Show HN: A simple site to make chessboard images - <AUTHOR> https://chessboardimage.com <comment><USER2> I really like it, but just a heads-up: the directions threw me for a solid 15-30 seconds.

"Click a piece to select it, then click on the board to place it."

Okay, cool! I clicked on the King's Pawn, then e4. The king's pawn disappeared, and then... nothing. I clicked e3. I clicked e4 again and then... e5? e2? Nope.

Okay, maybe something went wrong. Let's try with the queen's pawn. d2, pawn goes away. d4? d3? Nope.

I re-read the directions: "Click a piece to select it, then click on the board to place it."

Weird. The pawn went away instead of being selected. How do I select a pawn? Click f2. Nope.

At that point, I look again at the pieces below the board, and click on the pawn. It's selected! I click on e4. It's on the board! Okay, I get this now, but it's not what I expected.

I see what you're doing with the controls, but I think it's a poor match for your default state. When I see a chess board in starting position, my instinct is to move a piece, not to find a way to add new pieces to the board.

My thoughts:

If you want to keep the controls the same, I'd start with an empty board and maybe clarify the directions a smidge. I'd try something like:

      To place a piece, first select it from the case, then click any empty square on the board.

      To remove an existing piece from the board, click once on it.

      Use the buttons below for standard starting position or to import a FEN position.

If you're up for modifying the controls, I was expecting something like: clicking a piece currently on the board selects it. A second click on the same square deletes that piece, while a click on any other square "moves" the selected piece there, emptying its source square and overwriting the contents (if any) of the destination square.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Poor controls. You can actually drag and drop to place pieces, and clicking on an existing piece removes it, so the instructions should just be modified to say this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice! One suggestion, though: a common operation is to take one board position and move one piece on it. As it stands now, you can't just drag a piece, and if you click on one it disappears and you have to click on its type at the bottom.

I would prefer if you could click a piece to delete, and then, by default, your next board click puts that piece in the new place.

</comment><comment><USER5> That is not bad. Even if the scripts are disabled, or if images are disabled, or if the server is unreachable, a link to it is still usable, since the URL contains the FEN code. However, a suggestion is maybe you might want to add <noscript><img...> so that if images are enabled but scripts are disabled and the link is not directly to the picture, that it is still displayed without having to alter the URL (although even the way it is now, the instructions for altering the URL are available on that web page, so it isn't so much of a problem).

My "Farbfeld Utilities" software also can be used for making a chess board, if you have all of the pieces pictured in one file. So when you want to do it locally rather than adding a link on a web page, this can be done. (You can alter the colours and metrics below as needed)

      ff-chess 8 8 32 E5E5D7 001000 \
       | ff-composite <(pngff < pieces.png \
       | ff-text +PNBRQKpnbrqk 32 32 `sed 's.7.43.g;s.6.33.g;s.5.32.g;s.4.22.g;s.3.21.g;s.2.11.g;s./. .g' < board.fen`) 0,0,0 \
       | ff-border 0020FF 8

</comment><comment><USER6> So I usually use this site:

[http://www.jinchess.com/chessboard/composer/](http://www.jinchess.com/chessboard/composer/)

about once a week for creating diagrams. Have a look at them for some feature ideas.

Looking at your site the main problem I see is you don't indicate which player is to move anywhere.

I don't use all the features on the other site but I think my main advice would be to have a very generic colours and piece-font as your default and give people options to change them.

</comment><comment><USER7> If anyone's interested in a super-easy way to embed an interactive chessboard on their own page, I very recently made a <chess-board> web component, forked from chessboard.js: [https://justinfagnani.github.io/chessboard- element/](https://justinfagnani.github.io/chessboard-element/)

You can put a board on a page with one tag:

        <chess-board></chess-board>

And set it up via attributes:

        <chess-board
            draggable-pieces
            position="8/R7/8/8/k1K5/8/8/8">
        </chess-board>

The element also has methods to make animated moves, set position, clear the board, etc.

I still have a few touch-interaction bugs to fix, so I haven't submitted it to HN myself yet. I hope it's useful to someone!

</comment><comment><USER8> Great tool! In case anyone is interested in an animated version of something like this for visualizing moves, I made this tool with a friend a while ago: [https://www.gfychess.com/](https://www.gfychess.com/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Really nice! I especially like the way you can append FEN to URLs to create a shareable link.

</comment><comment><USER10> I feel like drag and drop would be more intuitive. Maybe slower though.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a feature of lichess, which is free and open source.

<comment><USER12> How do you generate an image from a position on lichess?

They have a board editor: [https://lichess.org/editor/rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPP...](https://lichess.org/editor/rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR_w_KQkq_-_0_1)

But I've not seen an option to generate an image (aside from taking a screenshot), which is what the posted site appears to have been made for.</comment></comment>


The story of EV-SSL, AWS and trailing dot domains - <AUTHOR> https://labs.detectify.com/2016/10/05/the-story-of-ev-ssl-aws-and-trailing-dot-domains/ <comment><AUTHOR> Isn't this a huge security hole in AWS?</comment>


Minimalistic Memoization (Python, 16 lines) - <AUTHOR> http://code.activestate.com/recipes/577219-minimalistic-memoization/

<comment><USER2> The Function memoize looks like a python decorator to me(<http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0318/> ),

IMHO, code can be more pythonic and still minimalistic if we declare fib this way using decorators

@memoize fib(n)

also we don't need to use the line : fib = memoize(fib) after this change

I don't know though if decorators were not used on purpose..

Update: I have commented updated code on recipe's page - [http://code.activestate.com/recipes/577219-minimalistic- memo...](http://code.activestate.com/recipes/577219-minimalistic- memoization/?c=10628#c1)

</comment><comment><USER3> Be sure to crank up your recursion limit to at least 1459 if you want the posted example to work.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not having worked much with Python, what's the * next to x in lines 9 and 11 about?

<comment><USER5> <http://docs.python.org/reference/expressions.html#calls>

Line 9: A formal parameter using the syntax * identifier receives a tuple containing any excess positional arguments.

Line 11: When the syntax * expression appears in the function call, expression evaluates to a sequence, the elements of which are treated as if they were the positional arguments.</comment></comment>


5 Essentials for every Developers CV - <AUTHOR> http://hackerjobs.co.uk/blog/2012/12/18/5-essentials-for-every-developers-cv

<comment><USER2> > Never, ever state that you were looking for work for four months or > something to that affect

well...

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure how to interpret "it doesn't have to be Donut C"...</comment>


Z3 SMT solver interactive tutorial - <AUTHOR> http://rise4fun.com/z3/tutorial/guide <comment><USER2> If you're looking for a fun, substantial introductory Z3 project, try writing a program to compare two sets of firewall rules for functional equivalence. Stated another way: does there exist a packet which is accepted by one firewall but not the other?

I was lucky enough to be tasked with solving this problem in Azure! We were changing the method by which node firewall rules were automatically generated, and wanted a way to verify equivalence between the old and new versions for each node. The brute force approach was clearly out: we'd have had to check 2^72 IPv4 packets (32-bit source address field, 16-bit source port field, 16-bit destination port field, 8-bit protocol field). I bummed around trying to figure out a way to transform the firewall rules into some kind of minimal normalized form for direct comparison, but the Z3 approach turned out to be shockingly simple. When Z3 is really well-suited for a problem, it feels like straight up magic.

If you want to spoil the implementation details for yourself, it goes like this:

1) Set up bit vector variables of the proper size for each field in the IPv4 packet header.

2) Encode each firewall rule as a restriction on the variables from (1), then conjoin them to form a logical representation of a firewall.

3) Task Z3 with finding values for the variables in (1) for which one firewall is true, and the other is false.

Here's a simple example which you can run directly in the linked demo page, using two integer fields (source and destination) for simplicity:

      (declare-const src Int)
      (declare-const dst Int)
      (define-fun matches ((srcLower Int) (srcUpper Int) (dstLower Int) (dstUpper Int)) Bool
        (and (<= srcLower src) (<= src srcUpper) (<= dstLower dst) (<= dst dstUpper))
      )

      (define-fun firewall1 () Bool
        (and
          (matches 0 10 20 30)
          (not (matches 5 10 25 30))
        )
      )

      (define-fun firewall2 () Bool
        (and
          (matches 1 10 20 30)
          (not (matches 5 10 25 30))
        )
      )

      (assert (not (= firewall1 firewall2)))
      (check-sat)
      (get-model)

This finds the model [0, 20] - a "packet" which is accepted by one firewall but not the other.

In practice this solution ran very quickly - less than a second for firewalls with hundreds of rules. It also gave a counterexample if the firewalls were not equivalent, which could be matched with offending rules and was very useful for debugging.

<comment><USER3> This was running user-facing, in production? Do you have any experience with scaling Z3? I'm thinking large problems running on many machines, contra many small problems on many processes.

For some reason, I always imagined that SMT was used to verify stuff _before_ putting it into production, but this opens up a whole new world of ideas for me.

<comment><USER2> It wasn't running as any sort of persistent service, if that's what you mean. It just ran during deployments to check output of old & new firewall generation methods for equivalence.

Something like what you describe was implemented in an Azure system called SecGuru, which is sort of a generalized version of firewall comparison to check security rule enforcement. Here is the whitepaper: [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/2016/02/secguru.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want a fun example of using Z3, I gave a talk recently that walks you through verifying programs in a tiny little imperative language by compiling them to Z3 formulas. It's easier than it sounds!

It was recorded [1] and I have example code and additional resources (papers, etc) on my site [2].

[1]: [https://youtube.com/watch?v=ruNFcH- KibY](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ruNFcH-KibY)

[2]: [http://jelv.is/talks/compose-2016/](http://jelv.is/talks/compose-2016/)

If you want to do more, you can extend the same process to _synthesizing_ programs, not just verifying them. It doesn't scale too far, but otherwise it's like magic.

<comment><USER5> Very nice! Check this out: [https://youtu.be/G2kx1aFpT6M?t=28m](https://youtu.be/G2kx1aFpT6M?t=28m)

BTW, TLA+ also compiles to Z3 (and other solvers: CVC3, Yices, Zenon).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Z3py (Z3 bindings for Python) is a much better interface for Z3 IMO.

[http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~msagiv/courses/asv/z3py/guide- examp...](http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~msagiv/courses/asv/z3py/guide-examples.htm)

<comment><USER7> I like the Lisp/Scheme syntax better, but that is because I have studied Lisps far longer than Python, and I just find them easier for phrasing logic.

The Python looks clean and familiar too.

F* the theorem-proving, program-verification language from MS is ML-like, and exports to OCaml and F#.

Can the Z3 SMT solver be used for F*'s SMT needs? I haven't found a link yet.

<comment><USER8> Yes, afaik F* uses Z3 internally.

I don't have any links, but I know a guy working on formalizing the translation from F* to Z3

<comment><USER7> I guess since F* is similar to F# or ML you could have a pretty cohesive solver to production toolchain. Having OCaml as an output option is great too.

I was looking at Idris with the C backend as a way of formalizing my programming for production programming. This makes another set to evaluate before deciding. I realize they are quite different, but I am just experimenting at this moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If Z3 is on here, I just want to mention Triton ( [http://triton.quarkslab.com/](http://triton.quarkslab.com/) ) which is a master thesis project from a French (?) person and Pin from Intel ( [https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/pin-a-dynamic- bina...](https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/pin-a-dynamic-binary- instrumentation-tool) ). With Triton and Pin you can instrument binary software and gather SMT formulas. It basically allows you to know about the binary SMT style.

I had to use it in a practical lab to figure out the input of some hashing function (that would almost always hash to 0). By knowing all the constraints, solving it to know what the input should be becomes quite easy (at least easy compared to brute force).</comment>


The Hacker Way, an alternative to Agile - <AUTHOR> http://www.vimeo.com/110554082

<comment><AUTHOR> An incredibly polemic delivery. Erik Meijer is a manifestation of the 10th man here.

If you look beyond the surface/delivery of the talk you will see some profound truth about the industry we're in.

I also see some parallels between what he is recommending and the way YCombinator and many Valley companies are set up (in stark contrast to the rest of the industry).

Great talk. Thought provoking.</comment>


The categories were made for man, not man for the categories - <AUTHOR> http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/

<comment><AUTHOR> Entertaining read if you ever had trouble with modelling type hierarchies in OOP.</comment>


Humans Interbred with Four Extinct Hominin Species, Research Finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/anthropology/humans-hominin-introgression-07438.html <comment><USER2> "Homo sapiens" is Latin for "wise man," but there were many Hominin species who possessed comparative culture, art, and intelligence. Neanderthals actually had larger brains compared to modern humans[0]. There are many theories on why Neanderthals became extinct[1]; my favorite is that we simply outbred them because of our sex appeal. What is Latin for "sexy human?"

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Anatomy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Anatomy)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction)

<comment><USER3> They had greater cranial capacity than us, but so do elephants and whales. And the animal with the greatest brain-to-body-size ratio is tree shrew, suggesting that size doesn't really matter when it comes to intelligence.

<comment><USER4> Neither of those animals has the appropriate morphology to build tools or use complex language. How do we know they aren't actually smarter than us?

<comment><USER5> > or use complex language.

That we know of. They might completely have complex language using different mediums (infra sounds, vibrations, movements, smells, etc.).

<comment><USER3> I believe all animals definitely have some sort of language, and that the complexity of a language depends on its utility in facilitating everyday interactions and activities. What are the most complex activities you've seen elephants get up to?

<comment><USER5> I never had the chance to meet elephants.

Now, from what I've learned/read about their behaviours, I have no doubt on the depth of their lives. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_cognition#Elephant_so...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_cognition#Elephant_society)

And I wouldn't call that "some sort of language". That's language. Species- specific. Not "human" language.

Even language that another species can grasp more or less perfectly. You can get that with minimal observation of dogs, cats, even birds. And obviously, animals read us as well.

Now, the complexity of an other species language may be partially out of reach because we do not have the same senses, abilities, history, memories.

So they might even engage in activities we cannot grasp or identify (and reciprocally) but for great patience, observation, study, understanding, and luck.

<comment><USER6> When I see a videos / images of wolves I don't perceive that "intelligence" that I perceive from dogs. Not to say wolves are any less intelligent or cognitive, dogs just have had the constraint that they needed to be able to communicate with humans well or they could die.

Kind of makes me think if we ever were to encounter extraterrestrial intelligence we might have trouble identifying them as intelligent, or, have trouble communicating with them, because we have trouble identifying and communicating with the terrestrial intelligence that surrounds us and is abundant.

<comment><USER7> Depends on the situation in which we encounter the aliens. If wolves were building interplanetary spacecraft, we'd have a hard time saying they weren't intelligent.

<comment><USER5> If they were, we probably wouldn't be there to see it. :D

Where No Wolf Has Gone Before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If we interbred with them, how are they actually species? It seems more to me you're talking more about racial or breed differences akin to breeds of dogs if two species actually successfuly had viable offspring in the wild.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, seems more logical to say ancient human experienced a number genetic divergences which were then folded into the mainline of the genetic stream.

<comment><USER10> Environment plays a huge role. If a nomadic group was in a jungle-like environment, wouldn't they more likely develop the traits of the other species well suited for jungle living? Over a long enough timescale.

<comment><USER11> > If a nomadic group was in a jungle-like environment, wouldn't they more > likely develop the traits of the other species well suited for jungle > living?

Yes, and this has already happened. The African jungle has its pygmies; the Southeast Asian peninsula and surrounding islands have their pygmies; and those two groups are totally unrelated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is the difference between the genes identifies as "extra-species sourced" and those which are a nominal part of homo sapiens DNA? How do we know they don't originate from intra-species mutation, for example?

<comment><USER13> Genes tend to to accumulate mutations at a constant rate (lots of caveats here, but that's the general idea). If you find that a population has a family of gene variants that are very different from the same ones in another population, then it's a good bet it arrived from external breeding. And the relative differences between the modern descendant genes can tell you when it happened.

Again, I'm sure the real models get really complicated and are no doubt still a little controversial. But that's the basic idea.

<comment><USER14> How do they differentiate multiple parallel lines lines of mutations coming back together from a separate subspecies existing for much longer?

<comment><USER13> Genes don't "come back together". If you have a given gene, it's a direct descendant from exactly one of your ancestors in each generation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would be very cautious interpreting these results. There are no DNA samples from the putative EH1 and EH2 hominin populations -- these populations are statistical constructs used to explain the data, but not (yet) directly observed.

I do think it's likely that H. sapiens intermixed with other hominins besides Neanderthal and Denisovan, but the models used to infer these results make a lot of assumptions and are at best a drastic simplification of reality.

<comment><USER16> Goes to show that every field has its own inferred "dark matter" of sorts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you are even vaguely interested in ancient human DNA, human migration, or human evolution I highly recommend Insito.me's[0] podcast, The Insight [1]. Improvements in genomics DNA extraction techniques combined with several key paleontological finds, have resulted in a revolution in human paleontology and anthropology.

[0] - [http://insito.me](http://insito.me)

[1] - [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the- insight/id13247444...](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the- insight/id1324744423?mt=2)

</comment><comment><USER18> > "For example, all present-day populations show about 2% of Neanderthal > ancestry which means that Neanderthal mixing with the ancestors of modern > humans occurred soon after they left Africa, probably around 50,000 to > 55,000 years ago somewhere in the Middle East."

I gotta wonder what people are thinking when they write this stuff. I mean, "Neanderthal mixing with the ancestors of modern humans occurred soon after they left Africa". Do they imply that those whose ancestors never left Africa are not "modern humans"? I doubt it. So they're just being sloppy.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm curious; can we assume they were similar enough to be attractive or desirable as mates?

It's obvious different cultural standards may have applied.

Or am I asking a stupid question?

<comment><USER20> Humans nowadays are attracted to everything from anime characters to people dressed in furry animal costumes. The set of things we're attracted to knows no bounds.

<comment><USER16> Perhaps the real evolutionary advantage of Sapiens was abstract thinking put to use in advanced sexualization of different species.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> [https://web.archive.org/web/20190730011623/https://www.sci-n...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190730011623/https://www.sci- news.com/othersciences/anthropology/humans-hominin-introgression-07438.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> Given that we carry the genetic legacy of all these Hominin species, are we still homo-sapiens?

Should modern humans be classified as something else, distinct from the original pre-interbreeding homo-sapiens?

If so, given how randy we have been, I propose Homo-Amatorius.

<comment><USER23> The two named species from the research are _Homo_ _sapiens_ _denisova_ and _Homo_ _sapiens_ _neanderthalensis_. We're _Homo_ _sapiens_ _sapiens_ , because we ate the wise-wise fruit.

(The other two are nameless data ghosts at this point, due to lack of corresponding archeological records, but presumably _Homo_ _sapiens_ _whateveris_ and _Homo_ _sapiens_ _someotheris_.)

It's kind of open to debate whether those should be independent species, or their own species, but basically we're all _Homo_ _sapiens_ of one sort or another unless you want to get into a long unresolvable highly technical argument about it, which revolves around what precise definition of "species" is useful in some arbitrary context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can these species be said to be extinct when their DNA is very much alive?

<comment> ben-schaaf Birds evolved from dinosaurs, certainly those are extinct, yet they share a large portion of DNA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This theory was one of the most interesting ideas in _Sapiens_ , take a look at a model of what other great apes look like, if so many types of dog can interbreed why wouldn't these great apes?

<comment><USER26> This is misleading. Superficial physical appearance isn't always a good indicator of genetic similarity or sexual compatibility.

<comment><USER13> Who's downvoting this? This is exactly correct. In fact domestic dogs have IIRC considerably less genetic diversity than their wolf ancestors do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Then they aren't extinct.

<comment><USER28> 2.3% Neanderthal Pride checking in!

<comment><USER29> Please don't post flamebait to HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> *homonym

</comment><comment><USER31> typical

</comment><comment><USER32> Hi everyone, just letting you all know, it's no surprise that modern homo sapiens ancestors bumped uglies with other species in the genus of homo back in the day. The enlightening part of this article is there are some unknown species in homo that we have genetic evidence of, but no fossil record. The thing you should be fascinated by, there were many contemporary relatives to homo sapiens that could have been as much or somewhat as intelligent. But they all disappeared and we are all that's left. We either killed them all or snoo- snooed them out of existence because homo sapiens seemed to have spawned faster and had more offspring in comparison.

So, please stop relating this to dogs fucking or being surprised that different species can tango under moonlight. Please stop.

Yes, different species, of different genders, of the same genus can warm up at night and spawn little hellions 7-9ish months later.

There's plenty of evidence that these other homo species were sophisticated, like the neanderthal. As much, if not more, that ancient homo sapiens (at the time).

Does that make a new species? Maybe. Current taxonomy guidelines are not perfect. There are other taxonomy systems out there that would spell this out, just not considered the universal standard we all know today. The problem is, how do you draw sharp lines in a blurry distinction without just creating a new "species" for every sexual adventurous encounter that results in a screaming child.

At the end, this article was cool and we should all be excited over this.

<comment><USER33> Yes that's the interesting part. But disagree that 'there's plenty of evidence'. The fact is, there's no evidence whatsoever - that's what 'unknown species' means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> So its possible that modern races of humans are actually our archaic ancestors?

<comment><USER35> No, what most people refer to as races of humans are a set of traits that are surprisingly shared across populations, albeit in different quantities.

The traits that we've inherited from our archaic ancestors aren't really the types of traits people use a distinguishing features between populations.

<comment><USER34> Question is would the Neanderthals have also shared traits with other hominids? I find that religion and politics kind of muddies the science with human evolution

<comment><USER35> I am not an expert. But it seems less likely since the Neanderthals existed for a shorter timespan over shorter distances then modern humans, so they must have encountered fewer hominin along their way.

If anything it is more likely that the deninsovans aquired genes from the decedents of the groups of Homo Erectus that migrated throughout south east asia and quite probably remained in small quantities in remote areas (like Homo Floresiensis did) when the denisovans arrived.

\---

Edit: Then it is the question of: Say that the Denisovans acquired genes from other hominin through interbreeding, would these genes then be passed on to us when our homo sapien ancestors interbreed with the Denisovans? That is a question I have no confidence in answering and should probably be deferred to geneticist or a genetic statistician.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Suppose we found enough DNA to recreate these hominins.

Would they be citizens or zoo animals? Either way, what if they want to interbreed? Do we determine this based on looks? What if the attraction is unidirectional?

<comment><USER37> They would be citizens. They would grow up like normal children. They would speak any human language. They could achieve anything any other human could in their lives. The differences would be subtle. They would appear like unusual humans to us, a racial group that we had never encountered. We would certainly see more commonalities with other modern humans than differences. All their traits would be present to some extent among living modern humans, but they would show us a unique and intense combination of those traits.

<comment><USER38> This is a massive assumption that we don't know is true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point)

> In 2004, Rohde, Olson and Chang showed through simulations that the > Identical Ancestors Point for all humans is surprisingly recent, on the > order of 5,000-15,000 years ago.

How can different populations of modern humans have interbred with different hominin species around 50k years ago when ALL of today's humans had the EXACT SAME SET OF ANCESTORS as recently as 15k years ago?

<comment><USER40> > How can different populations of modern humans have interbred with different > hominin species around 50k years ago when ALL of today's humans had the > EXACT SAME SET OF ANCESTORS as recently as 15k years ago?

Differences in past populations, including the interbreeding at issue, can be inferred from modern genes for reasons actually laid out in your own link, in the paragraph after the one you quoted:

 _All living people share exactly the same set of ancestors from this point back, all the way to the very first single-celled organism. However, people will vary widely in how much ancestry and genes they inherit from each ancestor, which will cause them to have very different genotypes and phenotypes._

<comment><USER39> This actually makes sense, thank you for actually reading the Wikipedia page rather than just searching for a quote :)

It doesn't really contradict this article, but there were a number of articles a couple of years ago about how Europeans had Neanderthal DNA that other ethnicities didn't share. In reality all modern humans are descended from the exact same Neanderthals, but Europeans still retain more of their genes.</comment></comment></comment>


Series A Funding With and Without Pre-orders  - <AUTHOR>

Just a quick question i need input from you guys on.  If hypothetically my startup has in the vicinity of $1M pre-orders, what scenario is more likely to play out in Series A funding?  A) VC's will give me more money but still want the same equity stake they would have asked for if i had no pre-orders or B) drop the equity stake they want and give me the same amount of cash if i had no pre-orders?
My query is i would assume that VC's would rather pay more and get a larger slice of the equity especially with pre-orders verifying there is a market demand for the product, however; that is entirely my take on things and might not reflect the relativity of what would occur in such a situation.
So whats the likely outcome in such a situation? <comment><AUTHOR> Anyone?</comment>


Responsive Web Design With Physical Units - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.smashingmagazine.com/2013/03/21/responsive-web-design-with-physical-units/ <comment><USER2> What a waste. All you need is basic media queries, resolution would be redundant. The better approach is to make vector graphics which will look good in any resolution. I get the article, I just think its an unnecessary overhead.</comment>


Encryption built into the Keyboard – Android and iOS - <AUTHOR> http://www.stealthtap.com/getapp <comment><USER2> This seems like a neat way to do message encryption. For the average user, this is probably too inconvenient as a long term solution though. Having to select the text every time, to explicitly tell it to decrypt, makes for a poor user experience.

<comment><USER3> Agree, but at the same time switching to another chat app for private messaging would be difficult . With this I can still stay on whatsapp and send encrypted messages rather than switching to another app..I guess we need to just copy the text by long pressing

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Downloaded the app. Sounds cool. Now I can do private messaging in WhatsApp.

</comment><comment><USER5> App works clean. Way to go with end to end encryption.</comment>


Automating Lie Detection on Cable News - <AUTHOR> http://www.knightfoundation.org/blogs/knightblog/2013/1/29/debuting-truth-teller-washington-post-real-time-lie-detection-service-your-service-not-quite-yet/

<comment><USER2> This is really exciting and representative of the great work funded by the Knight foundation.

I have to hope that this will be so good that it will lead politicians into not lying in public speeches, though I wonder about the long-term impact such things will have on society.</comment>


Three Pillars of Agile - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ard_adam/three-pillars-of-agile-9197ae52bf47 <comment><USER2> Anyone else notice that Agile basically became an excuse to place Project Management Institute trained project managers in scrums as "Scrum Masters" to ask people if they are going to check their code in by Friday 5 days a week? Because all software engineers need is constant pressure to crank out quality code, right?

I knew it was bad for the industry when a teammate told me "Look man, just check it in, QA will let you know if there are problems on Monday."</comment>


Nylas Pro - <AUTHOR> https://nylas.com/blog/nylas-pro <comment><USER2> I really love N1 but I can't believe they expect people to pay $7 a month for an email CLIENT, not even service. Office 365 is $9 a month and is the whole office suite including Outlook. I'm sure their cloud costs are losing them money but $7 a month just seems really really steep to me.

<comment><USER3> It's not just a regular client-- we've built out features like mail merge, open tracking, link tracking, behavior analytics, Rapportive-like sidebars, send later, emojis, snoozing, templated replies, calendar invites, and more. Nylas Pro also gives you unlimited accounts, so you can connect multiple addresses.

Folks using Nylas N1 are coming from the productivity world of ToutApp or YesWare. We're really not replacing Office 365 or Google Apps. We're looking at building new powerful workflows for people who live in their mailbox, calendar, and address book.

(I work at Nylas.)

<comment><USER4> $7 PER MONTH.

Nope.

<comment><USER3> You're always welcome to also run it yourself. [https://github.com/nylas/n1](https://github.com/nylas/n1)

<comment><USER5> does this mean that the free version won't be available anymore? Only the developer one?

<comment><USER3> There's a 30-day trial to use a version where the hosting is paid for by Nylas. After that point you need to upgrade to Pro in order for us to keep running the server infrastructure for you, and also to get features that depend on Nylas Cloud APIs.

The sync engine is open source, so you can also spin up a VPS on AWS, DigitalOcean, etc. and manage it yourself there.

You can read a bit more on the blog post: [https://nylas.com/blog/nylas- pro](https://nylas.com/blog/nylas-pro)

<comment><USER5> I started using Nylas because I find it cleaner than other programs and somehow setting a gmail account was easier. Besides this, I don't do much else with an email client than reading email, so all these new features are something that I don't really need and I don't feel like paying this much just to have a nicer interface

<comment><USER3> That's fine-- you're not our target user then. :) Hopefully you'll still get some benefit from the open source stuff!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Quantum computer emulated by a classical system - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2015-05-quantum-emulated-classical.html <comment><USER2> The paper's conclusion [1] does a much better job of summarizing what they did than the posted article. For example, they explicitly note limitations:

> _Because the QMT representation uses frequencies to encode the state, the > number of qubits would be limited by bandwidth. Using an electronic voltage > as a physical representation, we find that frequencies in the practical > range of 0.1 Hz to 100 GHz would allow for about n=40 entangled qubits to be > realized. [...] Since the quantum state is explicitly encoded in the signal > spectrum, security applications such as quantum key distribution would not > seem to be amenable to this approach, although they may be emulated._

And they even note that their approach has not been demonstrated to be superior:

> _It remains to be shown that this approach can be realized in a fault- > tolerant manner, using existing quantum error correction techniques, and > that it ultimately has utility and merit over current approaches to quantum > computing—or standard digital computers, for that matter._

My takeaway is that the paper's intended goal is to explain a neat, perhaps practical, way to emulate some qubits. It doesn't do anything "magical", it encodes all of the amplitudes into the signal (in a real quantum computer, you'd have no direct access to the amplitudes) and explains how to emulate operations being applied.

1: [http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/17/5/053017/article#njp5...](http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/17/5/053017/article#njp512897s9)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is something that has been noticed before mathematically, but hard to do in practice. The article is maybe a little confused. The limitation on size comes from the limit on frequency/amplitude resolution - for a given scale and resolution, the need to distinguish states grows combinatorially. It can be overcome by making the system smaller. Eventually you can rely on quantum effects to help, when you are no longer emulating a quantum system, you've basically built one.

</comment><comment><USER4> The article twice mentions that the emulator would use analog circuits. So there must be some reason why digital circuits would not work.

<comment><USER5> Probably has something to do with the determinism of digital systems.

<comment><USER6> Analog systems are equally deterministic. In fact, a digital circuit is just an analog circuit where the interpretation of the voltages is quantized.

<comment><USER5> An analog radio tuned to read nothing but static is not deterministic.

<comment><USER6> Just because you can't determine what it will do doesn't mean that it's nondeterministic. You just don't have enough information about the hundreds of billions of radio sources scattered all throughout the galaxy. You probably don't have any better information about what the radio station a few kilohertz away will broadcast next, either.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


You are listening to New York – police radio and ambient music - <AUTHOR> http://youarelistening.to/newyork <comment><USER2> [ SomaFM SF 10-33]

[http://somafm.com/sf1033/](http://somafm.com/sf1033/)

Ambient music mixed with the sounds of San Francisco public safety radio traffic.

[ SomaFM Mission Control ]

[http://somafm.com/missioncontrol/](http://somafm.com/missioncontrol/)

A mix of ambient and experimental music mixed with the historical sounds of the space program.

<comment><USER3> Soma FM is one of my favourite things. Their stations are among my top listening while working. The lack of ads/interruption and excellently compiled playlists make for wonderful listening that truly augments my mood and ability to concentrate.

<comment><USER4> Another recommendation : I used to listen to "Bluemars - Music for the space traveler" stream, but it has been defunct[0] for some time. However, it seems someone is trying to revive it there [1]. It is really great to use as background when coding. Eerie and inspiring.

(I just hope that my link won't DDOS it)

[0] [http://bluemars.org/](http://bluemars.org/) [1] [http://echoesofbluemars.org/index.php](http://echoesofbluemars.org/index.php)

<comment><USER5> Thanks, and thanks to mkal_tsr for the link to Mission Control, that sounds like fantastic music for work! Here is a list of my go-to music for work:

* (mandatory, already seen multiple times on HN) [http://musicforprogramming.net/](http://musicforprogramming.net/)

* Kruder & Dorfmeister - The K+D Sessions. Fantastic mix.

* Apparat - The whole discography, but especially Silizium, and Krieg und Frieden. Both mix deliciously electronic and violin/cello.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's also a similar native app for iOS called La Vue – perfect for late night coding sessions. It's also an eerie experience to walk down the streets of your own city while listening to the sounds of another city on the other side of the globe/country.

[La Vue for iOS] [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/la- vue/id566957123?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/la-vue/id566957123?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER7> Dang, this is cool...

I love the idea of procedural music using live data sets. This works really well - a lot of ambient music I listen to already has radio samples in it. I wonder if you could add reverb to the radio? Maybe with the room size oscillating very slowly.

Might I recommend a lower default volume for the radio? I'm listening to it more for the sound quality and not the words themselves.

<comment><USER8> [http://url2la.uservoice.com/forums/201637-general](http://url2la.uservoice.com/forums/201637-general) for

suggestions, it seems!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for listening to my site everyone. It's crazy that 3+ years after launch it's still finding new listeners every day! Feel free to @ me on twitter with any questions (@idontlikewords)

<comment><USER10> When the music player slides away, how do I bring it back?

<comment><USER9> Use the "RSS" icon in the top nav to slide it in and out. Not the most intuitive, I know. But in keeping with the minimalism... =)

<comment><USER10> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ohhh, I like this one:

[http://youarelistening.to/numbers](http://youarelistening.to/numbers)

<comment><USER12> Some background: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I've got The Conet Project 4CD box set.

A guy at Aquarius Records in San Francisco convinced me to "just have a listen" back in '98 or '99, and I bought them _immediately_

<comment><USER13> It's available to download at archive.org: [https://archive.org/details/ird059](https://archive.org/details/ird059)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I absolutely love this. On one hand you've got the peacefulness of mellow ambient music, and on the other, the potential death, doom and destruction from the police channels. It properly conveys the 'techno' feeling that something can go horribly wrong at any moment.

<comment><USER15> Apparently the idea for Twitter came to Jack Dorsey from listening to a police scanner: [http://www.cnet.com/news/jack-dorsey-on-his-childhood- inspir...](http://www.cnet.com/news/jack-dorsey-on-his-childhood-inspiration- for-twitter/)

It's very much a techno thing, reminiscent of a track like Space Manoeuvres' "Stage One". I'm not sure if it's ethical to do it with live emergency communications, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can someone elaborate please? Why listen to police radio while listening to ambient music?

I am genuinely curious and would like to understand this better.

<comment><USER17> It invokes a mood. It distills a spirit of night and cities that never sleep. Urgent events from a police scanner play upon a feeling of social connectedness. Combining that with ethereal music plays upon senses of tranquility, danger, peace, haunting, calms before storms, and life transpiring. Dramas like Blade Runner, The Killing, and True Detective, as a few examples, achieve many of their most beautiful moments through that same, heightened essence.

It's great for programming at night. It's meditative without entering a full alpha state. It's like other moods, such as sounds of rain and nature, that linger but don't distract. Many people find it conducive to "the zone" of creativity and productivity.

<comment><USER18> This is very strange to me. How can it not distract? Some guy beats up his wife, or worse, and knowing so helps you coding? I would have never guessed it. I understand the notion about a certain mood, as in Blade Runner, but that's carefully arranged fiction. This is real life. (The last sentence probably reads more dramatic than intended.)

<comment><USER19> Air Traffic Control feeds can be easier to let blur, since they lack any sense of drama. They do tend to be less busy late at night, though.

<comment><USER20> It's noon somewhere.

(I don't know where you get your ATC feeds but maybe you can get ones from across the world)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is a really great idea--bravo, xtrmntr! Are you traversing a SoundCloud playlist, or pulling randomly based on tags? It's quite cool.

If the police feeds are too dramatic, there's that excellent (archival) NASA audio one as well: [http://youarelistening.to/nasa](http://youarelistening.to/nasa)

</comment><comment><USER22> Worth mentioning that they cover a number of cities, including St Petersburg, where they listen to road traffic police (in Russian of course).

</comment><comment><USER23> This was really soothing until SFPD started talking about a nasty Truck/Motorcycle accident. They dropped the line "The rider is still down", and now I'm switching to ambient by itself.

Nice site though. This is actually pretty soothing as long as it's typical, nearly-undecipherable police chatter.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, listening to Chicago's at night can get pretty gnarly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is just great. Not only the sounds, but I love the backdrops. I'm reminded of how much I miss LA.

</comment><comment><USER26> Very nice!

Why not make the third component live -- and include a webcam feed in the background instead of the static image?

</comment><comment><USER27> In a similar vein, there's a great album that mixes ambient music with field recordings from airport terminals: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_for_Real_Airports](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_for_Real_Airports)

</comment><comment><USER28> Nice ! I would love to have a stream to play in my music player rather than in my web browser !

<comment><USER29> Bundle this into an app with some nice photos or live webcam and I'll throw some money at it!

<comment><USER30> Looks like they already did it: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/la- vue/id566957123](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/la-vue/id566957123)

<comment><USER29> Boom, purchased!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is really cool. Makes me feel productive. I have been working on ambient music that allows me to work and stay focused. Just released some of my first tunes here: [http://www.vpena.com](http://www.vpena.com)

<comment><USER32> Hey, great work. Listening to it now.

What toolset or DAW did you use to create these?

<comment><USER31> This was all done with Ableton live 9 on Surface Pro 3. I did use some field recordings and a few micro samples from Bill Evan's album, Moonbeams.

<comment><USER32> Wow great to hear.

I've been learning Ableton Live 9 on my Mac, along with a Push controller, which I can't recommend enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The site is also mentioned in a good episode of the design podcast 99% Invisible.

[http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-23-you-are- lis...](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-23-you-are-listening- to/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Bookmarked. I _already_ occasionally listen to local and nonlocal police scanners via Broadcastify with my own playlists of atmosphere and ambient- shoegaze music. No joke. I'll use this. Some beautiful, fresh music on the roll here.

<comment><USER34> Mind sharing any of your playlist?

I loved your explanation: "It invokes a mood. It distills a spirit of night and cities that never sleep. Urgent events from a police scanner play upon a feeling of social connectedness. Combining that with ethereal music plays upon senses of tranquility, danger, peace, haunting, calms before storms, and life transpiring."

<comment><USER17> Thank you! I'd be honored. Likewise, I'll be eager for any music from you, especially as you're even willing to ask. It should be noted that I truly love _all_ forms of music and sound without reservation.

Would be nice if HN had a simple forum or messaging/alerts for these moments. My lists are a disastrous mess in Foobar. It's time to finally get up to par and organize what I can on Spotify or whatnot for these situations. Any way to message, or just check back in a few days?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I tuned in just in time to hear a report of a child being shot. On the plus side, the relaxing music just makes this seem like the opening of a drama film.

</comment><comment><USER36> My first thought when I saw the website name was Screenwriter's Blues by Soul Coughing - which turns out to be looping on the info page!

Very cool idea.

</comment><comment><USER37> Thought this was the stupidest thing ever, then I listened. It's rather cool and seems to work. Kudos.

</comment><comment><USER38> absolutely love this, well done!</comment>


Lenovo firmware overrides Windows system files, after no-internet DVD install - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=29497693&sid=ddf3e32512932172454de515091db014

<comment><USER2> I would be interested to see if any other manufacturers are doing this as well.

You can easily check: if a file called wpbbin.exe is in your windows\system32 directory, that means Windows found and executed code that was in your firmware.

Or, see if your autochk.exe hash isn't from Microsoft (paste the hash into virustotal) If OK, virustotal would say, "Trusted source! This file belongs to the Microsoft Corporation software catalogue."

I ask because last month, when I searched for "wpbbin.exe" I found lots of people who thought they had viruses, posting scan logs to various sites, and the scan logs mentioned this file as well as things that looked like Dell and HP stuff. "Wpbbin.exe" is a file that would only exist in your system32 if Windows found it in your firmware.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> See also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10039870](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10039870)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The update in the thread says that apparently Lenovo recently disabled the feature, and that it was never enabled on Thinkpads

[http://news.lenovo.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=2013](http://news.lenovo.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=2013)

[https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/lse_bios_n...](https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/lse_bios_notebook)</comment>


Ask HN: Recommend Me Your Mattress? - <AUTHOR> Sleep is important and mattress shopping is hard. What mattress do you have and would you recommend it to other HN users?<p>Please include the price if possible, as (personally) I'm trying to keep costs reasonable. <comment><USER2> With mattresses, the only golden rule is that no one else's recommendation should matter to you. It really is a personal choice – a function of sleeping position(s), BMI, gender, preferred feel (in<->on), and other considerations (back issues, motion, heat, etc.).

This is actually scientifically verified: [https://www.rti.org/sites/default/files/resources/rr-0016-11...](https://www.rti.org/sites/default/files/resources/rr-0016-1108-hogan.pdf). As they put it: "The actigraphically best mattress was well distributed among the sample of participants and across the seven mattresses studied." Basically, there was no "mode" best mattress. No one else's experience applies to you.

They also note that "The mattress that individuals chose as optimal before the randomized, controlled phase of the study did not predict either the actigraphically determined best mattress or the best mattress as determined by reported sleep quality." My take: focus on in-home testing, trying to understand what you like, and return policies more than showroom tests or recommendations.

What I can offer is a fantastic way to reach your own conclusion: [https://www.themattressunderground.com/](https://www.themattressunderground.com/) (under the "Mattresses" nav tab).

Start here: [https://www.themattressunderground.com/mattresses/five- steps...](https://www.themattressunderground.com/mattresses/five-steps-to- your-perfect-mattress.html), [https://www.themattressunderground.com/our- articles/mattress...](https://www.themattressunderground.com/our- articles/mattress-shopping-tutorial.html)

This is the most thorough and least-biased mattress site I've found. I'm not affiliated except as a fan.</comment>


Show HN: CSV file merging - <AUTHOR> https://mightymerge.io/ <comment><USER2> I just use `xsv` for this. `xsv concatenate` and `xsv join` do a pretty good job. Blazing fast: [https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv](https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv)

<comment><AUTHOR> That tool looks pretty cool.

Funny thing is several years ago I made a very similar tool to what you pointed out above written entirely in bash/awk and is also blazing fast.

That's where I got the idea for this online tool. I wanted to create the same exact concept of working with files locally without having to open up a terminal/console.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is the code open source? How would one know with certainty their data isn't being surreptitiously copied?

(You can also recreate this functionality locally with a few lines of Python):

import pandas as pd

import os

list_of_files = [f for f in os.listdir('.') if os.path.isfile(f) and ".csv" in f]

print(f"Files that will be concatenated are: {list_of_files}")

original_df = pd.DataFrame()

for file in list_of_files:

      df = pd.read_csv(file, keep_default_na=False)

      original_df = pd.concat([original_df, df], axis=0, ignore_index=True)

original_df.to_csv(f"Output file.csv", index=False)

<comment><USER4> I like glob for getting the list of files:

        import glob
        list_of_files = glob.glob("*.csv")

You can also use Pathlib:

        from pathlib import Path
        dir = Path(".").glob('*.csv')

<comment><USER5> Glob is great but on some OS (Linux maybe?) it doesn't guarantee maintaining the order of files. If order matters, it would make sense to sort the results prior to processing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I tried vertical merge with 2 files that were each a single column of items (no header). The resulting file was 3 columns wide, 1 file in first column with second and third columns blank and then below that the items from the second file were in the 3rd column with columns 1 and 2 blank

I was expecting a 1 column result file with both files items stacked

<comment><AUTHOR> This is expected as merging currently requires a header row for each file so that it can automatically line up the data accurately.

For example if you had two csv files...

[File1.csv]

        Id,ProductId
        1,200
        2,300

[File2.csv]

        ProductId,Name,Id
        400,NameFor400,3
        500,NameFor500,4

Final output would be...

[Output.csv]

        Id,ProductId,Name
        1,200,""
        2,300,""
        3,400,NameFor400
        4,500,NameFor500

With that said, thanks for commenting! I will add an option for "No Header" files, or maybe even auto detect for these situations and do a straight merge:)</comment></comment>


Ask YC: How do you follow YC threads you enjoy? - <AUTHOR>

Often, I find great stories and comments I enjoy here and plan to return to see more comments, but when I get back to the site -- I completely forget.<p>Do any of you have a simple technique (or even a script) for keeping an eye on posts you enjoy? <comment><USER2> On the related note: how do you keep track of which comments are new since your last visit of the thread?

HN/reddit system with comments jumping around based on votes makes it hard just to quickly skim for differences.

Could there be a way to highlight not seen items? I found this a big help for information overload on the sites that do it (e.g. Google Reader, Bloglines).

However, I couldn't figure out how to do it elegantly (i.e. not needing to keep state on the server for each user) for prioritized threaded comments systems like HN/reddit.

For updates of a single page it's easy, you just need to bake timestamps for each item and page creation into HTML/JS and check them against the last page timestamp stored in the cookie.

But this system breaks down for multiple pages, as each one would need own cookie entry, otherwise any site visit would mark all new items as read.

That's btw MetaFilter's problem with highlighting new comments. Though there it's easier to follow the conversation due to linear nature of comment system.

Maybe the solution could be to have some dual way of accessing comments? Like prioritized threaded view for the first view and linear time ordered view for subsequent following?

<comment><USER3> I agree about the comment movements but it has been discussed here before. It would be nice to have the option to keep comments the way they are (moving) or to view them based on the time they were left.

<comment><USER4> If you know which comments on a page are new, then you also know which ones are old. The easy answer is to just gray out the older posts (only remotely challenging because the gray background of the page is about the color I WOULD have suggested for old comment text) -- and just leave the new comments as they are.

That allows you to easily skim the page for new content, while still allowing you to see the new posts in context.

A Digg-style collapse would also probably work, but for some reason, I see grayed out text more in line with the ycombinator mantra.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Should I add some kind of feature for this?

<comment><USER6> Starred conversations seems like an appropriate solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really like this idea too, just like stars in Gmail. A star would appear next to the article name in the index page (and detail page). One click and a star next to the article.

Works like a charm in Gmail. No need to even float stars to the top, just allow the user to filter only starred articles with one click.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I make a post in it, then check on my "threads" page (and my post's parent) every now and then. I'm doing it now, for example.

<comment><USER8> Yep this is what I do too.

<comment><USER9> Same here. Someone wrote a Web ap that would sort of do this for you, and emit an RSS feed (It think), but it would create an entry for each up or down vote, which was not that useful to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I built a little app for this...

<http://ycfeeds.com/feed/comments-on-item?item=396186>

</comment><comment><USER11> My technique is super low-tech. In my bookmarks bar, positioned conveniently below the site's favicon, I have a folder which is called "For Later". Into this folder I drop stuff I'll want to come back to at some point. Then (and here's the super part of my super low-tech claim), when I'm done with it I move it to another folder called "x" which I periodically delete and re- create.

This works everywhere with no extensions or anything, I use Foxmarks to sync the bookmarks themselves between machines (which you could skip if you only used the one machine), that's it.

<comment><USER12> Let's hear it for low tech. I like it when people are able to chain existing, simple tools; instead of engineering a new kludge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> yeah, i vote them up. there's a link in your profile that shows your saved stuff.

<comment><USER14> Concurred. It took me a while to find that saved thing though, it should be more prominent.

<comment><USER15> It used to be in the menu.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> To be honest, I usually just keep the thread open in a tab for a few hours until things die down. That said, I generally only comment on a handful of threads per week, so that's a manageable system for me. For those of you who participate more, I think that wouldn't work so well.

</comment><comment><USER17> I upvote articles that I don't have time to read, but want to keep track of. I've been doing this for at least a year, since the /saved?id=vlad feature came out (articles a user upvotes are available via that suffix to the url.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I keep it in Google Reader and just revisit the next time I go through the feed.

</comment><comment><USER18> Bookmark to instapaper. Come back and read later

</comment><comment><USER19> readitlater addon on firefox

</comment><comment><USER20> F5

</comment><comment><USER21> leave it open in a tab, refresh later.</comment>


I interviewed at five top companies in Silicon Valley and got five job offers - 10-6 https://medium.com/@XiaohanZeng/i-interviewed-at-five-top-companies-in-silicon-valley-in-five-days-and-luckily-got-five-job-offers-25178cf74e0f <comment><AUTHOR> I interviewed at 50 companies and got 3 offers.</comment>


Ask HN: What would be the cheapest way to host 1 TB of data - <AUTHOR> As the title says, I'm curious what would be the cheapest way to host 1 TB of data.<p>An estimate would be usefull <comment><USER2> What do you mean by "hosting"? Just storage, or making available to others? To how many? Will they download all of the data, or is it just 1 TB overall?

<comment><AUTHOR> Webhosting

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seedbox. These plans are more expensive than Backblaze but usually have unlimited transfers

</comment><comment><USER4> Backblaze is $5/month/TB.</comment>


What file comparison tool can I use under OS X? - <AUTHOR> http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/10099/what-file-comparison-tool-can-i-use-under-os-x/87188#87188 <comment><USER2> (From link at bottom) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_comparison_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_comparison_tools)

</comment><comment><USER3> FileMerge (should be in your Utilities folder)

or Kaleidoscope - [http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/](http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/)</comment>


Groupon Buying Up Clones - <AUTHOR> http://seekingalpha.com/article/246698-groupon-buying-up-clones?source=kizur

<comment><USER2> Quick! Make your own clone: grwpwn.com, etc.</comment>


Housing official in SV resigns because she can't afford to live there - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/11/silicon-valley-housing-official-resigns-california-home-prices <comment><USER2> From another article on this topic: "Many tech workers start out in San Francisco to boost salary and establish themselves before moving to more affordable markets." This is a key insight. Moving to the San Francisco Bay Area to establish a career is the industry equivalent of earning a Ph.D. at a major research university.

In this sense, the entire SF Bay Area is essentially a huge college town. It's perfectly normal for a college graduate to pick up and move elsewhere to start a family and live in a more affordable place. This is what Kate Downing and many others are doing.

<comment><USER3> What? I strongly disagree. I moved to the Bay Area to establish a software development career, and I've been in a PhD program at a major research university.

The connection between them is tenuous at best. At the very least, why is it equivalent to a PhD and not MS or BS?

<comment><USER2> A Ph.D. from a top university and 10 years working in the SF Bay Area tech industry are comparable in terms of their potential to increase one's earning power.

<comment><USER3> 1) "10 years in the tech industry" is not the same as "Moving to the San Francisco Bay Area to establish a career", which you originally said.

2) People rarely get a PhD to maximize earning power, so that's a weak proxy. The career path are also different. I think developers after 20 years are more than PhD researchers to become managers. (There are plenty of exceptions.)

3) Last I looked at the numbers, some years ago, a MS in computer science lead to higher career earnings than a PhD. (That's specific to CS - other fields are different.)

What is the source of your numbers? The best I could find was [https://www2.census.gov/library/infographics/pathways/engine...](https://www2.census.gov/library/infographics/pathways/engineering.pdf) which says that in general lifetime earnings for a software developer with a BS is $3.3M while a MS is worth an additional $200K. The US Census numbers don't appear to take cost-of-living into account.

I couldn't find numbers for people who started a career with 10 years in the Bay Area, nor for PhD graduates of top research universities.

4) "Equivalent" is a very broad term. Had you said "career earnings" I wouldn't have a problem. But a PhD nominally means that someone is able do to independent research. 10 years in industry means, what, that someone is able to be employed in industry? That's more like a MS than a PhD.

<comment><USER2> 1) I'm not making a reasoned argument supported by data. I'm suggesting a new metaphor that might help us understand what attracts and motivates many tech workers in the SF Bay Area.

2,3,4) I think you're taking my metaphor literally, which is not very useful.

I lived in the South Bay for 22 years working in various tech jobs, and I learned a few things about Silicon Valley culture (although I'm certainly no expert). Many young people with some degree of formal education and technical experience move to the Bay Area to establish careers and accumulate some capital. A few get wealthy and can afford to acquire property in the Bay Area and settle down to a reasonably normal life. Most, however, are transient workers who get valuable training and experience that will serve them well when they decide to move to a more affordable place. The "college town" metaphor is my way of describing this pattern.

<comment><USER3> Yes, and I'm arguing that it's a poor metaphor.

I think the metaphor you're looking for is that they are journeymen, and the time in the Bay Area their journeyman years.

In the college town metaphor, most of the students are working towards their bachelor degree, not PhD.

Have you ever been in a PhD program? Do you know many PhD researchers who did not end up in the Bay Area? Could you ask them if they think their PhD work was equivalent to 10 years as a software developer?

<comment><USER2> My father was an organic chemist with a Ph.D. from Yale. After earning his degree, he moved to Delaware to work for DuPont, along with thousands of other scientists. He was paid very well in comparison to the average blue collar or even white collar worker in the same city, so I think his Ph.D. paid off handsomely.

My parents didn't wait to start a family, purchase property, and start building personal wealth. They got involved in community affairs and local politics. They put down roots and had a balanced life.

In contrast, many Bay Area tech workers are living like extended adolescents, living in rental housing and working on a "corporate campus" for a company that is essentially in loco parentis. Typically they are not engaged in local community affairs or politics. Is this not somewhat like college?

<comment><USER3> The Baby Boomer era is past. What you describe of your father's experience no longer really exists. If that's the only person you know, then your impressions of the career possibilities of a PhD are seriously out of date.

In your father's era, many blue collar workers could also "start a family, purchase property, and start building personal wealth" with their jobs, including straight out of high school.

For that matter, the programmers of the 1960s and 1970s also had little problem getting a solid job.

Nowadays with a PhD in chemistry you often end up doing a postdoc or two for several years. As two data points, [https://sankirnam.wordpress.com/category/chemistry- jobs-2/](https://sankirnam.wordpress.com/category/chemistry-jobs-2/) :

> I didn't do a postdoc because I wanted to get an industry job, but now it > appears that a postdoc is necessary – and this is information that I only > found out _after_ graduating.

That in turn points to [http://justlikecooking.blogspot.com/2016/05/postdoc- required...](http://justlikecooking.blogspot.com/2016/05/postdoc-required- check-job-ads.html) , which points out job ads for industry which require post-doc experience.

An organic chemist now likely will be in the early 30s before being able to do the things your father did immediately after graduating. And without having to deal with issues like [http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/nj...](http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/nj7568-279a) or [http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/nj...](http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/nj6924-766a) . Yes, postdocs often have roommates: [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=postdoc+roommate&t=ffsb&ia=web](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=postdoc+roommate&t=ffsb&ia=web) .

You end with "Is this not somewhat like college". Absolutely, I agree. My point is that what you describe is much more like the college experience than it is the PhD experience.

Or like a journeyman, who _also_ , at least traditionally, does not 'put down roots'.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Posterous.com (YC Summer 08) launches Autopost to all major blog platforms - <AUTHOR> http://blog.posterous.com/autopost-to-everywhere-even-yo

<comment><USER2> There should not be two exactly same posts on the web. Put it in another way, all posts on the internet should be distinct.

<comment><AUTHOR> In an ideal world, we agree. However, in practice, it's just a part of the fragmented web world we live in right now.

Communities of people spring up all over the place, and a problem we have today is sometimes you do just want to get something everywhere, without posting multiple times. I might have a community on Twitter, Flickr, Xanga and Blogger... today I have to log in and post something 4 times. Or, post once by email from my posterous.

I think that's valuable, at least for me. But judging from our feedback from our users so far, they agree too. And as a startup, that's what counts.

<comment><USER3> What about having an option to not post it on Posterous? I know it seems somewhat counter intuitive to the interests of Posterous, but the email "interface" is so much better than most of what's out there for simple posts.

I imagine only a minority of users will not have these type of posts sent to Posterous. Additionally, once you're able to have Posterous on your own domain, many users will make the switch entirely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Before they got to alpha, was it called "pre-Posterous?"

What I'd like is a way to unify all of my Facebook/Myspace/Twitter microblogging.

</comment><comment><USER3> Game changing. If this works, Posterous will be the interface for many many blogs. Trying it on my wordpress blog now...

<comment><USER3> It worked. Only real problem is there's no way to add categorization and tags. However, the wordpress interface is so buggy and clunky, it might be faster to create via email, email to posterous, then add tags & categories via wordpress.

<comment><AUTHOR> True that. There is much for us to work on, and tagging is something we do think will be valuable down the road.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a great idea. The target market for those who can't see it is - non- technical people. Our parents, siblings and friends... They don't have to deal with some crazy blog interface. They can just use their already familiar email interface and email posts directly to email@example.com. And on top of that it integrates with flickr, twitter and legacy blogs.

If you can't see the potential then you are either 1) in a family of all engineers and scientists 2) have no non-technical friends 3) don't see what it can do for YOU... their is a world outside of news.yc.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting how they're posting to Tumblr, their competition.

I guess this shows how much they value openness and user happiness. Well done!

<comment><USER7> Absolutely agreed. I emailed Gary recently saying that I didn't think Posterous had enough to really compete with Tumblr. But something like this doesn't just change my mind (regarding Tumblr posts, of course) - it's genuinely a very useful feature. Well done.

<comment><USER8> I think this is great. Very valuable feature that puts them a bit past tumblr in one sense. I like that they're not all about competition, and are giving users tools they want to be happy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> you guys have really taken the "getting better every day" principle to your heart. absolutely fantastic going. keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER10> I may be wrong here . But given a choice of desktop application like Windows Live Writer(yeh windows only); many people would face a question? how does it matter using new web service?

In most of the cases I wont be pushing the same content to multiple blogs at once.

Sending mail is the simplest solution one can see though. Friendfeed-mailFF and now posterous. Also jason calacanis's shifting from blogging to email platform. its all 360 degree cycle.

Are we redefining how to blog ( by mailing either through posterous/way jason calacanis done having exclusive mailing list)?

oops everything is getting redefined

</comment><comment><USER11> Anecdote: The only _THREE_ people I sent to posterous.com all were somehow totally confused about how to signup.

I had to point out to each of them that it says you don't have to signup.

Really, it's very strange. People are trained to sign-up. It might make sense to change your front page to include a "Sign up now" button that just is a mailto:link or something similar. Maybe with a subject of "No signup is necessary! Just start sending email to posterous and you win."

Who knows-- just some feedback that I often have to talk people through the initial posterous process.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think the feature is fantastic more because it signals what is going to come. This could be the layman's version of a REST API! Just email to posterous and done! For posting pretty much anything.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure who is the market for this, people who want to post the same content on multiple blogs?

Why do they do that? I mean, I have one blog and I post on it. Seven blogs with the same stuff would be crazy. Is RSS so obscure that I have to go around to every community I'm a part of to push my content out to them?

Cool that the users like it - that's all that matters. Could be game-changing for those who participate in multiple communities, right?

I think I get it. Still not sure. Of course, I'm still working on why twitter makes any sense at all. "I'm thinking of going to I-hop" "Scratched my nose just now""Look! A butterfly."

feh

<comment><USER11> Well, aside from cross-blog publishing, I see a lot of benefit to announcing a blog post on Twitter and also store the photo over on Flickr. Those seem like no-brainer features that would be appealing to a lot of people.

<comment><USER13> If you find yourself doing photo-centric blogging, try OurDoings. Friendfeed will pick up the images from OurDoings as well as the post title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Um, I can barely keep up with one blog... who the heck has time to post to more than one?

Best of luck to them, but I'm obviously not the target market!

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned <http://ping.fm> which seems to do the exact same thing

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, but they're a dumb pipe. We actually a) also give you your own blog with blog address, and b) host all your images, video, music and files. =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> awesome feature.</comment>


How filmmaking is like launching a start-up  - <AUTHOR> http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6201857.html <comment><USER2> I think a better analogy is the garage bank making a killer album.

<comment><USER3> with much better odds...</comment></comment>


Pakyow 0.8: New Router, Updated View Syntax, and Smarter View Transformation - <AUTHOR> http://pakyow.com/blog/2014/03/04/zero_eight <comment><USER2> I've seen somewhere on the site that Pakyow is "up to 40 some percent faster than Sinatra". What makes Pakyow faster than Sinatra under the hood?

<comment><USER3> I can't speak too intelligently about how Sinatra is architected, but here's a bit about how Pakyow handles routing.

A route is just a regex and set of functions (blocks, procs, whatever). When a request comes in, the following things happen:

1\. An AppContext instance is created that contains the request's state 2\. Route is matched (narrowed by method then match on path) 3\. Each function is evaluated within the context

Hooks, etc aren't special things and are just functions at a particular location in the set. This set is built at startup, so there's no object creation to fulfill a request (except the Request/Response/AppContext objects). The routing bits of pakyow (pakyow-core) are very close to the Rack metal.

Aside from routing, nearly everything in Pakyow is middleware. This makes it easy to completely remove (not just disable) components like static file handling, logging, etc.

Hope that helps!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The philosophy underpinning this framework seems sort of amazing to me. I'm trying to figure out why it seems to be so under-the-radar.

<comment><USER3> Why thank you kind sir! Myself (primary dev) and the few people I know who use it agree :)

We've been intentionally quiet, to be honest. Lots of things to get straight since the initial release, much of which was done in 0.8. We're at a more stable point now and I hope to see some momentum build soon. Of course, any ideas you have would be welcome.</comment></comment>


Firebase not accessible from Jio Network (India) - <AUTHOR> Anybody else facing this issue. From morning this is the status I am seeing from Jio Network. Their DNS do not seem to resolve firebase URL.<p>curl -v https://firebaseio.com/ * Could not resolve host: firebaseio.com * Closing connection 0 curl: (6) Could not resolve host: firebaseio.com <comment><USER2> I'm not on Jio. I wasn't able to access a few sites today like [https://hn.algolia.com/](https://hn.algolia.com/) and [https://leanpub.com/](https://leanpub.com/) but they are working again after around 3-4pm or so

</comment><comment><USER3> Jio team, Please check this I have a production running app & all of our app users are affected

</comment><comment><USER4> yes, DNS resolution not happening for *.firebaseio.com on JIO network. Other networks seem ok

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes we are also experiencing this issue

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes, facing same issue

</comment><comment><USER3> seems to have been resolved since last 2 hours

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes, same issue

</comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for this

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, Same here</comment>


Semantics in HTML 5 - <AUTHOR> http://alistapart.com/articles/semanticsinhtml5

<comment><USER2> _Edit: Boy, do I feel stupid. What I proposed exists, and is called RDFa._ (<http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/>)

It occurs to me that the W3C already has an extensible semantics framework: RDF. This framework can be represented in many different languages (primarily N3 and XML), and is quite well-understood amongst semantic web people. The trouble is how to associate RDF 3-tuples with (X)HTML elements.

To take the date example from the original article, May Day next year could be represented in a machine readable format be the following 3-tuple. (I am not an expert in N3, so please pardon any mistakes. Also, if there's a good existing vocabulary for "equivalent to", please let me know.)

<#date1> <[http://example.com/#equivalent>](http://example.com/#equivalent>); date"2009-05-01"

In turn, this 3-tuple could be encoded in <meta> and <link> elements a la Dublin Core, or could be stored in an external RDF/XML or N3 document referenced by a <link> element. Perhaps a new element could even be introduced (just one) that allows the direct embedding of RDF content in a manner similar to the embedding of CSS content via the


Project Snowflake: Non-blocking safe manual memory management in .NET - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/project-snowflake-non-blocking-safe-manual-memory-management-net/# <comment><USER2> This work was also published in PLDI as "Simple, Fast and Safe Manual Memory Management" ([https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/2017/03/kedia2017mem.pdf)). The presentation from the conference is also online: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C07s5LTuTmE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C07s5LTuTmE)

<comment><USER3> No, this is a different paper and a different technique.

This paper cites "Simple, fast and safe..." in section 7 and explains the differences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Freaking awesome! So... the inevitable question... will this get merged into CoreCLR and become mainstream?

<comment><USER5> I would be surprised if MS wasn't intending to merge this in if it pans out the way they hope it will. Why else invest the resources to try and make it?

I know as someone who slings c# for the day job I'm super excited to try it out.

<comment><USER6> True, there are many research projects of Microsoft which ended up in production. Take the Linux Subsystem for Windows (Bash) for instance, or a little closer to home: Code contracts.

<comment><USER7> The Linux Subsystem for Windows isn't a great example. Folks in MSR Cambridge had Linux running on Windows circa Y2K. The Linux Subsystem today comes from a second effort using Drawbridge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great work - +1 CLR vs JVM battle. Hoping this will get merged with CoreCLR soon. Any info on this ?

</comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know of a game engine that uses CoreCLR instead of Mono (like in Unity)?

<comment><USER10> I've written an amateur, hobby-level engine, described here: [https://mellinoe.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/net-core-game- engi...](https://mellinoe.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/net-core-game-engine/). This was more of a personal exercise for learning and experimenting than a serious attempt at game design, so the engine isn't that advanced.

For something more professional and polished, there is Xenko, which runs on CoreCLR for some of its non-mobile targets. [https://xenko.com/](https://xenko.com/)

Also, Unity itself doesn't really run on Mono -- it just has a scripting layer that hosts Mono on top of its C++ core. Perhaps not a useful distinction for you, but I thought I'd mention it.

(Note: I work on .NET Core at Microsoft)

<comment><USER11> Do you know if this memory management work might also make it into .NET Native?

<comment><USER10> I don't know. From what I understand, this is still just a research project, and not something we have immediate plans to integrate into .NET Core. If we did that, though, I don't see why .NET Native wouldn't be considered as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems like this relies for some of its safety guarantees on checks in (their fork of) the C# compiler. For example, owner non-copy guarantees seem to be enforced at the C# front end level rather than in the CLR. That could cause problems for getting it into CoreCLR (and much more so the desktop CLR), as this is meant to support multiple languages; relying on a specific language front-end for safe use of a feature feels at odds with the 'common language runtime' philosophy... It would be great to see it though!

</comment><comment><USER13> What I wouldn't give to have this in Go. Literally have been playing with Mmap system calls recreating something similar with mixed results...

</comment><comment><USER14> Am I reading it right?

If you want to manage the memory allocation yourself you can.

Why not just pre-allocate a lost of objects and re-use / free those?

Think I'm missing something

<comment><USER15> It's a particular technique for managing the memory that helps you avoid accidentally using it after it's been freed/reused.

<comment><USER16> And you don't incur tracing overhead for objects in the manual heap. Reused objects from the GC still incur this cost.</comment></comment></comment>