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How Many Machines Do You Need To Run Your Site? - aaroneous
http://highscalability.com/how-many-machines-do-you-need-run-your-site
======
staunch
Servers are so damn powerful these days that it's a bit misleading to use the
number of servers as a measurement. The standard a few years ago was dual
processor PIII ~1Ghz machines with 1-4GB memory. These days it's a 4+ core
monster with 8GB+ memory.
Steve Huffman of Reddit posted on their latest server stats, which is
interesting: <http://reddit.com/info/2gdcv/comments/c2geky>
Most of the sites these days with a ton of servers just have Google envy or
investors who want money to be "put to work". Server and network gear is a
really easy way to go through money.
------
chmac
HighScalability is an insane site. Their stuff on how Google's datacentre
works is crazy! <http://highscalability.com/google-architecture>
------
palish
I'll let you know after we launch if this works, but we just have a single
dedicated box for 99/mo.
~~~
aaroneous
We launched our site with only one machine (dedicated host I think we paid
about $100/mo for it as well) and had stories about us on the big blogs
(TechCrunch, Gigaom, etc) - it performed like a champ. I guess it depends on
what your app is like though.
~~~
palish
Awesome, good to know.. I was a little nervous that I didn't have a massive
cluster ready to go ;) I'm just going to make sure my database indices are in
the correct places and see how launch does.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Cortana: The spy in Windows 10 - CrankyBear
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3106863/microsoft-windows/cortana-the-spy-in-windows-10.html?nsdr=true
======
Someone1234
> When it’s working as your virtual assistant it’s collecting your every
> keystroke and spoken syllable.
So is a Google Search.
Whenever you type into the Google Search Box it is "collecting your every
keystroke" or when you use voice search it is listening to your every "spoken
syllable."
You can word stuff that way to make anything sound like a keylogger. Heck even
Hacker News is "collecting my every keystroke!"
> But Cortana doesn’t stop there. With the recently released Windows 10
> Anniversary Update, hereafter Windows 10 SP1, you can’t shut Cortana off.
Misleading.
You can turn off all the web integration functionality of Cortana and turn it
into glorified Windows Search. What Microsoft removed was a specific slider
that never really did anything, all the other privacy controls (including
disabling web search entire) still exist either in the Privacy Settings panel
or in Cortana's own settings.
> Maybe you don’t mind Microsoft listening to your every word so it can catch
> when you say, “Hey, Cortana.” I do. Yes, I want the coolness factor of being
> able to talk to my computer. But I want the reassurance that it’s not
> listening when I don’t need it to be. I want a simple on/off switch. Windows
> 10 SP1 doesn’t have one. This is interesting, though: Windows 10 Education
> does.
This is just outright untrue. "Hey, Cortana" can be disabled in Cortana's
settings on all versions of Windows 10 with or without the anniversary update
installed.
~~~
spdustin
> Heck even Hacker News is "collecting my every keystroke!"
Not until you press _return_
> > But Cortana doesn’t stop there [...] you can't shut Cortana off.
> Misleading.
No, I don't think it is. You can tell her to "stop getting to know me", but
you can't turn her off, because her offline services are basically rebadged
offline desktop search. Cortana as the personification of search cannot be
disabled, and heretofore unspecified telemetry regarding your search behavior
is still sent to Microsoft. There is no way to disable or block this telemetry
without third party tools.
~~~
Xyik
> Not until you press return
Maybe true for HN, but not necessarily true for other sites like google search
/ FB search. It's common practice to send all keystrokes to the server to
speed up searches.
------
kelvin0
Ah yes, I suddenly have bout of nostalgia from the IE Monopoly Era. I remember
when IE was claimed by MS as being intimately linked to Windows and if removed
would hinder core functionalities.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp).
Specifically: "Microsoft stated that the merging of Microsoft Windows and
Internet Explorer was the result of innovation and competition, that the two
were now the same product and were inextricably linked together and that
consumers were now getting all the benefits of IE for free. Those who opposed
Microsoft's position countered that the browser was still a distinct and
separate product which did not need to be tied to the operating system"
I know this is not the same situation, Cortana is not part of a 'monopoly'
technology, however the fact that some features which users deem optional that
end up embedded in the OS is similar.
------
hughw
I'm comfortable with the privacy-compromises I accept with my phone (iOS). I
put my computer in a different category. It's not a social or entertainment
device, although I do use it for that a lot. It's primarily where I work, and
where I store sensitive or bulky information I've never carried on a phone. I
need control over my computer. I can accept non-free compromises like macOS,
as long as they continue to maintain the social contract with users. If you
can't turn off key loggers and on your PC, that OS is unusable for me.
~~~
AnonymousPlanet
I feel the same way. Sadly, there is a growing crowd that will point at your
mobile device and say "<Android|iOS> does it, so stop complaining!".
------
sahaskatta
I'm not so sure this article is entirely accurate. I have Windows 10
Anniversary Update on my Surface Pro 4 and the switch to turn "Hey Cortana"
off takes just 2-3 clicks.
Screenshot: [http://imgur.com/a/EI57H](http://imgur.com/a/EI57H)
------
pjmlp
Looking forward to similar articles about Siri and Google Now.
~~~
vetinari
I don't know about Siri, but you can disable Google Now (actually, you have to
enable it, if you want it).
There seems to be news, that since Anniversary Edition you cannot disable
Cortana anymore.
Plus, I have to agree with hughw above, that there is a difference between
phone and computer, what kind of data you have loaded on each. Windows 10, as
it is currently, is simply unacceptable.
~~~
contextfree
The Cortana features analogous to Google Now are still opt-in after the update
(i.e., you have to enable them if you want them). However, web search through
the search box can no longer be disabled through a supported method AFAIK.
------
divbit
From the article:
> Shouldn’t the new and improved Windows 10 be immune from the bugs that
> affect Windows 7, 8 and 8.1?
I'm not sure code works like that...
~~~
Sylos
What you quoted was sarcasm...
Microsoft is claiming that Windows 10 would be so much more secure than
Windows 7/8, and he's saying that if Windows 10 would be much more secure,
then it shouldn't be suffering from largely the same bugs and vulnerabilities.
So, Microsoft's claims are quite obviously bullshit.
------
benologist
It's hardly alone. When I started examining my home network DNS traffic I
quickly identified a bunch of software to remove or keep closed when I'm not
using.
------
wtbob
Y'know, a lot of government organisations use Windows; I wonder how they feel
about having all their information going to Microsoft …
~~~
jdmichal
First, they're likely not on Windows 10 yet. Second, they all likely have
enterprise management, where telemetry features can be fully disabled.
------
contextfree
This update moved Cortana from an all-or-nothing permissions model, where you
have to grant a whole bunch of permissions before you can use any Cortana
features at all, to a more granular model where the permissions are broken up
into a handful of categories and you only have to enable the ones required for
the specific features you want to use. These permissions are off by default as
well (this includes microphone access and listening for "hey Cortana"), but
you'll be asked to grant the relevant permissions when you try to use a
feature that requires them.
However, it's also true that there's no longer a supported way to turn off web
searches in the search box (at least as far as I know).
------
excalibur
Last fall's "November Update" was the first post-release change to Windows 10
that was dramatic enough to fit the description of a Service Pack. The
"Anniversary Update" should be looked at as Windows 10 SP2.
------
Theodores
I don't believe that a simple registry setting or two necessarily disables
Cortana. It might just pretend to be deaf but still be listening.With closed
source software you never know.
~~~
Infinitesimus
I suppose the same argument will hold true for Siri, Google Now,
Desktop/Phone/Browser search?
~~~
marcosdumay
KDE search does not send data over the network. Neither does Windows 7 search,
as far as I know.
About Siri, and Google Now, people know not to let it access sensitive
information. Now, people must learn the same about Windows 10.
------
Terr_
I always find it darkly amusing that Microsoft named their application after a
type of AI doomed to become a megalomaniac control-freak.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Personal Library Manager? - polm23
I have a lot of books. In particular I have a lot of doujinshi, or self-published amateur magazines, that don't have ISBNs or other universal identifiers.<p>I would like to take photos of the covers of these, keep track of what box/shelf they're stored in, and be able to add metadata. Is there any good software for that?
======
majkinetor
Don't look any further. Calibre FTW.
Some features (there are thousands of them):
\- You can make plugin for any magazine (python) including self-published
\- You can scan books for ISBNs and get certain 1 on 1 match online without
any effort or search foo. Without ISBN it will search by given criteria
\- Batch operations for everything
\- It first uses cover of the book (first page in PDF, epub etc), downloads
covers if there aren't any, or generates them if nothing can be found
\- You can add arbitrary metadata and give them types (bool, text, urls...)
\- You can share via web server and access lib from browser and even add books
from browser or simply copy them to special folder
\- Its x-platform
\- It supports zillion formats, and basically you can add zip or anything.
Audiobooks could be handled better but ok.
\- Its updated weekly for years
\- You can have different libraries, groups, virtual libs etc.
\- Awesome converter from-to number of formats
\- You can both have online tags applied and your own tags. I have personal
tags such as `reading`, `must read` etc. along with my own classification on
books that isn't merged with online stuff and is kept separatelly.
\- Awesome ebook reader
\- Many more options
\- There are plugins to put kindle encrypted books offline !
Simply, there isn't anything better out there. Anybody not using it simply
doesn't know better.
The only thing it doesn't have is in text search, but hey... I am sure its
comming one day or you can implement samo mumbo-jumbo on your own.
NOTE: Calibre is IMO not that good for research papers although YMMV. Zotero
might be better choice for this.
~~~
voldacar
Calibre is good, but last time I checked, it didn't let you organize books in
a tree-like directory structure, does it still just dump all your books in one
"folder"?
~~~
majkinetor
Its better then having folders. Folders are meaningless in organization of
multimedia. Better to use tags as they are more flexible.
Then you create virtual folders via tag search. You can show them as tabs or
have them in the menu to select. Single book can be in more then one virtual
folder that way - for example in Biology and Programming.
But no trees of any kind.
~~~
groby_b
Folders aren't "meaningless", they provide relational information (in form of
a hierarchy), something that tags are really bad at.
It's not folders that are important, it's subfolders. Many fields have an
implicit hierarchical organization, and reflecting that in some way is
extremely helpful. As are tags. Ideally, you want both.
~~~
majkinetor
Folders are special case of tags.
Tags can be organized better - its easy to create tag exclusion groups,
something that for example Gitlab recently added in the form of tag1::tag2 so
when you put one of those any existing one gets removed
You can get folders from tags within VFS, for examle TMSU does this ( a
x-platform file tagging system).
~~~
groby_b
As a user? I don't care a lick.
Of course we can map any kind of relational system into a series of strings.
What matters is support to do it in an intuitive way. Nested folders are
intuitive, in terms of organizing, browsing, and highlighting the existing
structure when adding new items.
Tags fail at least at the last two without UI support.
------
yboris
I always recommend looking at _AlternativeTo.net_ \- pick a software that's
close-enough and start looking at its proposed alternatives:
[https://alternativeto.net/software/delicious-
library/](https://alternativeto.net/software/delicious-library/)
ps - minor shameless plug -- if you need a library for videos, try my _Video
Hub App_ \- MIT open source: [https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-
App](https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App)
~~~
fjcp
Great suggestion, AlternativeTo.net was crucial during my transition to Linux
some years ago and I recommend it even to people on Windows trying to find
alternatives to commercial software. Although it may not have some obscure
software that would be what you are looking for, it's a starting point that
can give you some names to help further the search.
------
jdc
Calibre might work for you. It's generally geared toward e-books, but also
lets you add an "empty book" and then attach metadata to it.
[https://calibre-ebook.com](https://calibre-ebook.com)
~~~
stultus
Happy Calibre user here. works like a charm.
------
bayindirh
If you're using macOS, There's delicious library [0] and librarian pro [1] I'm
aware of. There might be other alternatives too.
[0]: [https://www.delicious-monster.com/](https://www.delicious-monster.com/)
[1]:
[https://www.koingosw.com/products/librarianpro/](https://www.koingosw.com/products/librarianpro/)
~~~
bouvin
I can recommend Bookpedia:
[https://www.bruji.com/bookpedia/](https://www.bruji.com/bookpedia/)
------
ziari
I would approach this as an inventory management problem (for which there are
plenty of FOSS solutions).
I'm not sure you require specialized software built for book/magazine
collections. Conceptually, you have a warehouse where almost everything has
"Qty: 1". The rest of the metadata (e.g., titles, authors, ISBNs, storage
boxes) can be custom fields.
------
Hates_
I'm using Airtable to keep track of my books and films. The added ability to
pull the data via a custom API is great.
[https://airtable.com/](https://airtable.com/)
My read books table
[https://airtable.com/shrlT6devX08UsF0o/tblejWxpyIWMDek3b?blo...](https://airtable.com/shrlT6devX08UsF0o/tblejWxpyIWMDek3b?blocks=hide)
------
mephosto
I would use a citation manager like Zotero:
[https://www.zotero.org/](https://www.zotero.org/)
------
deknos82
Tellico Rocks! It can search bookdbs and can also Investors dvds and other
stuff
------
Foxboron
I personally use papis to keep track of my references and sources. Can
probably be used for this.
[https://github.com/papis/papis](https://github.com/papis/papis)
------
jitl
I would recommend a database in Notion
([https://notion.so](https://notion.so)), a general purpose organization tool.
Disclaimer: I work at Notion.
~~~
VvR-Ox
I would not recommend this in comparison to Calibre.
Notion is a commercial product and I'm just guessing but probably vendor lock-
in in the long run.
Also it seems to be focused on team work and not managing papers/books. So as
good as using this you could also use any other wiki software or database to
do this.
# Calibre \- Has server solutions to host your library easily \- Is made for
managing books etc. \- It's open source and has a big community as well as
plugins
([https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre](https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre))
Don't get me wrong here, Notion looks like a great product and in my opinion
it could be the next big thing in project management if marketing keeps up and
they can convince the right people.
Only thing I really dislike about Notion so far: \- It's not Open Source :-p
(I'd love that)
For other things I'm sure it's awesome.
~~~
scrollaway
As a fan of notion I agree with your post.
That said, Calibre is awful imo. I would recommend looking into Polar
Bookshelf (open source): [https://getpolarized.io](https://getpolarized.io)
~~~
VvR-Ox
Thanks for the recommendation - I didn't know Polar and will definitely give
it a try.
What do you think is awful about Calibre?
~~~
groby_b
Cannot speak for the OP, but from my POV - dear $DEITY, the UI is bleeding
awful. And so is the experience of using it. Yes, it gets the job done, but it
falls far below the standards of any polished product.
For some, it is worth it, because it provides an OSS way to deal with audio
books. To others, who care about UI/UX - well, it provides an OSS way to deal
with books.
------
bschne
Airtable ([https://airtable.com](https://airtable.com)) might be a good
option, it's more like a general purpose organizational tool somewhere between
spreadsheets and a database.
It would allow you to start really simple, with not much more than a
list/spreadsheet, and then tack on additional features, referenced data and
things like images as you go.
------
olah_1
I recommend using LibraryThing[1] and it's mobile app for cataloging. Then I
would recommend TinyCat[2] if you want to lend these books out to people.
[1] [https://www.librarything.com/home](https://www.librarything.com/home)
[2] [https://www.librarycat.org/](https://www.librarycat.org/)
------
selimthegrim
Similarly, I am in the process of trying to prevent the math department of our
university from discarding a lot of books in their library of interest to the
physics department. I have a table full of stacks of books without barcodes
(although they do have ISBNs) and grumpy students/librarians demanding I get
on with vacating the table
------
sahinyanlik
I am using goodreads.com to create my shelves.
* You can find your book easily and add to your shelf and also you can track if you read or not. * Most of the book have its photos. I have both Turkish and English books and for both it is very effective. I didn't try Calibre for Turkish books btw. Also you can check your books anywhere you like.
~~~
Fnoord
Calibre can integrate with Goodreads if you use the plugin in Calibre for
Goodreads. This way you can synchronize your shelves and progress. There's an
obvious downside to Goodreads: your privacy. Having all my privacy settings as
high as possible, I do like it, but a data leak would expose my personal data.
------
jayaram
might not work for everyone, but I use Zotero, its not specifically designed
for books and magazines, but it works and keeps track of all my stuff!
link - [https://www.zotero.org/](https://www.zotero.org/)
------
wiggler00m
I use: Apple Books, Kindle, Play Books.
Will check out Calibre - thanks.
------
Ylodi
Libib is a good app for simple book catalogue -
[https://www.libib.com](https://www.libib.com)
------
deesep
I also use Calibre. It's been 4years and I absolutely love it.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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I Just Made My First Sale Woooooooooh - motyar
I just made my first web script sale,
http://motyar.info/draw/<p>Its the code to draw like on canvas like ms paint. User can download the drawing.<p>I placed the "Buy It for just $10" one week ago.
Here are more statics from Google analytics:-<p>467 Pageviews<p>327 Unique Views<p>00:04:20 Time on Page<p>78.95% Bounce Rate<p>69.59% % Exit<p>I need suggestion to improve sales.<p>Thank you all in advance!!
======
foxylad
Contact the buyer, and find out WHY they bought it.
Personally I can't see why anyone would spend money on this (no offence
intended), but perhaps they have a use case I (and possibly you) haven't
considered. You can then optimize your marketing for this.
~~~
vog
Indeed. Maybe the only reason for buying was to give some "kudos" to the
author?
In that case, making it open source and putting a donation button on it (e.g.
Flattr) might generate more revenue for the author.
~~~
motyar
Thanks! I am just learning about sales and it was the fist thing, I thought I
can start. FYI visitor come from above mentioned post from my blog.
------
pwim
What is _it_ that I can buy? I can guess, but you're giving me no clues.
~~~
motyar
Visitors come from my blog post, from ->
[http://motyar.blogspot.com/2010/04/drawing-on-web-with-
canva...](http://motyar.blogspot.com/2010/04/drawing-on-web-with-canvas-and-
jquery.html)
------
polyfractal
Other people have touched on your price and quality/usefulness of the app, so
I'll ignore those.
You're conversion rate is around ~0.3%, which actually isn't that horrible for
an unoptimized site. Between 0.25% and 0.5% is pretty average for newly
launched app.
In terms of marketing and copy, you need to work on your message and audience.
Who is going to use this? Probably not techy people who know how to use
Photoshop/Illustrator.
Perhaps grandmothers wanting to draw something for their kids? Or kids drawing
something for their grandmothers? Either way, neither of those audiences know
or care about "jQuery". This is just one example of how you need to optimize
your message.
With that said, I wouldn't put time or energy into promoting this further.
There are a lot of great drawing/illustration programs, both online and
offline, so its a pretty competitive market.
~~~
motyar
Thanks, I am a developer and doing good with services. I just wanted to start
learning about sales and I thought I can start with this script. Visitors come
from Google to my blog with keywords like "Draw with jquery" or "Drawing on
Canvas with jQuery" ect. (Here is the post
[http://motyar.blogspot.com/2010/04/drawing-on-web-with-
canva...](http://motyar.blogspot.com/2010/04/drawing-on-web-with-canvas-and-
jquery.html) ) and from this post they come to this demo page, they can buy if
they want to use the code in their own application.
Targeting a user group is good practice, and I think most of the visitors are
developers. Thanks again.
------
maris
Try out <http://sellfy.com/> \- you can offer discounts for people who share
your product with their Facebook/Twitter friends.
You can also setup freemium (in they sahre) - paid (if they want just buy)
model.
~~~
mapster
Paypal also has a button widget for sending paid customers to download link.
Of course Paypal takes its 3% taste of the kick.
------
lucian1900
This is a pretty terrible canvas drawing app.
~~~
motyar
Yes, But is a good code base to write your own drawing application with canvas
and jQuery. Thank you
------
potomak
Do you know your price is easily hackable?
Anyway I must implement a feature like this to my drawing app
<http://drawbang.com>, cool idea!
~~~
wlievens
What do you mean by "hackable price"? One can easily download the source code
of course... He did wrap it in a frame or something to make it somewhat
nontrivial.
~~~
jeremysalwen
I believe he is referring to this snippet in the source code:
<form name="_xclick" action="<https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr>
method="post" > <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick"> <input
type="hidden" name="business" value="[email protected]"> <input
type="hidden" name="image_url" value=""> <input type="hidden"
name="cpp_header_image" value=""> <input type="hidden" name="currency_code"
value="USD"> <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="Drawing with jQuery
on Canvas Script"> <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="10.00"> </form>
~~~
fezzl
PayPal IPN solves this by returning the transaction data to whatever IPN URL
that you specify. You can then verify that the correct amount was paid.
------
geon
That's pretty expensive for what you offer. You can't draw lines without
moving the cursor slow enough for the dots to overlap. There is not even a
brush size setting.
~~~
motyar
I feel the same way!! But one who is going to code his/her own drawing
application with canvas. Its a good code base. A lot of things to improve in
code.
Thanks
------
fezzl
Despite what others say, getting people to pay you money is an achievement in
itself. Keep improving the product using feedback you get from new
visitors/users!
~~~
motyar
I am agree with you "Getting people to pay you money is an achievement in
itself". And if I can sell such a code ( someone said "terrible") I think I
can do good in sales.
Thank you!!
------
wlievens
Congratulations!
Do you have any idea of people might be simply stealing the code? Any way to
prevent that (I guess not)?
~~~
scotty79
Someone who can steal it doesn't need it.
~~~
wlievens
I'm not sure. Is there not a big difference between someone competent enough
to copy-and-paste and integrate javascript snippets, and someone who can write
decent javascript code?
And unfortunately, the difference incrases as you go. For instance, I made a
rotating globe with clickable countries in js/canvas. Took me about 20 hours
to build - including time to pregenerate the globe sprites. I'm pretty sure
there's a vast swath of people who can integrate that code, but lack the skill
and patience to build it.
Would I be able to make some [pocket] money off something like that?
------
grabble
Bounce rate is scary high. You need something to keep them on the page longer.
And congrats on the sale!
~~~
motyar
Yes. I think a long copy can help me on this point. Thank you!
------
rsanchez1
My suggestion: put it on the webOS App Catalog. You'll just need to package it
up and it's ready to go. Easy way to get more money.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Windows could be required to use some Linux apps (Embrace, extend, extinguish) - greatgib
https://twitter.com/greatgib42/status/1262820102300479492
======
greatgib
My comment, copied from the other thread on the same subject:
Here is how I would sum it up:
* They create a new kernel file descriptor: /dev/dxg
* With this, on the Linux of WSL, it is like a direct "pipe" to a Windows host graphical stack.
* So it means that they can put code in Linux application code that will use Windows proprietary graphical stacks, like DirectX through /dev/dxg.
* And so, clearly, this Linux app will not work inside a normal Linux computer that is not a "guest" of Windows.
Now, you can see the "Embrace" and the "Extend"?
And to well understand the article, the following things have to be stressed:
This is not just something to render a Window or something like that, it is a
special "passthrough" api to all the things that are provided by Windows GPU
stack/drivers.
For example, they give the example of Cuda compute API, but also, they kind of
"built" DirectX sdk itself for Linux (debian, ubuntu, ...), but still the
proprietary closed blob that "apps" are expected to use, but that will rely on
/dev/dxg.
Also, if you want to use anything OpenGL on the Linux WSL, they will ensure
that it is translated to DX on Linux side, before going through the same
special DirectX api. The good thing would probably have been to do the
opposite side, ensure that Windows has the proper OpenGL support to be able to
pass gpu acceleration to the Windows host.
------
greatgib
Here is the blog post from Microsoft with all the scary details:
[https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-heart-
linux](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-heart-linux)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Ad Blocking Extensions Tested for Performance - rayshan
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking-extensions-tested-for-best-performance/view-all/
======
emn13
The methodology is questionable on several fronts:
\- you can't use the load event to compare advert-heavy vs. advert-free load
times. The load event does _not_ fire when the page is usable by the viewer,
it fires when every last request is done, in particular even requests fired
from various advert iframes. However, those requests may not impact page
usability. The load event may even never fire - any offscreen 1px spacer gif
that times out will cause that! I don't think there is a built-in event for
"done-enough", but the load event is certainly misleading.
\- opening the developer tools causes various side-effects; those can cause
the page to load more slowly than usual. You shouldn't benchmark with
developer tools open (unless you're explicitly targeting usage with devtools
open...)
\- comparing load times across browsers as reported by the browsers themselves
_may_ be valid, but it's not obvious. You definitely want to check that
carefully.
\- Measuring "peak" CPU usage is almost meaningless without considering how
long the CPU is used.
\- Measuring the chrome extension process CPU usage and memory usage isn't
very helpful, because running this kind of extension causes CPU usage and
memory usage in every content tab. Both of these statistics for chrome in this
use-case are meaningless. You'd need to measure the memory usage and CPU-time
of the entire chrome process tree to get meaningful results. Even in Firefox
without e10s it's not valid to measure just the main process CPU and memory
usage because plugins are in separate processes (and things like flash or h264
decoding can definitely use CPU and memory).
The only thing this page really makes a decent case for is that Chrome loads
pages faster than Firefox - but even there, it's not clear we're dealing with
an apples-to-apples comparison.
~~~
eXpl0it3r
> you can't use the load event to compare advert-heavy vs. advert-free load
> times
I don't see why not. It's exactly what they want to show, how much quicker
pages can load if you don't have to load the ads. And I personally am not
satisfied with a page that has loaded to the extend of usability. Either a
site loads fast or it doesn't.
> opening the developer tools causes various side-effects
As long as it's done for all the tests it should not matter. Whatever "side-
effects" are introduced will be applied for all tests. Of course this means
that the values themselves can't be used to compare the result against other
tests, but the goal here was anyways to compare between the different ad
blocks and not to generate values for general statistics.
~~~
chrismorgan
Some pages will be becoming usable before the DOMContentLoaded event is fired.
Some will become usable shortly after DOMContentLoaded is fired. Some will
become usable when load is fired. Some will become usable several seconds
after that. Some will never become usable. (Cynical aside: the ones with
excessive ads might fit in that classification.) There is no event that
measures _readiness_ of a page, nor can there be; there can only be a
collection of reasonable heuristics.
~~~
logfromblammo
This is where a human with a stopwatch may come in handy. The clock will start
when the page request is sent. Stop the clock when, in your opinion, you think
the page is ready to read. Alternately, if you feel the page is loading too
slowly, and have reached the limit of your patience, press this button
instead.
The event does not have to come from within the vanilla browser, without human
intervention. It could be from a plugin you create to collect human feedback
on load times.
Of course, the human element will significantly decrease the number of trials
you can do within a fixed time period.
~~~
chimeracoder
> Stop the clock when, in your opinion, you think the page is ready to read.
Even that is not enough. A number of sites ( _especially_ ad-heavy sites on
mobile devices) look ready to read, but as soon as you try to scroll, are
jerky and semi-unresponsive. It's particularly a problem on ad-laden sites of
small news publications. Blocking ads sometimes mitigates this, though not
always, as some sites insist on using Javascript to implement "fancy"
scrolling which inevitably breaks.
(Semi-related sidenote: please, for the love of God, _don 't_ use Javascript
to hijack browser scrolling. It's almost certain you will not get it perfectly
right and some users will suffer. It's almost never worth it. This is the #1
reason I end up having to switch to Reader Mode in Firefox).
~~~
logfromblammo
The maybe you stop the clock when the user navigates away from the page. If it
takes 30s to read the content without ad-loading and 40s to read it with ad-
loading, then by subjective user time, the page is 10s slower. That may be
because the ads take 10s to load, or because the distraction causes the user
to read at 75% normal speed, but it's still a measurable result from a single
variable change.
~~~
PhasmaFelis
You're going to get a whole lot of noise in your signal from readers who get
sick of waiting for/looking at the ads and leave early.
------
rockdoe
They didn't seem to know about e10s in Firefox Nightly which would have solved
their "no separate process" thing.
Measuring peak CPU is very, very stupid. The best Ad Blocker should have near
100% CPU but for an extremely short amount of time. Using 100% CPU is making
the most efficient use of the hardware, not being inefficient. Now, I think
due to the way they're measuring, it's actually closer to being average CPU
because task manager samples over a period.
Also: "Firefox didn’t like this page at all and we couldn’t get consistent
readings to run tests, on every refresh the browser would simply not respond
or crash."
Huh? I think somethings wrong there. Firefox obviously renders tmz.com. A bug
in the thing they used to monitor page load times? Did they check the
performance impact of it?
~~~
dingaling
> Using 100% CPU is making the most efficient use of the hardware, not being
> inefficient
Not necessarily with modern processors. A power-managedCPU at 50% clock-speed
actually uses less than half of the power as at 100%.
The relationship of speed to power is not linear, so for a laptop user the
most efficient use of hardware might actually be running one job for twice as
long at half-speed.
~~~
eXpl0it3r
Also if it's really using 100% of the CPU (not just one core), then it will
affect the overall PC experience since it uses up all available resources and
doesn't leave anything for other processes.
I personally dislike it when an application makes my "PC" lag every now and
then. CPU time and RAM are shared resources, thus applications should make
sure to not act selfish unless asked for (e.g. encoding a video, etc).
~~~
zymhan
It's not up to a random application to make sure you have other resources
available, that's your OS's job.
------
aidos
So it looks like about 1/4 of the time spent loading a page these days is
spent on the page and the remaining 3/4 are waiting for ad networks. There's
got to be an opportunity there.
I previously worked at a digital agency and one of my final projects was
building the website for a large TV channel. At one point I had to have a
meeting with the ad network to go through the integration.
The technical people involved didn't know anything about how their products
worked or the implications of integrating them. No idea if they were blocking
or async.
At one point I was trying to understand what, if any, changes I might need to
make to handle their ads that did full background take overs. "No no no, it's
an _expanding mpu_ " \- sure, fine, what does that even mean!?
(Don't get me started on having to swap using js for switching images in the
gallery for using individual pages because the onmiture page tracking numbers
were the metric that everything was measured by for selling ad space)
/rant
You'd think with all the smart people that have put their minds to ads on the
internet, there would be lightning fast, targeted ads that actually worked by
now.
~~~
manigandham
I've worked on lots of ad networks and am now building my own. The sad fact is
that most ad companies are not built by top engineers. It's an industry that
has lots of shady international players with lots of fraud and politics. Even
when there is good code, it's all usually focused on the backend with no
thought about the end user experience. Add to that both buyers and salespeople
who are clueless about technical details and this is what happens.
~~~
Fiahil
> The sad fact is that most ad companies are not built by top engineers.
This is an interesting thought. Working in a environment close to
advertisement (travel recommendation engine), I have a few possible
explanations on that.
\- First, working in with a product that have no (or close to) added value for
end users can be very bothering, and top engineers care about doing useful
things.
\- Second, to design a fast, simple and honest ad network you must fight your
own business/marketing team (because they always want more data, higher _click
through rate_ , etc). Since they have most of the power here, they end up
hiring more diligent engineers who won't argue about privacy, curated content
and other stuff.
\- Third, top engineers are working in ad companies, and secretly conspire to
make the whole system collapse from the inside.
~~~
manigandham
Ad companies are not typically considered "sexy". This is just an image
problem because few industries drop you into such massive scale and
engineering challenges from day 1. There is a lot of cool stuff to build.
It's not necessary to get computer science geniuses for this, and frankly I
need people who get stuff done rather than trying to save the world through
code. But the talent has been subpar because most of the companies outside of
the top few (google, facebook, twitter) are smaller and not tech driven. They
just pick up whoever can code up some simple server and get an ad on the page.
Add in all the shady companies and it gets worse. Optimizing for the user just
hasn't been a requirement.
We have a honest and fast ad network, probably the best you'll find. Quick,
simple, static ads that are non-intrusive. And we actually perform quite well.
It's not somehow at odds with the model, it's just harder... the question is,
who's willing to work harder at this?
------
Fiahil
Sure it's a nice test, and gives a keen idea of how much performance you can
grab by using uBlock Origin.
However, what about pages _without_ ads? Am I going to experience a
significant performance hit when running an adblocker on genuine websites?
This is important. Because, assuming the advertising industry is going to
self-destruct tomorrow morning, am I going to experience a slower web if I let
my add-on activated, and thus letting an opportunity for the ads to reappear
later?
~~~
bhouston
uBlock Origin seems pretty comparable to most of the other adblockers with the
exception of the pretty horrible AdBlock Plus.
------
mnw21cam
Would be interesting to have tested using a hosts file (like from
[http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/) )
instead of an ad blocker. Seems to work very well for me, and it doesn't cause
the browser to use loads of RAM.
~~~
huuu
I'm not sure: isn't it faster to just refuse the request than directing it to
localhost and waiting for a time out?
~~~
jlgaddis
As long as you don't have a firewall blocking traffic to/from localhost, the
TCP connection will be reset almost immediately (assuming you don't have an
httpd running on port 80) so you won't have to wait for a timeout.
------
malchow
In reality, people want a page that becomes _usable_ as quickly as possible.
Specifically, people use hovers and scrolling to test that a given page is
'ready.'
That is very different from a page that fires DOMContentLoaded as quickly as
possible. That metric is pretty much irrelevant to real people.
Which is part of why ads aren't quite as nasty as a lot of tech industry
people make out.
~~~
degenerate
When I start scrolling and the page seems ready to use, and then ads start
popping in late and breaking the document flow in the first few seconds - _you
better believe I 'm blocking them on your site_.
~~~
malchow
I quite agree. There's no excuse for that. Although most of the time it isn't
the fault of the website or publisher, but rather of an adtech partner.
~~~
manigandham
It's both. It's a shared execution and the publishers haven't really put the
work in either.
Check how well [http://www.theguardian.com/](http://www.theguardian.com/)
loads and you can see that it's perfect possibly to have plenty of ads while
still having a great reading experience.
~~~
malchow
Do you know what their architecture is? It is fast.
~~~
manigandham
Some details here: [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/developer-
blog/2014/de...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/developer-
blog/2014/dec/29/what-is-the-guardians-tech-stack)
It's not really the backend that matters, these days its the front-end setup
that makes the biggest difference. Less javascript, less huge unnecessary
images, less "interactive" crap and streamlining the loading of content first
then ads async can make a site load pretty quick. They also style the ad slot
dimensions (since all banners are standard sizes) which keeps the content from
moving around when an ad does load.
Its just simple effective optimizations, something that should be done but for
some combination of bad talent, bad management and poor priorities, just isnt.
------
jmnicolas
I heard about µblock origin on HN and blindly trusted the positive comments.
Glad to see my trust was well deserved, thank you all.
------
taspeotis
I've found uBlock Origin increases memory usage heavily on
[https://vimcolorschemetest.googlecode.com/svn/html/index-c.h...](https://vimcolorschemetest.googlecode.com/svn/html/index-c.html)
~~~
asdfaoeu
To be fair that page has 430 iframes. I'd say that's fairly atypical.
~~~
the8472
Atypical? Amazon does (did?) heavily use some <iframe>/<object> trickery to
preload resources.
------
rocky1138
I would have really liked to have seen an ad-reduced hosts file compared to
these in-browser blockers.
[http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt](http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt)
------
jackgavigan
At the end of last year, I spent a while working with an adtech firm, helping
them figure out their product strategy. They all use Ghostery and I started
using it too. Subjectively, my web-browsing experience improved massively,
particularly page load times. It's nice to see that experience borne out by
objective testing.
I often think that companies like Ghostery are missing a trick by not
advertising themselves as a method of speeding up your internet connection
because that's really what it does.
~~~
XzetaU8
"Ghostery, NoScript.. add-ons frequently phone home"
[https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2015-A...](https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2015-April/015236.html)
~~~
stingraycharles
Well yeah, because Ghostery is a product of Evidon, which helps adtech
businesses to get visitors to opt-in to tracking. It's a clever strategy,
because they give valuable feedback about which ads and trackers are blocked
for which reasons. If you can't beat them, outcompete them!
(I worked as CTO of an adserving platform and had to reject sales calls from
Evidon on an almost monthly basis)
------
jakeogh
Lowest overhead: Disable JS (add it to a hotkey) and use DNS level filtering:
[https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsmasq-
blacklist](https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsmasq-blacklist)
With surf+tabbed, each tab is it's own process, so you can enable and disable
JS and or plugins per page.
------
tim333
Next we need to find the best blocker cocktail. I use uBlock Origin, Ghostery
and Flashcontrol on Chrome. Bit over the top possibly - can take a bit of
trial an error to see what's blocking the thing if something you want doesn't
load.
~~~
jdmichal
Have you tried uMatrix? If you have, I'm curious how you think it compares to
your current mix.
~~~
the8472
seconded, for people who want to sacrifice some convenience for control
µmatrix may be a better choice.
------
teaneedz
Why is uBlock somewhat frowned upon here on HN? From what I've seen published
it's still a good solution - works well for me. I thought the original
developer gave up the project and was being rather difficult about the whole
thing.
~~~
rockdoe
He came back and has been improving it actively, and wasn't too happy about
technical decisions in the fork.
------
sandworm101
Forgetting the accuracy of the OP, I cannot be the only one who doesn't care
in the least that adblockers slow load times. Between my ISP's shoddy service,
the popups and distracting animations adblockers stop, the net effect is a
faster overall experience. A few seconds on page load is a fair price to pay
for the increased privacy and security.
------
amelius
Are there any ad-blockers out there that also block Google ads (inline in
websites, and also on top of search results)?
~~~
asdfaoeu
uBlock Origin does, though I'm pretty sure all do.
------
andor
A much overlooked alternative to installing sketchy addons is to simply
disable Javascript by default.
~~~
dtech
This also breaks 95% of the web
~~~
andor
You're spreading FUD. Disabling Javascript _by default_ is one of the easiest
ways to reduce browser attack surface, improve page load times and to remove
the most annoying ads. The vast majority of pages work (to some degree)
without scripts.
If you really need scripting on a page, _it 's very uncomplicated to add an
exception in Chrome_: just click the "Javascript blocked" icon in the address
bar, and choose "Always allow Javascript on example.com".
~~~
chimeracoder
> improve page load times and to remove the most annoying ads. The vast
> majority of pages work (to some degree) without scripts.
In my experience using NoScript for the past year on all my desktops and
laptops, this is at best only partly true.
Load times do definitely decrease, but this is dwarfed by the effect of having
to reload the page for most new sites after re-enabling Javascript (since so
many sites are unusable without Javascript[0]). In the end, it's a much slower
experience browsing the web, not faster, and even with aggressive
whitelisting, it's still rather frustrating.
I actually have separate Firefox profiles that I use for various websites that
tend to be particularly problematic with extensions (like online banking), so
I'm not even including those in this summary.
I wish using NoScript provided a faster browsing experience overall while
providing better security, but the simple fact remains that right now, it does
not. It provides better security at the expense of slowing down your browsing
experience.
[0] So many static blogs now literally fail to display static text without
Javascript!
~~~
nske
Sadly, that's true. I'm wondering how many feel that this is not a good
direction where things are going -or if it's just me being "old".
Why would someone want to use javascript on the client-side for things where
it's not necessary?
Year after year, the browser and the web are turning into "something else",
and while the possibilities are exciting, it seems the use cases where
javascript is used for things that actually make a positive difference, are
vastly outnumbered by the cases where it is used to re-implement in a more
flashy, complex and resource-intensive way things that have been usable,
performant and functional, 10 years ago.
IMO displaying content should be done just by HTML, using javascript if it's
not to provide _useful_ functionality, is wrong.
Whether it is browser HTML/CSS incompatibilities, flash atrocities or complex
script bloat, it seems the popular web always manages to fix one problem and
create another.
------
scrollaway
blogspam, stop upvoting this please.
~~~
dang
Is that fair? The article looks a bit spammy, but seems to be an actual test
not copied from elsewhere.
~~~
mcintyre1994
The article's solid and substantial, it's the first I've seen to quantify the
effect of ABP's acceptable ads policy. Also they have a view all button that
works.
------
the-dude
One of my pet projects is 'wijVrij', a cheap TP-Link router with OpenWRT and a
bootup-script which installs the winhelp2002 hosts file.
Works wonders on all your devices. [https://wijvrij.nl](https://wijvrij.nl) (
dutch )
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Not All Queues Compose - bothra90
https://www.notion.so/whole-sum-parts-099504c4e4234b55b9d5189704ff3fc8?p=9c2bfcf2910f46ceae4af6ba4fada83b
======
brudgers
Traditionally, last-in-first-out data structures are called "stacks" to
distinguish them from queues. In this tradition, "queue" only refers to first-
in-first-out data structures.
~~~
bothra90
Point taken, though I like to think of stacks as one of many ways of
implementing LIFO behavior.
~~~
brudgers
I used "stack" to name the LIFO logic sequence not an implementation idiom.
Linked list, pointer into sequential memory array, or restaurant plates have a
congruent dimension that "stack" abstracts over within the ordinary computing
tradition.
To me, your observation of the non-composability of stacks seems related to
the ability of push-down automata and turing machines to compute more complex
inputs than the finite automata (and equivalents).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automata_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automata_theory)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Intel caught with misleading marketing for its latest chips by TheVerge - mtgx
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/9/3856050/intel-candid-explains-misleading-7w-ivy-bridge-marketing
======
CyberFonic
Looks like ARM is getting to Intel!
When a company resorts to gimmicks to make its products looking better than
their main competitor, you know they're in real trouble.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Quixotry - my multiplayer word game - joelanman
http://playquixotry.com/
======
molsongolden
Would it be difficult to make the game keyboard responsive? Cool stuff other
than that.
~~~
joelanman
It's on the to-do list, thanks for playing!
------
joelanman
It uses node.js and socket.io in the back end, html/js/css front end. It works
pretty well on ipad, and ok on iphone/android (wifi).
Everyone plays in the same 'room' - simply send your friends the url to play
against them.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What are some high-impact books on leadership you've read? - yogrish
======
evolve2k
5 Dysfunctions of a Team (a leadership fable) as well as the related leaders
field guide to help you run a strategic weekend offsite are both amazing.
[http://www.betterworldbooks.com/Five-dysfunctions-of-a-
team-...](http://www.betterworldbooks.com/Five-dysfunctions-of-a-
team-H0.aspx?SearchTerm=Five+dysfunctions+of+a+team) [non affiliate link]
------
gargarplex
_21 Laws of Leadership_ has some good nuggets.
------
thornkin
Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Renaming files with mv without typing the name two times - premek
https://gist.github.com/premek/6e70446cfc913d3c929d7cdbfe896fef
======
kelnos
Something like this isn't really necessary. I do something like this (bash)
all the time when I want to change a part of a filename (renames "foo-bar-
baz.txt" to "foo-bar-quux.txt"):
mv foo-bar-{baz,quux}.txt
You can have an 'empty' bit to add or remove something from the name (renames
"foo-bar.txt" to "foo-bar-baz.txt"):
mv foo-bar{,-baz}.txt
That will work with pathname parts as well (as in the linked demo video) if
you include them in the command.
I guess the linked script is useful if you need to do some complex edits to
the filename, since you can't usefully have more than one curly-brace-group
for this use case. But in that case honestly I'm fine just double-clicking the
first argument to select, and then middle-clicking to paste, and then using
the arrow keys to edit.
~~~
naikrovek
I love/hate comments like yours.
You have technical knowledge applicable to the problem, and you share it. I
love that.
You miss an important feature of the solution shown in (I presume) your rush
to demonstrate your bash knowledge: the ability to edit a filename shown, in
place. Brace expansion doesn't do that, doesn't show you the new filename
_before you commit the name change_ and isn't even close to interactive. This
part is less great.
> Something like this isn't really necessary.
It may very well be necessary for someone else.
~~~
Godel_unicode
Not at all, you're just not thinking the solution all the way through. If you
want to see the results, an echo gets you there.
The important point though, is that one of the solutions moves you closer to a
common language with other posix users, and one moves you farther away. If you
use the tools the way they're intended to be used (brace expansion, for
example), you'll recognize it when other people use it. You'll understand
similar brace expansions in other commands you see others craft. You won't
need to remember if that shell you sudo'd into uses your override or not. The
reasons go on forever.
It really isn't necessary. That's not to say someone can't think of a reason
for it, but rather that there are better ways to do what it does.
~~~
titzer
For the OP's sake, I hope they completely ignore your advice.
Customize your environment to what makes you the most efficient. Yeah, sure.
Learn to use all the things that are there and understand what others do. But
_customize your environment to what makes you the most efficient_. This is an
interactive command. It's not like they are going to foist it onto everyone
else (which is the true sin, IMHO).
~~~
bb88
Changing the default behavior of a standard posix command is a footgun. It
would have been better to rename it.
~~~
Certhas
That's a valid constructive critique.
The people who are saying it's not necessary because they prefer alternative
ways of interacting with their machine are not arguing that though. The bit
the parent replied to was actually claiming that there is no valid reason to
do things this way (with a minor bash script) because there are other ways
(slightly mysterious curly braces hacks) that do something similar in some
cases... which is just, bizarre?
~~~
kd5bjo
'Godel_unicode > That's not to say someone can't think of a reason for it, but
rather that there are better ways to do what it does.
'Certhas > The bit the parent replied to was actually claiming that there is
no valid reason to do things this way … because there are other ways … that do
something similar
It appears to me that you're reading more into 'Godel_unicode's comment than
was written. Something not being necessary does not preclude it being useful,
and I haven't seen anyone imply otherwise except for you¹. Working through the
double-negative, 'Godel_unicode even explicitly acknowledges that some people
may have a reason to do things this way, despite their opinion that it's
inferior to their method.
¹ I haven't studied the entire thread, so it's likely I've missed someone's
comments.
~~~
Certhas
I read it as: You can think for a reason to do X but doing Y is strictly
better, so your reason is invalid.
I'm pretty sure what the comment doesn't say, also in tone, is something like:
Here are two options, X and Y, sometimes you might prefer one, sometimes the
other. Specifically look at the comment that Godel_unicode is disagreeing
with. That comment points out that some people might prefer the other solution
X for their own reason.
The way I read it, Godel_unicode replies that the person who is not using Y is
"not thinking things through", and is ignoring infinitely many reasons ("The
reasons go on forever.") to do Y. Even though you can come up with "a reason"
for X the infinitely many reasons for Y clearly beat it, and thus Y is just
objectively better.
Maybe the comment was intended more charitably than I read it.
~~~
kelnos
> _I read it as: You can think for a reason to do X but doing Y is strictly
> better, so your reason is invalid._
I think that's a much more strongly-negative interpretation than the text as
written calls for. My original post was nothing of the sort, and the reply I
think you're referring to was -- to me -- a nudge toward just simply realizing
that the standard tools that already exist are often much more powerful than
we think, and we can usually get 90+% of the way there without doing something
custom. And the 10% remaining isn't usually worth doing something non-standard
unless you have a very niche use.
------
kazinator
To make two copies of the last argument, so you can edit one of them in place,
in Bash (or anything that uses GNU Readlne), simply do this:
$ mv oldname _ # _ is your cursor
Now type Ctrl-W to erase the last word:
$ mv _
Then type Ctrl-Y twice to yank it:
$ mv oldname oldname _
Now edit in place as needed.
No utility needed, and just a regular mv command is issued whose inputs are
completely recorded in the history.
Now,let's automate that. Add this line to ~/.inputrc:
# ~/.inputrc entry
\C-T: " \C-W\C-Y\C-Y\b"
Reload with
$ bind -f ~/.inputrc
Now Ctrl-T does it:
$ mv oldname_
Hit Ctrl-T
$ mv oldname oldname_
How about having Ctrl-T end up on the first character of the name?
# ~/.inputrc entry
\C-T: " \C-W\C-Y\C-Y\b\eb"
~~~
amelius
Doesn't work if the filename contains spaces:
# mv "Foo bar" _
~~~
switch007
Ctrl-A, Alt-F, Ctrl-F, Ctrl-K, Ctrl-Y, Ctrl-Y
:D
~~~
kazinator
Ctrl-W Ctrl-W Ctrl-Y Ctrl-Y will work.
------
jacobsenscott
All the "something like this isn't really necessary, just memorize all the
esoteric bash globbing rules" posts are so far off, given the solutions in all
those posts aren't really necessary either. It is nice not to need to "pre-
think" how you are going to type your `mv` command. You just start typing it,
and when you realize it will be a bit complex you just hit enter and you have
an editor.
~~~
bspammer
A good compromise to me seems to be using `imv` from the renameutils package
which is pretty much exactly the same as the OP. That way you don't get
confused by different `mv` behaviour on different systems.
Hitting `<Ctrl-a>i` seems to me a small price to pay :)
------
barrkel
Any time renaming gets more complicated than (a) bash curly braces or (b)
rename command (Perl script that applies sed expression to each file name), I
break out Emacs wdired.
Then you can use all the Emacs tools to perform a mass edit across multiple
file names, and get them right before committing to the rename. Multiple
cursors makes a great addition, as does iedit-mode.
~~~
sdegutis
Multiple cursors plus C-x C-q on a dired buffer is amazingly powerful: you
literally just make changes to the lines in the buffer and run C-c C-c to
commit them, or C-c C-k to cancel. I've used this for very powerful mass-
renames before. (I imagine it also works for deleting files by removing that
line but never needed to try it before.)
~~~
ashton314
I use Emacs inside iTerm2. (i.e. `emacs -nw`) Do you know if the multiple
cursors package (which I just found today thanks to your comment) works with
that? Or is it only in the native windowed version?
~~~
sdegutis
It works with terminal-based emacs too. It just inverses the background color
of cells to fake the extra cursors.
~~~
ashton314
That is a glorious hack. Thanks! I'll try it out for a spin!
------
JoshTriplett
You can also hit Ctrl-x Ctrl-e to edit the command line in your preferred text
editor, and run it when saved and closed in the editor. So you can type the
mv, tab-complete the current filename, and use the editor for the new
filename.
~~~
JadeNB
> You can also hit Ctrl-x Ctrl-e to edit the command line in your preferred
> text editor, and run it when saved and closed in the editor. So you can type
> the mv, tab-complete the current filename, and use the editor for the new
> filename.
This doesn't seem to work in readline's vi mode. Do you know the equivalent
there? EDIT: Ah, kesor points out elsewhere
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22861894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22861894))
that it's just 'v' in normal mode.
~~~
JoshTriplett
You can also bind "edit-and-execute-command" to another key in your ~/.inputrc
.
------
bb88
Graybeard here (never thought I'd say that). 25 years of unix/linux in
production systems.
Changing the default behavior of a posix command is a footgun.
If I wanted to get help from mv:
$ mv --help
Usage: file [OPTION...] [FILE...]
Determine type of FILEs.
I get the help for the file command.
~~~
pwagland
And this is _exactly_ why, although this is cool, it would have been cooler
had it been renamed to, for example, `imv` (aka the name from the rename tools
project ;-) )
------
test1235
I can't remember where it was I read (saw this years ago), but the way to
actually get help online isn't to ask a question 'cos nobody responds ... you
have to propose an incorrect solution where suddenly everyone jumps up to
correct you with the answer you're looking for.
~~~
class4behavior
Cunningham's Law
~~~
pwagland
This is the correct answer, however the question was obviously misstated. They
_should_ have stated that the answer was something else. :-)
~~~
test1235
I can't believe I missed that opportunity!!
------
lopsidedBrain
My trick has always been to rely on tab auto-completion.
mv foo-<tab>
mv foo-bar-baz foo-<tab>
mv foo-bar-baz foo-bar-baz
Now I can edit the second part pretty quickly.
Downside: you have to at least type `foo-` twice.
Upside: command line history still has the full command.
~~~
loeg
Tab-completion is somewhat obnoxious in directories with lots of files sharing
a common prefix, for example.
Also, if you accidentally tab-complete the same file for output and input,
depending on how clever the program is, you may end up deleting the source
file.
~~~
saagarjha
I’ve done
gcc foo.c -o foo.c
far too many times :(
~~~
loeg
Seems like gcc should be smart enough to reject that mistake nowadays, right?!
~~~
saagarjha
I should write a shell frontend to gcc to warn if I do this…
------
kemitchell
`qmv`, `imv`, `qcp`, `icp`, and friends from the `renameutils` package come in
handy. I use `qmv -f do ...` with `EDITOR=vim` quite a bit.
~~~
roryokane
Link:
[https://www.nongnu.org/renameutils/](https://www.nongnu.org/renameutils/)
On macOS with Homebrew, install with `brew install renameutils`.
------
Symbiote
Zsh users can instead add this to their .zshrc:
autoload copy-earlier-word
zle -N copy-earlier-word
bindkey '^[,' copy-earlier-word
Then it's the default Alt-dot to copy the final argument of the previous
command, and Alt-comma to copy the final argument of the current command. The
move command is then "mv filename <Alt-Comma>".
Also, given this:
echo 1 2 3
echo 4 5 6
echo 7 8 9
Then on the next command, Alt-dot will copy/replace 9→6→3. Pressing Alt-comma
after Alt-dot will replace that with 8→7→echo.
~~~
nerdponx
Alternatively you can use ZMV
[http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/User-
Contributions.ht...](http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/User-
Contributions.html#index-zmv)
[https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/19291/73256](https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/19291/73256)
------
l8again
This is one of those times when I just love coming to hacker news. Seemingly
trivial quality of life improvement makes it to the top and the comments
section is lit up with several other cool alternatives.
------
BiteCode_dev
I think it's very nice, and should be the default behavior. Ergonomics of GNU
tooling is lacking to say the least. That's why we love fdfind and ripgrep and
love find/grep way less.
I would use it if it were the default behavior, but the problem is already
solved by the "moreutils" package, which I install on all my machines. This
lets you do:
vidir filename
or
vidir directory # default to .
And it will open your $EDITOR with one file name per line. You edit it in the
comfort of your favorite editor, and it batch renames for you, or rename the
single file for the first case.
Note that if you use vscode, $EDITOR should be "code -w", not just "code".
------
baby
For things like this, I don’t understand why we don’t have more interactive
CLIs, instead of CLIs that expect one line of a bunch of arguments.
~~~
fl0wenol
Because it's the shell itself that gets the focus for the interactivity. You
use generic suggestions (as listed elsewhere in this thread) to do things like
tab-completion, substituting in previously used arguments, copying the last
thing you typed, etc. but they work across commands.
------
gitgud
If you rename the 'mv' command, won't this break a lot of things relying on
it?
~~~
downerending
Several distros unfortunately include 'mv' and 'cp' aliases by default. To get
predictable behavior on the command line, always use '\mv' and '\cp'. (for
bash)
~~~
JadeNB
I didn't know that! Why does it work?
~~~
downerending
The backslash basically means "ignore any aliases or functions by the same
name, and run the first matching command in my $PATH instead".
One reason for providing this is so that you can have an alias like
alias mv '\mv -=myfavoritearg '
but it's also good for ensuring that you didn't pick up some distro nonsense.
~~~
JadeNB
Thanks! So '\' is special cased here—it's not some specific manifestation of a
more general phenomenon of specialised escape-handling in the shell?
~~~
a1369209993
> So '\' is special cased here
No; quoting any part of the command name prevents alias expansion. Eg 'mv',
"mv", 'm'v, m\v, etc all work.
------
reality101
type file then ctrl-a mv then ctrl-k ctrl-y space ctrl-y change file name
enter.
~~~
premek
nice, I didn't know about this
~~~
RMPR
Those keybindings belong to GNU readline
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Readline](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Readline)
------
zwischenzug
I posted about some 'God-like' bash shortcuts here:
[https://zwischenzugs.com/2019/08/25/seven-god-like-bash-
hist...](https://zwischenzugs.com/2019/08/25/seven-god-like-bash-history-
shortcuts-you-will-actually-use/)
Number 6 was a 'refer to current line' one.
There are so many ways to do these things that it's hard to get them all under
your fingers though. Most of the time I tab my way through the 'problem'
anyway.
------
Sierra-Sam
Here is my take on part of the problem.
https://github.com/Guy-Shaw/libmmv
https://github.com/Guy-Shaw/pmmv
The original perl-rename has the expressive power, but not the safety
features. mmv has been around since 1990 and, in my opinion, has always been
under-appreciated, but it could use some modernization.
------
ara24
As has already been said, bash brace expansion is quite powerful. It has many
usecases, such as,
diff file{.original,}
mkdir -p path/{a,b,c}/folder
for i in image{001..060}; do echo $i; done
Parameter Expansion is also equally useful, like changing a few characters in
long names,
mv ${i}.png ${i/imaeg/image}.png
------
qsdf38100
Nice, feels like Windows File Explorer ;D
~~~
lucb1e
And nemo, caja, nautilus, finder, thunar, simple file manager, dolphin,
konqueror...?
There are more graphical environments than just Windows' built-in :|
------
idoubtit
I use zsh's function _copy-prev-shell-word_. You can bind it to some key, e.g.
alt-m with `bindkey "^[m" copy-prev-shell-word`. Use _ctrl-v shortcut_ for
another key.
For instance, adding a suffix to a file name: mv myfile _alt-m_.suffix
~~~
mkl
mv myfile{,.suffix} seems easier and more general, and doesn't need zsh.
------
lottin
You can accomplish the same with basic editing commands, e.g.
mv <filename> C-M-b C-k C-y C-y
It may seem overly complicated but notice that you don't have to release the
control key, so it's actually very few key strokes.
~~~
outworlder
You can also do control+x control+e to send the command line to your
editor(whatever $EDITOR points to).
~~~
RMPR
On short commands, it tends to be slow in comparison of using GNU Readline
directly
------
dejj
Links for mass moving mentioned in the page:
\- 2018:
[https://github.com/lgommans/vinamer](https://github.com/lgommans/vinamer) \-
2017: [https://github.com/thameera/vimv](https://github.com/thameera/vimv) \-
2017:
[https://github.com/abaldwin88/roamer](https://github.com/abaldwin88/roamer)
\- 2006:
[https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/](https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/) ,
`vidir`
------
asamarin
The latest addition to my renaming-toolbelt has been `perl-rename'. This thing
is just wonderful: I can unleash all the power of perl-based regexes to rename
things in bulk.
Case in point: I had a directory containing thousands of .jpg images imported
from a foreign filesystem, and all of those files had tildes in them,
something like:
$ ls -1
EL+�CTRICO_0001.jpg
EL+�CTRICO_0002.jpg
EL+�CTRICO_0003.jpg
...
You get the idea; note those ugly unrepresentable characters over there. On
the original filesystem they read as "ELÉCTRICO", but that tilde was saved
using who knows what encoding, and I simply wanted to get rid of them and have
nice ascii "ELECTRICO_xxxx.jpg" files. After finding out that the strange
unrepresentable character was the byte 0xEB (so, in order to form an "É" you
needed those two characters together: a literal '+' and 0xEB), I could do the
bulk renaming with just:
$ perl-rename 's/\+\xeb/E/' *.jpg
Felt so good!
------
alexellisuk
For faas-cli-darwin -> faas-cli, I just do `mv faas-cli{-darwin,}` or `faas-
cli.tgz` -> `faas-cli.tar.gz` -> `mv faas-cli faas-cli.{tgz,tar.gz}`
This rarely saves me any time, but it's a nice hack to know about.
------
globular-toast
I discovered the `rename` command surprisingly late in my career. You could
write something like this: `rename .htm .html index.htm`. The nice thing is it
works for any number of files at once (you could put a glob on the right, for
example).
Oddly I just checked my Ubuntu machine and it had the man page for rename but
not the command. After being prompted to install it it installed a completely
different perl command and upon removing that the original manpage was gone.
Very strange.
------
dnr
Here's my contribution to this useful class of scripts:
[http://dnr.im/tech/articles/mvdir/](http://dnr.im/tech/articles/mvdir/)
[https://bitbucket.org/davidn/mvdir/src/default/mvdir](https://bitbucket.org/davidn/mvdir/src/default/mvdir)
Similar to vidir, but predates it by a few years. I still use it regularly!
------
anthk
I just use vidir(1) an ed(1), I'm lazy :).
~~~
lucb1e
For those like me who don't know it, in Debian vidir is in the "moreutils"
package. As the name hints, its purpose is to "edit a directory in your text
editor".
------
reanimus
This is a nice alternative to using curly braces, especially when the changes
aren't simple substitutions :D
~~~
Twisell
Most people are bragging about braces while OP commented about that. It's
especially useful for multiple alterations.
------
yakshaving_jgt
Renaming a single file is not very interesting. Renaming a whole bunch of
files is much more interesting, and when I need to do that, I use vimv[0].
[0]: [https://github.com/thameera/vimv](https://github.com/thameera/vimv)
~~~
premek
I rename a single file much more often
------
lkuty
That's why I love HN comments. Always learning a lot of stuff and regularly
the comments are more interesting than the original post itself. This is the
case for this one I think. Or at least a nice complement.
------
rurban
Always surprising to hear of people not knowing the basic readline key
assignments.
Ctrl-w Ctrl-y Ctrl-y is still easiest for single files, rename for multiple.
------
inopinatus
For an interactive edit I just use <ESC>-. to repeat the last parameter:
ls foo.txt
mv <ESC>-. <ESC>-. # and edit
~~~
mrb
Yup, readline's yank-last-arg command Alt-. or Alt-_ (see
[https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Commands-...](https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Commands-
For-History.html#Commands-For-History)) is the best off-the-shelf solution
that still gives the ability to interactively edit the filename. To minimize
the total number of key strokes I would suggest:
mv foo.txt
↑
Alt-.
That is: intentionally run mv with only one argument (the command fails but is
recorded in the history), Up arrow to recall the last command, and Alt-dot
(pastes the last argument).
This is literally replacing an entire shell script with two key strokes (Up,
Alt-.)
~~~
sigjuice
What version of bash do you use? I can't seem to get this to work with mine.
For me, Alt-. gets the last argument of the penultimate command.
$ echo $BASH_VERSION
5.0.11(1)-release
$ mv foo.txt
mv: missing destination file operand after 'foo.txt'
Try 'mv --help' for more information.
$ mv foo.txt $BASH_VERSION # Alt-. pasted $BASH_VERSION instead of foo.txt
------
bobowzki
"without typing the name two times"
Is that pun intentional? It's hilarious.
------
bmn__
`prename` is a thing; much more ergonomic than the solution in the article:
$ prename '$_=lc; s/jpeg/jpg/' IMG0001.jpeg
### IMG0001.jpeg → img0001.jpg
This is probably the most reimplemented program I use, seven times last time I
counted.
~~~
shawnz
This doesn't seem more ergonomic to me, and also it is not the same solution
(OP also inserted a dash in the filename)
------
pvaldes
or... you can do this
mmv '<asterisk>foo<asterisk>' '#1bar#2'
where <asterisk> is the common symbol (Will not appear in HN)
------
matthewhartmans
I think this is really neat! Well done OP! :)
------
calvinmorrison
Shout out to visit(1) for lots of renames
------
xixixao
This post and the comments here show what a poor UI the command line is (by
default).
~~~
jpxw
It’s trivial to enable vim mode in most modern shells, which solves most of
these issues
~~~
kesor
And in `vi` mode it is as simple as hitting `v` to edit any command to your
liking before executing it.
------
sashavingardt2
Why is this at the top of HN?
~~~
wondringaloud
I've been asking myself that question more and more. It seems HN has been
slowly becoming a Reddit-lite. There are significantly more low-quality
"thanks! this is great!" comments and "witty" one-liners everywhere.
Not to mention posts like these.
~~~
dang
People have been saying this since before Startup News was renamed to Hacker
News in 2007:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852)
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=turning%20%22into%20reddit%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)
More here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21755721](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21755721)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
On HTML 5 Drag and Drop - mgcreed
http://www.alertdebugging.com/2009/08/16/on-html-5-drag-and-drop/
======
adamhowell
This is a case where I think it would've been good to edit the title.
This post is about how they used HTML5 to enable drag and drop between browser
windows. Pretty nifty.
------
puredemo
Great preview of an upcoming feature. But how long will it be before this will
be able to go into production as relatively bug free? Years?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Surviving the SSHpocolypse - Kenan
https://github.com/blog/1212-surviving-the-sshpocolypse
======
akira2501
Maybe I'm missing something, but why would you patch SSH instead of just using
something like pam_mysql and nscd?
~~~
kijin
Previous, but still inconclusive, discussion about the same matter:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=895072>
------
viraptor
It's not clear from the post if they're still using a custom patch. It looks
like the fairly new option AuthorizedKeysCommand could save them some work,
since you can plug in an arbitrary external script that way.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Googie Architecture - spking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googie_architecture
======
scott31
Will probably be discontinued in 2 years
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
HIDDEN FIGURES - ymgch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK8xHq6dfAo
======
ymgch
HIDDEN FIGURES is the incredible untold story of Katherine G. Johnson (Taraji
P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle
Monáe)—brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served as the
brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of
astronaut John Glenn into orbit, a stunning achievement that restored the
nation’s confidence, turned around the Space Race, and galvanized the world.
The visionary trio crossed all gender and race lines to inspire generations to
dream big.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Creating the innocent killer - mlevental
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm
www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm
======
brudgers
clickable,
[http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm](http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm)
~~~
mlevental
oh man how the hell did i mess that up
~~~
dang
We've fixed it for you. Actually our software would normally have fixed it for
you, but www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm as a URL confused it. Maybe it
was the "www4".
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
MapReduce II (followup to "MapReduce: A major step backwards") - neilc
http://www.databasecolumn.com/2008/01/mapreduce-continued.html
======
jimbokun
This is the article they should have written in the first place. Much more
detail, much better qualified arguments. And the point about each generation
of computer scientists reinventing the wheel. Lisp being 50 years old and all
that.
------
apathy
> efforts such as PigLatin and Sawzall appear to be promising steps in this
> direction.
Sawzall is a parallel logfile analyzer. It takes logfiles stored into GFS and
MapReduces them for reliable billing (which used to be a nightmarish,
fundamental revenue problem and is now a nonissue -- all you Nooglers live in
a relative utopia). A unixy tool with a unixy mindset (gee, maybe that's
because Rob Pike wrote it). It's a special-purpose tool that is incredibly
good at its job, not a general-purpose filigreed hammer that is supposed to
nail everything in sight. And the fact that the authors could possibly
overlook this speaks volumes about their myopia.
Stonebraker naturally refused to answer the most obvious criticism of all --
_HEY ASSHOLE, WHAT ABOUT BIGTABLE?_
But then, if he addressed that, he'd no longer have an essay. And if Google
took his advice they wouldn't have the revenues to have made it as a company.
But that's not really something that academics think about, is it?
------
neilk
This is worse than the first article.
They seem to be conflating the use of a high-level, SQL-like language with the
architecture of the system. Of course you could layer a SQL-like language on
top of a MapReduce-based storage and processing array, and for some queries
that would be very user-friendly. If that is their whole point it is true but
trivial.
I think BigTable does have a limited join capability now.
The real difference between a MapReduce-oriented system and typical SQL
storage options is something like this. MR gives you assured scalability at
the cost of limiting what kinds of queries you can do, and as the authors
correctly point out, some queries get more and more onerous to create.
Usually, SQL storage engines place ease of querying above all else, but have
to go through painful and expensive procedures to scale well.
------
jimm
Upmodded, but I chuckled when I read their first item where they take an
obviously relational data problem then observe that you should use a
relational database instead of MapReduce for it. From that, they claim RDBM is
better.
~~~
ntoshev
I believe BigTable implements the kind of indexing they like.
Re the point of scalability; while we don't really know how well MapReduce
scales, usage at Google provides good hints that it does so well. Further, I
don't think relational databases scale linearly either, and it is notoriously
difficult to implement large DB clusters.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
UK Wind farms outstrip nuclear power - RobAley
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29715796
======
NickPollard
Relevant quotes:
* The energy network operator said it was caused by a combination of high winds and faults in nuclear plants. * The situation is caused by windy conditions boosting the output from turbines at a time when eight out of the UK's 15 nuclear reactors are offline.
Wind power is a helpful boost, but it's not fair to say it outstrips nuclear
when it's only for small specific periods of time with high wind, when half
the nuclear plants are down for maintenance.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Demand Media (Richard Rosenblatt, from MySpace) preps IPO - FluidDjango
http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/16/technology/demand_media_ipo_goldman/index.htm
======
patio11
We will now see whether Google considers Demand Media too big to fail or not.
(Demand Media is the biggest, most sophisticated search engine spammer in
history.) Your guess is as good as mine, but I'm thinking that either way the
shockwaves from that decision are going to be _huge_.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Discrete Differential Geometry: Helping Machines/People Think Clearly Abt. Shape - espeed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mcal5Cy7r4E
======
dmfdmf
Excellent.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Where do start to learn Cyber Security? - jypepin
Hi HN!<p>I'm a web engineer working mostly with Rails/Phoenix/Node and React. I want to learn more about security to be able to 1. build more secure applications, and 2. help client secure their existing apps.<p>What are good resources for this?
======
nickbee
The Web Application Hacker's Handbook:
[http://ftp.icm.edu.pl/packages/Hacked%20Team/FileServer/File...](http://ftp.icm.edu.pl/packages/Hacked%20Team/FileServer/FileServer/OLD%20Fileserver/books/SICUREZZA/Wiley%20-%20The%20Web%20Application%20Hackers%20Handbook=%20Discovering%20and%20Exploiting%20Security%20Flaws%20-%202008.pdf)
Matasano used to mail it to all their potential candidates and told them to
read chapters N throgh M.
Unfortunately I've forgotten the values of N and M, so just read the whole
thing. It's worth the time.
------
eliot010
1\. become a sys admin (DNS, DHCP, TCP/IP, Python, Linux etc) 2\. download
Kali 3\. play. break. experiment. 4\. visit the Null Byte website 5\. apply
intuition 6\. ready.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Robots will not take your job - twowo
https://www.wired.com/2017/08/robots-will-not-take-your-job/
======
crdoconnor
The "robotjobpocalypse" was pretty much always just a politically expedient
way of scapegoating aggregate job losses caused by outsourcing and austerity.
It's also something that some companies (notably Foxconn & Restaurants) like
to threaten regularly to keep their employees on their toes.
------
tyingq
I would guess there are some former bank tellers that disagree.
~~~
CryptoPunk
Ironically, there are far more bank tellers now than before ATMs were
introduced:
[http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-
rise-r...](http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-robots-
and-jobs/)
But of course, some occupations will be obsoleted by automation. The flip side
to that is that it creates consumer savings that result in spending in new
areas of the economy, which creates replacement jobs.
~~~
dragonwriter
If you look at that chart, the growth rate in tellers dropped precipitously as
the ATMs came online, and the stabilized at a very low rate (and that's
absolute number of tellers, not proportion of population.)
~~~
qbrass
The population grew about 24% between 1990 and 2010, while bank teller jobs
only grew 10%.
But the 90's had a recession (the cause of that dip you mentioned), and ATMs
allowed banks to expand instead of having to close offices because they
couldn't keep them fully staffed. So ATMs either cost bank tellers 80,000ish
jobs or stopped at least as many from getting fired in the 90's, while
creating 50,000 more jobs.
None of it matters, because ATMs could still improve enough to replace bank
tellers outright instead of just taking care of the low-hanging fruit that
eats up half their time.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The first asteroid we've seen from outside our Solar System is totally bizarre - nathanielc
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/20/16679890/interstellar-asteroid-oumuamua-pan-starrs-solar-system
======
nathanielc
Link to draft paper on Nature
[https://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/e...](https://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso1737/eso1737a.pdf)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Python Tools for Visual Studio - johndcook
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2011/08/29/python-tools-for-visual-studio.aspx
======
silverbax88
Awesome. Now I can do my robotics programming in the best IDE in existence.
Sorry, Eclipse, I love you and we're great together, but you're no Visual
Studio.
~~~
francoisdevlin
You spelled vi wrong
~~~
sigstop
I'm sure this was meant as a joke, but, the downmods still make me sad. I used
VS for some classes in school and at my first job and it made me a worse
programmer. It took years to undo the damage. In my opinion, as a developer,
and in my experience in working with a lot of other developers, terminal + vim
+ build tools (gcc/javac/python, etc) is far superior compared to VS.
~~~
silverbax88
I'd be curious as to what 'damage' you needed to have undone. I've written in
just about every IDE available (including vim) and quite frankly my opinion is
that, well, tools can make things easier but they won't make anyone a good
programmer.
~~~
sigstop
The debugger is a big one. I had a terrible habit of not thinking through the
code but just running through the debugger until I got it working.
Not thinking about how code looks (especially to other people) since I could
just resize the window to whatever.
A lot of the build complexities were hidden, which was fine as long as
everything worked, but, as soon as something small broke, I spent days reading
documentation and uselessly searching MSDN and the web trying to get the
project to build (so, not understanding my build environment is something else
I had to fix).
There are lots more (source control, collaboration, etc). I know that
switching my tools and my development environment made me a better programmer.
~~~
eropple
I do most of my development in Eclipse or VS, because frankly my time is worth
more than screwing around with Vim for more than basic text editing. Funnily
enough, I only break out the debugger when something's really nasty--maybe
once a week, for half an hour or so. I certainly don't practice debugger-
driven development, and I don't know anyone who does. Personal problem, not a
tooling problem.
"Not thinking about how the code looks"--personal and cultural problem, not
that of the tools; whether I'm in Vim or Coda or VS2010, I run a guideline at
100 characters (because 80 character lines is dumb in the age of the smallest
dev monitor being 1280 pixels wide) and wrap to it. Never heard a complaint
from anyone I work with.
Build complexity--here, you have something of a point, but MSBuild or Maven or
whatever isn't appreciably different than tooling with makefiles (except that
MSBuild probably has better documentation and there's some semblance of a
standard way to do things).
Source control? I use Hg and Git, seamlessly, from within VS2010 or Eclipse.
Not a problem at all. Collaboration? I've used VSTS for it before, but I just
hang a Chrome window in my second monitor and keep Redmine (at home--Bugzilla,
at work) and an IRC channel open. None of this is appreciably easier in the
Land of the Holy Terminal--it's just _different_.
I've used both heavily IDE-driven stuff and the stone knives and bearskins
that vi-land suggests, and my practices do not fundamental change from one to
the other--because I understand what I am doing and how and why to do it.
Changing your environment doesn't help you become a better programmer unless
you understand _why_ you did what you did and have developed the discipline to
not do it regardless of tooling. Your problem existed between keyboard and
chair, and it doesn't sound like you've fixed it--just hid it away.
~~~
sigstop
I'm glad the tools you use work well for you.
I have coworkers who use Eclipse (for Java). It's a CPU hog; often it locks up
entirely, crashes are infrequent but, happen. I've tried it; I know I'm much
faster with vim. For me, my time is worth more than putting up with Eclipse.
I use 80 characters per line because if I am at a larger monitor, I can have 2
or 3 split windows side by side. If I'm at a smaller terminal, everything's
still readable. I find narrower code is more readable anyway. Most developers
I admire write like that. In any case, this is a major flame war topic; if you
don't like it, I'm glad that your system works for you.
As far as build systems, I'll take autotools and its learning curve and pain
over VS any day. I can fix it when it breaks.
What are you trying to accomplish by saying that my problem is not the tools
but that I'm bad at programming? Why is it that because you think you can
write decent code in VS, that means that I didn't learn anything new when I
switched from it? I know I certainly did; in fact, if I could give myself any
advice back when I started any sort of formal programming, it would be: get
off VS and Windows immediately! I would be three years ahead of where I am
now.
~~~
eropple
I'm not saying you're bad at programming, I'm saying you're blaming the tools
for your lack of discipline. Plenty of good programmers I know are
undisciplined. But you can learn, and it's not the tools' fault that you
didn't do so before. Hell, I'm a VS2010/Eclipse driver but I write MSBuild
scripts by hand and I spent time the other day debugging the make/ant
monstrosity. Limiting yourself because it's the only way to make yourself
learn what you need to learn may work, but why not just _learn it_?
(And re: Eclipse--yeah, it's a bit of a hog, but _hardware is cheap_.
Developer time isn't. And the features it provides have no equivalent in vim
et al.--just look in the Source dropdown menu for a number of significant
productivity enhancers. Those are some of the more minor ones, even; Open Type
probably saves me half an hour a day in the monster of a codebase I have to
work in. Eclipse is by no means perfect, but it's geared toward reducing
boilerplate and stepping on the annoyances involved in Getting Things Done.)
~~~
sigstop
Most of my peers in school used the same "compile, debug" approach as well.
Most of them are still doing it and I can't see any serious software company
ever hiring them (there is no shortage of positions for mediocre programmers
though, so, they're doing just fine). I don't think this symptom is unique to
me and my lack of discipline. As to why I didn't just "learn" to use VS or
"learn" to program better? It wasn't for the lack of trying. MSDN was
worthless, written documentation (yeah, it was that far back) was worthless
and all of the code that other people wrote in VS that I had to interact with
was absolutely terrible. It wasn't until I switched my environment until that
I got any better. I got more from a man page in an hour than I did from a week
of reading MSDN.
As far as Eclipse; I've worked with large codebases and I was faster with vim
and knew my APIs better than any of my colleagues who used Eclipse. I heard
them complain about Eclipse freezing pretty much daily (as well as doing
something wrong when it came to interacting with perforce, often in a
devastating way). I know that I Got more things Done than any of them.
------
joeyespo
This is fantastic. Been using it for a few weeks now. Coming from a bare bones
editor (Crimson Editor :), it's been a wonderful experience.
------
rbanffy
How many people here use Python on Windows? What are you using it for?
~~~
skrebbel
You're asking that like it's special. Why is that? I mean, Python works great
on Windows. Has an installer and all that; next next next finish. Package
management is something of a hell (esp if you're used to ruby gems) but all in
all it works fine.
I for one, prefer win as a dev platform, no matter the deployment platform.
That means if the language of choice is Python, I use Python on Windows. I
always assumed that this is rather common..
~~~
rbanffy
Most of the pythonistas I know are more or less evenly divided between Mac and
various flavors of Unix. Windows users are somewhat rare, but present. I was
curious if other groups have different profiles.
~~~
dagw
"Pythonistas" might not use windows, but a lot of programmers who work on
Windows use python. Python on windows has been actively used at every place
I've ever worked.
~~~
rbanffy
Why would pythonistas not use Windows? I know I don't, but not everyone agrees
with me.
~~~
RyanMcGreal
Why would any programmer who isn't actually programming for Windows use
Windows? Unless you're writing .net applications in VS, Windows isn't a
developer-friendly operating environment.
~~~
rbanffy
Windows seems popular among programmers who also want to run PC games, even if
they don't program for Windows.
~~~
RyanMcGreal
I could see programmers running a dual boot with Windows and *nix.
~~~
dagw
I used to do that, but booting between two OS's was always kind of a pain and
really Windows 7 generally just kind of works. I haven't booted into my Linux
partition for month. For the times I need Linux there's vmware, but there are
relatively few things that I can't get done on windows.
Server side on the other hand I'm all *nix all the time.
~~~
RyanMcGreal
I also used to do that, but I landed on the other side - Linux generally just
kind of works, and I dropped my Windows partition a couple of years ago. For
the times I need Windows there's Virtualbox, but there are relatively few
things that I can't get done on Linux. :)
------
tansey
Pretty awesome that numpy and scipy are now supported by .NET. Does anyone
know if the nltk is supported yet?
~~~
runevault
Kinda makes me wonder how easy it'd be to use them with c# and other .net
languages, for anyone who was coming over from Python and already comfortable
with those libs.
------
mhb
Can I use it for remote debugging of an AWS server? Like Komodo IDE?
~~~
mhb
Doesn't look like it:
_Our remote debugging solution depends on msvsmon to provide the attach-to-
process functionality, so remote debugging doesn't work on linux out of the
box. However, given a process attach infrastructure on linux you could reuse
our debugger.py to talk back to Visual Studio, as that is a simple socket
connection. If you wanted to implement that and contribute it back we'd
definitely look at taking it._
<http://pytools.codeplex.com/discussions/259591>
------
joeyespo
The _only_ complaint I have is that the installer hijacks the Python icons. I
don't exactly care what program .py files open with since I usually drag/drop
them into the appropriate editor and run Python apps from the command line.
But I grew quite fond of CPython's file icons and they're much different after
Python Tools installation.
The workaround is to reinstall Python after installing Python Tools.
------
samyvilar
Interesting, I guess this shows how popular python has become, tried a couple
IDEs, so far pycharm, based on intellij, is one of the better ones if any one
has a better one would love to try it ...
------
alok-g
See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938632>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
From birth to 18, the brain stores 1.5 MB of information to master language - ClarendonDrive
https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/03/27/younglanguagelearners/
======
nostrademons
This is slightly ridiculous - if it were only 1.5MB of information computers
would have a much easier time with it. Google trains their voice-recognition
and language models on petabytes of data and still have trouble matching an
average 10-year-old. Word2vec is significantly larger than 1.5MB, and that's
just the embedding.
Kids pick up way more than just yes-or-no questions like "Is a turkey a bird?"
They're also observing the world visually - when a parent says "Look, it's a
turkey" and there's turkey in front of them, they make the association between
the visual image and the word. They infer information from sentence structure
as well - "it's a ..." is a very good clue that the following word is a noun,
and semantically, only certain words can go in certain places.
They need to make _negative_ associations as well. For example, to my
14-month-old everything that is round is a "ball": wheels are balls, painted
circles are balls, cylindrical rattles are balls, apples are balls, and actual
balls are balls. He'll eventually need to learn that we usually only use
"ball" to refer to 3-dimensional spherical objects used for recreational
purposes, but as everything is a recreational purpose at the moment and he
doesn't really get the concept of "spherical", this comes later.
On the other side, somehow he has managed to learn that the wide variety of
dog breeds are all "gǒu gǒu" (Mandarin for "doggy"), as are 2 of his stuffed
animals, but _not_ the bear. Chihuahas, poodles, german shepherds, corgis,
dachsunds, labradors, newfies - somehow he gets that they're all gǒu gǒu
despite a wide variety of physical appearances. Deep learning models to
classify dogs vs. cats are also significantly bigger than 1.5MB, but have much
less accuracy.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The death of Myspace: A former employee looks back - bootload
http://www.pedestrian.tv/entertainment/news/the-death-of-myspace-a-former-employee-looks-back/31505.htm
======
bootload
_"... Look at the odds against Facebook, Myspace had music, videos, local
partnerships, mobile integration, millions of bands, four times as many users,
the marketing sway of the FOX media empire, 22 international offices and $900
million in cash from Google. And Facebook still won out. You can’t deny that
is impressive. But how did they do it? ..."_
Better hackers?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Charity parties in 170+ cities, based around Twitter - ahoyhere
http://twestival.com/
======
dmolnar
They're using tipjoy to encourage donations and visibility via tweets, which
should also allow measuring how much money was raised directly by the event.
Wonder what they are doing to measure the other impacts, such as e-mail
addresses gathered from potential donors? Would love to see a report
afterwards that shows things like which tweets were most influential in
convincing people to donate or help.
Feels like this is notable in part because it's one of the first "twitter
inspired" charity events. (Unless there are previous ones, does anyone know?)
What can a charity do if it is going to be the next one to try such an event?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Jigsaw - hsnewman
https://jigsaw.google.com/
======
013
Trying not to sound too pessimistic, but none of these projects seem to be
revolutionary or add anything to existing solutions.
There's DDoS protection, A phishing extension, VPN, an android app for DNS?
The machine learning of comments could be useful for machine interpreted
language, so there's that.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Is the Metric System Better? [video] - caiobegotti
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hid7EJkwDNk
======
dgellow
Yes
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Bitcoin faces regulatory crackdown, Bank of England warns - oldcynic
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/mar/02/bitcoin-faces-regulatory-crackdown-bank-england-warns
======
dom96
The quotes in the article mention anonymity as one of the problems, but all
Bitcoin transactions are public. Is it really that difficult to tie people to
these transactions?
~~~
chatmasta
This is the UK government we’re talking about, the same government with
representatives who think “real people don’t need end-to-end encryption” and
that “we should get people who understand the necessary hashtags [sic]” to
implement back doors.
So more likely than not, the people calling for regulations on bitcoin have
little to no understanding of its basic properties.
~~~
cinquemb
> _So more likely than not, the people calling for regulations on bitcoin have
> little to no understanding of its basic properties._
How many on HN would gladly jump at the opportunity to "understand the
necessary hashtags", and write the software with skinner box like interfaces
for our glorious institutions that we owe our mind and body to in order to
protect us from ourselves?
Excluding those of you who already work on these profitable boondoggles of
course… ;)
------
d0lph
Title should be "cracking down on Bitcoin exchanges", I don't think they can
crack down on Bitcoin proper.
~~~
this_user
That would be difficult indeed, but you could certainly crack down on
exchanges, payment processors, miners and generally every company dealing with
crypto currencies, including banks. That would greatly cripple their
usability.
~~~
d0lph
I also think you could move most of that to a Tor onion service.
------
WheelsAtLarge
Bitcoin's real trouble is with transaction time and cost. Those are the
troubles that will bring it down way faster than any regulation. Once that's
fixed, there is no stopping it since there are countries where Bitcoin is
welcome. Example: Japan is one of those countries. The exchange rate between
fiat currencies and bitcoin will definitely bounce around but 100 years from
now someone will be using Bitcoin to make a transaction.
------
arisAlexis
Some remarks:
First of all, cryptocurrencies are a new paradigm and a threat to bans so
asking Bank of England is like asking taxi drivers their opinion about Uber.
Secondly, regulation means that they are accepted as legal tender, asset or
money officially.
Lastly, any country that will try to outright crackdown and ban them is at a
very great risk of economic exclusion and being left behind.
------
granaldo
At current market cap of almost 200b for bitcoin based on
[https://www.coingecko.com/en](https://www.coingecko.com/en)
It seems that the market is ignorant against news like this. As we have seen
after what some countries had attempted to ban
People will see value in this and try to acquire it. Making it harder to buy
may very well put bitcoin a higher price or activity goes underground.
Everyone loses
~~~
notahacker
Good to see somebody's done the "this is good for Bitcoin" post without
intended irony...
There's a tenable argument the UK simply isn't a big enough influence on BTC
prices to make much difference and the regulation probably won't go very far,
but arguing that making Bitcoins more difficult to acquire, spend or turn into
something spendable is going to drive demand for it is just silly.
~~~
russdpale
I will be buying the dip. Be greedy when others are cautious.
~~~
dogecoinbase
_Be greedy when others are cautious._
Youth really is wasted on the young.
~~~
joeblow9999
It's a paraphrase of Buffet's quote 'Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and
Greedy When Others Are Fearful'
Not so young.
------
cjg
More direct quotes and more information on Bloomberg:
[https://uk.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/boes-
carne...](https://uk.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/boes-carney-calls-
for-regulation-to-end-cryptocurrency-anarchy-1062914)
------
OnlyRepliesToBS
If you close the door after the horse, other speculators will see the value of
that horse's freedom.
This is a positive feedback loop.
Pyrrhic victory for law, but the banks get their protections codified in law.
------
deadmetheny
This is good for Bitcoin.
(such thin skin from the Bitcoin True Believers)
------
pmarreck
Well it's a good thing Bitcoin DNGAF what the state thinks because all Bitcoin
actually is, is math and code
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Corporate profits continue to increase, while wages continue to languish - doener
https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1018239133578194944
======
Findeton
If it was that easy, everyone would be creating their own companies...
------
Mr_Miner
The concept of profit maximization rules most of the corporate sector.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Genetically Capitalist (.pdf) - byrneseyeview
http://econ.binghamton.edu/papers/clark.pdf
======
daniel-cussen
Natural selection favors nerdiness...awesome.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Hypermedia, past, present and future - apievangelist
http://www.bizcoder.com/hypermedia-past-present-and-future
======
brandonlipman
This is a terrific article!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Tell HN: Buenos Aires Meetup next Friday - fpereiro
I'm a developer based in Buenos Aires. I'd like to meet more people living here who are into startups and technology, to see what we can hatch together.<p>When: Friday Sept 30, 8PM<p>Where: the Starbucks at Malabia 1720, Palermo, Ciudad de Buenos Aires.<p>Just in case, my email is [email protected]<p>See you there.
======
ferostar
Would love to go, but i have tickets to the Teatro Colón at that time (being
wanting to go for years and there is a Wagner's opera this weekend), so it's
going to be the next time for me.
------
benologist
Awesome. I'm working at Areatres right behind that Starbucks!
------
fpereiro
Great! See you there.
------
niico
Will be there!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Reddit is down for emergency maintenance - ORioN63
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/
======
ichthis
As are linkedin, stumbleupon, thepiratebay and fark.
~~~
ichthis
And 4square.
~~~
sxtxixtxcxh
and yelp.com
------
wglb
Let's not post when a site goes down. Not interesting.
In particular, check <http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/>.
It says reddit is up, so it is just down for you.
~~~
ORioN63
Actually, <http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/>, will tell you it is up,
because it is showing the emergency maintenance page.
And it is interesting, because as far as we know, it is all caused by the one
extra second. It's a mini-Y2K. If you saw Google's solution to it, it is easy
to see, that is not at all intuitive, and that bugs like this will continue to
happen.
~~~
ichthis
You win: "We are having some Java/Cassandra issues related to the leap second
at 5pm PST. We're working as quickly as we can to restore service."
<https://twitter.com/redditstatus/statuses/219244389044731904>
------
petercooper
This happens frequently (that is, maintenance that results in this page
appearing).. not sure how it made FP.
~~~
tzs
Reddit downtime usually is late at night or for a relatively short time. This
is Saturday afternoon, and it has been down for over an hour, so I'd consider
it noteworthy.
------
ORioN63
Is up now.
------
cleverjake
looks up to me
~~~
ORioN63
Really? Is still down to me...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Just released the Beta of CraftStudio, my coop game-making platform - elisee
http://craftstud.io/?beta
======
elisee
I spent the last 4 months redesigning and improving CraftStudio and I just
launched the Beta last night. It comes with a physics engine, a HTML5 Web
player (<http://store.craftstud.io/games>) built with Three.js and Lua.js, a
completely redesigned user interface and initial (though still a bit buggy)
Linux support, among other changes.
CraftStudio is my real-time multiplayer "game to make games". I built it out
of my own frustration with existing game-making tools and a desire to let
everyone (gamers, most importantly) make their own games. Minecraft was an
obvious inspiration to its blocky, pixelarty nature.
If you guys have any questions, technical or otherwise, I'll be more than
happy to answer them.
------
benaiah
Wow, this actually looks very impressive. Do you have any idea why most of the
"simple" game-making platforms are using Lua nowadays? Is it just because of
its ease of embeddability into other systems, or is there something else at
play?
~~~
elisee
Thanks :). Yeah, embedding and exposing functions to Lua is very simple.
Sandboxing it too: the I/O functions are confined to a few modules you can
easily disable, which is a huge plus.
And it's a fast, small language with no "complicated" symbols to type (no
C-like braces and stuff) and a nice learning curve, great for beginners /
less-technical people.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Mika Mobile ends Android development - vwadhwani
http://mikamobile.blogspot.com/2012/03/our-future-with-android.html
======
MattRogish
I work for an app company and can verify his comments.
Apple has done a great job at getting its users to pay for apps. They've done
this via:
1) Encouraging Developers to not price free apps (this happens sometimes in
review, in their literature, etc.)
2) Capturing device owner's credit card info at the start (so buying an app is
frictionless)
3) Removing low-quality, buggy, copycat, and junk apps from the store via
their review process
Google, on the other hand, has done just about everything wrong if you want to
make money from paid apps. I suspect this is because Google wants to make
money via in-app ad impressions and with free apps that's the only way you can
make any money (in-app purchasing notwithstanding).
1) No review encourages spyware, copycat apps, buggy or broken apps, etc.
2) Android's "return policy" (which has since been tweaked) encourages people
to pirate apps anyway (it's super easy to do so)
3) Initially (I'm not sure if this is still the case) you could sign up for a
market account without a credit card, thus leading to a lot of friction when
it came to paying for an app (entering your CC information was a royal pain).
Also, I share the frustration with the internal v. external/removable storage
problem. Our apps are traditionally larger (content-centric, with lots of high
quality images, audio, video) and have always ran into problems with Android
devices' limited on-board storage.
This was purely a cost decision by Google and a profit decision by
vendors/carriers as vendors wanted to produce devices as cheaply as possible
and make a killing on SD cards - sell a device with xxxMB storage and no SD
card, then force the consumer to go out and buy an overpriced SD card (usually
at point of sale).
This all makes Android a developer-hostile environment; yes it's easier to
initially get setup on Android (no provisioning profile, etc.) but it's all
pain after that. If I had a choice, and didn't make cross-platform apps w/
PhoneGap, I'd write iOS apps first/only.
~~~
masklinn
> 2) Capturing device owner's credit card info at the start (so buying an app
> is frictionless)
Don't forget the pretty popular iTunes gift cards, either as gifts from third
parties or to replace a CC.
~~~
protomyth
That is a huge bonus for a lot of teenagers. Pay cash at Wal-Mart for an
iTunes card so you can buy stuff from the app store.
------
zmmmmm
I wish Google would take the problems of cross phone compatibility more
seriously. Without it the entire purpose of Android is compromised, and yet,
they don't seem to put much effort into ensuring compatibility or motivating
manufacturers to ensure it.
For example, while I support Google's decision to keep the Android market
open, I don't see why apps that simply crash upon launch should be allowed
allowed to be sold and downloaded to people's phones. Google can easily detect
/ track this kind of thing and automatically flag phones not supported as
incompatible, refund users and notify the developers. On the developers side,
they should have access to an extensive database of compatibility information
so that manufacturers are shamed into seeing devices that are hard to support
getting black banned in the market and crossed off support lists by
developers.
I don't think you need an authoritarian approach like Apple's to make things
better, but you need to do more than Google is right now.
------
pragmatic
Too bad. My 5 year old son loves Battleheart.
I _bought_ it for the Kindle Fire. It's actually my son's preferred gaming
platform (compared to Wii, 3ds and Leapster Explorer) probably because the
game are so accessible/easy to use.
I've often considered getting into game development on the android. However,
it doesn't look like a profitable venture.
If the makers of a fantastic (highly rated, almost 5 stars on the amazon app
store) game aren't making money on the Android platform...what hope is there
for the rest of us.
------
cageface
I've been doing iOS dev for a while now and I'm considering expanding to
Android as well but stories like this give me pause. I guess I've been spoiled
by an environment that's homogeneous enough that I don't have to worry about
things like GL shaders mysteriously failing on some devices etc.
Can more experienced devs comment on how common these kinds of problems are in
practice? If I do some Android ports for my clients do I really need to buy
10+ devices and debug on each of them?
~~~
baconner
Your instincts are correct here I think. If you're writing games then I
suspect this is pretty accurate. You'd likely have to purchase a lot of test
devices and do a lot of tuning to keep up with the hardware. Android vs. iOS
game dev strikes me as a lot like the difference between windows and console
game development.
If, however, you're writing basic apps like I am and using the standard
development tools then it's a lot less of a hassle. I primarily write
appwidgets (apps that run on the home screen). Theoretically these have could
run into more fragmentation issues since various manufacturers have built
their own home screen replacements and improved appwidget capabilities have
been a focus in 3.x, 4.x. Yet in about 2 years since I started I've rarely hit
a device specific issue and I'm supporting 2.1 - 4.x. I have about 3000 active
users so not exactly large scale, but enough that if it were a serious issue I
think I'd be hearing about it more.
I have two devices - a nexus one to test on 2.x/phone and a transformer prime
to test on 4.x/tablet. Other versions I spot test in the emulator (admittedly
this is awful). That's been sufficient for me.
I'm sympathetic to the technical difficulties of developing and maintaining a
high quality game for the platform, but that shouldn't scare anyone off from
developing regular apps.
~~~
cageface
Interesting. The apps my clients have asked me to write so far are pretty
straightforward so maybe I could also get by with only a few devices. I'm
certainly not doing anything that pushes the hardware as hard as a game.
------
sawyer
For those who may not know, and because it's not mentioned in the blog post,
Mika Mobile develops their games in Unity.
It's a testament to the challenge of developing games to work on all Android
devices that even with Unity's support they still have to spend so much
development effort on shaders and debugging device specific issues.
~~~
beatle
what are these people complaining about?
Google didn't release Android to give the users the best possible product,
service and user experience. They released Android so they can serve ads.
An ad company will never give a shit about user experience.
I knew this the minute Google bought Android. It took them these long to
figure to this out.
~~~
methodin
What the hell are you talking about? Aside from admob integration on games
that developers add themselves, what ads are you seeing on the platform
outside of websites?
------
keeperofdakeys
Google wants the Android platform to move away from SD Cards, their Nexus
series really shows this. The Nexus S, their second Nexus phone, had no SD
card. However, due to the requirements of a separate filesystem for USB Mass
Storage, they partitioned the internal storage into two.
Then you get the Galaxy Nexus, with only one partition. It features Ice Cream
Sandwich, with MTP (Mass Transport Protocol). MTP allows access to a
filesystem without unmounting it, so the phone can continue to use the
filesystem. The only real disadvantage of MTP is that OSX and Linux support is
limited, since it is developed by Microsoft. It should also be said that ICS
still supports USB Mass Storage, but the Galaxy Nexus cannot.
The Asus Transformer also does this, using a large internal storage with no SD
card. More phones might switch to this model, but for now the SD card is not
going away.
~~~
gcp
Why the hate on SD cards? I mean, what's the reasoning behind this?
~~~
keeperofdakeys
From what I understand, its because there is always 'wasted' space. If you
have lots of movies and music, you might have a full SD card but empty
internal; lots of applications and the opposite might be true. With a single
internal space, all this goes away. Personally, I never want to remove my SD
card because it houses so many applications and files I use on my phone.
------
kenrikm
I would be interested to find out how MikaMobile did sales wise with their
Kindle Fire version of Battleheart. It would be a good gauge to base what the
total potential a developer has for supporting the Fire and ignoring the
general Android market. I remember (back in the day) when they first announced
Zombieville USA on iPhoneDevSDK, they have grown a great deal since then and I
wish them all the best.
------
jrockway
Seems fine to me. No money being made, no money to pay for development. I
don't blame this on Android phones or users, however.
(Bandwidth is, sadly, becoming a big issue these days, because nobody offers
unlimited plans anymore. 5GB per month means one max-size app and maybe a few
text messages before you start paying one billion dollars per nanobyte in
overages. It's like 1980s long distance all over again.)
~~~
RandallBrown
Apple caps 3g app downloads at 30mb I think. Any bigger than that and you need
to use wifi or sync via iTunes.
It would be nice if Google would implement something like this for Android. I
didn't even know about this limitation until today ( I'm an iPhone
user/developer).
~~~
dagw
Android App store warns you that you are about to start a large download via
3G and asks if you're sure you want to do so. Personally I find that a much
better approach. Apple doesn't know the details of my contract and if I want
to download 70 (or 170)MB over 3G, surely that's my prerogative and why should
my phone stop me?
~~~
nivertech
I have unlimited 3G data plan on my iPad and it always hated that Apple won't
let me update some apps until I'm near WiFi spot... until I bought Galaxy
Nexus inserted SIM from my phone with limited data plan and it exceeded my
capped data plan in the first hour (OS updates).
------
Jaecen
Perhaps Mika Mobile's problem is that they are trying to provide support like
a large company without the resources to do so. I certainly applaud their
effort, but would it have been more economical to simply tell people that they
can give a refund and that's it?
It seems a shame that they're giving up their position in the Android market
and abandoning some hard-won experience.
~~~
eropple
_What_ market? Virtually nobody making Android games is making money,
especially compared to iOS versions. It's exceedingly grim.
"We make 5% of our revenue from Android" is not exactly an outlier.
------
methodin
If only people spent as much time working on a decent platform like Andengine
(which works on most devices with little effort) instead of porting ios code
and ending up with apps that only work on devices they were tested on (or
complained from).
It makes sense they have to deal with problems all the time since they clearly
don't have a thorough understanding of the Android platform itself and what it
takes to actually support the range of devices. Buying $1,000+ of test
hardware will also not fix your problem if the problem is not doing things
properly. You certainly won't get it by patching ios-based code every time a
customer complains.
~~~
cageface
How do you anticipate problems like buggy GL drivers with inconsistent shader
implementations? At the rate new devices are coming out it seems impossible
for any framework to cover them all.
~~~
methodin
Fair point, but like I said, if everyone works in bubbles they will all have
to deal with this over and over again in different ways. Since these game
companies are not actually doing anything for the platform itself, like
sharing their libraries for dealing with the issues, they of course will find
it painful.
This reminded me completely of the pre-jquery era where if you wanted some
advanced JS functionality you'd have to reinvent the wheel over and over in
dealing with browser inconsistencies. After years of bitching and moaning
people finally released libraries to deal with the issue.
These companies have the right to complain, but complaining will not actually
help solve anything except give them a way out avoiding the the complexities
of porting platform-specific code to another platform.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
GoDaddy Acquires Uniregistry - amdixon
https://uniregistry.com/blog/post/better-together
======
batjoro
I recently saw an article ( [https://hostingchecker.com/research/the-most-
crowded-ipv4-ad...](https://hostingchecker.com/research/the-most-crowded-
ipv4-addresses-on-the-internet/) ) where Uni was mentioned and it had more
than 1,370k domains pointing to the IP. Wondering what happend to those? I
guess they are clients domains, but do they stay with Uni ot they go to
GoDaddy. Unclear from the pressrelease.
~~~
_eht
Speaking for some of those domains, we start finding a new place to put our
portfolio.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Why don't people use SCRAM for password authentication? - thristian
Blog-posts about password authentication usually talk about encrypting passwords in your database, with the understanding that the user's password will be sent verbatim to the server (possibly over an encrypted transport). The usual alternative is digest authentication, where the verbatim password doesn't go over the network, but the server needs to store the plaintext password on disk, which is even worse.<p>However, SCRAM authentication (defined in RFC5802) does not pass a verbatim password over the network, does not require a verbatim password stored on the server, or even an unsalted hash. It seems like it ought to be the best possible authentication scheme for all situations - over plaintext, over TLS, whatever. Why isn't it used more heavily? Why isn't it even mentioned in "how to store passwords" threads?
======
Bino
Some servers do support it as authentication method for various purposes...
However, for web the problem remains, even if the password isn't transported
on the wire, the user still needs to enter the password on a html/js page
provided by the server (which could be compromised anyway).
~~~
moonbug
Not if HTTP Basic Auth is used -- the browser itself will capture the
credentials. Shame kids today don't use it.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Exploit Prevention as a Service for Rails - tkellogg
https://hakiri.io/blog/grand-opening
======
jph
Take my money! :) Your service is super-useful for app security. I'm signing
up right now. Great idea.
My two cents for you: you're far enough along that you can start seeding your
market as fast as possible.
* How about going to meetups at app dev companies such as Pivotal, Carbon 5, ThoughtWorks, etc.?
* How about a free version for open source projects, or students, or nonprofits?
Try to make the signup faster and easier.
* How about an item on the homepage saying "Upload a Gemfile.lock to see if it's secure"? I would personally do this first because it's fast, easy, and needs no setup.
* How about an item on the homepage asking "What's your GitHub username?" then skim for vulnerabilities? I would personally do this because I write many open source gems.
~~~
vasinov
Great feedback!
A lot of these things are on the roadmap, including the free option for OSS,
pitching at larger dev shops, and Gemfile.lock scanning without signing up.
Thank you.
------
borski
This is a really useful service for what we call "version tracking," and it
looks like it's running Brakeman for you too. With that said, it won't find
vulnerabilities you code in yourself - only publicly released vulns that Ruby,
etc. have issued patches for. A tool like
[https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com](https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com) can help
you find more vulnerabilities that either a) haven't been found yet publicly
or b) you've written in yourself. (Disclosure: I'm the cofounder)
~~~
InAnEmergency
Definitely running Brakeman, as are
[https://codeclimate.com/](https://codeclimate.com/),
[https://www.pullreview.com](https://www.pullreview.com) and [http://rails-
brakeman.com/](http://rails-brakeman.com/).
~~~
borski
Yup! Nothing wrong with that - just wanted to make sure it was clear what was
going on. I run brakeman fairly often on my own for my projects. :)
------
revisionzero
Love the idea. An upcoming project, that I am a part of, will likely be built
on Rails, so this has been bookmarked!
~~~
vasinov
Let me know if you need any help setting up :)
------
homakov
Automated security audits are useless until we have some fancy AI
~~~
jerf
Testing can only prove the presence of bugs, or in this case, exploits... but
it _can_ prove the presence of exploits, and that is valuable data. (At least,
it can prove it reasonably well; false positives are a problem, but, well,
that's life.) Absence of exploits may not prove you're safe, but presence
certainly proves you aren't, and if your friendly pet automated scanner can
find it, so can everybody else's automated scanner.
I'd be comfortable saying "this can give you a false sense of security";
_useless_ is far too strong.
~~~
homakov
You're mostly right, but along with working scanner people should hire an
auditor to fix real bugs. Or it is just useless, spending a lot of money
annually for scanner forgetting about real vulns.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Hallo.business Business phone for 21st century - jegan_hb
<a href="https://hallo.business/" rel="nofollow">https://hallo.business/</a><p>Hi All,
We help customers call businesses without typing phone numbers. Customers can simply speak or type which team they would like to speak to and connect with the correct department instantly.It is hard to remember phone numbers and we would like to change this.<p>Currently, customers’ type a telephone number or virtual number(13, 1300, 1800 number) to reach a business. The challenge is that context of the call is not communicated when dialing the number. They have press 0-9 (repeatedly) to reach the correct team.<p>New companies can sign up here
<a href="https://hallo.business/portal/Register/Step1" rel="nofollow">https://hallo.business/portal/Register/Step1</a><p>Once the company account is created, agents and routes can be created. Route defines how the call is routed, say call to "support" is routed to agent "x"<p>Agents for the company can signup and answer calls using the app below
<a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=hallo.business.company.droid" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=hallo.business...</a><p>Customers can call business using the app below
<a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=hallo.business.customer.droid" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=hallo.business...</a><p>If you have any feedback I would love to hear it!<p>Thank you.<p>Regards,
Jegan
======
plttn
I'm curious enough to ask (and I don't mean to sound snarky with this), but
what's the value proposition?
If I'm a customer, what benefit do I gain from this? Phone numbers are easily
recognizable and they're already in use. I'm going to have to fight with an
IVR either way, and I can Google the number.
If I'm a business, I'm trusting a third party with my IVR to not disappear
after 3 months of not making money, my agents aren't really seeing any
improvement in customer connection (either through inhouse IVR or hallo, by
the time the customer gets to me they should be at the right department). So
how do I gain anything as a business by pushing my IVR to you?
~~~
jegan_hb
Hi, It's about creating transparency and relationship between the customers
and company.
As a customer, it's much easier to type(or say) the name of the business
rather than type a number. Also, if the call couldn't be answered by the
agent, then the callback will have the company name and agent name. The
customer can immediately relate to the call(rather than simply seeing the
number on the screen)
For a business, it takes 2 minutes for a business to signup and accept calls.
Plus the IVR can be changed without any cost. It's much easier for the
business to say call "my company"(handle for the company) rather than say call
800-433-7300
Regards, Jegan
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Lenovo leaked an AMD Ryzen 9 U-series chip - ekoutanov
https://www.techradar.com/news/lenovo-may-have-just-leaked-a-ryzen-9-u-series-chip-that-could-make-intel-squirm
======
pedrocr
X1 Carbon with 32GB ECC RAM, 4K screen, 2 M.2 slots and one of these Ryzen
APUs. That's pretty much my dream laptop. Will almost certainly not happen
though, particularly the RAM.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Has Elon Musk's Tesla already won? - mlacks
https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Has-Elon-Musk-s-Tesla-already-won
======
mlacks
>We can debate the merits of this sense of corporate responsibility. The fact
remains, though, that Musk's operation is not hampered by this galaxy of
moving parts. By keeping many of these functions in-house, Tesla can innovate
24/7 and implement a new technology tomorrow, not in 2025.
There is a quote I'm fond of; to paraphrase: To go fast, go alone, to go far,
go together.
I while I think that TSLA is doing a great job at innovation, it does seem to
be leaving a lot of jobs in uncertainty.
On one hand, those people can be find new, innovative problems to solve now
that (theoretically) the problem their job was working on is now solved.
On the other, most people in those positions aren't really in a position to
find and pull resources to solve a new problem. Here in the US, there isn't
much of a safety net to support them while they're just trying to put food on
the table.
Love the progress of Tesla, but I think there needs to be a solution to the
jobs that are going to be made obsolete by reducing the number of suppliers
and jobs. Don't know if this is a policy issue or a market issue to solve.
~~~
chillacy
The market doesn't care about suppliers and jobs going out of business
(actually more cynically the market encourages efficiency, and useless
suppliers are inefficient).
Sometimes places try to legislate make-work jobs into existence, using laws to
create jobs where none are actually needed. There's famous a milton friedman
anecdote:
> Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a
> worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that,
> instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He
> asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained:
> “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied:
> “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then
> you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
\---
Other policies might protect the workers by providing baseline resources (UBI
or services), or job retraining. There are all sorts of interesting
discussions along these lines.
Similar things have happened in the past, so we do have some idea of the
devastation it causes.
------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> The data Tesla collects from users, their environs, interests, tendencies,
> travel habits and the range of behaviors will arguably be more valuable than
> the engines and high-performance batteries powering them. This enables Tesla
> to hone the customer experience, while discerning where the market will veer
> next.
I for one, hope the companies focused on making great car hardware win this
battle, not the companies that want to turn the car into a giant data
harvesting platform.
~~~
0xdeadb00f
Sadly I don't know if that's possible in this day and age. Every single time
there's an opportunity to harvest data it seems companies do it.
~~~
gpapilion
Volume generally beats quality for models. So the default position of anyone
looking to analyze the data will be to ask for more of it.
This is where I think GDPR helps since it adds cost to that data. It really
gives you and opportunity to assess the value versus the liability of the
data.
------
paul_f
The article compared the market cap of Tesla to Hong Kong's GDP. I stopped
reading then.
~~~
naveen99
Also, Why do economists give government budget deficits as a percent of gdp
instead of Government revenue ? unnecessary indirection...
~~~
skissane
It isn’t really indirection in that government can raise taxes, thereby
increasing the amount of revenue available to service debt. The government
doesn’t have as direct influence over GDP, and the impact of government
policies on GDP takes longer to be seen. So it makes sense to express debt as
a percentage of the figure which is the harder constraint.
~~~
naveen99
It’s like startups reporting burn rate as a percentage of investor wealth.
Governments already operate mostly near maximum revenue. Raise taxes anymore
and Capital and labor walk away.
~~~
skissane
> Governments already operate mostly near maximum revenue. Raise taxes anymore
> and Capital and labor walk away.
Look at OECD data on tax revenue as percent of GDP [1]. France is at the top
at 46.1%. OECD average is 34.2%. US is near the bottom at 26.8%.
Given the big differences in tax rates, it seems implausible every government
is at maximum revenue - that might be true for the highest taxing countries
like France and Denmark, but is unlikely to be true for a below-average tax
country like the US.
The “Laffer curve” determines maximum government revenue - the point at which
raising taxes any further would cause overall government revenue to fall.
Nobody knows exactly where that point is, but most experts believe the US is a
fair way below it (see e.g. [2])
[1] [https://data.oecd.org/chart/63TM](https://data.oecd.org/chart/63TM)
[2]
[https://www.jstor.org/stable/23269968?seq=1](https://www.jstor.org/stable/23269968?seq=1)
~~~
naveen99
I wonder if the us numbers are misleadingly low because they may not include
state and city taxes. [https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-
breakdown...](https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-breakdown-
revenues-among-federal-state-and-local-governments)
~~~
skissane
The OECD website says [1]:
> This indicator relates to government as a whole (all government levels)
"all government levels" means
state/provincial/territorial/regional/county/city/town/etc, the whole lot
So I see no evidence it is “misleadingly low”, I think the OECD’s statistics
are generally accurate. (More accurate than the UN’s, because the countries
whose governments are most likely to commit statistical fraud are not OECD
members.)
[1] [https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-revenue.htm](https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-
revenue.htm)
~~~
naveen99
Thanks. Agreed.
------
Andys
I did some research on EVs for sale here in Australia and found that although
they are not the cheapest, Telsa has the best recharging network.
The supercharger stations along the main highways around the country are well
worth the extra price of the cars, if you need to go on a trip outside the
cities it will make it much nicer.
They also have the best battery thermal management (in the model Y) with its
air conditioner able to route warm or chilled coolant wherever it is needed on
the fly inside the vehicle. They are the only ones on the market doing this.
As far as I know they are also the only carmaker working on constructing
future car models out of huge die casts, which will greatly speed up
production and cut costs. This has nothing to do with being electric cars, any
car company could have done this already, but didn't?
------
specialist
I remain very bullish on Tesla.
Tesla is technically and organizationally ahead of their competitors. The EV
market is Tesla's to lose.
Reminds me of Toyota before them. Others could set out to copy everything
about Toyota verbatim, and in the 18 months it takes to implement, Toyota will
then be 18 months ahead. To get ahead of Toyota, you'd have to leapfrog.
And while the tech will certainly percolate out to others, I can't imagine any
existing player successfully adopting Tesla's organizational innovations.
\- Shuffling their org charts, so that octovalve and unibottles are even
possible.
\- Implementing new stuff asap, instead of waiting for model years.
\- Aggressively reducing part counts.
\- Toyota style vertical integration, reversing decades of outsourcing.
\- Learning how to write software.
Etc.
Any way. If Elon Musk can avoid imploding, I think competitors will have to
seize the future waves of disruption to displace Tesla. Solid state batteries
for EV. And people smarter than me are bullish on hydrogen fuel.
~~~
AtlasBarfed
Some of the core of Tesla's fundamental advantages are their lead in
integration of battery technology.
Their battery tech is "good", but that could disappear at any moment with the
theoretical advantages of solid state / lithium metal batteries over what is
used now.
Their software lead isn't that great however (aside from whatever state their
self-driving is in ), that's pretty straightforward software and integration
and UI, and really underlines how functionally stupid the incumbent ICE
companies are that "over the air update" is magical technology to them.
So Tesla's lead is substantive in the moment, but still very much tenuous.
Many other ICE companies could vertically integrate to match. Every new
platform by a company, and EVs generally demand a fundamentally new platform,
would be an opportunity to match a great deal of Tesla's vertical integration.
But the mainline ICE makers have been so slow and so stody and so stupid and
so corrupt for sooooo long, and that runs far deeper than just the C-suite in
their management hierarchies, that they will probably still be asleep at the
switch for ten years, despite the fact that nothing besides organizational
malaise stops them from changing course.
~~~
specialist
To clarify:
I'm only a casual consumer of geek news, so I hope someone can chime in to
correct me.
Whatever the quality of Tesla's software, the key point is they can write
software. I've read (heard) that other car mfgs outsource most or all software
development.
Random notion:
Your reply reminded of Apple dabbling with automotive stuff and the general
befuddlement about that effort.
It now occurs to me that Apple may be sizing up becoming the software stack
provider to the car mfgs cannot write their own.
------
Solstinox
It's uncertain whether Tesla has won. Less uncertain is that a lot of the
existing manufacturers have already lost.
~~~
s1artibartfast
I don't understand this sentiment. Do existing manufacturers even see TSLA as
a threat? Tesla has about 0.5% of the global market share for autos. Toyota
has 275 B revenue and 50 B gross profits Tesla has 24 B revenue and 4 B gross
profits Toyota sells ~ 10,7 million vehicles/yr and Tesla sells ~400k
It seems that rise and fall of various large auto manufactures are dictated
more by the competition between them, than anything the upstart Tesla is
doing.
~~~
snoshy
This might be true today, but will it hold in the medium/long-term future? The
precise concern is _that_ the existing manufacturers aren't paying attention
to the upstart that could conceivably eat their lunch in the medium-term
future.
The pivotal question here is whether the existing manufacturers are simply
burying their heads in the sand, or are ignoring the growth of EVs due to a
principled strategy that has legs. That case has not been made sufficiently
clearly, if it even has any merit, in my opinion.
~~~
s1artibartfast
My point is that I don't see any reason to believe it won't hold true in the
medium/long term future?
Do they have any interest in fighting for the EV market now? Are there
barriers to entry that can stop them from leisurely moving in one the
technology has wider adoption and maturity?
~~~
snoshy
A single data point certainly does not make a trend, but VW has actually tried
to compete and had to change their tune rather quickly by admitting that Tesla
has a sustainable lead in the EV space.
~~~
s1artibartfast
I think that is fair evidence suggesting that tesla can hold its own in the EV
space. That said, Im not convinced that this is an existential threat for any
of the top manufacturers. If tesla has the entire EV market for the next 10
years, it will become on of the top manufacturers, not eliminate them.
Hell, they could even be synergistic. Tesla charges a consumer premium for
clean EVs, sells the credits to auto manufacturers, who get to sell high
profit/ low mileage vehicles.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
LibGDX 1.0 released - octopus
http://www.badlogicgames.com/wordpress/?p=3412
======
sdfjkl
For those as ignorant of the Java/Android scene as me:
_LibGDX is a game-development application framework written in Java with some
C /C++ components for performance dependent code. It allows for the
development of desktop and Android games by using the same code base. It is
cross-platform, supporting Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Android, WebGL enabled
browser and iOS._ \--
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libgdx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libgdx)
------
pplante
I found LibGDX to be an incredible framework to quickly iterate with. I really
miss working with it as much as I did in 2012. The core developers are some
really great guys who are always willing to lend a hand. I probably wouldn't
have finished Droid Towers if it wasn't for their continued encouragement.
------
Kaedon
Good timing! I just started working with libGDX yesterday with my little
brother. We decided it would be better to use it than roll our own Java
framework and I think that was the right choice. It's been fairly straight-
forward to work through the install and demo game located here:
[https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/A-simple-
game](https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/A-simple-game)
------
bmoresbest55
I used this framework back on version 0.95 for a school project. We started
late (of course) and got stuck on an API call that we could not figure out.
Emailed a dev at like 10 or 11pm and got a response. Act of heroism...
~~~
Uehreka
It wouldn't happen to have been an Asteroids clone with motion controls, would
it?
------
Rezo
LibGDX is a lot of fun to work with, and a great way to target both Android
and iOS with the same code base.
What you might not have thought of, is that you don't have to limit yourself
to games. I created a successful productivity app entirely in LibGDX
(shameless plug,
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.absoluteat...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.absoluteattention.timer)).
Features common in games and LibGDX, such as the very good performance and the
rich animation capabilities can add a bit of flair to an otherwise boring app
and make it stand out from the crowd.
I see that with the 1.0 release, you can now even embed a LibGDX fragment into
your otherwise 'native' Android app. I can see this being very useful for apps
where you want to have your animated custom gauges and widgets surrounded by
the native OS chrome.
~~~
hedron
I found the most powerful feature is that you can create an app without a need
to deploy it to a real device over and over again. It saves a lot of time even
creating a multi touch game like Sum and Blossom
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.carrotfiel...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.carrotfield.sumandblossom)
~~~
Rezo
I agree fully, it's a huge productivity win. I built a small layer that
simulates or at least stubs out all the device-only APIs for the desktop
target; switching resolutions & DPI dependent assets (works), loading
translated strings from Android XML files (works), opening the marketplace
(stub), setting alarms and timers, etc.
I estimate I spent 99% of the development time on the desktop target with a
redeployment cycle of just a few seconds, and only test on the device
occasionally.
------
aaronsnoswell
Been working with LibGDX since 2010 - I still remember buying the Newton
physics game on my Motorola Droid. This was the best 2D Android game engine
back then, and it still is in my opinion :) Congrats to the devs!
------
chaghalibaghali
I recently managed to release my first game
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thomshutt....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thomshutt.bom))
using LibGDX and it really was a pleasure to work with - lightweight and not
too opinionated, but with some nice abstractions over the more fiddly aspects
such as out of the box Desktop/Web/Android/iOS support, input handling, app
lifecycles etc.
------
z3phyr
I would love to use this with clojure!
~~~
Jach
You can. [https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/Using-libgdx-with-
Cloj...](https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/Using-libgdx-with-Clojure)
(Bounce Away is a pretty fun game that uses both.) The problem I'm waiting for
someone else to solve though (and maybe I'll just make it a side-project one
day...) is a more idiomatic Clojure interface to LibGDX. Something like PyGame
would be pretty sweet too, though PyGame is wrapped around SDL and the whole
"blitting" pattern of getting stuff to the screen (which doesn't care if
you're writing functional, oop, or procedural code) doesn't really work
outside of 2D games.
~~~
georgeoliver
wait no more (I haven't tried it)? [https://github.com/oakes/play-
clj](https://github.com/oakes/play-clj)
~~~
gw
Thanks for mentioning my project. I just updated it tonight to support 1.0!
------
nubbee
I'd love to see a benchmark between LibGDX and OpenFL to test if either is
noticeably faster on the various platforms they support.
------
mentos
Great framework, great developers! Really enjoyed reading the summary of their
past 4 years, sounds like it was a really great ride.
------
gagege
If you're interested in an entity-component architecture for game development,
here's a nice example project to get you started with learning how to do it.
It uses libgdx for graphics and Artemis
([http://gamadu.com/artemis/](http://gamadu.com/artemis/)) for the entity
component system:
[http://code.google.com/p/spaceship-
warrior/source/browse/src...](http://code.google.com/p/spaceship-
warrior/source/browse/src/com/gamadu/spaceshipwarrior/#spaceshipwarrior)
------
jokoon
looks like a really big effort to make developing on android a better
experience, by clumping libs together, rather than just a game engine. I was
not able to find out if the scene2d thing has a partitioning algorithm of some
sort. Maybe It's irrelevant for an android device ?
Seems like good stuff though. Sadly I don't really "like" java...
~~~
terhechte
You can use any of the JVM languages with libgdx, such as Clojure, Scala,
Kotlin even JRuby [1]
[1] [https://github.com/mickey/libgdx-jruby-
exemple](https://github.com/mickey/libgdx-jruby-exemple)
~~~
jokoon
I've often considered C++ as a mandatory requirement for game development.
Java is fine though, but I just don't use it, and if I have to choose between
java and C++, I go for C++...
~~~
marktangotango
I've often considered Assembler as a mandatory requirement for game
development. C++ is fine though, but I just don't use it, and if I have to
choose between C++ and Assembler, I go for Assembler...
What a difference two decades makes eh?
~~~
omarhegazy
It really depends on what you're doing. Triple-A games and most graphically
advanced 3D games pretty much require you to use C++.
~~~
FreezerburnV
And assembly. I've heard from my boss (who did games a while ago at a very
notable company that still makes very well-known Triple-A games) that when
they were making a sequel to their first game, getting an assembly programmer
who really knew the CPU pipeline increased the performance of their graphics
pipeline by 40-50%. (at least) I would imagine that modern games continue to
need people who can program extremely optimized assembly, especially for
consoles.
------
omarhegazy
My favorite part about 1.0 is Gradle. No more Eclipse! Time to start writing
my games in Emacs, maybe even Sublime Text ...
Great fucking work, guys! Congratulations.
------
tosinaf
It's a really good framework, just need to give it a chance.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
No One Tweets Like the Japanese, and That Was a Problem for Twitter - swohns
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/how-twitter-handles-traffic-from-the-japanese-who-tweet-like-no-one-else/
======
josephschmoe
"built a new system—known as a software “framework,” in engineering speak"
Hearing the words "engineering speak" bothers me. Wired knows a significant
portion of its readers are engineers, right?
Saying just software framework would have probably been fine. Humans are
pretty good at inferring the meaning of words from context...
~~~
dragonwriter
> Wired knows a significant portion of its readers are engineers, right?
I seem to recall that Wired was widely regarded poorly in the technical
community as early as the turn of the millenium and that it has long been
viewed as something read by non-technical folks who want to feel "plugged in"
to technology.
So, I'd kind of be surprised if it was really the case that a "significant
portion" of Wired's readers were engineers.
~~~
solarmist
That's my impression of Wired as well, but this still seems a bit egregious
even for a layman's tech news site.
------
limaoscarjuliet
I had the same problem with Japanese folks. We had our system working all over
the World except Japan, where it would crash every morning. Turns out the
folks in Japan come in to work and at exactly 8:00AM they shout "HAI" hit
login button. All of them. At the same time. A login buffer size of 4 was not
enough to handle that ;-)
~~~
rambojohnson
> they shout "HAI" hit login button.
what?
------
ggreer
Twitter's engineering blog posted about this phenomenon last year.[1] It's not
as in-depth as I'd like, but it does contain some technical/architectural
details about how they scaled to deal with such high traffic.
1\. [https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-
record-a...](https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-and-
how)
~~~
ufmace
That's a far better description of what happened and the result than the
original linked article.
------
jgalt212
Didn't read the article, but I did grep it for unicode and utf-8 and found no
matches, so this might also be related.
Twitter lets you tweet 140 characters regardless of the bit width of those
characters in. For Japanese, I think almost all characters take two bytes in
utf-8. As such, given the same number of tweets, the bandwidth usage is approx
2X.
Twitter also seems much more useful in ideogram languages as 140 characters =
140 words = an article. In English, 140 characters = a short/medium sized
sentence.
~~~
nrinaudo
Japanese is often encoded in Shift_JIS, which is much better than UTF-8 (for
japanese text). Most browsers default to that encoding on japanese OSes, so
there probably isn't a real bandwidth issue, depending on the ratio of browser
to dedicated client usage.
As for ideograms, your statement is not correct. Kanjis allow for better
content/character ratios, certainly, but one kanji is very often not one word
- the word foreigner, for example, uses 3 ideograms.
On top of that, Japanese is not written solely with kanjis (as opposed to
Chinese, for example). It also uses katakanas and hiraganas, which stand for
phonems. This is more often the case on social networks where a lot of western
words are used - western words are almost systematically written with
katakanas.
Kanas are still more "efficient" than alphabets, but to reuse my previous
example, foreigner is written using 5 kanas instead of 3 kanjis.
~~~
FreezerburnV
I know it's such a tiny point, and very much off topic, but please don't
"pluralize" words such as Kanji, Katakana, etc. As someone who has spent a lot
of time learning Japanese, and who knows that Japanese words don't change
between singular/plural (with certain exceptions, such as attaching "-tachi"
to a word), seeing you write "Kanjis" or "Katakanas" so many times in a row
really bothers me.
I'll go back to my corner and leave you alone now.
~~~
SunShiranui
Well, he's speaking English, not Japanese. Do you refer to multiple pizzas as
pizze?
~~~
epaladin
It's more like the plural of 'deer' being 'deer'. I don't think I've ever
heard anyone attach an 's' to 'kanji' for pluralization when speaking English.
Like how it might be odd to say 'sushis' or 'wasabis'. Whenever I need to
stress plurality i would say 'kanji characters' or something like that. Oxford
English Dictionary lists 'sushi', 'kanji', 'shinkansen', 'katakana' all as
being mass nouns or having the plural form the same as the singular. The
exception in the words I looked up was 'tsunami' which may be pluralized as
'tsunami' or 'tsunamis'.
~~~
chc
Most of those _are_ the sorts of nouns that wouldn't normally be pluralized in
English. "Sushi" is like "rice" — specifies what the roll is made of rather
than the roll itself. We don't pluralize the name of a rail system like
Shinkansen because there is only one of it (similarly, "the L" but not "the
Ls"). But there are many Japanese loanwords that are commonly pluralized
differently in English. For example, futons, tycoons, typhoons, tatamis,
ninjas and kimonos.
It's ambiguous whether "kanji" is a mass noun referring to the character set
as a whole or a singular noun referring to a character in the set. I think
it's both. So it seems hard to blame someone for being unclear on the matter.
------
ibisum
The 'no downtime' thing really rings true with me .. during my personal time
working in Japan I found I'd become accustomed to the fact that it was just
'normal' to be going into the office after a few beers and working another
shift .. to the point where, when I returned to California, it was really
bizaare to me that, after 6pm, pretty much everyone went home and - except for
a few hardcore hackers - life just seeped out of the office space(s) we called
a workplace. I guess the different physical characteristics of the two
locations has a lot to do with it, not to mention culture - back home (at the
time) in California it was not at all weird to be spending up to two hours on
the commute, just sitting on the freeways in ones car, completely alone tuned
into whatever bland offerings the radio waves proferred, while in Japan I
don't think I had a car-ride longer than 30 minutes the whole time I was there
(airport lift) .. and there is something to be said for the vital 'energy'
that imbues a place like Tokyo at 9pm in the evening on a Tuesday, where most
of the world is still at work. Albeit drunk, at least in a good mood, but
nevertheless: still working. I got used to heading out at 10pm on any workday
and feeling really _alive_ out there in the walking streets, like there wasn't
a "shutdown" period before 12am.
The takeaway of this article to me is that, to be truly successful in the
International markets of the new electronic economies, one really does have to
disavow oneself of cultural baggage. I think I get better at that as the years
go by - but I can't, nevertheless, help to feel very sorry for my old
California associates who I know, even now today twenty years later, still
spend a really inordinate amount of time on the freeway. Oh, how impersonal
that life was ..
~~~
w1ntermute
> I can't, nevertheless, help to feel very sorry for my old California
> associates who I know, even now today twenty years later, still spend a
> really inordinate amount of time on the freeway.
You should feel more sorry for your Japanese associates, who spend 12-14 hours
at the office every day and never see their families, even though they
probably could've gotten their work done in half that time.
~~~
ibisum
> You should feel more sorry for your Japanese associates, who spend 12-14
> hours at the office every day and never see their families, even though they
> probably could've gotten their work done in half that time.
I don't know about that .. they spent more time doing things that mattered to
them - like, work, or associating with work colleagues/blowing off steam - and
less time doing things that were highly destructive to their health on an
immediate basis, like .. sitting in traffic for hours, being very un-social,
breathing in smog.
EDIT: Is it a 'cultural downvote', or something else I said? Because my
Japanese friends still don't 'get' why Americans think its so vital to have so
much private time being spent 'on the road'. This is very definitely a
cultural artifact, people ..
~~~
capisce
Maybe a daily walk in a park and/or 30 minutes of meditation could be better
for their health than spending 12 hours in the office with a break of having a
few beers each day. Seems like you're posing a false dilemma between spending
the full day in the office and having a two hour commute each day - it's
possible to choose neither of those. Are you sure your colleagues are so happy
about their situation?
~~~
ibisum
Oh, I missed that part out - certainly, my Japanese associates at the time got
a _lot_ more walk in the parks than you might think. For many of them it was a
vital part of the way home.
I just don't think the city planners of America in the 20th Century were as
sensitive to these issues as they _should_ have been. We cannot deny that the
automobile-economy made America _very_ unhealthy, and it wasn't until the era
of the gym that this became lesser of a health issue. Even still today,
though, by direct personal (thus: anecdotal) evidence, I can say without a
doubt that my American friends are far, far less healthy than the Japanese
side. Alas, its just a fact - even if we factor in the binge-work and
alcoholism. Not a popular perspective, but I think Americans need to get some
humility about this factor and stop building such monstrous cities with such
dependencies.. okay, this is now outside the scope of the original article,
which was fundamentally about the differences between cultures and how it
affects technical deployment decisions, but - after all - this is
fundamentally an Architectural problem as much as it is a cultural one (and
the two cannot be dissociated, really..) In the end, could the Twitter
difference really boil down to just how well the space of the two countries is
utilized? I think it does, ultimately, play a role in this discussion.
~~~
capisce
I absolutely agree that long commutes are bad, but I still don't think that
excuses Japan's overwork (Karoshi) culture. According to surveys Japanese
employee satisfaction ranks relatively low compared to other countries:
[http://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/english/reports/summary/200906/0...](http://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/english/reports/summary/200906/02.html)
------
kelukelugames
This is fun localization issue. Kind of like water usage during World Cup
games.
~~~
wisty
And power -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup)
------
hawkw
As a Scala enthusiast, it's neat to see one of my pet languages get press,
but...a "software engineering technology called Scala"? Did you mean
"programming language"?
------
philip1209
I wonder whether concurrent write operations in a single data center or the
load of achieving consistency between data centers caused more issues.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Beautiful 3-D Brain Scans Show Every Synapse - bane
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvXuq9jRWKE&feature=youtu.be
======
Gravityloss
This is excellent. In my opinion, computer science oriented people interested
in AI should study brains as well - it's a totally different approach to the
problem.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Is Nathan Myhrvold/Intellectual Ventures a patent Troll? - ashbrahma
http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/12/intellectual-ventures-sues-nine-tech.html
======
steveklabnik
Yes.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Numba: High-Performance Python with CUDA Acceleration - kumaranvpl
https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/numba-python-cuda-acceleration/
======
pavanky
I'd also like to shamelessly point out something I work on:
[https://github.com/arrayfire/arrayfire-
python](https://github.com/arrayfire/arrayfire-python)
It is a python wrapper around
[https://github.com/arrayfire/arrayfire](https://github.com/arrayfire/arrayfire)
and allows the code you write to use CUDA, OpenCL or x86.
~~~
snthpy
Sounds great! However without having looked at the API, my first reaction is
that it's yet another interface to learn. What would be awesome is if I could
just take my existing numpy or theano code and drop in an arrayfire object. Is
that possible or how similar is the API?
~~~
pavanky
There's an effort to have a drop in replacement for numpy using arrayfire.
[https://github.com/FilipeMaia/afnumpy](https://github.com/FilipeMaia/afnumpy)
It is still a work in progress and requires some upstream changes in arrayfire
to support the numpy api better.
~~~
snthpy
Thanks
------
lhenault
How does this compare to CuPy
([https://cupy.chainer.org/](https://cupy.chainer.org/)) ? It is now
independent from Chainer, is highly compatible with numpy and supports both
CUDA and CuDNN.
~~~
Loic
For the CUDA part I cannot tell, but Numba is also compiling on the fly your
Python code into machine code using LLVM. This where it shines. For example,
instead of pushing your code into Cython or a Fortran library, you can keep
writing in simple Python and get your code to run in some cases nearly as fast
as Fortran. This is my use case. I haven't used the CUDA features yet.
~~~
fnl
But LLVM doesn't support vectorizing, like AVX or SSE4, right? So I don't
think that would be nearly as fast as fully (Intel-) CPU optimized code...
EDIT: Let me hedge that a bit, to _advanced_ AVX instructions, as LLVM can do
simple loops and such.
~~~
lliiffee
I believe that LLVM 6 has finally introduced this, e.g. see
[http://llvm.org/docs/Vectorizers.html#vectorization-of-
funct...](http://llvm.org/docs/Vectorizers.html#vectorization-of-function-
calls)
~~~
Joky
Uh, what you're pointing at was introduced in 2012 in LLVM.
~~~
fnl
Only in parts, not all instructions, and some functionality it did have was
buggy. 4 and 5 are much more advanced/competitive on SIMD issues, it seems.
Edit: Oh, sorry you meant that other guy's link to LLVM's vectorization
tutorial. Ignore my reply ...
------
TheAlchemist
This looks really good, however I struggle to find real applications for that.
For almost all practical application, I use pandas or keras / tensorflow. I'm
probably biased as I mostly work with simple data that doesn't require
complicated calculations.
Would somebody have some benchmarks against pandas for some standard
operations ?
~~~
wesm
> Would somebody have some benchmarks against pandas for some standard
> operations ?
pandas creator here. Numba is a complementary technology to pandas, so you can
and should use them together. It is designed for use with NumPy arrays and so
does not deal with missing data and other things that pandas does. It does not
help as much with non-numeric data types.
~~~
j88439h84
Are you saying if that you have missing data you can't use numba, or if you
have missing data, and you use numba together with pandas, that pandas will
handle the missing data where numba alone could not?
~~~
grej
Heavy numba user here. What Wes is saying is that while Pandas handles some of
those missing values in an automated way, if you choose to use numba it uses
numpy arrays so you may have to handle some of those things yourself. I have
at times used a separate numpy array to indicate whether values are missing or
not. You could also use a value which is far out of the bounds of what you
might ever see in your real data, then test for that while you're looping over
those values (eg. fill missing values with -3.4E38 if you have a float32).
Depending on what you're doing, you might be able to use numpy.nan as a value.
It does work inside of numpy arrays. But some methods that operate on those
objects might not work as you expect.
For instance, if you run numpy.mean on a numpy array of [nan, 4, 5], it will
return nan. If you run the same thing on a pandas dataframe of the same
values, you'll get 4.5.
------
sandGorgon
oh wow! does anyone know how this compares to julia CUDA performance ?
~~~
wallnuss
Given that CUDAnative.jl is beating CUDA c in some benchmarks and in others it
is a bit slower, I would suspect that NUMBA is similar in performance.
The thing where the Julia CUDA support really shines is that it is supporting
arbitrary Julia structs and not just a blessed few datatypes like Float32.
------
m3kw9
So what happens if it runs in something like jupyter notebook mixed with
runtime code?
~~~
marmaduke
It works fine.
------
anc84
(2013)
~~~
grej
See the note at the top of the article:
Note, this post was originally published September 19, 2013. It was updated on
September 19, 2017.
~~~
p1esk
So, what exactly was updated?
~~~
bsprings
When I originally wrote the post in 2013, the GPU compilation part of Numba
was a product (from Anaconda Inc., nee Continuum Analytics) called NumbaPro.
It was part of a commercial package called Anaconda Accelerate that also
included wrappers for CUDA libraries like cuBLAS, as well as MKL acceleration
on the CPU.
Continuum gradually open sourced all of it (and changed their name to
Anaconda). The compiler functionality is all open source within Numba. Most
recently they released the CUDA library wrappers in a new open source package
called pyculib.
Some other minor things changed, such as what you need to import. Also, the
autojit and cudajit functionality is a bit better at type inference, so you
don't have to annotate all the types to get it to compile.
We thought it was a good idea to update the post in light of all the changes.
------
moon_of_moon
Real nice NVidia. Now how about some support for Linux on Optimus/Hybrid GPU
laptops?
~~~
jhasse
Stop buying them ;)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
MNPP - A high performance web server in a one-click installer - hmart
http://getmnpp.org/
======
viktorino
Mac + Nginx + Percona + PHP love them all!
------
altuzar
MAMP is from the past, agree. And nice site.
------
thwarted
_Install a world-class PHP_ development environment _on your Mac. Unleash the
speed of the webserver everybody is talking about, Nginx._
_the Apache web server has lagged in terms of performance during the last few
years. MNPP can handle much more requests per second than Apache with PHP
implemented as a module._
Seriously, is there anyone deploying something that requires high simultaneous
requests-per-second on OSX? One click install is great for the development
environment, but none of these are one-click installs on a cheaply scalable,
which means Linux on commodity hardware, production environment.
But the easier it's made to create a development that is like the production
is going to be a big win. As a systems guy whose team is in charge of that
kind of thing, the fewer hoops, and thus fewer workarounds, that are necessary
to get a complex system with a lot of different parts up and running for the
developers to develop against, the better.
~~~
jyr
MNPP is a desktop application for local execution, the closest thing to a
production environment. MNPP is beginning and is on the way to make things
easier for the developer.
------
DFectuoso
Jyr is definitly working hard on getting this project up and running, its
looking better every day! Congratulations!
~~~
jyr
Thanks, comming soon new features like create of vhost from the terminal
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
What does an idea person without software skills or business education do? - arpit
A very good friend of mine is an idea person and we spend a lot of time discussing our different ideas for web/iphone apps. I am (thankfully) a programmer so I can prototype my own ideas and put it on the www to get feedback and see if any of them catch on (none have yet). A recent conversation led to a discussion on what options she has. She is not a programmer and works as a part time web designer. When we discuss ideas, we are so not on the same page, so I am not super motivated to spend too much time developing an idea I am not convinced of. Her interests are very different from mine so I often pooh-pooh her ideas, but a few months later she shows me similar ideas that have been successful businesses or products.<p>What would you advise a person who is a good ideas person? She doesn't enjoy programming, so programming classes may be only the last resort.
======
akadien
Everybody has ideas. Your good friend is no different from almost everybody
else on the planet. Ideas aren't worth anything. If they were, there would be
a marketplace or exchange where you could buy and sell ideas.
Implementation is everything. If she can't or won't get the skills and
education to implement her ideas, then pity her.
------
IsaacL
Get some skills? If she already knows some web design, polishing up her skills
in that area is a useful skill for a tech startup. With a few months of self-
study, or finding some relevant work experience, you could probably get enough
basic business education to be of some use. So you were to team up, and you
were to focus on building product, and she worried about polishing up the
frontend, managing various marketing channels, doing market research,
sketching out financial projections, etc - it could work out.
------
nzmsv
Ideas have a negative value, if anything:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1191242>
It's pretty harsh, but anyone can come up with a hundred ideas they have no
hope of implementing. Myself included ;)
------
revorad
Perhaps she could find a job in one of the companies who have built successful
products matching her ideas. That will give her a chance to see up close how
it's done, while building her own skillset. She might meet some new people who
she could then team up with to start something of her own.
The other thing of course is to just take a chance and try making something,
if she can find someone to work with. She could look into outsourcing the
programming.
Generally, it's hard to say anything useful without knowing what her ideas are
about.
------
hmason
She should learn to write well and share her ideas. Then she has well-
articulated ideas that people may pay attention to.
------
notphilatall
If she is already working as a web designer, learning JS (with libraries such
as jQuery) would be a great first step. This way, she could start prototyping
her UIs to convince other people to help with the server-side components.
Also, she could take that skill to a design-challenged startup with a hot
idea!
------
arpit
Has anyone seen Quirky? <http://www.quirky.com/>. Seems interesting. Pepsi
Refresh is also interesting (if your idea has a benevolent aspect to it):
<http://www.refresheverything.com/>
------
HappySushiCo
IMHO -> ideas != product. if she could find a way to shape her ideas into
actual product plans then maybe it would be easier for other people to realize
their potential. more often than not, ideas are only as good as how you're
able to convey them to others.
------
CyberFonic
Goto university, get an MBA or business degree. She needs some foundations and
skills and techniques to progress ideas through innovation, market
development, etc. Refer her to Steve Blank's web site and/or book.
------
tunera
why don't you realize her ideas, and you two create a company?
~~~
arpit
I wish, but I have too many of my own projects going on, and her projects
arent interesting to me. But there is historical evidence that her ideas are
good for the niche long tail community she is a member of. Some iphone apps
that I dismissed later made a pretty penny for some other people
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Tips and tricks in using Webpack - yedakesom
https://github.com/rstacruz/webpack-tricks
======
nnq
I'm more interested in an up-to-date "webpack for complete newbs with hairy
hybrid-modern-legacy projects" resource, that would introduce you to
everything from scratch with real examples.
Hopefully including more real-world cases than greenfield clean code projects:
I want something like "start using webpack in an already started project that
mixes jQuery & Backbone, React and some Polymer on a few pages, and a home-
brewed-framework legacy portion" and maybe also has a few "isomorphic modules"
(ya know, the kind of code that can run both in browser and in backend nodejs
depending on context, but it "home made", not based on some nice magic sauce
like Meteor). Because this is what you see in real world projects and the
first questions when I tocuhed webpack were more along the lines of "how tf do
I mix this old-school browsers global script + this commonjs/require one +
this idiosincratic node-browser-isomorphic one" and "how to I tweak
minification rules for one file only to prevent weird code breaks from
variable renames"...
It's amazing how much _modern js learning resources_ assume you _already
know!_ And how plain/normal they expect your project to be when in real life
you're always seeing a mystic-quantum-chemistry-frankestein-puppy-hybrid thing
:)
~~~
tropin
Your comment is spot on. I checked the webpack home hoping this tool somehow
could optimize and/or clean inherited messed up projects with dozens of js
libraries, only to learn that is up to the programmer to explicitly tell it
the dependecies. At least, that's what I expected when I read "webpack
simplifies your workflow by quickly constructing a dependency graph of your
application and bundling them in the right order".
~~~
Sacho
In order to construct the dependency graph, it still needs some mechanism
through which to determine that a piece is dependent on another piece. Webpack
uses several popular mechanisms for that(amd, commonjs, maybe others I dont
know of), but they're all manual.
It sounds like you were looking for a tool more akin to UglifyJS or google's
closure compiler, which(as far as I know) take a single file and analyze it,
and then try to output "better" code equivalent to it.
Webpack tries to solve a different problem - from a bunch of scattered lego
blocks you define an "application"(by defining dependencies), and have webpack
bundle it together for you.
------
garysieling
I think the webpack documentation is missing the "why" in a lot of cases, so I
sometimes find it difficult to map my problems to the right area of docs.
The "vendor" and module splitting are good examples of this. Or, in this
example, using "process.env.NODE_ENV" makes a lot of sense if you use Heroku,
but is more cosmetic if you control the entire build chain.
~~~
acemarke
I wrote a blog post recently that tries to clarify how and why
`process.env.NODE_ENV` relates to JS build optimization:
[http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2016/11/posts-on-
packtpub-g...](http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2016/11/posts-on-packtpub-
generic-redux-modals-and-building-better-bundles/) .
~~~
garysieling
That's really interesting, I didn't realize so many libraries depended on it,
or that you could set it, thanks!
------
thelarkinn
Awesome post!!! I'll reach out to our awesome-webpack companion repo and add
this repo. Besides that, on behalf of the webpack core team, feel free and
reach out if you have any other questions or want to get involved.
We even have a new docs page where hopefully _most_ of the things on this
document are (if not should be) covered.
webpack.js.org webpack.js.org/concepts
~Sean + webpack Team
------
kasbah
I have tried to make use of Webpack a few times for my projects but the only
times I have actually managed is when starting on a new project with a
boilerplate and config generator. The way it is set up doesn't seem to meld
with my way of thinking at all.
I really like how straight forward Browserify is. Likely this is because I am
quite accustomed to Unix shell tools and makefiles (I actually use Ninja [1]
with ninja-build-gen [2] for a few of my Javascript projects) but Webpack's
hot-reloading would be really nice to have.
I do think it would suffice if Browserify was a bit more performant so I don't
have to wait for it after making a change. I keep meaning to try Rollup to see
if it will give me any advantages in that regard.
[1]: [http://ninja-build.org](http://ninja-build.org)
[2]: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/ninja-build-
gen](https://www.npmjs.com/package/ninja-build-gen)
~~~
petecoop
Have you tried using watchify [1] to speed up your builds in development? I've
also been using browserify-hmr [2] which is working nicely for hot module
replacement and found it easier to setup than Webpack's hmr.
I think one of Webpack's benefits is that this stuff is all bundled with it,
so everyone's using it but with browserify you need to go out and find these
solutions yourself
[1]:
[https://www.npmjs.com/package/watchify](https://www.npmjs.com/package/watchify)
[2]: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/browserify-
hmr](https://www.npmjs.com/package/browserify-hmr)
~~~
kasbah
Yes, I did try watchify but encountered some major errors during usage that
made me give up. I might give it another go and see if it is solved now.
Ah, it never even occurred to me to look for something like browserify-hmr,
will definitely try this out!
~~~
91bananas
I've been running browserify under grunt and by itself, both using watchify,
and I have no complaints. I came from just grunt, and a bunch of different
tasks like concat, uglify, etc. Browserify has been a revelation, way faster
compilation times, way less config, way fewer installed packages. Definitely
give it a go again.
------
jvain
Booleans, how do they work?
const DEBUG = process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'production'
module.exports = {
debug: DEBUG ? true : false
------
purplerabbit
I wish I had had this a year ago. Literally every item listed I had to figure
out awkwardly through digging around in github issues, blog posts, and stack
overflow.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Slashdot Effect - Digg_mov
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrHLkw558v4
======
Digg_mov
have fun
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The future of CAD and 3D printing will arm citizens - xkcdfanboy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmZAaxYwhOo
======
lifeguard
People will be sad when they realize the barrels are not rifled. That means
these are plastic zip guns.
~~~
xkcdfanboy
It's not hard to add a rifling to the model is it? It seems like they are
prototyping, testing, and incrementing designs.
~~~
lifeguard
It is impossible to add rifling to a plastic barrel that has metal projectiles
fired through it at the speed of sound.
These are muskets.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Tell HN: Major bug in Chrome - mtgx
I tried sending an e-mail in G-mail and it was saving and sending it as "undefined". At first I thought it might've been a weird Gmail bug, but now I see others mentioning that it saves their text as "undefined" in Wordpress, too, when using Chrome.<p>This seems to have started happening in the past few hours or so. Is anyone else experiencing this?
======
UnoriginalGuy
I just tried sending an e-mail in Chrome latest public release and cannot
reproduce.
Undefined might just be indicating that a javascript object is not set to a
defined value. If for example the JQuery library wasn't correctly loaded onto
both sites that could result.
------
dangrossman
Do you have the Grammarly extension installed?
This is almost definitely a problem with one of your extensions rather than
Chrome itself. Disable them to see which one.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Facebook And The Future Of Competition - colortone
http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/05/last_week_i_discussed_why.html
======
colortone
I hope everyone here is continuing to follow this meme. It's an incredibly
powerful way to design businesses.
I _strongly_ recommend John Seely Brown & John Hagel's 2005 "The Only
Sustainable Edge" to further ground one's understanding of the new dynamics of
advantage.
Any hacker that reads and understands that book would be unstoppable. And
should call me ;-)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Goodbye – Findx is shutting down - __ka
https://privacore.github.io/
======
tannhaeuser
I'm loving it how Fb makes a campaign about open data, yet blocks indie search
engines like findx.
Very informative post mortem; also includes the obligatory "incredible"
phrase.
Edit: didn't know Github, too, only allows Google and Bing. That's quite the
show stopper for gh IMHO. I guess we need a reciprocal data agreement of sort
such as "we don't link to sites which don't allow crawling"
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Vitamin C and Immuno-Oncology - daddylonglegs
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/03/02/vitamin-c-and-immuno-oncology
======
pazimzadeh
Here's the original article:
High-dose vitamin C enhances cancer immunotherapy
[https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/12/532/eaay8707/](https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/12/532/eaay8707/)
Takeaways:
Oral Vitamin C and intravenous Vitamin C have vastly different
pharmacokinetics and effects on cancer.
\- Low dose vitamin C (oral) is anti-oxidant and may attenuate chemotherapy:
Chemosensitizing effect of vitamin C in combination with 5-fluorouracil in
vitro
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12929582](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12929582)
"only a high concentration of vitamin C increased the cytotoxicity of 5-FU"
Ascorbic acid attenuates antineoplastic drug 5-fluorouracil induced
gastrointestinal toxicity in rats by modulating the expression of inflammatory
mediators
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5598240/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5598240/)
\- High dose vitamin C (intravenous) is pro-oxidant
\- High dose vitamin C (intravenous) alone slows tumor growth
\- High dose vitamin C (intravenous) combined with immunotherapy has a
synergistic effect
High dose vitamin C (intravenous) also synergizes with chemotherapy and spares
healthy cells
[https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/6/222/222ra18](https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/6/222/222ra18)
If you are in chemotherapy or immunotherapy, stay away from low doses of oral
anti-oxidant supplements such as Vitamin C.
~~~
tomlue
We did a data extraction project for 81 trials using oral or intravenous IV as
a cancer therapy! You can see the whole project at
[https://sysrev.com/p/6737](https://sysrev.com/p/6737). Basically we imported
81 VitC trials from clinicaltrials.gov and extracted dose levels,
administration methods, placebo usage, and some other data.
You can see all the oral studies here:
[https://shorturl.at/mvxy4](https://shorturl.at/mvxy4)
You can see all the IV studies here:
[https://shorturl.at/bn019](https://shorturl.at/bn019)
The results of the research will be published soon...
~~~
tomlue
Those links are broken and should be
You can see all the oral studies here:
[https://bit.ly/3ct2q4u](https://bit.ly/3ct2q4u)
You can see all the IV studies here:
[https://bit.ly/2Th9ud5](https://bit.ly/2Th9ud5)
------
y0ssar1an
Don't waste my time with this stuff.
- single study
- on mice
- hasn't been replicated
- purely speculative mechanism of action (How exactly is Vitamin C helping? They don't know!)
I guess I have to remind everyone that most published research is false:
[https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...](https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124)
~~~
ksaun
I appreciate and believe I understand your perspective. I do not refute your
criticisms of the research.
I have a different perspective, however. As someone who is expected to die of
cancer within a few years, even early/flawed research is of interest.
Especially with the cognitive impairments I feel from chemotherapy, I find it
challenging to wade through all of the ideas and opinions to get to
information that's useful in guiding decisions about my treatment.
In particular, this thread acquainted me with jcims's life experiences. I take
his statements at face value and believe that he's indeed spent countless
hours researching various treatment possibilities. That he is left with the
belief that vitamin C has promise as a treatment option gives me cause to
further explore the relevant science. I lack the time, energy, and knowledge
to investigate the plethora of options/speculation, so I greatly appreciate
when another credible person points me in a direction that's worthy of greater
attention.
This doesn't mean I'm planning to ask my oncologist about vitamin C or pursue
this as a treatment option at this time. :) It just gives me a promising area
of further exploration and I'll see where it leads me.
From this thread, I also gained reinforcement (in part through pazimzadeh's
summary, below) of my understanding that taking vitamin C oral supplements
during chemotherapy is ill-advised. I'd come across this guidance before, but
have been reminded of it by this article and this discussion.
So, my request to you is to please not discourage posts such as this article
here on Hacker News. If you prefer to not have your "time wasted [by] this
stuff" then please don't click on such articles or please suffer in silence.
Or, better yet, post your summary of the research's limitations, as you've
done here. (That is, your summary is useful, but your first line saddened me,
as I appreciated having my time "wasted" by this article and the subsequent
discussion. I hope others here do not heed your request.)
Edit: minor editing to simplify. (I realize this post is still rather wordy,
please forgive.)
~~~
wysifnwyg
They're encouraging the scientific process, which is the method by which we
validate science. Your objections to scientific process only serves to detract
from that process.
~~~
ksaun
What aspect(s) of my post suggest that I object to scientific process? (I do
not believe myself to hold the opinion you're attributing to me.)
------
jcims
Pursuing this as an adjunct therapy for my wife's cancer treatment showed me a
side of healthcare that I hadn't really considered before. Fear. Not fear of a
calculated risk going the wrong way healthwise, but profound fear of stepping
anywhere outside the brightly lit path of 'standard of care'. There's this
phase change in the doctor's expression that you can see visually when you
enter into conversations such as this (the other one being management of
hyperglycemia). There's a certain slackening of facial expression and
straightening of posture. The vocabulary becomes smaller, blinking more
regular, tone flatter and the conversation becomes more circular.
It took me a little while to sort it out, but I've come to the conclusion that
these (mostly young) doctors are so incredibly leveraged in their position by
student loans and sunk cost into their education that they simply cannot risk
anything outside of the prescribed approach to care for a
patient...particularly one where there is generally a foregone conclusion as
to the outcome. I initially raged against them individually, but now I see
them as scared children and my hatred is directed towards the system that
creates this fear. Should I encounter this situation again, my first goal will
be to find a doctor with a terminal illness themselves and see if we can't
forge a new path together.
~~~
arkades
Living on the other side of that table, and living in the rooms where docs sit
and shoot the shit after such patient encounters, _and_ as someone with a
debilitating chronic illness that people love to spout bullshit alternative
medicine theories and treatments for, I'm going to go ahead and say your
conclusion is both self-serving and wrong.
Self-serving because, naturally, the reason that your requests are met with
poor regard isn't because there's something wrong with the request, but
because something is wrong with the person receiving it. But that's okay;
that's the nature of human opinion and subjectivity. You can accuse me of the
same, of course - oh, and will. I'm sure this thread will go from Zero to
Malpractice in 6.4 seconds.
But wrong:
You're going to ignore this sentence, but dear god, do I want to burn it into
your eyeballs, and the eyeballs of every person reading this: _I care_. The
vast majority of my colleagues _care_. The vast majority of nurses _care_. The
vast majority of everyone you meet in the hospital _cares_. They've been
there, either themselves, or with a loved one; have been there in the past, or
are there _now_ , whether or not they disclose that to you. They _give a
shit_.
When we work with someone that is suffering and dying, _we care_. We hurt. And
when, god help us, there's a chance we can actually help and reduce that
suffering, be it for the patient or their family, and they _take that away
from us_ , we hate them a little. We hate them for making us care, and making
us watch and experience and share this suffering when maybe we didn't have to.
When a patient says, "You know, it's really important to us that we explore
(dubious option X)", it puts up our radar for "oh fuck, this is going to
suck." And the more the patient goes down that road, the more we know they're
going to veer away from care that's _at least have some evidentiary basis to
support it working_ , the more we know we have to go down the fucking drain
with them.
Not that long ago we had a lady on our IM service who'd had a promptly
diagnosed, treatable, resectable local cancer... 18 months ago. 18 months of
quack bullshit later, she came in to us because of the severity of her
constipation, because that cancer arose near her intestines, and had now
matted and infiltrated them. She and her family were proof to all
conversations regarding reality: she just needed IV nutrition of the
appropriate sort, because the problem wasn't that the cancer had utterly
invaded her GI tract, it was that she needed the right vitamins! Our
nutritionist couldn't come up with the miracle combination of IV nutrition for
her, because she kept deteriorating (of course she did.) The family wouldn't
allow painkillers, because those worsen constipation, and of course, they
refused to acknowledge this constipation was because of her rampant cancer
they opted to leave untreated, not because of some magic nutritional
deficiency. Which means no opiates - because any minute now we're going to
cure that constipation with the magic vitamin.
So we had to listen to her scream, then moan, then quietly writhe. For days.
While the family insisted we just find the right vitamin. Until the family
insisted we try spoon-feeding her, because there just isn't the right IV feed
for her. We refused. They fed her themselves. This lady who hasn't passed
stool in two-odd weeks promptly vomited, aspirated, and within a few hours was
in the ICU for a chemical pneumonitis.
We got to watch her die. We got to visit every-day. We got to try to gladhand
the family and give them bland cliches because we didn't want them to hurt
more. We didn't want to rub it in that they killed their mother.
But we got to watch it. In detail. I had the dismal, terrible pleasure of
pronouncing her dead.
I'm not afraid of the terribly scary management of a vitamin C infusion in a
terminal patient. I'm hurt. I'm pained. I suffer every time I have to watch
preventable misery and death because a patient and/or their loved one's are
busy chasing Google MD's endless font of nonsense. And because I'm not a
goddamned robot, I dislike suffering, and those people that force me through
more.
Surprisingly, doctors take a lot of solace in "we did what we could for her.
We made it as painless as possible. We gave her as many days as we could."
That means a lot. And when it's taken away from us, holy shit, do we hate it.
This was pretty stream-of-consciousness. I'm not editing it, and I'm not
coming back to it, so if anyone bothers responding, know it's not for me.
~~~
wavepruner
Thanks for this. As a chronically ill patient I've spent years struggling to
understand why doctors get so uncomfortable and sometimes hostile when I
pursue experimental treatments. Knowing that you go through the devastation of
watching people do reckless and dangerous things helps me understand.
------
clumsysmurf
I found this summary to be an easier read than the original research paper
[https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-02-high-doses-vitamin-
im...](https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-02-high-doses-vitamin-
immunotherapy-combating.html)
------
chrisco255
Worth noting that clinical trials are underway for studying the effect of
vitamin C infusions on 2019-nCov:
[https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04264533](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04264533)
------
bastian
This is an interesting link from the comments section of the article:
[https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04264533](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04264533)
------
watertom
Mice do not equal Humans for one simple fact.
Mice produce l-Ascoribic Acid already, where humans cannot.
I would argue that guinea pigs would be a much better model, because guinea
pigs, like humans don't manufacture their own vitamin C.
I would argue that testing any vitamin C therapy on animals that product their
own l-ascorbic acid is a waste of time.
------
piinthesky
Timing is everything when money is involved.
[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8067189/Chinas-
do...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8067189/Chinas-doctors-
racing-Vitamin-C-beat-coronavirus.html)
------
pstuart
Shooting up C doesn't sound appealing, but I wonder if liposomal C might be
worth exploring after all.
------
kaikai
Very high doses of vitamin C are also an abortifacient, although it's not as
reliable as other medical methods. If you think you might be pregnant or are
trying to become pregnant think twice about using vitamin C to treat another
other conditions.
------
blackrock
ELI5 please. So billions of dollars spent on cancer research, and the solution
this entire time, is to simply spike the IV drip with some lemon juice?
------
1996
TLDR: A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in Italy has
found that giving cancerous mice high doses of vitamin C (ascorbic acid)
enhanced immunotherapy, resulting in slowed or stopped tumor growth.
Maybe Linus Pauling was indeed on to something
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling)
) with his idea of high dose IV vitamin C: skipping the article as it seems to
take political positions ("But if this work makes some headlines of the “Linus
Pauling was right” sort, don’t believe them") and using Wikipedia as a source
instead:
Pauling's work on vitamin C in his later years generated much controversy. He
was first introduced to the concept of high-dose vitamin C by biochemist Irwin
Stone in 1966. After becoming convinced of its worth, Pauling took 3 grams of
vitamin C every day to prevent colds.[13] Excited by his own perceived
results, he researched the clinical literature and published Vitamin C and the
Common Cold in 1970. He began a long clinical collaboration with the British
cancer surgeon Ewan Cameron in 1971 on the use of intravenous and oral vitamin
C as cancer therapy for terminal patients.[143] Cameron and Pauling wrote many
technical papers and a popular book, Cancer and Vitamin C, that discussed
their observations. Pauling made vitamin C popular with the public[144] and
eventually published two studies of a group of 100 allegedly terminal patients
that claimed vitamin C increased survival by as much as four times compared to
untreated patients
(...)
medical establishment concluded that his claims that vitamin C could prevent
colds or treat cancer were quackery.[13][151] Pauling denounced the
conclusions of these studies and handling of the final study as "fraud and
deliberate misrepresentation",[152][153] and criticized the studies for using
oral, rather than intravenous vitamin C[154] (which was the dosing method used
for the first ten days of Pauling's original study
~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
I wouldn't say that "But if this work makes some headlines of the “Linus
Pauling was right” sort, don’t believe them" is a political position. Pauling
was wrong: he didn't say "High dose IV vitamin C is helpful", he said
(paraphrased) "High dose IV vitamin C is helpful because it is an
antioxidant". But it's not an antioxidant, as this paper shows, it's an
oxidant! It's helpful, but for exactly the wrong reason, and low-dose vitamin
C _is_ an antioxidant, which is _harmful_! So if Pauling were correct you'd
expect other antioxidants to help, but they also cause harm (in oncology).
~~~
1996
So basically this guy who said vitamin C IV in high doses fights cancer was
wrong and should be never rehabilitated , because the hypothetised mechanism
was the other way around? (anti oxidant -> oxidant)
I think we are forgetting the most important result there: vitamin C IV in
high doses fights cancer.
~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
> I think we are forgetting the most important result there: vitamin C IV in
> high doses fights cancer.
No, that's wrong. Vitamin C IV in high doses _makes certain chemotherapy work
better_ to fight cancer. And does so in a way that Pauling wouldn't have been
able to predict, his mechanism of action would imply that it would reduce the
effectiveness of the chemotherapy.
------
KWxIUElW8Xt0tD9
look up papers by Dr. Klenner on the use of intravenous vitamin C
see also "living proof" a New Zealand 60-minutes segment
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Git Confirm. Git hook to catch accidentally committed code (TODO/Skip) - pimterry
https://github.com/pimterry/git-confirm
======
themckman
There isn't a lot that peeves me more than working with developers with poor
git commit habits. As someone who takes every commit they make seriously, it
can really demotivate/depress me when I look at my team's git log and see a
series of poorly thought out commits and messages. It's always enjoyable to
look at a piece of code, wonder why it is the way it is and to find that
answer in a well written commit message by the author of the change. If a tool
like his can at least help developers keep the diff portion of their commits
usable, then I hope more people consider using it.
It'd be interesting if it could learn from a project's history and have a
developer confirm that they really want to commit files that it has determined
to be unrelated, together.
~~~
nathancahill
Same. Last project I worked on, most people used git add ., git commit,
without ever looking at what was staged. The peeves were real. I'd love a tool
that didn't let you commit unrelated files.
~~~
jbverschoor
And that's how you find those lovely credentials on github.
------
bArray
I'm a regular at leaving "TODO" in the code. It's a reminder that the
implementation wasn't great and requires another look at some point. If
something breaks it's the first thing I fix in that related code. It's okay to
simply not have time to write every piece of code to perfection - it's
important to capture that fact though.
Another regular thing I use is "NOTE" for code that really is not obvious at
all. If my code doesn't read easily, other programmers (or my future self)
know to check it for in depth information.
If at the time of writing code you recognise it's difficult to understand or
not completely correct then I think it's the perfect time to capture that
information into the code.
~~~
YZF
What's going to happen is that TODO is going to:
a) stay in the code forever.
b) seen 5 years later where it doesn't even make sense any more and by a
different person.
If it's difficult to understand or not correct don't commit it. Just fix it.
It's a false economy. Friends don't let friends TODO ...
~~~
atjoslin
The reason most people tell me they use todos is, "you can't do everything up
front."
I agree, but I hate TODOs. They're the worst form of keeping track of
technical debt.
Just open a ticket! I like to have a tag/label called "debt" that I put these
"TODO, bad implementation" type of problems under.
That way at least it's tracked.
~~~
aiiane
A preferred method for doing this at Google is to open a bug, and then leave
the TODO in the code with a reference to the bug number. This has the
advantage that if someone comes by to refactor the code later, they'll have
the chance to go look at the bug (possibly taking it and working on it,
possibly resolving it as obsolete if the original issue no longer applies,
etc).
Having the two-directional link between the bug and the code is quite useful,
especially for what is probably the most frequent use I've seen for TODOs: "We
could do this better, but the better way is blocked on circumstances beyond
our control. Once those change, revisit this."
~~~
bArray
I actually like that - perhaps that allows you to implement blocking as well,
for example: "TODO: X cannot be improved until Z & Y is complete.".
The projects I work on tend to have a very quick life cycle, so there isn't
even a ticketing system in place other than the occasional post it note. There
just isn't the time and the team is tight.
------
boardwaalk
Honestly I think the best thing you can do towards making good commits is
having a good GUI client and using it well.
What I do is, after I'm done making a mess of things, I click through each
new/changed file and study the diff. I might need to commit or discard or edit
specific chunks, but at the end everything is staged. Then I can click through
the staged files quickly to check for mistakes while formulating a good commit
message.
(You could also use DIFF=vimdiff or something too)
I find looking at individual hunks and files and staging them piecewise makes
it much easier to maintain an attention to detail than doing a 'git diff'
where everything flows together and 'git commit -a' where you might miss
untracked or temporary files.
~~~
wingerlang
I agree, some time ago I wrote down why I liked GUIs and this was the main
point.
A relevant part is:
This also means that for every commit, you ‘must’ skim
through each file and stage only what you want to commit.
This serves as a final reminder of your code and has on
multiple occasions led me to moments where I had added
some temp code which wasn’t supposed to be committed.
Full page [http://jontelang.com/blog/2016/03/02/committing-with-
sourcet...](http://jontelang.com/blog/2016/03/02/committing-with-
sourcetree.html)
------
web007
curl https://.../hook.sh > .git/hooks/pre-commit
This seems like a bad idea, since you may already have a commit hook that this
would clobber.
Does anyone use any kind of plugin manager for git hooks? I know I can just
build a shellscript (and have done so extensively) but is there something like
pathogen / npm / bundler for a pluggable git hook architecture?
[https://github.com/brigade/overcommit](https://github.com/brigade/overcommit)
seems to be an option, anyone have experience with that?
~~~
spenuke
It's hard to completely generalize for the clobbering reason you point out.
Assuming that you essentially want to keep your hooks coupled with your source
code (or, at least, it's ok to do so), I've found that Make works pretty well
here.
In the root of the project directory, you have a subdirectory containing all
the hooks you need (or use a git submodule), and then you create a Make target
to copy those hooks (and make them executable) to your .git/hooks directory.
Make is nice because it won't clobber existing ones (unless they are older, in
which case you probably want them overwritten).
Then, whenever someone first clones the repo (or whenever you make a change to
the hooks), they just need to run make on that target again.
Obviously, not an ideal choice for everyone, but it's pretty simple and works
well for me.
------
Sir_Cmpwn
Git hooks are pretty useful for catching yourself. I recently put this in
.git/hooks/pre-commit for one of my repos:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
npm run lint
------
coherentpony
You can also git add -p, but that's a habit you have to develop.
~~~
pimterry
I built this mostly because I _really_ like git add -p, but afaict it doesn't
work at all for adding totally new files, and it's easy to miss things in the
middle of big chunks of changes. But yeah, that's exactly the inspiration.
~~~
abusque
> but afaict it doesn't work at all for adding totally new files
You can use git add --intent-to-add on your new file (or -N for short), and
then use git add -p as usual. You can then use the edit mode to remove hunks
you don't want to commit just yet.
Not quite as convenient as on an already tracked file, but it's reasonably
usable.
------
jdoliner
This looks pretty similar to `git commit -v` which brings up a diff of changes
in a text editor and prompts you for a commit message.
~~~
nilved
Those things are not really at all similar.
~~~
jdoliner
I guess they differ in that one interactively prompts you for each change and
one just shows you all the changes at once. But it's similar in that both are
a way to confirm that you're committing only what you want to commit.
------
john_oshea
git config --add hooks.confirm.match "AKIA"
would probably be a good default for AWS users.
~~~
carterehsmith
For sure.
If I remember correctly, maybe a year ago, Github actually went through public
repos and emailed the people that had AKIAs in the repos. Apparently there
were many of them.
Myself, upon reading about that, I went through our (non-public) repo and,
sure enough, found like a dozen AKIAs with secret keys and all. Also found a
random AKIA in some binary file, false alarm.
But then I was like... wait a second. How about .pem files? Yup, found
several. .cer (some SSL certs), id_rsa? - yes to all.
That took a while to fix.
------
jquast
You could just add this pattern to something like
[https://github.com/landscapeio/dodgy](https://github.com/landscapeio/dodgy)
\-- Looks at Python code to search for things which look "dodgy" such as
passwords or diffs"
------
samstokes
I wish Github had a way of running these sort of checks before
accepting/rejecting a push. (I can understand why they would be reluctant to
run arbitrary user-supplied bash on their servers, though :))
~~~
praseodym
The GitHub flow [1] is to use pull requests for everything. Aside from being a
great code review tool, you can execute CI and other checks on them, even
making it required for those checks to pass before merging [2]. You can quite
easily hook your own checks [3], like the one from the original post or even a
check whether the committer signed a CLA (Spring Boot does this [4]).
[1]
[https://guides.github.com/introduction/flow/](https://guides.github.com/introduction/flow/)
[2] [https://help.github.com/articles/enabling-required-status-
ch...](https://help.github.com/articles/enabling-required-status-checks/) [3]
[https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/statuses/](https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/statuses/)
[4] [https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-
boot](https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot)
------
throwawayReply
It's a good idea but ultimately the people who don't care about this will
start doing: git commit -am "" /y
~~~
happyslobro
Don't forget -n (--no-verify). The last thing we need is some automated test
suite getting in our way ;)
------
dweinus
Does anyone know of anything similar as a Sublime package? I already do my
linting there, so this would be a great addition.
~~~
dweinus
In case anyone else is interested, this looks like a way to get there:
[http://www.sublimelinter.com/en/latest/creating_a_linter.htm...](http://www.sublimelinter.com/en/latest/creating_a_linter.html)
------
amitmerchant
This looks promising!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why working on Chrome made me develop a tool for reading source code - egraether
https://www.coati.io/blog/why_working_on_chrom_made_me_develop_a_tool_for_reading_source_code/
======
farhanhubble
What you're doing has the potential to change the quality and speed of
software development. We most often end up building upon existing code and
libraries. Scanning through hundreds of files and doing reference search after
reference search takes up an inordinate chunk of our time. Building a mental
model from flat code is inefficient and error prone. IMHO every language
should support this kind visualization. With virtual/augmented reality
becoming more common it's only a matter of time before such visualization and
programming tools will be more widely adopted.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Debugging using system calls in Mac OS X - bryceneal
http://bryce.is/writing/code/macosx/debugging/udp/sockets/dtruss/dtrace/eaddrinuse/2016/07/30/debugging-using-system-calls.html
======
danieldk
One thing that the article does not mention is that dtruss is also just a
DTrace script (well, a DTrace script in a shell script ;)). DTrace comes with
some other nice scripts (iosnoop, execsnoop, opensnoop, etc.)[1].
But you need to disable some portion of the system integrity protection:
[http://stackoverflow.com/a/34616033](http://stackoverflow.com/a/34616033)
[1] [http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2011/10/10/top-10-dtrace-
scr...](http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2011/10/10/top-10-dtrace-scripts-for-
mac-os-x/)
------
chmaynard
I love articles about expert sleuthing, especially when it involves low-level
code. I hope the author shares his discovery with the Go engineering and
documentation teams, perhaps via bug reports.
~~~
kangman
If you're into that there's a whole conference on dtrace you should check out
called dtrace.conf
------
0x0
Meanwhile, if you try to run the system lldb on the system ruby interpreter on
OSX, you get this:
% lldb ruby
(lldb) target create "ruby"
Current executable set to 'ruby' (x86_64).
(lldb) run
error: process exited with status -1
(cannot attach to process due to System Integrity Protection)
~~~
GuiA
Reboot in safe mode (⌘+R immediately after booting), open a terminal, run:
csrutil disable
Reboot.
-> % lldb ruby
(lldb) target create "ruby"
Current executable set to 'ruby' (x86_64).
(lldb) run
Process 436 launched: '/usr/bin/ruby' (x86_64)
I for one am glad that it's now much harder to scam my grandparents.
~~~
0x0
That disables a lot of useful protections, seems overkill just to be able to
trace a ruby script :-/
~~~
ptomato
You can also disable just the relevant bits - `csrutil enable --without debug`
would probably do the trick here.
------
mkagenius
Great tools, I should try to use them.
In this case could it have been done by lsof ?
------
callesgg
"UDP connections"? UPD is connection less.
~~~
thwarted
It is possible to have a "connected UDP socket". It is one that is already set
up with a remote endpoint.
_if you connect() a SOCK_DGRAM UDP socket to a remote host, you can use
send() and recv() as well as sendto() and recvfrom(). If you want._
[http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/multipage/connectman....](http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/multipage/connectman.html)
------
cheez
I often wonder why I don't come across bugs like this but then I think to
myself "I'd never write code that closes a socket until all writes and reads
are done."
So the question is: how do you do that in Go?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Zynamics acquired by Google - sp_
http://blog.zynamics.com/2011/03/01/zynamics-acquired-by-google/
======
sp_
My former boss (I left the company in October 2010) just announced that
zynamics was acquired by Google. zynamics is a boostrapped German startup that
never took any VC capital. We specialized in building reverse engineering
tools that help security researchers find vulnerabilities in software.
Curiously, we always saw HBGary as one of our main competitors. However, we
were focused on tech, not shady deals. :)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Particle raises $40M Series C to enable the Internet of Things - dcschelt
https://blog.particle.io/2019/10/30/particle-raises-40m-series-c/
======
mdorazio
Would like to see them use some of this to put out a LoRa board as an
alternative to cellular / WiFi.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
New Chrome for iOS scans for beacons broadcasting URLs - jimiasty
http://blog.estimote.com/post/124778667895/google-services-on-ios-now-work-natively-with
======
jimiasty
Estimote founder here.
Few days ago Google released their new, open beacon format - eddystone and
today just updated Chrome for iOS that can scan for beacons broadcasting
Eddystone URLs.
You can read more on our blog how to start broadcasting URL using beacons and
how to test it on Chrome for iOS.
------
Ezhik
Is this supported on Chrome for Android?
~~~
WojtekB
At the moment it's iOS-only, but should come to Android as well soon.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Replacing Skype with SIP using Plivo (YC S12) - bevenky
http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/05/18/replacing-skype/
======
nishadmusthafa
Great tutorial. I see that you've mentioned "non intuitive". We'd love to hear
how that can be remedied.
------
fakeer
I am thinking of switching to them(personal usage). I've had a Google Voice
for a long time but seeing no way to easily use it from my phone or desktop I
guess I'll rather dump them, they don't seem to do much good with GV either.
Maybe it will go into Google cemetery soon.
I am going to purchase some credit at Plivo. Not sure how much they charge for
calls to Indian numbers.
Update: Just checked, they don't offer calls to Indian numbers. At least that
is what I understood from <https://manage.plivo.com/pricing/>
~~~
nishadmusthafa
Hey Fakeer,
We do offer calls to India. The pricing is here
<https://manage.plivo.com/pricing/?country=india>
It's 2 cents a minute(which is the current GV rate)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
People overestimate their ability to recognize fake news - newman8r
https://www.quod.us/article/people-overestimate-ability-to-recognize-fake-news
======
joeblow9999
News about fake news. So meta.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Analyze contents of your videos with Dextro's API - sanchitarora
http://www.dextro.co
======
chatmasta
Nice, boola boola. ;)
I think I remember talking to David about this in SF a few years ago, or at a
YEI event or something. I interned at Numenta and he was aking me some ML
questions. Looks like y'all have come a long way. Nice job!
You might find some partners for a tool like this in music video publishers,
or advertisers looking to build competitive intel. e.g. a database of all
commercials with "X" in them, or all music videos with "Y" in them (for
product placement). Just a thought.
------
vosper
This looks like the inverse of the usual "tell we what's in this video" design
- Dextro seems to want you to ask it if something their system already knows
about is in a video.
I think I'd rather just submit a video and have all the matches and their
confidence / salience (not sure that these are the same thing).
~~~
jluan
Yes! General tagging of videos with all possible tags is great for media
discovery, but we've built our system with data analysis in mind. We want to
be useful for those who want to analyze photo and video datasets when they
already know what their query is.
We've found that most of the value is in the latter. For example, our system
helps answer:
1) on a publisher video server, which videos were about automotive?
Can we package those ads off to car brands?
2) how many people took photos of my brand's product on instagram
after our marketing campaign?
3) what were pedestrian traffic patterns like outside
our store based on the CCTV system?
~~~
tecnogram888
What video formats do you accept?
~~~
jluan
The video analysis demo accepts most YouTube and Vimeo URLs! (Occasionally
certain YouTube links trip up the fetching mechanism, however.)
Our full API accepts the major video formats.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Goodbye R scripts, hello R packages - RA_Fisher
http://statwonk.github.io/blog/2013/11/03/goodbye-scripts/
======
vikp
I love R, and it was actually the first language I really learned to program
with (for obvious reasons, I wouldn't ever recommend this). I can identify a
lot with the "one-off scripts" problem of R. When I look back at some of my R
code, I find that it is just a giant mess of commands mixed together semi-
randomly.
As I learned to program properly, I solved the reuse and "good code" problem
more by moving towards using Python than by making R packages. I occasionally
use R for data exploration and visualization, but Python has support for
almost all of the machine learning and statistical functions that I need.
I am very interested to hear how other people have solved this problem. Do you
only use R, or R in combination with Python/Julia/Java? If you only use R, are
you using it purely academically?
~~~
chubot
IMO the Unix philosophy of reuse is vital for data analysis. I recommend that
people in this space learn to use the interactive shell and shell scripts
well. I saw a comment that said "Shell is a REPL for C", which I think is
quite pithy.
People think too much about reusing R packages or Python packages. In my
experience you can get things done a lot faster if you factor things into
_programs_ and not libraries. This lets you use multiple languages, and all
real world analysis problems need multiple languages. (If you're only using
one language, then you're likely only working on part of the problem).
Right my toolset is Python, C++, and R, coordinated with shell scripts. I
still like R for quick plotting, and of course data frames are essential, but
I'm playing with Pandas now, which seems impressive. I don't think Python will
ever catch up to R in terms of statistical functions, but in terms of
plotting/munging/data frames it might.
In the future there will be more languages, not less (Julia will add to the
number of languages, not replace any). So being able to decompose a problem
into separate, reasonably generic, programs is an important skill IMO. Most
data analysis pipelines are a huge mess, but they don't have to be.
~~~
vikp
That's an interesting way to go about it. Any reason for using shell scripts
to coordinate the flow instead of things like Cython and RPy? (I don't shell
script a lot, so this may be a silly question)
These days, I mostly seem to be able to get away with using single languages
for applied machine learning, like a Python webserver that runs background
machine learning tasks, or an Android app in Java that connects to a webserver
written in Python. But back when I was doing less applied side stuff, I was
similar to you in that things were spread across R and Python.
~~~
chubot
In my experience, RPy is annoying to get working, because you're dealing with
Python versions and R versions together. It's brittle and usually unnecessary,
as it's you can just serialize to CSV or JSON.
If you can get away with using a single language that's good, and Python is
probably the only one where that is possible (i.e. can write both prototype
and production code, and data ingestion and machine learning). But I often
have to use C++ because of the data size, and I think R's plotting is more
convenient than anything in Python now.
The shell scripts have their messiness and sharp edges, but they definitely
save me many many lines of code. There is always some weird thing that needs
to be integrated/automated and shell is almost always the right tool for that.
------
elohesra
Purely out of interest, what's so wrong with Windows as a development
environment? I've seen this claim touted before on HN, but I've never seen an
explanation (not doubting that there is one; I just haven't seen one). I
develop on Windows every day, and I'm always happy to learn a new way to
improve my workflow, so does Ubuntu (or Mac) actually make it easier to
develop software, and if so then how?
I'd also be interested to hear what kinds of software you've found it hard to
develop on Windows.
~~~
CraigJPerry
>> what's so wrong with Windows as a development environment?
Command line.
When you're doing a task on a computer, some paradigms are better suited than
others depending on the task.
E.g. imagine delicately touching up pixels in a photo, guided by your artistic
eye yet instructing the computer by laboriously typing many commands into a
command line. There's no reason this couldn't work, it's just way more natural
to use a pen & digtiser, or a mouse.
When we're developing we're editing text and invoking commands. Editing text
is covered by any major platform just fine, a lot of popular editors & IDEs
are even cross platform.
Invoking commands are sometimes covered by the IDE, sometimes the commands
covered are pretty comprehensive (i'm thinking of Tom Christiansen's quip
"Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX").
There's a limit to what tasks your IDE can cover, even though some do try
really hard to cover all your needs (Eclipse has a web browser in it!) and
when you hit that limit as we so often do in development, you need a command
line.
At that point, Windows kind of whistles while sheepishly looking off to one
side.
There's a related point about development dependencies, some libraries are
hard and / or time consuming to build. A great package manager is a brilliant
productivity booster. Mostly though, it's the point about the command line.
(just to be clear, i have given powershell a good shot, i estimate i've
authored almost 1k lines of it).
~~~
elohesra
Thanks for the reply.
What sort of command line tasks are you trying to invoke on both systems that
are easier to invoke on unix? I can't think of any commands off the top of my
head that I've had to invoke recently, other than IIS commands. Maybe it's
just the fact that the C# developer's workflow is so heavily IDE based. I can
imagine that if you were having to manually invoke the compiler etc, then a
useful command line would be a must.
~~~
CraigJPerry
No problem at all!
Searching is a big one, looking through my shell history i frequently use
egrep although I think egrep is a bad example here since I could use the IDE
to do a search. The problem is that I frequently want to do something with the
results - maybe make a substitution in each of the result files, or compress
the files, or copy them to another host.
I overuse the find command, locate would run faster in many cases but find is
just a reflex. E.g. answering:
find data/ -type f -mtime -1 # get me the working dataset from today
I see a lot of source control commands, This is something all the IDEs do but
in my experience it's much more robust from the command line than an IDE.
There's a few 3 or 4 line scripts for various tasks I was doing manually. To
give an example one is to kick off a rebuild of my KVM virtual machine (I
currently write a lot of CFEngine code so this is a frequent thing when the
unit tests of the cfengine code don't go to plan and leave the KVM borked!)
The biggest use case in my shell history is simple navigation to look at or
operate on various files. Fuzzy search in ST2 is slowly winning my heart here
right enough but it doesn't work on remote hosts or even local dirs not in my
project.
~~~
elohesra
Very interesting, thanks for the in-depth explanation.
I think that this does appear to be a fundamental difference between Windows
devs and Unix devs. All of the things you've listed there, I'd do through the
GUI on Windows.
Searching, obviously, I'd Windows+E (or Super + E in OS non-specific keyboard
terms) to open up the explorer, then tab+tab to navigate to find, then type
the query. I can't think of an easy way to pipe a set of files into some sort
of function (e.g. for substitutions) outside of F#, maybe something exists for
that in PowerShell, but I find PowerShell to be a bit of a poorly-documented
mess.
Source control, again, I'd do through the GUI. With TortoiseHG, I've got my hg
commands available for me with the right click of a file/folder under a
repository. I see that it seems that this'd be significantly slower than doing
it through command line, but the windows shortcuts actually make it pretty
snappy to navigate through the file system in the GUI.
For kicking off a VM, I'd usually attempt to shortcut the command I'm looking
to execute regularly and then Windows+D my way to the desktop to execute it.
Windows does seem to have made the decision early on (i.e. back in '95, when I
first started using it) to provide a clean and concise GUI first and foremost,
and then to add programmer/automation-friendly terminal APIs as an
afterthought. I wonder if the issues that Unix users on windows have are
caused by the fact that Unix systems seemed to go the other way, and that
attempting to replicate a Unix experience on Windows would just lead to
frustration?
This is interesting, because I rarely get a chance to use Unix at work, nor do
I get much of a chance to speak to Unix devs (we're a Microsoft shop -- WPF,
ASP.NET MVC, and SharePoint if we're feeling masochistic). Thanks again for an
interesting snapshot into your workflow.
~~~
CraigJPerry
Likewise, ive just realised that I dont make effective use of the desktop on
windows but when you mention win+d to get to a screen worth of cherry picked
shortcuts, it makes sense.
I never really put anything on my desktop, I do use the win7 taskbar a lot but
I reckon ill start using the desktop too.
EDIT: meant to add for piping in windows, someone showed me something
similarly useful, if you drag a bunch of selected files onto a program icon,
the program can often make use of those files. E.g. drag some files onto the
outlook icon and it'll compose a new email with them attached.
~~~
elohesra
With regards to piping, yes this _can sometimes_ be true. It's very dependent
on the actual program. Programs on windows take a string array as the argument
to their main function, so if the program is written in such a way that it
iterates across every element of the string array argument and then does
something with them, then this'd work. Most of the Microsoft programs behave
sensibly with this, and execute an Open command against each of the files
dragged onto them, but this isn't guaranteed to be true.
I'd still like a nicer, general purpose way of manipulating multiple files in
Windows. That does seem to be one place where it's definitely lacking, but it
could just be that I don't know how to do it.
------
EpiMath
Interesting, thanks. ( Like your username too, despite him being slightly
denigrated in the linked article. ) I personally think that it is good to have
a basic grounding in some kind of fundamental "real" programming language
before you get into s-plus ( R ) or any other more domain-specific language.
The main reason being that you will better understand the compromises,
limitations and shortcomings. I like R but as a programmer I've seen some
awful code written in it!
~~~
RA_Fisher
Yes, if you read further on the blog, you'll see I'm more than slightly
denigrating. I read a book recently called The Cult of Statistical
Significance and it's really turned me against Fisher. Not only do I see his
methods as sub-standard to Bayesian analysis, he was really mean and
disparaging himself to those folks. It's interesting, my username is what it
is because he used to be my hero! Just 6 months ago, I really considered him
to be the father of modern science. Now I basically see his work as mostly
enabling mediocre scientists to rise through the ranks. This is what I mean by
that:
[http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/10/daily-c...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/10/daily-
chart-2)
~~~
EpiMath
I've spent my career thinking about these same issues. And certainly Fisher
was, well, abrasive to put it mildly. I've read much of his early work and I
think the intended context has mostly been lost. Many modern statisticians (
of the "frequentist" persuasion ) use a strange and awkward combination of
fisherian and neyman-pearson. We talk about "p-values" but then interpret them
as hypothesis tests with long-term error probabilities ( Fisher disavowed this
interpretation of p-values, and insisted they did not have a long run
probabilistic interpretation but were a measure only of evidence against the
null in the particular experiment. ) I think Fisher gets a bad rap for a lot
of later bastardization of his work. ( I'm sure it did not help that he was
not a likable person, or his valid but misguided and testimony about tobacco.
)
Still, I'm sympathetic to your position and can understand how you'd come to
that way of thinking. I'm not convinced even a diehard Bayesian would
completely disagree with Fisher's more restricted and stringent interpretation
of p-values. Or at least they would see it as a big step up from the more
common usage you are referencing.
~~~
baldfat
When did ideas get muddied by personality? I see this in the whole Ender's
Game debate and in this Fisher debate. We need to compare ideas outside of the
personality THAN we can separate the idea for the person.
In our history (Historical Philosophy/Theology Major) you would be apsolutely
shocked at the lives of great thinkers and disapprove so much of their lives
but MOST people don't know. This is the issue with open lives we know so much
more about people. It is never just a book or an idea we can learn maybe to
much???
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Greatest shortcoming of human race: inability to understand exponential growth - chupa-chups
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-15/albert-bartlett-on-message-about-exponential-growth-to-the-end/
======
chupa-chups
Sorry for the edited title, but the original title was too long.
The article is from 2013, but, from my PoV, quite relevant today.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Why can't I comment on an article I submitted? - ttonkytonk
I noticed that when I submitted an article today, I didn't have the option to comment on it.
======
ColinWright
Which one, and when?
_Edit:_ OK, I've turned on "Show dead" and there it is. My guess is that it
was DOA. Lots of submissions are DOA, and the reasons vary. You're best to
follow the advice in the Guidelines[0] and email the mods.
And it also appears that your question is answered in the FAQ[1]:
_" Why can't I post a comment to a thread?_
_" Threads are closed to new comments after two weeks, or if the submission
has been killed by software, moderators, or user flags."_
[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
~~~
jacquesm
Flagged, dead. See submission history.
~~~
ColinWright
I agree it's dead, although it doesn't say "[Flagged]".
And yes, submission history noted.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Airing: the first hoseless, maskless, micro-CPAP - dsego
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/airing-the-first-hoseless-maskless-micro-cpap#/story
======
DrScump
What percentage of those who rely on CPAP now breathe exclusively through
their noses in the first place?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Great Storm: Solar Tempest of 1859 Revealed (2003) - ableal
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_monday_031027.html
======
ableal
Also, 2009 predictions for the 2013 cycle peak:
[http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2009/29...](http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2009/29may_noaaprediction/)
And a 2010 news piece: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7819201/Nasa-
warns-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7819201/Nasa-warns-solar-
flares-from-huge-space-storm-will-cause-devastation.html)
------
hga
It's nice to see that a number of things have to come together to get outsize
effects like in 1859.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Looking inside a Linux powered slot machine - buovjaga
https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2018/02/looking-inside-linux-powered-slot.html
======
moondev
Awesome! Would be interesting to know more about the software and how they
test it all. I wonder what percentage of slot machines run linux? I would
assume most due to no liscensing fees?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Salesforce releases language model bigger than GPT-2 large - strin
https://github.com/salesforce/ctrl
======
minimaxir
I am working on a guide (should be released tomorrow) to easily get it up and
running for personal use. Here's my Twitter thread of current experiments with
the model:
[https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1173081315177975810](https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1173081315177975810)
I recommend reading the linked paper in the repo as it gives decent
examples/instructions on how to use the model. Although the size and
architecture is comparable to GPT-2, the emphasis on conditional generation
differentiates it.
~~~
riku_iki
> running for personal use
how one can use it for personal use? In my understanding it will not fit into
single GPU memory available to average person? Someone need to distill model
first?
~~~
minimaxir
It currently fits into a P100, but _barely_.
------
purple_ducks
Wow, that's some license addendum:
> This software should not be used to promote or profit from:
> violence, hate, and division,
> environmental destruction,
> abuse of human rights, or
> the destruction of people's physical and mental health.
~~~
solarkraft
So Salesforce could never use it?
~~~
bmm6o
Not sure which of those you think they would be violating? And they own it, so
the license doesn't apply to them, it applies to everyone else. (Apologies if
you're making a joke and I'm ruining it)
~~~
solarkraft
You can very easily argue that Salesforce, by dealing with companies who do
it, does all of the things that are forbidden by the license.
------
rdiddly
Anyone have a real-world use case for something like this? I must admit I'm
having trouble thinking of any that aren't essentially deceptive. Because in
my little biased world, I have no need of "text" per se, and what value any
text has to me is closely linked to the fact that it came from a human.
~~~
zawerf
Machine learning researchers aren't working on language modeling because they
want to enable fake news.
They are working on it because it improves all downstream NLP tasks. See:
[http://ruder.io/nlp-imagenet/](http://ruder.io/nlp-imagenet/). BERT, Elmo and
XLNet all fall under this use case.
For example if you're trying to recognize speech or translate some text, it
helps a lot if you can start off producing something that is statistically
grammatical even if the content is nonsense.
------
skybrian
From the blog post: "Beyond the technical work to develop this model, we’ve
also taken several steps to anticipate and mitigate malicious use cases where
possible."
From the preprint, this seems to be doing some review before release and
having a code of conduct in the GitHub repo.
------
novalis78
The unicorn prompt is the new text generator lorem ipsum
------
visarga
It was trained on 140GB of text on 256 TPUs for 2 weeks, the model being made
of 48 transformer layers. I'm wondering when we will see a model trained on
1TB or 10TB of text.
~~~
p1esk
I doubt training a scaled up transformer on 10TB of text will lead to
significant improvements (btw, 10TB is about the size of all books in English
in the Library of Congress). Image classifiers don't get _a lot_ better when
trained on a lot more data than ImageNet. 140GB is probably enough to train a
general model, which could be finetuned on extra data for specific tasks.
Text generators need a world model and situational awareness, something like a
map and a GPS signal. So we are probably two major breakthroughs away from a
machine that actually _understands_ something (or at least which seems to
understand something, if you're philosophically opposed to the idea that a
machine can understand something).
------
foundart
Could someone provide a high level summary of what this is for a technical
person not conversant with the field?
~~~
csande17
Salesforce has created a computer program where you put in a small prompt,
like "Wikipedia page about badgers" or "News article starting with the line,
'Donald Trump was impeached today'", or "French translation of 'I like
pears'", and it tries to predict what the text will be. You can also run the
program in reverse, where you put in a snippet of text and it predicts whether
it came from Wikipedia or a mystery novel or the fitness subreddit.
Salesforce created the program by first writing some relatively simple linear
algebra, then fiddling with the constants until the output happened to look
right. Their program contains 1.6 billion constants, which is more than any
other program of its kind.
This program is also special because Salesforce has released it publicly;
other organizations, like OpenAI, have previously claimed that text-generation
software is too dangerous to release to the general public.
~~~
lixtra
> writing some relatively simple linear algebra
Except, that it wouldn’t work if it was purely linear.
~~~
csande17
Right, yeah, it's linear algebra combined with a few non-linear functions. The
point is that Salesforce didn't come up with an algorithm that generated
English text by writing a grammar or thinking really hard about what sentences
look like—all the functionality comes from the "training" process that set the
constants.
------
buboard
> Advertisement
Yeap, This one is indistinguishable from reality
------
dan_mctree
Are there any hardware reqs to work with this?
~~~
pas
In theory, no. But for any decent performance, you need a big CUDA capable
GPU, as far as I know.
But you can try it on a CPU of course. (Maybe with some modifications; see
this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20977776](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20977776)
; also if someone can get it working in Google Colab you get a GPU capable
instance for free.)
------
kevinwang
Open AI did the right thing by not releasing their model; it's disappointing
that researchers are so callous about the potential effects of their research
in the name of progress.
~~~
csande17
I've never really gotten why AI types are so concerned about text-generation
models.
Like, sure, I can kind of see why you wouldn't want to make the Deepfakes
program public; it currently takes a lot of time, effort, and expertise to
swap faces realistically in a video, and maybe we don't want to give every
average Joe the ability to do that.
But pretty much everyone in the world can already pretty trivially write text.
(I'm doing it right now!) And the "typical" generation output from these
programs usually isn't very good—OpenAI had to try like thirty times for each
of the prompts in their PR materials—so it usually ends up being less work to
just write the fake news yourself instead of using the software.
My personal conspiracy theory is that all this talk of "the model is too
dangerous to release" really boils down to "if we let people test out the
model, they'll find it doesn't work as well as our PR team wants them to think
it does".
~~~
visarga
I dunno, this time the text looks really good. I got as far as 5 or 6 phrases
deep before it said anything silly. I would have been fooled if I red it in
real life.
My guess is that they will perfect the transformer and its training process,
curate the dataset and make this method really easy to use. Maybe it can do
translation, math, even auto-complete code. That is only by iterating more on
the current formulation of the Transformer.
But it is also possible that it is surpassed by something even better. This
new language model could replace the inductive bias specific to the
Transformer - the ability to "attend" to any part of the input text, with
something more efficient, because Transformers are quite hard and expensive to
train right now. Maybe the Transformer inductive bias is too general (like a
fully connected network) and needs too much data, with a slightly different
idea it could be made much more efficient and probably more convincing.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Show HN: Camelot – PDF Table Extraction for Humans - NavyDish
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/camelot-2
======
okket
See current discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18199708](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18199708)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Maybe Agile Is the Problem - signa11
https://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-agile-blah-blah/
======
zbentley
The core issue, I think, is that software development remains unpredictable in
many very common situations (for a whole lot of reasons, most of which are not
technical). Management and planning requires predictability, so we devise
systems like Agile to attempt to impose predictability. This addresses the
wrong problem: the work itself is unpredictable, no matter how predictably
your sprints start and end and how well you fit X% of a project into each
sprint. Things improve (in many cases thanks to systems like Agile) until they
hit a local maximum constrained by that fundamental unpredictability, at which
point planners and management are still unhappy, so more process is imposed,
abd eventually we end up in the situation described by this article.
Usually,causes of the fundamental unpredictability remain unacknowledged and
unaddressed beyond a superficial level.
~~~
zepto
I wonder how Apple gets round this?
~~~
konschubert
By never announcing things before they’re ready?
~~~
zepto
This seems to work very well. Why doesn’t everyone do it?
~~~
konschubert
You get a short-term boost out of announcing something. Some companies feel
they cannot wait for that boost until they’re done.
------
markodjurovic
All these new nonsenses are a problem. Those who understand them can also see
that they are nonsenses, and those who do not understand them think that they
are superior methodologies.
------
PaulHoule
Following the "12 principles" blindly is just as bad as letting your
organization be rolled by the "agile industrial complex".
The idea of breaking work up into little chunks is great -- it is in no way
contradictory to the ideas in the "Project Management Body of Knowledge" it is
just putting them together in a different way.
In fact, those ideas need to be put together in a way that works for a
particular organization.
In some cases the most important practice is the reduction of "work in
progress", that is, a simple kanban board without a lot of effort into
estimates and deadlines. If you have good build and deployment practices you
should be able to deploy "whenever the business needs it" and not have to wait
for a sprint to finish.
The biggest problem I see is a lack of trust between management and
engineering. If that trust is not there it doesn't matter much which
management methods you use. With agile you will bring conflicts up quicker,
but that just might cause you to burn people out and spin your wheels. If you
work on a longer timescale some people might be able to get work done despite
the dysfunction.
------
kevwil
No, corporate "agile" is the problem. Politics, resistance to change, and
power struggles are what's fatiguing. True Agile is liberating and
invigorating, but unfortunately rare.
~~~
bobm_kite9
So rare that perhaps the meaning of the word has changed irrevocably?
Disclosure masquerading as a plug: I’m writing this at the moment-
[https://riskfirst.org](https://riskfirst.org)
------
raducu
It's the same old bureaucrats who just changed in the "agile" clothes. Because
"agile" is whatever form the bureaucrats want to call "agile".
~~~
vanadium
It even shows up as “agile workplaces” these days, where it most often
manifests itself as open floor seating with no set arrangements—transient
would be the best characterization. FTA, just another example of how the
word’s lost its meaning, this time to the buzzword wars.
~~~
levythe
What do you mean by FTA? I'm not familiar with that TLA.
~~~
vanadium
"From the Article"
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Life After Being Acquihired - uglyzigzag
I co-founded a company for 4 years with 2 other cofounders. Early this year, we decided to pursue acquisitions because our business went on the trajectory as a lifestyle business and we wanted to have the best outcome for our investors.<p>We basically went to all the possible companies and got 3 acquihire offers. A) One with 3 cofounders with jobs and some consideration, B) one with 2 tech cofounders with some consideration and C) one with 2 tech cofounders with no consideration.<p>To make the investors happy, make sure the non-tech cofounder having a job (and the non-tech founder basically wanted to pay me to accept the offer A, but I did not take his money), I decided to agree to go with A, however, the buying company gave me a low ball offer while giving the two other founders great pay packages. My other offers from B and C were far appealing than A, with higher pay and far better levels (because both B and C truly needed me to build their tech and respected my seniority).
From joining the company A, I have been told myself every day that choosing A was a rational decision, but I'm sad every day. I don't like working for corp especially for climbing the corp ladders, but now I have to face being judged by levels every day. Company A basically told me, "if you think you are good, prove it to me", but I have been requesting to get a bigger scope project to get a chance for promotion, but there has been none.<p>I'm just sad because this choice may be rational but I have sacrificed for other people.
======
gus_massa
Do you have a vesting schedule?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Make it up as you go along - ntlk
https://medium.com/thoughts-on-creativity/cae042ffb171
======
zrail
"It unlocked a part of my brain I didn't know I had". I've felt this way about
games like D&D since I started playing in 8th grade. Yes they involve a game
structure but the most fun I've ever had has been telling ridiculous
collaborative stories.
It's imperative that we encourage creativity in kids. They're born with this
amazing capacity to imagine incredible things, all we as parents have to do is
manage not to kill that off. Telling stories together and playing games
together are two of the best things.
~~~
PaulHoule
The Steve Jackson game "Toon" is the best game to start kids around the age of
9 or 10. The first few chapters put the GM and the player through a very quick
"boot camp" that gets a game circle up and running.
------
ams6110
"Make it up as you go" may be fine for kids bedtime stories.... but when it's
used in software development (which is often the case when "agile" is mis-
implemented) it's a recipe for disaster. It ignores all the hard-learned
lessons that history has proven about what does and doesn't work.
~~~
stefl
Indeed, I agree, although I'd argue that I do try to learn as much as possible
from the experiences of others. I only very roughly covered what "make it up
as you go along" might mean as far as agile is concerned, because so much has
been written on the subject and I assumed some familiarity. Perhaps I could
have emphasised that more!
------
zaphar
Some times back, I stayed telling my kids a series of stories about a little
old man. They were all of the cuff and spontaneous and I have the kids
opportunities to suggest things in the narrative. The stories were always
silly.
I think my kids probably have the best memories from those stories though.
Imagination is a powerful thing to encourage in your children.
------
jdbernard
My mother had "Yellow Jacket" stories which she would make up at bedtime. They
always centered around fictional versions of us on a farm with work horses,
Yellow Jacket being the name of the horse we would ride. I have tried doing
the same for my kids, but I feel like my stories always end up really lame.
Maybe I need to try again.
------
ryanx435
Does anyone else ever have problems with Medium's pages not loading properly?
I use Opera on both my phone and my tablet, which both run various versions of
Android. I can see the picture splashed across the top of the page, but
nothing else. It is very weird.
~~~
stefl
I saw a message when I went to write this post on Medium that it doesn't yet
support mobile/tablets very well yet for writing, so they've disabled writing
on those devices. I'm guessing there are similar issues with reading from time
to time, then.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Presenting Doesn’t Have to Be as Scary as Halloween - mauricedecastro
http://mindfulpresenter.com/mindful-blog/presenting-doesn-t-have-to-be-as-scary-as-halloween
======
WorldTour
Very Nice.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The US military is trying to read minds - howard941
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614495/us-military-super-soldiers-control-drones-brain-computer-interfaces/
======
laurex
Ed Boyden's work is fascinating. He has been involved with many things I'd
expect to directly impact the future of the brain on a consumer level.
[https://mcgovern.mit.edu/profile/ed-
boyden/](https://mcgovern.mit.edu/profile/ed-boyden/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
System and Method for Validating Video Gaming Data - bytematic
https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10463971
======
bytematic
Abstract: The present specification describes systems and methods for
filtering a video game user's match performance data or loadout data through
validation mechanisms. For the performance data, the validated, signed
performance data are written to a leaderboard service of the video gaming
system. For the loadout data, the validated, signed performance loadout data
are transmitted back to the client device and used when playing a game. Free
computing and/or networking resources of the client game device are used as an
intermediate between the client devices, validation services, and/or
leaderboard services.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Developer Marketing Guide - craigkerstiens
https://www.devmarketingguide.com/
======
siddharthdeswal
Here's how in-depth this link is, presented in (hopefully) easier to
understand context for most people here:
"The Web App Development Guide for Marketers"
1) Get a database because they are the where all your data will be saved. "You
should have a db if you have nothing else."
\- MySQL book link
\- Relational databases video
\- more intro-to-databases links
2) "Fancy having a frontend?" A frontend is needed because your users will
want to use your awesome app
\- HTML link
\- CSS link
3) Do's and Don'ts
\- Have forms and buttons
\- Don't make the forms too long. Here's some research to show long forms lead
to lesser people submitting them.
... and so on and so forth.
~~~
michaelbuckbee
I don't think anyone (including the authors) would disagree that this is a
very basic introduction to marketing for developers.
A point that's very separate from whether or not it has value.
There are still way too many developers who are making awesome products and
then failing to get traction because they neglect the marketing basics.
Something like this article that plainly lays out the basics is very helpful
for setting a baseline.
~~~
TekMol
> There are still way too many developers who are > making awesome products
> and then failing to get traction
Can you give some examples? My experience is that the "Build it and they will
come" approach works surprisingly well.
~~~
ams6110
It works if you can hit upon the sequence of events to get some viral
attention. Hitting HN at the right time of day, or getting some other
attention among your target users. That can be a matter of chance but usually
requires at least some effort on your part.
Just creating a product and a website with no marketing whatsoever is unlikely
to get the attention of anyone.
~~~
richard___
How do you find out / when is the right time of day to post to HN?
~~~
grzm
Google indeed can be your friend here.
One analysis I like is from 'minimaxir: [http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-
hacker-news/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/)
There's also a Quora answer: [https://www.quora.com/When-is-the-best-time-to-
post-on-Hacke...](https://www.quora.com/When-is-the-best-time-to-post-on-
Hacker-News-to-get-and-stay-long-on-the-front-page)
And wouldn't you know it, a submission on Hacker News itself for a post
entitled "Best Time to Post? It’s Irrelevant":
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9426040](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9426040)
I'm sure there are others as well.
------
stevoski
> Email might not be the most attractive means of communication, but
> newsletters are direct and exclusive to customers, a good starting point.
> “You should have an email newsletter if you have nothing else... This is the
> one opportunity you have to make something just for them that no one else
> consumes.”
I'd love to see some broad evidence that email newsletters are effective. I've
experienced no strong correlation myself between the frequency of sending
newsletters and sales.
The strongest argument I've heard for email newsletters is, "it can't hurt, so
you should do it just in case it helps." But that ignores opportunity cost.
Can anyone (preferably who doesn't work for a email campaign company) give any
strong evidence in favour of regularly sending out email newsletters?
~~~
blowski
Email marketing is ridiculously cheap in terms of retention compared to most
other forms of marketing. You 'own' the list, unlike with Facebook and
Twitter. You can push to the list, unlike Google.
I can't talk for startups, but I have worked with very big enterprises on
email marketing and all their analysis said email was the most cost-effective
over the customer lifecycle.
~~~
ams6110
Makes sense -- when people subscribe to your email list, they have directly
indicated at least some level of interest in your product. That's more than
any bio/demo based ad campaign can guarantee.
~~~
blowski
Potentially, someone might have expressed interest by following or liking you.
The problem is that the only way of reaching those people is by paying
Facebook. The cost increases as your list grows.
When you send an email newsletter, even if your customers don't read it or
respond, you're getting your brand name and offer in front of them. The costs
barely change as your list grows from 100 to 10 million. That's the real
advantage of email compared to just about every other form of marketing.
Compare the costs and sales of pushing an ad to 10 million people who liked
you versus 10 million people who bought from you or subscribed to your
newsletter. The latter will nearly always give much better value for money.
~~~
unclebucknasty
May I ask which service you use where the cost barely grows from 100 to 10
million subscribers?
We use Mailchimp and it's definitely not the case. Might be time for a change!
~~~
unclebucknasty
Specifically, with Mailchimp, 100 subscribers would be free.
10 million would be $40,700/month.
[https://mailchimp.com/pricing/high-
volume/](https://mailchimp.com/pricing/high-volume/)
~~~
blowski
If you're using Mailchimp to handle a list of 10 million users you're
definitely doing it wrong. You need a tool that charges by number of emails
sent instead of size of list.
These days I'd suggest buying an in-house email tool and use an SMTP server
(SendGrid, Mandrill, SES, Mailgun). Pricing will obviously be more expensive
but it increases much more slowly than with Facebook. To send 10 million
emails on SendGrid would cost around $5K. Depending on the terms, that kind of
budget would cover somewhere between 50 and 50000 users with Facebook or
AdWords.
~~~
unclebucknasty
Ha! Yeah, well we're not quite at the 10 million mark, and not sure who would
pay that amount.
We actually use Sendgrid for transactional emails and should probably revisit
for marketing. They didn't have the list manangement features when last we
looked and there's a little integration dev that'll need to be done, but
you've prompted me to take another look at it. May be worthwhile now. Thanks.
But, even with those guys going from 100 emails to only 4 million (highest
quoted on the site), the price goes up a couple of orders of magnitude from
$9.95 to over $1600. That's hardly "barely growing costs" and for a
bootstrapped startup, the difference may be prohibitive. Hopefully, you've got
some revenue or funding by the time you hit that subscriber base. But, don't
want to gloss over the fact that you will pay significantly more as your list
grows substantially, even if it's less than with other channels.
~~~
blowski
OK I guess I phrased it badly. At a list size of 10 million, email will
probably cost around $10K per month to service. With SEM you'll be lucky if it
costs less than $250K per month.
So for every SEM placement, you can send 25 newsletters. So you need SEM to
convert 25x better than email to get value from it. That might be possible,
depending on the quality of your list, but my experience is that all companies
eventually use email marketing because it's so much cheaper with big lists.
I would question how you even got a list size of 10 million, or what you're
hoping to get from direct marketing, if $10K per month is prohibitive.
~~~
unclebucknasty
Points well-taken. Thanks for sharing.
------
chasenlehara
This post doesn’t go into detail about how to accomplish a lot of these things
effectively, so let’s share some of our favorite resources.
I’ll start: “How We Got 1,000+ Subscribers from a Single Blog Post in 24
Hours”
[https://www.groovehq.com/blog/1000-subscribers](https://www.groovehq.com/blog/1000-subscribers)
~~~
sah2ed
I hadn't seen that post before even though I have heard of Groove. Thanks for
sharing.
------
minimaxir
The problem with marketing as a developer is that there is a fine line between
helpfully increasing awareness of your product/service and _being an asshole
about it_ with modals which interrupt blog post reading and "growth hacking"
of unsolicited email/Tweet blasts/etc.
Silicon Valley has been encouraging the latter because it _works_ , to my
frustration. One of the reasons people ask for upvotes on Product Hunt is that
_everyone else is doing it_ and there are no visible consequences for doing
so. (and I've recently found out that people do the same for HN votes on
occasion because they assume it's a part of the culture)
~~~
user5994461
The line is only moral, at best.
You should perform AB testing and measure what's optimal for revenues.
If spamming the user with popups and emails makes them click and buy more,
adding more of it is making the site more user friendly.
~~~
paulryanrogers
"If spamming the user with popups and emails makes them click and buy more,
adding more of it is making the site more user friendly."
That's a generous interpretation of "user friendly." If a user genuinely
wanted those things, then yes it's truly an improvement. If users didn't want
them but got the impression pop-ups and emails were required then it's more
debatable. Put another way, paying for things is not user friendly, but
without doing so there would be less worthy of buying.
~~~
user5994461
Let's assume we're talking about short and clear email messages. Nothing shady
at all, not using misleading popup to trick the user into clicking adsense
ads.
If people buy more stuff when they receive 10 mails per months, is the user to
blame?
Additional information: Users really open the emails and don't mark them as
spam at all.
------
mariusmg
Isn't this a bit ..."basic" ? I mean sending emails and having a blog is not
exactly the pinnacle of marketing (especially for developers).
~~~
kristianc
Agreed - and feeds a little into the 'Launch and the world will be beating a
path to your door' mindset. Just as important as having a blog is being able
to mine trending topics and having a proper process in place around content
production.
~~~
AznHisoka
are there really trending topics around most b2b topics? most b2b content dont
exactly go viral.
~~~
rfrank
Yes in the sense of there being industry trends you should keep up with and
talk about. One thing with b2b sites is that you don't really need viral
content, because you likely have a very specific idea of who your customers
are.
Depending on the field, lots of b2b topics aren't super competitive SEO wise,
which makes it possible to really dominate a particular topic in search
results. Long tail keywords [1] are particularly helpful from my experience.
1\. [https://moz.com/blog/long-tail-seo-target-low-volume-
keyword...](https://moz.com/blog/long-tail-seo-target-low-volume-keywords-
whiteboard-friday)
------
mcjiggerlog
This is perfect timing for me - I've just finished building my side project
([http://www.artpip.com/](http://www.artpip.com/)) and feel like I've made
something people would want to use, but was unsure about how best to get the
word out. Thank you!
~~~
ausjke
Failed to install on Windows, wish you have a Linux version.
2017-01-01 13:27:22> Program: Starting Squirrel Updater: --install .
2017-01-01 13:27:23> Program: Starting install, writing to C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\SquirrelTemp
2017-01-01 13:27:26> Program: About to install to: C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\artpip
2017-01-01 13:27:28> CheckForUpdateImpl: Couldn't write out staging user ID, this user probably shouldn't get beta anything: System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException:
`
~~~
mcjiggerlog
Thanks for the report - I'll investigate. What windows version are you on?
Linux version is in the pipeline!
~~~
ausjke
windows 7 that is, 64bit
------
ssharp
re: retargeting
Before you go off shoving fistfuls of money at display ad retargeting
platforms, I'd highly suggest running placebo tests first. The platforms will
tell you how you're converting people into paying customers at a $2 rate, but
with retargeting, you've previously acquired their attention in some form --
that's how you're able to retarget them in the first place. The problem is
that, particularly with display ads and Facebook feed ads, you tend to cookie
bomb your audience and you're not getting a fair assessment of how many people
actually stayed engaged with you because your ads in some part.
In nearly all my experience, the actual value of retargeting is never what the
platforms tell you it is in their ridiculously misleading CPA reporting.
------
yenoham
Has anyone here gathered a bunch of resources similar to this, especially
around early-days bootstrap Marketing for SaaS?
We created our product as a group with engineering backgrounds and now trying
to switch some to full on Marketing mode and trying to grab anything I can get
my hands on.
~~~
marcusgarvey
Here's a terrific list compiled by Patrick Keane:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tAiya71mDQgtwn_F9-mN...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tAiya71mDQgtwn_F9-mNQhuc7GdsQ5e2_BeG69Cb82A/)
------
anacleto
If you're interesting in this topic read everything Patrick McKenzie writes:
[http://www.kalzumeus.com/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/).
This is guide is not "a bit basic", it just barely scratches the surface.
~~~
pryelluw
And do. Doing is much more effective than thinking. ;)
------
nrjdhsbsid
This is a good 1000 foot overview but they leave off some specifics that could
burn you bad.
Blog content: they say writing anything is better than nothing and there's
some truth to this, but compelling content is far more important. One thing
that can happen (seen it) is you hire some content monkeys to make you
"content". The result is bland and reads like stale Cheerios. Google will
knock your site ranking badly if users don't like to read your articles.
When I started writing content for this client my first article got more
organic traffic than their whole site with hundreds of pages of "content".
This continued with each article I wrote until 99+% of organic traffic to the
site came from around 10 articles I wrote.
Biggest thing with content is it needs to be good quality. Long form articles
with pictures work the best. The other extremely important point is to tailor
the subjects to your readers.
If you sell can openers write content about cans and cooking with canned
stuff. Write about ways to open cans when your opener breaks. Write about what
to look for in good can openers. Write about how canned food is made. Become
the one and only website about anything can related. Google questions your
readers are likely to type and get links to your site on the top search
results for those questions. Even if you have to pay some site owners it will
boost your rank tremendously.
Make sure a human visiting your site would think it was well made and google
will to. Use cdn's to make it load fast. The latest and greatest TLS certs.
Fully verified email addresses linked to you domain with all the bells and
whistles. Make your site seem legit enough that users would feel okay using
their credit cards there.
Email: make sure the emails you send are things your customers want to get.
Know the demographic of your customers and tailor your message carefully. It
goes far beyond subject line content, if you annoy your customers your emails
will get binned as "promotions" and nobody will see them.
------
janeboo
An App Launch Guide: [https://github.com/adamwulf/app-launch-
guide](https://github.com/adamwulf/app-launch-guide)
------
kumarski
1\. Get Leads. (get a good trigger signal)
2\. Send Emails
3\. Build Landing Page or other.
4\. 1-3 Repeat and modulate landing page and email template as you get more
customer conversations.
------
ensiferum
Get a botnet to upvote your blogs/product releases on HN/Product
Hunt/Reddit/etc.
------
Mister_Y
I love this! I always believed that the best developer is the one that has a
taste for business and this thing is in the line of it :D
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years - jseliger
http://www.sfexaminer.com/solve-affordability-crisis-bay-area-housing-stock-must-grow-50-percent-20-years/
======
gojomo
_News from 2029:_
Skylynr, the 'Uber of nanoassembled highrises', last night replaced 44 San
Francisco Victorians with apartment buildings.
Reached for comment, SF's Planning Department said the overnight construction
violates a city moratorium, to study displacement issues, now in its 14th
year.
The Board of Supervisors plans to address the issue in an emergency session
next Tuesday. A Skylynr spokesperson says over 4,000 new residents, in the
nearly 2,000 new apartments, will be registered as voters on the San Francisco
Department of Elections blockchain before that meeting.
By November, over half the city's voters may be residents of the on-demand
skyscrapers popping up across the city, most built by Skylynr or its
competitors Instatower and Zipartments.
~~~
flanbiscuit
I believe William Gibson described something similar to the self-building
towers in his book Idoru[1]. I think they were called nanotech buildings[2]
[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru)
[2]
[http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=83](http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=83)
~~~
Cerium
Additionally Neal Stephenson describes vertically extruded nanotech buildings
in "The Diamond Age".
~~~
flanbiscuit
I haven't read a sci-fi/cyberpunk book in a long time, I think I'm going to
pick this up. Been meaning to read more of Stephenson's novels
~~~
dgritsko
One of my favorite authors! Reading The Diamond Age right now as a matter of
fact. Favorite of his is probably Anathem or Seveneves.
~~~
aswanson
All of those have been in my kindle over a year. Need time to read.
~~~
passiveincomelg
Find a hammock in Nicaragua. Worked great for me. :)
------
sampo
Just quoting the last paragraph. This is the kind of honesty people need.
> Intellectual honesty requires taking numbers seriously. Either we prioritize
> making the Bay Area affordable for all of us or we don’t. The less housing
> we build, the more wealth will be trapped in high housing prices. Unless we
> decide to grow our housing stock to accommodate our economy, we are
> continuing to choose the interests of those who are rich or who already own
> their homes over the interests of the struggling middle and working classes.
~~~
rb808
If density increases the people who will benefit the most are current
landowners. If you have single family home on a big lot, its value will go up
many times if you can suddenly build an apartment building on it.
~~~
TomVDB
Most current home owners have no interest in selling to a developer or
developing ourselves. We just want to continue live in conditions that were
present when we bought it: a nice house with a garden on a quiet street.
Yes, that is selfish, but I'm not going to apologize for not wanting an
apartment complex next door. That said, I'm not going to vote against a state
level politician who wants to relax zoning laws to improve affordable housing.
~~~
sabarn01
You own your land not the conditions that surround that land.
~~~
TomVDB
That is true, and nobody claimed otherwise.
But I can have the _desire_ for the conditions to stay the same.
~~~
dublinben
We have a way for you to express that desire. You can buy the surrounding
properties and keep them exactly the same.
See Zuckerberg's purchases in Palo Alto for example.
~~~
qihqi
Or you can vote municipalities that best aligns with what you desire.
------
weeksie
Just a reminder that the growth rates for SF, SV, Seattle, Portland are all
pretty puny compared to the growth rates of, e.g. Detroit at its peak. Hell
they're not even that crazy compared to growth rates those cities have handled
before.
People just aren't interested in any perceived threat to their property values
so they're strangling growth based on an entitlement mindset. No, sirs and
ma'ams, your home's price appreciation isn't a _right_.
~~~
marcell
> No, sirs and ma'ams, your home's price appreciation isn't a right
Doesn't increased density help property values? If I can build a high rise on
your 1 acre plot of land, its value should go up.
~~~
weeksie
Depends! Increased density should drive up the price of land.
However, if you are in a neighborhood of single family homes and a huge multi
family building is constructed on your block, your home price will go down
because there will be enough supply to meet demand, taking pressure off the
single family homes.
If you are in an already dense city and regulations are relaxed so that more
high rises can be built in more neighborhoods, the price of your condo all
else being equal will be lower because there will be more supply. The land
price may well go up but your individual apartment would likely be worth less.
~~~
CountSessine
_a huge multi family building is constructed on your block_
which is why NIMBYs should at least be in favor of gentle density - duplexes
and triplexes, small walk-ups, etc. But they fight those like the end-of-days
too.
------
pascalxus
I know we'd all love to fix the bay area housing problem here. The most
obvious answer is to increase the supply. But, fixing the zoning laws and
allowing developers to build isn't the only thing that's standing in the way.
The problems are too numerous to fix: NIMBYs sueing developers, CEQA,
Proposition 13, AND don't forget about the underlying labor cost (all our
middle class people's aren't going to come back, after having been forced
out). The bay area has forever lost it's ability to produce cost effective
housing. One article I read, said that San Jose rents would have to increase
another 25% to 4.75$ per sq foot, just to allow developers to break even on
high rise construction! This points to some serious fundamental problem with
our economy here in the bay area and it's not going to fixed with just one or
two adjustments to the above reasons. We've kindof Venezuela'd our bay area
economy here.
Edit: here is the link (4.25 - 4.75$/sq foot to build in San jose!):
[https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/27/construction-costs-
co...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/27/construction-costs-could-hamper-
bay-area-residential-towers/)
By all means, let's work to fix the problem. But, for anyone who wants to get
cost effective housing in the next 30 years: I'm sorry to say it, its time to
bail out. We need to start lobbying software companies to get the heck out of
the bay area and CA in general.
Let's get Elon musk to build one of those hyperTubes to some city like Austin,
Denver, Albuquerkee, or madison, WI. maybe some of us could commute in for 4
days a week or something.
~~~
wahern
High-rise construction is expensive, but high-rises aren't necessary for
density. Wood-built low- and mid-rise is far more cost efficient, especially
when you don't require 1-2 parking spaces per unit.
The reason why we get too many high-rises and too few low-rises is because of
regulatory burden. In particular, the long, drawn-out, and capricious manner
in which the laws are administered and challenged. In that kind of environment
high-rises become more common simply because of the economy of scale--a high-
rise developer has resources and the wherewithal to see the project through
where developers of smaller developments do not.
The most important thing for commerce and especially real estate development
is consistency and predictability. Proposition 13 and the cost of labor can be
dealt because they're known quantities. Zoning boards and CEQA[1] are the real
killers as the unpredictability compounds, many fold, the nominal regulatory
burden.
[1] Compare NEQA to CEQA. The Federal NEQA law isn't much of an impediment to
development anymore because an efficient ecosystem has developed--specialized
assessment agencies that do the work quickly and cheaply, and relatively
efficient administration of the regulatory regime. The cost of a NEQA impact
statement is a known quantity and is easily budgeted. By contrast, under CEQA
it's much easier for NIMBYs to challenge impact statements, which means the
time and budget required for getting over the CEQA hurdle can be indefinite.
~~~
closeparen
>Wood-built low- and mid-rise is far more cost efficient
And also tends to be drastically worse build quality and sound isolation.
Given a mid-rise or a high-rise built in the same year, you definitely want to
live in the high-rise, all else being equal.
Higher quality multi-family buildings that middle-class people could see
themselves living in would go a long way towards changing public opinion.
Unfortunately, our multifamily housing stock is bifurcated between shoddily
built crap for the poor, and ultra-luxury high-rises for oligarchical
investors. If people don't want to live in a building themselves, it's harder
to accept its externalities for the benefit of others. Most people _do_ live
in apartments as students and young adults, and they'd never go back.
------
khazhoux
Or Google, Apple, Facebook could grow the next 200,000 jobs somewhere else?
Everyone talks about housing affordability and NIMBYs and we get into class
warfare and home-appreciation snobbery, but the simple thing I can't
understand is how will the area's transportation infrastructure scale up?
There's no credible solution.
~~~
asdsa5325
This. If Silicon Valley is full, then don't move there! Live somewhere else,
your wallet and your sanity will thank you!
~~~
s73v3r_
Unfortunately, until the big guys and the startup scene decide to move
elsewhere, or at least spread out beyond the Bay Area, that's not very
practical advice. I recently had a couple interviews with Google, and
basically, for the positions they wanted me for, I would be required to move
to Mountain View. So your advice in my situation would boil down to "Don't
work for Google."
~~~
asdsa5325
Google has many offices in other states
~~~
s73v3r_
They do. And I literally live around the corner from one. But the position
they're looking at me for would still require me to move to Mountain View.
------
alexhutcheson
The headline could also be re-stated as "To solve affordability crisis, Bay
Area housing stock must grow 2% per year".
Using a long time period will give you large headline numbers.
------
m0llusk
What is often missing from this discussion is financialization of housing
markets. As long as housing units are chips for a game among banks and wealthy
patrons it is not clear we will be able to build enough homes to satiate
artificially inflated demand.
~~~
rubicon33
This. This. This. This. This.
Absent from the vast majority of these threads is the critical component in
this "crisis":
Property can be purchased and held onto for purely speculative purposes,
thereby draining the inventory pool, and raising the cost of housing for
residents of the city.
This has been happening in the bay area for a very long time. Wealthy Chinese
investors who do not LIVE in the bay area, have purchased an incredible amount
of inventory over the last decade and it has remained vacant / unused.
Of course we need more building, that's obvious. But what we also need is to
immediately disallow the purchase of land by foreign entities that is not used
for habitation. I have yet to hear a constructive argument for why that
shouldn't be banned at a constitutional level. Housing may not be a "right"
per se, but it's certainly in the communities best interest to use available
housing for that communities interest, not the interest of wealthy foreign
investors.
~~~
boreas
You need to provide statistics for extraordinary claims about housing being
purchased by foreign investors and not used. Common sense says it should be a
very marginal phenomenon. After all, renting out property should almost always
be worth it with the high housing prices in the area.
~~~
coccinelle
I’ve been wondering about that when it comes to rent-controlled places like
SF. It seems « tenant occupied » properties sell for less than equivalent
empty places. Then is it worth it to let a tenant in who might just drive down
the price of the place if you decide to sell a couple of years later?
------
redthrowaway
What is far more likely is that people will simply leave the Bay Area, and
demand will fall. It's far easier to create tech clusters in other cities than
it is to convince a bunch of NIMBY boomers that other people need places to
live, too.
~~~
s73v3r_
"It's far easier to create tech clusters in other cities"
Wouldn't it have been done by now if that were the case? Yet SF is still the
Mecca for the tech and startup scenes.
~~~
redthrowaway
Network effects are powerful. But beyond the original secondary tech centres
of Seattle, Boston, and NYC, there are now thriving tech scenes in all sorts
of smaller markets--Portland, Denver, Austin, etc.
It's easy to see every major tech company having a base in SFBA for the
foreseeable future, but it's also easy to see being a working programmer
living in one of those smaller markets and actually being a homeowner being a
much bigger thing going forward.
~~~
s73v3r_
Given how hostile most of those companies have been to remote work, I'm not
too optimistic. I hope to be wrong, though.
And while those other cities do have some tech scene, it's still nowhere near
that of SV, and that's still the first choice of most developers.
------
saosebastiao
The entire current population of the bay area (~9M) would fit within 165 of
the 10,000 square miles of the CSA, if built at Parisian densities. That is
less than 2% of the land.
This is what boggles my mind: despite such a minimal land requirement, nobody
in the entire fucking region will budge. Put it somewhere else, they say. It
has become a game of musical chairs where nobody gets up for the next round.
State intervention is the only thing that will solve this problem.
~~~
shifter
Or, as the calculus on living in the Bay Area shifts [0], top tier talent
starts to direct itself elsewhere. This stems growth in the Bay Area since
founding successful companies in lower cost areas will be possible, housing
investment slows as a result of that, and the market naturally cools down a
bit [1].
[0] Don't fool yourself into thinking that only people without the income or
capital to live well in the Bay Area would leave it. There are intangibles
(culture, traffic, distance to skiing, etc.) that, for _some_ people, are non-
optimal. For others, it's perfect. That's okay, humans are a varied lot (and
it's a good thing).
[1] Nothing major, it will remain expensive due to geography and
talent/creativity/capital density.
~~~
jdtang13
It's not really about tech companies, although the tech companies don't help.
Contemporary conversation about Bay Area housing always makes it sound like
some impossible dream that is hampered by hordes of techies. It seems to me
that most of those concerns are red herrings; it's actually about zoning,
local opposition, and government incompetence. The other HN comment ITT
summarizes it pretty well:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16970532](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16970532)
------
njarboe
An amazing amount of land opened up in the Bay Area that could have been used
for housing developement with the closing of many military bases (The
Presidio, Treasure Island, Alameda Naval station, Concord Naval Base, Hunters
Point) and the closing of salt production in the South Bay. While a few of
these areas are finally seeing some construction[1] 20 years later, the
density is often low and the amount of acres set aside for green space seems
excessive to me. Treasure Island, for instance, is 465 acres with 300 of those
acres as parks. Cargill handed over 15,000 acres of salt ponds to state and
federal agencies for wetland restoration in 2002. No housing planned. For
comparison all of San Francisco is 30,000 acres.
[1][https://www.bisnow.com/san-francisco/news/construction-
devel...](https://www.bisnow.com/san-francisco/news/construction-
development/these-5-decommissioned-military-bases-are-the-bay-areas-biggest-
development-opportunities-74375)
~~~
cjensen
Salt ponds being turned into natural wetland is a HUGE win for the
environment, particularly water quality and fisheries. Being entirely mud,
they are literally the worst place to build in an earthquake-prone region.
"Affordability" just means a balance between jobs (which produce people
needing housing) and the supply of houses. There are TWO ways of fixing supply
and demand problems like that. It is insane that the city of Cupertino has
allowed the construction of offices for 26K jobs but only has housing for 58K
people. It is insane that Mountain View has allowed the construction of
offices for 30K jobs but only provided places for 77K people to live. Those
two cities and others collect all the sweet revenue and burden the rest of the
Bay Area with costs of housing and commuting.
Rather than insisting that cities must build housing, we should insist they
balance jobs and homes. I'm angry that my home town, Fremont, had a plan to
reserve space for both homes and jobs, but is forced by the state to accept
home construction and we have no money to build the schools needed to
accommodate the new population.
~~~
khuey
Fremont's jobs/housing ratio is 1.44 which is larger than the regional
average.
------
CodeWriter23
Someone who recognizes the opportunity to develop tech centers between the
coasts is going to cash in big. Zappos and Tesla seem to have had their
fingers on that pulse by settling in the Reno/Sparks area.
~~~
s73v3r_
For the past 20 years or so, every state has tried doing just that. Very few
have been anywhere near successful, and those that have end up with housing
problems similar to (maybe not as severe as) SV.
~~~
CodeWriter23
Difference being, Silicon Valley was not entirely booked up until recently.
------
partycoder
\- World population goes up
\- Global amount of wealthy people goes up
\- Demand for a spot in a city goes up
So if you extrapolate this 100 years, you will end up in a situation where
even the worst cities of 2018 will be unaffordable for the regular person.
~~~
cwkoss
This reminds me of the joke, "If our daughter keeps growing at this rate,
she'll be 12 feet tall by age 18"
~~~
partycoder
Sounds dumb but consider the evolution of world population over time:
\- 1950: 2.5 billion
\- 2000: 6 billion
\- 2018: 7.6 billion
~~~
cwkoss
I don't mean to be dismissive of your general sentiment, I think we agree - I
just think your example is a bit superlative.
I think when viewing exponential trends we need to consider the maximum
'carrying capacity' \- typically when something is growing exponentially there
is some latent 'available energy' that is being consumed to fuel the growth.
Once consumption reaches parity with that energy production - growth may
continue for a bit longer as 'excess reserves' are drained, but a trend
reversal becomes inevitable.
> even the worst cities of 2018 will be unaffordable for the regular person.
In your city example, I'd argue that once a city is too expensive for any
'regular' person it will create a negative feedback loop: if unable to source
enough labor to satisfy the service demands of the wealthy residents, those
residents will begin leaving, reducing housing prices until the problem is at
least somewhat mitigated.
~~~
partycoder
Except that in 2118 those wealthy residents may not need less wealthy
residents because of automation.
~~~
cwkoss
Interesting point. I'm skeptical, but certainly plausible.
------
eecsninja
Let's not forget this article from a month ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501)
The great irony is that there are plenty of people in the SF bay area who
think Tokyo is more expensive than SF just like it was decades ago, even
though it's not true anymore.
~~~
irq11
Tokyo is still very expensive relative to Japanese incomes. Is it more
expensive than SF on an adjusted basis? Hard to say, but it’s not as clear as
you’re asserting.
If anything, magacities like Tokyo and London show us that you can build like
crazy, and still end up a very expensive place to live.
~~~
nerfhammer
here's a thorough cost comparison breakdown: [https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-
living/in/Tokyo](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Tokyo)
rent in particular is drastically less expensive
~~~
irq11
Again: _you can’t just compare rent values without adjusting for income._
Japanese people aren’t earning San Francisco salaries.
The number you want there is the the one that says Tokyo is 10% cheaper than
NYC. That’s the adjusted number.
Say what you will about rent, but “10% cheaper than New York” is nobody’s
definition of cheap.
~~~
nerfhammer
the tool has all that in it
according to it, salaries in SF are ~66% higher than Tokyo and rents are ~300%
higher.
------
floatingatoll
How much of San Francisco’s billion dollars of debt would be mitigated by tax
revenue associated with a 50% increase in taxable population? Would the tax
revenue over 20 years make up for the infrastructure buildout costs and the
legal costs of fighting NIMBY folks to increase density?
------
lazyjones
It's the same all over the world. Politicians seem to have too close ties with
developers and real estate investors and they put unhealthy zoning laws in
effect to drive prices into absurd regions and boost tax income as well.
People should contact their representatives and ask them to change this. It
worked in Span (admittedly, they overdid it), it would work anywhere.
Unfortunately, there's no easy workaround for the situation. Perhaps an "Uber
for commuters" would work, together with some sort of coordinated
purchase/rent of affordable housing in areas ~1 hour commute from those
chokepoints? (i.e. get 100 people to move to a small village together, then
fill 2 busses every day with commuters to SF).
~~~
TomVDB
Are you sure that the zoning laws are driven by developers and real estate
investors?
In most Bay Area cities, they are the wishes of the residents who do not want
more development.
My neighborhood in Sunnyvale was recently rezoned to be single story only and
that process is entirely driven by the residents, not the politicians. It was
the 25th neighborhood in Sunnyvale to do so, and it cost around $200 per
resident to file an application. No a single resident was against it.
~~~
rmk
Palo Alto has a 50-ft building height limit. The height of greed, that is!
~~~
TomVDB
50 ft is plenty, 3 stories, and has little to do with greed.
The new zoning rules in our neighborhood limit height to 17 ft.
And greed wasn't the driving factor either.
People are much more concerned about the new neighbor tearing down the single
story house next door and building an ugly two story McMansion from which you
can look straight down in their garden/pool.
------
trumped
It sounds like a small problem if all tech companies want to stay in a small
geographical area and if they work with each other to resolve it... They
should look at what China is doing if they need ideas.
------
089723645897236
Hey maybe some other parts of the world need populating too. This obsession
with location location location is quaint to me in the age of telecom. Maybe
the Bay Area is just Done. It'll turn into every other Rich Person Town and
the people who need to get real s __* done will go somewhere else.
Legacy industry is no excuse to keep cramming more people onto a tiny
peninsula in California. It sucks for people in the middle and lower involved
right now but honestly I encourage them to move at all costs.
The writing is on the wall.
------
Clubber
I would think this could be solved by allowing remote work when viable, and
making sure there is plenty of internet in rural areas. I would love to live
on 5-500 acres somewhere and work on the porch. There's plenty of land to go
around; we're just stuck in the 20th century way of thinking about work in a
digital age. Strange.
------
austincheney
If 60,000 people continue to move from there to Texas every year then 20 years
from now when the area has lost over a million residents the housing prices
might well flatten organically. This madness is causing housing prices to
climb in Texas though.
~~~
tabtab
Tell you what, we'll send all the jerks to TX and keep the non-jerks ;-)
~~~
downrightmike
Then there wouldn't be anyone left.
~~~
justherefortart
But I was told Austin is the SF of Texas?!!?!
I used to laugh my ass off at ignorant Californians that would say that. It's
still fucking Texas.
~~~
seabrookmx
It's not a _terrible_ analogy though. I haven't been to all the major US
cities but I got a bit of a Portland vibe from Austin. It's definitely not
what I expected from my first time in Texas (I'm a West Coast Canadian).
~~~
tabtab
Let's not get into the usual culture wars here. My comment was meant as a
joke. My apologies if it offended anyone. Live and let live.
------
daveguy
Or worded another way: If Bay Area Housing grows slightly more than 2% per
year the affordability crisis will be solved within 20 years. ( 1.5 __(1 /20)
~ 1.0205 )
------
coding123
And the freeways can support this how?
~~~
epistasis
We really need to stop assuming that people are going to make heavy freeway
use, and permit more scalable transit.
Run BART the short way between SF and SJ, build _many_ clusters of high
density along heavy transit routes. Let the current freeway dependent
population continue to use them, but build housing so that people can get to
jobs without using single-occupancy passenger cars.
~~~
hedora
They need to assume people will use transit and also roads, and increase the
capacty of both. The capacity of the bay area road network has been
systematically decreased over the last ten years, even as the population has
grown.
Also, compared to most other places, traffic laws out here are ridiculously
inefficient. For example, light cycles that include a “yield on left turn”
step and then skip the left arrow if the lane has cleared are incredibly rare.
Also, instead of “left lane fast, right lane slow”, the law is “use whatever
lane you’re comfortable in”.
Simply ripping out the “improvements” made in the last decade and bringing
traffic laws in line with the rest of the US would increase road capacity by
double digit percentages.
(The lack of progress on public transit is also embarrassing, especially given
the tax and income levels around here)
~~~
epistasis
I agree, and my phrasing was imprecise; we _do_ need to assume that roads will
be used to some degree, but we also need to allow for types of living that
don't use freeways, or even perhaps allow living without a car.
Right now local regulations require large amounts of parking, which means
large amounts of the most valuable space devoted just to cars, and forcing
people to pay for the car. If you're forced to pay an additional 10% in rent
to cover the space used for parking, then you're probably going to get a car.
If people were allowed to make the decision to not have cars and reap the
financial benefits, we'd see a bigger shift.
As it is, car use is regulated into the way that we build things.
------
chroem-
The housing crisis is fundamentally a transportation problem. The bay area has
intentionally made it impractical to own a car, so everyone is forced seek
housing within walking distance of a limited number of public transit lines.
The "war on sprawl" and lack of affordable housing are two sides of the same
coin.
~~~
chrischen
Forcing people to live near transit is a good thing. The problem is thebat are
doesn’t allow building dense hosuing near transit lines (common sense!) and so
very few people can actually let people live near transit.
~~~
chrischen
*the Bay Area not "thebat"
------
acover
Are there studies that explain the cause of high house prices and what can be
done?
~~~
s73v3r_
Lots of people want to be there, and not enough housing is being built for
them all.
It doesn't help that a lot of the people moving there, are doing so because of
high tech job salaries, meaning they're more able to absorb the high rent
costs.
------
notadoc
Build up, it's the only solution.
------
joeblow9999
Good luck with that
~~~
epistasis
I think it's becoming increasingly apparent that the Bay Area needs a regional
government that can supercede tiny municipalities. Wise governance is
impossible with lots of small outposts preventing sensible planning for the
region, because they are only interested in advancing short-term interests of
a small number of people. Democracy does not function well in that
environment.
If the Bay Area doesn't step up to do that, it's likely that the State of
California will have to start implementing policies, and that's not going to
be as good as a regional government and planning.
~~~
conanbatt
The housing situation is a California wide problem. The bigger government is
the first one messing up housing.
~~~
epistasis
I agree that it's a California wide problem, though I think the cause is
slightly different in different parts of the state. What do you mean by:
> The bigger government is the first one messing up housing.
Do you mean that State policies are the ones messing up housing? I think that
Prop 13 and CEQA get named sometimes for stopping housing development, but a
far bigger hurdle are the local zoning policies, and the veto power of local
communities.
Are you suggesting something like a state-wide policy of by-right development
for plans that meet local code and zoning regulations? That would definitely
help reduce building costs, but it won't be enough to allow the amount of
housing that is suggested in the original article.
~~~
kyledrake
Seconded opinion for strong regional government with zoning control. If the
property owner fiefdoms aren't going to address the problem, it's time to take
solving that problem away from them.
To give an example of how bad this is, the city of Atherton has sued Caltrain
7 times over the electrification project, the latest one related to (wait for
it..) the use of 5 45 foot poles instead of 10 35 foot ones.
[https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2018/03/01/caltrain-and-
ath...](https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2018/03/01/caltrain-and-atherton-
cant-reach-a-deal-on-electrification-poles)
And this despite the fact it comprises less than a mile of the track and
doesn't even stop at the Atherton station during weekdays.
How can anyone expect this problem to get any better without major changes to
zoning control and major revisions to the property tax/rent subsidies? I'm not
holding my breath, and neither are all the other people that are starting to
think about leaving.
~~~
makomk
Wait, the fact that local residents can't even use the big ugly mass transit
line going through their neighbourhood is meant to make them somehow more
sympathetic to it?
~~~
kyledrake
As I understand it, there is discussion to start using the station again after
they finish electrification, which of course assumes the town doesn't try to
stop that somehow. It will also reduce air (and probably noise) pollution to
nearby properties, because the trains will no longer be running huge motors
spewing massive amounts of diesel exhaust while flying through the town.
None of that matters. Atherton is the wealthiest zip code in the country, and
is comprised completely of high-end houses and mansions owned by the super
rich, most of whom couldn't care less about mass transit or regional growth
issues. They've got theirs, the hell with everybody else. Their strategy for
keeping it this way is to fight all change, even if it's mutually beneficial.
------
frgtpsswrdlame
If this is true then I think the Bay will need to let go of it's ideas towards
rezoning. Deregulatory zoning adjustments just won't be able to stimulate this
level of building.
Why not just build out and do greenfield development but put some mandatory
density requirements in place for new building?
~~~
mywittyname
I think it's time for eminent domain. Local landowners are using their wealth
and political influence to deprive others of shelter for personal profit.
The federal government forcing the sale of land for high-density development
would probably be enough to spook landowners into seeing reason.
~~~
refurb
That makes no sense at all. It's gov't policies that created the high prices.
So the gov't then turns around and says "we're taking your property because
the price is too high"?
------
rb808
Because big dense cities like NY are affordable?
~~~
manacit
Manhattan (and parts of Brooklyn) != NY. I wouldn't call it "cheap", but there
are plenty of places in NYC where one can rent a bedroom for under $1,000 a
month easily (and maybe closer to $500/m in some places). That, coupled with
not having a car, actually makes quality of life very good if you're someone
who seeks out city living.
I know plenty of people that make $30k-$40k/y in NYC and can afford to live in
Bushwick with a few roommates and live nice lives. Single train commute into
Manhattan, plenty of things to do that don't cost a lot of money, no need to
worry about a car, etc.
Edit: a lot of people are replying that having roommates isn't tenable for $x
or long-term. I agree, and I don't think we disagree.
Solving a housing affordability problem for people making $15/h starting their
careers is part of the overall picture - housing available for people at every
income level. An experienced worker with a family won't be looking to live in
a 3br apartment with two roommates, but that same 3br apartment that was
affordable can also house a family of 4 with two wage-earning parents.
NYC is _filled_ with people in all sorts of jobs who, because there is housing
stock available in many levels, can afford to live alone, with a family in an
apartment in Queens, or in a house in NJ.
It's not panacea - transit is not as reliable as I wish it was, goods are
expensive, but it works for a lot of people
~~~
badpun
> live with (...) a few roommates and live nice lives
Those two together don't compute for most people. I'd say only a minority of
people are fine with living permanently in a dorm-like environment.
Historically, having to share a house/flat with strangers has always been a
sign of poverty.
------
ssalka
inb4 The Seasteading Institute builds "New San Francisco" off the coast
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why Indian TV news ignored the first ever caste discrimination lawsuit in the US - akbarnama
https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/07/29/ignorance-or-design-why-indian-tv-news-ignored-the-first-ever-caste-discrimination-lawsuit-in-the-us
======
known
As per #SaveJournalismFromBrahmanism 70% Editors are Brahmin who are just 3%
in India;
I propose a separate country to Brahmin since
[https://archive.is/h3TBP](https://archive.is/h3TBP)
[https://twitter.com/0x101/status/1291001732051263489](https://twitter.com/0x101/status/1291001732051263489)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Gameboy emulation library in JavaScript - arcatek
https://github.com/arcanis/virt.js
======
azeirah
That actually looks really promising. The performance of the pokemon demo is
really bad on Firefox unfortunately, but near perfect on chrome.
~~~
arcatek
I would love to talk with someone understanding Spidermonkey's inners to
optimize the code! Javascript optimizations are pretty hard since they can
suffer huge variations across browsers.
Anyway, I also have a lot of work to do to achieve Grantgalitz' performances
even in Chrome, so it should improve over the time :)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What is hnhackers.com? Is this cool or not? - dotBen
I've started getting emails via a site called http://www.hnhackers.com/ - which appears to have been created from the spreadsheet many of us put our details in for contracting..<p>http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clVJYi0yYVBka181Z0ZKRW9kQ0E&hl=en<p>But I'm not sure what to make of this site... I have no idea who is behind or what to make that they have taken my data and created accounts for developers on here without permission.<p>What do others make of it? Is this cool or not?
======
dotBen
Linkage for the above:
<http://hnhackers.com>
[http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clVJ...](http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clVJYi0yYVBka181Z0ZKRW9kQ0E&hl=en)
~~~
rbitar
Hey Ben,
I created hnhackers a few hours after the spreadsheet was posted on HN. Here
is my original post on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1264544>
I thought this would be a better way for us HN consultants to connect, but I'm
happy to remove you from the DB if you prefer. My email is in my profile.
note that I've addressed most of the issue in the original post but let me
know if you have any other feedback.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Micro-Habits Changed My Life - formorefours
https://medium.com/@peter.e.schroeder/micro-habits-changed-my-life-47f572bfc153?source=linkShare-7043335c1240-1495047102
======
CardenB
These are not "micro habits". These are just habits.
Secondly, the willpower cost of stacking on all these habits can easily eat
away at what you might gain from them. Yes, good habits are very important.
But instead of meditating, reading, following a strict sleep schedule, lifting
weights, and learning French, maybe you should just focus on two to three
strong habits at a time.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: React Canvas Example App – Rotten Tomatoes - vpanyam
http://vivekpanyam.com/samples/reactcanvas/
======
vpanyam
The source is up here:
[https://github.com/VivekPanyam/RottenTomatoesSample](https://github.com/VivekPanyam/RottenTomatoesSample)
------
vpanyam
It works best on mobile! Try adding it to your homescreen (this should remove
the browser's UI chrome).
------
waterlooalex
Very slick, works well on my phone. But I dont really get it. What does it do?
~~~
vpanyam
Thanks!
It pulls the top 50 rentals from Rotten Tomatoes and displays a poster and
information about the movie.
The point of building it was to try out React Canvas and test scroll
performance with lots of images.
I suppose it could also help you decide what movie to watch.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Cardboard Standing Desk - dragthor
http://healthydeveloper.com/cardboard-standing-desk/
======
dragthor
It's been two weeks of standing. Zero weight loss.
[http://healthydeveloper.com/weekly-
checkin-05-29-2016/](http://healthydeveloper.com/weekly-checkin-05-29-2016/)
vs.
[http://healthydeveloper.com/weekly-
checkin-05-22-2016/](http://healthydeveloper.com/weekly-checkin-05-22-2016/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Facebook Events Suck - jasjitsingh85
http://hotspotapp.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/facebook-events-suck/
======
lesiki
Facebook events are fine, it's the writer's FB friends that 'suck'.
~~~
jasjitsingh85
Hey Lesiki. Even if your friends don't 'suck', the fact that its spammy still
makes the platform far less effective. Even if your friends aren't spamming
you, its very likely one of your friends does have friends who do. That person
is less likely to respond to your event invites because they have either
turned off notifications or it gets lost amidst the spam.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Narrow Roads of Bozo Land: How We Came to Be Governed by Online Mobs - raleighm
https://quillette.com/2018/09/22/narrow-roads-of-bozo-land-how-we-came-to-be-governed-by-online-mobs/
======
tomlock
> Governance-by-online-mob raises all sorts of questions, such as how many
> members does such a mob need to contain before it must be obeyed? What
> qualifications are required to wield such awesome power? How does the mob
> decide which opinions are correct?
Similarly, what qualifications are required to distinguish objectively between
"political correctness" and actual righteous correctness? Does the author have
one of those qualifications?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
In Unix Everything Is a File - mutor
https://ph7spot.com/musings/in-unix-everything-is-a-file
======
pjmlp
Any UNIX old timer knows that actually:
In UNIX everything is a file, except when it is not.
~~~
majewsky
> In _Plan 9_ , everything is a file
Fixed that.
~~~
rdtsc
> > In Plan 9, everything is a file > Fixed that.
It was a short snarky comment. Also the article mentions that too at the
bottom.
Yeah they "fixed it" but by that time not enough people cared. The abstraction
purity was nice and developers and OS fans loved it, but it just didn't matter
for most application. Another way to put it is that Linux was already fairly
decent and it wasn't worth switching to a whole new OS just to have everything
be a file.
Another obstacle was that Plan 9 wasn't marketed or pushed enough. Imagine if
Google backed Plan 9 and pushed it as the Android OS, put it on Chromebooks,
updated it regularly etc. That would be enough for people to switch to it.
~~~
yepguy
I understand why it didn't take off, but I don't think it's true that Plan 9
was just a tiny incremental improvement over UNIX's architecture. Modern
networking and distributed systems would be a LOT nicer today if Plan 9 had
taken off in the 90s. I think the economic benefit over today's state of
affairs would have been massive, not just something that appealed to computer
geeks' sense of elegance.
~~~
rdtsc
> Modern networking and distributed systems would be a LOT nicer today if Plan
> 9 had taken off in the 90s.
But it didn't take off. That's already decided. It wasn't enough. One can say
well if it happened 10 years earlier maybe, it would have taken off. Or if
Linux never happened. But it's speculative.
Heck, Plan 9 source is there. If so much economic benefit can be derived, why
hasn't it become a dominant player. It had been around enough time, and there
are enough developers around to have flocked to it and make it overtake Linux
by now.
> I think the economic benefit over today's state of affairs would have been
> massive,
I think we already reaping enormous benefits open source licensing model in
general. We live in a world where you can download production grade operating
systems, databases, compilers, libraries for free and also inspect their
source. That is often taken for granted and is incredible compared to who it
used to be.
~~~
yepguy
I can't really disagree with most of your post.
The reason Plan 9 or its ideas can't be resurrected very easily _now_ is
because every machine on the internet has to pretend to be UNIX and speak a
thousand ad-hoc protocols. UNIX's many flaws have been papered over, one by
one, by incredible brute force (instead of in one fell swoop). I'm only
lamenting the fact that the 90s were a crucial period in the development of
the commercial internet, and in another timeline it could have developed in a
very different direction.
------
Pete_D
"Everything is a file" is a nice idea not taken far enough. The execution is
full of frustrating omissions and holes at the edges, e.g.:
\- unless you are using Plan 9 or gpm, reading mouse events is almost
certainly going to be a lot more involved than opening /dev/mouse
\- you can't portably use select() to wait on pthread conditions
\- lots of useful things (like POSIX shared memory objects) are file
descriptors, but aren't filesystem namespaced
Sometimes I wonder what the world would look like if Plan 9 had won.
~~~
pjmlp
That is easy, microservices über all.
I never had such appreciation for Plan 9, as I consider Inferno the best
design of what they were trying to achieve.
The only caveat was that they never came around to add an ahead of time
compilation support to DisVM.
------
rzzzt
Which was the last Unix release/flavor where you could still read(2) a
directory? All manpages that I've found say that you get EISDIR if you try it.
~~~
Someone
That depends on the file system (and, possibly, the OS, but I think the OS
should just forward the call to the relevant driver and return its result)
FreeBSD’s man page says
([https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?sektion=2&query=read](https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?sektion=2&query=read)):
[EISDIR] The file descriptor is associated with a directory
residing on a file system that does not allow
regular read operations on directories (e.g. NFS)
NetBSD says something similar, adding _”The readdir() function should be used
instead.”_
I also am not convinced that, for example, the Linux man page
([http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/read.2.html](http://man7.org/linux/man-
pages/man2/read.2.html)) guarantees you get _EISDIR_ when reading from a
directory. It says that if you get _EISDIR_ , _fd_ refers to a directory, but
isn’t explicit about the converse.
~~~
rzzzt
You are right. The default implementation in Linux returns -EISDIR, but
filesystems are free to change it to something else:
[https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/2a56bb596b2c1fb612f99...](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/2a56bb596b2c1fb612f9988afda9655c8c872a6e/fs/libfs.c#L211-L214)
[https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?p=1&q=generic_read_...](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?p=1&q=generic_read_dir&unscoped_q=generic_read_dir)
------
lucb1e
Wordpress strikes again.
Page is from 2014. Archive link:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20091119184152/https://ph7spot.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20091119184152/https://ph7spot.com/musings/in-
unix-everything-is-a-file)
Edit: archive of 6 years ago with some styling:
[http://archive.is/B9He](http://archive.is/B9He) (The page actually loaded for
me on the second try, and the design looks a lot more modern now.)
~~~
ChrisSD
Your link says the page is from 2009, not 2014 (2009-11-19 to be exact).
~~~
lucb1e
Oh right, my bad. I just saw a first archive.org index at 2014 but that is of
course not necessarily the time of writing/publication.
------
epx
I like the Linus Torvalds' interpretation: that (almost) everything is
actually a file descriptor. The few things that are not, like fork() returns,
are subject to criticism (DJB wrote about how fork() should return an fd, I
just couldn't find the URL right now.)
~~~
severine
This? [http://cr.yp.to/docs/selfpipe.html](http://cr.yp.to/docs/selfpipe.html)
> _Richard Stevens 's 1992 book ``Advanced programming in the UNIX
> environment'' says that you can't safely mix select() or poll() with SIGCHLD
> (or other signals). The SIGCHLD might go off while select() is starting, too
> early to interrupt it, too late to change its timeout.
Solution: the self-pipe trick. Maintain a pipe and select for readability on
the pipe input. Inside the SIGCHLD handler, write a byte (non-blocking, just
in case) to the pipe output. Done.
Of course, the Right Thing would be to have fork() return a file descriptor,
not a process ID._
~~~
epx
I have a faint recall of a DJB text with more in-depth discussion around the
topic, thanks anyway for providing a true reference!
~~~
severine
You're welcome! I found the link here:
[http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/tech/fork.html](http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/tech/fork.html)
------
ArtWomb
Is the _sendfile_ system call still the fastest way to transfer data locally
on Linux systems?
For communicating between processes running locally on system. Or, for
example, a server running locally on an android device. Unix domain sockets
typically beat TCP connections for most large file transfers. But is there
anything faster?
And what about transfers over the public net from machine to machine? I
usually just use netcat, ssh, or scp.
~~~
Pete_D
Consider trying rsync instead of scp - I've found it to be faster for multiple
small files.
~~~
arendtio
I love rsync, but being exceptionally fast is most certainly not one of it's
properties.
------
lvh
And it looks like the server may have run out of files (well, descriptors) :-)
google cache link:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:L6aopS...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:L6aopSQWczwJ:https://ph7spot.com/musings/in-
unix-everything-is-a-file+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-ab)
------
zmix
And if you use XML, all you need to do, is to add another forward slash after
the filename. And now, the network, the host and the data have become one:
Everything is a node (or an atomic value).
But hey, that's stupid. Let's not do that...!
~~~
techbio
By way of XPath. I don't disagree but--that's stupid because of... using XML
at all? Complications of altering/documenting ad hoc taxonomies? Mixing
paradigms under a unified syntax? Something else?
~~~
zmix
Would you mind giving me the one or other example? Or references to some
documents about this (in regard to XML), that I could reach?
------
zokier
I think the author might have confused Plan9 and UNIX.
~~~
DonHopkins
He also confused "The Art of UNIX Programming" with a "fantastic book".
~~~
Lordarminius
What's wrong with the book ? I have read it and I think it provides a great
introduction to Unix.
~~~
DonHopkins
One obvious problem with the book which this article demonstrates is that it
leaves the reader with the mistaken impression that "In Unix Everything Is a
File".
I assumed this was common knowledge, but apparently not, so here goes: Another
reason not to buy the book is that the author, Eric S Raymond, is a racist
sexist Islamophobic conspiracy theory spreading global warming denying gun
nut, who threatened to kill Bruce Perens.
In summary, and just because you asked, Eric S Raymond is a mediocre
programmer who has made a career of trying to pose as a hacker, define what a
hacker is, tell people how to become a hacker, all while viciously,
personally, professionally, and unfairly attacking actual successful
influential hackers like Richard Stallman, including his philosophy and his
life's work, by hijacking and distorting the definition of Free Software and
the very definitions of words in the hacker's dictionary, to reflect his own
extremist narcissistic racist political ideology, which most certainly does
not align with the non-bigoted ideology in the Hacker's Manifesto: "We exist
without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias."
[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond)
"In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent
crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they
average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people
are more violent is a fact independent of skin color." -Eric S Raymond
"A clash of civilizations driven by the failure of Islamic/Arab culture
(though I would stress the problem of the Islamic commandment to jihad more
than he does). I think he [Steven den Beste] is also right to say that our
long-term objective must be to break, crush and eventually destroy this
culture, because we can't live on the same planet with people who both carry
those memes and have access to weapons of mass destruction. They will hate us
and seek to destroy us not for what we've done but for what we are." -Eric S
Raymond
"And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions
face to face, I’ve got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel
extra special welcome." -Eric S Raymond
"When I hear the words "social responsibility", I want to reach for my gun."
-Eric S Raymond
As much as he thinks he and everyone else should own lots guns, Eric S Raymond
has recently stated (2017) that he believes blacks are too unintelligent to
own or to be trained to use guns:
[https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816449724127608833](https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816449724127608833)
>Unfortunately, this doesn't cover the BLM crowd, which would have an average
IQ of about 85 if it's statistically representative of American blacks as a
whole. I've never tried to train anyone that dim and wouldn't want to.
[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond)
Eric S. Raymond (born 1957) is a computer programmer, advocate of open source
software, and author or editor of several written works, including The
Cathedral and the Bazaar and the Jargon File. Coincidentally, "Yonder Racism"
is an anagram of his name.
Unfortunately, his work and expertise in computer technology[1][2] has been
all but overshadowed by his batshit insane wingnut tendencies in the wake of
9/11, his misogynistic claims,[3] and his increasingly wanky ego-gazing,[4][5]
as he acknowledges that people aren't so crazy about him anymore.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_la...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_lazy)
Eric S Raymond threw down the gauntlet and defended Russ Nelson's infamous
"Blacks are Lazy" article by calling everyone who wanted him to resign his
position as president of OSI "fools and thugs", and demanded OSI spend their
precious time and resources fighting critics of racism and defending Russ
Nelson's racist beliefs which ESR shares, instead of promoting open source
software.
[http://www.eweek.com/servers/new-osi-president-steps-
down](http://www.eweek.com/servers/new-osi-president-steps-down)
>“Abetting somebody elses witch hunt is no less disgusting than starting your
own.” “Personally, I wanted to fight this on principle,” Raymond said. “Russ
resigned the presidency rather than get OSI into that fight, and the board
quite properly respected his wishes in the matter. That sacrifice makes me
angrier at the fools and thugs who pulled him down.”
This would be funny if it weren't exactly like Trump's recent "'nt" flip-flop
on Putin:
>Nelson subsequently sought to explain himself in an essay titled "Blacks are
Not Lazy."
[https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/Eric_S._Raymond](https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/Eric_S._Raymond)
In 1999, Debian developer Bruce Perens published an "email threat" that he
allegedly received from Raymond. Raymond then "clarified" that he only meant
to defame Perens. From this we can assume that he is batshit insane and will
fucking kill and or write to anyone that says anything about him or his
software. If you are lucky you might get an O'Rielly book about you.
[https://lists.debian.org/debian-
user/1999/04/msg00623.html](https://lists.debian.org/debian-
user/1999/04/msg00623.html)
To: [email protected]
Subject: email threat
From: [email protected]
Date: 5 Apr 1999 22:48:42 -0000
Message-id: <[email protected]>
Today I received the following threat in e-mail from Eric Raymond. The message
was copied to the Silicon Valley Linux User's Group officers, who you may
consult regarding its authenticity. The police have been notified.
Because I know that Eric is a firearms enthusiast, for my own protection,
I feel the best strategy is for me to publicize the threat widely.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
> Damn straight I took it personally. And if you ever again behave like
> that kind of disruptive asshole in public, insult me, and jeopardize
> the interests of our entire tribe, I'll take it just as personally --
> and I will find a way to make you regret it. Watch your step.
The irony of Eric S Raymond threatening someone else for behaving "like that
kind of disruptive asshole in public" is rich -- very rich.
[https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-
perens/page/10](https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/10)
[https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/terrorismistic](https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/terrorismistic)
~~~
ernst_klim
Your reasons are totally ad hominem and dictated by your political views and
have nothing to do with the topic.
~~~
DonHopkins
Sure they do. He asked about what was wrong with the book, which I answered.
Besides the obvious factual error I pointed out (which you chose to ignore,
but is _literally_ the topic of this discussion, therefore relevant), there is
the well known fact that Eric S Raymond is a racist with a long history of
making ad hominem attacks against entire races and religions, as well as his
personal death threat against Bruce Perens and long career of attacking
Richard Stallman and the Free Software community.
I'm sorry that a single quote is just not capable of capturing the vast depth
and breadth of his racism and hatred of Perens and Stallman.
Is there something you find inappropriate or annoying about me expressing my
(apparently controversial) political view that racism is wrong, and quoting
Eric Raymond's own words to prove he is a racist? Why is that more annoying to
you than ESR's racism, threats and ad-hominem attacks themselves?
In the same vein (or bloody car seat), whenever anyone mentions the Reiser
File System, the fact that he murdered his wife often comes up. Do you also
find it inappropriate to mention that fact on Hacker News or Wikipedia too?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_fil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_file_systems&oldid=209063556#Features)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReiserFS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReiserFS)
~~~
ernst_klim
I don't see what Islam or irrational wiki or racism has to do with unix
programming and the book. Your political beliefs contradicting with ones of
the author does not make a _programming_ book bad.
~~~
DonHopkins
I was directly responding to a question from somebody who didn't know about
ESR. Were you previously aware of the fact that Eric Raymond is a batshit
crazy racist, or did you just learn something new from me that you didn't
previously know? If so, then mission accomplished! I'm glad to have opened
your eyes even a little bit.
Do my political beliefs about racism being bad and obligatory to call out
contradict your own beliefs, and annoy you so much that you're compelled to
argue and continue to drag this out? Or do you know some actual facts you can
prove about ESR that contradict the proof I posted with links and quotes? Then
by all means share your proof I'm wrong, instead of stifling the discussion!
Why are you so irritated and motivated to suppress those widely known facts
from being mentioned on Hacker News?
If simply stating the facts and quoting ESR's own words sounds to you like an
ad hominem attack, then that's ESR's problem, and maybe he should have kept
his mouth shut instead of publicly saying things like "The average IQ of the
Haitian population is 67... Haiti is, quite literally, a country full of
violent idiots", and he exercises enough personal responsibility that he
doesn't need you to bravely step up and defend his racism.
[http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7011](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7011)
Or is your real issue with the valid criticism I raised about the book (and
that you awkwardly ignored and haven't countered) about "In Unix Everything Is
A File" being wrong, which is LITERALLY the topic of this conversation, a
point many other people are discussing, and a major mistake of the book and
the article?
If you really believe that my criticism of the book in response to
Lordarminius's direct question has "nothing to do with the topic", then why
aren't you criticizing Lordarminius for asking me "What's wrong with the book
?"
And why aren't you arguing with all the other people here who have pointed out
that the API for reading directories is different than the API for reading
files, that ioctl is a kitchen sink of non-file-like operations, that many
objects in the Unix kernel are simply not files, etc?
Or is it just my second criticism of ESR's racism what ticks you off so much
that you totally ignored and failed to address my first criticism of his
book's factual errors, and incorrectly claimed my reasons for disliking the
book are "totally ad hominem"? Go re-read the very first sentence of my reply.
I don't see what ESR recasting the Jargon file to reflect his own political
beliefs has to do with hacking, but that's what he did, and it's also valid to
raise that point when discussing the flaws of other books he wrote.
[https://news.slashdot.org/story/03/06/08/1534249/esr-
recasts...](https://news.slashdot.org/story/03/06/08/1534249/esr-recasts-
jargon-file-in-own-image)
[http://www.ntk.net/2003/06/06/](http://www.ntk.net/2003/06/06/)
------
nailer
Are there Unixes where TCP / UDP ports are files? setcap on Linux gets really
old when you just want to give a user access to a porf.
~~~
squirrelicus
I can't say for sure, but i do know ucspi-tcp is a great tool that wraps the
noise for you into FDs. But it's only useful if you can tank the cost of
invoking a process per tcp connection.
[https://cr.yp.to/ucspi-tcp.html](https://cr.yp.to/ucspi-tcp.html)
------
jiveturkey
this needs a 2009 tag.
it should actually be removed as the article is wrong. even in 2009, how could
someone get this wrong? pretty sure 2009 was finally going to be the year of
the linux desktop! IOW unix had reached the masses by then.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Refund policy for digital products - yani
https://help.servmask.com/2016/04/07/picking-the-right-refund-policy/
======
bangelov
Very helpful and it covers all of the refund areas
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What Are Your Recommendations from the ACM Digital Library? - 0_gravitas
I'm a Computer Science Under-Grad (3rd year) who finally got an ACM DL subscription. It's a big library, are there any notable go-tos that anyone who has a subscription should take advantage of?
======
akg_67
Subscribe to TOC (Table of Content) email subscription/RSS service for your
area of interest. It includes link to latest papers with abstract.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Reddit user bgog explains why the US Internet traffic is so slow right now - dglassan
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/of0lu/wtf_is_going_on_with_the_internet/c3gqvi2
======
EwanToo
It doesn't do that, it's just a generic explanation of routing.
------
toyg
Well, it's a generic description, we don't really know how many routers and
hubs are really down. There's a better post downthread listing actual issues,
but none of them look major.
------
wglb
The site with the bad statistics is likely bad.
This <http://www.internetpulse.net/> is a much better site to see what is
actually happening.
------
yuvadam
How is this the first we're hearing of this?
This seems to be an extraordinary issue, how is this not covered in any form
of media?
~~~
EwanToo
Because it's not true...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Comp.lang.c Infrequently Asked Questions - garret
http://www.seebs.net/faqs/c-iaq.html
======
ars
Painful to read. Definitely should not be read by beginners.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Do Startups Create Jobs or Destroy Them - jonbot
http://www.betabeat.com/2011/11/03/do-startups-create-jobs-or-destroy-them/
======
justin_vanw
Without having read the article, the answer seems quite apparent to me. They
create jobs in one place and destroy them somewhere else.
Startups are really just businesses. So, when people say "I'm going to do a
startup", why don't they just say "I'm going to start a business". Well,
partly because if you said "I'm going to start a startup" it would sound
redundant.
But why don't we say "business" instead of "startup"? The just-so story I am
drawn to is that startups must be disruptive. A business can be opening a
chain of car washes, or a McDonald's franchise. Nobody is going to use the
word 'startup' there. However, what if I started a business, and my goal was
to develop a paint that never required washing. That would almost certainly be
considered a 'startup'.
Now, when you disrupt, you are disrupting commerce that is happening. It's
real money changing hands, people's jobs and so on. For the 'no wash paint'
startup, success means putting all the car washes out of business, eventually
anyway.
Finally, should we care? No. Nearly every business would fire all of it's
employees if it could. The carwash you are putting under? If it could do the
same quality of washing with half as many employees, it would fire half of
them. If it could do the same job with no employees, it would fire all of
them. The point is that there is no moral issue here, merely an issue of who
is going to collect the money. And of course the money not going to carwashes
will go to something else blah blah blah saddle makers blah blah blah Model T.
Now, there is a Player Piano scenario to worry about. What happens when,
inevitably, we automate all the mindless tasks we currently pay people to do?
Sure, lawns will look great, cars will be clean, shelves will be stocked,
houses will be immaculate, and you'll never see peeling paint again, and ipods
will be fully assembled by robots. What are all the mindless people going to
do? I don't honestly know. We need to figure this out.
~~~
cienrak
I think the Vonnegut reference is an apt one. But there is also a simpler
question at hand. When we romanticize startups, do we actually undermine the
larger, perhaps less interesting companies who are better at generating
employment and economic growth.
In the same way that the American dream of home ownership came back to bite
us, perhaps the cult of entrepreneurship could use a hard look.
~~~
justin_vanw
You don't increase wealth by being inefficient. The cult of startups leads to
more startups, but it doesn't make them more successful.
There are some exceptions, but the market can always be irrational for a
little while. LinkedIn and GroupOn aren't real businesses and eventually the
stock price will reflect this. However, in the short run they are able to pump
the stock price by having a microscopic float and getting listed on things
like Russel 2000.
Oracle, Cisco, Intel, HP are all startups, they are just very old and
established. They employ tons of people. They aren't doing us any favors if
they barely survive, however. Inefficiency makes us all poorer, even if in the
shortrun it makes some people better off because of a paycheck (HP employee
for example).
------
cienrak
Let's take an example - Etsy has grown to 80 engineers in the last year. If 50
of these workers had decided they wanted to go their own way and create a
startup, how many jobs would have been created and how many of those people
would be out of work?
Easy money at the seed stage means a lot of companies that are small ideas
trying their hand at building a business.
------
cienrak
Startups have different goals. Some want to stay lean and disrupt old
industries. Others, like Groupon, are inventing new kinds of comapanies and
hiring like mad.
Whatever the net-net is in terms of jobs created or killed by startups, the US
is better off for having a class of creative people in the technology space
trying to create new business models.
------
wccrawford
I'm always surprised that people claim things steal jobs. If you look at the
record of the unemployment rate, it's pretty obvious that it stays the same
over time. There are ups and downs, but they are not caused by inventions or
efficiency increases.
------
elias
When you automate a process to scale, you reduce the need for people. In that
sense, startups destroy jobs.
But when you create new ways in doing things like unlocking value (like how
Facebook has done with connecting the world), jobs are created.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Bad scrolling by Microsoft - bhashkarsharma
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/AstonMartin/
======
bhashkarsharma
Can someone open it in IE and confirm whether it works better than on other
browsers? That'd be a first.
~~~
mattkrea
It is somewhat better but still not very smooth in IE11
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A first look at Dell's 'Sputnik' Ubuntu Linux developer laptop - tanglesome
http://www.zdnet.com/a-first-look-at-dells-sputnik-ubuntu-linux-developer-laptop-7000001166/
======
sequoia
"Developer profiles"? What does that mean? It will install node && jshint &&
vim for me or what?
What I want out of a linux ready laptop from Dell (or anyone):
1\. Make the hardware and OS play nice. 2\. Nothing
I can do the rest just please make the display, media keys, battery, drives,
etc. work flawlessly. Profiles & all that stuff are no selling point at all.
~~~
tedmiston
Hopefully developer profiles will come to mean something like a developer
version of Ninite to configure and install common apps, frameworks, and
libraries in literally just a few clicks. This is often a long, painful
process that is all too familar, and should be totally automated.
~~~
w1ntermute
On Linux it's a matter of writing a one-line shell script to automate that
process. I wrote such a script to reinstall packages after doing a clean
install of Ubuntu, and it was entirely painless.
~~~
ninetax
That's pretty useful, do you think I could get a copy of that"?
------
makmanalp
> "The Sputnik will allow developers to create “microclouds” on their laptops,
> simulating a proper, at-scale environment, and then deploy that environment
> seamlessly to the cloud. George explained it would use LXC virtual
> environments containers for the microclouds. These cloud applications can
> then be deployed to Ubuntu instances running on the Amazon, OpenStack, bare-
> metal with Management as a Service (MAAS), and, eventually, Microsoft Azure
> clouds. "
Jesus. Can I just have a laptop, please?
I don't think they understand that their target market is going to wipe
whatever they put on there and reinstall their own. Or at least reconfigure
the crap out of it. It's like our house, you can't just dump whatever you like
into _our_ environment.
~~~
davidbrent
Or maybe their target market is in an environment where developers don't get
to just wipe their machines, and rather have to work on the same image as
everyone else.
~~~
omh
But for a corporate environment the image comes from the IT department, not
from Dell.
------
ori_b
Just get me a laptop with better battery life and a higher resolution screen.
Give it a better keyboard (none of that chicklet crap). Make it play well with
open source drivers. And that's it.
I don't want extra software. I don't want profiles. I just want something that
works out of the box with any recent Linux I throw at it.
~~~
dman
Thats approximately the exact feedback I gave when I signed up for the Project
Sputnik beta - better keyboard, working suspend resume, rock solid wifi
drivers, use slower processors if that means better battery life and improved
thermals and a great screen resolution ( >= 1600x1200 ). Do that and get out
of the way, dont try to add lock in on top of that.
------
lumberjack
By "developer" they really mean "newbie to-be developer". Otherwise I don't
understand what's with all the emphasis on software rather than hardware, as
if an experienced developer wouldn't already have a preferred developing
enviroment and wouldn't already know how to set it up.
And the price tag is outrageous even from the perspective of a to-be developer
that values having everything setup before hand.
~~~
Roboprog
Right on about the price. I recently picked up a MacBook, for a good deal less
than $1500, and while it doesn't have an SSD drive, the rest of the specs beat
out the Dell.
Of course, now I'm just sitting on the couch with my little Acer netbook
running Ubuntu. Getting a newer, slightly larger keyboard netbook would have
put me in driver hell, thus, the Mac.
------
mootothemax
I presume that Dell are aiming to make a killing from less-informed buyers
such as bosses at small companies (I have no idea how this might work at large
companies), and parents for their kids interested in programming. Given how
many people buy Dell, the "developer" tag will carry a lot of weight.
I certainly can't see any developer going out of their way to buy this for
themselves. My HP ProBook was cheaper, and came with a whole lot more
(including SSD and 1600x900 resolution). The only improvement I'd like is a
sturdier body, so will probably go for an Elitebook or Lenovo Thinkpad next
time.
------
stuff4ben
Personally I'd like 8GB RAM as a standard with the option to upgrade to 16GB.
A slightly higher resolution screen would be nice too, although in that form
factor it may not be possible (or cheap). It may be enough to convince me to
not buy a Macbook Pro the next go around.
~~~
fjellfras
The screen resolution is an issue for me as well. I think they should have
been able to fit in 1440x900 in a 13.3 inch size, similar to what the larger
macbook airs ship with, which makes working on two editor or IDE panes side by
side somewhat possible.
~~~
sigkill
Good point. Asus manages to fit a 1920x1080 screen in the same size.
------
jiggy2011
1366x768? My old P4 laptop had 1400x1050 (or something very close)
At least 8GB RAM , 15" 1600x1200 screen , a proper mechanical keyboard and a
blank SSD. Now that would be a developer laptop.
------
sharms
As someone who loves Ubuntu, this would be a great laptop except for the
resolution. Screens matter, especially for developers who will be using it day
in day out. In my experience 1366x768 has been a rough resolution to work at,
and the panels themselves are not very high quality. In comparison to the
Thinkpad and Macbook lines, it is a hard sell.
------
codex
This illustrates a key problem selling Linux. Linux hardware = commodity.
Linux software = commodity. commodity + commodity = commodity.
There's no differentiator here, for anyone. You might as well put a pinstripe
on it, or tint the windows, or put on a Type-R muffler: in the end it's still
a Honda Accord.
The best you can do is make sure that Linux runs well on your hardware, but as
the hardware is a commodity, that's not much of a differentiator. And for
sleep/wake issues you may not have the skills to make Linux work well on a
laptop, because nobody does.
This problem also exists with Android, but in the mobile space handset makers
are having some success differentiating on hardware and adding custom UI.
IBM makes a good chunk of change on Linux, but their model (admitting their
solution isn't turn-key and charging a bunch of money on customization)
doesn't work for laptops. And, of course, it offers no incentive to actually
create turn-key software.
~~~
ori_b
> _This illustrates a key problem selling Linux. Linux hardware = commodity.
> Linux software = commodity. commodity + commodity = commodity._
Sure, I don't disagree. I just don't see how the situation is different from
Windows. Selling Wintel boxes is a low margin business, and it seems that
selling Lintel boxes will be in the same boat.
------
bsphil
>i7 2GHz Intel Core2 Duo processor
A what?
~~~
bicknergseng
I did a double take, too. No the real question is who made the mistake... just
the editor, or did it propagate all the way down from some hapless Dell
spokesperson?
------
well-duh
Agree with several other commenters. My priorities, most important first, are:
0\. Everything must work with a free OS without requiring binary blobs.
1\. A good full-sized keyboard with a sane layout, preferably mechanical with
blue Cherry switches (hey, a guy can dream) even if this adds a few
millimeters and a few ounces. If this is impossible, the bare minimum is the
equivalent to last year's Thinkpad keyboard. I was all set to buy a Thinkpad
this year, but they lost me when they dropped the traditional keyboard. I
tried their new chicklet keyboard in a store and... well, it's a chicklet
keyboard.
2\. 15 inches Macbook-like quality screen with at least 1920x1200 resolution.
3\. Fast SSD and at least 8GB ram, expandable of course.
------
justauser
Regarding the use of LXC, I presume since it is a container you're still on
the same version/release as the host which in this case is Ubuntu 12.04? So
this is the new open-source lock in?
When is someone going to create a tiny gui-less linux distro meant for
purposes like this (local and uploaded to your hosting provider) which can
then run in KVM and company? And by tiny, I don't mean Debian minimal or an
equivalent Fedora. I mean a default size of probably 50MB and not much more
for your choice of localization/i18n. Then simple package management to
install your language platform and database support.
------
kevinherron
I've been following this and giving feedback on the IdeaStorm site for a while
now.
A lot of people have the same feedback: Upgrade to ivy bridge, give it 8gb
ram, give it a 1600x900 screen.
Until then it's too sub-par to consider my dev machine.
------
edwinnathaniel
I used a Dell Latitude e6510 laptop before with 8GB RAM, standard HDD (no
SSD), Intel Core 5. I was running GlassFish 3.x, WebSphere Portal Server
(don't ask), DB2, Eclipse 3.4 with plugins, Chrome with multiple tabs, and a
VirtualBox running Windows 7 (don't ask). Pretty damn fast.
Given a reasonable price and a better battery support, and a wee bit lighter
design with barebone Ubuntu + additional drivers, I'd definitely buy that
machine to replace my MBP.
------
durpleDrank
Does this mean that there will be an open wifi driver coming out of this ?
Will I be able to install gNewSense or trizeal on this?
------
pnathan
Hmmm.
What I, in particular, would pay for, is for Dell to have a repository of
reliable & tested drivers that they maintain for that particular hardware
setup. That way I could simply install a (relatively) standard distro (gentoo,
debian, red hat, arch, etc), and have a very high confidence that the drivers
worked seamlessly.
------
typicalrunt
It's a laptop targeted at developers and they give a measly 4GB of RAM? I hope
it's upgradeable. I like to run VMs and other developer-ish applications, some
of which use up a lot of RAM.
But on the top of my priority list is a good battery. Drop in an 8-10 hour
battery and I'm ready to buy.
------
mindcrime
As long as it will run Fedora, I might be tempted to buy one. And if the
hardware is "linux compatible" enough for Ubuntu, I'm guessing Fedora will run
just fine on it as well. I hope so anyway...
~~~
chimeracoder
I'd imagine so - there's very little incompatibility of this sort between
different Linux distros, and when it happens, it's almost always because of
bad developing practices (ie, system-dependent compilation of a closed-source
binary... statically compiled binaries are binary-compatible, and if it's open
source it can be patched).
The only thing that could be a problem are the drivers, but if those are open
source, you bet there'll be a patched package for any mainstream distro, and
even closed-source drivers on Linux these days are very good. I can't remember
the last time I ran into driver problems. What's more likely is fundamental
limitations of the hardware itself, rather than the drivers, but that won't be
a problem here.
------
chimeracoder
Have they announced when this will be available for purchase? I was
considering getting an XPS 13 Ultrabook now, but it sounds like it won't be a
long wait for the Sputnik?
------
brunoqc
Anyone knows if Dell is done selecting people for the Sputnick program? I'm
waiting to buy a new laptop and I would hate to be selected a couple of days
after I order one.
------
peterwwillis
Holy shit. They replaced a journalist with a buzzword machine.
------
mey
Was talking to a dell rep the other day at OSCON, (they gave away 3), they are
looking to get the vendor specific drivers upstream but don't have a timeline
for it.
------
stupidhurts
give me a t42 with a 2nd gen i7 then stfu.
why is this so hard?
------
nicholassmith
That screen resolution spoils it. Devs like designers appreciate the
additional pixels.
------
DannoHung
What the hell is a "microcloud"?
~~~
gosub
apt-get install virtualbox?
------
skadamat
Hahahah what a joke. 1,500 for a laptop like this
------
accountswu
This 1366 x 768 is worse than what Lenovo offered more than four years ago.
In 2008 Lenovo came out with X300, a 13" 3lb laptop with DVD drive built-in
and 1400 x 900 resolution. It was priced about the same as a 13" Macbook Air,
it had lesser battery time than MB Air, slightly more weight, but it had
optical drive in that weight, replaceable battery and it came with plenty of
ports (USB, VGA, LAN).
Too bad they don't make any 13" ones any more (X1 doesn't count, it is not a
true Thinkpad). They replaced it with the 14" 4lb T400s (1400 x 900), then
T410s (1400 x 900), T420s (1600 x 900) and newly announced T430s. I think many
developers would want to get an X330 with i7 and 1600 x 900 at 3lbs.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
PRISM data used to to help the entertainment industry tackle pirates - smsm42
http://www.sodthe.net/prism-data-used-to-help-the-entertainment-industry-tackle-pirates/
======
greenyoda
This article is just blogspam, and it even manages to mangle the link to the
original article. Here's the correct link to original article, with
references, including the PDF of the Kim Dotcom affidavits:
[http://publicaddress.net/onpoint/ich-bin-ein-
cyberpunk](http://publicaddress.net/onpoint/ich-bin-ein-cyberpunk)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Nonprofit modifying snorkel masks into safety gear for clinicians - sanj
https://maskson.org
======
sanj
I am leading this effort. Happy to answer questions.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
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