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Understanding the Limitations of HTTPS - kawera
https://textslashplain.com/2018/02/14/understanding-the-limitations-of-https/
======
aplorbust
More than 50% of the websites found through HN at present do not require SNI.
Do you think this is also true of the https-enabled www as a whole?
SNI was introduced to address the problem of shared hosting with respect to
SSL/TLS. In the not-too-distant past, SSL/TLS required a dedicated IP address
for each HTTPS-enabled website. One certificate per IP address.
There are still many, many websites that satisfy that requirement.FN1 I know
this because I use unpopular customised HTTPS clients and have SNI disabled by
default. I only enable it when necessary; I have automated this to happen
automatically if I receive an SNI error.FN2 Most of the time, I get no such
errors.
FN1. I am tired of articles which ignore this fact. If one assumes that all
HTTPS-enabled websites require SNI, then one is making an incorrect
assumption. For _users_ , the current SNI implementation (sending hostname in
plain text) is a problem; people are trying to fix it, as the blog mentions.
For _website owners_ and _hosting providers_ , current SNI implementation may
not be a problem. I am viewing SNI from the user perspective. I respect other
perspectives.
FN2. Most of the sites requiring SNI are Cloudflare sites. As the blog
mentions, unless the customer pays additional fees to use their own
certificate, Cloudflare acts as a MITM and the user only sees Cloudlfares
certificates, not the target websites. This is HTTPS as between the user and
Cloudflare, and then (hopefully) between Cloudflare and the target website. It
is not HTTPS between the user and the target website.
Edit: Note, FWIW, I do not use third party DNS and in fact do not use
recursive DNS at all. I retrieve, store and update DNS data and serve it from
localhost bound authoritative nameservers. (I also encrypt DNS packets with
CurveDNS in the home lab and with the few remote servers on the intenret that
support DNSCurve.) I wrote a custom "non-recursive" stub resolver (for speed
not privacy) that outperforms a cold recursive cache. It does not query root
servers and minimizes queries to TLD servers and remote authoritative
nameservers as it learns from previous answers and updates constant databases
and zone files accordingly. Over time, it sends _less_ queries than a
recursive cache.
~~~
deathanatos
> _the current SNI implementation (sending hostname in plain text) is a
> problem_
1\. Even if you don't do SNI, the hostname is on the certificate that the
server sends.
2\. For most users, the domain name already leaks in the DNS request, does it
not? That is, SNI provides no _less_ security.
3\. I have no idea what the status of WPAD is these days, but if you can
convince a client to use a WPAD file, IIRC, you can leak all the domains they
connect to, include HTTP(S) sites.
4\. For any IP address that doesn't require SNI, even if the certificate
didn't give away the site: the IP address is sent in the clear at the IP
layer; it should be pretty easy for an adversary to build up a mapping from
IP->DNS for the vast majority of popular domain names. Alternatively, the
attacker could just form a connection to that IP and see what site responds.
While it's certainly a privacy leak, it doesn't appear to me that the solution
is as simple as turning off SNI.
~~~
blattimwind
> 1\. Even if you don't do SNI, the hostname is on the certificate that the
> server sends.
Not necessarily, think about things like
*.tumblr.com or *.blogspot.tld
And while for example Cloudflare's free TLS certificates are not wildcard
certificates, they bundle dozens of unrelated sites in a single certificate.
The DNS remark still applies, since wildcards _themselves_ can't be cached by
a caching DNS server, only individual instances of a wildcard can be cached
(as usual). However, with a caching DNS server there will likely be many fewer
DNS requests that can be observed compared to HTTP requests.
~~~
jgrahamc
> And while for example Cloudflare's free TLS certificates are not wildcard
> certificates
That's incorrect. They are all wildcard.
------
BillinghamJ
None of this was really unknown, but perhaps not considered enough.
The article is simply making the point that HTTPS, by itself, doesn’t mean you
can stop thinking about security & privacy. But I would have thought most
people knew that already...
------
xorcist
Well, if your site is already running through Cloudflare, and uses a number of
third party javascripts, the surveillance introduced by accessing said site
over insecure wifi is probably not your biggest worry.
The Googles, Facebooks and CDNs are known to capitalize that surveillance
while your local pub might or might not. Describing that as a "limitation" of
TLS feels like a bit of a stretch. TLS is not really designed to counter
passive surveillance.
~~~
saurik
Most limitations are of the form "this was not designed to handle this
scenario"; defining a limitation to somehow exclude such is non-sensical.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
California's Broken Jaywalking Law - cozzyd
https://systemicfailure.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/californias-broken-jaywalking-law/
======
menssen
Anecdotally (I'm posting this to see if I'm the only one who's noticed),
there's something culturally (or legally) unique about jaywalking in
California.
The ambiguity of countdown timers should have been a problem in every
city/state that put them in. But I can't imagine reading this article about
anywhere else because everywhere else, everybody jaywalks all the time and the
laws are rarely enforced.
But relatively nobody jaywalks in CA. A few years ago I was in downtown LA
very early in the morning, standing on a street corner with five or so other
people who were all patiently waiting for a green light to cross a completely
empty street. No cars in sight. For someone from east of the Rockies, it's
actually kind of surreal.
Why is jaywalking such a big deal in CA?
~~~
jballanc
I definitely don't think it's just you. Once, when I lived in the valley, I
was at a restaurant on one side of the street and wanted to go to a shop
across the street, but it was the middle of the block and I didn't feel like
walking to the cross-walk. The road was 3 lanes in either direction, but there
was a wide grassy median, so I did what I've always done growing up in NYC: I
crossed the near 3 lanes and waited on the median for the traffic in the other
direction to clear.
Well, apparently the sight of a pedestrian in the median was unexpected enough
that every driver in the far 3 lanes slammed on their brakes immediately,
stopping traffic right in the middle of the block. It was as if they expected
that I was just aimlessly wandering across the road and would step out into
oncoming traffic if they didn't stop.
Of course, I think at least part of the problem is that pedestrians, _in
general_ , are so rare in CA. I used to live ~1 mile from work and would walk
in regularly, whereas co-workers who lived half that distance would always
drive (and don't get me started about the difficulty walking after 9 pm when
every lawn sprinkler in the valley would unleash a deluge across the
sidewalks).
~~~
iopq
Even worse, you get to street that has no sidewalk at all, you cross and the
other side has no sidewalk either. Literally no sidewalk on either side of the
street!
~~~
lsaferite
Welcome to 90%+ of the US.
I live in a fairly rural city and drive a stretch of road every morning with
no sidewalk and lots of walkers in the grass. And the speed limit is 65. I'm
constantly worried some idiot will wander onto the road.
------
dmitrygr
Refuse to talk to cops (always, not just about jaywalking).
Do not provide ID ever (unless driving, since it also happens to be your DL)
and do not answer questions as to whether you have ID.
The amount of paperwork they'll need to fill out in order to arrest you (and
thus allow them to search you [the claim will be that the search is for
weapons for their safety, but anything they find is free for them to use/look
at, incl your ID, if you even have it]) makes it not worth it for them.
They'll just find a stupider victim.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but i do often end up in court with cops over a lot of
things, this included, and have not yet paid any fines
~~~
killerdhmo
This isn't really an endorsement though is it. IANAL and I'm not often in
court with cops and I say cooperate they're people too. _shrugs_
~~~
MBlume
They're...people who want to point guns at you and steal your money? Why would
anyone want to cooperate with people like that?
------
escherize
This is a bit like keeping speed limits down at 65 mph (a standard set when
car technology was 50 years less mature).
It's another way that the state can selectively punish most any citizen at
will, within the bounds of law.
~~~
deadfall
Yes, I agree. The flow of traffic for most commuters, like myself, seem to
around 75 mph.
"The speed limit is commonly set at or below the 85th percentile operating
speed (being the speed which no more than 15% of traffic is
exceeding)[41][42][43] and in the US is typically set 8 to 12 mph (13 to 19
km/h) below that speed."
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit)
~~~
JoshTriplett
On the other hand, if the speed limit was set at 75mph, would that remain the
common speed of traffic, or would the common speed increase with the limit?
~~~
cozzyd
On the Autobahn people drive at infinity km/h
~~~
raldi
Could you convert that to mph please?
~~~
darkmighty
The maximum speed there is 1, in natural units.
------
mullingitover
The funny part is that it's also illegal for a car to make a turn through the
crosswalk while pedestrians are anywhere in the crosswalk. This is far more
dangerous than jaywalking and happens routinely. The law covering this is
rarely/never enforced.
------
vacri
_Otherwise, what’s the point of having a countdown signal?_
It tells people currently on the crossing how long they have. If they're
infirm, they may be better off waiting at a traffic island than trying to rush
across. The red hand is pretty clear - it means "don't start crossing", not
"start crossing if you're confident you can make it in time" (though that is
the way the countdown is used).
$200 is a ridiculous fine, though - that's over 20 hours work at the minimum
wage.
~~~
JoshTriplett
Agreed; this isn't at all ambiguous. If you were allowed to cross, it would be
a walk signal with countdown.
~~~
Cymen
That is a joke -- people walk at different speeds. Walking in carland is
enough punishment. The worst are burbias where the walk signal never comes on
if you don't press a button.
~~~
vacri
_Walking in carland is enough punishment_
LA was the only place I've ever been crossing the road with the valid
pedestrian signal and had to stop walking or I'd literally walk into the car
turning across my path (to the right, with the same green light I'm crossing
with). It happened a couple of times, and I was only there for one week.
~~~
seanmcdirmid
You have never been to china before. Here crossing the street is a game of
frogger.
------
flurp
Maybe the problem is the length of countdown timers? I don't know how they are
determined and set but anecdotally I often see 10 seconds or sometimes others
in excess of 15s or even 20s on a road that takes ~5s to cross.
It seems to me like this is a reasonable law IF the timers were set to only
give the pedestrians minimal amount of time to cross the street. Given it
takes 5s to cross, timer starts with 5 remaining. Pedestrians in the road see
it and rush to either side. Pedestrians about to enter the road will have an
easier decision to make: I can't make it in 5s so I wait. Obviously some will
think they can, then fine them; I think that's reasonable. But holding up
pedestrians with 20s remaining seems unreasonable to me.
The main problem I see is for slower pedestrians; seniors, handicapped etc.
They might need more time and could be caught of guard in the middle of the
street with no time remaining... An immediate thought would be a white
flashing hand as a warning that time is running low (no counter!)... Probably
requires lots of reprogramming though.
~~~
hijiri
It might just be that the car traffic signals are patterned to last that long,
so the pedestrian crossing signals are the same length to match. But that
would depend on the crosswalk.
------
hayd
$190-250, sheesh - that fine amount is far to high. The maximum parking fine
in LA, for parking on a red curb, only costs you $93.
~~~
thatswrong0
I recently got a $197 ticket for crossing a marked crosswalk in an
uncontrolled intersection on foot.. In front of a cop car. There was no
danger, but he accelerated at me in the intersection causing a "hazard".
Nailed me for CVc 21950(b). It's a racket - they're scumbags. If I didn't work
in tech, that could be a very difficult amount to deal with.
~~~
knorby
Wish you fought that, since the cop broke CVc 21950(c).
------
tommoor
Obviously this thread needs a link to this article for anyone that missed it a
few months back :)
[https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-
history](https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history)
------
meddlepal
As a Bostonian I find the idea of jaywalking fines quaint.
~~~
tommoor
As an Englishman I find the idea of jaywalking quaint
~~~
meddlepal
As a Bostonian I find the idea of heriditary rule quaint.
~~~
ZeroGravitas
Technically they don't rule, they're just a prominent part of a network of
very rich and well-connected families that move in the same social circles, go
to the same schools, give each other jobs and sometimes intermarry. Luckily
Boston has nothing like that.
------
bentrevor
I was in San Fransisco this past January, and I was actually stopped by an
officer for crossing when the hand was blinking, even though I made it to the
other side in time. I think it was a matter of the officer not having anything
better to do, since it was 8 in the morning. I didn't get a ticket because I
answered his questions politely, but I'm sure if I was still in high school, I
would have been a smart-ass about it.
------
nahname
Got a ticket for $205 while working in LA. Definitely felt like a cash grab.
------
sukilot
What's interesting is that cities have found that countdown timers cause
_drivers_ far up the block to race to beat the green light before to turns
yellow/red, which then causes collisions with bikers and pedestrians.
~~~
5555624
I haven't seen this behavior with cars; but, as a cyclist, I use them to
figure out if I can make it through an upcoming intersection or not.
What's annoying is the lack of a standard action when the countdown timer
reaches zero. At some intersections, the timers are set so that the yellow
light is the last second or two and zero is when the traffic light changes to
red. Other hit zero and then the traffic light changes to yellow. Some hit
zero and a number of seconds pass before the traffic light changes to yellow.
------
chrisbennet
It makes as much sense to ticket pedestrians crossing during the countdown, as
it would to ticket drivers for entering the intersection during a yellow
light.
------
iwwr
The fact that there is such a thing as 'jaywalking' is a broken aspect of
modern society.
------
upofadown
I'm actually OK with the enforcement. The politicians should do their damn
jobs and update the laws. The police shouldn't have to maintain a list of
exceptions in their heads.
... and yes, this is a car culture thing. Most of the broken laws relate to
bikes and pedestrians in the places where I have bothered to look.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
FSF Europe launches peer-to-peer search engine - jfruh
http://www.itworld.com/software/228393/free-software-activists-take-google-new-free-search-engine
======
jshen
I like the idea, but I think a p2p search should also include human filtering
and trust. I.e. i know the keys of my trusted friends and sites/pages they've
"approved" rank higher for my searches.
~~~
nmridul
Once you implement this, there would be lots of privacy concerns. But when
done by smaller company / non-commercial entities, the concerns might be
lesser.
------
JulianMorrison
Um, am I alone in getting a sinking feeling that the word "security" appears
only in one place on their site, and it's in regard to having your searches
snooped? Hint to FSF: not everyone on the web is an altruist.
------
JoshTriplett
I tried a few test searches, and didn't seem to get many useful results at
all. Searching for [debian] did not produce any debian.org results anywhere on
the first page. Similarly, searching for [google] did not produce google.com
(or any other google domain) on the first page. Searching for [lwn] produced
one random LWN comment, but nothing else. Searching for [linux] produced a
page full of links to the Wikipedia articles on Linux in numerous different
languages, in no sensible order.
------
mark_l_watson
Interesting code base. Java with a templating engine
(de.anomic.server.serverObjects) I have never seen before. Worth some reading
time.
Bigger picture: YaCy would need to reach a large critical mass of nodes before
being useful, so it would seem to be difficult to get enough people to donate
server resources.
Also, it is not clear how to keep anyone from doing SEO by running nodes that
make it a priority to spider promoted web sites.
~~~
jshen
What if it indexed your bookmarks. I'd find that very useful.
------
xorglorb
Well, it sounds cool, but the first result for "Google" is a Youtube Video
Converter, and it appears to randomly change between German and English.
------
nmridul
Is there a way they check the validity of every peer database ? What if I edit
the index in my computer so that my website comes at top of the result for
high competing terms (similar to google link bombing) ? And if I can lease
100s of computers, then I would be first on the result ...
------
andrewflnr
So this spreads the index across all nodes, right? I probably don't want an
index of the entire web on my hard drive. But at the same time, how efficient
can it be to hit a bunch of different nodes every time I search? How is it
going to affect me when people hit my node?
~~~
pyre
I imagine that nodes could be classified as cache-only, storage-only, or
cache-and-storage.
------
runn1ng
I downloaded the peer software... how do I know to how many peers I am
connected, how do I know what does my computer actually do, and why does
"local" yacy returns 0 results to everything?
Questions, questions, questions.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Writing a very fast cache service with millions of entries in Go - janisz
http://allegro.tech/2016/03/writing-fast-cache-service-in-go.html
======
pcwalton
From the article:
> [Go] also has managed memory, so it looks safer and easier to use than
> C/C++.
But most of the post describes a sophisticated way to work around the garbage
collector, totally reliant on a specific implementation detail of the current
Go GC (skipping of pointer-free data types), documented in a GitHub issue. It
seems easier to not have, or to not use, the GC in the first place for this
specific project if most of the engineering effort is going to go into an
elaborate workaround for it. In particular, I don't understand the reason for
rejecting offheap: the article suggests "a cache which relied on those
functions would need to be implemented", but surely this is less complex to
implement than the cache that relies on hiding what are effectively pointers
behind offsets so the GC won't think to scan them.
(This isn't a suggestion to not use Golang at all, to be clear. Nor do I mean
to suggest that GCs are bad things in general.)
~~~
vog
Maybe this type of program is better suited for a language like Rust.
However, while not having a GC, you have to take care of all memory issues in
a way that you convince the compiler that your won't ever blow up.
It would be very interesting to have such a comparison, so we could see
whether it's easier to work around the GC, or easier to write bullet-proof
code with manual memory management.
I'd expect the Rust to be more robust with regard to performance, but the
question is: Would it also pay off in term of code complexity?
~~~
mhd
I'm not sure how the current implementation of Go handles it, but its
spiritual relatives Modula-3/Oberon handled this quite well, with a GC for
most occasions and ways to bypass this with "unsafe" modules that allowed for
untracked allocations/deallocations and pointer arithmetic. It's not really an
either/or situation by (language) definition...
~~~
stcredzero
I'm puzzled as to why all mature GC doesn't have "permspace."
~~~
schmichael
Go's GC is non-moving and therefore cannot be generational.
[http://llvm.cc/t/go-1-4-garbage-collection-plan-and-
roadmap-...](http://llvm.cc/t/go-1-4-garbage-collection-plan-and-roadmap-
golang-org/33)
~~~
pcwalton
Nitpick: you don't need moving GC for generational GC. But you lose most (but
not all) of the benefit of generational GC without moving GC.
------
endymi0n
I still don’t get why people try writing their own data store, especially in a
language that's simply not very well suited to that task (and we're an almost
100% Golang shop here). Seems to be a rite of passage.
The requirements are literally <100LOC of wrapping an HTTP interface around
Redis with using TTL - which has been battle tested for years and is both rock
solid and ridiculously fast.
Public service announcement: Don't write your own data store. Repeat after me:
Don't write your own data store, except if you want to experimentally find out
how to build data stores. It's arbitrarily hard and gets even more so at every
layer. Plus, you leave behind an unmaintainable mess for the people after you.
There's already a great OSS data store optimized for every use case and
storage medium I could possible imagine.
~~~
im_down_w_otp
There are two datastores I would really like that don't exist.
1) An efficient, high-performance distributed persistence store for
arbitrarily large CRDT's.
2) A Kafka-like highly-available distributed binary log w/ cheap topics, that
doesn't require external coordination, and doesn't lose acknowledged writes
(which I'll happily give up any shape of linearization guarantee for).
~~~
chris_va
(1) Spanner does exist, though not really available outside of Google
~~~
im_down_w_otp
Yes, Spanner does exist. Spanner also does not satisfy what I said in #1.
~~~
QuercusMax
Can you elaborate on this?
~~~
im_down_w_otp
Well, for starters Google Spanner has almost nothing to do with CRDTs.
For another it would be really weird for Spanner to expose something CRDT
shaped since Spanner is a strongly-consistent distributed database which
depends heavily on global order and read/write locks driven by meticulously
coordinated multi-site global wall-clock time and consensus groups.
In some ways it's almost the opposite of what I want... with exception of the
fact that it's also distributed. I want extreme availability with lazy, weak
coordination.
~~~
chris_va
Read/write locks...
No, it's slightly more lazy in that that. It does timestamp coordination, but
retrospectively.
~~~
im_down_w_otp
You mean except for the lock table that's maintained by every paxos leader?
------
matthewmacleod
I wonder if I'm missing the point here, but why are Redis or
Memcached—implementations of exactly this service which are battle-tested and
well-used—not suitable due to "additional time needed on the network", but
this service _is_ suitable? Is it just down to the requirement for a HTTP API?
One thing I've noticed is an extreme demand for making internal services
available over HTTP. It has it's benefits, but the obvious downsides are the
overhead and complexity of HTTP being totally overkill for things like a key-
value store of this nature.
~~~
jzwinck
I had to read the relevant sections three times to sort this out. I believe
what they are saying is that this service they made had to speak HTTP in some
specific way, and since Redis doesn't speak that way directly they would have
needed to proxy requests in their service to Redis which would mean one
network hop to reach their HTTP service plus one hop to reach Redis.
Of course, Redis and Memcached support Unix domain sockets which do not use
the network and do not suffer from the overhead of TCP. The authors do not
address this at all, suggesting they weren't aware of UDS, nor the fact that
TCP within one Linux host does not touch the network at all.
Adding to the confusion is that even given an in-memory cache library which
overcame their objections to the "network" based ones, they still elected to
write their own low-level cache.
So the comment about time needed on the network was either spurious or
misinformed. And one thing it was not: measured.
~~~
bluetech
Quoting redis docs
([http://redis.io/topics/benchmarks](http://redis.io/topics/benchmarks)):
> When the server and client benchmark programs run on the same box, both the
> TCP/IP loopback and unix domain sockets can be used. Depending on the
> platform, unix domain sockets can achieve around 50% more throughput than
> the TCP/IP loopback (on Linux for instance). The default behavior of redis-
> benchmark is to use the TCP/IP loopback.
Haven't measured myself though.
------
Rezo
Redis eats million of entries for breakfast, is pleasant to work with, has TTL
expiration of keys built in and is available as a managed AWS ElastiCache
service when you get into serious data sizes: up to 32 core 237 GiB nodes, and
then you shard to add more. Redis is also super as a local cache, and simple
to deploy and manage together with the app that uses it.
Since you obviously ran some quick benchmarks and concluded that running it
locally over a unix socket (confused why you would mention "time needed on the
network"... you tested with local sockets, right?) was too slow, you should at
least let Antirez know you've run into a new mysterious performance bug ;)
Writing a cache service can be a fun side project, but I doubt you gained
anything by doing so except another homegrown part to maintain.
~~~
krenoten
redis is single threaded, so 32 cores doesn't mean much without sharding.
I generally prefer memcache unless you have a super locked-down infrastructure
(no engineers to deploy a KEYS operation that destroys a shard and all the
systems that rely on the data inside until it's finished). Multithreaded +
simpler API is great for multitenancy when you have to provide infrastructure
to engineers who don't want to learn about infrastructure.
------
Artemis2
Why did they have to invent "a very fast cache service with millions of
entries"? Are they the first company to ever need one so they had to write it?
Can't Redis or Memcached be fast (despite the "additional time needed on the
network" — even though Redis uses raw TCP for transactions, while this uses
HTTP + JSON)?
As others pointed out, Go is also a very poor choice if you need to work
around every part of the language.
~~~
mixedbit
Probably because they wanted full control and understanding of the source
code. Large companies often prefer to develop things in-house, even if there
already exist good alternatives.
~~~
nl
_Large companies often prefer to develop things in-house, even if there
already exist good alternatives._
Fair point. Except they are a small consulting company.
~~~
serafin_allegro
Nope. We are not :) We are e-commerce platform - part of Naspers Group:
[http://www.naspers.com/page.html?pageID=3](http://www.naspers.com/page.html?pageID=3)
------
sulam
Sorry, I stopped reading at 10K rps and p50 of 5ms. In this day and age these
numbers are pretty bad, especially for a cache where presumably all accesses
are constant time. Every single caching solution listed out-performs this
handily.
~~~
delroth
I had the same feeling when reading this article. That's nothing like "high
performance", especially the 5ms median latency. memcached is a whole two
orders of magnitude lower in terms of median latency.
------
inglor
> Considering the first point we decided to give up external caches like
> Redis, Memcached or Couchbase mainly because of additional time needed on
> the network.
Uh... we regularly get performance better than what the OP has described in
their "needs" with Redis. It can run in memory - on the same machine and has
plenty of HTTP frontends you can work on (not a lot of networking).
------
roel_v
So essentially, to meet their requirements, they had to work around the Go
garbage collector and use a non-standard HTTP server and JSON parser. Why not
just write it in C++?
~~~
smt88
> _Why not just write it in C++?_
No need. Someone already wrote Redis.
~~~
iveqy
Redis is written in C, afaik.
------
st0p
Why not use Varnish? POST messages of 500 bytes could easily be rewritten /
proxy'd to GET requests. That might not be 100% restfull but seems like a lot
less work. On our production environment Varnish always responds in less then
2 ms. Even on my development VM I never see response times > 5 ms. It has all
the other requirements they state.
Perhaps I'm prejudiced because Varnish has proven to be such an awesome
caching mechanism (we still use Redis as a key/value store), but this seems
like NIH.
~~~
leetrout
Varnish is actually difficult to use for POST requests unless you know C and
can tweak the existing vmods. I just came off the same basic requirements and
ended up going with Nginx (OpenResty) with Lua & Redis.
------
osweiller
As a user and advocate of Go (in my case primarily as glue code that is
beneficial because it's easy and efficient to get to results), articles like
this do the platform a disservice.
This implementation is far from fast (two magnitudes better performance and it
would be credible as "very fast"), and it is non-idiomatic, specifically doing
things to avoid the benefits of Go.
As an aside -- HTTP and serialization are both costly. In many, many cases
where I've seen them in effect, they were a significant expense for little to
no architectural gain.
~~~
nly
> HTTP and serialization are both costly.
But can be done very fast (introducing very little latency) and are essential
pure operations, so can be parallelized very well (for throughput). Of course,
this doesn't account for dev costs, and doesn't make your architectural point
invalid.
------
golergka
Straightforward, simple functionality, extremere perfomance requirements and
avertion to allocations and GC?
That sounds like model use case for good old C. I love Go and currently am
actively learning it, but why take a memory-safe, GC language and then build
your own ad-hoc memory management on top of it to avoid it?
~~~
fleitz
This is probably why the creators of memcached and redis chose C.
------
c0l0
I admit I only skimmed the article, but I think the tradeoff of parting with
the requirement of having an HTTP API with JSON as the message format for
transporting IDs over the wire, and just using Redis instead and its wire
protocol, would probably have been the more time-efficient way to arrive at an
(at least) acceptable solution for the problem they were looking to solve. But
yeah, where's the NIH in that? ;)
------
iagooar
I wonder if your team considered leveraging Nginx with some good caching
policy, for most use cases it should already have everything you need and
it'll probably be tough to beat Nginx's performance.
------
NicoJuicy
I found the mention of ffjson interesting, a faster serializer then the
standard buildin json serializer ( 2x - 3x as fast) ==>
[https://github.com/pquerna/ffjson](https://github.com/pquerna/ffjson)
~~~
LeonidBugaev
You should check
[https://github.com/buger/jsonparser](https://github.com/buger/jsonparser) and
[https://github.com/mailru/easyjson](https://github.com/mailru/easyjson) as
well. They are even more faster.
------
barrkel
Manual memory management isn't an esoteric technology. If that's what's
required to reduce GC overhead, it's an acceptable choice, especially when
it's in a fairly simple system like a cache (a hash table with an eviction
policy).
------
HereBeBeasties
If you think "very fast" is 5ms, over a LAN, then truly I despair.
I mean, if they've paid you to write this, I presume you have reasonable
hardware to run it on. Bog standard BSD sockets TCP on Linux is down around
the 10 microsecond range now. What on earth are you doing with the other
4.99ms?
------
JulianMorrison
"basically everything in Go is built on pointers: structs, slices, even fixed
arrays"
As I understand it while that does apply to pointer-to-struct and slices and
probably strings, that isn't true for naked structs and naked arrays. Those
both behave as value types like int.
~~~
jakub_h
True, one of the prime considerations for Go's design was that despite having
pointers, structs could be embedded as values into other structs. That's the
reason it doesn't look half like Java.
------
tyingq
I'm curious why they didn't use something like mmap. That would have skipped
the off heap approach, and also allowed for management, statistics, etc, to
run as a separate process.
Edit: Apparently the offheap package does use mmap if you pass a path to their
Malloc.
------
xor-xor
Regarding the comments here "why not Redis via UDS/loopback?" etc. - there are
some cases where such solution won't fit - e.g., running your service on Mesos
cluster.
------
Symmetry
Is this the sort of problem where optimistic concurrency would be a better fit
than standard locks?
------
elcct
very fast. much entries. so cache. such go. wow
~~~
twic
Go is web scale.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How not to be a better programmer - utternerd
http://blog.erratasec.com/2016/01/how-not-to-be-better-programmer.html
======
jacalata
"Don't ask for help and don't help other people" I think the author is
confusing being a better programmer with being a more politically successfully
programmer in a shitty organisation.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How do you organize all your photos? - rajesh-s
There's a drastic change in the number of pictures we take of every memory. What tools/flow do you use to organize and build a db of photos? Maybe even backups too.<p>There are ways to organize movies, shows, music that I've come across but nothing solid for photos.
======
mceachen
I've struggled with this for the last 18 years, and quit my tech job to build
a solution. It's in closed beta right now, but I'm going to send out another
wave of invites next week. Read more and sign up here:
[https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-
photostructure/](https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/)
------
jdmcnugent
I just dealt with this crap storm of a project last month. We had 40k photos
scattered across three laptops, old hard drives, and sd cards. First I just
crudely copied all of the folders on to an external hard drive and ran a
freeware duplicate remover to clean out about 20% of them. Then I used a
python script to go through this giant pile of pics and copy them in to
folders by year and month based on the created date. It also added yyyy-mm-dd
to the beginning of each file name. Now we are slowly going through month by
month and adding simple tags in the file name (event, location, names). It’s
far from perfect, but I didn’t want to deal with keeping everything synced in
a database or locked in to a certain OS or app, plus it should still be
searchable in 15 years when we are all running Windows 30 and Mac OS Ozarks or
whatever.
~~~
mceachen
May I ask, how are you saving the tags? Are you writing to sidecars?
Be careful with overwriting your originals. Many years ago I used jpegtran to
rotate losslessly, but didn't realize it was removing all the metadata as
well.
I added a bunch of heuristics to PhotoStructure to infer missing tags based on
sibling files, specifically because I'd borked so many of my own photos.
FWIW, I've tried to make design decisions that will hopefully allow libraries
to be very long-lived. PhotoStructure can copy unique (by SHA) originals into
a dated subdirectory, and has what may be the most advanced duplicate image
detection around (just added in the newest version). Your library is cross-
platform (for example, stored on your NAS, created on your mac, then opened on
your Windows box, and everything just works). The sqlite database is a
straightforward schema.
~~~
jdmcnugent
I just put the tags in the file name, like “2019-12-25_xmas_bob_grandma.jpg”.
Obviously you can’t go crazy with a bunch of tags, but I think I can get by
with 2 or 3 tags at most. I was afraid to use sidecar info or xattr because I
think that data can be lost if the files get moved between file systems (ie
eventually moved from the current hdd to the nas I have yet to buy, etc). I
definitely kept my raw unorganized folder on the ext hdd for now, but I’ve run
several scripts to make sure I didn’t inadvertently overwrite or miss
anything.
------
bradknowles
At the moment, I use iPhoto and iCloud photos. But this method does not scale.
I would love to have a more scalable cross-platform solution. Maybe something
like Adobe Lightroom that didn’t require a huge monthly subscription, plus all
the storage costs.
~~~
rajesh-s
Yeah when dealing with files this volume I'd prefer a self-hosted or local
storage
------
rasikjain
1) Photos taken from my mobile phone (android) are backed up to "Google
photos". This allows me to search by dates/objects/people/location etc. Google
also allows me to cast (screensaver) it to the television using chromecast.
2) Photos taken from DSLR are backed up to the folder on external drives(2)
and also synced with google photos.
This set-up is working fine for many years. I haven't explored any other tools
in recent times.
~~~
mceachen
Just FYI, Google Photos backups will not retain most of the metadata in your
images and videos when you try to recover your originals using Google Takeout.
------
DamonHD
I created [http://gallery.hd.org](http://gallery.hd.org) back in the day (a)
to make photos available for free when there weren't many eg for school
projects and (b) to origanise my own photos!
I am not taking many at the moment, so it's been less of an issue...
------
gamesbrainiac
I mostly have them backed up using backblaze. I just dump a lot of them into
my hard-drive from time to time.
Also, google now offers unlimited photo storage (as long as you are okay with
compression) if you have google photos. Its free.
------
B_Throwaway
I sync them to my laptop and keep them there for 30 days. Within those 30
days, I either post them in Whatsapp/Facebook stories or send them to
family/friends. Then, I just delete them.
------
Yvonne_McQ
I copy the photos to my laptop and also leave them on SD-card :) If I need
more space for new photos, I just take another SD-card.
~~~
mceachen
Please do not use SD cards as a long term backup.
Most cards will suffer bitrot in 5-7 years, and may be completely unreadable
in 10+ years.
None of my several handful of cards that are 10+ years old are viable anymore
(and they were stored in a climate controlled, low humidity, antistatic bag).
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Jeff Sessions, Next Attorney General - Animats
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/18/10-things-to-know-about-sen-jeff-sessions-donald-trumps-pick-for-attorney-general/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_sessionsdoj-954am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
======
Animats
Quote: "Legal immigration is the primary source of low-wage immigration into
the United States ... What we need now is immigration moderation: slowing the
pace of new arrivals so that wages can rise, welfare rolls can shrink and the
forces of assimilation can knit us all more closely together."
Expect strict enforcement of the rules on H1-B visas.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How do I create a freely accessible, no login required DIY dropbox - usermac
I just want a place that is free and easy for our staff to drop files, upload files without any login. It could be a separate machine used just for this. I'll clean it out every now and then. What do you think? Can you suggest something?
======
bikamonki
Get a free-tier AWS account, setup a bucket on S3 and then program something
very simple to upload files using the SDK of your preferred language. Use the
API to list folders+files so users can click to download.
Or if you want to setup the file server yourself:
[https://owncloud.org/](https://owncloud.org/)
------
sciencesama
install wordpress and allow for a free upload
[https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-file-
upload/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-file-upload/) or use a simple ftp
file system so you can upload it easily .
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Can I surf your couch? (Seattle YC meetup) - rriepe
I'll be coming into town for the meetup on Thursday, and I'm looking for a couch to crash/surf. I'll be in town Wednesday night through Sunday night, but any single day of letting me stay on your couch would be super helpful.
Things I like: hiking, kayaking, poker, microbrews, Django, CSS, design, personal hygiene, not smoking, startups.<p>I have an eye for design, I'm great at giving user-oriented feedback, and I love talking about new projects. Need feedback on yours? I'd be happy to supply it.<p>I don't know if anyone else is coming into Seattle for this, but if you are, please feel free to use this topic too.<p>Note: Sorry for the repost! I thought I'd get to this early in the day since I'm in a time crunch. Unfortunately that time was probably bad for west coasters.
======
callmeed
I might be driving up from Oregon Thursday. I would invite you to crash my
hotel but I prefer Rails and I'm not big on personal hygiene :)
Ok, seriously ... is your contact info in your profile? I'll get in touch if
I'm going.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How can I prepare for PM interview? - waystand
Hi,<p>For software development position I passed technical interview. Next step is project manager interview. I know that I missed different opportunities because I fail this part of interviews. Technical part is piece of cake but this kind of interview is my soft spot. How can I prepare this interview ?<p>Thanks.
======
taprun
I'm guessing the answers to every question is one of the following:
1) I give regular status updates to the PM 2) I communicate problems as early
as possible 3) I estimate work based upon past experience with similar tasks
4) I always think not just about estimates but also risk 5) I am constantly
looking to provide trade-off suggestions to maximize project ROI
Source: I'm a PM
~~~
sandworm101
7) Ensure my superiors are kept aware of project status. 8) Remain available
to vet marketing or other presentation documents on short order.
------
JSeymourATL
Come with your own questions for the interviewer.
This should be a two-way dialogue. You want to understand the Hiring Execs
biggest priorities and specific challenges. What does success look like to
him?
Ask: Imagine we're having a review meeting 12-18 months from now. It has been
a really successful year. What would be the top 2-3 things that we
accomplished together?
His answers will open up the conversation, full of insights.
------
nceruchalu
Read Microsoft Zen of PM: [http://microsoftjobsblog.com/zen-of-
pm/](http://microsoftjobsblog.com/zen-of-pm/)
Source: Was a Microsoft PM
~~~
10dpd
Note Program Manager != Project Manager != Product Manager
IMO Program Manager < Project Manager < Product Manager.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Twitter Bootstrap for "everyone else"? - davidw
I'm thinking of using Twitter Bootstrap for a site of mine, but I began to have some doubts while looking at it: it's a fairly small font, and has small icons, and come to think of it, Twitter itself is generally oriented towards the young and more technically savvy (the kind of people who know that it's really easy to increase the browser's font size). Sure, there are probably counter examples of someone's grandma being an avid twitter user, but I got to wondering if Twitter Bootstrap is a very good choice for a site very much aimed at "normal, non-technical people", who may also be a bit older than average, and not have the eyesight or patience to deal with something so small.<p>Has anyone actually done any research into this that they'd like to share? I know that it's in theory possible to resize it, but I'm a bit wary of how that would work out in practice.
======
adrianbravo
You can get around these issues with customization. There may be some other
frameworks for setting up a quick design out there that are better suited to
you if that's an issue, but I can't really help you there.
If icon size is an issue, you can try using Font Awesome:
<http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/>. It uses a font-face for the
icons rather than sprites, so you can configure further in css by adjusting
size and color, whereas bootstrap's icons are limited to black/white (plus
some opacity). A potential gotcha with this approach is you need to be sure
you can configure your web server to send the right content-type for the font
files you'll send. I had to do some minor nginx configuration to get it right
for certain browsers.
There are also pre-customized resources like bootswatch
(<http://bootswatch.com/>) if you want to get a look at some of the
possibilities.
And if you clone the bootstrap repo, you can fiddle around with the base LESS
stylesheets to make quick changes that affect the full system (lots of stuff
in variables.less:
[https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/blob/master/less/variab...](https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/blob/master/less/variables.less))
of course.
I don't think the issues you listed are particularly significant unless you
know that customization is going to be too costly in terms of time.
~~~
davidw
I've never customized it so I have no idea whether it's a scary mess that sort
of works but not really because you're taking it outside its comfort zone, or
whether it's all pretty easy. I guess I'll have to play around with it some
when the time comes.
Thanks!
~~~
eknuth
Customizing it with less is really pretty straightforward.
You can also generate custom css from the website. Just click the customize
tab in the topbar. You can bump up @baseFontSize. 16px works very well. You
might also want to increase the @baseLineHeight a bit as well.
------
jharding
It's pretty easy to customize Bootstrap to your needs. Whenever I start a
project, I usually always use Bootstrap to help increase my development pace.
Once all of the functionality is done, I then try to get away from the default
Bootstrap look and give my project a unique look. I can usually do this just
be playing with the variables in variables.less, although sometimes I have to
add some styling on top of Bootstrap.
For example, I used Bootstrap for my Chrome extension's web page
(<http://thejakeharding.com/philanthropist/>). At first glance, you probably
wouldn't realize Bootstrap was used, but really, Bootstrap is pretty much the
only thing that was used for styling. All I did was tweak some variables.
~~~
joshschreuder
Unrelated to the OP, related to the extension, but doesn't this sort of thing
attract Amazon's wrath, having an Associate ID set without any referrer from
the project site itself?
~~~
jharding
This is actually going to be the topic of my next blog post. Reading through
the Associates Program Operating Agreement ([https://affiliate-
program.amazon.com/gp/associates/agreement...](https://affiliate-
program.amazon.com/gp/associates/agreement?ie=UTF8&pf_rd_t=501&ref_=amb_link_84018271_7&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=&pf_rd_s=assoc-
right-1&pf_rd_r=&pf_rd_i=assoc_join_menu)), it seems like there is a decent
chance Philanthropist would be in violation of something. However, that
agreement is for associates, so I'm not sure if those rules would apply to a
browser extension.
Also, I mostly built the extension for myself so I could easily support one of
my favorite podcasts. There are only about 10 other users and since I don't
really plan on advertising the extension, I doubt the user-base will ever get
big enough to warrant concern from Amazon.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
SVG has more potential - kp25
https://madebymike.com.au//writing/svg-has-more-potential/
======
c-smile
SVG is too complex/heavy for simple tasks and actually is not that good for
complex tasks - more or less complex image requires special editing WYSIWYG
application to create it.
Let's imagine that you need to render simple icon using CSS that should change
color on :hover:
div.icon {
background: url(simple.svg) no-repeat;
background-size: 1em 1em;
}
div.icon:hover { ??? what to do here to change the color ??? }
Just to render this thing you will need: to download the file, parse SVG,
build DOM tree and "play" that DOM tree on canvas. Each task is not trivial.
While ago I've proposed at w3c-styles simple and lightweight solution for
vector images and shapes in CSS - so called path URLs:
div.icon {
background: url(path:c 50,0 50,100 100,100 c 50,0 50,-100 100,-100) no-repeat;
background-size: 1em 1em;
stroke: #000; /* vector stroke color */
}
div.icon:hover {
stroke: #F00;
}
The path uses the same format as "d" attribute in SVG's <path> element:
<path d="c 50,0 50,100 100,100 c 50,0 50,-100 100,-100" fill="#000" />
Parsing is trivial and rendering of such "images" is just a set of primitive
drawing operations. No DOM or anything like that.
More on the subject (with illustrations in Sciter) :
[http://sciter.com/lightweight-inline-vector-images-in-
sciter...](http://sciter.com/lightweight-inline-vector-images-in-sciter/)
~~~
yoz-y
I would argue that rendering simple paths is not really the goal of CSS (or
implementing icons for that matter). We already have images, we already have
fonts. If there is a third way to render simple vector paths then
transitioning to something more powerful (when somebody decides that they want
colour in their icons) will be just more painful.
~~~
masklinn
> I would argue that rendering simple paths is not really the goal of CSS
The goal of CSS is styling and decoration, simple vector paths seem comparable
to border images (and border image slices) and a simple and great way to
implement responsive decorative elements.
------
ptrincr
Look no further than D3.js as an example of the kind of visualisations which
are possible with SVG.
[https://github.com/d3/d3/wiki/Gallery](https://github.com/d3/d3/wiki/Gallery)
At least this is what introduced me to working with SVG. As much as I like D3,
mainly for charting, it's not the easiest thing to pick up.
~~~
th0ma5
If you skip the whole .enter() pattern then D3 is more approachable, IMHO.
~~~
Hupriene
d3v4 is improving the logic around .enter() a bit. See
[https://medium.com/@mbostock/what-makes-software-
good-943557...](https://medium.com/@mbostock/what-makes-software-
good-943557f8a488) Search for "Removing the magic of enter.append"
~~~
vanderZwan
You can also use Vega or Vega-Lite and let d3 be the low-level architecture:
[http://vega.github.io/](http://vega.github.io/)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8Fp9z-9DWc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8Fp9z-9DWc)
[https://vimeo.com/177767802](https://vimeo.com/177767802)
I especially like how they handle interaction (event streams/signals; about
six, seven minutes into the youtube video).
Supposedly there's a big update coming late fall, that upgrades vega and vega-
lite to the latest version of D3. It also (finally) introduces the interactive
bits to vega-lite.
------
igt0
SVG is amazing, my main concern about it. it is because it creates a huge
burden to browser developers. The spec is _huge_ [1]. And some parts are
outdated[2].
[1]
[https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/tree/master/Source/WebCore/...](https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/tree/master/Source/WebCore/svg)
[2] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/SVG/SVG_animati...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/SVG/SVG_animation_with_SMIL)
~~~
amelius
> SVG is amazing, my main concern about it. it is because it creates a huge
> burden to browser developers.
Yes, it would have been better if SVG was designed _on top_ of something
simpler; and this something simpler could be implemented by browser
developers. Probably, such an approach is more secure too. But, I guess it is
too late now.
~~~
bobajeff
I imagine they could implement it on top of Canvas/WebGL.
~~~
josephcooney
Like [https://github.com/canvg/canvg](https://github.com/canvg/canvg) (which
AFAIK doesn't do hit testing like 'real' SVG, but is a promising start).
------
formula1
I am using svgs in a project now.
\- The first issue was the designer Im working with didnt know how to export
to svg.
\- Second problem is my svgs ended up with very weird numbers and groups. Such
as the main groups offset was -60, 190 then another group to dlightly
compensate. Then the paths themselves compensated further.
\- Another issue is "cutouts" are nonintuitive for designers and also complex
to reverse when they are curves.
\- Another issue is linking and styling to an external svg. Despite you can
put them in an image tag, it cannot be styled this way. If you put it inside a
use tag, styling externally requires targeting ids.
\- anothwr issue is that they dont follow the normal rules of width/height. By
default they are 300x150 and takes a bit of patience to ensure they exist as
100% width (which I assumed was default)
Other than that, I am quite pleased with the format and am expecting great
things for it!
~~~
Falkon1313
Hand-written SVG, treated as elements of the markup (rather than an external
black-box object or image), usually works well. It's easily* styled, scripted,
and has good clean structure and values. There are, however, a couple of
problems.
Hand-writing a complex graphic is difficult! (ex: editing coastlines on a map)
Unfortunately, current WYSIWYG editors produce bloated, illogical output full
of bizarre measurement schemes, unnecessary translations, and incompatible
proprietary garbage - sort of like the bad old days of Frontpage and
Dreamweaver.
*There are also some quirks in both styling and scripting them (as others have mentioned, height is one, another is having to use NS versions of DOM functions instead of normal ones - but only sometimes).
Maybe by the time SVG turns 21, those things will be mostly sorted out. It's
still in its awkward teenage years.
~~~
ajstarks
An alternative to to hand-written SVG is to use a (Go) library like svgo [1]
to generate the markup programmatically. More info is also at [2] and [3]
[1] [http://github.com/ajstarks/svgo](http://github.com/ajstarks/svgo) [2]
[https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/the-other-side-of-go-
progra...](https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/the-other-side-of-go-programming-
pictures) [3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuDO1oQxARs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuDO1oQxARs)
------
CiPHPerCoder
SVG also has more risk: stored XSS, which isn't something you'd expect from a
file whose MIME type starts with "image/".
[https://github.com/w3c/svgwg/issues/266](https://github.com/w3c/svgwg/issues/266)
~~~
ogig
And more. I got a bug bounty by uploading a malicious svg witch would get
parsed and fetch external resources, even read local images.
If your app receives and parses svg server side you might have a hole there.
~~~
happyslobro
Forgive my ignorance, but why would anyone ever need to parse an SVG server
side?
Now that you got me thinking, SVG might be a decent, if somewhat large, format
for accepting sketches from users. Something like "draw a map, and we'll find
it on Google maps for you". But I am certain that that (SVG user input) isn't
a thing yet.
~~~
nitrogen
Maybe you need PNG thumbnails for user-uploaded SVGs.
------
Pxtl
When I first heard about svg, I was excited. Finally everybody getting behind
a vector graphics format... and since then the more I see the worse it looks.
A boosted, text-oriented, JavaScript-enhanced resource monster. All the worst
attributes of HTML, but in vector graphics.
Did anybody want this? I know I wanted a jpg of vector graphics - a resource-
friendly small system for embedding vector graphics into things. Something
where I don't have to worry about an image having an xss vulnerability.
Something that degrades gracefully so it can still work in some form on an
anemic piece of equipment.
But no. We throw bigger and heavier hardware at more trivial problems.
~~~
michaelchisari
Are vector graphics a trivial problem? I can't say that they are.
~~~
kensign
SVG is an untapped technology. It functions as an embedded document. When used
within the Object tag, it can run javascript and CSS and ideally renders
complex graphics with a much smaller payload. Also, they look amazing on all
devices as they use the browser's rendering pipeline. SVG has been a fully
supported standard for years.
[https://sarasoueidan.com/blog/art-directing-svg-
object/](https://sarasoueidan.com/blog/art-directing-svg-object/)
------
Animats
SVG as a representation language for draw programs is pretty good. Most draw
programs don't utilize it fully. While SVG can represent dimensions as inches
or mm, most programs only support dimensions as pixels, which makes SVG
useless for CAD drawings.
If you need drawings with lines and boxes, Inkscape is very helpful. Most
drawings in Wikipedia are in SVG, and many were drawn with Inkscape. You can
update drawings in Wikipedia by bringing them into Inkscape and editing them,
then checking them back in as an update. It's not a read-only notation, like
Postscript.
Manually tweaking SVG text, though? Painful. It's encapsulated like XML, so
you can, but you probably shouldn't. After you've done that, most draw
programs won't be able to handle the fancy stuff. And really, drawing by
typing text is like pounding a screw with a hammer.
~~~
the8472
> Manually tweaking SVG text, though?
Well, you could embed xhtml into svg and use regular html styling and text
layout instead.
~~~
OliverM
Only supported in Chrome and FF, no?
~~~
the8472
I think among the browsers it's only IE that doesn't support <foreignObject>,
edge does.
But of course then there also is the issue of SVG editing tools that don't use
a browser rendering engine
------
contingencies
Timing! I just pulled a 4AM night last night creating my first ever Lua
library, _svglover_ [0], to facilitate SVG display in LÖVE[1], for a
roguelike. Motivation was primitive[2] posted[3] last week. It's actually
pretty easy to work with, even for lazy coders who find regex parsing
acceptable like me[4] :) I'm no oldschool demo coder, but the coordinate
transformation system is basically just a simple layer on top of an OpenGL
pipeline. You don't even need viewbox, just groups with <g></g>
[0]
[https://github.com/globalcitizen/svglover](https://github.com/globalcitizen/svglover)
[1] [http://love2d.org/](http://love2d.org/) [2]
[https://github.com/fogleman/primitive](https://github.com/fogleman/primitive)
[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12539109](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12539109)
[4] _Make it work first, then make it work fast_.
------
niedzielski
Gordon Lee[0] has made a ton of sophisticated SVGs for Wikipedia and its
projects and recently presented at Wikimania. The Burj Khalifa[1] is one of my
favorites. Inspired, I wrote this short script for fun that chops up a Blender
file into PNGs[2] which I used to generate an animated SVG.
[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cmglee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cmglee)
[1]
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Burj_Kha...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Burj_Khalifa_floors.svg)
[2]
[https://github.com/rndmem/ndice/blob/master/blend/d/render](https://github.com/rndmem/ndice/blob/master/blend/d/render)
------
iamleppert
SVG works for the trivial graphics use cases that are presented. But it falls
apart for anything that requires more complexity, or dealing with documents of
arbitrary complexity.
There is little provision for incremental rendering, and poor control and
visibility of the internals of the rendering process. Once you dump your SVG
to the browser, that's basically it. There's no way to find out what is going
on.
It's really nice to just set a break point in your imperative Canvas code, or
WebGL code and see exactly what is happening, and use all the standard
debugging and profiling techniques. I have yet to see the same for SVG.
~~~
e1g
We solved this issue by using a rendering engine that has rich tooling, strong
profiling and inspection capabilities, and is centered around predictability -
React.
D3 v4 provides all of its goodness in loosely coupled modules with clear
boundaries, so you can use it for all heavy lifting that it's amazing at
(layouts, animations, shapes), then setState() all over the place to reflect
the results in the DOM. Performance wise, the only limits we are hitting are
native SVG limits on the number of nodes.
Our visualisations are complex (science and finance, to an expert and expertly
distracted audience), but no more complex than the rest of the app. React
paradigm is predictable, well known, and has a deep user base to lean on.
Performance and inspection tools are solid. And the only difference is that
the render method has a <g> instead of a <div>.
~~~
Chris_Newton
I’ve done similar things with React and SVG and I concur. As with scaling
anything up using React, you need to be careful about how you structure your
components so you can write shouldComponentUpdate everywhere you need it to
get acceptable performance. That in turn means you have to be careful about
how you represent the underlying data and any further data you derive from it
to use when rendering your SVG. However, assuming those things have been done,
I have found React+SVG to be a reasonably effective combination so far.
------
edejong
Three years ago I was amazed by the versatility of SVG when I discovered it
through D3 and it inspired our graphical designer to ask us designs never
before seen in SaaS applications. Once you're willing to dive into the
specifications, you'll find a treasure trove of possibilities.
There are some caveats beginning users should be aware of. First of all,
better forget multi line text or sophisticated text layout within the SVG. I
still think that's really missing in the current specification. As a commute
project I once wrote the dynamic programming layout of Knuth (used in TeX) for
SVG and JavaScript, but it was slow and didn't allow for multi line
selections.
Another problem is rendering speed. SVG renderers can be fast, but you have to
know what can be optimized by the gpu and what requires the CPU.
~~~
comex
> First of all, better forget multi line text or sophisticated text layout
> within the SVG.
Can't you do it by embedding an HTML document into the SVG with foreignObject?
(edit: corrected name)
~~~
edejong
You are absolutely right [1]! It is not supported by IE, unfortunately.
[1] Made a small jsfiddle:
[https://jsfiddle.net/7y27wfuy/](https://jsfiddle.net/7y27wfuy/)
------
thom
Annoyances with SVG:
\- Modularity is tough: you can nest <svg> or <g> elements with various
transforms, but there's no first class layout concept.
\- Pixel imperfections: browsers don't always render things 'nicely', and all
sorts of horrid aliasing can happen.
\- Styling options: all sorts of simple stuff like a double outline of a shape
is really difficult (without extremely complex filters)
\- Export: taking an SVG and exporting it as an image has lots of
complications, especially with embedded fonts.
All that said, the output is mostly okay, and it's possibly the easiest
graphical technology to integrate with React-style frameworks.
~~~
taivare
if anyone has a link etc. where I can find more / better info on exporting an
SVG as a image. It would be appreciated.
~~~
ceautery
A poor man's version is to draw it onto a canvas and save the canvas, e.g.:
var svg = '<svg version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" height="100" width="100"><circle cx="50" cy="50" r="40" stroke="black" stroke-width="3" fill="red" /></svg>';
i = new Image();
var cnv = document.createElement('canvas');
var ctx = cnv.getContext('2d');
i.onload = function() {
ctx.drawImage(i, 0, 0);
console.log(cnv.toDataURL());
}
i.src = 'data:image/svg+xml;base64,'+ btoa(svg);
~~~
thom
Now copy across all styles, embed all fonts and external images etc etc etc.
Nightmare.
------
amelius
I'm wondering if it would be possible to parameterize SVG files. Suppose I
have an icon in the file "icon.svg", it would be awesome if I could say in the
CSS:
.icon:hover
{
background-image: url("./icon.svg") main-color=#ff0000;
}
where "main-color" is a parameter of the SVG file. So the icon turns red upon
hovering (just an example).
Is something like this possible?
~~~
emilsedgh
background-image: url("./icon.svg?main-color=ff0000")
And serve icon.svg dynamically.
As others have mentioned, only for colors, there are easier ways.
But using this technique you can do anything.
~~~
marcosdumay
Just be wary of code injection. It is XML, so it should be easy on any
framework.
------
shurcooL
I really like SVG and this was a great article that contained many things I
didn't know.
That said, I _tried_ to use SVG for something as simple as displaying some
multiline monospaced text with whitespace preserved, and found it's either
really hard, or actually not possible (unless you position each glyph
manually). Is that really the case?
~~~
mrb
Why use SVG? Why not use CSS "white-space: pre-wrap"?
~~~
shurcooL
Well, I wanted SVG for its other features. Text is just a component of what I
wanted to draw.
------
mojuba
SVG has another interesting application: it can be used as a UI language for
graphically rich and complex interfaces, almost game-like but not quite. You
often see this kind of interfaces in audio, i.e. soft synths/effects. Though
you will need to create your own extension to the markup and a subsystem that
supports it in your OS, which in the end is not too complicated.
(Shameless self-plug as an example of an SVG-based GUI:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/magnetola-vintage-
cassette/i...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/magnetola-vintage-
cassette/id1027234156))
------
tofflos
I'd use it a bit more if I could style it with CSS without inlining the SVG
source code within my HTML.
~~~
gotofritz
There are JS libraries that will inline SVG sprites for you
------
robszumski
As a designer using SVGs across the web, there are a few drawbacks that are
easy to fix:
\- platforms like Twitter and Google Slides not accepting SVGs. I assume this
is due to security concerns.
\- Using SVGs on a website doesn't render with included WebFonts like normal
text would. This leads to outlining text, which is a huge maintainability
burden.
\- Graphics programs have tones of SVG bugs. Even "leading" software like
Illustrator and Sketch have a lot of bumps in the road.
Overall really excited about SVGs and use them as much as possible.
------
xnmvvv
The main problems I've experienced:
* SVG's performance degrades sharply after a few hundred objects, then you have to use canvas or WebGL, or prerender to images * browser differences
otherwise good
------
Hyperized
We use SVG extensively at: [https://fd.nl/krant](https://fd.nl/krant)
------
flatline
Generally I agree that SVG is awesome, but there are a variety of cross-
platform issues with it and I worry it does not get enough serious use to see
them addressed. The status quo is pretty good, but if you run into issues
there is not always a work around.
------
dahart
I'm quite excited for SVG absolute positioning to become available in all
browsers. It'll mean real responsive images, not just resizing, being able to
move parts of the SVG instead of scaling proportionally, as the image is
resized.
------
wrong_variable
The issue that makes me not enjoy working with svg is the lack of negative
scaling values. It makes it hard to do complex transformations on your vector
widgets. Canvas is so much more better.
~~~
formula1
Style= "transform : scale(-1, 1)"
I remember this was very important fir a personal logi of mine
~~~
carapace
Hey! Thank you so much. I was working in Jupyter with Sympy to generate SVGs
illustrating geometric relationships etc. (proofs of Pythagorean Theorem and
stuff like that) and I had to subtract the y values from the height of the
viewport to use the Sympy objects to generate coordinates for SVG.
This is so much cooler. :-)
------
bradoyler
This is why d3-node is the way to go...
[https://www.npmjs.com/package/d3-node](https://www.npmjs.com/package/d3-node)
------
aikah
The second example is supported neither in Edge nor in Firefox, that's the
problem. Extremely poor SVG support accross browsers.
~~~
itsnotvalid
Agreed. Just launched it over with different "modern" browsers and was
disappointed by the support.
------
SFJulie
SVG? Wasn'it the new tech (10 Years after ARM) in 2000 that was supposed to be
so wonderful it would be very easily adopted?
We are in 2016 ... ARM are still promising and SVG is still the new promising
thing. Well, SVG has not taken a wrinkle, nor grown up a lot. It is still
overpromising and complex.
Let me watch my backyard cristal balls for new innovations..
DCOM and RPC maybe? Oh, crumbs, it is called the cloud. All FW problems solved
by using HTTP with cookies that are so safe.
I can't wait for the next new thing... GUI, Universal Display format (aka
display postscript from NeXT), Xanadoo, XUL, sprites, linear framebuffers with
blitters?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Where can I sell the software of a failed startup? - rsinmtl
I was involved in a startup that failed. The startup was supposed to be a solution to ridesharing, let's say similar to Uber. We never launched but we developed a lot of code that represented at least a solid portion of the product.<p>Is there any marketplace where we can sell this code, and/or can anyone provide a ballpark range of what it might be worth?
======
smt88
You'll have a very hard time selling early-stage software. People tend to buy
revenue streams and customer relationships, not web software.
Specifically, there are lots of companies selling customizable Uber clones
right now.
~~~
severine
While the conversation gets traction, that seems a point well worth exploring.
Do you have any stories of valuable software that got a second life after
startup death?
~~~
smt88
> _Do you have any stories of valuable software that got a second life after
> startup death?_
No, I don't. That's kind of my point. The only tech companies that get decent
prices are high-tech (often technological breakthroughs). I've never heard of
or seen a web app have a value above maybe $2k when it had no customer base,
and even then, that $2,000 was tiny compared to the $100k+ that was invested
to build it.
------
mtmail
[https://flippa.com/](https://flippa.com/) is in that space.
P.S. prefixing the title with 'Ask HN:' gets you more exposure, the question
will then go to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/ask](https://news.ycombinator.com/ask)
~~~
rsinmtl
Thank for the link! I've updated the title but it doesn't seem to be getting
picked up by /ask. I guess it has to say "Ask HN:" from the outset
~~~
whatsstolat
It is now
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Leaders should create gaps - alphadevx
http://www.alphadevx.com/a/518-Leaders-should-create-gaps
======
gumby
> Creating silence
A tremendous tool not just if you're a leader. People feel compelled to fill
the gap, often in an interesting way.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Peer Networks and Health Innovation - kategleason
https://speakerdeck.com/nickgrossman/peer-networks-and-health-innovation
======
zaroth
You think SpeakerDeck could put the forward and back buttons a few pixels
apart so smartphone and tablet users would have a prayer of being able to
navigate through a deck?
Am I missing something or is it really impossible to advanced through the
pages with a smartphone?
EDIT: Ah hah, 'Download to PDF'
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Rules of Logo Design - jwilliams
http://www.tannersite.com/rules-of-logo-design/
======
neilk
Every successful design breaks at least one "rule". Because information is
retained when it's distinct from the norm. Talent in design consists not in
following rules but knowing when and how a rule can be broken.
IBM's logo is way too busy. Apple's original logo has too many colors and
isn't serious enough. GE is almost antique. UPS has that dull brown.
------
huhtenberg
Hmm .. let's see .. rules demand logo to be recognizable, unique, timeless,
bold, confident, surprising in presentation, solid, simple, not distracting
and balanced visually.
If you are having trouble with memorizing all these cool adverbs, just stick
to the rule #42 .. ready ? ..
It should be honest in it's representation.
A list that is perfect in its complete and utter uselessness.
~~~
apmee
Pedantry Corner: They're adjectives, not adverbs.
~~~
huhtenberg
Damn right they are :)
------
maxklein
His logos suck. A good logo should be recognized from it's outline - like BMW,
IBM, Apple, Mercedes, the Nazi Party. Using a nice font and adding a butterfly
is not a good logo.
So I prefer not to take advice from someone who is not even particularly good.
------
eventhough
Too many rules. Examples would work better than a list of rules.
~~~
jfornear
I'm sure you are supposed to assume he follows his own rules and that examples
are in his portfolio. That being said, after looking at his portfolio, I was
not impressed. Some of the logos he created did not seem memorable at all, had
unnecessary detail, etc.
You can't just follow a set of rules to come up with a nice logo. You kind of
need to have talent and an eye for colors, typography, etc.
Nevertheless, give him credit for listing out some helpful things to keep in
mind for designing things.
The one thing I would say differently is that if you really like a certain
logo's style, it isn't a crime to adopt similar styles for your own. All art
is influenced by others in some way, and don't stick with something that sucks
merely because it's 'original'.
~~~
jwilliams
Yeah. The most interesting ones were ones of practice rather than design -
check it in b&w, scale it, mirror it, etc. All perhaps obvious to many.
------
fjsjex
"Use sharp lines for sharp businesses, smooth lines for smooth businesses."
What is that supposed to mean?
~~~
whacked_new
use vague descriptions for va...
... blog articles.
------
manny
Was I the only one who read this as "Rules of Lego Design" only to have my
excitement crushed into a fine powder?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Scots Language - pshaw
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/scots-language
======
sleavey
I'm Scottish, but I work with a lot of Germans and every so often I try to
learn some. I have found that Scots has a lot of similar works to German,
sometimes more so than English. I guess this must be because it comes from
Middle English which is related to High German. A few examples: "ken" (to
know; "kenn" in German), "kirk" (church; "kirch" in German), "loch" (lake;
literally "hole" in German), "reek" (smell; "riech" in German), "mair" (more;
"mehr" in German). It's interesting to me because the other language I
sometimes hear in Scotland other than English is Gaelic, which at least to my
ear sounds nothing like any other language I've heard.
~~~
DonaldFisk
"Loch" in Scots isn't cognate with German "Loch" meaning hole, it's from
Scottish Gaelic "loch" meaning lake, and cognate with Latin "lacus", English
"lake", and German "Lache". Scottish Gaelic is a close relative of Irish and
sounds quite similar to it.
Edit: "reek" in Scots means "smoke" and is probably cognate with German
"rauchen".
~~~
koralatov
You're right: "reek" does mean "smoke" in Scots.
In modern usage, by speakers of Scottish English, it means "smelly". I'm not
100% sure, but I'm confident that "reek" in this context was borrowed from
Scots and the meaning has just drifted over time.
Its etymology is interesting, and it consistently means "smoke" or "smoking":
[https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Reek](https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Reek)
Scottish Gaelic ( _Gàidhlig_ ) and Irish Gaelic ( _Gaeilge_ , often just
called "Irish") are both direct descendants of Middle Irish, which ultimately
comes from a Celtic root. Gaidhlig gradually replaced Pictish, now extinct,
about a thousand years ago.
~~~
FireForce
In English, reek is either a verb or a noun, not an adjective.
~~~
koralatov
Common Scottish English usage I encounter daily: "that bin reeks", "my dog
rolled in fox poo and she reeks", "I was reeking of sweat", "that place
reeked".
~~~
SyneRyder
For what it's worth - I'm from Perth, Australia (presumably named after Perth,
Scotland), and we use the word the same way here. "Oh my god, that absolutely
reeks" would be a common usage.
------
raesene9
I generally like Atlas Obscura's articles, but this one has, to use a local
phrase, a load of shite in it.
I've lived in Scotland my entire life and never come across anyone who speaks
"Scots" as their main language. It's not taught as a course in any school that
I'm aware of, so the idea that 1.5 million people "read, spoke or understood
scots" seems like it required a bit of "flexible thinking" to be true.
What is true is that many scottish people understand words which come from
scots as their used in vernacular speech.
Things like "Auld" == "old" or "Braw" == "good", but I wouldn't equate that
with understanding a language.
~~~
falsedan
One doesn’t have to go far in Embra to hear about the dreich days nor the harr
coming off the firth, and it’s the least Scottish city in the country.
The vocab is distinct from English, and that puts it beyond an accent to a
full dialect and language of its own.
Also shite is northern English, Scots would call it a load a bawls pal
~~~
ppod
"a load of balls" and "pal" are pretty well understood anywhere in Britain.
Scouse and Geordie accents have lots of difficult pronunciation and unusual
vocabulary like this, and I don't think that they are languages.
~~~
falsedan
I don’t understand your distinction, mutual intelligibility does not discount
a tongue from being a language, and discounting dialects from the accent <->
language continuum seems overly logocentric. I agree that dialects like
Scouse, Strine, Geordie are not distinct languages; I also think that a rest-
of-The-world English speaker would struggle to understand a speaker going
full-on with the vernacular.
The trouble with finding equivalent meanings between words with similar
spellings/pronunciation is that you’ll conclude English and Dutch are the same
language (or Danish/Norwegian/Swedish)
~~~
kwhitefoot
I've lived in Norway for the last 32 years and from my English vantage point
Norwegian and Danish are definitely dialects of the same language. Swedish is
the one that has made the most progress to becoming a separate language
because of the large amount of vocabulary that is not shared with the other
two but it is still not really distinct. All three have essentially the same
grammar and syntax. I can converse with educated, well spoken, Swedes because
the pronunciation is very similar to Norwegian even though spelling,
vocabulary, and usage often differ. On the other hand I struggle with
Trøndersk which no one claims is a separate language from Norwegian, and
Danish is almost impossible in conversation because the pronunciation is so
different from Norwegian but reading it is very easy.
These three languages are much more similar than Dutch and English.
I think you need a more telling example.
------
lordnacho
> The two languages are about as similar as Spanish and Portuguese, or
> Norwegian and Danish.
Well I'm in a fairly interesting position to judge this. I speak Danish, and I
lived with a Norwegian guy for a long time. And my in-laws are lowland Scots.
There are indeed some old words like kerk that are Germanic. But I think it's
unusual for people to be speaking something that you'd call its own language.
At least the inlaws don't use it full-time. It's more that they have a number
of phrases that they sometimes pull out, and then there's a load of Robbie
Burns (Auld Lang Syne). They seem to be able to decipher his stuff in a way
that I as a mainstream English speaker cannot. They'd know what the gas
station sign meant, where I would have a reasonable guess but be unsure.
This is probably quite similar to a Dane picking up a Norwegian (or Swedish,
which is maybe a step more difficult) newspaper. You'd get most of it, but
there would be the odd word you don't get, or there would be an odd spelling,
or a noun would fall in the wrong gender. But you'd get the gist of most
everything. The problem is without some instruction you won't know what some
crucial small words are. (I found when learning German after just a few
lessons a whole lot of things fell into place and it went from unintelligible
to newspaper standard. Same seems to be happening wrt Mandarin and Cantonese.)
One thing to keep in mind is my inlaws insist the resurgence of Gaelic and
Scots are artificial; they didn't have any instruction in either. It's like
the languages have been reborn from the ashes, rather than having had a
continuous existence (which I guess they actually did). But the big rebirth
happened after they grew up in the 60s and 70s. Something similar is happening
in Wales. Welsh speakers I've met have tended to be young.
~~~
unhammer
See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Not](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Not)
. Similar things have happened and are happening to many other minority
languages (e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegianization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegianization)
).
\-----
Also, regarding Scots not being that different, people do tend to (not always
consciously) modify their speech towards mutual intelligibility when talking
to people of different languages. My parents recently visited Tangier, VA[1],
and had a conversation with some kids on the ferry, noticing "oh, they speak a
bit differently", then they turned to speak to each other and my mom couldn't
understand a word.
[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E)
------
s0l1dsnak3123
I really enjoyed this article. Scots is certainly a language of its own - to
hear it in the wild you must venture out of the more populous areas (Inverness
and Aberdeen are exceptions) of Scotland and into the highlands and rural
areas. It is also used much more by older, poorer or more isolated
demographics within Scotland: as a farmers' son, I met many Scots-speaking
people when I went to the market with my father.
People who claim Scots is "just an accent" don't know what they're talking
about.
~~~
raesene9
I'd say it's a dialect, not a language. It's more than an accent for sure, for
starters scotland has a load of different accents not just one, as I'm sure
many teuchters going to Glasgow have found out the hard way.
But I find it difficult to get to the idea that people "speak scots" in rural
areas.
I've lived and worked in Scotland my entire life and in 40+ years, not once
has someone start speaking in a language I didn't get in general
conversation... not once, and I would not regard myself as multi-lingual.
There's local terms that are used for sure, "you ken"
But that's not a language, that's a variety of local dialects.
~~~
falsedan
I expect they’re code switching to match your expected communication
preferences based on the normal class/environmental signals.
~~~
raesene9
I do hope you're joking/trolling at this point.
No they're not.
I've worked in factories in Cumbernauld, I've worked in universities in St
Andrews, I've worked in banks in Edinburgh, I've worked in accountancy offices
in Glasgow, I've worked in hospitals in Dumfries.
I've visited pretty much every part of the country, and no-one has ever "code
switched to match my expected communications preference"
This idea that Scottish people are some generic blob who speak "Scots" just
isn't true to the real diversity of the country.
Aberdonians, Glaswegians, Edinbuggers, residents of the Kingdom of Fife,
Teuchters and all the rest have different accents and different dialects but
they don't speak different languages.
~~~
Tycho
The workplaces you listed aren't a very diverse set though.
~~~
raesene9
If you feel that, I'd suggest you've not been to many factories in Cumbernauld
:P
~~~
fatfox
Aye!
------
lewis500
I was real interested in this article since my ancestors were about 80% scots
or welsh. Welsh is undeniably a language, but Scots makes you wonder about the
difference between a language and a dialect. I found this article by a famous
linguist:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/di...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/difference-
between-language-dialect/424704/)
It made an interesting point about English:
"English tempts one with a tidy dialect-language distinction based on
“intelligibility”...But because of quirks of its history, English happens to
lack very close relatives, and the intelligibility standard doesn’t apply
consistently beyond it. Worldwide, some mutually understandable ways of
speaking, which one might think of as “dialects” of one language, are actually
treated as separate languages. At the same time, some mutually
incomprehensible tongues an outsider might view as separate “languages” are
thought of locally as dialects."
This is spot on. The first thing I did after reading the article was go to
Scots Wikipedia. I could read the articles pretty well after a minute, since
there seems to be a nearly one-to-one mapping between the Scots words and
English words, and so I thought "this isn't a language." The grammar was
different than standard english, but similar to the way some southerners talk.
But had I grown up speaking another language maybe I'd have a different
instinct about whether that intelligibility made it a language. Moreover, says
something I chose written language for deciding whether it's a language or
not: all english speakers are used to not being able to understand spoken
english from other places and classes.
In the end, I suppose the whole difference is socially constructed and
involves politics mixed with what people regard as common sense.
Random sample ("featured article") from the scots wikipedia: "The testicle
(frae Laitin testiculus, diminutive o testis, meanin "witness" o virility,
plural testes) is the male gonad in ainimals. Lik the ovaries tae which they
are homologous, testes are components o baith the reproductive seestem an the
endocrine seestem."
~~~
jschwartzi
> The grammar was different than standard english, but similar to the way some
> southerners talk.
It's interesting that you mention this, since there are a lot of Scottish-
descent people in the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountains in the southeast of the
United States. I had some distant relatives there who still had a clan
affiliation that I met once when I was a child.
~~~
lewis500
Yeah that’s who my mom is descended from and I’m from Alabama. What happened
is There was a migration of scots Presbyterians to Northern Ireland, and then
from Northern Ireland to Appalachia. In the south they call that ethnicity
scots-Irish but over there I think they call it Ulster Irish. For a while
there were a series of books about the scots Irish (eg “born fighting” by
senator jim Webb and the chapter in outliers by Malcolm gladwell about why
scots Irish are so violent—-for some reason all the books were about
violence...I suppose because the people who buy the books want to thing if
themselves as brave and dangerous).
~~~
ploika
Minor nitpick: it would be called Ulster Scots rather than Ulster Irish.
------
binbag
I'm Scottish. There is a resurgence of Scots in the cities (I'm in Glasgow)
but it's a bit hipster. Even most central belt (Glasgow or Edinburgh) Scots
think it's a little bit of a joke language. So this is article is interesting
even for us.
History has done a good and subtle job of ensuring Scots is thought of as a
dialect of the poor - a lesser form of English.
The interesting thing here is the fact that Scots is clearly Germanic - the
resemblance is uncanny.
In the cities they have started putting Gaelic place names underneath the
English place names on railway station signs etc. Maybe it would have been
more appropriate to put Scots versions there, since Gaelic was (and still is)
the language of the North and not the lowland cities?
~~~
netcan
_" History has done a good and subtle job of ensuring Scots is thought of as a
dialect of the poor - a lesser form of English._"
Related processes happened all over western europe. Before radio &
conscription, regional english dialects ranged from thick to "can't be
understood one county over." There was a conscious effort to unify the
language under the official dialect, king's english. Something similar was
happening in Flanders, Netherlands right up until recently... Dialects were
discouraged in schools and speaking in dialect became associated with a lack
of schooling.
~~~
binbag
And kids in Glasgow schools were thwacked across the head if they spoke in
Scots.
------
jimnotgym
This strong dialect, almost a language type thing is pretty common in the UK
in general. I grew up in the Welsh border counties of England, and it was
pretty common amongst remote rural people to speak a dialect that would have
been impossible to understand by people in the towns 50 miles away. Bits of it
survive, in Shropshire it is relatively common to hear locals say the weather
is "cowd", and to pronounce words like "sheep" as "ship" (the old phrase
"spoiling the ship for hap'orth of tar", meaning ruining something of value
for the want of a cheap bit of maintenance, is apparently not about boats).
I find most intriguing that men call each other "mon", like, "Surry mon it's
cowd", or "how bin'ee mon". However the equivalent English, "hey man, it's
cold today" would be absurd in England. To the old folks "she" was normally
replaced with "her", as in "her is cawd".
So those are all variant pronunciations or usages, but it goes further. My
father is an upper-wommer (a yokel, but more effectionately meant. Literally
someone whose house is high up in the hills). When he spoke to his father I
used to struggle to follow say all. They would talk of "tumps" (small hill),
"unts" (moles), and the lovely "unty-tumps" (yes mole-hills). Owls were
"ulerts", gaps in hedges were "glats" bill-hooks were brummucks. There were
bits of old-English thrown in, I was once told a brummuck needed "whetting"
(as in whetstone, sharpening stone) and was confused enough as a child that I
thought soaking it in oil to treat the rust should do-it.
By the definitions above, if I as a teenager couldn't understand my
grandfather (who I saw regularly) talking to my father, surely they were
speaking a different language?
Btw despite this being the Welsh borders, Welsh is very uncommon as a
language, and whilst I don't speak Welsh, the vocab doesn't seem to come from
there. Welsh has a number of sounds like "Ll" that were not used.
Post WW2 farming became very prosperous in the area, and lots of farmers
became gentrified and sent their sons to the elite English private schools
(confusingly known as the Public Schools, for historical reasons). I think
this is largely responsible for reducing the usage of the local language. Know
you can still find it on building sites, farm labourers, and in little remote
pockets.
~~~
eudora
One of the points of the article is that Scots is definitely not a dialect,
and is definitely a separate language, to the point that the author stopped
answering the question of which it is because it was so common a
misconception.
~~~
jimnotgym
That was the point I was answering. Is this border-speak also not a language,
if I couldn't understand my own father taking it to my grandfather, as a
native English speaker with a shared accent?
------
acjohnson55
I'm surprised to read this whole thread and not see any mention of Irving
Welsh. When I studied abroad in Wales, I read Trainspotting, which is written
in the Edinburgh flavor of Scots. To an American, it was almost as much effort
as reading Spanish.
Speaking of Wales, if my Welsh roommates were talking amongst themselves,
their own flavor of English (distinct from Welsh, which they also spoke) was
almost completely unintelligible to me. Perhaps less from grammar and vocab as
much as an entirely different cadence and very different vowels.
~~~
mixmastamyk
Friend I met in my travels turned me on to the movie, loved it but first few
times had to watch with subtitles. :D
------
roywiggins
The Allusionist podcast did a good episode about Scots recently.
[https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/scots](https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/scots)
[https://www.theallusionist.org/transcripts/scots](https://www.theallusionist.org/transcripts/scots)
~~~
bgmeister
I think the Allusionist is a really interesting podcast, and this episode was
a great one. It brought back some early childhood memories of my time in
Scotland (where I first learnt to speak), and also of the responses to my
accent and vocabulary when we returned to Australia.
------
randcraw
I'm not a linguist, but Scots sounds less like a language than a creole (a mix
of languages which span essential terms), or even a pidgin dialect (an
incomplete mix, requiring phrases or a third language to replace missing
concepts). The article doesn't say explicitly, but I imagine Scots varies
geographically, with the mix reflecting contribution from local tongues
(English, Gaelic, French, Pict, etc).
~~~
Marazan
Yes, there isn't (in my view) such a thing as a singular 'Scots'.
The 'Scots language' is effectively a 20th century invention by early century
poets like Hugh MacDiarmid.
They created a pan-Scottish 'Literary Scots' combining language and grammar
from across the country. It's beautiful literary work but it is an artifice,
not a reflection of a language actually spoken.
The language of the Scottish Borders is a very different thing from the
language of the Highlands from the language of a Dundonian.
~~~
raesene9
+1
From my experience you're absolutely correct. This idea that Glasgwegians
speak the same "language" as Dundonians or Aberdonians or (heaven help us)
Edinbuggers, is just weird.
We don't. There's lots of local accents and phrases and words, but not some
"scots language" that we start speaking when foreigners aren't around :)
~~~
GordonS
Aberdonian here. Yep, doric is very different from dialects elsewhere. I
married a girl from Edinburgh, and after more than 10 years we're _still_
discovering new words from each others areas!
------
prestonbriggs
Check the books from [http://www.itchy-coo.com/](http://www.itchy-coo.com/)
"Harry Potter" in Scots is the way it ought to be read.
~~~
prestonbriggs
Also, consider [https://www.luath.co.uk/scots-language/luath-scots-
language-...](https://www.luath.co.uk/scots-language/luath-scots-language-
learner-an-introduction-to-contemporary-spoken-scots)
------
eaguyhn
There was a very good documentary about the history of English. Episode 4
covers the "Guid Scots Tongue"
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7UG6vHXArlk&list=PL6D54D1C7DAE...](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7UG6vHXArlk&list=PL6D54D1C7DAE31B36)
------
tdeck
Here's a great lecture about the Scots language and it's history - in Scots. I
found I could understand it if I focus, perhaps given my exposure to British
comedy. [https://youtu.be/cENbkHS3mnY](https://youtu.be/cENbkHS3mnY)
------
craigsmansion
Much as I enjoy the Scots accent, it's just that: an accent.
I know: "the difference between a language and a dialect is an army and a
navy." (meaning: there is no difference)
But insisting Scots is a separate language feels like a nationalist thing. As
the article mentions, it's not that Scotland doesn't have a real language all
its own, Scottish Gaelic. But that would take time to study and master, and
it's easier to really dive into your local pronunciation up to a point where
no one understands it as English, write it down phonetically, and claim it's a
language.
From the article:
"Ye may gang faur an fare waur" apparently meaning: "You may go further and do
a lot worse",
or,
"you may go farther and fare worse", if you pronounce it in dialect and just
write it down like that.
~~~
pbhjpbhj
_Fit ye bletherin on aboot_ ... I'd disagree.
I'd say it's a dialect; with an accent vocabulary matches somewhat, but Scots
differs considerably in word use and has grammatical differences. In fact I'd
be prepared to say there may be a language hidden away there somewhere, but
because in use people mix it with a more standard English it's akin to a
creole, perhaps.
My in-laws introduced me to "Scotland the What", and for the first few
watchings mutual comprehension with my native British English was on a par
with understanding Afrikaans [exaggeration]. But I think that show itself is a
dialect of Scots (Doric), which supports the higher claims to linguistic
independence IMO.
"Bi foo, fit, far an fan,
Ye can tell a Farfar man" (traditional poem)
Which of you _loons_ and _quines_ recognises that top line as "by who, what,
where and when,"?
That said, there are lots of differences in the UK in vernacular language use:
What you call your bread rolls (bread cakes, barms, baps, rolls, buns, muffin,
batch, cob, etc.), or a lane (wynd [Scots], ginnel, snicket, alley, passage,
jitty, etc.), for example. I imagine this is similar in other countries,
certainly it seems that way in France to some extent.
If I tell you what locals called their lunch where I grew up it locates me to
within about a 20 mile radius; 5 or 6 towns. But even with that Scots seems
more broadly distinctive.
------
krallja
For some Scots internet tourism, visit
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ScottishPeopleTwitter](https://www.reddit.com/r/ScottishPeopleTwitter)
------
barking
There's the closely related Ullans, practically unheard of pre-1998.
------
billfruit
Is it the dialect in which many characters speak in Walter Scott novels like
Rob Roy and Old Mortality, if so it is very intelligible to an English reader.
------
willmacdonald
There are several Scottish words I grew up using which are easily traceable to
Swedish:
\- Scottish = English = Swedish
\- bairn = child = barn
\- flitting = move house = flytt
\- greeting = cry = gråt
~~~
Symbiote
"To flit" is also standard English, although more specific than the Scots use.
It suggests a very small thing moving or fluttering, like a bird or insect.
~~~
kwhitefoot
It also means to escape and to leave suddenly, perhaps to avoid paying a bill
or to avoid arrest, as in "He's done a flit".
I come from the south west of England and flit was a perfectly ordinary word
though not used in the RP register.
------
emayljames
Ah ken wit yir talkin aboot. Scots isnae English, English 'an Scots developed
at the same time, fae the same source.
------
etatoby
I just checked on the keyboard app that I use, Google GBoard, and it supports
both Scots and Gaelic.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why Facebook is scarier than Google (ZD blog) - litepost
http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=1437
======
willarson
I honestly still find myself shocked at the low quality of ZD Net blogs. The
analysis is often minimal, the length is usually 300-500 words, and the
originality is non-existent. Trying to read that article was befuddling and
ultimately I resorted to bewildered skimming.
Regarding the argument, I don't think Facebook is going to be a serious
mechanism for good or evil until the company begins to take measured actions
aimed at a long term goal other than "be big" and "make money." Things like
the poor logistics for the API roll-out, constant minor changes, bug-inducing
updates, etc, are signs of internal disorganization. I can't see either short
or long term stability within that chaos.
I am also curious about Zuckerberg. I have heard both extremely negative
things (arrogant), and very positive things. As usual reality is probably
closer to the mean.
~~~
brlewis
Believing reality is generally closer to the mean sets you up for
manipulation. By adding extremes to the voices you listen to, I can move your
perceived reality in either direction.
------
pg
When this woman is writing bad things about you, it's a sign you're doing
something right.
~~~
ivan
So is it all right with facebook Paul? You are an icon for many people ...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Wallets that Metamorphose Depending on Your Financial Situation - robg
http://www.good.is/post/proverbial-wallets-wallets-that-metamorphose-depending-on-your-financial-situation/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+good%2Flbvp+%28GOOD+Main+RSS+Feed%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
======
pdx
Hmmm, I would short this idea.
The trend will be away from wallets to phones. No need for a wallet to carry
your credit card in, if your phone uses near field communication to be a
credit card itself.
A widget on your phone that can display a picture of a full/empty wallet would
be more in line with where the world is going, in my opinion, then an actual
wallet that I have to charge batteries, bluetooth pair to my phone, etc.
~~~
hugh3
I'm pretty careful nowadays about carrying the bare minimum of stuff in my
wallet, so I've rationalized down to the stuff I really need. But in addition
to debit and credit cards, my wallet has a driver's licence, an employee ID
card, a couple of health insurance cards, a stored-value smartcard for public
transport, and a random "free movie ticket" voucher that I'm gonna get around
to using one of these days. Oh, and some cash.
Even if I gave up using cash and rolled all my credit cards into my phone, I'm
still carrying around a bunch of cards from random bureaucratic organizations
which don't have much interest in changing their systems to enable me to avoid
carrying around their little card. I'm not sure how a phone-based driver's
licence would work (considering that I mostly use my driver's license to as
proof of age to get into bars). Besides, my wallet is a convenient place to
keep stuff, like that movie ticket I mentioned earlier.
Besides, damn near every time I try to buy something the clerk is obliged to
try to convince me to acquire one of the loyalty cards for whatever store I'm
at. Ohh, little plastic cards aren't going anywhere any time soon.
Oh, and my phone battery goes flat often enough as it is. If this left me not
only _incommunicado_ but also moneyless, this would be a serious problem.
~~~
pdx
I suspect I will also continue to carry a wallet. (a cloth one, not one with
bluetooth in it)
The point of the bluetooth wallet is to remind you of your bank balance since
you're using electronic payment. My point was that, when you go to buy
something with electronic payment, it will be with your phone ... and so you
won't be opening your wallet in the first place, even if you do still have it
in your pocket to carry your pizza coupons.
------
T_S_
_The Mother Bear [wallet] (pictured) has a hinge that makes it harder to open
if you are approaching monthly budgets._
Seriously, that is funny.
------
Derferman
I like the concept of these wallets, but the idea of having to plug my wallet
in every night to charge a battery is less than appealing. I think the
simplicity of the wallet, especially in today's world of smart phones, is one
of its most attractive features.
~~~
Groxx
Wireless charging stations will probably prevail eventually. If they went that
way, all you'd have to do is stick it next to your phone on a charging pad -
you probably already have them near each other frequently.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Treating acute psychosis with drugs can prolong the anguish - dghf
https://aeon.co/essays/treating-acute-psychosis-with-drugs-can-prolong-the-anguish
======
tcj_phx
Several good points in this article, thanks for the link.
I think that psychosis is a symptom of exhaustion. It's never appropriate to
treat exhaustion with sedatives ("anti-psychotics"). I posted about this
yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12331317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12331317)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Hiring managers what would it take for you to reply to every applicant? - deedubaya
Anyone who has applied for a job in the last few years knows the routine: take the time to apply to numerous job postings, maybe get an interview or two, but mostly never get a response yay or nay. You might even get a few interviews in, only to never hear another peep.<p>If an applicant takes the time to apply to your posting, why not give them a follow up regardless?<p>What would it take?<p>Disclaimer: I'm building https://www.hireloop.io to hopefully bring communication full-circle. I really want to make this less painful.
======
pytrin
> If an applicant takes the time to apply to your posting, why not give them a
> follow up regardless?
I'm not a hiring manager, but as the CTO I do review a lot of resumes incoming
for technical positions we are hiring for.
The vast majority of applicants do not appear to be taking any time at all
aside from selecting their resume to upload and clicking submit. It doesn't
seem like they even read the job requirements, since 90% of them do not meet
the minimal requirements we post. Some of them are not even developers, but
they apply for a developer position.
If someone does appear to be relevant and did also include a cover letter
relevant to the position, I will respond, regardless if they're a fit or not.
For me the biggest pain is the sheer amount of irrelevant submissions, which
makes you numb after a while. This is why I don't believe in job postings
anymore and mostly do headhunting.
Hope this helps!
~~~
dx034
Wouldn't it be pretty easy to send a standard email saying that the
application was rejected? Maybe have 2-3 with different reasons, should fit
nearly all cases. For the applicant it's still much nicer than hearing back
nothing at all.
~~~
madaxe_again
That requires one to spend time reading and thinking about whether someone
falls under "can't write a coherent sentence", "not remotely qualified", and
"this is a cv?!".
We would always give detailed feedback to everyone who came to interview, but
candidates who fell far from the field didn't get more than the automated
reply. Originally I tried responding to everyone, but it's a sucker's game. It
isn't just the time spent replying in the first place, even if it only takes a
moment, it's the replies asking "why do you think you're qualified to tell if
I'm qualified", "here's my creative writing piece from 11th grade, for a
developer position, read it please", "I'll sue you, fucker! I know my
rights!", "ok I understand can you teach me to program?", "ok I understand,
here's my startup idea, what do you think?".
All it takes is one candidate who responds irrationally to a rejection and
your entire day, and attitude to other candidates, can be blown up.
So, just like there's a bar for an invite to interview, there's a bar for a
positive rejection.
------
hbcondo714
I was recently laid off so I'm on the job hunt. I applied to Snap, Inc and
received this response within 2 weeks of applying
_Dear [First Name],
Thank you for your time and interest in a career at Snap Inc. At this time,
our team has decided to evaluate other candidates for the [role]. However, we
encourage you to apply in the future for positions matching your goals because
our needs change frequently. Thanks again!
Best wishes, Snap Inc._
They must receive an enormous amount of applicants from all over so even
though I didn't make it anywhere in the interview process, I'm appreciative of
receiving a response and getting closure.
When I was employed, our HR department used Monster's ATS. They found it
difficult to use and didn't bother to inform candidates of their application
status.
------
paradox95
What kind of reply would you want? Would a simple "no thanks" be enough?
I have been in the situation before where replying to everyone with anything
meaningful is simply not feasible. Maybe for a recruiter whose full-time job
is that but not for a hiring manager who also has to balance their regular
duties as well.
I have spent much more time on the applicant side of things than the hirer
side so I understand the goal. It can be frustrating to not get anything. If
it is a job you really want you may be inclined to hold everything else off
until you hear something just on the hope that maybe they haven't gotten to
your resume yet. So a little closure would be nice.
So maybe a better question for you is what are you trying to accomplish by
getting hiring managers to reply to all candidates? Give them closure or
provide feedback? If the former than maybe a simple "no thanks" will do.
By the way, I am speaking clearly to the scenario where a candidate sends in a
resume and doesn't hear anything back. In my opinion, even if the hiring
manager or recruiter does a phone call the candidate deserves a clear "no"
email at a minimum.
~~~
deedubaya
I think a "no thanks" is enough.
Would you give every applicant a "no thanks" if it was a simple click of a
button? Would that be valuable to you?
~~~
Twisell
Yup because I once applied to a big company and to this day I still don't now
if a human was actually involved in any part of the process... Given the
company and given the job it's quit possible that the HR people just filtered
out the result using standardized fields and never gave an eye at the CV &
resume I took 5 hour to write.
Months later I learn that they fire half of their HR externals contractors
(maybe for the best).
So in the end yes, a simple "I read, not interested" would be great.
And if applicable a variation that could be "not for this job, but maybe try
another one" or even "you need more experience" would actually be even more
useful.
PS: What I learn though is that for big company hiring process is broken. My
best chance of being recruited is to build a great project and communicate
about it at my current job (but that's not easy if you are at the bottom of
the stack and writing code under copyright...), but now I'm even less tempted
to even apply to theses big Co.
------
6nf
We get 200+ responses to most job postings. 90% or more of those are from
candidates that just spam every job ad on the internet with their CV even if
they live on the other side of the planet. We can't respond to each of those.
We will respond to everyone that gets past this first round. And if you get a
phone / in person interview we will definitely call you back to say 'no
sorry'.
~~~
kriro
I'd say that you should be able to rifle through 200 responses and sort out
the crap and shove them into a folder where they'll get some friendly auto
response rather quickly. Even if you go a step further and tag the mails as
"not qualified enough" and "doesn't fit the job posting" and have them get
different responses based on that it shouldn't take that long. I'd personally
consider every unanswered job application bad PR for the company/a mild
failure. Takes about a workday if it takes you 2 minutes/application. I'd
guess this can be done in <1 minute though but since you probably have to open
an attachment for many I think two is the safer assumption (from dealing with
a lot of unsolicited mail).
Is it really that unreasonable to spend one work day per job posting to
presort? The task can be parallelized nicely and even delegated down to
interns if you think it's not worth the time of someone in HR (I'd strongly
advocate against this).
~~~
dimino
Why put _any_ effort whatsoever into it? What exactly is the bad PR? The fact
is, maybe you don't _deserve_ a response just because you sent in your resumé.
Also, "why don't you just" is one of those _famous_ things developers hear all
the time and your comment reeks of it.
~~~
kriro
It's a simple long tail problem. People tend to be grumpy if they don't get a
response (at least some people will be, statistically speaking). Those people
will likely act as negative multipliers when it comes to your organization
(especially since some of them will already be in a bad mood if they are job
hunting out of necessity). They may or may not be less grumpy if they get a
response, my hypothesis is that at least some of them will be less grumpy. If
you get 200 replies for each job posting and presumably post a couple of jobs,
preventing some negative feedback (especially in the age of social media) for
a modest amount of work should be a no-brainer.
You can chose to have a "clearly spam" category that you don't reply to I
suppose but apart from these even the worst written applications deserve the
decency of an answer (personal opinion). Similarly I also think even the most
brain dead customer requests and support questions should be answered (once
again personal opinion).
The benefit is obviously very hard to measure which is why I can only make an
argument based on reasoning (or dogma I suppose). The cost however is really
easy to measure so the counterargument is easier to make.
------
SerLava
I just applied to a remote position posted on HN and some other places.
They sent out a mass email about 3-4 days later saying they had 550 applicants
they were trying to sort through- so hold tight basically.
Now I pretty much know I'll get a mass email "no" if they don't decide to
interview me. Which is nice.
~~~
deedubaya
That sounds better than most!
------
adrianmacneil
Pro tip: If you want a reply to your application, try to avoid cold emailing
hiring managers your resume. Often my inbox has a lot happening, and I'm not
inclined to spend time copying your resume into our hiring software unless
there is something spectacular about your email or background. Emailing hiring
managers out of the blue also will not help you bypass any steps in the hiring
process.
By filling out the application form on our website, you load all the
information into the form for me, and are guaranteed that a recruiter will
follow up on your entry. If you want to send an email to the hiring manager
_as well_ to explain why you are so awesome, that's fine, but it's probably
not going to help your chances of getting a job any more than just applying.
~~~
alanfranzoni
Well... the converse is true as well. I've already got a well polished CV (I
usually keep the resume mostly identical for my job applications, while I
customize a summary header and I write a dedicated cover letter), an updated
LinkedIn profile, a website, a blog, a Stack Overflow jobs profile...
and I need to enter that information AGAIN in your system, which is possibly
slow, hard to use and/or requires registration, just because your process says
so?
You'd better be a great company to work with and/or pay very high salaries, or
you won't get my attention. Today the developer market is largely driven by
developers, not by companies; make sure your practices are not driving
potential good candidates away from your company!
------
jasonkester
As a hiring manager, your job is finding somebody to hire. And that's it.
If you want somebody to critique your cover letter and resume writing skills,
interviewing ability, etc. I'm sure you can find somebody to do that. But they
will charge you for the service.
It seems a bit silly to expect some random company's hiring guy to provide you
that service free of charge.
------
smoyer
We have several people that apply for every job we post (and there are
hundreds per year). On top of that we receive resumes that clearly have
nothing to do with the position as well as cover letters that have the job
title wrong. Some attach these materials without actually filling out the
online application.
When there's no effort put into applying for our position, I don't see the
need to put effort into a reply ... And eventually a flag in our system will
send them a generic rejection (approved by legal I'm sure).
On the flip side, we're currently looking for a Google-style SET to work on
testing Enterprise Java software and have received almost no resumes that fit
the position as we envision it ... That's a pretty clear indication that the
job description we posted needs work.
EDIT: This position is still open ... My email is in my profile if you're
interested.
------
sean_patel
> Disclaimer: I'm building [https://www.hireloop.io](https://www.hireloop.io)
> to hopefully bring communication full-circle. I really want to make this
> less painful.
[https://www.hireloop.io/how-does-it-work](https://www.hireloop.io/how-does-
it-work)
Goes to 403 Forbidden. Atleast put something in there???
403 Forbidden
Code: AccessDenied
Message: Access Denied
RequestId: 4XMR36267413GRGBC72
HostId:
BGu7DieumfZVCvftdpMIhXeFm2Qyyy2TyJ+P9jpQr3csSyYNIZBoGKhush8nMc4rHSj6+HighM=3p-
All other pages, including Pricing page, work tho ;)
[https://www.hireloop.io/#pricing](https://www.hireloop.io/#pricing)
~~~
deedubaya
CloudFront was giving me troubles. Thanks for pointing out my malfunction!
------
jasoncrawford
If I were using a system where rejecting a candidate was a one-click
operation, and it also sent them a notification, I would click it. That's what
it would take--it would have to be that easy. There are too many resumes.
(That's at resume review stage. If a candidate has actually talked to you,
including any kind of interview, then they deserve a response, and I do follow
up with everyone who gets to that stage.)
------
trevyn
If this is how you're applying to jobs, you're doing it wrong.
Target a small handful of companies strongly relevant to your experience and
interests, and start informally chatting with people who work there. Ask about
the culture. Get coffee. Ask how they like working there. Talk about what
you've been working on that's related. Ask some questions about interesting
problems they're trying to solve. Be interested and interesting. Points for
going straight to an Eng VP or CTO -- even if they don't have the time to talk
to you, they'll pass it to one of their underlings who does, and when your
VP/CTO tells you to follow up with someone, you do.
The resume should be mostly a formality AFTER they've expressed some interest
in your skills and have invited you to formally interview.
And if it doesn't pan out, you've already made personal connections with
people there. Get coffee again for feedback.
~~~
dimino
If you're already employed and looking to change positions, sure.
But if you're unemployed, you don't have this luxury.
------
invaliduser
This is probably bad practice, and I don't hire much anymore, but when I did,
I could usually put the resumes in three slots: 1/ Good match, want to see 2/
Maybe 3/ No
I generally give an immediate answer to 1 et 3. 2 are applicants that may do
the job, but I am not really convinced, don't seem as great for the job as 1,
and want to see them only if nobody in 1 gets the job. Also, 2 is definitely
all the applicants that never received any answer from me, because I don't
feel like telling them a straight no (in cas I'd need to interview them), and
the job process usually takes a very long time. In the end, I either
forget/procrastinate/feel like it's been to long to decently answer, so no
answer.
As I said, I'm not proud of that, I know this is bad and not respectful to
applicants, just being honest at how bad I am at the recruitment job.
------
WhiteSource1
That works for automated systems, where you get an automated response. But
hiring managers are busy, have multiple processes with HR, and with the rise
of job sites end up getting hundreds of resumes, most of which are completely
irrelevant, since it's so easy to blast our resume across the Internet.
------
rvpolyak
I received 155 resumes for the last postion I posted it would be too time
consuming to reply to every single one. However I always contact all
candidates by phone that came in for an interview to let them know we have
chosen not to pursue them for the position.
------
codingdave
> I really want to make this less painful.
For who?
Replying to every applicant, the majority of which are borderline spam, is
just extra work with zero added benefit to the business. Even if you make it
easy, it is extra work. Not to be heartless, but people might then actually
reply to you, and you spend more time dealing with someone you didn't even
want to interview in the first place.
I get that as an applicant, this sucks. But as a hiring manager? Full
communication with every applicant is MORE painful. And that is why they do
not do it.
------
agrafix
Many applications that we get do not meet the key requirements from the job
posting and are very generic. If the applicant did not put any effort into the
application - why should I? Maybe this process can be automated with some
ML/NLP to check if the application (a) matches at least SOME requirements and
(b) is not too generic but actually hand written to match your posting and
company.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Two-Headed Go - luu
https://www.jefftk.com/p/two-headed-go
======
cjbprime
Interesting! I would have guessed going 2:1 against a stronger player wouldn't
help much. Maybe I'm digging in, but I'd expect that it stops being true soon
-- I'd be surprised if a 1-kyu didn't beat two collaborating 6-kyus most of
the time.
(I used to play a lot but don't anymore, was last at 1-dan AGA.)
~~~
pmontra
I'm 1 kyu. I don't have any problem winning against two 6 kyus (I saw some
experiments like that in the past.) There are simply too many things they
overlook. And two 1 kyus (or a room of them) won't win against a 4 dan. We're
playing different games.
What happens is that the weaker players become a little better at don't making
reading mistakes and at finding possible moves. Unfortunately they don't get
any better at evaluating moves and the unknown unknowns are still unknown. The
better player finds moves that none of the weaker ones would think about or be
able to explain.
I can imagine that the knowledge about the game of two 11 kyus have a smaller
intersection than the ones of 6 kyus. This means they become much better
together.
However two 1 kyu have about the same knowledge, so they could be at most 1
dan together, probably still 1 kyu.
~~~
reagent_finder
1k as well here.
I don't see it as much about knowledge of the game, more about avoiding
mistakes and less pressure that lets you look at a game more in-depth. That,
and two people will probably coalesce towards something like honte anyway.
Add to this the player opposing is under pressure because he HEARS the
discussion. Can he take advantage of knowing plans? Should he?
I'd say this is a nice learning tool, and honestly, anything that keeps you
interested and makes learning and playing a bit more fun is fantastic. I've
played 5-in-a-row go, pair go, 3-player go, 1-colour go, 3D go and tried
different board sizes like 38x38 or 19x19 infinite (sides 'joined'). I've
never run across this variant! Seems fun!
Making guesses about what a 2-player team's strength is is a losing
proposition, though.
~~~
jefftk
_> Add to this the player opposing is under pressure because he HEARS the
discussion. Can he take advantage of knowing plans? Should he?_
Since we knew the opposing player was listening we mostly didn't discuss
plans, at least not in a way that would have hurt the plans. Mostly we
suggested moves to each other, and pointed out problems with the other
person's suggestions.
------
AmericanChopper
Reminds me of Gary Kasparov vs The World, which surprisingly turned out to be
a better game of chess than you might have guessed.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov_versus_the_World](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov_versus_the_World)
------
re
It sounds (from the comment on that page) like the biggest benefit they got
was from being able to consult with each other to align on strategy and avoid
blunders, which apparently isn't standard in Pair Go. Without that, I wouldn't
really expect them to see qutie such significant benefits.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_variants#Rengo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_variants#Rengo)
[https://senseis.xmp.net/?PairGo](https://senseis.xmp.net/?PairGo)
~~~
jessriedel
Unlike the OP game, pair Go is actually a _handicap_ for the paired up side
rather than an advantage. You only get one brain per move, and that brain
might be forced into using a strategy it doesn't like by previous moves.
~~~
pmontra
Common wisdom is that in a pair go game everybody has three opponents :-)
Remember that it's not allowed any talking, except asking who's to move, maybe
who's to take a ko, and proposing to resign to the mate.
------
kadoban
This is a pretty common format for playing go. Usually called pair go. There's
even fairly large tournaments for it here and there.
(To be clear I'm only talking about the two players on a team part, it's
usually 2:2, not 2:1)
Personally I hate it and am absolutely awful at it, but to each their own.
~~~
Sharlin
Normal pair go explicitly disallows nontrivial communication of any sort. Very
different.
------
g82918
Pair baduk can be pretty fun. In my local club we do 2:1 and 2:2 pretty
regularly. There is strong diminishing returns above two players though. 3:1
and 3:2 and 3:3 are all usually too much consultation for the game play to be
fun if you don't have an opinionated leader on each side.
------
slilo
5:1 Pro game:
[https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/C0U4UnDCgML9K7r7qj3Yse4HDm...](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/C0U4UnDCgML9K7r7qj3Yse4HDmRvczX_dvb5BLYK3nfHJ5qr4g3vvK0NAkrEXpbQcgcASa92Uz1VvBy0mXsoroC4w8YCzaz2HDPrRA=w1440-rw-v1)
~~~
Buttons840
Just a picture? Who won? Any game record?
~~~
cokernel_hacker
AlphaGo won:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Go_Summit#Team_Go](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Go_Summit#Team_Go)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Startup Quote: Fred Wilson, co-founder, Union Square Ventures - raychancc
http://startupquote.com/post/3923883167
======
raychancc
If you have an idea that you can’t get out of your head, do a startup.
Otherwise join a startup.
\- Fred Wilson (@fredwilson)
<http://startupquote.com/post/3923883167>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Graphwidth.com – Learn graph width measures through visualization - FrederikJ
http://www.graphwidth.com/
======
FrederikJ
I created an app that teaches graph width measures interactively.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Poetic.io – the simplest way to transfer files (for free) - alvises
https://poetic.io
======
hobblin
Seems sketchy... how are they offering their services for free? What's the
gotchas?
~~~
alvises
why sketchy? The biz model is beautiful ads (on the free side) and a pro
version (still to come).
~~~
fasteo
Terms of use, Rights you license[1] (emphasis mine)
"In order for us to provide you with our file transfer service we require you
to grant us licences in respect of the files you wish to transfer.
Specifically, when you upload a file to our site, you grant us a _perpetual_ ,
worldwide, nonexclusive, royalty-free, transferable licence to use, reproduce,
distribute, and perform that file to enable us to transfer and store your
file; and the right to _sublicense this right to third parties_. We claim no
ownership or knowledge of content of your files as we only require what is
necessary to facilitate your file transfer."
Sounds sketchy to me
[1]
[https://poetic.io/legal/poetic_terms_of_service.pdf](https://poetic.io/legal/poetic_terms_of_service.pdf)
~~~
rakoo
When you think of it, it doesn't sound _that_ sketchy: all they need is the
authorization to move files around on their storage provider servers so they
can be retained for the chosen period of time and sent to the recipients. The
importatn part from the ToS here is _to enable us to transfer and store your
file_ ; it doesn't say it will use them for any other purpose, such as
marketing, customer targeting, or anything else.
Now of course these are only words and the only way to be sure is to encrypt
your files.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
What ancient DNA tells us about humans and Neanderthals - Vigier
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/9/16448412/neanderthal-stone-age-human-genes-dna-schizophrenia-cholesterol-hair-skin-loneliness
======
throwaway25070
In case you're wondering why so much research (and articles summarizing said
research) emphasize the negatives of Neanderthal DNA, consider the case of
Bruce Lahn, a Chinese-born American geneticist:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Lahn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Lahn)
> His research on the microcephaly-associated gene, MCPH1, led to the
> hypothesis that an archaic Homo sapiens lineage such as the Neanderthals
> might have contributed to the recent development of the human brain.[2] His
> research also suggested that newly arisen variants of two brain size genes,
> ASPM and MCPH1, might have been favored by positive natural selection in the
> recent human history.[3] This research provoked controversy due to the
> finding that the positively selected variants of these genes had spread to
> higher frequencies in some parts of the world than in others (for ASPM, it
> is higher in Europe and surrounding regions than other parts of the world;
> for MCPH1, it is higher outside sub-Saharan Africa than inside).[4] He has
> advocated the moral position that human genetic diversity should be embraced
> and celebrated as among humanity's great assets.[5]
Since Sub-Saharan Africans have no Neanderthal DNA, researching the potential
cognitive or other benefits non-Sub-Saharan Africans enjoy from that 1-5% of
their genome would be racist. Because we all know race is just a social
construct, and human evolution--at least with respect to intelligence--stopped
sixty thousand years ago, or else it continued identically everywhere--unlike
the population-specific adaptations for lactose tolerance or rarefied air:
[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/tibetans-
inherited-h...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/tibetans-inherited-
high-altitude-gene-ancient-human)
~~~
danieltillett
I love how even commenting on this topic requires the use of a throwaway
account.
I will be brave and post in my own name. Yes different populations of humans
around the world are genetically different, but we don’t know if any are
better or worse in any significant way. Tigers and lions are different
species, can interbreed (Liger), but we would not say one was a better or
worse - just different.
Of course on the flip side we don’t know that the different human populations
are not significantly different in some important feature. The bottom line is
we have no good data one way or the other on this topic.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Facebook Refuses to Remove Fan Pages for Colorado Killer - neya
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/facebook-page-colorado-killer/46629/
======
raikia
Good. It would be 100x worse if internet companies started (or continued) to
constantly take down content that had alternate views.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
No, you are not "running late", you are rude & selfish - bootload
http://gregsavage.com.au/2010/06/07/no-you-are-not-%E2%80%98running-late%E2%80%99-you-are-rude-and-selfish/
======
btilly
I'm reminded of a talk at a medical conference about patient interaction.
The talk was scheduled. People showed up. No speaker was visible. The doors
closed. People sat there. Finally someone got unhappy enough to leave.
Discovered that the doors were locked. Soon the whole room was up in arms.
Then the speaker got up from the first row, went to the stage, and said, "I
did this because no words are as effective as demonstrating the point. Yes,
you are all busy people. But your patients are busy people as well. Many bill
hourly so time is literally money to them. So don't waste their time and money
by being late."
~~~
whakojacko
I wish more doctors followed this...Ive spent far too many hours of my life
waiting in receptions or exam rooms at hospitals. Unfortunately they are kind
of squeezed in to seeing more patients per day than they would probably like,
and one delay ripples through the rest of the patients.
I wish there was some sort of system to know exactly how far behind (if at
all) your doctor was running that you could check online to minimize lost
time.
~~~
enneff
I've recently been seeing an Osteopath, and I've been really delighted that
his administrative staff have twice contacted me a couple of hours before
appointments to reschedule (by 30-40 minutes) as his schedule had slipped
during the day. I haven't spent more than 1 or 2 minutes waiting for him. It's
kind-of sad that this level of service is remarkable rather than customary.
------
csmeder
I get a php error when I visit this page. I guess the server isn't running low
on resources, it is rude & selfish. Or maybe just misconfigured :)
_Error 403: Forbidden Your PHP settings have been disabled by an H-Sphere
administrator.
Your current PHP configuration: \--> This configuration was changed: Please
bring your PHP configuration in compliance with admin settings or request your
administrator to re-enable support of your settings.
You don't have permissions to access this page. This usually means one of the
following:
this file and directory permissions make them unavailable from the Internet.
.htaccess contains instructions that prevent public access to this file or
directory. Please check file and directory permissions and .htaccess
configuration if you are able to do this. Otherwise, request your webmaster to
grant you access._
~~~
nopassrecover
Despite the sarcasm I think this is a great response on a serious level. Most
people are not late by intention just as this site wasn't intended to crash.
~~~
megablast
If someone is late, that is no problem, stuff happens.
When someone is always late, that is rude and inconsiderate.
~~~
martinkallstrom
Perhaps the same way dyslectics (sp?) are inconsiderate by always being unable
to spell correctly. From time to time, it would be acceptable.
Consider that for the person that is always late, it is probably a bigger
problem than for you. She has to endure it in all parts of her life. Assuming
that the problem is that she simply doesn't care is as ignorant as assuming
that a dyslectic simply doesn't care to learn how to read or write correctly.
~~~
kelnos
Analogy failure.
You can't just compare two things that on the surface may vaguely seem the
same, and just assert they are the exact same thing.
Dyslexia is a recognized medical (psychological?) condition. Being chronically
late is just rudeness, plain and simple. If you constantly lose track of the
time, buy a watch. Set an alarm. Use a smartphone with a calendar that will
remind you of things. Take responsibility for your actions and don't try to
excuse the inexcusable as some sort of "condition."
~~~
martinkallstrom
This is a fact: My sister is chronically early. She often winds up arriving to
meetings and places about 10-20 minutes ahead of the agreed time. The
consequence is hers the bear: she always has to wait for other people, even
those arriving on time. The problem is compounded by some of her friends
having the opposite problem, always arriving late.
I'm fully aware that being chronically to early or to late is not a recognized
medical condition. Research at this point merely concludes that the downsides
of chronically lateness is too great for laziness or procrastination being the
major driving force.
Dyslexia is categorized neither as a medical or psychological condition, but
as a "learning disorder". It is my belief that research will come to a point
where
You are correct that it is rude to be late. Rudeness is defines by culture and
in my culture (and I suppose yours) it is rude to be late. It is not a
universal thruth however, as other posters have stated, since cultural
differences exist.
All of the above tells me that chronical lateness is not "just rude". There is
more to it, which makes it a far more interesting phenomenon than most other
kinds of rudeness.
------
elbenshira
Interestingly, this is mostly an American (and a also a Western) problem. In
most of the world (South America, Middle East, Africa, East Asia, etc), "on
time" ranges anywhere between 30 minutes to 3 hours later.
We grade our personal productivity level much more than other cultures. Other
cultures value other things such as community and relationships at a higher
level than we do.
A story:
I was invited to an Indian friend's birthday party. It was going to be a huge
party with hundreds of invited people (all Indian, except two people),
musicians, a hire clown, and a full-fledged buffet. The invitation stated 6pm.
I arrived at 6:30pm because, well, I expected them to start late.
Guess what, only two people were there: the birthday friend, because he had to
set up the place, and a white guy, who was even more confused than me.
So the white guy and I helped our friend set up. Then we kicked the soccer
ball around for a bit. Just waiting.
People started to slowly trickled in at about 8pm. I don't think we started
eating at about 9pm. And it was all normal to them.
~~~
patio11
Don't compare "East Asians" disfavorably to American punctuality within
earshot of a Japanese salaryman.
The line beginning with "other cultures" is untestable horsepuckey reminiscent
of the absolute worst tripe in American multicultural studies. And I have a
degree in that. It survives only because it flatters the preconceptions of an
Ameican subculture in academia who prefers to have a ready critique of Western
culture, as if such a thing existed.
~~~
guelo
Geez, everything is a liberal conspiracy to some people.
If you don't believe there are differences in punctuality between cultures
then you just haven't experienced those cultures.
~~~
patio11
The line I called out was about "valuing relationships", which is both
viscerally offensive to me _and_ has no defensibly true meaning. It is like
saying whites love their kids more than blacks do. It is too poorly
constructed to even be wrong.
~~~
guelo
Fair enough, upon further reflection I agree that line is a meaningless
offensive generality.
I still don't get the non sequitur attack on academia.
------
JangoSteve
I don't know why, but at some point I just stopped sweating this sort of
thing. When others are late to a meeting, it doesn't really bother me. When
someone cuts me off in traffic, whateva. These are all small things that just
aren't worth the effort of getting upset.
_I told her I have been coming to you for 15 years but don’t take me for
granted.
...
Me? Am I ever late? Sure, sometimes. That’s inevitable even with the best
intentions. But I never plan to be late. I never ‘let time slide’ because my
stuff is more important than yours.
I am not talking about the odd occasion of lateness. I am talking about people
who are routinely late. In fact, never on time._
You seem to give yourself much more slack than you allow others. You're not
talking about people who are occasionally late, and yet you walked out on your
dentist who was late once in 15 years, from the sound of it.
~~~
megablast
Dentists and doctors are always running late, if you go in the afternoons.
They don't like sitting around idly, not earning money, so they set up the
system this way.
Most patients are in and out, but a few take extra time, and they rarely know
which ones, so they just assume they are all quick cases.
Always schedule meetings like this as early as you can.
------
lionhearted
Two potential solutions:
1\. Plan around it - be somewhere where the person being late doesn't affect
you. Have people meet you at your home or at a cafe where you're doing other
work or reading a book and it doesn't adversely affect you. Oftentimes, if I'm
traveling with a group of people, I give a time range - "Be there between
7:30PM and 8PM" - that lets the early birds get there at 7:30, and the "oh
shoot! gotta run!" people ideally get there by 8PM, but the early birds don't
get offended and feel disrespected (I'm more or less an early bird, I _hate_
being late - but I've got some friends and acquaintances who just aren't that
way).
2\. If you really want to get people to cut it out, make real world
consequences. Say "the meeting starts at 9:05 sharp, the doors will be shut
and no one will be admitted after that." Think really hard if the situation
calls for it, but it does work if you do stuff like that. If you're a
professor, you could say to anyone coming in late - "get out. see you next
week." You won't have people showing up late if you announce you're going to
do that and follow through. Up to you to judge if you want that sort of
environment, and you've got to really be on top of things and deliver straight
out the gate if you're being hardcore that people have to be there. But it
does work.
~~~
btilly
When I was teaching my solution was that homework which was not at the front
of the table, at the start of class, was not accepted. I also graded people on
only a certain number of homeworks, so missing a homework or two was not a big
deal.
It worked. Class started on time, with the question and answer period that I
thought was the most important part of class, but which the students probably
didn't realize was that important. (Well they did partway into the course. But
that is another story.)
------
TamDenholm
Personally i find being early more irritating than being late. When someone
asks me to meet them at 2pm (eg: Job interview) I'll generally arrive in the
vicinity 20-ish minutes early and hang out in a cafe or something and then
walk into their office for 2-3 minutes before 2pm.
I've noted some people in my experience to consider this to be late, 15
minutes before stated time is what they consider to be on time. This pisses me
off to no end. If you wanted me there at 1:45pm i'd have gladly appeared at
that time, just dont say one thing and mean another. GRRRR
------
devmonk
No, really. I'm running late. My friends understand that we know are being a
pain in the ass, but we just can't get it together. It is rude and selfish,
but more than that, it's just because we can't get our act together in time.
It's called "kids", man. Get over it.
~~~
billswift
My father worked long hours, and my mother managed four boys at once, and we
were really too close in age for even the oldest to be much help with the
youngest. She is the one who taught me that being late is impolite, if you
need to get there a little early to be sure you're not late, then that's what
you do. Kids appear to have become a great excuse for whiners and the
perpetually incompetent, for almost anything they do, or don't do.
~~~
devmonk
My wife and I can otherwise plan for ourselves and get to places on time.
With kids, even when we try to start getting ready an hour earlier, we tend to
forget things because of the number of things required and all of the
distractions caused by the kids, including them not doing what you tell them
to do.
Do I rush around in the car at times telling the kids that we're running late
again? Yes.
Would some of you that are complaining about those that are late also be late
if you had kids that had difficulty getting things done on time and you were
more scatterbrained with kids than without? Yes.
People that procrastinate a bit, aren't type A, and tend to enjoy life rather
than planning all the time, sometimes/often are late. It sucks, and it is rude
and shows lack of planning and caring enough about being on-time.
You are on-time. That is great.
------
Groxx
Similarly, taking great offense at someone who may very well just _be_
"running late" is rude and selfish, as it assumes your little _thing_ is more
important than anything which may come up in their lives.
Context. Always context. If your event does not require strict adherence to
starting times, don't require strict adherence to starting times. If it _does_
, keep your view of your importance in scope with theirs, and for God's sake
_learn to adapt when things don't go flawlessly_ so glitches don't stop
everything. Life is rarely flawless.
------
tjmc
This post is “very Sydney” as they say there. I lived there for 5 years and
deliberate lateness was very much a part of the culture – a social signal that
your time was more important than someone else’s.
I fondly remember a quarterly kickoff meeting where my boss ripped one of the
more pretentious reps a new one as she sidled in 30 minutes late. It didn’t
happen again.
Having said that - finding parking, catching public transport (oh God those
trains – shudder) and just getting around Sydney in general is a _bitch_.
~~~
wyclif
Off-topic, but what do you think makes public transport in Sydney so bad?
You're suggesting that it's so bad that it creates a kind of built-in lateness
for most events?
~~~
etherael
Cityrail is heavily unionised, to the extent that it's not that rare of an
occurrence that you will see staff standing at the ticket machines when you go
to buy a ticket to stop you from doing so ( this seems to be their alternative
to striking ).
This is in response to wage and staff concerns mostly, and I believe that the
fares for the train services at least in Sydney are mandated to be fixed at a
certain level unless they pass some kind of bureaucratic process. So, the
union won't let the budget slide in the direction of infrastructure spending
rather than wages and staff spending, simultaneously the fare fixing keeps the
pool of money for the system fairly static.
Thus, infrastructure projects in public transport are glacial / non existent
depending on your point of view, for about the past fifteen years I have been
hearing about a line being added between Epping and Parramatta that is still
yet to be completed, I'm not sure it's even been started.
The fact that the public transport is so bad results in people that really
need to keep a tight schedule attempting to minimise their reliance on said
system, they'll get a car or move some place very close to their place of work
(thus perhaps contributing to the ridiculous rents and real estate prices in
Sydney). The less people use it, the less people complain about it, the less
reason the tragically inefficient system has to actually improve, and frankly
it would probably take the threat of armed invasion to get them to pull their
shit together at any rate.
------
onan_barbarian
Lulz at "My dentist kept me waiting 50 minutes not long ago."
This is a pretty accurate measure of the value of a recruiter's time vs. a
dentist's. Medicos maintain a queue to ensure almost full utilization for
their valuable services.
------
ams6110
The meeting problem is not so hard to solve. Start at the appointed time.
Close the door. If the person who organized the meeting is not there, adjourn.
People will catch on soon enough. Organizations which have a chronic problem
with people straggling into meetings 10 or 20 minutes late are likely enabling
the behavior.
~~~
houseabsolute
Indeed. Although what happens when the organizer is on time and the person
they want to meet with is late? Leaving early only frees up the other person's
time and does not solve the problem.
------
anthonyb
A recruiter calling other people rude and selfish? Now I've seen everything...
------
joshfraser
This is a huge pet-peeve of mine -- not just showing up late, but any action
that communicates that you think your time is more valuable than mine. I view
my time as my most valuable asset so I'm really sensitive to people
disrespecting it.
------
JimboOmega
I'm chronically late. It's a problem. I'm working on it.
However I notice the poster talks about 9AM meetings. In every company I've
worked for, there are people who have a habit of scheduling meetings at the
very beginning of the working day, at 8 or 9AM. There are also programmers who
have a habit of coming in later, at 10 or 11AM, which is fine except the days
when there are meetings.
You can write and complain and admonish and discipline, but sooner or later
you have to realize scheduling meetings first thing in the morning doesn't
work for non-morning people. They will always be late, or slow, tired, and out
of it. If you notice that about 1/3 of your staff never makes the 8AM meeting
on time, it's the meeting time and not the staff that's the problem.
Also, making meetings very long and irrelevant encourages tardiness. You've
decided to waste my time by making me go to a big group meeting where two
people are going to argue about something that does not impact my work. Fine,
but don't expect me to make an extra effort to rush to it. I can get some of
my time back by being late.
------
jakevoytko
The strangest feature of chronic lateness is the view that meeting times can
be gamed. Some avoid negative costs for early arrival, like waiting for
tables. Others like the attention they get when they finally arrive. Yet
others like that nothing happens until they appear.
Disentangling from the chronically late is worth the time. Some situations
enforce punctuality. You can also pick a set-time activity for the meeting,
like the start of a movie. You can also apply penalties: I once had a
professor who allowed students to be as late as they want, but he would only
collect homework until the start of class. Other situations, like travel, open
the possibility of finding alternate arrangements. I have also resorted to
giving earlier meeting times than the actual meeting time, but this has extra
consequences.
------
stuaxo
Just scanned the article... the bit about the dinner party is funny. I'm
imagining the author fuming and sneaking looks at his watch as friends come
progressively in later.
His girlfriend catches the look on his face while he's helping with the coats
and hisses "not now!".
As the dinner party progresses, conversation remains strained as the last of
their friends arrive "Sorry mate, traffic was awful", Greg mutters something
under his breath while everybody pretends not to hear.
Later, once everyone's left it's same argument again: her friends are
"productivity obstacles" while she chokes back the tears she asking why he
won't just let it go. The anger, coiled like a spring in his stomach is still
there though: this is important, why don't they realise... !?
------
CaptainZapp
I agree in general. Being late, in a Western cultural context is just damn
rude.
He had me until the dentist story. I don't think that a dentist actually plans
to let patients wait, but it does happen. A dentist (mine at least) usually
plans in contingency for emergencies, but it may still happen that he
overshoots.
Question: Would you rather have your dentist hand out his cell phone # after
treating you on a Friday and their _may_ be some complexities on the weekend
for the price of waiting the occasional 20 minutes or a guaranteed punctual
dentist who lets you wait for three weeks while you agonize in pain?
~~~
demallien
It's a false dichotomy - the solution to being able to handle emergencies
quickly is the same as the solution to being able to see patients on time -
have some slack in your schedule. Of course, that may mean that you need to
charge more for your service, but I know plenty of people that would happily
pay a surcharge of 20% or so on their doctor/dentist visits if it meant that
they wouldn't have to be sitting around in a waiting room for an hour.
The curious thing about it is that it would only need to be about 20% to get
everyone clear, but instead of that, nearly every patient ends up needing to
wait for an hour, because there is _always_ an emergency that needs addressing
each day. I wonder why we don't see doctor's surgeries or dentists doing this.
Anyone have an idea?
~~~
CaptainZapp
Ummm
"the solution to being able to handle emergencies quickly is the same as the
solution to being able to see patients on time"
That's exactly what I said; just with slightly different words.
------
Tichy
Scheduling a meeting at 9am is also rather inconsiderate towards me. Besides,
why don't you just start without me? By scheduling it at 9am, you have made it
clear that my attention is not really important to you.
~~~
fliph
What's wrong with 9am?
~~~
Groxx
The part that says "am".
------
jbm
While I agree with the comment in general, my norm is to immediately cancel
and reschedule or go on without the person.
The victimization aspect (3 wasted hours) could also be avoided by not
passively sitting and waiting to start.
~~~
stuaxo
Yeah - surely there were other things happening during that day, to do?
Also, mobile phones .. the person being late will generally call (and maybe
during 3 hours (!!) the person waiting might ring and find out whats going
on).
Waiting, doing nothing for 3 hours and then complaining about it seems a bit
passive aggressive, I think I would wait an hour tops.
~~~
modality
The three hours wasted was actually just 20 minutes of 10 people's time.
Forcing people to sit and wait for 10 minutes is totally passive aggressive.
Also, not every employee can accomplish that much in 10 minutes. A support or
business person could fire off an e-mail or two, but an engineer suffers when
time is broken into small chunks. Engineers are also paid pretty well, so when
you're talking about 3 hours of "engineer-time" wasted, the cost to the
company adds up.
------
Brashman
I can't agree more with this post. Oftentimes people want to make dinner plans
with me and I ask for a time so that I can plan for things after. When these
times become 30 - 40 minutes late it messes up my schedule for the rest of the
night.
Similarly showing up on time and waiting some indefinite time for people to
show up is a pain. I'm ashamed to admit it but I've started being a bit late
to things because I find that almost always other people aren't on time
either.
------
blogimus
This is what I got when I tried the page an hour after posting to Hacker News:
_Error 403: Forbidden
Your PHP settings have been disabled by an H-Sphere administrator_
Now that is rude
------
mike-cardwell
If I agree to meet someone at a certain time, I make sure I arrive early so as
not to keep them waiting. I'd rather arrive early and wait, then arrive late
and keep the other person waiting.
That is the only polite way to behave when meeting up with somebody.
~~~
mike-cardwell
Also, if an event finishes at a set time of say 8pm, and I'm being picked up.
I don't tell the person to pick me up at 8pm. I add maybe 10 minutes on top to
make sure I'm out and ready and waiting when they arrive.
~~~
loewenskind
You should like someone who puts absolutely everyone ahead of themselves (not
making a judgment on if this is good or bad. It's definitely different then
me).
------
ojbyrne
As someone who's chronically early... If it involves travel of any kind in a
US city (9am meetings imply that), sorry, lateness is a given. 10 am, 11am,
etc, no problem being draconian, unless it actually involves inter-city travel
(i.e. not employees - in the sense that they're people who know where they're
going).
If you're asking people to go to a place that you're familiar with and they're
not, just assume they're going to be twenty minutes to half an hour late.
I've lost track of the number of times my GPS has guided me around a circle
for 15 minutes, or up to a detour sign, or to turn left on a no left turn
sign.
~~~
billswift
Maybe you should learn to read a map, and actually, you know, _plan_ your
route ahead of time. I wonder if trying to read a GPS while driving might be
almost as bad as talking on a cell phone?
------
stuaxo
I spend my life rushing to things. Probably some internal overestimation of
quite how much can be done for some length of time. Sure, it would be nice to
be on time for everything, but I was late every day to school (not for want of
trying to be on time). I try to be on time, and often can be (altho arriving
sweaty from running for the tube or bus). Other times it just doesn't happen.
We have mobile phones these days so it's no big deal.. having to arrive for a
hard and fast deadline is a lot less common than it used to be.
------
Dove
Once upon a time, my very favorite manager wanted to review the high level
schedule for his software product. So he called a meeting among all the
managers who worked for him. At ten, maybe fifteen minutes past the hour,
everyone had finally made it into the room, random issues with projectors and
computers and missing files had been resolved, and everyone was ready to
present.
The manager scowled. "People, if you can't run a meeting on time, I don't know
how you're _ever_ going to run a program on time."
Attendance was prompt thereafter.
------
drusenko
It's helpful to define what "being late" means. My rule of thumb is 0-5
minutes late is "on time", 5-10 minutes late is "OK but not great", 10-15
minutes late is "somewhat rude" and 15+ minutes late is "very rude".
One thing that annoys me to no end: people who are very early. If I plan my
schedule carefully around you being there at 2pm (or later) and you show up 20
minutes early, you are going to sit around for 20 minutes, and I'll feel like
an asshole, even though it's your fault.
~~~
loewenskind
>and I'll feel like an asshole
Why? I would try to make it as uncomfortable for them as possible so they
don't do that anymore.
~~~
stuaxo
Sounds like a great basis for friendship and personal relationships (although
maybe these are "productivity obstacles" too?)
~~~
loewenskind
We all have our personality quirks and I'm old enough to not be ashamed of
mine. I hate it when people get to things really early. My friends learn this
about me, just as I learn their quirks.
------
teye
Agree wholeheartedly.
I've said for a while now that being late is making the statement that you
don't value the other party's time.
------
TamDenholm
I also find doctors to be late in perpetuity, ive never in my life waited less
than 10 minutes PAST the actual appointment time. This is both an easily
identifiable problem and easy to fix, the receptionists could easily structure
appointments more appropriately.
~~~
papa
Well the problem may vary from provider to provider (and country to country),
but after observing my wife's situation as a physician in the U.S., I can tell
you that many doctors aren't late volitionally.
First, the problem isn't easily fixed. Here's the deal: At her HMO each doctor
has a panel of several thousand patients. Each patient visit during a normal
clinical day gets a 15 minute allocation with the MD. It used to be 20 minutes
at her HMO but was recently reduced in order to increase the patient volume.
Typically my wife's schedule is stacked appointment to appointment from 8-Noon
and then again from 1-5pm. A couple of time slots are left unscheduled for
high priority, emergent visits (if you've got a routine visit, forget it,
you'll get something a month or two out into the future).
No as you can imagine, 15 minutes per patient isn't much time. Some patients
require more time. With each successive visit, the wait will get longer and
longer. This isn't because the doctor (at least some of them) is being a jerk
or dismissive, it's because they're trying to do a thorough job with the time
allocated. If they can't finish what they need to in 15 minutes, well, she
goes over that time. It isn't too hard to realize how screwed up the schedule
can get after a couple of tough back-to-back cases.
My wife then tries to catch up during lunch hour because she doesn't take
lunch. After working through lunch, she kicks into the afternoon half of
clinic hopefully caught up, but sometimes not. And the cycle repeats itself.
The receptionists can't "easily structure" the appointments more appropriately
-- at least at the large providers -- b/c they're not the ones running the
game.
I'm not going to defend the overall system. That's a much bigger problem and
mess that a lot of smart people have looked at and have yet to solve. But I do
think it's worth realizing that, yes, many doctors do think your time is
valuable and don't purposefully try to waste your time. Many doctors are
overworked and are doing the best they can within the parameters of what
they've been given to practice medicine and that at some point you might be
that person that has an appointment that goes over the time allocated (and
when you do, hopefully you'll be happy the doctor ended up being attentive to
those needs).
Just hoping to lend some extra perspective (especially as someone who used to
feel the same way you do).
~~~
billswift
It was her choice to work in that situation, so I have very limited sympathy.
------
robryan
With the party thing, a lot of the time I am happy to get there right on time,
gives more time to spend with friends before people leaving/ passing out.
Unless it's a party I don't actually want to go to then I may make a late
appearance.
------
eogas
This comment may offend some bloggers, but I think anyone writing something
that starts with a warning about how it might offend people is simply writing
it for the shock value.
------
blackguardx
In NYC, no one ever seems to be "on time."
------
sabat
Actually, maybe I'm really busy, and doing the best I can. I value your time,
but I value mine more. And obviously you're not as in demand as other people
are. Sorry you can't appreciate that.
~~~
btilly
_Actually, maybe I'm really busy, and doing the best I can._
No.
No matter how busy you are, if you're good at planning you can routinely be on
time. If you're bad at planning, then you'll have problems no matter how
little you have to do. And if you make a point of surrounding yourself with
people who are able to manage to be on time, then you'll all get more done.
_I value your time, but I value mine more._
As my brother drilled into me a long time ago, "Yes, but..." is just a
dishonest way to say "No". Your actions clearly say that you DON'T value other
people's time. There is no need to bother pretending otherwise.
_And obviously you're not as in demand as other people are._
No. It is called "planning". And not being rude and selfish. You might learn
this "planning" thing. It could let you get more done without putting as much
effort out.
_Sorry you can't appreciate that._
Apparently you are aware that it is inconvenient when other people prove to
have desires that are at odds with your selfishness. But you clearly don't let
that bother you too much.
My attitude is that people like you are productivity obstacles to route around
and avoid.
(For the record I am someone whose natural tendency is to be chronically late.
But _not_ when someone else is depending on me.)
~~~
Tichy
Can you plan to be on time to the minute, though? With traffic? Or does being
on time mean you have to be early, to account for the possibility of travel
delays. Then suddenly it becomes expensive to always be on time.
~~~
btilly
I have seen people be chronically late to meetings when they just have to walk
from one room to another within a building. That I have no patience for.
With uncertain travel, you have a point. Still if you're a sales person who is
supposed to pitch me, be on time or don't bother showing up. Sure, being on
time is more expensive for you. But it is less expensive than a wasted trip,
so don't make it a wasted trip. If the relationship is more even, then I
understand travel delays but expect to see a reasonable attempt. If you're
late half the time and early half the time, I'll be OK with it. If I have to
consistently wait for you being late, that's going to be a problem.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Why are there no software projects on Kickstarter? - sroussey
Why are there no software projects on Kickstarter? I see hardware projects from both small teams and large companies. But I don’t see any software projects. Why is that?
======
thijsvandien
Several projects related to the Django web framework were funded through
Kickstarter, e.g. built-in schema migrations [1], improved support for
PostgreSQL [2], and work on the Django REST framework [3].
[1] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-
mig...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-migrations-
for-django)
[2] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mjtamlyn/improved-
postg...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mjtamlyn/improved-postgresql-
support-in-django)
[3] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tomchristie/django-
rest...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tomchristie/django-rest-
framework-3)
------
seren
I would say that most _pure_ software project are not necessarily capital
intensive, so if you have an idea you can just execute it, and directly start
selling to customers, so it makes less sense to do a Kickstarter.
Even if you do not really intend to monetize, and you want to develop
something to scratch an itch, a Github account is rather affordable.
~~~
bellsandwhis
So true, even though time and focus is worth lots of $$.
~~~
abbadadda
I'd counter that money can give some runway for the project to better exist
than it otherwise would be able to as a side project. If someone said, "If I
can raise $20,000 on Kickstarter I'll quit my job and work on this full time,
aiming to deliver in 6 months" that's a different value proposition that
simply running a GitHub account and coding in spare time does not afford.
------
frou_dh
Patreon ($x/month) seems to have more mindshare since the heyday of the big
all-or-nothing Kickstarter.
~~~
jandrese
Patreon is much better fit for continual software maintenence. You get a
monthly income to keep improving the software.
That said, video games aren't unheard of on Kickstarter. There's a final
product to deliver to the backers so they can check the "successful
Kickstarter" box and then move on to a new project.
------
trumbitta2
The exception: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-
just-a...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-
blogging-platform)
------
forkLding
Don't software-based games count? I always see games asking for funding on
Kickstarter.
------
bdcravens
Font Awesome raised money on Kickstarter (I was happy to participate)
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/232193852/font-
awesome-...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/232193852/font-awesome-5)
I think part of the issue is that most software projects tend to be a service
or have managed components, making it tricky to provide ownership to a
finished product, which is ambiguously stated as a requirement:
> At some point, the creator should be able to say: “It’s finished. Here’s
> what we created. Enjoy!”
[https://www.kickstarter.com/rules](https://www.kickstarter.com/rules)
~~~
sroussey
Wow! $1m raised as well!
------
gnicholas
When you're making hardware, there's a logical way to structure backer rewards
by offering the first units off the factory line. You can give these to your
early backers (to incentivize them to sign up) or to people who back later but
pay tons of money.
With software, there is no equivalent of "first unit off the factory line".
You could artificially create this dynamic by releasing the software in phases
to different tiers of backers, but this would probably just anger people
because it's entirely artificial. There are also limitations around apps, for
example Apple won't let you offer TestFlight beta testing as a reward. And of
course, you can't let people buy an iOS app through Kickstarter either.
I had to think creatively about the rewards/tiers for my software kickstarter,
which was successfully funded. [1] We let people who paid a little money vote
on a certain set of features, and people who paid more money could both submit
options and also vote. We also had branded mugs for higher-tier backers as
well, which we drop-shipped via Costco (note: only offer this to US-based
backers...). I think these voting/nominating tiers would work well for most
software, since it's costless to let people vote, and you want to make
something that your users want anyway.
1: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/72264020/read-across-
th...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/72264020/read-across-the-aisle)
~~~
plutonicks
I've also seen prepay or discounts work well.
Such as a free pro account for life or 50% off platform fees
I like your idea too. Id expect that it would create a trusted beta group that
has more buy in... How did it work out?
~~~
gnicholas
Worked out great! We were fully funded, and I reached out to the community
again when we launched a tool for another platform (Chrome extension). Several
years later, and we still have thousands of active users.
------
toomanyrichies
I would love for something like "Kickstarter for software" to exist. It would
help separate the "oh, that's a nice business idea, you should build it" crowd
from the "I need that app now and will happily pay for an ugly but workable
version of it" crowd.
------
purerandomness
Magit, the Git frontend for Emacs, has a Kickstarter:
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1681258897/its-magit-
th...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1681258897/its-magit-the-magical-
git-client)
------
bradhe
There are lots of software projects on Kickstarter! I think what you're
considering, though, is _consumer_ or _enterprise_ software. Which is because
the incentives don't align that way. The way to capitalize those businesses
isn't through Kickstarter.
------
phaus
There are, just not frequently.
This was a pretty successful product for 2d animation:
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/esotericsoftware/spine](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/esotericsoftware/spine)
------
dangerlibrary
There are a fair number of video game kickstarters - they have a mixed
reputation.
------
blackrock
Does Kickstarter allow you to raise money to build a product, where in
exchange for their support, you offer to give your backers a percentage of
future profits? And with an agreed upon profit sharing restriction.
Or is something like this in contradiction with SEC investing rules.
The interesting thing is if you build something that brings in $1 billion in
profits, and you continue to pay that small percentage out to your initial
Kickstarter supporters.
~~~
bdcravens
No.
> Projects can't offer equity.
> Investment is not permitted on Kickstarter. Projects can't offer incentives
> like equity, revenue sharing, or investment opportunities.
[https://www.kickstarter.com/rules](https://www.kickstarter.com/rules)
~~~
blackrock
I always found that confounding.
You put up a half-baked idea, and random people will throw a few hundred
dollars at you to help you achieve it. And all they get is a thanks, and
perhaps a mention, and possibly a tshirt.
And sometimes the person never had any intention of building the product to
begin with. It was an elaborate scam.
~~~
bdcravens
Kickstarter knows many projects fail, which is why they want to ensure there
are no guarantees or legal entanglements with the types of projects there. As
a Kickstarter purchaser, you have to know what you're getting into. I actually
was burned by one project (the HydraDock) but I honestly wasn't that angry; I
knew the subtle difference between sponsoring a project and a pre-order.
------
Costrak
I think it relates to the most common reward type permitted for the project
backers. Generally, they get the item they have backed, such as a game, a
movie. This tends to favour physical goods
~~~
eps
Except for computer games, of which there is a ton.
------
zadkey
Why would you not consider a computer game a software project?
------
codegeek
Software projects have a much lower barrier to entry and doesn't require
upfront intensive capital. The only thing you can do with kickstarter for a
software project is to get paid for your own time building the project. Most
people don't want to pay for that unfortunately. Doesn't have the same appeal
as a tangible physical product that you can showcase.
Kickstarter is for experimental and new things. Software customers are not
looking for new things. They just want their problem solved and will not wait
for a kickstarter project to do that unless you are building the next AI but
then you have the FAANGs doing it already.
~~~
eps
KS has long been used as a promotional vehicle for kick-starting not so much
the product development, but marketing/sales of the same. Often times it looks
like the developers themselves cover the final gap if the project can't
achieve its set goal naturally.
This way they basically go after a permission to spam supporters with project
updates, asking for retweets, mentions, etc. It helps gathering free beta
testing crowd. Perhaps there are also some SEO benefits too.
So in this context OP's question is really quite valid. I'm guessing that no
one has thought about using KS this way yet and it's definitely worth a try.
------
simple10
There are about a dozen notable software projects that raised money on
Kickstarter, but it's a tiny percentage compared to the total.
Font Awesome, Light Table, LiveCode, Lavabit, Diaspora, Ghost, NoFlo Flowhub,
Hypothes.is, etc. used Kickstarter to fund parts of their projects. See
Kickstarter Technology > Software category [1]. There's a steep drop off from
amount raised by notable projects to all other software projects.
The total amounts raised by software projects is significantly less than other
categories like hardware, board games, and art. Mostly this is do to 1) how
Kickstarter rewards work, 2) how Kickstarter marketing works, and 3) the
psychology of backers and existing angel investors.
It's hard to come up with good rewards for software projects. Since
Kickstarter does not allow equity rewards, the only option is a discount or
tangential reward like a t-shirt. People are already accustomed to seeing
special deals or bundles for software that's already built. Giving a 50%
discount or lifetime access on Kickstarter is typically not enough for
potential backers to take the risk for a project in prototype or concept
stage.
Projects that raise $100k+ in any category are almost exclusively driven by
marketing. Ads, influencers, email lists, cross promotions, etc. Kickstarter
will give an algorithmic discoverability boost to projects that are generating
a lot of sales, but you pretty much have to bring your own traffic.
Kickstarter marketing agencies almost always pass on helping software
projects. Disclaimer: I have a marketing agency and get a lot of inbound
requests to help with software, which I turn down. Kickstarter marketing is
already a niche (about 1M backers in the USA) and narrowing further down to
software makes the niche too small to work on most ad platforms.
Software projects with large built-in audiences or existing customer bases
have used Kickstarter to fund new milestones. See Lavabit Dark Mail Initiative
[2]. But we don't see this very often since the risk to reward ratio isn't in
the project's favor. It's unlikely that a software project will get a lot of
organic exposure on Kickstarter. Most of the backers will be existing project
users.
Due to the public nature of Kickstarter and limited campaign length of max 60
days, there's a high risk the raise will be seen as underperforming by the
public or existing angel/VC investors.
Summing it up... if you want to raise money for software by pre-selling at a
discount, you might as well just do it through Stripe and save yourself the 5%
Kickstarter fee and hassle of doing a Kickstarter campaign.
[1]
[https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/advanced?category_id=51...](https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/advanced?category_id=51&sort=most_funded)
[2] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ladar/lavabits-dark-
mai...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ladar/lavabits-dark-mail-
initiative)
~~~
sroussey
I am curious if KS can improve marketing spend for software project, where the
success of a project is story in and of itself.
~~~
simple10
I've wondered this as well. I think the idea of a small-team open source
project funded on KS in milestones is feasible. However, the promotion would
need to be handled by the community and backers vs the developer team.
Otherwise the time and monetary cost of frequently running campaigns on KS
would be too high of a distraction.
I also think there's room in the market to create a KS alternative
specifically for software that actually helps with promotion.
------
bogdanu
I wonder if there's a kickstarter for starting FOSS software/libraries...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Reddit: can anyone clean up the mess behind 'the front page of the internet'? - prostoalex
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/12/reddit-can-ceo-ellen-pao-clean-up-the-mess
======
toxicFork
“That’s more than double the population of the entire UK, so it makes about as
much sense as generalising every single person in the UK, if the UK had twice
as many people.”
Great quote.
One thing I have noticed with subreddits is that whenever a subreddit passes a
threshold of subscribers and gets more frontpage exposure, the quality gets
worse and worse until everyone starts hating it, unless moderators take
serious action. It happened to many of them, from /r/atheism to /r/gaming, to
/r/adviceanimals. As you get more people into any community, it needs more
policing and moderation. AskReddit and some others have stricter rules and
seem to be doing better.
~~~
wlkr
This is so true. I frequent a wide variety of online communities and the same
can be said of any of them. Any increase in the rate of new posts always leads
to a degradation in post quality until 'stream rate' is reached and people are
posting without the expectation of their posts even being read. Maintaining a
healthy post rate is crucial but, as you say, quality also needs to be
enforced by some form of moderation with unambiguous rules. Evolutions of a
community can be tied strongly to post-rate fluctuations over time and most
long term users are well aware of these iterations. On forums, large
communities can be splintered for the benefit of quality and discussion.
~~~
qznc
The phenomenon is quite old. See e.g. "eternal september" [0]. The sad thing
is that nobody has any better idea than strict rules enforced without mercy.
[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)
~~~
mcphage
> The sad thing is that nobody has any better idea than strict rules enforced
> without mercy.
The other sad thing is that so many online communities die because the
moderators aren't willing to resort to that, even though it works.
------
tomjen3
I tried to take the article serious until it classified all NSFW subreddits as
reddits dark side.
Yeah because collections of pictures of naked women are now so horrible they
must be "cleaned up".
~~~
monksy
I've got some news for them. Everyone is naked under their clothes. Its
horrible.
~~~
therealdrag0
"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."
\- Mark Twain
~~~
mkr-hn
That depends on what they're doing while naked.
------
rriepe
The subreddit infographic is terrible on its own, but the underlying logic
(moderator connections) is just abysmal. There was a time (maybe now, even, if
they haven't fixed it) where any subreddit could add anyone as a moderator
without their permission. Here's Zach Braff's actual reddit profile, for a fun
example:
[https://www.reddit.com/user/zachinoz](https://www.reddit.com/user/zachinoz)
------
StavrosK
But reddit isn't a single thing, it's a place for communities. Surely, it
can't all be messy, let alone equally messy.
~~~
mcantelon
The "clean up Reddit" campaign is likely an effort to get Reddit to impose
ideologically-driven authoritarian administration (more so than already
exists). 4chan was subjected to a similar campaign and eventually yielded.
Reddit's traditional approach has, for the most part, been to err on the side
of freedom of speech with minimal rules. Aside from the core rules, subreddit
fiefdoms are allowed to manage their domains as moderators see fit.
------
minimaxir
Reddit _can 't_ clean itself up, which is actually _the primary reason_ why
it's looking into alternative business models outside of advertising (Reddit
TV, RedditMade, Reddit Coin), since advertisers may not be willing to sponsor
a website with such material.
The fact that all of those models have failed miserably is a separate issue.
~~~
mcantelon
One thing they could do is create a separate domain/branding for subreddits
that aren't squeaky clean so things look different on the surface.
------
eertami
>SRS moderator: "but there are hate movements that use Reddit as a propaganda
organ… and someone needs to step up and get rid of them.”
Well yeah... like SRS. These people are oblivious to irony.
------
smtucker
I personally like the mess. If Reddit ever got "cleaned up" I don't think I
would ever return.
------
DanBC
NSFW also images of deliberate self harm
Interesting that they mention goatsac. He helps moderate /r/cuttersgonewild -
a sub reddit that reposts images from /r/selfharmpics and adds sexual
language. Admins have been told, many times. They don't care. On Reddit it is
fine to take a vulnerable person's image, add sexualising language, and repost
it to a different sub.
To view /r/selfharmpics you need to change your settings to stop subs showing
you custom CSS. For some reason /r/selfharmpics blanks the display.
See this example:
Original post to /r/selfharmpics
[http://www.reddit.com/r/selfharmpics/comments/2zbipf/nsfw_br...](http://www.reddit.com/r/selfharmpics/comments/2zbipf/nsfw_bruise/)
Repost to /r/cuttersgonewild
[http://www.reddit.com/r/CuttersGoneWild/comments/2zef7c/dadd...](http://www.reddit.com/r/CuttersGoneWild/comments/2zef7c/daddy_spanked_her_but_its_self_harm_because_she/)
(The Imgur header text is confusing. It's a bug[1] caused by /r/selfharmpics
blanking the display in CSS.)
I've seen users send multiple PMs to suicidal young people telling them to
just kill themselves. The users report the PMs; they block the account; they
take screenshots and message the admins -- nothing happens, even if that
account has messaged multiple people telling them to kill themselves.
Ask someone to upvote a post in a different thread? Fucking instaban.
------
elchief
Censorship of things you find offensive is not a great answer.
~~~
WorldWideWayne
I would like a comment system that lets me choose my own moderators either
directly or indirectly based on comments that i upvote. Then, if enough of my
moderators downvote a comment, i wouldn't see it.
~~~
therealdrag0
Interesting idea. But, echo-chamber much?
~~~
WorldWideWayne
Possibly, but I think it would be easy to engineer solutions to make an echo-
chamber less likely. I would still be in control and able to see hidden
comments like reddit where the hive-mind basically censors things but still
allows them to be accessed if you dig.
I guess that I just want something where I have a little more control as a
user. Many times on reddit there is a huge thread of jokes or puns that is
totally off-topic and I'd like to avoid them if I choose to. Many times I want
zero moderation so I can see what everybody is saying without having to click
"load more comments" on every sub-thread.
I can think of lots of variations on the basic idea of picking your own
moderators. I like the idea of untying a subject from a specific set of
moderators. So a sub-reddit would just be a subject, but not a set of
moderators. There could be a moderator marketplace where individuals or teams
of moderators who advertise their style and specify things like no-jokes, no-
puns, etc. There could be robot moderators as well. I would also like to give
my team of personal comment-curators more controls than just up and down-vote
like tagging or like the slashdot system where you could mark things as
funny/off-topic/etc.
(Crowd voting is a type of moderation too and I'd like to be able to ignore
them because I don't always trust the alleged majority.)
------
data_spy
As long as there are clear guidelines, they can use text, image, and
behavioral algorithms to do some serious clean up. I doubt it will ever be
perfect
------
exo762
Guardian call for censorship, with primary source being SRS mod which goes by
moniker Dworkin, which happens to be a nod to Andrea Dworkin - very radical
and men-hating person.
Good job, Guardian!
~~~
getsat
The brits have been cuckolds for a while now, so this isn't really surprising.
~~~
eertami
One article by two journalists for one paper does implies nothing about the
British opinion of reddit.
------
seany
I don't think anyone involved in SRS can be taken seriously enough to be cited
as an authority on anything. Yikes
~~~
intortus
On the contrary, good satire is often founded upon deep insights.
~~~
falcolas
I don't find SRS to be satirical in the least. Hateful, sometimes. Aggressive,
frequently. Strongly biased? Their bias is spelled out in the subreddit name.
The reason they bubble to the top of so many news articles is because SRS'
brand of equality is so strongly polarized in a way which makes for great
soundbites. Want to know what's "wrong" with Reddit? Grab a headline out of
SRS. Want a view on how to "improve" Reddit? Talk to a SRS moderator.
If you're looking for satire, check out /r/circlejerk/. They do a great job at
finding what's so wrong with the posts that hit the front page and satirizing
them.
------
StavrosK
I love how there's a "[sic]" after "penes", even though that's the correct
plural.
------
stefantalpalaru
Internet: can anyone clean up the mess behind 'the world wide web'?
~~~
StephenFalken
That makes me remember the now famous quote:
The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural
resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made.
When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-
-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
-- Alan Kay
~~~
raldi
What year is that quote from?
~~~
mirkules
2012: the full interview is here: [http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-
design/interview-wit...](http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-
design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442?pgno=1)
The complete quote:
Binstock: One thing about jazz aficionados is that they take deep pleasure in
knowing the history of jazz.
Kay: Yes! Classical music is like that, too. But pop culture holds a disdain
for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're
participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future —
it's living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write
code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from] — and the
Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource
like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the
last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in
comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
Edit to add some context:
Kay: Go to a blog, go to any Wiki, and find one that's WYSIWYG like Microsoft
Word is. Word was done in 1984. HyperCard was 1989. Find me Web pages that are
even as good as HyperCard. The Web was done after that, but it was done by
people who had no imagination. They were just trying to satisfy an immediate
need. There's nothing wrong with that, except that when you have something
like the Industrial Revolution squared, you wind up setting de facto standards
— in this case, really bad de facto standards. Because what you definitely
don't want in a Web browser is any features.
~~~
nickstefan12
It's amazing how much harder a decent wysiwyg is to make in web technologies
than you'd think. Content editable was supposed to get us there, but needs a
ton of override. Grouping key and click events into actions the way youd
expect ms word to function is again not easy!
~~~
mirkules
It is difficult, I agree. But that's not really the point Kay is trying to
make. Why should we implement these things in the web browser? Further in the
interview, Kay remarks that _that_ is exactly the problem - that we are
reinventing technologies that were around for decades (reinventing them poorly
to boot, as he puts it "reinventing a flat tire").
I happen to agree with him in theory: I think it's a huge missed opportunity
to force the browser to be an application delivery mechanism instead of a
content-delivery mechanism (or "object"-delivery as he puts it).
But of course in practice, there are historical and political reasons as to
why web-as-an-app-delivery-mechanism happened, not least of which - if we took
Kay's example of MS Word - is Microsoft's unwillingness to open up the
platform (or proprietary software, in general). So we had to re-solve these
problems in non-proprietary ways, while forcing proprietary app providers to
conform to web standards that would ultimately and perhaps knowingly
cannibalize their software sales.
------
killerninjacat
Nope they can't. Reddit is too much full of bullshit, hate, and things like
that.
~~~
darkstar999
The mainstream subreddits can be, but get into hobby subreddits and it is a
great community. /r/startups, /r/homebrewing, /r/malefashionadvice. Even
/r/personalfinance got front paged is still going strong.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Ars Technica System Guide, Winter 2019: The One about the Servers - Tomte
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/03/the-ars-technica-system-guide-winter-2019-the-one-about-the-servers/
======
leemailll
This guide reads like a /r/homeserver post without the rack, and lack a
introduction to fun stuff on /r/selfhosted
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
4D Toys: visualizing in the fourth dimension - michael_nielsen
http://4dtoys.com/
======
pmilla1606
This looks like fun, going to try this out over the weekend.
This is the same person who made this game (that also looks like good fun):
[http://miegakure.com/](http://miegakure.com/) that I remember reading about
some years ago but never got a chance to play with.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Fig, a feedback system for your side projects - Soupy
https://usefig.com
======
adityar
You should consider having a version that does not print the email in the
invocation - it may get picked up and be spammed. one might not want to
publicize the backend email recipient of the support/feedback. Another reason
is that if someone figures out the fig api, they can send emails to arbitrary
recipients thus blacklisting the fig domain.
One thought is that it ought to be a service that works with a hash/UUID and
that value maps to a recipient email on your database. so the only people who
know my email is fig itself. Still - one can in theory spam every fig user by
scraping for fig js. that brings me to some sort of recaptcha, i'm not a robot
support.
Added bonus: backend can route the message via any channel not just email.
------
cdvonstinkpot
Why do you say it's use-case is limited to 'side projects'? Seems it'd be just
as useful for prime time to me...
~~~
Soupy
To be perfectly honest, there's no reason it can't be used on more 'prime
time' real estate, but the primary converting audience thus far has been
smaller web apps (averaging ~10-100 messages a day / surface) and 1-X person
shops. I plan on continuing to target that segment to continue to feel out
what features are needed and desired as it organically continues to grow
(largely from referrals).
~~~
cdvonstinkpot
Does that 10-100/day/surface number refer to 'feedback' hits, or webapp/site
usage? I'd think if that's 'feedback' messages it'd indicate a much larger
amount of visibility-inducing traffic using the page the widget's made
available on. And IMO, small orgs (of which I'm a 1x/shop), are & can be
freelancers, or real jobs, that are/can be more than 'side projects'. To me,
saying 'side project(s)' infers a less-than-professional implementation. Maybe
not to everyone, but that's where my mind goes with that term. As a budding
freelancer myself, my jobs are more than 'side projects', but rather 'sporadic
contract employment'. I guess maybe I equate that term with more along the
lines of 'for fun'. -So that's my 2 cents...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
"I never agreed to that. Here's what I signed." - kmfrk
http://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/ev9k8/10_tips_before_you_sign_a_housing_rental/c1b9973
======
aaronsw
[Since reddit is under severe load, here's the actual text...]
ZorbaTHut 319 points 1 day ago
> A contract is a two-way agreement, so if you see terms in there that you're
> uncomfortable about, you can black them out.
This isn't even a housing thing, this is just a global thing. I don't think
I've ever signed an employment contract without modifying it. I've never had
my employer mention it afterwards.
Excessive non-compete clause? Bam, gone. Clause that conflicts with a verbal
agreement I had with the producer? Bam, gone. Cross out some bits, write notes
in the margin, make little arrows pointing at what you crossed out with your
initials, sign it, photocopy it, turn it in with your employment paperwork,
keep the photocopy.
"Your Honor, our ex-employee should go to ultrajail for breaching our
horrifying non-compete clause, and also owes us a billion dollars for Section
7 of his employment paperwork."
"I never agreed to that. Here's what I signed."
"Well, fuck."
[And then this reply seems very helpful...]
OriginalStomper 157 points 6 hours ago
I am a lawyer familiar with contract law, though not an employment lawyer. You
and sporkus are both correct (at least under Texas law and most other US
jurisdictions): it is not a binding contract until both parties agree to all
the changes.
Until the original agrees (by initialing the changes or at least signing the
agreement after your changes are made), the marked-up document is merely a
counter-offer. However, that means the employer has nothing to enforce against
you. Texas is an "employment at will" state, and here 99% of the time an
employment contract was the employer's idea, for the employer's purposes, with
little or no actual benefit to the employee. The employee usually comes out
ahead if the entire contract is unenforceable, or even if just the harshest
clauses are deleted.
Protip: while you are at it, also delete arbitration clauses. Completely and
whenever possible. The individual/employee will almost never win in
arbitration, unless the arbitration is conducted under a collective bargaining
agreement negotiated by a union. If there's even the hint of an arbitration
clause in your contract (ANY kind of contract, not just employment contracts),
then it does not matter how well you edited the rest of the agreement, because
arbitrators are free to be arbitrary. They are not legally required to follow
the contract -- they can do whatever they think is "fair." Strangely enough,
"fair" will almost always favor the employer or other repeat customer for the
arbitrator. Because, see, the arbitrators are in the business of arbitrating
disputes. If no one chooses them to arbitrate, then they have to find a real
job.
~~~
boredguy8
Them paying you after your modifications is sufficient (in most cases) to
constitute agreement. "Meeting of the minds" is not really a legal practice
today. The employer was objectively given notification of the modifications
and objectively paid the employee, constituting acceptance of the agreement.
Obviously no such case is open-and-close, but the modifications are probably
on fairly solid ground.
~~~
flipbrad
my Tort tutor (admittedly not a contract tutor, but...) boasted to the class
about signing up for a blockbuster video rental card, handing in a signed T&Cs
slip instore with the late fees clause blacked out. The acceptance of the slip
(putting it in a drawer) made that the contract; then commencement of trade
between the parties evidenced it. How he laughed, he says, when they pulled
out his file to wave it at him, trying to get him to pay a fine.
~~~
tptacek
This doesn't sound credible. It's based on the idea that a clerk at
Blockbuster can accept changes to contract language. A similar story could go,
"my Tort tutor added language to the rental contract that demanded Blockbuster
pay me $100 every time I didn't like a movie; how he laughed, he said, when he
demanded his payment after renting Marmaduke".
I'm obviously not a lawyer but this seems to have more to do with there being
_no valid contract to enforce_ than about him secretly modifying the language
of the contract.
~~~
boredguy8
I explain the difference below: "You couldn't sneak in a clause saying 'I get
a 100% pay increase annually' -- in this case, they're the party being bound
so would need some indication of assent beyond just a paycheck." Similarly,
the clause you identify means that Blockbuster is now the party that is bound.
Renting you a movie with that clause isn't sufficient proof of acceptance,
especially because there's no consideration that Blockbuster receives in
return.
~~~
tptacek
That makes sense, and it's kind of a moot point, right; either way,
Blockbuster isn't in a strong position to enforce a fine, and can simply
refuse to rent to you again.
~~~
randallsquared
Right, but then they'll hit your credit report, and you'll have to spend far
more time than it's worth (at the least) to fix it.
------
cwp
I've done this with just about every employment agreement I've ever signed,
and never had a problem. One time, the company I worked for was acquired by
IBM and I refused to sign their intellectual property agreement. The HR guy
said if I didn't sign it, I wouldn't get paid. I told him that if they didn't
pay me, I wouldn't do any work. The next day they came back with a more
reasonable agreement, but it was too late. I had already found another job.
~~~
casperc
Admittedly I have only signed one "real" employment contract, but it was sent
to me in two signed copies of which one was to be sent back. So making the
changes and then having them accept the changes by signing afterwards isn't
really possible.
Did you make your employer aware of the changes openly?
Edit: I mean, I could sign their copy, take a photocopy of my own and send it
back to them, but at no point would they be accepting my changes.
~~~
cwp
Oh, I was definitely open about it. Usually I'd be signing in person, so I'd
just say, "hey, I can't agree to this, and here's why," and then we'd mark up
the contract together. I think I once sent an email with my objections, then
edited the contract before I printed and signed it.
The actual mechanics aren't that important, though. The point is to actively
negotiate the agreement. Usually, employment agreements are cooked up by
lawyers that do everything they can think of to protect the interests of their
clients. That doesn't mean that they're sacrosanct.
If the company is putting a contract in front of you, they've already decided
to hire you. They've already put a lot of effort into the hiring process and
they won't want to throw that away over a few clauses that they may not be
able to enforce anyway.
So read the contract, and if there's something you don't like, say so. Get it
removed. It's usually that easy.
------
darksaga
Most non-compete contracts are about as valid as the paper they're written on.
I've signed a lot in my time and have only been brought into court once. The
judge laughed at the company and asked them if they were going to pay my
salary for the next 12 months I would be out of work if they wanted to enforce
the non-compete contract. Needless to say, The company dropped their case and
I still got a hefty severance check.
Companies can't keep you from being gainfully employed, even if it's with a
competitor in your same industry. This means most employment/non-compete
contracts are essentially non-binding agreements. I've never heard of someone
getting sued and losing trying to break an employment contract, it just
doesn't happen.
~~~
tptacek
It happens for customer-facing people; what you're really observing is that
it's hard to construct an enforceable noncompete for an engineer.
More relevant to HN founders is the question of whether a noncompete would
enable your company to kill any overlapping company you might find in its
cradle. That's not as clear cut as employment law.
------
jf
Another good anecdote along those lines:
<http://www.metafilter.com/47719/unite-and-take-over#1147083>
------
stevanl
Cached version:
[http://www.reddit.com.nyud.net/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/ev9k...](http://www.reddit.com.nyud.net/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/ev9k8/10_tips_before_you_sign_a_housing_rental/c1b9973)
------
calloc
It seems the traffic Hacker News is sending Reddit is causing it to topple!
~~~
lwat
This is very standard for this time of day on Reddit unfortunately.
~~~
calloc
And as a developer I understand that with the dynamic nature of Reddit that
eventually throwing hardware at the problem won't fix it.
It still saddens me, and as a Reddit Gold member I hope that soon they are
able to hire more people to more carefully look over the code and optimise it.
~~~
lwat
I wonder what the bottleneck is? Is it Cassandra?
------
tedunangst
Most underrated comment: "I laughed at your Perry Mason moment before the
judge." That fantasy never gets old.
------
ciupicri
Are these contracts really valid? I thought that a contract needs to be ultra
squeaky clean without any typos, crossed out words and so on.
~~~
veb
Anything is technically a contract when signed by both parties... right?
~~~
flipbrad
even if you didn't read it, in the UK at least (L'estrange v Graucob, IIRC).
Mind you, EU law (and hence, UK law) might strike out some terms as unfair.
And public policy is also grounds for certain (extreme) contracts to be
outlawed - for slavery, for example.
~~~
rmc
In some areas "public good" can override things aswell
------
huhtenberg
Wouldn't a company need to explicitly confirm such changes (say by initialing)
for them to become effective?
The way I read it is that he's basically hoping that his scratch-outs will go
unnoticed when the company brings him on board. That's simply because no
reasonable company will accept an employment contract with NDA clause stricken
out by a prospective employee. The only way this can happen is by an
oversight, and that's what he appears to be exploiting.
On the other hand, I did have my own contract amended at my request to list
and acknowledge by participation in a number of my past projects, open source
and not. They did not require a code escrow, nor the detailed description, so
something like "p2p communication system" gave me a carte blanche for doing
anything with p2p in it and keeping it all to myself.
~~~
mikeryan
No he's expecting the signing party to read the blacked out parts and either
agree to them (by signing) or not agree to them, by countering back.
I black line and edit contracts regularly. Usually not on printed contracts
with notes in the margins but with Word Docs with "Track Changes" turned on. I
then return it (unsigned) with an email explaining my changes. They then
either accept the new contract and sign or return it with their revisions and
we go back and forth until we're happy.
I'm always surprised by the number of people who don't negotiate language. I
was told once that a company only pays invoices in 60 days. I changed that to
30 on my contract and they didn't even blink.
------
smarterchild
It's too bad this doesn't work on a cell phone contract.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Do 10x Programmers Exist? Says Who? - Edmontonian
http://medium.com/@rheinmainwein/do-10x-programmers-exist-says-who-283138a8f454
======
dalke
"there are certain people in every profession who stand head and shoulders
above their colleagues"
The analogy bloodletting is quite good. If the above statement is true, then
there are certainly bloodletters who are 10x bloodletters. Their patients are,
of course, not 10x better at recovering.
An obvious analogy in programming is that high variability exists for all
measurements. Eg, if quality is measured by LOC then some may produce 10x more
code than others, even if the 10x is not meaningful for outcomes.
The summary of the issue by gnat at
[http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good-
programmer-can-be-as-10x-times-more-productive-than-a-mediocre-one) is quite
good. I find McConnell's argument more defensible, and distrust the modality
argument made by Bossavit.
~~~
Edmontonian
this is silly, the comparison to bloodletters was made to undercut the
assertion that people's experience is a reasonable way to evaluate ideas, but
human beings rely on experience at all times to evaluate. You're trying to
justify his analogy by using it in a different way than he intended.
It seems to be a fairly common experience in different professions that
certain people are better than others. I guess you'd disagree that Einstein
didn't stand head and shoulders above others in physics? Need I insult you by
mentioning the big names in computer science? and other fields.
Going back to bloodletting, if you insist on using it in a different way than
GB intended in his trollish response, I'm sure you know the whole profession
has been discredited, therefore it's not really logical to look for a
practitioner from a contemporary point of view who stood head and shoulders
above his peers.
~~~
dalke
Certainly, experience is a reasonable way to evaluate ideas, but that doesn't
mean the evaluation is valid. I agree that the bloodletting example was meant
to undercut the assertion. I also think the assertion - judging only on
experience - is incorrect, and that the example is a valid one. We have many
examples where experience lead to incorrect conclusions.
By experience, Aristotle argued that things in motion come to rest. Everyone
knew that ... until Galileo, further codified by Newton. One's experience can
be wrong. Hence the reason for software usability research. See "Making
Software", edited by Greg Wilson, for lay results of some of that research.
Here's an example of a more direct, empirical study:
[http://neverworkintheory.org/2011/10/24/an-empirical-
compari...](http://neverworkintheory.org/2011/10/24/an-empirical-comparison-
of-the-accuracy-rates-of-novices-using-the-quorum-perl-and-randomo-
programming-languages.html) .
You write "human beings rely on experience at all times to evaluate." We also
use comparison testing, as with that paper link I gave you. A hope is to
minimize preconceptions based on one's experience. We see this in the medical
field all the time, where we find that even single blind testing can unduly
affect the results.
We also use prediction to evaluate. Einstein predicted a certain bending of
light around the sun, which wasn't based on experience.
Therefore, I place a weak meaning to "human beings rely on experience at all
times to evaluate." We use it to guide our understanding, but also use other
techniques besides experience to verify the correctness of our understanding.
If you read my link you'll see that I disagree with Bernhardt's statement. I
believe he is guided by Bossavit's work, which argues that there's only been a
single test of the 10x principle. Bossavit's essay has two arguments: 1)
modalities in the papers show that this is not an established method, and 2)
the citations of McConnell all refer to a single study from the early days of
software engineering. If you read McConnell's response, you'll see the
complaint that Bossavit, by only focusing on McConnell's citations, ignored
other studies from the field that McConnell used to draw his conclusion, but
which were not in the essay. As I wrote, I object to the modality analysis, as
it must surely have a high false positive rate.
But my disagreement is based on research summarizes which have tested the 10x
concept, and not strictly on my own experience.
My own observations is that the great majority of practitioners are disdainful
of any sort of empirical testing, and will argue that experience always trumps
research. I read this exchange as being yet another example of that. I can see
why Bernhardt would want to close off the exchange early - it's pointless to
have an exchange about research topic X when the other person doesn't even
think it needs to be a research topic, doesn't even understand the basic
topic, and hasn't bothered to research it.
The correct answer would have been to point to McConnell's rebuttal of
Bossavit's statement, at
[http://www.construx.com/10x_Software_Development/Origins_of_...](http://www.construx.com/10x_Software_Development/Origins_of_10X_%E2%80%93_How_Valid_is_the_Underlying_Research_/)
, as pointed to in that StackOverflow link.
For what it's worth, bloodletting is still in use, though only for a couple of
diseases; hemochromatosis and polycythemia being the main two. See for example
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25175510](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25175510)
. Hence it's not true that "the whole profession has been discredited."
------
Bahamut
Whether they exist is a separate argument from arguing with a person - the
person may have given a bad argument, but that does not necessarily discredit
the claim.
This is not a terribly great article.
~~~
Edmontonian
It is a separate argument, but they are related because the question
eventually arises, "how do you prove that such a programmer exists."
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Microsoft must finish the job of opening .Net - ABS
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2847372/open-source-software/microsoft-must-finish-opening-net.html
======
CmonDev
Open-source cross-platform WPF with a light scriptable syntax, getting
improvements every month... Visual Studio on Mac and Linux... XNA-powered
MonoGame... Not having to use HTML5...
Man can dream :).
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Numerous celebrity/company twitter accounts hacked - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/05/either-fox-news-had-their-twitter-account-hacked-or-bill-oreilly-is-gay-or-both/
======
paulgb
Look at the twitter feed: <http://twitter.com/foxnews>
Looks like the feed is updated automatically from RSS feeds or some other
source. The latest tweet doesn't fit the template, so I'm guessing the
"hacked" theory is correct.
------
grouchyOldGuy
One does not necessarily invalidate the other.
------
vaksel
looks like its a widespread problem...I guess there is some vulnerability
being exploited
------
axod
Once you start to get big, hacking and spam surely follow... It'll be
interesting to see what the story is here. Is every twitter account hackable?
Are they going to start implementing some sort of spam filter? or a method to
report spam?
~~~
pmjordan
You can report spam to the @spam user. That's only effective against users who
are spamming, however. It doesn't really help in the situation where an
account has been compromised. I strongly doubt "every twitter account is
hackable"; someone probably just got hold of the passwords of the accounts in
question.
EDIT: looks like more accounts are being compromised. Maybe someone _has_
found a hole in twitter's servers. Or, a disgruntled employee decided to have
some "fun".
------
create_account
So does that mean I'm _not_ invited to Natalie Gulbis's birthday party
(<http://twitter.com/natalie_gulbis/status/1072283758>)?
Bummer.
------
TomOfTTB
In fairness, both could be true :)
------
jonursenbach
@barackobama was hacked as well.
------
wallflower
Probably a simple MITM attack. I think it's time twitter.com invested in a SSL
certificate.
~~~
pmjordan
<https://twitter.com/> does exist and work. Is there a problem with their
certificate?
EDIT: honest question, I'm not trying to be snarky.
~~~
wallflower
I guess I meant to say that Twitter should default to using secure cookies.
Once you login via twitter, it defaults to unsecured HTTP.
~~~
pmjordan
This is of course a fair point. I haven't seen the SSL version of the site
encouraged or even documented anywhere. I suspect it would take down their
current server infrastructure if all users suddenly switched to SSL access.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN - stream database open source hackers unite - gord
Im exploring some ideas in the land of stream databases [data which has strong sequential properties] and wonder if there are others already working in this space, or who might like to contribute/discuss/argue/hack open source code.<p>Ive put up some thoughts and C code, see -
- vfuncs project at google code
- quantblog.wordpress.com<p>enjoy,<p>gord.
======
tuukkah
I know people related to this project are interested in and working on such
systems: <http://gsn.sourceforge.net/>
------
gord
thanks, I had a look at gsn - That would be the middleware to gather the data
from sensor networks...
..whereas my interest is in how to deal with the fire-hose of ~10Gb data per
day, once you have 100Gb of it on disk and more streaming in all the time.
I'm aware of commercial offerings - \- KDB+ [its own semi-functional terse
languages - K & Q ] \- StreamBase [extended SQL]
The open source ones ... \- Aurora / Borealis ( MIT, Brandeis) \- Medusa (MIT)
\- Streams (Stanford) \- MonetDB (a Netherlands university) seem to
embrace/extend SQL and/or XQuery and/or RDF
Im thinking there must be a better way.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Adi.js - mariusbalaj
https://github.com/balajmarius/Adi.js
======
skrowl
This is broken.
Going to
[http://mariusbalaj.com/dev/Adi.js/](http://mariusbalaj.com/dev/Adi.js/) in
Win 10 / Firefox 43 (dev ed / aurora) + uBlock Origin 1.2.1 + all 3rd party
filters clicked other than multipurpose & easylist w/o element hiding rules =
You cool, G.
------
dvh
If I understand it correctly, adblock blocks any file named "advertisement.js"
where it set foo='bar', thus is foo!='bar' it must have been blocked, the rest
is glorified alert function.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
CI/CD on a budget for open source projects - danielmunro
https://danmunro.com/posts/ci-cd-on-a-budget-for-open-source-projects/
======
MaulingMonkey
> For open source projects, everything except the droplet in Digital Ocean is
> completely free.
Alternatively, Appveyor & Travis have fully free tiers. They don't even have
my credit card number. CI is trivially forked, doesn't require configuring
secrets per repository, etc. Being CI focused, both have configuration and UI
oriented towards having a matrix of builds that can individually pass/fail for
more granular results, and comes with various SVG badges for build status.
A concrete example of travis on a Rust project:
[https://github.com/MaulingMonkey/bugsalot/blob/master/.travi...](https://github.com/MaulingMonkey/bugsalot/blob/master/.travis.yml)
[https://travis-
ci.org/github/MaulingMonkey/bugsalot/builds/6...](https://travis-
ci.org/github/MaulingMonkey/bugsalot/builds/628911388)
Linux/Windows/OSX unit testing, Android/iOS/WASM builds.
------
idoubtit
A more indicative title would be: Hints for a self-hosted Java CI/CD with
Github actions.
If you're using Gitlab and languages other than Java, there is nothing useful
in this blog post.
~~~
torvald
You are right, but it does illustrate how little is needed to get your code of
the ground. See [https://github.com/sdras/awesome-
actions](https://github.com/sdras/awesome-actions) for a list of plug n' play
building blocks. And there are a bunch of different triggers and patterns
([https://help.github.com/en/actions/reference/events-that-
tri...](https://help.github.com/en/actions/reference/events-that-trigger-
workflows)) you can listen to, all tightly coupled with your code and (GitHub)
UI.
There is a lot of bang for the buck here.
------
Uninen
You can do everything mentioned in the bullet points (CI service, test, build
environment, docker image repository, code quality, coverage, metrics) except
running the production code for free on Gitlab.com or self-hosted GitLab
instance.
Edit. Serious question: why would you want to set up and maintain several
different tools when you can have everything running in one place?
------
dawnerd
I use drone on my own server and love it. Just another alternative I wanted to
mention
[https://drone.io/](https://drone.io/)
------
f00_
Google is offering free fuzzing to large open source projects:
[https://google.github.io/oss-fuzz/getting-
started/accepting-...](https://google.github.io/oss-fuzz/getting-
started/accepting-new-projects/)
~~~
dmwilcox
The Internet offers free fuzzing to open ports j/k that actually looks useful
;)
------
dan_can_code
Thanks for sharing Daniel. I'm not sure if you're aware but netlify and vercel
offer free domain hosting for Javascript / JAMstack projects. They both also
offer pretty decent free CI/CD workflows, but I'm not sure how that works with
custom images or anything.
------
exegete
I did something similar with a Flask server on EC2 that is updated on every
push using Github Actions.
[https://github.com/wesbarnett/flask-
project](https://github.com/wesbarnett/flask-project)
------
catchmeifyoucan
It comes down to how often you build, but I’ve been using AWS Amplify for
CI/CD, and it’s been really awesome and simple to set up. You point it to your
GitHub Repo, and you’re good to go. It works well for webapps.
------
nickbauman
It would be better if it were expressed using Maven instead of Gradle because
Gradle is just one more languaged-based build tool that rides on Maven.
------
econcon
You can use Lambda for CI/CD and it will run on demand so you'll not be paying
for it within free tier.
------
amdelamar
> Digital Ocean starts at a $5/mo buy in.
Heroku is $0/mo to start. heroku.com/free
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Linux Performance - Walkman
http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html
======
fasteo
I would recommend his book [1] to anyone interested in systems performance.
What really caught my attention is the focus he puts in having a goal and
applying a method to solve performance issues. Many times, I have found myself
"lost" while isolating a performance issue. Not anymore.
[1]
[http://www.brendangregg.com/sysperfbook.html](http://www.brendangregg.com/sysperfbook.html)
------
nisa
I'm just a lowly student assistant that deals with a lot of Linux machines
running Hadoop but I'm totally in love with these presentations from Joyent
and the SmartOS guys.
I seriously considered moving to SmartOS as ZFS and Zones and likely Dtrace as
these features that would make my job, that largely comes down to organizing
running software on machines and debugging problems, far easier..and would
allow me to use the machines to better degree but in reality it's not going to
happen.
Nobody is familiar with Solaris userland. I'm not a sophisticated and educated
systems engineer at Joyent I'm just a stressed guy trying to fix problems.
Unfortunatly Linux is pretty good at making it work because a lot people are
in a similar situation and someone will fix it for me.
I just don't have the time and knowledge and energy to e.g. fix native Hadoop
libraries in the ecosystem to build with another libc or make my own or other
applications able to run without some Linux specific crap..
That beeing said I really thought about pushing SmartOS/Solaris but as a lone
fighter It would be suicide in a world where everyone knows apt-get install
<whatever> and get his shit done in a reasonable way..
Maybe it's something for specialised application and not academia
I've came pretty far with just strace and perf top and most problems I had in
my own application where better analyzed by valgrind and kcachegrind or massif
and the visualizer...
~~~
adamnemecek
You might be aware of this but FreeBSD has all of those features that you
mention. The objections that you have against Solaris might still apply
though.
~~~
nisa
Yes. I'm running ZFS on Linux and while ZFS is really great it's not really
good integrated in the kernel and sometimes pretty unstable at least in my
rather esoteric scenario... Despite other claims FreeBSD suffers similar
problems.. ([https://clusterhq.com/blog/complexity-freebsd-vfs-using-
zfs-...](https://clusterhq.com/blog/complexity-freebsd-vfs-using-zfs-example-
part-1-2/)). Other problems are that jails are fine but there is no disk I/O
limitation possible...
I've also thought about FreeBSD and while pkgng is really great it's a similar
problem.. I'm stumbling upon bugs or untested things and I'm unable to
contribute time to fixing them.
~~~
tachion
Do you mind pointing to your PR's with the bugs you've found or at least
mention what they were? It sound like you've found a hell of a bugs/problems
in a system (and I am thinking about FreeBSD now) that me and huge number of
other people are running without any issues, so it would be beneficial for
everyone, if you'd share your problems with PR's - there is active community
around it that can fix issues if you are unable to do it.
~~~
nisa
Sorry if I was unclear. I stumbled upon a few issues running ZFS on Linux that
are known and on the development roadmap. Things like ARC integration and
better failure handling in case of disk problems.
I don't run anything big on FreeBSD and ZFS. I have not experienced problems
on a raidz2 ZFS fileserver that runs FreeBSD except that disks drop out quite
randomly but I've yet been unable to pinpoint that and it's likely that these
are hardware issues as the system runs on budget hardware.
Sorry if my comment spreaded FUD.
~~~
ryao
This might be of use to you: [http://open-
zfs.org/w/index.php?title=Hardware#Error_recover...](http://open-
zfs.org/w/index.php?title=Hardware#Error_recovery_control)
------
wmf
It looks like this page was recently updated and coincidentally today he gave
a talk on Linux performance at LinuxCon:
[http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-north-
amer...](http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-north-
america/program/schedule)
[http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/...](http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/LinuxPerfTools_0.pdf)
~~~
brendangregg
Yes, I gave the talk this morning. I hope people found it useful! In case
slideshare is quicker to load, the slides are also at:
[http://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/linux-performance-
too...](http://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/linux-performance-tools)
~~~
jaryd
Do you expect video of the presentation to be available any time in the near
future?
~~~
brendangregg
Sorry, like other talks at LinuxCon, it was not videoed. I think it would be a
useful to have a video of it, so, much as I hate to give the same talk twice,
I'll probably do it again at some point for the video.
~~~
rodgerd
Don't tell me you didn't submit for linux.conf.au next year...
------
josephyu0305
Nice link it show lot of Linux performance help when it comes the system
crash/ and very much learning i gotfrom his presentation.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Practicality: PHP vs Lisp - sajid
http://briancarper.net/blog/386/practicality-php-vs-lisp
======
tsally
Mahmud is one of the few HNers that actually has practicle experience
deploying Lisp in the real world. You might be interested in what he has to
say on the issue of practicality:
"Today, Lisp is nothing like what it was 8,7,6, even 2 years ago. It's not
just "good" in the well-explored text book fashion; no, it's _good shit_. Get
work done good. Think, hack, ship, bill for it good. 2-3 products per month
good. You still have to know where things are, who is working on what, what's
maintained and what's obsoleted by what. Sure. But there is absolutely no lack
of libraries." (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=972423>).
I'm curious if the author of the article has similar experience deploying CL
or if this article is just theorycrafting. I notice some experience with
Clojure, but this article was written in 2008.
~~~
jwr
I think many people who defend Common Lisp in this thread never actually
deployed web applications written in CL.
I have.
I had to seriously hack on Weblocks just to get things to work they way they
should. I had to work around various bugs and omissions. And worst of all,
every once in a while I discovered that I am clearly the only user of said
software.
A good example is when I discovered that the database interface (to CLSQL)
isn't thread-safe. It was a quick hack intended for a single thread only.
Obviously you'd never notice it in a demo setup. Turns out I noticed it just
when somebody else had that problem and wrote CLSQL-FLUID.
But there is more — after running the application for several months I
discovered two things:
a) there are obscure bugs related to caching in CLSQL, which I don't have time
to hunt down (stale content is being served),
b) there are bugs somewhere either in CLSQL or Weblocks that blocked part of
my admin interface and they are obscure enough that I don't even know where to
start looking,
c) every once in a while SBCL will crash on me and land me in the LDB.
Don't get me wrong — I like CL and I invested a significant amount of work in
to Weblocks — but I agree with Brian here: I don't want to discovere somewhere
along the way that I'm the first real user. At least not when I am on a
deadline.
I do most of my work in Clojure now, but when there is a simple web
application to write — hey, we get our hands dirty and we do it using PHP.
Because life is too short.
~~~
Ixiaus
PHP works well as a DSL for web applications; I recently switched from PHP to
Python + Pylons and am noticing significant differences in workflow. So
significant that I can see, precisely, why PHP is so dominant. Python's
features as a language completely overthrow those of PHP, though - I have no
reason to go back.
I've had my eye on Scheme as a potential web application environment for a
year now. Maybe I'll make the jump soon, Racket (PLT-Scheme) looks like it
would beat CL + Weblocks in maturity.
~~~
jacquesm
> I recently switched from PHP to Python + Pylons and am noticing significant
> differences in workflow.
Can you elaborate ?
~~~
Ixiaus
I'm noticing that the idiom for WSGI based frameworks, is to "layer"
applications (middleware), a lot like an onion. Certain actions/functionality
is only available within specific layers of that onion. I quickly found out
you can't just call _redirect(url('some_route'))_ from within your helpers (or
any module outside of the callable controller); the exception will be caught,
but instead of redirecting it will display it as an error.
In PHP, unless headers have already been sent, you can call this:
_header("Location: blablablabl")_ from wherever.
That's just one example of the difference in workflow, it took me some getting
used to before I could appreciate it. There are many other "little" things
such as above, that are different.
I'm loving Python + Pylons, the more I use it the more I get used to the
workflow too...
------
swannodette
Before people go around upvoting this article mindlessly. This article is from
_2008_ , before Brian rewrote this blog _twice_ in Clojure and got the hell
off WordPress. I'd be interested to hear what he has to say now about this
article (though it may be that his opinion has remained largely the same).
~~~
mechanical_fish
This remains a big problem with the web: Timelessness. It turns out that the
ephemeral nature of offline commentary is a big _feature_. If I say something
offhand in a bar I don't have to curate that statement forever, going back
every few months to add some editorial comment about how my opinion has
changed.
It struck me the other day that this is why archivists have trouble with the
web. Old links go dead all the time. Various people have tried to convince web
publishers that they should take the preservation of old links seriously - we
are destroying history! But it isn't just that preserving old links is hard
work - which it is - but that history is a _terrible burden_ for the living.
You are forced to curate and disclaim it, or risk having it held against you.
It's much more comfortable to just walk away from your history and hope that
it biodegrades.
Forgetfulness is a blessing, and few online systems provide it in any well-
thought-out fashion. Users are forced to use hacks to achieve it.
~~~
jherdman
How is this a problem with the web any more than anything? As soon as a
thought leaves your mind and is engraved on some sort of medium (be it
someone's memory, paper, or a webpage) it's out there for good.
Publishing thoughts on web, like print, demands rigour from the author and the
reader. Read actively, write like you have an audience, and be skeptical.
~~~
mechanical_fish
_As soon as a thought leaves your mind... it's out there for good._
This is another mindset endemic to engineers like myself: First-order
thinking. The notion that, because a bit in a piece of flash RAM, a memory in
someone's brain, and an etching on the wall of a thousand-year-old church are
all the same to first order -- "persistent" storage of information -- they can
therefore safely be treated as the same thing.
The second-order differences are pretty important. To pick just one particular
example: Human memory is not just an incredibly fallable medium (you remember
events that never happened, and your memory of events that did happen gets
distorted over time and is situational, dependent on your current mood) but it
is inevitably filtered through the personality of the rememberer. The only way
to learn what a World War II veteran remembers about the war is to listen to
what the veteran tells you. If the veteran happens to have been a personal
friend of General Patton, they will tell you certain things about Patton. If
the veteran was a sworn enemy of Patton, they will tell you other things about
Patton. If you strive to prevent them from doing this consciously, they will
do so unconsciously. Such is the nature of human memory and communication.
A photograph of Patton, or a written memoir, is an entirely different beast.
And, similarly, there is a big qualitative difference between a third-hand
account of a conversation in a bar, an entry in a handwritten diary that is
stored in your basement someplace, and a popular web page that has been
downloaded a thousand times and is available on Bittorrent in case the
original is taken down.
------
wvenable
"PHP is overly verbose and terribly inconsistent and lacks powerful methods of
abstraction and proper closures and easy-to-use meta-programming goodness"
Sometimes I wonder how much closures and meta-programming is just code for
coding sake. I've seen lots of examples of 5 line LISP code that does
something totally amazing but you don't really know what it means but it's so
abstract. If you have a quick job to do, I don't see that it's a limitation in
using a language that requires to build the most straight forward solution.
PHP is ugly, but for the most part it isn't horrible -- these days you can
easily avoid some of the worst parts and concentrate on making code that would
be very equivalent to the same code in, say, Java. PHP is very straight
forward -- it means what it says.
"Your web framework in PHP probably isn't continuation-based, it probably
doesn't compile your s-expression HTML tree into assembler code before
rendering it."
This just sounds like over-engineering the problem.
~~~
brlewis
Say you want to connect to a database, fetch some data, and present it using
HTML. Here's how it can be done using a DSL based on Scheme macros:
<http://brl.codesimply.net/brl_4.html#SEC31>
I can't forget to fetch the next row from the database. I can't forget to
check that I'm at the end of the result set. Grouping the results is easy and
straightforward. The statement and connection objects are automatically closed
when the request is done. Compare that to PHP.
I'm getting better, but even today I feel a little irritated when someone says
PHP was designed for simple web/database apps. I know what a language designed
for simple web/db apps looks like, and PHP is not it.
~~~
jacquesm
sql_apply("select id,somefield from sometable","applicator_function");
PHP is a programming language, it was not designed for 'simple web/database
apps' any more than any other language, you can use the building blocks
provided to create access at the level you require. But you can customize it
so that it does become usable for 'simple web/database apps'.
The above is a short sample of how I'd do the thing you describe and I don't
have to remember to fetch the next row from the table and I don't have to
check that I'm at the end of the result set, grouping is as easy as SQL will
make it and all cleanup is automatic.
~~~
btilly
_PHP is a programming language, it was not designed for 'simple web/database
apps' any more than any other language..._
Um, yes it was. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#History> to verify that
PHP started as a bunch of CGI binaries to serve some simple dynamic web pages.
The database bit came later, but at the start it was explicitly designed for
quick and dirty web pages.
~~~
jacquesm
You can't seriously compare the state of PHP today with the first released
version.
You could make such statements about every other mainstream language.
~~~
eru
At least the Lisp guys have figured out how to write parsers and lexers by
now. (They even grok lexical scoping.)
I guess we can't blame PHP for preserving the $ in front of variable-names
with all the legacy code lying around. But the following should parse in a
sane language:
$width = getimagesize($filename)[0];
Adding support for this would not break legacy code. Nobody can tell me that
naming all intermediate results like
$sizes = getimagesize($img);
$width = $sizes[0];
is such a preferable style, that the parser should enforce it.
By the way, this is how PHP pretends to support higher order functions:
function cube($n) {return($n * $n * $n);}
$a = array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5);
$b = array_map("cube", $a);
------
ulf
This illustrates a far greater point that every once in a while returns to the
surface of HN as well:
A tool is seldom more than a tool. In regard to languages, for most projects
there are more than enough constraints to begin with, so you can pick a
language of your choice in no time. Sure there are languages that suck and
languages that are awesome. But most of these comparisons only work in a
vacuum. And in practice, no project ever starts in a vacuum.
~~~
billswift
One of the first posts I wrote on my blog last year was about tools - the
first lines were:
Use tools appropriate to your skills and to the job you are trying to get
done. Learning to use more powerful tools is one of the best ways to increase
your effectiveness.
That is the best tool depends on _both_ the job and your skills. (Most of the
post was about my main illustration though, which was drafting versus CAD.)
------
bonaldi
So the comparison is between starting from absolute scratch with Lisp --
having to choose a framework, get a dev environment set up, choosing your
libraries etc vs an experienced PHP person just using PHP?
This article could easily be turned around to something like "use emacs, lisp
and the trusted framework you already know, or try to learn PHP with its
inconsistent naming and verbose syntax and ..."
Essentially he's judging languages by "wall-clock time", but only including
time-to-learn in one of them.
~~~
jakevoytko
He's not making that argument!
From the article: "You can learn PHP in a day or two if you're familiar with
any other language. You can write PHP code in any editor or environment you
want. Emacs? Vim? Notepad? nano? Who cares? Whatever floats your boat. Being a
stupid language also means that everyone knows it. "
The author didn't spend a lot of time talking about learning PHP because
there's not much to learn. There's nothing surprising in the components in the
PHP stack. If you know HTML, adding PHP has low overhead. DB reads and writes
are simple. If you can program in another language, you know all of the logic
statements you need to write an application. If you need an example, there are
probably tens of thousands of bad PHP tutorials online with bad sample code
that still manages to work.
I've learned PHP and Common Lisp from scratch at different points in my life,
and PHP had a much lower barrier to entry. I installed and configured PHP on
my local machine and made a stats-tracking webpage all on the same day. This
was my first server-side web application ever, plus my first database program
ever.
Fast forward 4 years, and I worked through "ANSI Common Lisp" for a month
before I felt comfortable writing regular applications in Lisp. Then I
installed Hunchentoot and stumbled around for a while, but was able to figure
out how to generate static content. Most of the Hunchentoot tutorials online
were for older versions, but I found one that proved invaluable. I then ended
up patching S-XML, because it was only written to support 5 or 6 of the 250+
"&" style HTML character codes. I sent that patch to the mailing list, but
I bet nobody ever got it. I tried to hook up a database, and found Postmodern,
which was nice. Thank God I already knew Emacs, but I wasted more than a day
fighting with upgrading SLIME and SBCL at the same time.
The Common Lisp path doesn't sound so bad, but compare it to my PHP experience
- I wrote an application on the _same day_ I first looked at PHP. By the time
I was integrating Database code, I was well over a month into learning Common
Lisp.
~~~
eru
Learning bad PHP may be easy. But from my exposure to PHP I find learning to
write good PHP code to be fairly hard. Because you have to work around all the
limitations of the language.
Common Lisp may not be a paragon of elegance, but it's not nearly as awful as
PHP. And Common Lisp is a fairly conventional, mostly imperative language.
Nothing as scary as Haskell or Prolog, or even Scheme.
~~~
scott_s
It's not an argument over which language helps a programmer produce better
code. It's an argument over which language helps a programmer generate an
almost-correct solution faster.
It's the same as Worse Is Better:
<http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html>
~~~
eru
Yes. I buy your argument, if you say "small-scale good-enough solution".
~~~
scott_s
To be clear, it's not _my_ argument. I'm just trying to clarify what argument
the author is making.
~~~
eru
Understood.
------
IgorPartola
Buyer beware: PHP documentation is not always as extensive as is boasted and
the user comments often times are very dangerously wrong. For an example of
this see the comments to json_encode where many wrong PHP implementations are
suggested (they don't take care of escaping non-ASCII data), or the
read/write/socket functions where bizarre timeout behavior is suggested, or
the microtime and usleep functions where even more bizarre things are
suggested.
~~~
mifrai
I fully agree. For instance, PHP implements it's own round function. Now there
very well may be a good reason they don't just use/implement the C99 round -
but one can at least expect it not to change. This isn't true, in some version
(I forget which), they changed their implementation and that caused all sorts
of headaches to us and our users that depend on these numbers.
Moral of the story? Don't use PHP for stats.
------
adamilardi
Despite the claims PHP is ugly. It's very easy to use. I've seen newb
programmers able to do simple if statements and read data from a database with
little coaching. It's really a delight to use for simple websites. The other
factor is it's standard on ALL shared hosting. If they started to make rails
or django standard I would have started with that instead.
------
scottjad
The biggest strength of PHP has always been that a non-programmer who already
has an HTML page can start adding dynamic code by inserting a simple tag into
their HTML file and continue working as they have been (edit the HTML file,
reload page, repeat). That's the lowest barrier to entry of any language
except maybe javascript.
------
thejay
_Most programmers aren't paid to revolutionize the world of computer science.
Most programmers are code monkeys, or to put it more nicely, they're craftsmen
who build things that other people pay them to create._
To say most programmers are craftsmen is a huge overstatement. Most
programmers have no sense of craftsmenship.
------
asnyder
Reading that article was pretty frustrating for me. Sure, if somebody decides
to sit down and start writing a complex WebApp or program in direct PHP it can
be a hodge-podge, however, if you were to use many of the frameworks out there
you can get a very positive, and consistent experience, while also enjoying
all the benefits of PHP's widespread adoption and support.
For example NOLOH (<http://www.noloh.com>), which provides just that sort of
abstraction. NOLOH devs never even need to really know that they're in PHP.
You would never know it from the consistent and elegant code, or the numerous
syntactic sugars that make coding in it a joy. While none of this is out of
the box in PHP, once you add NOLOH, poof, wonderful, clean, and consistent
language, with language features that rival many others. Furthermore, any PHP
environment can benefit from this, including all shared hosting users.
Thus in my opinion it's never that clear cut to suggest, oh PHP is crap, it's
terrible, I hate working with it, because the language is flexible enough that
you can write a framework that makes programming in it a joy. Now, if you were
to ask me if I would use PHP without NOLOH that would be difficult. I've done
it before, and it isn't so bad, but I would likely only go so far to a small
script, or a small WebApp.
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of NOLOH
~~~
jacquesm
NOLOH looks great by the specs, I'd probably put some time in to evaluating it
if it were open source.
~~~
asnyder
We do offer open-source projects license, and have an open-source guarantee.
Meaning that if anything should happen to us the source-code would be opened.
We're currently designing a clearer product section that details the guarantee
along with clearer descriptions of the free and commercial license options.
------
mahmud
Xach has a new toy under-wraps that's gonna revolutionize the state of Lisp
deployment. Really awesome stuff. Stay tuned ;-)
<http://quicklisp.org/>
------
shaunxcode
Solution? A framework which allows you to write lisp which turns into php
written in php? Below is how I would do this in what I am calling "lisphp"
<http://github.com/shaunxcode/lisphp>
(map-dict
[k v | tag :li (tag :strong k) (join "," (map [get :name _] v))]
(group-by :color (sql-query "select * from favcolor order by color, name")))
------
adamc
Another way to put it is that people don't learn lisp because it is never the
local maxiumum, the nearest, easiest hill to climb. That's probably true, but
always settling for local maximums has bad consequences over the long term.
Periodically you should invest in figuring out how to do things better
overall.
------
norswap
This is so true, and it's also valid for non-web uses of common lisp. Except
Racket they are no user friendly lisp/scheme package. And heck, even Racket is
far from ideal.
Lisp may be a superior langage, but setting it up is impractical for anybody
who isn't used to hack emacs and bash scripts all day.
~~~
swannodette
Wow people are upvoting this FUD?
> but setting it up is impractical for anybody who
> isn't used to hack emacs and bash scripts all day
This is Hacker News right?
Having built websites in PHP, Python, Ruby, and Clojure ... guess what? They
all present you with equal challenges if you're not building _trivial small
websites_ on shared hosting.
Getting a website up and running in Clojure is as simple as it gets. Compojure
ships with a good webserver baked right in.
~~~
Raphael_Amiard
> Getting a website up and running in Clojure is as simple as it gets.
Well you first have to get clojure running. And that's not as simple as it
gets
~~~
masomenos
You piqued my curiosity, never having tried Clojure.
My time from 0 to getting (the correct!) result of (+2 2) from Clojure's REPL
was approximately 60 seconds.
Pretty simple.
~~~
randallsquared
It took you less than 60 seconds to install Java, compile Clojure, and start
the REPL? :) I haven't actually used (or installed) Clojure, but most of the
complaints (here and on proggit) appear to be by people who don't already know
Java, and so have to figure out enough of the Java build process to build
Clojure in the first place, even though a touted advantage of Clojure is that
you don't have to deal with Java.
~~~
golwengaud
I have no java (programming) experience, and it took me ~45 s:
#apt-get install closure
#closure
user=> (+ 2 2)
4
Most of that 45 s was waiting for apt-get.
Now it's not going to be this easy on platforms that don't have such nice
package management (e.g. Windows). Furthermore, Raphael_Amiard makes a good
point that there's a lot more infrastructure that has to go into web
application development (or any other kind of application development, for
that matter) than computing the sum of 2 and 2.
Nonetheless, it just doesn't seem that hard. At worst, put a "clojure
/path/to/project.lisp" in rc.local or equivalent.
(Caveat: my web development experience consists entirely of a couple of toy
projects I ran on my laptop for my own amusement. Take all this with a grain
of salt.)
EDITed for formatting.
~~~
Raphael_Amiard
There is _no_ cloJure package, neither on debian, neither on ubuntu repos, and
it's called clojure, not closure, so either you are full of shit, either you
installed closure common lisp, either you have non standart repos. This is a
scary example of how a post can be upvoted when _nobody_ in presence
understands what they are talking about.
~~~
mfukar
<http://bit.ly/bbzeYP>
and
<http://bit.ly/bB1sVG>
You could use those.
------
michaelfairley
"LAMP stack on Windows"?
~~~
briancarper
A perverse case of <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome>. Please forgive
me.
------
Tichy
But why is it so - why is there no user friendly LISP, why did PHP win
instead?
~~~
sigzero
PHP won for two reasons. PHP is easy to pick up and ISPs installed mod_php
which gave it good performance.
~~~
ramy_d
very true. Also, this "Once you manage to get Emacs and SLIME going (I'm
assuming you already know Emacs intimately, because if you don't, you already
lose)"
sometimes i feel lisp is like an exercise in barrier of entry. "Let's make an
awesome language that is as inaccessible out of the box as possible" not just
application wise. knowledge wise too.
~~~
aerique
I've replied to these arguments before on HN but it bears repeating: You
really do not have to use Emacs and Slime to get going with Common Lisp. There
are many options including using whatever you're already familiar with or just
plain Notepad.
It's unfortunate that people advocating Lisp also advocate Emacs+Slime as the
only option (although it is a good option).
~~~
asciilifeform
> using whatever you're already familiar with or just plain Notepad.
This is disastrously bad advice. This is how to create parentheses-phobia.
~~~
aerique
Oh please. Most programmers already somewhat decent editors like Textmate,
Notepad++ or Vim.
------
neovive
Using a good PHP MVC framework such as CodeIgniter or KohanaPHP can go a long
way towards making your PHP code cleaner and more maintainable. PHP clearly
does not match the expressiveness and elegance of Ruby or Python nor does it
match the power of Lisp, but as the author points out, it does "get the job
done". Using a good framework will help you avoid reinventing the "well
written" PHP code wheel.
------
code_duck
Why is PHP offered as the only other solution? I've used PHP in plenty of
projects, and after years of experience with that, it would absolutely not be
my first choice to solve what the author describes.
How about Ruby/ + Sinatra or Rails, or Python + Django or Pylons?
------
jff
Over here, I wanted to try doing some web dev with Lisp, but couldn't find a
CL implementation that would compile on FreeBSD/sparc64, so I guess I'm boned.
------
rubinelli
I only see a "File not found" now. Did we break it?
------
c00p3r
Yes, it is that simple - you need some prepackaged basic stuff, like mysql
connector, xml, json parser and other commonly used modules. You need dumb-
easy install and integration with web server, and you need a quite large and
active community. In that case all cheap hostings will support it. PHP is
coming with all distros nowadays, so newbies and managers makes a choice
without thinking at all. _sudo yum install php-_ * - that is why.
btw, take the arc, add a buzzword (llvm) and easy api to write extensions with
fast FFI, and it will get as much hype as clojure - llvm is better buzzword
than jvm ^_^
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why C++ is a viable alternative to C in embedded systems design - Anon84
http://www.embedded.com/design/opensource/212100638?cid=RSSfeed_embedded_news
======
tristmegistus
I developed C++ software for a launch vehicle. It flew fine. The toughest
thing was convincing the old timers to change. They were much more comfortable
with assembly a lot more time in their schedules.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The next USB plug will finally be reversible - shawndumas
http://mobile.theverge.com/2013/12/4/5173686/usb-type-c-connector-specification-announced
======
cnvogel
"no more frustrated attempts to charge your phone with an upside-down cable"
\-- Is this really an issue for _anyone_? Seriously? Please enlighten me, if
you ever became frustrated over such a thing.
~~~
Pxtl
I'll bite. Somehow it takes me 5 tries to plug in my phone on the nightstand
if I'm doing it in the dark.
~~~
cnvogel
So, in this scatterbrained state, how many attempts would it take you to plug
in a redesigned connector :-)
------
Pxtl
Any particular reason why you linked to the mobile page?
~~~
shawndumas
because I was on a mobile device when I submitted it...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: I'm in the Bay Area, now what? - Killah911
I just came to the Bay Area (Cupertino to be exact), to meet with some potential clients for my startup. Things have gone great so far. But I need some advice on where I can run into a more startupy crowd, where I can look into maybe getting some working (coworking) space etc.<p>I'll be commuting between Florida and here, so where should I look for housing (right now it's the Essex Hotel, which is great but I don't feel in the midst of it all).<p>Look forward to some advice from fellow HNers who have set up shop here!
======
calbear81
Dojo is a good choice but if you like coffee and want to be surrounded by
startup people all day, no better place than Red Rock Coffee in Downtown
Mountain View. You're near dozens of startups (including ours) and close to
500 startups, Y Combinator and others.
At night, hang out with the cool kids in downtown Palo Alto. Thursday nights
at the Rosewood Hotel gets pretty crowded and you mingle with Sandhill VCs and
startup folks in a more ritzy environment. Weekends, make it up to San
Francisco, and hang out in the Mission and SOMA.
~~~
Killah911
Thanks for the advice, hangin' out at the Red Rock Cafe now and feeling very
much at home as I see lots of screens with code on them :)
------
lsiebert
Well Cupertino isn't too far from Hacker Dojo, which might be a good place to
start. <http://www.hackerdojo.com/>
~~~
Killah911
Cool, I'll definitely make the trip to see the Dojo!
------
davitr
You can find interesting meetups in the area on <http://www.meetup.com/>
------
jason_slack
I am in Cupertino if you wanna meet up and network.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Calling All Conservatarian Coders: Rand Paul Has a Gig For You - cpursley
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/06/05/calling-all-conservatarian-coders-rand-paul-has-a-gig-for-you/
======
argumentum
I would have considered going to this if the price was reasonable. As it is
($300 to $600), they are not going to get their purportedly intended audience
of "hundreds of programmers and other whiz kids interested in helping
libertarian and conservative causes close the digital gap with Democrats".
------
rbanffy
For a moment I though this had a relationship with the Lincoln Labs that
pioneered the "personal computer". I cannot imagine the place that gave birth
to the LINC would have anything to do with this.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
What's new in Python 2.6 - astrec
http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/2.6.html
======
rbanffy
I loved the multiprocessing module. Getting rid of the GIL is a major win.
I would prefer not having a GIL, anyway, but this is far better than nothing.
~~~
ii
Removing the GIL won't magically solve any problems.
_This has been tried before, with disappointing results, which is why I'm
reluctant to put much effort into it myself. In 1999 Greg Stein (with Mark
Hammond?) produced a fork of Python (1.5 I believe) that removed the GIL,
replacing it with fine-grained locks on all mutable data structures. He also
submitted patches that removed many of the reliances on global mutable data
structures, which I accepted. However, after benchmarking, it was shown that
even on the platform with the fastest locking primitive (Windows at the time)
it slowed down single-threaded execution nearly two-fold, meaning that on two
CPUs, you could get just a little more work done without the GIL than on a
single CPU with the GIL._
<http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=214235>
~~~
rbanffy
OK... So it´s not a major win.
BTW, how is threading under Jython?
~~~
ii
Jython uses Java's native threads, there's no GIL.
Update: Jython 2.5 Easter egg
>>> from __future__ import GIL
Traceback (most recent call last):
(no code object) at line 0
File "", line 0
SyntaxError: Never going to happen!
[http://zyasoft.com/pythoneering/2008/06/realizing-
jython-25....](http://zyasoft.com/pythoneering/2008/06/realizing-
jython-25.html)
------
wesm
Something huge in here in case you missed it:
"To reduce memory usage, the garbage collector will now clear internal free
lists when garbage-collecting the highest generation of objects. This may
return memory to the operating system sooner."
For someone building long running processes or loading data generating
millions of unique ints or floats over and over, this is major (though still
hard to believe it was ever an issue).
~~~
neilc
I'm not sure I understand why this is "huge." If the working set of the
program is stable over time (or slowly growing), it seems like this isn't a
significant win: it's only a win when the working set shrinks, and this change
allows the freed memory to be returned to the OS more promptly. Your examples
of "long running processes" or "generating millions of unique ints/floats"
wouldn't necessarily qualify: ISTM that the normal generational GC should
handle both those cases fine. Am I missing something?
~~~
jackdied
Long story short: CPython uses a custom memory allocator on top of the OS
malloc because some mallocs are really bad and python knows more about it's
memory usage patterns than the OS. The newer CPython allocator plays better
with popular OS's so that repeatedly newing and freeing lots of objects is
more likely to return memory to the system.
The old behavior didn't effect server sized systems and typical workloads but
it did piss off some embedded apps.
------
thedob
Abstract Base Classes will finally allow us some semblance of an interface.
Glad that this is one less reason to look to java when teaching the principals
and benefits of OO-programming.
------
gaius
I am excited by getting unwind-protect, ermm I mean Context Managers into my
production code :-)
------
ivankirigin
This is great. I'm looking forward to trying it out.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Insurance - danvoell
If the younger generations believe they have been screwed by housing and education, why don't they figure out how to fight back on health insurance? Are they not subsidizing the older generation right now? I feel like this is another version of pension / social security which is on a crash course with reality.
======
BA4gDY-cqjsEPWn
Existing laws are probably in place to prevent them from "getting even" and
since young people have lower turnouts at elections, politicians do the math
on who to support so regulation isn't likely to change either.
Another example would be social security next to health insurance, IIRC that
has the same scam baked into it.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Co-Founder Agreements... - jhacks
Does anyone have useful sample co-founder agreements? Something that includes the equity percentage split, vesting schedule(i.e. 1 year cliff, 4 year vesting), stock types, and so on...<p>I will be looking for a startup lawyer, but I want to do as much on my own as possible before spending the time and money with a lawyer.<p>Any and all help appreciated. Thanks!
======
jhacks
I don't think there is a way to "bump" threads... but no one can help? Maybe I
phrased my question wrong.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
An 18 Billion Mile Journey is almost complete. - sprout
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2010/08/an_18_billion_mile_journey.php
======
petercooper
_Which means, for the first time since its discovery, Neptune is about to
return to the same position in space that it occupied the day it was
discovered. And what date will that be?_
It will return to the same position within its orbit relative to the sun, but
surely not the "same position in space"? (The solar system has moved a little
further around in its orbit within the Milky Way too.)
I'm aware I'm questioning a qualified _astrophysicist_ here - something I am
not - so I'll blindly assume it's something to do with default frames of
reference until corrected otherwise ;-)
~~~
celticjames
Good source for a layman's explanation of how we measure where things are in
the sky is Astronomy Cast:
[http://www.astronomycast.com/astronomy/ep-171-solar-
system-m...](http://www.astronomycast.com/astronomy/ep-171-solar-system-
movements-and-positions/)
[http://www.astronomycast.com/astronomy/ep-170-coordinate-
sys...](http://www.astronomycast.com/astronomy/ep-170-coordinate-systems/)
~~~
nooneelse
Astronomy Cast is great. I wish I had a similar "not just what we know, but
how we know what we know", friendly conversation type podcast for more
subjects.
------
mturmon
It may be interesting to note that one way objects are discovered now is by
automated sky surveys ("event factories" or "robotic telescopes") like this
one:
<http://voeventnet.caltech.edu/feeds/Catalina.shtml>
The essence is to make multiple passes over the sky, comparing current images
with past images. Large image-differences represent moving objects, which are
looked up in a database. If they are new, they are entered into an event
queue, represented above. In principle, other robotic telescopes can scoop up
promising events and follow up on them.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Big data, Google and the end of free will - hunglee2
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/50bb4830-6a4c-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c.html
======
adenadel
This was on the front page yesterday
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12376695](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12376695)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
YouTube is down - pestkranker
https://www.youtube.com/?down=down
======
eviltandem
"YouTube" is so distributed I don't think it can be "down" anywhere but
briefly in a single geographic area.
------
heavymark
Been working here all day (East Coast US). Would be helpful to know where in
the country it's down when posting this.
~~~
yeezul
Had problems around 10AM (East Coast Canada) for about half an hour. Videos
wouldn't load or the page would load halfway
------
gapo
It was down for around 10 mins around 12 PM today EST
------
garou
All Right here (South of the Brazil)
------
drcongo
Works for me.
------
6nf
nope
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How did we make the DOS redirector take up only 256 bytes of memory? - tdeck
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2004/11/08/how-did-we-make-the-dos-redirector-take-up-only-256-bytes-of-memory/
======
tdeck
I ran across this when I was reading about the "CALL 5" interface that exists
in DOS. CP/M [1], the early cross-platform microcomputer OS, provided a set of
BIOS routines that you could invoke by setting up a function number and
arguments in the registers, then executing CALL 5. DOS system calls are done
through interrupts, but in order to make it easier to port earlier 8-bit CP/M
programs, you could also use a version of this CALL 5 interface in COM
programs. To this day, COM programs are supported in 32-bit Windows, which in
my mind means theoretically there might be some CP/M program that would run on
Windows as well with a few modifications.
[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M)
[2]:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16669352/call-5-interface...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16669352/call-5-interface-
on-ms-dos)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Dear GitHub - msvan
https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github
======
jonobacon
Hi Adam, Addy, Andreas, Ariya, Forbes, James, Henry, John-David, Juriy , Ken,
Nicholas, Pascal, Sam, Sindre,
My name is Jono and I started as Director of Community back in November at
GitHub. Obviously I am pretty new at GitHub, but I thought I would weigh in.
Firstly, thanks for your feedback. I think it is essential that GitHub always
has a good sense of not just what works well for our users, but also where the
pain points are. Constructive criticism is an important of doing great work. I
appreciate how specific and detailed you were in your feedback. Getting a good
sense of specific problems provides a more fruitful beginning to a
conversation than "it suxx0rs", so I appreciate that.
I am still figuring out how GitHub fits together as an organization but I am
happy to take a look into these issues and ensure they are considered in how
future work is planned. We have a growing product team at GitHub that I know
is passionate about solving the major pain points that rub up against our
users. Obviously I can't make any firm commitments as I am not on the product
team, but I can ensure the right eyeballs are on this. I also want to explore
with my colleagues how we can be a little clearer about future feature and
development plans to see if we can reduce some ambiguity.
As I say, I am pretty new, so I am still getting the lay of the land, but feel
free to reach out to me personally if you have any further questions or
concerns about this or any other issue. I am at [email protected].
~~~
krschultz
An open question is how the community should provide feedback. Trello provides
a decent example of how to do it well [1], but GitHub feels like a black box.
I've been on GitHub since 2008 and I have been paying every month for years,
but other than emailing support I have no idea how to vote for a feature
request.
My personal pet peeve is not being able to mark a public repo as 'deprecated'.
There are a lot of other people with the same frustration [2], but we have no
idea how to get that on GitHub's roadmap.
[1] [http://help.trello.com/article/724-submitting-feature-
reques...](http://help.trello.com/article/724-submitting-feature-requests-for-
trello) [2]
[https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/144](https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/144)
~~~
peterfpf
I normally put a big "[DEPRECATED]" notice at the beginning of the README.
This normally doesn't go unnoticed.
Another good example is harthur's "[UNMAINTAINED]" [1]
[1] [https://github.com/harthur/brain](https://github.com/harthur/brain)
~~~
simoncion
> I normally put a big "[DEPRECATED]" notice at the beginning of the README.
Aye. Some folks in the discussion linked to by krschultz complain that "People
sometimes don't read the README and -thus- don't notice deprecation
warnings.". To them I ask: "What makes you think that those sorts of people
will notice anything less than an overlay that _prevents_ them from
interacting with the Github UI for that particular repo?".
~~~
clinta
One concern would be around tools that fetch from github automatically. go get
for example would need some sort of structured metadata if it wanted to
surface an error to a user that a library is deprecated.
~~~
simoncion
> One concern would be around tools that fetch from github automatically.
Sure. But... like... git doesn't know _anything_ about deprecated repos.
AFAIK, that's not a feature of git's repo fetch machinery. Anything Github
would do to address this would _have_ to modify the contents of the repo,
right?
> ...go get for example would need some sort of structured metadata [to do
> reasonable repo deprecation warnings]
I mean, the JavaScript development community has -collectively- decided on a
_huge_ bundle of ad-hoc standards. I bet that it would be trivial for the
signatories of the open letter to decide on a tagging mechanism to use in
their README files to indicate repo deprecation. Do you disagree?
~~~
clinta
Go get does not start with a git clone. If you go get example.org/pkg/foo go
fetches [https://example.org/pkg/foo?go-get=1](https://example.org/pkg/foo?go-
get=1). So coordination between go and github could implement something for
deprecated repositories without changing anything in git.
More details here: [https://golang.org/cmd/go/#hdr-
Remote_import_paths](https://golang.org/cmd/go/#hdr-Remote_import_paths)
~~~
simoncion
> Go get does not start with a git clone.
Fair enough. (I don't use go, so I'm unaware of pretty much _all_ of its
internals.) [0]
> ...coordination between go and github could implement something for
> deprecated repositories without changing anything in git.
A couple of things:
* This only fixes things for Golang. It doesn't fix it for the couple-thousand other tools that pull things from Github.
* I never suggested changing things in git. That would be freaking nuts. :) EDIT: Or did you mean "without changing anything in the git repo"? If you meant that, then I strike this bullet point and apologise for the noise. :)
* Frankly, having a well-known file _in_ your Git repo that contains meaningful tags seems _far_ more compatible than changing git, or altering the $BUILD_TOOL<->GitHub integration... for one thing, the convention could be trivially adopted by non-git users. :)
[0] Thanks for the documentation link, BTW! :D
------
deathanatos
This, I feel, is the most important bug, even though it precedes the list:
> _We’ve gone through the only support channel that you have given us either
> to receive an empty response or even no response at all. We have no
> visibility into what has happened with our requests, or whether GitHub is
> working on them._
I'd like to call out that the GitHub user @isaacs maintains an _unofficial_
repository[1] where the issues are "Issues for GitHub". It's not much more
than a token of goodwill from a user to open a place like that to organize
bugs (GitHub: you are lucky you have such a userbase!), but it's the best
thing I know of for "has someone else thought of this?"[2]. Many of the issues
that have been filed there are excellent ideas.
[1]: [https://github.com/isaacs/github](https://github.com/isaacs/github)
[2]: though I'd say if you also think about it, you should _also_ go through
the official channel, even if just to spam them so they know people want that
feature.
------
Osiris
The author mentions that if GitHub was open source, they would implement these
features themselves.
Gitlab[1] is an open source repository manager that supports local installs as
well as public hosting at gitlab.com. If author appreciates open source,
perhaps they should put their efforts into improving an existing open source
option rather than relying on a proprietary solution.
[1] [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/tree/master](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/tree/master)
~~~
zanny
This. When you are tired of github, start using gitlab, and realize your
mistake going forward and stop making it, over[1], and over[2], and over[3].
[1] [http://sourceforge.net/](http://sourceforge.net/)
[2] [https://code.google.com/](https://code.google.com/)
[3] [https://bitbucket.org/](https://bitbucket.org/)
~~~
chei0aiV
Sourceforge runs Apache Allura, which is open source.
~~~
tcdent
What's realistic timing for getting a feature you contribute (and receive
approval) deployed and available for use?
~~~
sytse
The length of the merge request cycle depends on the complexity of the
feature. Simple fixes get merged in days, average features take weeks and
sometimes the review suggestions take multiple months to implement. After
merge it will release in weeks so since we're on a monthly rel cycle.
------
jballanc
It's 2016, and GitHub is stagnant.
GitHub used to bill itself as "Social Coding", but the "Network" graph has not
seen _ANY_ updates since its original introduction in April of _2008_. Issues
has seen _very_ few updates. Even the OSS projects that GitHub uses
_internally_ have grown stagnant as GitHub runs on private, internal forks and
maintainership passes to non-GitHub-employed individuals (e.g.
[https://github.com/resque/resque/issues/1372](https://github.com/resque/resque/issues/1372)).
The word "Social" no longer appears on GitHub's landing page. They're chasing
some other goal...whatever it is.
~~~
dominotw
> They're chasing some other goal...whatever it is.
I've been puzzled for a while with what github is doing hiring so many social
impact employees.
[https://twitter.com/agelender](https://twitter.com/agelender)
[https://twitter.com/_danilo](https://twitter.com/_danilo)
[https://twitter.com/rachelmyers](https://twitter.com/rachelmyers)
[https://twitter.com/nmsanchez](https://twitter.com/nmsanchez)
[https://twitter.com/BiancaCreating](https://twitter.com/BiancaCreating)
[https://twitter.com/ammeep](https://twitter.com/ammeep)
[https://twitter.com/davystevenson](https://twitter.com/davystevenson)
Maybe something more noble than a social coding site?
~~~
Estragon
Maybe something more noble than a social coding site?
I doubt it. Github has a reputation problem. I wouldn't put anything sensitive
on there, given the attitude github leadership showed about privacy ethics in
the Julie Horvath incident.
~~~
pekk
Even if you don't have anything against Github relating to the Horvath
incident, there are other things like Github shutting down people's projects
because they wrote a doc containing the word "retard." In other words, now
they are in the business of regulating the _content_ of open source projects
(beyond obvious precautions like not hosting stolen credit card databases,
child porn, etc.)
They seem to think they're too big to fail.
~~~
avinassh
They also removed [0] C Plus Equality [1] project twice. Even Bitbucket [2]
and Google [3] also removed it.
[0] - [https://github.com/FeministSoftwareFoundation/C-plus-
Equalit...](https://github.com/FeministSoftwareFoundation/C-plus-Equality)
[1] -
[https://github.com/ErisBlastar/cplusequality](https://github.com/ErisBlastar/cplusequality)
[2] - [https://bitbucket.org/FeministSoftwareFoundation/c-plus-
equa...](https://bitbucket.org/FeministSoftwareFoundation/c-plus-equality/)
[3] - [https://code.google.com/p/c-plus-
equality/](https://code.google.com/p/c-plus-equality/)
~~~
int_handler
What was the story behind this anyway? I am having a hard time determining
whether this was actually serious or were trying to parody feminist activism.
~~~
sotojuan
It was a joke by 4chan's technology board, made to see if people would take it
seriously (some did and even agreed with it!).
------
zzzeek
We need world class, modern, distributed bug tracking now. If you google
around for this technology, a lot of nice ideas, many using git itself as
transport, were poking around, and around 2009 they started falling silent.
Why? Because GitHub started up and everyone just buzzed over to it like so
many moths to a flame, having learned nothing from places like Sourceforge
about what happens when 90% of the open source world trusts their issue
trackers, which is really a huge part of a project's documentation, to a for-
profit, closed source platform that does not provide very good
interoperability.
If GitHub is kicking back and sitting on their huge valuations, then it's time
to pick up this work again. If issue tracking and code reviews were based on a
common, distributed system like git itself, then all these companies could
compete evenly for features and UX on top of such a system, without ever
having the advantage of "locking in" its users with extremely high migration
costs.
~~~
hk__2
> We need world class, modern, distributed bug tracking now.
Why distributed? You need a central place to report bugs and track them to
ensure they’re not duplicated everywhere.
~~~
monkmartinez
I am not Michael Bayer (but I hope to be more like him someday)... that said,
what I think he means or could mean is that issues would be distributed along
with the repo. Maybe something like a git log for issues that are attached to
and/or part of the repo itself.
Thinking about it, something like this would be sweet. I would immediately
have a snap shot of things that might go boom when I run said software. eta:
Instead, I have to go dig through github itself, which is slow compared to
greping through a git log.
~~~
mintplant
You've described Fossil.
[http://fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki](http://fossil-
scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki)
~~~
zzzeek
yes, fossil, you need to get me past this:
[http://fossil-
scm.org/index.html/dir?ci=acbee54e8ba8a3bd&nam...](http://fossil-
scm.org/index.html/dir?ci=acbee54e8ba8a3bd&name=src)
I'm talking about a portable issue tracker format that ideally uses something
like git as its transport (but note: this does __not __mean that the issue
database would travel along with the application 's source code! That might be
nice as an option but not by design). command-line and web-based front ends
can then refer to it. Fossil, OTOH, looks like a huge monolithic web
application / version control system / issue tracker / kitchen sink written in
very hard-coded C.
Looking through some docs, Fossil is anti-git and it claims its own DVCS is a
great improvement over git: [http://fossil-
scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/quotes.wiki](http://fossil-
scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/quotes.wiki). Because Fossil has every
possible feature packed all into one monolithic executable, rather than
relying upon existing systems like diff, patch, etc. this means Fossil is "the
opposite of bloat": [http://fossil-
scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/qandc.wiki](http://fossil-
scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/qandc.wiki) (in fact that is the opposite of
the opposite of bloat....)
------
monkmartinez
I do not operate a popular OSS project, but I have experienced the +1 spam and
it sucks. The suggestions, in my opinion seem rational.
Interesting side note: With the exception of Selenium, most of signees are
maintainers of JS/HTML OSS projects. I wonder if we could objectively compare
JS to <lang> projects in terms of the problems mentioned in the document. For
example, there is a strong correlation between +1'ers and JS repos vs. Python
or vice versa. Perhaps, we could walk away with JS devs are more chatty than
CPP developers when discussing issues... I don't know, just a thought.
~~~
ketralnis
I think it's just monkey see->monkey do. As soon as one person said +1,
everyone that saw it thought that that's just how you voted for stuff. It's
the same reason you see comments on HN or reddit that just say "This." or that
if you leave your shoes by the door, everyone else will do the same. I doubt
these people keep doing it if you ask them not to.
~~~
maxaf
There's an old story about this man who stood quietly next to a closed door in
Moscow, said nothing to no one, and did nothing else of interest. Eventually
others joined him, and before long a queue has formed. No one knew what they
were standing in line for.
Monkey see - monkey do.
~~~
semi-extrinsic
One of Milgram's experiments (not the infamous one) tested this, using people
standing on the sidewalk looking up.
[https://youtu.be/P0e6zG8IbE8](https://youtu.be/P0e6zG8IbE8)
~~~
ars
He might think he's testing conformance, but he actually just tested
curiosity.
~~~
ywecur
Wouldn't they at least ask after a while if that was the case?
~~~
ars
What makes you think they didn't? I saw lots of people look up, check the
people around them and keep going.
------
Permit
This first request is the anti-thesis of GitHub's simple approach:
>Issues are often filed missing crucial information like reproduction steps or
version tested. We’d like issues to gain custom fields, along with a mechanism
(such as a mandatory issue template, perhaps powered by a newissue.md in root
as a likely-simple solution) for ensuring they are filled out in every issue.
Every checkbox, text-field and dropdown you add to a page adds cognitive
overhead to the process and GitHub has historically taken a pretty solid
stance against this.
From "How GitHub uses GitHub to Build GitHub"[1]:
[http://i.imgur.com/1yJx8CG.png](http://i.imgur.com/1yJx8CG.png)
There are tools like Jira and Bugzilla for people who prefer this style of
issue management. I hope GitHub resists the temptation to add whatever people
ask of them.
[1] [http://zachholman.com/talk/how-github-uses-github-to-
build-g...](http://zachholman.com/talk/how-github-uses-github-to-build-
github/)
~~~
jasode
_> adds cognitive overhead to the process _
Yes! The maintainers _deliberately want_ to add cognitive overhead so the
quality bar for creating issues is higher.
By having simple zero-friction forms, you haven't removed cognitive overhead.
You've simply _shifted_ the cognitive load into the followup messages asking
for clarification of "reproduction steps", "version tested". The issues'
threads therefore begin with "meta" type questions which _duplicate_ the
checkboxes and dropdowns you were trying to avoid.
The default can remain zero-friction but it seems very reasonable to offer
options for maintainers to gain some control over their inbox.
~~~
ams6110
So use a real issue tracker. Most of the big ones integrate with github. Why
should they reinvent this wheel?
~~~
jclulow
If not to be a hosted software lifecycle tool, what the hell is Github even
for?
~~~
ams6110
"Software lifecycle tool" is too vague for a product to have focus and open to
too many interpretations as to what it should include. Even limiting scope to
issue tracking, there are different points of view on how that should work and
several widely-used but rather different software alternatives to choose from.
And how many teams spend the first three months of a project building a custom
issue tracker because they don't like any of the off-the-shelf options? Trying
to get issue-tracking "right" is a black hole for a company like github. Which
is probably why they provide the bare minimum free-form issue and that's it.
------
jasode
The bullet points of complaints feel like a continuation of Linus Torvald's
refusal of github pull requests in May 2012.[1]
Taken all together, it seems like github is on a path of alienating their most
valuable members. Github was unresponsive to Linus' feature requests and it
turns out that theme continues almost 3 years later.
If github plans to evolve into a full-featured ALM[2] like MS Team Foundation
or JIRA instead of being relegated to being just a "dumb" disk backup node for
repositories, they have to get these UI workflow issues fixed.
[1][https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-5654674)
[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_lifecycle_manageme...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_lifecycle_management)
~~~
treve
I don't see anything wrong with going after the massive amount of smaller
project with simple needs, instead of the few large projects & popular
projects with very specific needs.
If github evolves to the projects you're mentioning, you'll surely alienate
the many more casual users. I personally hate working with the bloated
applications you mention.
------
bsder
Distributed revision control users whining about centralized repository
lacking features.
Ummm ... anybody getting the irony here?
And, from a GitHub business perspective, why do I hear Lily Tomlin: "We don't
care. We don't have to."
Everybody anointed GitHub as "the chosen one" over strenuous objections from
some of us that creating another monopoly for open source projects is a _bad
idea_.
Pardon me for enjoying some Schadenfreude now that GitHub leveraged the open-
source adoption into corporate contracts and now doesn't have to give two
shits about open source folks.
Lily Tomlin's Phone Company Sketch:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw)
~~~
Perceptes
I'm an open source project maintainer and share many of the pain points
outlined in the document, but I also totally agree with you. Giving control of
your project to a company means losing control and having to resort to
desperate pleas like this. This is simply what happens when you can't fork it
yourself like you could with an open source project.
It's likely that GitHub will alleviate these pain points in time, but the
lesson is the same: let a company control your destiny and you can no longer
have what you want or need when their interests diverge from yours, even if
their system is the best there is and was radically better than everything
else at the time you switched to it.
------
asb
There's been no mention of phabricator yet so I thought I'd give it a shout
out. It's used by LLVM, FreeBSD, Blender, Wikimedia and others and I love it.
It's under very active development and even if it doesn't solve every issue in
this letter, by using an open source tool for development you of course have
the option to customize it to the needs of your community.
~~~
zzzeek
I'm looking very closely at Phabricator, it looks quite nice.
------
marknutter
Is this a case of the squeakiest wheels getting the grease? What if these
problems aren't representative of the overall user base? What if far more
people prefer a more simple, minimalistic interface than an ultra-
customizeable interface with myriad custom actions and events. I've always
appreciated software that deliberately keeps things simple (Basecamp and
Workflowly come to mind). It sounds like these people want a full blown
Jira/Stash installation.
------
AndyKelley
I don't like the general feel of these suggestions. It sounds like more
bureaucratic features, the lack of which is a big part of why GitHub is so
pleasant.
Making an issue or a pull request feels like having a casual chat with the
project maintainers. Adding fields and other hoops to jump through puts
distance between people.
~~~
lorenzfx
I guess for maintainers of popular projects, everybody's "casual chat" (by
people who did not read CONTRIBUTING.txt, do not supply the version of
relevant software they are using etc.) is not as fun as it is for you.
------
carapace
Wow, what a bunch of whiners. If you hate github so much why don't you just
fork it and fix-- Oh, right. It's not open source.
Well, there's your problem right there.
(I have sooooo much more in this vein but I'll spare you. ;-)
EDIT: No I won't. Fuck it. This is too ridiculous.
These guys (and they are all guys) chained themselves to github's metaphorical
car and now they're complaining that the ride is too bumpy and the wind is a
little much.
Don't whine about not getting to sit inside the car! Unchain yourself and go
catch one of the cars where the doors are unlocked and open and the driver and
other passengers are beckoning you to join them. (Apologies for the mangled
metaphor.)
These folks come off to me like masochistic babies.
~~~
santix
+1
Shouldn't we (the OSS community) have an open source, roll-your-own version of
something like GitHub? Like, the repo-management equivalent to a phpBB or a
Wiki or a Wordpress.
We do have the separate components, though maybe the hard part is to glue them
together. But still, it is something what would be worth the time and effort,
wouldn't it?
------
beshrkayali
I do like Github, and I understand how it makes the entire process of
maintaining a code repo a lot easier, but what I'd genuinely like to know is
why don't big projects just move to their own thing? I understand that there
isn't a single solution that exactly matches what Github has, and that
maintaining your own git server + git management/issues/etc.. app is a pain,
but I see it as the only real solution. Developing in the open can't be done
on platforms where restrictions apply, and they do apply. I'm saying this with
no intention of sounding like a jerk, but 18 project maintainers and/or
developer need to write an open letter to get Github to give'em a "me too"
button? I understand the issue, but i still find it rather silly.
The only aspect I could think of where Github has the pro is the community of
developers it has, but does it really matter that much? Especially for
established/big projects that probably don't care about the fork/stars
numbers, or the random look around-ers that pass by.
~~~
tyre
> I understand that there isn't a single solution that exactly matches what
> Github has, and that maintaining your own git server + git
> management/issues/etc.. app is a pain
You outlined exactly why people don't build their own or use another system.
Github is the best there is. That doesn't mean it doesn't have problems, but
if your company/project/expertise isn't focused in collaborative development
and/or version control, you're just distracting yourself by building your own.
The authors are not saying "we can build a better Github." They have
complaints and would like them resolved, but don't see a good way of having
that happen.
~~~
beshrkayali
> Github is the best there is.
Doesn't matter really as it's still a locked platform. The argument they're
making is that they're developing in the open and they'd like some sort of
expedited treatment because of the size of the project or because they're
doing OSS. I don't think those two can go hand in hand all the way.
------
anarchy8
I feel like there is a great opportunity right now for anyone to make a Github
replacement. Sounds like a lot of these features are sorely needed at the
moment. Why has Github been complacent?
~~~
ben174
By their very nature, git repos are one of the easiest things to migrate.
Simply point at a new remote and push, and that's really it. It means that,
unlike many other services, I could see GitHub being completely abandoned
almost over night. If something better came along.
~~~
mynewtb
You would lose the issues.
~~~
detaro
True, but thanks to the API and their relatively simple structure it's
reasonably easy to at least copy their contents as well. Linking them
correctly to user accounts on a new platform is probably the biggest issue.
~~~
johnmaguire2013
Users with public SSH keys would be easy:
[https://github.com/JohnMaguire.keys](https://github.com/JohnMaguire.keys)
When a new user signs up, ask them for their existing Github username and to
upload an SSH key that matches.
------
notabot
My company pays me to work on a fairly old-school free software project and we
run our own git service. Our workflow is email based so we won't ever consider
switching to GitHub.
That said, we do sometimes consider setting up an official mirror on GitHub.
Ideology aside (some team members might think we shouldn't promote a propriety
solution for free software project), the main thing that puts us off is that
there is no way to disable pull requests. Closing all pull requests by hand is
not appealing; leaving all pull requests open is not desirable. We can
probably write a bot to close pull requests, but that is just yet another
administrative burden.
Not sure if GitHub will ever consider allowing users to disable pull requests
though. That seems to go against GitHub's core interest.
~~~
justincormack
FreeBSD has worked out a means of accepting pull requests on their github
mirror, guessing using the API.
~~~
notabot
I myself don't really see any motive of doing that. It is administrative
burden (maintaining the service that bridge API and existing system, managing
GitHub accounts / tokens). Compare that to the number / quality of pull
requests received [0] [1] and I find RoI of doing that very low.
[0]
[https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/pulls](https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/pulls)
[1]
[https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pulls](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pulls)
------
arasmussen
I work on a very relevant project called Product Pains.
React Native, the open source project, is using Product Pains instead of
GitHub issues for bug reports and feature requests. This is because there were
thousands of open issues and, just as this document mentions, it's impossible
to organize them. The comments are all "+1" and it's really hard to tell
what's important and what's just noise.
If you take a look at [https://productpains.com/product/react-
native?tab=top](https://productpains.com/product/react-native?tab=top) you'll
see the power of being able to vote on these issues.
So why's Product Pains relevant?
1\. It's a temporary alternative to GitHub issues. I'm guessing GitHub will
get to adding votes eventually. If you want to use Product Pains for
organizing issues for your open source project, go for it. I'll even give it
away to you for free.
2\. It's a community dedicated to improving products. This document is chock-
full of great, constructive, actionable feedback. Product Pains is a community
built for posting exactly this. You can post feedback publicly, about any
product, people can vote on it, and posts with a lot of votes create a social
responsibility for the company to respond.
3\. It's a way for your voice to be heard. Posting on Hacker News lasts a day
and will get your voice heard. If you post actionable, constructive feedback
on Product Pains, and 150 people vote on it, it lingers waiting for GitHub to
do something about it. Around 600 users on Product Pains are also React Native
developers. They'd probably be ecstatic to vote on constructive feedback for
GitHub.
For example, go make an account and vote here:
[https://productpains.com/post/github/implement-voting-for-
is...](https://productpains.com/post/github/implement-voting-for-issues/)
------
mplewis
Bitbucket kills GitHub issues with these two features:
\- Multiple assignees for an issue \- An "Approve" button so that maintainers
can stamp a PR with the seal of approval
~~~
diezge
Surprised I didn't see my personal favourite mentioned - the unlimited free
private repos!
~~~
minimaxir
To be fair, GitHub has to make _money_.
None of the complaints are about the GitHub business model, which is IMO
pretty fair.
~~~
diezge
True, I guess with Atlassian it's different as their actual flagship product
is Jira (and I assume the people who buy the paid-for BB packages are loyal to
BB due to things like the free repos so it evens itself out).
------
neilgrey
Yup, I love GH, use it every day, but issue management is the pits.
It'd be really nice if I could custom sort the queue of issues so that I know
what's next up in my queue of things to do; right now I've got 5 tags called
NextUp:1 -> NextUp:5 on each repo; this takes way more manual updating than a
simple drag/drop widget.
Like they mentioned, having a voting system would be super useful for knowing
what matters -- I cringe every time I leave a +1, so I've gotten into the
habit of at least adding a comment after it --- but the premise and the pain
are the same.
~~~
ma138
We created ZenHub - [https://www.zenhub.io/](https://www.zenhub.io/) \-
specifically to solve these problems.
The addition of a task board in the GitHub interface allows you to communicate
both the priority and progress of GitHub issues.
While adding a +1 button to comments allows feedback without clutter.
Best of all, it is free for Open Source :)
You can read more on why we created ZenHub here - [https://medium.com/axiom-
zen/introducing-zenhub-2-0-c352a12c...](https://medium.com/axiom-
zen/introducing-zenhub-2-0-c352a12c2ec2#.qd71ypvkl) and get in touch with us
via our public support repo here -
[https://github.com/zenhubio/support](https://github.com/zenhubio/support)
I hope we can help improve your GitHub experience!
------
rmchugh
A shame that GitHub aren't more responsive to the community that enables their
success when they make such a big deal of their openness. It is also our own
fault that we have allowed ourselves to become dependent on a single provider
of a relatively simple service.
That said, I'm extremely grateful to the platform for enabling collaboration
on open source and to the company for its work on Git, Resque etc.
GitHub's strategy is to open source everything except the business critical
stuff, but it seems to me that their business is in enterprise support rather
than in actual software. Perhaps they should just open source the whole
platform and count on their service business being enough to carry the
company?
------
jondubois
I like GitHub issues as they are. I wouldn't like to force people to adhere to
a particular format when reporting problems.
I find it strange that some project maintainers get annoyed when people use
the issues section to post questions. What's wrong with that? A question can
reveal design failures about your software... Maybe if your software was
better designed, people wouldn't be asking the question to begin with.
I do think there should be a +1/like button though.
~~~
joncalhoun
Have you ever tried to maintain a popular OS project on Github? Github issues
feel great until you start using them at scale, and then they start to fall
apart without some structure. This is especially pronounced in open source
where many issues come from people who aren't familiar with what information
you need in an issue to quickly resolve it.
I don't think the authors are requesting that this be made mandatory for all
repos, but instead they just want the option to set up rules for repos they
maintain. As someone giving up their free time to offer software for the rest
of us, it seems only fair to let them set the rules about what they need
before they can resolve an issue.
The biggest issue I see OSS maintainers running into is that they likely
aren't the voice that Github listens to most anymore. If they can get some
companies that pay for Github Enterprise to sign their letter as well that
would likely help prioritize these features.
~~~
jondubois
My project's main repo has 150 issues (only 7 still open) and it works out
pretty well. Usually contributors will answer each other's questions and help
close issues.
I suppose that could be a problem if you have 7000+ issues (as is the case for
Docker) - But those projects represent an extremely small percentage of all
OSS projects on GitHub. Also, these projects usually have a lot of
contributors, so maybe those contributors could help filter through and
tag/close issues as necessary?
------
athenot
I have mixed feelings about these requests. Yes it would be nice to have these
extra features in GitHub. Its issue handling has always been a bit light on
the workflow side—but IMHO has made up for it with a pleasant way to organize
conversation around issues. The simple and smooth UX is part of what makes
GitHub so great.
For the opposite side of the spectrum, there's the Bitbucket+Jira combo. It is
customizable to a PM's heart's content, and in the process can become a mess
of a tool.
~~~
alfonsodev
I have mixed feelings about custom fields, I'd like Github UI to become as
burden as Jira, but in the other hand 'reactions' as Slack or Facebook are
implementing would make much easier to follow a discussion without so much
scroll down.
------
aaron695
After the whole incident where they deleted forks of a project without notice,
due to their belief on what is and is not appropriate words to use in code
without an apology I think we really need to re-assess GitHub in general.
Their 'control' of code and lack of respect to the people running projects is
very disappointing and they seem to not want to move forward on the issues.
I'm surprised the open community is allowing this de-facto ownership of the
worlds code and how it's written to take place, I'm not so sure they are a
benevolent dictator.
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150802/20330431831/githu...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150802/20330431831/github-
nukes-repository-over-use-word-retard.shtml)
------
guessmyname
Interesting petition, and I agree with it; but I wonder why are all projects
mentioned in the _Signed by_ section based on JavaScript? I know there are
other languages involved in some of those projects like C++ and Java in
Selenium and PhantomJS but this specific thing in the document makes me
believe that only JavaScript developers _(at least the ones using GitHub)_ are
more prone to complain than other type of developers.
~~~
sotojuan
It's simple: This was made by a JS developer who shared it on Twitter and
whose followers/community friends are more likely to be JS developers.
------
pvorb
The problem is that GitHub has a monopoly and is considered _the_ current
standard for Open Source. But I think that once some of the major projects
move to alternatives like GitLab (which has many of the features described in
that letter) GitHub will have to obey its user base. Unfortunately no Open
Source project with a large user base will dare to do the first step.
~~~
sytse
There are some open source projects with a large user base taking the step to
us, for example
[https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman](https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman)
Regarding the three demands in the doc:
1\. GitLab has issue templates in EE and on GitLab.com
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ee/merge_requests/28](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ee/merge_requests/28)
2\. GitLab has the award emoji function that doesn't spam and acts as a voting
system
[https://about.gitlab.com/2015/11/22/gitlab-8-2-released/](https://about.gitlab.com/2015/11/22/gitlab-8-2-released/)
3\. We're open to displaying CONTRIBUTING.md more prominently, please open an
issue on our public issue tracker that contains all our planned features
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
org/gitlab-ce/issues)
I'll go sleep now but please ask any questions so I can respond tomorrow.
~~~
pvorb
Yes, I already saw some of these.
Unfortunately, there's no Travis CI integration yet, which I've been using on
GitHub a lot.
I'm evaluating GitLab CI right now. Am I right, that I have to host a runner
myself if I don't want to use a shared runner for my project?
> You can setup as many runners as you need. Runners can be placed on separate
> users, servers, and even on your local machine.
Does "local machine" really mean a non-public machine like my notebook?
Appreciating help from GitLab's CEO :)
~~~
sytse
We would love for Travis CI to offer support for GitLab, they can use our new
commit status API.
But you'll find that GitLab CI is a pretty complete replacement. If you don't
want to use a shared runner you indeed have to use a shared runner.
Running on your local machine can indeed include your notebook.
~~~
pvorb
Thanks for the answer.
~~~
sytse
Welcome. I see an error in my answer. If you don't want to use a shared runner
you indeed have to add one yourself. Please be informed that shared runners
can run Docker images and that we plan to add runner auto scaling with 8.4 to
reduce the queue.
------
rlaferla
Github needs two major features: 1. discussion groups for users vs. devs as
people use issues for it currently. and 2. A searchable "license" attribute
for all projects with standard license templates for MIT/Apache/GPL/etc...
When looking for a source code, you need to consider the platform, language
and license.
------
duncan_bayne
"It's the world's tiniest open source violin"
[https://xkcd.com/743/](https://xkcd.com/743/)
------
aesthetics1
Each and every suggestion is a sane and much needed improvement.
~~~
Royalaid
Especially the +1
~~~
maligree
+1. Fix this.
~~~
dtm5011
me too
------
sqs
At Sourcegraph, we're trying to help solve these problems for developers
everywhere ([https://sourcegraph.com](https://sourcegraph.com)), both in open
source and inside companies. GitHub’s commercial success and contributions to
the world of development are impressive (and I'm speaking as a GitHub user for
8 years), but they can’t build _everything_ developers need on their own.
We’re really pumped about improving dev team collaboration in the GitHub
ecosystem by (soon) letting anyone use Sourcegraph.com’s code intelligence
(semantic search/browsing), improved pull requests, flexible issue tracking
with Emoji reactions instead of +1s (example:
[https://src.sourcegraph.com/sourcegraph/.tracker/151](https://src.sourcegraph.com/sourcegraph/.tracker/151)),
etc.—all on their existing GitHub.com repositories.
All of Sourcegraph’s source code is public and hackable at
[https://src.sourcegraph.com/sourcegraph](https://src.sourcegraph.com/sourcegraph),
so it can grow over time to solve the changing needs of these projects. (It’s
licensed as Fair Source ([https://fair.io](https://fair.io)), not closed
source like GitHub or open source.)
Email me ([email protected]) if you’re interested in beta-testing this on
your GitHub.com repositories.
~~~
alfonsodev
I think reactions as implemented in Facebook, Slack or Sourcegraph is a really
neat UX solution for the +1 spam problem.
------
fphilipe
My biggest gripe with GitHub has been the notification system. Personally I
can't use the web UI for notifications because they bundle multiple
notifications per issue. This leads to potentially missed notifications since
it is up to me to scan the issue/PR for new comments.
My workaround has been to use email notifications exclusively. I have a Gmail
filter that applies a label to all notifications and skips the inbox. Then in
my mail client I have a smart mailbox that only shows me unread notifications
with that label (or that folder, from an IMAP perspective). The smart mailbox
then shows me a counter of unread notifications. This way I don't oversee
comments when multiple ones are made in a PR.
Problem 1: No context in these notifications. It would be nice if these emails
could show the code in question for diff comments or the entire comments
thread.
Problem 2: Now what is really bad with these notification emails is that the
link "view it on GitHub" sometimes no longer links to the comment I'm being
notified of. This happens when the comment was made on a PR on a line of the
diff that no longer exists, as sometimes is the case when new commits are
pushed. I then have to go to the main PR page, expand all collapsed "foo
commented on an outdated diff" comments and manually search for the comment in
order to get the context and be able to reply.
By fixing problem 1, problem 2 would be automatically fixed with it and make
my workflow much more productive. Is there anyone else annoyed by this?
~~~
shurcooL
> Personally I can't use the web UI for notifications because they bundle
> multiple notifications per issue. This leads to potentially missed
> notifications since it is up to me to scan the issue/PR for new comments.
I think the bundling aspect is an awesome feature! I can read multiple new
comments all at once, with context in mind and less total context switches.
About being able to miss new comments - doesn't the link in the notifications
UI take you directly to the first unread comment?
------
felhr
I just created and maintain a little Android library (a very rewarding
experience by the way) so most of the complaints about Github doesnt really
apply to me because the size and reach of my project (I understand the point
perfectly though).
But I read some complaints about the users and the issues they tend to open
and I fully agree. They are a minority but I can't only imagine what people
with bigger projects have to deal with. This is what I've found:
\- People with little to zero experience in the language/framework that simply
state that my project doesn't work without providing more information and
sometimes they didn't reply to my "give me more info" inquiries.
\- Guys who just want to get their homework done and They are basically trying
to get it done using me as non-paid freelance.
\- And my favourite one, junior dev in a company, he needs to get their work
done with more pressure than the previous one so became anxious about their
problems and I feel it even via email. Eventually He gets the thing done but
He notices I changed the build system to Jitpack for better dependency
handling and and start to complain about Man in the middle attacks to his
company and black-hat hackers replacing my lib with a malicious one (I guess
it could happen but come on).
But it is a very rewarding experience besides these anecdotical cases
~~~
jitpack
Hi. your junior colleague might be interested in the security answer here
[https://jitpack.io/docs/FAQ/](https://jitpack.io/docs/FAQ/). It's an
important matter so will be happy to answer any more questions via
email/gitter.
You can also run JitPack on-premises and have full control over build
artifacts.
~~~
felhr
Fortunately not my junior colleague! just a junior dev using my lib in his
company's project. Thank you for the FAQ. I will forward it to him
------
runn1ng
All this problems seem to me like _good_ problems to have.
They all seem to stem from the fact that _github is too successful_. And too
many people are on github and too many people are using it, often in wrong
ways.
Of course github should solve them all. But still, it's still better to have
problems with too many people and too much interest, than have the opposite
problem - dying platform that people are leaving (see: sourceforge and Google
Code).
~~~
pvorb
It's not a good problem for the Open Source community after all.
------
dragonsh
Look at kallithea SCM at [http://kallithea-scm.org/](http://kallithea-
scm.org/), we have used it and in most cases it works well. Also it supports
both git and mercurial. Python should learn a lesson when they decided to move
their repository to closed source system like github. But obviously as people
use Facebook, developers use github for the same reason, network effect.
------
vmarsy
A lot of these points are fair and interesting, but I fail to grab some of the
points, especially that one:
Ability to block users from an organization.
What does blocking users mean? Blocking from commenting/making PR/cloning?
Why blocking a whole organization from an _open source_ project? What would
prevent such users to use a personal account instead to do what they
organization counterpart is blocked from anyways?
~~~
jessaustin
A more plausible interpretation would be that a particular GitHub organization
might wish to block the inputs of a particular user across all its projects.
That is, the phrase "from an organization" is adverbial and clarifies "block"
rather than "users".
~~~
vmarsy
You're probably right! I don't use organization accounts so I'm not sure what
was the issue, it would be to prevent haters to troll on every project of a
particular company?
~~~
jessaustin
Yes that would make sense to me, but keep in mind that any user may create an
"organization", so this might just be a bunch of repos associated with e.g. a
particular framework rather a particular company.
------
some-guy
I work at a large company with a central GitHub Enterprise instance, and we
use GitHub as a code-reviewing and code-hosting platform. Everything else
(including build-automation) is integrated through web-hooks to Atlassian
tools for many of the reasons noted in this letter. It works for us, but I am
hopeful that GitHub will listen and maybe someday we can have everything on
there.
------
teen
I actually disagree with some of these suggestions, I find the simplicity of
Github issues is what makes it so great. I think this should be solved with
3rd party tools, such as waffle.io
------
mpdehaan2
While I don't maintain Ansible anymore, +9 billion on this. GitHub is hard at
scale.
GitHub is fantastic because everyone is on it, but the issue system has not
improved since inception - and I felt the UI changes have actually stepped
back.
We had to implement our own bot to comment on tickets that did not appear to
follow a template, and I would have given a kingdom for a template that let
people filter their own tickets into whether they were bugs or feature
requests or doc items.
We also had a repo of common replies we copy and pasted manually (this because
there was so much traffic and me replying quickly would likely tick someone
off - but this too could have been eliminated mostly with a good template
system). Having this built-in (maybe I could have picked a web extension)
would have also been helpful.
So many hours lost that could have been features or bugfixes - and by many, I
mean totally weeks, if not cumulative months.
GitHub does the world a great service, and I love it, but this would help
tons.
I always got a response when I filed a ticket - ALWAYS - but a lot of them
were in the "we'll take that under consideration" type vein.
I feel opening GitHub RFEs up to votes is probably not the answer to serve the
maintainer side of the equation, since users outnumber maintainers, but these
needs to be done and would greatly improve OSS just based on expediting
velocity.
If you don't use the GitHub tracker you lose out on a lot of useful tickets.
However, if you use it, you are pretty much using the most unsophisticated
tracker out there.
It's good because there's a low barrier to entry, but just having a template
system - a very very very basic one, would do wonders.
A final idea is that GitHub really should have a mailing list or discussion
system. Google Groups sucks for moderation, and I _THINK_ you could probably
make something awesome. Think about how Trac and the Wiki were integrated, for
instance, and how you could automatically hyperlink between threads and
tickets. The reason I say this is often GitHub creates a "throw code at
project" methodology, which is bound to upset both contributor and maintainer
- when often a "how should I do this" discussion first saves work. Yet joining
a Google Group is a lot of commitment for people, and they probably don't want
the email. Something to think about, perhaps.
Also think about StackOverflow. It's kind of a wasteland of questions, but if
there was a users-helping-users type area, it would reduce tickets that were
not really bugs, but really requests for help. These take time to triage, and
"please instead ask over here and join this list" causes people pain.
I love all the work to keep up site reliability, maybe I'd appreciate
more/better analytics, but I totally say this wearing a GitHub octocat shirt
at the moment.
------
thockingoog
I could rant for hours about all the things GitHub doesn't do (or does wrong)
for "real" software development.
+1 from the Kubernetes project
------
john2x
I wish Github would add a "Discussions" tab for repos, so projects don't need
to create a separate Google Group (which require a Google account!) for
questions-that-are-not-quite-issues.
------
chippy
There are three groups within GitHub, and this article is about the issues
faced by the first - big open source projects (a small number).
The main bread and butter of GitHub is from private or organizational projects
and do not have these issues
The majority of accounts on GitHub are folks like the majority of HN readers -
developers, coders, hackers and do not have these issues.
So all these complaints are in a sense not applicable to the vast majority of
both GitHubs revenue generating customers and the vast majority of GitHub
users.
------
bad_user
While I like to bitch and moan about stuff myself, I don't really agree with
the first point.
What I like about GitHub's issue tracking is that (compared with alternatives,
such as Redmine or Jira) it is free form. It doesn't force users to fill
information such as steps to reproduce and I don't think it should. And that's
because the needs of every project is slightly different. Consider how
different the "steps to reproduce" are for a web user interface, versus the
usage of some library. Yes, it can be painful for an issue to not provide all
the information required, but on the other hand GitHub does a better job than
alternatives at fostering conversations and keeping people in the loop. I've
even seen projects use the GitHub issues as some sort of mailing list.
On the second point, I do agree that GitHub needs a voting system for issues.
Given that GitHub has long turned into some sort of social network, adding a
voting system for issues is a no-brainer. But then a voting system doesn't
address the problem of people getting frustrated about issues taking too long
to get fixed. +1's are annoying, but sometimes that's a feature and I've been
on both sides of the barricade.
------
rahelzer
Do the undersigned send any money to github? It might be better to phrase your
demand in the form of a question, "how much can we pay you to do this work for
us?"
~~~
rmchugh
GitHub's success is based on its community. Simple fairness says the community
should be respected and listened to, simple business says if the community
doesn't get something back, it will get pissed and go somewhere else.
~~~
tomcam
Again... No thought of how all this gets paid for?
~~~
rmchugh
By GitHub obviously. Improving their platform to maintain their momentum as a
community hub is pretty much a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned.
------
iwwr
Is there an issue tracking system out there that works on top of the Github
issue system?
~~~
rohamg
We would love your thoughts on ZenHub.io [1] - fully integrated issue
tracking, +1, estimates, burndown charts, kanban boards, even a personal todo
list - a lot of the features asked for here, right within the GitHub interface
and presented a lot more cleanly than competing products.
Disclosure: I work on ZenHub :)
[1] [https://www.zenhub.io](https://www.zenhub.io)
~~~
iwwr
Looks nice. How do I add additional organizations after the first one? Can I
send an invite to other organization managers to make themselves available for
ZenHub?
Thanks!
~~~
Cassidy57
Each organization is treated separately, all you need to do is install the
extension and visit a repo of the other org. From there you'll start a 2 week
trial and you'll be able to invite your team members and managers :)
------
ssmoot
+1 to the notification spam. Being @sam on github sucks sometimes. And as far
as I can figure out there's no way to set watching/following/notifications to
opt-in only.
So every time someone who knows a "Sam" uses @sam incorrectly in an issue I
get notified, have to unsubscribe, ignore, and leave a polite message to let
them know they're doing it wrong.
It's really lame that they've never fixed this.
------
Karunamon
Most of this stuff seems pretty common sense and reasonable. I really only
have a couple of objections:
* Issue templating.
It's one thing to prefill the entry box, it's quite another to add fields that
everyone must fill out. I quite like that filling out something on Github is
totally the opposite of filling out something on Jira.
* Issues and pull requests are often created without any adherence to the CONTRIBUTING.md contribution guidelines
This is a people problem that has plagued open source from day one. You cannot
engineer your way around it in a manner that doesn't annoy your contributors.
There was a blurb in here about getting rid of the big green "new pull
request" button, but that was when this link went to a google doc. Good - if
someone doesn't want to take PR's, then they have almost no reason to be on
Github in the first place. Put another way, it's the mark of someone that
wants a repo as a signpost of sorts without actually interacting with its
community.
------
its2complicated
I think if these people have that many issues with GitHub, they should find a
replacement. That's what happened in the Node community and it led to a better
Node. That's a big list of complaints and GitHub doesn't have much incentive
to fix 'em except to silence a bunch of cry babies that are bitching about a
free tool.
------
orf
I've felt the same way. The worst bit is notifications, so I get a
notification that someone replied to an issue I opened. How do I get there?
It's not in my notification page, I have to go to the email and click the link
from there. Things get missed.
GitHub needs to step it up. They got to the top first, but can they stay
there?
------
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
What I don't get ... why do people building free software even consider
forcing their users and in particular their contributors to use proprietary
development tools such as github? (Or, for that matter, exclude people from
contributing to their projects who only use free software.)
Next, we'll see public complaints to Microsoft because MS Word doesn't
properly support the way they want to maintain their project's documentation?
I mean, sure, feel free to complain all you like, but how is this not exactly
what was to be expected from the beginning, and why do you expect them to care
in the future, given that you just seem to have realized that they didn't care
in the past, for obvious reasons, and given that their incentives haven't
changed, and there is no reason for them to change in the future?
------
transfire
Many times, I've asked GitHub to add icons for :test:, :doc:, :admin: and a
couple others. I use them in commit messages as it helps categorize the type
of commit. This has to be the easiest kind of improvement imaginable, but they
have never bothered.
------
danielsamuels
I know they've only recently released new permissions for organisations, but
they're still extremely lacking. As far as I can see, there's no way of
setting permissions at a group level.
As an example of how this would be used, we have a Github team within our
organisation which is used for non-technical people to post bugs. These people
have no reason to be able to see or push code to the repository, they only
need to be able to create issues. This applies to every repository in the
organisation. As far as I can see, and without manually adding every single
repository to the team, there's no way of setting global permissions
permissions for a team. This seems like a major oversight to me.
~~~
teen
I just create a single repo for all issues, cross repo, and manage it with
waffle.io. Works well for me, but ymmv
------
Jyaif
I suspect they are focusing on developing their enterprise offering.
Anyway, I found that [http://feathub.com/](http://feathub.com/) addressed my
frustration about the absence of a voting system.
------
kkoch986
I would just love if they could add target _blank on all the links in comments
and issues. I'm constantly navigating away from the issue to view links in
question and then realizing the tab with the issue is gone.
------
kiloreux
My experience with Github support is terrible, if not one of the worst, I once
had an issue and contacted their support and it took them 1 month to respond
to me (literally) I was really surprised by that.
~~~
daniel-levin
I had the opposite experience. I am on the free student plan for private
repos. It has to be renewed annually. It wasn't clear to my how to do so. I
asked, and Scott from Github support contacted me in under a minute and sorted
it out. I was very impressed.
------
shmerl
It's also annoying that Github sometimes is missing some basic features like
attachments to bug reports and comments for instsance. All mature bug trackers
have such feature.
------
itomato
Why do you want GitHub to solve the (very) specific problems of issue and
defect tracking?
They make a facility available as a nicety, but if your project has legitimate
Global impact, you should be looking at (or bootstrapping) a counterpart.
Don't have the revenue for JIRA? Apply for the Free license.
Don't have the stomach for Bugzilla? Turn out a Node/Go alternative.
Don't have the business alignment with Clearquest or Rally? Lower your
expectations to suit your Free (as in beer) SCM tool.
------
jarjoura
There's a lot of great feature requests for issues at the bottom of the
document. Not sure why the document highlights only 3 things above the
signatures.
Yet, I 100% agree with them. I do not understand why Github issues are so
basic. The only feature I feel was added in all of 2015 was making the logging
of every metadata change extremely verbose (read: maybe too noisy now?!).
"Person assigned to the issue"
"Person added label"
"Person removed label"
------
justplay
I personally experiencing this issue. i wrote about this in 2014, you can
check here [http://paritosh.passion8.co.in/post/96619506751/dear-
github-...](http://paritosh.passion8.co.in/post/96619506751/dear-github-its-
time-to-put-karma-in-user) although i am addressing the problem in different
way but the issue is same.
------
technion
Don’t make it so easy to submit bad PRs
I recurrently refer to this[0] PR, and the subsequent discussion, as the
reason why, if any project of mine gets any bigger - it will not be accepting
Github pull requests.
[0]
[https://github.com/technion/maia_mailguard/pull/42](https://github.com/technion/maia_mailguard/pull/42)
~~~
placeybordeaux
Haha what a crazy final exchange.
> uh oh, someone is still sulking [...] We really don't care about the drama
Oh, okay buddy.
------
pekk
GitHub also does not allow deletion of bullshit issues.
------
ajsharp
I get that these are super frustrating issues for these people ( _cough_ guys)
that maintain these repos, but there's something telling about it that it's
all JS people. That last cute lil paragraph really sums it up for me:
> Hopefully none of these are a surprise to you as we’ve told you them before.
> We’ve waited years now for progress on any of them. If GitHub were open
> source itself, we would be implementing these things ourselves as a
> community—we’re very good at that!
LOL. I can't tell if this is "go-fuck-yourself"-level passive aggression, or
mindless hopefulness that there might actually be a universe in which Github
(or a company like it, with hundreds of millions of dollars of venture
funding) could be open source. If I worked at Github, my first thought after
reading this would be "mmmmm yeeeeaaaaaaa y'can g'fuck yr'self", while the
second thought would be "yea, you're not wrong". Generally, passive aggression
gets you nowhere when you're asking for something from someone/something who
owes you nothing (I know, I know, they "owe" their customers _everything_ ).
The Node/React/JS community is hilariously entitled, petulant and childish.
The tone of this whole letter is so god damned millennial, it's mind-boggling,
because they're not wrong about anything they're asking for. But it's _how_
they ask for it that leaves a dry, acid-y taste in your mouth.
~~~
Matachines
Interestingly most of these people are older than the millennial category
~~~
ajsharp
Fooled me ;)
------
dabernathy89
People often ask why WordPress doesn't use Github for its primary development
(they do have official read-only mirrors there), and it's not just because
they already had an SVN-based system in place when Github came to be. It's
because the tooling they already had was more sophisticated, especially
regarding issues.
------
cbr
We’d like issues to gain a first-class voting system,
and for content-less comments like “+1” or “:+1:” or
“me too” to trigger a warning and instructions on how
to use the voting mechanism.
Why bother users with a warning? Turn it into a vote, and then highlight the
vote icon so you can see what happened.
------
vjeux
A proposal for a better way to deal with github issues: a discussion tab.
[https://github.com/dear-github/dear-
github/issues/44](https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/44)
------
danpalmer
I'd settle for just a fix to the (minor) data-loss bug that I reported nearly
a year ago, and which still crops up once a month or so.
That, and something for code review. Pull Requests are terrible for code
review, and it wouldn't take that much to make them so much better.
~~~
piotrkaminski
I got frustrated waiting for improved PR code review, so I built
[https://reviewable.io](https://reviewable.io). It's best suited for private
repos (since there's a learning curve that make throw off potential open
source contributors) but it addresses a lot of the issues with PRs. Take a
look!
~~~
danpalmer
I've actually looked at Reviewable multiple times for use within our team, but
never decided to use it. From my usage of the demo, it feels complicated.
There are a lot of controls on the screen, and I struggle to tell what exactly
I'm looking at at any given time.
I also tried the demo, and was shocked to see that Reviewable had edited our
PR descriptions to include a big "Review on Reviewable" badge. We currently
make heavy use of PR descriptions in quite specific formats, and it felt like
Reviewable was forcing itself upon us.
To be clear, I'm really glad someone is looking at this problem, and
Reviewable looks like a step in the right direction. I'm just quite
opinionated on code review and developer tools, and I feel like it could be
much better.
~~~
piotrkaminski
Thanks for checking out Reviewable, and sorry it didn't work out for you. It's
definitely a more complex tool than plain PRs but you also get a lot more
functionality in return.
If you checked it out before I added the interactive onboarding (aka
butterflies) and on-demand help you might want to try (yet) again, since I've
been told it makes it a lot more approachable. Otherwise, and if you have the
time, I'd love to sit down with you (virtually or otherwise) to do a short
user study so I can better understand the UX pain points and maybe fix them.
As for the badge, it's actually mostly there to help developers find their way
to the review. In public repos, it's also the marketing payment for the
otherwise free service, but in private repos I can switch it off for you (the
flag doesn't have a UI yet).
I'm always looking to improve Reviewable, but in the end it's unabashedly
opinionated too, and sometimes those opinions will clash -- I'm OK with that.
I'd rather make a tool that some people will love than an enterprise monster
that everyone will love to hate. :)
------
billconan
One annoying issue I found with github is that it doesn't provide a discussion
board. a lot of times, I have a question to ask, it doesn't mean I found a bug
or anything needs progress tracking, but I have to go through the "github
issues".
------
qaq
To what degree a company has to not give a f$#% when maintainers of largest
projects on a platform can't get any feedback (compounded by a fact that some
of those maintainers are very prominent employees of largest github paying
customers)
------
kmfrk
Being a maintainer on a project with some minor community on GitHub is such a
garbage experience.
It’s pretty neat as a general user, but at least you get the impression with
BitBucket that they prioritize productivity and project management. And the
task system hasn't received any significant updates since their inception -
which is a shame, because tasks are an awesome invention, they just have to be
implemented awfully with issues.
I also remember that we recently had to move the entire decision-making
process to Slack instead where I suggested we just use the emoji voting system
to make our decisions with.
What really gets to me is how _adamantly_ GitHub has ignored all the people
who've gone on about this forever. Last time they seemed to care marginally
was when jacobian finally managed to twist their arm and get them to implement
the Close Issue feature, because one repo issue was a radioactive pit of abuse
and invective.
~~~
mpdehaan2
I wonder if the whole "managerless culture" is to blame and is unfixable? (In
other words, why hasn't SOMEONE had this thought about issues in N years? One
is they deem it not a problem, another could be that they think to optimize
for the filer, and the maintainer doesn't matter, or... there's no
organization at all?)
There could be (theoretically) no one to make anyone do anything, and perhaps
the issue tracker is either a quagmire of a codebase or something no one wants
to touch because something else is more exciting?
That's one theory.
My other theory is they spend a lot of time on scaling problems and/or GitHub
enterprise (which I haven't seen) -- and don't really do features anymore.
But it does feel there is no vision for changes to GitHub (maybe they think
it's "solved") and it's ceasing to evolve in noticeable ways in any direction.
Can't really be sure. But I find it interesting. Again, the core is good. It's
just curious to watch it so closely and not see the needle moving in any
perceptible way.
~~~
kmfrk
I like the theory of the flat-office culture or philosophy affecting this.
Then again, it could be the kind of anarchic Libertarian or laissez-faire bent
that we see with reddit that makes it exceedingly different to grant special
permissions and privileges, especially across subreddits/issues/users/orgs. Or
maybe user experience just doesn't matter for today's start-ups; maybe we've
passed the Overton window for start-ups deciding it's not worth caring about
their users.
A lot of the time, I feel like more of a user+ than a(n) (super)admin on my
own repos. I might as well have the permissions and tools to ruin my own
project - in the name of pure unadulterated freedom if for no other reason.
The dashboard and notification system have always been POS, too, so it might
just be that everything that basically isn't tethered to a GUI is on the
bottom of the totem pole.
------
nikolay
GitHub does certain things very well, other - not so much. I really think the
best way to get them to focus is to start contributing massively to GitLab.
Anyway, implementing just voting won't be a such a good idea in the time of
Emoji Reactions!
~~~
metasean
Actually, GitLab counts some emojis as votes - so you can have your :cake: and
eat it too ;-)
\-
[https://about.gitlab.com/2015/11/22/gitlab-8-2-released/](https://about.gitlab.com/2015/11/22/gitlab-8-2-released/)
\-
[https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/pull/5724](https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/pull/5724)
------
Zikes
Issue spam (in the literal sense) definitely needs addressed as well:
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CYI31g1UQAUXQbs.png](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CYI31g1UQAUXQbs.png)
~~~
pekk
It's my project, why can't I just delete issues like any other bug tracker?
~~~
Zikes
The issues were deleted in fairly short order, but their notifications were
still sent out to all repository watchers and persisted beyond the issue
deletion. Also, most issues were generated mere seconds apart from accounts
less than a day old.
So the issue isn't that GitHub didn't let them clean up the issues after the
fact, but that there were no a) rate limiting options, b) user reputation
options, or c) issue submission filtering options.
Any one of those three would have reduced the impact significantly.
------
peterfpf
This resonated so much with me
PS, it was moved to [https://github.com/dear-github/dear-
github](https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github)
------
jessaustin
Please update the link to [https://github.com/dear-github/dear-
github](https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github)
~~~
colinbartlett
Thanks, I've been trying all day to open the original link on mobile and it
just brings my phone to its knees and never opens. Not even sure what is
behind that link other than perhaps a very large Google doc?
------
yingbo
Funny. It's like "Hi, you are rich. We like you. You should onate your money".
There are tradeoffs, so pick services you like.
------
petke
I guess I don't know how to use githib. You can send bug reports on a project.
But how do you send questions or ask for advice?
------
alexchamberlain
Totally agree with what has been said. However, I find it interesting that
most of the signatories displayed were for JS projects.
------
edem
gog.com has a great mechanic for this which might work here called a community
wishlist [1] where people can submit games whey wish to see and people can
vote on it and eventually they get things done when possible.
[1][http://www.gog.com/wishlist](http://www.gog.com/wishlist)
------
ChuckMcM
I am interested in understanding how much recurring revenue Github is
receiving for hosting these projects.
------
bl4ckdu5t
I've never seen any issues spammed with +1s like the TravisCI request for
Bitbucket support
------
lifeisstillgood
Can anyone post a précis/examples - apparently I do not have rights to see any
spreadsheets at all.
------
thewhitetulip
we maybe need a feature of hotness of a bug, "affects me too", that'll
prioritize issues out of a bucket load of issues, plus on github you first
raise an issue then it is sorted into feature request or bug, can be made
better
------
jp_sc
Classic JavaScripters reaction: throw more tooling at it
------
dang
Url changed from
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/14X72QaDT9g6bnWr0lopDYida...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/14X72QaDT9g6bnWr0lopDYidajTSzMn8WrwsSLFSr-
FU/preview?ts=5698049d), which points to this.
------
johnlbevan2
NB: Duplicate post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10904693](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10904693)
~~~
dang
Since they're both near the top we might as well treat the later post (which
is the other one) as the duplicate.
~~~
minimaxir
The post with ~110 points was killed in favor of the ~50 point post at the
time. In that case using time as the tie breaker might not be the best since
people will have to upvote again.
~~~
dang
In general you're right, but this story was guaranteed not to lack for
upvotes. Indeed it went to #1 as soon as we buried the other one as a dupe.
I realize it's not a big deal, and it's actually a great sign about the HN
community that almost no one cares much about karma. But we do want to try
harder to give the original submitter credit, because then the incentive is
aligned with what's best for the community: finding good stories that haven't
been posted yet.
------
spellboots
:+1:
~~~
snickmy
ahahaha
------
wanstrocity
Chris Wanstrocity is an inept leader, social activists roam the halls in self
glory about their contributions to the world while Kakul spends money on
retreats and hires senior product people who have zero open source or dev ops
experience. This company needs intensive care with new leadership asap or they
will be doomed, Gitlab is salivating right now.
------
xpaulbettsx
While I applaud the initiative, it's also a pretty strong indictment of the
JavaScript / node.js community that there is not even a _single_ non-male OSS
maintainer on this list of important JS projects.
What is being done in the JS community by those who lead it to make progress
on this and who is leading that charge? If the answer is "Nobody", why is that
true?
~~~
arasmussen
Why did this get downvoted? Ugh.
~~~
qaq
Hmm what does this have to do a) with topic b) with node.js?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The curious case of the mobile MOBA - bruizar
http://www.bartverschoor.com/#!The-curious-case-of-the-mobile-MOBA/c1ld3/4770C7CC-7074-4466-B6E8-6C356055CECA
======
nugget
I think the most competitive RTS games require a mouse (or other peripheral
device) to achieve the desired level of immersion. I'm not sure how to best
explain the difference between finger-tapping on a screen and using a mouse,
but having spent lots of time on both platforms, it's definitely there.
~~~
XMPPwocky
Another issue: lag. I have yet to see a wi-fi connection without occasional
periods of enormous latency, packet loss, or both. Cellular data is even
worse.
RTSs and MOBAs both seriously suffer under those conditions.
Who's going to plug an Ethernet cable into their tablet just for one game?
~~~
bruizar
One of the nice aspects of tablet gaming (Hearthstone, Vainglory), is that
bringing your tablet with you to a friend is a frictionless way of setting up
a 'lan party'. Vainglory is best played with team members sitting in the same
room. Gone are the days that you'd have to carry with you bulky laptops or
worst, transport your tower/desktop to a friend.
On wifi: The privilege I enjoy of living in a country that has historically
had among the fastest internet connections in the world biases my view on
this. I've been called an LPB (Low Ping Bastard) since 1997 :-). From the
games of Vainglory I played I found it feels very responsive. Many places
don't have fast internet connections, so you do make a fair point, but I doubt
that wifi is the bottleneck here.
On cellphone data: The cellphone contract I use has an unlimited data plan
fast enough to stream youtube videos; but it is not yet reliable enough to
play Vainglory from the passenger seat. It is essentially unplayable even
though I have an above average data plan. I realize that until more providers
switch to a flat fee structure and upgrade their infrastructure, 'true mobile'
gaming for RTSs and FPSs isn't going to happen. However, these type of games
require so much cognitive attention that the situations where you'd play this
on-the-go is very limited (e.g. domestic trips via train, car: passenger seat
and plane (international trips are too expensive due to roaming fees)). You
don't really want to be playing Vainglory when you are out camping in the
woods, I hope :-).
------
bribri
Vainglory is an incredibly fun MOBA. I could see it getting really popular,
especially as the larger gain adoption
~~~
bruizar
Hi Bribri,
I wrote this article a year ago and I decided to submit it because the take
aways are still very relevant today. When I wrote the article, Vainglory
wasn't released yet. I've played a fair amount of Vainglory and they did
indeed crack the code for a mobile MOBA. The Halcyon Fold map from Vainglory
is a derivative of Twisted Treeline which offers enough strategic depth to be
played at the competitive level, unlike Zynga's Solstice Arena. This, and the
fluidity of the game sets it apart from the others imo. I still believe Super
Evil Megacorp would have been better served with a more tongue-in-cheek visual
style / IP if they want to address the entirety of the iPad install-base. This
would have lowered the entry barrier for those who do not particularly enjoy
the high fantasy style and would allow them to piggy-back off of successful
mobile predecessors such as Rovio's Angry Birds and Halfbrick's Fruit Ninja by
means of profit sharing on guest appearances. I'm very optimistic about
Vainglory's future.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Rewriting a large production system in Go (2013) - kid0m4n
http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2013/08/rewriting-large-production-system-in-go.html
======
lbarrow
Probably needs a [2013] tag. Previous discussion was here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6234736](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6234736)
~~~
dang
Thanks. Added.
------
kid0m4n
Quote from the linked paper [1]:
The majority of Flywheel code is written in Go, a fact we mention only to
dispel any remaining notion that Go is not a robust, production-ready language
and runtime environment.
[1]:
[http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43447.html](http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43447.html)
~~~
mratzloff
At my company, our high-volume Go systems are some of the most reliable and
predictable ones we run.
------
joshpadnick
Could someone familiar with the Go ecosystem comment on how well Go works with
relational and NoSQL databases? Specifically, I'm interested in libraries that
serve an ORM (or ORM-like) function, or that are non-blocking.
For example, in the Java world, libraries like jOOQ[1] make type-safe SQL
construction a breeze and allow you to make your relational schema a "first-
class citizen" of your app, versus a mere afterthought of how your ORM happens
to represent them.
Or in the Scala world, there's a non-blocking MongoDB driver called
ReactiveMongo[2].
Would love to hear how this compares to the Golang ecosystem.
[1] [http://www.jooq.org/](http://www.jooq.org/) [2]
[http://reactivemongo.org/](http://reactivemongo.org/)
~~~
bbulkow
My open source NoSQL database, Aerospike, has made a strong commitment to Go.
I first posted to golang-nuts in 2009, and our native Go client has been out
for a while ( [https://github.com/aerospike/aerospike-client-
go](https://github.com/aerospike/aerospike-client-go) ). We've supported the
GothamGo meetup, which was a great session if anyone was in NYC that saturday.
Shameless plug over, please forgive me, but you did ask about Go and NoSQL.
"non-blocking" is kind of a funny concept in go, because since they have green
threads, even what might seem blocking isn't "really" blocking. Not sure quite
what you mean - do you really mean "using channels and goroutines as the
interface" ?
The comment about Go's typing system not working well with NoSQL is certainly
true. I find it's annoying working with JSON - similar problem - but the JSON
tools have these nice ways of tagging your fields with the JSON fields for
easy conversion. We might have to look at this with Aerospike.
I spent time with one company, LiquidM in Berlin, who rewrote a PHP production
system ( that's not "muscular C developers" :-) and had a very, very positive
experience. They told me their switchover to GoLang was incredible, with line
counts reduced massively (like 3x) and performance up 10x and programmer
productivity way up. I was trying to find a blog post about their experience,
but nothing's coming up.
The most annoying problem with Go is its lack of performance compared to JVM
(including probably Scala), where common operations are usually 2x ~ 3x faster
runtime, in production. In my opinion, the GoLang people need to stop blaming
their garbage collector, because even with GC off Go is far slower.
The GoLang argument is code is easier and funner to write, which is certainly
true, and Go is still an evolving implementation.
Go's big thrust this year is solid support for ARM, likely so they can support
Android well. I'm running Go on my Raspberry Pi2 (and my original Pis, but
they only have one core so it seems a little dumb). It is a fun language.
------
curtis
Previous HN Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6234736](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6234736)
------
philsnow
> If I could get out of the 1970s and use an editor other than vi, maybe I
> would get some help from an IDE in this regard, but I staunchly refuse to
> edit code with any tool that requires using a mouse.
Ob"Fallacy of the excluded middle": you can get this kind of contextual
information in emacs pretty easily.
~~~
Dewie2
> > , but I staunchly refuse to edit code with any tool that requires using a
> mouse.
Like Acme.
------
hippo8
When I meet a function and I have no idea what it returns, the lazy thing I do
is
foo, bar := someFunc(baz)
int(foo)
Most times the conversion does not work and I see a nice little error with the
type of foo.
------
rudiger
Coming from an Erlang on Emacs background, does vim not allow you to follow
variable declarations to their definitions or otherwise get contextually
relevant information?
~~~
wtf_is_up
It does: [https://github.com/fatih/vim-go](https://github.com/fatih/vim-go)
------
IndianAstronaut
On the topic of rewriting, has anyone had difficulty refactoring Go code?
Having the compiler scream at you whenever you decide to leave a variable
undeclared seems to make this more challenging as opposed to just having your
IDE point out to you a variable is unused.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Modern life is lonely – We all need someone to help - dijit
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/16/modern-life-lonely-isolation-hardwired-lives
======
grondilu
Lately I've become more and more convinced that indeed, modern society sucks,
or at the very least that I, and people like me, am not well equipped to
flourish in it. I'm sure some people are though, but I suspect they are
becoming the minority.
Few days ago I also read Ted Kaczynski's essay[1], and it's hard for me not to
acknowledge how right he is on many points.
However, I do believe it is possible to survive all this, and that stoicism is
a way. Kaczynski wrote for instance :
"It is true that primitive man is powerless against some of the things that
threaten him; disease for example. But he can accept the risk of disease
stoically. It is part of the nature of things, it is no one’s fault, unless it
is the fault of some imaginary, impersonal demon. But threats to the modern
individual tend to be MAN-MADE. They are not the results of chance but are
IMPOSED on him by other persons whose decisions he, as an individual, is
unable to influence. Consequently he feels frustrated, humiliated and angry."
Is it not possible for the modern man to accept the drawbacks of modern life,
including loneliness, just as stoically as the primitive man was accepting
adversity and death? Whether adversity is man-made or "natural" should not
matter for the individual. From the stoic point of view, in each case it is
just an external factor.
It seems to me that as long as someone understands what is happening to him,
he can make his mind at peace with it, whatever it is. Was it not after all
one of the lessons of Epictetus, that what matters is not so much what happens
to us, but how we react to it? That as long as we are ready for the worst, we
can not really be troubled by it?
1\. [http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf](http://editions-
hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf)
~~~
madaxe_again
It’s also possible to live differently. I played the stoic for decades until
the isolation of being a business owner living in a city pushed me over the
brink.
I’ve struggled with loneliness my entire life - and adult life has been worse
than childhood. I started boarding school at six - and while I was homesick
for some time, the camaraderie of other inmates, uh, students, was the only
thing that kept me mildly sane - I had people to look out for and protect, and
similarly people looked out for and protected me.
As an adult, I’ve unwittingly repeatedly chosen lonely paths - moving
frequently for several years before settling down and starting a business. I
spent my days surrounded by people with nobody to relate to - I can be
friendly with employees and clients, but I can’t be friends. I can’t confide
about what worries me.
Either way, I broke - I spent most of 2016 having anxiety attacks that’d see
me vomit for weeks on end, to the extent that I ended up hospitalised several
times with severe dehydration and hypoglycaemia. I passed on the reins and
left.
I now live on the edge of a village in the middle of nowhere north wales. I
have drinks or go for walks with with my 93 and 84 year old neighbours most
days. I’ve made friends with all sorts, just by saying hello to folks as they
walk past the cottage.
My financial future is uncertain - but as I write this I am so happy it brings
tears to my eyes.
We’ve really forgotten what’s important - and there’s a story about a chap
called Midas that we could all do to learn a thing or two from.
~~~
1_player
Thanks for this, the first half of the comment perfectly sums up my last few
years.
I've moved out of London to try and live a more comfortable and less hectic
life in a smaller city, now I find I'm so alone I want to move back to the
city just to be with my friends.
I'd love to be in the middle of nowhere, or anywhere else in the world, but
the "friends" problem is always so understated. I _need_ friends(hip), or I
don't function. Even as an "antisocial" person, as my friends like to say,
friendship is the most important thing in life.
Funnily, the fact that I'm being productive while a big part of myself is just
a huge hole is impressive in itself.
~~~
WillReplyfFood
It feels like beeing a black hole, with a thin crust of human on top,
sometimes it hurts so much, that you can allmost hear a sucking, swirling
sound.
------
blowski
Personally, going to Church has helped me suffer less with loneliness. I've
made meaningful friendships, and relationships with people from all sorts of
backgrounds. It has given more meaning to my life than anything I found at
work, or by random socialising.
Of course, YMMV. Please take this as a random anecdote, not as evangelism.
~~~
mwang
I know a few people who have suggested attending a Unitarian Church
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism))
as a way to get the social benefits of church without having to subscribe to a
religious belief. Many congregations include atheists and agnostics.
~~~
toomuchtodo
There is also Sunday Assembly:
[https://www.sundayassembly.com/](https://www.sundayassembly.com/)
"The Sunday Assembly was started by Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, two
comedians who were on the way to a gig in Bath when they discovered they both
wanted to do something that was like church but totally secular and inclusive
of all—no matter what they believed."
~~~
hkmurakami
Had no idea such a thing existed. Thanks for the information.
------
mikeokner
I think a large part of the problem is that the younger generations have grown
up with pretty strong expectations placed upon them to do things like go to
college (at whatever cost), land a white collar job, climb the ladder, etc.
The obvious solution is to own your decisions and start doing what _you_ think
is right for you, but it's far easier said than done to step out from under
the expectations you've been saddled with your entire life.
~~~
Bartweiss
Expectations and also demands; as the precariat grows, and the unnecessariat
under it, there's steadily more risk to striking out on one's own.
Certainly a six-figure salary is not necessary for happiness, but if you find
yourself working long hours to make rent in some midwestern town it's going to
cut into your opportunities for self-discovery and joy. And if you got wise a
bit too late, after picking up federal student loans, you might well find that
your dream career is genuinely off the table. (Found your true calling as a
firefighter? Better keep up on those loans or you'll lose your license.)
It seems like we've created a system where the straight-and-narrow is
increasingly narrow, and the cliffs around it are increasingly high. It's
still worth finding one's own path, but in both social and purely-practical
terms it's gotten steadily harder.
~~~
77pt77
> It seems like we've created a system where the straight-and-narrow is
> increasingly narrow, and the cliffs around it are increasingly high. It's
> still worth finding one's own path, but in both social and purely-practical
> terms it's gotten steadily harder.
On the one hand yes, on the other hand mobility at every level has never been
greater, even if still not at the optimal level.
~~~
dota_fanatic
Can you provide some evidence for this claim? Inequality has grown pretty
systematically since the '70s, and though I don't have the link, there was a
study recently demonstrating that it's harder to move up than it was for our
parent's parents...
------
RandomInteger4
Best solution to loneliness is to gain massive debt, become dirt poor, and
battle daily with attention deficit issues while you struggle to learn and
become productive enough to get a job in the software industry with a pretty
horrible work history, an incomplete bachelors, and a near worthless
associates.
Living one rung lower on Maslow's hierarchy makes you forget about the desire
to be around people, or even leave the house (father's) all that often (2% of
the time).
Granted, I think maybe my concern for my health (irrational or not) has been
exacerbated, so I've traded loneliness for frequent panic attacks concerning
whether or not I might have cancer or a heart defect. On the plus side, I know
for a fact that I've torn back muscles weight lifting, so all I really need is
the medicaid office to get back to me after submitting my 4th application with
no phone calls or emails as to my status.
~~~
mattmanser
Ouch. Hope it gets better.
Have you tried subreddits like
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Anxiety/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Anxiety/),
/r/offmychest/, or something like 7 cups of tea?
As the story relates, we're more like to offer practical advice here on HN
rather than the emotional support you probably need right now.
It does, honestly, get better. You're making the right moves, even if it does
all look desperate right now.
~~~
RandomInteger4
Danke. I'm cool for the most part right now. I've come to embrace my anxiety
to an extent. If I'm able to type, then that means it's mostly not affecting
me at the moment. Late night just has me feeling a lack of inhibition and dis-
concern for my privacy on these matters.
As far as caffeine goes, I don't know what I'd do without it. Up until
recently I was on 2 doses of 3 cups (measurement unit) of espresso per day,
but I've realized that I needed to up the dosage, or at least the source. So I
went down to 1 dose of 3 cups of espresso + 1 caffeine pill later on, 1
Monster Energy (lowest caffeine content of all my sources I believe), and 1
cup of green tea. This also has the side benefit of pain relief from the
muscle tear issues.
As for software development, I'm in the process of learning the ins and outs
of OAuth and OpenID Connect prior to implementing a sign up and login. Using
Node, so it seems like there is a wealth of tutorials out there for passport,
and apparently many of them are insecure (or so I've read), so I want to fully
understand the concepts behind the most commonly accepted as secure protocols
for Authorization and Authentication. Please correct me if I've said anything
gibberish; still learning.
~~~
mattmanser
Caffeine can cause anxiety, I gave it up for a while when I started suffering
from panic attacks and it helped. I was lucky that I had no withdrawl
headaches.
Also, sleep. Good sleep, a bit of regular exercise and a bit of a routine are
a great deal of help to stablizing your mood and anxieties.
OAuth and OpenID are completely, ridiculously, utterly, pathetically over-
complicated. It's one of the worst specs ever released. You do not need to
know it to be a professional developer. Most professional developers will have
no clue how it works. Trust me, I have over a decade of experience. If you can
get a plug and play library, I really would just do that. Especially while
learning development.
I mean, if you're enjoying it, go ahead, but OAuth is basically stupid. A
cruel joke inflicted on developers and a lesson in how not to make a spec.
~~~
RandomInteger4
Understood, and that's generally what I've been taking away from it, but I
have a mind towards security and while I don't need to fully understand it to
be a developer, I must understand it for my own purposes, as I would (1) feel
completely ashamed of myself for blindly following tutorials, especially on
this topic, and (2) would not want to adopt the liability that comes with
implementing an insecure system for a client that has a bigger wallet than me
and wants to crush me financially even further for making a mistake that
harmed their customers or business. Is such a scenario likely? I don't know;
doubtful, but still, I'd feel like an impostor.
Truthfully, the spec itself doesn't seem too difficult to understand; it's
mostly my inability to stay focused that causes me the problems I deal with
when studying and coding. Perhaps the true culprit of our times are browser
tabs; the more I have open, the more overwhelming it becomes to consume them.
As for caffeine and anxiety it's better than the depression that I feel with a
lack of caffeine. Caffeine also has a kind of analgesic effect, or rather
maybe the lack of caffeine causes me to have more pain in my spine for some
reason. Sleep isn't too difficult with chronic melatonin use. Your body never
adapts to melatonin as with other substances, so you can maintain the same
dose (5mg in my case) with consistent efficacy. I'm out within 30 minutes
after taking melatonin.
------
estebancastano
For the past year, I've been working on the social isolation problem. Here's
the idea we're currently developing. Would love to hear folks' feedback. Would
you be excited about using this?
"A social app, like Tinder but for hangouts with friends.
See what your friends want to do, and swipe right to show you’re interested.
You can also join hangouts in the global feed to instantly expand your social
circle. Hangouts are capped at 10 people so you can actually get to know each
other. Post things you want to do, like "Hike in John Muir". When 10 people
swipe right, a chat opens up so you can coordinate when to meet & who is down
to go."
~~~
rorykoehler
These ideas always ended up becoming dating apps in the past so the idea to
restrict it to your existing social circle is a smart one. I would consider
using it if it was well executed.
~~~
solarkraft
But what if I want to build one up? I think something like a dating app (but
not for dating) could work. You'd just have to do some a policing to avoid the
trend towards people trying to find love, since both apparently don't work
together.
------
unabst
We're paying the price for the proliferation of existentialism, and it's
flavor of capitalism and justice.
"You're on your own" is good when reaping rewards and thriving in a
meritocracy, but not when you need help, are losing, or just want warmth.
But a healthy dose of loneliness is what has us reaching for each other.
So we should all just give in, and reach for each other.
Natural feeling tend to take care of themselves, so long as we're capable of
being honest.
Of course, that's the other issue.
~~~
bbctol
How are you defining "existentialism" here?
~~~
unabst
"I think therefore I am." The essence that precedes the thought. "Our actions
are the outcome of our being."
The notion that success is reserved for the deserving, and criminals are
devils that require punishment. That there are good and bad people; good do
good, and bad do bad. All we need to do is sort them. And that all depends on
our individual essence, our free will.
Everything good pre-exists and we shall be the judge.
As opposed to,
"There are no actors, only actions" and "We are the sum of our actions."
"I think therefore I'm thinking."
"I committed a crime, got caught, and that is why I'm in jail."
"I witnessed his birth, I changed his diapers, I taught him how to walk, and
he follows me around. He must be my son."
I actually don't have the name for the latter philosophy. I really wish I
knew. It's along the lines of Nietzsche and Aristotle, but I can't say they
put their finger on it. Any pointers welcome.
It also holds the key:
"I'm lonely. And that's the only reason I need you by my side."
That's all we need.
~~~
bbctol
The latter philosophy is called, uh, existentialism, so I'm not sure quite
what happened here.
~~~
unabst
Then what flavor is it?
With one existence precedes all phenomena.
With the other phenomena precedes all existence.
------
50
I think I have suffered from loneliness before. A stomach-stabbing loneliness
really. No friends to truly communicate, going on car drives with no
destination/intention but to just think, walking in the evening hoping someone
would strike a conversation, etc. Though I find my loneliness usually arises
because I expect something different than what already is. Expecting something
different than what is is a way to suffer (accept what is, and you’re free?).
Consequently, I find that I must make a home out of this loneliness. You know
how when you move into a new place and you are organizing or reorganizing or
maybe decorationing your work station at home to make it feel comfortable and
home-y? Well, that’s what I think I had to do internally to make my loneliness
not loneliness. I suppose convert loneliness into solitude.
Then again, I have this vague thought that many people suffer from loneliness
(depression, etc) because of how we are raised, how society, culture,
civilization, have molded our minds. I think in modern day, consciousness is
everything. But because it’s an unknowable object, we ignore it or worse:
pretend it doesn’t exist. Consequently, we end up hard-headed in a matrix of
half-baked beliefs, lonely, depressed, fearful, and anxious. I don’t know, the
whole social order I think is set up in order to avoid the unknowable, if you
will, of what everything is. The idea that the radio is blaring at all times.
That we are all taught to listen to channels but never taught to turn it off
and listen to the silence. If only we were to listen we would see that from
the unknowable arises a reflection; the consciousness of everything, the I-am.
At this point, I think, sort of in the poverty of true humility, everything
that appears is seen as a miracle. The birds chirping in the morning is as
much of a miracle as being in the perfect spot in the knowable universe for
life to exist. The question then arises: Why is it that we remain deaf/blind
running around anxiously in the noise when pure consciousness is right here
out in the open all the time?
Above all: I think loneliness may be combated through several forms: reading
really good fiction, doing drugs (weed in particular), having passionate sex,
or any form of escapism. I find that the latter are only temporary ways to
combat loneliness. If we would like to conquer loneliness, making a home of
yourself and reflecting on what truly is is really important.
~~~
ForRealsies
Have you thought about taking upon more responsibility? Be it to your
community, to a volunteer organization, pets, and even plants. Modern society
is malnourished when it comes to the sense of belonging.
“The higher degree of responsibility that you agree voluntarily to try to bear
the richer your life will be.” -Jordan Peterson
------
ensiferum
And talk about modern online dating. It takes defeat to a wholly new level.
Back in the day one could be rejected by a handful of ladies in a conventional
setting (bar, club, whatever). Now when you're dating online you can instantly
rejected by an infinite number of women \o/
;-)
------
partycoder
Modern society may have issues, but it as bad as it is usually portrayed.
10,000 years ago, you would live in a tribe. If you were not popular among
your tribe, it is likely you would be either exiled and forced to live in
solitude and die during winter or be constantly subject to violence.
2,000 years ago, you would live only to work in a farm or be in a state of
perpetual war. To make things worse, literacy rate was something around
0.001%, if you were lucky.
1,000 years ago, you would be essentially doing the same while dying from a
plague. There was no sanitation of any kind.
200 years ago, you would be working at a factory and going to war every 30
years.
100 years ago, there was no radio or TV, so you still had stuff like this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot)
About 60 years ago women were predominantly housewives and were vulnerable to
all sorts of abuse.
So no, right now things are better.
~~~
jonsterling
Wait, do you think that the Tulsa race riot happened because people didn't
have radio or TV? Wtf?
Race riots occurred in this country because of the acute structural
contradiction between the white settler-nation and the other nations; these
contradictions have not been resolved by radio and TV in the interim. We will
see more of these riots in the future.
~~~
partycoder
I do not think that.
But I think is that more people would not have been OK with that level of
violence and destruction if they had a chance to actually see it, rather than
presented through words on a newspaper.
------
wu-ikkyu
>How can a person be expected to be happy with, and in, themselves when the
eternal message is: “Try harder, do better, climb higher, don’t fail”?
"Success is as dangerous as failure. Hope is as hollow as fear.
What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure? Whether you go up
the ladder or down it, Your position is shaky. When you stand with your two
feet on the ground, You will always keep your balance.
What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear? Hope and fear are both
phantoms That arise from thinking of the self. When we don't see the self as
self, What do we have to fear?
See the world as your self. Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self; Then you can care for all things."
-Lao Tzu
------
gerbilly
We have to meet people more in real life.
Humans need face to face contact to be fully happy.
Why, as supposedly modern humans, do we have to rediscover this?
~~~
crimsonalucard
Its how we live and dine. Prehistoric humans ate, hunted and lived together as
tribes while at the same time acting very antisocial to other competing
tribes. We are built to be social at the same time we are also built to be
wary and even hostile to people we dont know. Its a contradiction. If you are
not eating and living with anyone then you are most likely lonely. The answer
is to find a community that eats and dines and live together.
------
sigsergv
I don't think number of lonely people increases, they just become much more
visible. Social networks and other changes in modern society make loneliness
acceptable and people stop hiding it.
~~~
martin_andrino
At the same time, social networks create an illusion for lonely people so they
feel accompanied. It’s not all that bad.
~~~
Falkens_Maze
Junk food isn't bad once in a while.
But if you eat junk food all the time, it's pretty obvious that one of the
immediate consequences of eating junk food every day is the general decline of
your health.
So it goes for social media. Social networks are the junk food of socializing.
And don't get me started on what that does to someone's sense of self, well-
being, norms, ethics, morality etc.
Maybe this picture will be illuminating to you[1]. It succinctly summarizes
what I'm trying to say.
I should probably mention the image might be NSFW.
[1] [http://artfucksme.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/12/controversi...](http://artfucksme.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/12/controversial-illustrations-gunsmithcat-luis-
quiles-2-700.jpg)
------
cousin_it
I think individualistic cultures like the West can only work by teaching their
members many subconscious habits for pushing away other people. That's great
because it enables individual creativity (not to mention freedom from some
ugly hierarchies we'd rather forget about), but the flip side is that people
feel more distant from each other.
Thankfully, solving this problem doesn't require changing all of society. You
can solve it for yourself: take a few years to notice and unlearn your habits
for pushing away other people. I'm confident that you have many such habits
right now, from the way you stare at your phone in public, to your posture and
facial expressions every minute of the day.
To give you a picture of the end result, imagine a stereotypical immigrant
from a more collectivist culture. Their reputation for openness isn't
undeserved.
------
solarkraft
Not having things in common with others doesn't exactly provoke loneliness.
You can be lonely around people you have a lot in common with. Worst thing is
that if you don't start a conversation you won't even know whether you do have
anything in common.
------
gumby
This is actually why I am so concerned with (as in: working towards) the
elimination of all jobs. "But what will people do?" I am often asked, as if
the worth of someone is determined by their job. They can write bad poetry or
watch TV, but I suspect and hope that a lot of the time will be spent with
others. Humans are social animals.
~~~
Danihan
So, just tons of STDs and overpopulation?
~~~
guhidalg
Sure, having sex is more fun than being lonely.
~~~
Danihan
Until the consequences of finite resources kick in...
~~~
gumby
_Particularly_ in an environment where the marginal cost of goods is nil,
price signalling should resolve this. Consider the economics of Simon, Hubbert
et al vs Erlich, Malthus et al.
------
thriftwy
I don't know, I have a wife and a few friends and loneliness doesn't enter
into the picture anymore.
If I was lonely I think I'll go somewhere where board games are played and
there find an unlimited company.
------
joshsyn
I have always been lonely all my life. I will use this to my advantage.
------
peterburkimsher
"needing some comfort, had been showered instead with practical solutions to a
practical problem, which had just upset her even more"
When something bad happens to someone you care about, don't say "What
happened?" That focuses on the problem. Maybe they don't want to talk about
it.
Ask "Are you OK?"
You can always say this even if there's nothing wrong.
If they say "Yes, why?", they're your friend.
If they say "Fine." then they don't trust you.
If they tell you "No, ..." they think you're a close friend.
Then ask "What can I do to help you? You're not alone."
Focus on the solution.
If you want to know if someone trusts you, just ask "Are you OK?" and they
will tell you.
~~~
ThePadawan
Unfortunately, "I'm fine" is a strongly ingrained default reaction in some
circles. I feel this largely depends on culture (e.g. the British 'stiff upper
lip' ideal) and negative media influence (personally, I'm thinking of the
misguided idea of 'real men don't cry').
How do we get through that barrier?
~~~
colechristensen
In many cases, respect the cultural difference, don't try to make other people
into what you prefer.
There is a difference between emotional intelligence and willingness to freely
express emotion. "I'm fine" in many cases just means "no, thank you".
------
cyberpunk0
We need a return to primitive values. Money is the problem, it is the driving
factor in virtually every problem we have today directly and indirectly
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Countries to Raise a Family in 2020 - ementi
https://www.asherfergusson.com/raising-a-family-index/
======
ementi
Thoughts?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Xoom browser is not ready for prime-time, even for HTML4 - YooLi
http://www.sencha.com/blog/motorola-xoom-the-html5-developer-scorecard/
======
jmillikin
I can't find any mention of testing HTML4 features in the article. Their HTML5
testing is limited to <audio> (somewhat works) and <video> (doesn't work), and
they don't mention what codecs they used. Most of the complaints are about
missing or incorrect CSS3 support.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How can a concurrency/python/back end dev help the refugees? - mezod
======
onion2k
Not specific to refugees, but find your local tech4good meetup and join in.
[https://www.meetup.com/topics/tech4good/](https://www.meetup.com/topics/tech4good/)
------
w3clan
Blockchain is being used at some of the refugee center -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMRc5gY3_iU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMRc5gY3_iU)
start looking into it.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Aaron's Law Is Doomed Leaving US Hacking Law 'Broken' - LukeWalsh
http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2014/08/06/aarons-law-is-doomed-leaving-us-hacking-law-broken/
======
LukeWalsh
Silicon Valley Corporations are blocking this because they want a blanket law
for punishing terms of service violations:
[http://motherboard.vice.com/read/silicon-valley-is-
stonewall...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/silicon-valley-is-stonewalling-
efforts-to-amend-the-law-imprisoning-hacktivists)
"Under the current CFAA, lying about your age is as criminally punishable as
stealing someone’s credit card information."
The solution to this needs to come from the leaders in Silicon Valley.
------
esbranson
What a sad, malicious article. S.1196 - Aaron's Law Act of 2013 - is in the
Senate Judiciary Committee chaired by Patrick Leahy, a Democrat not a
Republican. To be fair, the article should also say:
> "Unfortunately, Chairman Leahy has refused to schedule any debate or vote on
> this important issue – only he can explain why he refuses to move this
> bipartisan bill forward."
> Jessica Brady, press secretary at the Senate Judiciary Committee, said
> absolutely nothing about reform of the CFAA.
[https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/senate-
bill/119...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/senate-bill/1196)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How do you contain complexity? - jmilinion
Uncontrolled complexity is dangerous. It causes things to collapse on itself. Contained complexity is useful. It allows unimaginable things to be built.<p>You could say the result of contained complexity is this phrase "why of course, that's obvious" (after seeing that contained complexity).<p>In general, what techniques has anyone discovered in containing complexity to prevent it from hindering what you want to create?
======
Mahn
Usually I try hard to find the _simplest_ solution to a problem, not just the
one that works. I find simplicity doesn't hinder what you are capable of
building, but I suppose this is subjective.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Matlab–Python–Julia Cheatsheet - tomrod
https://cheatsheets.quantecon.org/
======
eigenspace
The second example in the first section is a bit misleading. They say that to
create a column matrix, ie. an (n, 1) matrix, the syntax is
[1 2 3]'
but that will give you the (lazy) hermitian adjoint of the column vector, not
a column matrix.
julia> [1 2 3]' isa Matrix
false
Instead, if you really need a true (n, 1) matrix you should 1) not use adjoint
because that will also take complex conjugates (unless that's what you wanted)
and 2) use collect to turn the lazy transpose (or adjoint) into a true matrix
julia> collect(transpose([1 2 3]))
3×1 Array{Int64,2}:
1
2
3
However, you almost never need to do this sort of thing and you should be fine
using either transpose on a row vector or just using a real column vector.
Also, near the end they talk about closures but don't actually show any
closures unless one is to assume the code snippets they're showing are
actually inside a function body themselves.
~~~
hyperion2010
That python "closure" is a big fat lie too due to python's late binding.
Depending on the context in which that code is being defined it may or may not
work as expected.
The only guaranteed way to ensure that a free variable in python function
scope (it's not a closure) does not change is to pass it explicitly as a
default value.
a = 1
def function(x, a=a):
return x + a
That will work in loops. Otherwise what you are really writing is
a = 1
def function(x):
return x + the_last_value_a_obtains_in_this_scope
a = 2
assert function(1) == 3
~~~
mehrdadn
> That python "closure" is a big fat lie too due to python's late binding.
What? It's not a big fat lie, it's the exact truth. The same truth you'd get
in any language, even Scheme:
> (define a 1)
> (define (f) a)
> (f)
1
> (define a 2)
> (f)
2
That's just how closures work...
~~~
hyperion2010
Fair enough, I think my complaint is more about the fact that closures and
python are not accompanied by a safety net the way they are in some other
languages, that doesn't make them not closures, it just makes them a less
useful abstraction (I've basically given up on using anything other than full
objects and list comprehensions in python due to the countless subtle and
often silent irregularities in how a form behaves when used in different
contexts).
Your example is true at the top level in scheme, but semantics in top (REPL)
are different (at least in Racket [0, 1]). In a source file you have to
explicitly use set! to mutate a so it is harder to shoot yourself in the foot.
In theory the implementation of closures is the same, but in python's case you
are free to mutate yourself into unexpected situations. Whereas I'm actually
not even sure it is possible to construct a situation in scheme (not at the
top level) where you could induce a situation similar to the one in python.
0\.
[https://gist.github.com/samth/3083053](https://gist.github.com/samth/3083053)
1\. [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/racket-
users/0BLHm18YUkc/BwQ...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/racket-
users/0BLHm18YUkc/BwQdBlnmAgAJ)
~~~
mehrdadn
In all brutal honestly I think you just need to realize this is just you being
upset at having shot yourself in the foot at some point (don't worry, we've
all done it) and then trying to blame it on closures somehow, in this case by
saying this makes them a "less useful abstraction". In all honesty, no, it
just doesn't. It makes them more useful. If I can make an analogy, it's a bit
like saying bicycles should only have fixed gears as a "safety net" because
you've broken or slipped your variable gears in the past and now you've just
learned to take a car or train if you want to go faster than first gear. I
mean, that's definitely _one_ way to live your life, but most people don't do
it that way... they just realize their mistakes are a natural artifact of
being in the learning process and instead of abolishing gears, they keep
practicing more so that they eventually get the muscle memory to use their
vehicle properly and don't have to think about this problem every time. That's
the way to solve the problem for good -- so you can avoid the downsides while
reaping the benefits at the same time.
------
msaharia
So, looks like Julia would be an easier transition for a lot of academic
scientists. What am I missing? I mostly use R and Python. Can anyone tell me
briefly why I should use Julia over Python?
~~~
adamnemecek
The whole development experience is so much better than Python.
~~~
FridgeSeal
Right?!
Not having a packaging system that is a stapled-on-afterthought is so nice.
------
bwindsor
The final MATLAB example of "Inplace modification" is not correct.
function f(out, x)
out = x.^2
end
x = rand(10)
y = zeros(length(x), 1)
f(y, x)
What happens here when you call f(y, x) is:
1\. The arrays x and y are passed to f (no memory copying done yet, since
MATLAB uses copy on write)
2\. When we have `out = x.^2`, this will allocate a new array in memory and
store in it the result of `x.^2`, and will call this `out`. The original `out`
which was passed into the function can now be garbage collected (although it
won't be, because it's still in the parent scope as 'y')
3\. When the function exits, the new `out` goes out of scope and can be
garbage collected.
So all this example does is allocate a new array, assign x.^2 to it, and then
throw that result away again. There's no in-place modification.
You can't really pass a matrix by reference in MATLAB like you can in Python,
however in some cases you can write your function in a specific way which will
ensure in place operations are done and prevent a huge matrix copy. For
example (pauses are just there so that you can watch task manager memory
usage):
function x = inPlace()
x = rand(100000000, 1);
pause(3);
x = doSomething(x);
pause(3)
end
function y = doSomething(y)
y = y.^2;
end
Conditions required are:
* Input and output variables must have same name in caller
* Input and output variables must have same name in callee
* Callee must be inside a function, not a script
Look here for a more detailed description:
[https://blogs.mathworks.com/loren/2007/03/22/in-place-
operat...](https://blogs.mathworks.com/loren/2007/03/22/in-place-operations-
on-data/)
------
mbeex
I hate these 2x2 (or nxn) matrix examples. You never know what is considered
column and what is row.
~~~
throwawaymath
Julia takes after Matlab, where matrices are defined by enumerating each row
followed by a semicolon. Personally I prefer Mathematica's syntax, but the
Julia/Matlab syntax is still way better than Numpy syntax (though to be fair
most of that is due to the lack of native matrix support in Python).
If it helps at all, this is exactly what you'll see when you create a matrix
in Julia:
julia> mat = [1 2; 3 4]
2×2 Array{Int64,2}:
1 2
3 4
~~~
dnautics
FYI you can also do this
julia> mat = [1 2
3 4]
~~~
throwawaymath
Oh that's neat. Thanks, I wasn't aware of that.
------
ForHackernews
Great to see Julia gaining more exposure. I worry that it will languish as an
obscure research language without strong corporate champions.
~~~
adamnemecek
Juno is developed by Uber.
~~~
longemen3000
any source for that? the github of the juno project have 4 people, and none of
them are working for Uber
~~~
eigenspace
I think that’s some misconception coming from the fact that the package in the
Atom repository is called Uber-Juno. I don’t think the Juno devs have anything
to do with Uber.
~~~
longemen3000
Ahh, yes, that is a plausible explanation. It adds to the fact that not a lot
of people know that Uber is a german word, indicating high hierarchy
~~~
wallnuss
Über just means above. So "über dir" is "above you". Urban dictionary has uber
in english to mean superior, but that is not the original German meaning.
------
rhymer
Last week I converted a simple side project in Python to Julia. It's a
sequential Bayeisan estimation problem. A pleasant surprise that the Julia
version runs 30x faster than the Python counter part. I am sure the Python
code can be improved using Numba and various tricks. But the Julia version
simply works with minimum effort.
I also feel the language really is built for people doing numerical computing.
I smiled when I find out that randn(ComplexF64) gives you circularly-symmetric
complex normal random variables. It feels like Julia understands what I want.
~~~
elcritch
Is the randn(Complex64) used in your Bayesian estimation project? I’d be
curious to know how if so!
~~~
rhymer
Yes but not directly. It is used in the Monte Carlo simulation part. In
communication systems everything is complex :D
------
aptroninnoida
The feature that sets Julia apart from any other language is that it is a
dynamically typed, optionally interactive language that is statically analyzed
to compile to efficient machine code. [http://aptronnoida.in/best-python-
training-in-noida.html](http://aptronnoida.in/best-python-training-in-
noida.html)
------
holy_city
Are there analogs to Simulink or some of MATLAB's toolboxes in Julia? I know
of a few shops that use Octave because developer pricing for MATLAB isn't
enough when we have an alternative, but there's still a need for a roving
license or two because there are a few things lacking in the ecosystem.
~~~
dagw
For Simulink the closest you'll get is probably OMJulia[1] which is a set of
Julia bindings to OpenModelica as opposed to a stand alone library
[1]
[https://github.com/OpenModelica/OMJulia.jl](https://github.com/OpenModelica/OMJulia.jl)
~~~
ddragon
For simulation there is also a library that reimplements the Modelica language
in Julia using macros:
[https://github.com/ModiaSim/Modia.jl](https://github.com/ModiaSim/Modia.jl)
------
inamberclad
Julia is missing from the Ubuntu 18.04 repos for some reason. 16.04 is stuck
at v0.45.
~~~
eigenspace
Yeah, the Julia community for better or worse seems to have an attitude of
“don’t get julia from a package manager, download a binary from our website or
built it from source.” No doubt this has to do with the fact that releases
happen quickly and it’s a giant pain in the ass to go and push binaries to all
these package managers.
~~~
ChrisRackauckas
This is because LLVM has bugs (like all software) and Julia carries around
patched versions of LLVM. Those fixes are being upstreamed over time, but it
takes time. Julia is a very hardcore test suite for numerical libraries, so it
happens to find things that only show up when numerical stability is pushed to
the edge, and Julia Base will have some tests fail if you don't build with the
patched LLVM. That said... a lot of users might not notice a difference. But
if you want what is known to be the most correct, then you should use the
patched one. However, Linux package managers require that you use their LLVM,
which in some cases is the wrong version, and in all cases is not the patched
one.
~~~
eigenspace
I didn’t know that the package managers require you to use Linux’s LLVM.
That’s a shame.
Do all the major package managers do this or is it just apt? I have a
relatively new version of Julia from pacman on Arch, I wonder if it has a
patched LLVM or not...
~~~
pjmlp
And rust does the same, as they also need their own LLVM version.
~~~
steveklabnik
We don't _need_ it, we just prefer it. You can build with stock LLVM if you
want. (And that's how distros treat Rust as well; they use their own version
instead of ours.)
~~~
pjmlp
What about the bugs that required a patched LLVM?
~~~
steveklabnik
You get the bugs. No way around that. We try to upstream as many of our
patches as possible, but we’ll always be a bit farther ahead. It’s just the
nature of things.
------
agumonkey
how did numpy manage to override `@` in python ?
ps: ohh this was introduced in python 3.5
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27385633/what-is-the-
sym...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27385633/what-is-the-symbol-for-
in-python)
pps: [https://pastebin.com/s751DRDi](https://pastebin.com/s751DRDi)
------
dzink
Are there good Tensorflow and Pytorch alternatives in the works writen in
Julia?
~~~
ddragon
Yes, there are already a couple.
The most well known is a 100% Julia neural network library called Flux.jl [1],
which aims to become what Swift for Tensorflow wants as well (to make the
entire Julia language a fully differentiable language) through Zygote.jl [2],
and even without it has already great integration with the ecosystem, for
example with the differentiable equations library through DiffEqFlux.jl [3].
Plus the source code is very high level (while being high performance,
including easy GPU support), so you can easily see what each component does
and implement any extension directly on your code without worrying about
performance.
There is also another feature complete native library that allows some very
concise code, Knet.jl [4], and the Tensorflow bindings [5].
[1] [https://github.com/FluxML/Flux.jl](https://github.com/FluxML/Flux.jl)
[2] [https://github.com/FluxML/Zygote.jl](https://github.com/FluxML/Zygote.jl)
[3]
[https://julialang.org/blog/2019/01/fluxdiffeq](https://julialang.org/blog/2019/01/fluxdiffeq)
[4]
[https://github.com/denizyuret/Knet.jl](https://github.com/denizyuret/Knet.jl)
[5]
[https://github.com/malmaud/TensorFlow.jl](https://github.com/malmaud/TensorFlow.jl)
------
timmit
I like it.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Facebook Marketplace powered by artificial intelligence - jonbaer
https://code.fb.com/ml-applications/under-the-hood-facebook-marketplace-powered-by-artificial-intelligence/
======
solipsistnation
...and this is why it shows me endless streams of bikes.
(I do look at a lot of bikes.)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Yes, You Can Write a Game in Just 10 Lines of Basic - headalgorithm
https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/tools-toys/yes-you-can-write-an-awesome-game-in-just-10-lines-of-basic
======
howard941
It's surprisingly difficult to find links to the winners. With DDG's help I
found the 2019 entries collected here.
[https://www.dropbox.com/sh/zj7u96etduyq6bv/AADtnnxtBq0XQNYtH...](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/zj7u96etduyq6bv/AADtnnxtBq0XQNYtH0hUug0Da?dl=0)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
No, Lyme disease is not an escaped military bioweapon - sohkamyung
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/no-lyme-diease-is-not-an-escaped-military-bioweapon-despite-what-conspiracy-theorists-say/2019/08/09/5bbd85fa-afe4-11e9-8e77-03b30bc29f64_story.html
======
hedora
Private mode blocker. :-(
~~~
sohkamyung
Try this link [1]. The Washington Post republished that article from The
Conversation.
[1] [https://theconversation.com/no-lyme-disease-is-not-an-
escape...](https://theconversation.com/no-lyme-disease-is-not-an-escaped-
military-bioweapon-despite-what-conspiracy-theorists-say-120879)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Stackboi – your thought stack assistant - milansm
https://stackboi.com/
======
wingerlang
So is this just a blueprint of something you 'might' make if enough people are
interested?
~~~
milansm
Yes, it's just something I think it could be useful. At least some variation
on that. I wanted to check what people think about it. What do you think?
~~~
wingerlang
Not sure. Usually it is difficult to pinpoint the moment you get sidetracked.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Is it worth open-sourcing my early stage startup? - derwiki
It's something I was interested in trying to do at my last job before I quit, but the battle was hand auditing an entire, mature codebase. The site I want to open source (http://www.cameralends.com) is less than 2 months old and could easily be audited. I'm interested in open source because:<p>- holds me to a higher standard of quality<p>- reduces the barrier for collaboration (anyone can submit a pull request)<p>- builds trust with the users<p>I think I understand the application level risks I'd be taking doing this, but I'm not sure about the business/legal implications. Would doing this make my startup stronger or weaker?
======
teyc
Your site is a marketplace. What users need is trust in other users, not trust
in your source code. What happens if someone loses your pricey lens? Or sells
it on ebay and disappears? Those are the main issues.
Furthermore, you aren't in the open source business. What happens if someone
offers you a patch, and it is not in the direction you want to go? What
happens if someone is not satisfied with your service and forks the code base?
Now you have even more problems.
------
QuantumGuy
It doesn't really matter as long as your startup is good, people really could
care less. Besides with an open source startup people can help you debug.
Which is exactly what the people I am working with did.
<https://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg>
<https://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/wiki/Business-Model> We even got a
kickstarter for our open source startup
<http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lefnire/habitrpg-mobile> So no it is not
a bad idea to open source your startup just be careful.
------
officialjunk
Doesn't sound like open sourcing is relavent to your product. Focus on the
minimal viable product, getting users and growing that revenue stream first.
You can always open source later.
------
AznHisoka
Honestly, it doesn't matter. You're better off worrying about how to get a ton
of users by ranking high in search engines, and developing good word of mouth.
------
miriadis
I absolutely agree with other comments here. This is not a software startup,
is a service and nobody cares about the software that supports it. You should
concentrate you efforts on provide the best support you can and not the
technical details.
------
arb99
>\- builds trust with the users
Most of your market honestly won't care if you have open sourced your code
(and it won't build up any further trust).
~~~
jmm57
Maybe not main stream users. However, the market right now seems to be early-
adopter-type camera geeks in San Francisco. I would think open sourcing the
application would garner some serious respect from that crowd, if not trust.
~~~
argonaut
Unless these camera geeks are also software developers that actively follow
open-source projects, I doubt they actually care. The intersection between
those two groups, multiplied by the very slight amount of trust that is gained
(teyc was right in that users don't care about your code, they care about
other users), while non-zero, is not substantial enough to warrant open-
sourcing and all the hurdles that come with it.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
What Networks Does BuzzFeed Use? - etr71115
http://blog.naytev.com/what-networks-does-buzzfeed-use/
======
ec109685
As a point of comparison to Buzzfeed's 1B views a month, YouTube does that in
6 hours: [http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/youtube-
statistics/](http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/youtube-statistics/)
~~~
shalmanese
Or, to put it another way, Buzzfeed is almost 1% of Youtube already.
------
JBReefer
No mention that most of Buzzfeed's content is from AskReddit? They usually
even cite each entry!
~~~
drauh
Not their video content, I don't think. My main exposure to BuzzFeed is their
various YouTube channels. Their video "personalities" have pretty big
followings.
~~~
etr71115
This post is a continuation of a previous one:
[http://blog.naytev.com/buzzfeed-networks/](http://blog.naytev.com/buzzfeed-
networks/)
------
shostack
Anybody have similar data on their adtech stack?
I can obviously see what tags load, but curious for what they have running
behind the scenes and what their ad/analytics infrastructure is like.
~~~
jonknee
Since they don't do conventional ads I am not sure they have much of an adtech
stack. They use Google Analytics and apparently DFP, but to serve their own
content (their ads are sponsored content).
~~~
shostack
I meant in terms of their article promotion. They surely must spend on getting
reach for their articles, particularly given how much they get shared.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How do computers 'know' when they've used the right encryption key? - jc_811
Probably a newb question, but security & encryption really interest me.<p>In this example say I encrypt the word "Coffee" and after encrypting it I send it through cyberspace as "37fbFFJKEBF79fdgueG"<p>So if a malicious attacker tries to crack this by pure brute force, each time they use the 'wrong' key they still get a value back - correct? So if they use the wrong key they will continue to get gibberish until they use the correct key and get the word "Coffee"<p>My question is, how does the hacker (or the computer) know when they've guessed correctly and differentiate between the gibberish & the real data? Does the data return an 'error' if you try to crack it using the wrong key? If not, how do they know when they have guessed correctly and cracked it?
======
tptacek
This is a good question that can get a little deep.
The short answer depends on what you're cracking.
Let's assume your message was encrypted with AES, using a key derived from a
passphrase, and nothing else. There's no authenticator on the message (no
keyed checksum) and so the ciphertext is insecure, but we'll ignore that.
Then the attacker is just going to try every possible password. As you
observed, each of those decryption attempts is going to generate gibberish.
But all those gibberish results will be _binary_ gibberish: a decryption
attempt with a key differing even in one bit from the real key will produce an
effectively random plaintext, with bits evenly distributed.
The right key won't have that property; the result will be 7-bit ASCII. It
will almost certainly be the only result that produces ASCII, and certainly
the only one producing intelligible ASCII. :)
If the message is encrypted securely, with an authenticator, the job of
cracking it might be slightly simpler: you use the authenticator to verify
that you got the right result. This is how some older systems tell you you got
the right key (but it also implies that you encrypted the MAC, which is unsafe
for other reasons).
Finally, if you're encrypting with a block cipher mode that requires padding
--- something you shouldn't do but that systems designed 5+ years ago all tend
to do --- you'll know if you got the right key based on whether the padding
makes sense. There's a very famous crypto attack based on this property.
[http://cryptopals.com/sets/3/challenges/17/](http://cryptopals.com/sets/3/challenges/17/)
~~~
jc_811
This was a super helpful answer, thanks!
------
jonny_storm
When working with a low-level cryptography API for the first time, you can
easily miss a step and subsequently mistake ciphertext for plaintext. Unless
the length or contents of the result fails to match your expectations, you'll
have no way to know otherwise.
Indeed, the notion of what expectations you can even have of the data, in
principle, relates to information theory and reducing said expectations is
crucial to keeping private transmissions secure.
------
dozzie
In the real world, an attacker knows _some_ plaintext of the message, or at
least its format. For instance, it would be an IP or TCP header, HTTP request,
or PNG/JPEG format header.
~~~
jc_811
So if this were happening with brute force, the attacker would keep using
different keys until the data returned was clearly an IP address? (or whatever
else they are looking for). And the computer doesn't actually know or get any
feedback if it's correct? It's all on the attacker to analyze the results of
each attempt
~~~
dozzie
> until the data returned was clearly an IP address?
No. Any four bytes is an IP _address_. You do realize that IP is a _protocol_
, right?
~~~
jc_811
Sorry misspoke there. I meant to simply sub in one of the examples you had
given (IP or TCP header, HTTP request, or PNG/JPEG format header)
~~~
dozzie
Ah, it was my fault then. Sorry. I had a header of an IP packet in mind. Its
format is known and machine-verifiable, and even includes a simple checksum,
so it's quite easy to tell if the guessed encryption key has a chance of being
valid.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why CrossFit is the Workout of Choice for Entrepreneurs - shanellem
http://blog.clarity.fm/why-crossfit-is-the-workout-of-choice-for-entrepreneurs/
======
paul-woolcock
I enjoy crossfit, but I try to remember what it actually is: a fad-y name for
the concept of "functional fitness." I managed to find a crossfit gym that is
_not_ ridiculously expensive, and a coach who was teaching functional fitness
long before "crossfit" was trademarked.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Lightweight C library to parse NMEA 0183 sentences - XtalBlue
https://github.com/jacketizer/libnmea
======
XtalBlue
I have written a C library for parsing NMEA 0183 sentences in Linux. It uses a
modular design where it loads each parser module as a dynamic library. Please
tell me what you think. Contributions are more than welcome.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The faulty logic of the "Math Wars" - antman
http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/opinionator/2013/06/16/the-faulty-logic-of-the-math-wars/
======
ZeroGravitas
Are the 'traditional' algorithms really chosen because they are the best? I
thought they varied by country/culture and they can't all be the best.
I also recently read that mnemonics fell out of fashion because lurid imagery
worked best and that didn't sit well with conservative types. Seems strange to
me that the fact based recall side of learning hasn't been seperated out
properly.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Detect red circles in an image using OpenCV - AlexeyBrin
https://solarianprogrammer.com/2015/05/08/detect-red-circles-image-using-opencv/
======
lettergram
It would probably be better to use the Lab color space, and then you only have
to look at the a channel (which is the transformation of color between red and
green).
I used this to great effect in edge detection because the Lab color space is
based on eyes. Just changing images from RGB to the Lab color space increased
the accuracy of edge detection (particularly for red/green items) by about 7%:
[http://austingwalters.com/edge-detection-in-computer-
vision/](http://austingwalters.com/edge-detection-in-computer-vision/)
Further, I used this color space to design a super accurate fiducial marker
(and QR code)[1], that can be used to store a lot more information, easier to
track, etc.
I believe the grad student I was working with was going to publish a paper at
some point. For what ever reason I wasn't involved with the paper and the
paper doesn't appear to be published yet.
The HSV color space separates out hue and saturation, which helps remove the
background noise, but it would have trouble with overlapping circles or
circles where red and blue say mix to make purple. Converting to the Lab space
would actually help distinguish overlapping colors as well.
Here's a link to my work: [1]
[http://austingwalters.com/chromatags/](http://austingwalters.com/chromatags/)
~~~
Jack000
can you expand on why RGB wouldn't work? The most obvious way I can think of
to include chroma information in apriltags would be to use 3 colors matched to
the peak sensitivity of each channel. Does the RBG spectral sensitivity
overlap too much for this to work?
~~~
lettergram
The RGB color space works, it just has light encoded in each channel (making
it unnormalized). Separating out the light, i.e. normalizing on the color is
what gives LAB the advantage.
Further, because the way RGB is structured taking the difference between
channels is more difficult (requires more calculations) than it does for the a
& b channels. For instance, the a channel represents red to green, or positive
a represents red and negative a represents green. This aids in finding edges
between red and green with a simple addition/subtraction between pixels(a[i,i]
- a[j,j]). If we were to try the same thing in the RGB space it would look
something like (R[i,i] + G[i,i]) - (R[j,j] + G[j,j]), and you would still have
the impact of light to deal with...
------
elteto
I once wrote a similar OpenCV application [1], but in my case I needed to
detect a closed contour and evaluate how close that contour was to being a
circle. To provide a "score" I took advantage of the fact that in a circle the
ratio C^2/(4 _pi_ A) = 1 (where C is the circumference and A is the area).
This is a unique property of the circle (it is equivalent to saying that the
ratio of perimeter to area is maximized in a circle) and it's always lower for
any other closed shapes. And it also provides a nice 0..1 result which can be
interpreted as a percentage score!
I followed pretty much the same image segmentation/binary threshold as in the
article, but found that the gaussian blur step was unnecessary in my case, so
I skipped it. Also, the closed contours API in OpenCV provides the area and
perimeter results so it was _very easy_ to get it all working. Most of the
code was actually just writing a simple UI in Python.
[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN6D5j2RfX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN6D5j2RfX0)
------
userbinator
This expression should work to get all the reds without having to do
colourspace transform (standard unsigned 8-bit RGB expanded to signed ints of
greater width):
r - g > 128 && r - b > 128
The constants can be adjusted to change the definition of what you consider
red. (Based on [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HSV-RGB-
comparison.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HSV-RGB-comparison.svg) )
~~~
lettergram
It doesn't properly handle the light, i.e. if the r or g channel is super dim
it'll cause issues.
------
0x0
Getting an SSL privacy error (NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID) on this page.
(I've removed the StartCom root CA from my OS after reading
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security.policy/k9PBmyLCi8I)
)
------
k_sze
Technically wrong. Those are red _discs_ , not red _circles_. </pedantic>
~~~
k_sze
You think I'm joking, right? I'm not.
Think of the keywords that apply to the title. "OpenCV" and "circle"
definitely are. I don't consider "detect" and "image" as keywords here because
if you are using OpenCV, there's a _very_ high probability that you want to
detect something in an image. So "detect" and "image" are pretty much implied
by "OpenCV". And I'm going to give you the benefit of doubt and include "red"
as a keyword.
So we end up with "OpenCV", "circle", and "red". Three keywords. "circle"
being technically wrong means that you got 1/3 of the keywords wrong. That's
actually no small mistake.
Let's say you are working on a project and you are in urgent need to find out
how to use OpenCV to effectively detect actual _circles_ (not red _discs_ ).
You type these keywords into your favourite search engine: ["opencv",
"circle"]. And you get this article as the top result because it has the right
keywords and it ranks high in popularity. Then congratulations, you just
wasted your precious time. Of course, you can start from this article and get
to your correct solution. But remember I said that you're in urgent need,
you're in a hurry, you don't have time to waste.
The converse is also true: you want to detect actual red _discs_ but you can't
find this article because the article's keywords are wrong.
When I saw the title of the article, I really was expecting it to talk about
detecting _circles_ , not _discs_. I started at the beginning and I thought
"ok, maybe the author's approach is to start from discs and eventually get to
circles". I followed through to the end expecting to see actual circles, but
then... nothing. I was really disappointed.
I could be even more pedantic and point out that in mathematics, a circle has
no width, but if we take that extra pedantic definition, then we won't expect
to detect anything at all in an image. The difference here is that when we
talk about "circle", we know that we are really talking about an _approximate
representation_ of a circle. But a circle is not an approximate representation
of a disc, or vice versa, period.
------
1024core
Or you could use the Circle Hough Transform:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_Hough_Transform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_Hough_Transform)
~~~
Animats
Which is what they did. It's inefficient, because it's a brute-force process,
but it works.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
No, Google and Facebook Ad Traffic Is Not 90% Useless - gk1
http://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-ad-campaigns-fail/?r=1
======
jaymzcampbell
This post makes what I think is a brilliant point and one that, if you apply
the same thinking to any other situation, is extremely powerful - understand
the _why_ (of something performing poorly) to make an informed decision
_before_ binning it off entirely as not fit for purpose.
------
mtgx
Maybe just Facebook's, though.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: StreamE – Cross-platform live-stream viewing service - ngerrity
https://streame.tv
======
ngerrity
I wrote StreamE because I was tired of constantly switching back and forth
between Twitch, Mixer, and YouTube to watch the live streamers I wanted to
watch. StreamE lets you search for, follow, and watch live streamers on all
the major platforms. I searched around to see if there was anything similar,
and found a couple browser extensions, that both seemed to want OAuth
verification, which I didn't want to mess with.
StreamE has some unique features, like a universal search across all the major
streaming platforms, and a custom following feature as well. Follow streamers
you like, and your list of followers is updated and stored in your browser/URL
for easy bookmarking and sharing. The site requires no logins or signups,
shows live indicators next to followed streamers, is mobile friendly, and is
dark mode by default.
I tried to keep StreamE as simple as possible, it is written in vanilla JS,
HTML, and CSS. I use the lz-string library (should be found through a quick
Google) to encode the JSON follower data inside the browser and URL. The
website hits a couple AWS Lambda endpoints written in NodeJS, which use the
various Twitter, Mixer, and YouTube APIs for some of the site functions.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why I Voted to Sell .ORG - danyork
http://www.circleid.com/posts/20191127_why_i_voted_to_sell_org/
======
ptest1
I don’t understand how this “sale” is legal in the first place.
PIR is a legal 501(c)3 nonprofit. You can’t really sell a nonprofit to a for-
profit company except in unusual and rare circumstances.
In California, I know you need a letter from the state Attorney General to do
so.
There are also federal restrictions on sales like this, particularly around
self-dealing transactions. This transaction was obviously self dealing.
Someone seriously needs to dig into this. The PIR board members could be in
big legal trouble. And also ICANN, which is a 501(c)3 nonprofit as well and is
subject to self-dealing restrictions.
This is obvious, plain as day corruption. In the business world, not much can
be done. But these are two nonprofits (PIR and ICANN), so something can and
should be done. These kind of transactions aren’t normally legal.
Like, just read the examples of what an illegal self dealing transaction is in
the eyes of the IRS:
[https://boardsource.org/resources/private-benefit-private-
in...](https://boardsource.org/resources/private-benefit-private-inurement-
self-dealing/)
“Keep Our City Beautiful, a membership organization, plants a city alley with
elaborate flowering bushes. The alley is not heavily traveled but the
decorations increase the attractiveness of the city’s main restaurant whose
owner is a member of the organization.”
ICANN clearly engaged in an illegal self dealing transaction by allowing their
former CEO to enrich himself with a deal that would otherwise not be possible.
Edit: please see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21658324](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21658324)
for a “what you can do right now”
~~~
zrm
Not only that, isn't there a sense in which a TLD is not actually property at
all? The DNS operates by consensus. There are a bunch of root server operators
who all agree who operates the .org TLD and then list those NS records in
their root servers.
What stops people from getting together, agreeing that a private equity firm
would be a poor steward of the .org TLD, choosing somebody else to operate it
instead, and pointing the NS records there instead?
Nobody really owns the DNS. It's a thing that works because there is a broad
consensus on how it should work. If the consensus is that this is a dumb idea
then what's stopping people from choosing not to go along with it?
And staging a coup over this would set a good precedent that these types of
flagrant money grabs are not to be tolerated.
~~~
jagged-chisel
Who owns the root DNS servers? Can those owners be convinced to stage such a
coup? If not 100%, then you have forked a TLD.
~~~
gorgoiler
Edit: sorry, re-reading your coup plot I see you wanted the owners of
{A..M}.ROOT-SERVERS.NET to collude in direct action. It’s not an implausible
idea at all, if the worst comes to the worst, even if it’s quite extreme. My
original comment misses your point a bit...
...
If you want to fix this by direct action on the root servers, rather than
ORG’s nameservers, the it doesn’t matter who owns the current root servers.
Their config is baked into your resolver’s installation files or source code,
and my naive understanding is that it takes only one patch to change each one:
[https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-
projects/bind9/blob/master/lib/dn...](https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-
projects/bind9/blob/master/lib/dns/rootns.c)
...though the changes would be fragmented until the patch had been rolled out
to 100% of resolver codebases and all instances of each resolver updated and
restarted. Not an easy solution without coordinating people as well as
software.
------
danpalmer
> Make .org domain names "accessible and reasonably priced for all", including
> limiting price increases to no more than 10% per year
This immediately stuck out to me as a really bad deal.
Rising with inflation, somewhere between 1 and 4% per year, would essentially
keep prices stable. This is tricky when selling internationally, but roughly
possible.
Rising by 10% each year is significantly faster than inflation, and would
result in a $20 domain name doubling in price in 7 years, or 6x in 20 years.
This is the internet we're talking about, 20 year time horizons are important
and yet still short sighted. In 100 years we're talking $275,000 rather than
the $400 that inflation would get us to.
> Ethos has said that their plan is to "live within the spirit of historic
> practice,"
This is not what Private Equity does. It cuts costs and quality, raises
prices, strips assets, and seeks to significantly increase profits. I think
it's naive and short-sighted to take them at their word, as this article
admits they are doing.
~~~
oefrha
Not sure why OP tosses out 10% price hikes per year as reassuring. Maybe he’s
too rich to make sense of small amounts of money like this. Even $10 is a
nontrivial sum in some underdeveloped countries as is.
Also, this is just “what Ethos themselves have said about their intentions
with regard to .org”, and we all know how good for-profit entities are at
keeping promises that affect their bottom line.
~~~
cartoonworld
His argument seems to be:
1: The Internet Society does great work protecting the Internet 2: Ethos is a
worthy successor to the Internet Society as the steward of .org.
This is incoherent. THis blog post can be summed up in one sentence: "I reckon
its fine."
Thanks for voting to sell .ORG Richard Barnes. I know he thinks its fine, I
think jacking the prices up 10% year over year is nonsense. What do the
financials look like and what's the internet getting out of this?
A money grab looks like a money grab.
~~~
oefrha
.org registry was already a pretty good cash cow. According to their tax
return[1], in 2018 they grossed ~$93m over ~$33m registry administration
expense, ~$7m employee compensation (interestingly there's a 30% year over
year increase here), and some other smaller expenses. They raised $48.7m for
Internet Society. Note that out of registry administration expense, $18.1m
went to Afilias[2] (this should also be in the tax return), a _for-profit_
technical registry provider. So every time you paid your $10 .org registration
fee, at least $5 went to Internet Society as a mandatory donation, somewhere
between $0-2 went to Afilias the for-profit contractor, some small amount went
to GoDaddy for marketing, etc. Anyway, a non-profit printing $50m/yr without
begging for donations is certainly nothing to sneer at, and under the control
of a for-profit entity they should expect more even if the price stays the
same. And you bet the price won't stay the same.
[1]
[https://thenew.org/app/uploads/2019/09/PIR-2017_2018-990.zip](https://thenew.org/app/uploads/2019/09/PIR-2017_2018-990.zip)
[2] [https://domainnamewire.com/2019/10/28/pir-org-slashes-
regist...](https://domainnamewire.com/2019/10/28/pir-org-slashes-registry-fee-
to-afilias-in-half-to-18-million/)
~~~
cartoonworld
As you said, according to the 2018 tax return revenues from PIR running .org
resulted in $48,000,000.00 in cash grants handed over to the Internet Society.
How much is the sale worth? That $48M Grant was worth more than Internet
Society's total revenue in 2016 according to wkipedia. ISOC just sold a
sustainable $50Million revenue stream.
If LetsEncrypt copped a $0.10 fee per certificate, how much would it cost for
Richard to rubber stamp a Symantec acquisition of LetsEncrypt?
~~~
type0
> If LetsEncrypt copped a $0.10 fee per certificate, how much would it cost
> for Richard to rubber stamp a Symantec acquisition of LetsEncrypt?
Easy now, don't give him ideas.
~~~
ohashi
Don't worry, they have your best interest at heart. With this extra money, we
can fund our certificate mission for our own personal gain forever. It's very
good for everyone.
------
jmull
Wow, this is the kind of guy running the internet... he just sold out all the
non-profits of the world. Jesus.
If you read carefully -- despite the title, he works hard to obscure it -- the
"why" is he just wants the money.
His argument about why it's OK -- "Trust me, Ethos is totally trustworthy" \--
is absurd and incoherent.
First of all, the point and purpose of private equity is to make money. To
misconstrue the issue as _distrust_ of private equity is backwards. I trust
them 100% -- to fulfill their purpose to make money. They _will_ extract money
from this investment as effectively and efficiently as they can. Raising
prices quickly is just one thing they might do, by the way. If they can find
an opportunity to make a nice and quick profit that devastates .org they won't
hesitate to take take it if it meets their current investment goals.
~~~
ohashi
I wonder how he drew the short straw to ruin his reputation with this garbage.
------
the_angry_angel
The simplified timeline (as I understand it, willing to be corrected if I'm
wrong);
1\. PIR, or someone very close, seems to have lobbied to have price
restriction of .org removed. My understanding is that PIR made the argument
that they're a non-profit, they have no reason to raise pricing extortionately
2\. This was passed, despite a large number of comments against the idea,
Ethos was incorporated the following day
3\. PIR sold itself to Ethos, a for profit company
The people involved seem to be moving between ICANN, PIR and private firms.
Given all these things I don't think it's unreasonable that people are deeply
sceptical. Especially with the ambiguity of "no more than 10% per year" being
throw around.
~~~
tinus_hn
You forgot the part where Ethos is the same people who controlled PIR. It’s
just a sleazy trick to take off the non profit veil, so they can start
skimming the profits. Does anyone really believe the non profit PIR and ISOC
couldn’t exist on their $90 million a year .org tithes?
~~~
the_angry_angel
Yeah I’d completely missed this part. Makes it even worse
------
Traster
This author is just outright naive.
>Even in the worst case, if Ethos considers dramatically increasing prices
(which, to be clear, we do not expect them to do!), the Registry Agreement for
.org requires a 6-month notice period during which domain owners can lock in a
10-year registration at pre-increase rates. This should seriously discourage
Ethos from doing this, because it would take 10 years for the new high rate to
even take effect for existing registrants, and new registrations would likely
fall off right away.
No, the worst case scenario is that they jack up prices and then run a massive
campaign FUD campaign about non-profits without .org addresses. Or they start
selling of Oxfam.org to competitors. Or hell, they start doing differential
pricing, gouging the people they think can pay.
>We're all trying to make the Internet a better place
No we're not. Don't be an idiot. Private equity companies are making money
from investments they have no interest in making anything a better place and
it's insulting to expect people to believe that.
~~~
wpietri
I think it's worse than naive. His two points are in impossible conflict. He
wanted a pile of money for the Internet Society, enough to "secure that work's
future". But the only way selling .org is worth a pile of money is if it gets
extracted from nonprofits. With plenty of profits left over to feed the
investors who put up the initial cash.
If the Internet Society wanted to secure their future, they should have raised
a proper endowment. Or they could have kept .org and bumped the prices
modestly so it made a profit equivalent to what an endowment would pay.
Selling it to a PE company is guaranteed to be worse for .org registrants,
because the amount of money extracted will be greater, and a PE firm will be
way less accountable. Especially a shadowy one just created for this.
And for those not familiar with the horrors of PE, I recommend reading about
what happened to Simmons Mattress once the financial engineers got a hold of
it:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmon...](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmons.html)
~~~
tptacek
Help me understand what you mean by "worse than naive" here. Richard Barnes
isn't going to see a dollar of this money and wouldn't need it anyways. I
understand people disagreeing with him, but, despite being automatically
disinclined to extend good faith to anything published at CircleID, I don't
understand where anyone derives bad faith from this piece.
I thought it was tremendously useful, if only to understand what was in the
minds of the people who unanimously voted to sell .ORG.
~~~
gwd
> Help me understand what you mean by "worse than naive" here.
"Naive" in this context generally means they were overly trusting when there
was no evidence to suggest trust was warranted. I'd interpret "worse than
naive" as saying that they are actually evidence to the contrary.
The logic presented is, "We need more money, so we sold it to this private
equity firm. But don't worry, they're not going to try to squeeze lots of
money from it."
The starting point for any for-profit company -- no matter how ethically run
-- is that they buy things because the expected value to them will be higher
than the cash they paid for it. We must assume that the _expected value_ of
PIR to the equity company is higher than the amount they paid IS for it. Which
means, either IS is actually getting _less_ (or at best the same) money than
they would have for keeping PIR, or it means that Ethos is going to charge
significantly more than IS is. The fact that Ethos bought PIR is prima facae
evidence that it's a bad deal for either IS or for the internet as a whole.
I mean, there are other possibilities, but none is really good. It's possible
that someone at Ethos capital actually did want to do IS a favor, and way
over-paid for PIR. But that's just a form of embezzlement; I certainly
wouldn't feel any better to know that .org was bought by someone who was
either incompetent or a criminal.
If you want to set up a long-term self-funding organization to do good rather
than making money, you don't do private equity; you set up a foundation.
Ethos, or whoever wants to make the world a better place, could provide a loan
to such an organization.
And even if you do decide to buy something, you _put your promises in writing_
in the form of a contract.
And even supposing Ethos really does mean all the things they say. Suppose
something happens and they go bust and have to liquidate their assets. What
happens then?
There are just so many red flags here, that "too trusting" doesn't even begin
to describe it.
~~~
jfim
Your scenarios are not mutually exclusive. To maximize their expected value,
you say that they could:
1\. Earn less than IS would
2\. Charge more than IS would
It's actually:
1\. They could earn less than IS would, because they're generous, incompetent,
or some other reason
2\. They could earn more than IS would, because they increase the prices, run
PIR more efficiently than IS would, increase the number of registrations more
than IS would, or some other reason
In scenario two, which is the most interesting, they could jack up prices, but
they could also run the business better, such as running the business more
efficiently or driving more business through advertising. I agree with you
that the former is likelier, but not necessarily the only reason why the deal
would have a positive expected value for Ethos. It could be that the deal is a
win-win one, where IS gets more money than they'd be able to make out of PIR,
and yet, Ethos comes ahead too by running it better than IS could.
~~~
wpietri
If you have some evidence that this is the case, feel free to give it. But
they've already outsourced the running of the registry to somebody else, so
any obvious efficiency gains have presumably already been taken. And if they
haven't, there's no reason to think a fresh-minted PE company would do any
better than hiring a competent manager.
------
ddevault
IRS Form 13909 can be used to submit complaints about non-profit organizations
to the IRS. Here are two pre-filled Form 13909's, one for ICANN and one for
ISOC. Just print it out, add your personal information to both, and mail it to
the address listed on the bottom of the form.
[https://yukari.sr.ht/dotorg-form-13909.pdf](https://yukari.sr.ht/dotorg-
form-13909.pdf)
Alternatively, this file can be opened with LibreOffice Draw to make edits and
prepare your document digitally:
[https://yukari.sr.ht/dotorg-form-13909.odg](https://yukari.sr.ht/dotorg-
form-13909.odg)
lodraw crash course: F2 + click drag to make a new text box, Ctrl+[ to reduce
the font size to something reasonable, red icon in the toolbar along the top
to export as PDF. You can send the document by email to [email protected].
~~~
ptest1
I’m doing this! Both for PIR and ICANN.
Please see my other comment on this thread. It is likely this “sale” could be
considered illegal.
Here is the information for ICANN which can be used for the above form as
well:
[https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/fy18-irs-tax-
for...](https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/fy18-irs-tax-
form-990-return-organization-exempt-income-tax-27may19-en.pdf)
Remember that the founder of this PE firm was at ICANN, so this transaction is
self-dealing on ICANN’s end as well.
~~~
ddevault
Thanks for the ICANN info, I'll prepare a similar form for them. Do you have
some resources I can use to summarize ICANN's questionable activities?
~~~
ptest1
The former CEO of ICANN basically started the PE firm PIR was “sold” to:
[https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2019/11/isoc-
pir-...](https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2019/11/isoc-pir-ethos-
capital-deal-timeline/)
ICANN, by lifting the price restriction, was likely “in” on this deal.
When a nonprofit does something to greatly enrich a former CEO, that’s likely
self dealing and illegal in the IRS’ eyes. The CA attorney general should also
take action (ICANN is CA based).
------
ajb
Right. This guy was appointed to ISOC by IETF, unfortunately this year, so his
term lasts until 2022. However there are 4 board members whose term is up in
2020 [1], one appointed by the IETF. According to BCP77 [2] The IETF will
choose its appointee in January. Nominations for candidates for all 4
positions apparently close next week, Dec 6 [3] so anyone who has the time and
interest to scrutinise the nominees (or even propose new ones) needs to act on
this pretty soon.
[1] [https://www.internetsociety.org/board-of-
trustees/](https://www.internetsociety.org/board-of-trustees/) [2]
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/bcp77](https://tools.ietf.org/html/bcp77) [3]
[https://www.internetsociety.org/board-of-
trustees/elections/...](https://www.internetsociety.org/board-of-
trustees/elections/2020/call-for-nominations/)
------
cbkeller
I think it's worth noting some of the timeline of this [1]:
> On May 13, 2019, ICANN announced that they would remove the price cap on
> .org registrations (despite 98% disapproval in public comments [2])
> On May 14, 2019, the private equity firm Ethos Capital was founded by former
> ICANN chief executive Fadi Chehadé and investor Erik Brooks.
> On November 13, 2019, it was announced that the Public Interest Registry
> (that manages .org) had agreed to be acquired by Ethos Capital, as its first
> investment.
> Subsequently, PIR announced it would abandon its non-profit status to become
> a B Corporation.
Is the author unaware of this, in on the deal, or just remarkably naive?
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Interest_Registry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Interest_Registry)
[2]
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_s...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_shambles/)
~~~
ramphastidae
Of course they are aware. This post is PR bullshit to cover up the facts you
mentioned.
------
mannykannot
In which a patsy sets out the arguments by which he was manipulated.
A large part of his motivation appears to be delusions of grandeur within an
organization, the Internet Society, which, up to now, has been of no relevance
whatsoever, and which has only now achieved a degree of prominence through an
act of apparently naive stupidity.
~~~
NamTaf
Good point. They claim they need the money to further in their mission to
improve the internet, but they’re throwing out the one good thing they’re
well-known for doing (and I’m doing so, trashing their reputation amongst the
public) in order to (so they claim) bankroll other things that most people
have never heard of in relation to them. That’s an incredibly shortsighted
gamble and reeks of excuses.
------
TheRealPomax
For all the good you've done in the past and now, Richard, this is just one
long disappointing read. Between the lines, the text is "we don't have the
people to maintain PIR and decided that rather than hire people for it, we
should sell it" and then a for-profit shell was set up and PIR was funneled
over to it, and now it's no longer your problem to have to deal with. From
your perspective, that's not making things better: that's walking away from
them. And now you've made it _our_ problem, one _we don't have the power to
fix_ and from our perspective, that's not you making the internet better:
that's making our internet worse.
~~~
stefan_
For PIR, an organization that literally does nothing but collect money as it
has outsourced all of its principal obligations, they sure have a hugely
inflated wage bill at an easy 5 million a year, for a ton of various directors
and VPs.
If anything, this has been a good wakeup call that fees for .org could and
should be slashed by some 80%.
------
koolba
> Make .org domain names "accessible and reasonably priced for all", including
> limiting price increases to no more than 10% per year
There is nothing reasonable about the current prices. It’s literally a few
hundred bytes of data mostly static data.
“10% per year” means it will double every seven years. “Up to” means they will
be doing it at the maximum. And unless this is legally codified I doubt they
would adhere to that either.
------
berbec
I wonder if he really believes this when he was typing it. I find it difficult
to understand the rationale of selling ORG to private equity and the justify
it as good for the internet. I hope this line of BS turns out to be true, but
giving ORG over to a bunch of MBAs with experience in day trading does not a
confident nerd make.
------
DrScientist
This is what happens when the PR or fund raising people get in charge of a
charity - suddenly it becomes all about raising awareness or funds and not
about doing....
Why provide a service ( like .org ) when you can 'raise awareness'? Or raise
funds for others to do stuff.
The great thing about being the fund raising or awareness part is it's
1\. where the money is
2\. where the exposure is
3\. and you have no responsibility for actually delivering stuff!!!
So you can justify higher salaries for the people running the charity....
[https://hbr.org/2011/09/you-should-be-able-to-get-
rich](https://hbr.org/2011/09/you-should-be-able-to-get-rich)
------
archi42
"While it's true that running .org provided a relatively steady income stream,
it effectively staked most of our revenue on a single business, and required a
certain amount of our resources to be spent managing that business,
distracting from the broader mission."
So, now they don't have any significant income stream anymore? Great! So once
they run out of money from the sell, they're closing down? That is, unless
they find some other way to generate a profit to burn on non-profitable-but-
good things (like they're doing now). For which .org was the perfect fit?
I mean, if THEY would have increased prices by 10% per-year for the next few
years, well, I think people would have been mad, too. But not as much as now,
since at least the money would have flown to some "good use"(tm). But now?
Cash flows to private investors, who expect (surprise!) to EARN money on that
deal.
~~~
IshKebab
Yeah this makes zero sense. If Ethos are going to keep the prices reasonable
(yeah right), they'll make the same amount of money as PIR did, so they won't
have paid more for it than PIR would earn anyway.
------
steve19
What it comes down to is the board wanted a large pile of cash so they could
do more of whatever it is they like doing, which apparently is not what many
of us think their core mission should be.
I look forward to reading how much the board members are being paid now, and
how much they will be paid in a years time.
~~~
morisy
Most non-profit boards pay $0. The Internet Society is one of them, with
Barnes taking $0 from the organization (as board members, they also have to
disclose if a related organization pays them):
[https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/54165...](https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/541650477/12_2018_prefixes_54-58%2F541650477_201712_990_2018121916022417)
There are a few exceptions to the boards-get-paid-$0, but they're rare and
doubt personal financial motivations are part of the decision.
~~~
steve19
But funnily enough the trustees of the Public Interest Registry (the .Org
subsidiary) were all being paid before it was sold.
[https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/331...](https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/331025119)
------
tinus_hn
Even if Ethos’ ‘intentions’ are to be taken at face value, $26 is still a
ridiculous price for basically no service. But these intentions are
essentially worthless or they’d be put in writing.
Why would there be no non-profit willing to do this ‘work’ providing this
‘service’ for whatever price you want? You should know, your organization
provides much more service for no money at all.
------
cyborgx7
I never actually stopped to consider why they chose to sell of the TLD. I
thought this was just a terrible organizational decision. Call me naive, but
it didn't occur to me that it was about the cash infusion. I can't believe
they want to jeopardize such an important part of the structure of the
internet for a one time cash infusion. Absolutely disgusting.
>If we take Ethos at their word
What a child
------
tobltobs
> This transaction will put that bigger mission on a solid footing
I don't understand how that should be true. Either Ethos would have too pay
too much or Ethos would have to be able to run this business more cost
effective. Both sounds questionable.
> While it's true that running .org provided a relatively steady income
> stream, ... > Establishing a more diverse portfolio of investments will
> allow us to have more predictable revenue over time.
Relatively steady sound pretty predictable to me. It will be interesting to
see who from the inner circle will benefit from those future "investments".
> Even in the worst case, ... the Registry Agreement for .org requires a
> 6-month notice period during which domain owners can lock in a 10-year
> registration at pre-increase rates.
That is wrong: "Registry Operator shall offer registrars the option to obtain
domain name registration renewals at the current price ... for periods of one
(1) to ten (10) years at the discretion of the registrar, but no greater than
ten (10) years."
------
jacob-malthouse
One of the big issues with this post is that it is trying to sell the terms of
the deal.
But the issue people have with it in the Internet Policy Community is not the
terms, which we no nothing about.
It is that the way it was done is a radical departure from how decisions are
normally made.
Usually you start by saying "I have a problem". In this case it would be "We
don't want to run .ORG anymore."
And then you engage the community in an open bottom-up consultative process to
come up with the optimal solution.
ISOC applied to run .ORG in 2002. They won a competition to run it against 10
other groups. Here is the original application they submitted to ICANN:
[https://archive.icann.org/en/tlds/org/applications/isoc/](https://archive.icann.org/en/tlds/org/applications/isoc/)
They said things like:
"PIR will institute mechanisms for promoting the registry's operation in a
manner that is responsive to the needs, concerns, and views of the non-
commercial Internet user community."
And:
".ORG is the home of non-commercial entities on the Internet"
[https://archive.icann.org/en/tlds/org/applications/isoc/sect...](https://archive.icann.org/en/tlds/org/applications/isoc/section8.html#c38E1)
After running .ORG since 2002, and growing it to over 10 million domains under
management under this promise, ISOC's Board suddenly and with no prior
consultation, decided to privatize it. They took that decision in a private
negotiation over less than 3 months.
That decision making process is not how the Internet maintains a stable and
secure infrastructure. It needs careful decision making to ensure reliable,
stable, and resilient operations.
------
NamTaf
If this was supposed to reassure people then I want to meet those people as I
have something to sell them. 10% per year price increases are insane! You
can’t exactly just change domain names to a cheaper option either, like say
insurance. Your whole identity is locked to it.
This only makes me more convinced that it’s a bad move.
------
greatgib
So much bullshit and so littke valid argument in this big post. But don't
worry 'Make .org domain names "accessible and reasonably priced for all",
including limiting price increases to no more than 10% per year' It can ONLY
increase of 10% per year. Like if it is a low number...
~~~
tehlike
And i dont think this is written on a contract, sounded like a mere intention.
~~~
55555
1\. We know that there's no limit in the contract, because if there was, they
would just say that.
2\. The reason there isn't a limit in the contract is because Ethos don't
actually intend to limit themselves to 10% yearly. If they did, they would
have agreed to write it into the contract, which would have let them pay less
for .org
------
jl6
This is so monumentally wrong that I have to wonder whether some kind of class
action lawsuit is inevitable. As the owner of a .org domain name, I feel
duped. I thought I was dealing (ultimately, not counting intermediate
registrars) with a non-profit organisation that had some permanent commitment
to the public good. Now I’m just renting from a landlord whose interests are
guaranteed to be the opposite of mine.
------
lioeters
> So if we take Ethos at their word, they should be just as good a steward for
> .org as the Internet Society has been
Sigh.. I'm guessing the author is/was not aware of the serious conflict of
interest among the decision-makers and private stake holders who passed
through the revolving doors of IS, ICANN, PIR, Ethos.
Voting with such naivete, especially underestimating the greed of a for-profit
organization, is not being a good steward. They've let down the public in this
decision.
------
nealabq
The Netherlands chapter of the ISOC is objecting to the .ORG sale (
[https://domainnamewire.com/tag/internet-
society/](https://domainnamewire.com/tag/internet-society/) ):
_We believe that the 2019 decision of ISOC Global to sell PIR to private
equity firm Ethos Capital is not in line with ICANN’s criteria from 2002 and
the subsequent promise from ISOC Global. Despite ISOC Global’s assurances to
the contrary, we share the misgivings of the international community about
giving a single privately owned entity the power to raise tariffs, implement
rights protection mechanisms possibly leading to censorship, and suspend
domains at the request of local governments. We also fear that ISOC Global’s
reputation has been severely harmed by even contemplating this transaction._
_We therefore call on ISOC Global’s leadership to reverse this decision
immediately, and do its utmost to restore faith in ISOC as the one global
organisation that through its many professionals and dedicated volunteers
sincerely strives for an internet for everyone._
------
leoedin
What is it with international supervisory bodies and blatant corruption (or
maybe incredible incompetence)? This has real parallels to the International
Olympic Committee and FIFA. I guess the parallels for all of them are a
monopolistic position (and in many cases an essentially government granted
one) with basically no oversight. Those conditions just seem to breed
corruption.
------
jacknews
So this is "we need the money to survive, and we completely trust these
private equity guys to do the right thing"
10%/year should be reaping quite some profit after a while. I wouldn't be
surprised if this is a pump-and-dump kind of deal, where PE substantially
raise prices and then sell the entity at a big profit, given the effectively
locked-in forward profits.
------
rdiddly
Idealistic greed is different from regular greed. Idealistic greed is always
about expanding the mission. To do work that's _even more_ important. To reach
_even more_ people. To expand the battle or skirmish into a full-on _war_ (see
this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21612488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21612488)).
It can lead to ruin just as easily as regular greed can, particularly when you
consider that the people you end up negotiating with, who often specialize in
regular greed, are usually better at it, and aren't hobbled and constrained
the way you are by your vision or mission.
------
yesimahuman
This is so incredibly naive, and he made at least one decision based on flawed
understanding of the 10yr price lock in: only _registrar’s_ need to be
notified. It’s up to them to notify registrants. If they were looking at a
significant price increase for .org or to lock in existing customers for 10
years, would they notify their registrants? I would think no!
It’s extra sad because they had a commercial vehicle with which to further
their mission, which could have been a huge asset to the ecosystem, and
instead of finding a way to have it be a source of sustainability, they threw
it away for a one time cash infusion.
The rest of the post is just this guy trying to make himself feel better for
an awful decision.
------
huhtenberg
> _Many of the current concerns about .org are premised on a presumption that
> prices will rise_
No, they are based on the fact that it was clearly a backroom deal with no due
process that would've NEVER happened if the seller wasn't closely associated
with the buyer.
------
jdkee
“ So if we take Ethos at their word, they should be just as good a steward for
.org as the Internet Society has been, with robust ties to the community and
an explicit public-benefit orientation.”
This man is a fool.
------
thunderrabbit
How does he mention LetsEncrypt and not have http redirect to https on his
site?
~~~
icebraining
It doesn't seem to be his site.
------
jonnypotty
Its fine because we're good and we get more money and Ethos are just simply
good guys so that's good and nice so I voted "Yay" and now things are better
because my organisation can keep me in a good job doing basically nothing
whilst corporations buy up and exploit the internet.
------
jmccorm
It seems like a slap across the face that they offer _as a defense_ a 10%
increase which _compounds annually_. That isn’t a defense... it is a stunning
illustration of the problem! Even the cable companies would be jealous (while
their own customers are cutting the cord left and right).
Worse, 10%/year isn’t a contractual limitation; it is but a statement of
“intent”. It is nothing short of malfeasance to have sold a non-profit’s
operations without sufficient safeguards. And to a private equity firm?
Outrageous incompetence if not criminal in action.
His article doesn’t justify the transaction or allay reasonable concerns. In
fact, he seems to be presenting the case for why this transaction is crooked
if not criminal!
------
mod50ack
I'm a .org domain user. My email is a .org, my website is a .org. It's [my
name].org. I've registered through 2029 now. Hopefully by then this whole
nonsense has passed. Honestly domain names have been handled very poorly over
the past 10 years, between this and the ridiculous gTLD system. They are just
becoming super-expensive vanity items for corporations to get nice redirects.
~~~
flir
Ditto. surname.org here. I'm going to 10-year it, and hope DNS is somehow
obsolete in a decade, otherwise I suspect I'll get a nasty surprise.
------
55555
IMO, putting "Ethos" in the name of your private equity firm makes it a little
bit too obvious that you don't want people to realize that you care about
nothing but money.
------
mirekrusin
"(...) what Ethos themselves have said about their intentions (...)" means
nothing. They can change their mind, put new directors in a month that will
have different opinions etc. What's important is what they can legally do and
how incentives are structured. Giving monopoly to private equity and expecting
good things to happen is a joke.
------
gorgoiler
How can you let market economics mix with something as basic as where your
organization registers its name?
Perhaps private equity could also take control of oxygen supply? If prices get
out of control, perhaps the market will make other respirable gases available?
I’m sure I’ll regret writing something so emotive, but I really resent being
backed into what feels like could easily be labeled a loony-left corner on
this debate. Is this .org sell off an exercise in driving those who lean even
slightly towards moderately left economics into insanity, incapacitating them?
------
jobigoud
Whatever he thinks of Ethos or the statements they are making isn't relevant
anyway. It's a private firm, it can be itself bought and sold, acquired,
merged, etc.
What happens if Google or Facebook or whatever suddenly wants to control .org?
They just have to shell out a few millions?
------
jannemann
Interesting to see how people are bound to their selective perception if they
can somehow profit from it.
Ethos will squeeze every last drop out of this opportunity.
------
sys_64738
Sell to a private equity firm that tries to maximize profit from those assets.
Yeah, what couldn’t go wrong with that. At least this individual has admitted
liability for his part in this TLD’s forthcoming downfall.
------
dewey
I'm kind of amazed that this website
([http://www.circleid.com](http://www.circleid.com)) is not served via https
and even the login is posted to a http endpoint. There's even a redirect from
https to http.
You would think that "A World-Renowned Source for Internet Developments" would
be on top of that.
~~~
sireat
Perhaps there is even a place to get a reasonably priced certificates. How
about free ones?
Richard, maybe you could suggest such a place? /s
Considering "the lady doth protest too much, methinks" tone of the post, the
inner conspiracy theorist in me starts to wonder if "Let's Encrypt" is as
benign in the long run as it seems.
------
kyranjamie
> limiting price increases to no more than 10% per year
Oh, well. That's okay then.
~~~
noneeeed
I.e. expect to see prices increase by 10% a year for the foreseeable future...
------
jaclaz
Out of curiosity, did anyone actually ask expressly Richard how he voted and
why he voted this way?
I mean, _escusatio non petita, accusatio manifesta_ :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_(E)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_\(E\))
or "he who excuses himself, accuses himself"
------
bluesign
I hate this justification of doing bad stuff with ‘for the greater good’
excuse.
------
syshum
>>> the Registry Agreement for .org requires a 6-month notice period during
which domain owners can lock in a 10-year registration at pre-increase rates.
This should seriously discourage Ethos from doing this
Or the could announce a massive increase to get all the .org owners to
register for 10 years to give them a massive influx of capital right away,
then divest that capital in to some other venture, then sell PIR to someone
else. I am sure Verisign would love to buy it, or Donuts
the Internet Society can not stop them from off loading it in a couple of
years after they extract their money from the .org space.
------
Tharkun
So...how much does it cost to run gTLD these days? Perhaps the time is right
to set up a non-profit to run one at actually affordable prices, instead of
the current ripoff and the future .org price increases.
~~~
icebraining
You have to pay about $200k to ICANN just to submit a proposal for a new gTLD.
~~~
apple4ever
Because it costs so much to add a new gTLD /sarcasm
~~~
C1sc0cat
Its not cheap you have to commit to very high up times with massive redundancy
eg survive continent failure
~~~
55555
Does ICANN pay for that infra though or do you? Because if ICANN doesn't pay I
don't see how that's relevant.
~~~
C1sc0cat
No the registry does that for real TLD's - this isn't a vanity domain like
.sony
------
goombastic
Why change something that's working well? For profit, that's why. The author
is either dumb or invested.
------
jacobmalthouse7
SaveDotOrg.org is a great place to start following this issue. Lots of
nonprofits organizing to defend .org.
~~~
dang
I appreciate your concern for this issue, and to judge by
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677)
and the current thread it seems clear that most of HN agrees with your view.
But it's against the rules of this site to use it primarily for political
advocacy, which is probably why your comments are being flagged.
If you want to use HN in its intended spirit, you're welcome to! That's
described at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
is summed up by the phrase intellectual curiosity.
~~~
jacob-malthouse
ok got it!
------
stefs
fair is fair, so i vote for selling .MIL and .GOV to a for-profit company.
brb, i'll make one. i promise not to hike prices too much (in the first year).
------
peterwwillis
I really don't like the internet and humanity in general for threads like
this. Calling a particular person names like navie, idiot, gaslighter,
corrupt, fool, greedy, insane, malicious, patsy, disingenuous, child,
disgusting, unethical, etc, the way people in this thread have, is never a
good thing.
It's really not cool when the target is a person. Receiving dozens of people
angrily accusing you of evil is upsetting, and can lead to fear, anxiety,
depression, and suicidal thoughts. I've seen people experience it. You may not
care about this person's welfare, but you should, if you want to be an ethical
human being.
It also doesn't help any idea you think you have, but it reinforces you
emotionally to believe it, even on the really rare chance that you _might_ not
have expert information, and are just reacting to your limited understanding
of a subject.
And it galvanizes opinions (your own, and of others) because of how the
emotion and anger is shared by so many people. It makes you believe all the
things people are saying, and you don't even stop to think critically. I know,
because I too have decided to agree with the crowd here before when they dog-
piled on others, only to find out the opinion everyone had (including my own)
was pitifully inaccurate. I later wanted to provide some correction, but good
luck fighting a mob when it wants to feel right.
~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Sorry, but no. He is not just a random guy off the street, he is in a
responsible public position, and this is already his defense, so it is
reasonable to think that this is the best he could come up with to defend his
decision, it's not some misinterpreted tweet that was taken out of context.
Also, I have not seen anyone advocating for hurting him, which would obviously
be out of place, but you can not take on the responsibility for a public good
worth billions and then expect exceedingly friendly treatment when you
completely fuck it up because you didn't care to exercise even a minimal
amount of diligence, in the best case.
And while "idiot" or "fool" might not be neutral terms, they are still terms
that at their core describe his actions in this case (assuming it wasn't
corruption), it's not just random name calling to degrade a person.
Now, if there really is an explanation how all of this is in the public
interest, sure, bring it forward, and push it to the front page of HN, I
certainly would want to know. But the mere fact that even the best-founded
judgement could always turn out to be completely wrong after all based on new
evidence is not a reason to hold back criticism when there is solid evidence
supporting that criticism, because the theoretical possibility does not mean
it is actually likely or common.
------
jacob-malthouse
ISOC CEO does not consider the public reaction or petition significant. He
stated that a mere 10,000 signatures when there are millions of .orgs
indicates lack of public concern or any serious opposition to the deal.
Ethos Capital paid $1.135 billion for total, unconditional, purchase of the
PIR from ISOC.
ISOC just "grabbed the opportunity when Ethos presented it,"
ISOC have reviewed Ethos’s governance plans and approved them, but will have
no means to enforce compliance with those plans.
The deal must be approved by the end of the 1st Quarter 2021 or it fails. The
exact date is still confidential.
It must be approved by two bodies – ICANN and the Pennsylvania Orphans Court,
which is a specialist court for estates and trusts.
The PIR is incorporated in Pennsylvania and this court must approve changes in
the PIR charter in order for Ethos Capital to take ownership.
This is because “the Orphans’ Court judge is the ultimate defender and
protector of the fund in question, and the Orphans’ Court will protect that
fund and ensure that the fund is distributed to the correct beneficiary”
There is a good introduction to this court at
[https://www.skhlaw.com/pennsylvania-orphans-court-101-all-
th...](https://www.skhlaw.com/pennsylvania-orphans-court-101-all-the-basics-
you-need-to-know-before-venturing-in/)
This means that if the Pennsylvania Orphans Court has not reached a
determination by 1st April next year, or if that decision is being challenged
in a manner which delays implementation, the deal fails.
------
driverdan
I'm surprised no one mentioned that Barnes works for Cisco:
> Richard Barnes is Chief Security Architect for Collaboration at Cisco
Cisco has had backdoored equipment and far too many security vulnerabilities.
They supply equipment to suppressive regimes like China, allowing these
countries to block, filter, and monitor internet traffic in an effort to
suppress human rights.
Someone who works for a company like that should not be trusted with important
decisions related to fundamental parts of the internet.
~~~
rasz
Up next "We are excited to announce Cisco acquisition of Let's Encrypt".
------
DoctorNick
Privatizing previously public services have always turned out badly. This will
be no different.
------
willgreen
This is nothing but the author attempting to justify his unethical decision to
himself. I hope he lives long enough to recognise, and potentially correct,
his mistake.
------
lovehashbrowns
The only thing I got out of that was "we want money." There's no real
justification for what they did. What's worse, and also condescending, is the
crap about taking Ethos at their word.
So let me get this straight; you typed out all these words to hide your real
intentions (you want money) and we're now supposed to trust you vouching for a
private equity firm? Please. Get the hell out of here. Put some more effort
into your schemes.
------
jellicle
I come away from reading that completely convinced that the decision to sell
.org will be a terrible one for internet users and .org name holders.
------
rocky1138
If the management of .org customers was as distracting as he claims (I believe
it), it would have been better to, instead of selling it, open up the
administration to bids where the private companies have to reach certain goals
and ensure certain provisions. If the management company can't do it or they
start breaking their contact, control reverts back to the Internet Society.
~~~
fanf2
PIR already outsourced the .org registry operations to Afilias years ago
------
whydoyoucare
It is not only naive, there is the classic "appeal to authority" fallacy in
the mix too! Someone wanted to badly do some damage control, which does not
seem to have achieved it purpose.
And yes, as someone stated, privaty equity companies want to make money from
their investments, believing anything else as their "goal" is utter foolish.
------
unexaminedlife
It's obvious the author and apparently their entire board didn't believe their
role was an important one.
In the end it sounds like whoever was doing the voting ended up putting the
wrong people in charge.
Would be useful to have a public reference listing the names of those who made
this vote so future non-profits don't make the same mistake.
------
christiansakai
This is the first time in many years on HN I see HN commenters commented
unequivocally 100% against the author.
------
jakeogh
Bad move: [https://www.economist.com/the-economist-
explains/2016/09/29/...](https://www.economist.com/the-economist-
explains/2016/09/29/why-is-america-giving-up-control-of-icann)
------
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
What a fucking moron!
1\. No, 26$ is obviously not a sane, let alone a reasonable price for a domain
registration. For comparison, you can register .de for < 4 EUR/year, so at a
price of 26$ this is redirecting 220 million dollars of funds that were
donated for charitable work to definitely not charitable profit for these
investors--or 160 million more than right now.
2\. The price increase is capped at _only_ 10% per year? Are you fucking
kidding me? Do you seriously not have a clue how exponential growth works?
.org has existed for 34 years, if you add another 34 years of increases of
"only" 10%, you are at 255$ per year. Or, as he himself calculated, it's more
than doubling the price in ten years, which would be just crazy.
3\. "They promised they'd be good!" ... seriously? You seriously can not see
the problem with a transaction where a profit-seeking entity obviously
explicitly avoids actually promising anything (that is: making any of those
"promises" legally binding)? After all, it is possible to actually promise all
those things in a meaningful way, that's what the legal system is for.
4\. "Give back to the .org community through a Community Enablement Fund" ...
or in other words: Appropriate charitable donations where the donors have
already decided what causes they should go to and redistribute them to their
liking. Can anyone really be too stupid to see through this and be in a
position to make such a decision?
5\. "While it's true that running .org provided a relatively steady income
stream, it effectively staked most of our revenue on a single business, and
required a certain amount of our resources to be spent managing that business,
distracting from the broader mission." ... WTF? And running it in the future
will not require any resources? Does this guy not understand basic financial
math either? Like, if you buy a business, you pay for expected profits, i.e.,
after you you have subtracted expected expenses, i.e., if you sell a business,
you still "pay" for all the future expenses? Selling a business does not
magically create money, it only shifts the cash flow to the present day. _The
only way selling a business can increase your cash flow is if the buyer
increases prices or reduces costs._
It's all so obviously from the bullshitting playbook you can hardly believe
anyone would actually believe any of these "arguments" to be of any value,
when the path to actually guaranteeing all of these things that we are
supposed to just believe is so obvious.
------
netfl0
Limit price increases to 10% a year!!?!??! Tone deaf AF.
I cannot believe someone actually wrote that down.
------
DoctorPenguin
Always remember that theese are the people in charge of running the internet.
I really hope he didn't have too much say in the important things at Let's
Encrypt. Because statements like this really damage the little trust I have
left in companys.
------
bogwog
So basically his two reasons are: “they gave us money, and I think they’re
worthy”
------
folio
Please, Barnes' "reasoning" is not naiveté. Barnes and his colleagues
understand exactly what they are doing. The Barnes article is evidence of
nothing but contempt for its intended audience.
------
tzs
I wonder what Network Solutions thinks of this? If you register a .org through
them, they offer 100 year registration for $999.
The registries do not allow a domain to be registered for more than 10 years
in the future, so the way NS implements this is by initially registering it
for 10 years for you, and then automatically registering an additional year
each year.
That only works out for NS if prices don't rise too much over the next 100
years.
I haven't read their terms to see if they have some sort of escape clause to
get out of the 100 year deal if prices rise too much.
~~~
miles
Some thoughts on Network Solutions' 100 year offer:
The 100 year domain: legal or not?
[https://www.tnl.net/blog/2004/03/23/the-100-year-domain-
lega...](https://www.tnl.net/blog/2004/03/23/the-100-year-domain-legal-or-
not/)
100-Year Domain Renewals?
[https://yro.slashdot.org/story/04/03/23/0235244/100-year-
dom...](https://yro.slashdot.org/story/04/03/23/0235244/100-year-domain-
renewals)
------
purple_ducks
Looks like OP is based in Washington D.C.
Guess he was feeling left out when it came to all the lobbying money and
croney corruption.
Strange he never addressed the fact that a new non-profit wasn't set up to
control the domain.
------
not2b
You can never take a corporation at its word. If you relied on promises that
you obtained (limits on price increases, etc) you should have gotten all of
that language into a legally binding contract. Even if current management of
Ethos is committed to what you say they promised, management changes,
companies run into trouble, and future management may come under pressure to
extract more revenue.
Also, what's the justification for 10% annual increases? Their costs aren't
going up faster than inflation.
------
timwaagh
There is a reason the author is on the board that gets to decide this. I wish
the relevant people would just pocket the money and book a plane ticket to an
offshore location, rather than bragging about it on social media. That way at
least some people other than the hedge fund would get something out of this
deal. I can understand simple corruption. I too need a fast-ish sportscar and
a decently sized mansion to fuel my habits. But this, I cannot understand at
all.
------
jiofih
Judging by the numbers, you can guess they sold for somewhere in the $100m-$1B
range. Hard to resist. And also known as corruption, when it comes to public
services.
------
tjpnz
If anyone believes Ethos will stick to increasing prices by no more than 10% a
year they're dreaming. This is a private equity firm, not a non-profit.
------
cannedslime
Hoping for "just" a 10% price hike annually is like hoping that a mugger just
steals your phone and wallet instead of stabbing you in the gut.
------
annoyingnoob
Renewing my .org domains now for as long as I can.
~~~
rinze
I just did the same. I'm with Dreamhost, and from the panel you can only do
that for 2 years, but if you contact them they'll let you do another 5
additional years.
------
DrScientist
Quick question - www.internetsociety.org - did you get a sweet heart deal or
are you on the same future track as everyone else?
------
musicale
This is nonsense; it ignores the huge conflicts of interest and the obvious
elephant in the room: nobody is going to pay a lot of money for something
unless they expect to get a lot of money out of it, and the only way to get a
lot of money out of .org is to extract it from the largely non-profit .org
domain holders.
------
C1sc0cat
A great pity that Poptels (Worker Coop) bid did not succeed over the internet
society.
I worked for one of the other bidders for .org as did Ivan Pope.
Don't suppose Billg or some altruistic rich people want to fund us to get the
Band back on the road :-)
Only Half Joking I am sure that Ivan And some of the Poptel team would be up
for it
------
rileytg
this is dystopian. is there anything we can do? i can’t think of anything...
government won’t help, the org which we trusted to protect .org is the one
screwing it, are we completely powerless?
if this battle is lost, what greedy move can they make next? how can we get
ahead of that now?
~~~
evross
Another post mentioned that this may be self-dealing. This comment they linked
has information on complaints/actions that can be taken:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21658324](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21658324)
------
jacob-malthouse
If you want to complain to ICANN about the sale you can do it here:
[https://survey.clicktools.com/app/survey/response.jsp](https://survey.clicktools.com/app/survey/response.jsp)
------
M2Ys4U
I'm worried that somebody with staggering naivete like this is on the board of
Let's Encrypt as well.
I wonder if he'd have the same lack of qualms about selling that to a private
equity firm...
------
choiway
This article just makes matters worse. Saying nothing would have been better.
Not selling would have been the best.
This seriously falls in the "I didn't know you could do that category" for me.
------
iamleppert
“Limiting price increases to only 10% per year”
Let that sink in for a minute. In only 10 years, it’s going to cost 10x what
it does today to register A NAME.
Technology was supposed to prevent things like this, not enable it.
~~~
22c
Your math is off, but yeah. It's exponential growth.
------
slantedview
Giving a monopoly to a private company that is only interested in maximizing
profit will end badly. This is obvious. The author is deluding himself to
think any other outcome will happen.
------
wyclif
Anyone care to give an analysis of how this will affect small-timers who want
to register .org domains in the future in comparison to registering a
different top-level domain?
------
pbhjpbhj
"Hey guys, now we run the .org registry we're providing valuable security to
the registry users through synergistically responding to key realtime threats.
As such, in order to now return correct IP addresses _every_time_ we need
extra funding and so there is now a $100 security fee per 100k requests. But,
in keeping with our forthright policy to stimulate internet growth the domain
renewal fee is only 10% higher than last year. We're also freezing all
updating of equipment as it might introduce security vulnerabilities."
\-- new .org registry owners, next year, probably
------
glitcher
I would love to see the author do an AMA here and attempt to address all the
counter-arguments in this thread!
------
Kakadoo
Andre Sullivan of ISOC needs to resign. ISOC international needs to get
rebuild based on integrity and trust.
------
coleifer
Whatever man, this is straight up grimy and both parties disgust me.
------
Ericson2314
Happy Thanksgiving! Why do I have to wake up to this horseshit.
------
jawns
> So if we take Ethos at their word
It is unfortunate that we have a business culture where to take someone at
their word is not only naive but so reckless that the duped gets most of the
blame rather than the duper.
And yet, here we are. This is the reality. Taking a private equity firm "at
their word" is so foolish that it's hard to believe the author isn't being
disingenuous.
~~~
wpietri
Any lawyer in the world would have said, "No, Dickie, we don't just take
companies at their word once the money changes hands. That's what contracts
are for." At best this guy is incompetent, assuming his technical skills
magically transfer to being business skills. But like you, I have a hard time
thinking he believes any of this.
~~~
55555
Yeah, the idea that you would take a private equity firm "at their word" and
not require it in writing is laughable.
------
mariuolo
This looks like a puff piece masquerading as blog entry.
------
0x0aff374668
the author can't even be bothered to implement proper TLS/HTTPS on their
website (Mozilla blocks it)... and they voted for domain names?
------
bachmeier
Is the 10% increase for _individual_ domains or _on average_? If it's on
average, that means those with the most valuable domain names can expect
increases of 300% or more soon...
------
jijji
i would question how much money is this guy making on the backend from this
newly formed "ethos" corp... smells pretty rotten
------
mcguire
"Because that is where the money is."
------
musicale
> 10% per year
AKA doubling every 8 years.
------
rinze
> If we take Ethos at their word
This guy must be new to this whole Crony Capitalism thing.
------
Aeolun
Oh thank god! They said they would be good.
I’m glad there’s no recorded instances in history where that turned out to be
a patent lie.
------
souterrain
> The Internet Society does great work protecting the Internet and bringing it
> to the people who need it most — work that is way more impactful than
> leasing domain names. This transaction secures that work's future and
> independence.
Is “lease” the understanding others have regarding the relationship among a
registrar and registrant?
Isn’t the registrar intended to operate the supporting infrastructure and no
more? Where does the concept of a “lease” enter the transaction?
~~~
ben509
You could own your name outright if you could take sole responsibility[1] for
resolving disputes. Basically, we'd have to have some scheme where everyone
can advertise which names they own, and then you'd negotiate directly with DNS
operators to convince them that your advertisment takes precedence over
someone else's.
So it could be done, it might even be a better scheme, but I think it would be
expensive and messy.
[1]: You could obviously pay someone to negotiate on your behalf, but you're
still initiating the action.
------
TheMagicHorsey
How relevant is a TLD anymore? There are so many options. Most people seem to
use Google, and then after visiting the site, they use whatever the
autocomplete in their address bar is. Or, they use an app.
At least in India, I've seen most people doing this on their smartphones.
Nobody likes to type in the address bar anymore.
~~~
unreal37
Yes, this.
I don't get how anyone actually cares about a top level domain. There are so
many. Pick another.
~~~
goatinaboat
_I don 't get how anyone actually cares about a top level domain_
Do you even email, bro?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Democratizing Big Data - Is Hadoop Our Only Hope? - ahoff
http://gigaom.com/cloud/democratizing-big-data-is-hadoop-our-only-hope/
======
martincmartin
I think the real question is "Is MapReduce Our Only Hope?"
MapReduce has a lot of limitations. It doesn't have a query language, instead,
you need to figure out the sequence of map and reduce steps and implement
those in your favourite low level language yourself.
And it can't do efficient joins. That means you need to visit each and every
row for each and every map-reduce stage. There's no b-tree or other "lookup
structure".
And it's a batch based framework, which means if you add 1% more data, you
have to re-analyze the entire data set, rather than update previous results
with the new 1%.
Disclaimer: I work at Endeca, which is about to launch Latitude, an Enterprise
platform for big data analysis. But (a) I work in Engineering, not sales or
marketing, so I spend my time thinking about the advantages and disadvantages
of various technologies, rather than how to sell them, and (b) I'm an actual
human being who has independent thoughts.
~~~
cdavid
I don't understand the claim that adding new data force you to recompute
everything. What requires re-computation will depend on the algorithm, but for
most simples cases I can think of, at least the map part will not require
computation if you record its result. I believe that's how couchdb view work,
for example
~~~
yummyfajitas
Hadoop is a fairly low level framework. So it requires the programmer to write
logic to incrementally calculate the map (i.e., input_data_may ->
map_results_may, repeat for june).
Similarly, it's up to the programmer to write a reducer which allows
incremental additions of data. And even then, you still need to make a pass
over all the data.
~~~
cdavid
That's a limitation of hadoop, though, not the MR idea by itself.
~~~
yummyfajitas
The limitation on the _map_ end is only a limitation for hadoop.
But the limit on the reducer is fundamental. Some reduce functions are not
associative, and some don't even have type [T x U] -> T x U. In those cases,
there is nothing to be done but redo the reduce.
~~~
cdavid
Indeed, reduce is the difficult part. OTOH, I think this limitation is seen in
many algorithms at a fairly fundamental level, and not just an artefact of MR.
The only alternative framework I can think of for dealing with really large
datasets in a distributed manner is sampling-based methods, with one-pass
algorithms (or mostly one pass algorithm).
------
gtuhl
I am not a big fan of Hadoop. It is a headache to configure and optimized for
installs with node counts only a few companies could make use of. I really
wish there were more options as I believe Hadoop is overkill for most of the
people using it.
For quick and dirty map reduce on a smaller node count I've started to really
like Disco (discoproject.org). You just pull down the backend with your
package manager, push your files into ddfs, write a python script, and run it.
~~~
mlmilleratmit
Interesting, I haven't looked at disco for quite awhile. How does disco
compare to hadoop streaming these days? (I'm highly biased, so I reach for
bigcouch most of the time now)
~~~
jamii
The latest release supports workers written in any language. Disco comes with
worker libraries for python and ocaml.
<http://discoproject.org/doc/howto/worker.html>
------
helwr
A good list of hadoop alternatives: [http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-
promising-open-source-alt...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-promising-
open-source-alternatives-to-Hadoop-MapReduce-for-map-reduce)
my personal favorite is BashReduce (~120 lines shell script vs ~600k lines of
java code in hadoop): <http://blog.last.fm/2009/04/06/mapreduce-bash-script>
If you're in bioinformatics you might be interested in this talk on handling
ridiculous amounts of data (PyCon 2011): [http://blip.tv/pycon-us-
videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-han...](http://blip.tv/pycon-us-
videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-handling-ridiculous-amounts-of-data-with-
probabilistic-data-structures-4899047)
~~~
helwr
Also see GraphLab, a New Parallel Framework for Machine Learning:
<http://www.graphlab.ml.cmu.edu/>
------
rryan
Hadoop is hardly our only hope -- off the top of my head there is Yahoo S4 for
expressing streaming topologies of large-scale data processing. There is
Google's Sawzall language for efficiently 'sawing' through and aggregating
stats about of large amounts of data. Databases like MongoDB are slowly
enabling the FLOSS community to process larger and larger datasets which
previously was very difficult for someone other than an engineer with a Google
datacenter, GFS, and BigTable at their disposal. And that's just scraping the
surface of great, Free and open-source projects available. AWS and Google App
Engine are making it affordable for the common man to run computations that we
could only dream about just a decade ago. I, for one, am very excited about
this and think we're doing just fine.
~~~
mlmilleratmit
Indeed there are plenty of alternatives, that was the subtle theme of my post,
but unfortunately I didn't have the space to go into any more detail... Follow
up piece!
------
Todd
I'm working on YAMRF (yet another MR framework) in C#. I wanted something like
Hadoop but something that was much simpler to setup and to hack on.
There's no question that Hadoop is the elephant in the room, so to speak. It
is very robust and performant, and there's a great ecosystem and community. It
is quite complex as a result and getting it set up and tuned can take a lot of
time and effort.
I've got the distributed file system working and am working on the processing
part now. The underlying framework is more general purpose than MR, working at
the level of data or record streams which can be run through LINQ, for
example. Dryad has this but it's a much more complicated beast.
Even though more general purpose computation is possible with such a
framework, it turns out that to achieve scale, your problem needs to be
parallelizable and MR is a good way to do that. I think that's why we aren't
seeing much in the way of alternatives, yet--it's a question of the "enemy of
good enough."
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Two explanations for variation in human abilities - QuitterStrip
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZwSrTsP3YkgnmHWnJ/two-explanations-for-variability-in-human-abilities
======
in3d
The chess analogy doesn’t work because those other experts not only spent
similar amounts of hours on chess as Carlson but they were most likely people
who were doing very well compared to others who played as much as them
previously. Carlson’s performance is excellent compared to talented experts,
not just to people who spent requisite amounts of time on chess. So the
performance difference is much higher than what the author assumes.
Comparing the number of games played by AlphaGo vs those played by Lee Sedol
also doesn’t work. AlphaGo was programmed to learn based on many games because
a computer can process that many games and it works. But it doesn’t mean that
it’s impossible for a computer to use different algorithms to extract
information based on fewer games. Also, Lee Sedol has deeply studied many
other games and their critical moves, not just the ones he played.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Computing planetary positions – a tutorial with worked examples (2003) - catilac
http://www.stjarnhimlen.se/comp/tutorial.html
======
sizzzzlerz
If you're interested in this type of computation and have some basic knowledge
of Python, there is a package called pyephem that you can install that allows
you to perform all sorts of calculations on the planets and other astronomical
bodies. It uses the same ephemerides data set that is used by professional
astronomers so it is quite accurate.
~~~
vamin
PyKEP ([https://esa.github.io/pykep/](https://esa.github.io/pykep/)) is also
quite good.
------
yoha
Some of the links from
[http://www.stjarnhimlen.se/comp/ppcomp.html#22](http://www.stjarnhimlen.se/comp/ppcomp.html#22)
are dead. If you want human-readable physical and orbital data for:
* planets, go to [http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?planet_phys_par](http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?planet_phys_par) and [http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?planet_pos](http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?planet_pos) (it points you to a table [http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/txt/p_elem_t1.txt](http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/txt/p_elem_t1.txt) where elements need to be corrected for a given date, see [http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/txt/aprx_pos_planets.pdf](http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/txt/aprx_pos_planets.pdf))
* moons, go to [http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?sat_phys_par](http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?sat_phys_par) and [http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?sat_elem](http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?sat_elem)
* dwarf planets, asteroids, etc, go to [http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi](http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi)
Also, some more data here
[http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?constants](http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?constants). If
you want more precise orbital elements at a given epoch (they vary through the
year), use
[http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?horizons](http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?horizons) (using
the Telnet interface, first choose "Ephemerides" (e) and then "Elements" (e).
------
McUsr
It is a great fun to compute Planetary positions. You should really read a
book named "Astronomical Algorithms" by Jean Meeus. That is the ultimate
source for those computations, for hobby use. (There is a really nice chapter
in there, about accuracy, and interpolation of values). You'll find various
implementations of the algorithms on the net.
------
davidw
Apropos - does anyone have suggestions for good Android apps for things like
this? I'm looking for something pretty for my kids, that lets you look at some
different things, like how the moon goes around the earth, night and day on
the earth, seasons, and maybe some of the other planets too.
~~~
bengali3
not sure about mobile, but I would think Kerbal Space Program has most of the
physics done, as well as an active mod community. I've always thought an
accurate solar system mod would be pretty cool
~~~
Lambdanaut
It exists. Check this out:
[http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/55145-0-90-Real-...](http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/55145-0-90-Real-
Solar-System-v8-5-Dec-23)
It's also a lot more difficult than the stock solar system.
------
amelius
Does it show how to compute the error margins?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
HTML5 Web-Based Music Player - simontabor
http://audio.simontabor.com
======
TazeTSchnitzel
Firefox doesn't support range, and this site doesn't using something to fill
in for its lack of support. :(
~~~
simontabor
Sorry! Unfortunately I haven't got round to doing extra support yet - Chrome
is the only browser that supports everything there at the moment. I'll sort it
out with Modernizr when I get some time.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
32c3: live recordings (unedited) - ibotty
https://streaming.media.ccc.de/32c3/relive/
======
ibotty
Skip about 15 minutes to get to the talk.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
“Billion Dollar Bully” Highlights Why Yelp Feels Unfair - smacktoward
https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/billion-dollar-bully-documentary-yelp.html
======
Fjolsvith
I got this feeling about Yelp when I first investigated their site and
advertising offerings for my business. Business owners beware.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
An Interview with Computing Pioneer Alan Kay - technologizer
http://techland.time.com/2013/04/02/an-interview-with-computing-pioneer-alan-kay/
======
alexjeffrey
I'm a little disappointed that the interview didn't mention COLA/STEPS as I
think this is by far the most interesting thing Kay has worked on of recent.
Obviously he's been an innovator throughout the history of computing and it
makes sense to interview him abotu the overall direction of the industry, but
it'd be great to hear about COLA especially as there's very little written
about it aimed at a non-academic audience.
<http://www.vpri.org/vp_wiki/index.php/Main_Page> is the primary resource
about COLA at the moment, if you're curious.
~~~
jcr
His work on Squeak [1], a dialect of Smalltalk, qualifies as both recent and
interesting. Similar could be said for his work on OLPC.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeak>
------
ricardobeat
Apple with the iPad and iPhone goes even further and does
not allow children to download an Etoy made by another
child somewhere in the world.
Kids can publish native apps if they want to, there are plenty of examples
around. But regardless, you can share _anything_ over the web. What about
Android? Does it "not allow children to download etoys" too? This is pure
vitriol.
~~~
tensor
I'm not sure what an "etoy" is, but I imagine it's essentially a program and
associated source code (e.g. so that you can learn from it). iOS bans, for no
reason, compilers or interpretors. Android allows for these. The majority of
children will not be publishing native apps.
~~~
mmariani
Check this out...
<https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/codea/id439571171>
<https://github.com/TwoLivesLeft/Codea-Runtime>
~~~
abecedarius
You can't export or import your code there, you can only type it in. (Unless
something's changed lately.) Even micros in the 70s could save/load cassette
tape.
(Codea is pretty neat anyway. I get sad to see the potential locked up.)
~~~
demallien
If we're talking about getting a kids to learn how to use these wonderful
tools, that's a feature, not a bug. I for one know that I learned to program
precisely because I couldn't just swap cassettes with the other kids. I had a
crappy computer that no one else had, so the only games I had were the ones I
typed in myself. That act of typing (and hence reading) the source code was
how I learned to program.
~~~
chj
This is neither a feature nor a bug. It's a restriction forced by Apple.
------
reeses
Alan Kay is 74, despite the fact that he looks 20 years younger. A couple grad
students should follow him around 24/7 with a microphone, a tablet computer,
and a digital camera and record any ideas he throws out there. He's like the
Phillip K. Dick of computer science. He's shaped much of the perception of the
world and his weakest works somehow surface 15-20 years later as tacit
assumptions.
------
nlawalker
I'd say it's not modern computing he's unhappy with, but modern _people_.
~~~
asveikau
OK, he was pretty grumpy and cynical. But is he wrong?
Wouldn't a society of people who are reading and writing, thinking and
creating be a better place than one where people are capable of no better than
SMS-speak and TLDR and letting Siri do their thinking? What if our society
turns into YouTube comments?
~~~
zwieback
I think the reality is that there's always a group of people who are creators
and thinkers and the vast majority just wants to be entertained. People like
Alan Kay are hoping to somehow convert the majority to be more creative.
~~~
xradionut
Most people live in the Box, some live outside and some collect the rent.
------
waterlesscloud
"There was always a “cloud” in the ARPA view of things — this is why we
invented the networks we did."
All part of the plan.
~~~
bitwize
The "cloud" is overhyped precisely because if you scratch off the marketing,
what you're left with is just another word for the internet.
I suppose it's a better metaphor than "cyberspace", but still...
~~~
scott_s
To me, "cloud" is the growing phenomenon of removing the need for individuals
and organizations to own their own hardware. That's quite different from the
existing network of networks.
~~~
alberich
Actually "cloud" can be traced to relatively old ideas like utility computing.
It just was not very feasible back then.
EDIT: "If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the
future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as
the telephone system is a public utility... The computer utility could become
the basis of a new and important industry." (John McCarthy, 1961)
~~~
scott_s
The idea may be old, but what's new is that it's becoming possible.
------
thewarrior
"much of the iPad UI is very poor in a myriad of ways."
Why does he say this ?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Prototype 1.7 - kuahyeow
http://www.prototypejs.org/2010/11/22/prototype-1-7
======
nestlequ1k
Anyone still using Prototype for new projects? I have a few legacy rails apps
(over 3 yrs old) that use it, but like most people I've have moved on to
jQuery.
~~~
jwpage
I used to favour Prototype.js over jQuery for more complex JS apps and leave
jQuery for smaller tweaks.
Nowadays I'd definitely consider something on top of jQuery instead, such as
backbone.js (<http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone>), eyeballs.js
(<https://github.com/paulca/eyeballs.js>) or sammy.js(
<http://code.quirkey.com/sammy>).
~~~
nestlequ1k
Agreed, underscore and backbone.js are amazing. JQuery is awesome at dom
manipulation, backbone is great at structuring reusable js components, and
underscore provides the prototype like helpers for manipulating collections
(underscore.strings is also an essential library).
These 3 tools have me loving js development to the same degree when I first
started using prototype (before the project stagnated and died).
------
jeswin
What I loved about Prototype (apart from changing my opinion about Javascript)
was that it sort of extended the language itself, and made more possible with
less. But now, I feel coffeescript is a better way to go. What I hated about
Prototype was performance. And jQuery is way better there.
This seems to be like Firefox v/s Webkit. Prototype 2.0 is going to fix a lot
of things (by not extending the DOM), but that approach is in many ways closer
to jQuery.
~~~
jashkenas
One thing that we're trying to maintain with CoffeeScript is that the
generated code is just as performant as you would have written in raw JS --
i.e. loops are just loops. It would be lovely if that sort of performance were
possible in a JavaScript library that supplied "each", but sadly, it's not.
~~~
jeswin
The verbosity problem in JS cannot be solved with libraries, although methods
like "each" made life a lot easier.
Seeing CoffeeScript is the first time I've felt I can write a full app in
Javascript. You and your team have produced something truly significant.
------
jeroen
From the "What's next" section:
_The next bugfix version (1.7.0.1) will feature a rewrite of the DOM code to
be easier to read and faster at the same time._
That sounds like a lot of impact for a bugfix release.
~~~
jwpage
It does sound like a lot of impact. As long as there's no developer impact and
the API remains stable, however, I'm a-okay with the devs pushing something
like that into a bugfix release.
------
invisible
I hate that they approach minified versions with, "Do it yourself." 1.7.0.1 is
what 1.7 was suppose to be and there is no ETA at all. The future of Prototype
is so much brighter in FuseJS[1] once it is out of beta.
1\. <http://fusejs.com>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
PopBooth: A Real Photo Booth powered by your iPhone/iPad - plusbryan
http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/15/popbooth/
======
MartinCron
Not directly related to this iPhone/iPad app, but I had a lot of fun setting
up a simple party photo booth with pretty pedestrian camera gear a few years
ago.
[http://martincron.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/relatively-
simple...](http://martincron.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/relatively-simple-party-
photo-booth-project/)
Since then, I've upgraded to a DSLR with live preview, HDMI out, and an eye-fi
card. So I'm thinking of trying an upgraded photo booth for my next party.
------
dablya
I was picturing an actual booth at a mall where instead of the camera you
place your iphone into the camera slot, go into the booth, take 4 pics, get
the print and keep the digital on your phone.
------
ynniv
This is not a "photo booth", just another photo sharing app. If one were to
make a real photo booth (ie, testing / dealing with on-site printing to an ink
yet, dye sub, or Polaroid printer), real photo booths are popular at weddings
this year. Vendors are currently providing this service for > $600 per
wedding.
------
relix
Does anyone know what company they use to print, perforate and deliver the
postcards?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Share your comments on my startup idea - logicb
I am getting ready for the November's "Launch an App Month" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1773398) to launch AppsToWin.com.<p>I just updated the landing page with a sample contest. Would like to hear the comments from HNers on my app and also what kind off web apps would you like to see in the contest.
======
logicb
Clickable <http://www.appstowin.com>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Auto-Scaling and Self-Defensive Services in Golang - rayascott
https://raygun.com/blog/2016/03/golang-auto-scaling/
======
aftbit
When I needed to solve this problem, I spun up 4x as many workers as I needed
and managed them through supervisor. This handles two of the requirements: 1\.
Autoscaling - Unless your workers are very expensive to run, or your load is
exceptionally spiky (e.g. 100x jumps), just pre-scale instead of autoscaling.
2\. If a process dies, supervisor (or runit or whatever) will restart it.
My supervisor config has each worker log to its own file (e.g.
/var/log/acmeinc/worker_01.log). For death detection, I'd probably use a
watchdog process that checks the mtime of each log file. If it's more than X
minutes old, then no work has been done in that time, so kill the process and
allow supervisor to restart it. Combine this with an in-process watchdog log
message ("hey, I'm still alive!") on the main consumer thread every X minutes,
and you have a fairly robust solution.
Tangentially, deferring engineering work by buying more hardware is almost
always a good idea. :)
------
edgurgel
Virding's First Rule of Programming
"Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains
an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of
Erlang."
[http://rvirding.blogspot.co.nz/2008/01/virdings-first-
rule-o...](http://rvirding.blogspot.co.nz/2008/01/virdings-first-rule-of-
programming.html)
~~~
siscia
My exact same thought.
I do believe that we, as software engineer, should understand how Erlang works
at its core and have some sort of shared know how about the implementation of
at least supervisors.
------
drakenot
Whenever I saw the auto-scaling mentioned I had assumed that they meant they
were spinning up new server(s) running this process, all working from the same
redis queue. But it seems that they are just launching more of the same
process from within the same machine.
For those of you who are experienced in platforms where this is a common
practice, can you tell me why this is done? I have seen this done a lot.
Why don't people just launch more worker goroutines (or whatever their
platform's concurrency primitives are) and max out their machine from a single
process? Is it to keep the code simpler (i.e., it is easier to just spin up
duplicate processes on the same machine) and not have to deal with any
concurrency?
~~~
brianwawok
My thought as well. If your server is sized to handle 4 workers, run 4
workers.
If you want to autoscale to save costs cool. But then use a server only sized
to hold 1 worker. Then the techniques in this post wont quite work.
The failure detector piece is neat, but if doing a true multi server scaling
setup, may be better to just kill a hung VM and fire up a new one. Just as
likely to be a server problem as a code problem. If automated why not just
nuke it all.
------
amouat
Nice read, but I'd like to point out that this is a very well studied problem,
particularly in HPC. I'd point to a few decent resources, but the only one
that my google-fu found was
[https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~engelen/courses/HPC/Algorithms1.pdf](https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~engelen/courses/HPC/Algorithms1.pdf)
The main advice is that you need to carefully balance communication overhead
against work done and also analyse the optimum number of workers per node.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Free To Play Games Have Arrived on Steam - peacewise
http://store.steampowered.com/news/5657/
======
peacewise
[http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/14/valves-steam-online-
store-...](http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/14/valves-steam-online-store-
launches-micro-transaction-games/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Open source community running on Google App Engine - livid
http://github.com/livid/v2ex
======
juanefren
I would be good to know how to change the language...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Steve Wozniak says he may be “patient zero” for coronavirus in US - RayMan1
http://alugy.com/coronavirus/steve-wozniak-says-he-may-be-patient-zero-for-coronavirus-in-us/
======
tabtab
Woz is a known prankster. Take with a grain of salt. Pranks are how he and S.
Jobs got to know each other well.
My favorite of theirs is a box to mess with the college TV's reception.
Students in the TV room were used to fiddling with the rabbit-ears antenna to
get better reception. Using their interference gizmo, The Steves would "train"
the students to make strange movements with the antenna to get better
reception. Once they had so much fun getting students to dance on whim that
they gave themselves away by laughing too hard.
Having grown up with rabbit-ear antennas I can relate. Finicky things they
were.
~~~
vikramkr
This wouldn't be a "prank," it would just be a lie. And it's not the sort of
thing your average rational smart person would lie about either
~~~
downerending
It's clearly something that no one could know, nor would it make a whit of
difference if they could know. It's a lame joke. Laugh. Or don't laugh.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Happy 55th birthday NASA To celebrate, 97% of you get an unpaid vacation. - tareqak
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/01/happy-55th-birthday-nasa-to-celebrate-97-percent-of-you-get-an-unpaid-vacation/
======
tareqak
Meanwhile, the President and Congress are still being paid to squabble over
who else gets paid.
Apparently, the FBI and CIA are still being paid too.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
CentOS 7 potential release - lpinca
http://seven.centos.org/2014/07/seeding-for-potential-release/
======
ck2
Even this article title says "POTENTIAL" release. I am not even sure it is
signed?
They are still doing QA, it will be a week or two before GA
Before you rush to 7.0 after 6.5 - things you are going to have to learn
because they change everything:
systemd replaces init.d
grub2 replaces grub
xfs is now default over ext4 filesystem
( _many, many people dislike systemd, it is somewhat anti-linux in nature_ )
No more easy editing/understanding grub.conf
No more easy to edit/understand /etc/init.d (systemctl instead)
No more text log files for system log (journalctl instead)
Watch out for default XFS filesystem instead of EXT4 because it is slower in
real world use for databases, etc.
Red Hat claims RHEL7 is 11-25% faster than RHEL6, I am not convinced at all, I
think they are referencing a stock setup for 6 vs 7, but I don't know anyone
that runs things stock without tuning. Wait for independent benchmarks.
CentOS 6.x will be supported until 2020
If you want a 3.x kernel for CentOS 6.x, try the ELrepo repository, they do
builds for both mainline and longterm 3.x kernel releases.
[http://elrepo.org/tiki/kernel-lt](http://elrepo.org/tiki/kernel-lt)
If you want newest GCC for CentOS 6.x try the CERN repo for devtoolset
[http://linux.web.cern.ch/linux/devtoolset/](http://linux.web.cern.ch/linux/devtoolset/)
ps. there is currently no way to upgrade a 6.x install "in place" to 7.x,
though Red Hat has migration tool and CentOS folks say they will look at doing
the same - but like I said, don't be in a rush to early adopt 7.x
pps. RHEL7 notes are a way to explore what else is new:
[https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-
US/Red_Hat_Enterp...](https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-
US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/)
~~~
nodata
_No more easy editing /understanding grub.conf_
True, the grub2 config is horrible.
_No more easy to understand /etc/init.d_
It's a bit more complicated, but not too bad:
Instead of "/etc/init.d/thing restart" you type "systemctl restart thing"
Instead of chkconfig --list, you type "systemctl list-dependencies"
Writing the equivalent script with systemd is much cleaner with less hacks,
particularly for launching as different users and doing locking.
_No more text log files for system log (journalctl instead)_
By default. It's fine once you get the hang of the new syntax:
journalctl --since=today --follow
_Watch out for default XFS filesystem instead of EXT4 because it is slower in
real world use for databases, etc._
Depends on the workload. Speed is only one part of it. For some benchmarks by
phoronix see
[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_315...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_315_hddfs&num=1)
~~~
ck2
I'll wait for more benchmarks to be certain but this database test of the 3.10
kernel (which 7 uses) of XFS vs EXT4 is not promising:
[http://openbenchmarking.org/prospect/1305166-UT-
FILESYSTE20/...](http://openbenchmarking.org/prospect/1305166-UT-
FILESYSTE20/fd501a41a2adcc643acc832de94444f9fd7d9678)
~~~
jerven
A 160 GB disk is not a real comparison for enterprises. XFS really starts to
perform better on disks 1Tb as well as 8 cores and above. EXT4 really starts
to creak when moving to filesystems that are 16TB and above. Something that is
going to be common in the 7 years that Cent-OS 7 is around.
Of course with the amount of backports of patches that any RedHat kernel has
the comparison to mainline version numbers is almost useless :(
For my workload the performance difference is 15% better for XFS than EXT4 on
the same 3Tb of SSD with the same workload.
------
nodata
Site seems down, but an aggregator has a mirror (see the second entry):
[http://planet.centos.org/](http://planet.centos.org/)
\----
copy/paste if that goes down too:
hi,
At this point we have a set of images that we consider release grade, pending
final testing, we will move to release these unless a major blocker is
reported.
folks with bandwidth to spare are encouraged to help seed these images via
torrents, here are the urls to hit:
[http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-140...](http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-DVD.torrent)
[http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-140...](http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-GnomeLive.torrent)
[http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-140...](http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-KdeLive.torrent)
[http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-140...](http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-livecd.torrent)
[http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-140...](http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-NetInstall.torrent)
[http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-140...](http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-Everything.torrent)
\- KB
~~~
AlexMax
It's quite sad, in my opinion, that this is halfway down the page while yet
another beating of the dead horse that is the systemd flam^H^H^H^H discussion
is the most visible comment thread. Thank you for posting this.
------
peterwwillis
If I were a large enterprise I'd reconsider CentOS. RedHat's lack of a
commitment to the customer's experience in favor of RH's personal design
preferences smacks of Oracle-ism. Anything they develop they immediately force
on their users, and you have to just accept it rather than use it optionally.
It's less easy to get away from those kind of changes versus something more
open like ubuntu/debian (and I have no love for debian). And then there's the
whole secret kernel patches and backported "features"... Then again i'm a
dirty hippie who prefers Slackware, so maybe i'm too Linux-libertarian for
today's enterprises.
~~~
SEJeff
Care to elaborate?
Systemd has a few nice features that I (as a systems admin of thousands of
servers) really like such as:
- simple "init script" like upstart, so magical or crappy shell scripts from vendors are a thing of the past. A standardized unit file
- Ulimit support natively as part of the format
- Limiting via memory/disk/cpu cgroups to contain buggy apps (hello mysql!)
- Process restarting so tools like supervisord, monit, runit, etc are no longer necessary
- It can _always_ stop an errant daemon as it uses control groups to do so, sysv init was sometimes buggy in this regard
- Private /tmp (via filesystem namespaces), limiting system calls a service can run, tcp wrappers, read only parts of the filesystem (like /etc) are all trivial to add to any legacy service such as bind or sendmail and a supported part of the systemd unit file definition.
RHEL/CentOS 7 also include some super nice things like the new abrtd for
centrally reporting any application coredump/kernel issue, pacemaker/crm for
high availability clusters, and just a lot newer linux userspace. (yay for du
-hsc | sort -h | tail)
As an _actual_ user who uses RHEL/Debian/etc on bare metal at scale, I really
see nothing but awesome in RHEL7. It is just like I see awesome in Fedora 20
or in the latest Ubuntu/Debian. The Linux ecosystem has massively grown. Now
we have a serious engineering company putting a lot of resources into
supporting a new operating system. I'd love to see some of the technical
reasons you have the opinion you do.
~~~
peterwwillis
I'm not going to turn this thread into a debate over the merits of individual
contributions to CentOS. All i'm saying is whatever RH develops gets shoved
into their distro with seemingly no regard to the customer. It's not just that
they're adding new tools, they're also forcing you to use them.
The nice thing to do for your customers is to make new technology _optional_ ,
and provide alternatives for people who have 10+ year old infrastructure that
they don't want to spend 2 years upgrading because it's now full of legacy
systems. But RH not only shoves anything they want down your throat, half the
time they're not transparent about the changes taking place, and you just have
to hope nothing breaks your apps (kernel as an example, but userland package
changes are similar).
~~~
SEJeff
RHEL6 is supported until 2020[1]
[1]
[https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/](https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/)
------
facorreia
Looks like a release candidate.
> At this point we have a set of images that we consider release grade,
> pending final testing, we will move to release these unless a major blocker
> is reported.
~~~
leog7
the site is not loading what's new besides upgrades?
~~~
facorreia
That page was just a list of links to download the images for testing.
------
netcraft
looking forward to trying systemd, hope it isn't too much of a learning curve.
Looking at: [http://tecadmin.net/red-hat-enterprise-
linux-7/#](http://tecadmin.net/red-hat-enterprise-linux-7/#) \- will HAProxy
come with centos 7?
~~~
SEJeff
It honestly isn't. The documentation is really good if you know how to use
google.
~~~
pling
Until its your network gatewayb appliance that is down and then you're
fucked...
NEVER rely on Google for documentation or GNU info as that's probably not
installed on your server.
This sort of scenario is where *BSD win every time.
~~~
SEJeff
The man pages are also available for every systemd app.
~~~
pling
Ok my bad there. Last time I looked there were no manpages.
~~~
SEJeff
No worries, upvoted. Knowlege ++
------
Mojah
A few mirrors already have the full version, so if the site is offline, you
can - for instance - grab one from a Belgian hoster;
[http://centos.mirror.nucleus.be/7/](http://centos.mirror.nucleus.be/7/)
------
atoponce
I guess the server is getting slammed, as I cannot get to the main page.
------
infocollector
Where is the ARM version? Anyone knows?
------
lpinca
Title updated.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
JavaScript Text Summarization - spongeblob
https://github.com/jbrooksuk/node-summary
======
spongeblob
I was browsing through my GitHub stars and found this one. I also noticed that
the owner of the repo is working on the project recently, so figured it was
worth re-posting it.
I notice also that this was posted 7 years ago at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211571)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A Source of Over-Abstraction – Or DRY Isn't Free - crazy_geek
https://drew.thecsillags.com/DRY-Isnt-Free/
======
AnimalMuppet
Taking DRY too far can wind up "compressing" your code (think LZW or some
such). That's not going to improve readability...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Is Microsoft looking to buy RIM? - run4yourlives
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/08/30/tech-rim.html?ref=rss
======
run4yourlives
Makes sense to me, but a hard deal to do for sure. RIM is not exactly a
startup.
With iPhone and the mysterious gPhone, Microsoft might find itself played out
of this market... buying RIM would make them the leader here.
It's also interesting to ponder what this would do to the other, non aligned
players like Palm.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Dendron – open-source, local first, anti-roam note-taking tool - kevinslin
https://dendron.so
======
kevinslin
[Dendron]([https://dendron.so](https://dendron.so)) is meant to be the fastest
way for people to create, reference, and collaborate on knowledge. It is based
on a [hierarchal first approach to note
taking]([https://www.kevinslin.com/notes/3dd58f62-fee5-4f93-b9f1-b0f0...](https://www.kevinslin.com/notes/3dd58f62-fee5-4f93-b9f1-b0f0f59a9b64.html)).
Hierarchy first means that Dendron helps you effortlessly create, manage, and
reference your notes through flexible hierarchies. I call it anti-roam because
instead of having every note be everywhere, every note is exactly in one well
defined place (which you can change over time).
You can read about our principles
[here](https:/dendron.so/notes/7fcebd7d-6411-4c9d-8baf-65629dc018a1.html)
I use Dendron to manage a corpus of 20k+ markdown notes. When I need to lookup
information inside Dendron, I know I can either __find it in a few seconds __,
or if I don 't, to know for certain that it is __not there __. This is an
incredibly empowering feeling of control in an age of information overload and
it is an ability I want to give to every person in the world.
~~~
appleflaxen
how does it compare to Athens?
------
mirrormaster
How is this different from
Foam([https://github.com/foambubble/foam](https://github.com/foambubble/foam))
~~~
ObsoleteNerd
I was racking my brain trying to figure out why this was giving me déjà vu. I
figured it had been posted before then renamed but seems like a totally
separate project doing effectively the same thing?
------
pkz
I still have a hard time understanding why there needs to be a markdown
preview window occupying space. When you go back to your notes will you read
the rendered version or just read the markdown? Maybe I am looking for
wysiwyg.
------
dathanb82
How’s the vim emulation in VSCode? I always miss being able to use vim in
these sorts of knowledge management systems. I’m using Obsidian right now,
which has ok, very basic vi emulation, but would love something that lets me
use more advanced vim-fu.
~~~
0_gravitas
have you ever tried vim-wiki (or vim-wiki + vim-zettel, if thats your thing)?
its been a godsend for me
~~~
dathanb82
I jus discovered vim-wiki a week ago, so it’s on my todo list. I’m on pat
leave right now, so not really doing any hard core knowledge management for
another couple weeks.
------
Maha-pudma
I like hierarchical note taking. I use Zim-wiki which is plain text and
actually working with folders and text files. I wonder how this compares, I
don't use vscode though.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Arduino popularity contest - fakedrake
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/1982
======
robotdad
Very interesting data! Thanks for sharing. Does your IDE support boards like
the Yun? How do new boards fare if you look at their usage from introduction
as opposed to all time?
~~~
tzikis
Great questions.
In regards to the Yun, we don't support it yet, essentially because we don't
support the Programming-over-Wifi. But anecdotal evidence from other companies
we've spoken to seems to show a single-digit usage (usage, not sales).
As for new boards... that's also a very interesting question. It does
fluctuate, but not as much as you'd think. The case that stuck out most was
actually the case of the Arduino Nano clones with the CH340G chip, which made
Nano the 2nd most used board. New boards tend to have a spike in "apparent
interest", if I may call it that, in other words in things like Page Views on
pages that have to do with the board, or Newsletter clicks, etc, but the
actual usage is more gradual
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why CEOs fail cybersecurity (hint: they aren't asking the right questions) - bnb
https://www.inc.com/schuyler-brown/5-questions-every-ceo-needs-to-ask-about-data-security.html
======
sasas
Relevant to Equifax.. the article should have -
6) Do you have a up to date list of all assets in your network/platform with
assigned owners? Have the components of the assets been registered for
vulnerability notifications?
You are running blind if you don't know what's in your platform. How can you
secure something if you don't know it "exists" ?
------
Kevin_S
I've come to a point where I really think no company will ever have even
competent InfoSec practices. I've worked at a fortune-100 (terrible due to
scale probably), a small InfoSec consulting firm (terrible due to lack of
scale and non-caring leadership as ironic as it is) and now a global firm
(terrible due to scale and poor training).
I have no idea how to solve this problem, it seems impossible.
~~~
sbrown12
Hiya Kevin. I wrote that Inc article. I feel you. How many times have you seen
one (or all of these)...
-credentials shared across teams -database credentials stored in plain text config files -unsecured mongodb clusters
I used to think that none of this stuff would change until people were held
accountable. Imagine if a data breach at work meant that I had to pay a fine
so steep that I had to declare personal bankruptcy...bet that might get
people's attention, but I doubt there's the political will to pass laws like
that.
Instead, I've spent my time trying to tackle it from the other end of
incentives- how do we make security tools easier to adopt than the
alternative? The SSO guys have done a great job, but there's plenty more to
do.
*Full disclosure, I founded a data security company
------
grumble
Why give hint, why not just state the fact in title grrr give me an old
fashioned headline any day ;)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Alien DNA, Demon Sperm, and Hydroxychloroquine? - jordhy
https://www.thedailybeast.com/stella-immanuel-trumps-new-covid-doctor-believes-in-alien-dna-demon-sperm-and-hydroxychloroquine
======
ChrisGranger
While it doesn't surprise me when an insane person says the sorts of thing one
would expect an insane person to say, it boggles my mind that these people
have significant numbers of followers.
With each passing year it's feeling more and more like reality is turning into
an episode of Twilight Zone...
------
jordhy
How far will this go? Is there any limit?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
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