><USER5> For this exploit, the security defenses didn't impress me as much. The immediate question I have is why are there chrome:// URLs at all? It seems you could achieve a much stronger sandbox by using native UI controls that are simply not attached to the webview. Then it would not be possible to trick it into making a same origin mistake.

I mean, this is standard advice for web apps and services, right? You build the control interface completely outside the main user app.

<comment><USER7> There are a lot of answers to this question:

1) From a UX perspective, we prefer to have the majority of the UI within a tab. We don't want to build up an entirely separate UI hierarchy outside tabs.

2) We tried putting native UI within a tab in early versions of Chrome, and it did not feel right. There was an uncanny valley effect. If the content of a tab doesn't feel like HTML, it feels wrong. And it isn't practical to emulate the feel of HTML perfectly with native code.

3) The Chrome team puts a lot of engineering effort into making the web platform as strong as it can be. We would like to eat our own dogfood when possible.

<comment><USER8> Off topic but:

I don't understand why on (chrome://chrome/settings/) I have blue links, blue underlined links, and buttons. I guess I could figure it out, but the meaning is opaque to me at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google has changed the relationship between exploiters and themselves into something symbiotic and fun.

How refreshing it is to hear excitement and admiration when a large tech company speaks about an exploit made in one of its products.

Super awesome.

[ See [http://blog.chromium.org/2012/02/expanding-chromium- security...](http://blog.chromium.org/2012/02/expanding-chromium-security- rewards.html) ]

</comment><comment><USER10> In Part 1 it's mentioned that they held up publishing this issue as it affects many other products:

"While these issues are already fixed in Chrome, some of them impact a much broader array of products from a range of companies. So, we won't be posting that part until we're comfortable that all affected products have had an adequate time to push fixes to their users."

Presumably this is referring to other webkit browsers and the wordpad.exe exploit. Does anyone know if these problems have been fixed yet?

<comment><USER5> The wordpad exploit, unless I'm mistaken, is basically just the equivalent of LD_PRELOAD. As such, there's nothing to fix.

This may be of some interest, as it there's some discussion of when it's an exploit and when it's just the way things are supposed to be. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3005832>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The idea of "perfect security" is a myth. The best approach to security is doing exactly what google is doing:

Off the top of my head:

1.) Spend a lot of time and money on security engineering. 2.) Constantly update, make sure it is not a hassle for users to update. Preferably force them to update, design with patching and updates built in and with minimal impact. 3.) Hire/pay a lot of people to try to break your shit. 4.) Keep a keen eye out for undisclosed vulnerabilities/exploits on the black market and have an easily accessible reporting mechanism for white hats which you do not pay. 5.) Notify the crap out of your uses when something goes wrong.

You can easily see why programs such as old versions of Adobe Flash and Reader were terrible from a security perspective if you try to compare them to the above criteria.

Talking about complexity and operating system design opens up a new can of worms. With iOS I think Apple is taking the extreme approach which works for like 99% of people who are not power users...

1.) Isolate everything. 2.) No third party apps that Apple does not approve. 3.) Everything is digitally signed. 4.) Limit apps from running other code. 5.) Be able to kill switch apps or wipe the device remotely.

</comment><comment><USER12> $60k seems kind of cheap after reading all that.

<comment><USER13> yeah it's a pretty amazing hack. I believe the guy who wrote it is a university student from russia(who also found other holes in chrome) so for him the $60k will go quite a bit further then for some one else and the prestige/job offers associated with it will go even further then that.

When the event was going on, another group called vupen(french company that deals in selling 0day exploits to govts) that found a hole in chrome during that contest refused to give up their method, when offered $120k instead of $60 and their ceo half jokingly said he might give it up for the entire million dollars worth of prizes google was offering

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Mind blowing. And so great you publish it all to improve the product.</comment>


The media mogul: A soon-to-be-extinct species? - <AUTHOR> http://shortformblog.com/biz/the-media-mogul-a-soon-to-be-extinct-species <comment><USER2> The real story: [http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersEdge/idUSTRE56806T2009...](http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersEdge/idUSTRE56806T20090709http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersEdge/idUSTRE56806T20090709). ShortFormBlog contributes nothing.

The point of the story is that media moguls became moguls for the glamor. Bigness is not an asset anymore. The future moguls will be mini-moguls. It mentions new media, but doesn't try to make the point that media moguls are a dying breed because print is a dying breed. This is Reuters and it probably doesnt want to make that point.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not if Michael Arrington has his way.</comment>


Grantophone: An instrument for your phone. - <AUTHOR> http://grantkot.com/blog/?p=41 <comment><USER2> Hi, so I created this app and here is a more recent video showing the user interface in the current version: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paFiugtZeik>

Also, there are a lot of features that I will be working on adding. I started this project without much experience in audio programming (I had an idea for something I wanted to make and decided to go for it and I'm learning as I'm going) so until now I have mostly been researching and planning. Development will be picking up now and I will be adding much more control and customization.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just bought it and it's very, very cool. The one thing I'd change (or make an option for) is making the notes continuous rather than discrete -- if I slide my finger over, it would be great to have it cleanly transition between the notes. Great work so far!

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Yes, originally I had also wanted it to be continuous. I settled on discrete pitches to make it a little easier to pick up. I will be adding sliders and stuff so you can change the tuning parameters as well as the other other parameters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just watched the author's tutorial video (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKJC6cqdGdE>). It's clear that he's a musician.

It's fascinating when people with a deep expertise in another subject can also write code. Makes me wish I had a deep understanding of some other field.

<comment><USER5> Yes, Grant is a very talented cellist (he's currently studying at Julliard).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't believe I never thought to do this myself. I have always wanted a Kaossilator.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3_yXmIfmYg>

<comment><USER7> Never heard of a Kaossilator before; it looks like great fun, and more to the point it lends itself completely to being an iDevice app. Hope somebody ports it asap!

<comment><USER8> Boom!

<http://www.korg.com/ikaossilator>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is one of the coolest presentations I've seen at Hack & Tell.

</comment><comment><USER10> My favorite thing about this is that he's extremely good at playing it. I also have an instrument app that allows for continuous pitch + autotuning (<http://www.iansimon.org/fingrophone/>), but his looks like it allows for way more expressivity.

<comment><USER11> No videos demoing fingrophone?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is available for windows phones as well as iOS. <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/grantophone/id476003757?mt=8>

</comment><comment><USER12> Saw this presented at the most recent NYC Lean Startup Machine. Grant is one creative son of a gun. I'm very excited to see this app evolve (and get onto Android).

</comment><comment><USER13> Most interesting...I wonder what the author's reasoning was for developing for Windows Phone?

<comment><USER2> I've actually been a C#/XNA guy for a really long while so it was easier for me to develop for WP7 first. But it is also available on iOS now.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for replying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very disappointed to find out that's a Sammy WP7 and not an Android. Wish I could buy it!

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I am trying my best to get it out on Android as soon as possible. There is a minor snag I've run into and trying to figure out.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I negotiate my job (salary/conditions)? - <AUTHOR>

I have been working in this startup for last 3 years, and overall my salary increased around 60% since the beginning, but I live in an expensive country, and this increase does not even cover the cost of living increase over the years.
My salary is about 30% less than the market value, for my skill-set and experience level (I'd got an offer which was 30% more than my current salary, 8 months back. (40% more than my salary then)). I am doing some contracting on the side, which pays decent (about thrice as much per hour of work).
How do I go about asking for more money or allowing remote work (so that I can move to my hometown, which is much cheaper), with fallback as consulting, to my boss?
Edit - I always got very positive reviews from my boss.We are a small shop, so till now all positions were at the same level, but with a recent restructuring, I will be offered best designation amongst all developers. (Unfortunately, its just change in designation, without any monetary appraisal associated with it.) <comment><USER2> Hm...does your boss and your company _know_ what market rates are? Don't assume that your company is purposefully underpaying you; it may very well be that they don't know enough of the market. In that case, esp. if you're on good terms with your boss, it'd be a simple matter of educating them in your research.

Startups usually don't have a ton of cash, so if you feel like you're still being shortchanged and the company simply can't afford to pay you more (from the company's perspective, increasing your salary may mean increasing everybody else's as well), you can ask for other things: more options, more days off, better benefits, and as you mentioned working remotely.

You're in a good position, and have built up good will over the years, so I'm sure they wouldn't want to lose you. It might be just a simple matter of bringing it up, so do that first.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Hm...does your boss and your company know what market rates are?

I am sure he does not. (He moved back recently, after working in the US for around last 20 years). I brought up this issue indirectly several times, when we tried to recruit people, conducted campus drives. Recently, a colleague of mine (who used to get the same salary as myself), left for over 70% salary hike. I intend to present more data points when talking to him.

How do I say "I think you are out of touch of the market rates for my skillset", without hurting his feelings/implying the company is cheap?

I actually prefer benefit (of possibly remote work, from a less expensive/better city), than hike. I just dont know how to bring it up. (ie, how to word it, without feeling/sounding awkward/needy.)

<comment><USER2> Well, you begin by _not_ saying "you're out of touch". =p You begin by saying "According to my research, these are the market rates for someone in my position. What are your thoughts?"

If it's really that he just didn't know what the going market rates are, then showing him the numbers shouldn't be insulting to him or the company; they're not purposefully underpaying you. If they were aware, then this is probably the gentlest and most professional way of "calling them out".

You might want to check out this classic:

[http://www.amazon.com/Negotiating-Your-Salary-Make- Minute/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Negotiating-Your-Salary-Make- Minute/dp/1580087760/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1304192182&sr=8-1)

Which goes into the strategies of salary negotiation, including raises and benefits and all that other good stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Salary negotiation is cultural — so saying which country you are in is critical. In fact my advice was going to be to jump to a new job is you're below market value, but in some cultures that's a bad idea, yet in other cultures one would be surprised that you didn't do it sooner...

</comment><comment><USER4> Given that you're in a country with high inflation, your best bet is to move to fulltime freelancing, assuming that you can get gigs consistenly. Otherwise, if you stay in your job, even if you get a raise now then you'll still need another in 6 months.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which is true, but as long as the company does not mind making up for performance+inflation, I dont see a financial reason to ditch them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the company/startup isn't that big, why don't you just sit down and talk with them explaining the position you are at?

</comment><comment><USER6> If you've got another offer, that is your trump card. Tell your boss you're leaving... you seem to have a lot of options, so why not leave or atleast pretend to? If your boss thinks you'll actually leave and you are valuable to the company, they'll do whatever they can to keep you. Hiring people is time consuming and expensive, and when you have a good person you'll do most anything to keep them.

Also - I don't understand what you mean by the cost of living increase over 3 years is more than 60%... did you have to move somewhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> I do not have another _job_ offer, but I do have consulting gigs, so I am comfortable moving out of the job, anyways.

> Also - I don't understand what you mean by the cost of living increase over > 3 years is more than 60%... did you have to move somewhere?

I work in a major city of the country, and in recent years, rate of inflation averaged between 15-18%/annum.</comment></comment>


Microsoft is updating the Windows Console colors for the first time in 20 years - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/2/16085806/microsoft-windows-console-color-scheme-update <comment><USER2> The original article that this is largely repeating is discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14918567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14918567) .</comment>


Ask HN: Who Needs a Job in Seattle? - <AUTHOR>

It's easier if those of us who are hiring know you live near us. ;) <comment><USER2> I don't need a job in Seattle at this very moment, but I'm looking to get involved with something interesting when the freelance gig I'm on will be finished. Probably around October.

Contact info in my profile. Thx.

</comment><comment><USER3> Where @ in Seattle?

<comment><AUTHOR> Downtown in Rainier bldg.</comment></comment>


MPAA Tech Officer Paul Brigner Switches Sides In Internet Fight - <AUTHOR> http://m.deadline.com/2012/04/mpaa-tech-officer-paul-brigner-switches-sides-in-internet-fight-report/

<comment><USER2> The ironic thing is, if any legislator who supported SOPA was exposed to the complexities and realities of copyright/IP legislation as this guy was, I'm sure SOPA would have never seen the light of day. Sadly, like most legislation that our elected officials pass through, their understanding of complex issues are never more than what their (unelected) staff has debriefed them on, and what (unelected) lobbying organizations pay them to believe. I'd love to read the internal MPAA memo concerning this.

</comment><comment><USER3> From what I gathered from the article and the linked post on cnet. He was hired for side A and sided with A. Now he was hired for side B and sided with B. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER4> No, although other things being equal it seems _more likely_ that someone would switch in that direction if their current personal convictions were aligned with B.

His posting to CNET is worth reading too: [http://news.cnet.com/8618-31921_3-57404804.html?assetTypeId=...](http://news.cnet.com/8618-31921_3-57404804.html?assetTypeId=12&messageId=12154966&tag=mncol;txt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I still remember reading about the Don Dodge/Microsoft/Google fiasco. Legacy PR based on top-down control of the message is fundamentally flawed.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why does zoom not work on that site?

<comment><USER7> It's a poorly designed "mobile" site - not needed since their site works perfectly in mobile browsers anyway.

Try the "FULL SITE" link in the footer - takes you to a zoomable version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "To be certain, copyright violations are a real problem, and on that I think we can all agree." Paul Brigner

I am unsure if the majority of HN would concede that point. Many comments have stated that it is a victimless crime, or you should only use SaaS, or make money through kickstarter etc. Hell, Paul Graham has stated anything copyable deserves no copyright.</comment>


Companies who give candidates homework assignments: knock it off - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/67ckb1/companies_who_give_candidates_homework/ <comment><USER2> Fundamentally, the reason I think that homework assignments (beyond show me fizz buzz in your favorite language) are ethically wrong, is that the cost of hiring someone is the company's not the employee's.

Employee's are asked to give up a lot when the work for a company, yes they're paid for their time but it goes beyond that. Many companies require that all inventions and patents belong to them during your tenure there. Many also have no moonlighting policies - meaning you're productive work life is essentially theirs.

An prospective employee is also often taking a risk that could sink them financially. The reverse is rare for large companies, especially since employee pay is a tax write off.

</comment><comment><USER3> What the hell? I'd much rather have a take home assignment than some abstract question on data structures.</comment>


Ask HN: When do you start thinking about performance in new projects? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I can assure you: If you're asking this question, you are far from that point.

Nowadays you can host projects on services like aws, heroku, etc. and they have pretty good performance right out of the box. You will rarely reach a point where performance is a huge issue.

This may happen if you hit the HN front page, get covered by the NYTimes, etc. but even then, you could just spin up some dynos to handle it temporarily and think about if this is just a spike or an actual growth. In 99% of the cases it's just a spike and you'll be back to normal the next day.

If you DO reach the point where performance becomes important, that probably means you have enough users. And in the worst case you could even ask your users for help. But if you're doing this well, you can really just tweet for help and many people will try to help you.

TLDR: Don't optimize until you get to a point where it becomes painfully obvious that you MUST optimize.

</comment><comment><USER3> For my own projects: Straight away to an extent. I take pride in making things work fast, within reason.

For work: I just try to avoid making things slow out of stupidity by avoiding things likes n+1 queries. On modern hardware this get's you to the "good enough" point. In enterprise software no one paying me has every cared about performance, they don't have a problem if it takes 15 seconds to load a page showing 10 items for instance, they certainly won't pay me to get that 500ms request down to 30ms.

And that's why commercial software is so slow and bloated, no one will pay a cent to make it otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER4> If it's a concern just use a language that's within an order of magnitude of C and don't write anything exceedingly stupid.

Java, C#, Golang, and Node are all fast enough that you could run 99.9% of the sites on the internet with a single machine.</comment>


How Long Does It Take To Build A Native Mobile App? - <AUTHOR> http://readwrite.com/2013/01/09/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-native-mobile-app-infographic#awesm=~oxKfkY6xmiXadj

<comment><USER2> Infographic was a nice touch! Accurate article.</comment>


Phoenix Servers with Packer - <AUTHOR> http://blog.woorank.com/2013/10/phoenix-servers-packerio/

<comment><USER2> By not deploying code directly to the running servers he's adding bureaucratic overhead to the development process rather than getting rid of it. He's putting his people in as active gatekeepers in a way that hasn't been necessary for most web development in a long time.

"This way of working might still be prone to errors, but at least we are not running configuration updates or deploys against resources in production."

If the old method was too fast and lots of mistakes got through then the new process they chose was right for that team. However, treating config changes and deploys to production as if they're toxic in general is kind of disrespectful to the vast number of companies that deploy to prod without knocking over their own website for hours at a time.

On top of that, if the new process is "still error prone" then he just increased the effort required by his team and slowed the overall development of the product for nothing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is a smart way to ensure the setup scales and it's robust. This would be very effective for small startups as it's reliable and give the tech admins peace of mind. I do find packer.io to be very intuitive and user friendly. Do you guys think that packer.io is the best for the deployment flows?</comment>


Becoming a Haiku Poet (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://haikuworld.org/begin/mdwelch.apr2003.html <comment><USER2> Here's my attempt after reading the article:

      open the lid
      bits of tissue all over
      my laundy

<comment><USER3> I rather like your haiku as well. In particular I enjoy how the second and third line can be read together and apart. It seems to reinforce the disappointment of finding your laundry in such a state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      hey I didn't know
      about the syllables thing—
      what else don't I know?

</comment><comment><USER5> Soft but clear In my head and heart Your voice lives

</comment><comment><USER6> I've always been a fan of the Limerick. There's just something about a well- written Limerick, it's like a Haiku, except funny and (usually) crass.

Asimov (the very same sci fi writer) compiled several books of them. Example below:

      There was a sweet girl of Decatur

      Who went to sea on a freighter.

        She was screwed by the master

        -An utter disaster-

      But the crew all made up for it later.

</comment><comment><USER7> I saw the title and expected something about programming for Haiku OS :) Still delighted by the article though.

</comment><comment><USER8>
      flaming tongues of ire
      whisper evil melodies
      through the stony pyre

</comment><comment><USER9> Here I come, In the sand, holding your hand, where no time remains.</comment>


Android Basics in Kotlin (New) - <AUTHOR> https://developer.android.com/courses/android-basics-kotlin/course <comment><USER2> I really like Kotlin and I hope it picks up in other fields!

<comment><USER3> You can already use it in any/every field that Java is used in (which is pretty much all of them).

There are also libraries written in Kotlin itself for a wide variety of areas now too.</comment></comment>


Hyper Networks - <AUTHOR> http://blog.otoro.net/2016/09/28/hyper-networks/ <comment><USER2> This is cool!</comment>