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A few things about Redis security - shawndumas
http://www.antirez.com/news/96
======
fulafel
It is NOT OK for networked server software in 2015 to be "totally insecure if
exposed to the outside world" without having this warning in large letters
stressed very visibly in documentation and in the software installation
process!
As is, Redis should probably default to only using the UNIX socket (where
filesystem permissions apply), with TCP-enabling configuration options having
impossible-to-miss warnings in example configs and documentation.
In the blog post there's this part, castigating inattentive users about
falling pray to this fail-open nature of Redis:
"The problem is that, whatever we state in our security page, there are a lot
of Redis instances exposed to the internet unintentionally. Not because the
use case requires outside clients to access Redis, but because nobody bothered
to protect a given Redis instance from outside accesses via fire walling"
Sounds like the author should really have another hard think about this
stance.
~~~
anewhnaccount
I have been in this position myself and I agree with your stance. Networked
software should be secure by default. The assumption should be "networked" ==
"exposed to the Internet". From my redis.conf:
"By default Redis listens for connections from all the network interfaces
available on the server."
In my case the reason Redis ended up exposed to the Internet was another dev
"updated the configuration" to the default provided by the package. Okay,
perhaps that was the wrong thing to do, but it simply shouldn't be that easy
to expose an vulnerable service to the Internet! I understand that people
should run firewalls too but a belt and braces approach should really be taken
here.
PS. While I'm moaning, Jenkins is another big offender in this respect. I
can't be the only person to have tried side-step its own security by having it
only bind to localhost and using SSH tunnelling only to find something which
can execute arbitrary code is exposed to the public Internet when the
configuration is switched back to its default. Yes, a firewall would fix it,
but as far as I'm concerned, Jenkins shares some of the blame for being
insecure by default in the absence of one.
~~~
iheartmemcache
The way redis is pre-configured out of the box has certainly been evaluated by
antirez and the rest of his team extensively. There are tons of things behind
the scenes which I'm sure factor into why one might bind to every interface
that we as end-users aren't aware of. Either way it's up to the engineer or IT
team to perform a little due diligence and be cognizant of what their software
is binding to. If something's going to be deployed, and it's _networked_ , and
it's _production_ \- spend five or ten minutes to do an impact analysis
beforehand. You don't even have to do anything rigorous. Spend 5 minutes with
out of the box utilities. Netstat -p and grep for whatever you added.
Back in the day, daemons (especially IRCds) would have a 'comment me to
enable' line arbitrarily inserted into the generated conf file which would
prevent the daemon from starting up entirely. You'd spend 10 minutes reading
through the config files rather than just presuming it was configured the way
you want. The belts and brace approach should be that. Stupid users won't be
able to just 'gem install <foo>' or 'apt-get install <bar>' then complain so
often that an engineer who has contributed so much to the community (remember
Antirez was doing this for ages, as a father, operating the entire project by
himself (support and all), for multiple years before he finally was able to
work on it full time) has to take time out of his day to justify "hey guys,
you're sort of responsible for the way you configure your daemons".
~~~
anewhnaccount
I wasn't attacking Antirez. We wouldn't be having this conversation if we
didn't agree Redis is essentially good work. I was attacking insecure by
default. The point is is that it's not unlikely that someone might
accidentally revert to the default configuration even when due diligence was
done in the first place.
Can you please go beyond vague references like "tons of things behind the
scenes" and "certainly been evaluated". What's the direct answer to the
question: "Why can't it just listen on loopback by default?"
I'm not sure "stupid users" and "clever Antirez" gets us any further towards a
proper answer here.
------
samwillis
I don't even expose redis externally, I tunnel all connections over ssh using
autossh and a restricted user on the server running redis.
Something like:
autossh -M 0 -N -L 6379:localhost:6379 -o "ServerAliveInterval 60" \
-o "ServerAliveCountMax 3" -o "StrictHostKeyChecking=no" -o "BatchMode=yes" \
-i /home/tunnel/.ssh/id_rsa [email protected]
Then on the clent side you just connect to localhost:6379 as if redis was
local.
Edit: Should add autossh automatically reconnects the tunnel if the connection
fails. Vanilla ssh does not.
~~~
patio11
FWIW: Appointment Reminder also does this. It's part of your healthy HIPAA-
approved breakfast.
(One of the other things you should strongly consider, if you care about HIPAA
compliance, is using either full-disk encryption or encryping the directory
where Redis' data file resides. We do this with encryptfs. We also encryptfs
the Tarsnap cache directory, which holds recoverable cleartext. Tarsnap
archives are encrypted automatically without requiring further work.)
There also exist another dozen or so box-ticking requirements with regards to
procedures and documentation, but those are the main rubber-hits-the-hard-disk
things you have to do with respect to using Redis for PHI.
~~~
iheartmemcache
Oh Patrick, I bet you know what I'm going to ask even before I ask it.
Implementation details please.
~~~
patio11
I'm having trouble parsing this -- what details do you want about what?
~~~
iheartmemcache
Oh sorry, what other things did you do to fulfill the PHI criteria? I've had
PCI-DSS, SOX and federal security experience, but nothing in healthcare. As
such, I was wondering what sort of security protocols were required, and how
much of it (if any) is just hand-waving security theater ?
------
mbrock
That I never have to care about remembering admin user names and that the
configuration is so utterly trivial is part of why I love Redis so much. I am
lazy and forgetful and "database systems" tend to scare me by being so
complicated. I never really know if my Postgres user accounts are set up the
right way. On my first job, SQL Server privileges were a frequent annoyance
when deploying, testing, etc, and I'm pretty sure the whole "security" thing
there was a total illusion anyway.
------
mrweasel
Given the example of being able to write stuff to the ssh authorized_keys it
would be prudent to simply chroot your redis installation. It seems like a
easy, if somewhat old fashion solution, to at least that part.
Generally speaking I think way to many services assume that they're allow to
roam the filesystem freely, when chrooting should be "the bare minimum" one
could expect.
~~~
antirez
Debian does this in the default installation, it uses capabilities I believe,
not chroot, but the result is that there is a "white list" for directories
where Redis can write, which are just /etc/redis/... to rewrite the config,
and the dir where Redis persists.
------
mikecmpbll
Just been hacked through this method and cannot believe how redis can ship
with such ridiculously insecure defaults, and that they don't even MENTION the
security concerns from the quickstart guide, which is what the majority of
people would use to get redis installed and set up.
[http://redis.io/topics/quickstart](http://redis.io/topics/quickstart)
Unbelievable.
~~~
omni
> such ridiculously insecure defaults
Like having port 6379 be open to anyone who happens to wander by? Your
firewall was horribly configured and you got burned, take this as a learning
opportunity to fix your mistakes.
~~~
mikecmpbll
exactly, but one wrong doesn't excuse another. just because I didn't have my
firewall configured correctly doesn't mean software that I use should a) have
insecure defaults and b) not make a song and dance about them on the page
designed to get you up and running with it.
------
nnx
[https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/redis.conf#L4...](https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/redis.conf#L435)
# Command renaming.
# It is possible to change the name of dangerous commands in a shared #
environment.
# For instance the CONFIG command may be renamed into something # hard to
guess so that it will still be available for internal-use tools
# but not available for general clients. #
# Example: #
# rename-command CONFIG b840fc02d524045429941cc15f59e41cb7be6c52 #
# It is also possible to completely kill a command by renaming it into
# an empty string:
#
# rename-command CONFIG ""
I'm a big Redis fan, and have used most of its power, including the great
HyperLogLog stuff, I never really looked at the CONFIG command and would not
have imagined it would allow such things even.
Is CONFIG commonly used? What are the use cases?
------
forgotpwtomain
Except if no config file is specified Redis defaults to binding to 127.0.0.1
instead of localhost? The docs even advertise:
> This is perfectly fine if you are starting Redis just to play a bit with it
> or for development, but for production environments you should use a
> configuration file.
Not to mention you can over-write arbitrary files by setting the dbfilename
and config directory (Not sure why this is an interactive option to start
with?).
------
bjblazkowicz
Hmm 9 hours ago and some script kid has already performed this on my local
vagrant-box? Pretty funny. I was running it behind vpn and I guess that's why
it got exposed.
They didnt even bother changing the keyname.
------
jokergd
elasticsearch redis
who's next?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: If you wanted to 'hardware jailbreak' a device, how might you do this? - hwhatwhatwhat
Most rootings/jailbreaks that have been widely released use software vulnerabilities to escalate privilege.<p>If instead you had access to the hardware of a device, and could make any reasonable modification or intervention, how would you approach this? What techniques are used for this class of attacks?<p>(Reasonable modifications might be things like soldering extra components, removing ICs, using oscilloscopes and data loggers - but not, say, decapping chips and imaging them in an electron microscope as presumably those resources are a lot more limited.)<p>More practically, how might you do this on recent devices such as latest, flagship iOS, Android, or Windows Phone handsets? Are there any good, educational examples of this?
======
dpeck
One of the best approachable writeups I've found on getting started in
reversing embedded devices is an old gem from Matasano. Retsaot is Toaster,
Reversed: Quick 'n Dirty Firmware Reversing -
[http://www.woodmann.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-11707.html](http://www.woodmann.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-11707.html)
That should give you a little bit of a feel for it. Its a fun rabbit hole to
spend a few years down.
------
breakingcups
Most commonly you can find either a RS232 port (not the regular one, a 3.3v
one!) or a JTAG port through which you might be able to influence the software
running on it.
For example, I managed to flash OpenWRT on my otherwise unflashable router
that way.
Another (even more hardware-y) approach is to dump flash chips containing
ROMs. With those roms in hand you might be able to find a vulnerability to
exploit, or you could replace the rom chip with a socket in which you can
place your own modified roms.
Bunnie famously broke the Xbox classic security by building his own hardware
to sniff the (until then thought to be unsniffable) HyperTransport bus. He
wrote a very interesting book about it and it's free nowadays:
[http://bunniefoo.com/nostarch/HackingTheXbox_Free.pdf](http://bunniefoo.com/nostarch/HackingTheXbox_Free.pdf)
~~~
Vexs
You can get a lot off rom chips, it's always the second thing I go for after
serial ports- and if you run into a password on the serial port, than it's
probably (often hardcoded) in the rom.
Sometimes they don't include headers and the like, so looking up a pinout and
soldering to the IC helps in that case too- tapping into the serial
connections between chips can reveal a lot too.
------
fulafel
Here's a good start for chip level stuff
"Fault attacks on secure chips: from glitch to flash"
[https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/ECRYPT2011_1.pdf](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/ECRYPT2011_1.pdf)
------
ManlyBread
Video game consoles used to do this with modchips and sometimes design flaws,
this might be a good starting point for your research.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
OpenStreetMap is now navigation-ready - dalek2point3
http://stevecoast.com/2014/05/19/why-openstreetmap-is-now-navigation-ready-for-people-like-you/
======
schabernakk
I tried switching to OSM in an effort to get away from google maps. People
always say 'OSM is consumer ready' but forget that OSM first and foremost is
the dataset. And as far as i am concerned, there is no good maps app on the
iOS appstore that even comes close to google maps. and i think i tried pretty
much all relevant ones. skobbler (which i just found out is part of coast)
seems to be the most polished. but as long as there is no unified search and
you have to enter streetname/adress/city in seperate boxes which excludes
searching for the names of buildings (for example university buildings) for
which the names clearly exist in the database and are shown onthe map, i have
no choice other than switch back to google.
i really hope this changes soon and the UI/apps catch up to the greatness that
is OSM.
edit: i have an iphone and although i live in canada i still use the german
appstore (CC requirement).
that's why i can't comment on the app the original post was about as it's only
available in the US store. it was more of a general remark about my
frustration with the state of apps using the osm dataset. I want to get rid of
google maps and I feel the maps part of osm would be ready for that. I can
tolerate if the commercial store data is not as up2date. But if the general
usuability suffers, i rather opt for gmaps.
~~~
Brakenshire
Have you tried the Scout App (which the article is about)? How does its search
work?
I agree that geocoding has been a problem for OSM, especially for building
numbers, where the data often isn't there. But on the software side there
seems to be progress recently, for instance, here are two open-source
geocoders released in the last few months:
Photon, made by Komoot:
[https://github.com/komoot/photon](https://github.com/komoot/photon), used in
production at
[http://www.komoot.de/suggest/?&hl=en](http://www.komoot.de/suggest/?&hl=en)
Pelias, made by Mapzen:
[http://stateofthemap.us/session/pelias/](http://stateofthemap.us/session/pelias/),
live demo at [http://mapzen.com/pelias/](http://mapzen.com/pelias/)
On building numbers, we need geocoders which can interpolate between sparse
data, and then use that system to highlight where the gaps are. People tend to
add data to OSM when they're confident that it's actually being used, to its
full extent. If there are a hundred buildings along a road, in theory you
don't need to add many of them before you can get a very good idea of where an
address might be.
~~~
sitkack
The map should communicate that it is interpolating the geocoded address by a
circle of probability. Or even show known addresses and then an alpha blended
triangle between them.
As you are saying, assistance from a mapping service need not be binary, just
add some extra information and communicate cleanly the probability of result.
------
thrownaway2424
Android really needs to do something about the permissions model. This app
asks for every permission in the book, but I have no way to tell if the app
will use these permissions for a good reason.
~~~
Brakenshire
I agree. Anyone know whether there's an Android distribution which will give
you more granular control over permissions? Cyanogenmod seems to be a little
better, but I haven't used it myself.
~~~
thrownaway2424
Granularity isn't really the problem. The problem is there's no connection
between something I want to do in the app and the permission it requires. It
might be obvious why this app wants to use my microphone at the instant I
tried to invoke some feature, but at install time it's not apparent at all.
~~~
Brakenshire
Yeah, that is what I intended (as in fine-grained controls).
------
Justsignedup
I'm just gonna point out something: OSM is 10 years old, and after countless
hrs and investing its finally ready for prime time. People who think a new
internet is coming via some disruptive technology need to read this article
and realize that real, long-term, awesome change takes time.
~~~
pekk
It's still not really usable for navigation, has all kinds of accuracy
problems and the worst is that they don't even want help scaling up the data
pipeline, they just want armies of people to click by hand on their weak
editing app.
Labor is expensive, technology is cheap, why insist on such an insanely labor-
intensive data pipeline?
~~~
MaBu
Things are changing in a way. There is Slide from Strava (
[http://labs.strava.com/](http://labs.strava.com/) ). Where you just roughly
click where a path is and it creates nice path from its database of gazillion
GPX tracks. It can be used as an iD editor plugin already. There are scripts
for automatic lake and building creation from satellite images but most
interesting thing seems to be coming from Digital Globe.
In this year state of the map USA ( [http://stateofthemap.us/session/mapping-
the-world-in-raster/](http://stateofthemap.us/session/mapping-the-world-in-
raster/) ) they said that this year SDK is coming where they would
automatically draw buildings and streets from satellite images and you would
get APIs to play with this and insert into OSM. (They already provide images
to OSM through Bing and MapBox). So yes drawing streets and buildings isn't
fun but you need people to know what is a street/cycleway POI and etc.. There
are also projects for figuring out one way streets, max speeds.
------
pedrocr
>we’re pumping all the good stuff that we can back in to OSM. This takes time
due to OSMs consensus on not importing the masses of fixes we generate.
This seems strange. Anyone know the story?
~~~
morganherlocker
OSM prefers user created data. Mass imports often contain errors all over the
place (many going back unnoticed for years). OSM holds a general mindset that
data should only be included if someone is fairly certain the data is correct
(which they would not be on a mass import). "When in doubt, leave it out."
That said, it is more of a guideline than a rule, and there have been mass
imports in the past.
~~~
Brakenshire
One solution might be for them to maintain their own error-checked database,
and then provide a website and map overlay ontop of OSM, pointing out where
the discrepancies are between the two. Then local mappers could go around and
confirm the corrections.
I do think in the long-run OSM will need some error-checking processes if it
aspires to be a definitive database. At the moment, I could quite happily
subtly mess up a motorway junction in Japan, and most of the OSM mapping
software would have no way to knowing not to package it up and send it out.
Vandalism is not an issue now, but as the dataset becomes more popular, I
think some mechanisms will need to go into place to protect its integrity
(particularly for major infrastructure).
~~~
sitkack
You might like the "Propagator Model" of computation, think of it is a
probabilistic graph with CRDT like information augmentation.
[http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/propagators/](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/propagators/)
[https://github.com/tgk/propaganda](https://github.com/tgk/propaganda)
------
dewey
Not really related to the post but they are talking about making OSM cosumer-
ready and every time I try to use OSM instead of Google Maps I realise it's
just not on the same level yet.
It doesn't have to be on par in terms of error correcting input or location
based search result because they just don't have the data on me like Google
does (locations close to my work place, home,...) but even just the basic task
of searching for my street on OSM [0] will give me a bunch of information the
end-user doesn't really need to know like:
\- tags
\- created by
\- version
\- changeset #
\- location ID
Is there a "cleaner" more consumer friendly web interface for the maps, maybe
with a prettier mapstyle like the ones used in apps like Foursquare (afaik
they are using OSM)?
[0] [http://www.openstreetmap.org/](http://www.openstreetmap.org/)
~~~
dublinben
You're really not meant to be using OSM.org directly as a drop-in replacement
for Google Maps or Bing Maps. It's primarily a back end dataset, and that site
is the front door to contributing to the data set.
You ought to try some deployments like
[https://www.komoot.de/](https://www.komoot.de/) and
[http://open.mapquest.com/](http://open.mapquest.com/)
~~~
coldpie
Thank you. I wish this was more obvious.
------
cheetahtech
I have totally converted to OSM with my startups.
We use it soley for all our mapping needs and it does quite well.
See it in action: [https://rdnation.com/roller-derby-
leagues](https://rdnation.com/roller-derby-leagues)
~~~
maxerickson
Some 'null's show through for one of the teams in New Jersey.
------
riquito
> Feel sorry for how proprietary maps are currently built. When there’s a new
> road built, they all have to scramble to add it.
I'm not into the business of maps, but don't the major players pay
Nations/Cities or third parties that _have_ the latest data about roads to be
promptly updated? (whoever build the roads must have the data, and they'll be
happy to sell it I suppose). (ok, probably every city uses a different format
or has the maps on paper...)
Then we can talk about if this data should be free or not.
~~~
davexunit
Map data is of utility to everyone, of course it should be free.
~~~
xanderstrike
Food is of utility to everyone, of course it should be free.
Transportation is of utility to everyone, of course it should be free.
Shelter is of utility to everyone, of course it should be free.
~~~
dllthomas
Those all have significant marginal cost.
~~~
toomuchtodo
The marginal cost of all of those is dropping. If you can automate mobility
(Self-driving EVs), the production of housing (3D printed homes), and farming
(automated planting, maintenance, harvesting), you can indeed provide it all
for free.
~~~
saraid216
Land is still a scarce resource.
------
whatts
Well, skobbler did all this for iOS and Android. And TeleNav bought skobbler
for $24M in January [1] -- so it's obvious why TeleNav might be able to do
this now.
But will skobbler support stop? Why switch from skobbler to TeleNav's own
products at all? With skobbler, you can get your whole continent's maps for
roughly $7.50.
[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/30/telenav-buys-
skobbler/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/30/telenav-buys-skobbler/)
~~~
whatts
Okay, skobbler has now published an update for its Android app where the
"Scout by TeleNav" brand is introduced.
------
ronaldx
Privacy policy says:
"Personal information does not include anonymous or aggregate information,
which after processing may not be associated with a specific person or
entity."
But I find this a dishonest definition of personal information.
The concept of the app depends on personal journeys being recorded and stored
("indefinitely"), which would very often and very easily identify a person via
their home or workplace. There should be consideration for this in the privacy
policies.
------
pella
List of OSM based Services - Routing :
[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_OSM_based_Service...](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_OSM_based_Services#Routing)
+
[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing)
------
janus
What's a good navigation app for Android that works outside the US? (Scout
doesn't)
I have a couple of apps in my phone (Navigator and Waze), but the UI is really
cumbersome compared to Google Maps. I use them because OSM maps are better in
small tows in my area than Google Maps, plus you can keep offline maps.
~~~
techsupporter
OsmAnd? I don't really use it for navigation (why not, see below) but I know
that it is a feature and I'm 100% sure of its offline maps capability.
Why not: It doesn't have bus/train/streetcar transit routing, something I
don't expect it to have, though I'm feverishly adding all of the bus stops
around me just in case.
~~~
privong
I use it for a general idea of where to drive. But I don't follow the
directions blindly. It seems to equate all "highways", meaning it gives equal
weight to interstates and state highways, which results in routes which are
direct, but slower than a slightly more indirect route making more use of
interstates.
~~~
Brakenshire
In Settings > Navigation, you can change the routing engine, incidentally,
which might solve that problem. Although the other options require an internet
connection for the initial calculation.
~~~
privong
Thanks. I guess I've shied away from those because I'm often out of cell
service when I need directions :) But I should do some test runs to see how
they compare.
~~~
maxerickson
I think it would benefit from an option for 'Online routing when available'.
------
chatman
How is this such a big news? There is no navigation option in default
openstreetmap.org experience. And there have been several other
navigation/routing websites based on OSM data before. I sense nothing new
here.
------
mauriziopd
For those looking for a good Android app that uses OSM. I use Mapfactor
Navigator and think it is great (I've used it in Italy, Austria, Slovenia,
Crozia). It let's you use it with OSM data or Tom Tom, you can use Google for
address search and use it offline if you need.
I'm not affiliated, just a happy user
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mapfactor....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mapfactor.navigator)
------
twothamendment
Consumer Ready? It is about 8 years behind in my neighborhood. My street
doesn't exist and it there in 2006.
Google has a street view of it and has been able to find my address since
2007.
~~~
dingaling
> It is about 8 years behind in my neighborhood.
Like I replied to the poster up-page; it's eight years behind because _you_
haven't gone and added that data. Jump to it!
~~~
pekk
OSM is perfect for everything _!
_ Well, OK, it (still) isn't there yet... but it would be if everyone would
only donate large amounts of manual labor to reproduce data which is probably
available somewhere else, and just isn't allowed to be imported because of OSM
policies against automation
~~~
hnha
Was some import from you "rejected" or why are you so aggressive? There are no
rules against automation. There are just guidelines for not screwing up
imports. You can import lots of data perfectly fine if the license allows it
and you invest time into making it work flawlessly.
------
mjcohen
And then they charge you US $25 per year or $5 per month for maps!!!!
I'll stick with Co-pilot and Navigon. At least when you get the maps they are
yours forever.
~~~
mkesper
No need to use this service. If a big chunk of the money would go into osm,
I'd consider it fair, though.
------
clarry
So for those of you who live in the US, congrats.
The situation in my area is nowhere near as good. I've got a couple Garmin
GPSes as well as a GPS capable phone, and I would just love to map every road
and path in a 100km radius from home. Unfortunately all the mapping software
I've tried is so horribly slow I'd have to buy a new computer to be able to do
much at all with the data I can collect.
~~~
keenerd
> So for those of you who live in the US, congrats. The situation in my area
> is nowhere near as good. I've got a couple Garmin GPSes ...
This smells of FUD. First, we are talking about OSM. Not whatever tiny dataset
is loaded onto a Garmin. Second, you did not name your location.
Any time someone says "oh, you can't use online maps in $country" I pick some
little town in the middle of nowhere and OSM consistently has three times as
many roads as the Big Name maps.
> Unfortunately all the mapping software I've tried is so horribly slow
You don't need mapping software. Just wander around, export to GPX and upload
the GPX to OSM. Someone else can do the editing from your traces.
~~~
clarry
_This smells of FUD._
OSM is cool. Like I said, I would love to help with it, and I've got the tools
I need to collect data. So what is my motive to lie about it? Why would I
spread FUD?
_Any time someone says "oh, you can't use online maps in $country" I pick
some little town in the middle of nowhere and OSM consistently has three times
as many roads as the Big Name maps_
Okay, let me give you a couple examples I am familiar with. Plenty of stuff is
missing or just plain wrong, right in town (now Google isn't perfect either
but the coverage is _much_ better). It only gets worse once you get out of
town.
[https://maps.google.com/?ll=62.316531,27.857552&spn=0.042946...](https://maps.google.com/?ll=62.316531,27.857552&spn=0.042946,0.132093&t=m&z=14)
[http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/62.3181/27.8425&layers=...](http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/62.3181/27.8425&layers=N)
\---
[https://maps.google.com/?ll=62.065628,28.308163&spn=0.043304...](https://maps.google.com/?ll=62.065628,28.308163&spn=0.043304,0.132093&t=m&z=14)
[http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/62.0659/28.2959&layers=...](http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/62.0659/28.2959&layers=N)
~~~
keenerd
Most of the time the country in question was in central/south america or
africa. I would never have expected Finland to be a counter-example. Thank
you.
But pretty much everyone else in your thread here disagrees about the tools
part.
------
GvS
"US and on iOS only"
~~~
gecko
There are links to not only Android, but even Windows Phone, on the linked
page. Where did you get iOS-only?
~~~
dan1234
From the article:
>Enter Telenav, where I work. We’ve spent approximately a zillion man-years to
fix these issues and today we’re announcing navigation using OSM within Scout,
our consumer navigation app. _We’re starting in the US and on iOS with the
rest to follow._
------
cnbuff410
So the more we use this app, the more contribution I can make back into OSM
AUTOMATICALLY, is that correct?
Hopefully they will release Android version app soon.
------
zmh
Maybe I overlook? Are there turn-by-turn navigation api yet? Over the last
year, every time I check it seems to be not available yet. I believe most or
all streets in OSM only support up to street level rather than street NUMBER
level. Well, please point me to some counter-examples if I am wrong.
~~~
morganherlocker
Try out OSRM[1]. It is open source[2], so you can run it yourself, or you can
use a public api for limited usage. The api has a JSON response with turn-by-
turn[3], and it is remarkably fast.
[1] [http://map.project-osrm.org/](http://map.project-osrm.org/) [2]
[https://github.com/DennisOSRM/Project-
OSRM](https://github.com/DennisOSRM/Project-OSRM) [3]
[https://github.com/DennisOSRM/Project-OSRM/wiki/Server-
api](https://github.com/DennisOSRM/Project-OSRM/wiki/Server-api)
~~~
zmh
Wow, speed is great. I'll definitely check it out. However, the second
statement still seems to be valid: OSM is still at the street name level
rather than street number level.
I read some MapQuest's document saying that Mapquest actually took points on a
street and interpolate all the numbers. Maybe OSM can do the same. Eagerly
waiting...
~~~
morganherlocker
OSM does have addresses, but coverage is far from perfect. Nominatum (the
geocoder used by OSRM) will interpolate addresses if it does not have the
exact parcel info, which is surprisingly accurate in many cases. Work is also
being done to create full address coverage as well[1], which you should check
out if you are interested.
[1] [http://openaddresses.io/](http://openaddresses.io/)
------
thrownaway2424
I installed this app and it seems fairly gross. Is it really just for driving
through places and not stopping? Because it seems to have close to zero points
of interest. In my town it is incapable of finding any restaurant or other
eatery which is not part of a huge national chain like McDonalds.
~~~
dingaling
> Because it seems to have close to zero points of interest.
1\. Go to osm.org 2\. Create an account 3\. Add the PoIs 4\. Save changes
~~~
jlarocco
That's all well and good for people who enjoy doing that. But I'm not
interested, and I suspect a lot of other people aren't interested.
And you can turn it around and say, "Well then it's your own fault OSM isn't
better," but the fact of the matter is, I don't care, and I'll just use Google
Maps, or Apple's maps, or some other map that has the info.
I like OSM, and I think it's neat, but trying to guilt people into helping out
is going to turn away more people than it's going to bring in.
~~~
fuck_google
Why should OSM even try to attract users that don't bring in any value by
contributing?
~~~
maxerickson
OSM shouldn't worry too much about those users.
If Telenav is attracting them, getting them to pay money and using some of
that money to improve OSM, the community probably shouldn't be too hostile to
honest evaluations from those people.
------
Semaphor
OSM has better maps than Google in my 200k pop town in the north of Germany.
Recently google even tried to have me walk through a closed company to get
where I wanted to go.
Sadly searching sucks (unless you know the specific address) and the reviews
for the international scout app make me very wary of using it.
------
chromelyke
For those of you asking about Global options, it sounds like this will happen
over time per the press release -
[http://www.telenav.com/about/pr/pr-20140519.html](http://www.telenav.com/about/pr/pr-20140519.html)
------
throwaway7767
Will the routing data be fed into OSM, or will telenav be building their own
closed routing database that they use in conjunction with OSM? I didn't see an
answer to that on the linked page.
------
netcan
"This item cannot be installed in your device's country"
Huh?
------
gchokov
The last I saw a similar post, couple of months ago, the map _was not_ ready
in my home area. Now tough, it's pretty advanced. Awesome progress!
------
thegeomaster
I hope they start doing Europe soon, OSM datasets definitely need some love
over here. And a big respect to all the people who made this possible.
~~~
ritonlajoie
Well, I typed my address in OSM (I live in Paris) and I can even see the
trees, on the map itself. I was very surprised.
Where do you live ? Also, you should really put some license there
[https://github.com/geomaster/vimrc](https://github.com/geomaster/vimrc) :)
Maybe try to promote a license you like :p
------
tgb
Play store says the app is incompatible with both my 4.4 nexus 7 and my aging
gingerbread phone, but doesn't say why. Anyone know?
~~~
dagurp
Same problem here. I have a Galaxy S3 (i9300)
------
justizin
Scout app is nice, but no cycling routes - something only Google seems to do.
:/
~~~
edraferi
Map My Ride has some great cycle mapping tools. They have several base maps
available, I'm not sure exactly where the data comes from.
------
leccine
I am glad to see OSM getting more popular because Google Maps is just getting
worse by every day. The new WebUI is absolutely terrible, I had to permanently
disable it because I could not even use my laptop while a GMap tab was open.
They removed features I used and added many I don't care. On the top of these,
the routing algo in GMaps is just laughable. It does not have the updated
version of no left and no right turns, if you have 2 routes one with no
highway one with highway it is going to pick the highway one even though it is
2 times the distance and so on. The traffic information is pretty much
useless, only got better when they merged in Waze information but still bad.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Twitter comes clean - vaksel
http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/02/01/twitter-comes-clean/
======
jacquesm
That's an amazing example of candid communication with your userbase, it
really impresses me very much.
I can think of (quite) a few other companies that I would very much appreciate
such candor from (but I guess that once you've IPO'd there are too many rules
and regulations at work to make such candor a working solution).
Kudos to Alex Payne.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
More Than Half a Million Raspberry Pis Sold - interconnector
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3011
======
hosay123
Pricing for similar hardware has literally crashed in the time it's taken Pi
production levels to ramp up. There are now multiple ARM vendors with open
source BSPs supporting hardware that's much more powerful and with comparable
pricing. See for example <http://www.cnx-software.com/tag/amlogic/> and
<http://www.cnx-software.com/tag/freescale/> .
Unlike the Pi these offerings usually come with Bluetooth, WiFi, larger flash
and 1GB RAM in dual or quad core configurations, and pre-packaged in consumer
friendly boxes ready for hooking to a display, although access to auxiliary IO
buses may be more difficult. SATA (Mele A1000G), GigE (Wandboard) and mini PCI
designs (i.mx6 Sabre Lite) are even available.
~~~
dfrey
What is an example of a better board that I can get shipped to my home for
under $50 USD?
~~~
hosay123
If all you want is USB, there are (seemingly hundreds of) Allwinner sticks
available via Aliexpress, e.g. <http://goo.gl/th1bO> as low as $34, which is
supported via the linux-sunxi port. Boards generally cost more, I've less
information on that.
~~~
dfrey
A board like the Pi is defined by these attributes (order irrelevant):
Price
Performance
Exposed I/O
Device Size
Community Size
I don't know of any board that beats the Pi on more than 3 of these
attributes.
The allwinner sticks you mentioned are comparably priced, but have a smaller
development community and very limited I/O. If all you want is a little media
player, I think they are a good choice though.
~~~
koralatov
I'd disagree that the order of those is irrelevant. Far and away the two most
important ones are `Price' and `Community Size'. If it cost three times as
much, the RPi wouldn't have been such a hit; if the community of users was
tiny, it wouldn't matter how cheap it was because it wouldn't have critical
mass. The Raspberry Pi managed to get out cheap enough and with enough support
to make it a runaway success, which is why we now face a glut of similar
machines.
------
russell_h
What is the best place to order one of these? I'd love to have one, but every
time I go to order one I'm put off by the suppliers websites.
~~~
fsckin
I bought two Model B's from Newark[0] on Jan 2nd, shipped on the 4th, and
received on the 7th. Wickedly fast. I think they will be out of stock soon.
[0]
[http://www.newark.com/jsp/search/productdetail.jsp?id=43W530...](http://www.newark.com/jsp/search/productdetail.jsp?id=43W5302&Ntt=43W5302&);
~~~
GiraffeNecktie
I also got mine from Newark and it arrived even faster. They even phoned me to
follow up which I thought was a bit over the top for a $40 item (although I
think they were just checking to see whether I might be a potential volume
purchaser)
------
davidcollantes
They could have sold many millions more, but finding them is difficult (if you
do not want to pay premium).
------
sushantsharma
Sincere Question: Can someone please explain the significance?
Edit: Thanks for the responses. May be I should have explored the site more
instead of just reading the article. <http://www.raspberrypi.org/about>
~~~
e1ven
One of the reasons the Raspberry Pi is really cool is it's helping to make it
easier for people to get into hardware hacking. It's fun, and it's cheap
enough you don't need to worry about break it.
While it's not quite as simple as a arduino, for those of us who like Linux
anyway, it makes it almost trivial to wire into all sorts of projects -
Wireless Helicopters, Door badges, tiny webservers, etc.
It's a great piece of kit, and a nice introduction into the embedded HW world.
~~~
blhack
No, it is not helping people get into hardware hacking. There is no more
"hardware hacking" going on here than there is on my macbook.
Arduino AVR is helping people get into hardware.
Raspberry pi is helping people build cheap netflix settop boxes.
edit: maybe I'm jaded. We've got about 4 totally idle raspis at our
hackerspace that have been donated by people who have no idea what to do with
them, but bought them anyway.
Yet, our stack of arduinos get use _constantly_.
~~~
CamperBob2
_Raspberry pi is helping people build cheap netflix settop boxes._
That's hardware hacking.
In reality, those of us who don't bring a pickaxe and a carbide lamp to work
are just "systems integrators" anyway. Attitudes and titles don't pay the
bills.
~~~
deelowe
Wha? There's a difference between SWE, EE/CE, and IT. The community around the
pi is more for the IT crowd. I see very few using the gpio pins for anything,
though that does seem to be getting marginally better.
Most of the value in the pi is the video decoder. So, that's the types of
projects it gets used for.
~~~
flurie
FWIW, I and many of my friends (who admittedly deal primarily with hardware)
find the gpio a big draw. The machine is cheaper and more useful than an
arduino after you've thrown in an ethernet shield. I got one to serve as a
doorbell router.
~~~
deelowe
Yeah. I'd like to get one for this reason too, but I'm also eyeing the new arm
devices that are starting to show up.
------
numbsafari
If you are in the US, be sure to check out www.newark.com. I tried ordering
through Allied and it was a disaster. After 6 months of delays they eventually
screwed up my shipment and said I'd have to resubmit an order and wait in the
back of the line. I didn't realize newark.com (a subsidiary/partner of
element14) sold them in the US.
Avoid shopping at Amazon (it's a ripoff by someone who is hoarding units).
It'd be great if RPi could find a way to expand production. At the very least,
being more upfront about the delays in production and who will actually get
units, would be a big help.
~~~
freehunter
I waited nine months to get mine, and I ordered two days after they were
released. Now that I have the board, my attention has been drawn back to
Arduino in the meantime and my Pi is just a general purpose computer I put in
the garage to view project plans for woodworking or repairing my truck and
occasionally SSHing into to test the occasional code to make sure it's ARM
compatible. I still have the plans for all the Pi projects I was planning, but
interest has worn off and the parts have been repurposed for things where a
couple Arduino boards can do the same work one Pi was going to do.
------
IgorPartola
TriLUG is having a meeting tomorrow night about Raspberry Pi's and you can
join via Google Hangout. This should give you a great overview of some of the
neat things you could do with one of these. Details here:
<http://www.trilug.org/2013-01-10/Raspberry_Pi>
------
bobbles
Is it possible to run Plex on a Raspberry Pi to make any normal tv an awesome
plex machine? or is the overhead of cables and setup not worth the effort at
the moment?
~~~
vanjac
I don't believe it's possible to run Plex Media Center on it yet, though there
are forum discussions on porting it to the Pi. But I do know that it can run
XBMC quite well and that is why I ordered mine a couple of days ago. I'm gonna
turn it into a sweet little XBMC machine which will be hidden behind the tv.
Just Google "Raspberry Pi XBMC", there are a lot of reviews and tutorials
showing how it's done.
------
jcmoscon
What projects are you implementing with Raspberry Pis?
~~~
linker3000
I'm just laying out the schematic for a GPIO board that includes a 4x20LCD
display interface, two mains relays, two opto-isolated mains power sensors, a
real time clock chip and interface to some one-wire temp sensors.
The Pi is going to be the master controller for my central heating system.
There will be a Web interface and I hope to implement something with a service
such as Google Latitude so I can have a 'back from holiday' mode where the
system knows when I'm, say, back within 25 miles of the house and fires up the
heating and water again.
That's my fun project for when I have some spare time.
------
JabavuAdams
Can't wait for the camera module...
------
IheartApplesDix
For those looking for complete control of their hardware platform, the
following link is a great place to start. Ever wonder how ARM Cortex chips
work at a lower level? Afaik, this is the only available open source
hypervisor.
[http://www.openvirtualization.org/open-source-arm-
trustzone....](http://www.openvirtualization.org/open-source-arm-
trustzone.html)
More information on the "opensource-ness" of Raspberry Pi:
[http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/all-
co...](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/all-code-on-
raspberry-pis-arm-chip-now-open-source/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Bitcoin trademark filed at USPTO - shii
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=26527.0
======
shii
<http://i.imgur.com/HALV8.png>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Programming Is a Losers Game - mpweiher
https://tomgamon.com/posts/a-losers-game/
======
shams93
So how will remote work modify this equation? Certainly the h1b visa program
is a brutal institution both for those trying to get the visas for work and
those who have the visa holders used against them as weapons. The irony of
silicon valley is that it cannot run without engineers and yet the engineers
are treated basically like a bunch of burning man sherpas.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What are your goals for next year? - l33tbro
Been reflecting a lot myself and would be interested to hear others thoughts for the coming year? Be as specific or vague as you like.
======
yesnoyesnoyes
Get my teeth fixed. Will have to get braces and wear them for 18 months.
Terribly scared of that. But it has to be done.
Push my passive income to $10k/month. At that point I don't worry about money
anymore.
Travel the world. Meet interesting tech, art and business people. And pretty
girls.
Make some friends along the way.
------
dbpokorny
I'll add autoclave.js to the anythingbot after getting it into a working
state...no one else is going to do it, that's for sure
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Rules for happiness (from a hacker who sold his company) - johnmax
https://medium.com/@snoopy2233/my-lifes-manual-for-happiness-from-a-hacker-who-sold-his-company-99ea9ef3c800
======
tyrex2017
for me rule 8 (mindfulness/meditation) has helped most. but all those rules
are easier written down than practiced. I would love to see a guide on how to
practice those..
~~~
johnmax
very true, need a study which shows which activities/rules are really
effective, including people-were-able-to-stick-to-them
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Transistors go 3D as Intel re-invents the microchip - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/05/intel-re-invents-the-microchip.ars
======
JohnsonB
Great, and what exactly is the improvement seen with tri-gate transistors as
an independent variable? Without that it's hard to judge what the significance
is for tri-gates. I understand Ars can't test a 32nm processor with tri-gates
but that doesn't make this analysis any less unscientific. Ars is not alone in
this dishonesty and I think even Intel's official statement was just as
confusing.
------
alecco
A bit later than engadget's post, but Ars has the best article. The second
graph in the second page got me to understand why this is important.
~~~
wmf
It's hard to tell what that graph means because it has two independent
variables (32 vs 22 nm and planar vs FinFET).
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Australian police want phone, web data kept indefinitely - damncabbage
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/police-want-phone-web-data-kept-indefinitely-20120926-26kj2.html
======
zoowar
Which is why the Woz is a crackpot.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
BPA-free plastics seem to disrupt sperm and egg development in mice - sahin-boydas
http://www.newscientist.com/article/2179481-bpa-free-plastics-seem-to-disrupt-sperm-and-egg-development-in-mice/
======
Apotheos
More and more disadvantages seem to come out against plastic every year, not
to mention the environmental impact they have.
Because of this I'll stick to my trusty glass water bottle for the foreseeable
future.
------
alexandercrohde
Could somebody explain to me if these mutations, being germline, are permanent
damage to the gene pool, or would go away after two generations?
~~~
krageon
> The abnormalities were passed on for three generations, but faded after
> that.
------
swingline-747
Makes one want to check out of society and get a homestead going growing your
own food in rural Utah.
------
tinus_hn
One would hope this was tested before the material was put on the market.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How To Get Great Ratings For Your Mac App - EvanMiller
http://www.evanmiller.org/how-to-get-great-ratings-for-your-mac-app.html
======
alexkearns
Great article and perfect timing - I have just submitted my first app to the
Mac store. Two questions:
You mention in the article that some of your customers amended bad reviews -
did they do that on their own volition or did you encourage them to do so.
Is there any way of contacting people who give you bad reviews, so you can
help them with the problems they are having, and hopefully get them to give
you a better review?
~~~
andydev
I've seen people amend reviews in the App Stores without being prompted, it
certainly helps and they tend to mention that they are updating a previous
review.
As for contacting people, Apple don't make this easy. The only way i've done
it in the past is to match up user names, if you can't do that then you have
no way to respond to the review in any way. Hopefully Apple will change that
in the future or at least allow developers to push the user towards support
via email or similar.
------
scottostler
Really liked this article. I'm curious about the professional QA – how did you
find the tester, and what sort of things did you ask him to test?
------
aptwebapps
This is really a great post. I think the title under-sells it.
------
QuantumDoja
Thank you for posting this.
------
sunnybythesea
Thanks for sharing another excellent article Evan
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Social Skills Are Last Line of Defense for Humans Seeking Work - spking
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-19/social-skills-are-last-line-of-defense-for-humans-seeking-work
======
antod
Does that automated personal assistant still need social skills when it is no
longer emailing the journalist directly, but instead talking to the
journalists own automated personal assistant?
I can't help feeling that in an increasingly automated world a few steps
further on from what the article discusses, the importance of social skills
will actually decrease rather than be a differentiator for humans any more.
Imagine how poor the social skills of a generation of kids could be that are
surrounded by robots doing nearly everything for them. Once people grow up
spending more time interacting with robots than other people, social
expectations and norms will change.
Caring about that stuff could end up being something that only old people
worry about. Like handwriting or sending letters or buggy whips etc.
~~~
positr0n
Reminds me of the first half of this smbc[1], which I found quite insightful
considering the medium.
[1]: [http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3576](http://smbc-
comics.com/index.php?id=3576)
------
nickthemagicman
Hahaha. "Social Skills" is such an intangible and weird thing to measure.
Social skills are contingent on so many things, environment, status, how you
feel that day, how well you know people youre socializing with, etc.
And psychologists have been trying to get to the root of the human psyche and
language and identity for decades with little progress.
It's weird that people use this as some sort of semi-concrete-quantitative
value.
------
blumkvist
Saying robots will replace humans' jobs is like saying in 1999 google will
replace teachers.
~~~
zzalpha
I'd imagine the horses were telling themselves the same thing back when the
automobile hit the scene...
Robots have already replaced human jobs. They started with factory labour, but
today they're trading our stocks, diagnosing diseases, driving our cars...
it'll be a very long time before automation can completely replace the human
animal (today, our ability to improvise in a highly unpredictable world gives
us a strong edge, which is why those self-driving cars won't be seen on wintry
roads any time soon), but I have no doubt that humans will get automated out
of work in the fullness of time.
~~~
runamok
Actually I think a self driving car might be better at driving on slippery
roads than most humans. Detect any wheel slip, vehicle yaw, etc. and
immediately take action. Not to mention being better at simple rules like
'when temp is below freezing lower speed by 10 mph'.
~~~
zzalpha
Eventually, yes.
Unfortunately current vision systems don't cope well with obscured roads, or
even precipitation.
My guess is that'll take changes to infrastructure. With snow packed roads you
simply can't see lines on the road and so need some other type of telemetry.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Open Big Data Computing with Julia - astrieanna
http://istc-bigdata.org/index.php/open-big-data-computing-with-julia/
======
EvanMiller
I like Julia because in many ways, it's a better C than C:
* You can inspect a function's generated LLVM or (x86, ARM) assembly code from the REPL. (code_llvm or code_native)
* You can interface with C libraries without writing any C. That let me wrap a 5 kLoC C library with 100 lines of Julia:
[https://github.com/WizardMac/DataRead.jl](https://github.com/WizardMac/DataRead.jl)
* You can use the dynamic features of the language to write something quickly, then add type annotations to make it fast later
* Certain tuples are compiled to SIMD vectors. In contrast, the only way to access SIMD features in C is to pray that you have one of those "sufficiently smart compilers".
* Like C, there's no OO junk and the associated handwringing about where methods belong. There are structures and there are functions, that's it. But then multiple dispatch in Julia gives you the main benefits of OO without all the ontological crap that comes with it.
For me, Julia feels like it's simultaneously higher-level and lower-level than
C. The deep LLVM integration is fantastic because I can get an idea for how
functions will be compiled without having to learn the behemoth that is the
modern x86 ISA. (LLVM IR is relatively simple, and its SSA format makes code
relatively easy to follow.)
Anyway, I only started with Julia recently, but I'm a fan. I should also
mention that the members of the developer community are very, very smart.
(Most are associated with MIT.) BTW I am starting a Julia meetup in Chicago
for folks in the Midwest who want to learn more:
[http://www.meetup.com/JuliaChicago/](http://www.meetup.com/JuliaChicago/)
~~~
pjmlp
> There are structures and there are functions, that's it. But then multiple
> dispatch in Julia gives you the main benefits of OO without all the
> ontological crap that comes with it.
Multi-dispatch is a form of OO.
~~~
StefanKarpinski
I would argue that it's the other way around: single-dispatch o.o. is a
special case of multiple dispatch.
~~~
pjmlp
Agree. The point being that OO is not plain Java or C++, there are many
concepts around what OO is all about.
------
mrcactu5
I have installed iJulia -- which involved compiling Julia from source.
What little bit I've tried with Julia so far is impressive.
What is the story anyway? Did a bunch of MIT people decide they needed
something faster than R & numpy ?
Julia inventor Alan Edelman is an fellow alumnus of Hampshire College Summer
Studies in Mathematics (HCSSiM). Scores points in my book.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Edelman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Edelman)
He wrote a terrific paper back in '95
[http://arxiv.org/abs/math/9501224](http://arxiv.org/abs/math/9501224) "How
many zeros of a random polynomial are real?"
~~~
StefanKarpinski
Alan is a rare and brilliant fellow. Just to clarify, he has been Julia's
patron from the very early days, but the actual design and development of the
language was done by Jeff Bezanson, Viral B. Shah, and myself. These days it's
a collaborative community effort.
------
pjmlp
Quite nice to see Julia taking off.
------
RivieraKid
I hope that the web libs will improve, I'm trying to create a very simple web
app, but the libs are in alpha stage.
~~~
adambard
I'm not sure Julia is the most appropriate for this application. It's
nominally general-purpose, sure, and you can run a web server from it, but you
can do that with any language with a socket library and strings.
Would you make a website with MATLAB?
~~~
pjmlp
> Would you make a website with MATLAB?
The world is a nail. :)
~~~
adambard
In retrospect I know several people who probably would serve their website in
MATLAB.
------
glifchits
As a beginner in scientific/data computing, is it worth building a foundation
in Julia or do with some other tool instead? I'm comfortable in Python but I
don't know if its best to teach myself how to use NumPy and friends when I
have the opportunity to immerse myself in this brand new shiny technology.
~~~
burntsushi
It depends. There is a certain allure to working with a shiny new technology.
It's sort of like an adventure, because not many have paved a strong path
forward yet. But not everyone likes an adventure. Sometimes there will be huge
roadblocks that don't have obvious solutions; especially for the beginner.
On the other hand, the scientific computing crowd for Python/NumPy is well
established and there will be plenty of people who have probably come across
any problem that you will see. There is already an established ecosystem of
tools that you'll be able to draw from, and it's likely that many of them have
been well tested and are reliable.
The decision is really up to you. Do you have the time and desire to go on
adventure? If so, maybe Julia would be a nice pick. Are you short on time or
weary of adventure? Then maybe Python/NumPy would be a better pick.
------
army
Very cool. I think the point about transcribing equations directly from papers
glosses over some of the hard issues with building numeric libraries around
floating point precision and numeric stability.
It's not that uncommon to see code that would have worked perfectly if double
precision floating point numbers were actually real numbers, but which blows
up badly once rounding errors happen.
Unfortunately there's not really any way to abstract those issues away. In
general, I'd hope that any the authors of widely used numeric libraries have
carefully thought through these issues.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
"One Move Too Many". The $3750 rock-climbing book. - heelhook
http://www.amazon.com/One-Move-Too-Many-Understand/dp/3928026208
======
Pinckney
Probably related to this:
[http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358](http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358)
------
sdoowpilihp
Two of my favorite things. Edge cases in code, and climbing. Who would have
thought they could come together so beautifully.
------
rueda001
An example of Algorithms gone rogue?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Submit your ideas for improving HN - sgdesign
http://hnwishlist.com/
======
phillmv
[http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893f...](http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893fe7f7)
("Implement a real name policy")
Seriously? Why does anyone think this is a good idea? Can't we just stomp this
one out for good?
I really miss noms de guerre. It saddens me that we moved away from handles
and pseudoanonymity being a default.
Says the guy using his real name.
~~~
Par_Avion
I think Hacker News' name policy is just about right. Its public enough that
we don't have things going on like 4chan, but its not public to the point
people are afraid to comment their opinions.
~~~
DeepDuh
> Hacker News' name policy..
Did I miss something? I can't find any username policy in HN's guidelines.
~~~
tikhonj
Well, it _has_ usernames. That's a policy in and of itself!
The policy, then, is completely implicit: you can have any valid username
which may or may not reflect your own name.
Oh, and you can't change them after the fact. As far as I know. That would be
a nice feature...
------
edw519
The greatest opportunity for improving HN lies with _us_ , not with the site.
Here's a good place to start:
<http://edweissman.com/how-to-participate-in-hacker-news>
~~~
Domenic_S
That's quite a statement. On a scale from "terrible" to "ideal", the
discussion on HN is a lot, lot closer to ideal than the UI/experience is:
UNKNOWN OR EXPIRED LINK
C'mon, this is 2013... paging dynamic results shouldn't be an issue.
What makes HN great _does_ lie with us, but I strongly disagree that it's also
the _greatest opportunity for improvement_.
~~~
alaskamiller
Maybe you weren't around awhile so you don't know the backstory. Link
expiration is partly because the servers back then wasn't able to keep up with
datascraping, for example when we made the only useable search engine for a
few years.
------
JoshTriplett
Nice idea. A couple of bugs I noticed while poking around on the site:
The sign in box seems to break Firefox's ability to save the username and
password.
When signed in, the "Change password", "My Account", and "Sign out" buttons
have three different clashing visual styles.
Please consider adding downvotes; for instance, I'd like to downvote ideas
like
[http://hnwishlist.com/posts/ae15555a-f3c1-43f3-8a80-cef2a22e...](http://hnwishlist.com/posts/ae15555a-f3c1-43f3-8a80-cef2a22e8dad)
or
[http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893f...](http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893fe7f7)
Also, a little more far-fetched: if you don't mind doing a bit of page-
scraping, you might consider letting people link hnwishlist accounts to their
HN account. Just have a profile field for an HN account, and let people prove
their ownership of an account by putting something like "hnwishlist username:
$NAME" in their profile temporarily. Then you could do things like offering
upvotes and downvotes using the same karma thresholds as HN.
~~~
sgdesign
Thanks for the feedback! And until I implement downvotes, maybe you could add
quick comments to explain why you think those are bad ideas?
------
KurtMueller
Mobile friendly site. I can never view this site while on my cell phone
without having to pinch zoom.
~~~
przemoc
Well, I often zoom it on the desktop computers too (depending on OS/Browser
settings). :)
It could be like killing two birds with one stone actually, because making it
mobile friendly quite likely would make it friendlier for non-mobile uses too.
------
tsm
I don't have an account there, but it's worth pointing out that alternative
sites like <https://lobste.rs> do exist.
------
djloche
Is there any interest in a 'RES' styled enhancement suite for HN? I'd like to
think that many of these (and other previously proposed) suggestions/wish
lists, someone has already created something to deal with the issues on a
client side level rather than trying to get PG to try and change something
that works good enough for him.
------
tsm
This is all fantasy. PG runs this in his spare time off a single server. Every
feature I saw on the list has viable workarounds. Yes, it'd be nice if they
were supported out of the box. But I don't think the lack of native features
is negatively impacting the _content_ of HN, which is the most important part.
So what's the argument of the site? "Hey PG, we know you're busy funding
startups and stuff, but we're mildly inconvenienced by some UX decisions
you've made with that experimental site you run on the side, and were hoping
that you could take the time to implement these seemingly-minor features
that've been discussed on HN for years. In exchange our happiness while using
the site will be somewhat increased, and we will instead whine about HN's lack
of modern CSS and Twitter Bootstrappiness and what have you."?
~~~
jmduke
Yes, PG would have to do all of this himself, because there's no way a hundred
developers would leap at the chance to contribute to the HN source and make
fellow developers happy.
~~~
alaskamiller
You actually described the reality very well despite your condescending
sarcastic tone.
~~~
jglovier
I would leap at the chance to contribute freely to the HN site to make fellow
developers happy, yes.
------
j45
Nice implementation of a suggestion/voting site.
My suggestion is singular: Let posts be tagged for startups, and
bootstrapping, so I can filter everything else out.
I'm happy to geek on my own time but what I come here is for startup content
and less interesting/novelty stuff.
~~~
gnosis
Tagging has been requested here multiple times, is controversial, and has
never been implemented.
I, for one, am very much in favor of it. I'd love to be able to filter out
topics I don't find interesting. It would also effectively address a lot of
griping about supposedly off-topic submissions.
~~~
j45
I wonder what is so controversial
------
DanBC
I really like the fact that your site seems to work well even with my reduced
window width.
If you're looking to seed your site with other ideas there are many existing
add-ons and clients and etc.
Searching Github for ["hacker news"] returns something like 700 hits.
Obviously, most of those are not relevant, but different searches for ["hacker
news" client] or ["hacker news" extensions] return over 100 projects where
people have implemented features that they feel improve HN.
The Chrome webstore, and the Firefox add-ons page, also have many projects
that people feel improve HN.
There's also the userscripts site, and userstyles site, also having many
changes to HN.
------
ctruman
Love the positive thinking. The full screen comment feature alone allows for
such a better experience when getting into discussion. Looking forward to a
lot of great ideas coming out of this!
------
polemic
There _is_ a feature requests link at the bottom of the page...
------
miguelrochefort
You know what? Improving HN is a waste of time. Why can't we just migrate to a
better link aggregator, such as Reddit? It would basically fix everything
(including design, mobile friendliness, lack of good apps, lack of API, etc),
at no cost.
I'm sure it would be easier to convince Reddit to let subreddits behave like
HN than trying to keep HN up to date with the modern world.
Just my two cents.
~~~
tsm
Having PG as a commenter, mod, and admin is a tremendous asset. HN also
benefits from the close ties to YC in general--it'd be a bit tricky to tell
all the YC folks that they need to post not on news.ycombinator.com but over
at reddit.com/r/therealhackernews or whatever.
~~~
phillmv
HN doesn't benefit from close ties to YC. YC benefits from close ties to HN.
YC folks will post to whatever is considered the de rigeur nerd/startup news
site, which over the last couple of years has become HN - having migrated from
reddit (and slashdot, before).
There will be another one, in due time.
------
tsm
>I use hnnotify, which works really well but relies on scraping. I'd love to
see official functionality that works pretty much identically to hnnotify.
If it's working "really well", why do you care about the fact that its
implementation is a kludge? It seems like we already have a good-enough
solution.
~~~
sgdesign
Maybe at some point whoever is behind hnnotify will decide they don't want to
pay a huge Sendgrid/Mailgun/whatever bill anymore and shut it down.
There's also the simple problem of discoverability. I never knew about
hnnotify until now, since it's not part of the main site.
------
rglover
I'm sure most people will dismiss this with "just use email," but I'd love to
have an inbox where people could message me. In situations where a comment
thread is better suited for a one on one convo, it'd be great. Also a nice way
to keep your email private unless necessary.
------
KevinMS
I'd like to see, if not both the up votes and down votes of a particular
comment, a score of how "diverging" the ups and downs are. I think it would be
very interesting to see when a particular comment is "divisive", (borrowing a
common political buzzword)
------
codefoe
If there will ever come a day when I can ditch the Chrome's HN+ plugin to make
HN look good, it will probably be with that. So I'm all for it. Great idea.
------
rahilsondhi
Sacha you are a beast! You're always putting our new projects. I'm starting to
notice your designs even before I see your signature too.
~~~
sgdesign
Thank you, that's quite a compliment!
------
welder
#1 Following users after liking a user's post or comment. (not publicly)
------
trxblazr
sub HN, like subredit.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
EQGRP Auction - mrb
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:owtq6OBSmgEJ:https://theshadowbrokers.tumblr.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
======
binaryanomaly
Torrent still works for those who want to have a look.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:40a5f1514514fb67943f137f7fde0a7b5e991f76&tr=[http://diftracker.i2p/announce.php](http://diftracker.i2p/announce.php)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Sal Khan and the Khan Academy to the rescue - derekc
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2329-sal-khan-and-the-khan-acadamy-to-the-rescue
======
pavs
Free online accredited college/school is an idea up for grabs and needs to
happen.
Monetization could be paying for the exams (fixed price per course as opposed
to per credit) and a single "sponsor" per course where the sponsor pays for
the cost_of_making_the_course + $x for the ability to be a "sponsor" of that
said course for first year.
ie, MS/Apple/Google sponsoring CS related courses. Where they sign contract
stating to not have any influence on study materials.
Exams on brick and mortar exam halls (rent rooms in traditional colleges?).
The only problem I can see for this kind of online only college is for some
courses where you actually need hands-on lab experience.
Possible?
~~~
ig1
If you have to pay for exams then how is it free ? - there's already a wide
range of course material on-line available for free. The material isn't the
issue.
~~~
pavs
The cost of hosting exams in a rented place has to come from someplace. I was
thinking more in the line of having a "structured" course, with syllabus,
study materials, quiz/test and even free e-books. Not bits and pieces of video
and texts randomly sprinkled all over the web.
The idea is to be an actual replacement of a brick and mortar college where
anyone can give an exam anytime they want when they feel ready, instead of
being forced to go through months of "learning". If you fail a course exam,
you can give the exam again next week (albiet different questionnaires).
Other ideas:
\- FAQ sections where students can send in questions on each course which can
be answered in the form of video/text. Have enough of those over time and it
replaces the need to have one-on-one interactions with instructors with
questions.
\- Add social aspect to the "online school" where students can see if there
are others in his area studying or have passed the same course that he/she can
meet up for a study group.
\- Online forums, Chat (moderated) on each courses with instant feedback.
\- Let companies/individuals/employer "sponsor" each course/major. Lets say
each exam costs $100-$200, Google/MS can give away 100 free exams to encourage
people to study computer science.
\- All materials is open for everyone to see, read, study, participate.
Students only pay for exams.
Just brainstorming.... We can dream, right? :)
~~~
JadeNB
> Have enough of those over time and it replaces the need to have one-on-one
> interactions with instructors with questions.
As a teacher, I may have a vested interest in your being wrong; but I think
that 'replaces' should be 'reduces' here.
~~~
pavs
:) My idea is not to replace traditional college, and I am pretty sure some
people will always require one in one interaction to be able to learn. My hope
is remove the barrier to higher education, the way things are right now anyone
who wants to join college needs to invest lots of money and time. It should
never be like this and anyone who is self-motivated should be able to have
easy access and learn and finish college.
~~~
JadeNB
I'm sorry; I didn't mean that you couldn't replace the traditional college
experience (I wouldn't want to try it, but I don't see any reason why someone
with infinite time and money couldn't), but rather that I don't think any
static FAQ, no matter how comprehensive, can _replace_ the need for
student–teacher interaction.
EDIT: Also, I whole-heartedly agree with your vision of universal
accessibility of education.
~~~
pavs
_but rather that I don't think any static FAQ, no matter how comprehensive,
can replace the need for student–teacher interaction._
Good thing you pointed it out. I failed to explain myself better how I wanted
the FAQ to work. It shouldn't be static, but rather the quality of the FAQ
will get better as students/educators suggests ways to improve/amend existing
questions and will be updated accordingly (think moderated wiki). Any single
question doesn't need to have one answer, but can have different take on the
same question from different people. It can be in the form of videos or Texts.
As for the educational resources itself (which will be different from the FAQ)
will be made by educators in their respective fields.
Thats the way I was thinking about it, but not the way it came out.
Regardless, I agree with you that in-person education experience is unique
that can-not be replaces by other means (as far as experience is concerned),
but the quality can definitely be improved, when the education resources is
fine-tuned for the experience of learning as opposed to the experience of an
education institute and everything that comes with it.
I am serious about this and I want this to happen, I am currently working on
proposals and fine-tuning my ideas/plans of action to get some funds going to
start working on something rudimentary and get feedback on it. Keep your eyes
open for me :).
------
MikeCapone
You can find his "Khan Academy" site here:
<http://www.khanacademy.org/>
~~~
paulgb
The quantity and quality of content Khan produces is astounding. I've found
the videos useful for reviewing linear algebra and probability problems.
~~~
jacquesm
Besides wikipedia he's one of the best things to come out of the internet from
an educational point of view. Simply amazing.
~~~
paulgb
Agreed. Also on my list: PlanetMath and MathWorld.
~~~
jacquesm
It would be nice to have a list of such sites!
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353362>
------
keeptrying
Theres some real quality here and I daresay some kind of business model
because theres so much value in his videos.
~~~
cpr
But the whole point is _not_ to have a business model--he's doing it for
philanthropic reasons.
~~~
keeptrying
Understood. But what I meant was that if someone was trying to create a
startup in this space, they might use some of his ideas. I think its great
that he's doing it for philanthropic reasons but I think education businesses
could definitely learn something from him.
~~~
owyn
These guys have a startup that is exploring this area:
<http://www.supercoolschool.com/>
------
morphir
Haha! Khan Acad. keeps growing and growing in terms of videos and popularity..
this is just awesome! :D
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Groupon Slashing Online Ad Spending in Q3 - rogk11
http://blog.mixrank.com/new-data-groupon-slashing-online-ad-spending
======
meritt
Groupon has simply gotten big enough they don't have to advertise as
aggressively, especially in search advertising. Their partnership with
AdParlor via Facebook is also running very strong.
Groupon all along has been bringing in substantial cash but also spending a
huge amount towards marketing. They've saturated their markets in the US. They
can now drop that marketing budget and see massive profits in their US
business.
~~~
cadwag
That would be like saying "since everybody already knows about Apple and their
products and they are bringing in substantial cash, they can cut their
spending." But instead, Apple has been increasing their ad spending as revenue
has gone up <http://gw5.appleinsider.com/article/?id=14437> (bit old, but
still holds).
Personally, I know that I only reach for a groupon or a coupon of any sort
when it's shoved in my face. For them to make such a drastic shift amidst
questionable profitability on exactly the first day of a new quarter makes me
inclined to agree with the author and say that it's a strategic shift in
direction.
------
bosfla
They are testing their theory that their ad spending amounts to capex. will be
very interesting to see what happens. if ad spending jumps back in Q4 or
revenues plummet then its probably the final nail in the coffin for the IPO
valuation. if not, then for the first time in a long while my expectations for
groupon long term will tick up.
------
debacle
I think it's just a change in strategy. Everyone I know who is a Groupon
repeat user gets the emails and visits Groupon almost daily. The ROI they're
getting from online ads is probably becoming marginal.
It wont solve the pathological customer issue, but that's the other weight on
Groupon's back.
------
Evbn
Nice to see Groupon empathizing with its customers, who can't afford to spend
75% of marginal revenue on customer acquistion.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
I love the Stackoverflow discussion format - mdemare
Reading the article on stackoverflow on bad habits the other day (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/164432?sort=votes) I noticed how much I loved their discussion format.<p>Generally, discussion boards for techies opt for full threading, while nontechie boards are completely flat. Both methods have significant flaws that annoy me to no end.<p>Stackoverflow has a format that I hadn't seen so far: A flat list of answers (sortable by score or date), with a flat, chronological list of comments per answer (hidden by default).<p>I love it! I think that it might be a superior choice for almost any forum.<p>Has anyone seen it before? Does it have drawbacks?
======
noodle
basically, you throw out an answer and who really cares whats in the comments.
doesn't foster discussion, only question/answer.
------
pclark
how do you have a real discussion if there is only 1 level of comments?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Handling 1M Requests per Minute with Go - mcastilho
http://marcio.io/2015/07/handling-1-million-requests-per-minute-with-golang/
======
peterwaller
There are two other solutions that spring to mind, which might require quite a
bit less code:
1) Take the original code, do the upload exactly in place in the original
request (not even spawning a goroutine). However: protect the upload with a
semaphore which only allows N-in-flight.
My reasoning is, well, if the system operates with low latency when operating
nominally, blocking the incoming request isn't too painful. The reason there
was a problem in the first place that there were too many requests in flight
and the system hit a meta-stable state where no requests could complete
efficiently.
2) (or instead of (1)): If you're going to have a worker pool, why have that
complicated chan-chan-Job business? It seems that `func StartProcessor` was
close to being a viable solution. All you need is to start a few of those in
parallel, each reading from the same `Queue`. Was there a reason to introduce
the `WorkerPool chan chan Job`? That looks quite a bit more complicated than
it needs to be. The queues don't need to be separate per worker unless there
is some other substantial reason.
\--
The next thing one would need to take care of is to ensure that the whole
system doesn't stall due to a broken/laggy network, so, to put some timeouts
on the S3 uploads, for example, to ensure the system can return to a stable
state on its own when the thundering herd has passed.
~~~
ignoramous
Re: Semaphore: Not dropping the connection might mean we might starve others
incoming msgs of resources (which might be a good thing) [0]. Also, releasing
the semaphore back into the pool in case of failures takes on a happy
complication of having to deal with errors beyond one's control.
Re: Queue: Wouldn't the queue involve locking lest two workers end up trying
to work on the same request? To be completely concurrent, I guess one could
use a lock-free data structure instead (or implement one on top of something
like RocksDB)?
[0] [http://ferd.ca/queues-don-t-fix-overload.html](http://ferd.ca/queues-don-
t-fix-overload.html)
[0] [http://engineering.voxer.com/2013/09/16/backpressure-in-
node...](http://engineering.voxer.com/2013/09/16/backpressure-in-nodejs/)
~~~
peterwaller
Semaphore, I'm suggesting:
Block on N-Semaphore, with timeout
Do timeout upload
Replace N-Semaphore
If you don't _always_ replace the semaphore, that's a bug.
Queue: I'm just comparing to what the article does. It already has contention
on a queue (the chan), it's just the chan-chan-Worker rather than chan-Job. In
practice, go channels happily handle millions of messages contending to
multiple workers just fine. Consider this test example where you aren't even
actually burning any CPU to perform the work:
package main
func main() {
q := make(chan int)
for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
go func() {
for x := range q {
x = x * 10
}
}()
}
for i := 0; i < 1000000; i++ {
q <- i
}
}
On my laptop, it runs in 0.333s single core, and it's slightly slower when you
set GOMAXPROCS > 1\. But not much slower, the total runtime goes to 0.4-0.5s
or so. (Measured with go 1.4). As soon as you do any actual work with the
messages you are passing around, the overhead of locking will be lost in the
noise.
------
Udo
I was confused by the numbers at first, so: that's 17k requests per second,
spread out over 4 dual core Xeon (Haswell) machines, which works out to just
over 4000 requests/s per machine. It's still a respectable number, but it's
much closer to what one would expect given the task.
Don't get me wrong, the most interesting part is definitely the implementation
and as a Go noob I found it very useful - it's just a bit misleading for the
headline to sum your request rate across all parallelized machines.
------
fasteo
>> But since the beginning, our team knew that we should do this in Go because
during the discussion phases we saw this could be potentially a very large
traffic system
I don't get this reasoning.
~~~
Ao7bei3s
Go is 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than Ruby, and much easier to write
concurrent code in.
It makes perfect sense to me. What would you have recommended them, for a
reasonably-high-performance server implementation? (Please don't say C.)
[https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?...](https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=go&lang2=yarv&data=u64q)
~~~
pjmlp
> Go is 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than Ruby, and much easier to write
> concurrent code in.
Than MRI Ruby you mean.
The advantage wouldn't be as much if Ruby designers cared to add AOT
compilation in the same vein as Dylan or Common Lisp to the canonical
implementation.
~~~
pselbert
That's exactly the space that Crystal [0] seems to be exploring. Statically
type checked and pre-compiled via LLVM. So it isn't the Ruby designers
themselves, but definitely Ruby flavored.
0: [http://crystal-lang.org/](http://crystal-lang.org/)
------
thwd
Arguably, UploadToS3 should not be a method of *Payload.
Suggestion: Make an S3-uploader package with _internal_ connection pooling,
upload queueing and concurrency handling.
~~~
zimbatm
This. Each S3-uploader can then hold a http.Client instance that keeps the
connection open to S3 between uploads.
------
darksaints
Does anybody here have any experience with Go's garbage collection pauses with
large stack sizes? I've got a scala app that regularly consumes about 48G of
ram, and I'm very happy with the response times during heavy loads like this,
but the P99.5 is abysmal because of garbage collection. I've tried tuning it,
but it doesn't seem like anything I do helps. I'll probably end up using an
Azul JVM but I'm curious how other languages end up handling this problem.
~~~
cdelsolar
What is P99.5?
~~~
ihsw
99.5th percentile -- below that threshold, requests are generally fine, but
there's a small fraction of requests that take way too long to go through due
to GC kicking in.
------
bpicolo
Cool article, not necessarily because of the language specifics but because of
the thought process involved. Thanks!
------
wpeterson
If this system is merely decoding JSON and writing payloads to S3 for
asynchronous data processing, why not have your clients write directly to S3?
~~~
blakesmith
I'm not the author of the article, but if I'd have to guess: Data
encapsulation, and interface control. If all your clients are talking directly
to S3 instead of your encapsulated service interface, you can't inject any
business logic at all and must design around the fact that you don't control
the service interface, Amazon does.
------
mrfusion
It's interesting this came up today. I'm looking for a new language to migrate
my flask/uwsgi web service to. I'm having a terrible time making it scale.
Are there any tutorials/templates/best practices for writing a small web
service in Golang?
~~~
plydatbk
the only reason to write something like that in Go is if you're looking to
impress a recruiter at (Go). Advise: pick a better tool for your problem.
~~~
thequailman
This is terrible advice. Golang may have a flavor-of-the-week status in some
people's minds, but it's a language that really deserves more credit. It is
really easy to program and learn, and it does a lot of stuff other languages
rely on third party programs for. With each release, nagging issues (namely
around garbage collection) are getting resolved, but it's more than production
ready. To ignore Golang right now would be akin to ignoring Java back in the
early 2000s in my opinion.
~~~
sbov
Golang has my attention, but I don't think it's anywhere near Java, at least
popularity-wise, in the early 2000s. By then most schools had already switched
their language of choice to Java - I'm not aware of any that has switched
theirs to Golang.
I do enjoy coding in Golang, but we use mostly Java where I work, and for us,
the benefits don't make up for the things we lose. This blog post is a great
example: the solution they had to find is the first thing you'd probably do in
Java, because Java has a standard package with all sorts of concurrency
patterns.
~~~
muraiki
Yeah, I remember wanting to do a fan-out pattern in Go and reading the Go
Pipelines and Cancellation article[0]. I saw the function merge() in the
article and thought, "Great, here's what I need!" I then proceeded to read
further and saw that I have to define this function myself based on the types
I'm using, which made me quite sad.
Go really needs a library for these patterns built in... I assume the lack of
generics prevents users from creating that themselves (I'm not trying to start
a language war here, seriously).
[0] [http://blog.golang.org/pipelines](http://blog.golang.org/pipelines)
------
AYBABTME
You can put up any large number of request if you make the period in 'per
{{period}}' large enough.
------
eva1984
Little confused here.So the third solution mentioned in the post is just a
worker pool? I think if we just slightly modified the second solution, it will
totally work.
1).Initialize a job channel
2).Initialize a set of workers that listen to this channel to pull the jobs
indefinitely. In this case just call go StartProcessor() for fixed number of
times.
What confuses me is that IMO workPoolChannel isn't necessary here. What is the
consideration behind to use a channel for workers?
------
avitzurel
IMHO this solution is nice but wrong. The point is not just creating a "cool"
program with Go that will handle HTTP requests.
Without really knowing the company's needs, I am relying on this paragraph
from the post:
While working on a piece of our anonymous telemetry and analytics system, our
goal was to be able to handle a large amount of POST requests from millions of
endpoints. The web handler would receive a JSON document that may contain a
collection of many payloads that needed to be written to Amazon S3, in order
for our map-reduce systems to later operate on this data.
Knowing this, I would build it differently.
1\. Clients post to S3 Directly 2\. Lambda -> Overload business logic, private
data, cleanup, spam control etc... 3\. Prepare files (64M) for Hadoop 4\.
Hadoop
There's no reason to have that proxy in the middle, Amazon S3 will handle
those millions of requests with no real trouble, I wouldn't throw machines on
this process.
------
th0br0
Other than the worker/concurrency mechanism being part of the language, what's
the difference to a RabbitMQ-Worker architecture? You might even argue that
the lack of persistence (in the given example) is a potential source for data
loss.
~~~
fixxer
I'm guessing persistence is not a priority.
The difference is management of a simple process (behind elastic load
balancer, of course) vs a more complicated architecture with three distinct,
load balanced process types (webserver -> queue -> worker).
------
istvan__
Is this supposed to be great performance? I think Netty does ~30K/s (1800000
req/min) out of the box. It thought Go has more out of the box performance,
maybe I am missing something.
~~~
anonyfox
Oh, performance? Let's throw numbers around! Here, Elixir/Phoenix beats them
all!
[https://twitter.com/julianobs/status/614416512825323520](https://twitter.com/julianobs/status/614416512825323520)
Hey, and Elixir is already _way_ more expressive than Go and it's incredibly
easy to build fault-tolerant and distributed systems, not to mention the
productivity gains when using the phoenix framework!
Seriously, posting requests/second metric without _any_ context about hardware
and sample code doesn't help anyone.
~~~
istvan__
Cool it is only 10-16x slower than Aleph.
[https://github.com/ptaoussanis/clojure-web-server-
benchmarks...](https://github.com/ptaoussanis/clojure-web-server-
benchmarks/tree/master/results/60k-keepalive#60k-keepalive)
~~~
anonyfox
full blown mvc framework vs communication layer, seems legit :)
but hey, as long as stuff responds in microseconds with zero errors under
load, just use it ! (Also, clojure is a way better language than go, too.)
~~~
istvan__
Yes I like to throw meaningless numbers around as much as the other guy. :)
------
Spien
Can already do this with a single thread using epoll. In fact, even a simple
epoll implementation can handle 1M HTTP requests in ~30 seconds on a single
thread juggling 10k connections.
------
sinzone
Have you considered in putting KONG [1] which is basically OpenResty (nginx)
in the front? With LuaJIT performances [2] are outstanding.
[1] [https://github.com/mashape/kong](https://github.com/mashape/kong)
[2]
[https://github.com/mashape/kong#benchmarks](https://github.com/mashape/kong#benchmarks)
------
mstump
16k requests per second isn't fast.
~~~
fixxer
16k requests per second is not fast if you're talking about fetching a page or
doing a minimal amount of I/O.
16k requests per second is worth writing about if you're talking about a
process with substantial side effects (S3 I/O).
~~~
mstump
It's just pass through. The limit in this instance is probably packets per
second of the legacy AWS network. Why is this difficult?
~~~
fixxer
Read the analysis. First attempt was "just a pass through".
~~~
mstump
No, it is just pass through, they just did a crappy job of handling
concurrency.
~~~
fixxer
Maybe they should hire somebody smart like you.
~~~
mstump
To be snide, maybe they should, I am an expert in this topic this is what I do
all day every day.
They're doing development without understanding how computers work, where the
bottlenecks are, or what the maximum theoretical throughput for the use-case
is. They ended up with something slightly better than the horrible situation
they were in, and are celebrating a inefficient solution as a technical
triumph.
~~~
fixxer
> inefficient solution as a technical triumph
They were able to solve their problem in a single process balanced over 4
boxes without ever having to hire someone like you, despite your expertise.
Could they have increased throughput? Absolutely. It would have involved a
different architecture with more complexity & time, and it also would have
relied on skills beyond what was immediately available. I'm guessing their
line count is around ~200 for the core functionality.
Can you share some actual technical points where they made an error? I would
really like to see you demonstrate expertise beyond these uninspiring
generalities.
~~~
Denzel
This type of simple I/O bound pass-through problem lends itself extremely well
to evented I/O. Conceptually, their first solution was closest to mimicking
the benefits of evented I/O, given how Go's runtime works. When a goroutine
submits a blocking I/O request, it will yield to another goroutine and wake up
later when it can work with the data. So what happened with their first
solution?
Well, Go's runtime allocates 8KB (last I recall) of growable stack space per
goroutine. Assuming that their first solution was deployed on the same
instance type as their final solution: c4.large (3.75 GB), then they could
handle at most ~470,000 outstanding gorountines; assuming that all RAM is used
for only gorountines, which is not realistic of course. So their server fell
over once it exhausted memory.
This type of memory exhaustion isn't a problem with evented I/O. You have a
single thread that responds to async events related to the I/O you're
performing.
So, due to the limitations of Go's runtime, they settled upon a worker-pool
that allows at most MAX_WORKERS outstanding requests to S3. Not the most
efficient solution for this problem. But it works for their use case, for now,
and that's what truly matters.
~~~
fixxer
Excellent, logic-driven critique.
------
meir_yanovich
Can you please explain why to use go and not c++/c
forget about language syntax / compilation complexity.
say i know both very well , now why to go with "GO" ?
thanks
~~~
nindalf
There are a few benefits of Go I can think of
* Fewer lines of code, fewer gotchas and hence easier to reason about and maintain.
* Powerful concurrency primitives (channels, select) built right into the language, rather than a library. A scalable producer-consumer implementation would probably be 100 lines of Go code.
* If your application isn't too latency sensitive (game server, frequency trading etc) then the GC simplifies matters. Its guaranteed to run for a maximum of 10ms out of every 50ms which is good enough for most applications. (but typically runs for around 1ms)
* Some of the tooling around the language is great. There are some great articles (I remember one posted to HN yesterday) about how people wrangled a lot more performance out of their code using the profile tool, for instance.
* Miscellaneous goodies like testing out of the box, an extensive standard library and being able to compile in 1/10th of the time.
An example of a service migrated from C++ to Go - dl.google.com -
[http://talks.golang.org/2013/oscon-
dl.slide#1](http://talks.golang.org/2013/oscon-dl.slide#1)
These are the benefits I could think of if a programmer knows C++ and Go
equally well. However, suppose he has to work with fellow programmers who
aren't comfortable with either, Go would be a superior choice. It would take a
week to learn most of Go and perhaps a month to grok it. I think C++ takes
much, much longer than that to learn properly.
~~~
meir_yanovich
Thank you for the reasoned reply.
~~~
nindalf
You're welcome :)
------
azth
Would have been much simpler and more straight forward to use a library like
Akka instead of manually coding all of this.
------
melling
What's the trick to resubmit without getting stuck going to the first post?
For example, I submitted this story 2 hours before this one:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844826](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844826)
In the past, when I try to submit a story, even if it's a couple days old, the
submission is ignored, and my vote is added to the original.
~~~
thwd
The slash at the end of the URL made the difference in this case.
------
mrfusion
Mods, can we change "go" in the title to "golang"? That's the official name,
and it makes it searchable by search engines?
~~~
f2f
I'm sorry but the official name is Go. You can search for "Golang" or "Go
Language" with no issue.
~~~
mrfusion
Would this thread come up under one of your suggested searches?
~~~
f2f
both the original article and the Reddit discussion come up in my results (as
1 and 2). the reddit discussion is only 16 hours old.
[https://www.google.com/search?q=golang%201%20million&rct=j](https://www.google.com/search?q=golang%201%20million&rct=j)
this HN discussion is too recent to show up in my results, however yesterday's
thread about Qihoo and golang does show up as number 4 or 5 when searching for
"golang qihoo".
no need to panic.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Startup Playbook - tedmiston
http://startup-playbook.com/
======
tedmiston
The Startup Playbook is #1 on Product Hunt today -
[https://www.producthunt.com/posts/the-startup-
playbook-2](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/the-startup-playbook-2)
Also, the Kindle edition is on sale for $0.99 for the first week -
[https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Playbook-Founder-Founder-
Vete...](https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Playbook-Founder-Founder-Veterans-
ebook/dp/B078QCRYWJ)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A vote against spaced repetition (2014) - gabor-meszaros
http://lesswrong.com/lw/juq/a_vote_against_spaced_repetition/
======
trump2016
Literally every guide on spaced memory tells users to avoid making the
mistakes he made. Nobody argues that you can learn big concepts through spaced
repetition.
Personally, I used Anki to learn the Amino Acid structures and abbreviations,
for which it was invaluable. Basically, Anki is gold for things you must learn
by rote or for things that you already learned but have trouble remembering.
Anki isn't, and was never meant to be, for learning. It's for turning things
you've learned but have trouble remembering into long term memory.
------
ess3
Feels like this mostly has to do with the flat nature of flashcards, not so
much about spaced repetition. Spaced repetition could be applied to playing
the piano or whatever.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
14 free tools that reveal why people abandon your website - jwilliams
http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/articles/understanding-your-visitors/
======
andr
#1 free tool that causes people to abandon your website: porn.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
18 Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies indicted in FBI jail probe - goldenkey
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/7-la-sheriff-deputies-arrested-fbi-jail-probe-article-1.1542319
======
a3n
> Four grand jury indictments and a criminal complaint allege unjustified
> beatings at downtown Los Angeles jail facilities
Wait. Is there such a thing as a _justified_ beating in a US jail?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How to Organize? - rthomas6
Most people seem to go through a life phase from around ages 9 to 15 where they learn how to organize and arrange their environment, how to clean up, etc. I am 27 and never went through this phase. Every day I look around my massively cluttered apartment and feel like I'm missing some essential skill that others learned earlier in life. I know this is really basic stuff, but what do I do?<p>Specifically:<p>* How do I efficiently clean up an area and <i>keep it clean while still using it</i>?<p>* How do I put away a large number of miscellaneous items in a manner that I know where they are and can easily be found again?<p>* How do I put away bowls and food storage containers such that they don't avalanche on me when I open the cabinet?<p>* How do I organize important documents such that I never lose them and can retrieve them after several years?<p>* About how much time should I expect to be devoted to house chores each day/week?<p>* What chores should I do on a regular basis, and how often? (How often should I dust? Vacuum? Clean toilets?)
======
andymurd
I have had to teach my SO exactly these habits. This is what worked for us:
Pick one small area to start with. We chose the kitchen because it is used
several times per day so keeping it clean pays the biggest dividend.
Think about how your storage should be organised. Most frequently used items
in the most accessible cupboards. How should people move through the space?
Where are the bottlenecks/sharp corners? This is a UX problem.
Throw away all the useless, broken stuff and the stuff that you haven't used
in a year. Be ruthless.
Clean your area properly for the first time - every surface, every item. Use
powerful cleaning products NOT hippy, earth-friendly coloured water. Wear
rubber gloves. Break into a sweat. This first clean is hard work.
Next time you do anything in your area, ensure that it is clean before you
start. Throw away rubbish, wipe up dirt, wash up, dry, put away. This should
not take long.
Clean up whilst using your area. Clean up after using your area. You are not a
teenager, pick up after yourself.
Schedule a time for cleaning. I find Wednesday evenings good because
work/TV/social-life is usually empty on Wednesday evenings. It is possible to
clean a (tidy) two bedroom apartment top-to-bottom in two hours, but don't
expect to be this efficient when you start. Two-three hours once or twice per
week is plenty unless you have pets/kids/coalminers living with you.
Take the time to notice that using your area is massively more efficient when
it is tidy and give yourself a mental pat on the back. When you mess up (we
all do), the motivation to get back to the tidy state should be there. You are
now a grown-up.
------
ASquare
A good framework, for overall organization and cleaning, to co-opt, is the 5S
methodology used in Lean Six Sigma Manufacturing environments
[https://goleansixsigma.com/5s-infographic/](https://goleansixsigma.com/5s-infographic/)
[https://goleansixsigma.com/how-to-easily-apply-5s-to-your-
wo...](https://goleansixsigma.com/how-to-easily-apply-5s-to-your-work-
station/)
Its actually quite easy to understand and implement.
------
davismwfl
I can't recommend it enough, hire a professional organizer to setup your house
work area etc and then have them teach you the hacks to make it stick and be
efficient. It does cost a little bit of money of course, but it is SO worth
it.
My wife isn't necessarily a professional organizer but has done it for people
and a few companies. She is one of those super organized people (and creative
about it) and she kicked my ass about my bad habits. She still calls me the
stacker from time to time, because I used to keep stacking shit on my desk for
months and then go through it to organize it. What sucked is like half the
pile would be trash by that point and I missed dates for things etc. She
thought it was ironic because a number of my clients have given me compliments
and sent me emails that say I am so organized and my code and project
deliverables are so clean and well thought out. They just never saw my desk
before.
She changed the workflow for me and has basically made me WAY better. When I
get stressed out I will tend to stack still sometimes, which tells me it isn't
yet 100% ingrained but I am working on it. But I know it has mostly worked
because now the irony is that I get stressed if I see stacks or things aren't
in their place, so its good.
The biggest habit to change is don't say I will get to it, just do it now.
That was (can still be at times) one of my biggest issues.
On the household things, my wife uses the daily & weekly routine. About an
hour everyday spread out throughout the day is dedicated to doing little tasks
so they don't stack up. Like wiping down the sinks in the bathroom after we
are done in the morning, it takes 3-4 minutes but then they don't get dirty
and require extra time to clean. She also planned out our cleaning schedule.
So like my 16 year old does his laundry on Wednesdays, she does my daughters
laundry on Thursdays, and ours on Friday. Sheets and towels are left for
Saturday. She does that with everything so that no day does any one of us
spend more than about an hour throughout the day doing any of the tasks. At
first I thought it would suck but after a while it has turned into the
greatest stress relief and efficient plan for us.
------
rudimental
Consider a professional that helps people get organized. A house cleaner can
help you with some of these, like how often to dust or vacuum. A professional
organizer (that you work well with) could help you with more of them, like
creating systems that help keep track of documents or organizing your food
containers. Check out highly rated people on yelp or get a referral from a
friend or national professional organization.
------
nyrulez
Life Pro tip: For some of these, hire a house cleaner and ask him/her about
these questions (might have to pay extra for that). You can write down the
steps they do and tell you to do, and try to repeat them. You will have a live
demo to guide you as well.
------
zuzuleinen
For me it worked this principle: "Leave everything in the same condition as it
was before using it".
That's it.
You can make an initial order, and after that order will stay if you commit to
this basic principle.
------
pain
Build pattern recognition.
Map your self and items, memory test your script as you try to place things,
find your settings and preferences for variables important.
I find if you make a point of what you do, your organization to find a system
can teach you things about your memory.
------
andrewrice
I'm in the same boat as you! I never developed strong organizational habits
and would appreciate some guidance.
~~~
papa
Hey Andrew, same offer I gave rthomas6 stands for you. If you want some one-
on-one guidance, let me know. papandrew (at yahoo.com). This is a topic near
and dear to my heart.
------
papa
This stuff is pretty near and dear to my heart since I'm a clean
freak/organizing nut. My wife thinks I have OCD.
This might be basic, but I'll give you my answers:
1) This may not be a satisfying answer, but the key for me is that my home is
neat and tidy to begin with. When some activity takes place, I might deploy
stuff to that area but as soon as the activity is done, I clean things up and
put them away. If I'm cooking, I might bring things out and continuously clean
up the kitchen as I go. The main point is that keeping an area organized and
clean throughout the process is part of the key.
2) So for this problem, my solution is two-fold: (1) Find a place for
everything in your home and organize stuff thematically so it's easy to find.
Think of your home like a library with a Dewey Decimal system for all your
household stuff. Hall closet? Maybe that's a good spot for cleaning supplies,
sponges, brooms and the like. I have 3 kids, so one of my closets is all
school supplies, art supplies, pens, crayons, binders, etc etc. The key thing
here is to group like stuff together. This will make it easier for you to FIND
stuff in the future. Also, in order for this to work, you must constantly put
things away after you are finished using it. If you don't do this, you'll fail
with your organizing (b/c you can't find stuff easily). (2) Attack the supply
side of the problem and eliminate unnecessary stuff. This is a big task and a
tough one for a lot of folks. I could go into more detail on this one, but
unless you are willing to purge some crap, effectively organizing stuff will
be challenging.
3) Are your plates and containers a hodge-podge of individual pieces not from
a common set? If so, this is your problem. If you purchase plates and
containers from a single set/design, you should be able to effectively stack
your bowls and plates. Ditto on the containers. If you buy from the same
product line, they often come in sets of nestable pieces or stackable pieces.
Get rid of the one-off odd bowls and get a uniform set (e.g. 6 bowls of the
same make).
4) Physical documents: file cabinet with hanging folders and/or manila
folders. Each folder is a different topic/category: Automotive, Home
Electronics, Bank Info, Home/Property documents, Travel documents/passport. I
probably have 2-3 dozen folder "topics". I get a document that needs to be
saved, I immediately file it in the cabinet. Taxes are always a breeze. As
soon as I finish my taxes for the prior tax year in April, I create a new tax
folder for the current year. Any docs with tax implications (letters from
charities for donations, receipts) goes straight into my tax folder. I do the
same for digital documents. Just carve out a little spot on your hard drive.
Create work and personal life folders. Route the files that you need to save
accordingly. Do this diligently and you won't be confronted with the
insurmountable deluge of documents. You can also solve the supply side of the
equation by periodically reviewing both your physical and digital documents
and purging stuff you no longer need. As with my response to #2, if you file
things properly, FINDING STUFF when you need it in the future is always a
breeze.
5) Depends on your personality and how much mess you can tolerate, but I
typically spend 15-30 minutes in the morning organizing my household before I
go to work and maybe the same at night. Mind you, I have 3 kids and a wife
with a busy schedule, so in order to manage the chaos, I need to organize
things twice a day. This may be overkill for a single guy (assuming that's
your status). The key thing is that by investing a small amount of time here
and there you can keep your organizational system humming. As long as things
are put away, things are easy to find. Once you let things slip, it gets
tough. As a side note, this is usually when I listen to podcasts (so the time
isn't completely wasted on humdrum cleanup).
6) Again this is personal preference and dependent on how much of a mess you
make. Beauty of this is that you can outsource these tasks! After my 1st kid
was born, that's just what I did. Now I have a house cleaning crew that visits
my home every other week and cleans the bathrooms, kitchen, vacuums and mops
the floors. You might be able to get by with once a month. 2x a month is
better. Personally I'd like once a week but I don't want to pay more than I
already pay at 2x/month.
I don't know if these responses are helpful. Happy to chat more about it if
you want more pointers. I've been contemplating an Ebook on this topic, so
would be interested in hearing more about your problems in this vein. If you
want to continue the conversation, let me know: papandrew (at yahoo.com)
------
metanoia
Here are my opinions on how to do this - these ideas may not work for you and
part of the journey will be figuring out what works for you.
* How do I efficiently clean up an area and keep it clean while still using it?
\- First, start with recycling/selling/donating/throwing things that you don't
need. A good heuristic for things you don't need are "If I haven't used this
for X months, I should get rid of it." X will depend on a few things, but
choose X such that it is somewhat uncomfortable. You may regret a few of your
decisions, but that's OK. Of course, your level of nostalgia may work against
you. If there are things that you must keep for sentimental reasons (pictures,
things of value) set these into another pile.
\- You'll now find that you have significantly less stuff, and less mental
overhead. You also will (hopefully) have more space. You __must __now find a
home for everything. Which leads me to the second question...
* How do I put away a large number of miscellaneous items in a manner that I know where they are and can easily be found again?
\- Group items together in logical categories - I have bins filled with
cables, computer stuff, home improvement stuff, clothing, snowboarding stuff.
For smaller things, find divided containers like a clear fishing tackle box.
\- Clear bins that are shallow are best so you don't have to root around to
find something, simply turn the container a few times to find what you're
looking for. Put them under your bed.
\- For things that are more frequently used, put them in your desk or kitchen
drawers. Definitely use drawer organizers.
* How do I put away bowls and food storage containers such that they don't avalanche on me when I open the cabinet?
\- Stack them. If your food storage containers are heterogeneous and don't
stack well, invest in some.
* How do I organize important documents such that I never lose them and can retrieve them after several years?
\- For the most important paper documents (marriage certificates, vehicle
titles, social security cards, bearer bonds, passports, etc) get a fireproof
filebox, or if not paranoid about fire or theft, a filebox. Again, group
things logically in hanging file folders, if you can't come up with a system
just create a file for each item. This box should not have a lot of contents.
\- Go paperless as much as possible. Paystubs, bank statements, etc. should
all be paperless. It is not hard to recreate these if needed unless you work
for someone who writes paper checks.
\- Get a document scanner like the NeatDesk and scan/OCR everything else
(offer letters, receipts, non-marketing material) to Dropbox or Evernote.
Boom. Most things are searchable. There are few documents that can't be
destroyed at this point. Again, this should not be a lot of stuff.
\- Opt out of all pre-screened offers for credit cards. Go to
www.optoutprescreen.com. This should cut your junk mail in half. Recycle the
rest immediately.
* About how much time should I expect to be devoted to house chores each day/week? * What chores should I do on a regular basis, and how often? (How often should I dust? Vacuum? Clean toilets?)
\- One thing I have noticed in my life is something I call the "seed of
disorder." Once an area is clean, and something is left out of place in that
area... entropy develops around that seed. Do everything you can to ensure
that any seeds are dealt with as soon as possible. Papers, dirty dishes, etc.
They all get out of control if you let them.
\- If you do that, you won't have to do more than taking out the trash, doing
and _putting away_ dishes, and cleaning your food prep areas on a daily basis.
If you're in SF and don't have a dishwasher figure 15 minutes a day to do
those things.
\- For the rest, it depends on your level of personal cleanliness (and those
that come visit you!). Ideally, hire someone to come every two weeks.
Bathrooms, floors, dusting, etc. are not fun. Plus, when you have someone come
clean you have to "pick up" and make sure everything is in its place to begin
with. If you can't afford a cleaner to come about twice a month here's a good
frequency:
\- Vacuum carpets: At least once every couple weeks. Get a roomba, it can do
it every day if needed.
\- Toilet: I'm assuming you're a guy. Wipe the rim off once a day. Put cleaner
in and brush once every two weeks, more often if you forget to flush.
\- Bathroom floor: Once every two weeks with a wet swiffer.
\- Dust: Once every two weeks unless you have allergies. More frequently if
you do, but use a respirator/N95 mask. Buy a very good true HEPA air filter -
this will reduce your dusting needs as well. Use a swiffer to dust wood
floors, and a swiffer hand duster to dust objects.
\- Change bedsheets: Again, if you have allergies, more frequently, but at a
minimum once a month.
\- Clean kitchen: Sweep the floors every two or three days, stuff tends to get
on the floor often. I have a roomba robot do this for me. Wet swiffer the
floor weekly. Move everything off each surface and wipe it down at least twice
a month.
\- Refrigerator: Check the refrigerator for bad food at least a couple times a
week. Don't let it get funky - you'll want to deal with it even less. Once
every three months or so get everything out of the fridge and wash down every
surface.
------
seekingcharlie
Something I have realised over time is that mess inherently attracts mess. If
there are dirty dishes in the sink, clothes on the floor etc, you are
significantly more likely to add to said mess (often it's unconscious).
With the above in mind, take a look at everything you own, every single item
in your apartment. Do you really need all of them? Don't fool yourself by
holding on to random crap thinking it will be of use one day - it won't.
Either throw it out or give what you can to Salvation Army. Less is more.
> How do I efficiently clean up an area and keep it clean while still using
> it?
When cooking dinner, for example, I have the sink filled with hot water &
detergent & I go back & forth between cooking & washing what is finished with.
As you're waiting for something to boil, do some dishes etc.
TIPS:
.Rinse all dishes in VERY hot water & they dry very quickly by themselves, so
you can simply put them away after you've eaten.
If you've just fried/cooked something on the stove, scrub the pan immediately
after you drain the food out (while the pan is still hot) with detergent.
Don't give any food/oil a chance to solidify - it will take you 4 times a long
to clean if you leave it until tomorrow.
In certain situations, it's better to leave a pot/pan to soak overnight (e.g.
after cooking rice).
> How do I put away a large number of miscellaneous items in a manner that I
> know where they are and can easily be found again?
Create themes of storage areas for the items that go in them. Garage for
tools, cleaning supplies. Study for stationary, printing ink etc. Basically,
keep things that are related to each other in the same place.
> How do I put away bowls and food storage containers such that they don't
> avalanche on me when I open the cabinet?
How many food storage containers do you have? How many do you need? You know
the deal..
> How do I organize important documents such that I never lose them and can
> retrieve them after several years?
Take screenshots with your phone - archive everything in folders via email
(bills, tax, receipts etc) so that you can always refer back to it.
> About how much time should I expect to be devoted to house chores each
> day/week?
Hard to say without knowing exactly how messy you are. In a general sense,
dinner dishes & hanging clothes in your room are a daily chore. Do a big
vacuum/sweep, mop & clean toilets on Sunday morning each week with some fun
music on. Do a big bathroom clean (bleach, glass cleaner etc) once a month.
Perhaps create a schedule/calendar for yourself to hold yourself accountable.
Start thinking about Saturday or Sunday as "chores day". And when you've done
your chores, make sure to reward yourself in the afternoon/evening to
reinforce the habit.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Page views required to generate $1M in ad revenue? - thinkzig
http://www.microsoftstartupzone.com/Blogs/the_next_big_thing/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=6bab7b08-81ca-4602-bd97-4b7b2c893e88&ID=675
======
russell
300 million in page views net $15K in revenue. Not a business I want to be in.
Google makes a very nice living because people who are googling are looking
for information and the ads provide links to information. People who are
socializing are not looking for something, they are already there. Most of the
time the ads are even below the level of annoyance. (Mouseover videos are
definitely over the threshold.) CPC vs CPM doesn't address the issue. Radio
and TV ads work because you cant avoid them. Print ads works because people do
scan newspapers in search mode.
The real issue is how to engage people when they are socializing. The
advertiser needs something more engaging the current social event. Sex sells
and flash sells, but the post is talking about something beyond that. I dont
think target advertising is much more than the same old same old, but more
refined. The break through will be something that enhances the social
experience.
Maybe something like a chat about Paris brings up a live feed of a Paris cafe
complete with tables for your avatars, with an urchin trying to sell you a
travel guide. Whatever it is it needsto be engaging an not annoying.
~~~
vaksel
pretty bad example, considering the people might be chatting about Paris
Hilton.
~~~
jasonlbaptiste
pretty sure sites like perez hilton are getting great CPMs and advertising
offers. It may be annoying/not to your liking as a site owner, but tv shows
"reskin" the site on premiere nights. That costs a pretty penny.
~~~
fallentimes
You're right - Perez Hilton is making an absolute killing:
[http://web.blogads.com/adspotsfolder/ba_adspotsfolder_revisi...](http://web.blogads.com/adspotsfolder/ba_adspotsfolder_revision_create_shortcut?persistent_uid=3e759f53402fc5bafd783046580df71f)
[http://web.blogads.com/adspotsfolder/ba_adspotsfolder_revisi...](http://web.blogads.com/adspotsfolder/ba_adspotsfolder_revision_create_shortcut?persistent_uid=2bf3ca8b27a840dd60c8a1170cc175aa)
And there's multiple occurrences of those ads. 40k-75k PER week isn't that far
of a stretch
------
pmorici
What sites like Facebook and Twitter need to do is infer peoples needs from
things that are happening to them in the moment. For example, if a user posts
to their feed "My POS car broke down" They should be shown ads for new cars,
repair shops, car rental and AAA. If a FB user invites 30 of their friends to
a Halloween party they should all be shown ads for costumes and other related
things.
FB and Twitter have the ability to preempt Google because they could predict
your needs from your updates before you even know them yourself. As it stands
though Facebook advertising strikes me as being about as effective as putting
up a billboard on the side of a highway.
~~~
seldo
For certain types of advertising, I think Facebook's ability to target by
demographic must make it significantly more cost-effective (and hence popular)
than keyword searches -- products for a particular age range, or relationship
status come to mind -- despite the lack of intentionality (i.e., a keyword
search is somebody looking for something, but a Facebook user is not).
------
staunch
> _But, based on a survey of social network sites let's assume an average CPM
> of $0.40. You would need 2.5 Billion page views per month to earn $1M in ad
> revenues. That is 2,500,000,000 page views...and how many sites can sell out
> all their page view inventory?_
This makes the mistake of assuming that one page impression = one ad
impression. That's not the case on most sites. Most sites can quite easily
have 2-4 ad impressions per page impression.
Also, it's not hard to sell out ad inventory at ridiculously low CPMs. There's
always _someone_ willing to pay _something_ for a genuine ad impression. Most
sites can probably sell a little bit of their inventory for a high CPM and the
rest for a very low one.
------
pjhyett
Trying to make that sort of money using something like an Adsense program is
going to take a hell of a lot more pageviews over having a sales force capable
of selling high-dollar ad packages.
That isn't to say that sites like PlentyofFish haven't been able to do it, but
your CPM has to be fairly high if you're not getting billions of pageviews a
month.
Sourceforge doesn't get nearly the level of traffic that Facebook does, but
they brought in $5.4 million in media revenue from 36 million uniques in their
first fiscal quarter of '09[1].
1\. <http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/news.html?d=155376>
~~~
int2e
Be careful not to confuse uniques with impressions.
Assuming 10 impressions per unique, that's still a very respectable CPM of
$15.
~~~
pjhyett
That's the point, though, $15 CPM is enormous compared to the article's claim
that the social network average is 40 cents.
~~~
jacquesm
I can confirm that claim.
This is over a sample of about 3 million uniques / month.
------
lallysingh
Hmm, not even counting the cost of content creation, how much is it going to
cost to produce 1M in ad revenue?
They mention 2.5 billion views for $1M. Being very, very conservative in data
transfer, that's several terabytes a month. 4k/page is 10 TB (3.858 MB/sec
sustained for a month), 32k is 80 TB (30.864 MB/sec for a month), etc. A
single banner image off of gamasutra.com (not even flash) was 149k.
The netlink, server hardware, and infrastructure (bought or rented ala
rackspace) isn't exactly cheap.
~~~
diego
This is highly dependent on what your site does. If you could somehow get that
much traffic on a blog, the cost of bandwidth and servers would be very low
(tens of thousands at the most, say 5% of your revenues).
On the other hand, if every page view is extremely heavy with a long tail of
uncacheable content (e.g. Youtube) or computationally expensive (web search
engine), then bandwidth and servers become a significant percentage of the
revenues.
------
pmichaud
I think it's pretty clear that the best way to make money from a site is to
sell things. For money.Crazy, I know.
~~~
netsp
A good way of making money is to sell things. But that is a way for a business
to make money, not a site.
It has never completely gone away, but there was a time when instead of having
ads, people thought sites should have shops. Newspapers would have shops. Sell
mugs and pens. A lot of sites like news sites actually added them.
This idea never went very far.
Facebook and the like are here to stay n the internet. Even if Facebook itself
goes out of business, it will be replaced. They are not a store. They do not
magically turn their visitors into Amazon visitors by selling stuff.
~~~
froo
_"This idea never went very far."_
Well, not to burst your bubble but there are many sites that use this exact
business model.
One of the sites that comes to mind is homestarrunner.com - who have been
doing this since they started.
Granted, it doesn't work for every business, but the fact is that if you
create a service that your users _genuinely_ care about, they will purchase
your merchandise, because for those users, this enhances their overall
experience.
It's a classic model that's taken straight from hollywood. Merchandising
revenue is a HUGE factor in lots of productions.
~~~
netsp
I never said sites don't have shops.
I'm saying Facebook are not going to monetise by adding one.
------
brc
Google CPC works because it ties in buyer behaviour with advertisers. The
solution to driving revenue from pageviews must either connect up existing
behaviour with advertisers (where can I buy an X), or create a compelling new
behaviour. For example, in the early days of newspapers, it wouldn't have been
obvious to look in the back for classified ads, but buyers learnt this and now
know to look in the back for the ads.
The power in social networks is the group of trusted friends. I'm sure some
sort of group question along the lines of 'do you guys think I should buy an
LCD or Plasma TV' with voting, or something similar, would develop new
behaviours, particularly amongst consumers of products they aren't completely
familiar with (anything from cars to financial products). Once you develop
this behaviour in a social network, selling ads into it is a cinch.
------
eli
Uh.. audience matters. Like, a lot. If you think all impressions are equal,
then you will only be able to attract lowest common denominator advertisers
who will only pay you commodity prices. Why do you think washingtonpost.com
has ads for asbestos lawyers?
If your site is for luxury yachts owners, or people looking to buy Enterprise
CRM systems, or is specially tailored to Fortune 1000 CEOs, you can charge
CPMs that most sites only dream of. With a dedicated ad sales staff You could
probably clear a million with a few hundred thousand page views a month.
------
heed
The thing that is difficult about ads, not many people like to be told what to
buy. And I think it might be the ads themselves that are lacking, not
necessarily how they are delivered.
For example, look at this award winning Pringles online ad:
<http://awardshome.com/cannes2009/pringles/can-hands.html>
The reason why this one is great, is because it isn't pushy, it has humor, and
it uses normal, honest language that we can all relate to. Maybe it's these
type of ads that need to be displayed in the social networks.
~~~
il
Your comment is so very incorrect.
It's not that _ads_ as a whole don't work, it's that untargeted, random banner
ads are very ineffective at driving conversions.
Ads on search, which frequently tell you what to buy, and don't have room to
be artsy of humorous generate billions of dollars for Google and probably much
more than that for its advertisers. I wouldn't be surprised if Google gets
$20-$100 CPM on its pageviews.
Award-winning ads are frequently not the most effective. The most effective
ads are often bland, boring ads that tell you what to buy but take into
account segmentation, positioning, targeting, behavioral trends, and so on.
~~~
heed
I don't think a downvote was warranted here, but do what you may.
Could you provide a source to your last sentence? I'd like to read more about
this. Thanks.
~~~
jimboyoungblood
Take a look at any trade magazine or other specialty publication. In general
the ads you'll find there have very low production values.
Award-winning ads and creative branding are necessary when trying to sell
highly undifferentiated, commoditized products (e.g., potato chips). But if
you have a product that is obviously differentiated from the competition (a
laptop with 100 hour battery life, an electric sports car, etc.), informing
consumers of your existence is often enough.
~~~
imp
I got the impression that ads in specialty publications and trade magazines
only have low production values because the companies advertising have small
budgets.
------
Ardit20
Last time I analysed revenue from ads per visitor the figure was between
0.0025 and 0.004, so 1000 views means 2.5 dollars at the low end or 4 dollars
at the high end, so maybe the problem is limited to social networking sites
alone. How can they make money? Perhaps freemium is the best way? I mean these
people, well some of them, well most of them are addicted to Facebook and all
the rubbish in it such as quizzes and friend poking, so if it costs say £2 to
I don't know, send your friend the perfect girl questionnaire, sure some
people will pay and if it goes hot and viral then all of them will pay, they
have to.
~~~
bmelton
Where are those numbers from?
~~~
Ardit20
just my own website
~~~
NonEUCitizen
which ad provider do you use?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Swift syntax for Vim - SmileyKeith
https://github.com/Keithbsmiley/swift.vim
======
tendom
It would be great to post an image of what this looks like in a couple code
examples. I've been working on this as well, primarily because I haven't seen
a syntax that gets it right, usually it's rushed or sloppy, and some just
really get the syntax wrong. with off false positives appearing all over.
~~~
leorocky
I think the problem is also vim which doesn't have a really great way to do
syntax highlighting. At least not an easy way. Highlighting is all in a single
thread and blocks which makes it slow on large files and the regular
expressions seem fragile. I think a better way to do syntax highlighting would
involve a lexer and bison instead of regular expression hell.
~~~
SmileyKeith
Surprisingly this file is pretty simple. The learning curve for writing syntax
files is definitely something though.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
New database tools worth learning about? - throughaway092
From 2013 to 2015, the hottest NoSQL databases like MongoDB and Apache Cassandra roughly doubled in popularity (on the expense of Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft), but there was practically no growth in the last 2 years.
There were many new names like Vertica Systems, VoltDB, Tokutek, CitusDB, REthinkDB but those did not pick up.
Anything new worth learning about?
======
eddwinpaz
Id like to learn MongoDB but I think old school non relational data base are
getting more and more popular due to simplicity of data in relation with high
level language.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why good people turn bad online - anotherevan
https://mosaicscience.com/story/why-good-people-turn-bad-online-science-trolls-abuse/
======
rainbowmverse
>> _After collecting data, including from people who had engaged in trolling
behaviour in the past, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil built an algorithm that
predicts with 80 per cent accuracy when someone is about to become abusive
online. This provides an opportunity to, for example, introduce a delay in how
fast they can post their response. If people have to think twice before they
write something, that improves the context of the exchange for everyone:
you’re less likely to witness people misbehaving, and so less likely to
misbehave yourself._
There have been times where HN got super slow or started erroring randomly,
but worked normally in a logged out browser. I assume this is what's
happening.
I'm also very glad for it because I know how I can get if there's no barrier
between my annoyance and the post button. This has helped me be less annoyed
and more self-aware in general.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Green Lights Forever: Analyzing Security of Traffic Infrastructure (2014) [pdf] - chatmasta
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot14/woot14-ghena.pdf
======
spoiledtechie
I've said it for years. If there were any technology that needed to be
radically upgraded, it would be traffic lights. We are still using technology
from over 60 years ago and it simple is one of those hidden, never to be
thought about dream upgrades. Can you imagine the significant differences life
would be made with the updates and upgrades to traffic lights could be made?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
CERN's iPod-like control devices, from 1973 - mfrw
https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2018/02/cerns-ipod-like-control-devices-from.html
======
basicplus2
May just invalidate a few patents..
~~~
eesmith
I read the paper and I'm trying to figure out what "iPod-like" means, and what
patents you think might be broken.
Could you elaborate?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Bashcached – memcached built on bash and ncat - make_now_just
https://github.com/MakeNowJust/bashcached
======
stonewhite
It can be used with a relevant Bash HTTP server for minimal developer learning
curve.
[https://github.com/avleen/bashttpd](https://github.com/avleen/bashttpd)
------
thecopy
Awesome! These small tools built on top of standard GNU tools are so
refreshing.
------
lobo_tuerto
Would be good to see some benchmarks on this! :)
~~~
make_now_just
Sorry. Benchmarks is too wrong to use in production. In fact, it is x200~1000+
slower than real memcached.
------
NelsonMinar
Lovely hackery. If I understand right, line 92 is reading and evaling commands
off a private named pipe.
[https://github.com/MakeNowJust/bashcached/blob/master/bashca...](https://github.com/MakeNowJust/bashcached/blob/master/bashcached#L92)
------
make_now_just
Now, it uses socat instead of ncat because socat is more simple than ncat and
it can cut off lsof.
------
yotamoron
So cool!
------
tokenizerrr
Cool. Why?
~~~
OskarS
Why ask "why" when the delicious question is "why not?"
~~~
tokenizerrr
I do honestly think this is cool. The readme does not make it clear if this is
a joke (which would be fine), or has any practical use whatsoever (which would
be awesome).
------
tener
I wonder how many security holes this thing has. can != should.
~~~
ardacinar
It's obviously more oriented towards testing and stuff (as something
compatible with memcached, but lighter) more than actual production use.
Security holes are a bit less urgent in that case.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Why does Google search redirect links instead of using JavaScript? - thinkloop
I am sure you have noticed that google search results point to a google.com link first instead of the actual result directly. This comes with a heavy price in terms of speed and usability.<p>Why does google not instead silently track the link using JavaScript when JavaScript is available? Is it in case of link sharing? If so, is that not an overly heavy cost for an uncommon use-case?
======
gregjor
I'm not seeing that. Searching for "honda motorcycles" I get a page of links
that look like this:
<a href="https://global.honda/products/motorcycles.html" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://global.honda/products/motorcycles.html&ved=2ahUKEwiZ_IK6wsLrAhVDHjQIHVtRC0EQFjAKegQIBBAB"><br><h3 class="LC20lb DKV0Md">Motorcycles - Honda Global</h3><div class="TbwUpd NJjxre"><cite class="iUh30 gBIQub bc tjvcx">global.honda<span class="eipWBe"> › products › motorcycles</span></cite></div></a>
It uses the ping attribute to track the clicks. Sponsored ad links look a
little different.
I'm using Chrome. I don't think the ping attribute is supported in all
browsers so in other browsers Google most likely does the redirect to
accomplish the same thing -- track clicks on search result links and capture
whatever it can get from the browser.
You can't just "silently track the link using JavaScript." One way or another
Google is going to track clicks on search results, whether through a redirect,
a ping, or JS code sending an AJAX request. However you look at it your
browser is going to make at least one additional HTTP request along with
following the link.
------
kamban
I had noted the same in the past. It does not seem to happen on latest chrome.
As another user pointed, it could be browser specific.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The 10 biggest tech scandals of the decade - paran
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=1947
======
unwind
Two nitpicks that disturbed me:
\- Hans Reiser is said to have developed a "computer filing system", not a
"file system".
\- The rootkit installed by Sony is called "copy-protection software". It was
the other way around, the copy-protection software _also_ included a rootkit,
which is something different.
I'm sure there are more, this article was quite doubt-inspiring on the
quality/editing side of things.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Animated Atari Logo - pajju
http://cssdeck.com/labs/animated-atari-logo
======
vonkow
If anyone's looking for a good front-end dev/designer, they should totally
hire the guy that made this when he gets back from backpacking in China /
Southeast Asia. I've worked with him before and he knows his stuff.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Man, 30, Dies After Attending a ‘Covid Party,’ Texas Hospital Reports - gigama
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/12/us/30-year-old-covid-party-death.html
======
gigama
"It doesn't discriminate and none of us are invincible," Appleby said. "I
don't want to be an alarmist, and we're just trying to share some real-world
examples to help our community realize that this virus is very serious and can
spread easily. In fact, the positivity rate has jumped to 22 percent."
[1] [https://news4sanantonio.com/news/local/i-thought-this-
was-a-...](https://news4sanantonio.com/news/local/i-thought-this-was-a-hoax-
patient-in-their-30s-dies-after-attending-covid-party)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Irish-born English speaker in visa limbo: low score in voice recognition test - ozfive
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-09/voice-recognition-computer-native-english-speaker-visa-limbo/8789076
======
sumo89
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU)
~~~
imrehg
Good ol' Burnistoun :)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1489312/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1489312/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Leap Motion's Augmented-Reality Computing Looks Stupid Cool - Hansi
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/leap-motion-glimpse-at-the-augmented-reality-desktop-of-the-future
======
rabedik
Hi HN, I was one of the engineers who worked on this. It was just a hackathon
demo, but we're really excited about improving the way you interact with your
computer.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Guy accidentally says Google's AMP helps rankings - williamle8300
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puUqJTJVz5A&feature=youtu.be&t=2055
======
sidcool
The way he was cut off says volumes.
------
mdotk
who is the guy?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Make coders develop Blackberry apps, says firm's boss - GotAnyMegadeth
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30932399
======
codezero
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8927539](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8927539)
------
Someone1234
That has absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality. Plus there are serious
logistical and moral issues with forcing companies to produce apps for a
certain product.
Let's take this statement:
> Mr Chen said the same should apply to apps on smartphones, so companies
> would be legally obliged to make versions of their programs equally
> available for all handsets.
I have a Nokia from 2001 which supports Java "apps." These are terrible little
programs developed on the old Java Mobile Framework, and have serious
restrictions placed on what they can do, and run on a terrible little 128 x
128 pixels screen.
Is Mr. Chen suggesting that my Nokia get a copy of every single popular app
produced for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone? And if not then where is the
line. Why should Blackberry get an mandatory app but not some random grey
market phone? Or some out of date handset produced five years ago?
To be honest Mr. Chen's comments are idiotic. They are just dumb. I fully
support Net Neutrality, and additionally if for example Apple started
requiring developers for iOS not to produced apps on other platforms
(including Blackberry) I'd want to see that made illegal for being anti-
competitive.
But right now Apple, Google, or Microsoft place no restrictions of app
developers creating apps for third party platforms. So developers are free to
produce apps on Blackberry, the only reason they likely don't is that
Blackberry doesn't have enough users to justify the cost of doing so.
If Blackberry can make an anticompetitive argument, they should. However this
is not it, not even ballpark.
------
secfirstmd
For a minute I thought this article was from The Onion.
Ridiculous, talking about sour grapes. Basically asking Congress to distort
the market in order to help fix the failings of his crappy companies lazyness
and lack of innovation over the past few years.
~~~
nfoz
There is a lot of nonsense in this piece, and a lot of nonsense out of
Blackberry.
But the one thing you can't criticize them for is "lack of innovation over the
past few years". I have a Blackberry Passport and it is very innovative, it
does stuff nothing else does and wows people when they see it. Of course it
has its faults as well, and Blackberry is a lot more than one product.. but I
would be more careful in my choice of criticism.
~~~
pen2l
> I have a Blackberry Passport and it is very innovative, it does stuff
> nothing else does and wows people when they see it.
Just curious, what are some of these "wow" things?
~~~
nfoz
A few things stick out:
1\. Form factor - it's a big square. That sounds dumb but there are specific
reasons why it's fantastic. Unlike an oblong rectangle, it fits very well in a
pocket; doesn't wobble around. Holding it feels solid... and it makes using
the apps fantastic. I have all the width in the world to view webpages like a
desktop, explore maps with my thumbs, load up spreadsheets (never thought I
would want to do that on my phone, but suddenly it was easy). I can zoom into
things with my thumbs easily. I _love_ the square shape. It also means the
keyboard is an excellent size.
2\. Keyboard - Wide real-physical-buttons keyboard.... which is also a
touchscreen! It's capacitive touch across the _real_ buttons. I've never seen
this anywhere, and it works phenomenally. This is used for a variety of
reasons, mostly subtle features that make typing wonderful. I can backspace a
word by swiping right-to-left across the keyboard. By swiping down across the
keyboard, I load a large set of symbols that appear over the screen's UI, so
now I have 7 rows of buttons easily accessible whenever I want, which is
awesome (I type a lot of symbols!). I can double-"touchscreen-tap" (not click)
on the keyboard to load a "bubble" text-cursor which is super useful for
selecting down-to-the-exact-character-I-want part of text for
select/copy/paste/etc., or even just to navigate around where I'm typing (I
scroll around on the keyboard-touchscreen to move it). It's hard to describe
but there are so many little features built into this thing that make it great
as a power-user.
3\. It's a bit like Linux in the 90's -- there aren't so many apps, but the
base OS gives you _tons_ of features that are important to me as a power-user.
For example, it can aggregate all your messaging from different apps into one
place, where you can create filters for which subsets of messages you care to
see, you can easily prioritize or delete messages, etc. The wide screen helps
with this. Also I have many options for tethering (mobile hotspot, or tether
via USB or bluetooth), screen-sharing via miracast etc., and lots of other
connectivity tools etc.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Samsung to put its voice assistant Bixby in all devices by 2020 - JumpCrisscross
https://www.google.com/amp/www.cityam.com/269405/samsung-put-its-voice-assistant-bixby-all-devices-2020/amp
======
masonic
Rerouts to cityam.com
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: DebOps – Ansible framework for managing Debian-based environments - drybjed
https://github.com/debops/debops/
======
drybjed
Hello, DebOps author here. I thought that I'd write an overview of the project
here for new or interested users.
On a basic level, DebOps is a set of Ansible roles and playbooks that manage
different services and applications on Debian / Ubuntu hosts. The project was
originally designed to manage a data center, but it works fine with a single
host as well.
I'm using and have been actively developing it for the last 6 years at a
medical university where I'm a full time sysadmin, managing 135 virtual
machines spread across 17 on-premise servers. But others who are using DebOps
are using it on the cloud while hosting it on Digital Ocean, Hetzner, AWS and
other cloud hosting providers. Supported operating systems include Debian,
Ubuntu, Raspbian or Devuan.
DebOps has over 160+ Ansible roles and playbooks to set everything you need
from the ground up. This ranges from lower level services such as your host's
firewall to fully fledged applications like GitLab and Nextcloud.
You'll have all the tools you need to set up common web applications written
in various runtimes such as Python, Ruby, Node, PHP, Go and many others. But
DebOps isn't limited to just web applications running on a single server. You
can set up an entire cluster of servers running any workload you want and it's
all secured over TLS. Or if you prefer a Docker / LXC environment, there are
feature-rich Docker and LXC roles to set up a server to run your containerized
applications.
All of the above services are defined as self-contained Ansible roles that can
be used as is or you can mix and match any of DebOps' roles with your own
custom roles and playbooks. To help get you started in a new server
environment, DebOps comes equipped with a common playbook that has a set of
roles that are commonly used on all hosts managed by the project, including
user management, basic services like NTP, OpenSSH, locale configuration,
firewall, and so on.
If you want to start using it, check out the quick start[1] and getting
started guides[2]. The quick start has instructions for getting up and running
quickly with Docker[3] or Vagrant. The getting started guide gives you step by
step instructions on how to configure your DebOps managed environment.
If you have any questions, write a comment here or drop by IRC on Freenode in
the #debops channel.
[1]: [https://docs.debops.org/en/master/introduction/quick-
start.h...](https://docs.debops.org/en/master/introduction/quick-start.html)
[2]: [https://docs.debops.org/en/master/introduction/getting-
start...](https://docs.debops.org/en/master/introduction/getting-started.html)
[3]: docker run -it --rm debops/debops
------
nickjj
A lot of what I learned about managing servers came from this project and
talking to Maciej (the author of DebOps).
I started using DebOps around 5 years ago. I naturally found it after
realizing how much effort it takes to really configure a production ready
server. It was nice to see someone had already invested years of effort into a
project like that. That got me going so much faster than starting at ground
zero (which I did for like 6 months before I found this project and started
contributing to it instead).
I mean, I can write a novel about Maciej but the TL;DR is after 20 years of
freelancing I've never met a single person who is as knowledge as him when it
comes to general sysadmin knowledge, but then you factor in his attention to
detail, patience and work ethic and you end up with something special. 5,200+
commits over 6 years is mind boggling (15+ commits a day on average) and
everything is done by the books (signing off on commits, impeccable changelog,
etc.). The project is ran with code quality standards that rival / exceed some
major open source projects.
All I'll say is, I'm very happy to have met him and to have stumbled upon his
creation all those years ago. We are lucky to have such high quality Ansible
material to use freely.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
China’s Mobike plans move into services and international expansion - janober
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/mobike-cto-joe-xia-techcrunch-china-shenzhen
======
IIAOPSW
I'm in China and use Mobike a lot. I've said it before and I'll say it again.
MoBike totally nails it. In terms of bike sharing they blow everything out of
the water. The bikes work, the unlocking via app is quick, the prices are
reasonable, and you can park anywhere. To anyone who says China can't
innovate, this will take the wind out of your sails. I think they will be the
first Chinese startup to become a consumer juggernaut on par with Airbnb or
Uber.
~~~
jk2323
I would bet against it.
Germany had the best tank in WW2. The "royal tiger". But the Russian T34 was
much cheaper. They outproduced Germany.
MoBikes are expensive and heavy. They look over-engineered for the problem
they are trying to solve. Compare this with the yellow bkes ofo. They seem to
be much cheaper to produce and are much lighter (no GPS positioning system,
location is saved by last cyclist during checkout).
~~~
crdb
Ofos get stolen. There are almost none left in Singapore. All you need to do
is remember the PIN, and scratch out the serial.
The "overengineered" Mobikes and oBikes (a competitor with very similar bikes
- solar panels for the electronics, GPS lock, etc.) are all that is left in
our streets.
~~~
dis-sys
Not sure which mobike model you guys have in Singapore, the ones in
Shanghai/Beijing have pretty poor user experience, it just feel so heavy
thanks to its chain-less design.
~~~
ttflee
Try its 4th gen bicycles with chains.
~~~
dis-sys
solid tyres? then still the same heavy feeling.
------
dis-sys
the entire bicycle manufacturing industry is being wiped out thanks to Mobike
and its competitor ofo (each has about 50% of market share). one of them
ordered 5 million bikes a couple months back, according to the files submitted
to the Chinese regulator, the manufacturer building those bikes are making
less than 1.5 USD per bike - you don't need to be smart to imagine the
conditions faced by those workers actually building the bikes.
bike shops around the country are being shutdown as people no longer
buy/upgrade/repair their own bikes, they rent one for 6 USD cent each ride.
you see less fun/cool/stupid/crappy bikes on street, they all look the same
now.
do they reduce emission? well, rather than walking to the metro stations to
catch metro people now ride a mobike/ofo to catch the metro, I don't see any
reduced cars on street. There is no stats to back the reduced emission story
at all - otherwise you'd be seeing them pointing to those figures jumping up
and down on daily basis.
do they make cities better? well, see photos below, remember - they don't
clean up their mess, they just deploy their tens of millions cheap bikes onto
your streets.
[http://img.mp.itc.cn/upload/20170327/3e5e188412ef46ca892d20f...](http://img.mp.itc.cn/upload/20170327/3e5e188412ef46ca892d20f57d6a7ab3_th.jpeg)
[http://s2.imbiker.cn/201705/22/b25b38ba8cda6df9c686657044f48...](http://s2.imbiker.cn/201705/22/b25b38ba8cda6df9c686657044f4813d.jpeg)
~~~
rahimnathwani
"the entire bicycle manufacturing industry is being wiped out thanks to Mobike
and its competitor ofo"
If fewer bicycles are being produced due to higher usage per bike, that's good
for the environment, right? Even if reduces the size of the bicycle
manufacturing market.
"manufacturer building those bikes are making less than 1.5 USD per bike - you
don't need to be smart to imagine the conditions faced by those workers
actually building the bikes."
I don't see how the profit made my bicycle manufacturers affects worker
conditions. These are determined by the overall labour market, as these
workers aren't bicycle specialists.
"I don't see any reduced cars on street."
The effect would have to be huge in order for you to be able to notice it.
(I'm assuming you didn't actually collect data.)
"do they make cities better?"
Yes. The subway journey from my place to work is unacceptably long, due to the
long walk at one end. Mobike has solved that problem. Three-wheeler electric
tuktuks riding the wrong way down the service lane are less prevalent now,
too, which is a bonus.
~~~
dis-sys
"If fewer bicycles are being produced due to higher usage per bike, that's
good for the environment, right?"
The manufacturers are being hit hard because their profit margin is squeezed
to the absolute limit. 8 RMB or less than 1.5 USD is the profit you get for
building and shipping a bike. With this in mind, do you seriously believe that
they are going to maintain the same level of control to limit pollution when
making those bikes? Well, your room for environmental protection is now at
less than 1.5 USD each bike, that is assuming the manufacturer is willing to
give up _ALL_ profit to battle pollution caused during production.
"Yes. The subway journey from my place to work is unacceptably long, due to
the long walk at one end. Mobike has solved that problem. Three-wheeler
electric tuktuks riding the wrong way down the service lane are less prevalent
now, too, which is a bonus."
Great, would you like to share a few photos on how the metro station look like
during peak hours? let's focus on those mobike/ofo pollution outside the
station. I have a few for you:
[http://www.52qixiang.com/uploads/allimg/170421/1-1F4211AU9.j...](http://www.52qixiang.com/uploads/allimg/170421/1-1F4211AU9.jpg)
[http://p3.pstatp.com/origin/1b7a00067dfae9a90762](http://p3.pstatp.com/origin/1b7a00067dfae9a90762)
~~~
rahimnathwani
"do you seriously believe that they are going to maintain the same level of
control to limit pollution when making those bikes?"
I believe that the level of profit they make has no impact on the level of
control to limit pollution. Their actions in regard to pollution will be
driven by whatever (dis)incentives are put in place by government regulations.
"that is assuming the manufacturer is willing to give up _ALL_ profit to
battle pollution caused during production"
That is assuming that the profit figure doesn't already reflect any costs for
'battling pollution'.
"let's focus on those mobike/ofo pollution outside the station"
You're using the word 'pollution' in a different sense than I was, and in a
wider sense than the common usage. I was talking about air quality, and I
guess you knew that. You're talking about space taken up on the pavement, a
very different problem.
------
beefsack
People are talking about Mobike being innovators, and their business sounds
like it's doing really well, but bike sharing is a concept that's been around
for a while. Melbourne Bike Share[1] was founded in 2010, though apparently
the bike sharing concept was around in Europe since the 60s[2].
People suggest Melbourne Bike Share was largely unsuccessful due to mandatory
helmet laws in Australia making them a bit inconvenient. I'm sure there will
be idiosyncrasies in certain places which make the concept less appealing.
In saying that though, I really wish there was a service like this when I
lived in Guangzhou. I think it's a great fit for very dense cities.
[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_Bike_Share](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_Bike_Share)
[2]: "Runde Sache". Readers Digest Deutschland (in German). 06/11: 74–75. June
2011.
~~~
rorykoehler
The sharing schemes in Europe and MoBike are completely different. The
dockless nature of MoBike, Ofo, Obike etc is an order of magnitude game
changer. I pick up a bike from below my block, ride it anywhere and just leave
it there. I use it many times a day. When I lived in Europe I never once used
the docked bike sharing services.
------
captainmuon
I would love to introduce this to my country, Germany. I think in large cities
it might work well, especially for the last meters after public transport, but
also in university towns. We already have rentable bikes, but Ofo and Mobike
proved that you don't have to have overengineered docking stations and
complicated locks. If you let people just leave the bikes where they want, it
works surprisingly well.
Problems are:
\- I have no capital, and you'd need a high investment upfront. Even the
simplest bike is not going to cost less than 200-300 €, and those are not the
most durable. Also, in Germany you require light. However, I think Ofo has
proven that you do not need GPS or electronic locks (initially), and you don't
need docking stations.
\- Germans sometimes hate new things. It is my gut feeling that I'd get a lot
of resistance. Especially after the first accident, or the first bike gets
thrown into a river. One problem is that in Beijing, apparently there is an
Ofo graveyard. I haven't seen it myself, but broken Ofo bikes are piling
meters high. You just need one bad competitor who creates a mess, and the
whole idea is in danger.
But:
\- As a renter, you are not obliged to get insurance for the riders AFAIK.
\- Bike infrastructure is good already.
\- It should be possible to make a sustainable business, but you'd have to
reach a certain scale.
~~~
sveme
Don't you have Callabike in your city? It's exactly the same concept, the lock
isn't complicated and it all works like a charm. Use the app to find one, ride
to wherever you want to, leave it there and log out. Then there's Nextbike,
which I haven't used yet but works similarly and stuff from local public
transportation companies like MVG Rad in Munich which has stations but allows
you to leave the bike also in a certain area. How does Mobike provide more
than these offerings?
~~~
captainmuon
Yes, but in my town you can only pick them up at the train station and have to
bring them back there. In larger cities there are more stations, or in some
places you can leave them anywhere, but I've never been to a place where they
were abundant. From what I've heard, Munich is a particularly good place.
The difference to the chinese bikes is:
\- The chinese bikes are dirt simple. They sometimes have reliability-oriented
features like special tires, otherwise they are just commodity bikes with a
lock, painted colorful. Call a bike in contrast is really overengineered, with
custom frame and everything. (OK, this is more of an advantage for the company
than for the user.)
\- There are no stations. This is the big difference. Where ever I can walk, I
can ride faster. I never look for a bike, I just grab one when I find it.
\- The bicyles are absolutely abundant. Even at a small subway station in
beijing, there are at least 50 of each brand. Contrast it with Hamburg, where
in the city center, 2 stops away from the central station, you find a sad
docking station with eight empty places. Maybe this is only possible due to
"chinese scale", I don't know.
------
ttflee
Mobike and other sharing bicycle competitors has been in a fierce fight for
three months.
From sometime this April to two to three weeks ago, it is not only free riding
a Mobike, but there is also a chance of random amount of cash gift, known as
Hong Bao. I have personally earned about $40 of cash by riding Mobike, the
amount of which almost reaches the deposit for renting the bike.
~~~
dis-sys
because they are both backed by major investors with access to unlimited cash.
they don't invest in those bikes, your deposit covers that, they don't manage
those bikes, what else to spend their cash on?
well, they picked the easiest way - they pay their users to use their
services.
~~~
ttflee
Even if my deposit had covered the gift cash, what I have got would be too
much in the sense of annualized returns. They just burned incredible amount of
investor's money in this campaign. It would be crucial which of them drains
its revenue first/last. I guess the investors would be in favor of a merger,
then.
------
wellinever
Governments should be forcing these operators to place the bike deposits in a
trust account, rather than using the money for capital to fund expansion. I
paid $50 USD as a "deposit" for oBike, however in the future when one of these
companies fails, they will take millions in deposits with them. Especially if
the bikes are getting stolen or wrecked.
------
owens99
Mobike is innovative, however, the competition is becoming so fierce with at
least 10 major copy cats here in Shanghai. The unit economics of this model is
being destroyed by the follower mindset in China's tech scene.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
National Videogame Museum Chronicles the Power of the Pixelated Arts - 6stringmerc
http://www.dallasobserver.com/arts/friscos-national-videogame-museum-chronicles-the-power-of-the-pixelated-arts-8196105
======
VonGuard
In the Bay Area?
Come visit the MADE! [http://www.themade.org](http://www.themade.org) We're a
lot closer!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Good working spaces in London (late night pref) - stegosaurus
Sometimes it's refreshing to get out of the house.<p>Any recommendations for good working spaces? Cafes, bars, libraries, whatever?<p>I'm finding it really hard to find a place that closes after, say, 9pm.
======
northernmonkey
It's difficult. There are surprisingly few decent ad-hoc work places in
London. I suggest looking at
[http://workhardanywhere.com](http://workhardanywhere.com)
~~~
stegosaurus
Yes, it's really odd! I used to work at St.Oberholz in Berlin. It was open
until midnight and had a fantastic vibe.
Thanks for the link but I don't have a device to download the 'app' to, so the
search continues...
------
aysha_a1i
Hi! Look Mum No Hands at 49 Old Street is pretty good & usually open past at
least 10pm.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Who watches the watchers? --shirt - jjsz
http://teespring.com/opengov
======
jjsz
I'll appreciate any criticism and advice.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Using Microscheme to write a keyboard controller, part 1 - technomancy
http://atreus.technomancy.us/firmware
======
blt
Cool to see languages besides C running on small hardware.
I would guess that memory consumption, not speed, is the limiting factor vs.
C. I skimmed through the source code and couldn't find a way to define
heterogeneous packed data types (i.e. structs). That would be a serious turn-
off for me. Cons cells are a lot of overhead. At least it has vectors.
~~~
technomancy
That's true; on the ATMega32u4 it's the 2.5kb of RAM that kills you. The 16MHz
clock speed is plenty fast for most microcontroller applications. That's why
Microscheme is just a subset of Scheme; there are no continuations or runtime
eval in order to save memory.
It's true that there are no structs, but it wouldn't be much of a stretch to
add them. There's a discussion of writing a macroexpander in another Scheme
runtime like Guile which can compile macros to microscheme output. (This is a
bit like how ClojureScript lacks runtime eval but allows you to write compile-
time macros in Clojure.) Writing a define-struct macro that compiles to
vector-ref at runtime would be pretty trivial once you have a macroexpander
working.
https://github.com/ryansuchocki/microscheme/issues/8
If you're interested in hacking on a small Scheme implementation, I'd
encourage you to give it a go. The author is very responsive and friendly.
~~~
rasz_pl
>That's true; on the ATMega32u4 it's the 2.5kb of RAM
I blame arduino, 70Mips >40KB ram STM32/dsPIC is same price, but teach sheep
arduino and they will only know arduino.
~~~
technomancy
For the vast majority of hobbyist electronics, good documentation is way more
important than specs.
~~~
sitkack
And a low latency toolchain that is easy to setup.
------
platz
This is nice - after recently building an ergodox I've been curious to
understand better the 'matrix scan' and how it's achieved, this should help
significantly.
Aside - Kind of an impressive project to replace firmware on various
keyboards, including the ability "run small compiled programs written in a
C-like language" (compiled with haskell) with a "Built-in virtual machine
interpreter for running up to six concurrent independent tasks"
[https://github.com/chrisandreae/keyboard-
firmware](https://github.com/chrisandreae/keyboard-firmware)
------
jhallenworld
I'm wondering if the USB protocol tax now allows you to run Scheme. I mean if
you didn't need USB you could use something like the PIC16F54 (512 ROM, 25
bytes of RAM) for $0.39 each... but you will almost certainly write the code
in assembly language. I tried to find the cheapest microcontroller with USB
support: I found C8051T622-GM ($0.982), with its luxurious 16KB of ROM and
1.25K of RAM. Curious if Microscheme will run on this- nope, it only supports
Atmega..
Atmega32u4 is like $3.43.. too much when you consider that you can buy a
keyboard for $4.00.
~~~
pkhuong
Looks like PICBIT is finally open source:
[https://github.com/stamourv/picobit](https://github.com/stamourv/picobit)
We use(d?) it at U of Montreal to drive small PIC18 robots. Except for the one
time I had to debug its GC, it was a fine platform, even for HS students.
~~~
_sh
I doubt PICBIT (or Microscheme for that matter) could run on the PIC16 family,
with it's 25 bytes of RAM. Wouldn't be much of stretch to port Microscheme to
PIC18s though (with 512+ bytes of RAM), the code generator is pretty straight-
forward:
[https://github.com/ryansuchocki/microscheme/blob/master/src/...](https://github.com/ryansuchocki/microscheme/blob/master/src/codegen.c)
------
agbell
I have an ergodox, and I love the look of this Atreus keyboard. I would love
to see better firmware support for more advanced keyboard features like dual
role keys and one shot modifiers, for ergodox and its descendants.
Right now the tmk firmware has the best support for these features, but I'm
having to do a lot of monkeying around with it to get dual role keys to work
in the home row without interfering with my normal typing.
For example, holding the 'f' or 'j' key acts as CTRL, but tapping works
normally.
~~~
technomancy
(original author here)
The TMK firmware works on the Atreus keyboards too; I used it for a while
before writing my own firmware. I plan on putting up some better docs soon on
how to use it with the Atreus if you want some of these more advanced
features.
From a learning perspective it's also nice to have a dramatically simpler
firmware too. The initial version of the C atreus-firmware codebase was just
over 100 lines.
~~~
agbell
Yeah, there is value in simplicity. I am trying to understand tmk to modify it
and it is a challenge.
At some point I want to make something like the Atreus but with a bit more
buttons. Basically the ergodox without the thumbs pads and most of the bottom
row and without a split.
On the subject of keymaps, it seems like a finite state machine with
transitions on down and release. I haven't seen any firmware try that yet.
Perhaps its the debouncing logic which makes that too complicated.
Keep up the good work!
------
blt
Cool to see languages besides C running on small hardware.
I would guess that memory consumption, not speed, is the limiting factor vs. C
in many applications. I skimmed through the source code and couldn't find a
way to define heterogeneous packed data types (i.e. structs). That would be a
serious turn-off for me. Cons cells take a lot of extra space. At least it has
vectors.
------
blt
Cool to see languages besides C running on small hardware.
I would guess that memory consumption, not speed, is the limiting factor vs.
C. I skimmed through the source code and couldn't find a way to define
heterogeneous packed data types (i.e. structs). That would be a serious turn-
off for me. Cons cells are a lot of overhead. At least it has vectors.
------
blt
Cool to see languages besides C running on small hardware.
I would guess that memory consumption, not speed, is the limiting factor vs.
C. I skimmed through the source code and couldn't find a way to define
heterogeneous packed data types (i.e. structs). That would be a serious turn-
off for me. Cons cells are a lot of overhead. At least it has vectors.
------
blt
Cool to see languages besides C running on small hardware.
I would guess that memory consumption, not speed, is the limiting factor vs.
C. I skimmed through the source code and couldn't find a way to define
heterogeneous packed data types (i.e. structs). That would be a serious turn-
off for me. Cons cells are a lot of overhead. At least it has vectors.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How many IT Consultants does it take to migrate a business into the cloud? - ManuJ
http://www.getapp.com/blog/how-many-it-consultants-does-it-take-to-migrate-a-business-into-the-cloud/
======
eitally
If you're only using consultants you're doing it wrong. I moved 16,000
employees to Gmail in three months, but the pilot and preparation phases
lasted 12 months. It took about 6 dedicated internal staffers to work the
project and multiple thousands of hours of localized and personalized training
led by other IT employees. ... and I'd consider this a big success. Compare it
to the City of LA's Gmail migration, which is being conducted almost
completely by CSC and moving very slowly (at significant expense).
~~~
eitally
Captain Obvious: It's even worse if you're doing anything related to critical
business systems. This was just a simplistic example to get the ball rolling.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Own a Shape - rglover
http://interuserface.net/2011/06/own-a-shape/
======
pedalpete
I disagree with this. Would anybody be able to identify the shape associated
with the brand without the brand logo being shown as well?
Though shape and color combined may hint at the brand, owning a shape is
extremely challenging. There are only so many shapes to go around, hence the
attempt to differentiate the RIM roundrect to the Apple roundrect.
Where does HP use the circle? It's in it's logo. Is it used elsewhere in HP
interfaces?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Jacob Appelbaum: Inconsistencies in Rape Allegations - Tomte
http://www.zeit.de/kultur/2016-08/jacob-appelbaum-rape-allegations-contradictions
======
cjbprime
Seems like an irresponsible article -- there were many credible reports, some
even given by people who've seen identified themselves with real names, and
this article casts doubt on two anonymous reports without mentioning the
others and talking about their credibility.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why should children program? A review of Seymour Papert's Mindstorms - dannas
http://dannas.github.io/2016/08/27/review-of-seymor-paperts-mindstorms.html
======
todd8
At my age I can barely read the article's thin, small, low-contrast font, but
I believe that I agree with the author. I read Mindstorms back when it was
first published and thought it was reasonable. Now, I'm more skeptical. I see
the early introduction of technology into schools as distractions.
I have the benefit of experiencing life before the impact of computers on
society. Heck, my parents wouldn't even let me get toys that required
batteries (too expensive to replace). So, I played with toy trucks and I read
and I climbed trees and I drew. I drew pictures of locks, of circuits, of
mazes, of buildings.
My own children grew up very differently. Playing video games, and their
schools insisted on early introduction of laptops, convertible laptop/tablets,
and iPads. At an age where I would be drawing complicated diagrams of
electrical relays to play tick-tack-toe (which, because I was just a 13 year
old kid with no training would have never worked) they played XBox.
I tried to get the schools to use paper and pencil for math lessons instead of
iPads, but the forces at work in school systems end up encouraging many
distracting technologies being introduced with no discernible benefit.
Furthermore, the development of abstract thinking, necessary for programming,
happens over time in children. Is there any evidence that early programming
instruction hastens it's development? Real research in education seems pretty
weak.
~~~
sneak
Perhaps the false dichotomy of electrical/paper is obscuring the very real one
of video games/not video games.
Playing XBox is a waste of time in any generation.
~~~
taliesinb
That's too easy. Think of a game like Civilization. Granted, it's limited what
you can learn from reading the in-game Civopedia, but probably thousands of
kids have more awareness and interest in the historical progression of human
civilization from playing that game.
And even if it is superficial awareness, those kinds of games exercise the
fantasy-making faculties that make history itself interesting to learn about,
even later as an adult.
Another example. There was this flop of a game in the early 90s, called
SimEarth, that I have very fond memories of. It taught me about the Gaia
hypothesis and the carbon cycle and stuff. Gameplay was pretty wacky though.
~~~
todd8
I remember SimEarth a modern version could be very educational, but not Gaia,
isn't it a wacky theory?
~~~
taliesinb
Hehe, yeah. Worse, it's a _wrong_ theory. But still kinda interesting, no harm
learning about it.
Agree a modern SimEarth would be awesome.
------
bobbylox
If you find this essay compelling, you might be interested in the game I'm
working on, Codemancer (
[http://codemancergame.com/](http://codemancergame.com/) ). A game that
teaches programming, with a compelling story about a girl on a journey to
rescue her Father. Coming this Fall to Mac, PC and Tablets.
I tried to hew closely to the principles of Constructionism which were
pioneered by Papert, and to make the game accessible to kids who wouldn't
normally be interested in programming.
~~~
MichaelGG
Love the look. And female protagonist is a huge plus - I've two daughters and
it amazes me just how much they _really_ want female characters. As a boy I
didn't care but perhaps I was unusual.
My first question is how will this teach the use of variables and conditional
logic? My daughter has been playing around with programming using Scratch and
things like that. But she is stuck with just linear "programs", basically just
creating animated stories.
There's other games that seem to have the same mechanics as yours: get the
robot from A to B by entering sequential instructions. How do you
differentiate? (I mean this as a positive question not a bad criticism.)
I've tried sitting down with her and doing some basics of functions, but it
doesn't seem to go over well (she's 10). She _did_ love DragonBox, the
algebra-instruction game. Even at 6 she was able to "solve for x" for simple
equations. So I think it's possible to sneak stuff in, somehow.
~~~
bobbylox
Yes, I find that to be the case more often than not: boys don't care about the
gender of their avatar. Girls do.
Codemancer has variables and conditionals, and uses them for various things.
Some of the game is very tactical, so conditionals are used to deal with
enemies who have semi-random behaviour. There are also levels that take place
"in the dark" (with a limited field of view).
Yes, "code your way to the target" games have become somewhat of a genre. I
think the story is one source of differentiation, as is the programming
interface -- Codemancer has no numbers greater than 5 (arithmetic is mod 6),
to keep the game from getting math-heavy. All the functions are symbolic, so
there's no reading required.
In Codemancer user-defined functions are "pages" in your spell book. Players
can call other pages, and even the page they're on (this is much later in the
game). You can also Cast a page onto an enemy who has been weakened. We've
seen that kids are pretty comfortable with the idiom of "Pages."
~~~
akkartik
Interesting. Do 'pages' support being called with arguments? That was the
place I found things like LightBot to be lacking.
~~~
bobbylox
Yes, in a roundabout way -- feeding arguments sets the variables on that page.
------
erikpukinskis
Preface: I'm going to use a really loose definition of AI here for a minute,
which includes any computer agent that makes decisions a human might make. So,
your alarm clock is an AI, the code that rejects your credit application is an
AI, but the code that decides how exactly to paint this letter C is not. Now
on to my comment:
I think children should learn to think about programs at a young age, because
understanding AIs will be equally as important as understanding other humans
in the coming century.
We will see more and more interaction with AIs who have powerful capabilities
beyond what most humans can do. We will start to see AIs with emotional
palettes and developmental trajectories that will allow them to integrate with
us socially. But also, the little AIs like the alarm clock and the credit
check are already more and more common gating structures in peoples' lives.
As long as the majority doesn't think about programs too much, you can ignore
them too. But as more and more people program, like reading it will become
more and more of a disability not to. Being able to think "natively" in
software is going to be important. Not mandatory, but important.
Why isn't that employment AI you met finding any construction jobs for you?
Does the physician AI really understand the probability that your Dad is NOT,
zero probability, going to cut back his saturated fat? Your gardening AI
(which is crossed with several other AIs that help you manage your household)
says to plant corn, but your neighbors haven't yet, does it know something
they don't?
If you can read code, those are questions you can ask.
~~~
twa927
I think you are severely underestimating difficulty of understanding non-
trivial code. Even good programmers would need days if not weeks to understand
how software like card processing AI works. And even when you understand the
code behind it the AI like deep networks produce models that cannot tell to a
human "how" it works.
So when a person uses a software component for real-life purposes I don't
think there's a difference between someone who knows how to code and someone
who doesn't - it's a black box.
~~~
erikpukinskis
> Even good programmers would need days if not weeks to understand how
> software like card processing AI works
I think there will be a shift in how we design software. Right now, software
is mostly organized into monolithic packages which are about the maximum size
a professional developer can make sense of in 40 hours per week. For the most
part, all corners of the codebase are written with the expectation that they
will be read by an expert in the language who understands the whole codebase.
Lots of side effects, advanced control structures, etc. In order for
programming literacy to take off, we will first have to start organizing some
of our software for widespread human understanding.
Instead of one giant pro-level repository, you will have a toplevel layer
which is mostly configuration code, but which is written in very domain-
relevant language, using only simple programming primitives: functions and
literals. It will be boxed into small, understandable modules, and editable in
a browser like any simple document.
The next layer down will be generic algorithms and data structures, also
written using simple programming primitives, and designed with very forgiving
APIs, again using as much domain-specific language as possible and pushing
non-domain specific implementation details down into libraries.
The third layer will be implementation-specific code, highly optimized, using
the full spectrum of language tools and programming constructs. Only the
domain of professional programmers.
Everyone, including children and executives will dabble in the top layer.
Domain professionals (everyone in your organization who is not a full-time
programmer) will work in the second layer, only in the part of the software
that they specifically interact with in their work. Full-time coders will
maintain the third layer, and will think of their role more as a support role,
building tools to support the organization, rather than maintaining total
control over the codebase.
~~~
twa927
So far there were multiple approaches that looked something like what you
described: component programming, visual programming, "4GL" languages. Heck,
even Steve Jobs wanted to sell software components. But these things failed.
"Coding" won.
~~~
erikpukinskis
Nothing I described is "not coding". I described using a subset of existing
language constructs for certain parts of a codebase, and structuring some
interfaces in a certain way.
I certainly didn't say anything about visual programming.
4GL... I think you meant something else there? Ruby and PHP are 4th generation
languages and are obviously doing quite well.
As for component programming... I think that's the closest historical
precedent for what I'm describing so I'll go deeper there...
Unlike "component people", I don't think there is any single interface for
high level domain-specific libraries. Every domain will be different. Objects
are certainly not a panacea. And I have no illusions that domain-specific
libraries would ever be automatically compatible with one another. I have no
illusions of some universe of easily integrated components. I'm just talking
about an isolated, high-level API on top of a single, internally consistent
codebase.
A simple example, instead of a repo with a bunch of configuration data and a
"start" command, build a service as a library without any deployment
specifics, and then have a separate repo that has a simple script that uses
that library to set up a specific instance.
Or, build a site as a library without any content, and then have a separate
repo that just binds in the content to the app, so that anyone could play
around with the content without having to dig through the implementation
details, and with a smaller chance of breaking something.
It's just about separating the part of the codebase that vaguely makes sense
to non-engineers from the part of the codebase that makes zero sense. I'm not
talking about any kind of radical technological shift.
~~~
twa927
> 4GL... I think you meant something else there? Ruby and PHP are 4th
> generation languages and are obviously doing quite well.
I meant languages with integrated GUIs and databases:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-
generation_programming_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-
generation_programming_language)
> A simple example, instead of a repo with a bunch of configuration data and a
> "start" command, build a service as a library without any deployment
> specifics, and then have a separate repo that has a simple script that uses
> that library to set up a specific instance.
If the service does something useful then it must use things like databases
and external APIs. So you need interfaces to abstract them - and they will be
big and complex. It looks like you end with the "component problem"?
------
Fiahil
I used to play a lot with Lego when I was young, and programming is not much
different from that.
Given a simple manual and a set of basic pieces you learn on your own the
basics, and then move to higher order constructions by experimentation. I bet
you can just give a child a basic black and white terminal and a "refined
documentation", and they'll be okay just as much. Just remove everything
unnecessary and sandbox the whole thing (you should expect the kids to break
it to install games at some point, but that's okay).
~~~
taliesinb
... segue to the wonderful LEGO Mindstorms, named after Papert's book, which
had a graphical programming language very similar to Squeak, which itself goes
back to Kay's dynabook, influenced by Papert.
OT, but I'm very grateful to Mindstorms, it took me to the next level when I
was a teen, from QBasic to C. Not because of its visual block language, which
I hated as I could already code, but because I found out about a thing called
NQC (Not Quite C).
NQC was a hobbled dialect of C that you could use instead of the LEGO's visual
language to program the RCX (the main computer brick with batteries in it).
I'd never tried C before, and it was a _revelation_.
And it unlocked wondrous hacks, like using the IrDA transceiver on the RCX as
a psuedo-lidar so that your robot could stop short of walls, it could even
estimate distance. At the time, it was so cool to me. From playing with my
stumbling robot trying not to hit obstacles I got interested in Rodney Brooks
and subsumption architectures. So it just inflamed my passions in AI and
programming at a critical part of my adolescence.
Ironic, though, that a Papert-inspired graphical language was the antagonist
in this story. The breakthrough came from wanting to scale the walls of the
little garden LEGO had built.
~~~
erlehmann_
> And it unlocked wondrous hacks, like using the IrDA transceiver on the RCX
> as a psuedo-lidar so that your robot could stop short of walls, it could
> even estimate distance.
Ha, I did that as well with Mindstorms RCX in like 11th grade or so! Later, in
university, Mindstorms NXT was used: Our first assignment was to follow a
track on the ground and the team I was the only one had two programs, one for
recording the track with the sensors and another for following the previously
recorded track in high speed without using sensors at all.
~~~
taliesinb
Cool hack. So you had to do multiple laps? It's interesting that dead
reckoning actually worked, we had lacquered wooden floor in my house and the
slip was quite bad, dead reckoning never worked.
~~~
erlehmann_
We were allowed to do multiple laps. I stopped attending the (non-mandatory)
course after I saw that the other teams were no challenge and some even had
problems to just follow a line.
------
Whackbat
To write good programs that provide any useful functionality often a solid
understanding of architecture and Mathematics is required. These skills are
better understood in my opinion without focusing on software development as
the end goal. A child is likely to be self motivated to write software if they
have these skills and, most importantly, a desire to do so.
~~~
tzakrajs
Mathematics? Wat? Software development is way more intuitive than mathematics
and high level abstraction obviates the need for mathematics skill.
~~~
khedoros
Mathematical concepts are usually pretty intuitive. I think that the problem
is more the notation that we teach than math itself being unintuitive and
difficult.
I'd also say that programming is a mathematical endeavor by nature; logical
manipulation is a branch of mathematics. If you're working at a level of
abstraction where you aren't specifying logical manipulations, then you're
filling out a template, not what I'd call "programming".
------
conceptpad
"Learning from Seymour Papert" \- MIT Media Lab Published on Aug 1, 2016 A
panel from the Spring 2014 Member Event. Panelists: Mitch Resnick, Marvin
Minsky, Alan Kay, and Nicholas Negroponte.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvgef9ABDUc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvgef9ABDUc)
------
endswapper
I think children should program, and I think they should do it as early as
possible. It's a form of mental calisthenics that when coupled with the right
parent/mentor will prove invaluable in development and beyond.
In the same way that child gymnasts(or insert appropriate example) get the
benefits of developing physical strength and range of motion I think child
programmers can reap mental benefits.
I think most education is focused on data accumulation as opposed versatility.
Usually, it is when you get to some level of advanced education that it starts
to teach you how to think. I think that is backwards, but perhaps a different
conversation. For example, my lawyer friends are quite proud that their law
degree "taught them how to think."
What I find most exhilarating (yes, exhilarating) about programming is the
problem solving aspect, which forces you to think differently. Finding comfort
in patterns has a certain pleasantness to it, however, my experience is that
you will eventually run in to situations that challenge your experience and
expectations. For me, that's not just a benefit of programming, but a metaphor
for life.
The more modes of thinking, or perspectives you possess the better you
understand yourself, how you think, your strengths and weaknesses. Then you
can hack yourself to improve or leverage each.
------
kpwagner
His conclusion, to "not try to make programmers out of kids, but rather enable
kids to be makers", seems like the right idea. "Hacky coding", which would be
an accurate description for the programming I've done outside of front-end
dev, is comparable to "making". Making is more about creativity and trying
than syntax and optimization.
It's not about encouraging mediocrity; it's about saying there's nothing wrong
with failing.
------
nicolethenerd
This is a bit of a tangent, but you guys seem like the right crowd. Logo has
been on my mind the past few days, as I'm rapidly approaching my 20th
"codeversary" (ie. 20 years since my very first programming lesson, in what I
believe was Berkeley Logo). To mark the occasion, I've been trying to figure
out what a Logo tribute tattoo might look like - the "turtle" is the obvious
thing that comes to mind, but in the version of Logo I learned on, the
"turtle" was just a triangle. I'm trying to come up with an image that's
aesthetically pleasing, doesn't actually include any code, and is recognizable
as Logo. So maybe the "turtle" drawing something, but what? (No idea whether
I'll actually muster the courage to get this inked on my body, but it's a fun
thought exercise either way.) Any ideas?
~~~
sn9
The obvious solution to me is an image of a turtle in the process of being
drawn by a Logo triangle.
You'd want it to be incomplete, but complete enough to have transformed from
an arrangement of lines to something that's unambiguously a turtle.
~~~
nicolethenerd
Thanks! Or a turtle being drawn by a turtle being drawn by a turtle... turtles
all the way down! ^_^
Seriously, though - I appreciate the suggestion - I was thinking of triangles
drawing triangles, and turtles drawing turtles - but it didn't occur to me to
mix the two. Great idea!
~~~
Intermernet
> triangles drawing triangles
Reminds me of a Sierpinski triangle[1]. Can you have a turtle infilled with
the Sierpinski pattern, or maybe a Sierpinski triangle being drawn by a
turtle?
Also, you could get a tattoo with something like:
to e :s :l
if :l>0[repeat 3[e :s/2 :l-1 fd :s rt 120]]
end
e 99 5
Which is Logo code to draw a Sierpinski triangle (main credit [2], you can
demo at [3]).
[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpinski_triangle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpinski_triangle)
[2]:
[http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/10793](http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/10793)
[3]: [http://www.calormen.com/jslogo/](http://www.calormen.com/jslogo/)
------
pfooti
If you liked this essay (which I did), you are probably going to be interested
in Audrey Watters's Hack Education blog. [0]
In particular there is a big difference between the kinds of Papert-inspired
computatiinal environments that provide microworlds for learning and a lot of
what is being produced today (which Watters rightly calls out as a rediscovery
of Skinner behaviorism and teaching machines). She has a lot of content and a
couple of essay collections.
0: [http://hackeducation.com/](http://hackeducation.com/)
------
gavinpc
Thoughtful and clearly written. I also have a six-year-old daughter and many
of the same concerns.
Even as a shameless Alan Kay fanboy, I'd managed to miss his 2007 TED talk
until last night. It includes a kind of front-to-back demo of how they were
using computers (and other means) to teach six-year-olds at that time, which I
haven't seen in his longer talks for technical audiences.
[https://archive.org/details/AlanKay_2007](https://archive.org/details/AlanKay_2007)
~~~
e12e
Also related, Alan Kay's talk on "Rethinking CS education (2015)":
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N9c7_8Gp7gI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N9c7_8Gp7gI)
------
vegabook
they shouldn't. They will be subjected to a relentless digital world from age
10 onwards, and before that, they should at least be given the chance to fully
bathe themselves in our intrinsically analogue reality, with all its subtle,
unabstracted, and beautiful detail.
------
twa927
I think programming is for adults. Programming abstractions we use and ways of
thinking are tailored to an adult's brain. I think that "programming"
environments for children are SOMETHING DIFFERENT than real-world's
programming. I don't see how what you learn in the former translates to the
latter.
I remember actually not liking programming when introduced in a school. They
didn't teach abstractions like functions, data types but rather long, math-
oriented series of instructions which needed visualizing in a notebook to
understand (I think environments like MIT's Scratch are something similar). I
only started to love programming when I saw it consists mainly of things like
functions, objects, different data types. But this kind of things is probably
too abstract for a kid to understand.
------
tdkl
> And when I watch her friends using the tablet in kindergarten, I see
> educational apps that introduces numbers, letters and simple logic. But
> couldn’t those subjects have been taught just as well without a computer?
Of course they could, but corporations couldn't earn millions in this case.
~~~
jdminhbg
No, people are very capable of earning millions by selling non-computerized
educational materials. See the textbook industry for an example.
------
mc42
I always look at the Lego windstorms with a degree of curiosity, as their
software libraries are derived from LabVIEW.
------
nojvek
This hits home. Lego mind storms is what made me get into programming. I had
so much fun tinkering with both the hardware and software.
Although labview based software was utter crap. There was an open source C
based version. That was my first building blocks.
I'm thinking of getting my nephew one.
------
anfroid555
Understand how to make games is different then playing games and surfing the
web looking at junk.
------
kasparsklavins
I teach kids low level programming. It can be quite rewarding.
------
edtechdev
Nice article, but I think you'd do many a favor by increasing the text color
contrast to make it more readable:
[http://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://dannas.github.io/2016...](http://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://dannas.github.io/2016/08/27/review-
of-seymor-paperts-mindstorms.html)
~~~
jwr
Also, please don't disable zooming on iOS devices. There is no good reason to
do it and it prevents some of us from reading at all.
~~~
dannas
Sorry for the inconvienence.
I wasn't aware that the site was blocking zooming, I had just copy-pasted an
old jekyll theme.
I've removed the references to viewport and a scale_fix.js file, hope that
helps.
~~~
jwr
Thanks! This is very much appreciated.
------
behnamoh
I think schools should teach only functional programming, because it's much
more challenging and better suits the purpose of educating the students.
When it comes to FP, I suggest Haskell without second thought, because it's
pure and forces children to think functionally. Haskell's clean syntax also
makes it easier for children to read and write code.
On a side note, Haskell also resembles much of mathematical notations kids
learn in school anyway, more so than any other language (guards, functions,
etc.) Teaching it would not only help kids with programming, but also would
serve as a tool to implement math lessons on a computer.
~~~
taeric
Contrast this with the tinkering view that students should be given devices
that do things. Often described in very imperative languages. It is not
shocking that many actually find imperative easier to get things done in.
This is not to say that I think functional is bad. But blind advocacy that
ignores how you got to the spot you are is not helpful in getting others to
the same spot.
~~~
behnamoh
Certainly imperative-style also has its own advantages, and I'm not saying FP
is better or anything.
You might be right about the tinkering view, and to be honest, I know that
sometimes procedural thinking is a must-have ability that kids should posses.
But then again, programming is not just coding, and kids getting used to
imperative-style would probably miss the whole point, which is finding
challenge.
Anyway, you know how hard it is for a person who is used to imperative to get
it out of his system and program functionally. I have found the other way
around much easier. Just a thought.
~~~
taeric
Why not both? Progress is usually the important part. Offering both is
expensive; but going all in on a single approach is dangerous in the failure
case.
~~~
technomancy
Teaching both would work for older kids, but a lot of Papert's work suggests
that most kids under 12 haven't yet developed enough capability for abstract
thought to use explicitly mathematical concepts to model the world, so
teaching FP style at that point is just going to lead to frustration.
If you're going to teach kids at younger ages, you need to introduce it in a
way that they can relate to physically, which is why Logo makes the turtle
central; it has a heading and position just like a child's body, and it moves
in a similar way to the way you think about moving yourself.
Anyway, you should read Mindstorms if you're interested in this topic; it does
a great job explaining why the Logo approach is specifically grounded in a
thorough understanding of childhood cognitive development.
~~~
taeric
Apologies for the late response here. This makes sense, I was not thinking we
were talking lower grade levels. So, 12+ is what I had in mind.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Populism takes a wrong turn - sajid
https://www.janus.com/insights/bill-gross-investment-outlook
======
ciconia
> [Trump's] tenure will be a short four years but is likely to be a damaging
> one for jobless and low-wage American voters.
The second part of that sentence - probably. The first part - not so sure.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Too much code cleaning, not enough results (data science) - throwawaystress
How important is it for data scientists to have clean, modular, reusable code? Here’s my problem: while working on a project, I’ll start off in Jupyter notebooks, toying around with the data, doing some EDA, etc. Eventually I’ll pull out some of that code into functions in a Python file, and call those functions from the Jupyter. Neat.<p>The problem is, as I get more and more functions, I want to organize them more, make them more generalizable and consistent, etc. I’ll also get carried away with organizing files and source control, cleaning up my notes, and making documentation to explain what models/data/source files/results exist, what they mean, etc.<p>And then I realize I’ve been spending less and less time getting results, and more on this “overhead”. I struggle to balance the desire the rush ahead and get results with the compulsion to make the code “beautiful” and to have the project in the cleanest possible state. I’ve seen plenty of other projects with terrible organization, no documentation, and confusing, poorly formatted code. But if I’m not producing value, my neatness doesn’t matter.<p>All in all, I’m feeling pretty unproductive because of these habits. Any advice?
======
lordkrandel
It depends, so I'm asking you some questions to give you ideas.
How much of this code is going to be read, reused, modified, studied by you or
other people?
Is it opensource or foundational?
Is it of any interest for the general public?
Could you actually spend more time in doing something else which is more
productive?
Is this refactor make you learn a new tecnique?
Can you find or develop an auto-formatter that makes messy code just neat and
clean?
If you are building models for a process or phenomenon, can the results be the
subject of an article, maybe in the future, to show your tecniques and ask for
feedback? Notebooks are just great for that.
------
itqwertz
A good rule to follow is to get it done dirty, add some tests, then refactor.
Real-world code is not always pretty or academic quality.
Automation is also a good way to get rid of monotonous tasks and boilerplate.
~~~
throwawaystress
Does that work with data science work, though? Along the way you build many
models and many kinds of ad hoc analyses that can build up. I’ve yet to see
someone write tests. For the most part, I’ve only seen people write big long
scripts that they call, setting some global constants at the top. I’m aspiring
to be better than that, but it seems counter to the goal of getting results
quickly.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Nintendo Makes It Clear That Piracy Is Only Way to Preserve Video Game History - ingve
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wjm5kw/nintendo-makes-it-clear-that-piracy-is-the-only-way-to-preserve-video-game-history
======
cableshaft
I basically already had this happen on my end years ago. I worked as a
designer/producer on two games developed and published to WiiWare: Evasive
Space and NEVES Plus.
But our publishing company went under, and Nintendo took the games down
several years ago. I still have them on my hard drive on my Wii, and I hunted
down copies of the files so I could keep them in my collection, but there's no
way for anyone else to get those games legally anymore. And they were pretty
decent games, too (Evasive Space was probably too hard in retrospect, but
still fun. NEVES was a solid puzzle game with lots of modes and a Patapon-ish
character art).
It sucks. I wish I could tell friends and family to check the games out, but
about the only thing I can do now is link to Youtube videos.
If I had the rights, plenty of cash, and the licenses, I would have ported
these for other platforms, but instead they're just trapped in time (except
for emulators), and I'm sure already pretty much forgotten. but at least
there's emulators.
NEVES Plus Trailer:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQb19p09Y7Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQb19p09Y7Q)
Evasive Space Trailer:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhpKxYtuuug](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhpKxYtuuug)
There's other games I worked on for companies that are no longer easy to get
either, these are just the two that were on the Wii.
~~~
cr0sh
About the only thing you can do is keep a copy of them, keep the copies
updated and backed up, then wait 20-30 years, and assuming anyone is still
using the hardware, let them out then.
Likely, any principals or others with any interest about the game probably
won't remember or won't care - heck, they might even be happy.
It has happened with a lot of 8-bit stuff from the 80s (mostly home computer
software); with the exception of Nintendo of course. The Disney of games I
guess.
Ultimately, you have to wait and hope such companies pass away - though as we
both know, Nintendo is a very old company, so that might not be an option.
At that point, I'd just wrap up your archive, then figure out a way to put it
on the internet with plausible deniability and/or anonymity (it can be done).
~~~
cableshaft
I don't have the code to these, at least. I wish I did. I worked for the
publishing company, and we never got the actual code, just the builds. I think
I still have a few older builds around somewhere, though.
I still have a copy of the code for a game for another defunct startup, and
every once in awhile I get the urge to try to contact someone and see if they
don't mind me porting it (I don't see how they could, they barely cared about
the game even back then). I have tons of other projects that are higher
priority, though. Still pains me that that one isn't still available for
people to play, though.
Honestly, I wish all of these things that I put so much of my life could still
be playable. Basically my entire professional career in the game industry is a
black hole, whereas the games I made and released on my own 6 years previous
to that are still playable online, and I'm currently working porting and
updating a game I made and released on the Xbox 360. Trying to get that out in
time for its 10th year anniversary next year.
Part of the reason why I started getting into board game design is because
once they're made, they're out there, and people can play them, they can't be
taken down by a company or become obsolete due to dying platforms, and if I
ever want to show them to new people, I can just bring them to a party. And I
can always put a print and play copy up that people can mess about with.
~~~
toomuchtodo
You might consider getting in touch with Jason Scott at the Internet Archive
(@textfiles both here and on Twitter), and shipping him a hard drive to put
the files you mention into cold storage (where they’re archived, but not
accessible).
The Internet Archive has an emulator to enable the playback of orphaned video
games in browser.
~~~
cableshaft
That's good to know. I actually have some other things that are possibly rare
and/or unique that he might be interested in too, that I wasn't sure what to
do with, but didn't want them to just sit in my basement until they stop
working. They're on flash cards for consoles though, not hard drives.
~~~
toomuchtodo
I have no doubt Jason can facilitate the extraction from whatever media you
have.
------
beezischillin
Nintendo is one of the worst game companies when it comes to dealing with
online / their fans. The YouTube / Twitch streaming controversy was just
ridiculous... They will also aggressively chase down people who run sites that
preserve old games that aren't even produced anymore even if they don't intend
to allow people any access to them in the future.
As far as they're concerned people shouldn't be allowed access to these
historic works, no matter the circumstances.
It's pretty sad behavior from a company beloved by so many.
By the way, I also find it really interesting that video games are software, a
special kind of software that we assign a very particular type of value to
that's not really monetary. We want to keep them alive and enjoy them so long
after their time has passed. It's so much different than, say, a copy of
Photoshop 2.11 or Winamp 3.
~~~
hnaccy
>By the way, I also find it really interesting that video games are software,
a special kind of software that we assign a very particular type of value to
that's not really monetary. We want to keep them alive and enjoy them so long
after their time has passed. It's so much different than, say, a copy of
Photoshop 2.11 or Winamp 3.
Creative works are valued longer because new creative works don't function as
replacements. There's only one Canterbury Tales or Super Mario World.
An old photoshop copy is more like an old almanac, it is a tool.
~~~
cr0sh
> An old photoshop copy is more like an old almanac, it is a tool.
Sometimes, though, the old tool is better than a new one.
For instance, if I have a choice between a Craftsman wrench from say, 1970, vs
a brand new one from today - guess which one I'm going to choose?
Software can be like this as well; indeed, there are some DOS apps out there
for which there isn't a good replacement available (though they can be niche -
which is probably why).
~~~
StellarTabi
There's a lot of software that used 20MB at the most in the XP days, but
doesn't run on windows 10 or is missing some random new 2010+ era feature and
just needs a patch, but now the only modern version of this software is a
minimum-viable-product SaaS monthly subscription.
------
mrspeaker
This is why I'm not a fan of Steam-type stores... they'll eventually be gone,
and the games I've paid for won't be accessible.
Occasionally I love going back through my old CD-Rs (copied to hard drive, of
course), finding old troves of files, projects, and games. That's why I always
get the latest Factorio as direct download - I know someday in 20 years time
I'll be hankering to bust that out again!
~~~
PostOnce
Not only that, but Steam games get fucked with after release, so you can't
even necessarily get the original game if Steam is still operating.
[https://www.pcgamer.com/au/grand-theft-auto-san-andreas-
stea...](https://www.pcgamer.com/au/grand-theft-auto-san-andreas-steam-update-
removes-songs-resolution-options/)
(songs removed from San Andreas due to time-limited music licenses, apparently
at some point the renderer was replaced with the one used for iOS)
I think you can't downgrade to an old version of Stranger's Wrath either, but
I could be wrong there. [https://www.destructoid.com/oddworld-stranger-s-
wrath-finall...](https://www.destructoid.com/oddworld-stranger-s-wrath-
finally-goes-hd-on-steam-235041.phtml)
Then there are games like Diablo III where you need to be online to play
single player, and therefore need a current patch, which means they can nerf
or fuck with in any way they want a game you already liked and may no longer
like after the changes.
Having to follow patches sucks, and piracy is often the only way to avoid it.
~~~
profmonocle
WoW is a pretty good example of this too. Patches and expansions changed so
much over the years that many players feel like it isn’t the same game
anymore. Blizzard fought against private servers running the classic game for
years, until the pay finally decided to make official classic servers. (But if
your favorite iteration of the game was something between classic and current,
you’re still out of luck.)
~~~
bausshf
Sounds like RuneScape too.
They even killed the official classic version not too long ago.
------
mywittyname
Copyright law needs to be amended to remove copyrights from media which is no
longer readily available. If a company stops distributing their copyrighted
materials, then it is safe to assume that it is no longer economically viable
to do so, thus, they aren't losing money if it is put into public domain.
~~~
gnud
I don't disagree, but I don't think this would not work for all copyright. It
might work for "personal use" reproduction - books, video games.
I don't think it would work for the 'public performance' part of copyright -
composers, playwrights, movie directors.
For example, a lot of contemporary music is not published at all. If you get a
score from the composer, you still have to pay royalties when you perform the
music publicly.
~~~
socceroos
> I don't disagree, but I don't think this would not work for all copyright.
My head is spinning...
------
taurath
This seems disingenuous when talking about offline games stored on an SD card
- when you buy a CD and the CD is destroyed or the store that you bought the
CD closes you don’t have an expectation that you will always get new copies of
that CD.
With games that are online only, one also expects that wen the service is shut
off you won’t have access. This is pretty accepted (but would be nice if there
were some way to preserve the server code)
But games that are inherently offline and perform online checks are the worst.
If I get something on steam that checks in with steam every 10 minutes, then
steam goes away, then I’m pretty miffed.
~~~
eloisant
The thing is that with a CD, you can easily make backups.
With games with DRM stored on SD, who knows? If you copy the files then you'll
probably be able to play it on the console... Provided it's the one you bought
it on? I wouldn't even bet on it.
------
dbg31415
> As it stands, even after the store officially closes, Wii users will be able
> download any past titles they’ve purchased and downloaded from the Wii Shop
> Channel, provided they can fit them on either the Wii’s internal storage or
> an additional SD card. However, Nintendo said that in a yet unknown point in
> the future, the company will close all services relating to the Wii Shop
> Channel, "including the ability to redownload WiiWare and Virtual Console
> games, as well as the Wii System Transfer Tool, which transfers data from
> Wii to the Wii U system."
Seems understandable. At some point you'll hit end of life with software and
support will end. I'm sure they'll give plenty of notice, and I'd imagine it's
5-10 years out. I'm sure if you called support and told them that your NES
cartridges didn't work any more they'd probably just tell you to blow on it.
* Myth debunked: Blowing in your Nintendo games never actually fixed anything – GeekWire || [https://www.geekwire.com/2014/blow-nintendo-games/](https://www.geekwire.com/2014/blow-nintendo-games/)
~~~
bitwize
Nintendo used to sell Official Nintendo Cleaning Kits specifically in response
to blowing on cartridge card edges, to prevent people from damaging their NES
carts due to moisture oxidation.
All but the most severely dusty NES carts should work just as well as a clean
cart. NES carts failed mainly because of a fault in the NES front loader
mechanism.
Me, I had a TI-99/4A before owning a NES. Random hangs and glitches were
normal to me. (The TI-99/4A was prone to overheating.)
~~~
jandrese
That and Nintendo installed an incredibly touchy DRM chip that demanded a
cleaner signal than was strictly necessary for the game to work.
~~~
rincebrain
My favorite thing about the 10NES is how the easiest way to get a Famicom->NES
adapter is to open one of the first wave of NES carts, because those were made
on Famicom boards and then have an interposer with the 10NES chip on it. [1]
Though in digging up a source for this, I discovered my new favorite thing,
which is that Tengen (infamously) made a (mostly) cleanroom duplicate of the
10NES and got sued over it, and when a company recently wanted to make NES
cartridges, they reverse engineered Tengen's chip in turn. [2]
[1] -
[https://www.reddit.com/r/gamecollecting/comments/frpyh/you_m...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamecollecting/comments/frpyh/you_may_already_have_an_official_famicomtones/)
[2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)#Nintendo_Entert...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_\(Nintendo\)#Nintendo_Entertainment_System)
------
mindslight
The real question is when are people going to get the message?!
The incentives of commercial online publishers were clear from their very
beginning. The pattern of retroactively pulling content began quite some time
ago.
I'm sympathetic if someone really doesn't know any better, succumbs to all
that advertising pushing them towards $proprietary_service and thinks thats
the cool path, only to get ripped off later on.
But anyone familiar with the idea of _personal computing_ has no excuse! Stop
investing your mindshare into this proprietary app-poverty. It's mildly easier
in the beginning, but you're paying incrementally every time the business
invents a new way to fuck.
Meanwhile if you do a slight bit of self-actualization to adopt a _personal
computing based_ setup, it's not just going to shift out from under you.
_Your_ ROM collection won't just disappear out of the blue one day, nor will
your emulator stop working because eg the developer went out of business or
insists on pushing a new one with "improved" advertising/surveillance/control
and it's incompatible with your usage.
------
ortusdux
News of the shutdown made me think of this guy:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/a97diy/my_79yo_fath...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/a97diy/my_79yo_father_exercises_with_wii_fit_almost/)
------
silveira
We say buying digital games but in reality we are renting digital games. Also,
a lot of times paying the price of physical games for these rentals.
~~~
jandrese
In particular, this is a way for companies to skirt the law, specifically the
Doctrine of First Sale. By never letting consumers actually purchase the
product they aren't afforded many of the legal protections that were hard
fought for on physical goods.
------
AdmiralAsshat
What blows in particular is that some of those games only found their way
stateside via the Wii store. _Sin & Punishment_ comes to mind. You can find
ROMs of the original Japanese N64 version online, but I doubt anyone has ROMs
of the US/PAL versions for the Wii that had localized menus (the dialogue was
already in English).
~~~
rincebrain
Given that the Wii Virtual Console games were a bundled emulator and ROM, and
you could swap the latter out, I imagine the content is indeed available.
~~~
danbolt
GBATemp users have reported that the game gets localized at runtime[1], rather
than a a modified ROM. Kind of ingenuous on Nintendo Redmond's part[2].
One would likely have to use Dolphin to emulate the Wii emulating the game.[3]
[1] [https://gbatemp.net/threads/sin-and-](https://gbatemp.net/threads/sin-
and-) punishment.183066/
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Software_Technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Software_Technology)
[3] [https://wiki.dolphin-
emu.org/index.php?title=Sin_%26_Punishm...](https://wiki.dolphin-
emu.org/index.php?title=Sin_%26_Punishment)
~~~
rincebrain
Lord, Nintendo, _why_?
That's like killing a fly with a suitcase nuke.
~~~
danbolt
I can't really speak for the main reason why, but my guess is that it gave
Nintendo a level of flexibility with localizing the game without having to set
up a Nintendo 64 development environment.
------
petemc_
I bought a good number of games from xbox store but got out of the habit and
didn't log in for a few years. Went through the pretty painful process of
logging in to my account again recently on a new console, no sign of any
purchases and if I tried to download them from store I was prompted to pay for
them.
------
cwkoss
Someone should file a class action lawsuit to sue for refunds on all funds
Nintendo received for product they are now rendering worthless.
------
zokier
I would have thought it obvious that if need an online service to access
something, then you are eventually going lose access to that something when
the service inevitably closes down.
Also _in the context of ROMs_ (and other pre-internet games) I do contest the
general thesis that piracy is the only road for preservation. You don't need
to distribute ROMs to the public to preserve them. Put them in a museum if you
want and they could be preserved perfectly fine without needing to resort to
piratism.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Characteristics of Great Software Design - edw519
http://bie.no/blog/computers/software-engineering/pragmatic-programming/2006/03/characteristics-of-great-software-designtm/
======
bjornbjorn
"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I think only how
to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not
beautiful, I know it is wrong." -R. Buckminster Fuller
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Comparing clusterings–an information based distance [pdf] - espeed
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047259X06002016/pdf?md5=71251a6300127946404246c8f8d8f7ea&pid=1-s2.0-S0047259X06002016-main.pdf
======
espeed
Note this is the paper on the information theoretic metric, the "Variation of
Information":
"It is closely related to mutual information; indeed, it is a simple linear
expression involving the mutual information. Unlike the mutual information,
however, the variation of information is a true metric, in that it obeys the
triangle inequality"
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_of_information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_of_information)).
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What's the best SMS API provider for a uk startup - JayInt
I have a great idea in the SMS market but I can't tell which provider is best a startup just trying to get away with paying as little as possible.<p>options are:
(a) https://www.tropo.com/
(b) http://www.fastsms.co.uk/topic-pages/bulk-sms.html?source=aw-bulksms-2;
(c) http://www.esendex.co.uk/; or
(d) http://www.textmarketer.co.uk/index.htm.<p>Maybe you know a better one?
======
teljamou
Have a look at <http://nexmo.com> which is a wholesale SMS API with direct to
carrier model and REST Cloud based.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Every sci-fi spaceship, to scale, in one infographic - johnpark
http://visual.ly/all-sci-fi-spaceships-known-man
======
iamdanfox
High res: [http://thumbnails.visually.netdna-cdn.com/all-scifi-
spaceshi...](http://thumbnails.visually.netdna-cdn.com/all-scifi-spaceships-
known-to-man_52448ad9767ff.jpg)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Hazmat Math – Elliptic curve arithmetic for Cryptography.io objects - tuxxy
https://github.com/tuxxy/hazmat-math
======
lvh
The cryptography library currently already supports the most basic elliptic
curve operation you need: scalar multiplication. Sometimes you need fancier
operations. For example, this supports direct point addition and point
subtraction, which for example is used in SPAKE2 to achieve blinding.
Right now these are focused on a tight binding between Python and C
(specifically, OpenSSL). The function names are direct equivalents of OpenSSL
function names. Most of the rest of the library provides an abstraction from
OpenSSL -- but it turns out that providing a safe abstraction to cryptographic
primitives can be very tricky :-)
(Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of cryptography.io; I occasionally show
up for cryptographic background. This project builds on that project, and is
being considered for upstream inclusion.)
~~~
tuxxy
Hey there! Glad to see you give this background on this library.
I built this because I was prototyping a split-key proxy re-encryption scheme
with cryptography.io and I needed to perform some of this arithmetic. I found
that a PR was made to include it but the team seemed hesitant to add it in.
I thought it would be best to build it as a separate module. Everything is
working great so far. I think I'll probably add the rest of the arithmetic to
it eventually.
Anyway, thanks for dropping in! :)
~~~
lvh
Another question: is your PRE scheme published? Which papers should I go read
to know what it does? (Admittedly, I haven't read the Python implementation
yet, maybe I should just go do that... I'm familiar with BBS98 but not much of
the work after that.)
~~~
tuxxy
The Python reference implementation is what we have as far as public
information on the schema. We're working on getting a paper drafted up and
published quickly, though.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Two spaces after a period: Why you should never, ever do it - prostoalex
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html
======
kjs3
Must be interesting to have enough spare time to scribble that many words
devoted to something so monumentally trivial.
------
eli
Sometimes I think it looks better. Don't tell me what to do.
~~~
jgeorge
I'm inclined to do the opposite of whatever Slate tells me I ought to do.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Daily Grooves, keep-it-simple music discovery - ronjouch
http://www.dailygrooves.org/
======
ronjouch
Hi, OP and creator here.
Motivation for this small app grew up as I became frustrated of reading music
blogs in my RSS reader. I just want a stream of fresh music and bands to
discover, but instead of that, Reader-ish experiences put me in front of
series of individual articles where text took over music's throne, and where
actually listening to music requires constant clicking and fumbling with
players.
Then I discovered [http://hypem.com](http://hypem.com) , which is great but
didn't feel right either (to my eyes: maybe too much categorization, bubbling
me too much into what I already like, and a bit on the heavy side), so I built
my own dumbed-down version, which doesn't try to be smart, is limited to
throwing up one YouTube playlist per day, and embraces randomness (well,
within the limits set by the sources choice).
I'm extremely pleased with the results, measured by the dozens of artists I've
already discovered in a few weeks of usage. Because instead of being scared of
100+ unread items in my 'Music' Google Reader folder, I now just open DG and
discover what chance decided would come next.
I'm posting it here hoping it will also be useful to a few HNers :)
\- Feedback welcome.
\- For the braves who will peek at the code: beware, this is my first GAE app,
and my second Python program altogether. So please don't throw too much pointy
stuff at my ugly code, but gentle suggestions and patches are very welcome.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
German intelligence agencies can decrypt PGP (Google translate) - ungerik
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.golem.de%2Fnews%2Fbundesregierung-deutsche-geheimdienste-koennen-pgp-entschluesseln-1205-92031.html
======
nhaehnle
Most likely they just don't know what they're talking about. This is a
government answer to a question posed by parliament, which means that it
probably went through a lot of hands, most of which don't even know what PGP
stands for, let alone what the technology does.
The statement itself is very vague anyway, saying that "it depends on the
strength and the quality of the encryption". Which most likely translates to:
they cannot actually break PGP, but they have some tricks to get key material
via other means, and then obviously they can decrypt.
~~~
pmjordan
In addition to weak keys, I would not be surprised if most of the time they
actually just steal the keys off the subject's system (and install keyloggers
for catching the passphrase). The "Bundestrojaner" (federal trojan) has been
widely reported and even if the police no longer use that particular software,
I'm sure the secret service have their own, similar tools.
The other thing is that often, knowing _who_ the subject is talking to and
_when_ is probably half the battle. PGP doesn't intrinsically protect against
that.
~~~
eblackburn
Agreed. No matter how complex they key, phyiscal security can nearly always be
broken. From mysterious breaks ins to _we have ways of making you talk_
------
JoachimSchipper
Note that "depending on the type and quality of the encryption" can mean "if
you use 512-bit keys" (or e.g. use weak entropy to generate the keys). Indeed,
that's the likely explanation - if Germany really figured out how to decrypt
best-practice PGP, they wouldn't be blabbing about it.
(Also note that the Subject: line is unencrypted by design.)
------
justanother
Understand that Western governments have had legal access to rubber-hose
cryptography for some time. Inasmuch as a person may be beaten with a rubber
hose until the passphrase is revealed, I've no doubt they are able to break
PGP.
------
phaer
I think the title sounds much to factual for such a vague statement. They that
they are _in principle_ able to decrypt _such encryption_ , that can mean
anything from "we can if the key is weak" over "there is a law which permits
us to install a backdoor on your pc" to "we can beat you up until you tell us
your password".
And it is in the best interest of german intelligence agencies to make such a
vague statement. If they would admit that they are unable to break pgp, that
would be taken as a software recommendation by everyone who is afraid of them.
------
raverbashing
"Can decrypt" is a phrase that gives many interpretations
For example, SSH, can you do a MITM? Can you decode a pcap dump? Only for a
specific crypt?
Same thing with a PGP, if you have resources you can certainly throw several
machines at a dictionary attack and can come with a decryption for most cases
(after a long time).
~~~
Joeboy
> "Can decrypt" is a phrase that gives many interpretations
It's also not the phrase that Google translate gives me - I get "at least
partially and / or evaluate", which could refer to lots of things, eg. traffic
analysis.
Also... anybody with a copy of PGP (or GPG) can decrypt PGP'ed messages. PGP
would be rather pointless otherwise.
Edit: Also there's a pretty good chance it's just plain old fashioned
bollocks.
------
jstanley
Does anyone know if this is true? Is it a side-channel attack? The translated
English is pretty hard to make sense of.
~~~
dhoe
No, it's not true. Some minor news outlet misunderstanding things.
~~~
leh
Or some major politicians :)
------
DasIch
The answer given is so vague and devoid of meaning they could just as well
have answered with a "Some times may be". I don't see any reason to be
concerned about the security of PGP.
------
blablabla123
Does now every crap get voted to the top on HackerNews?
------
hnwh
The NSA have been saying for years that PGP was just that - "Pretty Good"
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Bog Butter - bookofjoe
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-bog-butter-made-of
======
bookofjoe
See also: [https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/03/study-finds-
people-i...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/03/study-finds-people-in-
ireland-and-scotland-made-bog-butter-for-millennia/)
Original paper:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-40975-y](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-40975-y)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Write Junior Code - bibyte
https://www.parsonsmatt.org/2019/12/26/write_junior_code.html
======
reikonomusha
This might be a little bit of a “hot-take”, but if idiomatic code written by a
competent senior engineer remains inscrutable and unmodifiable after around 2
weeks of training an engineer who is at the beginning of their professional
career, then that language is probably a bad choice to use in production. If
lenses, MTL, fancy concurrency are “the way” to do things in Haskell, and
those require an extraordinary amount of time to learn, then Haskell may not
be a good choice for production code from a sociological POV.
I haven’t used Haskell professionally so I can’t actually weigh in on the
veracity of the prominence of difficult-to-learn code. I do know about using
another “weird” language though: Common Lisp. We at Rigetti took a bet with
Common Lisp and it passes the “senior-written idiomatic code can be junior-
learned and modified” smoke test with flying colors. Every group of interns
and every new grad that has become involved in the tens of thousands of lines
of code has been able to contribute substantially in less than two weeks.
~~~
TeMPOraL
Or, just don't hire junior developers :).
This reminds me of what my boss from my second-ever job told me when he tasked
me with starting a new project: "I know I promised you you'll get to choose
your own tech stack, but you're going to write it in PHP; I know you'd like
something better, perhaps Ruby, but when it comes to hiring developers to help
you, I'll have to pay a Ruby developer $X, and I can get PHP developers for
$X/2".
I guess it makes business sense for bottom-feeder development. In my case, it
burned me out completely.
Anyway, I work in Common Lisp professionally these days too, and we don't shy
away from using both simple and moderately-complex macros. There's nothing
magic in them. Sure, tracing a problem with the expansion of someone else's
macros can be a cognitively taxing work, but you're going to have to do this
kind of work somewhere anyway - if not here, then when trying to figure out a
convoluted call graph of 20 functions or methods that macro would have
abstracted away for you (which was a common thing to do at my previous job,
involving Enterprise Java).
~~~
Rapzid
"Junior" might as well be an IQ classification.. How many people change their
IQ?
The reality is something nobody really talks about.. When a company doesn't
want to hire a "junior" it doesn't mean they don't want to hire somebody
without X amount of experience in a tech stack or without X amount of
experience in the industry.. They don't want to hire people bellow a certain
aptitude.
Many "juniors" will never be "senior". Even if they get the title and salary.
We all know "seniors" in salary and title only.
Some people are inexperienced "seniors" year one.
~~~
TeMPOraL
Viewing it from this lens, it still doesn't make sense to sacrifice
productivity of people "with aptitude" for the sake of expanding your hiring
pool to include people "without aptitude". Instead of bringing down everything
to the lowest common denominator, one can try to assign different types of
work to people with different levels of aptitude (or care).
(Personally, I feel what makes "forever juniors" isn't aptitude, but lack of
care. I don't see it as flaw of character - the factors like structural anti-
intellectualism in the industry, lack of enthusiasm due to work being
meaningless, and that not everyone is into programming beyond it being a
9-to-5 job all contribute to some people not learning. This suggests to me
that expecting people to learn and making learning part of their jobs - actual
part, with paid time set aside for it - can overcome this problem.)
~~~
nsomaru
> anti-intellectualism in the industry
Could you expand upon this point?
~~~
TeMPOraL
A bit more here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21909816](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21909816).
But the gist of it is: the industry prefers to work with dumbest tools
possible and throw cheapest bodies they can get at a problem, instead of
expecting people to keep learning, improving themselves, and applying these
improvements to their work. This article is an example of that - it advocates
discarding advanced tools given to the programmer by Haskell, in favor of
writing dumb code that's easily digestible for beginners. Most of the advice
about avoiding "clever code" is a form of that too.
I find it a penny-wise, pound-foolish approach, because when you do this
trade-off, you're losing in two places. First of all, you handicap your
skilled team members. But secondly, the cost (in terms of time, money and
incidental complexity) of a project grows _faster than linear_ with the number
of people you get involved in it. It'll be O(n!) if you do it naively, O(n
logn) if you arrange people into hierarchies, but the problems still grow
faster than they're solved as you scale up.
The alternative approach I'm encouraging is to make responsible but full use
of the power of the tools you have, and if this goes over the head of some new
hire, then _teach them_ until they understand and can make use of that power
too. Embrace and encourage learning as a part of this job (actual, expected,
and paid-for part). Push the industry upwards, instead of dragging it down.
------
smadurange
I think one should write the code that's most suitable for a specific
scenario. Senior vs junior has nothing to do with this (at least not in a
categorical way). I have met many who call themselves seniors who really just
aren't as good as they think they are.
The best engineer I've worked with sometimes wrote simpler code and sometimes
wrote highly sophisticated code. If there's someone on the team who can't
understand a particular piece of code, he should just ask and learn. There's
no reason to weigh someone down just to make an inexperienced, incompetent
programmer or unwilling to learn something happy.
Good code isn't junior code. Good code isn't senior code. Good code is just
what works best in a specific scenario. And it takes experience and details of
a problem to decide what that is exactly. Dogmatic, rigid views just don't
work well in this line of work.
~~~
didibus
Agreed, I'm not a huge fan of junior/senior. What we should be talking about
is inexpert/expert, which doesn't always map 1:1 with how long you've been
working, or practicing. Though obviously, the longer, the more likely you
learned and became more knowledgeable. But some people spend 10 years doing
the same thing over and over, and that's not broadening and deepening their
skills the slightest.
So in my opinion, there is two type of unreadable code, there is the code
that's just plain bad, convoluted, overly complicated, like a Rube Goldberg
machine. That one is often written by inexpert programmers, sometimes they are
juniors, and sometimes they're senior as well. And then there is code that you
personally can't read, but which is great code, simple, coherent, to the
point, etc. You just haven't learned the vocabulary and grammar to understand
it.
------
zzzeek
To be clear, one of the reasons I decided to focus on Python in the early
2000's was this reason, that I wanted to work within a computing language that
was as accessible as possible to the widest variety of programmers, thus
helping to ensure that the code I write would be maintainable by others, the
libraries I create would be in high demand, and whatever code I write for
employers would be maintain a high degree of transparency to everyone else at
that employer.
My general impression of functional languages with Haskell at the top, is that
these languages are inherently not for "junior" programmers of any stripe.
That is, if you are a programmer writing Haskell code that actually works and
does something useful, by definition you are nothing like a "junior"
programmer. A "junior" programmer would be doing it in PHP, C#, or Python.
Just the kind of motivation one would need to learn Haskell and actually be
functional at it would take you out of the realm of the vast majority of
"junior" programmers.
This is based on my own experience of working alongside many other
programmers, many of whom were probably not necessarily "junior" however they
were the kind of programmers that went home at 5 pm. These people could get a
lot done but only in a language that did not require intensive conceptual
visualization. Even in Python, parts of code that I would write that would get
too clever / recursive / FP-ish would be lost on everyone else and I'd be
stuck having to save everyone from that little clump every time something had
to change with it.
~~~
thanatropism
One would expect that a language like Haskell abstracts away the need for
junior programmers. In the same way that digital computers abstract away the
need for pencil-and-paper calculators.
~~~
rubber_duck
I've never seen a scenario like this and even with the ideal case of current
abstraction frameworks there is always tedious grunt work that juniors get to
cut their teeth on - doing minor adjustments to fine-tune requirements, adding
minor functionality, etc. Stuff where you don't want to waste time and focus
of senior devs.
The only scenarios I saw where juniors were not needed is overly complex
systems where the barrier to entry was so high you needed a huge amount of
upfront knowledge to do anything. Those were not good projects to work on.
------
TeMPOraL
I have the opposite view. Sure, don't go overboard with power _for your own
sake_. If it ends up a convoluted mess, it's your fault and you should
refactor - proper application of powerful language concepts result in clean
interfaces hiding complexity that rarely, if ever, needs to be touched again.
From my personal experience, instead of writing dumbest possible code to make
juniors productive from day one, just don't hire juniors. Or at least, not the
absolute beginners. And if you do hire juniors, accept that they'll need more
than few weeks to get up to speed.
Despite the perceived smartness, our industry has a weird anti-intellectualism
deeply ingrained in it. Programming is a profession - you're supposed to get
better over time. Learning is part of the job. And yet it seems to me that
more and more people think that what they've learned prior to their first job
is all they'll ever need to understand, and anything beyond it is "clever
code" that needs to be expunged.
(Of course, keeping everything dumbed down makes sense if you're interested in
penny-wise, pound-foolish optimization on the hiring side of the company, or
otherwise like to have developers be replaceable cogs. But it's not in the
best interest of the developer, and arguably it isn't in the product end-
user's best interest either.)
~~~
reikonomusha
One of the most enjoyable aspects of my career has been teaching and mentoring
engineers with little experience. Everybody starts somewhere, and I would
never want to suggest an organization I’m a part of ought to bar a healthy,
tempered number of less experienced folk.
But, organizations aren’t charities, right? I might like mentoring, but that
doesn’t mean it’s the best choice for a company to make. Fortunately, there
are a plethora of incredibly bright and talented individuals who really can
move the needle in your business in a _short_ amount of time. You wouldn’t see
it from number-of-years worked, but you’ll find out by investing your time and
energy in them. With this attitude and managerial philosophy in mind, I find
that you inevitably build stronger, more loyal, more flexible, and
exceptionally competent teams this way.
~~~
TeMPOraL
Well, sure. My main point isn't that you shouldn't train hires (you can't
really expect to not train new hires). It's that I don't think it's worth it
to sacrifice your team's internal productivity for the sake of speeding up the
onboarding process and/or making it cheaper - which is what IMO the article is
essentially suggesting.
The article is about Haskell, but this advice - make code newbie-friendly,
avoid "clever" code - keeps popping up again and again. The extent to what's
considered "clever" varies between jobs, languages and programming
communities.
As an example, when my old Java job was grudgingly upgrading from Java 7 to
Java 8, my boss took me to the side, and said to me: "I knew you'll be happy
about the transition, but if you could, perhaps consider refraining from using
_lambda expressions_ ; I know you understand them, but some of your colleagues
do not".
I didn't comply; instead, I've explained lambdas to people in my project. It
took few minutes, they understood it almost immediately, and we continued
using full feature set of Java 8 just fine. The practice eventually spread
around, and the other day I saw a particular developer my boss was worried
about, going around the office full of excitement, telling everyone about the
cool things he's just learned about Java 8 (namely, lambdas and streams API).
Soon thereafter, everyone was using these features, and they've lost their
status as "clever code".
So, to put my point another way, perhaps instead of worrying about the code
being friendly to experienced developers, one should take the time to teach
the new employees - just like you are doing.
~~~
clarry
I fully agree with this. I haven't really seen code that is 1) actually useful
but 2) so clever that you can't quickly explain why or how it works (or just
let the person reading it figure it out or ask stackoverflow...). So I don't
really even know what people mean by clever code.
~~~
Viliam1234
In my experience, a big danger is when someone higher in the company hierarchy
is a former developer who no longer writes code.
Such person will perceive the new language features or libraries as "too
clever, and not really necessary", will voice their opinion loudly, and you
can't make them learn and find out that it's actually simple and useful. (And,
yes, lambdas in Java 8 were an example of that.)
~~~
tabtab
Find good examples that you can defend well, and overwhelm them with practical
and relevant examples.
------
bauerd
Wish there was something similar to Elm, but designed with
backend/networking/generality in mind, like Go. Take the Haskell core language
without all the lang extensions, and accompany it with a solid stdlib. I want
an FP ecosystem that's not rooted in research. Can have a more simplistic type
system, etc. Basically a functional Go. Maybe an effect system, idk.
~~~
thrower123
I keep telling myself that this is the year I'm going to really learn F#; it
has a lot of the nice parts of Haskell, but is a little more on the pragmatic
end, and has access to the whole .NET world.
The problem I run into frequently on my abortive attempts is that when things
get harder, it's too easy to just drop back and smash something out in C#.
~~~
Multicomp
Once you get used to / take for granted the additional compiler features in
F#, you will find yourself weaning yourself off C# code more and more.
Resistance is futile!
2019 ends my year of F# focus. In 2020, I will take a look at Rust since it is
C-but-not-nearly-impossible-to-correct-insecure.
Between Get Programming with F# and Domain Modelling Made Functional, I am a
convert for F# and will continue using it into the future. Why?
Quick example: I'm currently hacking together a program for the RPG system
used in Star Wars Fantasy Flight Games, so that the game master can input
possible player actions during their turns and keep track of player stats,
generate NPC encounters etc. and so forth.
Writing the back-end in F# (stored to SQLite) really helps me keep the game
rule book (business logic) straight, with compiler-based warnings if I try to,
say, stick XP into a function that expects in-game cash.
On the front end, I'm using plain old Windows Forms in C#. The UI is mostly
for data crunching and keyboard-first usage (I'm keeping in mind my FoxPro
days and gui.cs / TUI / keyboard-first functionality from that twitter thread
a few weeks back), and is mostly for gluing UI controls to the back-end itself
(maybe this will be a mobile app, website, etc. in the future depending on the
GM's needs).
For this program, I wouldn't write any game logic in C#, now that I'm used to
F#. C# lets me get away with too many mistakes compared to F#, for the same
reasons JavaScript lets me get away with (even more) too many mistakes
compared to C#.
------
emodendroket
I don't know much about Haskell but I'd say in any language you shouldn't
write code to show off your erudition. Doing that kind of thing in production
code is hardly the mark of a truly senior engineer. If the code is the best
way to solve the problem, though, why is it so inscrutable in this language?
------
ehnto
This is why I advocate for popular frameworks in commercial projects, even
though I don't prefer writing in them myself. Sure, it's easy to find people
who know {Language}, but everyone has their own idioms, and they will need to
spend time learning yours.
A framework has the benefit of having existing documentation you didn't have
to write, an existing community of people solving problems the framework may
have, and most importantly a slew of idioms that are literally codified and
documented.
Do things "The {Framework} Way" and when you onboard someone familiar in
{Framework} you should only have to help them with the domain space knowledge
and any novelties of your specific implementation. You still get to use
advanced concepts, but hiring and onboarding is significantly simplified.
For personal projects, I never use frameworks, it's not nearly as fun as
writing greenfields code. But in a commercial project, long term viability of
the project should probably come before fun.
------
modernerd
“Why not write Go instead?” was the response from an audience member after a
talk at Haskell eXchange 2019 that encouraged simple use of Haskell.
They had a good point — if a primary goal in your team is to make code
accessible for juniors and maintainable for new hires without weeks or months
of ramp-up, and you need to ban Haskell language features, extensions, and
libraries to achieve that, perhaps there are better choices than Haskell?
And if the Haskell community needs a repeated rallying cry to “write simple
Haskell”, maybe it's a sign that a new Haskell standard should be created that
defines what “simple“ Haskell code means.
Juniors could then feel assured that learning the 2050 Haskell standard [or
whatever] would be enough to help them get a job as a Haskell junior. And
companies would have a target to move their codebases towards that's
consistent across the industry.
------
pizlonator
I think that it’s important to hire people who are comfortable with the whole
language that you are using.
I also think that “junior code” could mean the opposite of what the author
means. Lots of smart juniors write code that abuses complex language features
in noncanonical ways that confuse all of the people. Lots of senior devs stick
to a known (and canonical to them) subset of features that proved themselves
in battle for them.
~~~
np_tedious
> Lots of smart juniors write code that abuses complex language features in
> noncanonical ways that confuse all of the people.
Do you really see people do this in Haskell? I'm "junioring" my way through a
problem set now (advent of code) and that does not describe my solutions at
all. It is definitely not pro-level Haskell. I use direct recursion with an
accumulator when I know there's gotta be some recursion scheme that fits the
bill, very simple types, very few advanced combinators and symbols, etc.
It definitely could be better, but it suffers from a lack of fanciness rather
than an excess. I've peeked at some expert solutions posted online and they
are neat and super impressive... but by and large they confuse the shit out of
me.
I have a hard time picturing being overly ambitious as a common beginner flaw
in this space.
~~~
pizlonator
Different folks take different paths. In any language, you will find folks who
start out by kinda overshooting before they learn to tone it down.
It’s not that all Juniors are this way. Maybe some get it right or maybe they
even act too skidding. But I think of it as a Junior trait to sometimes
overshoot on complexity.
------
ummonk
>Let us grow Haskell in industry by writing simpler code and making room for
the less experienced.
>Let’s not delete all of our fancy code - it serves a purpose! Let’s make it a
small part of our codebase, preferably hidden in libraries with nice simple
interfaces.
Says something about the Haskell culture that this isn't already standard
practice, regardless of the need to train junior programmers.
~~~
sukilot
It says something about the Haskell _language_ \-- that it has near infinite
power for abstraction and Don't Repeat Yourself-ism. Most Haskell code is
fancy because if anything else had a large amount of mass, it could be
abstracted to higher-level Haskell. Haskell programs have size approximately
"log(size of program in another language) ^ k" because anything repetitive can
get squeezed out.
------
userbinator
Almost every other language has a problem that it's already so dumbed-down to
the point employees get treated as disposable/replaceable. There's a reason
obscure languages pay very _very_ well, but if you dumb them down, it's not
hard to see what will happen to that advantage...
(I don't work in Haskell. Now I have mixed feelings about it.)
~~~
sukilot
There are more $200K+/yr new-college-grad C++ and Java jobs at FAANG than all
$200K+/yr Haskell jobs in the world.
------
ljm
> Employee writes a ton of really fancy Haskell, delivers fantastically and in
> about 1000 lines of code. Everyone is very impressed. The project grows in
> scope.
>
> Boss: It’s time to hire another Haskeller. What are the job requirements?
The job requirements should be the same as the ones the original engineer was
hired for. Then they can mentor the newbie. After all, they're not an expert
if they've done this, they're still able to explain why they pulled in a shit
ton of libraries to do their work.
Asking that person what the new requirements are is doomed to fail because
they moved the goal posts. Give them a junior and let them learn.
~~~
huffmsa
That's the thing a lot of devs who hire don't get. You don't necessarily need
someone who knows the language inside and out on day one.
What you need is someone smart and who can demonstrate that they can learn new
languages quickly.
They understand the fundamentals of how to write software.
Language specific abstractions are just muscle memory.
~~~
sukilot
No one learns Haskell quickly. "the fundamentals of how to write software" are
very different in Haskell from other languages, even other functional or
functional-ish languages.
------
Cthulhu_
I have a page saved with a load of quotes, some of which are about this very
subject. Here's a selection, from
[http://quotes.cat-v.org/programming/](http://quotes.cat-v.org/programming/):
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore,
if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not
smart enough to debug it." — Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger in The
Elements of Programming Style
------
Syzygies
One should code in Haskell as if it were a small language like Scheme (or
Standard ML, or early OCaml, or..). It's a wonderful language for that. The
deep stuff isn't actually necessary.
~~~
verttii
True, but the problem is that any production ready library you come across
uses some pretty advanced type magic that you have to learn to understand. At
least to some extent.
Servant, the currently dominant API library/framework alone is already based
on type level programming.
------
crimsonalucard
I'm kind of having this problem. I'm a senior engineer but junior Haskell
programmer.
Can't find any jobs willing to hire me as a junior haskell programmer so I
just stick with the popular languages.
------
rantwasp
talking about haskell, i always get a laugh out of: [http://steve-
yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-...](http://steve-
yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-announce-discovery.html)
------
mark_l_watson
I enjoy Haskell and I use it for some of my own projects, but I rarely use it
professionally. I also use a simpler style of writing Haskell: I try to make
as much of my code as possible be pure, with no IO or touching the real world.
I try to isolate impure code as much as possible.
Using a subset of Haskell makes coding fun and productive, but when I have to
read and use other people’s code, it takes time to understand what they are
doing.
I have made peace with using Haskell in a simple way, enjoy it, but frankly
spend most of my time using Lisp languages like Hy, Common Lisp, and Racket. I
have been using Lisp languages for 35 years and part time Haskell for about 7
years, so it is understandable why I have an easier time with Lisp.
------
pearapps
If code written by a "Senior" Engineer is unreadable/unworkable by someone
with less experience - that is 100% on the writer. Don't enable ego-fueled
programming, best to either do as the article suggests or bring in some actual
more senior engineers who have already learned that code is read 10x more than
written, and should be optimized thusly.
------
tus88
Wow but he continues to recommend using Haskell at all...
------
mendelmaleh
I'm having a similar experience with Golang, 90% of job postings are senior
level, everybody wants 3+ years experience in the field, etc.
------
dreamcompiler
Perfectly fine advice if you're solving a routine problem with well-understood
solutions with no special reliability, productivity, or security requirements.
Terrible advice if you're pushing the envelope. If you're using Haskell with
half its functionality verboten, why use Haskell?
~~~
war1025
Which is, perhaps, why basically no one uses Haskell in production.
------
choeger
While you do it, find a business case for the language development. PL papers
in the <Funny Title>:<Actual Description> format make a good read but a
production language also needs more mundane input and work.
------
hestefisk
Do Haskell programming jobs really pay better than, say, a Java programming
job?
~~~
Sevii
Maybe working on the one internal system Facebook has written in Haskell.
[https://engineering.fb.com/security/fighting-spam-with-
haske...](https://engineering.fb.com/security/fighting-spam-with-haskell/)
Otherwise, I don't think many jobs pay more than Java engineer at FAANG.
------
29athrowaway
What I try to do in my projects is to allow complex code (if it serves a
purpose), but only in libraries and try to make it as self-contained and well
documented as possible. Application code should be simple.
~~~
m45t3r
I concur. We use Clojure, and the actual application logic is boring and
simple. This is good because it is easy to navigate in code from any project
(even from other teams).
Complexity is all at our common libraries. So most programmers don't even need
to understand our abstractions, they just work. Of course, sometimes our
abstractions are not enough so you need to get your hands dirty. However I
would say it works well 99% of the time.
------
throwaway8291
Or become senior and apply for that Haskell job in five years.
------
ofrzeta
The same goes for Scala in my opinion. A company using Scala should restrict
themselves to a easily comprehensible subset of Scala.
------
heyflyguy
I feel like you could say some similar things about flutter.
------
golergka
That's why as much as I love Haskell as a language and a way of doing things,
I will not choose it to implement anything in my place of work.
------
lesserknowndan
This post probably also applies to <insert name of programming language here>.
------
zackmorris
Just for another data point, I'm a "senior" developer (been programming for 30
years) and I tend to look more at frameworks than languages. I really think
that starting from first principles allows one to end up with an elegant
solution, regardless of whatever errata is present in a language. A good
framework is the elucidation of an idea with the edge cases covered so that
you don't have to reinvent the wheel. It should give you the tools you need to
integrate with your code and then get out of the way.
Specifically, take something like Laravel. It's based on Ruby on Rails, which
borrows heavily from .NET. Personally I think that Ruby is a decent language
that gets a few things right, despite some early compromises to get closer to
the metal which caused some unwieldiness down the road. However, Ruby on Rails
has a brutal learning curve unmatched by just about any other framework that
I've learned. And the end result unfortunately succumbs to being too
opinionated due to emphasizing convention over configuration too much IMHO. I
think that's why it fell from favor, and personally I wouldn't recommend it
for new development.
Whereas Laravel does a lot of what Rails does, despite using the "hackier" PHP
language and less syntactic sugar or magic under the hood. The companion
Laracasts are mostly exceptional. I would even go so far as to say that if you
want to learn Ruby on Rails, learn Laravel first. That way you can build on
context and be comfortable with Rails in a few weeks rather than the months it
would take to learn it from scratch. You'll also notice the inconsistencies in
Rails more and be able to work around them so your code is conceptually
correct, rather than evangelize why their existence is needed or that they're
the "one true way" to do something.
What I'm trying to say is that after using Ruby on Rails, I'm still not sure
what problem it's trying to solve half the time. It seems to be structured in
a way that solves issues encountered late in a project, but it's never really
clear why one path was chosen over another. Like I solve a problem in my head,
then have to translate it to the Ruby on Rails way. I don't get that as much
with less-opinionated frameworks like Laravel. I think the best approach is to
provide as much functionality as possible with sane defaults but not force the
user into a paradigm.
Simplifying from Angular to Vue is another example of this. There are many
others, but to play on this, it's one of the reasons why I'm uncomfortable
with stuff like Kubernetes. Or even Unity for that matter. The more
monolithic/enterprisy/opinionated something is, the more I'm skeptical of it.
This idea of working from first principles (the way a new user might) is a way
to think about how to go about writing code that junior developers can use,
even if the concepts involved are senior-level. I practice this technique but
it easily gets lost in translation and I find myself explaining the easy vs
simple dichotomy a lot. It's probably even cost me jobs to be honest. But that
doesn't mean it's wrong.
------
3fe9a03ccd14ca5
> _The project can’t really grow anymore. Maybe the original employee left,
> and now they have a legacy Haskell codebase that they can’t deal with._
This is the litmus test for a good language, in my opinion. Not the way it
makes you “feel” when writing it, but how easily it can add in new people to
the project and get them running.
This is why — even with all of its shortcomings — I prefer Go to almost every
language now.
------
Thorentis
Not specific to Haskell but, I think code in general is becoming more complex
than it needs to be without any added benefit other than adding an extra
buzzword to the list of things you know.
In a non-functional programming language for instance, I firmly place lambdas
in this category. I was working on a legacy Java 7 application the other day,
and Netbeans was configured for using lang spec Java 8 (which I later switched
over to 7). Every time I wrote an anonymous function, it could give me a
yellow underlined hint saying I should convert this to a lambda. Why? Why
should I do that? It doesn't make it more readable, it saves only a few
characters of space (our target platform had more than enough disk space for
this to be irrelevant), and it makes the code more difficult to skim. And it's
an extra thing a junior may not know about that they get bogged down trying to
understand. Given, it's a simple concept and isn't hard to understand. But
this applies to all sorts of other silly syntactic sugar the internet has
decided is cutting edge tech, that is making our code bases less readable.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Review my app: Rmmbr. - sahillavingia
Here's the URL: http://rmmbrapp.appspot.com/<p>Rmmbr lets you easily create notes. Type in whatever permalink you'd like to use and it'll create one if it doesn't exist. I use it to replace the Life.txt I've had on my desktop for ages.<p>It truly is an MVP. I'll add more features soon, but nothing crazy. I dig simplicity.<p>Stats: took me 30 minutes to build using Python and App Engine. Tweeted it and told my friends, over 100s of notes already.<p>I'd love feedback on what you'd like to see added or changed. Thanks!
======
scalyweb
Great project. You might look at this similar idea someone released a few
months back.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1437852>
<http://notepad.cc>
~~~
sahillavingia
Ah yes, that'll provide great ideas for my own take on it. Thanks!
------
ifesdjeen
I would definitely use something like that one day, if it'd have Emacs
keybindings. After switching from Mac OS to Ubuntu, i really miss those (C-{F,
B, P, N}, M-{E, A}, yank, insert and so on). Well, all those things.
For now, I'm using Emacs Chrome plugin, that creates a button right next to
any textarea to type anything more complex than plain text (indents, lots of
moving text around etc).
It's nice to have an online pad. But so far Evernote does everything I ever
wanted from online type pad, and I still prefer Remember The Milk - for tasks.
Although, I'd be much more happy to use Emacs org-mode, but up until now I
haven't seen an online service that'd store and present them in some fancy
great way. maybe i should build it?..
------
stephencelis
Easter egg? <http://rmmbrapp.appspot.com/test>
------
askbjoernhansen
How is this better than your Life.txt file on your desktop? If it's for
sharing, how is it better than a github gist for example.
If you want to continue working on it; at least add some syntax; a "not-in-a-
textarea-view-mode" and such.
~~~
sahillavingia
It's better because I can have many of them, and I can easily access them from
whatever device or computer I'm on.
It's very simple right now, but it does what I need. Perhaps I'll add features
like you've suggested, but right now I'm happy with the textarea + ability to
add tabs.
Thanks for the feedback though, code highlighting may make sense to implement
in the future :)
~~~
okeumeni
Wow!
------
jhrobert
I believe that there is a need for such simple application. I am doing
something similar to promote wikis, <http://new.simpliwiki.com>
------
petervandijck
Make it auto-save and remove the save button :)
~~~
sahillavingia
Once I learn AJAX, I'll definitely implement that.
------
sahillavingia
Clickable: <http://rmmbrapp.appspot.com/>
------
nir
nice app, but I wish you chose another name... <http://rmmbr.appspot.com/>
~~~
sahillavingia
Yeah, just was brainstorming and built the app, then looked for whatever name
would kinda fit. I am going to use <http://rmmbr.org/> though, as people will
clearly get annoyed having to type appspot.com.
~~~
nandemo
For some of us non-native English speakers,"rmmbr" might be difficult to
remember.
~~~
sahillavingia
Yeah, I was debating going with something else, but I thought remember without
the e's wouldn't be too tough. Any suggestions (that I could just mask on top
of rmmbr for others who prefer it)?
~~~
nir
What I meant was that I already have an app called rmmbr running on appspot -
<http://rmmbr.appspot.com/> \- so it would be cool if you used something other
than rmmbr.
I don't have any trademark etc, so there's nothing I could do about it, it
would just be nice. (My original name was "rmbr", btw, I changed it after a
request from someone who had a similar app with that name)
------
qoobster
hello from hacker news!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Astronaut's Video Satirizes NASA Bureaucracy - blogimus
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100346538
======
alabut
Direct link to the video:
<http://youtube.com/watch?v=_424YskAfew>
The thing that makes it watchable is the speech bubbles above the actors'
heads point out the subtext of the conversations at each step in the
bureaucracy.
Not surprisingly, it's very applicable outside of NASA, we've all seen some of
the patterns of behavior in private industry, in both organizations large and
small.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Did Apple Make A Mistake Choosing Objective-C For iPhone SDK? - breily
http://www.psynixis.com/blog/2008/04/25/did-apple-make-a-mistake-choosing-objective-c-for-iphone-sdk/
======
comatose_kid
Language popularity is one small component in determining success of an SDK,
and is the wrong thing to focus on. He should have at least considered the
reach of the platform it is running on.
------
tlrobinson
No. Objective-C is a great language, and Cocoa is a great framework built on
top of it.
Any half-decent programmer should be able to pick up the basics very quickly.
------
BigZaphod
The answer is simple: No.
------
LPTS
This guy is clueless.
"For example, it took a long time for Apple to even realise that it needed to
release an SDK for the iPhone. What they were thinking, I have no idea, given
it’s a blindingly obvious requirement."
Obviously not. Obviously from the polish on the SDK, they were planning it all
along. In fact, obviously selling the iPhone as a cellphone is a trojan horse
for a revolutionary device that will act as a bridge between the computers of
the 1990s and the cybernetic future. These guys are playing a game over years,
planning this stuff way ahead of time. It comes out as a phone. Then, with
GPS, 3G, SDK, it turns into a platform for games, enterprise, etc. After
another year, it will do video chats like a tricorder and work with all sorts
of devices.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Intel 80386, part 12: The stuff you don’t need to know - matt_d
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190205-00/?p=100865
======
DiabloD3
Raymond Chen always writes the neatest shit.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The little book about OS development - pykello
http://littleosbook.github.io/
======
gregonicus
Thanks for this awesome work! I would love to see a littlehypervisorbook too!
------
sriram_malhar
This is amazingly comprehensive. Thanks so much.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Clojure Job Board - ertucetin
https://clojurecademy.com/clojure-jobs#
======
max0563
Constructive Criticism:
Get people to post some jobs before posting it to HN. If I saw that there were
a lot a jobs on here I'd be more inclined to stick around especially if I was
looking for a Clojure job. If I am looking to hire I'd be more inclined to
stick around because a lot of posts must mean a lot of people are also viewing
those posts. What you have now is just an empty web page with a few links. As
a side effect of this, I completely forget about the site once I finish typing
this comment.
Not trying to be cruel here, but I have made the same mistake a thousand times
already so I know.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Anatomy of a Program in Memory (2009) - Tomte
http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/anatomy-of-a-program-in-memory/
======
haberman
Really great article and blog.
> You can examine binary images using the nm and objdump commands to display
> symbols, their addresses, segments, and so on.
You can also use my new tool Bloaty McBloatface
([https://github.com/google/bloaty](https://github.com/google/bloaty)). Check
out the -v option especially, which will dump a memory map of both the file
domain and the VM address domain:
$ ./bloaty `which ls` -v -d segments
FILE MAP:
[0, 19d44] LOAD [RX], LOAD [RX]
[19d44, 19df0] [None], [Unmapped]
[19df0, 1a5f4] LOAD [RW], LOAD [RW]
[1a5f4, 1a700] [None], [Unmapped]
[1a700, 1ae00] [None], [ELF Headers]
VM MAP:
[0, 400000] NO ENTRY
[400000, 419d44] LOAD [RX], LOAD [RX]
[419d44, 619df0] NO ENTRY
[619df0, 61a5f4] LOAD [RW], LOAD [RW]
[61a5f4, 61b360] LOAD [RW], LOAD [RW]
VM SIZE FILE SIZE
-------------- --------------
95.1% 103Ki LOAD [RX] 103Ki 96.1%
4.9% 5.36Ki LOAD [RW] 2.00Ki 1.9%
0.0% 0 [ELF Headers] 1.75Ki 1.6%
0.0% 0 [Unmapped] 440 0.4%
100.0% 108Ki TOTAL 107Ki 100.0%
If you leave off "-d segments" the map will include all sections too (like
.bss, .text, etc). Here is an example of that output:
[http://pastebin.com/3XGcqA8k](http://pastebin.com/3XGcqA8k)
------
xenadu02
> Once virtual addresses are enabled, they apply to all software running in
> the machine, including the kernel itself. Thus a portion of the virtual
> address space must be reserved to the kernel
Reserving a portion of the address space for the kernel is a performance
optimization and not necessarily required.
In 32-bit macOS the kernel has its own separate address space just like a
process. Syscalls copy or map data in and out. The benefit is user mode
processes can use all 4 GB. The obvious downside is the extra overhead and TLB
flushes.
32/64-bit iOS and 64-bit macOS use the standard convention if having the
kernel's address space mapped into all processes. Especially on 64-bit there
is no benefit to doing otherwise.
------
rimher
I'd recommend reading absolutely everything that's on this website. Everything
from CS-related stuff to Feynman is worth the time!
------
qwertyuiop924
Wow this is a cool blog. Seriously.
And now I understand memory segmentation. Wow, that is terrible. Seriously
Intel, what is it with you and overcomplicating things?
------
adamnemecek
This blog is the best resource for anything related to the kernel/hw boundary.
Better than any book I've seen.
------
userbinator
Win9x actually looks more similar to the Linux layout, with ring0 only
occupying the highest GB, but has an additional area from 80000000h~BFFFFFFFh
which is shared across all user-mode processes and used for things like DLLs.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The CHIP Is a $9 Computer That Can Almost Do It All - Errorcod3
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/08/the-chip-is-a-9-computer-that-can-almost-do-it-all/
======
dmitrygr
The CPU they use is famous for lack of GPL sources and lack of stability when
using their GPL-non-compliant binary blobs
YMWV! (Your mileage _WILL_ vary)
~~~
bri3d
Additionally, they use ARM Mali GPU IP which is much less open and has far
lower-quality drivers (IMHO) than the VideoCore GPU used on Raspberry Pi and
friends.
~~~
pcwalton
I've had a lot more trouble with VideoCore IV drivers than Mali. In my
experience VideoCore has massive overhead on each call to glDrawElements(),
making it almost unusable for even small numbers of render state changes. When
trying to work around that by batching more aggressively, I ended up with more
than a half dozen or so varyings, which caused the drivers to happily crash
the entire board.
~~~
bri3d
Mali has massive driver stalls as soon as you start touching VBOs directly (ex
to make dynamic VBOs using glBufferData). There are also a lot of fun and easy
ways to shoot yourself in the foot and cause the driver to exhaust memory.
I think mobile GPU drivers in general are pretty much a wasteland, but at
least VideoCore is a documented wasteland.
~~~
pcwalton
Fair enough. It's really sad how we have enormous GPU power available in the
mobile hardware, but in practice the drivers hold them back so much that that
GPU power is really limited.
~~~
TD-Linux
There is a lot of work being done on the Mesa NIR-based VideoCore driver. I'll
be exciting to see what becomes of it.
[http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/VC4/](http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/VC4/)
------
mrb
A lot of people wonder how this can be done for $9, but as it was pointed out
tablets based on the same specs (A13 SoC, 4GB storage, 512MB RAM) can already
be found starting at $30 [1]. Take off the display, case, battery, camera,
cable, charger, and yes it is certain the CHIP can be manufactured for
approximately $9.
Also keep in mind the company doesn't need to make profits selling the CHIP
itself. Their business plan seems to be to sell it at cost while making money
on the plethora of accessories: the LiPO battery is $10, the VGA Adapter is
$10, the HDMI adapter is $15, etc. Also they might try to make a $0.50 or
$1.00 profit here and there on shipping costs (the FAQ even has an entry
"international shipping is too expensive").
Enjoy your $9 computer. 15 years ago a machine with these specs would have
cost 1 month of an engineer's salary... I love technological progress!
[1] [http://www.ebay.com/itm/7-A13-Single-Core-8GB-Google-
Android...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/7-A13-Single-Core-8GB-Google-
Android-4-0-Touch-Tablet-PC-MID-WIFI-Dual-Camera-/321747700995)
~~~
noblethrasher
> Enjoy your $9 computer. 15 years ago a machine with these specs would have
> cost 1 month of an engineer's salary... I love technological progress!
I was about to dispute that statement, because I remember that used Dell
Latitude C600 laptops (with 512 RAM and 20 GB HDD) were going for about $700
on eBay around 2002. But, that same laptop cost over $4000 just two years
prior. So, indeed, that could have been a month's wages for an engineer.
Still, it's amazing that something can go from "prohibitively expensive" to
"impulse buy" in the span of 3 years.
~~~
mrb
For comparable specs, on top of the $4000 you need to add:
\- 4GB of _solid-state_ storage. This alone was $4000 for 4GB in 2000:
[http://www.jcmit.com/flash2014.htm](http://www.jcmit.com/flash2014.htm)
\- Wireless adapter. They were very rare and expensive back in 2000 but I
can't find exact price information
------
mplewis
They're claiming better specs than the RPi Model A (512 MB RAM, 1 GHz CPU)
with more features (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi on board) for $9 vs the RPi's $25.
I highly doubt they will be able to produce the CHIP for $9/unit.
~~~
bravo22
As do I. They might be able to pull it off with discounts from their suppliers
but I imagine it is difficult to build a sustainable business around that
price.
Even assuming 20K volumes:
Current market price for 4GB of flash is about $2.50[1]; 512MB of RAM is about
$2[1]. Processor -- even if something like A33 -- would be about $4. You have
another $2 of regulator, connectors, etc. The PCB is about $1.75 in volume and
assembly would be $1. That's $13.25.
Even if somehow they manage to make this thing really really cheap and get
below that price, let's assume $7 or 50% of magical discount on top of current
volume pricing, that's not much margin. Even if you sell 100K of these a year
(which is very high) you've made only 200K in profit!
EDIT: I forgot about BLE+WiFI -- add $4!
Some are saying PCB pricing is high: I'm basing that on 2.3"x3.3" 6 layer
board with 8 mils holes, and 4 mil clearance and ENIG finish.
[1] I'm basing this on recent 50K purchases but here is a more public source:
[http://www.dramexchange.com/](http://www.dramexchange.com/)
~~~
bri3d
They're using AllWinner A13, which is quite old now. There's a good chance
that since they mention frequently "working closer with AllWinner," AllWinner
are dumping their old A13 stock onto CHIP at fire-sale prices, or that
AllWinner are moving A13 even further downmarket.
I think your PCB and assembly costs are a bit high, as well.
I agree that their margins can't be good.
~~~
bravo22
It looks like R8 which is based on A13, most likely PoP because I don't see a
DRAM or NAND flash in their pic.
PCB might sound high, but it isn't standard 8/8/10 spec PCB. It will have
smaller holes and tighter tolerances.
~~~
bri3d
You're right, and it must be PoP as I don't see any RAM in the picture either.
AllWinner must be cutting them a hell of a deal, or (as others have
speculated) they must be trying to subsidize the main board with other
products.
~~~
bravo22
I think it is a combination of both. But even then I can't imagine profit of
more than $1-$2 per board AT BEST.
------
adricnet
I backed the Kickstarter. Looks like a really neat device with interesting
capabilities and Debian :)
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/chip-the-
wor...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/chip-the-worlds-
first-9-computer)
------
mintplant
I'm more interested in the PocketCHIP than anything else. For a while now I've
been trying to find a handheld computer (with a physical keyboard) that won't
break the bank. But I'm worried about the quality of the CHIP itself... guess
I'll see how this pans out first.
~~~
ansible
The last good one that I know of was the Sidekick 4G from Samsung. Great
keyboard. In sure you can get a used one cheap these days. Put Connectbot on
it and you've got a small handheld terminal.
Another option is the Motorola Photon Q.
~~~
fragmede
> Motorola Photon Q.
Sadly, that was already old when it was released as new in _2012_. Given 3
years of wear and tear, I was sad when I finally had to trade mine in for a
keyboard-less glass brick.
~~~
ansible
Yeah, I was still considering it at the time, even though I was on at&t,
instead of Sprint. There were some form posts of guys depopulating the chip
SIM, and wiring in a SIM card holder. The thought of doing that to an
expensive new phone and still being sick with 2G speeds stopped me from moving
forward.
I've looked at some BT keyboards with my glass brick, but the keyboards
themselves were terrible.
------
ralmidani
I wonder if this would make a good server. Aside from storage, it has specs
comparable to a $5/month Digital Ocean droplet:
[https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/](https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/)
------
cwyers
> The CHIP has already blown past its $50,000 goal and is now at about
> $200,000. They expect to ship in one year and they’re a Haxlr8r company so
> they have some solid manufacturing support.
TechCrunch, why on earth do you think I know what "a Haxlr8r company" is?
~~~
anigbrowl
I hadn't heard of it either but I found it easy to guess, and Google is only a
moment away.
(One Moment later) Yep, just as I thought: a HArdware aCCeLRATOR, like YC but
for hardware.
------
jgome
The anonabox was criticized for, among other reasons, having the "open-source
hardware" logo... its hardware was as "open-source" as of this, yet I can't
see the criticisms in this case.
------
bravo22
Dug up some details on the R8 used in the CHIP. It doesn't look like it'll
have much juice. There are comparable chips out there (made by Atmel for
example) in terms of speed/performance.
Single Cortex-A8 (don't disclose cache sizes) DDR2/3 up to 530MHz 16-bit bus
512MB Max capacity Support NAND/SPI Nor/SD Card 1080p30 decode, 720p30 encode
H.264
They don't disclose the clock but can't imagine it is high.
[1]
[http://www.allwinnertech.com/en/clq/R_series/2015/0514/6066....](http://www.allwinnertech.com/en/clq/R_series/2015/0514/6066.html)
------
silasb
No one here is talking about the PocketChip, which I think is the coolest
thing. If it's hackable it will be really interesting to see what people do
with it.
~~~
nilleo
I totally agree. When looking at the Kickstarter campaign and reading through
the content my thoughts were "neat" but I wasn't particularly _excited_. When
I got to PocketCHIP part however, I thought "oh that's kinda cool I guess",
and then my hoarder side starting thinking "oooo think of the possibilities of
a packaged, portable computer like this!".
I'll definitely be keeping an eye on how the PocketCHIP turns out.
------
jasiek
It's actually $29 per unit with shipping. Nothing to see here, move along. At
$9 a piece they would make very little on each board.
------
karmakaze
The product shot is rather contrived. An actual CRT using composite video
juxtaposed with wireless dual analog joystick controllers.
~~~
kondro
I think composite video is built into the chip.
~~~
karmakaze
This is true. Who today has a CRT that they care to use? Perhaps the $9 price
tag or $24 with HDMI _product_ is contrived.
If it had Ethernet or USB, it might be useful for experimenting with
distributed systems.
------
bcg1
"The CHIP Is _a fictional_ $9 Computer That _doesn 't exist and_ Can Almost Do
_Nothing At_ All"
Just in case someone feels like fixing the headline.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Journalism is treason in Germany - muhpirat
http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/2015/07/30/german-digital-rights-pioneers-investigated-for-treason/
======
creshal
It's a sad tradition:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiegel_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiegel_scandal)
(Interestingly, the Spiegel carefully tries to not have an opinion on the
current scandal and just quotes both sides.)
~~~
muhpirat
Yes, I know that. Its realy sad specialy according to our "Grundgesetz" §5
~~~
schwarze_pest
The Grundgesetz has no Paragrafen.
~~~
muhpirat
Artikel. Sry. You are right.
------
a3n
> Germany's plans to expand domestic Internet surveillance earlier this year.
Sorry if this smells slightly of Godwin's law, but if the internet had been
available from when the Berlin Wall went up until it came down, the Stasi
would not have bothered with neighbors being informants; they would have done
exactly this.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Refactor Party: An idea I shared on GitHub - Zaskoda
https://github.com/Zaskoda/RefactorParty
======
Zaskoda
I'm OP. I'm a dev, but not particularly spectacular at dev. I'm also not
qualified to host or run an OSS project. I'm full of noobness in that regard.
But I had this idea and I thought this would be the best way to try to share
it and see if it's catchy for anyone else. YCombinator is one of the few
places I've shared this link.
Side note: Tho I read the news here often, I don't post. My account here is
nearly 8 years old and as of this post, I have two karmas!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
11M households could be evicted over the next four months - onetimemanytime
https://www.fastcompany.com/90532305/11-million-households-could-be-evicted-over-the-next-four-months
======
joe_the_user
So I see 553,742 people homeless at last estimate (2017, unfortunately). 11M
would 20x this amount, an amount that seems catastrophic and unmanageable.
Moreover, this seems like a situation where an emergency event is treated like
an ordinary, non-emergency situation. And the reason for this is apparently
that America's system of governance is so polarized and dysfunctional that no
entity either can or will put forward a broad plan to escape the situation.
[https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-
america/homeless...](https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-
america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-report-legacy/)
~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _America 's system of governance is so polarized and dysfunctional that no
> entity either can or will put forward a broad plan to escape the situation_
There is a federal eviction moratorium in effect on federally-subsidized and
federally-backed housing [1]. Many states and cities have more-comprehensive
moratoria in place [2].
I'll also note that CARES Act was almost 3x the size of the EU's recent
package (over 7x if one ignores its loans) and 4 months earlier. The
Republican's follow-up bill, half the size of the Democrats', is still larger
than the EU's single package.
American government has plenty of faults. But inability to act in a crisis is
not one of them.
[1] [https://www.consumerfinance.gov/coronavirus/mortgage-and-
hou...](https://www.consumerfinance.gov/coronavirus/mortgage-and-housing-
assistance/renter-protections/)
[2] [https://ny.curbed.com/2020/3/26/21192343/coronavirus-new-
yor...](https://ny.curbed.com/2020/3/26/21192343/coronavirus-new-york-
eviction-moratorium-covid-19)
~~~
dragonwriter
> I'll also note that CARES Act was almost 3x the size of the EU's recent
> package
The EU isn't a national government, their package is a lot more generous than
any comparable US-centered supernational regional org.
As far as national governments go, the German package passed in April was
about US$10,000 per capita, about 1/5 of GDP. CARES was about US$5,000 per
capita, about 1/12 of GDP. Germany passed additional packages, for a total aid
passed through through June of over $17,000 per capita, over 1/3 of GDP.
------
cwhiz
“Could” is a pretty important word here. This estimate is from a survey of how
people feel about their ability to pay rent. It’s not an actual estimate of
the number of distressed tenants or the number of landlords looking to evict.
I would imagine there is plenty of uncertainty at the moment due to Congress
being completely dysfunctional. But let’s say they pass an unemployment
extension and send out another round of stimulus checks. What’s the next
survey going to look like?
~~~
dividedbyzero
Despite the uncertainty, just that the current pandemic can drive a country so
extremely wealthy as the US to a point where such a humanitarian crisis on US
soil is a somewhat realistic possibility, it's crazy. 11 million households,
what a number.
After all, in the larger context, this pandemic is pretty benign among
disasters of that magnitude. History is riddled with cataclysms – decades-long
droughts over whole continents? Been there, bought the studded leather shirt,
got murdered by Mongols. The Black Death, Mount Tambora, a Carrington Event in
modern times, Tunguska (but larger), ... This sort of thing has happened lots
and lots of times and will happen again.
If anything, our recent past has been extraordinarily calm. If it turns out
the US government can't keep, something like a tenth of the population? in
secure housing during this, good luck with climate change, good luck with the
next big one that maybe won't be so benign. This is deeply disconcerting.
~~~
thu2111
The virus is indeed pretty benign compared to many other disasters. Very
benign when you take into account the various statistical distortions e.g.
most COVID deaths being more like "tested positive at time of death" rather
than actual additive deaths.
But the over-reaction to it is on an ahistoric scale. It's quite cataclysmic.
You've had people pulling their own teeth out with pliers because the dentists
were all closed [1], you have people being locked in their homes for weeks or
even months without being able to go outside [2], people being welded inside
buildings [3], you have half of all restaurants on Yelp permanently closing
[4], you have the elderly being abandoned in care homes to die [5] [6]
So whilst I agree _diseases_ have happened before, the kind of global end-of-
days mentality we're seeing here is extremely rare. It's not driven by the
actual facts of the virus, there's something else at work.
[1] [https://nypost.com/2020/04/21/people-are-pulling-their-
own-t...](https://nypost.com/2020/04/21/people-are-pulling-their-own-teeth-
with-dentists-on-lockdown/)
[2] [https://www.abc.es/sociedad/abci-hombre-permanece-aislado-
it...](https://www.abc.es/sociedad/abci-hombre-permanece-aislado-italia-
tras-17-test-positivos-covid-19-202007231415_noticia.html)
[3] [https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/coronavirus-residents-welded-
insi...](https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/coronavirus-residents-welded-inside-their-
own-home/)
[4] [https://mashable.com/article/yelp-restaurants-temporary-
perm...](https://mashable.com/article/yelp-restaurants-temporary-permanent-
closures/?europe=true)
[5] [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-
europe-52014023](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52014023)
[6] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/26/canada-care-
ho...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/26/canada-care-homes-
military-report-coronavirus)
~~~
flunhat
My understanding is that it’s the other way around — both cases and deaths are
being undercounted substantially. And testing capacity has been intentionally
kneecapped by the govt (if you test fewer, you’ll find fewer cases, which
looks good).
All told, COVID looks to be about 10x deadlier than the flu. Which is still
low, but not trivial given how quickly it spreads.
~~~
thu2111
I don't think your understanding is up to date.
10x deadlier than the flu would require it to have an IFR of 1%. Even the US
CDC, which has been over-exaggerating the dangers from the start, peg it at
much less than that, more like 0.3% and many studies are putting it even
lower, like between 0.08% (low end, Denmark) and 0.36% (Germany, Heisenberg).
But those IFRs are also calculated using the standard definition of a COVID
death - someone who died, and was testing positive.
If you look at Italy, early on they realised there was a conflation going on,
and so they did proper studies of some sample of COVID deaths to see why they
really died. They concluded only 4% of the patients had no other medical
conditions, and I recall reading (but don't have a link right now) that they
concluded about 12% had really died of COVID. The rest all just happened to be
infected when they died of something else, which would make sense given the
first stat. So you can cut a digit off most of the reported death rates.
All suggestions of undercounting are based on the assumption that all excess
death is caused by COVID, and nothing else, even though in some countries e.g.
the UK many excess death certificates don't even mention COVID, and in other
countries like Germany there basically isn't any excess death:
[https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Cross-
Section/Corona/Socie...](https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Cross-
Section/Corona/Society/population_death.html)
~~~
malyk
If you look at the CDC data on Excess Deaths[1] then you can see that COVID
and the response to COVID has been responsible for a significant number of
excess deaths in every week since the week ending on 3/28.
So, maybe not 10x deadlier, but certainly way deadlier in total count of
deaths.
1 -
[https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm)
~~~
thu2111
COVID _and the response to it_ \- maybe yes. But remember that many countries
have seen no excess death at all, their graphs are totally flat. Just look at
EuroMOMO.
People have tried to figure out why. It's supposedly the same virus
everywhere. It's not related to hospital overload or healthcare availability
because nowhere ran out of that, despite the initial scares.
It might be care home related, as that's where 80% of the deaths are (reported
to be). It might be related to decisions to flush hospitals to make way for a
modelled surge that never happened. But then that'd fall squarely into the
response bucket.
The US data is hard to interpret because it only goes back to 2017. I can't
seem to find longer term data. Do you know where to find it?
In the UK - one of the 'worst hit' in the world supposedly (but those stats
were found to be wrong) - to find similar excess deaths you have to go back to
1998/1999/2000\. Is this bad? Well, "once in 20 year excess death spike" may
seem bad. But events that happen once every 20 years aren't especially rare.
Back then nobody panicked. Nobody talks about the terrible winters of 1999
when they lost so many loved ones. So it's really important to be able to put
these excess death stats in perspective, otherwise you just see a bump in a
graph and are told "this is really bad".
------
iandanforth
This reminds me of the saying "If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem.
If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem." There has to be
an opportunity for collective action here.
~~~
novok
You sit there and do nothing. The sherrif eviction backlog alone would take
forever I would imagine.
~~~
koheripbal
...while your credit rating drops 200 points for the next 10 years.
The alternative is calling your landlord and speaking to him - almost as if
he's a real human being. Tell him you'll have to move if he doesn't
temporarily lower the rent.
~~~
dencodev
nevermind!
~~~
Schiendelman
As a landlord, this is not true in several ways.
First, in every municipality I've leased in, a landlord is only entitled to
the rent from a broken lease up to the point where they find a new tenant.
Second, landlords can't typically collect rent after a date of eviction (same
reasoning - you can't charge for a service you haven't rendered).
Third, rents are dropping across the US. It's not a given that they'll find
another tenant immediately.
Fourth, the cost to recover rent is high, and usually not worth it.
~~~
harambae
>rents are dropping across the US
do you have a citation for this? my experience in Boston in that landlords
have stopped jacking up rents. that's about it. I haven't seen any come down
yet.
------
LatteLazy
I find this really interesting because if I were a landlord and had a tennant
who was now paying and otherwise had a good history, I would NOT want to be
trying to fill a place at a time like this. I'd just forgive and forget.
~~~
ElonMuskrat
Landlords are levereged to the tits. They are a few mortgage payments away
from foreclosure. These are acts of desperation.
~~~
swiley
Good. Let them feel some pain for helping overinflate the real estate market.
~~~
scarface74
So if the rental market became smaller. How would that help anyone? Would the
tenants all go out and buy houses?
~~~
runeb
I guess what they hope for is that landlords would face foreclosures or dump
property, causing prices to fall, enabling more people to buy their own
housing. That all depends on how many of current tenants are just outside the
ability to buy and that being the main reason they rent instead of own.
~~~
scarface74
The last thing you want if you want to decrease unemployment is for people
buying homes. Once you buy a house you limit your mobility and limit your
optionality to go to where the jobs are.
In fact, you should be encouraging shorter leases.
I got rid of my house in 2012 after getting married so my (step)sons could
stay in their much better school district. I was hesitant to buy a house in
2016 because I had no idea what direction my career might take when my
youngest graduated in 2020.
I might have even gone the r/cscareerquestions route and “learn leetCode and
work for a FAANG” and move to the west coast. But my rent was increasing like
crazy and I wanted to lock in my housing costs by buying.
Thank God I found a remote opening at $BigTech. If not, I would be selling my
house in the next couple of years and trying to move - under normal non
pandemic circumstances.
~~~
runeb
If the mobility was true to such an extent you wouldn't have the overinflation
the real estate market to the degree we see in certain places. That all goes
out the window if the employers in the area close down, of course. But then
the landlords have the same problem anyways.
~~~
scarface74
Over inflation is mostly on the west coast because of the inflated salaries of
tech companies that until now, didn’t want people to work remotely. There is
no reason that a software company couldn’t have all of its employees work from
anywhere in the country.
As far as I know, the entire cloud consulting division of the three major
cloud companies always had plenty of by default remote jobs. I know that AWS
does (that’s where I work).
------
DoreenMichele
Pointless blurb that won't get traction:
This is part of why I blog and run r/GigWorks and r/ClothingStartups: I
figured out how to make money from the street while very ill.
This is solvable. We just aren't working on the right things.
We need to get people working again in a way that doesn't spread the virus. We
need to work on resolving our housing supply issues. We've torn down a million
SROs and not replaced them. We've largely zoned Missing Middle housing out of
existence.
We collectively know how to create affordable market rate housing in walkable
neighborhoods. We just basically choose not to in the US.
And now it's A Real Crisis, not "just a few _losers_ with _personal problems_
". We need to get our head out the sand and stop pretending we are too stupid
to fix this, good god. We aren't too stupid. That's not the issue.
~~~
kennyadam
I'm not very comfortable with the answer to this problem being 'how to make
homeless and sick people keep working'. America desperately needs better
social security nets. (for example) Seeing Bezos net worth skyrocket by
billions at the same time as millions of people losing their homes is
absolutely disgusting.
~~~
watertom
If we didn’t have social security the country would be a dumpster fire right
now.
Employer provided healthcare is the dumbest idea ever, it should be outlawed.
I don’t care what it’s replaced with just as long as it’s gone.
~~~
RhysU
Social Security was created in 1935. How would you characterize the 159
American years preceding its creation ?
~~~
dredmorbius
For 86 of those years, ownership of another human being was the law of the
land and for all of it rampant discrimination against any not of English
Protestant ancestry was pervasive, so for a start there was that.
From 1862 to 1934, over 1.6 million homesteads were created through the
Federal Government. For a filing fee of $18 (~$200--$500 in 2020), and five
years sweat equity, a 21 year old male could claim 5-640 acres by building on
and working it. Homesteading continued as a vastly reduced practice, though
remaining an option, until 1976 in the lower 48 and Alaska until 1986. Open
range provided for additional livilihood based on unowned acreage for
ranchers, and mining stakes were prospected throughout the West. But by 1890,
the notion that there was unsettled land for the taking had passed; the
frontier was closed.
Not that this access was available to all; blacks, Native Americans (this was
originally _their_ land), Mexicans, Chinese, Catholics, and other non-Anglo
groups were routinely denied rights to land.
Prior to 1860, unorganised squatting was common. A Free Soil movement, based
in part of free or cheap land grants to white farmers also emerged.
Too at the time, wage labour was relatively uncommon -- many households were
effectively their own businesses, most farmsteads, others practicing trades or
professions. The rise of factories, railroads, steel mills, and coal mines
gradually shifted this balance. But exposure to the money economy was often
lower than now. Less upside perhaps, but also less systemic risk for most
households.
Life expectencies were far lower than today: 49.3 years in 1901, 60.2 in 1934,
78.8 today. Pensions tended to be private, often failing, or support offered
through multigenerational households (an idea whose time may be returning).
Those living to old age often found themselves with no means of subsistence.
Social Security had a solid basis in real lived pain.
There were frequent economic crises and panics.
You may have heard of the Joads. There's a truth behind that fiction.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath)
------
Skunkleton
To put this in perspective, the linked data shows that 43% of all renters are
at risk of eviction, which is 17M households. The 11M number is just in the
next four months.
------
ithkuil
In Italy landlords have to pay taxes for the rents even if the tenant doesn't
pay (the government defaults to not trusting citizens to declare income), thus
creating a pressure to formally evict tenants. (This problem was fixed a few
years ago for residential rents but it's still a problem for commercial
rents). How does this work in the US? How does it compare, as a landlord, to
face months of likely vacant property versus months of months continued use
but with missed payments?
~~~
Pfhreak
In the US, landlords would still pay property tax, but not income taxes if
they didn't collect any income. Things might get complicated if you rent
significantly below market rates though I'm not sure about that.
The US, unfortunately, has an ethos that failure to pay rent is almost always
an individuals personal failure. This makes it culturally acceptable
(generally) to evict someone who can't make rent because it is a moral failing
of the renter (and not, say, the outcome of systemic failures beyond the
renters control.) So while landlords probably benefit from getting a portion
of their normal rent, they are under significant cultural pressure to evict
people who can't pay.
~~~
cman1444
I would hesitate to say that there is "cultural" pressure to evict a tenant.
Landlords aren't evicting people because their friends tell them to. They
evict people because they think they will have better luck trying to find a
new tenant who will hopefully be able to pay their rent.
------
codingdave
Clearly, this many evictions would be a bad thing. But being allowed to evict
is only the first of multiple roadblocks. The local eviction court has to
grant the eviction, and law enforcement has to show up to actually force them
out. Even if all 11M evictions get approved, I don't foresee law enforcement
having the bandwidth to make them all happen. When I was a landlord, even
under normal times, it would take weeks to get an appointment set with the
sheriff to show up and force the eviction.
I'm not saying this is a good situation, I'm saying that there is more to this
process than just stamping some paperwork, with multiple opportunities to slow
it down.
~~~
ryan_lane
Depends on where the eviction is occurring (some states/cities/counties are
faster/slower). When I worked for a property manager, you didn't have to wait
weeks for the deputies to show up. If an eviction was scheduled for a date, a
deputy is there. The landlord hires contractors to move everything onto the
curb, and the deputy is there to ensure there's no violence. If there's really
this many evictions, they'll likely group them so that less deputies will be
required.
Hopefully lots of things will slow it down, but I doubt that's one of them.
The only thing that will definitely slow it down is to have longer
moratoriums.
------
schoolornot
I've forever been a proponent of personal responsibility. Saving a few bucks
here and there and building up an emergency fund that can carry you through
6-8 months. With that said, the current situation seems untenable. I'm curious
to read other opinions and suggestions here because to me the only solution
appears to be a re-opening and relaxing of current restrictions in order to
restore economic activity.
Surprising enough, all this chatter about evictions and missed payments hasn't
rocked the US housing market one bit. In fact, prices are up.
~~~
blablablerg
With the rising costs of living and low wages we have seen in the last couple
decennia, making ends meet is troublesome for a lot of people, let alone the
having the capacity to save for an emergency fund.
Personal responsibility is easy to say, but when you are born rich or
advantaged you need minimal personal responsibility to get by and when born
poor you can have all the personal responsibility you want and still get
f*cked over. The problem is bigger than personal responsibility. Social
security is very poor in the US compared to modern European countries.
------
kwhitefoot
Surely 2.3 M households is at least 1% and perhaps close to 2% of the US
population. If that is the case _and_ if it were evenly distributed pretty
much everyone would know someone who had received such a notice.
How can this be happening in a developed country?
So I suppose that it is very unevenly distributed so that most people are
blissfully unaware that it is happening.
------
mnm1
This is yet another failing of the federal government. They have the funds to
bail people out just like they did in the last recession. They just won't do
it. I hope people remember that when they are on the streets. Their government
could have helped in the worst crisis in almost a century, but it didn't. It
chose to bail out big companies instead. It chose to reduce the extra
unemployment to force people back to risking their lives. These would have
been easy issues to fix (the unemployment even was temporarily) but our
representatives chose not to. Two months the Senate has been sitting on the
next corona bill and have done nothing while Americans suffer and now are
completely fucked eviction and unemployment wise.
They also didn't do shit to fight the virus itself and instead actively sought
to spread it as much as possible.
~~~
sdinsn
> They have the funds to bail people out just like they did in the last
> recession.
Uh, what? The US is $26 trillion in debt.
We also are bailing people out anyway- the extra federal unemployment made
unemployment benefits worth more than workers' average pay.
> Two months the Senate has been sitting on the next corona bill
Because the first bill doesn't expire until the end of this month.
> They also didn't do shit to fight the virus itself and instead actively
> sought to spread it as much as possible.
It's the people that chose to not wear masks. It's the people that chose to go
to events and go on vacation.
~~~
mnm1
> We also are bailing people out anyway- the extra federal unemployment made
> unemployment benefits worth more than workers' average pay.
We had no problem bailing out a ton of businesses that didn't need it, so
clearly there is no shortage of money. Also, making more money from
unemployment during a pandemic is a feature, not a bug. People need to stay at
home. That's the whole, entire goal.
> Because the first bill doesn't expire until the end of this month.
The checks have stopped. Unless you think they can get the bill passed and
checks sent and delivered by this Friday, then there will be a gap that most
people can't cover. So the Senate has indeed decided not to care as they are
quite aware this is the case and have had two months to deal with it, yet
refused to. So it's irrelevant when "the bill" expires when people aren't
getting anymore money already and there's no plan for them to get any in the
near future.
> It's the people that chose to not wear masks. It's the people that chose to
> go to events and go on vacation.
I agree. But the government has the biggest responsibility. And they haven't
done anything but sabotage the process.
------
onetimemanytime
11,000,000 * $1500 = $16.5 Billion a month. Since we've gotten to the point
where we talk about $trillion deficits and bailout, this will not break the
bank. Yes, why not give me too money, they'll just stop working and live rent
free..etc etc. All valid points, but Covid is a real thing and the economy is
shot.
or the government can send anyone up to a certain income limit in need $1500
_per household_ for 6 months. If they sent to all 128 million households it
would be about $1.2 Trillion for 6 months. If I was a politician, this is what
I'd do for votes /popularity since the purse is being opened anyway
~~~
sdinsn
The federal government is already sending out $2400 per month to people who
are unemployed.
~~~
onetimemanytime
how so?
~~~
sdinsn
What do you mean, "how so"? Federal unemployment is $2400/mo.
------
Pfhreak
It's well past time we built and maintained affordable social housing in this
country. Not gigantic, underfunded, monolithic projects but appropriately
scaled, tax funded, distributed apartments.
It's been successful in many parts of the world, including in the US. It won't
be enough to solve this immediate crisis, but maybe it helps us land on our
feet better and builds resilience for the next time.
~~~
hkai
What problem are you hoping to solve through this?
We did it in Hong Kong. Over 30% of the population lives in virtually free
housing rented from the government.
They don't have an incentive to work. They get to live in one of the most
expensive cities in the world for free, without contributing.
Meanwhile, those who have a job slightly better than McDonald's are not
eligible for this generous giveaway, and are punished by being forced to live
in tiny private apartments that they are unlikely to ever afford to buy.
Is this what you consider justice? Punish the working class?
~~~
cloogshicer
In the major European city I live in, 62% of people live in social housing.
Most people still seem to want to work here.
Even if there were a few 'leeches' here and there I'd gladly subsidize them
for the benefit of a social safety net.
Personally, I also wouldn't consider those people leeches at all. Your
assumption seems to be that everyone who works is automatically contributing
to society - with all the bullshit jobs around, I find this questionable at
the least.
~~~
teetertater
I just moved there, and it's a fantastic place to live/work
------
MR4D
The real gem in this article is the Eviction Estimation tool linked to from
the second paragraph:
[https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiNzRhYjg2NzAtMGE1MC00N...](https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiNzRhYjg2NzAtMGE1MC00NmNjLTllOTMtYjM2NjFmOTA4ZjMyIiwidCI6Ijc5MGJmNjk2LTE3NDYtNGE4OS1hZjI0LTc4ZGE5Y2RhZGE2MSIsImMiOjN9)
------
torgian
What I find darkly hilarious is that these landlords won’t find anyone to
replace those they evicted... because nobody can pay the rent
~~~
Raidion
That's not quite true, but it will lower rental rates, which will impact
selling prices, which will impact capital reserves, which will impact...
~~~
wasdfff
It wont lower them. Stagnate, maybe, but rents really don’t drop.
------
pjdemers
The small city I live in is paying people's rent to avoid having small
landlords go bankrupt. Because bankruptcy owned buildings can stay vacant for
years, while the courts figure out who gets what. All that time, no property
taxes are paid.
~~~
AnimalMuppet
So the city is paying peoples' rent in order to _save money_. Interesting.
Nice longer-term thinking.
May I ask which city?
------
rondennis
I really can't believe this is happening. The pandemic is making people so
desperate.
~~~
harambae
>I really can't believe this is happening
That's because it's not. "could be evicted over the next four months" is the
phrasing in the article, and its wildly unlikely.
Look at the posts at /r/realestate. They show the Redfin/Zillow statistics and
people selling their houses for more than last year in every major metro area
I've been interested in. There's also a lot of concern that lack of
construction during covid will lead to a shortage.
If there's going to be 11M households evicted, why are real estate prices
doing better than ever? Because all of America is clueless except this one
brilliant Fast Company journalist?
~~~
webninja
10 reasons why real estate prices are going up:
1) Home buyers are more likely to be younger people and older people are more
likely to be home sellers. Younger people (buyers) are more likely to be
active now and willing to move.
2) People are rethinking the small studio apartment they were quarantined in
and are looking for better or larger places to WFH in.
3) Money is usually a chief concern for sellers but with the mortgage
forbearance and deferral options why would anyone bother to sell their
appreciating asset that they can keep and live almost for free in?
4) Interest rates dropped to near 0% and will remain there for about 2 years.
That substantially boosted home prices.
5) Some people living in apartments felt that it was hard to social distance
there so they bought a house with land and separation.
6) Substantially more free time to browse houses for some people now!
7) The inflation rate is increasing. Fed target is to overshoot 2% to get to
3% or more annual inflation.
8) Old people aren’t interested in moving out to nursing homes and end-of-life
care facilities now where cases are perceived to be more concentrated and
undesirable.
9) The Census is happening this year and the government would prefer if people
move around less to keep their numbers accurate.
10) Homes containing unevictable tenants can’t be freed up for the housing
market to consume. Even all the bad tenants that mistreat and mishandle their
landlord’s rental homes get to keep mishandling their home while you have to
keep looking for an unoccupied affordable home.
There is a massive shortage of homes in certain parts of this country so
existing homes keep getting bid up and up. Even if some of these reasons
disappear, the others will still remain.
On the first home I offered 5k over asking price when there were 10 other
offers and was bid out by 1 other guy. The second home I offered 10k over
asking price and narrowly beat out the 10 other offers. With that many offers,
the housing supply could double in my area and housing prices would still keep
going up. It’s a very hot market and I don’t see it shifting anytime soon. Not
at least until we see the Momths of Inventory metric (which is a leading
indicator for home price direction) increase to over 6 months and that might
not happen until next year or beyond.
------
Bombthecat
I wonder how many voted for trump, and even living on the street, probably
vote for him again...
As a German, it is really hard to feel sorry for you guys over there..
~~~
sumedh
When you have propaganda running 24x7 on TV, you do not get the full picture.
Lot of Americans do believe that Trump is doing a good job because the TV says
so.
~~~
Bombthecat
My down votrs already shows, that propaganda works.
As a German i also can say: been there, done that :)
~~~
ShamelessC
It's possible you're getting down voted even by people who hate Trump. Keep in
mind, he lost the popular vote by 3 million and has never had decent approval
ratings.
How is it hard to feel sorry for us? We didn't _all_ bring this on ourselves.
Certainly not the majority of us.
~~~
Bombthecat
Not all Germans killed jews or supported hitler.
But we all know how that played out..
------
BMSmnqXAE4yfe1
Not gonna happen. Brrrrrrr.
//\-------------------
Long version for HN moderators:
In the current climate, I believe, the outcome suggested in the title of the
article, could be largely avoided, if suitable monetary policies are timely
introduced, via responsible bipartisan legislation.
------
Proven
Won't happen, the risk is 0. Because the Fed's creeping mandate and upcoming
elections. The both parties want to buy votes.
If you like your fiat money, you can keep your fiat money (and your Big
Government). By the time this is over savers will be completely destroyed.
~~~
pengaru
> By the time this is over savers will be completely destroyed.
As a saver who owns his home outright, this statement cracks me up.
My outlook on this situation is that I can weather the storm for _years_ with
zero income and stay in food and shelter throughout without government aid.
The folks with little savings and high rent or expensive mortgages are who I'm
concerned about. They seem far more likely to be "destroyed" in the coming
months/years.
Us savers can either sit pretty and watch the chaos, buy the dip and profit
handsomely from the recovery, or go shopping for cheap homes.
~~~
danhak
The parent seems to be implying that fed policy will continue to drive down
the value of the dollar.
In this scenario savers get crushed as inflation whittles away the value of
cash while asset prices climb. And the “folks with little savings and
expensive mortgages” that you allude to actually come out on top.
~~~
pengaru
> the “folks with little savings and expensive mortgages” that you allude to
> actually come out on top.
What good is an expensive mortgage when you can't pay it, lose your home,
_and_ now have bad credit preventing you from capitalizing on all the new
opportunities created by all the foreclosures and vacant rentals?
The savers have _options_. At any given moment a saver can decide to buy a
pile of stock, or go get a mortgage. Why would we sit idly by while inflation
gets so bad it no longer makes sense to hold cash? It doesn't happen
overnight, there will be plenty of interesting opportunities in the mean time
available to those with good credit and/or a pile of cash.
------
hnarn
11M out of the current US population is 3.3% Think about that for a second. If
this article is correct, more than _three percent_ of the US population may
become homeless in only four months.
It's estimated that about 2M people were homeless during the great depression
in the US, which is only about 1.6% of the population at that time.
I don't enjoy sounding like an alarmist but at this point I can't help it: my
opinion is that if the US does not introduce something pretty close to
democratic socialist policies soon to ensure there's a safety net to take care
of these people, massive civil unrest is all but guaranteed.
~~~
morceauxdebois
Social safety net is not "democratic socialism". This is not some exceptional,
ground breaking policy, the US is just catching up to the rest of the planet.
Americans have to stop poisoning online political discourse with their
illiteracy.
~~~
hnarn
I’m not American, and yes it is democratic socialism (social democracy).
What’s politically illiterate is avoiding the S-word at all costs when what
you’re talking about is wealth redistribution.
------
peacemaker
In some countries they banned landlords from evicting tenants during the
pandemic to stop stuff like this happening. They then asked banks to provide
mortgage holidays so that the landlords could afford to keep non paying
tenants. In my opinion this is a good example of government intervention for
the greater good.
Is there any political will in the US to do the same? Could something like
this ever be considered in congress or would it be seen as too 'socialist'
maybe?
~~~
jackson1442
I wouldn't be surprised to see a bill with mortgage holidays, etc pass the
House. The Senate is far too conservative to even let this go to a vote,
though; McConnell just put a relief bill to a vote that dramatically reduces
unemployment assistance ($600/wk -> $200/wk), and I doubt we'll see anything
better.
~~~
flywheel
The Republicans have always been the problem. They are rat-fucking the country
and laughing about it - McConnell laughed when asked about unemployment
assistance - he has no intention of helping Americans. He is a ghoul. We are
doomed as long as the Republicans have power.
~~~
logicchains
The Republicans aren't the ones pushing so aggressively to shut down the
economy and destroy these people's livelihoods. Unemployment is significantly
higher in states with stronger lockdowns
([https://www.aier.org/article/unemployment-far-worse-in-
lockd...](https://www.aier.org/article/unemployment-far-worse-in-lockdown-
states-data-show/)), and Blue states generally have the strongest lockdowns.
~~~
Sohcahtoa82
I mean...you understand why the lockdowns are happening, right?
Other countries are seeing COVID cases dropping, while the USA just keeps
going up and up because lockdowns and proper masking and distancing procedures
are being resisted.
By arguing against lockdowns, you're implying that an increased death toll is
an acceptable cost to save the economy.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
New home door locks can be controlled online - acesamped
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jl_aDdGkqkb7Oxvbnu-FyznhbiqQD92VEVU80
can somebody say "iphone app?"
======
acesamped
can somebody say "iphone app"?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Untold Story of Larry Page’s Incredible Comeback - taigeair
http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/04/25/google_s_larry_page_the_co_founder_s_untold_story.html
======
hellbreakslose
Worth the read!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
NFC as a Service - Flomio. Thoughts? - auston
http://flomio.com/
======
lightblade
Very interesting. This might be a viable business in Asian countries where NFC
is pervalent. But the technology have not reached wide adoption here in North
America for this kind of business to be viable.
Its definitely worth watching.
------
delano
I didn't know what NFC meant. I couldn't find an answer on the site so I had
to search for it on Google (it stands for Near-Field Communication).
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Is the iPhone a banana? (European court precendent) - notauser
http://theplanis.com/blog/iphonebanana/
======
kbob
In US law, I'd think the more relevant precedent would be US vs. Microsoft.
Judge Jackson wrote a lengthy decision procedure for when a platform is a
monopoly.
Microsoft's position was that Windows is not a monopoly, because customers had
the option of buying a Macintosh instead of a PC. Jackson threw that argument
out (and Posner let that opinion stand in appeal, IIRC).
I think this is the relevant bit.
<http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm#ii>
IANAL.
------
cawhitworth
You know what would be embarassing? If a company selling web-based project
planning solutions had broken links in their website. Especially a link that
was at the bottom of every page on their company blog, and was the link that
was supposed to take you to the page about the product they sell.
~~~
notauser
You are right, that is pretty embarrassing. It slipped through when I did a
template update and I have now fixed it.
Thanks for the heads up.
~~~
cawhitworth
I feel slightly bad about phrasing it in a snarky way now. Thanks for updating
it, though :)
------
lwhi
I think there should be grounds for anticompetitive behaviour.
Whether I bought my iPhone outright, or whether I'm tied into a contract for
18-24 months, there isn't a sense of competition because I have no reasonable
alternative to purchasing from Apple's App Store.
------
ableal
The post about prospectus credibility is not bad:
<http://theplanis.com/blog/latestage/>
~~~
barrkel
I wonder how much of that is a result of European risk aversion and relative
economic rigidity, focusing on credentials, legal barriers to competition (as
opposed to building a better product), "connections and pedigree". It all
sounds like big corporation CYA behaviour where the returns are low and
predictable and you just need to scale, rather than an investment with big
potential for upside and concomitant appetite for risk.
But like he says, it's only one data point.
~~~
Robin_Message
> European risk aversion and relative economic rigidity, focusing on
> credentials, legal barriers to competition
This is racism.
> It all sounds like big corporation CYA behaviour
And this is illogical. I mean, if Europe is the risk averse one, why is the
acronym "cover your ass"? It should be "couvrir ton derriere", or at least
"arse!"
~~~
amock
>> European risk aversion and relative economic rigidity, focusing on
credentials, legal barriers to competition
>This is racism.
This is an ad hominem argument. The original poster's comment sounds more like
a statement about how he sees European law.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Bloodborne creator Hidetaka Miyazaki: ‘I didn’t have a dream, wasn’t ambitious' - alacritythief
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/31/bloodborne-dark-souls-creator-hidetaka-miyazaki-interview
======
WillPostForFood
Great quote from Miyazaki, who rose from programmer to president of the
company.
_“Now I’m president,” he says, “I get to meet a lot of other company
presidents. They’re such weird people. I’m fascinated by them.” With a smile,
he adds: “I use some of them as enemy characters in our games.”_
~~~
Filthy_casual
This quote reminded me of an anime/manga called Attack on Titan, where it's
said that its creator draws inspiration for Titan looks from bullies that had
in his school years.
------
Filthy_casual
>But Miyazaki had a problem: at 29, he was too old to apply for graduate
positions and too inexperienced for anything else. “Not a lot of places would
take me,” he says. “From Software was one of the few.”
Career switchers who are slow to find their knack in life deserve a fresh
start. I say that from the position of being one. Talent _does_ exist among
the people who are trapped in mediocre, unfulfilled lives, and all they look
for is their chance to shine.
I bloody love Dark Souls and Bloodborne.
~~~
kleer001
I am considering a career AND industry change, and I'm almost 40. Can you give
me some general advice or pointers about career switching. I'm not entirely
sure why I would think you might have a basis, just reaching out.
~~~
rokhayakebe
This is not an advice, but just a comment. I think many software engineers
would KILL it if they worked for small mom and pop shops, or small practices.
They could help turn many $500,000/year businesses into several times that
revenue. Plus they would have WAY more autonomy then working at startups and
tech companies, which in my opinion are just factories.
~~~
TheCowboy
I agree with you, but there are a lot of catches when dealing with small
businesses. They don't apply to every business, and my experience could be
anecdotal. But there is an argument to be made that some of these businesses
remain small for a good reason.
The first problem with many of these small businesses is they don't want to
pay market rates for people with the skills and talent. If you do generate
that much revenue, it's not guaranteed that you'll be brought up to a market
rate.
You might not even get credit for achievements, where people view you as a
commodity worker. You'll encounter owners or employees who know just enough to
be dangerous, and therefore don't value the skills you bring to the table.
Their son knows some HTML, how hard can it be? You can't build Facebook or
automate all of their business processes in a weekend?
You'll be caught in situations where your time will be micromanaged to the
point where you can't be productive. The farther away a business gets from
software, the less experience management has with managing software projects
and the people who work on them. It's difficult to get autonomy for a project
that might take days and weeks for tangible results, when most people are used
to being able to see the progress and results more immediately. They won't
understand everything or anything you're doing and may doubt you actually know
what you're talking about or understand their needs.
Your "maker's schedule" will be sliced and diced into useless microblocks of
time. Because you know computers, you'll be tasked with keeping printers and
desktops running. You will be the first person people disrupt throughout the
day with any issue.
------
devindotcom
I've been playing Bloodborne every evening for the last week or so, and it is
tremendous. It's the only game that __minor spoiler __has ever gotten
Lovecraftian horror correct in a really convincing way. The tone is pretty
much one hundred percent on target.
I'd love a couple of my cosmic-horror-loving friends to play it, but it is
_fucking_ hard. I'm not sure they'd make it to the first boss, to say nothing
of past it and the next however many there are.
As someone else points out, it may unfeasible for you to get a copy of your
own (it's a PS4 exclusive), so you can of course watch others play - but
seriously, it's not the same thing. Creeping around corners waiting for an
ambush, inspecting hideous statues, hearing the slither of some nearby yet
hidden hostile creature - the mindset you enter while playing is important to
the consumption of the content. Watching another play, you don't quite have
that. If at all possible, don't watch, just wait for your chance to play it -
outside of Dark Souls and to some extent its prequel and sequel, it's pretty
much a one-of-a-kind experience.
~~~
doktrin
> I'd love a couple of my cosmic-horror-loving friends to play it, but it is
> fucking hard. I'm not sure they'd make it to the first boss, to say nothing
> of past it and the next however many there are.
> outside of Dark Souls and to some extent its prequel and sequel, it's pretty
> much a one-of-a-kind experience.
Weird. Bloodborne is the first of the "series" that I've even been remotely
tempted to play. The combat mechanics look fresh and exciting. Every video
I've ever seen of its predecessors featured gameplay that looked boring and
clunky (even if challenging).
~~~
cdr
The combat in Dark Souls was amazing. The hitboxes were so finely tuned you
could just about dodge by a hair. The Artorias boss fight was the most fluid
battle I've seen in a game, though maybe Bloodborne can top it. The PVP was
absolutely great also, with skill-intensive counters for everything meaning
the most skilled player almost always came out on top.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWLsLb-
tK8A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWLsLb-tK8A) (audio possibly NSFW)
~~~
alacritythief
The hitboxes are done very well in Bloodborne, to the point where the
Bloodborne subreddit has dubbed it "hitbox porn".
Examples:
[http://gfycat.com/FlatOffbeatDrake](http://gfycat.com/FlatOffbeatDrake)
[http://i.imgur.com/WWUzhSe.gifv](http://i.imgur.com/WWUzhSe.gifv)
[http://gfycat.com/LinedCookedKoodoo](http://gfycat.com/LinedCookedKoodoo)
------
sergiotapia
This game is just phenomenal, I find myself thinking about the game and it's
creatures late at night while trying to sleep. It has a quality to it that
requires your undivided attention and I think that's why it permeates so
easily into your psyche.
If you haven't tried it out yet, do yourself a favor and at least rent it.
It's one of the best game to come out in the past decade. You'll hear people
whine about it being hard, but it's not like that. It's fair. You mess up you
will be hit. If you're patient and time your movements you'll glide through
the areas and make the game seem like a typical hack n slash. You will make it
look easy.
------
izacus
Does this game also require you to pointlessly repeat large chunks of levels
after death on bosses like the Dark Souls games did?
~~~
mreiland
Yes, coupled with a 30 second load screen after every single death. I've never
played any of the other games, but I can tell you after playing this for a
while that this game is not for me due to how they implement the difficulty.
Just to give you an idea, it took me 7 or 8 years to beat Kingdom Hearts 1
because of how bad the camera was. I got to a point where I just walked away.
I really dislike games that are difficult due to ackward controls, cheesy
mechanics (such as enemies popping behind you in an area you just cleared),
that sort of thing
I played it for a few hours but I got tired of things like
\- you roll and the camera lifts up so you're staring down at yourself and can
no longer see the enemies you rolled from
\- if you hit the enemy at the end of your range your attack pushes them back
further than your characters steps forward so you miss the followup attack and
they end up killing you (or hurting you badly).
\- Sometimes when you attack an enemy they'll slide sideways (I say sometimes,
I mean quite often). I've seen them slide so far they slide behind the camera
at which point you're guessing where they are based upon where they
disappeared.
\- Your attacks do random amounts of damage. Sometimes it takes 3 hits to kill
a mob, sometimes 4 or 5. But because every attack uses stamina, you really
want to use as few attacks as possible and sometimes you die for it because
that 1 random enemy required an extra hit. I never figured out why.
\- the healing items appeared to give a random amount of health back.
\- Some of the level designs appeared to be such that it maximized the pain of
the camera. One enemy in particular I'm thinking of is big and surroundedin by
innumerable unbreakable boxes and such. He wasn't that difficult himself, but
being able to avoid his attack successfull due to the aforementioned boxes,
etc, was a tedious chore.
I can see the appeal to the game, but it just isn't for me. And this is coming
from a guy who plays most games on hard. But there's a certain kind of
difficulty I don't enjoy and unfortunately this game lands right square in the
middle of it.
edit: The thing that caused me to respond in the first place.
The game moves slow overall. You kill an enemy, he drops loot, but not
immediately, so you end up waiting to see if he dropped loot. If he does, you
run to the body, hit X, wait for the confirmation to pop up, hit X again, and
then eventually go on about your day. When you're playing the same level over
and over again it gets _really_ time consumingly tedious. Add on to that the
30 second load screen (that's not an exaggeration) and you have a game that's
pure tedium (atleast for me).
~~~
anon4
_Your attacks do random amounts of damage_
No, it matters which part of the weapon hits the enemy. With the hammer for
instance, you really need to aim it right - to hit the enemy with the head
part and not the hilt part.
Some of your other gripes can also be summarized as "you must become
proficient at the mechanics" and the rest is fucking bullshit which Miyazaki
put in because he hates you.
~~~
mreiland
I figured that's what it was, but I couldn't ever see it. Someone else created
the character so I didn't choose the weapon, but it was a long whip/blade
thing that would open and close (for faster/slower attacks). It may just be
harder to see with that particular weapon, I did actively try and check if
that was the case.
For the point about the mechanics, there are some mechanics I simply don't
want to deal with because I don't personally find them fun. The designers are
free to design the hit system so that the enemies have a tendency to slide
back towards the camera. I'm just as free to avoid the game because I don't
want to get good at turning my analog stick at just the right angle because
they slid back in a way that makes no sense.
That isn't me attacking the game, there are obviously a lot of people who
really like the game. I've been gaming since the Atari days and I've grown to
have my own set of likes and dislikes for games.
I will say there was something really addictive about the game. I wanted to
keep playing despite the frustration, but the frustration itself was due to
mechanics I simply don't like (and the slowness of the play is a _huge_ pet
peeve of mine. I played Tales of the Abyss on emulator because I couldn't deal
with the slow load times on the actual PS2, I actually stopped playing the
game because of them).
OTOH, I ordered my PS4 from Amazon and it bricked w/i 6 hours of getting it,
so maybe if I put in a bit more time I'll learn how they want you to play the
game... We'll see, I could not believe it when the PS4 shut off and refused to
start up again.
~~~
anon4
Haha, yeah, I can see where you're coming from. The game really is meant to be
bullshit and to hurt you. From what I've seen though, Bloodborne has a lot
less bullshit mechanics-wise than the previous games. Just look at the Capra
Demon fight from Dark Souls: small room with pillars all over, one huge boss
and two attack dogs crammed in there with you. Your weapons bounce back when
you hit the geometry; theirs don't. Have fun. Also: The Archers in Anor Londo.
For me though, that's part of what makes it special. It wouldn't feel so good
actually getting past the obstacles if it was fair.
------
doctorpangloss
If you want to see more of the game but find it too cumbersome to buy, I
started by just watching it on Twitch[0].
[http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Bloodborne](http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Bloodborne)
~~~
philtar
How would it be too cumbersome to buy?
~~~
jmgao
It's a PS4 exclusive, so anyone who doesn't already have the console have to
buy it ($400) to be able to have the privilege of buying it.
(it was worth it)
~~~
ekianjo
There's some chance it comes on PC later on. Maybe. Just like Dark Souls did.
~~~
simias
Dark Souls never was an exclusive and it was published by Namco. Demon's Souls
would be a better comparison and it was never ported to the PC unfortunately.
Sony is publishing the game and I'm not sure it would be in their best
interest to have one of their only notable PS4 exclusives available on an
other platform.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ideological Segregation Online and Offline - shrikant
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1588920
======
_delirium
Intriguing result. The conventional wisdom is that the internet makes
political groupthink worse, on the theory that while RL requires people to mix
with lots of people around them, the internet makes it easy to self-select
into echo chambers. The study seems to find the opposite. One guess is that
the internet actually mixes people more easily, due to the low barriers in
hopping from site to site; whereas IRL, many people tend to live in areas that
are generally "conservative" or generally "liberal", and mixing between them
is much harder.
~~~
hga
_Exactly_. I have retired back to my home in _deep_ Red State America (SW
Missouri), and I interact with local liberals on blogs and the local paper.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
ShopList - mobile phone shopping list that's actually usable - davidw
http://shoplist.dedasys.com
======
danielha
Simple and nifty. I'm already accustomed to typing out a shopping list (or
whatever else I need to remember) on the PC and texting that to my mobile.
But you're right; the most interesting aspect of this is the fetch from the
service's server. I've been exploring ways to tinker with such an integration
but I haven't gotten anything just yet. This makes me want to look into it
again.
------
davidw
I was quite happy with this application and am thinking a lot about what other
interesting things could be done with a fusion of mobile phones and the web...
Most of the j2me shopping lists are crap because who in their right mind would
want to sit around typing in a shopping list via a phone's keypad?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Clojure/core quick reference - fogus
http://clojuredocs.org/quickref/Clojure%20Core
======
michaelty
Excellent reference! This is going to be handy for "->" and "->>".
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How efficient-market theory has been proved both wrong and right - flavio87
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13240822
======
nazgulnarsil
will the economist links ever be blacklisted? Or am i the only one who finds
their journalistic standards to be lacking?
~~~
alecst
It would be more constructive to say exactly what about this article you found
to be lacking, rather than bashing the whole site.
------
lionhearted
"There is now widespread acceptance that investors can behave irrationally"
<\- Get out of here. People are irrational?
All kidding aside, I started my university studies in economics before
switching over to management halfway through. The thing about efficient
markets isn't that economics is claiming that things are instantly, always,
100% priced correctly, it's that they'll price themselves correctly over time
and in aggregate. Econ doesn't say that no one will make a bad purchase ever,
it says that if you wait around for a while, the "invisible hand of the
market" will do its thing and price things correctly. If people are
"overpaying" for gasoline, more people will start digging and refining oil to
take those profits. The more people that start producing, the more prices will
have to fall to compete, until prices get sane again. If lots of speculators
get involved as they have recently, they'll artificially decrease supply by
stocking reserves until they need to eventually unload those reserves,
resulting in - as we saw - prices going up, up, up - and then crashing down,
down, down when the speculators have to unload their oil on the market. Funny
how everyone who complained about speculators and gas for the last few years
aren't talking about how cool it is to have gas in the $2 to $3 range again.
So sure, housing was overheated for a few years. Then people realized it, and
you can see what's happening now. It's not really a pleasant thing that people
make bad decisions that aren't obviously bad decisions at the time, but it's
been the nature of reality for as long as reality has been around. Nowdays,
instead of worrying nonstop about droughts, famine, floods, plague, we're
worrying about things that are relatively much less painless. There's still
unpredictability and people don't act perfectly in any given timeframe, but
things tend to straighten themselves out if you give it a while.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Favorite language for coding webpages? - ImaBauss
I've dabbled in many languages such as Ruby, php, and Java. However I want to choose a language to really stick to master! What are your guyses preferred languages for coding websites/webapps? If you could put benefits as well as drawbacks to your favorite language as well that would be amazing!<p>-Thanks for your time
======
samlev
I've spent a lot of time working in PHP. I largely enjoyed my time, because it
provides a (mostly) easy-to-deploy, fast-to-develop platform for web
development. What it also provides is a maintenance nightmare. It promotes
sloppy coding, and the library of standard functions are horribly
inconsistent. Many people never run into this, but whe you really want to
design something properly, using strong OO ideas, then PHP just isn't up to
the task (type hinting is for objects only? what?).
Ruby I've never used personally, but it seems kinda popular. It doesn't have
the market penetration for deployment of PHP or python, though.
Python is my new favourite for web development due to a couple of very nice
frameworks. Django for when I want to build something fast, and don't care too
much about controlling the particulars like user management, etc. Pyramid for
when I want to develop something which will involve a lot of customising
parts. They both have their strengths and weaknesses, and what you use is both
personal preference, and should be decided based on the project.
Java - Oh, Java. GWT provides a nice way to build webapps with Java, but I'm
not a fan of using it to build 'page' based web applications. That's personal
preference, though, and I've got no good reasons not to use it - it just rubs
me the wrong way for web.
------
callahad
All of the modern languages are pretty capable, and learning any one of them
will make it easier to learn any other.
I'd suggest looking around and figuring out what people in your area are
using, then picking whichever one has the most active user group. Being
connected to real people in that language's community is a great way to stay
motivated and accelerate your learning.
------
pshc
Javascript.
Benefits:
\- Sharing code between client and server is a huge win
\- Less impedance mismatch glue code in general
\- V8 is really fast
\- Node.js makes me write everything streaming style which may reduce page
latency
Drawbacks:
\- Javascript (I like coffeescript but I _still_ write more bugs in CS than in
plain JS...)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Feasibility of a GPU Service Provider? - nobody271
Say you go out and buy a couple 2080's and put them into an Ubuntu Server box. Could you use that box to provide GPU support to local computers (either in the same building or other buildings on the same ISP within, say, a mile)?<p>Of course, NVIDEA offers gaming as a service so it must be possible on some level (https://www.nvidia.com/object/cloud-gaming.html).<p>Is there software you could install on a Windows machine that would act like a GPU driver but would really send those commands over the internet to your local GSP (GPU Service Provider)?<p>You could use the same service for other things:<p>- crypto (of course)<p>- cracking hashes<p>- training machine learning models (probably won't get much use of that in your neighborhood, though).<p>Maybe you could even charge by the number of calculations done. Only five months ago someone created a related post on reddit about vectordash (https://www.reddit.com/r/gpumining/comments/86ofw2/rent_out_your_gpu_compute_to_ai_researchers_and/) but that was more for AI than gaming.<p>Now seems like the right time for this, right? GPU prices are crazy and GPUs are in demand for all sorts of applications. So if you could get the same performance by renting a 2080 for you know, $20 a month why wouldn't you?<p>Is there any existing software for this type of application?
======
zenexer
This is already a thing:
\- [https://parsecgaming.com/](https://parsecgaming.com/)
\- [https://www.paperspace.com/](https://www.paperspace.com/)
Those two collaborate to do more or less exactly what you've described. It
ends up looking a lot like RDP/VNC, but without the latency.
If you take the time to calculate Paperspace's profit margin, you'll see that
it's a risky business to be in. You'd have to buy GPUs in bulk, and, even
then, you're competing with the same company that's selling you the GPUs.
Nvidia doesn't license the most useful API, Nvidia GRID
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_GRID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_GRID)),
with consumer cards. You have to get their datacenter-grade cards (e.g., the
Tesla line) if you want access to the most relevant APIs. It's possible to
unlock consumer cards for this purpose, but, as you're lacking the respective
license, you're liable to get sued. This effectively means Nvidia is two
slices of your pie instead of just one. (They can do whatever they want with
their own hardware an APIs.)
~~~
nobody271
I think I Just went from entrepreneur to customer, lol. It might still work if
you just did it for fun and the games had to support OpenGL or something. But
yeah, wow, parsecgaming is polished af.
------
kgersen
NVidia Geforce driver licence doesn't allow deployment in datacenter (see
[https://www.geforce.com/drivers/license/geforce](https://www.geforce.com/drivers/license/geforce)
)
------
BrandonBradley
I think there is a market for this and started building on a similar idea last
week.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Best tips for holding great conversations with liberal arts alumni? - Emore
I'm attending a university alumnus dinner, being the only CS-student there.
======
Jun8
After my PhD in EE, when I started my graduate work in Linguistics I had quite
a shock to see how different they thought and argued (and then I took a course
in the philosophy of department, _that's_ a different story altogether).
My advice would be: Try to get the most out of meeting with them. It's easy to
look down on the "soft sciences", but you'll be surprised at the insights you
may learn. You should not use jargon, even if it sounds mundane to you, they
won't understand it and think you're doing it deliberately to look clever.
~~~
Emore
Thank you for the advice!
Also, I should mention that I am indeed fascinated by the multitude of topics
that other have studied, but that I don't know anything of. That's the
problem, I believe: I want to get past the mundane "So what is that?" sort of
questions.
~~~
atgm
Try to keep it going; all you can do is hold your half of the conversation. If
you don't know what something is, try to relate it to something you do know --
if the other person is holding up their end, they'll work with you and you'll
have a decent conversation.
Edit: It's really the same as holding a conversation with, say, someone who's
in a technical profession you don't know about, or a family member you haven't
met for a long time. We liberal arts majors aren't aliens!
~~~
Jun8
I disagree, not with liberals arts majors not being aliens part, but this
being the same as talking to someone from any technical profession you don't
know about. In my experience, the thinking process thought and praised in
liberals arts fields is in some respects quite different from that in any
technical field, as to sometimes be a real impediment in communication.
One example from a topic I worked on: author attribution using stylometry. To
a CS (or EE or whatever) the thought that you can take a corpus composed of
writings from various authors and train classifiers to differentiate the
unique styles of each would be mundane. To some English majors, such a strong
structuralist approach would border on sacrilegious (remember Prof. Keating's
reaction to such an approach to judge poetry in _Dead Port's Society_ ). Each
approach has something to be said for it but it has to be done delicately,
otherwise polite discussion becomes impossible.
------
eof
If/when you need to disagree/contradict them frame it in a way that is not
like you are the authority.
Generally, it's probably better (more polite) to say "I am pretty sure it's
actually..." or, "I always thought it was .." even when you know 100%.
Wikileaks is probably a good topic of conversation (politics and technology).
~~~
vizvizviz
This. Conversation is a give-and-take. Simply declaring that the other person
is wrong and that you are right makes people less open to continue talking to
you, as it makes you seem combative.
------
deafcheese
Just approach it like you would any other conversation. Ask questions about
their lives - everyone likes to talk about themselves. Make jokes. Try not to
be nervous. Be yourself. There is no need to act differently just because
you're talking to liberal arts alumni.
------
brudgers
Assume you are below average: <http://sivers.org/below-average>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Who's buying the Mac Pro? - abennett
http://www.itworld.com/personal-tech/82746/whos-buying-mac-pro
======
nickyp
Basically: people who need to fill the slots to connect hardware that's as
expensive as their computing platform and/or are running a software stack that
can also cost as much as an iMac. In generally these people fit the 'Pro'
suffix ;-)
High-end multi-channel audio interfaces and/or audio processing cards that
accelerate audio plug-ins. Even Firewire or USB equipment works best if each
device is using dedicated controller cards. (every Mac has only 1 USB/Firewire
controller)
If you need to connect multiple 30inch Cinema Displays and still have proper
performance (e.g. 3D) you need multiple GPU's. These cards often get replaced
after a couple of years to boost performance.
And most often these kind of applications demand a lot of (very performant)
storage so RAID controllers and lots and lots of hard-drives come into play.
If you're not buying a Mac Pro for these kind of workflows, you're just
shopping for bragging rights I guess ;-)
And trust me: if you're using a Mac Pro in this manner you're not jealous
about that very speedy iMac with that really nice display. It might me
speedier, but it just can't do what your workstation was bought for.
And hey, maybe you'll buy one for the 'light web browsing' in your den ;-)
~~~
bhousel
One other difference: the Mac Pros use ECC memory, the iMacs do not. This
makes sense, given the users that each product line targets.
~~~
Tamerlin
Good point.
That probably adds quite a bit to the cost of the machine.
I realized after the fact that I implied that the creative industry was the
ONLY other one that would be interested in a MacPro rather than in an iMac,
rather than just an example. Oops.
------
petercooper
The current low end Mac Pro does kinda suck compared to the iMac. Indeed, I
think it sucks compared to the _previous_ Mac Pro, which I own.
I bought the "entry level" (the default entry level - you could do a downgrade
to 4 cores for a small saving) Mac Pro almost two years ago - it's an eight
core 2.8GHz Xeon. It benches better than the mere quad 2.66GHz Nehalem _and_
was cheaper in 2008 than the current entry level machine! I think I got a
bargain ;-)
I can only believe that Apple's in a limbo with the Mac Pro and getting ready
to unveil something massive in the next several months. The Mac Pro has pretty
much sucked since the latest Nehalem revision compared to what it was.
~~~
bcl
NOTE: Apple has said they aren't releasing anything new for the remainder of
the year.
[http://www.macrumors.com/2009/10/27/phil-schiller-claims-
no-...](http://www.macrumors.com/2009/10/27/phil-schiller-claims-no-more-new-
apple-products-this-year/)
~~~
ionfish
Given that it's practically November, on a reasonable interpretation "the next
several months" that Peter mentioned isn't limited to 2009.
~~~
bcl
Ahh, but that statement includes November and December, and since those months
have been excluded by Apple (assuming we can believe them) it would be more
accurate to say next year, or January or some other statement that excludes
the rest of this year.
;)
------
cobralibre
I think quite a few Mac users would have a genuine use for the Mac Pro's
expandability, but have to satisfy themselves with dangling piles of
peripherals off the USB and Firewire ports of their iMacs and MacBooks because
they can't justify the cost of a Mac Pro -- and they aren't spending somebody
else's money.
I would also like to take this opportunity to salute the author for his use of
the word 'nichier.'
------
pxlpshr
The 27" iMac is the anomaly in the equation, prior to that the iMacs were not
nearly as comparable to the Mac Pro. And, the author is taking an existing
hardware configuration and comparing it to a brand new release which has blown
the doors off just about everything at its price point.
The benefit of the Mac Pro is obviously upgradability. I own one, it's a beast
of a machine. The question to a buyer is, are you really going to own/upgrade
it after ~3-4+ years, which is about when you start to realize the cost
savings of said system vs. all-in-ones?
For most people the answer is no, so the iMac 27" is a much better deal.
~~~
bjelkeman-again
I have a 4 core Mac Pro. It replaced a gaming PC and a Mac Cube. The reason I
went with the Mac Pro was that I need the power for gaming and wanted to use
my old 22 inch screen, which is a leftover from the Cube, but still going
strong. I want to try to upgrade the graphics card now, but that is about it.
My screens generally has lasted two computers, so over time I guessed that the
Mac Pro would be better value for money, as I don't have to chuck away screens
as often. But the price for screens have gone way down so I am not sure what
the next computer will be.
------
m0shen
They are being purchased by the creative departments for various ad, print and
digital firms. I've done IT consulting for several of these types of
companies, it's typical for them to spec out low(er) end Mac Pros and then
load them up with third-party ram and disks. Sometimes they're purchased as a
bundle through accounts with places like PC Connection.
~~~
transburgh
I work with a couple of agencies and the creatives are moving to iMacs. Cost
less and built in monitor. The only people that use the MacPros are video
editors.
~~~
madh
I find that most are moving towards laptops (mbp) with external monitors.
------
bhousel
Another compelling reason to prefer a Mac Pro over an iMac would be
virtualization. Since I began using it a year ago, VMWare fusion has
completely changed how I work.
I have 6 VMs set up on my Macbook Pro that I use regularly - they contain
different versions of Windows along with Oracle, SQL Server, and various
service packs. I don't think I will ever go back to setting up a bunch of
dedicated machines for the testing and development that I do. If I wanted a
desktop server, I'd definitely buy a Mac Pro for this.
The way I would use it, 1 Mac Pro == 8 or more PCs :)
------
Tamerlin
"The Mac Pro's target market is probably among people doing research or
running render farms"
and "Now if even hard-core enthusiasts like Matt and myself are turning to
laptops and iMacs..."
Makes me think that the author's view of the world is very narrow.
Renderfarms are in fact a bad target for a Mac Pro -- part of the reason for
the MacPro's cost is graphics hardware, which you don't need on a
renderfarm... though that's probably going to start changing as the graphics
processors continue to become compute clusters. That is, of course, why
there's such a market for rack-mount headless servers.
Outside of research, there are as mentioned elsewhere in the comments the
creative industry, which has much more need of memory, computing power, and
graphics performance than the "hardcore enthusiasts" -- compositing and
animation can be very intensive tasks... imagine the amount of data involved
in just the models for the battle scenes in "The Return of the King" for
example.
------
spenrose
Almost no one. Total desktop sales have been drifting down for 2 years:
[http://images.macworld.com/images/news/graphics/143380-mac-u...](http://images.macworld.com/images/news/graphics/143380-mac-
units-q409_original.jpg) Of the 800K desktops, over 600K were iMacs (no
citation; sorry), and the average selling price was ~$1,250, meaning that
Apple sold well under 100K Mac Pros. I would guess it's a ~250K unit/year
business, shrinking slowly. They can probably keep swapping new processors
into the existing design for years w/o significant R&D costs. My guess is
high-end video-editing will keep it alive for some time.
------
acangiano
My co-founders and I use beefy MacBook Pros to handle the work associated with
ThinkCode.TV. We produce programming screencasts, so nothing too CPU/GPU
intensive compared to some other companies. Well, our laptops barely make it.
When working with video processing, the more powerful and future proof (read
expandable) your hardware is, the better. I fully expect us to consider
purchasing some Mac Pros in the future. How much time does a high-end Mac Pro
saves us over a new iMac? Is that time worth the cost difference? If yes,
we'll go with Mac Pros, if not we'll go for the iMacs.
------
stuff4ben
One word, expandability. The top-end iMac is pretty much maxed out, whereas
the low-end MacPro has plenty of room for expansion and performance upgrades.
If I was in the market for a new high-end development platform, I'd be all
over the low-end MacPro and then upgrade it myself. It's definitely cheaper to
get memory and HD's from Newegg than Apple. Although I do have to say the 27"
iMac is pretty sweet but I doubt I'd have enough desk space for it.
~~~
DannoHung
I almost wish Apple would sell a bare-bones MacPro so I could pick decent
parts without Apple markup and not have to pay for the shitty parts they stick
in the entry level model.
No hard drive, no video card, no ram. Just the CPU, mobo, case, and a copy of
Snow Leopard (and pretty kb+mouse).
~~~
hamidp
I too wish Apple would disregard the core of its business plan and introduce a
niche product that few would buy.
~~~
kylec
Assuming that it's priced reasonably, I'd definitely buy it. I'm sure a lot of
people would. But it's something that Apple's not going to do as it won't work
out of the box.
------
MikeCapone
I have an early 2008 8-core Mac Pro with 8 gigs of RAM. I just don't like
laptops much, since I'm always at my desk (and I have a Macbook anyway).
------
jsz0
I bought a Mac Pro recently as an audio workstation. It's probably overkill
for my needs but there were enough reasons to go for it. ECC memory, internal
RAID, ability to drive more than 2 displays, lots of RAM capacity, optical
input/output, etc. It is an extremely reliable well built machine. My biggest
problem with the iMac is being unable to use two perfectly matching displays.
------
rythie
I think they are pushing the iMac to replace most of the high end use cases
the Mac Pro had with the 27inch display, 16GB max memory, and Quad Core CPU
options.
Some people here are saying the reason to buy a Mac Pro is that it is
expandable - I think for that reason Apple would rather you kept buying new
iMacs rather than upgrading your Mac Pro.
------
protomyth
The new iMac does remove some customers from the Mac Pro, but if you need the
fastest Mac available or need slots (more video people now then photoshop
people) the Mac Pro is it.
Actually, I think the new Mac mini server will make some people think who
might have purchased a Mac Pro instead of an Xserve.
------
gcheong
A friend of mine composes music in his spare time and recently bought a Mac
Pro just for doing this.
------
numbchuckskills
I think the author is a little out of touch. Who's buying the Mac pro? Hordes
of preppy college students who will use it browse the web and write up papers
in Word. It's far from uber-niche.
~~~
mseebach
No, they're getting MacBook Pros. What's the point of having an expensive
computer if you can't parade it at Starbucks?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Latvia blocking extradition of Gozi writer due to disproportionate US sentencing - Libertatea
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/08/05/latvia-blocking-extradition-of-gozi-writer-thanks-to-disproportionate-us-sentencing/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nakedsecurity+%28Naked+Security+-+Sophos%29
======
PeterisP
It's widely covered here in Latvian local media - the general message is that
there are grounds to charge (and likely convict) him with a bunch of crimes
locally; but -
1) local prosecution claims that there aren't any grounds to prosecute on
~half of claims that USA wants to charge;
2) defense lawyers claim and popular sentiment (including politicians) believe
that USA doesn't have a just/fair court system for computer related crimes;
3) there is a strong position for local jurisdiction in crimes in "cyberspace"
\- if some action is legal locally, then people shouldn't care if it's illegal
in USA; if some crime carries max penalty of 5 years, as is here for computer
fraud; then extraditing him for charges of the USA requested 67 years -
essentially life sentence - is unacceptable.
~~~
walshemj
If they had robed a bank physically would they still not be extradited?
And given their neighbors experience with cyber war I woudl have expected
Latvia to take this a lot more seriously
~~~
PeterisP
The whole point is that if they physically robbed a local branch of an USA
bank, stealing money of USA citizens and say, even killing USA citizens in the
process, then they wouldn't be extradited nor prosecuted for USA laws. And, by
the way, even armed robbery w. killings (IMHO far worse than any amount of
theft/fraud) would still carry less penalty than the 67 years currently
requested, barring serious aggravating circumstances.
~~~
jordanb
It's been long established in international law that the crime occurs where
the harm occurs. That's why the Lockerbie bombers were tried in Scotland.
~~~
dragonwriter
The Lockerbie bombers were tried in the Netherlands by a Scottish Court under
Scots Law, with a weird jurisdictional set up, as part of a negotiated
compromise to resolve US/UK demands that they be tried in the US or UK, and
Libyan demands that they _not_ be tried in the US or UK, and the location and
other arrangements for the trial do not represent any "long-established
principle in international law", unless you include the principle that
international law is mostly just whatever the involved sovereign states agree
to at the time on the specific issue in question.
~~~
smutticus
>international law is mostly just whatever the involved sovereign states agree
to at the time on the specific issue in question.
Thank you. I've long made the argument that international law is arbitrary and
capricious without much buy-in from those around me. It's good to hear you say
it.
~~~
dragonwriter
I'm not saying that there aren't some fairly well-settled substantive
principles of international law that aren't just arbitrary and capricious, I'm
just saying that you don't find any of them illustrated by the decision of
where to locate the Lockerbie bombing trial.
(OTOH, even where there are well-established principles of international law,
the absence of consistent enforcement and application leads to them not being
inviolate.)
------
kybernetikos
As far as I'm concerned, the US's cultural acceptance of prison rape should be
enough to stop any extradition to the US for any crime that would garner
prison time.
~~~
octo_t
Not just prison rape, but the very idea of "prison should be as harsh as
possible" is absolutely awful.
~~~
sigzero
Hmmm...I do not know anyone with the mentality of "prison should be as harsh
as possible". Prison shouldn't be a "cake walk" either.
~~~
chongli
Personally, I'd go even further. The very idea that prison is primarily about
punishment (revenge by proxy?) instead of rehabilitation is wrongheaded.
The goal of any policy should be the betterment of society. We have plenty of
evidence to show that prisons designed for rehabilitation have lower
incidences of recidivism than harsh, punitive ones.
~~~
briandear
The recidivism rate in Sweden is 35%. Which means, that even with a
rehabilitative-oriented system, you still have 1/3 of prisoners returning to
jail. It does provide some substance to the claim that some criminals can't be
rehabilitated, because even in one of the "best" systems, you still have a
large number going back to prison.
Of course, the US recidivism rate is 67%, which is horrible, however it's very
difficult to compare Sweden and the United States simply because you have some
significant differences. It's difficult to assume that the only variable in
play between the US and Nordic countries are simply the justice system.
First, you have a demographic differences. You also have significant
differences in culture as well. In Sweden for example, single parent families
are just 20% of all families with children. Yet in the US, 67% of all black
families with children are single-parent, with 42% in the Latino community and
overall a rate of over 30% for all families with children in the United
States. In 1960, the overall rate was just 9%. I'm not arguing for or against
single parent families, but there is a strong correlation between the
likelihood of being arrested and the strength of the family unit. Here's an
article that discusses it more, including research citations:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/the-real-
co...](http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/the-real-complex-
connection-between-single-parent-families-and-crime/265860/)
Suggesting that the prison system is the primary cause of recidivism is to
miss the point. We shouldn't be focusing on recidivism, we should be focusing
on what gets people into prison in the first place.
~~~
newnewnew
Sweden has a growing problem with crime in an immigrant population[1] that
does not feel it is part of Swedish culture[2]. Soon, the Swedish will have
the same governance problems as America stemming from a multicultural society.
[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime#Sweden](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime#Sweden)
[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/world/europe/swedens-
riots...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/world/europe/swedens-riots-put-
its-identity-in-question.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)
~~~
osivertsson
Why would a multi-cultural society cause governance problems?
------
scotty79
Extraditing people to US for computer crime is like extraditing to Iran for
insulting Allah.
~~~
mmphosis
Praise to the Mighty Dollah.
------
gst
Even though it seems that in this particular there is no extradition, it's
somewhat concerning that there are so many countries that would extradit their
citizens to a foreign country, although those citizens might have never
visited this country (Gary McKinnon is another example). My home country has a
policy to never extradit its own citizens and up until now I assumed that this
is the norm for most countries. ("never extradit" means that you can still go
to jail if you're doing something that's illegal in the foreign country and in
your home country. But in that case you are sentenced by a local judge and put
into a local jail.)
~~~
elnate
Which country?
~~~
joseflavio
In my country too, Brazil.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition)
"Own nationals: Some countries, such as Brazil,[6] the Czech Republic,[7]
France,[8][9] Germany,[10] Japan,[11] the People's Republic of China,[12] the
Republic of China (Taiwan)[13] forbid extradition of their own nationals.
These countries often have laws in place that give them jurisdiction over
crimes committed abroad by or against citizens. By virtue of such
jurisdiction, they prosecute and try citizens accused of crimes committed
abroad as if the crime had occurred within the country's borders (see e.g.
trial of Xiao Zhen)."
------
chmike
The problems will be solved through education and giving people a second
chance. I mean a real second chance. US Justice has turned into a self
promotion race through populism by exagerating charges and sentenses. Trials
and jailing has turned into a business. Education loans has led to restore
slavery.
US once considered the example of liberty, free speach and enterpreneurship is
now subject to the consequences of extremas in all fields. Thanks to lobbying
and subversion of regulating institutions.
Russia has crumbled under the weight of it's central administrative policy, US
starts to crumble under the pressure of people's greediness and disabling of
regulating structures as well as loss of sense of morale.
~~~
torkins
"Education loans has led to restore[sic] slavery" is one of the most
hyperbolic comments I have read on HN. I don't agree that giving students
credit secured by future income is equivalent to forcibly converting a free
human into the property of another.
~~~
speeder
I am someone with student debts.
For the past 4 years, I mostly worked on what I could, not what I really
wanted...
Happily, sometimes there was a overlap, but how it is not slavery?
I cannot quit. I cannot choose what I will work with (mostly, every time I was
without a job, I had to accept whatever offer came by, the few times I tried
to be picky I ended even more indebted to buy food). I cannot live where I
want... And so on.
With some employers, I did feel owned, because even if they did not knew I was
in deep debt, they could push me to do whatever they wanted, just with a small
treat of dismissal, because I CANNOT afford be dismissed, my debt payment is
way above the country average wage, and for the last years I've been living
reaching the end of each month slighly indebted or with a zero balance in the
bank.
I dread the day I suffer some accident, near my home people ignore the red
light a lot, and I think if I ever get hit by a car, I don't have money to pay
medical expenses. (my parents are also in debt, partly by their incredible
education expense they had with me, sometimes taking loans they knew they
could not pay just to pay for my schooling).
Right now I am co-founder in a startup, and every time our cash starts to run
low, conflicts flare up quickly, because the pressure becomes immense, it
generates lots of instability, and I already lost two relationships over this
(ie: not over having a startup, but having those debts and financial
instability and extreme dependance on employers).
~~~
joseflavio
I believe we are really heading for a de facto Wage slavery (mainly now that
you can't declare bankruptcy from students debts)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery)
~~~
speeder
I am from Brazil, there is no personal bankrupcty.
Also, your debts are inherited, mandatorily, specially if you have spouse,
kids, or parents (in the order. if you die, your spouse will get at least 50%
of your debts, if you don't have one, then your kids will be forced to take at
least 50% of your debts, if you don't have kids, then your parents... the
other 50% must be inherited by someone too, but you can choose with your will
who will be the unlucky person).
And because a side effect of inheritance laws, the government can (although I
never heard about it doing it) give your debts to a third cousin even.
Also, another thing is that here in Brazil student debts commonly have as
collateral the assets of a third party (in fact all sorts of debts here work
that way, except for companies), so if I DO fail to pay my debt, then it will
pass to my parents, that are already indebted and will certainly fail to pay
it, then their stuff will be taken (and I don't have anything to be taken, my
3 most valuable assets are my laptop, my phone, and my glasses).
EDIT to joseflavio: Your link is about law in Portugual, not Brazil, note the
currency mentioned is Euro, not Reais.
EDIT2 to joseflavio: I got curious enough, to see if there is anything
analogous in Brazil, and indeed there is, by another name "renuncia".
The law (I will skip the non-interesting part) about "renuncia":
Art. 1.807. O interessado em que o herdeiro declare se aceita, ou não, a
herança, poderá, vinte dias após aberta a sucessão, requerer ao juiz prazo
razoável, não maior de trinta dias, para, nele, se pronunciar o herdeiro, sob
pena de se haver a herança por aceita.
Art. 1.812. São irrevogáveis os atos de aceitação ou de renúncia da herança.
Art. 1.813. Quando o herdeiro prejudicar os seus credores, renunciando à
herança, poderão eles, com autorização do juiz, aceitá-la em nome do
renunciante.
§ 1o A habilitação dos credores se fará no prazo de trinta dias seguintes ao
conhecimento do fato.
§ 2o Pagas as dívidas do renunciante, prevalece a renúncia quanto ao
remanescente, que será devolvido aos demais herdeiros.
Thus in short: You have 20 days to renounce your inheritance.
If your are inheriting debts and renounce your inheritance, your creditors can
sue to force you still inherit the debt and pay them, and after the debt is
paid, the "good" parts of the inheritance get successfully renounced and go to
someone else, thus attempting to renounce a debt only results in punishment,
since you still get the debt, but DON'T get the good parts of the inheritance.
~~~
reginaldo
This analysis is wrong. One inherits the debts, but only up to the value of
the assets inherited. See Art. 1.792
Art. 1.792. O herdeiro não responde por encargos superiores às forças da
herança; incumbe-lhe, porém, a prova do excesso, salvo se houver inventário
que a escuse, demostrando o valor dos bens herdados.
Free translation:
Section 1792. The heir is not liable for charges greater than the forces of
inheritance: it must, however, provide evidence of excess, unless there is
inventory to excuse himself, demonstrating the value of inherited assets.
~~~
speeder
I did not saw that, thanks.
Although you must still prove yourself that the debt exceeds the assets, this
can get very problematic in some cases (like I guy I know that AFTER he died,
people found out that beside his official wife and his 2 previous divorced
wives, he also had 5 other "marriages", and the 7 women did not knew each
other, he had children with all of them, and each one thought he owned a
different business... this case is still in inventary hell, but last I heard
of it, they concluded each child will inherit 10 million BRL each plus
lands... but they don't started yet counting the debts... also, all of the
women were correct, he never lied about what he owned, only he never presented
anyone with the full truth, to each one he presented himself owning a
different business he really owned, I wonder how the guy pulled that off)
~~~
reginaldo
Wow... My father is a civil lawyer and deals with inventories regularly, but I
don't think he's ever gotten a case so contrived. And I fully agree that
having to prove the debt exceeds the assets is a major annoyance. Anything
that puts the brazilian justice system in your back (especially in this case
where the burden of proof is inverted), is a nightmare.
------
Smrchy
If only the US would not have such disproportionate blind eyes towards the
Wall Street bankers.
------
andmarios
This is one of the few times I am with the US point of view. Stealing thousand
of bank accounts isn't a small crime. If anyone here found his bank account
empty, would he be ok with a top of 5 years of jail time for the culprit? If
one person commited suicide, or lost his house, etc due to a theft caused by
these guys, is it ok?
He isn't a teenager who downloaded a song, he isn't a security researcher who
was just playing around, he isn't a whistleblower who wanted to protect our
privacy by informing us, they didn't ran a service to help oppressed people
reach out; they are bank robbers, top notch bank robbers if they compromised
so many accounts.
~~~
caf
Personally I have come around to the view that purely financial crimes should
merit only financial punishments, of a sufficient magnitude to deter the
crime.
I'd like to think that I would be rational enough to maintain that position
even if I was the victim of such a crime.
~~~
rayiner
That's ours poor people who have nothing to lose. What do you do when a guy
whose broke steals a million dollars?
~~~
ansgri
take it away and give her some prison time, in this case. The problem is, of
course, that in the prison she will be taught how to steal professionally, so
an ideal rehabilitative prison should prevent any contact between inmates.
------
reginaldjcooper
This is truly great. Maybe Latvia will be able to offer asylum to the next kid
charged for downloading with intent to share.
------
sandis
While this has indeed been the case so far, it's important to point out that
the final decision is scheduled to be made by the Cabinet of Ministers
tomorrow (Tuesday).
------
scotty79
Too bad that UK didn't have such good jugment as Latvia in case of Richard
O'Dwyer.
------
Fuxy
Anybody thinking this is the new slave labor or is it just me? Need more
workers? Introduce stricter laws.
Given the mess the American legal system is just about anybody can be
sentenced for something so the only question is how many slaves/criminals do
we need?
------
znowi
What a pleasant surprise. Tiny Latvia said _no_ to the mighty US. My
compliments.
------
tomaac
Today it was decided to extradite him to USA.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Intel Confirms 8th Gen Core on 14nm, Data Center First to New Nodes - richardboegli
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11115/intel-confirms-8th-gen-core-on-14nm-data-center-first-to-new-nodes
======
dogma1138
The focus in this thread appears to be on the wrong thing. Intel has
introduced a new process here for die interconnects
[http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/emib.html](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/emib.html)
This can be very interesting especially if this can be expanded to other
products. TSVs increase the pricing of certain products by a substantial
margin and have pretty high failure rates, they also increase the internal
resistance of components and can cause thermal issues.
HBM and 3Dxpoint built on EMIB can reduce the price of these components
substantially, it can also make it viable again to split the dies of the IGP
and the CPU allowing Intel have SKUs with different IGP configuration
including EDRAM/SRAM without having to have multiple die designs.
~~~
wmf
I don't think the cost of multiple die designs is significant for Intel since
they amortize it over very high volume. (For example, they updated the
Celeron/Pentium/i3 line to Kaby Lake even though customers probably won't even
notice.) EMIB looks like it would always be more expensive than a single die
or MCM so I don't see the benefit for consumer chips.
~~~
dogma1138
EMIB allows you to integrate dies that are built using different processes
which means that you don't have to wait for all of your processes to align.
If you can't produce reliable SRAM at 10nm no problem, if you want to
integrate FPGAs that are build using a different process no problem, you want
to scale up the same basic core design of 4 core clusters again just make the
same small dies and interpose them based on market demands. This will allow
Intel to sell Xeon SoCs/CPU's with 128 to 256 core which isn't viable if you
put them all on the same die, it also means that they don't have to disable
cores for different SKU's now if they want to make a 10 core CPU they just put
10 cores and not 12 with 2 of them disabled.
People also overlook the cost of the masks, a set of master masks cost a lot
of money even their copies cost a small fortune and as we go into more and
more intensive processes as far as radiation goes the lifespan of these masks
shrinks in an ever increasing pace.
~~~
ethbro
I'm assuming this might also mean they can leverage their legacy fabs to a
greater degree for non-critical components in competitive spaces? That seems
like a huge advantage.
It sounds like a move from "Do we assume the next node will be ready for our
most important chip in X years?" to "What parts of chips is the next node
currently ready for?"
Fabbing smaller dies on lower-yield, leading edge processes would also be
nice. Curious what the trade-offs will look like in terms of power/thermal vs
a monolithic die design.
------
throw2016
The $64 G4560 making the i3 redundant, Kabylake X, and now this. This seems
like a meltdown at Intel.
I think there is a real risk if AMD deliver superb performance and value with
Zen, Intel will lose a little bit of the shine and a lot of consumers will not
perceive them as innovative anymore.
The sheer number of skus itself shows Intel has been on a bit of a downward
spiral towards becoming something of a 'marketing company'. Kabylake has
negligible to no gains over skylake making it a pure branding exercise. Risky
move for reputation. Time to focus on innovation and value.
------
orik
wow -- bad news.
Intel already failed to get off of 14nm with Kaby Lake, and now they're
pushing it back another cycle?
~~~
kogepathic
I can't wait until AMD releases Ryzen in March. I haven't owned an AMD system
since socket 939, but Ryzen pricing is leaking now, and it looks like it's
going to significantly undercut Intel's current prices. [0]
Let's hope this encourages Intel to discount their current and future chips.
More competition is always good for the consumer.
[0] [http://m.hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/102322-uk-us-prices-
amd-r7-...](http://m.hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/102322-uk-us-prices-amd-r7-ryzen-
processors-spotted)
~~~
samfisher83
Lets hope the Ryzen is the real deal.I mean the i7-3610 is just as good as my
i7-6700hq which was like 3 or 4 years ago. Without competition we are in
trouble. I remember when Athlon64 came it made Intel come up with core2duo
which was a quantum leap from p4.
~~~
sqeaky
I agree with you that competition is important. I disagree that the
improvements in generations of i7s are as minor as they superficially seem to
be.
For at least my task, compiling large amounts of C++, the difference between
the different i7s is huge. I get a new expensive laptop every two years (and a
cheaper machine for portability or other purposes each off year). I have a
high end 1st, 2nd, 4th and 6th gen i7 each machine is measurably faster with
the oldest machine taking almost 10 minutes and the newest taking just about 2
minutes to build the same codebase.
~~~
dman
Which is your latest i7 chip? Did you switch from hdd to ssd somewhere along
the way? What are the core counts with each generation ?
~~~
farresito
Do SSDs make any noticeable difference? I think I once read a post (maybe from
Joel) where they bought SSDs and the difference in compilation time was
negligible.
~~~
dman
At work my compile times went down by 70% on switching to a SSD.
~~~
sqeaky
What language? How big of a build? Is your build too large to fit in RAM?
~~~
dman
C++ on windows. Lets just say that the number of things hooking into file
modified notifications (anti viruses etc) are largely the culprit.
------
deepnotderp
EUV pushbacks from Applied Materials and ASML have pushed 10nm back quite a
bit.
I honestly don't see Moore's law progressing beyond 3nm, maybe even stopping
at 7nm or 10nm.
~~~
luhn
Well, Moore's law is already dead. Intel missed the mark last year.
As far as shrinking transistors further, isn't 7nm the physical limit?
Edit: I'm mistaken. Transistors as small as 1nm have been developed.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer#Technology_demos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer#Technology_demos)
~~~
Analemma_
When transistors stop shrinking- whether that's at 10, 5 or 7nm- the limit is
going to be economic, not physical. Intel probably could make a chip with 1nm
transistors; the question is whether it would ever deliver a positive ROI,
since
\- the R&D and the fabs would probably cost a zillion dollars, in a shrinking
market for high-performance CPUs
\- yields would probably be very low, even as the process matured - this
problem is becoming more and more pronounced with the latest generations
\- the advantages over the current chips would not be great; note svantana's
comment about diminishing returns with the most recent process shrink
~~~
curiousgal
>a shrinking market for high-performance CPUs
It is??
~~~
AnimalMuppet
Well, for chips that are, say, twice as fast as the best current chips for
three times the money, I suspect that the market is in fact shrinking, because
_for most people_ , current chips are good enough.
There's still plenty of people who want more speed badly enough to pay for it,
but my impression is that there aren't as many as there used to be.
~~~
ethbro
Or in other words, the market for single-chip performance is shrinking.
The hyperscale folks care about how much physical space given performance
takes, but that's likely more energy/performance than chipcount/performance
constrained.
------
wmf
It's kind of odd that AnandTech doesn't mention Coffee Lake. These rumors have
been going around for months.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Twenty Rules for Amazon Cloud Security - chaostheory
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/11/20-rules-for-amazon-cloud-security.html
======
wmf
There's an assumption here that you use EC2 even though you don't trust
Amazon. What is the cost of this assumption?
It would be interesting to separate these rules into universal ones and EC2
ones. I suspect that in many cases, following all these rules would add enough
cost to offset any savings of using EC2.
------
rgrieselhuber
A lot of these rules apply to more than just Amazon's cloud. If you're
deploying to any one of the major hosting providers out there, it's critical
to understand where you should be encrypting network traffic, etc. This is
especially true as most of the affordable service providers don't provide any
real DMZ-type support for the machines you rent.
------
mmmurf
In other words, how to shave the yak for about 6 months setting up a
complicated security infrastructure.
These may all be good practices, but how many of them assume that Amazon
itself will get hacked?
For entrepreneur on a budget, isn't #20 the most important one?
~~~
delano
How does encrypting data and not allowing passwords for shell accounts affect
your budget?
~~~
wmf
I suspect that many sysadmins have little experience with dm-crypt and all the
key management you'd need with it, so learning and installing that stuff has a
cost. And you better test thoroughly, because losing a key could mean losing
all your data.
------
bob_dole
Aren't you in an enclosed network subnet within your own cloud in ec2?
~~~
emmett
No, you share network subnet space with (an arbitrary number of) other EC2
users.
------
apollo
How about Google app engine?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Introducing Apple Music - brbcoding
http://www.apple.com/live/2015-june-event/215baa98-f26b-4a74-8f50-bdfb062ea294/
======
mercer
I don't quite understand why they put so much emphasis on 24/7 radio. First, I
knew few (younger) people who listen to radio. Second, it's technically not
that impressive.
But most importantly: music is very divisive and tastes differ greatly. Apple
has usually done a great job to keep their image as neutral as possible.
There's a reason why the types of artists they generally associate with are
rather inoffensive (Coldplay, The Beatles) or at worst found annoying (U2, or
rather Bono).
So who gets excited about such a radio station?
(I just saw Drake get on stage, which actually illustrates this. He's neutral
enough to not offend, but because it's _music_ , I imagine a collective groan
from pretty much all of my friends.)
To be clear, it's kind of a _cute_ idea, but why emphasize it so much?
~~~
austenallred
I would kill to be able to go to the party Spotify will undoubtedly throw
tonight.
There wasn't one thing in the entire presentation that was even intriguing,
let alone in innovative. The reason I loved my iPod is because I didn't _have_
to listen to the radio. And now Apple is making that the killer feature?
_RADIO?_ Like it's freaking 2002?
Other than that and artist communication (which I would _maybe_ care about for
_one_ artist), Apple Music is Spotify. Their solution for finding what you
want to listen to? "I like rock and alternative" (whatever that means). This
has been done a dozen times, and rarely well.
Spotify has been iterating exact same concept for years and has all of my
friends listening to it, as well as all of my playlists. People tell me Rdio
is similar, but I've never had reason to use it. The only way Apple wins is if
the power of something being the Apple default is truly that strong. Having
Siri integration is literally the only thing that Apple has a leg up on any of
the other music services on.
And then they call it "revolutionary" and throw it in a "ONE MORE THING!"
slot? That's pretty bad. And I'm an Apple fanboy.
~~~
JonFish85
"The only way this wins is if the power of something being the Apple default
is truly that strong."
For something like this, yeah, Apple default is probably that strong.
Considering that it'll button right into all of their hardware (laptop, iPad,
iPhone), I could see it being a fairly significant thing for them. It's one
less app to have to use, one less payment interface to deal with, and
integrate with whatever music the user already has.
Not to mention that Apple probably has a lot more clout in the bargaining
arena with the record labels than Spotify does, and a LOT more cash to throw
around.
~~~
dperfect
I've been an avid Rhapsody user since the early days. One thing that still
annoys me about Rhapsody on iOS devices is that if the app has been closed or
backgrounded (not playing music) for long enough, hitting the "play" button in
control center (or bluetooth devices) often goes back to playing from iTunes -
which I don't use.
The ideal solution would be Apple fixing that - allowing for a user-defined
default player. I'm sad to say it, but if that doesn't become a reality, I may
be tempted to switch to Apple's streaming service for that one reason alone.
~~~
NathanKP
That's the exact reason they designed it that way.
Apple is intended to be a walled garden rather than a true equal platform for
the app devs. As much as I like Apple hardware I hate their mobile OS because
of this approach of building special integrations for their built in apps that
you can't even remove, while denying other app devs access to the full range
of device integration, except if you go through their limited API's.
------
seivan
Looking forward to ditching Spotify. Stopped paying once they removed Cmd-F
filtering and the app started to lag on my 2014 Macbook Pro (with dedicated
GPU).
Also, I agree with the keynote speakers, Spotify "Radio" never worked for me.
Always got repeated songs or songs I hated.
I wanted automated "thumbs up" if I finished a song, or "thumbs down" if I
skipped it, without having to worry about repeated songs.
And a million of other complaints.
~~~
ryanSrich
I'm so glad I finally have an alternative to Spotify. They removed staring,
apps, and filtering. Their radio is abysmal (almost as bad as Pandora).
What I'd really like to see is a radio feature that plays songs that sound
like the song you requested. What all these algorithms seem todo is play songs
that other people listened to after or before the song you requested. Or they
just play something in the same genre. Genres are kind of dead now, so it
doesn't make sense to recommend songs this way. Why not suggest songs with
similar guitar riffs? Why not suggest songs with artists that have similar
voices?
~~~
jessriedel
> What I'd really like to see is a radio feature that plays songs that sound
> like the song you requested.
Isn't this exactly what Pandora does?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project)
~~~
ryanSrich
That's what they advertise but based on my experience (I used Pandora for
years in college) it's quite a ways off.
~~~
jessriedel
OK but you said
> What all these algorithms seem todo is play songs that other people listened
> to after or before the song you requested. Or they just play something in
> the same genre.
and I am pretty sure that, under the hood, this is _not_ what they are doing.
They really are using individual attributes about the song (e.g., tenor
vocalist, minimalism, heavy distortion, etc.) to try and find something that
sounds the same.
So I think your real complaint is "I don't think the algorithms are good
enough yet, even though they are trying to do exactly what I want".
------
stock_toaster
I found this entire part of the presentation a combination of boring and
awkward. Honestly couldn't care less about it.
I did find it funny when Iovine said "revolutionary" though, and a few in the
crowd seemed to chuckle/laugh, and he appeared a bit confused.
~~~
cjensen
It was a very un-Apple-like presentation. Apple has a reputation for
rehearsing presentations many times. The presentations are critiqued in order
to make sure they are clear and to the point.
These presenters didn't fit the usual model. They acted like hadn't rehearsed
much (Iovine in particular). It was wildly unclear what, exactly, they were
talking about. Lots of abstract hand-waving instead of keeping things concrete
and clear.
I'm mystified how this happened.
~~~
hamburglar
Eddy Cue was embarrassing. He made so many grammatical errors it was like he
was winging it, and when he tries to seem hip it's cringeworthy. There was a
moment where he queued some stuff up and then stiffly said, "yeah! I think I'm
really gonna enjoy this playlist!" as if anybody in history has ever exclaimed
that.
------
thirdsun
Concerning Radio: While I like the general idea of putting human curators in
charge, I think the very broad target audience and the mainstream appeal +
expectations of Apple will render this service close to useless for anyone
who's really deep into music. I don't want to sound like a hipster, but I
spent a lot of time digging up old and new gems in music and I really don't
expect Apple's radio station to bring a lot of worthwhile discoveries to the
table.
The format itself is great - NTS radio has been doing similar stuff for years,
independent from ad money or any other influences, just the taste of the
respective show host. Apple however? They have to appeal, in general, to
everyone and you can't have it both ways - it's either deep, niche and
interesting to a small crowd...or very wide and superficial.
Playlists: The suggestions coming from their playlists, don't sound more
interesting than what rdio and probably every other streaming service (I don't
use Spotify, can't compare) is doing - we saw Bruce Springsteen and "Big Rock"
as automated playlists in the demo - not the hardest usecase I imagine. I'm
less confident when it comes to obscure jazz fusion krautrock crossovers from
the early 1970s. In that case you'll probably have to get your hands dirty
yourself, with countless open tabs just like it has been for years. Not that
I'm complaining, I enjoy going down those rabbit holes.
~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "They have to appeal, in general, to everyone and you can't have it both
ways - it's either deep, niche and interesting to small crowd...or very wide
and superficial."
Why can't they can do 'shows' like regular radio catering to different tastes?
------
baldfat
> Revolutionary
Really Apple Revolutionary? You are years late tot he game and you bought
Beats. Revolutionary and you have Jimmy Iovinne do the presentation?
~~~
pavel_lishin
Who is Jimmy Iovinne, and what's with the juxtaposition of him and
'revolutionary'?
~~~
k-mcgrady
He's one of the world's most successful record producers and also co-founder
of Interscope. He worked on Springsteen, Tom Petty, U2, Dire Straits, John
Lennon records and more.
~~~
arfliw
He also cofounded Beats with Dr Dre and sold it to Apple.
Many speculated that was partially a talent acquisition, to get him working on
projects exactly like this.
~~~
k-mcgrady
Did he co-found Beats? I couldn't confirm. AFAIK he joined up early and got
lots of stock or something like that.
~~~
arfliw
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beats_Electronics#Formation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beats_Electronics#Formation)
>The company was formally established in 2006,[1] a time when Iovine perceived
two key problems in the music industry...
My understanding is he essentially WAS Beats, with Dre lending his name and
like consulting on style and whatnot. Iovine being the brains. That has
carried over to Apple where Iovine works full-time and Dre does not. Apple
wanted Iovine.
------
devindotcom
Would have been a great 5-minute update - "we're adding in direct interactions
with artists, and a cool new worldwide radio station DJed by a couple really
clued-in people. It's reasonably priced and works with all your existing
iTunes stuff. First three months free!!"
But that looong, rambling explanation of every little feature, punctuated by
clips from hip-but-safe artists, was entirely too much show for it.
~~~
davidhperry
Perhaps they needed to fill space after nixing the revamped Apple TV
announcement, if recent rumors are to be believed.
------
Animats
So what is this new product? The Apple site doesn't say.
If you just want background music, try Radio Coast.[1]. This is a successful
streaming music project which annoys the RIAA because it doesn't have to pay
royalties. Years ago Seeburg, the jukebox manufacturer, offered a background
music service, using a special record changer which played 1000 songs over and
over. The music was recorded by their own in-house musicians, so they didn't
have to pay the RIAA. They never copyrighted the records, which you had to do
back then to get copyright protection. Instead, they used a primitive form of
DRM - the speed, record size, groove width, and hole size are all nonstandard.
All those records have been converted to files, and there's a streaming site.
Hundreds of hours of 1950s elevator music.
[1] [http://radiocoast.com/](http://radiocoast.com/)
~~~
istvan__
This is literally the best content in this thread. I haven'd heard about this
but this project is freakin amazing.
------
nostromo
That was an inordinate amount of pomp and circumstance for an updated Music
app.
A radio station? No time shifting? People replaced their radios with Walkmen
and iPods for a reason...
And "Connect" just sounds like Ping 2.0.
~~~
zyxley
> That was an inordinate amount of pomp and circumstance for an updated Music
> App.
"We're basically cloning the entire feature set of Spotify and integrating
that into our existing services" is bigger than you give it credit for.
~~~
underyx
It's not even the entire feature set. For instance, it seems like I can't
control different devices with it, which has lately grown to be an essential
feature for me — 60% of the time when I have my phone on the charger, I can
just yell 'Okay, Google' from across the room, and Spotify will put whatever
music I ask it to on my PC's speakers.
~~~
threeseed
Pretty sure that's available today.
I just say 'Hey Siri play XYZ' on my watch and the music plays on my car
stereo.
------
d0m
The link just open a modal with "Introducing Apple music".. I couldn't find a
way to watch the video or text associated with it. Is it a browser issue? Or
is the link wrong?
~~~
Nicholas_C
You have to click the X at the top left. For some reason it's a popup over the
intro page.
------
jameshart
So with "News" and "Music", Apple's positioning themselves as a provider of
curated, editorialized content. Isn't this a bit like the old Yahoo/MSN portal
play? Are Apple betting they can actually found and fund a media consumption
channel solely through subscriptions?
------
zyxley
"Beats One" sounds like it's halfway an attempt to move into the SiriusXM
space - live radio over the 'net and on devices, with actual DJs and so on,
packaged in a way that's slicker than most internet radio streams. It will be
interesting to see if it's any good.
------
god_bless_texas
I think the most exciting part of Apple Music is the idea of allowing
musicians to put their music into the apple store. Much like the Apple store
gave a storefront to small indie developers, this might do the same for
musicians worldwide. The idea that a small time guy can get a small profit via
the app store instead of just posting onto Youtube and crossing his or her
fingers is cool.
Aside from that, I really have expected thought changes more than anything
from Apple WWDC and this one is just disappointing.
~~~
k-mcgrady
Little guys have always been able to get music on iTunes. CDBaby/Tunecore etc.
allow you to upload your music and have it distributed everywhere including
iTunes and Spotify. Artists will still want to go through those services as
they enable you to upload one place and be available everywhere.
~~~
threeseed
It may have been available on iTunes but it sure as hell wouldn't ever be
discoverable.
Apple Music should help out with this.
------
r721
>As Tim Cook and Jimmy Iovine revealed Apple's music streaming service on
Monday, Spotify's Daniel Ek, whose streaming service is a direct competitor to
Apple's, tweeted a two-word reaction that summed up his feels: "Oh ok."
[http://mashable.com/2015/06/08/daniel-ek-spotify-ceos-
apple-...](http://mashable.com/2015/06/08/daniel-ek-spotify-ceos-apple-music/)
------
temuze
The product page is live now:
[http://www.apple.com/music/](http://www.apple.com/music/)
------
heyts
The "connect" feature is eerily reminiscent of Ping if you remember that. It
was part of iTunes and was a failure from the start and subsequently killed at
some point. I'm really wondering if they will succeed this time.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping)
~~~
rimantas
Connect is about connecting artist to listeners. Was Ping about that?
~~~
tjl
Yes it was. I think the main difference this time will be integration with
Twitter and Facebook. If the artists know that what they post on it can show
up in Facebook and/or Twitter they'd be more likely to use it. We'll see. It
could flop like Ping, or it might not.
------
jhgg
Surprised they are also releasing this on Android!
~~~
tjakab
There's already a Beats Music app on Android, and possibly with a not-
insignificant subscriber base. Since Apple Music is replacing Beats Music
outright they probably didn't want to leave those subscribers out in the cold.
They'd basically be handing over customers to Spotify and Rdio.
~~~
johnward
That plus the family pricing thing is enough to have me consider the service.
My wife loves iOS. I currently use Android. $14 a month isn't too bad for
multiple users.
------
jameshart
"Music has been part of the Apple DNA from the beginning". That quote's
probably enough to get them back into the High Court...
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer)
------
LesZedCB
I'm curious what exactly the _EDIT: Artist_ payment model will be, especially
compared to spotify
~~~
dudus
9.99 for individual and 14.99 for a family plan. With 3 months free
And free ad supported stations as well.
[http://www.apple.com/music/](http://www.apple.com/music/)
~~~
LesZedCB
Oops I meant artist payment model!
------
capkutay
Before talking about doing 'revoluationary' things in the music industry, I
would love it if iTunes reliably had the music I paid for every time I opened
it up instead of a greyed out list item with an ambiguous cloud icon next to
it.
~~~
j2bax
Oh I know. This kills me. Make sure iTunes Match is turned on in your Settings
> Music. Somehow it got switched off on mine at one point or another. After
turning it back on, everything is appearing now. I'm still not incredibly
happy with the streaming though. Sometimes a song will end mid song and go to
the next one. I kind of wish it could keep a cache of the last couple hundred
songs I listened to to reduce network usage as well.
------
rconti
Spotify has done a far, far better of integration with devices like Home
Theater receivers than Apple has. Airplay works on my receiver, but Spotify is
awesome. Fire up a playlist on the laptop, close it, switch to my phone, it
can now control the playlist I started on the phone which is now running on
the receiver.
The receiver itself plays the music directly rather than being streamed from
the device I started playing on. Nifty.
------
ConAntonakos
Twitch.TV has actually taken up a large portion of my time listening to live
DJ streams. Now if only I could easily use it on my phone while the screen
light is off. If this is what Apple is trying to accomplish, then that's
interesting; otherwise, there are so many products from which to choose.
------
chillytoes
Apple Music is so underwhelming. I see nothing which differentiates it from so
many other music products. It was a little sad to see the word "Revolutionary"
projected above the stage. _snore_
------
hyperbovine
Any mention of whether it works offline / on which devices? All I want in life
is to play sports while listening to Spotify on my iPod shuffle.
------
glomph
Funny that they chose exactly the same name as google.
------
unsignedint
Wonder if they'll be providing web player for it.
Personally, that would be a big deciding factor, as I don't want/can't run
iTunes.
------
kyledrake
It's just offering radio at cost?
Download VLC and click on "Icecast Radio". Tens of thousands of streams, for
free.
------
cletus
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
iTunes Radio, Apple's first attempt in this space, is awful. X skips per hour?
Really? The story went that Apple's execs actually had no idea how Spotify
worked so thought they really had something.
It's the kind of fiasco that would've earned the execs a bollicking in the
Jobs days and, to me, the buck had to stop at Tim Cook.
I'm a paid Spotify subscriber. Generally I like it but it has its warts:
\- They did an app update a few months ago that's viewed as pretty much
universally awful for reasons I can't really explain;
\- Their catalog has many holes (eg Australian music, in this case probably
because Spotify doesn't have an Australian service);
\- I used to think artists were being Luddites by opting out but there's
actually good reason for this. They don't earn royalties proportional to the
actual plays. The royalty scheme imposed by the record companies gives a
disproportionate amount to currently popular artists;
\- Because of the last point you have artists who are missing or, in some
cases, you have all their songs except their 1-2 money makers;
\- Worse, for some songs, particularly for things from the 70s for some
reason, you can't get the original. You just get some shitty remaster that
sounds like bad karaoke.
\- Spotify's radio feature is the real weak point for me. Repeats (sometimes
with only a song in between) and the thumbing up and down I don't think really
has the desired effect. Like I might be on a good string of songs but I know
the worst thing I can do is thumb anything up OR down as experience has taught
me this can only make things worse.
Really "thumbs up" should probably mean "don't change anything". Or at least
me listening to something in full is itself is a positive indicator.
That being said, I'm not really sure you can do satisfying recommendations
here. So much of music is I think tied to memory and nostalgia. You might like
a particular song because of a particular person, place, time or event. How
does liking that inform any other music choice?
At the same time your radio playlist has to be large enough not to be too
repetitive.
What's more, there's actually an art to playlist selection. It's why, for
example, at a concert you'll generally see a band start with something upbeat,
play anything a bit more mellow in the middle and finish on a high note.
Curated playlists (which I guess Apple is calling "guest DJs" because that's
what it amounts to) is an idea with some history (eg Songza, bought by Google
last year I think).
I actually find myself listening to iHeartRadio a lot. I pick a music style
I'm in the mood for and just try different stations until I find something not
too objectionable. Sure there are DJs (99% irritating) and some ads but at
least I don't need to build a playlist, worry about what's on Spotify and what
isn't or make a decision each song about whether to thumb it up or down. It's
it or nothing (well... something else).
Radio really has a low cognitive cost.
------
oneeyedpigeon
No new iPod announced yet. Disappointing.
------
dvcc
So the radio, shared playlists and Beats? Except now when you listen to the
radio, you get to eat away at your data plan.
~~~
uncletaco
Unless you use Sprint in the US. Or connect to wifi when you're streaming
music in your home.
~~~
vbezhenar
It's funny how much of Apple functionality is tightly coupled with US. In my
city (capital of my country) Apple Maps are worthless, Siri suggestions are
worthless, PayPass is worthless, Apple Pay is worthless, iTunes Movies are not
available, Bookstore is not available. Now streaming will be worthless too,
because mobile data plan for 1 GB per month costs more than this Apple Stream
(though I might listen to it at home or at work, but I prefer to listen music
in car or while walking, so it's less attractive).
~~~
johnward
Most of those things are kind of worthless in the US too still. Many retailers
have no idea what NFC or Apple Pay is. I used Google Wallet at gas station a
few months ago and blew the cashiers mind. The only thing I know about apple
maps is my wife still prefers Google Maps.
------
piyush_soni
"Remember when Steve Jobs said even Jesus couldn’t sell music subscriptions?"
[http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/8/8744963/steve-jobs-jesus-
pe...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/8/8744963/steve-jobs-jesus-people-dont-
want-music-subscriptions)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Jay Z Reveals Plans for Tidal, a Streaming Music Service - ValG
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/business/media/jay-z-reveals-plans-for-tidal-a-streaming-music-service.html?_r=0
======
DIVx0
I'd pay $20/month or more for a service that:
* had high quality streams
* had gigantic library
* _biggest of all_ cracked the 'discovery' nut.
I listen to music all day, I don't like to listen to the same tracks more than
a few times so I have a hard time keeping my queue full.
I'm a Spotify subscriber so I'll find an artist I think is interesting, play
their whole discography and then start digging into 'related artists' to find
new stuff.
This is a bit of a drag and is hit or miss. I don't necessarily want to find
related music, but music that I might like. Spotify's radio feature is just
about useless. Voting one way or the other will skew it to play pretty much
_only_ the thumbs up'ed artist or avoid a genre entirely if you thumbs down a
particular track.
I still think there is a killer music service waiting to be born. I don't
think Tidal will be it.
~~~
freehunter
I like Spotify's discovery. I subscribe to a lot of playlists that are
constantly updated where I can get a lot of new artists from. Never used the
radio, I just go to their playlists and find Americana or Alternative or
whatever I'm looking for.
~~~
DIVx0
I've tried many of their playlists. I've found some that are very good and was
thrilled to find them, however the content was easy to exhaust and I ended up
picking apart those playlists for new artists. Back to square 1 if you will.
I know it sounds like whining, but I really think the 'killer app' of music
will be something that can effortlessly pick out the unknown gems from the
ocean of new music. I'm continually surprised about the quality of new music
but I don't like to have to dig around for it my self.
~~~
encoderer
I can't help but feel that you're doing it wrong?
Spotify playlists are beautiful because you _subscribe_ to it. The playlists
are updated and curated continuously. This is true of the Spotify-published
playlists and those of musicians, celebrities, etc.
~~~
DIVx0
Sure, i know what you're saying. The playlists I do subscribe to are indeed
updated continuously. However updates are relatively minor. A few songs from
artists already on the list, maybe one or two totally new-to-me artists every
other week. I'm not saying it's nothing but I want more.
Spotify boasts a gigantic library, I cant imagine I've heard everything good
(objectively) already. There has to be thousands of hours of material that I
simply can't find that I'd otherwise love to hear.
------
freehunter
Here's the problem: I don't want another music service. I want all my favorite
artists on _one_ music service. There is literally no reason for them to not
be other than various forms of greed.
Garth Brooks created his own music streaming service because the people behind
the album don't get enough attention. Taylor Swift doesn't put her music on
Spotify because she can make more money on iTunes. Jay Z creates a streaming
service to put out higher quality music files at a higher price. The result? I
don't listen to their music even though I really want to (I know Jay Z is
still on Spotify).
Hey Taylor, this isn't 2005, where I would buy a bunch of MP3s from anywhere
and put them on my iPod. I don't store music locally, hardly anyone does.
Apple doesn't even make a large-disk iPod anymore. Likewise, how many people
are going to be willing to subscribe to multiple music sources like they do
Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon?
You have a problem with Spotify? Work with them. Let's ask Sony how they fared
coming up with Crackle instead of using Netflix.
~~~
nothrabannosir
Competition = good, one music service to rule them all = bad. Good on Tailor
Swift for keeping Spotify on their toes. Good on you for choosing Spotify and
not Tidal.
Let a thousand musical flowers bloom, and may they forever compete for
attention of the bees, giving us more colors and extravagance as time
progresses.
Please keep making alternative music services and please keep giving us more
choice, better quality and lower prices.
~~~
Retra
More choice doesn't mean better quality. It means you are far more likely to
make the wrong choice, and that you have to invest more energy into doing so.
And that can really eliminate the convenience such a service aims to provide
in the first place.
Choice is good when the options are differentiated. Like choosing between a
CD, an MP3, or a streaming service. It's not nearly so good when you are
choosing between Stream A, Stream B, or Stream C.
~~~
Steko
The same argument could be made for cars or airlines or hamburgers. Too much
choice, I might chose wrong oh noes you could get locked into the wrong $10
service for a month.
~~~
Retra
Yes, it could. And I suppose you're going to argue that user experience means
nothing? That, as a company, getting "locked into the wrong $10 service for a
month" is a perfectly ideal way to treat your customers?
------
sehr
_The plan was unveiled on Monday at a brief but highly choreographed news
conference in Manhattan, where Jay Z stood alongside more than a dozen
musicians identified as Tidal’s owners. They included Rihanna, Kanye West,
Madonna, Nicki Minaj, Jack White, Alicia Keys, the country singer Jason
Aldean, the French dance duo Daft Punk (in signature robot costumes), members
of Arcade Fire, and Beyoncé, Jay Z’s wife._
That's a lot of cooks!
~~~
ValG
I think what's interesting is that this in intended to give artists buy-in to
the streaming service. If they can get enough exclusive material and artists,
I could see it take off. A few months ago I remember reading a post by an
artist that said this is the only way for artists to get their fair share, but
no one was big enough to tackle it, maybe Jay Z is the guy to do it?
------
deeviant
“This is a platform that’s owned by artists,” - Jay Z
I think he meant, "This is a platform owned by established, rich, and ageing
artists, whose resolve to assist up-and-comers should rightfully be
questioned."
Not to say this can be any worse then something like Spotify, which already
trounces over the independents, but I hardly think this is a likely group to
bring democracy and creativity back to the musical scene.
~~~
goatandsheep
Actually, you can only publish if you're registered with one of four record
labels: [https://tidalsupport.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/201167132...](https://tidalsupport.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/201167132-How-can-I-publish-my-music-in-TIDAL-)
~~~
stolio
That says _unsigned_ artists must register with one of those four _services_.
From their web page, the first one listed
([https://www.recordunion.com/](https://www.recordunion.com/)) is a digital
distribution company that charges under $15/year to interface with an online
store on the artist's behalf.
If an artist is signed to a label then it's on the label to have a working
relationship with the online stores and streaming services.
~~~
simplexion
So... they have to pay $15 a year for someone else to upload their music?
~~~
mkr-hn
This is normal. I think Pandora and Grooveshark are the only services that
don't require a distributor for unsigned artists.
------
some1else
“The challenge is to get everyone to respect music again, to recognize its
value,” said Jay Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter. “Water is free. Music is
$6 but no one wants to pay for music. You should drink free water from the tap
— it’s a beautiful thing. And if you want to hear the most beautiful song,
then support the artist.”
\---
Water is metered here in Slovenia, more like on-demand streaming.
~~~
bobbles
This metaphor is all over the place. Water sure as shit isnt free, taxpayer
support yes, free no. Should we not support all the people behind getting the
water to your end of the pipe?
------
guelo
They might have a chance if these big name artists, and their record
companies, agree to pull their music from all the other services.
------
lqdc13
Why not just let people download the songs? I would hate to stream FLACs... Or
stream anything for that matter.
Then again, Bandcamp already does it.
~~~
copsarebastards
Yeah, I'd rather download stuff too, but we're not the average user. I think
an ideal platform does both.
------
DigitalSea
I don't know if the world is ready for this kind of thing. As an audiophile I
think it is great that we're going to get access to a trove of lossless music,
but I think the majority who is happy listening to music through their iPhone
earphones and tinny speakers in their smartphones won't care (especially not
enough to pay double the cost of a Spotify subscription).
Then there is the kind of internet speed required to stream lossless music.
For those who have FLAC's in their music collection know that an album is
hundreds of megabytes compared to a V0 rip which is only usually around the 75
to 100mb mark (depending on length and tracks). Now imagine streaming a track
that is upwards of 20mb+? Here in Australia we have poor internet, we're
ranked pretty low. I already struggle to stream 320kbps from Spotify Premium
on my connection. The story is the same in New Zealand and other parts of the
world. Then you have the bandwidth limitation, a lossless streaming platform
would chew through potentially gigabytes of data (in Australia we still have
bandwidth caps and we get speed limited or charged extra for going over them).
Then there is the subject of modern music production. Sad to say it, but most
modern music is so overproduced and compressed during the mixing stage that it
doesn't matter if you're listening to a 128kbps MP3 or lossless, it won't
sound any better. Most music is destroyed in the studio before it is even
released, therefore not worthy of listening to in any high bitrate format. If
you want to debate this, I implore you to read up on "the loudness wars" in
which it has been pretty documented that music is getting louder and the
louder it gets, the lower the quality is (as the dynamics and peaks are
stripped out).
I think Tidal is great, but I am very sceptical that it will address the
issues people currently have with Spotify, more specifically how it pays out
royalties. I do think there is a serious lack of strong music platforms that
encourage discovery. As great as Spotify is, it doesn't let me fluidly
discover new music. Rather I find myself clicking through related artists
which feels counter-intuitive considering how much music and music data there
is out there. Tidal very much comes across to me as a platform built by a rich
music industry hotshot, backed by equally big and established artists who have
sold millions.
I would love to see the idea of a VIP backstage feature incorporated into a
platform like this. You can pay a monthly subscription fee to subscribe to an
artist and in return get access to a members only area with exclusive early
release music, discount merchandise, pre-release concert tickets, a chat
feature/Q&A and other member only private features. I think something like
that could work really well for large groups like One Direction and artists
like Justin Bieber especially. Seems like a logic additional revenue stream
for large and small artists alike.
It is a really nice idea, coupled with the exclusives component as well, but I
just don't think the majority cares enough about music quality as a select few
do. Most people cannot probably even hear the difference between lossless and
a 320 MP3 (especially considering they're listening on prosumer equipment like
iPhones and MacBooks). I would definitely use this if it had some classic
artists on here, 60's/70's rock and blues that wasn't overproduced and would
sound great lossless (like Led Zeppelin's earlier material or The Beatles
especially).
Metallica's Death Magnetic album -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Magnetic#Criticism_regard...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Magnetic#Criticism_regarding_production)
is definitely not going to sound any better if it finds its way onto the Tidal
platform, that is for sure.
~~~
thezilch
Even if FLAC was required for "high-fidelity" \-- it's not -- a 20mb track and
assuming the track is at a super short length of 60 seconds is going at
~341kbps. YouTube is already pumping bits faster than that at 360p [0], so
that really doesn't seem like a hard part of the equation, and surely the
market for this is not looking to capture an audience smaller than YouTube's.
[0]
[https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171)
~~~
DigitalSea
I was just using FLAC as a comparison for lossless considering when someone
thinks of lossless audio they will mostly think of FLAC. Of course it goes
deeper than that.
I think the hard part of the equation is still definitely dealing with
bandwidth and speed limitations though. I have issues streaming Youtube video
even more so than I do HQ Spotify tracks (and it is a problem more common in
Australia particularly than most think). Optimisations can only go so far
before you encounter hard limitations software cannot work around without a
reduction in quality.
Considering the platform will offer 320 and lossless, I guess they're not
limiting themselves to some small niche of the market. Most people will
happily pay the same price for Spotify like quality and a possibly larger
catalogue on Tidal, but I don't think the lossless aspect is going to be as
big as Jay Z thinks. It's a marketing gimick more than it is a selling point
for the general audio consumer.
~~~
0x0
1k/2k/4k video streaming seem to be coming along alright in many markets so I
don't think lossless audio streaming is over the top. Totally understand the
sucky situation in Australia though. Maybe an aussie cdn cache could help in
that particular market?
------
adamnemecek
Not to sound like a naysayer but this is going to tank so hard it's not even
funny.
------
anonbanker
I'll avoid the obligatory XKCD (927), but doesn't this move, and all other
fractionalizing of the music industry, merely serve to make Piracy the most
appealing option?
not that I mind; I haven't paid for music since 2007.
------
ElectricFeel
HE. Jay Hova!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How to 100% turn off Google personalization for search? - tlogan
I have problem that me (I'm in US) and my college (he is Europe) are getting different results for a search a Google query.
We use the following to turn off personalization:<p>- we added `&pws=0` to query<p>- we use browser in incognito mode.<p>Is there any way to turn off personalization completely including IP adress tracking?
======
dpapathanasiou
Use <http://scroogle.org/> instead
------
ijt
Have you tried <http://disconnect.me/>?
~~~
tlogan
It does not help.
It seems like Google decides what to show by IP address - not sure if it based
on history of queries from that IP address or based on location of IP address.
The same query from my college's day work (just a couple of miles away) gives
different results.
~~~
pilooch
Build a seeks node, <http://www.seeks-project.info/>, configure it to only use
Google search as backend. The both of you can then use the Seeks frontend
instead of Google, and you'll get the same results.
Additionnally, you guys will benefit from each other's actions on results.
------
murz
[http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#...</a>
~~~
tlogan
We are using incognito browser (no cookies).
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
IMF predicts slowest global economic growth since 2008 financial crisis - hhs
https://www.axios.com/imf-global-economic-growth-great-recession-financial-crisis-8ce86d7e-698a-4947-bddb-100f8548cf22.html
======
acd
I am proposing that the newly printed money from central banks causes
deflation not inflation. Newly printed money flows to automation which lowers
consumer prices. Traditional central banks say that newly created money goes
to wage inflation but that is not fully true. Further we have globalization
which again lowers consumer prices and newly created local money by central
banks does not effect foreign wages.
"Under this policy approach the target is to keep inflation, under a
particular definition such as the Consumer Price Index, within a desired
range.
The inflation target is achieved through periodic adjustments to the central
bank interest rate target. The interest rate used is generally the overnight
rate at which banks lend to each other overnight for cash flow purposes.
Depending on the country this particular interest rate might be called the
cash rate or something similar." source:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_policy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_policy)
\- It is just wrong to think that you can control consumer price index on a
globalized market.
~~~
notfromhere
Consumer prices aren't really going down, at least on things people care about
(food, housing, or education).
At least in the U.S., it seems like the consumer classes are pretty tapped out
in terms of consumption, and wages are stagnant so new consumption growth is
elusive. With the income inequality that the U.S. is current experience, there
just aren't enough consumers with resources that can keep spending
indefinitely.
~~~
malandrew
I would imagine that consumer prices going down for everything but local,
supply constrained goods like housing, education and healthcare, is leaving
people with more disposable income to spend on local, supply constrained
goods, thereby making them more expensive.
~~~
notfromhere
From a micro perspective, the cost of consumer goods seems to be steady but
the cost of housing, education, and healthcare is increasing faster than
inflation.
------
onlyrealcuzzo
Is _growth_ adjusted for inflation here? I.E. is it _real growth_?
A 0.8% increase does not keep up with inflation, so that would already be a
decline in real terms.
It seems like it does. The EU, US, and China are like 70% of global GDP. And
if they're growing at 1.2%, 2.4%, and 6.1% respectively, I don't know how
global growth could be only 0.8%. The rest of the world would need to be deep
in the red.
~~~
tmn
I think you're posting a good question. I'm also curious. But inflation isn't
fixed. How can you conclude that is not keeping up with inflation.
~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
I don't disagree with you, but I think Central Banks would.
It's basically their job to keep inflation steady.
On one hand, we can criticize them for not doing a good job. On the other
hand, if you compare the volatility of inflation vs equities vs house prices
vs just about anything -- they're doing pretty good.
------
kristianp
I read recently that QE has disrupted capitalism's process of creative
destruction by keeping alive companies that would have died otherwise[1].
These low-growth zombie companies drag on the economy.
[1]. [https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/qe-would-kill-finance-
and...](https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/qe-would-kill-finance-and-
capitalism-mckibbin-warns-20191008-p52yov)
------
jacquesm
Surprised it took this long given the way the US economy is being yanked left
and right on a moment's notice. Just think about how much money you could make
if you could affect the DJIA with a tweet.
~~~
ceejayoz
I wonder if it's legal for Twitter to make market moves prior to pushing out a
Trump tweet. Single-signal high frequency trading, basically.
~~~
semi-extrinsic
Pretty sure the answer is no. US insider trading law is very much concerned
not just with whether you traded on material nonpublic information, but also
on whether your trading based on this information was a breach of trust
between you and the person giving you the information.
As far as I understand, overhearing a stranger discussing a deal at the local
Starbucks and trading on that, is perfectly legal. But overhearing your wife
discuss a deal and trading on that is illegal, as it is a breach of trust.
Edit: I managed to find the article I remember reading on this. Turns out it
was Matt Levine in Dec. 2018. To quote him:
> Famously, in American insider trading law, it’s legal to trade on inside
> information that you randomly overhear in a train station.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-03/inside...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-03/insider-
trading-in-the-potato-trade)
~~~
opportune
Is a stranger talking on the phone in Starbucks really public information?
If so, I would start a SAAS that just puts a microphone in every Starbucks and
high end restaurant in ritzy corporate areas like Bellevue, Palo Alto,
Manhattan and sell that data to some quant fund. That signal could be worth
billions per year
~~~
AznHisoka
If you start that, let me know. I'll then head to my local Nobu with a friend,
and pretend I'm from Adobe discussing an imminent deal to buy Docusign, while
holding Docusign shares :)
~~~
opportune
I take no responsibility for model drift and filtering adversarial data is the
responsibility of the consumer :)
------
IanDrake
I'll take 2.4% growth all day long.
The title is misleading. I don't want incredible growth, I want sustainable
growth.
------
seamyb88
Group of rich dudes tells world the poor are in for a rough time.
~~~
anm89
Group of rich dudes forecast the weather...
How dare they try to model a thing which is not themselves!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
NextDNS first to block ALL third-party trackers disguised as first-party - poitrus
https://medium.com/nextdns/nextdns-added-cname-uncloaking-support-becomes-the-first-cross-platform-solution-to-the-problem-e3f437f84342
======
yegor
Neat, but Windscribe ROBERT already supported this for over a year:
[https://windscribe.com/features/robert](https://windscribe.com/features/robert)
------
delfinom
Late to the party. Trackers are now moving to A records instead of just CNAMES
just because blockers were already emerging.
~~~
poitrus
Source?
A records are blockable the same way, it wouldn’t buy them anything here.
~~~
t3f
If it is true it would buy ad servers greater obfuscation since blockers were
relying on CNAME metadata to differentiate between safe and unsafe targets. If
more reverse lookup and secondary metadata and vhost dereferencing is required
it will complicate performant ad stripping at a minimum.
[0] [https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/apply-pi-hole-blocking-to-
cn...](https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/apply-pi-hole-blocking-to-
cnames/25445/95)
[1] [https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-
issues/issues/780#iss...](https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-
issues/issues/780#issuecomment-552971940)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: BeardedSpice: Mac Media Keys for the Masses - trhodes
http://beardedspice.com
======
stephanvd
Nice, thanks!
I needed this for my Synology NAS, so I added bindings for it:
[https://github.com/beardedspice/beardedspice/pull/4](https://github.com/beardedspice/beardedspice/pull/4)
------
matthiasak
so music.
such keyboard shortcuts.
wow.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Washington Post Releases U.S. Climate Data on GitHub - infodocket
https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2020/08/07/washington-post-releases-us-climate-data-github/
======
jonnydubowsky
More info on how to access the data:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-
environment/2020/08/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-
environment/2020/08/07/how-use-posts-climate-data-analysis/)
A link to the GitHub repository:
[http://github.com/washingtonpost/data-2C-beyond-the-limit-
us...](http://github.com/washingtonpost/data-2C-beyond-the-limit-usa/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
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