The Difference Between Unit Testing and Integration Testing  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.typemock.com/2011/05/difference-between-unit-testing-and.html <comment><USER2> The language about software testing always seems to centre on the taxonomy of the tests rather than the software that is being tested. The concepts of controllability and observability (taken from hardware testing and control engineering) would seem better placed to further the discussion on testing and give developers a better vocabulary for describing what the tests do, at what level of system abstraction and how effective those tests are.

</comment><comment><USER3> When developing web apps the best testing that works for me is a combination of unit and integration testing. Leaning mostly on the integration side.

Thing is, in most of what I do every day, what I care about is the end result. It doesn't matter so much to me that calling a specific function with a specific set of parameters produces a specific result, what I'm more interested in is sending a signal into the application and getting an expected output somewhere down the line.

Of course when I'm working on something more algorithmical, unit tests are preferred and tend to produce much better results. But this kind of work is unfortunately quite rare.

<comment><USER4> Yup, I'd agree with that. These days I only use Unit Tests in a few very specific scenarios:

1) I like to write a 'nominal case' unit test because it helps me think about the sort of API that I want, and it let's me see the fun stuff up on the screen very quickly.

2) I've found a bug, so I write a unit test because apparently this bug was in code that I wasn't able to reason about correctly when I first wrote it, which means it is probably tricky - the unit test will stop regression.

3) When investigating a bug, and I want to assure myself that a subsystem is reacting the way that I expect it to, I sometimes write unit tests as a way of proving to myself that I have understood what is going on.

I've seen other people write loads of unit tests for every single little thing, but it actually makes their code more rigid, as if you want to change an interface, you not only have to change the code in the product, but you have to change all of the unit tests too. The result is that people don't like changing what is written, and prefer to overlay a level of abstraction to avoid the rewrite, leading to less clear architecture overall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a school of thought which says that unit tests should never touch a database. This has always struck me as a strange way to write tests: Mocking out a database is quite painful, and it means that you're testing an artificial system very different from what you run in practice. It's much easier just to unit test your model classes against SQLite, which is blazingly fast.

Similarly, some Rails developers try to completely isolate their models, controllers and views from each other when unit testing. A controller test, for example, won't render any views, and it will mock out the model layer. Similarly, a view test will ignore the controller, render the view manually, and mock out the model layer.

In my experience, these kinds of fully-isolated unit tests take a fair bit of work to set up, and they result in overspecified module boundaries. Plus, there's always the risk that your view objects will work fine using mocks, but fail using real model objects.

Personally, I prefer to test my Rails model objects using SQLite. And increasingly, I sharply minimize the amount of code in my controllers (and views, of course), and test it almost entirely using integration tests in a simulated browser. This makes it easy to get 100% code coverage with very little work, and it's still quite fast for a medium-sized app.

I mock web services using the 'vcr' gem, which can record a series of HTTP responses and play them back later. And of course, I mock out credit card gateways, AWS API calls, and anything else which requires a network to run. But I don't use mocks just for the sake of using mocks.

<comment><USER6> Actually, Unit tests should only test 1 thing. (Hence the name 'unit' tests.) So they shouldn't be testing both your models and your logic at the same time.

Plus, they are -way- faster when the database stuff is mocked out.

Of course, that's not always possible and efficient.

<comment><USER5> My philosophy is slightly different: Unit tests should test one API. But whenever possible, they should respect the encapsulation of that API, and only test the public access points.

In particular, I dislike unit tests which dig around in the private implementation details of a module, and specify how it connects to other modules "behind" it. Invasive unit tests make it much harder to change those implementation details.

<comment><USER7> You're not really talking about unit tests, then: you're talking about progressive integration tests, since the failure of a module "behind" your module can cause extra spurious failures.

Now, it may in fact be the case that you may argue that you can replace unit tests with all of these sorts of integration tests. I'm not so sure: digging around the private implementation details ways usually the easiest way to test strange error conditions—but it's by no means easy. Though these days, I try to write as much pure code as possible, nullifying the benefits of an approach like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A quick way to distinguish these in web apps is that integration tests typically are going to cross IO-barriers like calling a web service or accessing a database. If you're writing a layered architecture, this will be across those layers.

Unit tests should always be really, really easy to write. If they are not, then that is a 'smell' in your code that indicates one or more of the following things:

* If you cannot inject fakes of dangerous/unpredictable dependencies, you are probably creating these within the class. Pull that up! Or at least make it override-able. [1]

* Your class/function under test is doing way too much. Break out responsibilities into other methods or classes.

* Your test is too big! Think smaller. For example, if you're writing a test case for a recursive function, maybe you can start with the terminal condition instead of the whole thing together.

* You're actually writing an integration test. That's okay. Those are useful too :) They just take a bit more elbow grease.

[1] A great example of this is the DateTime object that this author mentioned. If you make heavy use of the DateTime.Now/Today in your code, you can and should make a 'freezable' wrapper class. Basically, you can freeze the clock at any time you wish. You can then thaw the clock and it goes back to using DateTime.

</comment><comment><USER9> I see it this way - Unit Testing is to ensure that components & features are coded correctly. Integration Testing is about ensuring multiple components can work nicely together as an Application.

<comment><USER10> Yes I totally agree. I don't compare them, I consider them both critical.

For the record I tend to avoid controller tests for non-API controllers; if the app only got HTML views I don't see the point of testing controllers really. Then I think integration tests using browser simulation covers it enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> great article, well put gil.</comment>


Instant floor planner project by an architect on HTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://planwithin.com/demo/tadr.html

<comment><AUTHOR> One of our professor has a different approach to floor designing and architecture. He thinks AutoCad is not really a architectural tool. He build something called as TAD based on his concepts.

This is one of his other project to make it possible to present a floor plan on mobile or browser.</comment>


MA, CA take the top spots in Bloomberg's index of innovative states - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-07/here-are-the-most-innovative-states-in-america <comment><USER2> Massachusetts could be even more innovative if they banned noncompetes. EMC is the biggest employer lobbying to keep noncompetes in the state. Dell, based in Texas will probably want to keep noncompetes in place as well.

<comment> at-fates-hands What's their success record for enforcing them?

In Minnesota, I've had companies twice drag me into court trying to enforce a non-compete and the judge laughed at both companies and I was sent on my way.

The key in both cases was the company I had left was trying to keep me from working in the same field for a competitor. My attorney argued that if I'm "gainfully employable" you can't restrict me from earning a living in my chosen field - to do so would invite economic hardship.

The judge asked if they would rather compensate me for two years at my current salary (which was a six figure salary), or let me go work for their competitor. The company quickly chose the latter.

<comment><USER2> Don't know, as I am in CA. Someone from MA would have to answer this. The reason I won't consider jobs in states where noncompetes are legal is because employers will force them on employees during the hiring process (usually by surprise after the employee has given notice at there previous employer).

Noncompetes would be almost fair if it was required to compensate the employee for the duration of the time it is enforced. In the US, that's rare, but in the EU it not uncommon (gardening leave). In other words, the real underlying reason that noncompetes are used is to limit job-hopping by employees looking for better working conditions or a higher salary, but under the guise of prevent company secrets from being disclosed to a competitor is what is sold to the legislature.

<comment><USER3> I've worked for 5 companies since I've lived in MA, I've only ever had to sign a single non-compete, over 10 years ago. None of the places I've worked since have had them. I've never met anyone in MA that had one enforced.

<comment><USER4> Every one of the 4 companies I worked for in MA rolled out the non-compete on the first day of work. Not one of them even mentioned it beforehand.

Sadly, it's just par-for-the-course for being a high-tech employee in MA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's quite surprising achievement considering their surface area and pop size which both relative to CA, are small. And given the CA propaganda, doubly surprising. On the other hand, they have some great higher ed institutions.

By propaganda I mean the constant CA self congratulatory atmosphere, we're the best, most innovative, always at the forefront of cool, if we were a nation we'd rank... economically, etc...

Good on you bay state.

<comment><USER6> Well, MA only won by percentages. Of course CA winds by orders of magnitude when total size of the categories are considered.

CA is larger than most nations on earth. Its economic opportunities are 100 for every 1 anywhere else.

<comment><USER7> I have read somewhere that Santa Clara County's GDP and population is really close to one of Qatar's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These rankings are pretty meaningless.

All of these metrics except for productivity are "density" measures. That is the size of the state matters (in a way that penalizes states with larger, more diverse economies).

A better ranking would be to use CSAs. Industry clusters are based more on region than states. State borders are relatively arbitrary with respect to technology clusters. CSAs are based on commute times so better reflect industry clustering.

Having said all that, I think MA is great. If I didn't hate the cold weather and East coast cultural conservatism I would consider moving to the Boston area.

<comment><USER9> I'm from Boston and am always confused by the whole "East coast cultural conservatism" thing, care to elaborate?

<comment><USER10> If you haven't lived in California then it's hard to notice the stodginess of the society you live in.

<comment><USER11> I can't tell if the hilarity of your statement was intended.

<comment><USER12> I feel like it wasn't intended. I'm honestly not sure when we arrived at HN users calling societies outside of California "stodgy."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Boston is filled with college students and skilled professionals. The skilled professionals work in tech, biotech, finance, and healthcare primarily. Boston is an amazing city that any one who is tiring of the SF/SV scene should seriously consider.

</comment><comment><USER14> MA beat out CA in the following categories:

* Percentage of state GDP spent in R&D.

* Percentage of "tech" companies vs total companies. This counts software, hardware, defense, pharmaceutical, biotech, renewable energy, etc.

* GDP / employed person.

* Percentage of STEM employees / total employees.

CA beat MA in the following categories:

* Percentage of STEM degree holders / total population.

* Patents / US Total and Patents / million people.

All categories were equally weighted.

<comment><USER15> I would love to know the values at a city resolution.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, that would be more valuable. "Boston" is a huge portion of "MA", while (for example) "San Francisco" is but a small slice of "CA", so if the Boston area were compared directly against the San Francisco area, the results would no doubt be quite different.

<comment><USER14> Many of the Boston area tech companies are actually outside Boston (Cambridge, Rt 128) while many of the SF area companies are similarly outside San Franscisco (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino, Berkeley, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It would be interesting to add a column of average income tax rates. At a glance, it seems like higher tax states tend to have more innovation, but that could just be my own bias.

(Correlation isn't sufficient to show causation, but it would show that taxes don't have a negative effect on innovation as many anti-tax proponents would argue.)

<comment><USER18> If could also show that where innovation has led to exploding revenue, politicians decided to take a bigger cut. The trouble is, with no way to isolate the effects, you can only make religious statements about the causes. People who want more state control will see taxes as a good, as they do given any set of facts.

<comment><USER17> An influential sect of economics is unashamedly founded on beliefs instead of empiricism: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology)

<comment><USER19> Washington state is the easy counter case for high tax states. No state income tax, 10% sales tax. Doing about as well as these states. In fact, you are prohibited from moving here. And there's a constant complaint that we are overtaxed and that adding income taxes would destroy the state (just like Mass. and Ca. have been destroyed).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Healthcare tech, which is disproportionately based in MA, is having a moment. So I imagine that contributed to the ranking.

</comment><comment><USER21> Oregon is 6th - not bad at all considering it's relatively new to tech, and doesn't have that large a population in any event.

<comment><USER22> And on top of that Oregon is actually a desirable place to live as compared with MA or CA.

<comment><USER21> California has a bunch of great stuff going for it in terms of weather, a variety of landscapes, and so on, but between the NIMBYs and the inability to deal with density... yeah, it's got some serious problems too.

I visited Boston once in the summer. Nice place, but no way would I ever live there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Contributing to the ranking of MA is probably Boston's "Innovation District"[0] that has been renovating some of the less-nice parts of the South Boston waterfront area.

[0] [http://www.innovationdistrict.org/faq/](http://www.innovationdistrict.org/faq/)

</comment><comment><USER24> The difference between the top two is not large enough to conclude one is more innovative than another.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'd like to see where Canadian provinces fit on this list. Wonder if those numbers are available.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't understand the point of things like these. You could choose any set metrics or variables that you want. How do we know these arbitrary categories are actually associated with a meaningful outcome? This is silly

</comment><comment><USER27> I live in Arkansas and I am only slightly surprised at the state's position. I did expect we'd beat out Louisiana, at least.

<comment><USER28> I stay in Tri-State area within Memphis Metro bounds mainly. The culture and priorities of local governments seem to be against intellectualism or high- tech to the point that TN and MS's positions on the list don't surprise me. That TN beat out MS made sense but sad that MS was so low. Thing is, the Mid- South _needs_ innovation and high-tech jobs to offset the poverty and crime coming from losses in manufacturing and farming. Yet, it's almost like they fight positive stuff.

Not sure if any of this applies to AK. The three states usually have more similarities than differences as it's all similar types of people. Like an extended family, haha.

<comment><USER27> I know exactly what you mean, there's a really strong anti-intellectualism that blankets this region. It's mostly in rural areas, but that accounts for probably 95% of the state's geography so they get to call all the shots unfortunately.

Also Arkansas is AR, AK is Alaska. A pretty common mistake, cousin ;D

<comment><USER28> Oops. I slip on those kind of things all the time haha. Yeah, the rural areas are dominating in that. I think the push will have to focus on how increased tech will bring more jobs to the area and maybe (ironically) increase their voice on politics. A way to stay in the loop, be heard, negotiate deals, whatever. Might be a decent selling point.

<comment><USER27> It seems to be working in Texas. Dallas is such a technological hub now that Texas might actually become a blue state before long! It gives me hope for my area, at least.

<comment><USER28> I was thinking about Texas as I wrote that. They're the innovation leaders in the South. Another tactic of mine is appealing to the pride of local states by reminding them Texas is kicking their asses and they can't let that happen. So, we steal anything good they're doing without the... Texan stuff...

What you think? Competitiveness might help where other strategies failed?

Note: Texas has to factor into these discussions one way or another as they've shown how to get it done. I figure at least Nashville or Knoxville in TN could follow suite as they're already playing it smarter (err closer to Texas) than most of the South in IT. Chattanooga went 1Gbps, too. I'm not sure what cities are comparable in... AR... and MS.

<comment><USER29> Southaven MS was one of the first cities in America to offer public wireless internet service. Otherwise I can't think of a single good thing for tech to come out of that area.

<comment><USER28> I was over there just a week ago. Didnt know that about them. The thing they havd going is they're a miniMemphis with lots of growth and low cost of living. There's untapped potential there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why is Maryland highest is science and engineering degree holders? And how does that differ from STEM concentration?

<comment><USER31> Lots of medical jobs - the NIH is in Bethesda, and Johns Hopkins Hospital is the #1 employer in Baltimore (with the university not far behind). Plus tons of NASA (Goddard), DoD (Ft. Meade and NSA headquarters), and related contractors in the DC suburbs. DC has more post-graduate degrees per capita than any state (and more than most cities), and Maryland gets a lot of spillover.

The difference in the statistics is explained below the chart - "STEM concentration" is based on employment field, regardless of education.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ah, well. Only one reaction possible. I like to think this is how Gov. Brown handled the news:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i51lXfc2zDw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i51lXfc2zDw)</comment>


Snowden distributed encrypted copies of NSA docs around the world - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/snowden-distributed-encoded-copies-of-nsa-docs-around-the-world/ <comment><USER2> I'm just going to leave this here:

"When I was in Hong Kong, I spoke to my partner in [Rio de Janeiro] via Skype and told him I would send an electronic encrypted copy of the documents," Greenwald noted. "I did not end up doing it. Two days later his laptop was stolen from our house and nothing else was taken. Nothing like that has happened before. I am not saying it's connected to this, but obviously the possibility exists."

<comment><USER3> ASK HN: How Does Edward's Dead Man Switch(EDMS) Function?

How?

So, there are these remote backups/sites out there, encrypted. Say, every week ES has somebody Bob post a keyword somewhere, a forum, pastebin, etc. The owner(s) Alice, Doreen, Glen, etc... of these backup sites manually or 'auto- crontab' for this keyword, or coded sequence of keywords, if so, fine, steady as Edward goes.

If not, .... ES released his hand(See hyperventilated Dyson's DMS in Terminator II film) sprung trigger. NOT good:

This interrupts the auto-cron periodic keyphrase(word) update and the toothpaste tubes are vigorously flattened, and you can't get the toothpaste back in.

(How? ie, How does EDMS trigger release become known to remote system trigger manager Bob or crontab daemon?)

Neighbor Bob check's local lampposts for Ed's new white tape once a week?

Can Bob be automated?

<comment><USER4> This is needlessly complex. Just find people that you trust to hold onto the key, and a few other people to hold onto the file. People who's priorities are aligned properly and are use to being leaned on (journalists and/or activists). When they read in the New York Times that Edward Snowden is dead, some or all of them publish.

If you are worried about one of those people colluding with another to get the secret sauce too early, then split the secret. Give it to 50 people and require any 10 of them to release their material. Or whatever, you can tune it how you like depending on how many people you trust and how much you trust them. Automation is unnecessary.

<comment><USER5>
      # cat /etc/cron.daily/dead-man-switch

      #!/bin/bash
      wget -O latest https://raw.github.com/asdf/feab/data.txt
      if [ ! grep `date +%m%d%Y` latest ] ; then
        echo "The key is uRYB9vCT53jCSkjzaf9b" | mail -s "I'm dead." glenn.greenwald@...
      fi

Wouldn't be hard to run this on a few random computers around the world pretty anonymously. The NSA getting the key isn't too big of a deal.

Of course, you'd want to test this and make it more fault tolerant.

<comment><USER6> Find one, know the page, obtain the logs who accessed the page, find all. Or catch Snowden and keep updating the page yourself. Not that it can not be done in a similar way but it is non-trivial to get it right.

<comment><USER7>
      | it is non-trivial to get it right.

But malware writers / botnet owners have been doing it for a while.

<comment><USER3> POST EDMS triggered launch, a simmering autonomous viral botnet, foisting ES plaintext onto infected email address lists, pastebin, etc., anything else it can fool CAPTCHA registration, with generating SHA256 signatures, new passwords, the whole open source kitchen sink of paranoidal-crypto-craft to effect public-at-large propagating whistle-blaring incriminating secrets, successfully leaked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm starting to think the freakout we've seen in the media up to now is for much more than the Prism disclosure. This guy is the real thing, he's got serious insurance to bargain for his life & he's taken all precautions to safeguard it. No wonder they're scared shitless.

<comment><USER9> The "freakout" in the "media" outside of the HN/reddit/internet bubble is mostly obsessed with "Where in the World is Carmen, I mean Edward, Snowden?" and not so much in the whole PRISM, constant universal wiretapping scandal.

<comment> k-mcgrady I'm in two minds about this. Focussing on this issue is obviously important but I think the general public gets bored of it after a few days. They are much more interested in the human story. Keeping them hooked on that with the obvious regular explanation of who Snowden is and why he's in the news might get people to want to look into the actual story more. And if there is a big 'break' in the story (Snowden captured, makes it to Ecuador, etc.) people will be hooked and then the story of the spying will hold their attention. People (and I include myself) are much more interested in a story about other humans than a computer hacking/spying story that doesn't really involve many specific people directly.

<comment><USER10> I agree. Outside of Hacker News, no one is talking about PRISM at all.

The drama regarding Edward Snowden's whereabout is the only thing keeping the story going.

For most people, PRISM was one of 100 stories on their newsfeed that day.

<comment><USER11> Amazingly happy to see that HN and /r/news|politics|worldnews now looks like /r/conspiracy exploded all over them.

I am happy that the worries of echelon, which was treated as rumour, hearsay and conspiracy theory are now 100% proven to the entire world.

I am looking forward to seeing what further revelations Snowden's files will show.

<comment><USER12> Not sure if you're using sarcasm[1] or not, but Echelon is accepted fact and has been for many years.

The European Parliament held reports on the capabilities of Echelon. Industrial espionage has been linked to Echelon.

The purpose of Echelon (intercept communications data) is the stated purpose of GCHQ. Really, it's on their website and in their recruiting material. They monitor all communications, anywhere in the world, from DC to light.

Echelon isn't fantastic weird conspiracy theory.

[1] Sarcasm is not useful in text and it's especially not useful on a forum like HN, where there tends to be a higher number of users who are more literal than the regular population.

<comment><USER11> No sarcasm at all.

For the majority of the population, they have either never heard of echelon, never took it seriously or have outright dismissed it as a crazy conspiracy irrespective of the previous proof.

I think of all these things are coming out now as an opportunity to have a serious discussion about wtf the US (and humanity) is doing.

It's time to work as a global civilization. Our resources are squandered on creating truly a prison planet (no reference or credit to Alex jones).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hope Glenn has also thought about what should happen if he has a sudden car accident.

<comment><USER14> Just for the uninformed that may not know what your referencing.

[http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/21/email-sent-by- mic...](http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/21/email-sent-by-michael- hastings-hours-before-his-death-mentions-a-big-story-and-a-need-to-go-off-the- radar/)

<comment><USER15> Woah. The scene of that accident looks straight out of a movie scene, looks too unreal to be a normal car accident!

<comment><USER16> Michael Hasting's friend was just interviewed on TV:

 _" His friends and family that know him, everyone says he drives like a grandma, so that right there doesn't seem like something he'd be doing, there's no way that he'd be acting erratic like that and driving out of control"_

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEIjna7672Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEIjna7672Q)

<comment><USER17> Do people who drive like grandmas spend bread on a 200 hp Mercedes coupe?

According to this article [1], Hastings describes himself as a "a recovering drunk/addict/screw-up." In another True/Slant piece, he says, "I have smoked crack." He crashed a car in a drunk-driving accident at 19.

It's funny how geeks, who pride themselves on rationality, throw Occam's Razor out the window at the drop of a hat.

[1] [http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/06/21/LA- Weekly...](http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/06/21/LA-Weekly- Michael-Hastings-car-speeding-had0history-of-drunk-driving)

<comment><USER18> FWIW, 200 HP is not a lot and is, as far as I can tell, Mercedes' least powerful engine (201 HP 4-cylinder). In a 3,500 lb. car, it will not be especially fast.

(I used to have a 3,500 lb. coupe, a Pontiac GTO. Now that was fast. It had a 400 HP V8.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Headline should be _CIA burgles house in Brazil?_

 _"When I was in Hong Kong, I spoke to my partner in [Rio de Janeiro] via Skype and told him I would send an electronic encrypted copy of the documents," Greenwald noted. "I did not end up doing it. Two days later his laptop was stolen from our house and nothing else was taken. Nothing like that has happened before. I am not saying it's connected to this, but obviously the possibility exists."_

<comment><USER20> That would be a terrible headline based on that quote. Speculative, sensationalized headlines are undesirable even if they push an agenda you support.

Makes it very easy to dismiss.

<comment><USER19> _Speculative, sensationalized headlines are undesirable_

Oh, I agree completely! Unfortunately, copywriters for almost every popular newspaper in the world do this by rote.

I added a question mark. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is definitely the only reason I think he is still alive. The NSA has probably done forensic analysis on the workstation that he utilized to transfer the intel...and as Snowden has noted, he does not want to be careless with the information or it's distribution in contrast to Manning.

To make it simple, I think he released to the public the appetizer, and has withheld any main course or desert (sorry for the analogies...lunch time).

</comment><comment><USER21> Wikileaks made their "insurance" available to everyone via torrent... in other words they have safety in numbers. Snowden having distributed to file to "many different " people is vague and if the # is small could put them in real danger.

<comment><USER4> On the other hand, he's been to both Hong Kong and China now. Government officials from either country may be among those people with the encrypted data. Whether or not they release the encrypted data when/if the key is publicized doesn't really matter.

Publicly distributing the encrypted data _does_ seem to be better to me, but making it ambiguous as to whether or not foreign governments have it seems like it could be a decent second best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder to what degree Wikileaks held Snowden's hand through all of this? For those who remember, Assange's organization distributed a large encrypted archive through bittorrent around the diplomatic cable leaks, presumably with a dead-man's switch [1] set up to reveal the key. I'm sure that Snowden had some procedures in place before departing to Hong Kong, but I also recall Assange saying they were trying to reach out to Snowden a week or two ago, and perhaps (hopefully!) they were able to give him some insurance tips, including potential pitfalls that Snowden may not have thought of.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man's_switch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man's_switch)

<comment><USER23> If it's at all true that Assange had foreknowledge of Snowden's attempt to re- penetrate NSA via B-A-H, that would be very bad news for Wikileaks IMHO.

<comment><USER22> Not saying it goes back that far, but referring to more recent times. Like over the past couple weeks. I don't think anybody in the world other than Snowden himself knew of his plans to penetrate BAH. But even if they did, who cares? As long as they didn't help him, I do not believe that knowledge of an impending crime is in-and-of itself a crime (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). What are they gonna do? Trump up some sexual assault charges?

<comment><USER23> Well it would be conspiracy to commit a felony for starters. And how do you think the American people would handle the idea of a foreign-born spymaster using his acolytes to infiltrate the national security apparatus, however angelic he claims his motives to be?

<comment><USER24> Plenty of other countries around whose residents are happy to find out in what kind of ways we rightless non-residents are being informationally manhandled by you.

<comment><USER23> Then feel free to try to spy on us like all the other foreign countries do. In the meantime if you have better ways to detect and track violent extremists that could be literally anywhere in the world without accidentally scavenging data belonging to our allies then I'm sure the NSA is all ears; you could probably make your suggestions on any web forum, in fact.

Perhaps there's an RFC forcing AQ to set the "evil bit" on their IP packets? That's a feasible technical solution, I suppose, as long as AQ is RFC- compliant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So all anyone that wants access to the whole of what he has recovered needs to do is kill him and then it will all be released? That doesn't seem like a good position to put ones self in.

<comment><USER26> Snowden isn't carrying military secrets or anything. Details about internet/phone surveillance are of relatively little consequence to foreign governments, who certainly have a good idea of what's going on already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> He's no ordinary system administrator. This whole thing seems very well thought through.

<comment><USER28> If you were going to put your life in jeopardy and go on the run, you would probably think it through very carefully as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is the kind of thing which may help keep him physically safe, but massively hurts him both in the court of public opinion (which matters a lot, if his actions are to have any positive effect for the public), and should he stand trial in the United States (although, one could argue that if it gets to that he's lost either way). It puts the people arguing for a pardon for him in a much tougher position.

<comment><USER30> Why? The data is encrypted so unless he divulges the key, it's useless to whomever has it.

Also, we don't know what the data contains. So even if he does give out the key and the media start publishing, who's to say what comes out wont be in the public interest?

I think it's a bit early to say this strategy has massively hurt him.

<comment><USER29> It doesn't matter what the data is at this point, since it's encrypted, but what it says, to a disinterested observer, is that Snowden is the sort of person who would gladly wield the threat of disseminating classified US information as a way of protecting his own skin. This directly contradicts the falling-on-my-sword, leaving-my-girlfriend-and-highly-paid job martyr/hero positioning he's been going for.

Snowden is coming to light as a complex character, not some altruistic idealist who expects a pardon and a ticker-tape parade. Phrases that come to mind are "David vs. Goliath," "Catch me if you Can," and "John Le Carre." I love it because it's a more interesting story this way.

<comment><USER30> I see your point. I guess I feel that the majority of people _are_ capable of realising real life doesn't imitate Hollywood and Snowden quite rightly needs to take some sensible precautions if he is to have any hope of sustaining this story and effecting the public debate and ensuing policy changes he's fighting for.

<comment><USER29> No, this is in fact real life _imitating_ Hollywood -- Snowden has turned himself into a Doomsday device! I am hooked on this story like some people are hooked on "Keeping Up With The Kardashians."

<comment><USER31> No, this is a guarentee the information gets out regardless of what happens to him. Snowden is going to get the information out. Or, if they kill him, the information gets out. This puts those who don't want that information getting out in a difficult position, but it doesn't change his own situation very much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> And just like Wikileaks the trickle of information will gradually dry up and we never hear anything again. The thing I hate most about these leakers is that they have huge stores of documents but only release a tiny fraction.

<comment><USER33> That makes sense. As Snowden said in one of the interviews, the reason he doesn't want to release everything is so that other countries don't have a blueprint from which to develop their own PRISM.

<comment><USER23> Is Snowden still focused on PRISM alone? The blueprint to that is already out, it's called FISA and FISA Amendments perhaps sprinkled with a bit of Ruby on Rails and web services magic.

<comment><USER33> I just assumed he was talking about the technical, not legal, blueprint. I highly doubt a full stack web framework would be the right hammer to spy on the world's communications!

<comment><USER23> PRISM doesn't spy on the world's communications. It automates FISA warrant compliance, you're probably thinking of one or more of the many other NSA systems out there.

<comment><USER33> Probably! It's easy to lose track!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is double-edged sword! While USA/NSA does not want Snowden dead to keep secrets for as long as possible - suddenly half of the world might become more interested in exactly that to happen rather sooner than later.

</comment><comment><USER35> If it was known (assumed) that Snowden sent Greenwald files, don't you think every intelligence group in the world with an interest in obtaining US classified information would be very motivated to obtain that chip?

</comment><comment><USER36> I wish Greenwald would share these documents that are so shocking and revealing. I would like to see what all this fuss has really been about.

</comment><comment><USER37> wasn't this kind of assumed? to go this far and not cover all bases would be incredibly stupid and he doesn't strike me as such.

<comment><USER38> Agreed and I think the move to travel through China and Russia had to have been part of his plans at the start as this just drags all of the International parties into the fray whether they want to keep it quiet or not. It also then behooves everyone to keep him safe so they don't get escalate the finger pointing game on who might have had him killed.

I'd personally like to see less focus on the guy and more on the message though.

<comment><USER39> Interesting view. Hadn't thought about it like that :) For now China seems to be pretty happy about Snowden.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I wonder how he was able to amass thousands of documents within two months of being in his current position while still screening them for information beyond the scope of what he was trying to leak. The possibility that there is confidential information about foreign operations outside of the internet surveillance makes me lose a great deal of respect for him. I also don't trust someone who wasn't even able to manage a GED to read through thousands of intelligence documents... just putting that out there. I feel like many have been too quick to give this guy a free pass.</comment>


Show HN: Market Share of Mobile SDKs - <AUTHOR> https://appfigures.com/top-sdks <comment><AUTHOR> There are so many 3rd party tools to help you build and make money with apps, but it's hard to tell which are the more popular ones.

We've (Appfigures) been scanning iOS and Android app's for SDKs as part of our platform, and we now make the market share data public.</comment>


If ad tech is not sustainable, what can publishers do? - <AUTHOR> http://www.poynter.org/2016/if-ad-tech-is-not-sustainable-what-can-publishers-do/413370/ <comment><USER2> This is a really good analysis, and part of a good series. My suggestion: resubmit it following HN's (somewhat hidden) guidelines: emailing email@example.com as a notice seems generally to help.</comment>


Pfizer's Big Breakthrough: Global Tax Avoidance - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/opinion/pfizers-big-breakthrough-global-tax-avoidance.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region <comment><USER2> There is an entire class of hedge fund who make their money by only investing in the stock of companies who are merging. This is called merger arb and this deal is a huge one.

Unfortunately it is about as uncertain as a deal can be due to concerns about the government not allow the merger.

For those of you who don't follow corporate mergers, there has been a trend recently of larger american based corporations doing mergers with smaller foreign companies to move their head quarters to another country where the corporate tax rate is lower, these are know as tax inversions.

Burger King famously recently merged with Canadian "icon?" Tim Hortons in an attempt to domicile the corporation in Canada to lower their tax rate.

This is only going to intensify and its corporations telling America that their corporate tax rates are too high.

The US has a tax rule specific to itself where by it taxes corps at 35% on profit no matter which country it was earned it. It does let companies deduct taxes paid to foreign governments but it leads to companies operating in a way to minimize their US taxes.

From the article linked at the bottom[0]:

> Pfizer takes in about 40 percent of its revenue from sales in the United > States and 60 percent from foreign sales. Yet, according to its 2014 annual > report, Pfizer had about $17 billion in pretax income from overseas, and > almost a $5 billion pretax loss here in the United States. By shifting > profits overseas, Pfizer pays relatively low cash taxes compared with the > nominal United States tax rate of 35 percent. Instead, much of its American > tax liability is illusory, taking the form of an obligation to pay taxes in > the future if it repatriates cash to the United States.

This leads to companies jumping through hoops to shift earnings income around and to holding large chunks of cash off shore of the US.

This might be upsetting to some people who think corporations don't pay enough taxes but it's not going to go away. The world isn't going to get more protectionist, especially on the heals of TPP.

The US needs to deal with this.

[0][http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/25/business/dealbook/why- pfiz...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/25/business/dealbook/why-pfizers-deal- may-change-the-system-oftaxing-multinationals.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER3> This is the type of thing where I feel absolutely ashamed of how impotent the US is, despite its superpower status. I find it hard to believe that if we had Andrew Jackson as president today, and Ireland and Bermuda were allowing US companies to shield themselves from paying US taxes, that these tax inversions and avoidance schemes wouldn't be quickly and swiftly resolved with extreme prejudice. Ireland alone is costing the US maybe a hundred billion a year. Our relationship with them is not worth that much. Throw sanctions on them. Make Ireland pay taxes to the US. Don't recognize any IP of any Irish company. Threaten them with bombings. Do something. While it is a "problem" that the US has higher corporate tax rates, that's only an actual problem if the US lacks the will or power to enforce those higher tax rates. And the US has the power. And we look like a joke for letting little shit countries give companies back doors to our tax code.

It's also a reason why I think a defiant blowhard like Donald Trump could make waves as president. I don't think he'd have any problem dropping his sac to break treaties and crack skulls.

<comment><USER4> Poe's law? Poe's law.

<comment><USER3> Nope. I'm just a man with beliefs that most people today would call antiquated.

<comment><USER4> Ok - can you elaborate why you so clearly favour aggression and blaming Ireland rather than simple domestic legislation and general political will to prevent these companies using other countries as tax havens?

<comment><USER3> Sure.

I like the logic of trying to close it with domestic legislation, but the US sucks at that. For one, congress and the president cannot ever seem to work together to get anything meaningful done. But secondly, every single time we think we make an exception or a rule in the tax code, we learn that crafty investment bankers figure out how to exploit the rule. As Plato said, "know thyself." And we suck at playing nicely.

Completely hypothetically, say we could kill tax inversions. The whole thing has felt like a game of cat and mouse game for a century now. Inversions are the tax-avoidance scheme du jouer. For example, for years, Pfizer has already been paying virtually no taxes in the US by storing all of its IP in an offshore subsidiary. The "double Irish" trick is being done by companies who have never done an inversion. There are all sorts of holes in the tax code that other nations use to fuck the US. And there's no way we can compete on the rate, since we'd be competing with countries that have a 0% rate. Many companies pay a zero percent corporate tax rate on all of their offshore profits (which, IIRC, is attributed to a subsidiary in Bermuda), and mostly claim to have nothing but losses to write off in the US.

We need to finally say, "fuck this nonsense." Companies don't need laws to inform them when they're acting morally. It is immoral to act the way they are, and instead of playing cat and mouse like we have been doing, we need to put our foot down and MAKE every company obey the spirit of the tax laws, and not the letter. And the only way I know of to make that happen is to use extreme threats like invalidating their IP if they pull these tricks, or threatening the countries that aid them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Leave it to the NYT to shill for more taxes and more government. Of course the article doesn't mention _one single factual dollar figure_ about this inversion, it only decries the horror. They estimate major inversions cost the treasury $2 billion a year. Wowsa, that's a rounding error in a $4 trillion annual budget.

I've encountered many deals where small foreign companies were looking at doing business in the US but when we explained to them federal and state corporate taxation they were discouraged from setting up shop here. I'm sure there are hundreds if not thousands of similar stories each year. Instead of reducing the US corporate tax burden (amongst the highest in the world) and encouraging companies to set up shop here, the US tax code discourages such investment and growth.

<comment><USER3> Every tax discourages something.

<comment><USER6> I have no problem with discouraging alcohol, tobacco, heroine, cocaine, and gasoline usage.

<comment><USER3> Cool. That would get us a few billion of the five trillion we need to collect.

<comment><USER6> 1) Total alcoholic beverages sales in the U.S. $211.57bn [1]

2) Why do we need to collect five trillion?

[1] [http://www.statista.com/topics/1709/alcoholic- beverages/](http://www.statista.com/topics/1709/alcoholic-beverages/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe the bad thing is not in avoiding taxes but in dumb attempt of IRS to charge high tax rates to entities who has enough resources to choose more tax friendly jurisdiction anyways.

<comment><USER8> The tax rate is set by congress, not the IRS. How is this the fault of the IRS?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think everybody should contribute to pay fair taxes if they are able.

Why should small companies pay taxes and big companies pay zero? Then the small ones have to pay extra for those who didnt pay.

There are certain things with globalization that is definitely not good for society, swapping profits for losses and paying zero tax is definitely one of the issues.

These companies take advantage of infrastructure paid by other tax payers road infrastructure, education infrastructure that brings skilled workers for them to employ. So why is that certain organization leech and do not contribute back equally?

</comment><comment><USER10> Considering those tax dollars go towards torture, murder, indefinite imprisonment, war crimes, genocide, illegal surveillance, and other tragedies I applaud any company which finds novel ways of resisting the tyranny of the united States government.

<comment><USER11> It also goes towards the roads and infrastructure the company and its employees use daily.

I don't understand why people refuse to pay their countries membership fees. They have no problem paying the fees for their gym, their sports club or their phones, but as soon as they have to pay for the services their country offers its okay to not pay?

<comment><USER12> I do. It has to do with value, not with price. Anything with a high price, whether it's a good or a service, has a negotiable price tag. Not so much with tax.

Say I make $25k a year, and I pay $5k in tax. I'm probably getting that back in value (health insurance, roads, safety, etc).

Now say I make $100k a year. I'd probably be paying $30-45k a year in tax (depending on the country). This is getting to the point where you're no longer getting enough value for your $/€.

Third option, say you make $1M a year. On average, you now need to pay $400-500k a year to the treasury of your country in tax. No way you're getting that in value. Alternative: you structure things through a tax friendly jurisdiction, and at the end of the road you only have to pay $150k instead of $400k, legally.

Honestly, why would I pay $400k in tax if I can pay $150k? Tax aside, I'm obviously still spending money in the country where I live (-> creating income for businesses, increasing the taxable base of those businesses, who in turn will pay full corporate tax).

<comment><USER13> > No way you're getting that in value.

Infrastructure was in place before you were born that gave you the opportunities to succeed.

It's now time to pay that back(/forward?) so that others have similar chances to succeed.

<comment><USER12> It was, but it would be in place regardless of whether you succeeded or not. Maybe not historically, but today, whether I personally succeed or not doesn't matter to the budget/deficit. Those who carry the taxable base are the middle class; the employees who can't restructure their affairs.

Paying back / forward is great, but (imo) it has a limit. Unless you inherited your wealth, most people who are self made will have paid a significant amount of tax before they tax optimise their structures. So, if you're a success, you will have paid back your "debt" to society (and then some).

There needs to be a limit somewhere. Some countries are more aggressive (i.e. the US) in collecting their tax dollars than others (i.e. the UK).

<comment><USER14> "people who are self made".

There is no such thing.

A single child raised to finish college costs the taxpayer in Germany 300'000 Euro in subsidized nursery, free school, and free college.

Additionally, each person costs a lot for roads, public transit, etc.

And then you have to add in that for every person who gets to become a billionaire, you have hundredthousands who won't become billionaires, but still cost you equally much. There's no way to find out who is going to become a self-made millionaire, and who isn't.

And society already tries to provide many programs only to those kids with high potential, to save money. Programs like this [1] are already exclusive.

If you want to give the generation of your kids the same chances at becoming self-made millionaires, you have to provide all of them with this high quality service.

Which means you have to accept nominal tax rates of 48%+.

        </comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

[1] [http://www.enrichment.lernnetz.de/content/information.php](http://www.enrichment.lernnetz.de/content/information.php)

<comment><USER12> > Which means you have to accept nominal tax rates of 48%+.

Except, you actually don't. You are always free to move to a country with a lower (or a higher) tax rate, for whatever reason.

If someone wants to go live in Monaco, and not pay anything, that's his/her right. There is never a debt, in the true sense of the word.

<comment><USER14> Well, nice for quoting half of my sentence.

If you want that the next generation has the same opportunities, then you need those taxes.

Without them, you won't be able to provide intelligent and engaged children (no matter their family's wealth) with quality education.

<comment><USER12> Yes, absolutely. I totally agree we need taxes for the next generation. I just don't believe 48%+ taxes are ever paid by the truly wealthy, only the middle class.

Most wealthy people (people with net worths in the tens of millions and up) pay rates closer to zero, by using every trick in the book. Or well, their advisors do it for them. At most, they will pay the capital gains tax rate.

> Without them, you won't be able to provide intelligent and engaged children > (no matter their family's wealth) with quality education.

Wealth does give you the freedom to send your children to the best schools in the world, regardless of the country you live in. But obviously, that's an extremely selfish view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _" The $160 billion deal to combine Pfizer and Allergan, the maker of Botox, does not appear to be illegal. But it should be. This merger is a tax-dodging maneuver that enriches shareholders and executives while shortchanging the public and robbing the Treasury of money."_

Wow. The Wall Street Journal editorial board sounds like Bernie Sanders. If the WSJ is writing editorials like that, cracking down on offshore tax avoidance is no longer acceptable to the business community. This is forward progress.

<comment><USER5> Except this is a NYT editorial, not WSJ.</comment></comment>


Internet, Social Media and the Individual - <AUTHOR> https://techimadions.com/internet-social-media-individual/ <comment><USER2> Has a couple nice quotes, but doesn't come to any useful conclusion or call to action. Feels like it's speaking platitudes without even trying to push/offer an alternative or even a new way of thinking about things.

<comment><USER3> How can someone decide what action to call for if they can't explore a topic by discussing their perception of it? A forum full of nothing but calls to action sounds like my personal hell. My Twitter feed is already too much like that :p</comment></comment>


Stopping Pollution with Pine Needles - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/07/18/stopping-pollution-with-pine-needles <comment><USER2> In the southeast of the US longer pine needles from varieties of pines such as slash pine are used for garden mulch. Ironically, this was later in the season than I normally do this, I just laid down 52 bales of mulch in my garden.

Here it is common for a few reasons.

1\. It is in-expensive (about $3.75 a bale). 2\. It provides insulation to the plant roots to keep the soil warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer. 3\. On steep inclines it tends to knit together to stay on the incline to prevent erosion. 4\. As it breaks down it amends the soil with nutrients.

The only negative is that you have to add new mulch every year because it mostly breaks down after a year.

People who have pine tree farms use this as an extra revenue source. [https://www.aces.edu/blog/topics/business-opportunities- fore...](https://www.aces.edu/blog/topics/business-opportunities- forestry/harvesting-pine-straw-for-profit-questions-landowners-should-ask- themselves/) [https://www.carolinacreations.biz/blog/mulch-and-pine- straw/](https://www.carolinacreations.biz/blog/mulch-and-pine-straw/)

<comment><USER3> How do you deal with the soil acidity?

<comment><USER2> Many flowers etc. in my beds prefer acidity. If it gets too acidic some lime can adjust things back.

<comment><USER4> > ... If it gets too acidic some lime can adjust things back.

You probably mean lye [1], which is alkaline to neutralize the acid.

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

<comment><USER5> Lime is alkaline, too, and cheaper:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_lime](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_lime)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://archive.is/t9qC2](https://archive.is/t9qC2)

<comment><USER7> So the secret is making charcoal with pine needles at 550 degrees.

Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> From what I remember when I lived in the South every 5 cu yards of pine straw comes with a free copperhead, I wonder what they get in the Himalayas...

<comment><USER9> When you buy pine needles in bales? I've been spreading pine needles since I was 7 and not once have I encountered a snake in a bale of pine needles.

<comment><USER2> I think that's a joke. Snakes do like to hide out in loose pine straw.

<comment><USER8> Not in bales, more like when you know someone who knows someone who delivers it by the truckload. Usually they were babies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I appreciate Pine trees even more now. I am in Canada and have access to many pine trees. One time I wanted to do a bit of soldering but could not find my flux. Small town had nothing anywhere near me so decided to see if I could make it. Quick DDG search shows rosin flux you can make from pine sap so I went to a tree, they all have gobs of sap dripping from some point, and collected some dirty sap. Took this home and soaked and stir it in pure isopropyl alcohol. Ran through a coffee filter and just let most of the alcohol air dry away. I love my flux it smells great works perfect and I know where that puff of smoke is coming from now. Felt rewarding as well 10/10 will keep doing this.

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting research, but utterly impractical. Are they proposing to harvest all the pine needles from all the forests in the Himalayas, convert them to charcoal and then use that to filter the Ganges? How much do they have to spend on this?

It's a fun mental exercise, but it's so far from realistic that it's funny.

<comment><USER12> You'd be surprised what is realistic when the labor is pine needle cheap.

I wouldn't be surprised if you could pay some of the locals living there $5-10/day to collect pine needles, and have them end up better off than they are now.

<comment><USER13> Moreover, in western China the labor isn't cheap, it's free. (Uighur slavery)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't imagine 6 tonnes of charred pine needles dumped in the Ganges effectively lasts more than a day for the purposes of heavy metal absorption. The math is beyond me, but it doesn't seem overly difficult. Especially when you consider that the needles don't show up all at once. They fall from the sky one at a time. After the first harvest, little Jimmy will be wandering through the once-lush, and now barren pine wasteland individually picking up pine needles with an eyebrow tweezer. It's interesting, but probably only "three legged dog" interesting.

<comment><USER15> You are also strip mining one biome to try to save another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting article, but I don't see the original research linked. There isn't much content here to say the effectiveness of the pinecones on the water purification. I was also confused with the 550 degrees vs 35 degrees comparision. I'd be curious to see if pine cones can have an impact on desalination as well.

</comment><comment><USER17> Pine needles are great for scrubbing pots and pans if camping. But we don't do that. It might be green and practical but it doesn't happen.

The same with this story, great in principle but not going to happen. Pollution needs to stop at source and you need legislation and enforcement for that.</comment>


Show HN: real-time eye tracking web analytics  - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I would like to introduce Gazehub, an online eye tracking and web analytics platform that shows you real-time data of where visitors look (and click) on your website.
We are currently running a free limited beta.
To sign up, visit www.gazehub.com <comment><USER2> Wait... So I would have to purchase a $99 "eye tracker" just so that some random website can follow my eye movement?

Seriously? I understand the concept, but if it relies on 3rd party software/hardware for the user that has a camera to watch the user, it would never work.

Good concept, but bad implementation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, your thinking about right now. In a few years time, eye tracking will be as widespread as webcams are today. Plus there are already tens of thousand eye trackers in the world. And as the technology is maturing, its becoming more available

<comment><USER3> So what does a user need to have for you to be able to track their eye movement?

<comment><USER4> GazeHub platform has two side: 1) Users who want analytics, they just add the code to their website and see results. 2) Users that already has real eye tracker, The data will be collected from this group.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem with current analytic tools is that they are good for site with huge number of visitors. I can not get anything from few number of visitors.

With real eye tracking i can even know why people left my page in first 10 seconds. Where they looks in first 10 seconds.

</comment><comment><USER5> There was a similar startup a while ago that was acquired by fb, [http://gazehawk.com/](http://gazehawk.com/)

Goodluck

<comment><USER4> Hi, Yes, we know them but they use web came for eye tracking and that has been always problem with those ideas. There are many like gazehawk but recording eye movement with normal web came is always a problem

<comment><USER6> Opengazer, is an open-source gaze tracker for ordinary webcams [http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/opengazer/](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/opengazer/)

p.s. not affiliated, but have met with the team several times at the lab

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm guessing this requires access to a site viewer's webcam? That would be a request that probably wouldn't fly with new, unique site visitors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, actually were not using webcams at all. We using real eye trackers. Commercial eye trackers are becoming cheaper (eg. $99 see [https://theeyetribe.com/](https://theeyetribe.com/)) and even the bigger eye tracking companies such as Tobii and SMI are starting to make low cost eye trackers.

Tobii, which is partly owned by Intel, has also already developed laptops that have eye trackers intergrated

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> interesting

<comment><AUTHOR> We made it as easy as google analytics, where you just have to put a tracking code in your website to get eye tracking data</comment></comment>


SOAP: The 'S' stands for simple (not really) - <AUTHOR> http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/soap/simple <comment><USER2> This is great. My (so far, only) experience with SOAP started when my boss asking me to investigate the new version of a (very big) vendor's SOAP API. Support for the old version of the API was being dropped in a few days.

It turns out that our framework has SOAP built in, so I had it suck in the WSDL and make a sample request. It was rejected with a generic error. As it turns out, our framework was generating requests that looked like this (simplified with much SOAP nonsense stripped out):

      <SOAP-ENV:Envelope>
        <Authenticate xmlns="http://bigcorp.example.com/elements/global">…</Authenticate>
      </SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

…and the requests in the API documentation look like this:

      <SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:bigcorp="http://bigcorp.example.com/elements/global">
        <bigcorp:Authenticate>…</bigcorp:Authenticate>
      </SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

the difference being that our framework declares a "default namespace", while their API expected a "namespace prefix". As far as I could tell from _reading the spec_ (always a bad sign when you're using a standard that both ends support) the difference shouldn't matter.

\- - -

I went to my boss. He showed me the old code; all the requests it needs to make are hardcoded based on the docs, and substitute XML-encoded variables in the right places.

Save a few minor changes, that's the process we still use today, and it fucking works.

<comment><USER3> Something's seriously messed up if, once the XML has been parsed, their code can even _tell_ the difference between those two constructs, much less care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The original article is here:

[http://wanderingbarque.com/nonintersecting/2006/11/15/the-s-...](http://wanderingbarque.com/nonintersecting/2006/11/15/the- s-stands-for-simple/)

I am glad to see it get more attention. It is a classic and it is really about more than SOAP. It is about the way technologies get hyped and over-sold and over-promised, and then made unusably complicated. SOAP is just the example.

<comment><USER5> _It is about the way technologies get hyped and over-sold and over-promised, and then made unusably complicated._

In the excellent book "Antipatterns," I recall that this is called a "Wolf Ticket:"

 _Wolf Ticket is a product that claims openness and conformance to standards that have no enforceable meaning. The products are delivered with proprietary interfaces that may vary significantly from the published standard._

<http://sourcemaking.com/antipatterns/wolf-ticket>

Wolf tickets are sold as safe choices because of their interoperability, but of course once you have anything non-trivial built upon them, you discover that the interoperability doesn't actually work and you are left locked into your vendor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Must be ~5 years since I last used SOAP. Needless to say I hated the stuff. Complex to build, complex to use (interoperability between different stacks - java/.net/... - was like 'cross your fingers and hope for the best'), complex to debug and walk through tcpdump network packets. It's complex in every way but the name.

Of course, since that times I've alway advised against web services and so far I've succeeded in avoiding them.

<comment><USER7> I'm being asked to create webservices so other developers don't do direct database access and their stuff wont break when things change. How do you manage that?

<comment><USER8> Designing an API is a skill in itself, but I think rule 1 is "Don't use SOAP"

JSON over REST seems to be flavour of the month FWIW.

<comment><USER9> "Flavour of the month" might be a bit harsh. It certainly is popular these days, so it's not wholly inappropriate. But it's worth noting JSON/REST is popular with, and largely because of, people who've learned the painful lessons of earlier messes like SOAP.

It's not (just) a hot new thing used by new faces who've never really known any other way.

<comment><USER8> I actually didn't mean to disparage JSON over REST in any way. In fact I really like it.

I only qualified the statement as technologies change quickly (only 12 months age we would probably have been talking about XML over REST) and things will no doubt change again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My worst memory of SOAP was dealing with an attachments API that required each _byte_ in a byte array to be wrapped in an XML element.

You ended up transferring ~10x the size of the file. I suppose gzip would have helped somewhat.

<comment><USER11> My worst memory of SOAP is using it. Experienced it for the first time ever a couple of weeks ago (all I've used before now is ad-hoc JSON or XML apis, mostly JSON) and (knocks on wood) never, ever again. The article touches on a few of the things I really didn't like about it, the main one being the expectation that you will use tooling to generate code rather than the contract first, and that every time I hit a hurdle and switched to a different library, I had to start over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I will now share my secret SOAP API Pro Method:

Step 1: Ignore all tools which supposedly make things easier (very important)

Step 2: Find the web service API documentation

Step 3: Ctrl-C example XML request

Step 4: Ctrl-V example XML request into program, replacing appropriate parts with program variables

Step 5: Parse the response. You're on your own here... Godspeed. :)

<comment><USER13> The company I work for has to digest a handful of XML and SOAP protocols. Theoretically, they all conform to spec A or B, and/or define their own subset of that spec with an XML language definition. There should be like 3 or 4 pieces of code which would handle _every_ format they offer.

Practically: ctrl-C, ctrl-V, and call them when it doesn't work. More often than not it's either A) incorrect documentation, or B) you hit a bug (yes, this means their sample-code doesn't work. It happens frequently). A good chunk of our request-data builders are simply string manipulators, because some of the APIs we call are nitpicky about the _order_ of XML attributes in a tag.

I laugh when people tell me XML works better "because it's a standard".

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> At one time SOAP wasn't too bad, until it tried to solve a lot of complicated problems (via WS-*), and in the process made the simple problems complex. Contrast this with HTTP which is being used for ever-more complex problems yet is really no more complicated in the simple case than it was in 2000. This seems like an important principle in protocol design.

<comment><USER15> Indeed. "RESTful" is basically a name for using HTTP well, and such APIs are usable for anything from bash script to Big Vendor Library™.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I do a lot of Salesforce.com development and the use of SOAP has been the bane of my existence. They have recently introduced a new REST API that will be going GA in the spring.

"Dev: What happens if I GET the endpoint's URL?

SG: Don't know. Using GET is undefined.

Dev: Hrrm. And what happens if I move the service to a different endpoint? Do I get a 301 back?

SG: No. SOAP doesn't really use HTTP response codes.

Dev: So, when you said SOAP uses HTTP, what you meant to say is SOAP tunnels over HTTP."

The beauty of REST is that it is representative of how the web works. With SOAP you're almost always limited to the use of POST methods and when I go to read another developer's code, I see their own defined nouns and verbs for resources they are sending/receiving like "getUsers", "getContacts", and "createPerson". These often are ambiguous or don't match up with the actual resource they are trying to work with.

Endpoints in REST are self documenting, you can read what it is that you're trying to do based on the endpoint and the HTTP verb (put, post, delete, et al)

<comment><USER17> From which language, out of curiosity?

<comment><USER16> Predominantly PHP and Ruby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I feel a bit sad for all those people who worked on SOAP. I assume most of them simply wanted to make the web better and now we all point and laugh at their efforts with the 20/20 vision that only hindsight can allow.

Thanks for trying SOAP people, it was a noble effort but it's game over I'm afraid.... oh wait, I just saw on Wikipedia that these were Microsoft people. In that case, screw em. SOAP is wank! YOU'VE WASTED YOUR LIVES!!

<comment><USER19> Even worse for CORBA. ..

On the second thought: The same companies made SOAP right after and along with CORBA. Maybe, even the same people. Don't blame Microsoft too much: IBM, Oracle, SAP, BEA - they are all ... equally "good"

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> We have the misfortune of dealing with a third party SOAP API at my office. My coworker did it the "correct" way, autogenerating thousands of lines of C# from the WSDL and trying to get the objects transparently serialized and deserialized. That turned out to be a multi-week effort, so finally I got fed up and spent 4 hours writing code to directly extract the values we needed from the raw XML.

<comment><USER21> I'm no fan of SOAP, but as a C# guy I'm curious to know what took so long?

<comment><USER22> I've got the same question. But I've written them in both Java and C#.

I worked on a project recently where we had a team of Java guys who worked on a SOAP implementation for a month. They could not get it to work in any way, shape or form. It was handed to me, and three of us did it a half an hour. All custom SOAP, still worked.

I just don't comprehend why this seems so hard to people on Hacker News. SOAP is just another protocol and as messy as any other.

<comment><USER23> > SOAP is just another protocol and as messy as any other.

I think that's where you and most of the other people on the thread are losing it. SOAP is way messier than just good old REST.

(disclaimer: I've never been forced to actually use SOAP.)

<comment><USER24> I have had to do both: SOAP is WAY more messy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think it's a law that any protocol or technology with 'simple' in the name invariably isn't.

<comment><USER26> It's also a law that any field with the name 'science' in it isn't a science. (Health science, social science, military science, earth science, computer science...)

<comment><USER27> And any country with democratic or people's in it's name, is not democratic or belonging to the people (Democratic Republic of North Korea, of Congo, PRC ... )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wow. This sums up my entire exposure to SOAP over the last few months. Thanks for the humorous, yet factual exchange of information!

</comment><comment><USER29> SOAP really just exists to keep a tools/consulting/appserver/softwarestack business alive. Pretty sad.

</comment><comment><USER30> Reminds me of the "Why I hate frameworks" essay by Benji Smith.

<http://benjismith.net/index.php/2005/09/30/hate-frameworks/>

</comment><comment><USER31> SOAP has always seemed bizarre to me. It's something like "We think CORBA was a good idea, but they messed some stuff up, so we'll toss the entirety of CORBA and make something with a completely new set of problems while completely ignoring most of the mistakes we learned with CORBA."

I'm still luke-warm at best on the whole ORB idea as-is, but even thinking from the point of view of someone who thinks object brokers are the best thing since sliced bread, I feel like the SOAP people got it very wrong.

</comment><comment><USER32> It crosses some layer boundaries too.... having to manually edit (or I guess dynamically generate) wsdl files so that we can add a reverse proxy or load balancer in front of a webservice machine to access it several different ways in .net was definitely a pain in the butt.

</comment><comment><USER33> This wonderful Socratic dialogue has articulated my professional hell over the past six months.

</comment><comment><USER34> The only thing I like about SOAP's modern implementation is that it comes packaged with a WSDL usually - I would welcome a world where most REST APIs included a WSDL so I could just automatically stub a wrapper library.

</comment><comment><USER35> Design-by-committee in action...

</comment><comment><USER36> Some previously implemented projects implemented a SOAP prepaid account balance billing interface that runs in production today. Nobody is willing to touch the interface for modifications because every developer tasked to review proposed changes complain that it's way too brittle and prone to complexity.

This article is bittersweet because it sums up everybody's feelings pre- and post- implementation.

</comment><comment><USER37> Sigh. this article made me a little sad. I keep wondering why the corporates who have all the money and resources keep using a technology that is just so old and has so many issues, when they have the better alternatives. My entire week was spent in just trying to get the configuration and a hello world service up and running.

</comment><comment><USER38> Let me preface this by saying I'm not particularly a microsoft basher, however this smacks of their history of interface development. Remember COM in the 90's? It was so complicated no one really knew how it worked. The only way to use it was to use a compiler that had native support for it ... MS Visual Studio and MS VB. Delphi came a long way quickly and made it work. Anyway whether intended or not, the result was you were initially tied to using a MS tool to use the technology. SOAP seems the same. Odds are if you're writing one end of it or another (client or server) somewhere the mix you're going to have a Microsoft tool. If you want to talk to the product of that Microsoft tool by far the easiest way will be to use a Microsoft tool. So despite being "open", their implementation of it ties you into some vendor-specific tools.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell Eurgh. Reminds me of writing Perl code to talk to .NET SOAP services in a previous job. Never again.

</comment><comment><USER39> Why did SOAP win, and XMLRPC not win?

<comment><USER40> Soap was supposed to be the enterprisey safe superset of XML-RPC.

From my experience back at the beginning -- XML-RPC was slightly underspecified, and would have used a bit more of a firm hand about clarification of what was legal and what wasn't. SOAP was wildly overspecified and complexified to the point that you needed an army of consultants. Which is just perfect for enterprisey stuff, since you conviently have an army of consultants that need to have something to do.

IMHO, XMLRPC inhabited a middle ground that was washed away by REST and ajax/json type interfaces. It's an extra bit of complexity that's just not all that popular now, rather than a stunningly less complicated version of SOAP.

<comment><USER41> Yep... as I remember it, XML RPC was "specified" by Dave Winer, and it was really sloppy. As I remember, there was no discussion of character encoding in the spec, and if you read the spec literally, you actually HAD to generate invalid XML documents because the spec was written by someone who did not understand that there was such a thing as character encoding and that it was important. And Winer absolutely refused to add features or to allow any kind of process by which XML-RPC could evolve into something good enough to use. Then the Microsoft people who brought you COM in all its baroque loveliness got their hands on the concept and made an industrial strength, godforsaken, complex thing called SOAP. The problem with SOAP mostly stemmed from the fact that they thought that all the work would be done by compilers and IDEs and so forth... they thought all the programmer would do is click a button and hey presto they would be able to run one object on one server and another object on a second server, and who cares what happens on the wire protocol? It's the compiler's job! But that's a terrible recipe for interoperability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The "Simple" in SOAP is seriously overtrumped by the "Simple" in SNMP.

<comment><USER43> ...and the 'Lightweight' in LDAP ;-)

<comment><USER13> Oh God, I started reading the spec for LDAP a while back... terrifying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It's easy to rant, but hard to come up with a viable alternative, that encompasses the same scope. XML-schema and WSDL are mocked as an aside, but I dare you to provide me a REST alternative for those, as standardized as those. For all the horror stories, I have used Java to interact with a C# webservice without any pain, including WS-Adressing. The WSDL and XML-schema were a godsend compared to the earlier spec.

Like people that think you can just replace XML with JSON: you are missing stuff.

<comment><USER45> A REST alternative for what?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Could it be that SOAP never had a solid set of test cases? Implementing a reasonably complex API should involve passing a series of public and very specific tests.

</comment><comment><USER47> Love it. However at least SOAP is a spec and generally works.

REST is an architectural style there is no spec, just a idea! Added to that most folk also only build REST-like services.

Implementing a client for REST based services often requires a bunch of (generally simple) coding which takes time and is error prone.

Also pure REST is really good for building data access/CRUD services but makes it hard to build RPC type services without mangling the semantics.

<comment><USER48> > However at least SOAP is a spec and generally works.

SOAP has several versions of the spec and a bunch of vendor-specific cruft. The SOAP use-cases from this comment thread are enough indication of that.

> REST is an architectural style there is no spec, just a idea!

Yeah, but you use REST every day in your web browser. A lot of the times it isn't strongly RESTful, but it's still REST. For example, to view this comment thread and post your reply to someone's comment.

In SOAP, if I call the getUserByID(42) method on your end, and you don't have a user with id 42, what do you do? Do you return an empty response? Do you return some kind of SOAPFault? If so, what kind?

In REST, if I GET <http://yourservice.com/users/42> and you don't have user 42, I get HTTP 404. That's the only logical response.

> Implementing a client for REST based services often requires a bunch of > (generally simple) coding which takes time and is error prone.

This is no different from SOAP, with the exception that with SOAP you have to have your requests stuffed into XML by some libraries which have read some other autogenerated XML to figure out how to stuff your requests.

With REST, you can write a library (that wraps HTTP calls), or you can use curl, or (for simple GET requests) you can use your browser. Your platform might not support SOAP, but it definitely supports REST.

> Also pure REST is really good for building data access/CRUD services but > makes it hard to build RPC type services without mangling the semantics.

This has been said multiple times but let's say it again:

 _REST is not RPC._

If you're looking to remotely call procedures on your app, REST isn't going to provide that.

The only case where REST doesn't work is the case where your client demands SOAP. In any other case, REST works beautifully. Not everyone does REST right, but even when it's done suboptimally (e.g. not providing hyperlinks to related resources) it's still worlds better than SOAP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I never did anything using SOAP, and thought that this technology died many years ago.

</comment><comment><USER50> "I trust that the guys who wrote this have been shot."

Ha ha! I must remember this put-down - it could be used in so many contexts :)

</comment><comment><USER51> As an ex-SOAP-dev... Yeah.

</comment><comment><USER52> Oh god... that's my life!

</comment><comment><USER53> I stopped using SOAP in the shower a month ago and have never felt cleaner. Showering is a more efficient process now:

\- I spend less money on resources (SOAP, lotion, etc)

\- I get clean faster -- SOAP used to slow me down

\- Using someone else's shower is easy, I just take my towel. I don't have to worry if their SOAP is compatible with me.</comment>


Ask HN: Could Ycom IPO? - <AUTHOR>

PG recently stated that the companies in the portfolio are worth around $3 Billion. Indeed, Ycom can be seen as a progressive company who's employees are given a budget to make projects to drive profits. <comment><USER2> The additional burden of public disclosure and compliance would seem like a deal killer. Not to mention the general loss of "control" that accompanies an IPO.

Plus, raising capital/access to capital doesn't appear to be an issue for Y Combinator.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why would Y Combinator want to IPO? What possible good could it bring?</comment>


Just launched restaurant recommendation site - feedback? - <AUTHOR> http://qmato.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Qmato is the first web/mobile site to provide truly occasion-appropriate, personalized restaurant recommendations. Qmato solves a common problem that no other site or app can: "What is the best restaurant for me, for this particular occasion?" We do this by scoring restaurants on over 250 different sentiment metrics drawn from an analysis of millions of reviews and reports - so unlike other services, Qmato actually knows what each restaurant is like, and what is _specifically_ good about each restaurant. This means we are able provide recommendations that are truly tailored to the occasion (and to your taste as well).

Here's an example: Let's say you want to eat outside and enjoy the weather. You don't just want a place that has any old outdoor seating, even if it has a high rating and even if your social network has Liked it a lot. That's all well and good, but it doesn't help you identify what you really want: a place that has really excellent outdoor seating. A couple tables on the sidewalk of a busy street won't cut it - you want something more pleasant and secluded, where you can really enjoy the outdoors. Because Qmato scores each restaurant on the pleasantness of its outdoor seating, we can actually recommend a place where you can really enjoy the weather - and that you'll truly love.

Or take breakfast - when you go out for breakfast, you don't just want a place that serves breakfast (whatever else might be appealing about it) - you want to go to a place that serves a _really excellent_ breakfast. Knowing that "this restaurant has a high rating and it also serves breakfast" isn't enough. What if the high rating results from other features of the restaurant, and their breakfast is just mediocre? Qmato actually scores each restaurant on its breakfast quality, and will recommend the places that have the _best breakfast_.

Or even atmosphere - other services don't provide any way of identifying the best places for a quiet, intimate meal or a fun lively one. Because we score each restaurant on over a hundred different atmosphere properties, Qmato makes it easy to find the places that are the best fit for whatever atmosphere you're looking for.

In total, Qmato gives users direct, one-click / one-touch access to great recommendations for over 30 different kinds of restaurant experiences. Or, if you want more control, Qmato's natural language keyword search lets you describe anything you're looking for - atmosphere descriptions, service, price, value, food qualities, recommended items, etc. (Oh yes, Qmato also provides carefully curated item recommendations, so you won't have to puzzle over the menu when you arrive.)

On Qmato, there is no need to dig through hundreds or thousands reviews to find a good place, like you'd have to on Yelp. And unlike other restaurant recommendation products (like Ness or CleverSense), Qmato recommends restaurants that will actually provide the kind of experience you're looking for. That's something these other services simply can't do.

Now, we know that occasion isn't the only thing that matters. That's why we developed Qmetric - our proprietary ranking algorithm that optimally combines the occasion category score with overall rating, general preferences you can set explicitly (e.g. quiet, good value, creative food, vegetarian friendly, etc.), and preferences machine-learned from your ratings. Qmetric ensures that for every search, your results are always sorted in the all-around optimal way, and that you always get great recommendations.

Qmato lists over 800,000 restaurants nationwide. Currently, Qmato is available as a website and a mobile-optimized website at qmato.com. Native apps are under development.

Any feedback would be much appreciated!

Aaron</comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone used Smalltalk for Graphics? - <AUTHOR> Does anyone here have experience with smalltalk for developing Gui-applications? (cross platform, or any at all)
I'm kinda interested in it, since the protoype system in Javascript is supposedly derived from the one in Smalltalk, and there seem to be quite the community around the language.
I'd be glad to hear your anecdotes/experiences with the language, doesn't have to be Gui-stuff. <comment><AUTHOR> Or maybe, has anyone here ever used Gnu Smalltalk? It looks quite nice - <USER2> though I don't know about the cross-platform capabilities.</comment>


FreeType Development and Maintainance - <AUTHOR> http://pledgie.com/campaigns/18808

<comment><USER2> Wow, I didn't realize iOS used FreeType as its rasterizer. I wonder why Apple didn't just use the OS X subsystem?

<comment><USER3> In fact, I think JailbreakMe.com used a vuln in FreeType.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interestingly, 'AdobeUS' appears twice in the pledge list. Could it be that the fonts group at Adobe recently started embracing open source (see also the Source Pro fonts)?

<comment><USER5> Adobe has been increasingly embracing open source for a while now: tamarin, brackets, acquiring typekit, phonegap, etc.</comment></comment>


In This Talk - <AUTHOR> https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/03/16/in-this-talk/ <comment><USER2> This was a fun read, thanks for sharing.

"Computer science arrogance is measured in nano-Dijkstras" :)

I wasn't familiar with Bill Wadge. Apparently he designed Lucid: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_\(programming_language\))

<comment><USER3> Yup, the pioneering dataflow language (along with Ed Ashcroft) much praised by Alan Kay.

Wadge has been blogging for a few years now, some about Lucid and more recently telling stories from his academic career.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=billwadge%20comments%3E0&sort=byDate&type=story)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I found this super-hard to read, mainly due to having to keep referring back to the acronyms that I didn't understand the definitions of.

</comment><comment><USER5> This was also submitted yesterday [1], but didn't spark much of a discussion then.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22591303](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22591303)

<comment><USER2> Your link is the same as this one ;)

I think the problem is the title. "In This Talk" doesn't look interesting enough, and in fact I hesitated before clicking. Now I'm glad I did, it's an amusing bunch of anecdotes.

<comment><USER6> I knew what the title meant the moment I saw it. Being good at giving talks is not completely unimportant for people who want to make money in a venue similar to that of Steve Jobs or so.

<comment><USER2> Hehe. I actually avoided it _because_ I thought it was "entrepreneurial" advice on giving talks, the sort of article I hate.

Instead, this was a bunch of amusing anecdotes from an oldschool CS guy, no practical advice for startups whatsoever. The kind of article I enjoy! ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is this economy too good to be true? - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/is-this-the-too-good-to-be-true-economy/2019/05/03/9f05aff0-6dbc-11e9-8f44-e8d8bb1df986_story.html <comment><USER2> This article is mostly just wondering aloud and not looking for explanations.

Explanation will of course be multicausal, but one reason for very low unemployment is this: [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S)

As the growth of working age population gradually stops, there will be almost full employment because demand (old retired people and their benefits) will grow relative to amount of workers.</comment>